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Bellori's ‘old lady’: on informed versus uninformed criticism

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 26; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02666281003675342

1943-2178

Livio Pestilli,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The contents of this essay were read at the 2007 annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America and the article accepted for publication here in the fall of 2007. For a complementary reading of Bellori's “vecchiarella” anecdote, see Sheila McTighe's “The Old Woman as Art Critic: Speech and Silence in Response to the Passions, from Annibale Carracci to Denis Diderot”, The Journal of the Waburg and Courtauld Institutes, 2008, LXXI, pp. 239–260. 1 – R.W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis. The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967). 2 – Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, ed. E. Borea (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), p. 319. For a recent English translation see The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. A.S. Wohl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 246. 3 – Bellori, The Lives, p. 246. Ibid., Le vite, p. 319: ‘Volgevansi nondimeno gli occhi di tutti a Guido per la gentilezza e leggiadria del pennello, accomodato subito a piacere, ed il quale soddisfaceva più molto che tante maravigliose parti di Domenico. Ma Annibale fra li varii discorsi altrui disse che egli aveva imparato a giudicare queste due opere da una vecchiarella, la quale riguardando la Flagellazione di Santo Andrea dipinta da Domenico, additava e diceva ad una fanciulla da essa guidata per mano: “Vedi quel manigoldo con quanta furia inalza i flagelli? Vedi quell'altro, che minaccia rabbiosamente il Santo col dito, e colui che con tanta forza stringe i nodi de’ piedi? vedi il Santo stesso con quanta fede rimira il cielo?” Così detto sospirò la vecchiarella divota, e voltatasi dall'altra parte riguardò la pittura di Guido e si partì senza dir nulla. Con questo esempio insegnò Annibale in che cosa consista la perfezzione delle opere di pittura, e quanto sopra gli altri Domenico prevalesse nell'azzione e ne gli affetti che principalmente debbono attendersi in quest'arte. Contuttociò veniva egli defraudato dalla gloria che meritava grandissima, non vi essendo chi riguardasse più che tanto opera sì degna; perché non solo veniva egli posposto a Guido, ma ad altri infelicissimi pittori di quella età’. The original source of this anecdote was Giovanni Atanasio Mosini (alias Govanni Antonio Massani) in his 1646 preface to the posthumous publication of the Trattato by Monsignor Giovanni Battista Agucchi (1570–1632). See D. Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1971; orig. 1947), p. 271: ‘Vn letterato de’ primi di quel tempo, domandò ad Annibale, chi si fosse portato meglio di due Pittori della sua Scuola in vn lavoro, che insieme fecero per vn Cardinale [i.e. Scipione Borghese], cioè vn'Historia grande per ciascuno della vita di vn medesimo Santo, dipinte à fresco in Roma dentro vna Chiesa nelle due lati, l'vn'inco[n]tro all'altro. Al quale quesito Annibale rispose, che quelle due Historie erano state cagione, che egli si era conosciuto se stesso per vn grandissimo balordo: perche non haueua mai saputo comprendere, quale di esse meritasse d'esser più lodata; sintanto che egli non imparò à conoscerlo da vna Vecchiarella; la quale hauendo per mano vna Fanciulla, si fermò vn giorno à guardare l'vna e l'altra di quelle Historie; & egli l'osseruò; che me[n]tre ella ad vna fissò lo sguardo, andò voltando l'occhio da ogni parte per mirarla tutta, ma non disse mai vna parola, né diede altro segno d'alcun affetto, che in lei hauesse cagionato il guardar quella Pittura. ma [sic] poi all'altra Historia voltatasi, cominciò à dire alla Fanciulla: Vedi vedi figlia quell'huomo, che fà la tal cosa; e col ditto gli accennaua la Figura, che quell'attione, ch'ella diceua, rappresentaua: e così di mano in mano mirando l'altre Figure, le additaua, e ne dicharaua con gusto le attioni alla Fanciulla, la quale ancora pareua che se ne prendesse diletto. Hor vedete (disse Annibale al Letterato) com'io hò imparato à conoscere, quale delli nostri due Dipintori habbia più viuamente espressi gli affetti, e più chiaramente la sua Historia dichiarata. E questo bastò per chiarissima risposta à quel quesito’. 4 – The use of an old woman as a ploy for the simple, uneducated members of society has a long lineage that goes back to antiquity. Baldassar Castiglione refers to such an anecdote in The Courtier: ‘Nor do I think I should be held at fault for having chosen to make myself known as a Lombard speaking the language of Lombardy rather than as someone who is not a Tuscan speaking Tuscan, and so having avoided the mistake of Theophrastus who was easily recognized as not being Athenian by a simple old woman, because he spoke Attic too much’. The Courtier, trans. G. Bull (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 35; Ibid., ed. A. Quondam (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), p. 9: ‘per non fare come Teofrasto, il quale, per parlare troppo ateniese, fu da una semplice vecchiarella conosciuto per non ateniese’. The unmasking of Theophrastus’ affected Athenian accent by an old woman is related by Cicero, Brutus, trans. G.L. Hendrickson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), XLVI, 172, pp. 147–9: ‘I'm not surprised therefore about the story told of Theophrastus, who asked an old market woman [anicula] the price of something. She named it and added: “Yes, kind stranger, not a farthing less”. It vexed him that she had detected his foreign birth, although he had lived long at Athens and was accounted the most perfect speaker of his time’. Cicero was followed by Quintillian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H.E. Butler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), VIII, 1, 2–3, p. 197: ‘I would remind you of the story of the old woman [anus] at Athens, who, when Theophrastus, a man of no mean eloquence, used one solitary word in an affected way, immediately said that he was a foreigner, and on being asked how she detected it, replied that his language was too Attic for Athens’. 5 – Bellori, The Lives, p. 61. Ibid., Le vite, p. 16: ‘Là dove il popolo riferisce il tutto al senso dell'occhio, loda le cose dipinte dal naturale, perché è solito vederne di sì fatte, apprezza li belli colori, e non le belle forme che non intende; s'infastidisce dell'eleganza, approva la novità; sprezza la ragione, segue l'opinione e si allontana dall verità dell'arte, sopra la quale come in propria base è dedicato dell'idea il nobilissimo simolacro’. Bellori, of course, is following Monsignor Giovanni Battista Agucchi whose classical views emphasized that ideal beauty could only be apprehended by an educated audience whereas low subjects were for the uneducated. Agucchi, Trattato, in Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, p. 247: ‘E sorgeuano nuoue, e diuerse maniere lontane dal vero, e dal verisimile, e più appoggiate all'apparenza, che alla sostanza, contentandosi gli artefici di pascer gli occhi del popolo con la vaghezza de’ colori’. See also S. McTighe ‘Perfect Deformity, Ideal Beauty, and the “Imaginaire” of Work: The Reception of Annibale Carracci's “Arti di Bologna” in 1646’, Oxford Art Journal, 16, no. 1 (1993), p. 78, and M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators. Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 60. The opinion that the simple, uninformed viewer was satisfied by the mere allure of colours was previously expressed by Armenini (De’ veri precetti della pittura), Pino (Dialogo di pittura) and Dolce (Lettera to Fasparo Ballini). See Giovan Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura, ed. M. Gorreri (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), p. 36. See also D. Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 13. 6 – For the ‘variations on the theme’ of the vecchiarella in Malvasia, Passeri and Pascoli, see F. Thürlemann, ‘Betrachterperspektiven im Konflikt. Zur Überlieferngsgeschichte der “vecchiarella” Anekdote’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 21 (1986), pp. 142–3 and 154–5. 7 – Although published independently in 1664 as a lecture given at the Accademia di San Luca, L'Idea was published together with all the editions of The Lives. See Bellori, Le vite, p. lxxvii. 8 – See Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis. 9 – Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, pp. 34 and 39. 10 – Horace, Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), vv. 361–365, 480–1: ‘Ut pictura poesis: erit quae, si propius stes, /te capiat magis, et quaedam, si longius abstes. / haec amat obscurum, volet haec sub luce videri, / iudicis argutum quae non formidat acumen; / haec placuit semel, haec deciens repetita placebit’. 11 – See L. Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 65: ‘Some of the most important of these texts were not meant to be documents in art history at all. The celebrated Horatian “ut pictura poesis” is merely the most widely diffused, if also the most unspecific, formulation in an ancient tradition by which poetry is defined, defended, or attacked by analogy to the visual arts. Characteristically, painting or sculpture is thought to offer a simpler case in the speaker's rhetorical gambit’. 12 – Plato, Critias, 107c, in The Collected Dialogues (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 1213–4. 13 – Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1989), II, xiii, 8–10, pp. 295–6. ‘It is often expedient and occasionally becoming to make some modification in the time-honoured order. We see the same thing in pictures and statues. Dress, expression and attitude are frequently varied. The body when held bolt upright has but little grace, for the face looks straight forward, and the whole figure is stiff from top to toe. But that curve, I might almost call it motion, with which we are so familiar, gives an impression of action and animation … Where can we find a more violent and elaborate attitude than that of the Discobolus of Myron? Yet the critic who disapproved of the figure because it was not upright, would merely show his utter failure to understand the sculptor's art, in which the very novelty and difficulty of execution is what most deserves our praise. A similar impression of grace and charm is produced by rhetorical figures, whether they be figures of thought or figures of speech. For they involve a certain departure from the straight line and have the merit of variation from the ordinary usage’. 14 – Cicero, De Oratore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), III, L, 195–6 pp. 155–7. The first to claim that there was in animals a ‘sensus communis’ was Aristotle in his treatise On the Soul: ‘But in the case of the common sensibilities there is already in us a common sensibility that enables us to perceive them non-incidentally’. See The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 425a 27–8, pp. 676. Ibid. Sense and Sensibilia, 449a 9–11, p. 712: ‘We must conclude, therefore, that there is … some one faculty in the soul with which the latter perceives all its percepts, though it perceives each different genus of sensibles through a different organ’. Aristotle clearly specifies the site of this common sense in On Youth, Old Age, Life and Death, and Respiration: ‘Certainly, however, all sanguineous animals have the supreme organ of sense-faculties in the heart, for it is here that we must look for the common sensorium belonging to all the sense-organs’. Ibid., 469a 10–12, p. 747. Leonardo da Vinci, in the wake of Aristotle and medieval authors states: ‘Non vede la imaginazione cotal eccellenzia qual vede l'occhio, perché l'occhio riceve le spezie, overo similitudini de li obbietti, e dàlle alla impressiva, e da essa impressiva al senso comune, e lì è giudicata’. See P. Barocchi, Scritti del Cinquecento (Milano, Napoli: Ricciardi, 1971), I, p. 235, also quoting J.P. Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci (London, Phaidon 1970), I, p. 24. 15 – Cicero, Orator, trans. H.M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), xi. 36, pp. 331–3. 16 – Ibid., p. 157: ‘Mirabile est, cum plurimum in faciendo intersit inter doctum et rudem, quam non multum differat in iudicando’. 17 – Aristotle, Politics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 1282a 1–23, pp. 2034–5. 18 – Ibid., 1282a 10–12, p. 2034: ‘Even if there be some occupations and arts in which private persons share in the ability to choose, they certainly cannot choose better than those who know’. See also Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, p. 127, where the author underlines the impact that the Poetics of Aristotle, and more generally the literary criticism that derived from it in Cinquecento Italy, had on the idea that ‘vulgarity and the highest quality are incompatible’. As Mahon points out, ‘Aristotle divides poets between the serious-minded, who are concerned with noble themes, and the trivial-minded, who are concerned with the affairs of the vulgar’. Aristotle, Poetics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, II, 1448b, 24–27, p. 2318: ‘Poetry, however, soon broke up into two kinds according to the differences of character in the individual poets; for the graver among them would represent noble actions, and those of noble personages; and the meaner sort the actions of the ignoble’. 19 – Pliny, Natural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), XXXV, 84–5, p. 323. 20 – Ibid., 85, pp. 323–5. For the socio-economical and art historical import of this anecdote see L. Pestilli, ‘Pliny's “Ne Supra Crepidam Sutor”: Representing Shoemakers in Italian Art and Society’, Source, XXVI, no. 3 (Spring 2007), pp. 10–22. 21 – Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. J.R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 97–8. 22 – E.C. Agrippa, De scientiis in generali, in Barocchi, Scritti del Cinquecento, p. 80. 23 – F. Petrarch, De remedies utriusque fortunae, in Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, p. 55. 24 – Barocchi, Scritti del Cinquecento, p. 523. 25 – F. de Hollanda, Diálogos em Roma (1538). Conversations on Art with Michelangelo Buonarroti, ed. G.D. Folliero-Metz (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1998), p. 77. 26 – Barocchi, Scritti del Cinquecento, p. 521. Ibid., quoting the Vocabolario della crusca defines the word ingannacontadini: ‘Qualunque lavoro d'arte, grossolano, ma molto appariscente, e che perciò alletta e inganna i contadini, ossia le persone rozze e inesperte’. 27 – Vincenzo Borghini, Selva di notizie, in Barocchi, Scritti del Cinquecento, I, p. 629. 28 – Ibid. 29 – Ibid., p. 101: ‘Felici gl'artefici, se de l'arte loro ne giudicassero sempre e periti’. The translation is taken from Barkan, Unearthing the Past, p. 6. Even though in this context I concur with Barkan's translation of ‘periti’ as ‘artists’, strictly speaking the translation ought to read ‘How fortunate the artists would be if their works were always judged by the expert’. 30 – Leonardo, Trattato della Pittura, Cod. Urb., ed. P. McMahon (Princeton, 1956), f. 33v, no. 89, also quoted by E.H. Gombrich, The Heritage of Apelles. Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford: Phaidon, 1976), p. 120, and P. Barocchi, Scritti del Cinquecento, VI, 1979, 1290, who states that the Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270, f. 33v., is datable to 1500–1505 according to C. Pedretti. 31 – A. Condivi, The Life of Michelangelo, trans. A. Sdgwich Wohl, ed. H. Wohl (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), p. 71. Similarly Quintilian in The Institutio Oratoria (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1989), II, 8, p. 249: ‘For the only true art in pleading is that which can only be understood by one who is a master of the art himself’. See R. Goffen, Renaissance Rivals. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2002), p. 300, for a reference in Pino who implies that artists are better equipped than patrons to judge themselves. 32 – Barkan, Unearthing the Past, p. 74, shares this view when he writes: ‘Fame is construed fundamentally as a competition, and the fact of a synchronic contest among artists living and dead judged by artists themselves speak to a kind of transhistorical community of artists, who exist … largely in relation to one another. It is this community that Pliny represents as the ultimate place of judgment’. 33 – See L. Pestilli, ‘Michelangelo's Pietà: Lombard Critics and Plinian Sources’ Source, XIX, no. 2 (Winter 2000), pp. 21–30. 34 – Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, xxxvi, 65–66, pp. 309–11 and 81–83, pp. 321–3. For a Renaissance repartee on the subject between the knowing artist and the inexpert critic see B. Cellini, Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. J.A. Symonds (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 437–8, on Cosimo dei Medici exchange of views with Cellini about the completion of the Perseus: ‘ “Benvenuto, this figure cannot succeed in bronze; the laws of art do not admit of it”. These words of his Excellency stung me so sharply that I answered: “My lord, I know how very little confidence you have in me; and I believe the reason of this is that your most illustrious Excellency lends too ready an ear to my calumniators, or else indeed that you do not understand my art”. He hardly let me close the sentence when he broke in: “I profess myself a connoisseur, and understand it very well indeed”. I replied: “Yes, like a prince, not like an artist; for if your Excellency understood my trade as well as you imagine, you would trust me on the proofs I have already given” ’. 35 – Plato, Republic in The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 601c, p. 826 36 – Ibid., 601e, p. 826. 37 – Ibid., 601e–602a, p. 826. 38 – For the influence that Aristotle's Poetics (the ‘bible of criticism’) had in Cinquencento literary and art historical criticism, see Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, p. 126. 39 – Barocchi, Scritti del Cinquecento, I, p. 17: ‘In Titiani quoque Veneti exactis operibus multiplices delicatae artis virtutes elucent, quas soli prope, nec plebeii quidem artifices, intelligant’. (‘Anche nelle opere finite del Veneto Tiziano splendono le molteplici virtù di un'arte raffinata, che solo gli artisti, purché non volgari, comprendono’.) 40 – Barocchi, Scritti del Cinquecento, I, p. 524. 41 – Dolce summarized and published in Italian Aristotle's work as Somma Della Filosofia D'Aristotele … Raccolta da M. Lodovico Dolce, (Venice, 1565 [?]). 42 – L. Dolce, The Dialogue on Painting of M. Lodovico Dolce, in M.W. Roskill, Dolce's Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), p. 103. 43 – Ibid. 44 – Barocchi, Scritti del Cinquecento, I, p. 620. 45 – Ibid. For a similar distinction see Aretino's letter to Michelangelo, dated April 1544 in R. Goffen, Renaissance Rivals, p. 334: ‘But if Your Lordship [i.e. Michelangelo] is revered thanks to public acclaim, including those who are ignorant of the miracles of his [your] divine intellect, why not believe that I revere you, who am almost capable of the excellence of your fatal genius?’ 46 – G. Comanini, Il Figino, Overo Del Fine Della Pittura (Mantua, 1591), in P. Barocchi, Trattati D'Arte Del Cinquecento (Bari, 1962), III, pp. 249–50: ‘Dico adunque, insieme con Platone nel decimo della Repubblica, che tutte l'arti si riducono a tre schiere et ordini. Il primo è delle usanti, il secondo delle operanti et il terzo delle imitanti … Conchiude adunque questo filosofo, per le ragioni da lui allegate, che l'imitazione è terzo della verità e perciò vie più d'ogni altro artefice lontano dal vero’. 47 – G. Mancini, Considerazioni Sulla Pittura, ed. A. Marucchi (Rome: Accademia Mazionale dei Lincei, 1956), I, pp. 6–7. See also G. Mancini, Considerations on Painting, Xerox University Microfilms (Ann Arbor, 1975), Ph.D. thesis by T.B. Butler, 1972. 48 – Mancini actually states that Plato's quotation comes from Laws but Butler, op. cit., II, 411, n. 15, specifies: ‘Inexact quotation. Platonis Opera Omnia quae extant Marsilio Ficino Interprete. Frankfurt, 1602. De Repub., X, p. 754’. 49 – Mancini, in Butler, op. cit., pp. 10–11. L. Salerno, in his commentary on Mancini's Considerazioni Sulla Pittura, in A. Marucchi, Commento alle Opere Del Mancini (Rome, 1957) II, x, states: ‘Il pittore infatti non considera “internamente” la natura delle cose imitate, ma solo la loro apparenza. Concetto che il Mancini fa risalire ad Ippocrate, ma che poteva aver letto anche nelle Dicerie del Marino, la cui fonte è il Varchi il quale asseriva che il pittore imita “il di fuori”, mentre il poeta imita “il di dentro” delle cose’. 50 – Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, p. 271. 51 – Already by the time of Malvasia's Felsina Pittrice (1678), in a letter supposedly sent to the author by Alessandro Algardi, the vecchiarella’s anecdote is considered a nonsensical fabrication: ‘Le chiacchiere della vecchia, che dicono, che dicesse Annibale che avea da lei imparato a giudicarla, sono fandonie, sono invenzioni’. See C.C. Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice. Vite de’ pittori bolognesi (Bologna, 1841), II, p. 226. 52 – As noted by Marc Fumaroli, by the seventeenth century the connoisseur's ‘gout savant’ or judgment had become as important, if not more, than the artist's ‘invention’. See M. Fumaroli, ‘Rome 1630: entrée en scène du spectateur’, in Roma 1630. Il trionfo del pennello, (Milan: Electa, 1944) Rome 25 October–1 January 1995, p. 57.