Cambridge University Press 0521781876 - The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition Giovan Pietro Bellori Excerpt More information Introduction After the Death of Raphael and his Schol- hus did William Aglionby recount, in 1685,in lars (for, as for Michelangelo, he made no TPainting illustrated in three diallogues, the crisis School), Painting seemed to be decaying, and and rebirth of Italian painting, events of nearly a hun- for some years there was hardly a Master of dred years earlier. If the English and a certain simpli- any Repute all over Italy. The two best at fication can be ascribed entirely to Aglionby, the ideas Rome were Joseph Arpino and Michel Angelo and even the words were taken bodily from the Vite de’ da Caravaggio, but both guilty of great Mis- pittori, scultori et architetti moderni published thirteen takes in their Art: the first followed purely his years earlier by Giovan Pietro Bellori. Fancy, or rather Humour, which was neither This work consisted of twelve biographies of artists founded upon Nature nor Art, but had for of European level and fame but associated partic- Ground a certain Practical, Fantastical idea ularly with Rome, selected according to a precise which he had framed to himself. The other historiographical perspective: nine painters (Annibale was a pure Naturalist, copying Nature with- and Agostino Carracci, Federico Barocci, Caravag- out distinction or discretion; he understood gio, Rubens, Van Dyck, Domenichino, Lanfranco, little of Composition or Decorum, but was and Poussin), two sculptors (Franc¸ois Du Quesnoy an admirable Colourer. But, much about the and Alessandro Algardi), and one architect (Domenico same Time, the Caraches of Bologna came Fontana). It had been immediately understood that to Rome, and the two Brothers painted to- Bellori had a “new way”2 of writing about the figu- gether the famous Gallery of the Pallazzo rative arts. In fact, for historical vision, interpretive Farnese: Hannibal, the Youngest, was much acumen, cultural solidity, adherence to the figurative, the greatest Master, though his eldest Brother and literary quality, nothing of the sort had been pub- Augustin was likewise admirable; They re- lished since the time of the second edition of the Lives newed Raphael’s Manner, and Hannibal par- of Vasari (1568), in whose footsteps, precisely, Bellori ticularly had an admirable Genius to make intended to follow, albeit in a completely original proper to himself any Manner he saw, as he manner. did by Correggio, both as to his Colouring, Unlike Vasari, Bellori was not an artist; rather, Tenderness and Motions of the Figures: in a he was known to antiquarians, philologists, numis- word, he was a most accomplished Painter matists, and men of letters throughout Europe as one both for Design, Invention, Composition, of them, one of the most illustrious members of the Colouring, and all parts of Painting, having Republic of Letters, a scholar who had already pro- a soveraign Genius which made him Master duced some notable publications on antique coins and of a great school of the best Painters Italy gems, classical reliefs, and the poems of Tasso. Dur- has had.1 ing the months when the Lives came out, Bellori also I thank Marco Collareta and Maria Cristina Molinari for many exchanges of ideas, and the Principi Massimo for having opened their archive to me with exceptional generosity. To Paola Barocchi, Evelina Borea, and Francesco Caglioti I am profoundly grateful both for having discussed with me many of the ideas set forth in these pages and for having been so kind as to read them and react to them with crucial criticisms and suggestions. What began as a productive relationship of intellectual exchange with Alice and Hellmut Wohl has developed into a friendship that I consider an honor. 1 © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521781876 - The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition Giovan Pietro Bellori Excerpt More information 2 Giovan Pietro Bellori: The Lives published one of the works for which he came to be of Saint Luke in Rome in May 1664 and then included best known: a study of the Column of Trajan.In subse- as a preface to the biographies in 1672. As a result, quent years, the great majority of his books were mainly that text came to be read as the “programmatic mani- concerned with ancient monuments, objects, and festo” of a “normative aesthetics.”8 In essence, Bellori texts. was considered to have brought to definitive matura- Although Bellori was known throughout the nine- tion a complex aesthetic system to which he would teenth century almost exclusively as an important an- then rigidly adhere in his qualitative and historical tiquarian, in the twentieth, strangely enough, he was assessment of artists, thus arriving at his condemna- celebrated, attacked, and debated for only one of his tion of Caravaggio and the exclusion of Pietro da Cor- more than forty books: the Lives.3 In fact, entire gen- tona or Borromini from his writings. Panofsky’s Bellori erations of artists, collectors, and art historians had sees contemporary art in terms of a dualism that un- accepted Bellori’s judgment concerning the history of mistakably recalls the antithesis between classical and Italian painting, the same judgment that had fasci- baroque, or between linear and pictorial, that was codi- nated and convinced William Aglionby and that still fied by Heinrich Wolfflin¨ only two and a half centuries today – albeit with notable corrections – appears sub- later.9 stantially valid. But, stranger yet, it was not for his A crucial contribution to this interpretation came lucidity and farsightedness as a historian that Bellori in 1947 from Denis Mahon’s Studies in Seicento Art was considered “the most important historian of art and Theory. One of the principal objectives of this not only in Rome but in all of Italy, even in Europe, book, which remains indispensable today, was to in- in the seventeenth century” by Julius von Schlosser,4 troduce the figure and the writings of Giovan Battista the founder of the history of art criticism as a schol- Agucchi “as the precursor of Bellori, within the gen- arly discipline. In his eyes, Bellori was important not eral scheme elaborated by Dr. Panofsky”;10 however, so much for his assessment of what had gone before it achieved its greatest influence by denouncing the him or for his function within seventeenth-century eclectic interpretation of the Carracci reform of paint- culture, as for his role as the “founder of the classicis- ing as a colossal historical falsehood, to be ascribed tic opinion of the eighteenth century which, just as mainly to Bellori, his predecessor Agucchi, and his ri- the Renaissance had found the concept and epithet val Malvasia. It was a matter of the natural development ‘Gothic’ offensive, now found the concept and epithet of a theme implicit in Panofsky’s vision: the conviction ‘baroque’ for the art of their own grandfathers equally that seventeenth-century classicism had been marked so.”5 Paradoxically, then, Bellori was of greater inter- by a radical schism between theory and practice in art. est for what he had excluded from his Lives (Bernini, For Mahon, the most important consequence of classi- Cortona, the “baroque”) than he was for what he had cism had been the construction of a history of art that covered and how he had covered it. He seemed impor- was literary in character and essentially insensitive to tant above all as a theorist of classicism, a “forerunner of figurative values and that, in its failure to grasp the orig- Winckelmann.”6 inality of the Carracci, had reduced them to a sum of lo- In the same year as the publication of Schlosser’s cal sixteenth-century pictorial traditions. Mahon called masterpiece, Die Kunstliteratur (1924), this interpreta- it “the Classic and Eclectic Misinterpretation of the tion, which was decidedly unbalanced philosophically Carracci.”11 and closely related to a view with a long history, was The seventeenth-century sources, with Bellori in confirmed and expanded upon by Erwin Panofsky in the forefront, were thus summarily put in the dock, Idea: A Concept in Art History.7 In that extraordinarily or at least tacitly suspected of blindness and book- brilliant and tendentious study, Bellori became the or- ish pedantry. The coup de graceˆ came from Roberto ganizer and consecrator of the age-old theory of “ideal Longhi. Already in 1934, in “Momenti della pittura beauty”; Panofsky disregarded dozens and dozens of bolognese,” he had attacked the “misguided rational- books by Bellori, and even the Lives themselves, to fo- istic and mechanistic attempt to clarify the Carracci,” cus on the “Idea of the Painter, the Sculptor, and the namely,“Malvasia’seclectic interpretation, and the clas- Architect Chosen from the Beauties of Nature, Supe- sicistic one of Bellori”;12 but it was in “Proposte per rior to Nature,” a brief lecture delivered at the Academy una critica d’arte” in 1950, that the great rediscoverer © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521781876 - The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition Giovan Pietro Bellori Excerpt More information Introduction 3 of Caravaggesque painting launched his fatal attack on 1976.15 Previtali’s introduction, still today the most im- Bellori: portant study devoted to Bellori, has the great merit of having at last historicized him, assigning him not only Bellori, Felibien,´ and their associates, the men a place in the evolution of an aesthetic theory over the who oppressed and despised all the great rev- centuries but also a place in his own historical time.