Historiography Lesson #2 Critiquing Primary Sources: 17 th century Art Theorists and Biographers November 27, 2007
Directions: 1. Divide into 4-5 groups. 2. Read through the biographies on this sheet individually. 3. Among your group members, share the seventeenth-century text provided; have each member read aloud a sentence or two.
4. In your groups, consider the following about the text:
What kind of information is presented? How is it presented? Are there apparent biases or opinions? Why? How might this text this useful to historians and researchers? How might this text NOT be useful?
5. Report Out.
Gian Pietro Bellori (also known as Giovanni Pietro Bellori or Giovan Pietro Bellori , (1613 - 1696) was a prominent biographer of the Italian Baroque artists of the seventeenth century. As an art historian, he was the Baroque equivalent of Giorgio Vasari.
Born in Rome, he was considered by his contemporaries as the most authoritative witness of the artistic culture of his own time; modern art historiographers, on their part, claim that Bellori has played a predominant role in determining the character of art literature over a long period of time. In his texts the platonizing theory of art was given its ultimate formulation, thus achieving canonical status – a status that was to retain its currency at least up to the beginning of the 19th century. Bellori also contributed, by promoting the graphical documentation of the excavation objects, to anticipating the 17th century methodology of research, thus setting the example for modern archaeology.
Around 1660, he began to write, with an European viewpoint, the seventeenth-century artists biographies, selecting those who, in his opinion, had better served the cause of classicictic tradition.
Biography Likely nephew of the antiquarian collector and writer Francesco Angeloni, he lived in Angeloni's home in Rome. He apparently took art lessons from Domenichino. As a young man, he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca, but studied and wrote about classical and contemporary art. In 1664 he delivered an influential speech to the Accademia on the Ideal in Art . In 1672 he published this as a preface to his biographies of recent and contemporary artists, titled: Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni ( The lives of the modern painters, sculptors, and architects ).
In his view, the Renaissance ideal had been rescued from the tangled post-Raphael and Michelangelo styles by the robust classicism of those following the Carracci's style. Bellori advocated idealism over realism or naturalism. This famously led to Bellori's reverence of the painting of Annibale Carracci and sanguine repudiation of Caravaggio. His writing of the 'Idea' is draws influence from Giovanni Battista Agucchi, Vasari, Leon Battista Alberti, Aristotle and others. His heroes were Domenichino and Nicolas Poussin, his friend. Alessandro Algardi gained more praise than Bernini (who is not mentioned in Bellori's Lives). He respected Andrea Sacchi, and his pupil Carlo Maratta, but shunned Pietro da Cortona.
Vasari's definition of " disegno " (which was at that time seen as the most important element to a painting or sculpture's artistic value) is tied up in the concept of 'prudence', and forms the basis of subsequent value judgments in art by the likes of Bellori. An artist's work could essentially be seen as a series of choices, and the wisdom of these choices was owed to the character, or 'prudence' of the artist. Bellori and Agucchi, after Aristotle, equated the practice of idealism with prudent choice, and naturalism with poor prudence.
Bellori's Lives of the Artists also discusses the brothers Annibale and Agostino Carracci , Domenico Fontana , Federico Barocci , Rubens , Anthony van Dyck , Francois Duquesnoy and Lanfranco . His preference for the Bolognese artists Bellori's planned sequel was never completed, except for the entries for Guido Reni , Sacchi and Maratta .
The Complete printed works of Bellori are available online at: http://biblio.cribecu.sns.it/bellori/index.html
Karel van Mander (May 1548–September 2, 1606) Dutch Mannerist painter, poet, and writer whose fame is principally based upon a biographical work on painters - Het Schilder-boeck (1604; "The Book of Painters") - that has become for the northern countries what Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Painters became for Italy. This was the first systematic account of the lives of northern European artists, and our only source of information about some of them.
Het Schilder-boeck contains about 175 biographies of Dutch, Flemish, and German painters of the 15th and 16th centuries and is a unique source of information on the northern European artists of those times. The material is a condensed translation into Dutch of Vasari, information collected by van Mander himself when he was in Italy in 1573-77, and information from friends and correspondents.
Biography Born of a noble family at Meulebeke in Flanders, van Mander studied under Lucas de Heere at Ghent and in 1568-69 under Pieter Vlerick at Courtrai and Tournai. After traveling, van Mander in 1583 settled at Haarlem, where, with Hendrik Goltzius and Cornelis Cornelisz., he founded a successful academy of painting. His fame is, however, principally based upon his Schilder-boeck , the voluminous biographical work on the paintings of various epochs—a book that has become for the northern countries what Vasari's Lives of the Painters became for Italy. It was completed in 1603 and published in 1604, in which year Van Mander removed to Amsterdam, where he died in 1606. Van Mander was famously influential on the art writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among others, Cornelis de Bie and Arnold Houbraken imitated his Schilder-boeck .
Van Mander’s own pictures, which were mainly religious and allegorical, adopted the elongated forms of Mannerism, but his later works showed a tendency towards naturalism.
A facsimile of Het Schilder-boeck is online at http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/mand001schi01_01/mand001schi01_01_0001.htm
Francisco Pacheco (bap. November 3, 1564 - November 27, 1644) was a Spanish painter, best known as the teacher of Diego Velázquez and Alonso Cano, and for his textbook on painting that is an important source for the study of seventeenth-century practice in Spain. He is described by some as the “Vasari of Seville”; he was voluble and didactic about his theories of painting and thoughts about painters, but he was conventional and uninspired in his own painting. In addition to material on iconography and technique, Pacheco's Arte de la pintura (1649) includes valuable biographical information on Spanish painters of the time.
Biography He was born at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, son of Juan Pérez and wife Leonor del Río, and moved to Seville at a young age. He was a student of Luis Fernandez, and did much of his learning by copying works of the Italian masters. He visited Madrid and Toledo in 1611, studying the work of El Greco, then returned to Seville and opened an art school.
Pacheco's school emphasized the academically correct representation of religious subjects, not least because he was the official censor of Seville's Inquisition. His own work reflects those constraints.