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An Airborne Rescuer from the North in El Paso: "Ruggiero" Or "Perseus"? "Hippogriff" Or "Horse"?

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An Airborne Rescuer from the North in El Paso: Quidditas Volume 11 Article 6 1990 An Airborne Rescuer from the North in El Paso: "Ruggiero" or "Perseus"? "Hippogriff" or "Horse"? John F. Moffitt New Mexico State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Renaissance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Moffitt, John. F (1990) "An Airborne Rescuer from the North in El Paso: "Ruggiero" or "Perseus"? "Hippogriff" or "Horse"?," Quidditas: Vol. 11 , Article 6. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra/vol11/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Quidditas by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. JRMMRA n (1990) An Airborne Rescuer from the North in El Paso: "Ruggiero" or "Perseus"? "Hippogriff'' or "Horse"? by John F. Moffitt New Mexico State University I. A QUESTION OF PROCEDURE LIKE POLICE DETECTIVES, art historians weigh evidence according to certain established or traditional procedures. It is a dogma of our discipline that one of the primary tasks confronting the art historian is that of deter­ mining authorship; by so doing, we establish a more or less likely date of execution for a work. Having done this, then (if not before) the art histo­ rian should certainly attempt to identify correctly a picture's subject matter and, if possible, establish the nature of its sources, either textual or icono­ graphic. Things have changed since the long-gone days when it was sufficient that the art historian be merely a sensitive connoisseur wholly devoted to ferreting out certain stylistic peculiarities. The current generation of art historians are the products oflabored Ph.D. programs; therefore, we fancy ourselves scholars. The result is that we are increasingly interested in mat­ ters iconographic, and these interests naturally lead us toward certain iconological considerations. Iconology involves us in historical study and analysis of the evolution of ways of pictorially telling stories; it demands a thorough knowledge of standard literary conventions and specific textual sources. Therefore, as commonly practiced, the order of questions posed by the present-day art historian-scholar placed before an obscure or undocumented work proceeds JOHN F . MOFFITT as follows: (1) the tentative assignment of authorship, (2) the nearly auto­ matic determination of a time and a place of execution, (3) the entertaining of certain conclusions as to likely subject matter and its implications. I would like to present an odd example of these procedures by discussing an accepted - nevertheless, quite impossible because it is dearly posthumous - authorial attribution that has arisen largely due to an overlooked instance of confused iconographical borrowing. In this case, I shall first examine the possible subject matter of the painting, which is apparently Italian in origin, by pursuing the matter of its nearest compositional equivalents. In this case, the purpose of the procedure is to expose an overlooked case of nonauthorship, leading in turn to other cogent suggestions for a more likely author, with results additionally pointing to the probability of a very different dating for the painting. I shall dose the case with some general observations about the implications of the wo_rking relationships between Italian painters and northern prints. II. THE CASE IN POINT AND A QUESTION OF PROCEDURE BY CONSENSUS The object of my pursuit is a painting from the Kress Collection cur­ rently held by the El Paso, Texas, Museum of Art (fig. 1) . 1 Unsigned, un­ dated, and untitled, this picture is painted in oils on a small wooden panel measuring only 43 x 34.4 cm. Its provenance is rather obscure, and all that is certainly known of the painting is that it turned up in the late nineteenth century in a private collection in Ferrara, Italy. It was acquired by the Kress Collection in 1939 and first publicly exhibited in 1945 at the National Gal­ lery in Washington, D.C. For want of sixteenth-century documentation, all that can be known about the possible intrinsic significance of this panel is what can be seen today, and even the art historian's professionally trained eye can ascertain only (as a near fact) that this is a painting belonging to that vague art historical entity called international mannerism. The bare result is that the work is generally European and that it may date anywhere from ca. 1550 to 1620. This initial noncondusion is supported by one of the expert written opinions kept in the Kress Archives: So little is recorded of the sketchy surface that it is difficult to identify the brushwork. The most evident tricks of style are a flitting, but not rapid, small stroke combined with much blot­ ting of the wet pigment - a trick which appears in other pictures AIRBORNE RESCUER of various attributions and which is possibly not significant. The influence of Dosso [Dossi] is evident in the subject matter, but not in technique. The x-ray evidence is too slight for a definite attribution. 2 Notwithstanding this carefully considered opinion of stubborn ano­ nymity, the El Paso panel is presently (and authoritatively) attributed to Girolamo Sellari da Carpi (Carpi, 1501-Ferrara, 1556). Although this con­ clusion has since been disputed by a couple of scholars (namely, Frederick Antal in 1948 and, later, Roberto Longhi), the current attribution to Girolamo da Carpi still represents the accepted one. The present-day autho­ rial status is mainly due to the "facts" contained in certain opinions pro­ nounced as long ago as 1939/ 40, as presented by a panel of internationally ranked experts. This committee consisted ofsix connoisseurs (now deceased). Those supporting the Carpi attribution included Giuseppe Fiocco, F. Mason Perkins, William E. Suida, and Longhi.3 The two dissenters were, however, perhaps even more impressive - Bernard Berenson and Adolfo Venturi - but they thought only that the El Paso panel was the work of Lelio Orsi (15n-87). 4 As far as I can tell, the committee members never collectively met face-to-face. Worse, it appears that some (but probably not all) of these experts had never studied this work firsthand. Some, if not all, of the opin­ ions kept in the archives of the Kress Foundation were exclusively based on the analysis ofphotographs. Even worse, these photographs were black-and­ white glossies - definitely not color prints or transparencies (now common aids, these were rare in 1940). Whether the piece by Orsi or by Girolamo (and I would say neither), the arguments of these world-renowned experts were all sound, at least according to the conventions of connoisseurship in their time - half a century ago! As far as I can tell, no one has since bothered to question in any serious or searching way the cumulative weight of those authoritative evaluations laid down fifty years before in regards to the admittedly obscure El Paso picture. Theirs was a problem of procedure that has since become largely obsolete. A widely dispersed and geographically centrifugal entity like the Kress Collection is now largely an artifact of the past. This kind of artistic conglomerate has become largely extinct due to restrictive tax laws and because of changing patterns of taste, now favoring less-omnivorous and 81 JOHN F. MOFFITT less-eclectic patterns of collecting. For the purposes of our larger concerns - the traditions of evidential procedures - it may be pointed out that all those scholars exemplified the great age of connoisseurship. Belonging to what might be called the "preiconological" age, they mainly asked Who did it? Since subject matter meant much less to them than it does for the next generation of art historians (the Ph.D.-holding scholars), the connois­ seurs did not perhaps consider as deeply that other question, of at least as much consequence, What does the picture really represent? My case study reveals the manner in which pure connoisseurship can occasionally trip over its own blinkered ignorance of humanist literature. In this particular case, the three other procedural problems specifically to be attached to the El Paso panel can be called (1) connoisseurship by committee, (2) con­ noisseurship by photograph, (3) connoisseurship by (in one case, trans­ Atlantic) mail. Besides briefly noting the stylistic traits they thought were generally attributable to Girolamo da Carpi's obscurely documented oeuvre, some of the half-dozen experts hired by the Kress Foundation had also remarked upon another factor, even more nebulous than that of "style." This other element is the "spirit" of the picture. Thus, particular mention was made of the "premonitions of romanticism" and the "humorous, melodramatic implications" in the El Paso panel. These are, of course, wholly subjectively perceived traits. Nevertheless, it was felt that these numinous factors added a certain, strictly geographically predetermined character to the panel, namely, "the spirit of the picture that would have been more at home in Ferrara than anywhere else in sixteenth-century Italy."5 The background of that enthusiastic endorsement is easily ascertained: since the picture turned up in Ferrara (a fact), it is logically assumed to have been painted in the same place centuries before (a nonfact). Moreover, by this self-propelled line of reasoning - "painted in Ferrara" - the initial Girolamo da
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