Literature and Artistic Practice in Sixteenth-Century Italy

496 Pages·2017·17.829 MB·English

by  Angela Cerasuolo

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Cover illustrations: Naples, Museo di Capodimonte, su concessione del Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività
Culturali e del Turismo
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Everything factual is already theory: to understand this would be the
greatest possible achievement. The blueness of the sky reveals to us
the basic law of chromatics. But don’t go looking for anything behind
phenomena: they are themselves what they teach, the theory
J.W. Goethe
∵

Contents
Foreword iX
Barbara Agosti
Acknowledgments Xiii
List of Illustrations XV
Introduction 1
1 The “Libri di Bottega”: A Covert Transmission 11
1.1 The Background 15
1.2 Leonardo’s Writings: Transcriptions and Abridged Versions,
The Multiform Existence of a Never-to-be-born Treatise 19
1.3 The Underground Circulation of Cennino Cennini’s Libro
dell’arte 30
1.4 “My Intention was to Write only of the Lives and Works of our Artists,
and Not to Teach the Arts”: The Introduzzione alle arti and the
Technique of Painting in Vasari’s Vite 41
1.5 Il Riposo by Raffaello Borghini: Analysis of a Text as a Mirror of
Technical Knowledge Present in Workshops at the End of the
Sixteenth Century 53
1.6 De’ veri precetti della pittura by Giovan Battista Armenini—
A Consciously “Grammatical” Approach 69
1.7 The Treatises of Giovan Paolo Lomazzo and the Legacy of Leonardo
in Lombardy 76
2 Issues and Forms 86
2.1 Disegno and Invention: Schizzo macchia abbozzo and the
Construction of the Work of Art 88
2.2 Prestezza and Diligenza as a Key for Interpreting the Relationship
between Technique and Style 100
2.2.1 Armenini and Vasari: Symptoms of Discord 102
2.2.2 Chiaroscuro and Grottesca: Prestezza in Two Techniques
Characteristic of Mannerism 114
2.3 The Paragone: Also a Technical Challenge 121
2.4 Colour and the Counterfeiting of Nature 132
2.4.1 The Beauty of Colours 132
2.4.2 The atramentum of Apelles 138
viii CONTENTS
3 The Processes 144
3.1 The Technique of Drawing 146
3.2 The Preparation of Cartoons—The Transfer Processes 162
3.3 Colours: Pigments in the Treatises 173
3.3.1 Lists of Pigments in Borghini and Lomazzo 174
3.3.2 Armenini’s avertimenti on Pigments 184
3.3.3 Mixing the Colours: From the mestiche to the Palette 190
3.4 The Myth of “True Fresco” 199
3.5 Tempera Painting 209
3.5.1 Vasari and Egg Tempera: Revival of an Outdated
Technique 212
3.5.2 Glue-size Tempera: Tüchlein, guazzo, chiaroscuro 220
3.6 Oil Painting 231
3.6.1 Preparazione and Imprimitura 238
3.6.2 The Execution of a Painting: Bozze and Finiture 246
3.6.3 Oil Painting on Wall 250
3.6.4 Sebastiano’s nuovo modo, from Wall to Slate 260
3.6.5 Painting on Stone from Sebastiano to Vasari and the Artists of
the Medici Court 265
3.6.6 Painting on Copper—The Beginnings 271
3.7 Varnish and Finishing 275
3.7.1 Varnishes 277
3.7.2 Glazes 287
3.7.3 Finishes and Retouching 294
4 Through the Paintings: A Few Significant Examples. Investigations
Carried Out at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples 304
4.1 Madonna del Divino Amore—The Complicated Genesis of a Simple
Image 305
4.2 Madonna della gatta—Variations on the Theme of the Holy Family—
Raphael and Giulio Romano 339
4.3 Additions to the Genesis of a Painting: The Small Paintings and the
Calvary by Polidoro da Caravaggio 364
4.4 Parmigianino’s Holy Family 393
4.5 The Paintings of Sebastiano del Piombo in Capodimonte 402
Bibliography 421
Index 472
Foreword
Barbara Agosti
As Angela Cerasuolo explains in such an exemplary fashion in this book,
the development of a treatise on painting that was not limited to the tradi-
tion of books of recipes and workshop notebooks (libri di bottega), but rather
an established literary expression of the awareness of the unbreakable bond
between technique and style, is interwoven with the development of the
modern manner (maniera moderna), and indeed begins with the personality
of Leonardo.
At the origin of the project that he had long pursued but never brought to
fulfilment—the writing of a treatise aimed at passing on instructions for the
practice of painting—lies Leonardo’s tireless revindication not only of the lib-
eral and non-mechanical nature of this art, but rather, and over and above this,
of the superiority of painting, a true science based on the primacy of the sense
of sight over the written word. In a passage that would have taken its place at
the beginning of this work (Cod. Vat. Urb. 2v–3r) he had written:
Painting represents the works of nature to the senses with greater truth
and certainty than do spoken or written words; but the written word will
better represent words to the senses than will painting, but we will say
that the science which represents the works of nature is more worthy of
wonder than that which represents the works of the man creating the
work, that is the works of man which are words, for instance poetry and
other such works which communicate through human language.1
‘Human language’, however, was a tool that could be effectively used, corre-
sponding to the strong didactic bent of Leonardo, in order to share with the
younger generation and with posterity, the observations and precepts on
which were based the radically new conception and practice of painting devel-
oped by the artist.
1  La pittura rappresenta al senso con più verità e certezza l’opere de natura che non fanno le
parole o le lettere, ma le lettere rappresentano con più verità le parole al senso che non fa la
pittura, ma diremo essere più mirabile quella scienzia che rapresenta l’opere de natura che
quella che rapresenta l’opere de l’operatore, cioè l’opere de gli omini che sono le parole com’è
la poesia e simili che passano per la umana lingua.
x Agosti
Among the many possible examples, one might pick out his notes on the
importance of the continuous practicing of the sketch (the abbozzo), and
on the value of the uncultivated composition2 (componimento inculto) to
inventiveness, as an essential stage of the creative process—a way of conceiv-
ing disegno that will be promptly assimilated by Raphael, from his years in
Florence onwards, and will then be transmitted through his pupils to the cul-
ture of the sixteenth century, marking a turning point in the history of drawing
and its critical reception (see below paragraphs 1.7 and 2.1).
Another eloquent example is how the overcoming of geometrical perspec-
tive in favour of a different idea of space as an atmospheric continuum mea-
sured in the perception of the observer, opened up the possibility of radical
changes in the manner of composing storie, leading to the rejection of sub-
division into independent scenes with autonomous points of view, hitherto
in use in decorative cycles (for instance the Paduan frescoes by Mantegna or
those in Arezzo by Piero della Francesca).
This precept, formulated at the time of his first stay in Lombardy and
absorbed within the texts selected for the Libro di pittura (Cod. Vat. Urb. 47 r–v),
quickly generated decisive breakthroughs in paintings of the last decade of the
fifteenth century; in fact, it is then that painters begin to execute storie which
unfold on the walls without viewers having to change their view-point whilst
moving from one scene to another, as occurs for instance in the Grifi chapel in
the frescos by Zenale in San Pietro in Gessate in Milan (but also in Filippino
Lippi’s Carafa chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome).
If one also thinks of the endless notes on the subject of shadows and lights,
and their interference with colour, strengthened by the investigations by the
artist on the representation of relief on the picture-plane, it is in these texts of
a very technical nature that lies the root of the comparison between painting
and sculpture that within a few decades was destined to become the subject
of the paragone between the arts, so dear to the culture of the age of the
Academies, from Benedetto Varchi to Federico Zuccaro (see section 2.3 below).
With Leonardo, there comes a dramatic shift in the position and hierarchy
of the intellectual status of painting, which had been established in the mid-
1430s by Leon Battista Alberti in De pictura, a text in which painting, following
the prejudice of humanistic culture, continued however to be subordinate to
literature; a text with which Leonardo, active over a generation later, had a very
adversarial relationship. For the Florentine humanist, painters still had to turn
to the scholars and men of letters to draw from them nuove invenzioni and to
learn how to compose a storia beautifully (bello componere la storia) (III, 54).
2  Gombrich 1952, p. 59 (translator’s note).
FOREWORD xi
The dense summary (Section 1.2) on the circulation of the writings of
Leonardo in the period preceding the first edition of his treatise, promoted
in Paris in 1651 by the French Royal Academy, effectively shows how this text
was read much more by artists than by men of letters, and with what force it
could still speak to the painters of successive generations, from Giovan Paolo
Lomazzo to Giulio Cesare Procaccini, from Annibale Carracci to Guido Reni,
Federico Barocci, Diego Velázquez . . .
Leonardo’s treatise is therefore rightly introduced as the core from which
will develop the ‘technical’ current which will traverse the literature of art in
the sixteenth century, and which I think is considered here for the first time
‘from life’: that is, exploring it not on the basis of abstract theoretical ques-
tions, but rather according to questions resulting from direct contact with
the physicality of the works and their language, creating a very profitable and
stimulating dialogue between technical and formal data. It is, from this point
of view, a book that marks a happy reversal of the trend, consolidated in the
bibliography of the last decades of the twentieth century, that splits these two
means of investigation (and their historiographical traditions) leading to a
paradoxical lack of communication. A particularly significant chapter (1.4) it
seems to me, is devoted to the introductions to the arts which open the Vite of
Giorgio Vasari, that the author had conceived as a necessary and integral part
of the book from the time when he was working to prepare the first edition,
published in Florence in 1550. The so-called Teoriche included again with only
a few changes in the edition of 1568, are probably the most luckless pages, the
least read and the most misunderstood in the entire work of Vasari.
The analysis to which the author submits these pages, with helpful expla-
nations and new material on Vasari’s sources, allows one instead to understand
the significance of the three introductions placed before the corpus of biogra-
phies of the artists, and the coherence with which they were welded to it: far
from serving the purpose of a repertoire of concrete instructions, the Teoriche
aim rather to provide the reader with a model of technical vocabulary (and
therefore a sample-book of operational problems), inserted in the speech of
the spoken tongue, and an indispensable tool for the understanding of the
contents of the book of the Vite itself.
The treatise on the ‘true precepts’ of painting by the painter from Faenza—
Armenini—is of an entirely different character; published only in 1586, but
the result of the author’s mid-century experiences in Rome, this is indeed an
extremely valuable source for detailed knowledge of the technical processes of
painting in the sixteenth century. Having arrived in Rome just after the death
of Perino del Vaga, the last direct heir to the great school of Raphael, while
Michelangelo was carrying to completion the second of the two frescos in the
xii Agosti
Cappella Paolina, and while the mature Cecchino Salviati and the very young
Taddeo Zuccaro were blasting off the last fireworks of the Maniera, Armenini
aimed to preserve and pass on a wealth of knowledge and technical skills
acquired through the avid study of the major figurative texts of modern paint-
ing, and of the working methods of the Masters, preparing, as it is here well
explained (1.6), a veritable grammar of practical instructions, from the prelimi-
nary stages of preparation up to the execution of the work.
The historical and critical reconstruction outlined in the first part of the
book is set down in the two chapters that follow, and which are also the result
of a comparison, again direct and carried out in full independence of mind,
with the workmanship and style of the works, their problems of conservation,
and the information provided by the sources: it begins with an analysis of terms
which taken together constitute the basic critical references for the under-
standing of all discourse on the figurative culture of the maniera moderna,
such as invenzione, diligenza, prestezza, loaded with implications for the tech-
nical culture of artists, a series of “issues and forms” that are then organically
linked to the “processes” examined in the concluding chapter, up to the thrill-
ing final sequence of case studies of a group of masterpieces in the Museo
di Capodimonte in Naples, splendidly presented here as the real test of the
validity of the approach and rigour with which this book is constructed. The
Madonna del Divino Amore and the Madonna della gatta, two works which as
a result of the recent investigations that have been carried out we now under-
stand much better; the former as part of the late activity of Raphael, through
which passed the presence of Leonardo at the court of Leo X (1513–1516), and
the latter in the continuity of inventions, language and technical solutions
that binds the earliest examples by the hand of Giulio Romano to his Master’s
example; the three swirling bozzetti by Polidoro related to the gestation of the
great altarpiece in Messina of the Way to Calvary, stages of the creative process
hovering between elaboration of the drawing and beginning of the painterly
execution, the charming Sacra famiglia of Parmigianino, refined testing of the
expressive potential of guazzo; the portrait of Clement VII with a beard, and
the Madonna del velo by Sebastiano del Piombo, painted on slabs of slate, in
which the choice of the stone support made by the former pupil of Giorgione
who passed, to use a famous phrase of Roberto Longhi, through the Herculean
arms of Michelangelo, is functional to the desire to compete with sculpture,
not only in the durability of materials, but also with the powerful simulation
of relief.