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LET Lb JRLI1V COLLEGE WINTER 1967 ^_. MUSEUM LET lb JRLI1V COLLEGE WINTER 1967 ALLEN MEMORIAL ART MUSEUM BULLETIN VOLUME XXIV, NUMBER 2 WINTER 1967 Contents An Exhibition of Paintings, Bozzetti and Drawings by Baciccio January 16 to February 13, 1967 Foreword by John R. Spencer ----- 63 Introduction to the Paintings by Ellis Waterhouse 65 Introduction to the Drawings by H. Lester Cooke ----- 71 Catalogue ...... 77 Illustrations ...... 99 Printed three times a year by the Department of Art of Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. $6.00 a year, this issue $2.00; mailed free to members of the Oberlin Friends of Art. An Exhibition of Paintings, Bozzetti and Drawings by Giovanni Battista Gaulli called II Baciccio under the Sponsorship of His Excellency the Ambassador of the Republic of Italy to the United States of America Sergio Fenoaltea January 16 to February 13, 1967 Foreword Until quite recently the artistic reputation of Giovanni Battista Gaulli, called II Baciccio, rested almost exclusively upon his fresco deco­ ration of the vaults of II Gesu in Rome. Studies by Zeri, Brugnoli and Enggass have added substantially to his known work and to our under­ standing of him as an inventive and prolific painter. This exhibition should be considered as a first attempt to integrate the literature with the works of art. It does not pretend to make any new discoveries. It is designed, rather, to enable the viewer to make his own discoveries in the art of Baciccio. To this end many of the drawings and bozzetti for the major fresco cycles are brought together for the first time to il­ luminate his well-known ceiling decorations. Although Baciccio exe­ cuted a large number of altarpieces, thev are so widely dispersed and often so inaccessible that this aspect of his career is less well-known than his work in fresco. Among the representative examples of the religious paintings in this exhibition some are appearing away from their home museums or collections for the first time. The Dijon Preaching of John the Baptist, Denis Mahon's Madonna della Serpe and Andrea Busiri Vici's two Apostles Baptizing are making their debut here. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, from the Corsini gallery, has never before been exhibited outside Rome. Baciccio's mythologies and portraits are prob­ ably even less known than the altarpieces. The restricted number of portraits in this exhibition will serve to illustrate his artistry in this difficult genre. The mythological subjects may be equally revealing for an understanding of Baciccio's debt to Bernini and Correggio and o no for his contribution to the nascent Rococo. The Ajaccio bozzetto The Continence of Scipio has never before appeared outside the Musee Fesch. The Oberlin Death of Adonis is reunited for the first time with 63 its companion from Burghley House. In a sense this exhibition is to be taken as Baciccio's first "retrospective." Like all such first attempts it is necessarily both restricted in scope and selective. Some lacunae were impossible to fill, but the exhibition, taken with the two excellent essays that follow, cannot fail to arouse in the viewer an awareness of the richness and variety in the art of Giovanni Battista Gaulli. The name Baciccio, or Baciccia, as it is also spelled in the old docu­ ments, is a Genoese dialect pronunciation of Battista and appears fre­ quently among Genoese painters. Giovanni Battista was born in Genoa in 1639. Nothing certain is known of his early training, although it is quite likely that he copied the works of Pierino del Vaga in his native city and that he was influenced by the painters of Genoa and by Van Dyck. He left Genoa for Rome either in 1653 or 1657 after his parents, brothers and sisters had died in the plague. In Rome he met Bernini, who was of considerable importance in forming his style and in ad­ vancing his career. By 1662 Gaulli was a member of the Accademia di S. Luca. In 1669 he made a trip to Parma to study the frescoes of Correggio and the paintings in the Ducal collection. By 1685 his style began to change, apparently due to the dominance of Maratti in Roman painting. He died in Rome in 1709. In preparing this exhibition we have relied heavily on the advice of Prof. Ellis Waterhouse and of H. Lester Cooke. Robert Enggass gra­ ciously gave permission for us to rifle his monograph on Baciccio and consulted with us on the selection of paintings for the exhibition. The catalogue entries for the paintings are derived in the main from his monograph. H. Lester Cooke made available to us his notes for the cataloguing of the drawings. In addition to the lenders, the museum directors, and the Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione we must single out for our especial thanks Italo Faldi, M. V. Brugnoli, and Giovanni Caran- dente for their encouragement and assistance. The staff of this museum, Mrs. Chloe H. Young, Mrs. Athena T. Spear, and in particular Mrs. Jan K. Muhlert, have accomplished the formidable task of gathering and presenting this exhibition with enviable calm and dispatch. We recognize with gratitude the assistance of the Trustees and Administra­ tion of Oberlin College in making this exhibition possible. Finally, and by no means last, we express our thanks to our colleague on leave, Richard Spear, "our man in Rome," who first suggested the exhibition and who has since served as excellent liaison. John R. Spencer 64 Introduction to the Paintings The notion of an exhibition of the work of Baciccio which does not happen to be held in the Church of the Gesu at Rome might seem, at first thought, to be a little like Hamlet without the Prince of Den­ mark. The only more or less one-man exhibition of the Roman Seicento that has ever, to my knowledge, been attempted was that of Pietro da Cortona (and his circle) which actually was held in the Salone of the Palazzo Barberini, but this august precedent need not frighten off those who want to make the Roman Seventeenth Century come alive to us. There can, after all, never be an exhibition of the work of Bernini, who was the central creative force of the age in all the arts. A Baciccio ex­ hibition is one of the necessary prolegomena to the exposition imaginaire of Bernini, and perhaps the central problem which must be raised bv an exhibition devoted to Baciccio is What was the nature of Baciccio's per­ sonal talent? or, in other words, How far was the artist we know the creation of that great impresario, Bernini? We know from Rangoni's letter to the Duke of Modena of Christ­ mas Day 1666 that Baciccio had already then done a portrait of Bernini (Enggass doc. 53), and I suspect that Bernini's support of Baciccio per­ haps began in that year, when he helped to get him the commission for the S. Agnese pendentives (no. 3). But no powerful impression of Bernini's style is apparent until the Diana and Endymion of 1668. There has been an enormous gain in the possibility of our under­ standing of what Baciccio's art was like before this, from the fact that the Italian State has acquired the Chigi/Incisa Pietd during the past year, and that it is now, after a light surface cleaning, exhibited for all to see in the Palazzo Barberini. The suggested derivation of this from Annibale Carracci's Farnese Pieta (except for the motif of the steps 65 behind) does not seem to me convincing. The origin of its stylistic re­ finement seems rather to be Genoese Van Dyck; the way the right arm and hand of the Virgin echo Christ's right arm and hand, and the deli­ cate tonal contrast between the fennel-colored wimple of the Virgin and the lovely snowy drapery on which Christ's legs are lying are a very long way from Annibale's interests. The beautiful texture of this white drapery is also instructive if one compares it with the pink drapery which half covers the Endymion in the picture of 1668. The latter drapery is like Bernini's sculptured folds, with no real texture to it — and this lack of texture remains constant for the rest of Baciccio's life, and is almost disagreeably insistent in those of the late altarpieces which have lately been cleaned. There is another element, which persists in Baciccio's art until the end of his life, and which is quite independent of Bernini — a liking for rolling mountain landscapes with noble trees. This also appears first in the early pictures painted for the Chigi, finest perhaps in the Rest on the Flight (? of 1669) (no. 4) in the Roman Galleria Nazionale, but no less impressive in the huge B. Giovanni Chigi of 1671/72 still in the Palazzo Chigi at Ariccia. These are very much more like the work of Gaspard Poussin than anything else, and I have allowed myself to wonder whether the mysterious "French painter" to whom Baciccio was apprenticed for a short time on his first coming to Rome could have been Gaspard Poussin. This apprenticeship was said to have been ar­ ranged with the help of the Genoese Ambassador, who was probablv Agostino Franzone (Ambassador 28 May 1657 to 11 November 1658), and it mav be worth noting that, in the eighteenth century, among the O O i ' o pictures in the Franzone Palace in Genoa were "due paesi ovati, bellissi- mi, di Gasparo Poussin." This feeling for Gaspardesque landscape per­ sists in the Preaching of John the Baptist from Dijon (no.
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