Francesco Paolo Di Teodoro, [Letter to Leo X by Raphael and Baldassarre Castiglione]

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Francesco Paolo Di Teodoro
Lettera a Leone X di Raffaello e Baldassarre Castiglione
[Letter to Leo X by Raphael and Baldassarre Castiglione]

Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 2020

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro

The few lines I am going to write are devoted to a book and an exhibition, which were unfortunately both luckless. On the occasion of the fifth centenary of Raphael's death, the great exhibition dedicated to the painter from Urbino was to be held in Rome, at the Scuderie del Quirinale, from 5 March to 2 June. The exhibition, which opened on March 5, was closed three days later, following the health emergency caused by the Coronavirus. As of this writing, it is not known whether it will reopen. The second room of the exhibition is dedicated to the famous Letter of Raphael and Baldassar Castiglione to Pope Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici, second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent). Coinciding with the event, the Olschki publishing house published a new edition of the Letter by Francesco Paolo Di Teodoro. The most pleasant aspect of the booklet is, without a doubt, the fact that it was designed for the 'general public', in an effort to disseminate (while sticking to scientific accuracy) which is not always common in this type of studies. To open the volume are, in particular, the words of the curator who clarifies how the booklet saw the light pending the critical edition of the same Letter, destined to be published in Scritti di e per Raffaello (Writings by and for Raphael) (edited by Di Teodoro himself), whose release is given for imminent.

Di Teodoro has been long studying Raphael’s Letter, at least since 1994, when the scholar - following his doctoral thesis - provided the first edition published by the Bolognese Nuova Alfa publishing house. He published it a second time in 2003, also in Bologna, with Minerva Soluzioni publishers. I have already had the opportunity to review in this blog the first version of 1994 and I believe that what was written then is, after all, still valid, so I would like to refer to that text, which you will find by clicking here.

Below I will just add some updates and a personal consideration.

A new specimen

In today's version Di Teodoro reports on the discovery of a new specimen of the Letter, which he himself found and made public in 2015. The copy is kept in a private Mantuan archive and, without any doubt, is the manuscript cited by Bernardino Marliani in 1584 and by Antonio Beffa Negrini in 1606. The manuscript (which provides the letters of Baldassar Castiglione) was the result of the work of Bernardino Marliani, who had been commissioned by Camillo Castiglione (the son of the famous writer) to select, order and publish the father's letters. The work was never completed. The samples of the Letter have therefore increased from three to four: three manuscripts and one in print.

It should also be noted that the most important specimen, signed by Baldassar Castiglione, was in 1994 in the private archive of the Castiglioni counts, while today it is kept in the Mantua State Archive, having been purchased by the Italian State in 2016.

The Letter and the safeguard of art heritage

The Letter by Raphael and Baldassar Castiglione was to serve as a dedication to Pope Leo X in the great project for the detection of antiquities in Rome undertaken by the artist from Urbino on behalf of the pontiff. This is, without a shadow of a doubt, an extraordinary document, often considered as the birthdate of the concept of safeguarding art. What makes the document very particular is indeed that it went beyond the 'usual' humanistic complaint about the ruins of Rome (examples have been found since the time of Petrarch); in fact, it provides an operational survey plan aimed at the census and graphical representation of the antiquities of the Eternal City. To stand out on all this is the way of planning by the architect Raphael, i.e. the artist commissioned by the pontiff in 1514 to build the new basilica of San Pietro, the man imbued with classical culture, who wanted to live and die like the ancients. However, from here to talking about protection in a modern (and today's) sense, the distance is still ample. In short, we must not make the mistake of identifying (uncritically and without any attention to the passing of the centuries) forms of protection of the heritage that emerged only during the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, I would like to refer to the decree issued by Leo X on August 27, 1515. Marcantonio Michiel was the first to connect this decree to Raphael’s project of mapping Roman antiquities, giving life to the myth of Raphael as superintendent of the city's antiquities. That decree – as Di Teodoro wrote - "had the sole purpose of allowing Raphael to acquire materials for the construction of the new basilica of San Pietro [...] and to save those marble or stone artefacts that kept inscriptions" (pp. 7-8). If one adds that the pontifical decree clearly stated that "«it is extremely necessary for the construction of the Roman temple of the first of the apostles that the materials of stone and marble, of which it is opportune to abound, are procured on the spot rather than transported from out of town»" (p. 7), in reality my personal perception is that the decree was issued to regulate (under Raphael’s supervision) the reuse of the ancient (at least of what was not considered 'strategic'), an aspect that today could hardly be combined with the protection of heritage. Without prejudice to the extraordinary nature of the Letter, therefore, it seems to me important to contextualize it and avoid making it rise to a symbol placed in an abstract and, in fact, inexistent reality.