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The Collector's Cut: Why Pierre-Jean Mariette Tore up His Drawings and Put Them Back Together Again Author(S): Kristel Smentek Source: Master Drawings, Vol

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The Collector's Cut: Why Pierre-Jean Mariette Tore up His Drawings and Put Them Back Together Again Author(S): Kristel Smentek Source: Master Drawings, Vol The Collector's Cut: Why Pierre-Jean Mariette Tore up His Drawings and Put Them Back Together Again Author(s): Kristel Smentek Source: Master Drawings, Vol. 46, No. 1, Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Draftsmen and Collectors (Spring, 2008), pp. 36-60 Published by: Master Drawings Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20444544 . Accessed: 08/01/2014 20:21 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Master Drawings Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Master Drawings. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 18.7.29.240 on Wed, 8 Jan 2014 20:21:41 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Collector's Cut: Why Pierre-JeanMariette Tore up His Drawings and Put Them Back Together Again KRISTEL SMENTEK In the eighteenth century, drawings emerged as "impress"itself on themind of theviewer or lis objects of central importanceto connoisseurs. tener.1First impressions were thusthe foundation Though theyhad been appreciatedby collectors on which more complex ideaswere developed. since the Renaissance, itwas only then that they For connoisseurs,whose claimsto expertisewere became the very foundation of connoisseurial based on their study of drawings, the immediate claimsto knowledge.Deemed by theoristsof the apprehension of an artist's sheet was of pivotal period to be purer, lessmediated expressions of an importance.Securing the legibilityof artists' artist'scharacteristic maniere than paintings, draw drawings was, I suggest, a goal that ismanifest both ings became the empirical data on which attribu inMariette's distinctive mounts and inhis interven tions and art historical taxonomies were based. tionsinto the drawings themselves.2 This belief in the primacy of drawing motivated As eighteenth-centurytheorists repeatedly the collectingand scholarshipof the eighteenth stressed, it was in drawings and not in paintings century'smost famousconnoisseur, Pierre-Jean that the connoisseurcould observe the artist's Maniette (1694-1774). Yet Mariette frequentlymind and hand most freely at work. This was a altered the very fabric of his Old Master drawings, view shared by Mariette. Expanding on claims completing, trimming,and reassemblingthe advanced by Roger de Piles (1635-1709) in his works he so prized-even, on occasion, splitting Idee du peintre parfait (1699), theorists such as double-sided sheets into two separateworks. JonathanRichardson, Sr. (1667-1745), and How are we to reconcile these interventions with Antoine-JosephDezallier d'Argenville (1680 hisprofound appreciation of thestylistic purity of 1765) posited thatdrawings were ultimatelysupe artists' sheets? Part of the answer may lie in the rior to paintings. De Piles had asserted that in epistemologicalconcerns that guided eighteenth paintings artists strove to outdo themselves and centuryscholar-collectors such asMariette. thus compromised their true style. By contrast, in The eighteenth century was an age of empiri drawings, artists "let themselves be seen as they cism-a time when knowledge did not derive are."3 Drawings were therefore a truer index of an from philology or abstract reasoning but rather artist's caractere,defined by de Piles as "the way a depended on firsthandobservation of phenome painter 'thinks' things," and, deploying the na. This applied as much to the study of art as it metaphor of impression, the "seal that distin did to the natural world. Empirical theories of guishes him from others and with which he knowledge were grounded in a model of percep imprints on his work the lively image of his tion in which sensory experience was thought to mind."4 By 1727 Dezallier could proclaim that "a 36 This content downloaded from 18.7.29.240 on Wed, 8 Jan 2014 20:21:41 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions beautiful volume of drawings by the best painters mere curieuxmore clearly than the careful and sys is a true school of painting."5 Later, in 1745, in his tematicfirsthand examination of artists'drawings. Abregede la vie desplus fameux peintres, Dezallier To be a connoisseur was to be an empiricist. repeatedde Piles's assertionthat drawings, rather "The science of the connoisseur,"~as both thanpaintings, offered the connoisseur unmediat Richardson and Mariette described it, depended ed access to an artist's defining manner: "A on experience, on the unbiased observation and painter, in painting a picture, corrects himself and comparativevisual analysis of numerousworks of suppresses the fire of his genius; in making a art,especially drawings.'4 As Carol Gibson-Wood drawing, he throws down the first fire of his has shown,Richardson drew heavily on John mind, he abandonshimself and showshimselfjust Locke's Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding as he is."6 In his Traite de la peinture et de la sculp (1689) in theexposition of his theoryof connois ture(1728), the source of much of Dezallier's own seurship." Using the metaphor of the printing theory,Richardson describeddrawings as "the press,Locke hypothesizedthat sensations from the mind itself and the quintessence of art" and went externalworld imprintedthemselves on themind so far as to claim that paintings were but pale imi as characters on a "white paper;" these impres tations of an artist'smore spirited, drawn originals.7 sions furnished themind with simple ideas or rep Mariette frequentlyexpressed his belief in the resentationsput before themind forapprehen significanceof drawingsfor the "true connois sion, reflection, and rational analysis.'6 Ideas were seur."8 In a sale catalogue published in 1750, he fixed in memory through attention and repeti wrote eloquently that, "in a drawing, refined and tion; internal reflection on them led to the build enlightened eyes discover the whole of the mas ing of complex ideas; comparison of those ideas ter's mind, the creative spirit, the sparkling and led to hypothesesbased on physicalresemblance. wholly divine fire that emanates from the soul and AdaptingLockean epistemologyto connoisseur which a moment of reflection is prepared to ship, Richardson argued that an attribution, for extinguish and make disappear."9 Writing private instance, is derived from a comparison of the ly to Giovanni Gaetano Bottari (1689-1775) in object on view with themental ideas or images of 1762, he statedcategorically that "the intellectual an artist's style retained in the memory.'7 When part [of painting] ismore clearly discerned in the agreement is reached between the object on view drawings of themasters than in their paintings."" and the image in themind, an attribution results: In one of the earliest publications with which Mariette was involved, the importance of draw For when weJudge who is theAuthor of any Picture, ings was made explicit in the very format of the orDrawing, we do the same thingas when we say who book.The so-calledRecueil Crozat, published in a portrait resembles; In that case we find the Picture 1729, was one of the earliest reproductive print answers to the Idea we have laid up in ourMinds of publications to include prints after artists' draw such a Face; so herewe compare thework under consid ings aswell as after their paintings." The inclusion erationwith the Idea we have of theManner of such a of drawings was explained in language reminis Master,and perceive the Similitude.'8 cent of de Piles: "Drawings are, so to speak, the touchstone for attaining knowledge of each The effectivenessof thisprocess depended on the author's relative merit; each reveals himself as he viewer s initial reception of clear and distinct ideas is, he cannot disguise himself."12 In the preface to such as are presented "in a well-ordered sensation thesecond volume, published in 1742,Mariette's or perception."' Given the importance of senso language is more forceful: "Nothing is more ry data in the acquisition of connoisseurial knowl appropriate than drawings for a sound knowledge edge, the clarity of sense impressions was impera of the true character of each master."''3 Nothing, tive. It was this perceptual clarity, Iwould argue, therefore,distinguishes the connoisseurfrom a thatwas one thingMariette soughtto create in 37 This content downloaded from 18.7.29.240 on Wed, 8 Jan 2014 20:21:41 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Fhqure 1 BARTOLOMMEO _- } P<I'ASSEROTTI l _ k If~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~tdof a Left * ~~~Hand Being * 1t- IDrawn by a Right Hand Paris, Muhsi'e dit Lain're, Dcparteicnt des Arts Grapuliqiues themounting and presentation of his drawings. 2 Fiznire Few eighteenth-centurymounts aremore cel MannerofJUSEPE ebrated today than thosedesigned by Mariette, RAIBERtA _ and few, I suggest, are as revelatory of eighteenth century visuality and the impression theory of Seated(raped sensation that shaped it.The practice of mounting Paris,Muisec diu drawings was not new; Mariette's mats draw on a Loui'rc,DiqJ~rtciiieiit trdto by. tradition two before detsIsArtsArt, Graphqle~s.Eni .r_ established centunes by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) in his Libro de' disegni whose elaborate presentation was prized and emulated by subsequent collectors, especially Mariette.2 Evolved from Vasari's example, Mariette's blue paper mounts are anchored by cartouches inscribed with the name of the artist and are often embellished with elaborately drawn borders that simulate the carved moldings of pic ture frames, emulating, for example, bead-and reel or laurel motifs, or the outset corners, guttae and garlands characteristic of eighteenth-century classicizing frames (Figs. 1-2).3 Occasionally, Mariette added a line of text in Latin to the mount, elucidating the subject of the drawing or the circumstances surrounding the execution of a relatedwork.
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