RENDIMIENTO DE BIOMASA EN VERDE (kg.ha 1 )

This chapter will now turn to weighing up the intrinsic value of Patch’s volumes of engravings - their specific contributions to art-historical scholarship - against the wider impact they had upon British taste. Each of the four volumes is prefaced by introductions in both Italian and English, suggesting that they were intended for sale in both countries. As has been discussed earlier in this chapter, it is logical to assume that Patch would not have had his engravings after early masters published in either country had he not believed in a substantial audience for them, and his comments concerning his own ingenuity at being the first to publish such volumes further indicate his awareness of his own astuteness. Additionally, it has also already been intimated that it was Patch’s friendship with Horace Mann which served as the primary conduit for bringing his work to the attention of influential figures in the British art world, as it was through Mann that Horace Walpole became acquainted with Patch’s engravings. Walpole believed that Patch’s contribution to introducing the British cognoscenti to early Italian art was immeasurable, writing upon the oc- casion of Patch’s death in 1782 that the artist had had “great merit ... in bringing to light the admirable paintings of Masaccio, so little known out of Florence till his prints disclosed them.”86 Indeed, Walpole was so enamoured with the Masaccio vol- ume that he showed it to the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds.87

86_{See note 38.}

87_{“I am expecting Sir Joshua Reynolds, our best painter, whom I have sent for, to see some} wonderful miniatures I have bought, and these heads of Masaccio. I think they may give him such lights as to raise him prodigiously. I must repeat it, the mouths, and often the eyes, are life itself.” Walpole to Mann, 20 January 1771 in Lewis, vol. 23, 1969, pp. 267-268. In the same letter, Walpole requested two more copies of the Masaccio volume to give to other (unidentified) people. It is interesting that Walpole was the instrument for Reynolds receiving a copy of the Masaccio engravings (if indeed he did; the Phillips sale catalogue of Reynolds’s collection of drawings, scarce prints and books of prints records only “the works of Bartolomeo, with his life by T. Patch”. London, 1798, p. 34). The Masaccio volume was referenced in relation to Reynolds’s visit to the Carmine during his time in Italy in William Cotton, ed., Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Notes and Observations on Pictures (London: John Russell Smith, 1859), a collection of Reynolds’s writings containing,

Smiles suggests that Patch’s work on Masaccio may have been the catalyst for Reynolds’s lecture incorporating reflections on the same artist, delivered to the Royal Academy students in 1784. This, Reynolds’s twelfth discourse, contains the only extended discussion of a ‘primitive’ artist; in the discourses, the formative literature of British artistic theory in the second half of the eighteenth century, Reynolds took as his exemplars those artists who reflected mainstream aesthetic taste, unsurprising when one considers that his audiences included aristocratic con- noisseurs and patrons.88 _{Reynolds qualified Masaccio’s achievements historically in} relation to those of Raphael and, although his praise of the earlier artist is not as extensive as that afforded him by Patch, Reynolds singled out a number of laud- able elements of Masaccio’s style.89 _{This, perhaps, is also unsurprising given that} the context of Reynolds’s referencing of Masaccio is a defence, within the discourse of the artistic practice, of borrowing or imitation as developmental and emulative processes.90 _{In comparing Reynolds’s text with Patch’s volume, it is apparent that} there is a direct correlation between the Brancacci subjects analysed by Reynolds and those reproduced by Patch. Material evidence for this claim may be found in the library of the Royal Academy, which holds a loose, unbound collection of six- teen of Patch’s Masaccio plates (without the accompanying textual introduction) - all of individual heads. If Patch’s volume was indeed the sole visual source material used by Reynolds in his lecture preparation, then it was Patch’s understanding and translation of Masaccio’s achievements and stylistic merits that was disseminated by Reynolds in late-eighteenth-century Britain, and which were, in fact, inimical to Reynolds’s own theoretical beliefs as expounded in the Discourses. For, as previ- ously discussed, the heads demonstrate that Patch’s representation of Masaccio’s art focused on the depth and naturalness of his individual characterisation. Interest- ingly, though, Reynolds’s personal response to seeing the Brancacci chapel himself thirty years prior to the occasion of his lecture shared clear similarities with Patch’s later interests. Reynolds noted that Santa Maria del Carmine contained “A Chapel amongst other material, the excerpted written observations from two of Reynolds’s Italian tour sketchbooks.

88_{Chapter 5 set forth an argument for Reynolds’s theoretical position (in relation to the primitives,} at least) being a reflection of that of his patrons.

89_{Compare “it will be sufficient to say that both Michelangelo and Raphael studied after [the} Brancacci chapel frescoes] and that the latter even condescended to introduce some of those figures into his own compositions having besides learnt from Masaccio the surest method of varying his Characters by taking them from nature” (Patch, 1772, p. 3), and “Raphael, as appears from what has been said, had carefully studied the works of Masaccio; and indeed there was no other, if we except Michael Angelo, (whom he likewise imitated), so worthy of his attention; and though his manner was dry and hard, his compositions formal, and not enough diversified, according to the custom of Painters in that early period, yet his works possess that grandeur and simplicity which accompany, and sometimes even proceed from, regularity and hardness of manner.” Reynolds, ed. by Wark, 1997, p. 218.

Painted by Masaccio” and that “Raffiele[sic] has taken his Adam and Eve driven out of Paradise from hence, the heads according to the ancient custume[sic] are Portraits and have a wonderful character of Nature”.91

The first catalogue of the Royal Academy’s library was compiled in 1802, and it included La Vita di Fra Bartolommeo. This may have been gifted by an artist, but it also may have been purchased from one of the booksellers known to supply the institution; newspaper advertisements reveal that Mr. Randall of Pall Mall, whose premises were leased from the auctioneer James Christie (as were the Royal Academy’s), was selling the Fra Bartolommeo and Giotto volumes in 1773, and a year later Mr. Molini, who identified himself as bookseller to the Royal Academy, had some of the Ghiberti engravings for sale.92 _{John Flaxman’s proposition in 1810} that the Academy purchase Patch’s book of engravings after the Ghiberti reliefs is further evidence of the importance accorded to Patch’s volumes in the immediate decades following their execution.93

A more wide-ranging reconstruction of Patch’s immediate and later audi- ences is afforded through the records of sale catalogues and the bookplates and inscriptions that survive in various copies of the volumes, and these throw up a host of both expected and unknown names. Established and supposed early owners were William Beckford (builder of the Gothic Fonthill Abbey and owner of multiple early Italian artworks, some of which ultimately went to the National Gallery), Count

Leonardo Cicognara, a ‘Mr. Mounsier’ to whom Patch inscribed the copy of La

Vita di Masaccio (bound with caricatures and other engravings) now in the British Museum, and Robert Udny, elder brother to the consul of Leghorn.94 There are

91_{Reynolds, 1752, BMPL 1859,0514.305, f. 31v.}

92_{Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, Sat March 20th 1773, Issue 1194 and Morning} Chronicle and London Advertiser, Mon Jan 31st 1774, Issue 1463 respectively.

93_{RA Council Minutes, IV, 236, 1810 August 13; recorded in the RA Library Catalogue of 1821.} See Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, ‘The ‘Diffusion of Knowledge and Taste’: John Flaxman and the Improvement of the Study Facilities at the Royal Academy’,Walpole Society, 53 (1987) pp. 226- 238.

94_{The provenance information for these four examples is as follows. Beckford: the Patch volume} in the Pierpoint Morgan Library, gifted by Ken Clark in 1981, has a pencil note on the flyleaf identifying Beckford as a previous owner; his ownership of it could be identified with lot 1894 in the Philips’ auction catalogue of his library (A Catalogue of the Magnificent, Rare and Valuable Library of Fonthill Abbey, 1823), which reads “The Life and Works of Masaccio with the caricatures, folio”, although Patch’s name as author is not present. Cicognara: Count Cicognara (1767-1834) amassed a library on art, archaeology and related fields which he sold to the Vatican in 1823; his self-authored catalogue -Catalogo ragionato dei libri d’arte e d’antichit`a posseduti dal Conte Cicognara (Pisa, 1821) - contains two Patch listings, one for a Masaccio volume (seemingly alone) and the other for a Ghiberti one. Mr. Mounsier: British Museum 1854,1113.1. This individual is seemingly unknown and there are no other items in the British Museum connected to him. Udny: a Ghiberti volume is listed as lot 18 in the thirteenth day’s sale of his collection in London by T. Philipe, which began 26 May 1802. In this catalogue the volume is credited only to Patch, with no mention of Gregori.

three copies of Patch’s engravings in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Na- tional Art Library, one of which - a bound volume including Masaccio, Giotto and Fra Bartolommeo - has no provenance information beyond the date the museum ac- quired it.95 The second was part of the Alexander Dyce bequest and is the Masaccio volume bound with that of Giotto (not, unusually, also including Fra Bartolommeo) and a single engraving of a bronze statue of Hercules. The latter is dated 1775 and is signed ‘Gregori delin et Scul’ in addition to the following inscription: “Ercole

Da un Bronzo antico della medesima grandezza appresso Tommaso Patch”.96 The

provenance information for the third is as limited as that of the first, but this copy - the Masaccio - is bound with the same series of other engravings as that at the British Museum, which was given directly by Patch to its recipient (Mounsier); both include twenty-five full-sized engraved caricatures signed and dated between 1768 and 1769, twenty-eight smaller caricatures and a series of plates after sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings in Florentine collections.97

Another recorded owner of some of Patch’s engravings illuminates an addi- tional facet of his influence in relation to early Italian art. The 1805 sale of the collection of books and prints owned by the portrait and history painter George Romney (1734-1802) included six plates “after Fra Bartolomeo, in aquatinto.”98 In January 1775, as part of a two-year Italian residence, Romney spent three weeks in Florence where records attest to his having met Patch. First, on 16 January Romney was introduced by Patch to copy unspecified paintings at the Uffizi.99 Sec- ond, a note in one of Romney’s sketchbooks reads “speak to the apothecary in Patch’s name”, prefaced by a reference to a painting by Fra Bartolommeo which suggests a recommendation by Patch (who of course had intended to engrave all of Fra Bartolommeo’s extant paintings).100 _{Importantly, both written and visual} records document the fact that Romney also looked at primitives whilst in Florence,

95_{National Art Library, 66.E.10, acquired by the museum 2 November 1954.}

96_{V&A DYCE.2804-2841. Underneath a newspaper cutting describing the Masaccio volume and} pasted to the first folio is an inscription in ink reading “3-3-0 at Sotheby’s, April 14 1866.” Richard Redgrave,DYCE COLLECTION. A Catalogue of the Paintings, Miniatures, Drawings, Engravings, Rings and Miscellaneous Objects Bequeathed by The Reverend Alexander Dyce (London: South Kensington Museum, 1874) p. 269.

97_{One example is an engraving after a landscape by Gaspard Dughet identified on the plate as} being in Horace Mann’s collection. National Art Library, 66.E.36, acquired by the library 28 March 1868.

98_{The Intire and Genuine Collection of Prints, Books of Prints and Drawings of George Romney,} Esq.T. Philipe, London, 22-23 May 1805, lot 10 (the second day’s sale).

99_{Fabia Borroni-Salvadori, ‘Artisti e viaggiatori agli Uffizi nel Settecento’,Labyrinthos, 3 (1987)} p. 127. Judging from a letter by Romney addressed to a fellow artist back in Rome, it seems that one of his primary requests was for Titian’sVenus of Urbino, immensely popular with visiting artists and guarded closely by the Florentines. See John Romney,Memoirs of the Life and Works of George Romney(London, 1830) p. 188 for a transcription of the letter.

100_{Italian sketchbook, 1773, YCBA B1980.30. Inscribed on the verso of the flyleaf ‘Geo. Romney} June 5, 1773’.

and it is tempting to speculate, given their known connection, that Patch may have encouraged his interest in this direction.101 There are two sketches by Romney an- notated (identified as the artist’s own hand) ‘Cimabue’; one appears to depict the marriage of the Virgin and the other a scene of mourning (Figs. 69 and 70).102 This accords with two letters written by Romney in which he informed his respondents - Charles Greville (1749-1809), the nephew of William Hamilton, and a ‘Carter’ who was a fellow artist in Rome, respectively - about his activities in Florence:

[In Florence] I met with great entertainment from the old masters, in particular Cimabue and Masaccio; I admired the great simplicity and purity of the former, and the strength of character and expression of the latter. I was surprised to find several of their ideas familiar to me, till I recollected having seen the same thoughts in M. Angelo and Raphael, only managed with more science.103

I was very much entertained, and I believe employed my time to greater advantage, in making sketches from the works of Cimabue, Masaccio, Andrea del Sarto, and Michael Angelo [sic].104

Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo were the two artists referenced by Mann in his description, written in a letter of 1771 to Walpole, of Patch’s engraving project.105 Romney’s exposure to and interest in “the simplicity of Cimabue’s and Giotto’s schools” was first highlighted by William Hayley and referenced again by the artist’s son in his later counter-biography.106

Patch’s volumes were also owned by collectors and connoisseurs whose names are synonymous with the interest in the primitives, such as William Roscoe, who 101_{Prior to his stay in Florence, Romney had spent approximately eighteenth months in Rome} where he was acquainted with the Fuseli circle. As Alex Kidson has demonstrated, much of Rom- ney’s time in Rome was spent in studying classical art and that of the High Renaissance with the aim, common to many artists of the era, of building a repertoire of sketches for future work (Alex Kidson,George Romney, exh. cat. (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2002), pp. 19-22 and p. 98). There have been no identifications of copies after early Italian art in the so-called Roman sketchbook, although there is a note relating to a painting by Masaccio at “St Clements ... belong- ing to the Irish Fryers[sic]” in the YCBA one, which presumably references the frescoes thought to be by Masaccio in that Roman basilica. Whether this note was made whilst Romney was still in Rome, and therefore pre-dates Patch, or whether it was a suggestion from Patch as something for Romney to look at at a later date is difficult to establish. Other notes on the same page relate to Florentine artworks.

102_{The former is on a leaf of Romney’s Italian sketchbook now in the YCBA. The latter is in the} collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See Yvonne Dixon Romney and Alex Kidson, eds., ‘The Romney Sketchbooks in Public Collections’,Transactions of the Romney Society, 8 (2003).

103_{Letter written by Romney to Greville and dated Venice, February 29 1775. Romney, 1830) p.} 114.

104_{Letter written by Romney to Carter, undated but also written from Venice. Ibid., p. 118.} 105_{Mann to Walpole, 22 February 1771 in Lewis, ed., vol. 23, 1967, p. 276.}

106_{William Hayley, The Life of George Romney, Esq. (Chichester, 1809) p. 308. Romney, 1830,} p. 102.

owned the engravings after Masaccio, Giotto and Fra Bartolommeo, and Alexan- der Crawford, Lord Lindsay (Masaccio, Giotto and Fra Bartolommeo, bound to- gether).107 _{All four of Patch’s volumes were present in the library of Charles East-} lake, President of the Royal Academy and Director of the National Gallery, and in the latter role responsible for a significant influx of works by primitives into the national collection in the 1850s and 1860s.108 _{Additionally, Samuel Rogers’s sale} catalogue of 1856 both indicates that he owned a complete set of Patch’s engravings and includes a list of prices.109 The relatively high price realised by the volume described as “Patch’s Heads, after Masaccio and others” reflects the upward trajec- tory of value assigned the primitives during this period.110

Some of those names listed above reoccur in connection with another facet of Patch’s influence on the British knowledge of and taste for Italian art. Patch’s role as the seller, to Charles Townley, in a transaction which enabled the importa- tion of the first known Trecento fresco fragments into Britain has been previously mentioned. It is not clear exactly where Townley kept these frescoes but, as Smiles recently demonstrated, they were exposed to a significant audience through Town- ley’s connection with the Society of Antiquaries. Records attest to Townley having loaned the society (of which he was a member) his ‘Giotto’ fragment depicting a single female figure from the Annunciation to San Zaccaria along with the corre- sponding plate of Patch’s publication in 1801 (Plate II).111_{Townley thought that the} figure’s “action would be best understood, when seen united with the Composition, 107_{Roscoe: Lot 1331 in the Roscoe sale of prints, painter’s etchings, drawings, and paintings} (eleventh day) 20 September 1816 - “Patch’s Imitations of the pictures of Giotto, in twelve plates, of Masaccio, twenty-six, of Fra Bartolommeo twenty-four, half bound, Russia.” Lord Lindsay: the copy now in the Ulrich Middledorf Collection at the Getty Research Institute, which has a Bibliotheca Lindesiana bookplate.

108_{A full catalogue of Eastlake’s library, sold by his widow to the gallery in 1870, was made} and published by George Green in 1872, and this invaluable source has recently been digitised. See Susanna Avery-Quash, ‘The Eastlake Library: Origins, History and Importance’, Studi di Memofonte, 10 (2013) pp. 3-46 for a detailed analysis of the compilation of the library and the ways in which Eastlake made use of it as a resource.

109_{Lot 1636 in the Christie’s sale of Samuel Rogers’ library, seventeenth day, Friday May 16th} 1856 - “Patch’s Gates of San Giovanni, at Florence - h.-b.russ. Firenze 1774”, and lot 1637 in the Christie’s sale of Samuel Rogers’ library, 17th day, Friday May 16th 1856 - “Patch’s Heads, after Masaccio and others - calf Florence 1770”. The poet Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) amassed a significant collection of primitives in the first half of the nineteenth century. He visited Paris in