retrato de un rebelde y absurdista
10. LAS ADAPTACIONES
Giorgio Vasari’s influence extended far beyond the parameters of the literary genre of biography, and specifically artists’ lives. Another textual form congenial to the appearance of the figures of the Italian primitives was, naturally, that of the travel
33Roger de Piles,The Principles of Painting (London, 1743), p. 297. 34Ibid., pp. 127-128.
35Jonathan Richardson,An Essay on the Theory of Painting, 2nd ed. (London, 1725), p. 270. 36For Bell, see Howard Colvin and Lawrence Wodehouse, ‘Henry Bell of King’s Lynn’,Architec- tural History, 4 (1961), pp. 41-62. Henry Bell,The Perfect Painter; or, a compleat history of the original, progress and improvement of painting(London, 1730).
guide to Italy. The authoritarian role played by the guide in the self-directed ritual of travel during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been explored within a variety of frameworks.38 In relation to Italy and Italian art, with which a tourist desired an acquaintance in order to participate in the rituals of polite socia- bility, Vasari was cited as the ultimate authority from an early stage.
The Catholic priest Richard Lassels (c.1603-1668) is frequently credited with both introducing the term ‘grand tour’ into English and authoring one of the most influential and comprehensive guidebooks for the early history of that phenomenon - The Voyage of Italy (published posthumously in 1670).39 Lassels’s text was written and refined during the mid 1600s, meaning that his comments on Baroque artists such as Bernini were well-informed.40 The information about Renaissance art in Lassels’s book was explicitly derived from Vasari.41 Whilst references to earlier artists are outweighed by those to later, given that the author’s stated preference was not for the visual arts those that are included are perhaps even more notable.42 Donatello is named as one of three significant modern sculptors; a mention of the tombs of Giotto and Cimabue in the Florentine Duomo leads to a brief digression regarding the restoration of painting and a direction to Vasari for further reading; another example is the mention of Duccio as the original designer of the marble pavement in Siena cathedral.43 Given both the above references and Vasari’s em- phasis on this particular monument, it is perhaps surprising that Lassels goes no further in his account of the interior decoration of the Campo Santo than describing it as “curiously painted.”44
A number of decades later, Jonathan Richardson sent his son (of the same forename) to Italy with the express commission of studying Italian art and antiq- uity. Richardson the younger’s assiduity in completing this task led to the joint authoring of what has been described as “one of the first grand tour guides which offers serious visually acute connoisseurship of Old Master paintings”, theAn Ac- 38For a recent explanation, see Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) particularly Chapter 1.
39Exhaustive researches into Lassel’s life and writings have been conducted by Edward Chaney; see Edward Chaney,The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion: Richard Lassels and ‘The Voyage of Italy’ in the Seventeenth Century(Geneva and Turin: Slatkine, 1985) andThe Evolution of the Grand Tour(London: Frank Cass, 1996).
40Lassels visited Bernini’s studio whilst in Rome in the 1640s.
41Lassels frequently invoked Vasari’s attributions and anecdotes, and expressed his trust in him at instances when the Italian’s authority was called into question. See, for example, Lassels, 1670, vol. 1, pp. 237-238.
42“... when all is done, give me Books in a Library, not pictures.” Lassels, 1670, vol. 1, p. 238. 43Respectively, pages 8, 193 and 237. Vasari’s attribution in the last of these examples has long been regarded a deliberate fiction. See Paul Barolsky,Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari (Pennsylvania; The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991) p. 9.
count of some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, &c, with Remarks published the following year.45 Again, the preponderance of artistic fo- cus was directed towards the fashionable High Renaissance and seventeenth-century masters, but the primitives were not ignored and, indeed, Richardson evinced an appreciation of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century artists. Paintings by Fra Angelico in the Uffizi were praised as “fine ... and very Gentile”, and a mosaic depicting the Annunciation, which Richardson believed to be by Pietro Cavallini (but which is now given to an unknown fourteenth-century artist), was salvaged from its “Gothic” style, in Richardson’s opinion, by its “Thought ... so fine, I wonder other Painters have not taken it in treating this Subject.”46 Richardson was also one of the first authors to steer his reader towards a work by Giotto that was not the Florentine campanile - the Navicella mosiac in San Pietro, Rome.47 Furthermore, Richardson gave the work aesthetic consideration:
The Bark of Giotto in Mosaic is over the Pillars, and in the inside of the Portico, so that ‘tis seen at a great height as you come out of the Church to go into the Piazza: ‘Tis very Beautiful, and much better Coloured than I imagined: The Fisherman is the Best Figure, and is really fine.48
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its high-profile location, theNavicella became the standard artwork mentioned in discussions of Giotto.49 Tobias Smollett (1721- 1771), the irascible novelist and doctor, also mentioned it in his Travels through France and Italy of 1766, appraising it in an historical as well as aesthetic context:
The great picture of Mosaic work, and that of St Peter’s bark tossed by the tempest, which appear over the gate of the church, though rude in comparison with modern pieces, are nevertheless great curiosities, when considered as the work of Giotto, who flourished in the beginning of the fourteenth century.50
As the subsequent chapter of this thesis will demonstrate, a number of purported drawings of theNavicellaalso circulated amongst certain artistic circles in England,
45Hugh Brigstocke, ‘Richardson, Jonathan’, The Oxford Companion to West-
ern Art, Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press, accessed Jan 17, 2013,
http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e2224.
46Richardson Senior and Richardson Junior, 1722, p. 62 and pp. 78-79 respectively.
47The mosaic seen by the British from the eighteenth century onwards was a seventeenth-century reconstruction, containing only a couple of fragments of the original work.
48Richardson and Richardson, 1722, p. 293. Richardson junior’s singling out of the fisherman for especial praise was not original, however; Vasari wrote of the figure’s naturalism. Vasari, trans. by Bondanella, 1991, p. 24.
49The Navicella has one of the most completefortuna critica’s of any of Giotto’s works; it was the only modern work mentioned by Leon Alberti in hisDe Pitturaof 1435.
further testifying to the interest in the work.51
A guide to Italy published anonymously in 1787 is distinguished for both its multiplicity of references to primitives in general and its singling out of unusual names. The Gentleman’s Guide in his Tour through Italy mentions no fewer than a dozen works attributed to Giotto - including the ubiquitousNavicella, a wooden cru- cifix in the Roman church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the Campanile - and works by such very-rarely referenced names as Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi.52 The guide was reissued in 1791 in an expanded version, containing a catalogue of artworks and with detailed descriptions of Rome, Florence, Venice and Naples. This new version was published with the name of the author - Thomas Martyn (1735-1825), a Professor of Botany at Cambridge University.53 Although Martyn’s two-year tour of the continent, undertaken as a tutor in 1778, and the journal he subsequently published are mentioned in his biographies, it would appear (unsur- prisingly, given the surplus of travel literature from the era) that his comments on art and architecture have been largely overlooked by historians of the eighteenth century. However, the fact that Martyn was a close friend of John Strange, the British Resident in Venice between 1774 and 1786, now noted as an important early collector of medieval and early Renaissance art, makes him interesting in the con- text of the rediscovery of the primitives.54 John Strange is known to have owned works attributed to a number of primitives, with a focus on Venetian artists but also including Tuscan; by 1775 he owned, for example, a large altarpiece depicting the 51The account of the mosaic given by Richardson junior and quoted above continued with the following information regarding drawings of it in England: “My Father has the Drawing, but without that Fisherman. My Lord Pembroke has one more Perfect.” Richardson and Richardson, 1722, p. 293.
52The paintings referenced by Martyn in these instances are anAnnunciationand one depicting the Virgin, San. Giuliano and San. Niccolo respectively, both of which were in Santa Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi, Florence.
53Martyn published extensively on botany, but also evinced an interest in the visual arts early on. In 1766 he published a two-volume connoisseur’s guide to paintings and sculptures in British collections, and four years later, an illustrated treatise on the art of engraving, entitledA Chrono- logical Sequence of Engravers, from the invention of the art to the beginning of the present century. The character of the latter corresponds with the historical nature of the interest shown by many of those eighteenth- century connoisseurs who paid attention to early Italian art. See G.C. Gorham, Memoirs of John Martyn and Thomas Martyn (London, 1830).
54John Strange, like many early collectors of primitives, combined scientific pursuits with an- tiquarian interests. He also patronised Francesco Guardi extensively. More scholarship remains to be carried out on the formation and nature of his collection. For Strange, see John Ingamells, ed.,A dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy, 1701-1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997) 902 ff and Robert Sharp, ‘Strange, John (1732-1799)’,Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26636 (ac- cessed 29 July 2009). Michael Compton remarked on the frequency of a dual interest in science demonstrated by collectors of early Italian art, but ultimately concluded that the divergence in the status, wealth and backgrounds of those who bought and sold primitives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries meant that it was not possible to establish a general profile for such connoisseurs. Compton, 1960-1961, p. 45.
Death of the Virgin ascribed to Giotto, though now attributed to fifteenth-century Venetian artist Bartolomeo Vivarini (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Presumably the two men corresponded over their mutual scientific interests, but as to whether Strange directed Martyn’s attention to Trecento and Quattrocento art is surely a point for further research. Although Martyn’s comments on the primitives do not go much further than a simple catalogue of the works he saw, that he paid attention to such a large number relatively early in the history of the revival of interest in early art is certainly noteworthy.
Another travel guide which directed its readers towards early Italian art was first published at what may seem, retrospectively, to have been an unpropitious moment for travel and tourism - the turn of the nineteenth century. Regardless, it still became highly influential. Mariana Starke’s (1762-1838) two-volume Letters from Italy was first published in 1800; its popularity was such that it reached a second edition just two years later, and its comprehensiveness is reflected by the fact that much of Starke’s text formed the basis of the earliest Murray travel guides to Italy.55 The practical bent of Starke’s guides has been acknowledged, as too has the centrality of art to her concerns. Starke’s guides contained detailed information regarding issues important for and to tourists, such as food, roads and accommoda- tion (kept up-to-date in successive editions), and she employed an influential rating system for sights and cultural attractions, which included artworks.56 With regards to the primitives, one of Starke’s most valuable contributions is her thorough and sympathetic assessment of the Campo Santo frescoes which, being located in Pisa, she thought had been unfairly neglected:
So little has been said by English Travellers concerning Pisa, that I shall venture to send you a rather minute description of this City, especially as it may with truth be called the cradle of the Arts.57
Thus Starke signalled from the outset of this letter her attitude toward early Italian art, and she utilised the example of Pisa as a departure point for a brief account of the resurgence of the visual arts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Moreover, she perceptively posited the monument as the starting point of an active partici- patory experience, the tracing of that development of painterly skill and technical knowledge:
55Mariana Starke,Letters from Italy: between the years 1792 and 1798, 2 vols., (London, 1800.) 56Starke has traditionally been credited with innovating this system, but Zoe Kinsley recently demonstrated that similar such “method[s] of classification” were in use prior to Starke’s publication in the home-focused travel accounts of other female tourists: Zoe Kinsley,Women Writing the Home Tour: 1682-1812 (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008) pp. 40-41. See James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) for an account of Starke’s role in shaping the development of the guidebook.
Travellers who see Pisa first, and afterwards proceed to Florence and Rome, have the advantage of tracing the gradual progress of these arts to that state of maturity which the fostering care of the Medician Princes at length enabled them to attain.58
Starke also enumerated artworks in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, and mentioned the Brancacci Chapel frescoes in reference to Masac- cio’s status as being “the first person who adopted the present improved style of painting”.59 The Brancacci chapel does not seem to have roused her to the degree of detailed commentary as the earlier Abb´e Richard, whose account of his travels was also widely read by the British. Richard assessed the church and its decoration as follows:
The Carmine, the church of the Carmelites, grand and vast, of antique construction ... and very well decorated ... Some scenes of the life of the apostle St. Peter, painted in fresco by Masaccio, ancient painter of the Florentine school, who was one of the first to throw off the yoke of his masters in order to imitate nature, and remove from drawing this cold style, that you notice in all ancient paintings. One can believe that Masaccio would have made great progress, if he hadn’t died at twenty- six years old in 1445. This chapel is a monument to the force of a happy genius who knows how to make a route for himself, without precepts and without a model, to the real beauties of nature.60
The Brancacci chapel notwithstanding, Starke, like Martyn, covered a remarkably wide range of primitives in her guidebook. Caroline Palmer contended that the sculptor John Flaxman, who made notes and copies after the early Italians during his tour throughout the country in the decade before Starke and shared a consider- able personal acquaintance with her, may have played an influential role in directing her attention so markedly towards such art.61 Starke herself pointed to the aid of
58Ibid., p. 199. 59Ibid., p. 291.
60“Il Carmine, ´eglise de Carmes, grande & vaste, de construction antique ... & tr`es bien d´ecor´ee ... Quelques traits de la vie de l’aptre S.Pierre, peints `a fresque par le Masaccio, peintre ancien de l’´ecole Florentine, qui l’un des premiers secoua le joug de ses matres pour imiter la nature, & ter au dessein cette maniere roide que l’on remarque dans toutes les peintures anciennes: il est `a croire que le Masaccio adroit fait de grands progr`es, s’il ne ft pas mort `a vingt-six ans en 1445. Cette chapelle est un monument de la force d’un heureux g´enie qui fait se frayer lui-mme, sans pr´eceptes & sans modele, une route qui le conduit aux vraies beaut´es de la nature.” Abb´e Richard, Description Historique et Critique de l’Italie, vol. 3, (Paris, 1766), pp. 48-49 (this author’s translation).
61Caroline Palmer, Women Writers on Art and Perceptions of the Female Connoisseur, 1780- 1860, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Oxford Brookes University, 2009), p. 92.
another artist, William Artaud, in formulating her assessments of artworks.62 The reliance on guidebooks by tourists, covering a wide spectrum of social classes, is evidenced by both the proliferation of the genre in the eighteenth century (concomitant with the aggregation in the numbers of those journeying to the con- tinent) and the material evidence of their ownership and use in the form of sales records, inscriptions and annotations. In addition to being repositories of informa- tion, guidebooks could also provide the locus for a series of interactions between author and reader, and renegotiations of attributions based on the reader’s own empirical evidence. Again, the above explication has endeavoured to illustrate the wealth of direction (and, at times, information) to Italian primitives available to readers through guidebooks, which, in some documented cases, served as an impe- tus to further investigaton.