ANALECTA ROMANA INSTITUTI DANICI XL/XLI ANALECTA ROMANA INSTITUTI DANICI XL/XLI 2015/16 ROMAE MMXV-MMXVI ANALECTA ROMANA INSTITUTI DANICI XL-XLI © 2016 Accademia di Danimarca ISSN 2035-2506 Published with the support of a grant from: Det Frie Forskningsråd / Kultur og Kommunikation SCIENTIFIC BOARD Ove Hornby (Bestyrelsesformand, Det Danske Institut i Rom, -31.03.2016) Karoline Prien Kjeldsen (Bestyrelsesformand, Det Danske Institut i Rom) Jens Bertelsen (Bertelsen & Scheving Arkitekter) Maria Fabricius Hansen (Ny Carlsbergfondet) Peter Fibiger Bang (Københavns Universitet) Thomas Harder (Forfatter/writer/scrittore) Michael Herslund (Copenhagen Business School) Hanne Jansen (Københavns Universitet) Kurt Villads Jensen (Syddansk Universitet) Erik Vilstrup Lorenzen (Den Danske Ambassade i Rom) Mogens Nykjær (Aarhus Universitet) Vinnie Nørskov (Aarhus Universitet) Birger Riis-Jørgensen (Den Danske Ambassade i Rom) Niels Rosing-Schow (Det Kgl. Danske Musikkonservatorium) Poul Schülein (Arkitema, København) Lene Schøsler (Københavns Universitet) EDITORIAL BOARD Marianne Pade (Chair of Editorial Board, Det Danske Institut i Rom) Patrick Kragelund (Danmarks Kunstbibliotek) Sine Grove Saxkjær (Det Danske Institut i Rom) Gert Sørensen (Københavns Universitet) Anna Wegener (Det Danske Institut i Rom) Maria Adelaide Zocchi (Det Danske Institut i Rom) Analecta Romana Instituti Danici. — Vol. I (1960) — . Copenhagen: Munksgaard. From 1985: Rome, «L’ERMA» di Bretschneider. From 2007 (online): Accademia di Danimarca ANALECTA ROMANA INSTITUTI DANICI encourages scholarly contributions within the Academy’s research fields. All contributions will be peer reviewed. Manuscripts to be considered for publication should be sent to: [email protected] Authors are requested to consult the journal’s guidelines at www.acdan.it Contents MATTEO CADARIO: L’ostentazione del lusso nel trionfo di Cn. Manlio Vulsone e la funzione di abaci 7 e kylikeia nel modo ellenistico e romano CARSTEN HJORT LANGE: Triumphal Chariots, Emperor Worship and Dio Cassius: Declined 21 Triumphal Honours HANS RAMMINGER: Language Change in Humanist Latin: the case of traducere (to translate) 35 MORTEN STEEN HANSEN: Butchering the Bull of St. Luke: Unpublished Writings by and about the 63 Painter-Poet Giovanni da San Giovanni LENE ØSTERMARK- JOHANSEN: In the Footsteps of Winckelmann: Vernon Lee in the Roman Galleries 91 at the Fin de Siècle Butchering the Bull of St. Luke Unpublished Writings by and about the Painter-Poet Giovanni da San Giovanni by MORTEN STEEN HANSEN Abstract. Giovanni da San Giovanni (1592-1636), the most significant Florentine fresco painter of his generation, was also a poet and writer of satire, but because of the scandalous nature of his literary production only a small part of it has been preserved. The present study aims to compensate for that situation by publishing a number of his poems from a manuscript in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence, together with an anonymous seventeenth-century vita of the artist from the manuscript collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale in the same city. The previously unpublished biography also contains information about his satires. The poems reveal the painter-poet’s concern with a “low” version of the vernacular, serving his transgressive self-representation in grand-ducal Florence. Giovanni da San Giovanni (Giovanni sensory experience, and the Tuscan language. Mannozzi, 1592-1636), named after his In this respect the poems share themes with hometown in the Valdarno, was among the his paintings, though here his painted oeuvre artists in Florence who, following in the shall only be addressed briefly. footsteps of Michelangelo and Bronzino, Less than a household name today, composed burlesque poetry in the tradition of Giovanni da San Giovanni’s contemporaries the Florentine poet Francesco Berni. With a recognized him as the most significant fresco single exception, all of the painter’s surviving painter in Tuscany. Among his murals in poems have been preserved in a manuscript in the palaces of Italian nobility, the Sala degli the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence, which Argenti in the Palazzo Pitti, his last project contains poems by other Florentine seicento cut short by his premature death, remains painters and engineers as well: Cosimo Lotti, his best known, the hall now being part of Francesco Furini, and Baccio del Bianco.1 The the itinerary of the Museo degli Argenti following presents Giovanni da San Giovanni’s (Fig. 1). Salvator Rosa, who spent the decade verses together with an equally unpublished of the 1640s in Florence, held him for the vita of the artist from a codex in the Biblioteca best painter the city had known.2 Fame, Nazionale in Florence (appendix). Deploying however, did not exclude controversy, which colloquialisms and local dialect, the painter’s affected negatively the historical record. Our largely scandalous poems exemplify a “low” knowledge of the painter is above all based on version of the vernacular, harnessed against his Florentine biographer Filippo Baldinucci. Petrarchism and its idealizations of love, Admiring the artist, he also regretted what he 64 MORTEN STEEN HANSEN Fig. 1. Sala degli Argenti, Palazzo Pitti, Florence. The frescoes on vault and southern wall (right) are by Giovanni da San Giovanni, 1635-36. Those on the eastern wall (left) are by Francesco Furini, 1639-1642. (Photo: Alfredo Dagli Orti / Art Resource, NY). took to be his bizarre behavior as it spilled refused to commit to paper out of respect for into his art in “inappropriate” pictorial decency. In this light the manuscript vita in the conceits. At times the biographer admitted Biblioteca Nazionale is of particular interest, that he possessed information, which he because it contains information that did not BUTCHERING THE BULL OF ST. LUKE 65 pass Baldinucci’s self-censorship. Baldinucci The Riccardiana manuscript told how the painter, late in life during periods Eight of Giovanni da San Giovanni’s poems when too ill with gout to leave his house, took in the Riccardiana Manuscript are consecutive to reading the satirical Ragguagli di Parnaso by and preceded by a title page (fol. 148r), Traiano Boccalini and began composing his “Contro i pedanti non s’intenda/ de’ nostri own “news reports from Mount Parnassus.”3 sacerdoti e Cattolici/ ma de’ pedanti degli Unlike Boccalini, whose work primarily was poeti/ ci et altri infideli” (Against the Pedants directed against the despotism of the leaders does not indicate/ our priests and Catholics of the European states (the Medici included), / but the pedants among poets/ and other the painter wrote about his colleagues in infidels). The first of the poems was published Florence, on account of which he made in the catalogue of the Francesco Furini many enemies. In a fit of rage Cesare Dandini exhibition in Florence in 2007-2008, but it is threatened him with a sword upon learning included below because of its importance to that his colleague had described his painted the collection as a whole. The last and ninth figures as being made of glass, a situation poem, which appears later in the manuscript, which Giovanni da San Giovanni managed has been published elsewhere.8 Among the to talk himself out of.4 His widow Margherita poems one can identify three different hands, di Camillo Marzichi must have considered his none of which are autograph.9 Only the first Ragguagli defamatory because she submitted two sonnets belong to Contro i pedanti, which them to the flames, but the texts had an raises the question if more originally were part afterlife via oral transmission. Baldinucci of that collection. Probably a later owner of described a few that he considered not too the manuscript decided to delete poems two, offensive, and the anonymous vita contains four, and six with pen and ink. For sonnet two further information about the texts. the censor used horizontal strokes, making it The painter’s early biographers provide completely unreadable except for a few words. some insight into his literary formation. On the other two pages parallel diagonal Having been through formal training for strokes result in gestures towards, rather than the priesthood and the notarial profession in actual, censorship, since the poems remain San Giovanni Valdarno at the behest of his mostly intact. The owner of the manuscript parents, he knew Latin. Baldinucci described could thereby take a moral stance against the how in Florence the painter as an apprentice to texts while preserving them. At places the the painter Matteo Rosselli spent his evenings censor’s ink has run through to the other side reading poetry and history.5 A collection of of the page or etched holes. Giovanni da San Giovanni’s poetry could once The transcriptions follow the original be read on the walls of a villa in Castello. In the orthography as closely as possible, and all courtyard of “il Pozzino,” then belonging to modifications are marked with brackets. Those the wealthy merchant Giovanni Francesco di at the end of a word with a question mark Michele Grazzini, the painter executed scenes indicate that the remaining part of the word based on Ovid, Apuleius, Ludovico Ariosto, is unreadable. An independent set of brackets and Giovanni Battista Guarino, now mostly with a question mark signifies an illegible lost as a result of their outdoor location.6 The word, though in the case of the second poem painted scenes he accompanied with his own it can deem several words. For the translations verses, which Baldinucci, who duly copied