The Art Market in Rome in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in the Social History of Art [1 ed.] 9789004388154, 9789004336995

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The Art Market in Rome in the Eighteenth Century

Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets Editor in Chief Christian Huemer (Belvedere Research Center, Vienna) Editorial Board Malcolm Baker (University of California, Riverside) Ursula Frohne (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster) Daniela Gallo (Université de Lorraine, Nancy) Hans van Miegroet (Duke University, Durham) Inge Reist (The Frick Collection, New York) Adriana Turpin (Institut d’Études Supérieures des Arts, London) Filip Vermeylen (Erasmus University, Rotterdam)

volume 5

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hcam

The Art Market in Rome in the Eighteenth Century A Study in the Social History of Art Edited by

Paolo Coen

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Coen, Paolo, editor. | Mercato dell’arte a Roma nel diciottesimo  secolo (Conference) (2012 : Palazzo Barberini, Rome, Italy) Title: The art market in Rome in the eighteenth century : a study in the  social history of art / [edited] by Paolo Coen. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2018. | Series: Studies in the history  of collecting & art markets ; Volume 5 | “The essays in this volume derive  from an international congress held in Rome in April, 2012.” | Includes  bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018046173 (print) | LCCN 2018046510 (ebook) |  ISBN 9789004388154 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004336995 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Art—Collectors and collecting—Italy—Rome—History—  18th century—Congresses. | Art—Economic aspects—Italy—Rome—History—  18th century—Congresses. | Art—Marketing—Congresses. | Art and  society—Italy—Rome—History—18th century—Congresses. Classification: LCC N5273 (ebook) | LCC N5273 .A76 2018 (print) |  DDC 709.456/3209033—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046173

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2352-0485 ISBN 978-90-04-33699-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-38815-4 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Figures and Tables vii 1

The Art Market in Rome in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in the Modern ‘Social History’ of Art 1 Paolo Coen

2

The Social Histories of Art 28 Peter Burke

3

The Value of a Work of Art: Minor Collections and Display Practices 53 Renata Ago

4

Marketing Strategies and the Creation of Taste in Seventeenth-Century Rome 68 Patrizia Cavazzini

5

Jan Meyssens’ 1649 Portfolio of Artists: The Conception and Composition of the Book Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (and the Inclusion of Three Italian Painters) 86 Raffaella Morselli

6

Moral Subjects and Exempla Virtutis at the Start of the Eighteenth Century: Art and Politics in England, Rome and Venice 115 Valter Curzi

7

Sir Joshua Reynolds in Rome, 1750–1752: The Debut of an Artist, an Art Collector or an Art Dealer? 131 Giovanna Perini Folesani

8

Brownlow Cecil, Ninth Earl of Exeter, Thomas Jenkins and Nicolas Mosman: Origins, Functions and Aesthetic Guidelines of a Great Drawing Collection in Eighteenth-Century Rome, Now at the British Museum 146 Paolo Coen

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Contents

9

The Capture of the Westmorland and the Purchase of Art in Rome in the 1770s 187 Brian Allen

10

Economic and Scholarly Appraisal of Ancient Marbles in Late 18th-Century Rome 199 Daniela Gallo

11

Jean-Baptiste Wicar in Rome (1784–1834): Fifty Years of Purchases, Sales, and Appraisals of Works of Art 211 Maria Teresa Caracciolo

Index 225

Figures and Tables Figures 1.1

Filippo della Valle, Terracotta Replica of the Funerary Monument to Manuel Pereira de Sampaio, c. 1753, Lisbon, Museu de Lisboa ©Museu de Lisboa 6 1.2 Antonio David, Portrait of James Francis Edward Stuart, The Old Pretender, London, Weiss Gallery 7 1.3 Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Portrait of Johann Wolfgang Goethe in the Roman Campagna, Frankfurt, Städel Museum 9 1.4 Pierre Subleyras, Portait of Benedict XIV and Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, Rome, Museo di Roma ©Museo di Roma 10 1.5 Raphael, The Ansidei Madonna, London, The National Gallery ©TheNationalGallery, London 10 1.6 The Hall of the Philosophers, Rome, Musei Capitolini, Palazzo Nuovo 11 1.7 Giovanni Paolo Panini, The Picture Gallery of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, Hartford, Conn., The Wadsworth Atheneaum ©Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum 14 1.8 Annibale Carracci, Pietà with Saints, Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini ©Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica di Roma, Palazzo Barberini e Galleria Corsini, Palazzo Barberin 14 1.9 Roman copy from a 230–220 BC Hellenistic original, Dying Gaul, Rome, Musei Capitolini ©MuseiCapitolini 15 1.10 The Gallery of King Gustav III, Stockholm, The Royal Palace 16 1.11 Gilles Demarteau the Elder after Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Portrait of Jacques-Onéysme Bergeret de Grancourt, Washington, D.C., The National Gallery of Art 17 1.12 Roman engraver of the eighteenth century, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi’s Studio [Studio di Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, ove sono state restaurate le Statue contenute nella presente Raccolta], in Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, Raccolta D’Antiche Statue Busti Bassirilievi Ed Altre Sculture Restaurate, Rome, 1768, fol. 6, Göttingen, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek 19 1.13 Anton von Maron, Portrait of Thomas Jenkins, Rome, Accademia di San Luca ©AccademiadiSanLuca 20 1.14 Carlo Maratti, or Maratta, Self Portrait, Bruxelles, Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique ©Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (RMFAB), Brussels 22 1.15 Archibald Skirving, Portrait of Gavin Hamilton, Edinburgh, National Portrait Gallery of Scotland 23

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Figures and Tables

4.1 Angelo Caroselli after Nicolas Poussin, Plague at Ashdod, London, The National Gallery Presented by the Duke of Northumberland, 1838 ©The National Gallery, London 69 4.2 Michael Sweerts, A Couple Visiting Shepherds in the Campagna Romana, Rome, Accademia di San Luca ©Accademia di San Luca 75 4.3 Valentin de Boulogne, Judgement of Salomon, Rome, Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini ©Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica di Roma, Palazzo Barberini e Galleria Corsini, Palazzo Barberini 78 4.4 Sinibaldo Scorza, View of Piazza Pasquino in Rome, Rome, Museo del Palazzo di Venezia ©Museo del Palazzo di Venezia 78 4.5 Nicolas Poussin, Amor Vincit Omnia, Cleveland, Oh., Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of J. H. Wade 1926.26 ©The Cleveland Museum of Art 79 4.6 Francesco Furini, Andromeda, Budapest, Szépművészeti Múzeum ©Szépművészeti Múzeum 81 4.7 Guido Reni, Saint Sebastian, Genova, Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Rosso ©Musei di Strada Nuova 82 4.8 After Antonio Allegri, called Correggio, Ecce Homo, London, The National Gallery. Bequeathed by the Revd. William Holwell Carr, 1831 ©The National Gallery London 84 5.1 Jan Meyssens, Frontispiece of the Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library 87 5.2 After Pieter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Pieter Paul Rubens, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library 90 5.3 Antoon van Dyck (drawing)—Paulus Pontius (etching), Portrait of Antoon van Dyck, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library 91 5.4 Antoon van Dyck, Self Portrait, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art ©TheMetropolitanMuseum 92 5.5 Antoon van Dyck (drawing)—Gillis Hendricx (etching), Frontispiece of the Icones Principum Virorum (…), Cambridge, The Fitzwilliam Museum 94 5.6 Jan Meyssens, Engraved Dedicatory Letter to Michel Le Blon, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library 96 5.7 Antoon van Dyck, Portrait of Michel Le Blon, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario 97 5.8 Erasmus Quellinus (drawing)—Pieter de Jode II (etching), Portrait of Erasmus Quellinus, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library 100

Figures and Tables

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5.9 Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert (drawing)—Pieter de Jode II (etching), Portrait of Pieter de Jode I, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library 102 5.10 Nicolaes van Helt Stockade (drawing)—Wenceslaus Hollar (etching), Portrait of Stefano della Bella, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library 103 5.11 Wenceslaus Hollar (drawing)—Jan Meyssens (etching), Portrait of Adam Elsheimer, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library 104 5.12 Francesco Padovanino (drawing)—Jan Meyssens (etching), Portrait of Francesco Padovanino, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library 106 5.13 Pieter Paul Rubens, Self Portrait, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art ©TheMetropolitanMuseum 107 5.14 Jan Meyssens (etching) from Guido Reni, Portrait of Guido Reni, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library 110 6.1 Francesco Fernandi called Imperiali and Agostino Masucci, Volumnia and Veturia before Coriolanus, Ariccia, Palazzo Chigi, Museo del Barocco, Lemme Collection 121 6.2 Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, The Triumph of Caesar, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, Kimbolton Castle 125 6.3 Agostino Masucci, The Fight between the Horatii and the Curiatii, Rome, Accademia di San Luca 126 6.4 Guy-Louis Vernansal II, Furius Camillus condemning the pedagogue of Falerii, Rome, Accademia di San Luca ©AccademiaSanLuca 128 7.1 Girolamo Pennacchi called Girolamo da Treviso, The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House ©Burghley/ JonCulverhouse 133 7.2 After Girolamo Cavedoni (?), Rebeccah and Eleazar at the Well, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House ©Burghley/JonCulverhouse 133 7.3 Andrea Solario, Madonna breastfeeding her Child, Paris, Louvre ©RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Michel Urtado 134 7.4 Joshua Reynolds from Andrea Solario, Madonna breastfeeding her Child, Plymouth, City Museum and Art Gallery 135 8.1 A view of Burghley House, Stamford, Lincolnshire 148 8.2 Joseph Nollekens from the Antique, Medusa Rondanini, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House ©Burghley/JonCulverhouse 156

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8.3 Joseph Nollekens, Boy on a dolphin, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House ©Burghley/JonCulverhouse 157 8.4 Angelika Kauffmann, Self-portrait in Bregenz Native Dress, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi ©Uffizi 159 8.5 Angelika Kauffmann, Portrait of Brownlow Cecil, 9th Earl of Exeter, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House ©Burghley/JonCulverhouse 160 8.6 Angelika Kauffmann, Portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Zurich, Kunsthaus ©KunsthausZürich 161 8.7 Nicolas Mosman, Male academic nude, Rome, Accademia di San Luca 164 8.8 Nicolas Mosman after Anton von Maron, Portrait of Nicolas Mosman, London, British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department 168 8.9 Nicolas Mosman after Thomas Jenkins, Hagar and Ishmael, London, British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department 169 8.10 Nicolas Mosman after Ludovico Carracci, The Christ Child asleep, guarded by three angels, London, British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department 171 8.11 Marco d’Oggiono, Madonna and Child Holding Cherries, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House ©Burghley/JonCulverhouse 172 8.12 Michelangelo Anselmi, Christ and the Woman of Samaria, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House ©Burghley/JonCulverhouse 173 8.13 Nicolas Mosman after Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Virgin and Child, London, British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department 176 8.14 Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Virgin and Child, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House ©Burghley/JonCulverhouse 177 8.15 Nicolas Mosman after a follower of Guido Reni, Virgin Mary Preaching, London, British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department 180 8.16 Follower of Guido Reni, Virgin Mary Preaching, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House ©Burghley/JonCulverhouse 181 8.17 Anton Raphael Mengs, Perseus and Andromeda, St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum ©The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Vladimir Terebenin 184 8.18 Nicolas Mosman from Anton Raphael Mengs, Perseus and Andromeda, London, British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department 185 9.1 View of the Casita del Principe, Madrid, Real Sitio de El Pardo 190 9.2 Annibale Antonini, Dizionario Italiano, Latino e Francese (Lyon, 1770), Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando 192 9.3 Detail of Annibale Antonini’s Dizionario highlighting the initials PY [Presa Ynglesa = English Prize], Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando 193

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9.4 Christopher Hewetson, Portrait of Francis Basset, Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando 195 9.5 Christopher Hewetson, Portrait of Francis Basset, Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando 196 9.6 John Robert Cozens, View of Ariccia, Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando 196 9.7 View of Tehedy Park, near Camborne, Cornwall 197 9.8 Vincenzo Brenna, A Ceiling Design in the Antique Style, Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando 198 9.9 After Guido Reni, Aurora, Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando 198 10.1 Roman Art, Juno (Barberini’s Hera), Vatican City, Musei Vaticani, Museo Pio Clementino 201 10.2 Roman Art, Nerva, Vatican City, Musei Vaticani, Museo Pio Clementino 202 10.3 Roman Art, Juno Sospita Lanuvina, 100–150 AD, Vatican City, Musei Vaticani, Museo Pio Clementino 207 11.1 Adolphe Wacquez and Alphonse Leroy after a drawing by Raphael, Head of a Man of Religion and Drawing of the Same (Studio for the ‘Madonna del Baldacchino), in Choix de dessins de Raphaël qui font partie de la collection Wicar à Lille, reproduits en facsimile et gravés par les soins de M. H. D’Albert duc de Luynes, Paris, 1858, tav. XVIII, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie 215 11.2 Adolphe Wacquez and Alphonse Leroy after a drawing of the school of Raphael, Head of the Madonna ‘La Perla’, in Choix de dessins de Raphaël qui font partie de la collection Wicar à Lille, reproduits en facsimile et gravés par les soins de M. H. D’Albert duc de Luynes, Paris, 1858, tav. I, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie 217 11.3 Bernard Picart after a drawing by Raphael, Head of the Madonna known as ‘La Perla’, in Impostures innocentes ou Recueil d’estampes d’après divers peintres illustres (…), 1734, tav. 7, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie 219 11.4 School of Raphael, Head of the Madonna known as ‘La Perla’, once in the Wicar Collection, Lille, musée des Beaux-Arts, ©Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille— Jean-Marie Dautel 220 11.5 Jean-Baptiste Wicar, Portrait of Lamberto Gori, drawing, Rome, Museo Napoleonico 224

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Figures and Tables

Tables 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Items in the ‘Prima stanza dei quadri’ (first picture room) 56 Items in the ‘Seconda stanza dei quadri’ (second picture room) 57 Paintings in the ‘Sala’ 61 Furniture in the ‘Sala’ 62 Statues in the ‘Courtyard’ of casa Amadori 64 Statues on the ‘mezza scala’ in casa Amadori 64 Statues in the ‘Entrance before the stairs’ in casa Amadori 65 Statues in the ‘Sala’ in casa Amadori 65

chapter 1

The Art Market in Rome in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in the Modern ‘Social History’ of Art Paolo Coen 1

General Considerations

1.1 Introduction The essays in this volume derive from an international congress held in Rome in April, 2012.1 The overall aim is to investigate the Roman art market from different perspectives and to present it as a case study, thus providing a solid base from which to deepen and extend our understanding of the art market. Of necessity, given the present state of the discipline, this means confronting a series of problems. A number of difficulties have arisen from the excessive exposure of the subject. One of the consequences of 1989 was the collapse of several moral and ideological barriers that had long kept the connection between art and money separate. Since the 1980s and 1990s the business side of artistic production has aroused and continues to arouse huge interest, which sometimes has led to distorting the artistic or historical facts in favour of economic, or in certain circumstances even to pan-economic interpretations. Thus every single aspect, every single decision taken by the artists, no matter the place and the times, could or even should be attributable to the law of supply and demand. The result is a kind of cabinet de curiosités, which may be perfect for establishing new lines of academic research and sometimes even for selling books, but of dubious philological quality. To avoid this kind of problem the present book has taken some specific measures. In general terms, the extent and even more the limits of the art market were carefully delineated; equally, special importance was given to the spaces for the debate and exchange of ideas. A general principle underlying the present volume is that the lens of the art market offers a legitimate tool 1  Paolo Coen, ed., Il mercato dell’arte a Roma nel XVIII secolo: un caso di studio nella storia sociale dell’arte. The congress, which was funded by Italy’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism (MIBACT), was held at the Barberini Palace, Rome. I wish here to thank the scientific committee of the Fondazione Luigi Spezzaferro—namely its president Serena Veggetti and Rossella Vodret—for their constant support for this project. This particular essay of mine owes much to the conversations with Enrico Castenluovo, to whom it is dedicated.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004388154_002

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with which to assess the rich interconnections between history, history of art, history of taste and history of art criticism. This does not imply, in any way, that the art market is a unique ‘key’ with which to unlock what happened in Rome’s art system of the time. Rather, the different essays offer vantage points from which to view the intersections and divergences of a host of currents motifs and sensibilities in seventeenth- and even more eighteenth-century artistic and intellectual life. The primary training of the contributors is from within art history, which however does not exclude the contributions of other disciplines like cultural history, history and archaeology, all of which have been subjected to social and cultural historical analyses. Many chapters are aimed at introducing new figures or, alternatively, at improving our knowledge on aspects of important dealers, agents or collectors, which had previously remained in the dark. These accounts, no matter if often very different, assist in the reconstruction of a unified fabric. Other chapters are principally engaged in revising certain specific categories in the interpretation of the Roman market. The present introduction tries to identify and enhance some of these patterns of interpretation, thus providing a context in which to understand the actions of individuals and institutions. This approach was suggested and encouraged by the reviewers and thus, although the subject has been treated differently by different authors and the approach in some cases is more implicit than overt, it is hoped that this introduction indicates a direction, the value of which hopefully will be illustrated in the essays taken as a whole. 1.2 Basic Questions All the essays in the present volume have to do directly or indirectly with Rome and its art market, and span the period from the mid-seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century, i.e. that time which is normally called ‘the long eighteenth century’. Peter Burke’s preface, an open tribute to Enrico Castelnuovo,2 raises questions that are valid for the whole team of contributors. The first, what is today’s range of the art market, arises from the expansion of the topic in terms of history and geography. It is true that there is a long history of research into those times and places where it was traditionally known that the market played an important role: this is particularly true for the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, investigated as early as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mainly due to Hanns Floerke, and then more recently by scholars such as John 2  Enrico Castelnuovo, “Per una storia sociale dell’arte,” Paragone 27 (1976, 313): 3–30, reprinted in Castelnuovo, Arte, industria e rivoluzioni. Temi di storia sociale dell’arte (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007).

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Michael Montias and Michael North.3 However, it is equally true that more recently the focus has expanded to places and times previously unthinkable, such as South America, China and Africa or, in Europe, the traffic of artistic items well before the classical era.4 ‘Who studied and who is studying the art market?’ Here is a second, basic question. A salient feature of today’s state of research is precisely the difference in approaches. It follows therefore that there is a need to find common ground, a common language of communication. In other words, it is important for the same points of observation to construct a common ‘field of force’—as defined by Bruno Toscano—where scientific findings are considered valid the rough all different components, rather than just one or two. This process, to some extent still far from being accomplished, represents the critical step from a multidisciplinary approach to genuine interdisciplinarity. 1.3 A Short History of the Study of the Art Market in Rome A perspective of this kind frames the choice of the main topic of the book. The art market in Rome of the eighteenth century is in fact a case study, and was historically among the first areas to be analyzed. The deepest roots of research can be identified in the monographs of Carl Justi and Adolf Michaelis, published in the second half of the nineteenth century.5 These two pillars were followed by the book of Lesley Lewis, shortly after the Second World War: the three books, no matter if very different from each other for intent and achievements, are still a point of reference, not only for the quantity and quality of the archival material and bibliographic quoted.6 However, even more solid support was given by Francis Haskell’s Patrons and Painters, the first section

3  Hanns Floerke, Studien zur niederländischen Kunst. Die Formen des Kunsthandels, das Atelier und die Sammler in den Niederlanden vom 15.–18. Jahrhundert (München: Muller, 1905); John Michael Montias, Le marché de l’art aux Pays-Bas (Paris: Flammarion, 1996); Michael North, Das goldene Zeitalter. Kunst und Kommerz in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Köln: Böhlau, 2001). 4  See, for instance Castelnuovo and Ilaria Bignamini, Arte e società, in Enciclopedia delle Scienze Sociali, 9 vols. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1991–2001), I, 1991, 319–339, now also online, and more recently Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, ed. Thomas DaCosta-Kauffmann (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014). 5  Carl Justi, Winckelmann: sein Leben, seine Werke und seine Zeitgenossen, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Vogel, 1866–1872); Adolf Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882). 6  Lesley Lewis, Connoisseurs and Secret Agents in Eighteenth Century Rome (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961).

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of which was entirely devoted to seventeenth-century Rome.7 Beyond some limits in terms of the overall historiographical framework, which will be highlighted later, the author perfectly framed the subject, so as to become almost canonical. Haskell himself completed the scenario thirteen years later, releasing another important volume, Rediscoveries in Art: here he complicated the issue, investigating changes in taste together with the constant desire to establish—and to follow—universal esthetic values.8 Haskell did not just give substance to or even literally create a truly considerable number of figures and cases. His most important contribution lies in having forged the general interpretative categories and their sub-categories in very didactic—and therefore somewhat repeatable—terms. Let us just consider the author’s careful stratification of art collectors and patrons according to their census and status; the role assigned to the religious orders; or, finally, his opening to wider sectors of the public, a line of research that had already been covered elsewhere but was hitherto largely uncharted on the banks of the Tiber. In other words, the two books and in particular Patrons and Painters laid the rails on which almost any research on the subject still largely runs. It is not strange therefore to find references to Haskell in the notes of several chapters of this book. As is widely known, the same Patrons and Painters greatly undervalued the artistic role of Rome in the eighteenth century: according to Haskell’s vision, at the end of the seventeenth century the city substantially lost its leading position, a close consequence of the economic crisis which first came to light under Alexander VII (1655–1667). From Franco Venturi onwards modern and specific, focused studies have modified Haskell’s judgement. The consensus today is to underline the driving and proactive power of Rome in terms of economics, no less than in the world of esthetics, at least until the advent of the Napoleonic armies in 1797. This very clear change of perspective, covering the whole range of the artistic production and including the ‘applied’ arts, was indicated in the exhibition Art in Rome in the eighteenth century, which took place in 2000 in Philadelphia and Houston.9 Thus, today’s scholars tend to think of the passage 7  Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations Between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963). 8  Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). 9  Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore: da Muratori a Beccaria (Torino: Einaudi, 1969). Regarding the world of arts, see Anthony M. Clark, Studies in Roman Eighteenth-Century Painting, ed. Edgar Peters Borown (Washington, D.C.: Decatur House, 1981); Liliana Barroero, La pittura a Roma, in La pittura in Italia. Il Settecento, ed. Giuliano Briganti (Milan: Electa, 1991), 383–463; Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, exh. catalog ed. Borown and Jonathan Rishel (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000); Barroero and Stefano Susinno, “Roma arcadica capitale delle arti del disegno,” Studi di Storia dell’Arte 10 (1999): 89–178.

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between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Rome in terms of continuity, albeit still keeping some indisputable differences. The sense of continuity is strengthened by those studies that focus attention on the forms and tools of the market. This explains, among other things, the presence of essays rooted in the Seicento rather than in the Settecento like those by Patrizia Cavazzini, Renata Ago and Raffaella Morselli. 2

Rome in the Eighteenth Century as an ‘Art System’

2.1 Background As stated above, Rome played a significant role in the European art scenario throughout the eighteenth century.10 Being the capital of the Papal States and the seat of the papacy, the city was first and foremost a necessary point of reference for diplomats and international politics. Since the Pope was one of a kind, a monarch without any earthly heirs, destined to leave a vacant throne at his death, diplomats sent by foreign powers became alarmed at the slightest illness or sign of influenza, while during a conclave things reached a frenzy of activity. However, even in quiet times the Popes were keen to make their mark and animate daily life. On April 14, 1708, on the occasion of his first papal audience, the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Portugal, Count das Galveias, André de Melo e Castro, organized a procession of carriages that was so splendid as to be reproduced in etchings by Giovanni Battista Sintes, copied from a drawing by Peter Lerman. According to a report written by the ambassador’s secretary, as the carriages came into the open, passing the Sant’Angelo bridge which connected the heart of the city to Trastevere and the Vatican, the golden decorations literally dazzled observers and spectators, almost blinding them. A few years later, in July 1747, the last representative in Rome of King John V of Portugal, Commander Manuel Pereira de Sampaio (Fig. 1.1), gave a grand banquet at his residence in Piazza della Pilotta, near the Quirinale Palace, the table laid with porcelain from Saxony, India, China, as well as a ‘rich cruet made of silver gilt.’ Even today, the art collections of the Quirinale Palace, now the residence of the President of the Italian Republic, preserve four large Chinese

10  Unless otherwise specified, reference here is to my Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel XVIII secolo. La domanda, l’offerta e la circolazione delle opere in un grande centro artistico europeo, with a preface by Enrico Castelnuovo, 2 vols. (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2010).

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figure 1.1 Filippo della Valle, Terracotta Replica of the Funerary Monument to Manuel Pereira de Sampaio, c. 1753, Lisbon, Museu de Lisboa

porcelain vases with the coat of arms of Sampaio, which were donated at the time to the Pope.11 Rome was also chosen as the residence of the ‘kings without a crown’, or the heirs of European dynasties who, having been forced to leave their thrones to monarchs professing the Protestant religion, continued over the years to claim their rights. The most important was the British dynasty of the Stewarts, 11  Teresa Leonor M. Vale, Scultura barocca italiana in Portogallo. Opere, artisti, committenti (Rome: Gangemi, 2010).

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figure 1.2 Antonio David, Portrait of James Francis Edward Stuart, The Old Pretender, London, Weiss Gallery

or Stuarts, beginning with James Francis Edward, the Old Pretender (Fig. 1.2). Thanks to Pope Clement XI, the Stuarts were able to reside in Palazzo Muti in Piazza Santi Apostoli, today’s Palazzo Balestra, and were awarded, for a certain period, an annual salary of 8,000 scudi, about £2,000. Their importance and power of attraction began to wane towards the 1760s; the final blow came in 1766, when, at the death of the Old Pretender, the major Catholic sovereigns,

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including Clement XIII, refused to recognize the Young Pretender, Charles Edward.12 However, in the eyes of the sharpest observers there were clear symptoms of decline. At the diplomatic and foreign policy levels, the concordats made by Benedict XIV and the other popes with the major nations of Europe on property rights, especially the privileges of the Holy See abroad or the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, were signs of an era drawing to a close, which was destined to suffer a decisive blow with the arrival on the scene of the Napoleonic armies. Economically, the Papal States were in the throes of a long-term crisis, in which the progressive decline of land revenue and flows of money were compounded by a continual growth in public debt. There was, to be sure, no shortage of ‘enlightened’ men, ideas and even attempts at reform, as shown for instance by the entrepreneur and banker Girolamo Belloni; overall, however, bureaucracy proved to be incapable, for various reasons, of revitalizing the nerve centers of the state and making them responsive to the real demands of society. Faithful to a rigidly protectionist policy and obliged to protect the interests of both the Curia and the great patrician families, as well as the corporate system of the academies of arts and crafts, the state failed to encourage private enterprise, except in rare and circumscribed cases.13 In the eyes of those who came to Rome, especially for the first time, the city still appeared beautiful and different from any other, to all intents and purposes, still playing its role of ‘universal’ capital of the arts. The famous words of Johann Wolfgang Goethe (Fig. 1.3), written on October 5, 1786, best express this European consciousness: Yes, I have finally arrived in this city, the capital of the world! (…) My desire to reach Rome was so great and so much increased at every passing moment that I could no longer stay anywhere, and stopped in Florence for only three hours. Now I am here and calm—calmed, it would seem, for the rest of my life. All the dreams of my youth now seem alive.14 The various courts of both major foreign dignitaries and the representatives of the local aristocracy vied with each other and with the reigning pontiff for pomp and for the ostentation of power and wealth. Many noble families—

12  Frank McLynn, The Jacobites (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). 13  Franco Venturi, “Elementi e tentativi di riforme nello Stato Pontificio del Settecento,” Rivista storica italiana 3 (1963): 778–817. 14  Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Roman Elegies and other Poems, selected, translated and with an introduction by Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1996).

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figure 1.3 Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Portrait of Johann Wolfgang Goethe in the Roman Campagna, Frankfurt, Städel Museum

including the Colonna, the Borghese, the Pamphili and the Barberini—could count on the remarkable and sometimes extraordinary collections of ancient and modern art, started by their ancestors and gradually consolidated over time. However, Rome was also home to collections formed, in whole or in part, precisely in this period, as is well illustrated by those of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, Cardinal Alessandro Albani, Cardinal Giuseppe Renato Imperiali, as well as Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga—here portrayed beside Benedict XIV (Fig. 1.4)—to whom we shall return later. In compliance with the laws in force, which were strengthened by Valenti himself in 1749, the great Roman collections remained substantially intact until almost the end of the eighteenth century. In assessing the remarkable effectiveness of this legislation, Francis Haskell noted, among other things, that ‘no major painting by Raphael’ came to England during the eighteenth century, with the sole exception of the Madonna Ansidei (Fig. 1.5), now in the National Gallery of London. The same spirit of protecting the art heritage of Rome, expressed as early as the sixteenth century by Raphael’s famous letter to Pope Leo XIII, led to establishment of specific conservation institutes such as the Capitoline Museums, the apostolic Chamber’s Chalcography (Calcografia

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figure 1.4 Pierre Subleyras, Portait of Benedict XIV and Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, Rome, Museo di Roma

figure 1.5 Raphael, The Ansidei Madonna, London, The National Gallery

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figure 1.6 The Hall of the Philosophers, Rome, Musei Capitolini, Palazzo Nuovo

Camerale), the Vatican Collection of Medals (Medagliere Vaticano), the Capitoline Picture Gallery (Pinacoteca Capitolina) and the Pio Clementino Museum. The Capitoline Museums, for example, were founded in 1734. In that year, at the insistence of Marquis Alessandro Gregorio Capponi, Pope Clement XII Corsini decided to safeguard Cardinal Alessandro Albani’s collection of antiquities and keep it in Rome (Fig. 1.6), adding to it a substantial nucleus that had gradually been forming in the Campidoglio since 1471.15 A significant role in the art system was played by the art schools and academies. For example, inside Palazzo Mancini, along Via del Corso, there was the French Academy, a place of reference not only for pensionnaires; other similar though less organized schools were founded by individual artists such as Sebastiano Conca. None however managed to equal in importance the

15  Francesco Paolo Arata, “La nascita del Museo Capitolino,” in Palazzo dei Conservatori e il Palazzo Nuovo in Campidoglio. Momenti di storia urbana di Roma, ed. Maria Elisa Tittoni (Ospedaletto: Pacini, 1996), 75–85. On Capponi’s role, see Statue di Campidoglio. Diario di Alessandro Gregorio Capponi (1733–1746), ed. Michele Franceschini and Valeria Vernesi (Città di Castello: Edimond, 2005).

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Academy of Saint Luke.16 The Academy, founded in the second half of the sixteenth century to formally bring together painters, sculptors and architects, played a role of strategic importance in the city’s art system. In the eighteenth century it was located in the Roman Forum, in a building directly behind the church of Saints Luca and Martina and despite a lack of funds maintained a significant role, continuing, among other things, to enlist many foreigners among the ranks of its ‘Professors’. Artists from Germany, as well as France, Poland, Spain and Britain, regularly took part both as teachers and in competitions. The 1773 competition, which was on the set theme of The Departure of Hector, saw a Briton win for the first time: David Allan. The medal can still be seen today at the Society of Antiquaries in Scotland. The city was often home to art exhibitions, mostly of paintings. This kind of event originated in the late sixteenth century in or near certain churches on the anniversary of their patron. In the eighteenth century, the most important exhibition, organized by the artist’s charity of Virtuosi, was held on March 19, St. Joseph’s day, in the pronaos and in the square of Santa Maria della Rotunda, i.e. the Pantheon. In other circumstances, the exhibitions were organized by particularly wealthy citizens or residents. The Portuguese ambassador, Manuel Pereira de Sampaio (Fig. 1.1), understood, for example, that by organizing exhibitions of the works to be shipped home, he would give the Roman public an idea of the wealth and power of John V, his sovereign. After a first event, on April 1747, a second exhibition was organized two years later in Sampaio’s own residence, Palazzo Colonna in Piazza della Pilotta. A canopy was put up to protect and show off the silver produced by Roman masters for the Patriarchal basilica and the Church of São Roque in Lisbon, including a 160-centimeter gilded silver statue representing The Immaculate Conception, made by the silversmiths Gagliardi.17 As well as the Pope, the two Portuguese exhibitions welcomed a large number of visitors. According to a journal of the time, the Chracas, during the second exhibition ‘there came to see the chapel many cardinals, and members of the highest nobility, princes and princesses, and even His Majesty, the King of Great Britain. Such was the gathering that the streets were always crowded with carriages’.18

16  On the foundation and the history of the Accademia up to 1650 c., see The Achademia Seminars, ed. Peter Lukehart. On the eighteenth-century Aequa Potestas. Le arti in gara nel Settecento, exh. catalog ed. Angela Cipriani (Rome: De Luca, 2000). 17  Teresa Leonor M. Vale, “Eighteenth-Century Roman Silver for the Chapel of St John the Baptist of the Church of Saint Roque, Lisbon,” The Burlington Magazine 152 (2010): 528–535. 18  Diario Ordinario, April 29, 1747, 11.

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13

The Art Market

The Public: From the City’s Lower Classes to the Collectors of the Grand Tour A significant internal demand for art came from the middle and lower classes of the population. Lawyers, secretaries, officials and scholars but also artisans and retailers, employees and service workers would invest moderate budgets, sometimes less than five scudi, to hang on their walls a Madonna, a small painting of flowers or a landscape, a paper print with touches of watercolor. At the other extreme, there were the great collectors. Though less frequently and intensely than in preceding periods, Rome remained a theater for the creation of truly remarkable and substantial art collections. An important key figure, parallel to those of Albani, Ottoboni and Imperiali, all cited above, was Silvio Valenti Gonzaga (Fig. 1.4).19 Born in Mantua but soon moving to Rome to pursue a career in the church, Valenti Gonzaga very soon became an appreciated art expert, particularly by Prince Eugene of Savoy, whose passion for the arts led him to an impressive series of purchases of books, prints and even more paintings. Some were bought personally by Valenti during his many trips abroad; when in Rome, he acted through advisers such as the painter and landscape artist Giovanni Paolo Panini or the dealer Giovanni Barbarossa, to whom we shall return shortly. The result was a collection of 832 paintings, once kept mostly in his buen retiro at the beginning of Via Salaria, just outside the Aurelian Walls. In 1749, a largely fantastical vision of the collection was offered by the aforementioned Panini, in a painting today at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut (Fig. 1.7). The fifty or so paintings identified by scholars include the Dead Christ Supported by Angels by Andrea Mantegna, a copy of Raphael’s Portrait of Julius II, a Portable Tabernacle by Annibale Carracci, the first now in the Statens Museen for Kunst in Copenhagen, the last two at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica of Palazzo Barberini, in Rome (Fig. 1.8). Within this more or less traditional scenario, state collections began to make their first appearance. As mentioned above, from the thirties onward several important museums were founded in the city: they would soon set a fashion throughout the world, as attested to by the British Museum, among others, founded in 1743. The directors of the Roman museums pursued purchasing policies that were, at times, extremely dynamic. 66,000 scudi, about £16,500, were given by Clement XII to the Marquis Alessandro Gregorio Capponi to buy the Albani collection and keep it in Rome, thus instituting the Capitoline 3.1

19  See Ritratto di una collezione. Pannini e la Galleria del Cardinale Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, exh. catalog ed. Raffaella Morselli and Rossella Vodret (Geneva-Milan: Skira, 2005).

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figure 1.7 Giovanni Paolo Panini, The Picture Gallery of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, Hartford, Conn., The Wadsworth Athenaeum

figure 1.8 Annibale Carracci, Pietà with Saints, Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini

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figure 1.9 Roman copy from a 230–220 BC Hellenistic original, Dying Gaul, Rome, Musei Capitolini

Museums. Capponi, who was the first director of the museum, continued to add more items over the following months. In December 1733, at the death of Princess Ippolita Ludovisi Boncompagni, he opened negotiations with the legal representative of the heirs, Cardinal Troiano d’Acquaviva for the acquisition of the Galata morente, or Dying Gaul (Fig. 1.9). The starting price of 12,000 scudi, set by the sculptor Agostino Cornacchini, was halved to 6,000 scudi, around £1,500. A broader and more expensive purchasing campaign was undertaken by Clement XIV, who was to be outdone by his successor Pius VI, to set up and endow the Pio Clementino Museum, in 1771. Daniela Gallo’s essay in this book details the delicate process of evaluating and buying the artworks, as in the case of the Juno (see Daniela Gallo’s essay, Fig. 1), bought on April 2, 1772 from Princess Barberini for 2,600 scudi, or £650. On the other hand, a significant number of works ended up outside the borders of the Papal States and were exported to the whole of Europe and the four corners of the globe. Let us consider, first, the demand created by the Catholic pilgrims, who came to Rome primarily to visit the holy places and the basilicas. These people, eager to take home a souvenir, would preferably seek a sacred image of a martyr or a view of the city. On a much higher level were the great European collectors, individuals able to combine the love of art with extraordinary economic means. A major role among them was played

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The Gallery of King Gustav III, Stockholm, The Royal Palace

by a number of sovereigns, who looked to Rome mainly as a source of classical antiquities, starting with the large marble sculptures which traditionally reflected the image of official power. Frederick II, who became King of Prussia in 1740, bought the collection of statues that belonged to Cardinal Melchior de Polignac; Gustav III of Sweden turned to Francesco Piranesi to acquire the collection of his father Giovanni Battista Piranesi, at that time kept in his ‘museum’ of Via Sistina: after a number of vicissitudes, about 150 marble sculptures made their way to two special galleries in the Royal Palace in Stockholm, where they still make a fine show (Fig. 1.10).20 The range of great European collectors included clergymen, aristocrats but also nouveaux riches: so was for instance Pierre-Jacques-Onéysme Bergeret de Grancourt (Fig. 1.11), the rich tax collector from Montauban, France—here portrayed by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. As we know, a significant number of great collectors came from Britain in the wake of a passion for ancient art and consequently for Italy and Rome in particular, which had taken hold in the late seventeenth century and became even stronger in the eighteenth century. This factor, along with the others mentioned earlier, contributed decisively to making Rome a major center of attraction for artists, intellectuals and, in broader terms, for the young people belonging to the 20  Rossana Caira Lumetti, La cultura dei lumi tra Italia e Svezia: il ruolo di Francesco Piranesi (Roma: Bonacci, 1990); Anne-Marie Leander Touati, Ancient Sculptures in the Royal Museum. I. The Eighteenth-Century Collection in Stockholm, with contributions by Magnus Olausson (Stockholm: Swedish Art Museums, 1998).

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figure 1.11

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Gilles Demarteau the Elder after Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Portrait of JacquesOnéysme Bergeret de Grancourt, Washington, D.C., The National Gallery of Art

higher strata of European society. This phenomenon, which reached its peak in the eighteenth century and is generally known as the Grand Tour, proved to be a very effective tool to promote the demand for products of Italian and specifically Roman art overseas. The individual grand tourists, their routes and their habits have been the subject, also recently, of remarkable historiographical

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interest. We should also mention, in this context, that at least some of the protagonists traveled incognito.21 The Grand Tour was a journey of education, study and recreation, but also of purchasing. Within this vast and complex phenomenon, Valter Curzi’s essay in this book analyzes two particular aspects, namely the creation and subsequent export of albums of print reproductions of Roman antiquities, often made by Francesco Fernandi, known as l’Imperiali, and Francesco Bartoli, and the commissions given to contemporary Capitoline artists of exempla virtutis. In fact, one of the aims of going on the tour was almost invariably the acquisition of works of art in Rome, both ancient and modern. Seen as the materialization of the journey’s end or the attainment of virtù, these works went on to form and enrich art collections throughout Europe. 3.2 The Dealer and His Markets A major issue addressed by the book lies in the professional profile of the dealers. In Rome there was a class of professional dealers: so, in this respect the city can be somewhat compared to eighteenth-century London and Paris.22 Some Roman dealers focused on paintings and were, therefore, often called quadrari. As in the Netherlands, several started their careers as painters who at some point in their lives, due to a lack of talent or vocation, abandoned their profession. The quadrari mainly sold paintings that were reasonable in price and size, genre scenes, devotional themes or effigies of famous personalities, such as popes, cardinals and bishops, as well as the reigning monarchs of European nations. One good example of the whole category is Giovanni Barbarossa, who was able to gain the trust of prestigious clients such as Cardinal Valenti Gonzaga (Fig. 2): in fact, Valenti Gonzaga not only employed Barbarossa as adviser to his picture collection (Fig. 5), as noted above, but also appointed him to the post of Assistant to the Pope’s Antiquarian, the Commissario alle Antichità e Belle Arti. More often dealers offered paintings along with sculptures, drawings, prints, artworks and sometimes even books. ‘Belisario est nôtre tyran, d’autant plus qu’il est fortuné et ne connoit pas le besoin’: in this way the Theatine father Paolo Maria Paciaudi introduced Belisario Amidei to the Count of Caylus. Amidei, who owned a large gallery in Piazza Navona, did not disdain to work as a wholesaler or for the benefit of such dealer-restorers 21  Richard Wrigley, Protokollierte Identität. Anmerkungen über das Incognito in der Reisepraxis und der Reiseliteratur des 18. Jahrhunderts, in Europareisen politisch-sozialer Eliten im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Joachim Rees et al. (Berlin: BWV, 2002), 209–218. 22  For London, see Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: the Growth of Interest in the Arts in England 1680–1768 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988); for Paris Andrew McClellan, “Watteau’s Dealer: Gersaint and the Marketing of Art in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 439–453.

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figure 1.12 Roman engraver of the eighteenth century, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi’s Studio [Studio di Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, ove sono state restaurate le Statue contenute nella presente Raccolta], in Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, Raccolta D’Antiche Statue Busti Bassirilievi Ed Altre Sculture Restaurate, Rome, 1768, fol. 6, Göttingen, Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek

as Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (Fig. 1.12) or Agostino Penna. His main target was the high end of the customer market, especially that connected to the Tour: in the short span of four years, between 1749 and 1752 he filled his pockets with the money given to him by the Earl of Leicester for a set of classical statues destined for Holkham Hall, which included Venus, Meleager, Ceres, Minerva, Isis, Neptune, Bacchus and The Nile. From the 1750s onward the ranks of professional dealers were swollen by a new generation, very often from the United Kingdom and especially Scotland, who all had a great capacity to promote goods to their customers, to the point where they could be considered veritable tastemakers. A key role in this regard was played by Thomas Jenkins (Fig. 1.13). Jenkins, who in the past had almost always come across as a forger or a cheat, was actually one of the most successful and innovative dealers of those times. Having started at the bottom of the ladder as an artist of little value, through a combination of talent and ambition he managed to amass a fortune of 400,000 Roman scudi, about £100,000. Jenkins’s pivotal figure in the Roman society was saluted with a feeling of respect mixed with admiration, verging on the limits of idolatry. Thus, many would stop him in the street and address him with the title of Illustrissimo, murmured with deference whilst bowing to kiss his ring. Nonetheless once again Rome defies easy comparisons with other European cities—and markets. As already verified by Haskell for the previous century, the quadrari and the other professional dealers were flanked—and not infrequently beaten—by a wide variety of individuals. ‘À Rome tout le monde

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Anton von Maron, Portrait of Thomas Jenkins, Rome, Accademia di San Luca

s’occupe de tableaux et prétend d’y connoître; beaucoup de gens vivent de ce trafic, sur-tout avec les étrangers’, witnessed a French traveler of the time, Monsieur de Lalande.23 This kaleidoscopic tableau is confirmed in this book by Patrizia Cavazzini, Giovanna Perini Folesani and Maria Teresa Caracciolo. ‘Barbers, tailors, shoe-makers, inn-keepers, connoisseurs, and painters, in 23  Joseph Jerôme Le Français de Lalande, Voyage d’un François en Italie, fait dans les Années 1765 & 1766, 8 vols. (Venice: Desaint, 1769), V, 222–223.

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particular gilders, all sold pictures’, states Cavazzini, for instance, for the seventeenth century. In 1665, the phenomenon was strongly denounced by Filippo Maria Bonini. In his Ateista convinto, Bonini outlined a coruscating scenario of the Roman market, dominated by counterfeiters who saturated the market in art, archaeology and numismatics.24 A key role was played by artist-dealers and even more by painter-dealers. One may easily take as the model for this category Carlo Maratti, or Maratta (Fig. 1.14).25 Maratti, a pupil of Andrea Sacchi and, therefore, anointed heir of the great era of Seventeenth Century Classicism, dominated the Roman art scene between the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He used the art market first to boost his earnings through a collection that included pieces such as Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna with Child, Andrea Sacchi’s Portrait of Francesco Albani, Nicolas Poussin’s Triumph of David, all now in the Prado Museum. In 1711, when drawing up the terms of the marriage pact for Faustina, his only daughter, Maratti placed at the disposal of his future son-in-law, the noble and lawyer Giovanni Battista Zappi, 25,000 scudi, circa £6,250. A few months later, in 1713, his estate was still estimated at more than 45,000 scudi, an amount worthy of a person of noble rank or a successful entrepreneur. Moreover, Maratti exploited the market to promote a form of Counter-Reformation classicism, both as regards the past—Raphael, Poussin—and especially the present, which was represented primarily by himself and his students. In this way, he overcame the traditional opposition of the Academy of Saint Luke to the market, paving the way for generations of academy-dealer artists, from Andrea Procaccini to the neoclassical age and beyond. In the late eighteenth century, the line of behavior conceived by Maratta was to be resumed by Gavin Hamilton (Fig. 1.15), for whom David Irwin coined the triple profile of ‘archaeologist, painter and dealer’.26 Both Perini Folesani and Caracciolo investigate the actions of renowned painters in the market. Perini’s subject is the young Joshua Reynolds, his 1750– 1752 sojourn in Rome and the cultural roots of his work as agent and artistic advisor to wealthy collectors. As is widely known, the city was also home, sometimes for long periods, to these kinds of individuals, who had the task of finding, choosing and often buying works on behalf of third parties, mostly rich foreign collectors. These functions necessitated not only a good knowledge of 24  Tomaso Montanari, “Roma 1665: il rovescio della medaglia. L’ateista convinto delle sole ragioni di Filippo Maria Bonini,” Ricerche di storia dell’arte 96 (2008): 41–56. 25  Coen, Maratti e la ‘questione mercato’, in Maratti e l’Europa, ed. Liliana Barroero et al. (Rome: Campisano, 2015), 275–288. 26  See David Irwin, “Gavin Hamilton: Archaeologist, Painter and Dealer,” The Art Bulletin 44 (1962): 87–102; Coen, Maratti e la ‘questione mercato,’ 275–288.

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Carlo Maratti, or Maratta, Self Portrait, Bruxelles, Musée Royaux des BeauxArts de Belgique

market rules and mechanisms but also specific expertise in the figurative arts, so as to be able to make reliable judgements about the authenticity, state of preservation, needed restorations and, finally, the current price of each piece.27 Caracciolo’s main subject is Jean-Baptiste Wicar, a French painter trained under Jacques-Louis David, who soon became known also as a connoisseur as 27  For a global reconsideration of the role of the art agents, see Your Humble Servant: Agents in Early Modern Europe, ed. Hans Cools et al. (Hilversum: Verloren, 2006).

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figure 1.15

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Archibald Skirving, Portrait of Gavin Hamilton, Edinburgh, National Portrait Gallery of Scotland

well. The essay provides an additional opportunity for reflection on the conditions and tools that an artist had available to work on the Roman market. In one of his most famous caricature drawings, The Congress of the Antiquarians, Pier Leone Ghezzi ridiculed ‘those who pretend to be scholars in the fields of art and archaeology, but, to say the truth, are involved in the market of buying and selling’. Ghezzi’s targets were the art collectors and even more the art experts, at those times often called intendenti, who in fact played

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a major role in the trade. Among these expert-dealers—and so portrayed by Ghezzi as part of his Congress—was Antonio Borioni. At least officially, Borioni was a pharmacist, with a shop located near the Spanish Steps. His main source of income, however, was the art market, through a collection, or rather a stock, famous for its precious stones and engraved gems. This profile explains a second caricature of the same Ghezzi, this time full length, where the pharmacist holds in his hand one of the tools of his trade, a huge enema. ‘[This is] Antonio Borioni—reads the caption—a pharmacist in Via dei Greci, who plays the part of being a scholar in the field of antiquities, but rather than emptying the purse, he should keep emptying the guts’. On a much higher level than Borioni was Cardinal Alessandro Albani, already mentioned several times, considered one of the rulers of the Roman art market. Thanks to his diplomatic relations with Austria, the German states and Britain, the Cardinal was a point of reference for correspondents, artists and travelers. Albani could satisfy any request for artistic material, even the most particular. In 1755 the English admiral John Forbes asked the Cardinal for an ancient fragment which could somehow be associated with the world of ships. No sooner said than done. A little later, Albani sent him one ‘avec l’empreinte du vaisseau de Neptune Dieu de la Mer’. In this case, the prelate was content to have a porcelain object in exchange, but he usually asked for cash. 20,000 scudi, i.e. roughly £5,000, was the price paid by King George III of England for Albani’s entire graphic collection, obtained through different brokers. 3.3 Areas of Collecting A key question raised by the volume has to do with the contents of Roman art dealers’ stocks or, in economic terms, what the public might find available. Virtually all the contributors to this book deal with this subject, though probably none so directly and in detail as Brian Allen. The hold of the cargo ship Westmorland—as detailed by Allen—gives us a very concrete idea of the variety and range of goods sold in Italy, and Rome in particular: this included items that Antonio Pinelli has described as products of the so-called ‘Grand Tour factory’.28 3.4 Running the Business The many art shops open on the streets or in the squares of the city were the main outlets for the quadrari and other dealers. The dealer and publisher Ludovico Mirri opened his own one along Via della Mercede, a few yards 28  Antonio Pinelli, Souvenir: l’industria dell’Antico e il Grand Tour a Roma (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2000).

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from the Spanish Steps: customers could here buy paintings by old masters or, alternatively, books such Le Terme di Tito (The Baths of Titus). Other sales points were the private residences of the dealers themselves. This was, inter alia, how most of the British contingent operated. The Scottish dealer Colin Morison, for example, kept several hundred paintings at his home in Via San Sebastianello, again a few yards from the Spanish Steps, including over three hundred ‘belonging to the first school of Italian Renaissance painting’. Artists and craftsmen often preferred their own workshops for exhibiting and selling. So too did the painting restorer Bonaventura Benucci, while, on a higher level, did one of the most famous sculptor-restorers of the period, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi. Cavaceppi’s workshop (Fig. 1.8), immortalized by a famous print in the Raccolta di antiche statue (Collection of ancient statues), contained dozens of statues and other pieces in plaster or marble. A small number of individuals chose pleasant rural settings, surrounded by gardens or parks. In addition to the above-mentioned Antonio Borioni, we may add Jenkins, who in 1775 rented a residence near Castel Gandolfo where he would stay in the hot season. The villa, which was visited by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Angelika Kauffmann and Thomas Jones, among others, was judged by the Jesuit, Father John Thorpe, writing in 1775, to be ‘a sort of trap’ for young Englishmen. Considerable attention was always given to how items could best be displayed to the public. The existence of these typologies and approaches even in the seventeenth century is detailed in this book by Renata Ago. Dealers who sold paintings on a semi-serial scale would place the works directly on the pavement, without frames, grouping them according to size (like in a modern poster shop). This is the way that paintings and drawings were displayed by the quadraro Giovanni Rumi in Piazza del Gesù. Higher-end works were displayed according to more esthetic criteria. Barbarossa, for instance, arranged them in different rows, as in the collections of the nobility. If displayed in a house, the best pieces were placed in the stateroom, embellished with multicoloured fabrics, mirrors and fine furniture. The more refined dealers would create special environments, like a sort of museum, for their best pieces, imitating the traditions of the aristocracy. A good example is the ‘little gallery close to the garden’ built by Maratti (Fig. 1.14) in his beautiful house near Piazza Barberini, but Antonio Borioni and Giovanni Battista Piranesi also shared the same paradigm. Once the works arrived in their hands, dealers adopted a wide range of approaches and methods to attract customers and boost sales. One such approach involved the use of what were, to all intents and purposes, promotional tools. Some methods involved trying to improve the overall image of the dealer in the eyes of the public, so as to acquire a good reputation. Many, therefore, sought

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accreditation as scholars and art experts, a typical phenomenon especially among artist-dealers. This explains, for instance, their will to publish books, sometimes personally written by the dealers, some others merely funded by them. This mentality was widespread as early as a century before, as clearly demonstrated in this book by Raffaella Morselli’s essay on the seventeenthcentury production of art books in Flanders. The range of this kind of literary product in eighteenth-century Rome was vast. It included books that adopted serious scientific approaches, simple notebooks illustrating an anthology of works or the results of archaeological excavations, illustrated guides to the city and museum catalogs. Eighteenth-century Roman dealers also employed the tools of direct promotion in an effort to sell what they had in stock or what was available on the market. To advertise a work, for example, they made a drawing of it or had one made, to be transmitted to a potential buyer. The method, which Cardinal Alessandro Albani had already used successfully in the first half of the century, was perfected by Thomas Jenkins (Fig. 1.13), as shown in this book by the present writer when describing the so-called ‘Mosman Drawings’, now in the British Museum. Instead of drawings, which were by their very nature of limited availability, several dealers preferred to resort to prints. The person behind an illustrated edition of an album had the works engraved, had a critical outline compiled by a scholar of note and finally had everything laid out in a sequence of famous objects. On the one hand, this procedure testified to the authenticity of a certain piece, it emphasized its value and, therefore, increased the price; on the other, it aroused in the viewer an automatic desire to possess it. In the 1770s Mirri printed a catalog of the paintings in his shop. Gavin Hamilton went even further when making an illustrated album named Schola Italica Picturae, which was actually designed precisely to sell some of the pieces shown. Others wrote or financed guides, making sure to insert in the text a description of their collection and constantly reminding tourists to come and see it. This approach was adopted, for example, by Giuseppe Vasi, a printmaker best known for the 200 engravings in the Magnificenze di Roma Antica e moderna, but who was also active as an art dealer and a celebrated writer of guides: Then if my esteemed readers would be so good as to enter my rooms, which are on the ground floor near the urn of Metella [in the Farnese Palace]—we read in the Itinerario Istruttivo—they will have the pleasure of seeing the famous Atlas, and other ancient marble sculptures, as well as my own works that have so far been published (…). You will

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also find several paintings, which I keep for my own pleasure, by Giulio Romano, Paolo Veronese, Baroccio, Caracci, Pietro da Cortona, Giordano, Caravaggio, Maratta, Benefial, Cav. Conca, Filippo Lauri, and other living painters, who perhaps will be to your satisfaction; also different landscapes, and prospects, as well as some bas-reliefs in metal by the abovementioned Buonarroti, which gave pleasure to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold I. the Prince of Bransuic [sic], and so many of noble persons who have come to honour my studio.29 3.5 Conclusions The essays in this volume, even taken as a whole, are far from covering the subject. Much work remains to be done on the topics addressed here. So this volume does not seek to offer a final word on the art market in Rome in the eighteenth century. Rather, it aims to provide new insights and pose new questions about topics that remain, for all their changing in shape and meaning, of vital importance to intellectual, artistic, social and cultural history. The book, beyond these limits, still manages to ask some important questions. Did the art market in Rome exist? Can we can then ‘profile’ it, draw up a check-list of artistic and even more important economic conditions and characteristics? Or should we rather place it at a different and lower level, when comparing it to the art markets of Paris or London? What, after all, does it mean when someone in the eighteenth century referred to Rome for the buying of works of art and building up of a collection? Our contemporary understanding of the main topic of the theme, of the mechanics and functions, even on the logistical side, remains quite dim; because of the ‘liquidness’ of the Roman laws and rules, its art market remains quite an elusive expression. Yet it can be glimpsed as we continue to study the enormously rich material connected to art trades in Rome, documenting its existence: from the thousands and thousands volumes of handwritten documents at the Archivio di Stato di Roma, to the account books and travel diaries overall Europe, spinning a web that expands all over Europe, and beyond.

29  Giuseppe Vasi, Itinerario Istruttivo di Roma diviso in otto giornate (Rome: Casaletti, 1777), 430.

chapter 2

The Social Histories of Art Peter Burke For Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg

⸪ In 1996 an American professor of art history, Allan Langdale, delivered a paper at the Getty Institute entitled ‘The Rise and Fall of the Social History of Art’. Five years later, a College Art Association panel was asked to respond to the question, ‘Whatever happened to the Social History of Art?’.1 In what follows I shall argue that Langdale’s diagnosis of decline was somewhat premature, like the parallel diagnoses of the end of art history, the end of art and the end of history.2 As for ‘whatever happened’, I believe that the social history of art is alive and well, even if it may not always be recognizable to those who remember how it began. Like other approaches to art and to history, it has changed over time. It has its own history, or rather its histories in the plural, since a variety of approaches now coexist and to some extent interact.3 It may be useful to distinguish two social histories of art from the start, one broad and the other relatively narrow. In a broad sense, that of an ‘external’ approach that places works of art in their context, rather than focusing on internal developments, the social history of art, like that of music, goes back to the eighteenth century. For example, the English philosopher Lord Shaftesbury explained what he called the ‘revival of painting’ by the ‘civil liberty, the free 1  Cf. the symposium of the College Art Association, “Art or Society: must we choose?” Representations 12 (1985) and the panel at their annual meeting in 2000, “Whatever happened to the Social History of Art?”. 2  Hervé Fischer, L’histoire de l’art est terminée (Paris: Balland, 1978); Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? (Munich: Deutsche Kunstverlag, 1983); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 3  Enrico Castelnuovo, “Per una storia sociale dell’arte,” Paragone 27 (1976): 3–30, rep. in Castelnuovo, Arte, industria rivoluzioni: temi di storia sociale dell’arte (Turin: Einaudi, 1985) offers a perceptive survey. Indeed, the only justification for an article covering the same ground as Castelnuovo’s is that so much has happened in this field since 1976.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004388154_003

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states of Italy as Venice, Genoa and then Florence’. The Liverpool banker William Roscoe, in his Life of Lorenzo de’Medici (1795), linked the concern for the arts in Florence to ‘the frequency and violence of its internal dissensions’, while the social theorist John Millar of Glasgow pointed out that Florence led the way in ‘manufactures’ as well as in the arts.4 The narrower or more precise approach, linking changes in art to changes in the social structure has long been associated with Marxism, ever since Marx and Engels suggested in their German Ideology (1846) that ‘Whether an individual like Raphael succeeds in developing his talent depends wholly on demand, which in turn depends on the division of labour and the conditions of human culture resulting from it’.5 By the middle of the twentieth century, however, it had become possible to distinguish at least three approaches to the external history of art: the cultural approach, the Marxist approach, and what might be called a social history at the microlevel. 1 The cultural approach emerged from the German tradition of Geistesgeschichte, viewing works of art as the materialization of world-views. Jacob Burckhardt belonged to this cultural tradition. So did his student Heinrich Wölfflin, famous for his ‘formalist’ approach to art but interested in its cultural context as well. In the preface to his Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), Wölfflin argued that styles of art ‘express their epoch’ because modes of vision change. The tradition was continued by Wölfflin’s student Max Dvořák, the author of a study entitled Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte (1924), and by Erwin Panofsky. It may seem strange to describe Erwin Panofsky, most famous for his contributions to the study of iconography, as a social historian of art, even in a broad sense of that term. All the same, the younger Panofsky was concerned to place art in context. One of his essays studied perspective as a symbolic form, emphasizing the shift in Renaissance painting ‘from aggregate space to systematic 4  Herbert Weisinger, “The English Origins of the Sociological Interpretation of the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 11 (1950): 321–338. 5  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, written in 1846, English translation (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 430. On Marx’s views on the arts, see Marx and Engels, On literature and art: a selection of writings, ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski (New York: International General, 1973); Otto Karl Werckmeister, Ideologie und Kunst bei Marx (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1974); Margaret Rose, Marx’s lost aesthetic: Karl Marx and the visual arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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space’ and describing this as ‘a concrete expression of a contemporary advance in epistemology or natural philosophy’.6 A second essay, originally a seminar paper from 1931, became the classic description of the iconographical method. It distinguished three stages in the study of images. Following the description of the image and the identification of its meaning, the third stage illustrates the external approach. This stage is concerned with the image’s Dokumentsinn or Wesenssinn, defined as ‘those underlying principles that reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion’. Panofsky’s examples included Leonardo’s Last Supper as an expression of Renaissance ideals and Gothic architecture as the embodiment of scholastic philosophy.7 Panofsky’s paper recalls an article published nine years earlier by the sociologist Karl Mannheim (unusually for him, in an art-historical journal), on the interpretation of world-views, distinguishing three levels of meaning in every cultural product: objective, expressive and documentary.8 In a third essay, published in 1951, Panofsky returned to the example of Gothic architecture and scholasticism, mentioned briefly in 1931, amplifying and justifying it. He began by noting that both phenomena emerged in the same region, Northern France, at the same time, the early twelfth century. The analogy had already caught the eye of Heinrich Wölfflin, who commented that ‘we still have to find the path that leads from the cell of the scholastic philosopher to the mason’s yard’.9 Responding to this challenge (though he does not mention Wölfflin in his essay and may even have forgotten this text), Panofsky argued for ‘a genuine cause-and-effect relation’ between the two movements, focusing attention on what he called ‘mental habits’, transmitted via schools and sermons.10 6  Erwin Panofsky, Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’ (Hamburg: Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. Vorträge, 1924–1925 but 1927), 258–330, English translation Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York and Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books and MIT Press, 1991), 205. 7  Panofsky, “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der Bildenden Kunst,” Logos 21 (1932): 103–119, rev. English translation Panofsky, Meaning in the visual arts: papers in and on art history (Garden City, Mass.: Doubleday, 1955), 26–54. 8  Karl Mannheim, “Beiträge zur Theorie der Weltanschauungs-Interpretation,” Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 1 (1921–1922): 236–274, English translation in Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1952), 33–83, at 44. Cf. Joan Hart, “Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: a Dialogue on Interpretation,” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 534–566. 9  Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock: eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien (Munich: T. Ackemann, 1888), English translation, with an introduction by Peter Murray (London: Collins, 1964), 77. 10  Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe, PA: Archabbey Press, 1951), Consulted edition (New York, NY: Meridian, 1957), 20–21.

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The cultural approach to art history was not confined to the Germanspeaking world. In France it goes back at least as far as the literary historian Charles Dejob, author of L’influence du Concile de Trente sur la littérature et les beaux-arts (1884). This topic appealed to a number of his successors, notably the art historian Emile Mâle, whose series of studies on art and religion include L’art religieux après le concile de Trente (1932).11 The French sociologist Pierre Francastel also wrote about ‘La contre-réforme et les arts’ but he is better known for his book Peinture et société (1951), a study that contrasted the enthusiasm for perspective in the age of the Renaissance with its abandonment in the age of Cubism.12 Curiously enough, Francastel does not mention Panofsky’s earlier work on this subject. All the same, he too was concerned to study perspective as a set of conventions in a cultural context. Quoting Émile Durkheim on social space, Francastel argued that ‘Space is not a reality in itself that is simply represented in a different way in different periods. Space is man’s experience itself’.13 His discussion of world-views drew on the work of cultural anthropologists such as Marcel Mauss, Maurice Leenhardt and Claude Lévi-Strauss.14 Art history has its own social history. Francastel was on the fringe of the socalled ‘Annales school’, acknowledging the help of Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel and publishing articles in their journal.15 As for Panofsky, he formed part of a group centered on Aby Warburg and his library in Hamburg. Another member of the group was the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, author of Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923–9), to which Panofsky alluded in the title of his essay on perspective. Warburg himself studied world-views, as in the case of the Renaissance merchant Francesco Sassetti, but, as his essay on portraiture and the Florentine bourgeoisie shows, he took more interest than Panofsky in the relation between art and society.16 11  The same topic attracted interest in Germany: Werner Weisbach, Das Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation (Berlin: Cassirer, 1921); Nikolaus Pevsner, “Gegenreformation und Manierismus,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 46 (1925): 243–262. Cf. Romeo De Maio, Michelangelo e la Controriforma (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1981). 12  Pierre Francastel, Peinture et société: naissance et destruction d’un espace plastique. De la Renaissance au Cubisme (Lyon: Audin, 1951). Cf. Peter Burke, “Problems of the Sociology of Art: the work of Pierre Francastel,” Archives européennes de sociologie, 12 (1971): 141–154. 13  Francastel, Peinture et société, 29. 14  Francastel, Peinture et société, 125. 15  Francastel, Peinture et société, preface. Francastel, “Baroque et classique: histoire ou typologie de civilizations?,” Annales. Économies, Société, Civilizations, 12 (1957): 207–222. 16  Carlo Ginzburg, “Da A. Warburg a E. H. Gombrich: note su una problema di metodo,” Studi medievali 7 (1966): 1015–1065, reprinted in Ginzburg, Miti, Emblemi, Spie (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 29–106; Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale University

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In similar fashion to Warburg, the American art historian Millard Meiss combined a study of world-views with a concern for the social environment in a monograph on Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (1951). Meiss suggested that the experience of plague in 1348–9 led to a revival of a mystical form of piety that led in its turn to changes in pictorial style. In his cautious manner he wrote that changes in style ‘may reflect these profound social changes in Florence and Siena, or rather the taste and the quality of piety that they brought into prominence’.17 2 Marx’s brief discussion of the relation between art and society was developed by his twentieth-century followers. Georgi Plekhanov’s study of art and social life, for instance, goes back to 1912. In 1933, Max Raphael, a former student of Wölfflin’s who had diverged from his master, published a study of Picasso in which he focussed on ‘the material and ideological conditions that have influenced him and how he has reacted to them in his art’.18 Four years later, the young Meyer Schapiro, who was to become a distinguished historian of both medieval and modern art, published an essay on the social context of abstract painting in the Marxist Quarterly. More famous, or at least notorious, was a study entitled A Social History of Art, published in English in 1951 but written by a Hungarian émigré, Arnold Hauser. What Hauser offered was in fact a fairly conventional Marxist approach that linked art to social class. For example, he discussed ‘the class struggles in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages’, the ‘Baroque of the Protestant Bourgeoisie’ in the Netherlands, ‘Romanticism as a middle-class movement’ and the relation between ‘the film age’ and ‘the crisis of capitalism’. The book sold well, was translated into seventeen languages and helped to launch the phrase ‘the social history of art’. Appropriately enough, given his emphasis on art history ‘without names’, Hauser was himself part of a trend. Another Marxist historian of art was Frederick Antal, another Hungarian émigré whose discreetly titled Florentine Press, 1982), 205. Cf. Burke, Aby Warburg as Historical Anthropologist, in Aby Warburg, ed. Horst Bredekamp and Michael Diers (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1991), 17–21. 17  Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 70. 18  Max Raphael, Proudhon, Marx, Picasso: trois études sur la sociologie de l’art (Paris: Excelsior, 1933), English translation (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980), 116.

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Painting and its Social Background had appeared in 1947.19 Antal, a former student of Wölfflin’s, remained open to alternative approaches and praised the social history of art as practiced by non-Marxists such as Warburg and Meiss.20 His own work, on the other hand, revealed—like Hauser’s—a fairly conventional form of Marxism, though it was one with more analytical bite. Antal viewed culture as an expression or even a ‘reflection’ of society. In a famous contrast between the paintings of Gentile da Fabriano and Masaccio, for example, Antal argued that they were expressions of the ‘feudal’ and the ‘bourgeois’ world-views respectively. Realism was the art of the bourgeoisie. He declared an interest in Hogarth precisely because ‘his art reveals … the views and tastes of a broad cross-section of society’.21 In the essay ‘The Social Background of Mannerism’, on the other hand, the background was the economic decline of Italy and ‘refeudalization’, reflected in what the author described as an increasingly irrational and unrealistic art.22 Both Antal and Hauser were followers of a third Marxist intellectual, Georg Lukács, the centre of a discussion group, a ‘Sunday circle’ that met in Budapest from about 1914 onwards. Mannheim was another member of the group.23 Antal, who was employed in England as a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, had followers in his turn. He was described by the art critic Herbert Read as having ‘discreetly avoided’ naming Marx in his publications, ‘though not in his more intimate contacts with his students’.24 In their turn, three of these students in particular made significant contributions to the social history of art. One was Francis Klingender, author of a study of Art and the Industrial Revolution and another of Goya in the Democratic Tradition, published in 1948 but written earlier, at the end of the Spanish Civil War. In the preface to the 19  Frederick Antal, Florentine Painting and its Social Background (London: Kegan Paul, 1947), an expanded version of an article he had published in German in 1924–1925. 20  Antal, “Remarks on the Method of Art History I–II,” Burlington Magazine 91 (1949): 50–52; 73–75, reprinted in Antal, Classicism and Romanticism. With Other Studies in Art History (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 175–189. 21  Antal, Hogarth and His Place in European Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), xvii. 22   Antal, “Observations on Girolamo da Carpi. Appendix: The Social Background of Mannerism,” Art Bulletin 30 (1948): 81–103, esp. 102–103; reprinted in Antal, Classicism and Romanticism, 158–161. 23  Anna Wessely, “Antal and Lukács,” New Hungarian Quarterly 73 (1976): 114–125; Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and his generation, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 13–17; Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis, ed. Éva Káradi and Erzsebet Vezér (Frankfurt am Main: Sendler, 1985). 24  Herbert Read, Introduction to Goya in the Democratic Tradition, by Francis Klingender, second edition (New York, NY: Schocken, 1968), ix.

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latter book Klingender expresses his ‘indebtedness’ to Antal. What he owed the master is especially visible in the introduction to the study of Goya, where Klingender commented that ‘the impoverishment and political impotence of the middle class’ in seventeenth-century Spain had ‘prevented the emergence of a consistent bourgeois style like that of the Dutch’.25 A second English disciple of Antal was Anthony Blunt, who was well-known as an art historian long before he was unmasked as a spy. In the preface to his Artistic Theory in Italy (1940), published seven years before Antal’s monograph on Florence but influenced by his public lectures and private conversation, Blunt, like Klingender, expresses gratitude for ‘instruction’ in what he calls ‘method’ (carefully avoiding the word ‘Marxism’). His study of artistic theory at the Renaissance included a chapter on the social position of the artist. Blunt also followed Antal (as Federico Zeri would do, a little later) in presenting the Counter-Reformation as a movement of ‘refeudalization’.26 A younger student of Antal’s was John Berger, whose most influential contribution to the social history of art remains a series of television programmes broadcast by the BBC in 1972 under the title ‘Ways of Seeing’. The programmes were a Marxist riposte to another successful television series, Kenneth Clark’s Civilization (1969), which exemplified the cultural approach to art. For his part, Berger claimed that ‘the art of the past is being mystified’ because art was becoming a commodity. For example, the famous Leonardo drawing of the Virgin, now in the National Gallery in London, ‘has become impressive, mysterious, because of its market value’.27 3 Both the cultural and the Marxist attempts to relate art to society provoked criticism. For example, there were a number of rejoinders, more or less constructive, to Panofsky’s essay on Gothic and scholasticism. Meyer Schapiro (to whom Panofsky had sent a copy of the book) wrote back with the question: ‘If scholastic philosophy and architecture show a remarkable parallel in certain aspects, is philosophy the independent variable?’ Panofsky’s reply was to argue that in the Middle Ages everyone learned something of scholastic method at 25  Klingender, Goya, 33–34. Castelnuovo, Per una storia sociale, 16–17. 26  Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1600 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), 104. Federico Zeri also followed Antal in this respect in his Pittura e controriforma (Turin: Einaudi, 1957), 47 and 51. 27  John Berger, “Frederick Antal: a personal tribute,” Burlington Magazine 96 (1954): 259–260.

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school, and that this was what ‘induced a “habit”’.28 The literary historian Ernst Curtius, another recipient of the book, was admiring but skeptical, wondering whether there was any advantage to be gained by giving a general name to all the creative manifestations of an epoch.29 Still less constructive, indeed an essay in ‘deconstruction’ in the sense of demolition, was the reaction of Ernst Gombrich, replaying Karl Popper’s famous critique of Mannheim’s collectivism and accusing Panofsky of belief in the Zeitgeist.30 Hauser too was critical of what he called ‘the error of giving philosophical thought precedence over artistic forms’, while Carlo Ginzburg noted later that, despite Panofsky’s reference to the diffusion of ideas, his readers remain with the impression of an argument based essentially on analogy.31 In the face of criticisms such as these, Panofsky seems to have retreated to iconography. His reply to Schapiro was semi-apologetic. ‘The whole little thing is an attempt to link up what everyone feels is somehow akin in such a way that the connection is at least debatable … though hardly ever verifiable’.32 Again, thanking Carlo Ginzburg for sending his article ‘From Warburg to Gombrich’, Panofsky referred to ‘the very just objections which you make to my Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism’.33 Needless to say, the Marxist approach to art history also evoked criticisms. Meiss expressed his reservations about the Marxist approach in an otherwise sympathetic review of Antal’s book.34 Francastel described Hauser’s book as one ‘dont la faiblesse dépasse l’imagination’, though he praised that of Antal as ‘riche d’expériences, de connaissances, de sérieux’.35 Ernst Gombrich’s negative review of Hauser’s book remains one of the most memorable contributions to the long debate on the validity of a social history of art. Gombrich was 28  Panofsky, Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, ed. Dieter Wuttke, 5 vols. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001–2011), III, 2006, 193, 201. 29  Panofsky, Korrespondenz, III, 2006, 208: ‘Ich weiss nicht, warum die Leute glücklicher sind, wenn alle schöpferische Manifestationen einen Epoche auf 1 Generalnennen gebracht werden’. 30  Gombrich used to dissect Panofsky’s essay in his class on method for graduate students at the Warburg Institute. 31  Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History (London: Routledge & Paul, 1959), 260; Ginzburg, Da Warburg a Gombrich, note 132 (originally note 131). 32  Panofsky, Korrespondenz, III, 2006, 199. 33  Panofsky, Korrespondenz, V, 2011, 949. 34  Meiss, review of Florentine Painting and its Social Background, by Antal, Art Bulletin 31 (1949): 143–150. 35  Francastel, “Problèmes de la sociologie de l’art,” in Traité de Sociologie, ed. Georges Gurvitch, second edition, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958–1968), II, 1968, 278–296, at 278–279.

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unusual in the self-consciousness of his empiricism. His position, like that of his friend Popper, may be described more precisely as methodological individualism, summed up in the famous opening to his Story of Art: ‘There is really no such thing as art. There are only artists’.36 He described Hauser as offering facile explanations in terms of the Zeitgeist and as caught in the ‘intellectual mousetrap’ of dialectical materialism.37 Michael Baxandall, a colleague of Gombrich’s at the Warburg Institute, did not mention Antal or Hauser by name in his Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972). All the same, they were obvious targets for his critique of ‘facile equations’ between realism and the bourgeoisie and his dismissal (as ‘philistine’) of an approach to images that treats them as a simple reflection or illustration of social conditions.38 Hauser’s reaction to criticism, like Panofsky’s, was to retreat, and in later works he emphasized the limitations of the social approach to art as well as its successes.39 4 Was there a third way to write the social history of art, an alternative to both Marxism and Geistesgeschichte? One had indeed been offered by Martin Wackernagel in a study of the milieu of artists in the Florentine Renaissance: Der Lebensraum des Künstlers in der Florentinischen Renaissance (1938), published at a moment when the political associations of the term ‘Lebensraum’ (taken from the geopolitical vocabulary of the geographer Friedrich Ratzel),

36  Burke, ‘Ernst Gombrich’s Search for Cultural History’, in Meditations on a Heritage: papers on the work and legacy of Sir Ernst Gombrich, ed. Paul Taylor (London: Paul Holberton, 2014), 14–21. 37  Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Social History of Art,” Art Bulletin 35 (1953): 79–84; Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Cf. Michael R. Orwicz, “Critical Discourse in the Formation of a Social History of Art: Anglo-American Responses to Arnold Hauser,” Oxford Art Journal 8 (1985): 52–62. 38  Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 151–152. 39  Hauser, Philosophie der Kunstgeschichte (Munich: Beck, 1958), English translation, The Philosophy of Art History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959); Hauser, Soziologie der Kunst (Munich: Beck, 1974), English translation, Sociology of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). On his changes of mind, see Lee Congdon, “Arnold Hauser and the Retreat from Marxism,” in Essays on Wittgenstein and Austrian Philosophy in honour of J. C. Nyiri, ed. Tamas Demeter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 41–62.

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were particularly unfortunate.40 Hans Tietze outlined a similar approach to Venetian art in an article on ‘Master and Workshop, while Hanna LernerLehmkul studied the Florentine art market.41 This promising approach, interrupted by the Second World War, was revived in the 1960s, when the Wittkowers, for instance, published a study of ‘the character and conduct’ of artists from ancient times to the French Revolution.42 An important contribution was made by Gombrich, who took the social history of art seriously as long as it was conducted at the micro-level (one of the faults that Gombrich identified in Hauser was precisely what he called the neglect of the ‘minutiae of social existence’). Gombrich’s essay on the early Medici was one of the first serious studies of art patronage since Warburg’s investigation of Florentine portraits. It was rapidly followed by Francis Haskell’s masterpiece, long in the making, on Italian patrons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.43 Haskell’s introductory comments on the dangers of generalization may be read either as self-deprecation or as a critique of scholars who generalized too easily: ‘Any attempt to “explain” art in terms of patronage has been deliberately avoided. I have also fought shy of generalizations and have tried to be severely empirical—even at the cost of shirking certain problems that have deeply interested me and which I know to be vital’.44 The studies by Gombrich and Haskell helped to found what might be called an empiricist tradition in the social history of art, in contrast to the Marxist tradition in particular but also to the cultural tradition exemplified above by Panofsky and Francastel. Since the early 1960s, studies of art patronage, particularly the commissioning of painting in Renaissance Italy, have proliferated to such an extent that 40  Martin Wackernagel, Der Lebensraum des Künstlers in der florentinischen Renaissance (Leipzig: Seeman, 1938). 41  Hanna Lerner-Lehmkuhl, Zur Struktur und Geschichte des florentinische Kunstmarktes im 15. Jahrhundert (Wattenscheid: K. Busch, 1936); Hans Tietze, “Master and Workshop in the Venetian Renaissance,” Parnassus 11 (1939): 34–45. 42  Rudolph Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn; The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963). 43  Gombrich, “The Early Medici as Patrons of Art: A Survey of Primary Sources,” Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. Ernst Fraser Jacob and Cecilia M. Ady (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 297–311, reprinted in Gombrich, Norm and Form (London: Phaidon, 1966), 35–57; Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of Baroque (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963). Another pioneer was Meyer Schapiro, “On the Relation of Patron and Artist,” American Journal of Sociology 70 (1964): 363–369. 44  Haskell, Patrons, xviii.

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they might be regarded as a cottage industry.45 Architectural patronage in the Renaissance has also been the focus of some important studies, while some scholars have examined the connections between art patronage and political patronage, mecenatismo and clientelismo.46 5 The empirical approach has been criticized in its turn. In the 1970s, a distinguished American historian of architecture, James Ackerman, noted the ‘aversion to theory’ of the majority of his colleagues and complained that ‘Art history in this country has been a discipline without any avowed theoretical base’.47 For some time the main alternative to empiricism was some kind of Marxism, which survived into the age of the Cold War. Relatively orthodox Marxist contributions included studies by Nicos Hadjinicolaou, a Greek exile to France, on art history and class struggle; by Karl Werckmeister, a German exile in the USA, on the Bayeux Tapestry as political ideology; and in Britain by John Barrell, who examined representations of the rural poor in landscape 45  A small selection might include Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, Princes and Artists (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976); Albert Boime, “Entrepreneurial Patronage in 19th-Century France,” in Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France, ed. Edward C. Carter, Robert Forster and Joseph N. Moody (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins Press, 1976), 137–207; Jonathan Brown and John H. Elliott, A Palace for a King: the Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980); Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Bram Kempers, Kunst, Macht und Mäzenatentum: der Beruf des Malers in der italienischen Renaissance (Munich: Kindler, 1989); Artists and Patrons: Some Social and Economic Aspects of Chinese Paintings, ed. Chung-tsing Li (Kansas City: University of Kansas and University of Washington Press, 1989); Mary Hollingsworth, Patronage in Renaissance Italy. From 1400 to the Early Sixteenth Century (London: Murray, 1994); Dale V. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Jill Burke, Changing Patrons. Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2004); Michelle O’Malley, The Business of Art. Contracts and the Commissioning Process in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 46  Deborah Howard, Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975); Antonio Foscari and Manfredo Tafuri, L’armonia e i conflitti: la chiesa di San Francesco della Vigna nella Venezia del ‘500 (Turin: Einaudi 1983); Manfredo Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento: religion, scienza, architettura (Turin: Einaudi, 1985); Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Francis W. Kent and Patricia Simons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 47  James Ackerman, “Toward a new social theory of art,” New Literary History 4 (1973): 315– 330, at 315.

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paintings.48 Right up to his death in 2008, the American scholar Albert Boime continued to pay homage to Arnold Hauser and pursue a social history of art that took ‘as its point of departure Marx’s central idea of class conflict’.49 Other contributors to the social history of art wore their Marxism more lightly, introducing qualifications and refinements to the theory. Hans Hess, for example, another refugee from Hitler’s Germany, distinguished three ideological levels in the work of art: the outspoken, the unspoken and what he called the ‘ideological use’ of works after they have been produced.50 Two important studies by Timothy Clark were also published at this time, both of them focussed on nineteenth-century France. They might be described as Marxian, in other words inspired by Marx, rather than Marxist in the sense of following the doctrine of the master.51 As Clark put it in what might be called his manifesto for the subject, in the case of the social history of art ‘it is easier to define what methods to avoid than propose a set of methods for systematic use’. He rejected views of art as a mere ‘reflection’ or illustration of social trends, but refused to retreat, in the manner of Gombrich and Haskell, to the ‘immediate conditions of artistic production and reception’. He described his middle way as ‘a history of mediations’.52 Clark went on to found an MA course in the social history of art at the University of Leeds in 1975, and to participate a year later in the foundation of the ‘Caucus for Marxism and Art’ within the College Art Association, the professional organization of American art historians. He taught briefly at Harvard, leaving after an acrimonious dispute with a more traditional art historian (Sydney Freedberg), an incident suggesting that a social history of art was not yet completely respectable within the profession. 6 If scholars working in the Marxist or Marxian tradition run the risk of reductionism, the empiricists risk what might be called ‘descriptivism’, ‘shirking 48  Nikos Hadjinicolaou, Histoire de l’art et lutte des classes (Paris: Maspero, 1973); Otto Karl Werckmeister, “The Political Ideology of the Bayeux Tapestry,” Studi Medievali 17 (1976): 535–595; John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: the Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 49  Boime, Art in an Age of Revolution 1750–1800, in Boime, A Social History of Modern Art, 3 vols. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987–2007), I, 1987, xxv. 50  Hans Hess, Pictures as Arguments (London: Sussex University Press, 1975). 51  Timothy J. Clark, Image of the People. Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973); Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois. Artists and politics in France 1848– 1851 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973). 52  See Clark, On the Social History of Art, in Clark, Image of the People, 9–20.

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certain problems’, as Haskell put it. Are there other possible approaches to the social history of art? From the 1970s onwards a number of them have emerged. In what follows I shall distinguish ten, numbering them for convenience although they intertwine or shade into one another. These ten approaches are concerned with reception, with collecting, with art worlds, with the anthropology of art, with visual culture, with the geography of art, with gender, with domestic settings, with politics and with economics. In all these cases it would be possible to cite quite a wide range of examples, but reasons of space permit only a few. Studies of early modern Europe (like books in English) predominate because I know that area best, but I have tried to give readers some impression of the whole field. 6.1 The Reception of Works of Art In the case of painting, Giovanni Previtali was a pioneer with La fortuna dei primitivi, following the Italian tradition of studies of the fortuna of Dante, Machiavelli and so on. Previtali dated the revival of interest in Italian painters before Raphael to the late eighteenth century, though the extent of the revival should not be exaggerated. In the early nineteenth century the National Gallery in London was able to acquire a painting by Masaccio for £25. It is significant that the Gallery wanted to acquire a Masaccio, but also that the market price was so low.53 Where Previtali wrote what might be called an intellectual history of reception, in his Rediscoveries in Art (1976), Francis Haskell presented a social history in which art dealers and art museums played a part in changing taste.54 In Der Anteil des Betrachters (1983), a title that echoes Gombrich’s phrase ‘the beholder’s share’, the German art historian Wolfgang Kemp adapted reader-response theory to the study of paintings.55 A fourth major figure in what has become a long list of reception studies is David Freedberg, whose Power of Images (1989), as if responding to Ackerman’s critique, includes the term ‘theory’ alongside ‘history’ in its sub-title. Freedberg, a specialist on the sixteenth-century Netherlands, entered this field with a study of iconoclasm, using destruction as evidence of reception.56 This approach has been extended, 53  Giovanni Previtali, La fortuna dei primitivi. Dal Vasari al neoclassici (Turin: Einaudi, 1964). 54  Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (Ithaca, New York et al.: Cornell University Press, 1976). 55  Wolfgang Kemp, Der Anteil des Betrachters. Rezeptionsästhetische Studien zur Malerei des 19. Jhts (Munich: Mäander, 1983); Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), Part Three. 56  David Freedberg, Iconoclasts and their Motives (Maarssen: Schwartz, 1985); Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, Illinois et al.: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Cf. Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte:

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notably by Dario Gamboni, to other forms of iconoclasm, from the destruction of statues for political reasons to attacks on works exhibited in galleries in protest against modern or postmodern art.57 6.2 The History of Collecting The history of reception is obviously linked to the history of collecting works by dead artists, and Haskell’s Rediscoveries in Art might be cited as an example of both trends. Some studies of past collections go back a long way: Simona Savini Branca’s Il collezionismo veneziano nel ‘600 dates from 1964, while Eugène Müntz published Les collections des Médicis au XVe siècle in 1888. However, it was in the 1980s that the history of collecting turned into a movement. Major landmarks from that decade include The Rare Art Traditions (1982) by the American journalist Joseph Alsop, the Polish historian Krzysztof Pomian’s Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux (1987); the French scholar Antoine Schnapper’s Collections et collectionneurs (1988), and the foundation of the Journal of the History of Collections in 1989.58 The trend coincided with the rise of interest in the anthropology and the psychology (or even the pathology) of collecting, witness novels such as Bruce Chatwin’s Utz (1988) and studies such as Werner Muensterberger’s Collecting, an Unruly Passion (1994), which drew on psychoanalysis.59 The approach has been extended to museums, including studies of the Louvre, for example, and the Altes Museum in Berlin, concerned, among other things, with the kinds of people who viewed the collections.60 Bilderkämpfe von der Spätantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975). On art history and reception theory, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Reception Theory in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, 36 vols. (Oxford and New York: Grove, 1996), XXVI, 61–64. 57  Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion, 1996). 58  Joseph Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena Wherever These Have Appeared (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982); Miguel Moran and Fernando Checa, El Coleccionismo en España: de la camara de maravillas a la galeria de pinturas (Madrid: Catedra, 1985); Krzystof Pomian, Collectioneurs, amateurs et curieux: Paris-Venise: XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1987); Antoine Schnapper, Collections et collectionneurs dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1988). A later landmark was Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-century Europe (Washington, DC: Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, 1995). 59  A brief overview in Burke, “Qualche riflessione sull’antropologia storica del collezionismo,” in Il collezionismo a Venezia e nel Veneto ai tempi della Serenissima, ed. Bernard Aikema, Rosella Lauber and Max Seidel (Venice: Marsilio, 2005), 11–15. 60  Kenneth Hudson, A Social History of Museums: What the Visitors Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975); The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur

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6.3 Art Worlds Alsop located collecting in what he called an integrated ‘cultural-behavioral system’ that includes markets, museums and fakes, remarking that ‘the entire system has great import for the social history of art’.61 That brings us to a third approach, widening out from the micro-history of artists and their patrons to the art world or the ‘field’ of art as a whole. This approach is associated with two sociologists, Howard Becker in the USA and Pierre Bourdieu in France. In a book entitled Art Worlds (1982), Becker argued that art was a collective rather than an individual activity and he investigated the whole complex of institutions that have come to surround the production and consumption of art in our time: art schools, exhibitions, museums, art journals, galleries and auction rooms.62 Becker’s work was important but it has been overshadowed by that of Pierre Bourdieu, the theorist of cultural fields—academic, literary, scientific and aesthetic.63 Bourdieu has often drawn on history for his examples and conversely, a number of social historians of art have admitted their debt to his ideas. Despite the originality of his approach, though, Bourdieu has a place in a tradition. Early in his career he was impressed by Panofsky’s essay on Gothic and scholasticism. He translated it, wrote an afterword for it and went on to make the concept of mental habit or habitus (derived from Thomas Aquinas via Panofsky) one of the cornerstones of his social theory. The study of artists and workshops has also become increasingly common since the 1960s.64 Some of these studies focus on the problem of collaboration. Macgregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Walter Hochreiter, Von Musetempel zum Lernort. Zur Sozialgeschichte deutschen Museen 1800–1914 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994); Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics and the Origins of the Modern Museum in 18th-Century Paris (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1994); James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World from the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 2000). 61  Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions. 62  Howard Saul Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, Cal, et al.: University of California Press, 1982). There was of course an earlier literature on art schools, including Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art. Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), and on exhibitions. 63  Pierre Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art: genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1992), English translation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). 64  Studies include Bernard Rosenberg and Norris Fliegel, The Vanguard Artist. Portrait and Self Portrait (Chicago, Ill: Quadrangle Books, 1965); Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (New York, NY: Wiley, 1965), new edition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993); Ettore Camesasca, Artisti in bottega (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966); Burke, L’artista: momenti e aspetti, in Storia dell’arte italiana, ed. Giovanni Previtali and Federico Zeri, 12 vols. (Torino: Einaudi, 1979–1988), I, 1979: 87–113; John Michael Montias, Artists and Artisans

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Where more traditional ‘individualist’ art historians were concerned to disentangle the part played by specific artists, others now emphasize the collective contribution. The American art historian Svetlana Alpers caused something of a sensation with a study of Rembrandt’s workshop or, as she called it, his ‘enterprise’, a book treated by one reviewer as an illustration of ‘the dismal fate of art history when the study of art is no longer its primary concern’.65 More recently, a study of Raphael focussed on his leadership of the talented group that surrounded him in Rome and on his ‘managerial style’.66 6.4 The Anthropology of Art Anthropologists had long been interested in the relation between art and society, despite the problem of speaking about ‘art’ in cultures that are not familiar with that concept. Raymond Firth, for instance, published a book on Art and Life in New Guinea as early as 1936, while Claude Lévi-Strauss turned to the study of art a few years later, arguing (in a manner closer to Marxism than to the structuralism for which he was to become famous) that ‘split’ or double representations in the art of tribal societies reflected the division of those societies into two parts, from only one of which men could choose wives.67 However, interest in this topic seems to have been increasing in the last few years, with examples ranging from the social uses of photography in India to tattooing in Melanesia, including an ambitious attempt, by Alfred Gell, to construct a new social theory of art, focussed on ‘agency’ and the contexts in which objects take the place of social agents.68 in Delft (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); Martin Warnke, Hofkünstler: zur Vorgeschichte des modernen Künstlers (Cologne: DuMont 1985); Anabel Thomas, The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 65   Hilton Kramer, “Rembrandt as Warhol: Svetlana Alpers’s ‘Enterprise’,” review of Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market by Svetlana Alpers, The New Criterion 1 (1988). 66  Collaboration in Italian Renaissance Art, ed. Wendy Stedman Sheard and John T. Paoletti (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978); Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988); Bette Talvacchia, “Raphael’s Workshop and the Development of a Managerial Style,” in Cambridge Companion to Raphael, ed. Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 167–185. Cf. Giorgio Tagliaferro, Matteo Mancini and Aikema, Le botteghe di Tiziano (Florence: Alinari et al., 2009). 67  Claude Lévi-Strauss, Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America (1944–1945), reprinted in Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1963), 245–268. 68  Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion, 1997); Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Gell, Art and Agency: an anthropological theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).

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Art historians will note the convergence between Gell’s approach and that of some of their colleagues, notably Hans Belting, notably his contrast between the history of art, beginning at the Renaissance, and the history of images, more appropriate for the Middle Ages when images were cult objects, treated as persons.69 Belting has even described one of his books as an anthropology of the image, Bildanthropologie. But he also has his place in a tradition that goes back to Aby Warburg, who was interested in anthropology and liked to describe himself as a Bildhistoriker not a Kunsthistoriker.70 Thanks to their concentration on what used to be called ‘primitive’ societies, in which objects, including what we call ‘art’, are part of social life, anthropologists have often concerned themselves with what they used to call the ‘function’ and now tend to describe as the ‘uses’ of images. One example of this approach is La distinction (1979) by Pierre Bourdieu, who was an anthropologist before he became a sociologist and shifted his gaze from Algeria to France. His suggestion that displaying works of art of different kinds aids individuals to distinguish themselves socially from others has been followed by some art historians. Again, Samuel Edgerton’s Pictures and Punishment (1985), focusses on the use of devotional images at executions.71 6.5 Visual Culture Anthropologists have long used the term ‘culture’ in a broad sense that refers to the attitudes and values of a society or group and their expressions or embodiments in artefacts and performances. The study of ‘Visual Culture’ follows this lead. The phrase first occurs in Baxandall’s Painting and Experience (1972).72 Praise for the demonstration that institutions shaped visual sensibilities in 69  Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: Beck, 1990), criticized by Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, NY: Zone, 2011). 70  Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: Fink, 2001). Cf. Nils-Arvid Bringéus, Bildlore: studiet av folkliga bildbudskap (Stockholm: Gidluns, 1981), approaching the subject from the side of ethnology. 71  Bourdieu, La distinction: critique social du jugement (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979); Antonio Urquizar Herrera, Coleccionismo y nobleza: signos de distinción social en la Andalucía del Renacimiento (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2007); Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution during the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 72  Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 32–33. Cf. Allan Langdale, “Aspects of the Critical Reception and Intellectual History of Michael Baxandall’s Concept of the Period Eye,” Art History 21 (1998): 479–497, reprinted in About Michael Baxandall, ed. Adrian Rifkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 17–35; Burke, review of Painting and Experience by Baxandall, Sixteenth-Century Journal 40 (2009): 52–55; Jeremy Tanner, “Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art,” Cultural Sociology 4 (2010): 231–256.

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Renaissance Italy soon came from a leading anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, who described Baxandall, in an essay on art as a ‘cultural system’, as taking ‘precisely the sort of approach I am here advocating’.73 Baxandall’s own position is not easy to characterize. On one side, he expressed his doubts about the concepts of ‘art’ and ‘society’, describing them as ‘artificial and arid entities’, and objecting to ‘a direct matching of the form of a picture and the form of a society’. On the other, he described his book as an essay on ‘the social history of pictorial style’ and called a painting ‘a deposit of a social relationship’. It might be best to compare him to Warburg and Meiss and to call his approach ‘socio-cultural’, since he wrote about ‘the period eye’, a ‘visual experience and habit’ that the artist shared with his contemporaries. The most memorable part of his essay discussed the making of this period eye, informed by social practises such as dancing or gauging the volume of barrels. It might be described as a subtler version of the idea of ‘ways of seeing’ central to the programmes by John Berger published in book form the same year as Painting and Experience. Gombrich viewed the idea of the period eye with suspicion as an avatar of the Zeitgeist.74 However, it is surely closer to the idea of habitus. Hence it was no surprise to find Bourdieu describing Baxandall’s book, on the occasion of its translation into French, as ‘an exemplary realization of what a sociology of artistic perception might be’.75 Baxandall’s example was followed by Svetlana Alpers in her Art of Describing (1983), which employed the phrase ‘visual culture’ and juxtaposed Dutch paintings of the golden age to other objects from the same period, from microscopes to maps in order to view art ‘as a social manifestation’ and ‘gain access to images through a consideration of their place, role and presence in the broader culture’.76 Despite these initiatives, the term ‘visual culture’ only came into regular use in the 1990s, especially in the Anglophone world (in Italy, the phrase comunicazione visuale seems to be more common). The rise of this approach, in which cultural theory plays an important part, is most obvious in the USA, both in its scale and in its degree of institutionalization (courses, departments, associations and journals). One of the pioneers was the University of Chicago, where William Mitchell offered a course on ‘Visual Culture’ in the 73  Clifford Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” Modern Language Notes 91 (1976): 1473–1499. 74  In an interview with Allan Langdale in 1994, Baxandall referred to Gombrich’s ‘suspicious reaction’ to this concept: Langdale, Aspects, 21, 33. 75  Bourdieu, Les règles, 313–321. 76  Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), xxiv–xxv.

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early 1990s. Another was the University of Rochester’s ‘Visual and Cultural Studies Program’.77 Critics see this development as the beginning of the end of art history, but others regard visual studies as complementary to art history and look forward to some degree of hybridization. 6.6 The Geography of Art A fifth approach that has recently grown in importance is the geography of art. Needless to say, it is not a completely new idea: concern with national and regional schools of artists is almost as old as art history itself, while Dagobert Freys’ Englisches Wesen in der bildenden Kunst and Nikolaus Pevsner’s The Englishness of English Art date from 1942 and 1956 respectively. However, the approach has taken new forms. The contrast between a Dutch ‘art of describing’ and an Italian art of narrative drawn by Svetlana Alpers was supported, as we have just seen, by a discussion of Dutch visual culture. Another innovation is the rise of interest in art produced in what used to be called the ‘provinces’, now described as the ‘periphery’, as in the case of two well-known articles, one by Castelnuovo and Ginzburg and one by the Polish scholar Jan Białostocki. The first of these articles criticized the traditional association of peripheries with backwardness or cultural ‘lag’, while the second argued that peripheries are places where traditions are weaker than in artistic centers, allowing hybridization and other kinds of innovation.78 Another new trend is concern with the artistic effects of cultural encounters, especially, though not exclusively, in the age of European expansion and colonization. Scholars have noted the effects of the knowledge of western aesthetic conventions such as perspective on local artists in Mexico, for instance, in Peru, in India, China and Japan, encouraging innovation and producing hybrid styles.79 77  Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, Visual Culture: Images and interpretations (Hanover and London: University press of New England, 1994); William J. Thomas Mitchell, “What is Visual Culture?” in Meaning in the Visual Arts. Views from the Outside; A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Irving Lavin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 207–217; Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1999). 78  Castelnuovo and Ginzburg, Centro e Periferia, in Storia dell’arte italiana, I, 1979, 285–352; Jan Białostocki, “Some Values of Artistic Periphery,” in World Art: Themes of Unity in Diversity, ed. Lavin, 3 vols. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1986), I, 49–58. 79  Serge Gruzinski, Painting the Conquest: the Mexican Indians and the European Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1992); Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); Bailey, Art on the Jesuit missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999); James Cahill, The Compelling Image: Nature

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Recent attempts to write world histories of art, only to be expected in an age of globalization, have placed geography even more firmly on the agenda of art historians. A particularly important contribution to this trend has been made by Thomas Kaufmann, a specialist on the art of both Central Europe and Latin America in the early modern period. His Toward a Geography of Art (2004) begins with a history and a critique of earlier studies in Kunstgeographie, noting the distortions of perspective resulting from nationalist prejudices, and ends with a discussion of the prospects and possibilities of a future artistic geography.80 6.7 Art and Gender Where older social histories of art (like social histories and sociologies in general) used to be focussed on class, newer ones are more concerned with gender. The feminist movement made its impact in the 1970s, beginning with the American scholar Linda Nochlin’s question, ‘Why are there no great women artists?’ One way of answering the question has been to list the obstacles that women artists have confronted in the course of history, as in the case of Germaine Greer’s The Obstacle Race.81 Another answer, in a certain tension with the first, has been to blame the prejudices of male critics and historians for the omission from the canon of ‘old masters’ of women who successfully overcame those obstacles. There has been a movement, in which Griselda Pollock has played a prominent role, to rehabilitate ‘old mistresses’ such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt.82 A third strategy is to argue that the concept of ‘art’ should be widened to include female contributions to the decorative arts, such as needlework, in the same way that the concept of ‘literature’ has been widened to include women’s writing in informal genres such as journals and letters.83 Alternatively, scholars have looked for the feminine contribution to the arts at the level of patronage. In the case of the Italian Renaissance in particular, this approach has engendered a whole and Style in Seventeenth-century Chinese painting (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1982); Timon Screech, The Western Scientific Gaze and popular imagery in later Edo Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 80  DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). 81  Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” ARTnews January (1971): 22–39, 67–71; Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and their Work (London: Secker & Warburg, 1979). 82  Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1981). 83  Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Pr., 1984).

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shelf of monographs.84 Indeed, a single patron, Isabella d’Este, has been studied again and again.85 Women collectors deserve to be studied in a similar way, notably the American Isabella Stewart Gardner, who modeled herself on the Renaissance Isabella and founded a museum in Boston.86 6.8 The Domestic Turn A recent shift of interest in studies of the Italian Renaissance in particular has been the revaluation of the decorative or ‘applied’ arts and their settings, especially the domestic interior. An earlier phase of interest was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain and its equivalents elsewhere.87 The current turn is linked to women’s history, since the domestic interior has long been considered a female domain, but it also forms part of broader historical trends, notably the interest in both private life and material culture. Female scholars are prominent in this new field and so are museum curators. Participants in this turn have produced an important body of work on the interiors of houses, especially the urban palaces of the upper classes, as a setting for display.88 Renewed attention has been given to the different kinds of 84  Catherine King, Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy, c. 1300–1550 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Committenza artistica femminile, ed. Sara F. Matthews-Grieco and Gabriella Zarri, Quaderni Storici 104 (2000): 283–295; Evelyn Welch, “Women as Patrons and Clients in the Courts of 400 Italy,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2000): 18–34; Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss and David Wilkins (Kirksville, Miss.: Truman State University Press, 2001); Katherine McIver, Women, Art and Architecture in Northern Italy: Negotiating Power (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Ann Roberts, Dominican Women and Renaissance Art: The Convent of San Domenico of Pisa (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008). 85  Recent contributions include Clifford Malcom Brown, “A Ferrarese Lady and a Mantuan Marchesa: The Art and Antiquities Collections of Isabella d’Este Gonzaga,” in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Cynthia Lawrence (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997): 53–71; Stephen John Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Francis Ames-Lewis, Isabella and Leonardo. The Artistic Relationship between Isabella d’Este and Leonardo da Vinci, 1500–1506 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). 86  Morris Carter, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court (London: Heinemann, 1926). 87  Attilio Schiaparelli, La casa fiorentina e i suoi arredi nei secoli XIVe XV (Firenze: Sansoni, 1908). 88  John Kent Lydecker, The Domestic Setting of the Arts in Renaissance Florence (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1987), Facsimile reproduction (Ann Arbor, MI: University Park, 2001); Peter Thornton, The Italian Renaissance Interior: 1400–1600 (New York: Abrams, 1991); At Home in Renaissance Italy, ed. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006); Isabella Palumbo Fossati, Intérieurs vénitiens à la Renaissance: maisons, société, culture (Paris: Michel de Maule, 2012).

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object to be found in houses, such as chairs, beds, tapestries, carpets, plates, dishes, mirrors and goblets, and to the family rituals associated with some of these items, for example the cassone and the deschi da parto, and with the values embedded in them.89 This new wave of research has not only helped to bring Renaissance Italy closer to us, but also encouraged a revaluation of what we perhaps too easily call its ‘works of art’, reproducing a distinction between ‘fine art’ (or in French, beaux-arts), considered to be superior, and ‘decorative arts’, treated as inferior. The distinction was clear enough in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in the case of Renaissance Italy, it may well be anachronistic.90 6.9 Art and Politics An eighth variety of the social history of art is concerned with the political messages of works of art and the politics of patronage. In fact a number of Marxist or Marxian historians of art, from Hadjinicolaou to Clark, emphasized politics as much as society, notably the links between art and revolution. Boime, for instance, in his study of the Macchiaioli, noted their involvement in the demonstrations against Grand Duke Leopoldo, quoted Giovanni Fattori on the year 1859 as marking an artistic as well as a political revolution and pointed to the ‘leveling aspect’ of paintings produced by the group.91 NonMarxists, from Enrico Castelnuovo to Klaus Herding, have also studied art and revolution.92 Propaganda or, more generally, the uses of images to support (or, in the language of advertising, to ‘sell’) a ruler or a regime, has attracted a good deal of attention.93 The relation between art and nationalism has awakened interest, like the links between art and empire.94 A remarkable feature of the 89  Cristelle L. Baskins, Cassone Painting, Humanism and Gender in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, The Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). 90  Guido Guerzoni, Apollo e Vulcano: I mercati artistici in Italia (1400–1700) (Venezia: Marsilio, 2006). 91  Boime, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento: Representing Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). 92  Castelnuovo, “Arti e rivoluzione: ideologie e politiche artistiche nella Francia rivoluzionaria,” Ricerche di storia dell’arte 13–14 (1981): 5–20; Klaus Herding and Rolf Reichardt, Die Bildpublizistik der Französischen Revolution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989). 93  Paul Zanker, Augustus und die Macht der Bilder (Munich: Beck, 1987); Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992); Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008); Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). 94  Boime, Art of the Macchia; Nationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Richard A. Etlin (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1991); Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India,

50

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last few decades has been the rise of studies of art and politics from a number of different angles. The German art historian Martin Warnke, for instance, has written on the politics of both architecture and landscape painting.95 The representation of soldiers and warfare has attracted some historians.96 Other studies might be described as contributions to the history of the politics of culture. A Swedish scholar, Lars Berggren, has investigated the politics of monuments, analyzing the campaign in the age of Francesco Crispi to erect a statue of Giordano Bruno in the center of Rome in order to humiliate the Pope.97 Thomas Crowe has studied the contribution of artists to the public sphere in eighteenth-century Paris, while Holger Hoock has demonstrated a closer and more regular involvement of art and artists in political issues in eighteenthcentury Britain than had hitherto been suspected.98 6.10 The Economics of Art Last but not least, as the British say, there is the economic approach to art, exemplified by American scholars such as Michael Montias and Richard Goldthwaite. Montias, an economist turned historian of Dutch art, put generalizations about the low price of paintings in the Dutch Republic and their wide social diffusion on a firm basis, while he explained the increasing specialization of artists (in seascapes, flowers and so on) as a strategy of product differentiation in an age of increasing competition. For his part, Goldthwaite analyzed the demand for art in Renaissance Italy by treating it as part of a larger ‘world of goods’ including furniture (linking up once again with the 1850–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Anthony D. Smith, The Nation Made Real: Art and Identity in Western Europe, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); John M. Mackenzie, “Art and the Empire,” in The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, ed. Peter James Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 296–315; Art and the British Empire, ed. Timothy Barringer, Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London: Profile, 2010). 95  Politische Architektur in Europa vom Mittelalter bis heute, ed. Martin Warnke (Cologne: DuMont, 1984); Warnke, Politische Landschaft: zur Kunstgeschichte der Natur (Munich: Hanser, 1992). 96  John Rigby Hale, Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990); Peter Paret, Imagined Battles: Reflections of War in European Art (London: Chapel Hill, 1997). 97  Lars Berggren, L’ombra dei grandi: monumenti e politica monumentale a Roma, 1870–85 (Roma: Artemide, 1996). 98  Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); Hoock, The King’s Artists: the Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003).

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51

domestic turn).99 It is in this context that we can place the growing number of studies of the art market. Studies of markets for paintings in Bruges, Antwerp and Florence go back to the early decades of the twentieth century.100 All the same, the rapid growth of such studies is relatively recent, from the 1990s onwards, usually taking the form of collective volumes, though a few important monographs have also been published.101 This trend among art historians has parallels in sociological and anthropological studies (of the sale of traditional African art in New York, for instance) and is surely linked to the increasing importance and visibility of the art market in our own day as well as to the ‘externalist’ trend in art history that has been discussed in these pages.102 7 What kinds of scholars have produced this body of work? Most of the studies discussed here were written by art historians, but contributions have also come from museum curators such as Peter Thornton, journalists such as Joseph Alsop, archaeologists such as Kenneth Hudson, economists such as Michael Montias, anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz or Alfred Gell, sociologists such as Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu and Bram Kempers, literary historians such as John Barrell and plain or general historians such as John Elliott, Peter 99  Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Montias, “Art Dealers in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands,” Simiolus 18 (1988): 244– 256; Richard Goldthwaite, “The Empire of Things: consumer demand in Renaissance Italy,” in Patronage, Art and Society, 153–175; Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 100  Hanns Floerke, Studien zu Niederländischen Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte (Munich and Leipzig: Georg Müller, 1905); Lerner-Lehmkul, Florentinischer Kunstmarkt; Aldo De Maddalena, Il mercato d’arte in Firenze nel ‘400 (diss., University of Florence, 1944). 101  Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800, ed. Michael North and David Ormrod (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); The Art Market in Italy, ed. Marcello Fantoni (Modena: Panini, 2003); Artwork Through the Market, ed. Ján Bakoš (Bratislava: VEDA, Vydavatel’stvo Slovenskej Akadémie Vied, 2004). Individual studies include North, Kunst und Kommerz im goldener Zeitalter: zur Sozialgeschichte der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992); Marten Jan Bok, Vraag en aanbod op de Nederlandse kunstmarkt, 1580–1700 (diss., University of Utrecht, 1994); Elizabeth Alice Honig, Painting and the Market in Early Modern Antwerp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Guerzoni, Apollo e Vulcano; Paolo Coen, Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel diciottesimo secolo. La domanda, l’offerta e la circolazione delle opere in un grande centro artistico europeo, with a preface by Castelnuovo (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2010). 102  Raymond Moulin, The French Art Market: a sociological view (New Brunswick: Rutgers University, 1987); Christopher B. Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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Paret, James Sheehan, Carlo Ginzburg, Richard Goldthwaite, Serge Gruzinski, Holger Hoock and myself. Occasionally, if all too rarely, scholars from different disciplines collaborate on a book, as in the case of Jonathan Brown and John Elliott.103 It will be clear enough that I do not believe in either the decline or the fall of the social history of art, either in the broad sense of ‘social’ that includes culture and politics, or in a more precise sense. In the late 1950s, Arnold Hauser remarked that ‘the day of the sociological interpretation of cultural achievements … will not last for ever’.104 The concepts of ‘art’ and ‘society’ have been called into question, but at the same time external approaches to art have become respectable. In the 1990s, for instance, several volumes in the Oxford History of Art adopted a social approach and organization, and the author of one of them, Craig Clunas, took as his point of departure ‘the social and material circumstances in which objects of art were created and used’.105 The old social history of art may be dead, or at least very sick, but the approach has been reinvented as German Marxists, for instance, have been replaced by American feminists. More exactly, there is evidence of a much greater variety of approaches than used to be the case, anthropological and geographical as well as sociological and political and concerned with gender as well as class. For some critics, this variety is a bad sign. Timothy Clark described what he called the ‘cheerful diversification’ of art history in the 1970s as a sign of disintegration.106 Whether we complain about today’s fragmentation or welcome the competition between approaches, it is worth noting what the various social histories of art still have in common: a rejection of what is considered to be an overemphasis on individual artists, for instance, and a concern with the relation between images and their environment. Problems remain, as always, but various social histories of art appear to be in good shape.

103  Brown and Elliott, A Palace for a King. 104  Hauser, Philosophy, 5. 105  Jás Elsner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100– 450 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Welch, Art and Society in Italy, 1350–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997). The quotation from Clunas, Art, 13. 106  Clark, “The Conditions of Artistic Creation,” Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1974, 561– 562, reprinted in Art History and its Methods: A Critical Anthology, ed. Eric Fernie (London: Phaidon, 1995), 248–253.

chapter 3

The Value of a Work of Art: Minor Collections and Display Practices Renata Ago As we all know, a not insignificant aspect of the value of a work of art (in financial terms, too) is its ‘provenance’, i.e. whether or not it was once part of a prestigious collection or belonged to an authoritative and influential owner. This applies both to works of art in the strict sense and other ‘cultural’ objects such as books and, a fortiori, codices and manuscripts. The phenomenon originates in the very practise of collection and starts almost immediately, as we can see in the case of the collection of Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), consisting mainly of codices: no sooner did the news of Bembo’s death spread than the agents of major collectors got to work, competing for the best items.1 Another aspect to keep in mind is that the prestige of a collector and a collection depends on reputation. Therefore it becomes vital to tell the world what works of art are contained in it by showing them to as many ‘connoisseurs’ as possible and maybe even using some of the new forms of advertising then emerging, namely catalogs, drawings, etchings and prints of the most precious and beautiful paintings, statues and marble objects. In my opinion, an equally important and effective form of advertising was to have one’s personal library or ‘museum’ featured in a guidebook of the city where it could be seen, such as Pompilio Totti’s two editions of Ritratto di Roma moderna (1638 and 1645), or Fioravante Martinelli’s Roma ricercata nel suo sito (1644), or Bellori’s Nota delli musei, librerie, galerie et ornamenti di statue e pitture ne’ palazzi, nelle case, e ne’ giardini di Roma (1664), or the treatise Librerie celebri di Roma published by Carlo Bartolomeo Piazza in the appendix to his Eusevologio romano (1698), not to mention the many eighteenth-century guidebooks that accompanied the numerous travelers on their Grand Tour. The most interesting aspect of these guidebooks, it seems to me, is the fact that they devoted space not only to the great collections of princes and cardinals but also to those of the more modest writers, secretaries, agents of noble 1  Paula Findlen, “Ereditare un museo: collezionismo, strategie familiari e pratiche culturali nell’Italia del XVI secolo,” Quaderni storici 115 (2004): 45–81.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004388154_004

54

Ago

families, lawyers, artists, etc. In other words, these guidebooks devoted space not only to those with power and authority but also to simple private gentlemen, in the language of the times often called gentilhuomini particolari, such as the well-known Lelio Guidiccioni and Francesco Angeloni, the subjects of a study by Luigi Spezzaferro more than 15 years ago,2 or Nicolò Simonelli, researched by Giovanna Capitelli, who had himself painted while poring over his possessions.3 Moreover, the authors of the guidebooks were often part of the same middle class literary environment as these ‘particular’ collectors, with whom they were sometimes close friends. No wonder then that they worked to promote their reputation and prestige. Apart from featuring in guidebooks, art works could also be valorized by the way they were collected and displayed. Not being able to compete with the great collectors in terms of the wealth and value of their works, these people with more modest means had to play a different hand, exploiting their ‘connoisseurship’ and their network of relations. Thus, Francesco Angeloni’s ‘museum’ contained ‘paintings by great masters, numerous medals of gold, silver and metal with figurines, lamps, vases, tripods, and other ancient things made of metal and many natural and petrified things, such as a great variety of beautiful snails, especially Indian ones of great value and large books of drawings by major painters and others of considerable esteem, and again two great books of select prints, with another especially of Luca d’Olanda and Alberto Duro, and talented artists from over the Alps, as well as a large one with the prints of the abovementioned Alberto, and a good quantity of weapons from other countries as well as our own, some of which are in the style of trophies, and, lastly, various curiosities of nature and of art’.4 Like others of similar learning and connoisseurship, Angeloni personally drafted an inventory of his treasured possessions, by which he raised their standing; they were no longer mere house furnishings but museum objects. To emphasize this superior quality they were all collected in four rooms, which he called ‘studio or museum’. The way in which works were displayed was also important. This might be by concentrating the best items in rooms dedicated solely to them, and therefore devoid of any furniture except the pedestals of statues; or neatly arranging books in rooms used only as libraries and adorned with the portraits of famous 2  Luigi Spezzaferro, “Le collezioni di alcuni gentiluomini particolari e il mercato: appunti su Lelio Guidiccioni e Francesco Angeloni”, in Poussin et Rome, ed. Olivier Bonfait et al. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1996), 241–255. 3  Giovanna Capitelli, “‘Connoisseurship’ al lavoro: la carriera di Nicolò Simonelli (1611–1671),” Quaderni storici 116 (2004): 375–402. 4  Spezzaferro, Lelio Guidiccioni e Francesco Angeloni, 246.

The Value of a Work of Art

55

men; or placing coins and medals in cabinets so that they could be classified using the most up-to-date criteria. Thus, useful space was sacrificed to boost the reputation of the collection and the collector. In his attitude Angeloni was not unique. For example, the painter Francesco Raspantini did the same, making an inventory of all his personal possessions, in particular his paintings. We know very little about Raspantini except that he was born in Assisi to a family of civilian class—he had relatives in the legal profession—and perhaps led an adventurous life, because he not only made a large donation to the Trinitarian convent of San Dionigi di Roma and their ‘religione della redentione de schiavi’. He also possessed two ‘abitini da riscatto’: one in wool and one in silk.5 Finally, we know that he was a Cavaliere, i.e. a Knight, as specified in the title used when he appeared before the notary and as confirmed by the mantle with the cross found in his wardrobe.6 It is also known that he had been ‘for many years a disciple’ of Domenichino and followed him to Naples, but we have yet to discover any of his works. Giovanni Battista Passeri, who perhaps speaks out of envy, says that he had ‘little success’. However, he also says that Domenichino had left him his study, which was then passed on to Carlo Maratta.7 In 1664, the traces of this ‘studio’ were still visible in Raspantini’s house in Rome, situated between Piazza Navona and Piazza Madama.8 The apartment had only seven rooms, a kitchen and a cellar, but the owner did not hesitate to dedicate two of them entirely to his paintings, and they had no furniture, not even a chair: In Raspantini’s first picture room, or ‘Prima stanza dei quadri’, twenty-four pieces were displayed; in the second picture room, or ‘Seconda stanza dei quadri’, fifty-five (see below, Appendix 1, Tables 1 and 2). The collection contained many copies, described as ‘good’ or ‘well painted’, but there were also originals by major painters, such as Girolamo Muziano, Domenichino and Guido Reni. In the first room, especially, all the pictures had beautiful gilded and carved frames. Having the few mediocre works by Francesco Raspantini, like for instance the small Saint Peter weeping on copper, hung in the midst of so many masterpieces would have certainly increased their prestige and value.

5  Rome, Archivio di Stato (or ASR), Notai Auditor Camerae (or AC), vol. 5943, fol. 23, 1664. 6  A SR, AC, vol. 5943, fol. 23, 1664. 7  Giovanni Battista Passeri, Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti che anno lavorato in Roma. Morti dal 1641 fino al 1673 (Rome: Gregorio Settari, 1772), 44. On Raspantini see also Richard Spear, Domenichino (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). 8  A SR, AC, vol. 5943, fol. 23, 1664.

56 table 1

Ago Items in the ‘Prima stanza dei quadri’ (first picture room)

Subject of the picture

Dimensions

Support Frame

Marriage of St. Catherine, good copy of Correggio Apostle holding a book in his hand, by Domenichino

oversized

canvas

Christ and Mary Magdalene, good copy of Raphael Madonna’s flight to Egypt, good copy of Raphael St Paul the hermit, by Calabrese Ecce Homo with manigoli (?) St Francesco with death in his hand Madonna’s flight to Egypt with two little angels in the air Marriage of St. Catherine with St John Madonna nursing her son, good copy of Correggio Ecce Homo with two angels St Francis kneeling, good copy of Muziani View of the Dead Christ with the two Marys Madonna with rose and putto Madonna with sleeping cherub, unfinished, by Domenichino St. Peter weeping, my own painting St Francis Saviour, said to be by Giulio Romano

gilded with gold leaf

testa—canvas   of a measure suitable to paint a lifesize head imperial   canvas oversized  

black and gold

4 palms oversized testa

     

oversize

 

gilded gilded with gold leaf black with gold threads gilded

imperial canvas 3 palms

 

black with gold leaf

 

gilded with gold leaf

4 palms 7×5

   

gilded no

4 palms

 

gilded

3 palms small

  copper

gilded gilded

small

copper

gilded

small small

copper wood

ebony walnut

black with gold arabesque gold arabesque

57

The Value of a Work of Art table 1

Items in the ‘Prima stanza dei quadri’ (first picture room) (cont.)

Subject of the picture

Dimensions

Support Frame

Madonna, said to be by Giulio Romano Octagonal crib

small

wood

walnut

 

gilded copper

Octagonal Cristarello, by Guido

 

copper

Mary Magdalene naked with death in her hand Two towns, by Salvatore Rosa St Paul carried by angels

 

 

ebony with jewels and stones and gilded copper flowers ebony with silver thread black and gold

testa  

  copper

black and gold gilded

table 2

Items in the ‘Seconda stanza dei quadri’ (second picture room)

Subject of the picture

Dimensions

Support

Frame

Pietà by Carracci and Domenichino

oversized

 

Two perspectives of the countryside Bacchanal by Niccolò della Simona Noli Me Tangere, by a talented man Two naked putti, my own painting St Francis receiving the stigmata, copy touched up by Domenichino Head of St Joseph and the rest unfinished, by Domenichino

testa

 

gilded/black with gold touches no

imperial canvas imperial canvas testa

 

no

 

no

 

 

7×5

 

no

testa

 

no

Portrait of St Joseph, by Cupertino

testa

 

no

58 table 2

Ago Items in the ‘Seconda stanza dei quadri’ (second picture room) (cont.)

Subject of the picture

Dimensions

Support

Frame

Head of the Madonna and the rest unfinished Head of St. John the Evangelist, unfinished, by Domenichino

testa

 

no

testa

 

St Francis receiving the stigmata, by Carracci

mezza testa

 

black with gold thread

Village with unpainted figure Three cherubs and part of a town, embossed, by Domenichino Town with shepherds and animals, oblong, by a talented man

testa 4 palms

  canvas

no no

mezza testa

 

Stepping off a boat, by Salvatore Rosa Town with various animals, by Niccolò della Simona Fish, by a talented man

3 palms

 

no

no no

4 palms

no

4 palms

no

Piece of meat and cabbage

4 palms

no

Madonna and Child, by Domenichino Portrait of a putto, by Cesare Fracassano da Cantiano Venus sleeping with a putto, by Carlo Veneziano Venus and Adonis with some putti, by a talented man Head of St Andrew

3 palms quartered

as if golden

Madonna with young Christ and St. John, sketch by Tintoretto Angel freeing St Peter from prison, by Pietro Pesce

paper

black

small

white

imperial canvas mezza testa

no

small

no

mezza testa

gilded

no

59

The Value of a Work of Art table 2

Items in the ‘Seconda stanza dei quadri’ (second picture room) (cont.)

Subject of the picture

Dimensions

Battle, by Aniello Falcone

mezza testa

Drawing of Laocoon

small

Battle, by Aniello Falcone

mezza testa

Two villages

small

Madonna crowned by Our Lord Assumption with angels and apostles Cherub

Support

pen on paper

Frame black with gold thread black with gold thread black black

1,5 palms

miniature glass

ebony, glass black

 

slate

slate

Two towns, by a talented man Crib, by Domenichino Head of St. Sebastian, by Domenichino St Paul, by Pomarangi Lucrezia Romana, good copy of Guido Old man’s head, by Franco Colonna Diana bathing, by Domenichino, unfinished part Old hand, by Carracci

small oversized oversize

table canvas  

no no no

mezza testa canvas of 4 palms mezza testa

canvas canvas canvas

no black with gold thread no

7×5

 

no

testa

canvas

Bacchanal

imperial canvas testa imperial canvas

 

black with gold thread no

 

 

 

no

testa

 

no

Madonna, my own painting Adam and Eve driven out by God the Father, by Domenichino, unfinished Head, my copy from Domenichino

60 table 2

Ago Items in the ‘Seconda stanza dei quadri’ (second picture room) (cont.)

Subject of the picture Country and figures with a woman who rides a horse, by Gio Benedetto Castiglione Bas-relief with Roman triumph, by a talented man St Cecilia giving her belongings to the poor, unfinished, by Domenichino Sheep and other animals, by Gio Benedetto Castiglione Jacob’s Journey Perspective with a picture inside, by Bibiano Hunting in a Storm chiaroscuro drawing View, by Bibiani Cyclops, drawing in red chalk by Carracci Venus with some satyrs, by Annibal Carracci Garland of flowers, with a sketch by Salvatore inside

1

Dimensions

Support

Frame

testa

 

no

 

bronze coloured clay

 

oversize

 

no

 

 

no

testa

 

carved plaster

3 palms

canvas

no

testa 3 palms small 1 palm small

white canvas bonded fabric

no no no  

The Inventory of Raspatini’s House

We can see that the collection contains many copies, which are all good or well painted, but there are also originals by major painters. In the first room especially, the pictures all have beautiful gilded and carved frames. Hanging in the midst of so many masterpieces, the few mediocre works by Francesco would certainly have gained in prestige and value. The approach of placing his own paintings next to those of the great artists of the previous generation is most noticeable in the Sala:

61

The Value of a Work of Art table 3

Paintings in the ‘Sala’

Subject of the picture

Dimensions

Support

Frame

Full length portrait of Pope Gregory XV, by Domenichino St Peter crucified with two robbers, good copy of Guido Crib, my copy of Domenichino St Charles, copy of Catinari’s Saint Charles Unfinished Magdalene and angel who carries the cross, my own painting Madonna and child sleeping, oval, good and retouched copy of Guido Pietà, good copy of Carracci Madonna nursing the Child with two angels, oval with corners Lot and his son, my copy of Domenichino Madonna with young Christ and St Joseph, oblong Portrait of Pius V

4×6

 

no

8×5

 

no

9×6 large, for an altar more than a testa

   

no no

 

no

 

 

9×5  

   

gilded with fruits in relief gilded gilded

4×6

 

no

Imperial canvas Imperial canvas 4 palms size of 4 palms testa

 

no

 

gilded

    Canvas

white no no

Magdalene, my own painting Magdalene, sketch by Carracci Peasant

Here four out of the fourteen pictures on the walls were painted by Raspantini, including two copies taken from originals of his master Domenichino, one representing A Crib, the other Lot and his Son (see below Appendix 1, Table 3). Some furniture and some items placed in the ‘Sala’, such as the ebony and ivory desk or the harpsichord, may here be interpreted as evidence of a certain degree of affluence, although the notes highlight the fact that they were no longer in their best condition: thus the ‘two chairs of Genoese leather’, the ‘two cowhide chairs with red fringes’ and the ‘walnut coloured wooden tripod for washing hands with ceramic basin’ were respectively said to be ‘old and broken’, ‘worn’ and ‘old’ (see below Appendix 1, Table 4).

62 table 4

Ago Furniture in the ‘Sala’

An ebony and ivory desk with a chess board pattern Two cowhide chairs with red fringes, worn Three red stools and one black A harpsichord with its leather cover, all broken Wooden side table with five drawers, two large and three small, and two doors Walnut coloured wooden tripod for washing hands with ceramic basin, old Two chairs of Genovese leather, old and broken Three cowhide chairs with green fringes, very worn

The items in the next rooms are displayed in the same way, although the furniture suggests more private use, more oriented towards family life and less for public display. Here, not surprisingly, most of the paintings are by Raspantini himself. The seven chairs and four stools in the room indicate that the room was designed to receive guests, and so its walls were open to the inspections of visitors. By displaying his own works in the midst of those by Domenichino and copies of Raphael and Carracci, he was sending a clear message: the works of Cav. Raspantini deserved to be placed beside those of the great masters. This interpretation, which perhaps can seem a little presumptuous on his part, is confirmed by Francesco’s will, which he wrote himself: ‘It should be pointed out that my inheritance includes pictures by a number of famous men, which are of great value and worth, as well as cartoons and drawings of the most talented painters and in particular Carracci, Raphael and Domenichino, and there are also numerous prints … a large number of fine and beautiful blue oltramarini, worth hundreds of scudi, various clay cherubs made by the most talented of men … different instruments and items that belong to the painting profession such as mathematical instruments, large porphyry stones, a wooden life-size model that can move, compasses, rulers, brass archipennelli and a wax modaletto and it is certain that all these are worth more than three thousand scudi in all, so it is important for my heirs and the executors of my will to know how to administer them, that is not to throw them away, and also many drawings I did in my lifetime … will likewise be of some value and different modaletti of machines, and other curiosities will be around the chests and house here in Rome; it must be pointed out that also my house in Assisi has paintings by men of talent and drawings that are worth hundreds of scudi’.9 9  A SR, AC, vol. 5946, fol. 225, 1663; fol. 231, 1665. My emphasis.

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Raspantini’s concern that his heirs do appreciate the symbolic and financial value of his works and his entire collection so that they would not be cheated is not an isolated case. The will of the engraver Gaspare Mola is very similar in tone: ‘To the hospital of S. Carlo al Corso, I leave all my pictures, paintings, and drawings, done by a number of talented painters, and printed papers and books of various kinds, and a enamel sword guard, which, being a rare work, is of the greatest worth, and worthy of the greatest king, or emperor because it is unique, and which will perhaps never be made again by others, and it is new, and its guard and sheath for the dagger, and the belt, and pendants of enamelled iron; there is nothing in the way of payment as there is no money to pay for it; but if it is to be sold, a fair and honest price would be at least three thousand scudi of gold, and if you try and find the right person with the courage to gain possession of such a work, if this person is not a fool, he would never engage in doing it for that price, because if he did, it would be with great surprise, or wonder that he succeeded, because I, who made it, consuming a very long time, say that there was help from Heaven, or rather a miracle, so that it could be made again, and left up to great princes to ensure that an honest price is paid for it, the guard and sheath of which I was offered from Her Majesty of Tuscany one thousand five hundred scudi, which, not being the right amount, I refused. This little story is to warn the administrators of the hospital not to be deceived by the words of inadequate connoisseurs and give it away for a small price, and I recommend that every two or three months it is rubbed with a fine cloth, that it is dry so that it does not get rusty, cleaned everywhere with the cloth, and kept away from humidity, and tell the Great Princes that the said guard and its sheath shall be kept, and bought and held dear as a rare jewel … The abovementioned pictures of mine, drawings, prints, and books are worth at least six thousand scudi of gold, and that when they are consigned an accurate and special inventory is made, with a description of each piece of the said pictures, and the number of hand drawings, as well as the printed papers of antique and modern copper print, and that the pro tempore administrators of the said hospital, will be obliged, four years from the day of my death, and before, if it can be done and if the occasion is found, to sell the above paintings and other things as expressed above, that they not let themselves be persuaded to sell at a small price, and that they try to get at least six thousand scudi, or more, as much as they can get and as the quality of the times may require, rousing the conscience of those who will be overseeing this procedure.’10

10  A SR, AC, Testamenti e donazioni, vol. 28, fol. 358, 1639. My emphasis.

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Thus, also in this case the instrument used to guarantee the value of the works is a ‘particolare e spetiale’ (i.e. a particular and special) inventory. We can see a parallel between the way the works are displayed and how they are described, forming a sort of synergy intended to confer value, a value that is not just honorary and abstract but translated into a price. In both these cases, moreover, there is talk of a possible sale but at a price that must reflect their real market value. Unfortunately, however, for neither the one nor the other has it yet been possible to find the deed of sale of the inheritance and so I cannot compare the value that is ‘fancied’ by the owners with the actual price paid by the buyers. We can measure this difference in a third case, which does not involve paintings but statues, though only in very general terms, as we shall see. The owner this time was not an artist, but a successful lawyer.11 He lived in an area called Arco di Portogallo in a building with at least 18 rooms, divided into three apartments, complete with courtyard, wine cellar, a carriage house big enough for two carriages, a patio and attics. In the absence of a ‘galleria’, which a house like this could have had, the art works were displayed in the hall and adjacent rooms. However, since most of the works were statues, many were also located outside in the courtyard, stairs and corridors, following a model that had long since become standard in Rome: table 5

Statues in the ‘Courtyard’ of casa Amadori

A complete statue of Bacchus on top of the fountain, about 3 palms high A marble head and bust without arms at the beginning of the stairs A marble head above the travertine lintel of the well

table 6

Statues on the ‘mezza scala’ in casa Amadori

A complete statue of a clothed woman in the wooden niche, about six and a half palms high A plaster head and bust of an emperor in an oval niche

11  A SR, S. Girolamo della Carità, b. 1, 1639.

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Statues in the ‘Entrance before the stairs’ in casa Amadori

Five marble heads and busts in the niches: A head and bust of Antinous in the oval inside the loggia near the stairs A head and bust of a faun in another oval A head and bust of an emperor in the third oval A head and bust of an emperor in the oval of the loggia above the door of the room A head and bust of an emperor in the 5th and last oval of the loggia

And finally, the ‘Sala’: table 8

Statues in the ‘Sala’ in casa Amadori

A complete statue of Apollo about 5 palms high on a painted wood inlay stand with the coat of arms of Amadori and Rivaldi Another complete statue of a dancing faun four palms high on top of a similar stand Another complete statue of Mercury of the same height on a similar stand Another complete statue of a nude Venus five palms high on a similar stand Another complete statue of a bathing, half-clothed Venus 6 palms high on a wooden pedestal A head and bust of Apollo about two palms high on a similar stand A head and bust of a consul and similar stand A head and bust of Faustina and similar stand above the fireplace of the said room A head of Annibale Cartaginese around 1.5 palms high A similar head of Caesar Augustus as above A head of a boy A head of a consul A head and bust of Apollo An oblong marble bas-relief with three small profane figures and faux gilded metal frame Two wooden candlesticks in gold and blue Another complete statue of a bathing half-clothed Venus 6 palms high on a wooden pedestal

In addition to the statues, there were 54 paintings. Just like Raspantini’s ‘Picture rooms’, the ‘Sala’ in Amadori’s house was also practically devoid of furniture and was therefore only intended to display the owner’s collection. The statues and the accompanying ‘accessories’—the niches for the statues in the

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courtyard, the sgabelloni painted as if inlaid with the lawyer’s coat of arms— were arranged in a way that enhanced their value: works displayed with so much care and attention had to be valuable and perhaps even ancient, since they portrayed, amongst other things, emperors, gods, fauns, etc. The 54 paintings that adorned the room and the two wooden candlesticks of gold and turquoise confirm the impression of value. The owner was absolutely convinced of this and indeed in his will he placed his statues in a special trust: ‘I want the said Mr. Francesco, my brother and heir, to auction, with the assistance of the said gentlemen of the said Congregazione di S. Girolamo della Charità, all the jewels, silver, and other articles in my house except the statues, heads and busts, which I do not want to be ever sold, but to remain under a perpetual trust, which I will describe below, and the price obtained I wish to be deposited in the mount of piety, or Banco di S. Spirito, and that it is invested entirely in monti camerali non vacabili (financial institutions), or perpetual annuities. It is also my wish that the statues are never to be sold, lent, or removed from the house, including the five statues in the five niches in the corridor before the stairs, the five large statues and four heads and busts which are in the Sala with their scabelloni, and the five heads which are above the fireplace of the said room, and that those that I have ordered as above, each one must remain in a perpetual trust as above…’12 The lawyer did not have children and left everything to the Congregation of San Girolamo della Carità, which administered his inheritance for more than a century after his death. Silver and jewellery were quickly evaluated, and presumably sold, but I have yet to find a trace of any transactions. The rest was instead conserved until 1718, when we find a note about his books—all about the legal profession—which states that the whole had been evaluated at 500 scudi.13 Another note concerning the paintings states: ‘It was resolved that the paintings of the inheritance of Felice Amadori, previously valued by order of the E.mo Protettore, can be sold separately, or in pieces, in whichever form they can be sold at the estimated price.’14 The statues, however, remained for the time being protected by the trust. But, as often happens with the administration of inheritances, in the long run the costs exceed the revenues and little by little the curators were forced to sell even the things that initially were to be kept. Thus in 1770 a third note states that ‘since there are in the said house [of the Amadori inheritance] statues by mediocre modern authors, consisting 12  A SR, AC, Testamenti e donazioni, vol. 28, fol. 203, 1639; copy in ASR, S. Girolamo della Carità, b. 175, fol. 1. 13  A SR, S. Girolamo della Carità, b. 175, fol. 217. 14  A SR, S. Girolamo della Carità, b. 276, fol. 108v.

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of different types of marble busts and small figures, most of them broken and with missing pieces, not exceeding in total the value of about 40 scudi’ the curators request the terms of the trust to be ended and permission to sell.15 Given the context and reason for this note—whose goal was to get the trust suspended—it is likely that the quality of the statues and their total value were deliberately underestimated. However, there is no doubt that the difference between the owner’s illusions and the disillusion of the market must have been very great. What I am presenting here is work in progress and there are still several gaps to fill. Nonetheless, I think that the cases I have presented, while not wishing them to be representative of anything other than what they are, illustrate the processes that produced the ‘fancied’ value of goods, i.e. the value that people attached to objects over and above their exchange value. Often this proved to be quite abstract and unrealistic and nowhere near their actual market price. Moreover, there is also another aspect that I wish to underline. To me it seems that in working out the value of their assets, our three characters established a relationship of reciprocity: on the one hand they gave a value to inanimate objects, presenting them in a way that in their opinion would best fulfil their goals, However, when it came to leaving the earthly world, and not completely trusting in their prior arrangements, they shifted the level of valuation from the immaterial to the material sphere, setting a price on things which, precisely because of their presumed worth, they had until then refused to sell. On the other hand, through this dual arrangement—their symbolic value in life and financial value in death—they conferred on these inanimate objects the power to show outside the value that their owners attributed to themselves and which, by putting them on display, they tried to communicate to others.

15  A SR, S. Girolamo della Carità, b. 275, fol. 221.

chapter 4

Marketing Strategies and the Creation of Taste in Seventeenth-Century Rome Patrizia Cavazzini Patrons and Painters in Seventeenth-Century Italy, published in 1963 by Francis Haskell, has fundamentally shaped our view of the relationship between painters and their customers in seventeenth-century Rome.1 This groundbreaking work, which initiated the study of collecting, examined for the first time the role of patrons in the output of the painters who worked for them. Even though Haskell mentioned minor collectors belonging to the professional classes, and even anonymous consumers, he focused mostly on noblemen, cardinals and learned connoisseurs. He believed that in Rome, in the first half of the seventeenth century, painters worked largely on commission, and that the market, until the end of the Barberini pontificate, was mostly irrelevant. He thought that the growth of the market was dictated mainly by foreign visitors, and that no painters who had reached a certain level of fame would work for a merchant beyond his first years, with the exception of the Bamboccianti. Fifty years later, these beliefs need to be partially reassessed. While it is certainly true that painters much preferred to work on commission and that they did not put themselves at the exclusive service of a dealer, working for a patron was not the only strategy available to them. Only the most successful painters could avoid any involvement with the market, while the others, from the very beginning of the Seicento, could work for a dealer, or, on their own initiative, could sell him paintings already completed, or could paint finished canvases and sketches destined for a wide clientele. An article by Jane Costello, published in 1950, shows very clearly what went on in the Roman market around 1630.2 It examines the vicissitudes of Fabrizio Valguarnera, a Sicilian nobleman who, arriving in Rome from Spain, exchanged stolen diamonds for paintings, both originals and copies, by various 1  See Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters: a study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963) and its review by Louise Rice, The Burlington Magazine 152 (2010): 543–546. 2  Jane Costello, “The Twelve Pictures Ordered by Velasquez and the Trial by Valguarnera,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 13 (1950): 237–284; Roma 1630. Il trionfo del pennello, exh. catalog ed. Michel Hochmann (Milan: Electa, 1994).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004388154_005

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figure 4.1 Angelo Caroselli after Nicolas Poussin, Plague at Ashdod, London, The National Gallery Presented by the Duke of Northumberland, 1838

artists, including well-established ones. Sometimes he commissioned pictures directly from painters, but in many instances he bought them from merchants or from private individuals, via intermediaries who were themselves painters, illuminators or carpenters. For Valguarnera, Nicolas Poussin, Giovanni Lanfranco and Alessandro Turchi finished paintings begun without a specific customer in mind, This for example is the case of Poussin’s Plague at Ashdod, which the Sicilian nobleman had immediately copied by Angelo Caroselli (Fig. 4.1). Valguarnera, who meant to resell his purchases, was quickly arrested and poisoned while in prison, and it is from the surviving trial documents that the story is known. Rightly Costello concluded that there already existed a well-developed open market for paintings in Rome in 1630 and that some of the most significant works were destined for that market. She also pointed out that many painters used to keep a stock of pictures for sale, some completed and some only sketched, in order to give the potential customer a general idea of the finished work. Studying the private archives of individual families, as has so often been done in recent decades, tends to reinforce the notion of artists working on commission for patrons, while trials and notarial deeds, in particular inventories, are better suited to revealing the scope of the art market and its mechanisms. Many judicial documents, summarily published by Antonino Bertolotti in the late nineteenth century offer various insights into this

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world.3 The complexity of the art trade is perhaps best shown in the trial for the theft of two pictures by Pieter van Laer from Hermann van Swanevelt’s house in 1631, documenting frenetic exchanges among many people, painters, collectors, gilders and masons, all of whom traded in pictures.4 Some of them specialized in the works of a particular painter; for example the gilder Dario Ferro often sold works by Swanevelt, while the mason Gabriele Renzi traded those by van Laer. Until the 1650s it was actually very difficult to document other sales of works by the Bamboccianti, undermining Haskell’s hypothesis that they were at the origin of the expansion of the market.5 However the Bambocciate are difficult to track down, as they were simply called paesi until very late in the century and most inventories of the first half of the Seicento do not include attributions. Fundamental to the understanding of the art market have been the various works by Luigi Spezzaferro, who has analyzed the activity of intellectuals, such as Nicolò Simonelli, artistic advisor to wealthy collectors, and the production of the painter Pier Francesco Mola.6 At his death Mola left many sketches and many copies of his own paintings, in addition to copies of works by others, which were all certainly for sale. Earlier in the century many painters such as Agostino Tassi and Tommaso Salini who owned an endless number of paintings of fruits and flowers had behaved in a similar fashion—more painters’ inventories of the same kind have been discussed by Linda Freeman Bauer.7 3  See for example Antonino Bertolotti, Artisti Lombardi a Roma nei secoli XV, XVI e XVII. Studi e Ricerche negli archivi romani (Milano: Hoepli, 1881); Artisti Belgi e Olandesi a Roma nei secoli XVIe XVII: notizie e documenti raccolti negli archivi romani (Firenze: Gazzetta d’Italia, 1880); Artisti francesi in Roma nei secoli XV, XVIe XVII (Mantova: G. Mondovi, 1886). 4  Bertolotti, Artisti Belgi, 127–138. Giovanna Capitelli, “‘Connoisseurship’ al lavoro. La carriera di Niccolò Simonelli (1611–1671),” Quaderni storici 39 (2004): 375–401; Patrizia Cavazzini, Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-century Rome (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 148. 5  Luigi Spezzaferro, “Per il collezionismo dei Bamboccianti a Roma nel Seicento: qualche appunto e qualche riflessione,” in Da Caravaggio a Ceruti. La scena di genere e l’immagine dei pitocchi nella pittura italiana, exh. catalog ed. Francesco Porzio (Milan: Skira, 1998), 83–88; Cavazzini, “Display of Paintings for Sale,” in Display of Art in Roman Seventeenth-century Palaces, ed. Gail Feigenbaum (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2014), 103–106. 6  Spezzaferro, “Pier Francesco Mola e il mercato artistico romano: atteggiamenti e valutazioni,” in Pier Francesco Mola: 1612–66, exh. catalog ed. Manuela Kahn Rossi (Milan: Skira, 1990), 40–59. Patrizia Cavazzini, “Pier Francesco Mola tra le corti e il mercato,” in I Mola da Coldrerio tra dissenso e Accademia nella Roma barocca, eds. Adriano Amendola, Joerg Zutter (Mendrisio: ISA), 213–225. For Simonelli see also Capitelli, “Connoisseurship al lavoro,” 375–401. 7  Donatella Pegazzano, “Documenti per Tommaso Salini,” Paragone 48 (1997): 15–16, 131–146. For Tassi see Cavazzini, Painting as Business, 130–134. Linda Freeman Bauer, “Oil Sketches, Unfinished Paintings, and the Inventories of Artists’ Estates,” in Light on the Eternal City: Observations and Discoveries on the Art and Architecture of Rome, ed. Helmut Hager et al. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987): 93–103. George Bauer and Linda

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Spezzaferro’s examination of Prospero Orsi’s activity has also been particularly revealing.8 According to various seventeenth-century sources, Orsi was instrumental in Caravaggio’s receiving commissions from patrons such as Vincenzo Giustiniani, Ciriaco Mattei and Cardinal del Monte, as he constantly trumpeted Merisis’s ability in exchange for a fee.9 Spezzaferro showed that Orsi, who was nicknamed Prosperino delle Grottesche, in the early 1610s sold the Altemps various paintings, including a Bath of Callisto by Annibale Carracci, an Orpheus by Jacopo Bassano, several paintings by Caravaggio, including a peasant and a still-life with a carafe, presumably copies, and another still-life by a Bartolomeo, almost certainly Cavarozzi. As will be discussed later, Orsi’s behavior was not exceptional, but was rather characteristic of painters of grotesques and gilders, two categories difficult to distinguish from each other and from academic painters. More recently, extensive investigations of trial documents and inventories have revealed a more complex panorama of the art world in early seventeenthcentury Rome than the one described by Haskell and have helped to put into a broader context the results of previous scholars.10 It has become evident    Freeman Bauer, “Artists’ inventories and the language of the oil sketch,” The Burlington Magazine 141 (1999): 520–530. For the later period see Paolo Coen, Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel XVIII secolo: la domanda, l’offerta e la circolazione delle opere in un grande centro europeo, with a preface by Enrico Castelnuovo (Florence: Olschki, 2010), 137–145. 8  Spezzaferro, “Caravaggio accettato. Dal rifiuto al mercato”, in Caravaggio nel IV centenario della Cappella Contarelli, ed. Caterina Volpi (Città di Castello: Petruzzi, 2002), 23–50. 9  Giovanni Baglione, Le vite de’pittori, scultori et architetti dal pontificato di Gregorio XIII del 1572 in fine a’ tempi di Papa Urbano VIII nel 1642 (Rome: Andrea Fei, 1642), ed. Jacob Hess et al. (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1995), 137; Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice: vite dei pittori bolognesi, 2 vols. (Bologna: Guidi), II, 9; Giovanni Battista Passeri, Vite de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti che anno lavorato in Roma. Morti dal 1641 fino al 1673 (Rome: Gregorio Settari, 1772), ed. Hess (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft 1995), 395; Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori, e architetti moderni (Rome: Mascardi, 1672), ed. Evelina Borea (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 216. 10  Cavazzini, Painting as business; Richard Spear, “Rome,” in Painting for profit: the economic lives of XVII Century Italian painters, ed. Peter Sohm et al. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 43–50; Fausto Nicolai, Mecenati a confronto. Committenza, collezionismo e mercato d’arte nella Roma del primo Seicento. Le famiglie Massimo, Altemps, Naro e Colonna (Rome: Campisano, 2008), 292–306; Loredana Lorizzo, “Documenti inediti sul mercato dell’arte. I testamenti e l’inventario della bottega del genovese Pellegrino Peri ‘rivenditore di quadri’ a Roma nella seconda metà del Seicento,” in Decorazione e collezionismo a Roma nel Seicento: vicende di artisti, committenti, mercanti, ed. Francesca Cappelletti (Rome: Gangemi, 2003), 159–174; Lorizzo, “People and Practises in the Painting Trade in XVII century Rome,” in Mapping Markets for Painting in Europe 1450–1750, ed. Neil de Marchi et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 343–358; Lorizzo, Pellegrino Peri. Il mercato dell’arte nella Roma Barocca (Rome: De Luca, 2010); Renata Ago, Il gusto delle cose: una storia degli oggetti nella Roma del Seicento (Rome: Donzelli, 2006).

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that from at least the end of the sixteenth century very many painters, mostly unknown today, were active in Rome. They came from the rest of Italy and Europe, lured by the possibility of finding employment and of studying ancient art and modern masters. Thus in the city there soon existed an endless supply of paintings, original and copies, of various qualities and prices. Rome became a buyer’s market, where an endless chain of salesmen and brokers might be needed in order to sell a picture. Even though collecting spread quickly among all levels of society, many customers were not very discriminating, and they would easily lose interest in a more expensive canvas if a cheaper one was available. There were no clear boundaries between the worlds of high and low art. Many famous collectors, in addition to commissioning works of art, bought them on the open market, and not all they bought was of good quality. Many wealthy noblemen amassed numerous dismal paintings, while occasionally people from the middle-class, or even from the lower middle-class, might buy or commission paintings of good quality. The Accademia di San Luca, intent on affirming the nobility of painting, was firmly against the circulation of works of art in the open market, and in particular against sales from shops.11 Its rules had little impact on the dynamics of the art trade: barbers, tailors, shoemakers, innkeepers, connoisseurs and some painters, in particular painter-gilders, all sold pictures, sometimes from a shop, sometimes from their homes, or from both. Academic painters however did respect the prohibition against selling works from their own shops, and displaying paintings in their windows, or outside their houses; therefore it was relatively difficult for them to reach beyond a small circle of clients who knew and influenced each other. Few artists however could make a living painting only for famous patrons, without ever resorting to the market. Many painters did not get enough commissions, and even when they did, fees of hundreds of scudi were usually the compensation for altarpieces, not for ‘quadri da stanza’. It was not so easy to receive the 100 scudi per figure that was the standard used by Guercino.12 There are numerous instances where portrait heads, even by 11  Cavazzini, “Pittori eletti e ‘bottegari’ nei primi anni dell’accademia e compagnia di San Luca,” Rivista d’arte 5 (1, 2011): 79–96; Coen, Il mercato dei quadri, 7–17; Peter Lukehart, “Visions and Divisions in the Early History of the Accademia di San Luca,” in The Accademia Seminars, ed. Lukehart (Washington: CASVA, 2009), 161–196, 352–356; Isabella Salvagni, “Gli ‘aderenti al Caravaggio’ e la fondazione dell’Accademia di San Luca. Conflitti e potere (1593–1627),” in Intorno a Caravaggio dalla formazione alla fortuna, ed. Margherita Fratarcangeli (Rome: Campisano, 2008), 41–74. 12  Spear, “Guercino’s ‘prix-fixe’: observations on studio practises and art-marketing in Emilia,” The Burlington Magazine 136 (1994): 592–602. On painters’ fees in Rome, see Spear, “Rome,” 43–60.

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well known painters, fetched only 10–12 scudi, single figures 25, multi-figured narratives 100 or less. Transactions could be complex, and therefore guaranteed by an intermediary, who would oversee all aspects from the quality of the final product to the time of delivery, to the cost. Often in Rome the price of a canvas was not established in advance. If painting was to be considered an intellectual and not a manual activity, it could be practiced only for pleasure, not for gain. At least in theory, paintings could not be sold, and their price could not be bargained for; they had to be given away as gifts, otherwise they would become ‘as vile as a chest commissioned to a carpenter’.13 Some painters truly behaved according to these principles. Moreover, because generosity was an attribute of nobility, painters felt that by not naming a price they would end up receiving a higher sum from their customers.14 While this strategy might have been effective when dealing with the upper classes, it became much less so when the client base expanded. A shoemaker buying or commissioning a painting certainly felt no need to make a grand gesture when deciding on the painter’s compensation. In the city there was also a strong feeling that the value of a painting could not be determined until it was finished. It had to please the patron and it could be rejected if he disliked it for any reason. In case of a public work a painting often had also to meet with the general approval of painters and amateurs, a condition specified in many contracts.15 If it did not, a painting would be rejected and its author would have to pay damages to his client. Thus the hostility of fellow painters could cause substantial damage to one’s career—one only needs to think of Caravaggio. Many paintings were valued once they were finished, either officially by appraisers appointed by the Accademia di San Luca or unofficially, ‘by asking the opinion of many’, as happened in many instances, for example for many frescoes in Palazzo Mattei di Giove, or for many 13  “Giovani Battista Paggi,” in Giovan Gaetano Bottari, Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architettura scritte da’ più celebri personaggi dei secoli XV, XVIe XVII, ed. Stefano Ticozzi, 8 vols. (Milan: Giovanni Silvestri, 1822–25), VI, 1822, 71–72. For what follows, Lukehart, “Delineating the Genoese Studio: giovani accartati or sotto padre?” in The artist’s workshop, ed. Lukehart, Studies in the History of Art 38 (1993): 37–57; Spear, The ‘divine’ Guido. Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the world of Guido Reni (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 210–24; Cavazzini, “‘Patto fermo’ o cortesia negli accordi tra pittori e committenti a Roma nel Seicento,” Ricerche di storia dell’arte 101 (2010): 5–20. 14  Spear, The ‘divine’ Guido, 212. 15  For Rome, Cavazzini, “‘Patto fermo’,” 6–7. For Genoa, Timothy J. Standring, “An exclusive artist ‘conventio’ between Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione and Desiderio de Ferrari,” in Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Denis Mahon, ed. Maria Grazia Bernardini (Milan: Electa, 2000), 259–262.

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works paid by the Camera Apostolica.16 Among the many factors that influenced the valuation of a finished canvas, the renown of the author was certainly one.17 The easiest way to reach fame, and thus to see one’s prices increase, was to paint a successful altarpiece. On the contrary, rejection or criticism of a public work was extremely damaging, ‘a stain on one’s honour’, as Bernardo Castello claimed.18 The biographer Gian Pietro Bellori says that the rejection of Caravaggio’s first public work, which according to him was the first version of the St Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel, ‘made the painter almost despair of his reputation’, and that Vincenzo Giustiniani rescued him from his suffering with the decision to buy it.19 Then as now, reputation could also be augmented by advertising. People involved in the painting trade, both merchants and intermediaries, could purposefully spread the fame of artists they dealt with by word of mouth, with the goal of getting them more commissions and raising their prices, as Prospero Orsi did for Caravaggio. A barber did the same for Spadarino, convincing a silversmith to commission a painting from him, even though the silversmith up to that point had only collected works by the Cavalier d’Arpino.20 A broker might simply suggest the name of a painter to a potential customer who was undecided, or might employ different strategies. Saints’ feast days became important occasions on which to advertise paintings. When Salvator Rosa in 1639 exhibited a canvas of Titius at the Pantheon on the occasion of the feast of St Joseph, Niccolò Simonelli, the famous merchant-amateur, published an encomium in its favor, gaining universal praise for the painter.21 In 1652 a tailor-merchant commissioned an elaborate and expensive gilded frame for A Couple Visiting Shepherds in the Campagna Romana by Michael Sweerts— now in Rome, at the Accademia di San Luca (Fig. 4.2)—to make it stand out at the feast of San Giovanni Decollato.22 The tailor, who meant to sell the picture,

16  Gerda Panofsky-Sörgel, “Zur Geschichte der Palazzo Mattei di Giove,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 11 (1967–68), 111–188. 17  Spear, “Rome,” 73–78. 18  Louise Rice, The Altars and Altarpieces of new St Peter’s. Outfitting the Basilica, 1621–1666 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 253. Spear, “Rome,” 54–56. 19  Bellori, Le vite, 219. 20  Patrizia Cavazzini, “Oltre la committenza: commerci d’arte a Roma nel primo Seicento,” Paragone 59 (2008): 72–92, 82. 21  Passeri, Le vite, ed. 1995, 388; Lorizzo, “Salvator Rosa e il mercato dell’arte a Roma: dinamiche e strategie commerciali,” in Salvator Rosa e il suo tempo 1615–1673, ed. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer et al. (Rome: Campisano, 2010), 373–382; Haskell, “Art Exhibitions in XVII Century Rome,” Studi Seicenteschi 1 (1960): 107–121. 22  Cavazzini, “A painting by Michael Sweerts on the Roman Art Market,” Oud Holland, 127 (2014): 109–115.

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figure 4.2 Michael Sweerts, A Couple Visiting Shepherds in the Campagna Romana, Rome, Accademia di San Luca

had probably learned the strategy from Rosa, who used gilded frames to draw attention to his own paintings in the same exhibition.23 Many dealers sold both from a shop and from their homes but kept the best paintings at home; amateur-dealers did not have a shop. To visit a house where paintings were sold it was desirable to have an introduction, even if the house belonged to a painter or dealer. Monsieur Balthasar de Monconys, a French connoisseur who was in Rome in 1664, left a good description of what it was like to search for paintings in Rome at that point—and his experience was probably not so different from Valguarnera’s.24 He went alone to visit the wellstocked store of the brothers Giacomo and Stefano Petit—presumably related to a painter from the Hague.25 The Petits sold many works by the Bamboccianti 23  Adriano Amendola, “‘Questa signor mio è la ruffiana delle pitture’. Salvator Rosa e l’invenzione di un nuovo modello di cornice,” in Salvator Rosa e il suo tempo, 255–268; Passeri, Le vite, ed. 1995, 392. 24  Balthasar de Monconys, Journal de voyages (Lyon: Boissat, 1665–66), 452–465. Spezzaferro, “Pier Francesco Mola,” 48. 25  Nicolai, Mecenati a confronto, 297–302 for their inventory; Capitelli, “Il paesaggio italianizzante,” in La pittura di paesaggio in Italia. Il Seicento, ed. Ludovica Trezzani (Milan: Electa, 2004), 227 for the painter Petit.

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of the first and second generation, many landscapes, but also paintings by very famous Italian artists, such as Domenichino, Guercino and Pietro da Cortona. Monconys was then taken by Simonelli to the house of Cavalier d’Arpino’s sons, who evidently were merchants, and to that of Costanza Piccolomini, the sculptor Matteo Bonarelli’s wife and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous lover. As Sarah McPhee has shown, she traded pictures from her house.26 The painter Jean Lemaire also accompanied Monconys to see pictures for sale, acting as a consultant. Lemaire helped him buy a Poussin from the Salviati and a Bacchanal of Putti, also by Poussin, and two large canvases by Claude Lorrain from Bernini.27 By this date, the Bacchanal, presumably an early work, sold for 600 scudi, while the two Claudes went for the more reasonable price of 200. In both cases Monconys had the paintings authenticated by their author, and Claude touched up one of his. In the early Seicento many works sold on the market were extremely cheap, but Valguarnera’s experience puts very well into focus the higher end of what was for sale at that date. He bought paintings from the Genoese Giovanni Stefano Roccatagliata, who had an important position at the court of Urban VIII, similar to that of Nicolò Simonelli, who had served cardinal Brancaccio, Camillo Pamphili, Alexander VII, and finally Flavio Chigi.28 As is well known, Simonelli was involved in the picture trade from the 1630s, but Roccatagliata even earlier. Shortly after 1630 he sold paintings of very high quality by Annibale Carracci, Valentin de Boulogne, Simon Vouet, Antonio Tempesta, Sinibaldo Scorza, Jean Lemaire, Paul Bril, Caravaggio, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and many by Nicolas Poussin from his very first years in Rome.29 Roccatagliata was active in the secondary market (Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci had died well before he could have begun his commercial enterprise), but even more in the primary one. In the case of Lemaire and Poussin, he must have bought canvases directly from the painters, helping them to establish their reputations, possibly doing for them what Orsi did for Caravaggio and Simonelli for Salvator Rosa and Pier Francesco Mola. Roccatagliata bought and sold pictures of Venus (by 26  Sarah McPhee, Bernini’s Beloved (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 82–109. 27  Monconys, Journal de voyages, 458. The “pope’s sculptor” who sold these paintings to Monconys in 1664 was obviously Bernini. 28  For Simonelli see Capitelli, “‘Connoisseurship’;” Spezzaferro, “Pier Francesco Mola”. 29  Costello, “The Twelve Pictures;” Cavazzini, “Poussin, Cassiano dal Pozzo and the Roman Art Market in the 1620’s and 30’s”, The Burlington Magazine 155 (2013): 808–814; Stefano Pierguidi, “Note sui dipinti di Poussin e (Vouet?) di provenienza Roccatagliata e dal Pozzo”, Studi Piemontesi 41/1 (2012): 113–123; Elena Fumagalli, “Poussin et les collectionneurs romains au XVII siècle,” in Nicolas Poussin, exh. catalog ed. Pierre Rosenberg et al. (Paris: Réunion Musées Nationaux, 1994), 48–57, at 52–53.

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Poussin and Annibale Carracci), landscapes, architectural paintings, battles, and views, all subjects that must have been easy to retail on the open market. He seems to have speculated on them as he clearly waited a few years before trading the canvases by Poussin. According to Bellori, Poussin around 1625 sold his works on the market for 7 or 8 scudi each, but Roccatagliata traded some in 1633 for an average of 55 scudi.30 Many dealers’ inventories for the early part of the century do not carry attributions, and where they do there is no way to check their reliability. However some of the paintings owned by Roccatagliata can be tracked down and his attributions confirmed: for example the Judgement of Solomon by Valentin (Rome, Palazzo Barberini), the View of Piazza Pasquino by Sinibaldo Scorza (Rome, Museo del Palazzo di Venezia), the Amor Vincit Omnia (Cleveland Museum of Art), the Aurora at Tatton Park (National Trust), the Venus and Adonis in Fort Worth (Kimbell Art Museum) by Poussin all belonged to him (Figs. 4.3–4.5).31 Unfortunately a portrait of the painter Filippo Napoletano by Caravaggio, also in Roccatagliata’s possession, has not come to light. Another papal official who traded in paintings was Bartolomeo Barzi, responsible for the wine provisions at the courts of Francesco Barberini and Urban VIII, in whose house many paintings were produced and sold.32 He owned works by Claude Lorrain, Agostino Tassi, Valentin, Angelo Caroselli, Lanfranco, but his favorite painter seem to have been Benedetto Fioravanti, a little-known author of still-lifes. Barzi owned an extraordinary number of the latter’s works, and of many of these he also commissioned copies.33 He had Fioravanti collaborate with Camassei on many canvases, none of which has survived. The high quality of what Roccatagliata and Barzi sold was unrelated to their being part of the papal court; in fact a Flemish tailor, Cristiano Stringherland, who died in 30  Bellori, Le vite, 426; Cavazzini, “Poussin, Cassiano dal Pozzo,” 812. 31  Costello, “The Twelve Pictures,” 278; Standring, “Some pictures by Poussin in the dal Pozzo collection: three new inventories,” The Burlington Magazine 137 (1988): 608–626; I segreti di un collezionista. Le straordinarie raccolte di Cassiano dal Pozzo 1588–1657, exh. catalog ed. Francesco Solinas (Rome: De Luca, 2000); Cavazzini, “Poussin, Cassiano dal Pozzo.” 32  Spezzaferro, Archivio del collezionismo romano, ed. Alessandro Giammaria (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2009), 103–128. The date of the inventory is December 1644, not 1645, and Barzi was “canevario”, not “camerario” in the papal palace. 33  Eduard A. Safarik, “Invention and Reality in Roman Still-life Painting of the XVII Century: Fioravanti and the Others,” in Life and Arts in the Baroque Palaces of Rome: ambiente barocco, exh. catalog ed. Stephanie Walker et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 71–82; Laura Laureati, “Francesco Maltese. Benedetto Fioravanti,” in La natura morta in Italia, ed. Laureati and Trezzani, 2 vols. (Milan: Electa, 1989), II, 768–769; Giuseppe Bocchi and Ulisse Bocchi, Pittori di natura morta a Roma. Artisti Italiani 1630–1750 (Viadana: Arti Grafiche Castello, 2005), 143–152.

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figure 4.3 Valentin de Boulogne, Judgement of Salomon, Rome, Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini

figure 4.4 Sinibaldo Scorza, View of Piazza Pasquino in Rome, Rome, Museo del Palazzo di Venezia

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figure 4.5 Nicolas Poussin, Amor Vincit Omnia, Cleveland, Oh., Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of J. H. Wade 1926.26

1634, was also selling rather expensive pictures in his house, while he kept the cheaper ones in his shop.34 The most valuable of his paintings, unattributed in his inventory, were worth from 50 to 120 scudi, an almost sure sign that they were by well established artists. When a dealer came into possession of a good picture—or of a good copy of a renowned one—he usually had it duplicated or multiplied, sometimes on a smaller scale and by a different painter. In 1600 the painter Antonis Santvoort had in his shop the Ecce Homo by Hans Rottenhammer and a copy; Karel Oldrago, a painter-dealer who collected various works by Adam Elsheimer, at his death in 1619 also owned various copies of his Burning of Troy.35 Many dealers used to commission multiple versions of the originals they possessed, endlessly multiplying a prototype (and indeed in some shops prototypes were 34  Cavazzini, Painting as Business, 139–143, 160–161. 35  Elizabeth Cropper and Gerda Panofsky-Sörgel, “New Elsheimer Inventories from the Seventeenth Century,” The Burlington Magazine 126 (1984): 473–488; Lothar Sickel, “Antonis Santvoort: eine niederländische Maler, Verleger und Kunstvermittler in Rom. Mit eine Anhang zum Testament Cornelis Corts,” in Ein privilegiertes Medium. Deutsche, Französischen und Niedeländische Kupferstecher und Graphikverleger zum 1590 bis 1630, ed. Eckhard Leuschner (Munich: Hirmer, 2012), 39–62.

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not for sale). Stringherland, Barzi and Roccatagliata were all involved in the production of copies; in particular Roccatagliata commissioned many copies after Poussin, evidently by other painters, as he valued them at a fifth of the originals.36 He was not producing fakes, but was selling copies as such, possibly because he intended to create a fashion for Poussin. It is impossible to tell how often the careful distinction between originals, imitations and copies was made by merchants, but their inventories have to be kept in mind when dealing with provenance. For example, an Andromeda by Francesco Furini was considered an original in the Petit brothers’ shop in 1660 and it might well have been one of the many versions painted by Furini himself—like for instance the one in Budapest (Fig. 4.6)—but it was not the best known today, which is in the Hermitage.37 In 1627 the shoemaker Nicola Botta was selling a ‘St Sebastian with a raised hand tied to a tree by the painter Guido’, a description well suited to the painting by Reni in the Palazzo Rosso in Genoa (Fig. 4.7) which has no known provenance before 1683.38 The attribution was made by the painter Antonio Circignani, and should therefore be reliable. Presumably most of the Cinquecento paintings by famous masters sold in Rome by merchants were not originals; there were just too many of them and copies after them were not always indicated as such. For example it is hard to believe that either of the two portraits of Cardinal Bembo by Titian, sold in Rome in the early Seicento were autograph, as one was too small and one was on panel, while the one in the National Gallery in Washington is on canvas.39 Dealers seem to have contributed to the popularity of certain authors, of certain genres, even of some images, in particular with the wider public: there is in fact a strict correspondence between what was sold in shops and what could be found in middle-class houses. In the early decades of the seventeenth century the paintings on display in the rooms of some dealers were more uniform than what would be seen in those of a true collector, sometimes in terms 36  On Sperincks as a copyist, see Anthony Blunt, “Poussin Studies X. Karel Philip Spierincks, the First Imitator of Poussin’s Bacchanals,” The Burlington Magazine 102 (1960): 308– 311; Nicolas Poussin. Works from his first Years in Rome, exh. catalog ed. Denis Mahon (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1999), 32, cat. 29, 128; Standring, “Some Pictures,” 625–626. 37  Nicolai, Mecenati a confronto, 298–299; Svetlana N. Vsevoložskaja, Museo statale Ermitage. La pittura del Seicento (Milan: Skira, 2010), 218, cat. 84. 38  Piero Boccardo and Xavier F. Salomon, Guido Reni. Il tormento e l’estasi. I San Sebastiano a confronto (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2007), 82; Nicolai, Mecenati a confronto, 302, docs. 6a, 6b. A St Sebastian appears in two separate inventories of Botta’s paintings, one without measurements and one without authors. If the two citations refer to the same picture, then its measurements correspond exactly to those of the painting in Genoa. It was a “tela d’imperatore,” meaning approximately 130 × 100 cm. 39  Costello, “The Twelve Paintings,” 272–273; Spezzaferro, “Caravaggio accettato,” 36, 47.

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figure 4.6 Francesco Furini, Andromeda, Budapest, Szépművészeti Múzeum

of style—many could be by the same painter, or from the same school—but often also in terms of genre. The same happened in the houses of those painters who kept a large stock of their works to show to customers.40 Some dealers and painters had at home an overwhelming number of still-lifes or landscapes. Their display might have had an influence on the taste of minor collectors who showed a marked preference for painting without a subject early on, and 40  For what follows, see Cavazzini, Painting for Sale; Cavazzini, “Lesser Nobility and Other People of Means,” in Display of Art, 103–106.

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figure 4.7 Guido Reni, Saint Sebastian, Genova, Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Rosso

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by 1700 many middle-class houses were decorated exclusively with paintings without a subject. In particular shops had a significant role in the diffusion of still-lifes, which became widely popular in middle-class houses earlier than in palaces. Many shops belonged to painter-gilders, a category very close to that of the painters of grotesques, who were responsible for many decorative details in frescoes, such as festoons of fruit, vases of flowers and representations of birds. From the first decades of the Seicento these painters started producing still-lifes and paintings of birds on canvas, and they sold them in their shops for very low prices. Thus they became available to people of all social conditions: Orsi was already selling still-lifes to the Altemps in the early 1610s, the unknown Baldassarre Baderni painted similar canvases of fruits and flowers for the Medici court in 1617 and for a courtesan in 1620.41 Some subjects that could often be found in shops were particularly popular in houses as well, especially representations of women that were openly or discreetly seductive, such as the Magdalen, Susanna, Judith, Lucretia and Cleopatra. They were displayed as a series of heroines, which included figures from the old Testament, Roman history, and Catholic saints. Venus was often added to them, leaving no doubt that their appeal was at least vaguely erotic.42 Mythology was reduced almost exclusively to the stories of Venus and Diana. Representations of Venus with Cupid and a satyr, the Bath of Diana, the story of Callisto, and Diana and Acteon could often be found, to the exclusion of most other mythological subjects. The Diana and her Nymphs by Domenichino now in the Galleria Borghese was also often imitated. Copies of works by sixteenth-century masters, in particular Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto and Bassano were often sold in stores and found their way into ordinary collectors’ houses. Among the most popular compositions sold on the market were the Four Seasons by Jacopo and Francesco Bassano; the Bacchanals, various Venuses, and the seductive Magdalen in a Landscape (Florence, Palazzo Pitti), by Titian; the Ecce Homo (London, 41  Lorizzo, “Pittori di natura morta e mercato dell’arte nella Roma del Seicento: novità su Andrea Bonanni, Carlo Manieri, Antonio Tibaldi, Giovan Battista Gavarotti e Laura Bernasconi,” in Natura morta: rappresentazione dell’oggetto, ed. Costanza Barbieri et al. (Napoli: Arte’m, 2010), 90–95; Cavazzini, “Fiori, Frutta e animali nel mercato artistico romano di primo Seicento,” in Roma al tempo di Caravaggio, exh. catalog ed. Rossella Vodret Adamo (Milan: Skira, 2011), 433–455. 42  Cavazzini, “‘Queste lascive pitture … sono altari dell’inferno’: dipinti provocanti nelle dimore romane del primo seicento,” in I pittori del dissenso, ed. Stefan Alb et al. (Rome: Artemide, 2014), 131–146.

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figure 4.8 After Antonio Allegri, called Correggio, Ecce Homo, London, The National Gallery. Bequeathed by the Revd. William Holwell Carr, 1831

National Gallery; Fig. 4.8) the Reading Magdalen (formerly in Dresden), and various Madonnas and Venuses by Correggio. Among the works by Raphael, many Madonnas were copied, but also paintings that were on public view and therefore easily accessible. Large altarpieces were reproduced on a domestic scale, in particular the Tranfiguration in San Pietro in Montorio and the St Cecilia after the copy now in San Luigi dei Francesi. The Galatea was often copied on a small scale, and copies after it were sold in shops. The Madonna of the Pilgrims by Caravaggio, his Crucifixion of St Peter, the Cardsharps, as well as the Giustiniani Doubting Thomas were also often mentioned in dealers’ inventories. Two paintings belonging to the Mattei, the

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Capture in the Garden and the Supper at Emmaus were considered pendants and reproduced in the same format—indeed they might have been conceived as such.43 Among the most frequently copied works by Guido Reni were the altarpieces of the Trinity and the St Michael. His representations of the Magdalen, and St Sebastian were also popular. In 1637 the merchant dealer Pietro Paolo de Lilio was selling reproductions of almost all of these compositions.44 As already mentioned, on the market could also be found copies and imitations of early works by Poussin, but not of his later ones. Works by the Carracci and their followers were always in favor with dealers, while those by Pietro da Cortona were less so. Caravaggio remained more popular in the market than with elite collectors: in 1692 the Cardsharps was still replicated in the shop of Carlo Foresta, a painter dealer who also owned a copy after the Danae by Correggio, of a Bacchanal by Titian, and of his Tribute Money.45 Moreover Foresta painted and had others paint various reproduction of a Pietà by Annibale Carraci which he owned. Perhaps even more than elite collectors, merchants such as De Lilio and Foresta contributed to the creation of a canonical list of works by modern and ancient masters.

43  See for example the inventory of the merchant Pietro Paolo de Lilio, Archivio di Stato di Roma (or ASR), Notai dell’Auditor Camerae, vol. 3020, fols. 611–616, 639–641, partially transcribed in Nicolai, Mecenati a confronto, 297. He sold many copies of famous pictures, including a “presa di Cristo et un emmaus viene da caravaggio, 8 e 6 in circa”. For the Mattei pictures see Stefano Pierguidi, “Caravaggio e il ciclo della galleria di palazzo Mattei,” Storia dell’arte, 136, 2013, pp. 87–98. 44  See note 43 and ASR, 30 Notai Capitolini, uff. 19, vol. 130, December 1623, fol. 608, where in the inventory of Sebastiano Paciantus could be found both a Trinity and a St Sebastian tied to a tree after Reni. St Sebastian was the owner’s name saint. 45  For the inventory of the painter and dealer Carlo Foresta, or Carlo de Foresta, see ASR, 30 Notai Capitolini, uff. 17, vol. 252, October 16, 1692, fol. 521; The Getty Provenance Index Databases, PI I-929, http://piprod.getty.edu/starweb/pi/servlet.starweb, last accession July 14, 2014.

chapter 5

Jan Meyssens’ 1649 Portfolio of Artists: The Conception and Composition of the Book Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (and the Inclusion of Three Italian Painters) Raffaella Morselli In 1649 the Flemish painter and engraver Johannes, or Jan, Meyssens first published in Antwerp the Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime qui par leur art et science devron vivre eternellement et des quels la lovange et renomée faict estonner le monde, a sort of portfolio made of engraved portraits of some of the most renowned artists of the time (Fig. 5.1).1 Immediately after its publication the book became famous in Flanders and England, so was re-published over 1  From now on reference is made to the copy of Jan Meyssens’ book at the Rijksmuseum’s Library, Amsterdam, catalogue number I, 137 (I) 1883–1234. For the number of etchings and other considerations related to this specific edition see Hans-Joachim Raupp, Untersuchungen zu Künstlerbildnis und Künstlerdarstellung in den Niederlanden im 17. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim-Zurich and New York: Olms, 1984), 157–163, the only scholar who analyzed Meyssens’ collection, in the broader context of his essay on Flemish seventeenthcentury literature on the arts. The edition consulted by Raupp differs from the one in the Rijksmuseum. Raupp cites for instance a portrait of Raphael and a portrait of the mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Bruyant, both missing from the edition here analyzed. Another complete edition, though different from both the Rijksmuseum’s and Raupp’s, belongs to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. A fourth edition, once on the art market, contains 99 prints, including Bruyant’s portrait.   Basic contributions on Jan Meyssens (1612–1670) are Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen (…), 3 vols. (Amsterdam: B.M. Israël, 1718–1721); Christiaan Kramm, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters, van den vroegsten tot op onzen tijd. Gebroeders Diederichs, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: Diederichs, 1857–1864), 1115–1116, still extremely useful. See also Willem Rudolf Juynboll, Winkler Prins van der kunst. Encyclopedie van de architectuur, beeldende kunst, kunstnijverheid, 3 vols. (Amsterdam and Brussels: Elsevier, 1958–1959); Erik Duverger, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, 14 vols. (Brussels: Koninklijke Academie voor Brussel, 1984–2009); Histoire de l’histoire de l’art septentrional au XVIIe siècle, edited by Michèle-Caroline Heck (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009); Ann Diels, The Shadow of Rubens: Print Publishing in 17th Century Antwerp: Prints by the History Painters Abraham van Diepenbeeck, Cornelis Schut and Erasmus Quellinus II (London and Turnhout: H. Miller— Brepols), 2009.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004388154_006

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figure 5.1 Jan Meyssens, Frontispiece of the Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library

the years. The success of this publication, which reached its peak around the year 1700, was due to several factors. One of the keys lies in its contents, i.e. in the information given on painters well-known throughout Europe. The engraved plates, even when taken out of their original context, illustrated a number of sources on masters such as Pieter Paul Rubens or Antoon van Dyck, so as to become the true foundation of Flemish art literature on the arts. A second reason for the book’s success was its promotional purpose, and thus its connection with the world of art, collectors and art dealers. Promoting the Flemish schools of painting, the Images became a model throughout Europe for all sale catalogues up to the end of the eighteenth century. This true portfolio of artists may thus be interpreted as a significant chapter in the long-term history of the mutual relationship between Italy and Flanders in he development of both art

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books and art sale catalogues throughout Europe. Roman experience, as is evident from the captions of the Images, was intended as a sort of ‘business card’ to be shown and reused by each painter once he was back home. A similar purpose might be found for instance in the circle of the Bentvueghels. As is widely known, each new member received a new name during the initiation ceremony, which marked his admission to the brotherhood. The artist would use this name from then on, thus making it a tangible sign of his training course and of recognition within the artistic community of Rome.2 Given today’s current state of the art, to acknowledge the reception and appreciation of the book’s first print edition in Europe remains quite a difficult task. The portraits of the artists included in it and the short biographical notes placed at the bottom of the prints are fundamental to the artistic literature on Flemish painting from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Both the portraits and the biographical information were used by the poet and art expert Cornelis de Bie in his Het Gulden Cabinet, also printed in Antwerp and also by Jan Meyssens 13 years later, in 1662.3 In 1694 Meyssens’ Images was published in London as The true effigies of the most eminent painters and famous artists that have flourished in Europe. The English edition included numerous additions, the total number of the engravings having risen to 142.4 In this edition, Meyssens’ plates were added to those of Domenicus Lampsonius, made in 1572 by Jerome Cocke and Philip Galle 2   Godfried Johannes Hoogewerff, De Bentvueghels (’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1952); Judith Verberne, The Bentvueghels (1620/1621–1720) in Rome, in Drawn to the warmth. 17th-century Dutch artists in Italy, exh. catalog, ed. Peter Schatborn and Verberne (Zwolle: Waanders, 2001), 22–32. 3  On Cornelis de Bie, see Jan Frans Willems, “Cornelis de Bie,” in Belgisch Museum voor de Nederduitsche Tael- en Letterkunde en de Geschiedenis des Vaderlands 4 (1840): 268–297; Biographie nationale publiée par l’Académie Royale des sciences, des lettres et des beauxarts de Belgique, 4 (1873): 785–789; Bibliotheca belgica: Bibliographie générale des Pays-Bas, 27 vols. (Gand and The Hague: Vanderporten—Nijhoff, 1880–1890), II, 188–237; Eugène De Seyn, “De Bie, Cornelis,” in Dictionnaire biographique des Sciences, des Lettres et des Arts de Belgique (Brussels: L’Avenir, 1935), 202–203; Gerard Lemmens, introduction to Het gulden Cabinet vande edel vry schilder const, inhoudende den lof vande vermarste schilders, architecte, beldthowers ende plaetsnyders van dese eeuw, ed. Gerard Lemmens (Soest: Davaco, 1971), 1–15; Christiaan Schuckman, “De Bie, Cornelis,” in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, 34 vols. (Oxford and New York: Grove, 1996), IV, 38. 4  The True Effigies of the Most Eminent Painters, and Other Famous Artists that have Florished in Europe Curiously Engraven upon Copper-plates. Together with an Account of the Time when they Lived, the most Remarkable Passages of their Lives, and most Considerable Works (London: D. & T. Browne, 1694). See Dominicus Lampsonius and Jean Puraye, Les effigies des peintres célèbres des Pays Bas (Bruxelles: Desclée de Brouwer, 1956).

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for the book Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae Inferioris effigies. Together they form a unique gallery of Flemish painters, from Van Eyck to Rubens and van Dyck. This and other changes profoundly altered the original aim of the project. Initially a portfolio of the best living or recently deceased Flemish artists, whose works could be purchased in the markets of Antwerp and Utrecht, the book became a work of art literature for ‘all such gentleman as are lovers of the art and ingenuity’. The first edition was a catalog of the region’s great masters—with a few odd inclusions, as we shall detail below—with the aim of selling works of art; the English edition underwent an intellectual process through the poetry of De Bie, in order to showcase the excellence of the past. The portraits contained in the Image are well known and the biographies have been the subject of study by specialists. Nonetheless, the book as a whole still lacks an organic and systematic analysis. Among the purposes of the present essay are the giving of a better understanding of the reasons behind this compilation, to explain how the plates came about, on what basis the artists were selected, what Jan Meyssens was trying to do, as this seems further to demonstrate the international networks that underpinned the art market at the time. 1

The Sources of Meyssens’ Portfolio of Artists

Behind the conception of this project was a group of artist-dealer-collectors, who can be identified by analyzing the title page and the individual plates. The group was linked by relationships of profession, friendship and kinship. The group approached the international art market as united, presenting themselves in official portraits that detail their individual artistic achievements; they were all depicted, or had themselves depicted, in fashionable and stylish clothes, showing off chains and medals given to them by rich patrons, and accompanied by the symbols of their profession. The recently deceased Rubens and Van Dyck (Figs. 5.2–5.4) were chosen to lead the procession of artists specializing in various genres, which included some who were much less wellknown and certainly of a lower quality, to give the group greater credibility. The Flemish tradition of engraved portraits of painters had already become established practise in the sixteenth century with Lampsonius, and the foundations of artistic literature had already been laid by the Schilder-Boeck, which the painter, poet and biographer Karel van Mander had published in Harlem in 1604. This book discussed past and contemporary painters and was not in any way intended as a means of market promotion: it gave a historical reconstruction of the driving forces behind Flemish painting, accredited by its sources

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figure 5.2 After Pieter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Pieter Paul Rubens, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library

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figure 5.3 Antoon van Dyck (drawing)—Paulus Pontius (etching), Portrait of Antoon van Dyck, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library

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figure 5.4 Antoon van Dyck, Self Portrait, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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and the paintings themselves. Meyssens’ portfolio was very different from either of these models. After Lampsonius and Van Mander, the most direct exemplum and model of excellence for Meyssens and the group that gravitated around the painterdealer was certainly van Dyck’s Icones principum, edited in Antwerp between 1632 and 1641 by Gillis Hendricx (Fig. 5.5).5 As early as in 1632 the poet Constantijn Huygens noted in his journal that he was in possession of a first edition of the illustrious men drawn by Van Dyck, probably a prototype, prefaced by this epigram ‘Vivitur ingenio: servat cum vertice dextra Dyckius et sunto caetera mortis, ait’. The famous painter was in London that year but the project was continued by his publisher, Martin van den Enden, and in 1634 Van Dyck was back to finalize plans. The completed work has 80 plates divided into three groups: 16 portraits of princes, princesses, aristocrats; 12 wise men and statesmen; 50 portraits of artists and ‘Amateurs’, headed by a portrait of Rubens and followed by one of Van Dyck. It must have been this last section that spurred Jan Meyssens to enter the field: he too printed a very limited edition of 34 engravings, taken from Van Dyck’s portraits of famous men, between 1646 and 1650, placing himself in direct competition with the official printer Gillis Hendricx.6 He had evidently understood that this was the kind of product that the market craved and he did not want to miss out. After this first attempt he published the Effiges Imperatorum Domus Austriae, consisting of 14 plates, and Les portraits des Souverains Princes et Contes de Hollande, a larger collection of 40 plates. But if he wanted to compete in the market he needed something new. Thus he came up with the idea of portraits of contemporary artists accompanied by a short cursus honorum. A modern and flexible tool: a catalog with a portrait and a biography of the artist whose work was up for sale. The edition analyzed here, the oldest of those mentioned, is the key to understanding the logic behind the plates included and the way they were arranged. The internal grammar of the language, and the external grammar that places it within the milieu in which it was conceived and made, is contained in these pages from the frontispiece to the dedicatio. 5  See Van Dyck graveur. L’art du portrait, exh. catalog ed. Pascal Torres (Paris: Musée du Louvre—Le Passage, 2008) for previous bibliography and this book’s sources. Of the highest importance is still Marie Mauquoy-Hendrickx, L’iconographie d’Antoine van Dyck. Catalogue raisonée (Bruxelles: Bibliothèque Royale Albert I, 1956). 6  Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450–1700, ed. Friedrich W. H. Hollstein, 72 vols. (Amsterdam: Hertzberger, 1949–2010), XIV, 27, nos. 209–242.

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figure 5.5 Antoon van Dyck (drawing)—Gillis Hendricx (etching), Frontispiece of the Icones Principum Virorum (…), Cambridge, The Fitzwilliam Museum

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From the iconographic point of view, we can immediately see, from the first page (Fig. 5.1), the work’s dependence on van Dyck’s book.7 Fame, in the form of a statue standing on an Ionic column, illustrates the title of the book, written at the base. This is accompanied by a long introduction in which Jan Meyssens describes the main characteristics of his work ‘A Anvers mis en lumiere par Iean Meyssens peinctre et vendeur de l’art du Cammerstraet l’an MDCXLIX’. It is interesting to see that Meyssens states his profession at the beginning: a painter and art dealer in Cammerstraet, Antwerp. In his self-portrait, too, engraved by his son Cornelis, included in the book, he declares that he is not only a painter that specializes in portraits but also, and especially, an expert and seller of prints. Meyssens, therefore, is a connoisseur, dealer and artist rooted in his hometown, with his own print shop, of which he gives the address. Meyssens, who was born in Brussels in 1612 and moved to Antwerp as a young man, had been a pupil of Anthony van Opstal and, later, Nicolas van der Horts. However, he preferred to focus on engravings, soon becoming a master of the genre. 1.1 Michel Le Blon’s Contribution and the Creation of the Book The origin of this book is further to be found in the ambiance of the painters’ guild of Antwerp and Utrecht, in that industrious and international artistic environment that turned out great numbers of works for numerous English, Danish, Polish, German and French collectors. After the death of Rubens in Antwerp on May 30, 1640 and of Van Dyck in 1641 in London, the city of painters needed to show the world that the arts continued to flourish there and was a center for collectors, agents, brokers and dealers who frequented shops, workshop, the homes of art lovers and intellectual circles. It must have been in this context that the idea for the portfolio first emerged. Evidence can be found in the engraved letter that introduces the collection written by Jan Meyssens on April 12, 1649 (Fig. 5.6). Meyssens here clearly states to be the father of the whole work, having suggested the path to follow and having provided portraits which he had had made into drawings and which, finally, he had had engraved. The engraved letter was addressed to Michel Le Blon (1587–1656), a Flemish agent for the Swedish monarchy. Le Blon’s character has recently been reassessed, from the historical point of view, through an analysis of his correspondence with Axel Oxenstierna, Queen Christina of Sweden’s foreign minister from 1644. Through the letters, Badeloch Noldus has

7  Van Dyck’s bust dominates on the half-coloumn of Icones principum’s frontispiece.

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figure 5.6 Jan Meyssens, Engraved Dedicatory Letter to Michel Le Blon, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library

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figure 5.7 Antoon van Dyck, Portrait of Michel Le Blon, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario

reconstructed a detailed biography of the agent, which sheds light on the history of the Meyssens Portfolio.8 Le Blon (1587–1656), whose elegance we may appreciate thanks to a rarefied and introspective portrait painted by van Dyck between 1630 and 1635 and now in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (Fig. 5.7), is the key to understanding the logic behind Meyssens’ work. A German jeweller and engraver, Le Blon moved to Amsterdam in about 1610, and there he began to print catalogs of ornaments and silverware.9 The cousin, on his mother’s side, of Joachim von Sandrart (his mother was Ursula Sandrart), he went on a long trip with him to Italy in 1627, visiting Bologna, Florence and Rome. While in Rome, Le Blon and Sandrart were introduced to the Bentveughls’ group and so became the protagonists 8  Badeloch Vera Noldus, “Loyality and Betrayal. Artist-Agent Michel Le Blon and Pieter Isaacsz, and Chancellor Axel Oxienterna,” in Your humble servant: agents in early modern Europe, ed. Hans Cools et al. (Hilversum: Uitgeverij verloren, 2006), 51–64, with earlier bibliography. For the Italian translation see Quaderni Storici 2 (2006): 385–400. See lately Noldus, “A spider in his web. Agent and artist. Le Blon and his northern european network,” in Double agents: cultural and political brokerage in early modern Europe, ed. Marika Keblusek et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 9  The volume by Michel Le Blon, Eenvoldige vruchten en spitsen voor d’ancomen kunst liefhebbende ieucht (Amsterdam: editor unknown, 1611) includes 14 engravings illustrating ornaments for jewellry, such as friezes with exotic animals, animals, insects, fishes, flowers, fruits and leaves. Le Blon published decorations for handles, knives, swords and coats of arms as well.

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of the group’s quite original rito d’iniziazione, as recalled later by Sandrart.10 In a beautiful paragraph of the 1675 Teutsche Academie, he describes him as an exceptional and unparalleled connoisseur, particularly of drawings and engravings for books, and that Le Blon was a ‘padre per l’arte, specialmente per me’.11 The two cousins made acquaintances throughout Europe and in all the courts, thus supplying exceptional material for Meyssens’ book from both the iconographic and biographical points of view. Many of the authors included were personal friends of Le Blon (David Beck, Rubens, with whom Blon had regularly corresponded, Jacob Jordaens, Willem van de Velde, Jan Boeckhorst, Erasmus Quellinus, Simon de Vlieger, and van Dyck himself), while others (Aegidius Sadeler, Gerrit Honthorst) were Sandrart’s teachers. The choices made by Meyssens are the result of Michel Le Blon’s careful groundwork, who was always on the look out for what the market had to offer. Le Blon was in fact at home in many painters’ workshops and was adept at getting his hands on all sorts of art works in the region. He and Peter Spierinck, the son of the tapestry maker, François, who had long worked for the Polish and Swedish courts, producing huge tapestries, could procure whatever the market required.12 Their network of artists, artisans, sellers, importers could satisfy all tastes. In addition, for seventeen years Le Blon had been the agent of the Swedish court, ever since he had met Oxenstierna at Jacob van Dijck’s house in the Hague, who welcomed poets and artists in his ‘Swedish House‘. He had a hold on the Flanders market. The year 1649, when Meyssens published his book, also coincided with a great Flemish art commission for Sweden: Queen Christina, in fact, ordered 35 paintings for the ceiling of the royal palace of Uppsala from Jacob Jordaens, which were unfortunately destroyed in the fire of 1695. The operation was coordinated and successfully completed by Michel Le Blon. Two years earlier, in 1647, the agent had sent his friend David Beck to Sweden to paint Queen Christina. Because of this, his portrait was included in the Meyssens album. The Flemish agent was therefore at the height of his fame when Meyssens published the book dedicated to him, which represented a confirmation of his intellectual supremacy. Every living painter at that time would have wanted to be included in the list of artists Le Blon had at his disposal. 10  Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste, 3 vols., (Nüremberg: Jacob von Sandrart, 1675–1680), I, 1675, 27–28. 11  Von Sandrart, Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675. Leben der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, ed. Arthur Rudolf Peltzer (Munich: Hirth, 1925), 244. 12  Noldus, “An ‘unvergleichbarer liebhaber’. Peter Spierinck, the art‐dealing diplomat,” Scandinavian Journal of History 31 (2006): 173–185.

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The Structure of Meyssens’ Book: Phases and Typologies of the Portraits The portfolio’s structure is not easy to understand. By analyzing the engravings, the writings and the biographical information we can distinguish at least three phases. They correspond to three different typologies, sometimes interlinked, suggesting that the work was the result of a long process. The first typology concerns living artists working and living in Antwerp or Utrecht, or who had moved there from other places and made works to sell on the market. The second concerns engravers who had contributed to raising this profession to the highest levels, and includes dead or non-Flemish artists. The third, smaller group includes painters that apparently do not fit into the other two categories, but who worked for the Arundel circle, whose members included both Le Blon, agent for the crown of Sweden in England, and Joachim Von Sandrart, author of the gallery of portraits belonging to Henry Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel. However, all these artists were tied together by their international fame, the honors received at the courts they frequented, clients of high standing, their mutual acquaintance, family relationships or training, and the fact that they were still working actively. The technical inscriptions that accompany the prints, ‘pinxit, delineavit, sculpsit, excudit’, create a significant system of internal interconnections. Very often they refer to painters in the book who, in turn, have drawn portraits of others and have been engraved by artists who in turn were copied, in an endless game of mirrors that always involves the same circle of people connected to Le Blon. Here is an example: the portrait of the painter Erasmus Quellinus (Fig. 5.8), who was a friend of Le Blon, was engraved by Pieter de Jode II (whose father is also among the engravers, although already deceased at the time the book was published), remembered for having been sent to Paris by Le Blon to make some engravings; his effigy was painted by Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, a pupil of Gerard Seghers who also features in the portfolio. This interplay continues ad infinitum, in a sort of artistic-historical maze. As regards the book’s contents, this depends on the version consulted and, in any event, the impression is that it was printed at different times with many variations and additions. The version studied here, consisting of 78 etchings, should be stripped of at least seven. In fact, the portrait of Pierre Franchois, added after the edition of 1649, was not published by Meyssens. Another plate that should be removed is the one dedicated to Jan Baptist van Deynum because it was not published by Meyssens and bears the date of 1651; the same goes for the one on Antoine van Leyen, because it was engraved by Richard Collin and the one on Cornelis De Bie, since it is stated that he is the author of this work, an obvious reference to the book published by Meyssens 1.2

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figure 5.8 Erasmus Quellinus (drawing)—Pieter de Jode II (etching), Portrait of Erasmus Quellinus, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library

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in 1661. Neither should it include the portraits of Joannes Peeters, Carel van Savoyen, an etching made by the same person with no other specification, or David Bailli. Some artists also fall outside this framework, such as Jacques Vrancquart, or Francart, an architect, whose engraving states that it was published by Meyssens. The same can be said of Jacques d’Arthois, whose portrait was painted and printed by Meyssens. The poet Adriaen de Venne seems spurious because he has no connections with Antwerp, as also does Thedore Corenhert, a poet who died in 1590, and Jacob Adriaensz Backer, too, while Henry de Keiser, who died in 1621, is the only sculptor mentioned, but is also one of the best in Holland. Corneille Dankerts de Ry must have been added for the same reason: he was a famous architect who had redesigned the Amstel in Amsterdam. Leonard Braemer had no connections with either Antwerp or Utrecht. The first sequence produced was that of the most famous engravers, both dead and alive, who had made a mark in the history of this technique. They were chosen on the basis of the network of relationships woven by the publisher, Meyssens. Compared to the section on painters in the Southern Netherlands, this section, at least in the present state of the art, seems to be freer and consequently offers fewer lines of interpretation. Each plate is marked by the double entry ‘Meyssen pinxit et excudit’, while the engraver may vary, as in the plate engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar dedicated to Henry van der Borcht, dated 1648. The list is long: Jacobus Matham, who died in 1631, was chosen because he was the grandson of Goltzius; Jan Sadeler, wearing a gold chain given to him by the Duke of Bavaria, was chosen by virtue of his skills as an etcher. Aegidius Sadeler was born in Antwerp and taught Joachim von Sandrart in Prague in 1621, but the threesome also includes Rafael Sadeler. Wenceslaus Hollar is the only one that has a coat of arms at the bottom of the engraving and proudly displays a copy he made of Raphael and the tools of his trade. He was in Antwerp at the time, a war refugee. Then we have Cornelis Cort, Pieter de Jode I (Fig. 5.9), who died in 1634, Jacques Callot, who died the following year, Guido Reni, chosen for the etchings he made of his own works, Henricus Hondius, engraved from a signed drawing, a famous engraver and designer of geographic maps. Also included is Stefano della Bella (Fig. 5.10), in a portrait by Nicolaes van Helt Stockade, etched by Wenceslaus Hollar. His name is the only one not in capital letters. At this time he was still the undisputed master at the French court. When producing the series devoted to engravers, Meyssens must have already been thinking of a portfolio of painters, without really knowing what his ultimate goal was, namely to create a catalogue of living artists. Thus, with the same writing as on the first portraits of engravers, ‘Meyssen Pinxit et excudit’,

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figure 5.9 Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert (drawing)—Pieter de Jode II (etching), Portrait of Pieter de Jode I, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library

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figure 5.10 Nicolaes van Helt Stockade (drawing)—Wenceslaus Hollar (etching), Portrait of Stefano della Bella, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library

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figure 5.11 Wenceslaus Hollar (drawing)—Jan Meyssens (etching), Portrait of Adam Elsheimer, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library

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he produced a portrait of Adam Elsheimer (Fig. 5.11), writing a vibrant biography full of personal details; Bonaventura Peeters, whose works were to be found in the homes of collectors; and Roelant Savery, who died in 1639. This information was not made explicit in the engraving, so this fact can be used as a terminus ante quem to date the selection of engravings—ten years before the full edition. The same inscription appeared in the plates dedicated to Francesco Padovanino (Fig. 5.12)—not Alessandro Varotari nor Ottavio Leoni—Hendrick de Keyser and Jacob van Es. 1.3 Choices Made among Contemporary Artists The group of contemporary artists can be recognized since the person painting the portrait, drawing the copy, making the engraving and finally printing was almost never the same artist. Then, the biographical notes are full of information about pictorial typologies, clients, stays abroad, specialties. The artists selected were all living, except Otto Van Veen, who died in 1629 but was included because he was one of the most important masters in all the Netherlands and especially because he painted the chapel of the Holy Sacrament in Antwerp Cathedral, depicting the Last Supper (oil on wood, 3.5 × 2.25m), dated 1592. Tobias Veraecht, who died in 1631, was from Antwerp and, more importantly, was Rubens’ first teacher. Guillaume de Nieulant, too, was linked to the city, because he was a member of the brotherhood of Antwerp painters, and had only just passed away in 1635. His portrait was personally made by Jan Meyssens, as a tribute to his friend. As mentioned before, Antwerp’s two most famous sons, Rubens and Van Dyck, had also died (Figs. 5.2–5.4). Van Dyck was the only painter for whom the exact words ‘Chevallier du roi d’Angleterre’ were added next to his name. The notes that accompany Rubens’ portrait summarize all the honors he received and even mention the day of his death, May 30, 1640, which must have weighed heavily on the future of the city of painters. Rubens is here selfportrayed in the haughty pose of a gentleman at rest, looking straight at the observer, his composure dignified, simply and classically dressed, a bearing that is philosophical, austere and sober. End of the century items are still all there: the voluminous jacket, the patterned sleeves that had been so fashionable in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the slightly fringed shoulders with strengthened armholes that made them look puffed up, the fine central placket, the massive chain around his neck, among the many, that perhaps was given to him by Pope Paul V. The image’s prototype is an early Self Portrait now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York (Fig. 5.13): it is said of him that

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figure 5.12 Francesco Padovanino (drawing)—Jan Meyssens (etching), Portrait of Francesco Padovanino, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library

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figure 5.13

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Pieter Paul Rubens, Self Portrait, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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he was the true phoenix of our century, but his death in 1641 had taken him away forever.13 By comparing the notes that accompany the painters and the symbols with which they are portrayed, we can make other considerations about this indispensable catalog. Firstly, the specializations must be taken into account: a carefully chosen lexical declension accompanies the portraits. History, portraits, fruit, animals dead and alive (Adriaen van Utrecht specialized in poultry, chickens, birds), miniature portraits, landscapes with figures and animals, small nude figures, miniatures of flowers and small animals (Leo van Heil’s genre), landscapes from life with houses and villas, architecture, engineering works, perspectives, marines, ships, ports, boats, hunts, fish, ruins of Rome, naked children, battles, scenes by candlelight, all form an unprecedented repertoire of genres. Very often the favorite techniques were also mentioned: oil, tempera, painting on glass. 1.4 Antwerp’s and Utrecht’s Art Markets: An International Network The number of clients mentioned in the book reflects the international nature of the painters’ guild of Antwerp and Utrecht: Emperor Ferdinand II, for whom Wouters worked, the King of Spain, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Dutch princes, Henry Frederick of Orange and William King of England, Cardinal Doyen, the bishop of Ghent, the Duke of Parma, Alessandro Farnese, Cardinal Cybo and the Bishop of Ostia, Domenico Ginnasi, for whom Pieter van Lint painted respectively the frescos in the Cybo chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome depicting The History of the True Cross and the paintings for the Cathedral of Ostia; the Duke of Bracciano, who hosted Johann Wilhelm Baur in his Roman residence. Nikolaus Knüpfer and David Beck worked for the King of Denmark; the latter was the court painter to Queen Christina of Sweden, and was with her in 1647 in Stockholm. Here he is shown in front of a portrait of the queen still on the easel, proudly displaying a chain and a medal with the image of Charles I. France, Provence, Italy, Germany, England, Denmark and Poland form a map of the courts most active in commissioning works and showing the greatest openness towards the South Holland market. Also mentioned were the world famous painters born there: Balthazar Gerbier headed this category since he had received commissions in London, had received a knighthood from Charles I and had been an agent for the King of England in Brussels from 1630 to 1640. It was he who had drawn up an inventory of Rubens’ assets on his death and sent it to Charles I, although, when Meyssens’ book was published, he had already fallen into disgrace. Gaspar de 13  On this portrait, see Walter A. Liedtke, “Anthony van Dyck,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 42 (1985), supplement.

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Crayer was said to be still active in his workshop, making beautiful works in Brussels: for his effigy a portrait by van Dyck was used, today in the Lichtenstein collection. Corneliis Janssens van Ceulen had moved from London to Utrecht but his parents were from Antwerp, while Henry van der Borcht was described as a great antiquarian and art expert, acquainted with the Arundels, like van der Borcht. Little is known of Simon Bosboom: he did not have connections with Antwerp but with Amsterdam. However, he was a close friend of the Quellinus family and had been in England. Thus he was entitled to remain in the Portfolio. The tools of the trade were those most dear to the artists: a palette, for example, or a chisel, piles of sketches, the instruments of thoughtful geometry: intellectual, architectural, physiognomical. Those who had received awards wore them around their necks or held them in their hands: medals, necklaces, letters, as was the case for Rubens (Fig. 5.2), Ian Sadeler (with a chain and medal given to him by the Duke of Bavaria), Aegidius Sadeler (with a double chain and a medal with the image of an emperor), Guido Reni (Fig. 5.14), Gerard Seghers (chain given to him by the King of Spain), Gerbier, Coques, Willeboirts Bosschaert, Honthorst, van Nieulant, Jordaens holding a sheaf of papers, Seghers with a paper with an engraved decoration, Dankerts Corneille de Ry, Hendrick Hondius (a compass) van der Borcht (a drawing with medals), and Leo van Heil with architectural drawings. The only one with a palette was Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen: an ancient emblem in this modern world of specialisms and commissions without frontiers. The book included three Italian artists, i.e. Stefano della Bella, Francesco Padovanino and Guido Reni (Figs. 5.10, 5.12 and 5.14)—to whom we shall return later. The most internationally renowned of the three was certainly Stefano della Bella (1610–1644; Fig. 5.10). He was ranked among the engravers because of his excellent reputation as a draughtsman, his artistic qualities and finally his familiarity of living in the European courts. Stefano della Bella’s reputation leaned mainly on the thousands of engravings and drawings he had left in the collection of the Grand Dukes of Florence and on about the same number in the collection of the court of France. In the thirties of the seventeenth century he had begun to compete with Callot inventing the soft-ground—or vernis mou— technique of engraving, with delicate variations making his works inimitable. During his 1633–1636’s sojourn in Rome, financially supported by his patron Don Lorenzo de Medici, the artist came into contact with some of the numerous Flemish and Dutch painters who were in the city. Therefore, right at this time his reputation spread also in the northern countries. In Rome Stefano also met two print dealers, Israël Henriet and François Langlois, named Chartres, who greatly contributed to his commercial success in the north. When in Paris, between 1640 and 1650, he also traveled in South Holland: during this trip,

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figure 5.14 Jan Meyssens (etching) from Guido Reni, Portrait of Guido Reni, in Jan Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (…), 1649, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Research Library

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which took place in 1645, he apparently met Rembrandt. Given these experiences, della Bella’s inclusion in Jan Meyssens’ book sounds quite natural. Francesco Padovanino (1561–1617; Fig. 5.12) was the second Italian artist to be included in the collection. While the inclusion of Stefano della Bella could be justified because he was an international artist working for the court of France, who came into contact and also worked with Flemish artists, the reason for this Paduan painter to be there is more difficult to explain. Meyssens’ words at the foot of print come to our aid: the painter, a good inventor of stories and skilled portraitist, was there because he did a portrait of Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel and his wife Aletheia. It must have been in Padua that he was contacted by Arundel, during his second stay in Italy, 1612–1613, or during the third, in 1620. Moreover, Arundel was well acquainted with the city, having, in fact, enrolled his two eldest children at the university there. Meyssens, however, confused Francesco with his son Ottavio (1582–1634), since he writes that the painter had previously lived in Rome and was living in Padua. Thus, Meyssens provided another year, 1634, when the younger, i.e. Ottavio, died, which can be used to date this first group of works. Being an astute agent, Le Blon had paid homage to the artist who immortalized, apparently with success, the same Arundel, who served as the British ambassador in Holland between 1632 and 1633, providing Meyssens with a signed drawing (‘F. Padovanino delineavit’), in which the painter drew himself wrapped in an elegant cloak, young and good-looking, devoid of any other connotation. In spite of this, there are many doubts about the identity of the subject: he could also be Ottavio Padovanino who, as stated, was the son and pupil of Francesco Padovanino and indeed had long lived in Rome and then gone back home.14 1.5 The Presence of Guido Reni: The Role of Jan Jacobs We have already mentioned the Portrait of Guido Reni (Fig. 5.14), the third Italian painter included in the portfolio. Reni, probably selected for the series of engravers, was included after 1642, since Meyssens mentioned the year of his death. The painter was remembered for his inventions, known in Flanders only through prints, and also for his etchings. So Meyssens had never seen anything by the Bolognese painter, except the self-portrait, which he owed and engraved, as proven by the inscriptions. Meyssens knew that Reni was a renowned and important artist, and thus deserved to be included.

14  Information on Ottavio is extremely scarce. A work by Francesco Padovanino survived in the church of the Madonna del Carmine, Venice. One may attribute to Ottavio a beautiful drawing representing The Rape of Proserpina (black ink on paper, mm 380 x 270), signed, sold by Christie’s New York, on January 25, 2005, sale no. 1476, no. 47.

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As mentioned before, the inclusion of Stefano della Bella and Francesco Padovanino was basically due to their international profiles and their portraits for the Earl of Arundel; regarding to the former, one may also add his trip to Flanders. Reni’s presence, on the other hand, seems harder to grasp. How could the engraver get his hands on that self-portrait, which today is unfortunately unidentifiable? The link between Flanders and Bologna was provided by a special friend of the painter, the silversmith Jan Jacobs (1575–1650); a friend of Reni’s first teacher, the Flemish painter Denis Calvaert, he was one of the few who had access to the master’s house.15 He had also lived close to Reni, in the same parish of San Matteo delle Pescherie, between 1632 and 1635. Jacobs had often helped the painter by giving him easy work from which, with a minimum amount of time, he could make easy money for both. He often sent art works to Flanders for sale, as was the case with Guercino’s Baptism of Christ (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) in 1623. It is not difficult to imagine, therefore, that in his last decade, when Reni needed the economic assistance of friends, he succumbed to Jacobs’ proposal and sent a self-portrait to Meyssens in Antwerp. Meyssens was preparing a catalog of the most important painters, targeting the international court market, and Reni had to be in it. Moreover, the goldsmith was born in Brussels and there he still had relatives, including his niece Anna Jacobs, his brother’s daughter, who had just married Jan Meyssens and had moved to Antwerp with him.16 Here is the connection, then. Jacobs, who was called ‘il Bolognese’, i.e. ‘the bononian’, by the artist biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia—persuaded Reni to dress just like Rubens, 15  On Guido Reni’s partisans in Bologna and specifically on Jean Jacobs see my “‘Io Guido Reni Bologna’. Profitti e sperperi nella carriera di un pittore ‘un poco straordinario’,” in Vivere d’arte. Carriere e finanze nell’Italia moderna, ed. Morselli (Rome: Carocci, 2007), 71–134. The portrait of Jacobs, mentioned by Oretti, once a property of the Collegio dei Fiamminghi—i.e. the Flemish Boarding School—of Bononia, today on deposit at Bononia’s Pinacoteca Nazionale, may not be ascribed to Reni. I wish here to thank Gianpiero Cammarota for having shown me the painting and Anna Maria Bertoli Barsotti for having shared her researches on Jean Jacobs. 16  On Jan Jacobs and Bononia’s Collegio dei Fiamminghi, see Mario Battistini, Del Collegio Jacobs in Bologna. Da documenti storici di Bruxelles (Imola: Paolo Galeati, 1929). For a closer and detailed analysis of Jacobs’s biography and works, see Anna Maria Bertoli Barsotti, “Jean Jacobs, un orefice fiammingo a Bologna,” in Crocevia e capitale della migrazione artistica: forestieri a Bologna e bolognesi nel mondo (sec. XVII), ed. Sabine Frommel (Bononia: Bononia University Press, 2012), 287–302; Bertoli Barsotti, Joannes Jacobs Bruxellensis 1575–1650, orefice a Bologna, fondatore del collegio dei fiamminghi (Bononia: Bononia University Press, 2014).

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i.e. in the Flemish style, draped with a chain and the famous veil of organza collar, from which he was never parted. A little melancholic, in old age and with a visible wart on his cheek, something never seen before in the portraits known to us, was how he presents himself in the land of Rubens. And so it is by chance that, together with the mysterious Padovanino and the famous Stefano della Bella, he made his appearance in one of the engravings of Cornelis De Bie in 1662 and from there he sailed to England in the English version of 1694. 1.6 Conclusions To reconstruct the history of art and artistic culture in Rome during historical times means also recognizing the continuous and significant contributions acquired from the outside. These contributions were linked, among other things, to the peculiar form of the Papal States government and its consequent relations with other countries, outside and within Europe. This aspect, which is a constant of the cultural and artistic system of the city, became even stronger from the late seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. Depending on the circumstances, these external contributions assumed various forms. Sometimes one had to deal with the export to Rome of paintings, sculptures, applied art or even art books. In this regard the cities of Flanders occupied a remarkable role, thanks to their thriving artistic production and flourishing art markets. In other circumstances the external contributions took the form of men, or of artists, collectors or operators of the art market. These individuals were active in Rome for varying periods of time, from a few weeks up to a maximum of several years, sometimes up to the end of their lives. The impact of the two factors on the Roman ‘art system’ might be measured in the 1750s and 1760s. In that crucial period the city recorded the arrival of a new class of art dealers. Many of them, such as Colin Morison, Gavin Hamilton, James Byres or Thomas Jenkins, came from the United Kingdom. Beside sharing the country of origin and the attitude toward the market, they also had as a common feature a particular attitude to press and advertising. In fact, all four operators—as Paolo Coen demonstrated—were used to manipulating this particular medium, so as to make it functional to their specific business. Of course, Rome had a tradition of its own. At that stage, the city had long since developed its own trajectory in this field. The activities of Cardinal Alessandro Albani’s and Baron Philipp von Stosch’s entourage prove this point. But the four UK operators went further. Arising from their native culture, of which Jan Meyssens’ book—as well as van Dyck’s—was an integral part, they enriched the Roman environment, deepening and tightening even more the

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knot between text, image and promotional intent. The publishing projects of Gavin Hamilton, above all the portfolio entitled Schola Italica Picturae, provide a clear example of this tradition. Thus the four UK operators on the one hand wrote a new chapter in the ‘painful birth of the art book’, to make a direct reference and tribute to a well-known essay by Francis Haskell. On the other hand, they marked a point, which is very important for our purposes: this point has to do with the history of the diffusion of Jan Meyssens’ album and its subsequent reception in Rome, mainly through the Hamilton portfolio.

chapter 6

Moral Subjects and Exempla Virtutis at the Start of the Eighteenth Century: Art and Politics in England, Rome and Venice Valter Curzi Although much research1 has been carried out on Roman art from the last decade of the eighteenth century,2 the first half of the century is still largely ignored. Even today, information on the art situation in Rome is slanted by a quasiautomatic shift in interest to the period that critics have long described as ‘neoclassical’. The issue of periodization is a subject of constant debate among scholars concerned with the last period of the arts in the eighteenth century:3 1  A quantity of research on the topic has been published since my paper was given at the conference organized by Paolo Coen in Palazzo Barberini, on March 2012. Some of it helped to clarify the issues already addressed in this paper, thanks also to materials coming from the archives which were previously unpublished. Special reference is here made to Steven Brindle, Kent and Italy, in William Kent. Designing Georgian Britain, exh. catalog ed. Susan Weber (New Haven & London: Yale University, 2014), 89–109; Seduzione Etrusca. Dai segreti di Holkham Hall alle meraviglie del British Museum, exh. catalog ed. Paolo Bruschetti et al. (Milan: Skira 2014). I have personally returned to the same issues in Rispecchiamenti e ciclicità della storia. La celebrazione degli “uomini illustri” nelle Arti del Settecento tra Italia e Inghilterra, in Exempla Virtutis. Un Pantheon a Ravenna per le Arti, ed. Nadia Ceroni et al. (Bononia: Bononia University Press, 2013): 33–49; Memoria dell’antico nella pittura di storia a Roma tra Seicento e Settecento: un contributo per la revisione storico-critica del Neoclassicismo, in Roma nel Settecento tra letteratura, arte e musica, conf. proceedings ed. Beatrice Alfonzetti, (Rome: Viella, 2017): 255–272. 2  Reference is made here to the numerous monographs dedicated to major painters of the eighteenth century—and more sporadically to sculpture and architecture—and to research gathered in the catalogs of the most significant exhibitions dedicated to the Roman context of the eighteenth century, i.e. Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, exh. catalog ed. Edgar P. Bowron and Jonathan R. Rishel (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000); Il Settecento a Roma, exh. catalog ed. Anna Lo Bianco et al. (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2006); Roma e l’Antico. Realtà e visione nel ‘700, exh. catalog ed. Carolina Brook and Curzi (Milan: Skira, 2010). 3  See in particular Orietta Rossi Pinelli, Le arti nel Settecento europeo (Turin: Einaudi, 2009); Thomas W. Gaehtgens, “Classicisme et néoclassicisme à Rome, Londres et dans les pays germaniques,” in L’Antiquité rêvée. Innovations et resistances au XVIIIe siècle, exh. catalog ed. Guillaume Faroult et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2010): 65–77; Liliana Barroero, Le arti e i Lumi: pittura e scultura da Piranesi a Canova (Turin: Einaudi 2011).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004388154_007

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if, as is now commonly accepted, the term ‘neoclassical’ is nothing more than a semantic ‘straitjacket’,4 as Rosenblum called it, what would be the best way to adhere to the historical truth without running into contradictions? It is first of all necessary, in our view, to interpret the age of Winckelmann not as a break with the past decades but rather as part of a gradual process of refocusing on the value of the classical past as a possible model for contemporary art. In this light, it is important to highlight the substantial continuity in Rome between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, recognizing the centrality not only of the classicizing tradition of Carlo Maratti, as in part has already been done,5 but also and in particular the rediscovery of the classics and Greco-Roman culture by a group of late seventeenth-century art critics headed by Giovan Pietro Bellori.6 This classical inheritance, which, as we shall see, was to acquire international importance, should be understood not as a simple survival of the traditions of the previous century but rather as a projection of something new, responding to different needs, both cultural and social. The early decades of the eighteenth century were fundamental if we wish to create a plausible, authoritative model of the Roman market. In attempting to map out one of the numerous ways of restoring visibility to this period, we have chosen to focus on the theme of exempla virtutis, expanding the framework of reference examined by Robert Rosenblum.7 In this particular work, which today remains exemplary in terms of methodology, Rosenblum places an artistic movement based on classical models and characterized by a moralizing tone in the 1760s, and sees it essentially as a French phenomenon. We, on the other hand, will set this phenomenon back in time and shift our focus to England. We would like to start our reflections by highlighting a consideration that is often cited by scholars of early eighteenth-century English art. In 1715, in An Essay on the Theory of Painting, Jonathan Richardson urges his compatriots to consider that ‘No Nation under heaven so nearly resemble the ancient Greeks,

4  See Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), Italian translation, with a preface by Antonio Pinelli (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1984), 37. The term “straitjacket”, in Italian “camicia di forza”, does not appear in the original 1967 edition. 5  Barroero and Stefano Susinno, “Roma arcadica capitale delle arti del disegno,” Studi di storia dell’Arte 10 (1999): 89–178. 6  For a summary see the essays focussed on the antiquarian research published in vol. 2 of L’idea del Bello. Viaggio per Roma nel Seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori, exh. catalog ed. Evelina Borea, 2 vols. (Rome: De Luca, 2000). 7  Rosenblum, Transformations.

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and Romans as we’.8 He goes on to list the many qualities—courage, honesty, elevated spirit, love of freedom and simplicity—which, in his opinion, the people of England share with the ancient Greeks and Romans. There is evidence that in England, at that time, a process of rediscovery of the ancient world was already under way, a world of which they felt and believed they were the legitimate heirs. During these years, in fact, major exponents of the English cultural scene, engaged personally in the rise of the Whig party, such as Joseph Addison and the philosopher Shaftesbury, promoted the idea of a virtuous parallel between the British nation and the Roman Republic, extolling the British constitutional government as a custodian of a freedom unknown in other countries.9 In Great Britain, therefore, the process of reassessment of the ancient world started before in the rest of Europe, which would soon choose classicism as a common authoritative language for the modernization of taste and morals. The British interest in the rediscovery of the classical roots of Western culture might also partly have been the result of the temptation for those of established Protestant faith to diminish the traditional role of the Catholic Church, holder as it was, on the soil of Rome, of the legacy of a civilization traditionally perceived as the most illustrious and glorious. We should add to this religious aspect an even more significant aspect of a purely political nature: the prolonged tussle between the Tories and the Whigs for the leadership of the British government, which started with the revolution of 1688. By styling themselves as the country’s progressive force, the political advocates of a parliamentary monarchy, and fresh from their victory over the Tories in 1714, the Whigs found themselves engaged, within and without the national boundaries, in an operation of propaganda designed to promote an educated and liberal image of themselves. The need to renew social and cultural customs was soon to be satisfied by an opening to the traditions of European art, and especially an unreserved admiration for Italian art, which was to inspire, as we know, the caustic satire of William Hogarth.10 The latter’s appeal for the arts to be inspired by a more radical nationalism was not 8  Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715), in The Works, 3 vols. (London: Egerton, 1792), I: 94. 9  For the works of Shaftesbury, Addison and Steele see Virgil and his Influence. Bimillennial Studies, ed. Charles Martindale, (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1984); Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 10  A particular reference is made here to Hogarth’s well-known The Battle of the Pictures, engraved in 1745. For a critical meditation of the connections between taste and the art market in mid-eighteenth-century Great Britain see in particular Ilaria Bignamini, “Osservazioni sulle istituzioni, il pubblico e il mercato delle arti in Inghilterra”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 53 (1990): 177–197.

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enough, though, to defeat the sophisticated rhetoric of images that revolved around a system of values and a figurative repertoire derived from GrecoRoman literature and history. While it is true that in the early eighteenth century the English aristocracy was familiar with Virgil, Homer, Ovid, Livy and Plutarch, thanks to the proliferation of English editions in the previous century, it was the widespread practise of the Grand Tour that led to an admiration for antiquity.11 In Rome, in particular, the ‘bookish’ knowledge of travelers educated in the classics would be transformed, in most cases, into an emotional experience as well as an intellectual adventure, mostly satisfied by the systematic selection, collection and decoding of the rich repertoire of images taken from the city’s Greco-Roman heritage. In previous studies I have underlined the importance of the collections of classical art drawings made by British travelers to the Papal capital in the second decade of the century, which constituted the first true case of a sort of Roman model being exported beyond the confines of Italy.12 The subjects of reliefs and wall paintings, as well as ancient statues, were copied by a large number of talented artists, the most outstanding of whom belonged to the circle that revolved around the Roman artist, Francesco Fernandi, detto l’Imperiali, (1679–1740) one the most important being Francesco Bartoli (1635–1700), son of the famous engraver Pietro Santi. In the case of l’Imperiali, who was an important figure for the British Grand Tourists, a major role in establishing contacts with the British was played by Cardinal Giuseppe Renato Imperiali, close to the Catholic Stuarts who had lived in exile in Rome since 1719.13 Bartoli’s excellent credentials derived directly from his father’s fame. His major works, such as Admiranda Romanarum antiquitatum or Antichi sepolcri, and large number of

11  On the eighteenth-century fortunes in England of the classical culture see Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 12  Curzi, “La tradizione del classico come legittimazione culturale e politica: modelli della pittura romana antica in Inghilterra e in Russia,” in Roma e l’Antico, 197–206; Curzi, “Copiare l’antico nella Roma del Settecento tra pratica artistica e speculazione intellettuale,” in Le due Muse. Scritti d’arte, collezionismo e letteratura in onore di Ranieri Varese, ed. Francesca Cappelletti et al. (Ancona: Il lavoro editoriale, 2012), 156–163; Seduzione etrusca. 13  Edward T. Corp, “The Stuart Court and the Patronage of Portrait-Painters in Rome 1717– 1757,” in Roma Britannica. Art Patronage and Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-century Rome, ed. David R. Marshall et al. (London: The British School at Rome, 2011), 39–53.

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engravings enjoyed wide circulation in England, providing a repertoire of images that was essential for the knowledge of the ancient world.14 In many cases it is easy to imagine how the possession of these works, which as early as the 1720s had become an obligatory point of reference for architects and decorators,15 could have led to a desire to expand this gallery of images with new drawings commissioned directly in Rome. This practise benefited from the archaeological excavations taking place in Rome in the early decades of the century, mostly of burial chambers and niches, with significant findings of frescoed rooms from Republican and Imperial periods, leading to an increase in the knowledge of the rites and customs of ancient Rome and Greece. First and foremost these drawings constituted a cognitive repository of the classical world that could illustrate the works of classical ancient authors. These were sought by the British along the routes of the Grand Tour, to be handed to printers for the publication of new editions.16 It is worth underlining the new status of the image in the eighteenth century, perceived as an indispensable instrument of study and verification, a perception shared by the most enlightened cultural circles of the times;17 we may mention here the publication in 1719 of the five volumes of L’Antiquité expliquée et representée en figures, containing 1355 engravings by Bernard de Montfaucon, not forgetting, though, that the same methodological approach, evident in the title of the French scholar’s work, had already been adopted in 1697 by Francesco Bianchini in his La istoria universale provata con momumenti, e figurata con simboli degli antichi.18

14  Pietro Santi Bartoli, Admiranda romanarum antiquitatum ac veteris sculpturae vestigia anaglyphico opere elaborata … (Rome: De Rubeis, 1693); Santi Bartoli, Gli antichi sepolcri o vero mausolei romani et etruschi trovati a Roma … (Rome: A. De Rossi, 1698). 15  Adriano Aymonino, “Syon House e la fortuna delle fonti antiquarie nella decorazione inglese del Settecento,” in Roma e l’Antico, 207–212. 16  It is significant from this point of view that recent research on Thomas Coke identified one of Coke’s main scopes for collecting drawings from ancient Rome and Florence during the Grand Tour in the project of publishing the complete works of Titus Livius, fully illustrated: see Suzanne Reynolds, “Thomas Coke e la storiografia romana: le virtù repubblicane e il giovane virtuoso,” in Seduzione etrusca, 79–89. 17  Marcello Barbanera, “Dal testo all’immagine: autopsia delle antichità nella cultura antiquaria del Settecento,” in Roma e l’Antico, 33–38; Élisabeth Décultot, “Genèse d’une histoire de l’art par les images. Les recueils d’antiquités et la naissance du discours historique sur l’art, 1600–1800,” in Musées de papier. L’Antiquité en livres 1600–1800, exh. catalog ed. Décultot, with the collaboration of Gabriele Bickendorf and Valentin Kockel (Paris: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2010), 24–35. 18  See Francesco Bianchini (1662–1729) und die europäische gelehrte Welt um 1700, ed. Valentin Koklel et al. (Berlin: Akademische Verlag, 2005).

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Thomas Coke, Richard Topham, Lord Burlington, Richard Mead, who were all members of the Whig party and fellow travelers to Rome, were all involved in commissioning copies of antiquity from numerous artists that formed a much larger group than previously documented, if the Topham collection at Eton is anything to go by.19 These were young artists whose apprenticeship in antiquity appears to have been consolidated by the highest academic standards, as attested to by the results of the Concorso Clementino.20 The copies made by these young artists, such as Giovanni Domenico Campiglia and Pompeo Batoni, went on to have brilliant careers, satisfied a demand for antiquity which could not be met by the still scarce supply of excavated objects. Thus people had to make do with paper museums, collections in which it was considered a mark of the highest prestige to acquire, from Francesco Bartoli, the watercolour drawings of his father Pietro Santi, in many cases made into engravings in the abovementioned texts. To these seventeenth-century drawings were added examples by Francesco himself, documenting recently discovered ancient paintings. Bartoli tried to satisfy the continuous demand of British buyers in a rather carefree manner, judging from the comments of his biographer Nicola Pio: ‘[Bartoli] copies many ancient things from prints, which he colors, giving them different names at a whim to sell to foreigners, saying they were found in the ancient ruins of Rome’.21 In addition to drawn copies and purchases of Greco-Roman antiquities, which were still hard to come by in the city, paintings on subjects of Roman history were a natural way to integrate a context which, as we have already mentioned, was to be taken as a model of contemporary mores. Demand for paintings of this kind must have been far more widespread than has been documented to date and must have continued at least until 19  Hugh Macandrew, “A group of Batoni drawings at Eton College, and some eighteenthcentury Italian copysts of classical sculpture,” Master Drawings 16 (1978): 131–150; Louise M. Connor Bulmann, “The Florentine draughtsmen in Richard Thopam’s paper museum,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofia 4, 7 (2002): 343– 357; Connor Bulmann, “The Topham Collection of Drawings in Eton College Library,” in 300 Jahre—Thesaurus Brandenburgicus. Archäologie, Antikensammlungen und antikisierende Residenzausstattungen im Barock, ed. Henning Wrede and Max Kunze (Munich: Biering & Brinkmann, 2006), 325–338. 20  An analysis of the eighteenth century’s operation of the Accademia di San Luca is given in Aequa Potestas. Le arti in gara a Roma nel Settecento, exh. catalog ed. Angela Cipriani (Rome: De Luca, 2000). 21  Quoted by Giulia Fusconi, “Francesco Bartoli,” in Le meraviglie di Roma antica e moderna. Vedute, ricostruzioni, progetti nelle raccolte della Biblioteca di Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte, exh. catalog ed. Maria Cristina Misiti and Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò (Turin: Daniele Piazza, 2010), 57.

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figure 6.1 Francesco Fernandi called Imperiali and Agostino Masucci, Volumnia and Veturia before Coriolanus, Ariccia, Palazzo Chigi, Museo del Barocco, Lemme Collection

the middle of the century, as evidenced both by the pair of paintings commissioned by Sir Gregory Page from l’Imperiali depicting Hector and Andromache and Volumnia before Coriolanus (Fig. 6.1), and by the pair of landscapes with Cincinnatus and The Departure of Attilius Regulus, requested by Ralph Howard from the well—known English painter, Richard Wilson, during his stay in Rome.22 22  The first two pieces were painted in c. 1740 for Page’s country house, Blackheart Park. Yet in the Lemme collection, Rome, they are now in Palazzo Chigi, Ariccia: see Fiammetta Fiammetta’s Luly Lemme’s entries in Il Seicento e il Settecento romano nella Collezione Lemme, exh. catalog (Rome: De Luca, 1998), 134–138; Francesco Petrucci, Francesco

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One of the first commissions of this kind must have been the series of six exempla virtutis requested in Rome, between 1714 and 1717, by the first Earl of Leicester, Thomas Coke (1697–1759), which we now know thanks to Louisa Connor Bulman, after first being pointed out by John Ingamells.23 In tracing the popularity of these subjects, the Coke series is important in two ways: firstly, in consideration of the emulative spirit shared by the collections of these early lovers of the classical world; secondly, as positive proof of an early interest to codify the Grand Tour through patronage as a rite of passage into adulthood with the ensuing political and social responsibilities. It is quite remarkable, as Suzanne Reynolds recently pointed out, that Coke appeared in the majority of the paintings he commissioned: in this way he made clear his desire to become the protagonist of a story so illustrious and influential as to become a model for his contemporaries. Here are the subjects of Coke’s Roman commission: Tarquinius and Lucretia, by Andrea Procaccini, to whom we owe Numa Pompilius delivering the laws to Rome; Aeneas in the Elysian Fields by Sebastiano Conca; Cincinnatus recalled by the Roman Senate to take on the office of dictator by Luigi Garzi; The continence of Scipio by Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari and Masinissa and Sophonisba by Tommaso Chiari. Eventually, Pietro da Cortona’s Coriolanus in the Volscian camp would be added to the series; some decades later it would figure next to the Tarquinius and Lucretia and Chiari’s canvas in the main hall of Holkham, the country house built between 1734 and 1764 in Norfolk and one of Britain’s most important neo-Palladian buildings.24 It was no coincidence that the series was commissioned in 1714, the same year as the Whigs’ political victory. The choice of Tarquinius and Lucretia, as one of the very first themes to be represented on canvas, had a special meaning in the context of Livy’s history of Rome. According to Livy, the rape of Lucretia by the son of the king Tarquinius the Proud led to the birth of the Roman republic in 509 BC, after the Roman people had risen in revolt, horrified by such a tremendous crime. After Conca’s depiction of Aeneas, who in the Elysian fields learns from the words of his father that he would found a city that was to have Fernando, detto “L’Imperiali” (Milano 1679- Roma, 1740) (Rome: De Luca, 2017). The two other pieces, now in Brinsley Ford’s collection, London, were originally part of a group of seven, painted in 1752: see Silvia Blasio’s biographical entry on Wilson in La pittura di paesaggio in Italia. Il Settecento, ed. Anna Ottani Cavina and Emilia Calbi (Milan: Electa, 2005), 236. 23  See the entry on Thomas Coke in John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy 1701–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 225–226; Connor Bulman, “Moral education on the Grand Tour: Thomas Coke and his contemporaries in Rome and in Florence,” Apollo 157 (2003): 27–34. 24  Elizabeth Angelicoussis, The Holkham collection of classical sculpture (Mainz am Rhein: von Zabern, 2001).

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a glorious future,25 there followed episodes intended to celebrate those who devoted themselves to the Republic’s good: the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, a wise man devoted to science and philosophy, the first promulgator of a system of law and religious reforms that led to the establishment of lasting civil harmony; Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who during a period of great difficulty for the republic was temporarily appointed dictator by the Senate, a position which he gave up as soon as he had defeated the Equi, returning to his life as a farmer; and Publius Cornelius Scipio, as depicted in Nicolas Poussin’s famous painting, which significantly became part of Walpole’s collection in 1741, who became the model of magnanimity for his decision to return a young woman of rare beauty to her family, after she had been taken prisoner in the capture of Carthage. Examples of female virtues were not missing either, thanks to Pietro da Cortona’s and Tommaso Chiari’s paintings: this is true for Veturia, the Roman lady who convinced her son Coriolanus, then the head of the Volsci, to give up the project of besieging Rome, in the name of love for their own country; and for Sophonisba, who preferred to commit suicide rather than to become the prey of a stranger’s victory. Coke’s idea of commissioning works illustrating the history of Rome to glorify the political stance of a new class of men of high ethical and moral values was paralleled in the developments taking place in England in the arts. Under the protection of the Whigs, a number of Venetian painters fled to England, the first being Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini and Sebastiano Ricci.26 Pellegrini arrived in England in 1708 with the Earl of Manchester, who placed him at the center of the artistic activities promoted by the Kit-Cat Club, a major force in the social and cultural life of the time, whose members belonged to the landed gentry. In the same environment we find Sebastiano Ricci, who had arrived in London in 1711, encouraged by his nephew Marco who had already 25  The painting had great success: six versions of it are currently known, including the one at the Uffizi, Florence; see Angela Negro’s entry in Il Settecento a Roma, 208–209. 26  George Knox, “Antonio Pellegrini and Marco Ricci at Burlinghton House and Narford Hall,” The Burlington Magazine 130 (1988): 846–853; Jeffery Daniels, “Sebastiano Ricci in England,” in Atti del Congresso internazionale di studi su Sebastiano Ricci e il suo tempo, ed. Anna Serra (Milan: Electa, 1975), 68–82; Knox, “Sebastiano Ricci at Burlington House: a Venetian decoration ‘alla Romana’,” The Burlington Magazine 127 (1985): 601–609; Knox, “Pellegrini in Inghilterra,” in Antonio Pellegrini. Il maestro del Rococò alle corti d’Europa, exh. catalog ed. Alessandro Bettagno (Venice: Marsilio, 1998), 39–61; Xavier F. Salomon, “Sebastiano Ricci e la decorazione della cappella del Royal Hospital di Chelsea,” in Sebastiano Ricci 1659–1734, ed. Giuseppe Pavanello (Verona: Scripta, 2012), 295–307. Finally, see Sergio Marinelli, “La Venezia degli inglesi, l’Inghilterra dei veneziani,” in Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner. Pittura inglese verso la modernità, exh. catalog ed. Brook and Curzi (Milan: Skira, 2014), 100–107.

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been in England for several years. Once the commission of the decoration of Saint Paul’s dome vanished—marking the first, true defeat of Venetian painters in England—Ricci collaborated with Pellegrini between 1709 and 1715 on the decoration of Burlington House, painting a mythological cycle celebrating, to a large extent, the talents of the hostess, Countess Juliana, Lord Burlington’s widow. The subjects of the paintings were inspired by the books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose popularity in England is attested to by the printing of the complete edition in 1717 by Jacob Tonson, after the publication of several partial translations. A procession of characters dear to mythological literature, such as Europa, Diana, Galatea, Arianna, Narcissus, came to life on the walls of the rooms of the grand staircase and reception hall of the London residence, painted in festive colors and of great decorative effect. Although the cycle was didactic in intention, it did not convey a sense of the sacred but rather one of grace, elegance and beauty. In contrast to this splendid result, Pellegrini’s attempt to adapt to a more sober style in the Triumph of Caesar painted around 1713 on the walls of Kimbolton’s grand staircase was less successful (Fig. 6.2). The Roman subject commissioned from Pellegrini seems to indicate, though, an emerging awareness among British patrons of the depiction of the lessons of history, and that Roman history in particular required something other than Venetian elegance. It is clear from the versions of the Continence of Scipio in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the latter from the Earl of Derby’s collection at Knowsley, which were painted during Pellegrini’s last period in England, his stay coming to an abrupt end in 1713, that the painter’s endeavors in the themes of Roman history clearly showed his incapacity to adopt a different approach from his typically light and elegant pictorial style and imaginative tone. This incapacity was to become of some account, considering the rapidity with which an encyclopaedic knowledge of Roman history spread among the Grand Tourists, fueled by a passion, as we said, for copying works of antiquity. A cultural awareness quickly brought about a need for contemporary artists to develop a new figurative language and a more measured style, to which Roman painters in direct contact with antiquity could more easily adapt, producing very different results from the Venetians. Coke’s commission is indicative of this and his choice was shared by other British travelers in Rome. In 1716, when Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari, one of Maratta’s most talented pupils, famous for his calm classical style, painted the Continence of Scipio for Coke, he was also commissioned by Richard Boyle, Lord Burlington, to paint scenes of Roman history—which are now missing. This is not all. Yet in February 1716 Anthony Grey, Earl of Harrold, then in Rome for his Grand Tour, visited Chiari’s studio, saw Lord Burlington’s paintings and decided

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figure 6.2 Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, The Triumph of Caesar, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, Kimbolton Castle

to order a pair for himself: they had to be of the same size as Lord Burlington’s, i.e. five feet wide. Regarding the subject, inspired by the myth of Aeneas and Dido, Harrold sought the advice of the famous antiquarian Francesco Ficoroni to guarantee the most scrupulous historical accuracy in clothing and settings.27 27  Ingamells, A Dictionary, 160–161 on Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington and Earl of Cork, 469–470 on Anthony de Grey, Earl of Harrold.

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figure 6.3 Agostino Masucci, The Fight between the Horatii and the Curiatii, Rome, Accademia di San Luca

He was to be portrayed as a Roman general in his portrait statue sculpted in 1726 by Dowyer for the family tomb in Flitton Church, Bedfordshire. It is quite interesting to note that from 1704 to 1711 the choice of subject for the first and second classes of the painting section of the Concorso Clementino, which Chiari long served as a member of the jury, was always a theme of Roman history taken from Livy, Plutarch or Valerius Maximus, from whose works often lengthy excerpts were included in the notices of competition as guidelines for the young artists. The competitions mostly concerned subjects from the early centuries of Roman history and promoted, among artists as well as among potential clients, not only such well-known subjects as the Rape of the Sabines or the Fight between the Horatii and the Curiatii (Fig. 6.3), but also the exploits of less well-known figures that had rarely featured in paintings, like Mettius Fufetius, or Ancus Marcius, Servius Tullius, Manius Curius Dentatus, Furius Camillus.28 In the 1711 competition, the subject chosen for the painting and sculpture sections was Furius Camillus and the master of Faleri. Among the twenty-one 28  I disegni di figura nell’Archivio Storico dell’Accademia di San Luca, II, ed. Cipriani et al. (Rome: Quasar, 1989), 41–160. For an overview of the success of these historical figures in painting, see Il mito di Roma tra arte e storia, ed. Curzi (Rome: Viviani, 2007).

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competitors taking part in the painting competition as many as six were foreigners: two Germans, two Frenchmen—one of them was Guy-Louis Vernansal II (Fig. 6.4)—the Irishman Henry Trench and the Englishman William Kent.29 The last two had been living in Rome for several years, both training under Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari. In 1711 Trench, who was not new to the Capitoline competition, won the second prize in the first class; Kent, on the other hand, had to wait until the 1713 competition to win the second prize in the second painting class.30 From Kent’s stay in Rome we also have a portrait, in the British government collections, of William Aikman, in which the youth appears with a pencil holder in his hand and a cast of a female head, representing the artistic skills acquired by copying ancient originals, a practise institutionalized precisely within the context of the Concorso Clementino.31 It is therefore not surprising to find both Kent and Trench copying works of art for Coke.32 Furthermore, Kent remained at the service of the Earl of Leicester even after his return to England, working as an agent in the purchase of Roman antiquities for what would, over time, become one of the most important British collections of Greek and Roman sculpture. Among the items sent by Kent from Rome were the busts of Lucius Antonius, Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius,33 indicative of the process of identification with famous men of the past, soon to 29  I l mito di Roma, 141–145. “1711: Prima Classe: Il fatto di Furio Camillo che, avendo assediata Faliria, condannò il famoso Pedagogo alla pubblica ignominia di essere sferzato nudo dà suoi medesimi scolari che egli aveva a tradimento condotto al campo ad effetto di farveli arrestare prigionieri e di astringere per la loro liberazione i Falisci a cedere allo stesso Furio la città assediata, conforme vien raccontato da Livio nel libro quinto della prima Deca.” 30  I disegni di figura, 151. Trench had already won the second painting class in 1706 with a drawing representing The Killing of Tarpea; the previous year he had been awarded the third class, having competed with copies made from antique statues. Despite these Roman successes, his career never took off. See Michael Wilson, William Kent. Architect, Designer, Painter, Gardner, 1685–1748 (London et al.: Hemley, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 59. 31  Both Aikman and Kent are documented in Rome during the summer of 1710 and probably took part in John Talmann’s travel to Naples; see Ingamells, A Dictionary, 11. 32  On the two artists, see Ingamells, A Dictionary, 569–571, 950–952. Previous critics inexplicably minimized the role of Rome’s art context in Kent’s formation, citing summarily his apprenticeship in Benedetto Luti’s and Giuseppe Chiari’s workshops. Only recently has John Dixon Hunt in his contribution on Kent as a garden designer given due importance to his experience in Rome as a painter. Dixon Hunt cites a letter from Kent, dated November 1714, where the artist declares his apprenticeship with Chiari. See Wilson, William Kent, at 23–38; Margaret Jourdain, The Work of William Kent. Artist, painter, designer and landscape gardener (London and New York: Country Life and Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948); Dixon Hunt, William Kent. Landscape garden designer (London: A. Zwemmer Limited, 1987), 10. 33  See the entries in Angelicoussis, The Holkham collection.

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figure 6.4 Guy-Louis Vernansal II, Furius Camillus condemning the pedagogue of Falerii, Rome, Accademia di San Luca

be translated into the fashion for ancient style portraits, which, more than elsewhere, became remarkably popular in England, and of which John Michael Rysbrack is recognized by critics as one of the principal exponents.34 In the popularization of the half-length portrait without a wig, clothed in the ancient paludamentum or toga, in accordance with the imperial portrait models of the philosopher, orator and politician, we cannot exclude the direct contribution of Kent himself, who returned to England in 1718 after a long stay in Rome to become a major player in the spread of Neo-Palladianism, in close collaboration with Richard Boyle. It is significant that he was the interior designer for Houghton Hall, the new country home of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, the construction of which

34  Scherf, “Le buste à l’antique 1720–1730,” in L’Antiquité rêvée, 105–113; Malcom Baker, “Commemoration ‘in a more durable and grave manner’. Portrait busts for the British in early eighteenth-century Rome,” in Roma Britannica, 273–283. Both scholars record the portrait bust of Daniel Finch, executed around 1723 by Rysbrack, as one of the earliest examples in England of “all’antica” portraits. Since Daniel Finch was strictly connected to the Tories, one wonders that there was a competition in holding the record in the dissemination of an original image.

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was started in 1720, coinciding with his amazing political rise.35 Another country house in the Neo-Palladian style, its Stone Hall was completed with all its furnishings in about 1730, with contributions from Colen Campbell, the author of Vitruvius Britannicus. It is one of the earliest eighteenth-century examples in Europe of a residence in the classical style. The neo-sixteenth century architecture, in which models of Roman classicism are mediated by the solutions of the most famous architects of the sixteenth century, is accompanied by a series of bronze copies of famous Roman sculptures and portrait busts of illustrious men and women of the past.36 The walls were lined with shelves full of busts, purchased in Rome, of Trajan, Hadrian, Commodus, Septimius Severus and his wife Julia Domna, Marcus Aurelius and his wife Faustina.37 To complete the gallery, in the middle of the back wall on a mantelpiece supported by two herms and decorated with a bas-relief depicting a Sacrifice, we have a portrait bust of Walpole himself, made between 1726 and 1730 by Rysbrack. The British politician had himself portrayed in the style of the Roman emperors of the second and third centuries. AD, the lorica being replaced by the paludamentum decorated with the Star of the Order of the Bath, a knightly order keenly supported by Walpole himself in 1725. Coming to the conclusion, one should keep in mind, still making reference to the success of the exemplum virtutis as a mean of promoting and celebrating individual patrons or social groups, that it was also during those very years that the famous series of Owen McSwiny’s allegorical tombs were painted as well. The series, conceived to celebrate the protagonists of the 1688 Glorious Revolution and some of the most illustrious representatives of the Whig party yet deceased, was destined for the house of Lord Richmond, a Whig member

35  A  Capital Collection. Houghton Hall and The Hermitage, ed. Larisa Dukelskaya and Andrew Moore (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002). 36  The interior furnishing may be reconstructed by the Aedes Walpolianae of 1735: following the example of Aedes Barberini to Quirinalem, which date back to 1642, this publication accurately describes the artworks distributed in the apartments. For the reprint of the 1752 second edition of the English inventory see A Capital Collection. The bronzes cited here—including François Girardon’s copy from the Laocoon and copies from the Borghese and Medici Vases, still at their place—were purchased by Robert Walpole’s son between 1722 and 1723 in Paris, where he sojourned during his Grand Tour. As a novelty in the social context of the time, one should remark on the idea of a gallery of male and female exempla: there was a strict parallel between the portrait busts and medallions of Walpole and his son and their respective wives, decorating the ceiling of the Hall. 37  For the identity of the busts, still in their place and sometimes denied in some recent studies, one must refer to the Aedes Walpolianae.

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as well.38 Our purpose in writing this is to show how this cycle, now dispersed in a number of different museums, may be interpreted as more evidence of the gradual shift of British patronage from other contexts toward the Roman context. McSwiny’s series, started in 1722 through commissions to some of the best painters of the schools of Venice and Bononia, came to an end in 1729 with a canvas representing an Allegorical Tomb of George I, by Francesco Fernandi, nicknamed l’Imperiali. Imperiali, a protagonist of the British Grand Tour in Rome for those interested in documenting the antique, as mentioned previously, painted the figures, while the Valeriani brothers executed the painted architecture, clearly derived from classical prototypes. Now, while the first examples of the series were pervaded by a quite generic and fantastic approach to the antique, Valeriani’s work shows a true philologic spirit. Historical truth, rather than imagination and fantasy, is the only mean to legitimate the needs of a world which was quickly shifting to the values given by classics.

38  See the entries in Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner, 259–260; Curzi, “Rispecchiamenti e ciclicità della storia. La celebrazione degli ‘Uomini illustri’ nelle Arti del Settecento tra Italia e Inghilterra,” in Exempla Virtutis. Un Pantheon a Ravenna per la Arti, ed. Nadia Ceroni, Alberta Fabbri and Claudio Spadoni (Bononia: Bononia University Press, 2014), 33–49.

chapter 7

Sir Joshua Reynolds in Rome, 1750–1752: The Debut of an Artist, an Art Collector or an Art Dealer? Giovanna Perini Folesani Reynolds spent most of his Italian stay in Rome, living there continually from March 1750 to the beginning of May 1752. His lodgings varied within a small area, alternating between a room above the Caffè degli Inglesi opposite the Spanish Steps and one in a well-known residence for artists in Via Gregoriana, located in one of the buildings now hosting the Bibliotheca Hertziana. Thus it is hardly surprising that all his extant sketchbooks but one contain records (either graphic or verbal) of art works visible in Rome, both ancient and, prevailingly, modern.1 In any case, it is surprising that such records are much fewer than one would expect, considering the time he devoted to the study of art in that city. Although all sketchbooks contain notes and drawings after Roman art works, dispersed amidst studies after Venetian, Tuscan, Bolognese or Neapolitan paintings and sculptures, only two of them are almost entirely dedicated to Rome, namely the sketchbook in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, and the one recently bought by the Plymouth City Museum to honor one of her most distinguished native citizens.2 In particular, the Plymouth City Museum sketchbook contains several drawings after works (mostly pictures) in private Roman collections, especially the Barberini, Borghese and Colonna ones.3 It has been generally assumed that Reynolds’s often hasty sketches after Italian art works were conceived as visual 1  On Reynolds in Italy, see my Sir Joshua Reynolds in Italia, 1750–1752: Passaggio in Toscana— Il taccuino 201 a 10 del British Museum (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2012), with reference to earlier literature. Specifically on his Roman stay, on the art works he studied and on the collections he visited, see my “Reynolds a Roma,” in Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner. Pittura inglese verso la modernità, exh. catalog ed. Carolina Brook and Valter Curzi (Milan: Skira, 2014), 109–115, published in Italian and English. 2  On Reynolds’s sketchbooks, see note 1, as well as my “I taccuini di Sir Joshua Reynolds: storia, identificazione, circolazione, fortuna,” in Souvenir d’Italie—Il viaggio in Italia nelle memorie scritte e figurative tra il XVI secolo e l’età contemporanea, ed. Maurizia Migliorini et al. (Genoa: De Ferrari, 2008), 395–431. The abbreviations used to identify them in this essay are the same used in the literature above, save for PCM (Plymouth City Museum), which stands for former CG/61 (Copland-Griffiths n. 61). 3  Perini Folesani, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 14.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004388154_008

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records of somehow original inventive, compositional or decorative solutions to be used later as prompts in his original art production. This is indeed true for most drawings. In fact compositions like Madonnas and Child (with or without young St John) or figures of Charity could easily be adapted to portraits of mothers with children. This utilitarian interpretative approach, however, is not always altogether satisfactory. In the Plymouth City Museum there are sketches which do not seem to fit this pattern: e.g. those after The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine by Girolamo da Treviso (‘An Ignoto’ for Reynolds; Fig. 7.1),4 or the carraccesque Rebeccah and Eleazer at the Well (Fig. 7.2), which bears inventory attributions originally to Agostino, then Ludovico Carracci, and is now given alternatively to either Lanfranco, Garbieri, or is stated to be a copy after Girolamo Cavedoni;5 or an anonymous Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine related to Scarsellino.6 These three pictures have at least three features in common: i) they are not easy to reuse in portrait painting (with the possible exception of the Scarsellino); ii) they are currently in England (the former two at Burghley House, the country mansion of the Earls, later Marquis, of Exeter) or were there in the past (the last one is now in a private collection in Italy, but at the beginning of the last century it was part of the Mond collection in London); iii) finally they all come from Rome, more precisely from the Barberini Collection. This is certain for the former two, and is plausible for the Scarsellino, according to the somewhat cryptic entry in the 1671 inventory of Cardinal Antonio Barberini, concerning a picture on copper whose companion piece was St Francis kneeling in prayer: ‘Spolatio [sic, instead of Sposalitio] di Santa Caterina’.7 In the same sketchbook Reynolds also studied other pictures at the time in the Barberini collection, like the Madonna breastfeeding her Child now at the Louvre (from a British Collection; Figs. 7.3 and 7.4), whose attribution has meanwhile been downgraded from Leonardo da Vinci to Andrea Solario. This 4  See PCM, fol. 43r and Philip Pouncey, “Aggiunte a Girolamo da Treviso,” Arte Antica e Moderna 4 (1961): 209–210 and Fig. 85b. 5  Cf. PCM, fol. 47r. See Emilio Negro, “Giovanni Lanfranco,” in La Scuola dei Carracci: i seguaci di Annibale e Agostino, ed. Negro et al. (Modena: Artioli, 1995), 171–216 at 173–174, Fig. 218; Alessandro Brogi, “Bolognesi di primo Seicento,” Nuovi Studi 3 (1998): 127–137. 6  Cf. PCM, fol. 52r and Maria Angela Novelli, Scarsellino (Milan: Skira, 2008), 201 and 317, no. 177. 7  To identify these three works, see the final index in Marilyn Aromberg Lavin, SeventeenthCentury Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 475, 520 and 623. The latter quotation refers to Taddeo Barberini’s inventory: this identification is likely, but on its Barberini provenance, see specifically note 4 above. The first quotation refers to Rebecca at the Well, as Rachele con il servitore di Abramo, by Agostino Carracci: which is the original attribution at Burghley House. The second quotation makes reference to a painting by Scarsellino.

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figure 7.1 Girolamo Pennacchi called Girolamo da Treviso, The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House

figure 7.2 After Girolamo Cavedoni (?), Rebeccah and Eleazar at the Well, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House

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figure 7.3 Andrea Solario, Madonna breastfeeding her Child, Paris, Louvre

picture had previously caught the eye of Peter Paul Rubens, who had reused it, obviously trusting its original attribution.8 In a different sketchbook, the 8  Cf. PCM, fol. 46r and David Alan Brown, Andrea Solario (Milan: Electa, 1987), 189–190, 214– 216, entry no. 52 and figs. on 189 e 192. This sketch has been published in Michael Burrell, “Reynolds’s Mona Lisa,” Apollo 164 (2006): 64–71 at 66, Fig. 3. As for Rubens’s acquaintance with this painting, see Michael Jaffé, Rubens. Catalogo completo (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989), 200–201, entry and Fig. no. 280, now in Potsdam: Jaffé mentions a copy of this picture by Rubens in the Corsini Collection in Rome. Another one (or possibly the same?) is at the

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figure 7.4 Joshua Reynolds from Andrea Solario, Madonna breastfeeding her Child, Plymouth, City Museum and Art Gallery

one at the Pierpont Morgan Library, Reynolds sketched another Barberini picture then ascribed to Leonardo, Modesty and Vanity (also known as Martha and Magdalen), often reproduced in later eighteenth-century prints and highly praised by Lanzi. Its present whereabouts are unknown (according to the entry about its black and white reproduction in the Fototeca Zeri), although a version with important variations concerning the figure of the Magdalen is in San Diego.9 The presence of this group of Barberini paintings in English collections during the nineteenth century appears to prove that, not surprisingly, Reynolds shared with his fellow nationals a penchant and taste for less obvious or famous Italian art works. It may also raise the suspicion that he may have been somehow involved, directly or indirectly, in their trade and sale to British collectors. Personally I believe that if this was ever the case, it may have happened only much later in his career, when he was a successful painter in London and an acknowledged authority in the British art world and beyond. It is a fact that his sketchbooks were in the hands of his studio assistants and relatives,10 and perhaps they had some circulation also amidst a narrow circle of patrons and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica: see Lorenza Mochi Onori and Rossella Vodret, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica. Palazzo Barberini. I dipinti. Catalogo sistematico (Rome: L”Erma’ di Bretschneider, 2008), 349, inv. no. 900, with a Torlonia provenance. 9  Cf. PML, fol. 38r [recte 54v] and Leonardo e l’incisione. Stampe derivate da Leonardo e Bramante dal XV al XIX secolo, ed. Clelia Alberici, with entries by Mariateresa Chirico De Biasi (Milan: Electa, 1984), 161–162, entries nos. 242–244 (for late eighteenth-century prints). See also Luigi Lanzi, Storia Pittorica della Italia, 3 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1968– 1974), I, 1968, 100. 10  See Perini Folesani, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 16–18.

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friends, especially in his later years, when his less pressing commitments as a portrait painter left him more time to cultivate his social relations and devote time to art collecting. Even well after his death, in the nineteenth century, his sketchbooks in the possession of his family were perused and leafed through by artists like Beechey and Haydon.11 I find it most unlikely, however, that Reynolds was ever personally and directly involved in the sale of the Barberini paintings as an agent, middleman or dealer. Their sale happened at much later dates, when he had long been back home, and it obviously entailed a breach or circumvention of the fideicommissum or trust protecting them (as was often the case with so many Italian paintings sold at the time and currently still abroad or lost).12 I think rather that he must have been a sort of scout, a path-finder, who—it little matters whether deliberately, by chance or incidentally—was able to raise and direct the interest of wealthy Britons (and their agents) towards less obvious works of art available in Italy, and especially in Rome. In other words I believe that Reynolds was as good at reforming insular taste in matters of contemporary art as he was at guiding the insatiable appetite of his fellow nationals for Continental Renaissance and Baroque works of art (the so-called Old Masters), pointing to new, less obvious targets, by means of private conversations as much as by his example as an artist or his official discourses at the Royal Academy. Suffice it to mention here his lucky and uncompromising promotion of Ludovico Carracci as preferable to Annibale, or his unconventional interest in the art of Seicento Florence, which is so apparent in his collection and in his artistic experiments, as I have shown elsewhere.13 In any case at no point in time and space is there evidence that he was ever directly involved in the art trade, other than as a collector. Art collecting was as much a professional as a social duty to him. Because of this he was inclined to exchange art works with his patrons and friends, even when the advantage was merely social rather than artistic. A case in point is his offer 11  Perini Folesani, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 18 on Haydon and 304 on Beechey. On Haydon see also, more specifically, Perini, I taccuini, 406–407. 12  For other Barberini paintings see Guercino’s Esther and Assuero now in Ann Arbor, Michigan, from the collection of the Duke of Northumberland, who in turn bought it from Vincenzo Camuccini; see Luigi Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino (Rome: Bozzi, 1988), 265, entry no. 180: a sketch by Reynolds after it is in MMA, fol. 53v. See also a Claude Mellan copied byReynolds in PCM, fol. 63r; cf. Claude Mellan, gli anni romani: un incisore tra Vouet e Bernini, exh. catalog ed. Luigi Ficacci (Rome: Multigrafica, 1989), 248–249, entry no. 61. 13  On his interest in the art of Seicento Florence, see Perini Folesani, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 31–33; as for Ludovico Carracci, see Perini, “‘L’uom più grande in pittura che abbia avuto Bologna’: l’alterna fortuna critica e figurativa di Ludovico Carracci,” in Ludovico Carracci, ex. catalog ed. Andrea Emiliani (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1993), 269–344 at 315–318.

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of Gainsborough’s Girl with Pigs (which he had bought for 100 guineas in 1782 at the Royal Academy exhibition) to the Earl of Upper Ossory in exchange for a dubious Titian in his possession. (Although the Earl declined this proposition, Sir Joshua eventually sold his picture to Charles Alexandre de Calonne for 300 guineas, shortly after Gainsborough’s death).14 Another case in point is his prompt acquisition from the Spencers of Althorp of their Leda and the Swan, bearing a rather generous attribution to Michelangelo. They wished to dispose of it quickly, after their precocious child Georgiana, only a few years old, had grossly embarrassed them, by pointing her finger to the picture gloriously hung in the dining room and asked her mother, in the presence of several distinguished guests: ‘Mom [sic], what is that goose going to that lady for?’15 Even so, in a fairly cryptic statement closing his review of a famous exhibition of drawings by Reynolds and Gainsborough held at the British Museum in 1978, John Hayes seems to suggest that on the contrary Reynolds started collecting and possibly even trading art works when young, in Rome,16 in order to make a living, as he had no grants to study there. On the other hand, Francis Broun—the only scholar ever to try a systematic study of Reynolds’s collection of paintings so far, lying a special emphasis on Netherlandish painting—claims that Sir Joshua’s first documented acquisition of a painting for his collection dates to 1755, shortly after his return home from Italy. Besides, he makes no reference to the painter’s involvement in art dealing, not even as an occasional activity. On the contrary, he proves that rumors ascribing to Reynolds a precocious activity as an agent on behalf of others during his Italian stay are unsubstantiated.17 It is a fact that, unlike Mengs and many French artists, Reynolds had no public or royal grant to rely on. It is also well known that, beside his possibly meager savings from the money earned at the beginning of his activity as a portrait painter in his native Devonshire, mostly for naval officers in Plymouth, he was also patronised by the Edgcumbes of Mount Edgcumbe, the most prominent

14  See Francis J.P. Broun, “Sir Joshua Reynolds’s collection of paintings,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of Princeton, 1987), II, 237–240. 15  Broun, “Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Collection,” II, 292–295; William Thomas Whitley, Artists and their Friends in England, 1700–1799, 2 vols. (London and Boston: The Medici Society, 1928), II, 196. 16   John Hayes, “Gainsborough and Reynolds at the British Museum,” The Burlington Magazine 120 (1978): 865–866. 17  Broun, “Sir Joshua Reynolds’s collection,” I, 19–21.

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aristocratic family in his native town, Plympton. In Rome he painted several oil copies after famous pictures for them.18 The Pierpont Morgan Library and the British Museum ‘Tuscan’ sketchbooks prove that, although Reynolds held oil copying in contempt and ranked it a waste of time, he nevertheless made many more oil copies after Old Masters than he would later care to admit or that are known today.19 Even so, it is unlikely that he could make a living out of this. He may have earned some extra money during his voyage from England to Leghorn, aboard the battleship Centurion under the command of his friend Augustus Keppel, where he allegedly traveled at no expense. As my Genoese colleagues have pointed out, relying on their experience as citizens of a former maritime state with a thriving local school of painting, it had been usual from the seventeenth century to have painters on board (battle)ships in order to take pictures of enemy fortifications from the sea. One may suspect that this hypothesis holds true for Reynolds as well, as he apparently tried the camera obscura when still very young, despite the fact that this optical device was deemed rather expensive at the time. Even so, it was used by the Royal Navy to survey and draw mechanical profiles of the coastlines, and this points to an interesting connection between Reynolds and the Services.20 It is documented that, once in Rome, Reynolds spent part of his time on painting caricatures of British, and especially Irish Grand Tourists, possibly even introducing his fellow national Thomas Patch (at the time a landscape painter in Vernet’s studio) to this genre, which was to have ensured the latter’s 18  On young Reynolds and his patrons in native Devonshire, most notably but not exclusively the Edgcumbes of Mount Edgcumbe, see Sir Joshua Reynolds. The Acquisition of Genius, exh. catalog ed. Sam Smiles (Bristol: Redcliffe Press Ltd, 2009), 30–36. 19  See the copies listed in PML, fol. 1r [recte 90v], made known by William Cotton, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Notes and Observations on Pictures, chiefly of the Venetian School, being Extracts from his Italian Sketchbooks (London: Russell Smith, 1859), 1–2, later reprinted in Charles Robert Leslie and Tom Taylor, Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1865), I, 40–41. In the nineteenth century some British aristocratic collections would boast copies of Old Masters made by Reynolds and now lost. The ones formerly in the possession of the Spencer-Churchills at Blenheim Palace were probably genuine: see George Scharf, Catalogue Raisonné, or a List of the Pictures in Blenheim Palace with occasional remarks and illustrative notes (London: Dorrell & Son, 1862), 42 (after Annibale Carracci) and 108 (after Correggio) and the subsequent sale catalog: Catalogue of the Collection of Pictures from Blenheim Palace which by Order of his Grace the Duke of Marlborough will be sold by Auction, sale catalog (London: Christie, Manson & Woods, 1886), 54, nos. 215–216. 20  Cf. Perini Folesani, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 8–9, note 16 and, for his youthful View of Plympton Sound (possibly made with the help of a camera obscura) Sir Joshua Reynolds. The Acquisition of Genius, 174–175, entry no. 92.

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long-lasting fame. In the mid-1740s some students of the French Academy, at the time hosted in the Mancini Palace, had practiced the same genre, like Jacques Saly for Ange Laurent la Live de Jully.21 It may be noted en passant that Reynolds’s caricatures were in the Italic vein of Ghezzi and Zanetti, i.e. they friendlily teased individuals according to the bland humor so characteristic of catholic oratories, instead of being conceived in the more impersonal, yet more constructive British, specifically Hogarthian vein, i.e. in a key of political, moral or social criticism and satire. I deem it very unlikely that Reynolds ever spent his time on restoring Old Masters’ paintings, especially considering the destructive experiments he later carried out after his return home, for instance on the van Dycks in the Ashburnham collection.22 He might have achieved better results if he had done some practise in Italy, but when there, this might have been a total waste of time for him and would have brought him little money. As for the issue of his early involvement in the art trade, some questionable evidence might come from the recently published British Museum sketchbook, which contains the draft of a letter addressed to his sisters, who would insist on inviting him back home. In his attempt to persuade them to be patient and wait a little longer—a month or two—he makes an obscure and ungrammatical reference to a sum of money he was entitled to, unless he was deceived, and that he might credit to them via ‘Dresden’—a word cancelled and changed into ‘Bruxelles’. It is not clear what this sum is for, nor why it should travel via Central and Northern Europe.23 In this story of money expected, yet not obtained and therefore uncertain, there is an equally obscure reference to a name virtually unreadable (some read it ‘Wertemburb,’ which is a German town or village, some ‘Weissenbourg,’ which is a village in Alsace: I would rather opt for ‘Westemberby‘ or ‘Westembury,’ which might be a misnomer for Westbury in Wiltshire). In any case it should be the name of a place (it comes after the preposition ‘at’). Still, it might be put in some relation to a note, not written by Reynolds, inside the back cover of the Copland-Griffiths’ 21  On Jacques Saly, see Stanislas Lami, Dictionnaire des sculpteurs de l’école française au XVIII siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: H. Champion, 1910–1911), II, 321–326 and also Suzanne Boorsch, “The ‘Recueil de Caricatures’ by La Live de Jully after Saly,” in Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2004): 68–83. On Reynolds’s relations to Patch, see Perini Folesani, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 101 (note 225), 111–112 and 118–121. 22  See Mansfield Kirby Talley, “‘All Good Pictures Crack’: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Practice and Studio’, in Reynolds, exh. catalog ed. Nicholas Penny (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 55–70 at 57; Broun, “Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Collection,” 263. 23  It is published in Perini Folesani, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 194, with comments on 227–229. Caroline Elam has kindly suggested to me that a more accurate interpretation of its contents is the one adopted here, following her cue.

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sketchbook: ‘Daniell Wertenberg in Tübingen chez Signor Meyer’.24 The hand which wrote this note in a linguistic Anglo-Italo-French-German medley, looks unlearned and Italian, rather than French or German. The only fact that I have been able to ascertain concerning this Wertenberg is that this word might also be the name of a German place. Together with the Old Testament first name to which it is linked, it might indicate that the gentleman bearing it, like his landlord, was possibly Ashkenazi. Even so, as a merchant or a banker he had certainly done nothing memorable enough to have come down to us, nor can we tell what he had to do with Reynolds, nor why—in the case—the money expected by Reynolds should transit via Dresden or Bruxelles. Therefore I find it very unsafe to talk about Reynolds’s early involvement in the art trade relying on such scanty evidence. Another note on the last leaf of the Sir John Soane’s Museum sketchbook looks more promising: ‘Tell Mr Wilson sell picture’.25 At least the man mentioned here is clearly identifiable with Richard Wilson, the famous landscape painter who arrived in Rome from Venice in 1752. He features among the friendly acquaintances and fellow nationals met by Reynolds during his last few months in Rome, as is proven by some written notes and possibly even sketches by him that can be spotted in Reynolds’s extant sketchbooks.26 For instance, Wilson’s handwriting can be easily recognized in the note bearing the name and address of a hairdresser in St Mark’s square in Venice, a certain Fabri from Perugia, written in the Copland-Griffiths’ sketchbook. This information looks so important to Reynolds that he keeps reporting it in other sketchbooks, in his own handwriting. In this case, one may well wonder what sort of picture Reynolds would ask Wilson to sell: one of his own, one by somebody else or one in Reynolds’s possession? Caricatures and contemporary portraits could be easily sold only to the people portrayed therein, their relatives and/or friends; therefore it is an option that can be ruled out. Landscapes and views could be sold to anybody at any time, but Reynolds did not seem to have practiced these genres until later in life, when he was back in London and only for his own pleasure, without any commercial intent or veritable artistic research.27 Nor can we assume that Reynolds in Rome devoted time to history painting. Despite his obvious 24  C G/64. 25  S JSM, fol. 96v. 26  On the relations between Reynolds and Wilson, see Perini Folesani, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 80–81, 97, 106–107 and 143. 27  See David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds. A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), I, 577–582, entries nos. 2184–2214 and II, 620–621, figs. nos. 1719–1725.

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ambitions to this effect, he was probably aware of his limited talent in this genre. His most famous attempts in this field, painted at home towards the end of his career, show that in Italy he would have been met only with mockery and been pitied. It follows that the only possible interpretation of the aforesaid note is that it refers either to a copy after an Old Master painted by Reynolds or, alternatively, to a painting by someone else that he had acquired for trade. It is hard to decide between these two options. The list of copies painted in Rome by June 13, 1750—that is after less than three months of stay—to be read at the beginning of the Pierpont Morgan Library sketchbook probably exceeds the requests of a single patron like Lord Edgcumbe. Moreover it refers only to the first few months of his Italian and, more specifically, Roman stay. Therefore it cannot give an idea of the total number of copies he actually produced throughout his two year stay, at first in Rome and later in Florence, as is shown by a note saying ‘Send for my things at Piti,’ which clearly refers to the canvases, brushes, palettes, and colors used to paint copies therein.28 On the other hand buying works of art for trade was a risky option for making money, partly because competition was certainly very strong (as is shown by the detailed analysis of the Roman contemporary art market made by Paolo Coen),29 therefore striking a good deal—i.e. buying at a low price to sell at a high price—was obviously difficult in a city full of Italian and foreign, even British, professional and amateur dealers of art and antiquities. It also required a lot of time and money, whereas Reynolds seems to have had little of both. Besides it implied developing special abilities and a specific experience in terms of connoisseurship and commercial acumen, which Reynolds could not have acquired in London, where his master Thomas Hudson had indeed sent him to the auction rooms to fetch the lots he had bought or even to bid on his behalf, but following detailed instructions concerning the works to buy and the prices that should not be exceeded.30 There is no evidence, however slight, that Reynolds in Rome would act in name and on behalf of one or more wealthy collectors from Devonshire and its neighborhood or from elsewhere (the Earl of Exeter, for instance), who would provide him with the money to buy Italian works of art, out of which he might have obtained only a small profit as a middleman. 28  See Perini Folesani, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 211, with comments on 293–294. For the copies painted in Rome, see above, note 19. 29  Paolo Coen, Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel diciottesimo secolo. La domanda, l’offerta e la circolazione delle opere in un grande centro artistico europeo, with a preface by Enrico Castelnuovo (Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 2010). 30  Broun, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Collection, 18–19.

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If we analyze the notes placed towards the beginning and the end of almost every one of his extant ten sketchbooks, it may be observed that, on the eve of leaving Rome, and then Florence and eventually Venice (that is, each of the cities where he stayed for months or at least weeks, rather than just days), he would write down a number of tasks to be charged to his local friends, usually young British artists like him, such as, beside Wilson, sculptors like Joseph Wilton and Simon Vierpyl, or the Irish painter Samuel Hone, a brother of the more famous Nathaniel.31 Amidst these various tasks, including more or less complex cross-payments from and to fellow Britons, there are some notes like this: ‘Take the Flowers from Dogana and the Portrait‘ (where ‘flowers’ are more likely to be paintings, like the portrait, than perishable goods: still, for all we know Reynolds never tried his hand as a flower painter). There are also lists of names of Italian Renaissance painters, followed by numbers (usually low).32 It might well be that these scanty hints point to some occasional art trading of low profile, especially of prints and drawings, or of Northern art to be sold in Italy (which might help explain the reference to ’Bruxelles’ in Reynolds’s draft of the letter to his sisters mentioned earlier). Yet these are very occasional, rare occurrences. There is no systematic evidence or pattern thereof. They are seemingly contradicted by other notes which bear only fallacious similarities, such as ‘Buy Hands in Plaster,’33 or ‘Send my Jesses to Vierpiles to be sent at Ashleys,’34 or the list of prints—both loose and bound in volumes—left with Vierpyl.35 These notes obviously refer to materials bought for his forthcoming new studio in London, as is proven by the fact that some of these bound volumes of prints can be recognized in the sale auctions of Sir Joshua’s possessions, organized by Henry Phillips after his death.36 As for the Ashleys indicated as the temporary addressees of the casts, they should probably be identified with John and Richard Astley, two brothers, the former being an amateur painter and architect, as well as a friend of Reynolds’s and a famous 31  On all of these, see John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers to Italy. 1701– 1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 518 (Samuel Hone), 967–968 (Vierpyl) and 1009 (Wilton). On Nathaniel Hone, see Ingamells, A Dictionary, 517–518 and Anne Crookshank and Desmond John Villiers Fitz-Gerald [the Knight of Glin], Ireland’s painters, 1600–1940 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), ad vocem. 32  For the note concerning “flowers,” see Perini Folesani, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 211. For the lists of names of Italian painters, see ibidem: 211–212. 33  P ML, fol. 1v [recte 90r]. 34  C G/64, fol. 99r. 35  C G/64 fol. 42v. 36  Henry Phillips, A Catalogue of all the Great and Valuable Collection of Ancient Drawings, Scarce Prints and Books of Prints which belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds Deceased (London: Lloyd and Phillips, 1798).

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Epicurean. He had also been one of Reynolds’s companions at the beginning of his stay in Rome: perhaps they had met in London in the studio of Thomas Hudson, where Reynolds was also apprenticed.37 Certainly Astley had anticipated both his friend and his master in their journey to Italy and was already there to meet them. In any case, plaster casts, prints and drawings were as much a part of studio fixtures as they had been part of any Western artist’s reference tools and aids for work from the Renaissance onwards. While studying at Hudson’s, Reynolds had valued the former’s conspicuous collection of drawings, including Italian ones, partly bought and partly inherited from his father-in-law Jonathan Richardson, at times coming in turn from Sir Peter Lely’s collection, as is proven by their collectors’ marks. As an old man, thinking back to the difficult period of his artistic beginnings, Reynolds could state: I considered myself as playing a great game and instead of beginning to save money, I laid out faster than I got it in purchasing the best examples of art that could be procured, for I even borrowed money for this purpose. The possession of pictures by Titian, Vandyck, Rembrandt etc. I considered as the best kind of wealth.38 He would thus reveal his personal penchant for gambling, well in tune with a widespread national inclination. Yet his training as a copyist of drawings, which he studied in Hudson’s collection trying to imitate their style to the verge of forgery, had endowed him with specific connoisseurship in the field of graphic arts, especially Italian drawings, but also Flemish and Dutch—with special attention to Rembrandt.39 There is no question that collecting prints, as well as trading in them, was more affordable than either collecting or trading paintings. Therefore it may well be that, while busy at building up the first core of his own collection of prints and drawings for his own use, he would also buy duplicates and second-rate works to trade them and make a profit thereby. 37  See Ingamells, A Dictionary, 32–33 and also The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. Ingamells and John Edgcumbe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) 13–16 at 14, letter no. 9 to Joseph Wilton dated 5 June 1753, where some “Ashly” is mentioned, and at 15, note 10, for his identification with John Astley. 38  Leslie and Taylor, Life and times, I, 115. 39  On his copies after Guercino, see e.g. Nicolas Turner and Carol Plazzotta, Drawings by Guercino from British Collections, with an Appendix describing the Drawings by Guercino, his School and his Followers in the British Museum (London and Rome: The British Museum, 1991), 152–154, entries nos. 126–127, 259–262, entries nos. 46 e 48. See also Perini Folesani, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 26–27.

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I also wonder whether his late public complaints about his lack of ability in draftsmanship, in sharp contrast with our modern perception of his rather chameleon-like and eclectic qualities, reflect not so much a case of unwarranted low self-esteem, or of rhetorical modesty, but rather some deliberate attempt to side-track his audience by denying the existence of the very qualities necessary to engage in the activity of an Eric Hebborn much before him.40 In other words, I still do not believe that he was engaged in a systematic activity of trade and possibly forgery of graphic works, although this was more financially viable, but also somehow trickier than the trade in paintings. I rather believe that on occasions he may have earned some money this way as well. We have to bear in mind that, for many years to come, he would indeed immediately reinvest every single profit he could make into building up his professional and social image. Thus it is easy to understand why his long journey back home, via land to Calais, took place by cheap postal coach, keeping obsessively accurate records of his expenses on travel tickets, meals and overnight lodgings, while Giuseppe Marchi, a Roman youth he had hired to act as his studio assistant in London, had to walk on his own all the way from Rome (or, more accurately, Florence) to Paris, where they would finally link up again.41 Once back home, opening a studio in the center of London would entail some big investments,42 made possible not so much by the virtually exhausted family money, as by the patriotic support and patronage of men and women from his native Devonshire met during his Roman stay (their names surface in his various sketchbooks, next to those of a number of Irishmen who would also become his regular patrons in London), and possibly he also had to borrow money. At the same time, he carried out hard-nosed promotion of his newly-acquired artistic abilities, thanks to the exhibition of his innovative experiments in portraiture made on patient and cheap models such as his employees, family and friends, as well as, of course, himself. A swerve, rather than shift, in his style and, more importantly, in his conception and method of painting (where his new, special attention to invention and composition was progressively apparent) becomes evident if we compare what he painted before and after his Italian stay. This helps acknowledge how his studies in Italy and the heavy economic investments made in himself bore fruit later and affected his own work. It also shows the deep change that took 40  Cf. Eric Hebborn, Master Faker. The Forging of an Artist, An Autobiography (London, Sidney and Auckland: Pan Books, 1991). 41  Leslie E. Taylor, Life and Times, I, 86. 42  Ian McIntyre, Joshua Reynolds. The Life and Times of the First President of the Royal Academy (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 78 and 85.

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place in his method of considering his collection of pictures; seen firstly as part of his regular use of materials acquired in Italy (casts, prints, drawings and possibly paintings) and later as works that the high profits made in London would enable him to buy at auctions, exhibitions and shops, or barter with fellow collectors, artists and friends, throughout his professional career, definitely upgrading him from a collector of comparatively cheap graphic works to much more expensive paintings.43

43  On Reynolds’s reception of the Italian method (with special reference to Tuscan painting), see Perini Folesani, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 18–19, 24–25, 27–35, 65–70 and passim.

chapter 8

Brownlow Cecil, Ninth Earl of Exeter, Thomas Jenkins and Nicolas Mosman: Origins, Functions and Aesthetic Guidelines of a Great Drawing Collection in Eighteenth-Century Rome, Now at the British Museum Paolo Coen In the Prints & Drawings Department of the British Museum there are seven heavy volumes, donated to the museum in 1789 by their owner, the ninth Earl of Exeter, which contain 277 drawings.1 Most are sheets containing reproductions of works of art which were in Italy in the eighteenth century, and more 1  London, British Museum, Department of Prints & Drawings (from now on quoted as BM, P&D). Mosman’s drawings were drawn to my attention in 2000 by Jacques Foucart, in connection with the market for caravaggescque paintings in eighteenth century Rome and the work of Leonard I. Slatkes on the same topic. My research went through different stages. In 2006 it became part of a paper of mine given to a congress edited by Luigi Spezzaferro, later reworked so to become part of my book on the Roman art market of the same century: see Paolo Coen, “Caravaggio e i suoi nel mercato romano del diciottesimo secolo,” in Caravaggio e l’Europa. L’artista, la storia, la tecnica e la sua eredità, ed. Luigi Spezzaferro (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2009): 148–156; Coen, Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel diciottesimo secolo. La domanda l’offerta e la circolazione delle opere in un grande centro artistico europeo, with a preface by Enrico Castelnuovo (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2010); Coen, “Esportare quadri nella Roma di Pio VI (1775–1799): le inclinazioni estetiche di Brownlow Cecil, nono conte di Exeter,” in Roma fuori da Roma. L’esportazione dell’arte moderna da Pio VI all’Unità. 1775–1870, ed. Giovanna Capitelli et al. (Rome: Campisano, 2012), 87–102. In different stages I had the privilege of obtaining help from Brian Allen, Brendan Cassidy, Jon Culverhouse, Edith Gabrielli, Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Steffi Roettgen, Kim Sloan, John Somerville, Luigi Spezzaferro and Jonathan Yarker, to whom goes my warmest gratitude.   On April 3, 2018, when this essay was at the press, I came across another graphic enterprise by Nicolas Mosman, i.e. an album of 44 drawings from the Antique, which was then on the London art market: the owner graciously gave me the opportunity of examining it. The album bears the name and date “Collezione di tiramenti rari di celebrate statue antiche 1755”, followed by a second page with an index of the drawings: these two pages were added later, probably in the mid-nineteenth century, when they were bound in the with drawings. So, one cannot make any strong reference to them. The album is an important step forward in our comprehension of Nicolas Mosman as a draughtsman: see note 50 below and Coen, “Copie a disegno da pezzi classici sul mercato romano del diciottesimo secolo: un nuovo album di Nicolas Mosman e una proposta per Bartolomeo Cavaceppi,” in Libri e album di disegni nell’età moderna (1550–1800), ed. Vita Segreto (Rome: De Luca, 2018): 2–17. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004388154_009

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often than not in Rome; the majority of the copies were made by a single artist, Nicolas Mosman, as evidenced by the signatures and uniformity of style. The caption in the margin of the last drawing made by the artist, a copy of a Saint by Domenico Zampieri, in Palazzo Rondinini reads: ‘The Last Work of Nicolas Mosman, who after having Been in the Service of The Rt Honble / The Earl of Exeter for Near Thirty Years, being Constantly Imployed in Copying the most Celebrated/ Pictures in Rome Died Augt. the 12 1787’.2 Today the set of drawings is still normally called the ‘Mosman drawings’ or the ‘Mosman albums.’ After they were acquired by the British Museum, a series of glosses in the margins of the original legends were added by Francis Annesley and other librarians. These additions, which continued at least until 1839, greatly altered the original series, transforming the ‘Mosman albums’ into a sort of encyclopaedic dictionary, sorted alphabetically by the artists’ surnames or nicknames. This was done to facilitate consultation. However, it condemned the corpus to rapid obsolescence, and at the same time erased valuable indications in the original sequence. The ‘Mosman drawings’ have long been known to scholars. Thomas Ashby, Steffi Roettgen, Leonard I. Slatkes, Jacques Foucart and Richard Verdi, for example, drew on them for their respective studies; in more recent times, they were used by Jonathan Yarker to write his general study on the eighteenthcentury phenomenon of copying art works in the United Kingdom.3 Much work, however, remains to be done if this group of drawings is to be understood in all its different facets. Thus we can take advantage of today’s new and greater sensitivity towards fields of art history that for a long time were underestimated, such as drawings, copies and finally the art market, particularly in eighteenth-century Rome. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to give us a better insight into the overall significance of the ‘Mosman albums’ by looking at the commissions of the ninth Earl of Exeter, a profile of Nicolas Mosman and finally the contemporary Roman art system. As will be argued, this corpus of drawings was produced so as to subtly meet, stimulate and shape the demands of the Earl of Exeter. This sophisticated maneuver, which was of course modulated on the true availability of works of art in Rome at that particular time, saw Thomas Jenkins acting behind the scenes in the role of deus ex machina.

2  B M, P&D, T 3, no. 1. 3  Thomas Ashby, “Thomas Jenkins in Rome,” Papers of the British School at Rome 6 (1913): at 488–489; John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and his times comprehending a life of that celebrated sculptor (…), 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), I, 122; Jacob Hess, “Amaduzzi and Jenkins in Villa Giulia,” in Hess, Kunstgeschichtlichen Studien, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1967), I, 309–326; Steffi Roettgen, introduction to Anton Raphael Mengs and his British Patrons, exh. catalogue ed. Roettgen (London: Zwemmer, 1993), 14, 40, note 25, and 140, entry no. 46.

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figure 8.1 A view of Burghley House, Stamford, Lincolnshire

Once again, Jenkins proved to be a key figure in the connection between Rome and Britain as an art dealer or ‘taste-maker’, sticking to Brinsley Ford’s definition of the man.4 1

The Earl of Exeter

The corpus owes its origin, as we said, to Brownlow Cecil, ninth Earl of Exeter. The Cecils, as is known, were members of the high British aristocracy.5 The family fortunes began in the second half of the sixteenth century, when William Cecil became chief minister to Elizabeth I firstly as Secretary of State and then Lord High Treasurer. William among other things built Burghley House, near Stamford, Lincolnshire, today still one of the most remarkable residences of the Tudor age (Fig. 8.1). A second golden age came in the final decades of the seventeenth century: the fifth Earl, John Cecil, known as ‘the travelling Earl,’ was passionate about the Grand Tour and launched, together with his wife Anne Cavendish, a spectacular and costly campaign to purchase works of art, 4  Brinsley Ford, “Thomas Jenkins, banker, dealer and unofficial English agent,” Apollo 99 (1974), 416–425. 5  Unless otherwise indicated, on the Cecil family and the 9th Earl see Eric C. Till, A Family Affair: Stamford and the Cecils, 1650–1900 (Northampton: Alec H. Jolly, 1990); John Somerville, “Burghley: The House and the Cecil Family, A History,” in Italian paintings from Burghley House, exh. catalog ed. Hugh Brigstocke et al. (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 1995), 14–27.

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and Italian paintings in particular.6 Seriously set back financially, the Cecils managed to recover within a couple of generations through a series of shrewd marriages; it was during this new and brilliant period, in 1801 to be precise, that they rose to the rank of Marquis. The ninth earl was educated initially at Winchester College and then, in line with the traditions of the Cecil family, at St John’s College, Cambridge. Our sources describe him as a man interested in almost every field of human activity, conversant, though by no means an expert, in various branches of knowledge. Significant in this respect was a sort of notebook, still in the Burghley archive, where Brownlow added information he collected over the years from many different sources: so, without following any particular order, we have, for example, a recipe for picture frame paint followed by one on the best ways to make a pudding. Even more revealing is his library, also in Burghley House and largely intact, which testifies to his exceptional range of interests, from the sciences to the humanities. Some areas of culture are more pronounced. One of these is music. It is precisely to the ninth Earl that we owe the bulk of the music section of the library at Stamford; it is particularly important not only because it tells us of the tastes of the time but also because it contains exceptionally rare or even unique books.7 Of equal importance is the section on the arts. Along the shelves we find practically the whole range of critical literature produced up to that time, architectural theorists—such as Sebastiano Serlio, Andrea Palladio and Jacopo Vignola—Giorgio Vasari, Giovanni Baglione and Giovan Paolo Bellori, including a handwritten life of Carlo Maratta and the 1753 edition of Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi’s Abecedario Pittorico. The latter is of great value for our issue. After he bought it, Brownlow unbound it and added several blank sheets of paper, upon which wrote in his own hand a series of annotations: they updated Orlandi, adding several hundred paintings he had seen in person and that had roused his interest, sorted by author, subject and location.8 The annotations, as we shall see further on, give us an insight into what the nobleman saw and appreciated. 6  Brigstocke, “John Cecil, the 5th Earl of Exeter: An English Traveller, Patron and Collector in Italy,” in Italian paintings from Burghley House, 28–37. 7  Gerald Gifford, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music Collection at Burghley House, Stamford (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 8  Cf. Brownlow Cecil’s manuscript notes on Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi, Abecedario pittorico (…) contenente le notizie de’professori di pittura, scoltura, ed architettura (Venice: Giambattista Pasquali, 1753), copy at Burghley House, Library, F i 12 (i.e. Cecil, Glosses to Orlandi). The pages with the handwriting of the ninth Earl are not numbered. Given this lack, references here made to the original pages of the book one, each time preceeded by “before” or “after”. See also Brigstocke’s entry in Italian Paintings from Burghley House, 140–141, note 53.

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Brownlow Cecil’s Two Grand Tours: A Special Impact on a Quite Special Individual

It is common knowledge that the Grand Tour played a key role in the cultural growth of the British society of the eighteenth century and even more for its aristocratic class. This statement, believed to be generally valid, must be taken with great caution in the case now in question. The impact of the Tour on an intellect such as Brownlow Cecil’s needs to be assessed carefully. Brownlow, in fact, made his two trips in the sixties and, therefore, was part of a relative minority—which in those same years included, among others, John Stuart, third Earl of Bute9—who saw Italy as an adult rather than as a teenager. In 1763, Brownlow was, in fact, already approaching his forties and was a man of experience. In 1754, after the death of his father, he had become Earl and assumed responsibility for the family fortunes; two years later his first wife died. Brownlow, consistent with his now-mature age and a personality described by contemporary sources as one exercising extreme caution, prepared his trip with great care and very responsibly. In the months prior to setting off he bought and consulted travel books; he also listened to people who could share their experiences with him and to whom he asked specific questions. In this circle of acquaintances there was the Scottish artist, William Patoun.10 Patoun, then having recently returned from year and a half spent in various Italian cities—from November 1761 to June-July of 1763—later wrote down his memories in Advice on travel in Italy,11 which was to become a manifesto of the eighteenth-century British Tour. In fact, he fully answered the Earl’s questions: the work mixes a number of warnings and remedies to resolve the various situations of danger or annoyance a nobleman could face once having crossed the Alps, whether the customs of the Kingdom of Sardinia, the hotels in Bologna or even simply the problems of getting food outside towns: as regards the last, ‘a cold tongue, or a piece of roast beef in the chaise will prove an excellent

9  Francis Russell, “John, 3rd Earl of Bute and James Byres,” in Roma Britannica: Art Patronage and Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-century Rome, ed. David R. Marshall et al. (London: The British School at Rome, 2012), 121. 10  John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 746–747. 11  The original manuscript of Patoun’s Advice, still in the Exeters’ archive at Burghley, was published in Ingamells, A Dictionary, XXXIX–LII. The work is currently dated 1766: see Ingamells, A Dictionary, XXXIX and 747. See also Edward T. Corp, The Stuarts in Italy, 1719– 1766: a Royal Court in Permanent Exile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6.

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companion.’12 These meetings fully satisfied the Earl: afterwards, as we shall see, he asked Patoun to act as his guide during the trip. In the summer of 1763, having made all his preparations, Brownlow told everyone he was leaving for Italy and would be staying away for a couple of years.13 Having crossed the Alps, he made a stop in Turin, leaving again on October 12 with stops in Parma, Florence, Rome, Naples and then again in Florence. His first trip was entirely to his satisfaction. However, as soon as he returned to England, Brownlow had an attack of epilepsy.14 After he had managed to nurse himself back to health, he set off for his second trip to Italy in October 1768 and stayed till May 1769, with more or less the same amount of time and places as before, except that he also went to Venice.15 The Earl managed to do quite a bit during his two trips. In addition to attending the courts and salons of the aristocracy, he went to the theater, concerts and anywhere he could to listen to music, about which, as we have seen, he was passionate. As shown in some autograph reports which are yet to be published, he spent several hours of the day in Rome visiting monuments and places where he could admire works of art, especially paintings.16 In addition to churches, museums and the houses of the nobility, Brownlow visited the Vatican Library and the Accademia di San Luca, which, thanks to a bequest in the early ’50s of a collection of paintings by Fabio Rosa, had quickly become the largest contemporary painting exhibition in Rome, especially landscape paintings.17 Most of his visits were guided by local cicerone, who had the right contacts and could resolve any problems of a practical nature. In Rome, for example, Brownlow turned to Johann Friedrich von Reiffenstein who 12  Patoun, Advice, XXXIX, XLI, XLIII. 13  Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and London University Press, 1937–1983): X, 1941, 344–345. See Hugh Belsey’s entry on Mann in Ingamells, A Dictionary, 635–636 and Giulia Coco, “Horace Mann: ‘L’idolo di Firenze, ricco, amabile, appassionato d’arte e dotato di ottimo gusto’. Ritratto di un conoscitore e mercante d’arte nella Firenze dei Lorena,” Studi di Storia dell’arte 21 (2010): 235–246 at 237–239; Coco, Artisti, dilettanti e mercanti d’arte nel salotto fiorentino di Horace Mann (Roma: Scienze e lettere, 2014). 14  John Heneage Jesse, George Selwyn and his contemporaries, 4 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1843–1844), I, 1843, 332. 15  Ingamells, A Dictionary, 343–344. 16  Burghley House, Archive, doc. 23 a–e (from now on cited as Cecil, Reports). Doc. 23 consists of a number of sheets containing quick autograph memos of the works of art visited by the ninth Earl during his stay in Rome. See Coen, “Esportare quadri”, 87–102; Coen, Gli appunti manoscritti di Brownlow Cecil, nono conte di Exeter: la memoria visiva di un grande committente britannico nella Roma del Settecento, in press. 17  Coen, “Da collezione privata a museo pubblico: la raccolta di Fabio Rosa e il suo ingresso in Accademia di San Luca,” Ricerche di storia dell’arte 107 (2013): 5–16.

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put him in touch with the colony of German neoclassical artists. He must have spent even more time in the company of his fellow countrymen, including James Byres and Thomas Jenkins. It was precisely at this time, in fact, that the two were becoming points of reference for many British tourists visiting Rome. Byres arrived in Rome to become an architect, but because of his lack of talent then converted into a cicerone—as well as an art dealer. For example in 1764 he acted as guide for Edward Gibbon, who later mentioned him with warmth in his Memoirs; later on he would organise ‘courses’ to tour the city.18 Brownlow may have met Byres in 1763, keeping in touch with him in the following years, as evidenced by some of the letters that are still in the Burghley House archives.19 Jenkins, in Rome since the 50s, had in turn put aside his artistic activity to become a tour guide, a banker and one of the most fortunate—and controversial—art dealers. He had a direct and widespread knowledge of the Roman art system and market mechanisms, which were vital in designing and organising his business. In addition to hosting the most important names in international tourism in his two Roman residences, the one in Via del Corso and the other in the Castelli, the Scottish dealer kept in touch by letter with substantially all the major collectors of his times, including Catherine of Russia herself. Throughout his life he was able to meet a constant and strong demand for works of art, as a dealer and agent for purchases made by European aristocrats and specifically the British in Rome.20 In any event, the ninth Earl did not simply look at works of art. As shown by his expense accounts, he also bought a huge number of art works and of culture in general. The decision to turn to Patoun as a guide can be seen in this light. Patoun, who had trained as a painter, was known among his contemporaries primarily as a connoisseur. He was described as ‘a very great critic in painting’ in a letter sent from Rome on June 16, 1762 by George Dance Jr., one of the future founders of the Royal Academy in London.21 He was ‘a gentleman 18  Brinsley Ford, “James Byres, principal antiquarian for the English visitors to Rome,” Apollo 99 (1974), 446–461; Coen, “L’attività di mercante d’arte e il profilo culturale di James Byres of Tonley,” Roma moderna e contemporanea 10 (2002): 153–178. 19  The letters were published by Roberto Valeriani, “Reiffenstein, Piranesi e i fornitori romani del Conte di Exeter,” Antologia di Belle Arti 55–58 (1998): 145–154. 20  Ford, “Thomas Jenkins:” 416–425; Coen, Il mercato dei quadri, 193–200, 282–287; Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome, 2 vols. (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2010), 208–221; Jonathan Yarker and Clare Hornsby, “Buying Art in Rome in the 1770s,” The English Prize. The Capture of the Westmorland, an episode of the Grand Tour, exh. catalogue ed. María Dolores SánchezJáregui et al. (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2012), 66–71. 21  Letter of George Dance, June 16, 1762, London, Royal Institute of British Architects, Ms. Fam. 1/3, as quoted by Ingamells, A Dictionary, 747, note 3.

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of considerable learning and some taste in painting’ according to John Galt, the biographer of Benjamin West.22 Brownlow wanted to use his trip to Italy to update or complete the work that the fifth Earl and his wife had started in Burghley about seventy years ago. It was precisely then, at the end of the seventeenth century, that Exeter’s collection had acquired its distinctly Italianate flavour—purchasing Baroque and late Baroque paintings from the schools of Genoa, Naples, Venice and Rome, works by Giovanni Battista Gaulli, Giacinto Brandi and especially Carlo Maratta—noted also by Waagen and whose works have largely come down to us today.23 3

The Ninth Earl in Rome: A Vast Campaign of Art Purchases

Apart from books, the ninth Earl also bought in Rome a wide range of objects. Considerable sums were spent on a collection of drawings and in particular on prints. Thus a few thousand drawings were purchased, which—according to the custom of the time—were almost always bound in large volumes and therefore kept in the library. A special section of the print collection focussed on landscape, vedute and capricci. Brownlow did not acquire works just by Giovanni Battista Piranesi but also other major exponents, from the entire catalog of the Calcografia Camerale to Giuseppe Vasi’s Le Magnificenze, of which the tenth and final volume was issued in 1761. Brownlow’s interest also spanned the applied arts. In this category we have, among other things, a couple of fine marble inlay table tops,24 two plates of glass cameo with white figures on a blue background copied in scale from classical bas-reliefs, the Endymion sleeping in the Capitoline Museums and the Ganymede with the eagle in Villa Albani,25 as well 22  John Galt, The Life, Studies and Works of Benjamin West, 2 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1820), I, 143; Robert C. Alberts, Benjamin West: a Biography (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 54. 23  Gustav Friedrich Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain, 4 vols. (London: John Murray, 1854–1857), III, 1854, 403; Brigstocke, “The 5th Earl of Exeter as Grand Tourist and collector,” Papers of the British School of Rome 72 (2004): 331–356. 24  For these tables, probably assembled and manufactured in Rome, although the constituent materials came mostly from the Vesuvian area, see Gervase Jackson-Stops’s entry in The Treasures Houses of Britain. Five hundred years of private patronage and Art Collecting, exh. catalog ed. Jackson-Stops (Washington, New Haven and London: The National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 1985), 303, no. 227; Valeriani, “Reiffenstein, Piranesi,” 147–150, pl. 9. 25  Valeriani, “Reiffenstein, Piranesi,” 146. For their models see Henry Stuart Jones, A catalogue of the ancient sculptures preserved in the municipal collections of Rome. I. The sculptures of the Museo Capitolino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 219; Peter C. Bol’s entry in

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as two mosaic Views by the specialist Cesare Aguatti, one of which is signed and dated 1774.26 Totally different is the vast collection of lithological samples still to be found in Burghley, mostly taken from ancient excavation sites and then reworked. The Earl had them made into uniform shapes and sizes and added labels to them: on the back of the samples we can still read in his unmistakable handwriting ‘breccia verde’, ‘granito orientale’ and finally ‘rosso antico’. There is nothing particularly new in this. In fact, it was normal to find these objects in eighteenth-century Rome. The stone samples could be found loose or placed in portable litoteche, i.e. specially bound containers resembling books. In other cases, both litoteche or single samples of stones would be reproduced on paper in tempera or watercolor. In this context mention should be made of the litoteca of Monsignor Leone Strozzi, the Studio di molte pietre, signed and dated 1726 by Pier Leone Ghezzi27 and finally the collection donated in the 1780s by Bishop Riminaldi to the University of Ferrara, probably created in the workshop of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi.28 As for contemporary sculpture Brownlow’s preference was for Giovanni Battista Piranesi. At that time, the sculptor’s workshop in via Sistina—containing the ‘Piranesi Museum’—was a well known crossroads of the Grand Tour, and as such was a big attraction for international visitors, drawn by its imaginative and sometimes bizarre reworkings, which were based on or included antiquities. The main bedroom in Burghley House has a most extraordinary fireplace by the Venetian, which incorporates various original classical pieces in the reworked white statuary marble, including three cameos in ‘rosso

Forschungen zur Villa Albani. Katalog der antiken Bildwerke, ed. Herbert Beck et al., 5 vols. (Berlin: Mann, 1989–1998), I, 1989, 134, no. 134, pl. 237. 26  I.e. A View of the Coliseum and A View of Tivoli’s Temple of the Sibilla: the latter generally dated 1775. See Valeriani, “Reiffenstein, Piranesi,” 150–151, pls. 10–11 and Alvar GonzálezPalacios, Il Gusto dei principi. Arte di corte del XVII e del XVIII secolo (Milan: Longanesi, 1993), 220, 243–245 and 250; “Aguatti, Cesare,” in Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon (Munich et al.: SAUR, 1992-) I, 1992, 574. 27  Cf. Coen, “‘E tutto passò per le mie mani’: il codice dell’Alessandrina nel profilo di Pier Leone Ghezzi,” in Le pietre rivelate. Lo ‘Studio di molte pietre’ di Pier Leone Ghezzi, manoscritto 322 della Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina, ed. Coen and Giovanni Battista Fidanza (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2012), 31–56. 28  Anna Maria Giusti, “La litoteca donata dal cardinal Riminaldi,” in Il Museo Civico di Ferrara, donazioni e restauri, exh. catalog ed. Elena Bonatti (Florence: Centro Di, 1985), 139–140; Lidia D’Avenia, “Giovanni Maria Riminaldi, Mengs e Pacetti: mecenatismo romano di un cardinale ferrarese,” Roma moderna e contemporanea 13 (2005): 365–380 at 367 and 376, note 11.

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antico’.29 Joseph Nollekens was another favourite.30 Nollekens, one of the best British artists active in Rome, gained experience as a sculptor in Bartolomeo Cavaceppi’s workshop, who taught him all there was to know about the Roman art system, guaranteeing him success in a difficult and highly competitive environment.31 In 1768, the British sculptor won first prize in the Concorso Balestra, organized by the Accademia di San Luca, with a group representing Jupiter, Juno and Io, now lost; two years later, in June 1770, he became a member of the Academy of Florence.32 Among Nollekens’ large number of works, Brownlow Cecil preferred those in terracotta. His liking for this material is shown in Burghley House by the copies of the group of Niobe and the nine Niobids33 and three busts, including the Portrait of David Garrick, dated 1764.34 Nollekens had again learned this technique from Cavaceppi and went on to develop it further, influenced by some contemporary pensionnaires of the French Academy, such as Claude Michel, known as Clodion, who was in Rome in 1762.35 Brownlow was also taken with Nollekens’ marble works. Often these were copies, sometimes of ancient originals, sometimes modern originals. The first category included reproductions of the famous Medusa Rondanini (Fig. 8.2)36 and the equally famous group of Niobids: in 1769 the sculptor received £200 for the Medusa, still at Burghley.37 The second category included one of the most admired

29  Valeriani, “Reiffenstein, Piranesi,” 146–147, pl. 3; Coen, “Giovanni Battista Piranesi mercante d’arte e d’antichità, ‘commistione di lavoro antico e moderno’,” in Roma e l’Antico. Realtà e visione nel Settecento, exh. catalog ed. Carolina Brook et al. (Milan and Geneva: Skira, 2011), 65–70. 30  Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and Dealing, I, 305–307. 31  Smith, Nollekens, I, 122; Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and Dealing, I, 305, 307, note 1. 32  John Kenworthy-Browne, “Terracotta Models by Joseph Nollekens, RA,” The Sculpture Journal 2 (1998): 72–84; Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and Dealing, 306. 33  John Drakard, A Guide to Burghley House, Northamptnonshire, the seat of the Marquis of Exeter (Stamford: John Drakard, 1815), 98; Seymour Howard, Antiquity restored. Essays on the Afterlife of the Antique (Wien: Irsa, 1990), 179. 34  For the bust and its attribution see Carola Oman, David Garrick (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958), 238; Kenworthy-Browne, “Nollekens, Joseph,” in Ingamells, A Dictionary, 710; Howard, Antiquity restored, 178, note 10. 35  Kenworthy-Browne, “Terracotta Models,” 72–84. 36  Drakard, Burghley House, 90; Howard, Antiquity restored, 179, note 14. 37  Adolf Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882) 227, n. 5; Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and Dealing, 305 and 307, note 8, also for the reference to the letter by Thomas Jenkins to Charles Townley on September 25, 1772.

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figure 8.2 Joseph Nollekens from the Antique, Medusa Rondanini, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House

pieces still in Burghley House, the Boy on a dolphin (Fig. 8.3), from an original by his master Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, which is today in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.38 38  Drakard, Burghley House, 103, 244; Rupert Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors, 1660–1851 (London: The Abbey Library, 1968), 277; Howard, Antiquity restored, 78–97 and 896–911, no. 146. Exportation licenses for the Medusa and the Boy on a dolphin were signed by the antiquarian and dealer Henry Jennings. For Jennings’ connection with Brownlow Cecil see Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and Dealing, 295–296, note 4.

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figure 8.3 Joseph Nollekens, Boy on a dolphin, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House

However, the lion’s share of Brownlow Cecil’s art purchases was made up of paintings. He came to own many old masters, especially Italians, as well as a remarkable number of contemporary artists, with a penchant for neoclassical Germanic painters. In this regard, Angelika Kauffmann deserves a special mention. The painter, born in Switzerland in October 1741, went to Italy for the first time with her father Joseph Johann in June 1762, stopping first

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in Florence, where she met Reiffenstein. It was at about this time that she painted the Self portrait in Bregenz Native Dress (Fig. 8.4), still in the Uffizi and distinguished by a style that was inevitably still immature and provincial. Things began to change in January 1763 when, having moved to Rome, Kauffmann made rapid progress, particularly in portrait painting, showing extraordinary social skills: this period saw her first contacts with the British colony, thanks to her mastery of the English language, which she learnt from the painter Matthew Nulty.39 Brownlow Cecil met Angelika in Naples in the winter of 1763–1764.40 A strong bond immediately developed between the two, strengthened by various commissions. This Neapolitan phase includes the Portrait of Brownlow Cecil (Fig. 8.5) and the Portrait of David Garrick, both still at Burghley House. Brownlow Cecil’s commissions were the first step in a successful career: in 1764 Kauffmann painted the Portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (Fig. 8.6), today at the Kunsthaus in Zurich, and became a member—at the young age of twenty-three—of the Accademia di San Luca. When possible the ninth Earl commissioned works directly from the artists. So it was with Kauffmann and with the Prussian Jakob Philipp Hackert, whom Brownlow possibly met during his second Tour from 1768–1769. Hackert, as we know, came to Rome from Paris at the end of 1768 with his brother, Johann Gottlieb, soon becoming a member of the international community: his acquaintances at that time included the French painter Antoine François Callet—a testimony to his continued rapport with France and the French41— the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel, the German painter Johann Christian von Mannlich, and finally Johann Friedrich von Reiffenstein.42 Commissions by the Earl of Exeter included the three gouaches today at Burghley, depicting the Temple of Minerva Medica, a River landscape and a View of Rome from the Milvian Bridge, all signed and dated 1769.43 In this case too the Earl proved to 39  Anthony Morris Clark, “Roma mi è sempre in pensiero,” in Clark, Studies in Roman Eighteenth-century Painting, ed. Edgar Peters Borown (Washington: Decatur, 1981), 125–138. 40  Wendy Wassyng Roworth, “Between ‘Old Tiber’ and ‘Envious Thames’: the Angelika Kauffman Connection,” in Roma Britannica, 293–301. 41  Emilie Beck-Saiello, “La formazione francese di Hackert: tra esperienza della Natura e ricerca del Vero,” in Jacob Philipp Hackert. La linea analitica della pittura di paesaggio in Europa, exh. catalog ed. Cesare de Seta (Napoli: Electa, 2007), 39–53. 42  Claudia Nordhoff and Hans Reimer, Jakob Philipp Hackert (1737–1807). Verzeichnis seiner Werke, 2 vols. (Berlin: Akademie, 1994), I, at 5, 21 and 97. 43  Nordhoff and Reimer, Hackert, II, 21–22, nos. 58–60; Massimo Visone, “Jacob Philipp Hackert e il paesaggismo inglese,” in Jacob Philipp Hackert. La linea analitica, 80 and 89, note 12, with bibliographic reference; Simon Reynolds, “Jakob Philipp Hackert und die

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figure 8.4 Angelika Kauffmann, Self-portrait in Bregenz Native Dress, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi

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figure 8.5 Angelika Kauffmann, Portrait of Brownlow Cecil, 9th Earl of Exeter, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House

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figure 8.6 Angelika Kauffmann, Portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Zurich, Kunsthaus

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be a talent scout. The three works, heavily indebted to Claude—as noted also by Goethe44—established Hackert’s reputation within a few months in Rome and Naples.45 In other circumstances—and especially, of course, when looking for old paintings—Brownlow turned to the free market, and in particular to those active in the Roman market. Apart from Reiffenstein and Byres, who, as stated above, worked both as guides and art dealers, of particular significance in this regard was Thomas Jenkins. Jenkins had come to Rome in 1753 to study painting but soon decided to increase his earnings by any means that were in some way connected to the art world, working as a tour guide, money-changer and banker, especially for wealthy British aristocrats, and dealer in ancient and modern works of art, in which he immediately showed a special talent.46 The many roles he played, coupled with undisputed human capabilities, made him indispensable for British travelers on the Tour. 4

The Origin of the ‘Mosman Drawings’

It is in this context that we must place the meeting between Brownlow Cecil and the aforementioned author of the corpus of drawings in the British Museum, Nicolas Mosman.47 Born in June 1729 in Haroué, Lorrain-corresponding to the modern region of Meurthe and Moselle-Mosman after having been first trained in Vienna settled in Rome, formally as a papal soldier but in actual fact to further his artistic education. In January 1757 he produced his first known work, a blood red pastel drawing of a Male nude (Fig. 8.7).48 The drawing, which britischen Sammler,” in Jakob Philipp Hackert. Europas Landschaftsmaler der Goethezeit, exh. catalog ed. Hubertus Gassner et al. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 70–74, at 71. 44  Thomas Weidner, Jakob Philipp Hackert. Landschaftmaler im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft, 1998–), I, 95–102. 45  See Thomas Frölich’s entry in Römische Antikensammlungen im 18. Jahrhundert, exh. catalog ed. Max Kunze et al. (Mainz am Rhein: Philip von Zabern, 1998), 17–18, no. I.5. 46  See also Bignamini, British Conquerors of the Marbles, 2: Thomas Jenkins as Connoisseur, in Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging And Dealing, 208–221. 47  Basic biographical references on Mosman are in Friedrich Noack, Das Deutschtum in Rom seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag, 1927), facsimile edition (Aalen: Scientia, 1974), II, 409. See also Mengs and his British Patrons, 14 and 140; Valeriani, “Reiffenstein, Piranesi,” 150, 154; Olivier Michel, Vivre et peindre à Rome au XVIIIe siècle (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1996), 392 and 427. 48  Rome, Archivio Storico dell’Accademia di San Luca (AASL), Disegni di figura, n. 41. See Noack, Das Deutschtum in Rom, II, 409, Mengs and his British Patrons, 140, no. 46. For an overall view of Rome’s academic drawing of the time see I disegni di figura nell’Archivio

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he did within the context of the Scuola del Nudo on the Capitol, earned him second place in that month’s award given by the academic painter Stefano Pozzi.49 In the years immediately following its foundation, in 1754, the Scuola del Nudo, which was directly linked to the Accademia di San Luca, was a crossroad for any young man with artistic ambitions in the capital of the Grand Tour: the list of winners and the surviving academic tests emphasize its cosmopolitan nature. The high formal quality of Mosman’s Nude reveals a level of stylistic maturity, as is appropriate in an artist now close to thirty years of age. From 1752 onwards Mosman approached Anton Raphael Mengs: he would keep a strong debt to the Bohemian master throughout his career.50 The technical qualities gained in the workshop of the Bohemian master, known precisely for the high standards he expected of his students and of himself, facilitated Mosman’s involvement in the sixties in a particular branch of the aforementioned ‘antiquities industry,’ that of copying classical objects: this is suggested in some drawings on copper, published in Winckelmann’s Monumenti antichi inediti51 or ‘the two drawings (…) of the Agrippina and the Gypsey [Borghese]’, for which he was commissioned in 1769 by the Earl of Bute, through James Byres.52 Likewise, there is a letter written by Mengs to von Maron from Florence in August 1773, which suggests Mosman’s name in regard to a drawing made for Abbot Marco Bruni.53 However, Mosman was unable to get more than sporadic assignments and ultimately remained a figure just beyond the limit of anonymity, something entirely normal in the art capital of the world. The Earl of Exeter’s commission, therefore, was an opportunity not to be missed.

Storico dell’Accademia di San Luca, ed. Angela Cipriani et al., 3 vols. (Rome: Quasar, 1989–1991). 49  A ASL, vol. 33 bis, January 1757 [fol. 4v]. Mosman, here mentioned as fiamengo, i.e. “flemish,” obtained the second of the three prizes given by Stefano Pozzi, preceded by Raffaele Secini and followed by Alessandro Albertrandi. Students used spend several months on end drawing at the Scuola del Nudo, sometimes winning more than one prize. This was true for Raffaele Secini, for instance, who was first prized in August 1755 and selected again the following months; see for instance ivi, august 1755, fol. 2. 50  These reflections were made before the discovery of a second group of drawings by Mosman, forty-four copies from the Antique, which bear the apocryphal name and date Collezione di tiramenti rari di celebrate statue antiche 1755 (see note 1 above). 51  See Mengs and his British Patrons, 140. 52  Francis Russell recently published James Byres’s two letters to the Earl of Bute, dated May 12 and 20, 1769, where Mosman’s graphic reproductions are mentioned; see Russell, “3rd Earl of Bute,” 128–130. 53  Roettgen, Anton Raphel Mengs: 1728–1779, 2 vols. (Munich: Hirmer, 1999–2003), II, 549.

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figure 8.7 Nicolas Mosman, Male academic nude, Rome, Accademia di San Luca

The arrangements for doing the drawings were agreed between May 7 and June 5, 1764, during the ninth Earl’s first stay in Rome. In September of the same year in fact, James Martin saw Mosman at work in Palazzo Barberini ‘taking a drawing of the famous Magdalen of Guido for Lord Exeter.’54 The financial 54  James Martin Journal, as quoted by Ingamells, A Dictionary, 344.

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agreements stipulated that in exchange for his drawings Mosman would receive a salary each month: as of 1773 it consisted of thirty Roman scudi per month, making a total of 360 scudi a year, just under 100 pounds.55 Sometime before 1823 the aforementioned Francis Annesley, who was looking for information about the corpus donated to the British Museum, wrote: ‘Mr. Nollekens, statuary in Mortimer Street, London, assured me that he was at Rome when the drawings in this book were made by one Mossman, a German, who was recommended at Brownlow, Earl of Exeter, and he worked at them for several years at five shillings a day, afterward Lord Exeter gave him half a guinea. Lord Exeter told Mr. Nollekens the Book cost him £2000.’56 5

A Basic Question: Why?

At this point one wonders why Brownlow commissioned these drawings from Mosman. One explanation is that it was for documentary reasons. A certain number of Mosman’s drawings would be used by the Earl as souvenirs de Rome, that is, to remind him of works he had had the opportunity of admiring in Rome during his two trips. These would certainly include copies Mosman drew of the Cappella dell’Annunziata by Guido Reni in the Palazzo del Quirinale, The Prophet Isaiah by Raphael in the nave of the church of Sant’ Agostino and, finally, the Allegory of History by Anton Raphael Mengs in the Sala dei Papiri at the Vatican.57 In this sense, artist and client were part of an established tradition, such as Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Museum Cartaceum, and including John Talman and John Topham, to name just some well-known exponents directly connected with Britain.58 On the other hand, if taken globally the number of ‘Mosman’s drawings’ that fall into this category, that of having just a documentary function, in truth turns out to be marginal. 55  The salary was later increased, also thanks to Jenkins’s petition. See Burghley House, Archive: “Io sottoscritto confesso d’aver ricevuto dal Signor Tomaso Jenkins per uso e ordine di Sua Eccellenza My Lord D’Exeter scudi seicento trenta moneta quali sono per numero 21 mesi del mio onorario a ragione di scudi 30 il mese dal primo Luglio 1773 a tutto marzo 1775. In fede questo dì 11 marzo 1775”. After Mosman’s death, which occurred on August 14, 1787, Brownlow kept paying a yearly pension of £20 to the “widow of the poor Mosman”; see also Valeriani, “Reiffenstein, Piranesi,” 153–154. 56  B M, P&D, T, 3.1. 57  B M, P&D, T,5.16 for Meng’s Allegory of Time; BM, P&D, T,5, 27 for Raphael’s Prophet Isaiah. 58  See John Talman and the building of an Eighteenth Century Connoisseur, ed. Cinzia Maria Sicca (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008); Antonella Capitanio and Sicca, Viaggio nel rito. John Talman e la costruzione di un Museo Sacro Cartace (Florence: Edifir, 2008). On Richard Topham’s collection, now at Eton College, see the volume edited by Marie-Louise Fabréga for the Musée du Louvre, now in press.

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In fact, Mosman almost always took as his models works that were marked by substantially different characteristics, i.e. small or medium-sized pictures— thus easily transportable—at the time belonging to private owners willing to sell, provided they were made a good offer. Not surprisingly, a large number of the works shortly after being copied by Mosman were, in effect, sold. The list of buyers is very long and includes major European collectors, such as the Empress Catherine II of Russia59 and especially British collectors, such as Sir Lawrence Dundas,60 George Autun,61 the consul of Naples Isaac Jeminau,62 William Weddell,63 William Young Ottley, Lord Northwick,64 Charles HanburyTracy, first Baron Sudeley,65 George Grey, 6th Earl of Stamford,66 John Trent,67 and the same ninth Earl of Exeter who bought several works copied by Mosman, as we shall see below in greater detail. ‘Mosman’s drawings’, as already stated elsewhere, were used by Brownlow Cecil in his activity as a collector: that is, the nobleman used them, once back home, to understand and, in a sense, to

59  In 1773 the Empress bought from Thomas Jenkins a Saint Mark, then attributed to Correggio; BM, P&D, T,5.43. She also appears to be the buyer of Bartolomeo Schedoni’s Holy Family, BM, P&D, T,3.50. Regarding Francesco Trevisani’s Danae, it appears simply as “gone to Russia”, with no further indication: see BM, P&D, T,4.92. 60  Lawrence Dundas bought Correggio’s Head of a woman for his house at 19 Arlington Street, London (BM, P&D, T,5.40), which was re-furnished in the 1760s by Thomas Chippendale. See Anthony Coleridge, “Sir Lawrence Dundas and Chippendale,” Apollo 86 (1967): 190–203. 61  Autun bought after 1769 from Thomas Jenkins Scarsellino’s Flight into Egypt; see BM, P&D, T,4.75. 62  In 1770 Jeminau bought from Jenkins a Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist, which was lately reproduced by Mosman; see BM, P&D, T,5.23; the painting was sold as an original by Raphael and thus identified with the Madonna di Casa Alba. Jemineau also bought from Jenkins a Good Samaritan, then referred to Jacopo Palma il Vecchio; BM, P&D, T, 3.67. 63  William Weddell bought two paintings reproduced by Mosman, Poussin’s, Apollo with two of the Muses and Mengs’s Holy Family with St Elizabeth and Saint John: see BM, P&D, T.5.7. For the latter see Steffi Roettgen’s entry in Mengs and his British Patrons, no. 46. 64   Lord Northwick bought Raphael’s Saint Catharine of Alexandria—formerly in the Borghese collection—from the dealer Alexander Day; in 1839 the painting became part of the collection of the National Gallery of Art, London (NG 168); cf. Sylvia Ferino Pagden and Maria Antonietta Zancan, Raffaello. Catalogo completo dei dipinti (Florence: Cantini, 1988), 80. 65  For Correggio’s Saint Agnes, later in “Ld. Sudleys (sic) Collection”, see BM, P&D, T,5.45. 66  For the Holy Family by Correggio later “in the possession of the Earl of Stamford”, see BM, P&D, T,5.28. 67  Trent bought the Sibilla by Guercino; see BM, P&D, T,4.33.

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‘see’ what works were available in Rome and could be purchased to enrich his family’s collection at Burghley House. It would seem that the idea for the ‘Mosman drawings’ was suggested to Brownlow by Thomas Jenkins. We must consider firstly that it was Jenkins who showed Mosman’s first attempts in September of 1764 to James Martin, inviting him to his own home; then it was Jenkins who managed the economic relations between artist and patron and who hung a portrait of Mosman painted by Anton von Maron in his own home, known today only through the above mentioned copy made by Mosman himself (Fig. 8.8);68 and finally, it was again Jenkins who made sure in 1787 that, after Mosman had died, his widow and her two young children were provided with a pension of twenty scudi. Jenkins, as shown before, was the right sort of person for such an undertaking. He had an absolute familiarity with the art market, its tradition, sources and tools, which in part he also helped to renew. Most importantly, Jenkins embodied Seneca’s ‘cui prodest? ’ at its best: in essence, he was the person who drew the greatest benefits from the entire ‘Mosman drawings’ operation. A portion of these gains he pocketed from direct sales of art works. Twenty-nine of the pictures copied by Mosman were at the time in Jenkins’ stock, including two of his own brush, the one depicting Flora,69 the other, which later became part of Thomas Thornhill’s London collection, Hagar and Ishmael (Fig. 8.9).70 What is more, Jenkins also had the opportunity to earn money indirectly from royalties after a deal had been concluded for mediating the sale of paintings owned by others. For him, therefore, it was a simple matter to suggest to Mosman—and through Mosman to the ninth Earl—works belonging to friends and associates, collectors and dealers, such as Cardinal Alessandro Albani or Byres. The same mechanism also worked well when it was aristocratic families who were selling. In fact, Jenkins was completely at ease with the Roman nobility and even more with the maggiordomi, who were almost always employed to carry out the orders of their masters in negotiations of this 68  B M, P&D, T,3.1. 69  B M, P&D, T,3.84; see Ashby, “Jenkins,” 489. 70  B M, P&D, T,4.102; see Ashby, “Jenkins,” 489. Thomas Thornhill came from a wealthy Yorkshire family which owned several properties all over England: one of them was a comfortable flat on the western side of Berkeley Square, London, no. 49. On Thomas and all the Thornhills see the papers since 1956 deposited at the Cambridgeshire County Record Office, Huntingdon, Thornill Collection, n. 148. See also Hugh Phillips, Mid-Georgian London: a topographical and social survey of central and western London about 1750 (London: Collins, 1964), 287; Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne. The Later Years (London: Methuen, 1986), 143, 176 and 188.

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figure 8.8 Nicolas Mosman after Anton von Maron, Portrait of Nicolas Mosman, London, British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department

kind. For example, Jenkins presented the Barberini’s maggiordomo with a sort of ‘shopping list’ of the objects that were of interest and the price he was willing to pay.71 It was certainly not by chance, therefore, that Mosman took as his models four works from the Giustiniani collection,72 seven from the Barberini,73 71  Coen, Il mercato dei quadri, 216. 72  Christ displaying his wounds by Giovan Francesco Albani, A Saint and Saint John the Evangelist by Domenichino, The soothsayers counselling Pharaoh to destroy the child Moses by Nicolas Poussin: see BM, P&D, T,4.6, 16, 18 and 60. 73  The Penitent Magdalen and Sant’Andrew Corsini by Guido Reni, The Virgin and Child with St John, St Agnes and two angels and An angel weeping by Annibale and Isaiah by Guercino; BM, P&D, T,3.29, 34, 57 and 63; T,4.30.

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figure 8.9 Nicolas Mosman after Thomas Jenkins, Hagar and Ishmael, London, British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department

eight from the Santacroce74 and finally as many as fourteen from the Borghese.75 Again several of the copied paintings were later sold, such as .

74  H  erodias receiving the head of the Baptist, The Rape of Europa and Saint Joseph by Guido Reni, Venus rising from the sea by Giovan Francesco Albani, Saint Sebastian, Saint Francis and Saint Jerome by Guercino and Bacchus and Ariadne by Jacopo Palma il Vecchio; BM, P&D, T,3.17, 45 and 47; T,4.1, 36, 38 and 43; T,5.1. 75  A youth addressing a nude prisoner and Supper at Emmaus by Caravaggio, Saint Magdalene in meditation by Annibale Carracci, The Christ Child asleep, guarded by three angels by Ludovico Carracci, Saint Catharine of Alexandria and the Entombent of Christ by Raphael,

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Ludovico Carracci’s The Christ Child asleep, guarded by three angels, sold by the Borghese to William Young Ottley (Fig. 8.10).76 6

The Aesthetic Guidelines of the ‘Mosman Drawings’: The Ninth Earl’s Side

The criteria used in the choice of paintings to be copied depended primarily on the aesthetic choices of the client, Brownlow Cecil. This explains the number of copies of paintings in the ‘Mosman drawings’ of the great Italian Renaissance masters. Mosman did two drawings of Leonardo da Vinci works: the Barberini Madonna and Child holding cherries77 and a Saint in the socalled ‘Challamare Palace’—i.e. once in the collection of Costanzia Eleonora del Giudice, Princess of Cellamare and Duchess of Giovinazzo. The ninth Earl, moreover, was passionate about Leonardo, something that was perfectly normal in England at that time. In the above-mentioned reports drawn up in Rome during the Grand Tour, the Earl took note of two Leonardo paintings he had seen in Palazzo Barberini.78 In the annotations to Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi’s Abecedario Pittorico, previously mentioned, he outlined eight other paintings by Leonardo, including two that he got to know precisely thanks to Mosman’s copies.79 It is quite natural, at this point, that in the end he decided to buy the Madonna and Child Holding Cherries from the Barberini (Fig. 8.11),80 still at Burghley House, though now, after Berenson, it is attributed to a follower of Leonardo, Marco d’Oggiono.81 The same can be said for Raphael and his school. Mosman made seven copies of as many paintings by Raphael, five of which were in Rome: in addition to

Virgin and Child with a shepherd by Anton von Maron, The so-called Sacred and Profane Love, A child kneeling by the side of a lion, Samson carrying the walls of Gaza and An Angel [Boy playing a tambourine], Danae by Titian, Saint Cecilia by Guido Reni, Venus and Adonis by Luca Cambiaso; BM, P&D, T,3.49, 52, 53, 64 and 89; T,5.19, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32 and 36–38. 76  B M, P&D, T,3.64, 77  B M, P&D, T,5.34 and 35. 78  Cecil, Reports, folio d. The documents mentions a “Madonna feeding the Bambino” and “The two Maries”. 79  Cecil, Glosses to Orlandi, folio after 336: “Virgin and Child with a blue flower in his hand by Leonardo da Vinci at Burghley”. 80  B M, P&D, T,3.38. 81  See Brigstocke’s entry in Italian paintings from Burghley House, 66–67, no. 13.

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figure 8.10 Nicolas Mosman after Ludovico Carracci, The Christ Child asleep, guarded by three angels, London, British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department

the previously mentioned The Prophet Isaiah in the church of Sant’Agostino and the two Borghese paintings, the Saint Catharine of Alexandria82 and the 82  B M, P&D, T,3.89: “This picture was painted about the year 1507, it was formerly in the Aldobr[andini] Collection, from which it was procured by Mr Day, at the close of the last

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figure 8.11 Marco d’Oggiono, Madonna and Child Holding Cherries, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House

Entombment of Christ,83 the paintings were owned by Roman dealers: The Virgin and Child with Infant Baptist84 in 1769 was in the hands of Thomas Jenkins, The Holy Family with St. John85 belonged to James Byres. The Earl was in awe of Raphael, which again was perfectly normal in view of the prevailing aesthetic tendencies of the British aristocracy in the eighteenth century.86 During his Roman trips, he noted in his reports a small Self-Portrait which belonged to the Altoviti and a second Self-portrait at the Age of Eleven Years in Palazzo Spada.87 His penchant for Raphael and, in a broader context, for masters who painted in a similar style during the next few decades was reflected in his purchases. Thus we have the Christ and the Woman of Samaria, purchased for Burghley House and attributed to Giulio Romano, being recognized only much later as

century; it passed into the possession of Lord Northwick, who subsequently sold it to Mr Beckford, from whom it was purchased in 1839 by the National Gallery”. 83  B M, P&D, T,5.26. 84  B M, P&D, T,5.23: “The Original Formerly in the collection of the Duke of Massa di Carrara, and by Cardinal Cibo the last male Heir of that Family left as a legacy to a Person that served him, from whom it was purchased by Thomas Jenkins the Present Possessor Rome 1769” and in another hand: “it now belongs to Mr Lemineau (sic) the English Consul at Naples 1770”. 85  B M, P&D, T,3.90: “This Picture was formerly in the possession of the Jesuits at the Convent Called the Gesù in Rome to whom it was given by Cardinal Farnese who Built the Church”. 86   Giovanna Perini, “Raphael’s European Fame in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, ed. Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 261–275. 87  Cecil, Reports, fol. e, recto and verso.

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figure 8.12 Michelangelo Anselmi, Christ and the Woman of Samaria, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House

by Michelangelo Anselmi (Fig. 8.12),88 The Adoration of the Magi, thought to be by Francesco Vanni and recently attributed to Ventura Salimbeni,89 and finally The Virgin and Child, bought in Rome from Byres as a copy of Raphael and registered as such in the documents of Burghley House: recent research has identified the copyist as the main seventeenth century disciple of Raphael, Giovanni Battista Salvi, known as Sassoferrato.90 The Earl looked at Mosman’s copies with an interest mixed with avidity and in the end chose The Holy Family 88  See the entry “Giulio” and Extracts from an old catalogue of the furniture at Burghley, in Cecil, Glosses to Orlandi: “Christ and the Woman of Samaria by Giulio Romano formerly in Cardinal Mazzarino’s collection is now at Burghley”. See also Brigstocke’s entry in Italian paintings from Burghley House, 42–43, no. 1; Elisabetta Fadda, Michelangelo Anselmi (Turin: Allemandi, 2004), 175, no. 33, pl. 36. 89  Cecil, Glosses to Orlandi, 207: “Adoration of the Magi by Fr. Vanni at Burghley’s”. See Brigstocke’s entry in Italian paintings from Burghley House, 128–129, no. 47. 90  See Brigstocke’s entry in Italian paintings from Burghley House, 132–133, no. 49. As mentioned by Massimo Pulini, the Madonna and Child painted by Sassoferrato on the left side of his Portrait of Cardinal Rapaccioli, now at Sarasota’s John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, might well be connected to the painting now at Burghley; François Macé De Lépinay, on the other hand, compares it to the one at the Pinacoteca di Brera: see Macé de Lépinay, Giovanni Battista Salvi “Il Sassoferrato,” exh. catalog ed. De Lépinay et al. (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 1990), 92–93, no. 34; Pulini, “Il minimalismo della bellezza,” in Il Sassoferrato. Un preraffaellita tra i puristi del Seicento, exh. catalog ed. Pulini et al. (Milan: Medusa, 2009), 30, 32 and 116–117. On Sassoferrato’s connection with Raphael see specifically Marchi, “Sul ‘raffaellismo’ di Giovan Battista Salvi, il Sassoferrato,” in Sassoferrato. Un preraffaellita, 56–63.

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with St. John, offered to him by Byres, for which, in view of its pedigree, he paid very dearly: only after a few decades was the work proven to be a copy, though of good quality, of the Madonna del Passeggio, now in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.91 The ‘Mosman drawings’ include a group of ten images dedicated to the works of Correggio. One of them, representing the so-called Virgin of the Basket— today in the National Gallery of Art in London—was at that time in Spain: Mosman therefore copied it from a copy made by Anton Raphael Mengs during his stay in Spain.92 The remaining nine were instead to be found in Rome,93 including a Virgin and Child in an unknown location.94 Correggio’s works were enthusiastically received by the ninth Earl, who had obviously been gripped by a sort of ‘Correggio-mania’, which had been all the rage in Rome and beyond from at least the seventeenth century. He thus made a note of three Correggios in his records of the Grand Tour, a ‘Madonna, Bamb[ino], St. Joseph’ and ‘St. Frances in ecstasy’, in Palazzo Orsini in piazza Navona, and ‘Our Saviour and the Angel in the Garden’, in Palazzo Altoviti.95 Of the works drawn by Mosman, the Earl decided to buy the Virgin and Child: attributed since the nineteenth century to Giulio Cesare Procaccini, the work is still at Burghley House (Figs. 8.13 and 8.14). Next, the esthetic choices of the ninth Earl also meant that Mosman had to copy many paintings by seventeenth-century artists working in the tradition of classicism. A good example is Nicolas Poussin. Mosman copied six works

91  Luitpold Dussler, Raphael (London and New York: Phaidon, 1971), 44–45, with no mention of Burghley’s copy. 92  B M, P&D, T,5.44. Correggio’s Madonna of the basket—now at the National Gallery of Art, London (NG 23)—mentioned by Vasari in the Baiardi collection, Parma, was acquired later by the Kings of Spain, where it is documented from 1666 to 1793. In 1813 the painting was acquired by William Buchanan and brought for the first time to England to be sold, finding no purchaser; it was acquired by the National Gallery in 1825, after a brief passage in France. Cfr. Cecil Gould, The Paintings of Correggio (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 219–222; Roettgen, Mengs: 1728–1779, I, 187, no. 125, WK1; Elio Monducci, Il Correggio. La vita e le opere nelle fonti documentarie (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2004), 138–139, no. 27/a. 93  B M, P&D, T,5.17, 28, 33, 41–43 and 45, corresponding to The Holy Family in the sacristy of the curch of San Luigi dei Francesi, The Holy Family with angels, Cupid making his bow, Saint Mark, Saint Agnes, Christ praying in the garden and Saint Catherine. In the Settecento the work in the sacristy of San Luigi dei Francesi was firmly believed to be a Correggio, and for this frequently visited by the public of the Grand Tour, sometimes with Byres acting as a guide; only in modern times was it re-attributed to Giulio Cesare Procaccini. See Coen, Il mercato dei quadri, 307. 94  B M, P&D, T,3.70. 95  Cecil, Reports, fol. e, recto.

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by the French master, three without specifying the location,96 an Apollo with Two of the Muses belonging to Baron Valentini,97 a ‘Pharaos’ daughter saving Moses’ and The Soothsayers Counselling the Pharaoh to Kill Moses in Palazzo Giustiniani, and finally an Acclamation of Saul belonging to Thomas Jenkins in 1785.98 All these were completely in line with the tastes of Brownlow Cecil. In the reports of his visits to Roman houses, he made a note of the whole series of Seven Sacraments belonging to Boccapaduli and three individual paintings, including a Slaughter of the Innocents in Palazzo Giustiniani;99 in the annotations to the Abecedario Brownlow listed twenty-three paintings under the name of ‘Nicolas Poussin’, including the Giustiniani Slaughter, a Venus and Cupid and The Assumption of the Virgin belonging to Soderini.100 All this resulted in the acquisition of Venus and Cupid—recently attributed to Giacinto Gimignani101—and the Assumption of the Virgin: the latter, bought for 500 scudi in 1764 through the mediation of James Byres, is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.102 Attention then focused on Guido Reni. Mosman devoted a total of thirtyseven drawings to works attributed to the ‘Divino Guido’: six were in the hands of Thomas Jenkins, namely The Annunciation, The Virgin Mary Praying from the Barberini collection, two Salvator Mundi, one of which formerly belonged to the Bighi collection, the Saint Catherine Holding the Palm, a Woman Wearing a Turban Set with a Stone.103 This veritable invasion of Reni paintings was certainly greeted positively by the ninth Earl. In the reports of his visits to Rome he took note of the aforementioned frescoes in the chapel of the Annunciation at the Quirinale, and of fourteen other paintings, including Portrait of Cardinal Bernardino Spada in the same building and The Assumption of the Virgin in the Santacroce collection;104 forty-eight were mentioned in the annotations 96  C  hrist on the Mount of Olives, Saint Peter rasing the Tabite and a Holy Family with Saint John; BM, P&D, T,4, nos. 55–57. 97  B M, P&D, T,4.58: the Apollo was sold in England, first to William Weddell at Newby and then to Thomas Hope. 98  B M, P&D, T,4.59–60. 99  Cecil, Reports, fols. d and 23e: the other two Poussins here mentioned are A Landscape with St John and an angel in the Barberini Palace and The Virgin, Child and St John in the Corsini Palace. 100  Cecil, Glosses to Orlandi, fol. after page 372. 101  Cecil, Inventory of the Plate, Pictures, China, Linnen, and House Hold Furniture at Burghley, MSS., Burghley House; see also the entry on Nicolas Poussin in Cecil, Glosses to Orlandi; Brigstocke’s entry in Italian Paintings from Burghley House, 86–87, no. 23. 102  The letters of David Garrick, I, 400. 103  B M, P&D, T,3.11, 13, 24, 40, 42 and 44. 104  Cecil, Reports, fols. a, d verso, e: Cecil mentioned Reni’s Joseph with Putiphar’s Wife in the Palazzo della Cancelleria, then seat of the Cardinal Ruffo, Fortune in the Ursini Palace in Piazza Navona, a Head of an old man in Palazzo Altoviti at Ponte Sant’ Angelo, a Madonna

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figure 8.13 Nicolas Mosman after Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Virgin and Child, London, British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department

to the Abecedario, apportioned between the British and Italian collections.105 These esthetic choices were then put into practice in terms of purchases made. This is demonstrated by a miniaturised copy of Guido’s Madonna and Child by and an “original sketch” in the Palazzo Bolognetti, The Martyrdom of Saint Peter and The Allegory of Fortune in Palazzo Corsini, Baccus and Ariadne in Palazzo Boccapaduli, a “Guido when young by himself,” The Madonna with the Child and “a Carthusian [monk]” in Palazzo Barberini and Portrait of Cardinal Aquila belonging to Cardinal Bassani. 105  Cecil, Glosses to Orlandi, folios before 1.

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figure 8.14 Giulio Cesare Procaccini, Virgin and Child, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House

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Theresia Concordia von Maron, cited by Byres in a letter dated June 12, 1771,106 The Holy Family oil on copper by Simone Cantarini107 and Judith with the head of Holophernes, signed and dated ‘Elisabetta Sirani F 1658.’108 There are no surprises among the ninth Earl’s three purchases of works shown to him by Mosman, An Angel, The Virgin and Child109 and the Virgin Mary Praying, which Thomas Jenkins had acquired from the Barberini (Figs. 8.15 and 8.16).110 7

The Esthetic Guidelines of the ‘Mosman Drawings’: The Influence of Thomas Jenkins

Other choices in the ‘Mosman drawings’ are better explained if we look at what Jenkins was up to. In fact, he used the Mosman drawings to whet the ninth Earl’s appetite and convince him to buy paintings that were not to his usual taste. A good case in point is Guercino. Mosman made eighteen drawings of works by this master from Cento,111 including a copy of The Persian Sibyl at the Capitol and Saint John reading in the Pamphili collection, now Galleria Doria Pamphili.112 As is known, Guercino—and in particular in his early years, when closest to Caravaggio—was for a long time on the margins of popular taste. His achieved definitive critical and market fame in the second half of the eighteenth century, thanks in no small measure to Jenkins. From the time he first arrived in Rome, the Scottish dealer was a great admirer of Guercino, acquiring paintings such as the Saint Mary Magdalen, copied by Mosman113 and even 106  Cfr. Valeriani, “Reiffenstein, Piranesi,” 150, 152. 107  Cecil, Glosses to Orlandi, after 460: “Virgin, Infant, St Joseph, by Sim Cant. Da Pesaro at Burghley, a small picture”; cf. Brigstocke’s entry in Italian paintings from Burghley House, 52–53, no. 6. 108  Cecil, Glosses to Orlandi, 153; cf. Brigstocke’s entry in Italian Paintings from Burghley House, 138–139, no. 52. 109  B M, P&D, T,3.38 and 39. 110  B M, P&D, T,3.37. 111  B M, P&D, T,4. 30–44 and 83. Paintings are Isiah in the Palazzo Barberini; Saint Margaret in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli; Endymion sleeping in the Palazzo Doria Pamphili; a Sibilla; Saint Mary Magdalen in the collection of Thomas Jenkins; The Entombement of Christ in the Palazzo Colonna; Saint Sebastian, Saint Francis and Saint Jerome in the Palazzo Santa Croce; The Holy Veronica in Palazzo Altieri; The Holy Family in the palace of the Duchess of Cellamare, later sold to the collection of the Portoguese consul at Naples; A woman grieving on the body of a warrior; Saint Peter denying Christ; a second Saint Francis; Saint John the Baptist in the Giustiniani Palace and The Dream of Saint Joseph in the Academy of Saint Luke. 112  B M, P&D, T,4.27 and 29. 113  B M, P&D, T,4.34.

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more drawings. A manifesto of this passion, in which criticism and market were again brought together, was the Raccolta di alcuni disegni del Barbieri da Cento detto il Guercino, which was entrusted to Francesco Bartolozzi by Jenkins and friends of his who were collectors and dealers, including Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Alessandro Albani. All factors point to Jenkins as the one who transmitted this passion to the ninth Earl, providing him, among other things, with a copy of the Raccolta, which is still in the Burghley library.114 This then explains Brownlow’s mention in his reports of 24 works at the time attributed to Guercino, including a ‘Cleopatra showing herself to Aug[ustus]’ in Palazzo Boccapaduli.115 And it again explains why in the end, always through Jenkins’ mediation, Brownlow bought the Jacob Receives the Blood-soaked Robe of Isaac by Guercino from the Barberini.116 Jenkins’ influence may also be seen working in the case of Michelangelo Merisi and his followers. Mosman copied five works that at the time were attributed to Caravaggio,117 plus about another twenty of other masters of Naturalism, such as Giovanni Baglione, Alessandro Turchi, Valentin de Boulogne and especially Gerrit van Honthorst, at the time known by the nickname of ‘Gherardo, or Gerardo delle Notti’. Prominent among the nine works marked by Mosman as by ‘Gherardo’ was the Passion of Christ series, which, making up at least twelve paintings—including The Scourging of Christ, Christ’s Agony in the Garden (Berlin, previously Dahlem), Christ’s Capture (Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada), Pilate Washing His Hands (Paris, Musée du Louvre)118—may be identified with the one originally made for the Capuchin church of S. Eframo Nuovo in Naples, where our sources mentioned it in 1692 and from where it eventually made its way to Rome.119 Even before his arrival in Italy Brownlow, 114  J. F. Dove, Catalogue of the Burghley-House Library (London: Alfred Sweeting), 122, under “Barbieri, Designs”. 115  Cecil, Reports, fols. d and e. 116  Brigstocke in Italian Paintings from Burghley House, 92–93, no. 26. 117  B M, P&D, A young man with a prisoner and The Supper at Emmaus in the Borghese Palace, Cupid breaking his bow, A Turkish Woman later bought by Mr. Rawlinson, Judith with the head of Holophernes in Cardinal Albani’s Palace; T,3.49, 52, 54, 56 and 58. 118  B M, P&D, nos. T,4.45–52 and 54: Christ before the High Priest, a second Christ before the Hight Priest in the Giustiniani collection, Christ before Pilatus, The Mocking of Christ, Pilatus washing his hands, Ecce Homo, The Scourging of Christ, The Entombement in the Giustiniani collection and An Angel appearing to St Peter. 119  Benedict Nicolson, Caravaggism in Europe, revised and enlarged by Louisa Vertova, 3 vols. (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1989), I, 179–188 Matthias Stom. Isaac blessing Jacob, exh. catalog ed. Richard Verdi (Birningham: The Barber Institute of Fine Arts and The University of Birningham, 1999), 44–45. For Pilatus Washing his Hands see also Franziska Fischbacher, Matthias Stomer: Die sizilianischen Nachtstücke (Frankfurt am Main et al.: Lang, 1993), 79, Fig. 12.

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figure 8.15 Nicolas Mosman after a follower of Guido Reni, Virgin Mary Preaching, London, British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department

and the British public in general, had been able to become familiar with this kind of style. In 1627 Charles I bought Death of the Virgin by Caravaggio from the Gonzaga collections, and sold a few decades later. Several artists influenced by Caravaggio had worked in England, such as the two Gentileschi, father and daughter, and the previously mentioned Honthorst. Among the many

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figure 8.16 Follower of Guido Reni, Virgin Mary Preaching, Stamford, Lincolnshire, Burghley House

paintings left by Honthorst in England, the ninth Earl of Exeter was probably at least familiar with the gigantic King Charles I and his Wife Queen Henrietta Maria as Apollo and Diana in Hampton Court—which at the time had earned the artist honorary British citizenship and a pension of £100120—as well as The Duke of Buckingham and his Family, which has always been in the possession of the British royal family and currently is also at Hampton Court.121 It is no wonder, then, that in his reports Brownlow noted a fair number of Caravaggio paintings, including the Maddalena Doria Pamphili, and also some by ‘Gerardo delle Notti’.122 However, his opinion of Caravaggio was rather harsh. In the annotations to the Abecedario he wrote: ‘Virgin and Child, colouring good, 120  Matthias Stom. Isaac blessing Jacob, 31. 121  Jay Richard Hudson and Rudolph E.O. Ekkart, Gerrit van Honthorst (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1999), XXIII–XXIV, 15, 19–20, 27, nos. 92, 385, 415. 122  Cecil, Reports, fol. d and e.

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drawing detestable by Michel Angelo da Caravaggio’.123 At play here in his appraisal of Merisi is the influence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian academic culture, which reached its most complete form in Giovan Pietro Bellori’s Vite, which circulated widely in England: expressions similar to those used by Brownlow Cecil were employed to describe the same pictures, including the Doria Mary Magdalene, by many other British grand tourists, including the poet and scholar Thomas Gray, who had been in Rome with Horace Walpole in the first half of 1740. Therefore it is most logical to assume that the remarkable number of works by Caravaggio in the ‘Mosman drawings’ was due to Thomas Jenkins’ influence. Jenkins played a fundamental role in the general reappraisal of Caravaggio and his school in the 1760s. One reason for the Scot to do this was the working of the market. In this period, in Italy, and Rome especially, there was an abundance of naturalistic works, which could be acquired at a much lower price than ones by Raphael, Annibale or Reni. Jenkins had, among other things, the above-mentioned series of the Passion of Christ, attributed first to Honthorst then to Matthias Stom, and now dispersed in various museums. This would explain the ninth Earl’s purchase of paintings by Caravaggio, such as Virgin and Child, the very painting he had spurned in the annotations to the Abecedario, and which today is firmly attributed to Jean Tassel,124 or Susanna and the Elders, on which the signature of Artemisia Gentileschi has recently been discovered.125 The same mechanism can be seen working with regard to Anton Raphael Mengs. Mosman copied nineteen works by the Bohemian master, including the well-known Perseus and Andromeda, which was commissioned by Sir Watkin Williams Wynn for his home in Wales but ended up in the collections of Catherine II, as indeed recorded by a British Museum librarian in the margins of the drawing (Figs. 8.17 and 8.18).126 Even before he left for the tour, Brownlow was of course well aware of Mengs’s work, being a master with a truly European reputation, and also because he had received a number of British commissions.127 After meeting Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, in Dresden in 1751,128 Mengs’ ‘English campaign’ was to include a copy of Raphael’s School of Athens for the Duke of Northumberland, finished in 1757, and the Allegorical

123  Cecil, Glosses to Orlandi, 377. 124  Cecil, Glosses to Orlandi, 377; see Brigstocke’entry in Italian Paintings from Burghley House, 140–141, no.53. 125  Nicolson, Caravaggism, I, p. 111. 126  B M, P&D, T,5.53. 127  See Urlich Finke, “Mengs und England,” in ‘Sind Briten hier?’. Relations between British and Continental Art 1680–1880 (Munich: Fink, 1981), 57–82; Mengs and his British Patrons. 128  See Roettgen, Introduction to Mengs and his British Patrons, 10.

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portrait of James Caulfield, Lord Charlemont, dated between 1756 and 1758.129 More commissions followed in the 1760s and the beginning of the 1770sties: Horace Walpole’s enthusiastic judgment of Mengs—made in 1757 after seeing the Duke of Northumberland’s gallery at Charing Cross—came to be shared by many other connoisseurs and collectors, including Thomas Robinson, James Barry and George Clavering Nassau, Lord Fordwich, and the third Earl of Cowper,130 Lord Clive.131 However, when Brownlow arrived in Italy and despite his aforementioned penchant for the German neoclassical style seemed to opt for other masters, and in particular Angelika Kauffmann. This comes out clearly in his annotations to Orlandi’s Abecedario. The biography of the Bohemian master seems more like a dutiful tribute to an undisputed glory, when compared with the apologetic spirit that permeates the one of the Swiss painter, due to a mix of information obtained at first hand and through the reading of contemporary biographies, such as those by Giovanni Gherardo de’ Rossi.132 In this case, too, then, the inclusion among the ‘Mosman drawings’ of such a high number of copies of Mengs seems attributable to external pressures. Mosman himself must have had some say in it, since, as we have seen, he received his training under the Bohemian master. The predominant role, though, must again have been played by Jenkins, who had a vested interest in promoting Mengs. As is well known, when the Bohemian left Rome for Spain, Jenkins got hold of the entire contents of his studio. There is therefore nothing unusual in finding in Mosman’s anthology two works that indeed belonged to Jenkins: the Portrait of Meng’s wife as Diligence and St Mary Magdalene. In preparing the ‘Mosman drawings’ project, Thomas Jenkins no doubt had the traditions of the Roman market in mind. For example, the idea of promoting the sale of works of art through drawn or printed copies, which were then incorporated into volumes of a scientific nature, first emerged in the first half of the century in the circle of Cardinal Albani and Baron von Stosch, a member of which was the pharmacist and dealer Antonio Borioni. In the second half of the century the same idea was taken up, among others, by Cavaceppi 129  Roettgen, “Un ritratto allegorico di Lord Charlemont dipinto da Mengs e alcune annotazioni sul rapporto tra Piranesi e l’ambiente neoclassico romano,” in Piranesi e la cultura antiquaria. Gli antecedenti e il contesto, ed. Maurizio Calvesi (Rome: Multigrafica, 1984), 149–170; Mengs. La scoperta del Neoclassico, exh. catalog ed. Roettgen (Venice: Marsilio, 2001), 209 and 234, no. 73; see also in the same catalog Hildegard Kreschmer, “Biografia di Anton Raphael Mengs,” 366–368. 130  In 1760 Mengs painted a Holy Family for Lord Fordwich, in 1769 the Portrait of Lord Cowper; see Mengs. La scoperta del Neoclassico, 296, no. 103. 131  For the Deposition of Christ, an autograph replica for Lord Clive of Mengs’s painting for the bedchamber of Charles III of Spain see Mengs. La scoperta del Neoclassico, 209 and 366–368. 132  Cecil, Glosses to Orlandi, Index, folio after letter “K”.

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figure 8.17 Anton Raphael Mengs, Perseus and Andromeda, St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum

‘ Mosman drawings ’ in the British Museum

figure 8.18 Nicolaus Mosman from Anton Raphael Mengs, Perseus and Andromeda, London, British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department

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and Gavin Hamilton in the Schola Italica Picturae, which included reproductions of several pieces in Hamilton’s possession, including St. Jerome by Reni, now in the National Gallery of London. As is known, a key element in this kind of publication was to disguise the commercial intent and ennoble the works for sale. For this reason, in the illustrated catalogs works belonging to the dealers were mixed with others from aristocratic collections, which were used to ‘crown’, or ‘frame’ the former. Jenkins knew this kind of instrument and handled it to perfection. Starting in the 1750s, he issued a publication of a scientific nature around a lucky archaeological find, the so-called Carafa Vase, thus ensuring an almost immediate sale. In the ‘Mosman drawings’, we can glimpse a further element of novelty. Instead of carrying out the undertaking himself, with all the expenses and financial risks it entailed, Jenkins acted like a hand in a glove: in essence, he suggested the idea of drawn copies to the ninth Earl who, as a matter of fact, had made a similar request, and then took the helm, shaping, at least in part, the tastes of the purchaser and finally making a substantial personal profit from the sale of his own works and those of others. 8 Conclusion The ‘Mosman drawings’, which for a long time have been of only marginal interest to critics, can, at this point, be seen as a series of remarkable interest. Part of their value is linked to the beauty of the copies themselves, which in many cases is on a par with the best examples of the genre, such as the copies of antiquities made by Batoni and others for Richard Topham’s album. The ‘Mosman Drawings’ are also important for their capacity to comprehend some aspects of the personality of the ninth Earl as a collector, and especially as a buyer of art works from Italy. Thirdly, they are important for what they represent in the art market. In this respect, this corpus of drawings is like a delicate and sensitive diaphragm between demand and supply. Above all, though, they are important for the light they shed on the history of art criticism. They give us insight into a very broad phenomenon. It is not as a market mechanism in itself that the collection is interesting but as a market mechanism seen in cultural terms, a factor in conditioning taste.

chapter 9

The Capture of the Westmorland and the Purchase of Art in Rome in the 1770s Brian Allen The story of the armed British merchant ship, the Westmorland, captured by the French navy in January 1779 with a cargo including hundreds of works of art purchased in Italy by a group of young British Grand Tourists has only recently come to light, but it has now been the subject of a major exhibition held at the Yale Center for British Art and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2012–13, and this paper provides a short summary of its findings.1 In March 1778 the Westmorland lay at anchor in the harbour at Livorno on the coast of Tuscany waiting to depart for England. We have no visual record of the Westmorland’s appearance but we know that she was launched in London in 1776 and was capable of carrying a cargo of about 300 tons that made her sufficiently large to make an annual trading voyage to Italy financially viable. Even in times of peace among the European powers, the journey between England and Livorno provided numerous hazards, not only storms and calms but also the threat of pirates operating from the Barbary coast. A well-armed merchant ship such as the Westmorland, which when it left Livorno carried twenty-two carriage guns and between twelve and sixteen swivel guns, could forego the pressure to sail more slowly in convoy under naval protection. The Westmorland was only one of dozens of ships used by agents in Italy to send artworks to their new owners in Britain, but dealers and agents took considerable care to safeguard the objects being conveyed. Certain items, such as drawings that could be rolled up, were usually sent overland. Intaglios, jewelry and other 1  The contents of this paper are primarily taken from Maria Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui et al. (eds.) The English Prize: The Capture of the Westmorland, an Episode of the Grand Tour (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012) which had not yet been published when this paper was delivered on March 16, 2012. All references are taken from this source. The publication accompanied the exhibition organized by the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London in association with the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid and the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford. The exhibition catalogue/book contains contributions by Professor José M. Luzón Nogué and a team of eminent eighteenth-century specialists including Professor John Brewer, Dr Kim Sloan, Dr Frank Salmon, Dr Clare Hornsby, Dr Jonathan Yarker and Professor John Wilton-Ely.

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small items might be sent in personal baggage or with a trusted third party. For paintings and sculpture the maritime route was probably the cheaper option. From Rome objects were usually transported to Ostia or Civitavecchia by river, then on to Livorno by sea. The British Resident at Florence, Sir Horace Mann, writing in 1745 to his friend Horace Walpole about the latter’s purchase of the Roman sculpture known as the ‘Boccapadugli’ eagle promised to ‘order him [the eagle] directly to Leghorne [for that is what the British called Livorno in the eighteenth century] by sea, and from thence will contrive some way to send him home, in a man of war if possible, for as he has not Jupiter’s thunder with him, he can only be safe under the protection of that of Neptune.’ At this moment when the Westmorland set sail in the late-1770s France had just entered the American War of Independence on the side of the colonists and the ship’s captain Willis Machell was well aware of the danger of capture but was also prepared to capture enemy merchant ships himself. In addition to the works of art, the Westmorland’s cargo included olive oil, barrels of anchovies, parmesan cheeses, medicinal drugs, silk and Genoa paper. The ship had previously transported artworks as we know from a letter written in November 1777 by the art dealer Thomas Jenkins to the collector Charles Townley in which he mentioned a consignment of ‘four cases of Marbles on board the Westmorland’ sent on an earlier journey from Italy. Although the Westmorland was supposed to set sail by the end of March 1778 it remained in port and did not set sail until late December. At noon on January 7, 1779 the ship was captured off the eastern coast of Spain by two French warships and the following day, along with two other captured British ships, laden with cod, they arrived at the safe port of Málaga where the French could sell their cargoes. It was quickly realized that the Westmorland contained an important cargo and the British consul in Málaga wasted no time in mentioning the incident to Lord Grantham, the British Ambassador in Madrid. On January 9, the legality of the prize was established by a naval trial and the French were given rights over the ship and its prisoners. The capture of the Westmorland was by no means an unusual occurrence. Later in the same year the collector Charles Townley lost further crates of artworks when the privateer the Favourite, along with three other ships jointly valued at £200,000, was captured by the French and taken to Toulon, where its contents were sold. British privateers also took prizes comparable in value to the Westmorland. The French East Indiaman La Ferme was, for instance, captured in November 1778 with a cargo said to be worth £100,000. It is remarkable to think that precisely one thousand, mostly French but some Spanish, ships were captured by British privateers and recorded at the Prize Court in London between 1777 and 1783. Perhaps the most spectacular prize captured by the

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British ships the Ranger and the Amazon was the Santa Inés, a very large 800ton vessel which contained sugar, black pepper and beeswax and was valued at the enormous sum of £200,000. The first object removed from the Westmorland cargo was a valuable picture mentioned in the manifest sent to the Spanish Prime Minister, Floridablanca. This was Anton Raphael Mengs’s The Liberation of Andromeda by Perseus (see Paolo Coen’s essay, Fig. 8) which had been commissioned in Rome in 1768 by Sir Watkin Williams Wynn and, after a ten-year wait, it had finally been dispatched to him, although of course he was never to set eyes on it. This is not the place to recount the full story of the Mengs painting (there is an important essay on the subject by Steffi Roettgen in the The English Prize exhibition catalog) but the picture was eventually purchased by the Empress Catherine II of Russia and it remains in the State Hermitage in St Petersburg to this day. With news of the Westmorland’s capture reported in the English press, some owners of the goods on board made enquiries about the fate of their belongings and of course the Italian merchants who had shipped and insured the goods quickly made their compensation claims. According to the documents preserved at Toulon, the Westmorland was among the more valuable prizes taken during the war, and many merchant companies competed for over a year for the purchase of its cargo. The cargo was finally sold in 1780 to a grocers’ company called the Compañia de Lonjistas de Madrid (Company of Commercial Agents of Madrid). Although the perishable goods on the Westmorland were quickly sold by their new owners, the crates containing the art and books remained in warehouses in Málaga. In fact more than four years passed before these crates came to the attention of the Spanish Prime Minister Floridablanca who in turn probably informed the Spanish King, Carlos III, who then ordered the marqués de Pimentel, the vice protector of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, to select ‘a man of taste’ to examine and determine the value of the cargo. The King then instructed the merchants at Málaga to make a list of the contents before transferring the crates (fifty in total) to the Real Academia in Madrid, a process that began in October 1783. When the Secretary of the Real Academia, Antonio Ponz, returned from a journey to Britain in the spring of 1784, he was entrusted with the care and cataloguing of the objects. Floridablanca then chose the objects he thought might appeal to the King’s taste with the Academia keeping the rest. The King would pay for all the objects with the unwanted works returned to the Company of Commercial Agents who could then attempt to reach some agreement with the British Ambassador, who was interested in recovering what he could for the original owners.

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figure 9.1 View of the Casita del Principe, Madrid, Real Sitio de El Pardo

A selection of objects for the King was sent to Palacio Real in Madrid and to the small palace, or Casita del Principe (Fig. 9.1) built for the Prince of Asturias, the future Carlos IV, in the Real Sitio de El Pardo, near Madrid. These included two chimneypieces, two inlaid marble tabletops and drawings depicting them, some small marble sculptures, and feather flowers and flower trimming for dressing gowns delivered to the Princess Asturias. Ponz set aside a collection of books, engravings, sculptures and paintings for the students and teachers at the Real Academia. The remainder of the crates lay in the Academia rooms waiting for the Company of Agents to collect them, although in the end they lost interest in the material. Some paintings, including the two portraits by Pompeo Batoni (now in the Prado) and marble tabletops were sent to Floridablanca’s official prime ministerial residence in Madrid, the rest remaining at the Real Academia. The modern tailpiece to this episode begins about twenty years ago when José Maria Luzón Nogué, former Director of both the Prado and Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid began to investigate a group of five supposedly ancient Roman urns that had arrived in Spain in the eighteenth century but had been moved to the archaeological museum in 1867. A casual reference in an essay in the museum’s journal in 1872 provided some information about their provenance and referred to their being part of the cargo of a ship—the Westmorland—captured a century earlier. By the late 1990s the Westmorland provenance had been so completely forgotten that even the identity of the

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sitters in two important Batoni portraits in the Prado, previously lent to Floridablanca, had long since been lost. In 1999 under the direction of Professor Luzón, a group of students and scholars began to examine documents in the Real Academia in Madrid relating to the cinerary urns in the archaeological museum, which they suspected were fakes or composite works. This initial research and much further in-depth work was undertaken by two of Professor Luzon’s graduate students, Ana María Suárez Huerta and María Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui and this paper is based almost entirely on their findings and the work of the other contributors to the Westmorland exhibition catalogue. The present author’s association with the project began in April 2000 when he was asked to attend a meeting at the National Gallery in London arranged by Nicholas Penny (at the time, Director of the National Gallery) and Gabriele Finaldi (the current Director) with Professor Luzón and María Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui with a view to exploring the possibility of an exhibition of their findings in London. As it transpired the National Gallery was unable to commit to an exhibition at that point but the present author remained intrigued by the project and in November 2000 was invited by Professor Luzón to give a paper in Madrid about the Brinsley Ford Archive, housed at the Paul Mellon Centre in London which was beginning to play a vital role in identifying the original owners of the property and to allow me to see at first hand the discoveries that had been made to date. The Ford Archive contains a vast amount of material about British and Irish travellers to Italy in the eighteenth century. Further visits to Madrid followed and in 2002 I committed the Paul Mellon Centre to a research partnership with the Real Academia. This collaboration also led to two summer courses funded by the Paul Mellon Centre and held in conjunction with the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2002 and 2007. As a result of initial research at the Academia various inventories were discovered that related to the contents of the captured Westmorland that had eventually arrived at the Real Academia. A number of the crates on board the ship were labeled ‘H.R.H.D.G.’ and it was quickly realized that these initials stood for ‘His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester’. This was of course the younger brother of King George III and this identification was an important landmark in the research, as was the discovery of a pro memoria note given by the British Jesuit priest, Father John Thorpe, to the Spanish procurator general (in other words the King’s attorney) in Rome, José Nicolás de Azara y Perera, Marqués de Nibbiano who passed it on to the Spanish prime minister, the conde de Floridablanca. In this document the name of the ship—the Westmorland—was given. A complete record of the negotiations and the price

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figure 9.2 Annibale Antonini, Dizionario Italiano, Latino e Francese (Lyon, 1770), Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

paid by the Company of Commercial Agents was also discovered in the archives of what is now the Banco de España in Madrid. The next phase of research was concerned with matching the initials on the crates with the aristocratic young British travellers whose property they contained. What made this possible was the then recently published A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers to Italy 1701–1800 compiled by John Ingamells and based on the extensive archive on the subject amassed by Sir Brinsley Ford, housed at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. The process of identifying the books and prints from the Westmorland in the library of the Real Academia was made much easier by the fact that the librarian of the Academia, Pascual Colomer, had written the initials ‘P.Y.’ meaning ‘Presa Ynglesa’ or ‘The English Prize’ in ink on the books: this happened for instance on Annibale Antonini’s Dizionario Italiano (Figs. 9.2 and 9.3). In

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figure 9.3 Detail of Annibale Antonini’s Dizionario highlighting the initials PY [Presa Ynglesa = English Prize], Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

addition some of their original owners (or in some cases their tutors) had inscribed their names in the books, or they were books brought from libraries at home. Over a number of years the researchers managed to identify the books, prints and their owners through this painstaking process. By 2000 the research had been taken overseas to investigate archives in the UK and the United States. For instance, among the Egerton Papers in the British Library in London is one of the most complete inventories of the Westmorland, presumably sent from Málaga, and the archives of Lloyd’s insurance company in London also contained references to the ship. There was similarly much material relating to insuring the cargo in the archives at Livorno. The creation of a database to contain all this material in an ordered and systematic manner was undertaken by Lola Sánchez-Jáuregui, and this demonstrated that 778 cultural items from the Westmorland arrived in Madrid in 1784. So far 165 of the 294 books have been identified. All 49 maps have been identified as well as 98 of the 107 prints. Surprisingly, only two of the 136 pieces of sheet music have so far been traced, but the success rate with drawings is much better with 62 out of 67 watercolors and gouaches identified. Identifying the paintings has proved more problematic because many had been misattributed to other artists in later inventories and were often described as being the work sent by pensionados (grant students) of the Real Academia studying in Rome. To confuse matters further, during the nineteenth century some paintings were sent out on long-term loan to other institutions in the Spanish provinces, where they were located. In some instances new, unrecorded objects were discovered in the rooms of the Real Academia. As a result the project has been able to identify 28 of 40 sculptures and 33 out of 59 paintings. The greatest number of objects belonged to an extremely wealthy young man named Francis Basset, the heir to a Cornish copper and tin mine fortune. Basset was orphaned at a very early age and was educated at Harrow, Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, which he left in 1775. Het set off on his Grand Tour at the age of nineteen in the spring of 1777 with his tutor, the Reverend William Sandys, vicar of the family parish church. Sandys had already spent three years in Italy from 1771–1774 so he was well prepared to guide his young charge. Basset reached Rome sometime in the autumn of 1777 and must have

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commissioned his portrait from Batoni soon after his arrival. He also commissioned his bust alla romana from the Irish sculptor based in Rome, Christopher Hewetson (Figs. 9.4 and 9.5). He purchased a remarkable suite of six large watercolors of views in the Alban Hills by John Robert Cozens (Fig. 9.6). In addition Basset purchased many engravings, such as the colored series of the Loggie di Rafaele nel Vaticano and the Galleria Farnese by Giovanni Volpato. He also purchased 14 volumes of Piranesi engravings and, as a sign of gratitude, Piranesi dedicated to him one of the plates of his volume. Much of what Basset acquired would have been intended for the family country house, Tehidy Park, in Cornwall (Fig. 9.7) and despite never receiving these objects he went on to be a collector of real distinction. Basset’s Grand Tour lasted about a year, but that of George Legge, Viscount Lewisham and future 3rd Earl of Dartmouth, lasted about three years. In Rome, Lewisham sat for Batoni. Lewisham’s crates on the Westmorland consisted mainly of books written in Italian and dealing with Italian art, literature, theater, and history as well as the usual array of guidebooks that one might expect of any Grand Tourist. He also bought a number of copies of Old Masters. Lewisham’s purchases were modest perhaps because he was unable to match the quality of works that his father had purchased in Rome in the early 1750s. Like Lord Lewisham, Frederick Ponsonby, Viscount Duncannon, came from a distinguished family, and his father too had assembled a distinguished art collection. Duncannon set off for Italy with his tutor Samuel Wells Thomson after he left Oxford in 1777. The acquisition of major works of art does not seem to have been a priority, although he was clearly a serious devotee of the fine arts. His crates were packed with architectural drawings, views of Switzerland and of the Roman sites and many books devoted to art and the specific cities he had visited. He was also something of an artist himself although it has not yet proved possible to identify any works by him that were on the Westmorland. Although, as we have already seen, detailed early inventories list the contents of the Westmorland we are less fortunate in having very little information about how and where these travellers made their purchases in Italy. In the case of the hundreds of books on board the ship it is clear that some of them formed part of small traveling libraries that Grand Tourists brought from home as a means of preparing for what they would encounter en route and in Italy, but also as an important way of relieving boredom during long coach journeys between cities. Some books however were clearly bought during the journey in Paris, Geneva, Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples, but precise details of such

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figure 9.4 Christopher Hewetson, Portrait of Francis Basset, Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

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figure 9.5 Christopher Hewetson, Portrait of Francis Basset, Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

figure 9.6 John Robert Cozens, View of Ariccia, Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

purchases do not, alas, survive. It is highly likely that the celebrated British art dealers in Rome such as James Byres and Thomas Jenkins (see Fig. 9.15 in Paolo Coen’s Introduction) were the source of quite a few of the works (especially the antiquities) on board the Westmorland. These men, who realized that there was much more money to be made in art dealing than in producing works of art themselves, remained at the heart of the Roman art dealing

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figure 9.7 View of Tehedy Park, near Camborne, Cornwall

world in the middle and later decades of the eighteenth century, and they not only understood the artistic needs of young British gentlemen travellers but played a vital role in forming their artistic tastes. What essentially emerges from a study of the contents of the Westmorland is that many of the objects purchased were little more than modest souvenirs, such as the gouache drawings (based on popular topographical prints) of the great sites of Rome and other cities that were present in abundance. Apart from the portraits by Batoni of Francis Basset and Lord Lewisham and Mengs’s celebrated history painting Andromeda and Perseus (see Fig. 9.8 in Paolo Coen’s essay) one of the most notable features of the Westmorland’s cargo was the absence of high quality pictures by celebrated Old Master painters. The contents of the Westmorland provide us with a time capsule from 1779, a window into the art market and the collecting culture of the Italian Grand Tour at a very precise moment. The common assumption that all Grand Tourists returned to Britain festooned with great works of art, such as landscapes by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin or outstanding pieces of ancient sculpture, is exposed (except in rare instances) as a misconception since, as the evidence of the Westmorland demonstrates, travelers were much more likely to return with copies (often in miniature) of the celebrated works of art that they had seen (Figs. 9.8 and 9.9). The prevailing dictum, promoted from early in the eighteenth century by Jonathan Richardson, the author of a standard guidebook to Italy, that a good copy was better than a poor original is much in evidence in the contents of the Westmorland. But the range and variety of Westmorland objects, especially the richly informative array of books, provide a density and level of detail that has enabled us to begin reshaping previous thinking about the subject.

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figure 9.8 Vincenzo Brenna, A Ceiling Design in the Antique Style, Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

figure 9.9 After Guido Reni, Aurora, Madrid, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

chapter 10

Economic and Scholarly Appraisal of Ancient Marbles in Late 18th-Century Rome Daniela Gallo From St Petersburg to Edinburgh, from Prussia to Spain, in late eighteenthcentury Europe, antiquities—and sculptures in particular—were an undisputed status symbol. The perquisite of the Italian merchant and financial class and the high aristocracy since the Renaissance, ancient statues and reliefs had aroused the greed of those who, beyond the Alps, were looking for artistic and cultural recognition, becoming an important emblem of the European cultural koine of the Greco-Roman-variety. In opening his country up to Europe, Peter the Great had followed the trend by collecting books on antiquities and ancient objects of a small size.1 However, since the Tsar’s agents could not find the right contacts in Rome or the rest of the peninsula to acquire marbles, it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the Russian aristocracy began to collect ancient sculptures, purchasing among other things English collections that had been built up over the previous decades.2 As for the British, who carried off to their island far more crates of ancient marbles than the armies of Napoleon did later, they surrounded themselves with statues of gods and imperial portraits in their country houses and, more rarely, in their London town houses. They thus completed a process that had begun in public schools, where Latin and Ancient Greek took up three quarters of the 1  Pierre le Grand et ses images de Rome, ed. Olga Medvedkova (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2010). 2  This was the case of the magnificent collection of Lyde Browne, a director of the Bank of England, purchased largely by Catherine II in 1784. See especially Oleg J. Neverov, “The Lyde Browne Collection and the History of Ancient Sculpture in the Hermitage Museum,” American Journal of Archaelogy 88 (1984): 33–42; Neverov, “La collection des antiquités formée par Lyde Browne achetée par Catherine II,” in Le collezioni di antichità nella cultura antiquaria europea, ed. Manuela Fano Santi (Rome, Giorgio Bretschneider, 1999), 154–160; Jonathan Scott, The Pleasures of Antiquity. British Collectors of Greece and Rome (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 136–139. More generally, on the interest of the Russian aristocracy of the 18th century for ancient marbles, see now Sergei Androsov, “La fortuna della scultura greco-romana in Russia nel Settecento tra originali e copie,” in Roma e l’antico. Realtà e visione nel Settecento, exh. catalogue ed. Carolina Brook and Valter Curzi (Geneva and Milan: Skira, 2010), 81–90.

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syllabus and where, in Westminster upper school, conversations were even held in Latin.3 But what was the market price of these ancient works? Given the great demand, it is tempting to think that they cost much more than a work of modern origin. Was this really so? What sort of things were assessed by late eighteenth-century Roman dealers when setting prices? According to Abbot Lanzi, and no doubt after the publication of Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art, collectors gradually abandoned iconographic criteria and focused on style, relying on their connoisseurship; however, in Rome, the sculptors-restorers and the curators of the Museo Pio Clementino continued to concentrate on building iconographically coherent series of works and showing a great variety of artistic genres. As regards style, they looked at a range of values but mostly took into account quality of craftsmanship, and it did not matter whether the work was Etruscan, Greek or Roman.4 So what criteria were adopted to highlight the qualities of the items earmarked for foreign collectors, who often had no opportunity of seeing their purchases before buying them? 1

Purchases for the Museo Pio Clementino

I shall attempt to answer these questions by focusing on the 1770s, when work began on building the new Vatican Museum. The Roman antiquities market may well have seen a big shakeup but it remained a phenomenon of some complexity. Among the works purchased for the new Museo Pio Clementino between 1772 and 1778, the year when, under Pope Pius VI, the rooms adjoining the octagon courtyard were completed, the most expensive sculpture was a colossal statue of Juno (Fig. 10.1) sold by Princess Cornelia Costanza Barberini on April 2, 1772 for 2,600 roman scudi.5 Then at a lower cost we find a seated statue of a young man in oriental dress wearing a Phrygian cap, identified as Paris, bought in December of the same year from Casa Altemps for 1,800 scudi, while in May of the previous year Girolamo Verospi had sold the Pope his famous seated

3  See especially Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique. Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). 4  On this topic, see Daniela Gallo, “Les Antiquaires italiens du XVIIIe du siècle à l’épreuve du style,” in L’Héroïque et le Champêtre, ed. Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc et al., 2 vols. (Nanterre: Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2014), II, 271–289. 5  Nota delle Statue, e Monumenti Antichi Acquistati per formare il Museo Clementino e dei loro prezzi e spese dei ristauri e trasporti e d’altro, Città del Vaticano, Archivio Storico Musei Vaticani (ASMV), case IIIa, fascicle 1: 29.

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figure 10.1 Roman Art,  Juno (Barberini’s Hera), Vatican City, Musei Vaticani, Museo Pio Clementino

Jupiter for 1,500 scudi.6 The same price of 1,500 scudi was also paid for the socalled Sardanapalus, purchased from the Quarantotti family’s administration through the Fabric of Saint Peter in 1772,7 and the same amount was again paid for a ‘group of Bacchus with a faun’ bought from the Casa Giraud on January 31, 1776.8 Finally, only just a little less expensive was the group of a Satyr and Nymph, sold by Thomas Jenkins on January 24, 1772, for 1,400 scudi, and the statue of Nerva (Fig. 10.2), restored by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, which the museum purchased for the same price on May 4, 1776.9 All the other statues cost no more than 1,000 scudi, which was the price of four breccia corallina columns 16 and 3⁄4 palms high or a couple of porphyry columns 11 palms high10. 6  7  8  9  10 

 ota delle Statue, respectively at 31 and 26. N Nota delle Statue, 27.
 Nota delle Statue, 33.
 Nota delle Statue, 12 and 25. A SMV, case II, fascicle 18, n. 51 (63 red).

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figure 10.2 Roman Art, Nerva, Vatican City, Musei Vaticani, Museo Pio Clementino

Thus, the statue of the Discobolus found in 1771 in the ruins of the so-called villa of Gallienus at Tor Colombaro, between the eighth and ninth miles of the Via Appia, and bought for a thousand scudi on December 25 of the following year, was considered less valuable than a pair of Basanite ‘urns’, respectively green and black, for which 2,150 scudi were paid to the Collegio Clementino from January 1778 onwards.11 The precious set of Muses with Apollo playing a lyre found in the Pianella di Cassio, near Tivoli, in May 1776—totaling twelve statues (the set also included a small sleeping Apollo ‘with his head perhaps listening to the oracle of Themis with an altar before’, and seventeen herms, of which only three were intact)—cost 5,600 scudi, paid in three installments over four years.12 The most highly priced statues were the two Apollos, each valued at a thousand scudi, the one with the lyre undoubtedly because its head was still there, ‘inserted in ancient times’, and the sleeping Apollo because of its ‘rarity and integrity.’13 In fact, even though size played an important role in the valorization of excavated sculptures, integrity, and in particular the presence or not of the ancient head, was a key element. For this reason, the most highly priced of these Tivoli Muses were the Polyhymnia and the Thalia, valued respectively at 600 and 700 scudi, while the others cost between one hundred and 250 scudi. 11  N  ota delle Statue, 18 and 36. 12  Nota delle Statue, 7–9. The remnant was payed only on February 9, 1780; see Nota delle Statue, 10. 13  Nota delle Statue, 8.

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As for the 700 scudi paid for the Thalia, this was because the attributes were still there, the mask and the crook, though in a fragmentary state.14 On the other hand, less importance was attached to size for the statues or groups from a collection, which therefore had already been restored. In this case, the most important factors were the uniqueness of the iconography and the quality of the workmanship. The large sum disbursed for the Barberini Juno was because only the arms were missing and integrated ’already from ancient times,’ and the fact that the Visconti considered it to be ‘one of the most perfect clothed statues’15 then known. ‘If we consider the art, everything in this image is interesting and admirable. The grace of the contours, the beauty, and the majesty of its large eyes, for which reason it was called Juno βoῶπις, the elegant and graceful draperies, the fine workmanship in every part, make it a work of a great artist of Greece,’ 
wrote Giovanbattista and Ennio Quirino Visconti in their description of the statue in the first volume of the museum’s illustrated catalogue.16 They said they were tempted to link it to the style of Praxiteles and the Hera which the sculptor made for the temple of Plataea, but the lack of works certainly by him or reliable information about where the statue had been kept in antiquity made them decide to take a very close look at “the style of the headˮ. They noticed ‘something about this quadratus, as Varro had said, repeated by Pliny.’17 In the rendering of the drapery, and in particular ‘the way it fell to the left side’, they noticed ‘a winding movement, or succession of uniform folds’ typical ‘of that older style, which is often called Etruscan.’18 They concluded that it must have been a work made at a time when “art, which had reached its greatest perfection with Praxiteles, still retained some traces of an earlier more ancient style; just as in the paintings of Raphael we sometimes see 14  N  ota delle Statue, 8: “Melpomene Musa con testa riportata in antico scudi duecento cinquanta/Polimnia Musa con sua testa antica riportata scudi seicento per l’integrità/ Talia Musa con testa antica riportata con maschera e pedo scudi settecento/Musa sedente senza capo in atto di scrivere col braccio voltato verso la sinistra scudi trecento/Musa con lira stante in piedi senza testa scudi duecento trecento [sic]/ Musa sedente senza capo con bellissimi panneggiamenti scudi trecento/Musa sedente senza capo assai frammentata e guasta scudi duecento per la bona scultura/Musa in piedi senza capo di scultura inferiore, ora scoperta per Giunone scudi cento.” About the history of the discovery of this group and its restoration see Chiara Piva, Restituire l’antichità. Il laboratorio di restauro della scultura antica del Museo Pio Clementino (Rome: Quasar, 2007), 87–107. 15  See Giovanni Battista Visconti, Introduction to Il Museo Pio Clementino (…), by Visconti and Ennio Quirino Visconti, 7 vols. (Rome: Ludovico Mirri, Luigi Mirri and Gasparo Capparoni, 1782–1807), I, 1782, 2. 16  Visconti, Introduction, 2. 17  Visconti, Introduction, 2. 18  Visconti, Introduction, 3.

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vestiges of the styles of the most skilled fifteenth-century artists”.19 They ended their scholarly disquisitions with a discussion of the type of diadem and the ornaments of the clothing. Exhibited in the Sala Rotonda since 1785, the colossal statue of Juno Barberini was therefore considered to be a work ‘of Greek sculpture’ and the best depiction of the goddess in the museum.20 Its high price was justified by its fine style and workmanship. Its value was undisputable because its excellence had never been called into question. While in Pasquale Massi’s bilingual guide book, published in 1792, it was pointed out that the arms had been added after the purchase by Giovanni Pierantoni, it is still described as a ‘colossal statue of great excellence.’21 As for the Altemps Paris, it was a well-known statue previously reproduced in Paolo Alessandro Maffei’s Statue di Roma, published at the beginning of the century, and its iconography was extremely rare. Although Ennio Quirino Visconti was not sure whether there was a connection with the Euphranor bronze, he considered it to be a work ‘invented’ by the ‘Greek schools’ ‘so graceful is its movement, well set, elegant in shape, and the expression just right.’22 He reserved his only criticism for the seventeenth-century restoration, which, having shortened the left leg, did not attach the left foot in the right way.23 The Verospi Jupiter, too, the first ancient sculpture purchased by Cardinal Braschi as the treasurer of Pope Clement XIV, was a well-known statue with a rare iconography, having appeared in Maffei’s collection in 1704.24 In the museum it was placed in a prominent position, in a niche in the third section of the Sala dei Busti, in the center of the perspective who marked the passage that went 19  Visconti, Introduction, 3. 20  Descrizione del Museo Pio Clementino, in ASMV, case IV, fascicle 2.2, fol. 30. 21  Pasquale Massi, Indicazione antiquaria del Pontificio Museo Pio Clementino in Vaticano (Rome: Lazzarini, 1792), 121. The restoration was made in 1774. Always displayed in the Sala Rotonda, the statue is now considered as a work of the mid-second century A.C. from a Greek original of the Late Hellenism dated from the second century B.C., which descends from a type datable from around 420–400 BC representing Aphrodite or Tyche. See Giandomenico Spinola, “La Galleria delle Statue, la Sala dei Busti, Il Gabinetto delle Maschere, la Loggia Scoperta, la Sala delle Muse, la Sala Rotonda e la Sala a Croce Greca,” in Il Museo Pio Clementino, 3 vols. (Città del Vaticano: 1996–2004), II, 1999, 254–255, no.10, pl. 40. 22   See Ennio Quirino Visconti’s contribution in Visconti and Visconti, Il Museo PioClementino, II, 1784, 69. 23  Ennio Quirino Visconti’s contribution in Visconti and Visconti, Il Museo Pio-Clementino, II, 1784, 70. This Paris, still displayed in the Gallery of the Statues, is a work from the Antonine period derived from prototypes of the end of the fourth or of the beginning of the third century B.C. See Spinola, “La Galleria delle Statue,” 57–58, no. 76, pl. 10. 24  As in Massi, Indicazione antiquaria, 62.

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from the Galleria delle Statue to the Sala dei Busti. But only the head and top half of the body were of ancient origin.25 Thus, whereas for the Altemps Paris the price was influenced by an imperfect restoration, for the Verospi Jupiter the absence of almost half of the statue was an even more important factor in establishing a price. The case of the so-called Sardanapalus is a little different. Winckelmann had identified the statue, which was found in 1761 in Monte Porzio Catone, in his Monumenti antichi inediti as a portrait of the Assyrian king,26 while Ennio Quirino Visconti identified it more correctly as an effigy of a bearded Bacchus.27 It had been found in a large niche supported by four caryatids, bought by Cardinal Albani, who continued to be a major player in the market until his death in December 1779. At the time it was purchased for the Museo Clementino, it was the extremely rare iconography and the quality of the sculpture that determined the price. According to Visconti, in these colossal shapes the artist had managed to convey both the majesty of the god as well as the “voluptuousness and flabbiness of an adult”, the characteristics of a Bacchus.28 Stylistically, however, the Sardanapalus was not considered by Visconti to be of the same quality as the Barberini Juno and it fetched a far lower price.29

25  See Spinola, “La Galleria delle Statue,” 110–111, no. 77, pls. 7 and 19. The statue, datable between 80 and 100 A.C., depends from a type of the Late Hellenism inspired from the Jupiter Capitolinus by Apollonios. It is still displayed in the Sala dei Busti. 26  Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Monumenti Antichi Inediti, 2 vols. (Rome: Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 1767), II, 219–221, no. 163. 27  See Ennio Quirino Visconti’s in Visconti and Visconti, Il Museo Pio Clementino, II, 1784, 81–85, pl. XLI. 28  Ennio Quirino Visconti’s in Visconti and Visconti, Il Museo Pio Clementino, II, 1784, 84–85. Here are Ennio Quirino Visconti’s original words: “Per quel che riguarda l’arte il nostro Bacco barbato è un pezzo degno di qualche studio. La voluttà, e la mollezza nell’età adulta non possono esprimersi né con maggior sentimento, né con maggior dignità. Il corpo non solo è delicatamente pasciuto, vestito, e colto, ma l’anima stessa mostra quella stupida contentezza d’una persona abbandonata a’ piaceri, e che non ne sente rimorsi. L’aria del volto è però grandiosa e nobile, qual si conviene ad un Dio, e la fisionomia lo mostra capace di grandi idee.[…]I capelli sembrano stillanti di preziosi balsami, e l’abito è eseguito con una somma verità d’imitazione, e composto con ottimo gusto”. 29  Today, this sculpture is dated around 80 A.C. and considered as a work derived from a bronze prototype by Praxiteles or an artist of his circle, made around 330–310 B.C. probably for the Theater of Dionysos, in Athens. It is displayed in the Sala della Biga. See Spinola, “L’Atrio del Quattro Cancelli, la Scala Simonetti, la Sala della Biga, la Galleria dei Candelabri, la Galleria degli Arazzi, la Galleria delle Carte Geografiche, la Galleria di S. Pio V,” in Il Museo Pio Clementino, III, 2004, 50–53, no. 3, pl. 9; Jean-Luc Martinez in Praxitèle, exh. catalog ed. Alain Pasquier et al. (Paris: Musée du Louvre and Somogy, 2007), 328–330, no. 81.

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It was its ‘integrity, size, and workmanship’ that distinguished the Bacchus with a faun found in the Giraud estate of Frascati, qualities for which it was considered a prototype of the other similar groups already known, one of which was preserved in the Florentine Gallery.30 Published in the first volume of the illustrated catalog, it was displayed in a special area of the museum, between the Vestibolo Rotondo and the Cortile Ottagono.31 The ‘uncommon gracefulness’ of the workmanship and its fine state of preservation compared to other known replicas, in Florence and Naples, also justified the amount paid to Thomas Jenkins for the small Satyr and Nymph group bought in 1772, a group that still had traces of ancient gilding on the nymph’s urn.32 The same criteria were also adopted to evaluate the so-called seated Nerva (Fig. 10.2), restored by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, which still had its ancient head, albeit reworked by the sculptor, and only the upper half was original.33 The prices paid for the works of the Museo Pio Clementino, therefore, were in line with the academic perception of them, which is not surprising since it was the same people, Giovanbattista Visconti and his eldest son Ennio Quirino, who were responsible for the purchases and their subsequent stylistic, formal and iconographic classification. Carlo Pietrangeli34 calculates that in just the first two years, between 1772 and 1774, Pope Clement XIV acquired 221 sculptures for the new museum. Given that in six years only a small number of particularly costly works were purchased, we may conclude that, except for a few rare cases, ancient GrecoRoman sculpture was not expensive. For 100 scudi you could even buy a quasicolossal statue, but in an archaic or archaizing style, such as the Lanuvina Juno (Fig. 10.3), bought by the museum on December 3, 1782.35 Between 1772 and 1778, quality anthropomorphic statues were bought for 200 or 300 scudi.36 An 30  Giovanni Battista Visconti in Visconti and Visconti, Il Museo Pio Clementino, I, 79. 31  Descrizione del Museo Pio Clementino, fol. 2; Indicazione del sito, ove sono gli Antichi Monumenti nel museo Pio Clementino in Decembre 1790, in ASMV, case IV, fascicle 2.3: fol. 2; Massi, Indicazione antiquaria, 19. 32  See Giovanni Battista Visconti in Visconti and Visconti, Il Museo Pio Clementino, I, 88. For this work, now kept in the Magazzino delle Corazze, see Gallo, “Les Antiquaires italiens,” 285–286. 33  See Ennio Quirino Visconti in Visconti and Visconti, Il Museo Pio-Clementino, III, 1790, 6–7, pl. VI. Originally, the colossal statue, still kept in the Sala Rotonda, represented a Hellenistic sovereign. Cavaceppi’s restoration transformed it into Galba. See Spinola, “La Galleria delle Statue,” 257–258, no. 13, pl. 40. 34  Carlo Pietrangeli, “Il Museo Clementino Vaticano,” Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia 27 (1951–1952): at 107; Pietrangeli, I Musei Vaticani. Cinque secoli di storia (Rome: Quasar, 1985), 59. 35  Nota delle Statue, 5. 36  See ASMV, case IIIa, fascicle 1.

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figure 10.3 Roman Art,  Juno Sospita Lanuvina, 100–150 AD, Vatican City, Musei Vaticani, Museo Pio Clementino

iconographically rare bust cost no more than 200 scudi and a marble relief vase fetched a similar price. More costly was a zoomorphic sculpture in colored marble: in January 1772, 280 scudi were paid for a “di bigio (grey) heifer.ˮ37 And in April of the same year, Princess Barberini was paid 300 scudi for a porphyry bust of Philip the Younger and 150 for a sarcophagus.38 It may then come as a surprise that it cost 700 scudi to restore a large basanite krater, found split in two near Sant’Andrea al Quirinale in 1772 and restored by Alessandro Lippi. However, the material, size and Dionysian iconography of the object made it extremely valuable. It took a total of two years to restore, complete and polish the outside and inside.39 Initially exhibited ‘in a corner’ of the Cortile Ottagono and from 1790, on the top landing of the Scala Simonetti, this Dionysian krater was part of the set of antiquities belonging to the Museo Pio Clementino that were taken to Paris, in compliance with the terms of the Treaty of Tolentino, signed by the Pope’s representative in 1797.40 As for the prices fetched by modern sculptures, it comes as quite a shock to find that only 500 scudi were spent in February 1772 for the relief of Pisa

37  A SMV, case IIIa, fascicle 1, 14.
. 38  A SMV, case IIIa, fascicle 1, 29. 39  See documents transcribed in Gallo, “Il Museo Clementino tra novità e tradizione,” in L’età di Papa Clemente XIV. Religione, politica, cultura, ed. Mario Rosa et al. (Rome: Bulzoni, 2010), 253, note 37. 40  See respectively Descrizione del Museo Pio Clementino, fol. 5v; Indicazione del sito, fol. 17v. See also Spinola, “L’Atrio dei Quattro Cancelli,” 42–43, no. 19 and pl. 7c. The ancient part is datable to the Augustean period. Still today, the krater decorates the Scalone Simonetti.

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restaurata by Pierino da Vinci, then attributed to Michelangelo.41 Michelangelo’s canon was not then in vogue: the grace of Raphael and his school was preferred to the exaggerated forms of the great Florentine.42 The relief, however, was displayed in the Galleria delle Statue, above the Eros from Centocelle and next to the Sardanapalus. Furthermore, in the Florentine Gallery, for a long time Buonarroti’s Bacchus towered in the Levante corridor together with ancient sculpture, even though Visconti did not follow Gori’s example—who had included a notice on Michelangelo’s statue in the volume on antique sculpture of his Museum Florentinum—and the Pisa restaurata was not listed in the illustrated catalog of the Pio Clementino. However, to appreciate better the fact that these ancient sculptures no longer cost too much in Rome, we can compare their prices with the fee paid to Canova just ten years later for the funerary monuments of Clement XIV and Clement XIII. Canova received 10,000 scudi, plus another 1,000 in gratuities, for the monument in the basilica of the Holy Apostles, which the sculptor started in April 1783 and took four years to complete. And he was paid 22,000 scudi by Prince Abbondio Rezzonico for his uncle’s tomb, inaugurated in St. Peter’s on April 6, 1792.43 It is also worth remembering that, in June 1778, the sale price for one of the two all’antica desers that Luigi Valadier had made for the Bali of Breteuil was 10,000 zecchini.44 For contemporary painting, I would only point out that, in 1768, Batoni’s Allegory of Mercy and Justice, today in the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, was priced at 1,400 scudi,45 i.e. the same amount as the so-called Cavaceppi Nerva or the Satyr and Nymph group that the Pope bought from Jenkins in 1772. Works by famous Old Masters, on the other hand, were worth much more. Paolo Coen, in fact, reminds us in his book that Ludovico Mirri, the publisher of the first four volumes of the Pio Clementino catalog, put Agostino Carracci’s Hero and Leander up for sale for 6,150 scudi a little before 1786.46 It is also of great 41  Nota delle Statue, 24. 42  On this issue see Gallo, “Le Michel-Ange de Lanzi: le récit vasarien revisité au XVIIIe siècle,” in La réception des Vite de Giorgio Vasari en Europe (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle), ed. Corinne Lucas Fiorato et al. (Genève: Droz, 2017), 177–190. 43  Mario Praz and Giuseppe Pavanello, L’opera completa del Canova (Milan: Rizzoli, 1976), 92–93, no. 24 and 94, no. 39. 44  Susanne Adina Meyer and Serenella Rolfi Ožwald, “Le fonti e il loro uso: documenti per un atlante della produzione artistica romana durante il pontificato di Pio VI,” in Una miniera per l’Europa, ed. Maria Cecilia Mazzi (Rome: Istituto nazionale di Studi romani, 2008), 122, note 160. 45  Meyer and Rolfi Ožwald, Le fonti e il loro uso, 89. 46  Paolo Coen, Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel diciottesimo secolo. La domanda, l’offerta e la circolazione delle opere in un grande centro artistico europeo, preface by Enrico Castelnuovo (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2010), I, 31 and 170.

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interest to see that Joshua Reynolds was prepared to pay between 32,000 and 48,000 scudi for the Boccapaduli Seven Sacraments by Poussin, whereas the Duke of Rutland had hesitated when James Byres had asked for 12,000.47 According to the lists published by Coen, it would seem that ancient sculpture was more highly priced in the medium to low quality range, but this is a first impression that must be verified by further investigation.48 2

Foreigners in Rome

Recent studies of Roman historians on the eighteenth-century art market49 have revealed a general picture that is more articulate and far more complex. Thus, I think it would be worthwhile to ask ourselves once again what drove the great European aristocracy and bourgeoisie of the late eighteenth-century to buy antique sculptures. It was possible, in fact, to get the best contemporary paintings and sculptures and even masterpieces by Old Masters, but it had become very difficult, or even impossible, to get fine quality ancient works ever since the Pope had opened a new museum in the Vatican. And when we read the letters Gavin Hamilton sent to William Petty, the second Earl of Shelburne, between 1772 and 1778, crucial years for his collection of antiquities in Berkeley Square, London, we are struck by the energy with which the dealer tried to convince his illustrious client of the quality of a product that he had no opportunity of examining before purchasing. So, to convince him of the quality and to justify the price, he compared the items with other works in major historical collections and which had been engraved in the century’s most consulted catalog, the previously mentioned Raccolta di Statue antiche e moderne by Paolo Alessandro Maffei, a native of Volterra. So, for example, in the case of a Cincinnatus found by Hamilton in the ruins of Hadrians Villa, he wrote, ‘It is no less than a Cincinnatus taken from the plough, the same as that of Versailles of better sculpture, though not so well preserved, of the same artist that made the Gladiator at the Villa Borghese. The head is almost the same.’50 47  Coen, Il mercato dei quadri, I, 170, 603–604. 48  I have not been able to consult, for instance, the essay by Francesco Paolo Arata, “Il Museo Capitolino sotto il pontificato di Pio VI Braschi (1775–1799): acquisti, restauri e calchi di antichità,” Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma, CX (2009): 111–152. 49  See Coen, Il mercato dei quadri and Una miniera per l’Europa. 50  See the letter dated January 18, 1772, published by Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, Digging and dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), II, 22, no. 31.

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Even though he would not be able to see the statue until after he had bought it, Lord Shelburne, a politician and budding collector, could convince himself not only that he was buying an item of quality but that the gallery of Shelburne House, one of the finest neo-classical buildings in London, designed by Robert Adam, would be equal to a great Roman princely palazzo. As for the agreed prices, the amounts are much higher than those paid by the Pope. By way of example, Hamilton wrote that he had offered this same Cincinnatus to the Pope for £500, i.e. for 2,000 Roman scudi, but had been refused.51 In fact, for the same price, papal officials had bought two statues, one of which was a rare example of an African, thus confirming the tendencies we have seen as regards cost and selection criteria. As for Lord Shelburne, believing perhaps that he was getting a bargain, he bought the Cincinnatus for £450.52 3

A Double Market

What we have, then, is a dual reality: the official Roman market and the antiquities market for foreigners, where prices are up to four times higher than the starting value.53 This enables us to understand how Jenkins, Hamilton and Byres could become so rich. It confirms the importance of a collection of ancient works of art beyond the Alps as an important mark of social distinction. Those who possessed ancient sculptures, especially in turn of the century England, had a discreet grounding in Greco-Roman culture, followed the dictates of fashion imposed by illustrious architects, and were above all incredibly rich. It remains more difficult to assess the situation in Rome. It is true that wages were very low—Chiara Piva54 points out that a restorer working for the Museo Pio Clementino earned about 19 scudi a month, plus whatever he could make on other commissions—but a fashionable sculptor could earn a considerable sum of money. In this context, the Museo Pio Clementino, especially in its early years, was a patrimonial and scholarly initiative of great value, supported by contained financial resources: a model to be imitated and reflecting a dual reality in the art market that is still of great relevance today.

51  Letter by Gavin Hamilton to Lord Shelburne dated July 16, 1772, published by Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and dealing, II, 24, no. 37. 52  On the history of this gallery, see Scott, The Pleasures of Antiquity, 160–168. 53  Regarding to this topic, see also the prices of marble copies of antique sculptures made by Cavaceppi and quoted by Piva, “Bartolomeo Cavaceppi tra mercato e restauro,” in Roma e l’Antico, 62. 54  Piva, Restituire l’antichità, 231.

chapter 11

Jean-Baptiste Wicar in Rome (1784–1834): Fifty Years of Purchases, Sales, and Appraisals of Works of Art Maria Teresa Caracciolo Throughout his life the artist Jean-Baptiste Wicar built up a large collection of drawings, today still partially preserved at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille. It was a remarkable enterprise. Wicar, French by birth and Roman by adoption, was trained in Jacques-Louis David’s studio in Paris. Though focusing primarily on history painting, he was a good portrait painter as well: for today’s amateur, his numerous portrait drawings are maybe the most compelling section of his production. Once in Italy, Wicar made great profits acting as an art dealer. The son of a poor family of an ancien régime-ruled Lille, the artist died owning a large estate and a remarkable art collection, comprising not only his famous drawings, but also paintings, sculptures and other objects. Peintre érudit, with a sharp eye on the evolution of art criticism and newborn art history, Wicar also built up an important library, connected to a large collection of prints: the latter, primarily made of prints d’après, was a tool to enlarge and sharpen his qualities as a connoisseur. Wicar was in fact one of the best connoisseurs of his times, especially of ancient drawings and of the art of Raphael, well-known and sometimes even feared all over Italy. From the late eighteenth to the first decades of the nineteenth century Wicar wove a network of relationships with key figures of the European art market, such as collectors, agents, intermediaries and dealers. Some were English, such as William Young Ottley and Samuel Woodburn, some others French, such as the lesser-known painter Blanchard (perhaps the same Blanchard who sold drawings to Vivant Denon). Many more, anyway, were Italians, like Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, Giovanni Antonio Armano, Lamberto Gori, Carlo Baldeschi and the most-hatred Florentine rival Antonio Fedi, who had taken away from Wicar’s hands his first collection of drawings. Wicar built not just one, but three different collections of drawings by old master painters. The first collection, created roughly between 1785–1798, as previously mentioned, was stolen in Florence by Fedi at the end of 1799. The second collection, by far the most spectacular of the three, was sold in Rome by the same Wicar to the British dealer Samuel Woodburn in 1823, who sent it to England: it later became the property of Sir Thomas Lawrence, was

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004388154_012

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subsequently dispersed and today it is quite difficult to reconstruct its contents. A document recently discovered by Monica Preti-Hamard indicates that Wicar’s collection comprised 7000 drawings. Such a number was mentioned in a letter sent from Rome in 1823 to Count Aldrovandi by the dealer Giovanni Antonio Armano: My Dearest Count, may I congratulate you on the excellent purchase that you made of the Bianchetti drawings, which were mine. Wicar, who sold his 7000 in number, not more than 800 of which were of excellent quality, among them 70 major works, got 11 thousand Roman scudi, half of them being given away since the really important ones were intact. Italy is stripped of her most valuable possessions every day, and these drawings would have been a treasure trove for study […] useful and of great ornament for the new museum in Rome, but here they are blind.1 The number 7000 should be underlined, being quite spectacular, especially when comparing it to the renowned collection of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, which totalled about 9000 drawings. We have already pointed out, on the basis of our previous knowledge and from new documents, that Wicar’s third collection came to incorporate a substantial part of his first collection. I will therefore not go into the purchase, one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of the Roman antiquities market, which took place between Rome and Florence in the 1820s.2 In fact, almost all the drawings stolen from Wicar ended up later in the city of Lille’s collections, except for a group of about twenty originals by Raphael, which were bought earlier in Florence by the English painter and collector William Young Ottley. Ottley took them to England, where they were to remain, divided up after further sales, between the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Wicar’s collection now in Lille includes a group of Italian drawings from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, by far 1  Here is the original Italian text: “Signor conte pregiatissimo, Ella riceva le mie congratulazioni per l’ottimo acquisto che ha fatto delli disegni Bianchetti che eran miei. Wicar, che ha venduto li suoi 7 mila di numero, e di qualità eccellente non più di 800, fra i quali 70 sono principali, ha incassato 11 mila scudi romani, e sono mezzo regalati essendo intatti quelli che sono veramente principali. Sicché l’Italia si spoglia ogni giorno del più prezioso, e quei disegni per lo studio sarebbero stati un tesoro (…) utili e di maggior decoro in Roma che il braccio nuovo del Museo, ma qui son ciechi.” See Maria Teresa Caracciolo, “L’activité de collectionneur de Jean-Baptiste Wicar: choix et enjeux,” in Collections et marché de l’art en France, 1789–1848, ed. Monica Preti-Hamard et al. (Rennes and Paris: Presses universitaires de Rennes and Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2005), 147–162; Preti-Hamard, “Celleberrimi Francisci Mazzola Parmensis graphides. Les collections de dessins du Parmesan à Venise et à Bologne. Collectionneurs, marché, édition,” in Jean-Baptiste Wicar et son temps, 1762–1834, ed. Caracciolo et al. (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2007), 311–335. 2  Caracciolo, “L’activité,” 149–154.

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the most important in number and quality, and some other minor groups of the French and Northern schools. Side by side, then, there is a range of true masterpieces—such as the series of autograph drawings by Raphael, as well as groups by Filippino Lippi, Fra’ Bartolomeo, Parmigianino, Titian and Annibale Carracci, to name but a few—and many less important sheets: basically all the Italian schools are represented, including by sheets of the Tuscan, school, which were sagaciously bought by Wicar in Florence and its surrounding territory. So, springing from an historicist criterion, Wicar’s collection joined great masters with second-rank artists. Its scope was to show the evolution of Italian art, from its origins to the contemporary era, in a most “complete” way: hence, it was conceived to be displayed before the eyes of a wide public, as in a true museum. In 1835, according to a particular bequest written by the painter the previous year, Wicar’s third collection of drawings became part of the Museum of Lille. Although being only a fraction of the total number of graphics gathered by Wicar over a lifetime, it gives us the opportunity to explore his choices, strategies and objectives in the world of collecting. Despite much work on Wicar’s collection of drawings having already been done, a deep and thorough analysis from the art market perspective is still lacking. In fact, Wicar took extensive advantage of what the market was offering at the time: it was a period of extraordinary opportunities, as a direct consequence of the requisitions of works of art in Italy made by the revolutionary armies after the Napoleonic Wars of the end of the century. Besides forming new French public collections, these requisitions allowed many military and civilian representatives of the French army—such as the same Wicar, for instance—to enrich their personal collections. This has been the topic of the research carried out by the writer in collaboration with Cordélia Hattori during the 2013 Lille Museum exhibition on Wicar’s collection of drawings; an exhibition where the drawings of Italian, French and Northern European schools gathered by the collector were not only presented in the light of modern and contemporary scholarship, but also of earliest appraisals, first and foremost by Wicar himself, and later by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars.3 The Wicar collection bequeathed to the Lille museum in 1834 is fairly well documented. Since it consists of masterpieces, it has been carefully studied since the 1800s. However, we have unfortunately lost—at least as far as we know—the original inventory of the collection, which certainly must have existed and been compiled by Wicar himself, when the collector, unmarried and 3  See Caracciolo, “Jean-Baptiste Wicar collectionneur de dessins: une approche à rebours,” in Traits de génie. La Collection Wicar; Botticelli, Dürer, Raphaël, Michel-Ange, Poussin, exh. catalog ed. Cordélia Hattori (Paris: Chaudun, 2013), 48–108.

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without natural heirs, began making arrangements for his large collection of artworks, made up of paintings, drawings, sculptures and works of decorative art. However, we have other elements that can help us reconstruct Wicar’s collection as it was in his time, in particular three important documents that shed light on it. The first is the oldest annotated catalog of the collection, which was compiled and published in Lille in 1856, i.e. twenty years after the drawings became part of the Lille collections, by Charles Benvignat (1805–1977), an architect by training. He was commissioned to classify, study and present the collection in the museum, an appointment he held until his death in 1877.4 Charles Benvignat often cited Wicar’s manuscript inventory, which was the fundamental starting point for his task, the result of which remains to this day the catalog that most directly reflects Wicar’s own judgements of his drawings. The second is a collection of prints that document part of the collection as it was in the mid-nineteenth century, containing facsimiles of the most important drawings in the series by Raphael owned by Wicar. They reflect the collector’s artistic and historical convictions in the context of mid-nineteenth century studies on Raphael. It should not be forgotten, in fact, that Passavant was preparing the first catalog of drawings by Raphael roughly between 1839 and 1860, and the fact that he is mentioned by Benvignat shows that he exchanged views with the architect and curator of the collection. The prints were made in Lille and Paris in 1858, under the direction of an authoritative member of the Institut, Paul-Joseph Honoré d’Albert, Duke of Luynes.5 It is not surprising to find that all the drawings considered in Wicar’s time to be original Raphaels are now no longer attributed to him. What interests us, however, is to understand on what basis and on what concrete data the drawings were ascribed to Raphael. One example is particularly significant. The eighteenth print in the 1858 collection bears the following title: “Raphaël, Tête d’un religieux et dessin à mi-corps du même personnage” (Fig. 11.1). The author then commented: “probablement une étude de saint Bruno pour le tableau de la Vierge au Baldaquin du musée Pitti”. This identification (not so much due to the erudition of the Duke of Luynes, in my opinion, as to the notes of 4  Ville de Lille. Musée Wicar. Catalogue des dessins et objets d’art légués par J. B. Wicar, ed. Charles Benvignat (Lille: Lefebvre-Ducrocq, 1856). 5  Choix de dessins de Raphaël qui font partie de la collection Wicar à Lille, reproduits en facsimile par MM. [Adolphe] Wacquez et [Alphonse] Leroy, gravé par les soins de M. H. d’Albert duc de Luynes, membre de l’Institut (Paris: Rapilly, 1858). On the collection see D’après les Maîtres. Léonard de Vinci, Raphaël, Watteau, Goya, Courbet …; la gravure d’interprétation d’Alphonse Leroy (1820–1902) à Omer Bouchery (1882–1962), exh. catalog ed. Hattori (Roubaix: Association des Conservateurs des Musées du Nord-Pas-de-Calais, 2007), 36–41. See also Johann-David Passavant, Raphael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni Santi (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1839), French edition (Paris: Renouard, 1860).

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figure 11.1 Adolphe Wacquez and Alphonse Leroy after a drawing by Raphael, Head of a Man of Religion and Drawing of the Same (Studio for the ‘Madonna del Baldacchino), in Choix de dessins de Raphaël qui font partie de la collection Wicar à Lille, reproduits en facsimile et gravés par les soins de M. H. D’Albert duc de Luynes, Paris, 1858, tav. XVIII, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie

Wicar’s lost manuscript inventory) was most pertinent. In fact, the drawing was part of Wicar’s first collection, stolen from him in Florence and in a list of drawings in his first collection, the one taken from him, which Wicar had sent at the beginning of the 1800s to his friend Humbert de Superville, for his help in finding them. The collector specified: “n. 30: Raphaël, petites études pour des figures du grand tableau du Palais Pitti représentant la Vierge sur son trône avec deux anges qui font de la musique”. It should be noted that Wicar made a mistake when he mentioned figures in the plural (des figures), since the reference was to two studies of the same figure, and angels playing music, since in fact they are not; moreover, the saint depicted in the painting and drawing might not be St. Bruno but St. Bernard. It is clear, however, that the first owner of the drawing knew perfectly well what drawing was being referred to and that the description was right. In 1829, in fact, Luigi Pungileoni, in his Elogio storico di Raffaello Santi da Urbino, also confirmed this: alluding to the Raphael’s Madonna of the Canopy, preserved in Galleria Palatina in Florence, he stated: “Mr. Wicar has the drawing of the head of a saint in this picture made with a silver pen”. Nevertheless, in 1973, R. W. Scheller, who published Wicar’s manuscript list, said (as did also Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée) that it was hard to identify the drawing described by the artist, and that it was likely

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to be a study for the Coronation of the Virgin, also known as the Oddi altarpiece, originally in San Francesco in Perugia, taken to Paris in 1797, and then returned to Italy, and now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana (in which the Virgin, crowned by Christ, is actually surrounded by angels playing musical instruments). In Scheller’s opinion, the drawing mentioned by Wicar was not identifiable and was to be considered lost.6 Actually, the identification of the drawing is not a modern discovery but was a proven fact even in Wicar’s time; it was illustrated furthermore in the 1858 collection of prints, a reference that was removed from all modern studies of the Lille Raphael, in particular in the catalog of the Paris exhibitions dedicated to the master in 1983–1984.7 It should also be noted that the drawings shown in the two illustrations that open the 1858 collection of facsimiles were then considered to be two undisputed masterpieces and the two most important items in the series of Raphael folios in Wicar’s collection. It is also true that these two folios would today be poles apart from the works chosen to represent the “jewels” in the Lille Raphael series. They concern a Madonna’s head and a study of the planet Mars, a mosaic of one of the signs of the Zodiac for the dome of the Chigi chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. Currently, these two folios are no longer considered to be autographs and have been the subject of two of the biggest “misattributions” made by contemporary critics.8 The Madonna’s head was labeled in the first print (Fig. 11.2) of the 1858 collection as: “Tête de la Sainte Vierge dite à la perle”. The author commented: “Dans le tableau original, Raphaël avait d’abord indiqué la Vierge de profil; il changea ensuite la pose de trois-quarts, presque de face, regardant saint Jean à sa droite, et le dessin a été probablement fait pour la dernière idée du tableau”. The painting referred to is the Madonna and Child, St. Elizabeth and St. John the Baptist, now in the Prado. It was not, in fact, a “Madonna of the pearl” but the “pearl” in the collection of the King of Spain, who owned it in the seventeenth century, it having previously belonged to King Charles I of England (who had bought it from the Duke of Mantua).9 Philip IV of Spain regarded the work as “the pearl” or the greatest masterpiece in his collection, a work that in the 6  Luigi Pungileoni, Elogio storico di Raffaello Santi da Urbino (Urbino: Guerrini, 1829), 73; Robert W. Scheller, “The case of the stolen Raphael Drawings,” Master Drawings 11 (1973): 119–137; Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, Catalogue des dessins italiens, collections du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, Lille and Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997), 185, no. 532. 7  On Raphael’s drawings see the section by Françoise Viatte, Catherine Mombeig-Goguel and Hervé Oursel in Raphaël dans les collections françaises, exh. catalog (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1983), 149–322. 8  Brejon de Lavergnée, Catalogue, 199, no. 558 “ D’après Raphaël ou Giulio Romano, Tête de Vierge ” and 197, no. 554 “D’après Raphaël, Ange et figure représentant la planète Mars”. 9  Giovanna Perini, “Una certa idea di Raffaello nel Seicento,” in L’idea del Bello. Viaggio per Roma nel Seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori, exh. catalog ed. Evelina Borea (Rome: De Luca, 2000), 153–161 at 154.

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figure 11.2 Adolphe Wacquez and Alphonse Leroy after a drawing of the school of Raphael, Head of the Madonna ‘La Perla’, in Choix de dessins de Raphaël qui font partie de la collection Wicar à Lille, reproduits en facsimile et gravés par les soins de M. H. D’Albert duc de Luynes, Paris, 1858, tav. I, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie

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nineteenth century even ended up on an adventurous journey from Madrid to Paris and back again between 1813 and 1815 (as part of Joseph Bonaparte’s collection during the war between Spain and France, which ended with the French defeat at Vitoria, in 1813). Much discussed by critics, the painting is now considered to be a work of Giulio Romano. It should, however, be mentioned that another version of the painting has recently reappeared, the so-called “Pearl of Modena,” found in the storerooms of the Galleria Estense and considered, at least by some scholars, to be an autograph work by Raphael, thus signaling a return to the hypothesis of a work painted by Raphael. In the case of this Lille drawing, it was Passavant again who first questioned its attribution to Raphael, in 1860. Passavant gives a very detailed analysis of the “Madonna known as the Pearl,” and points out that among the many preparatory studies for the painting there existed a drawing by Raphael “aux deux tiers de nature, à la pierre noire, très travaillé,” intended for the head of the Virgin known as “La Madonna del Marchesato,” which passed through various Dutch collections, and was sold on various occasions at an ever higher price (Passavant quotes the exact prices: 125 florins in 1777, when it was sold by the collector of Leiden van der Mark, and 160 florins when sold by Ploos van Amstel in Amsterdam in 1800). In Passavant’s day, the drawing was part of a private English collection. A folio famous enough to be reproduced in Bernard Picart’s Impostures innocentes, a fine collection of prints was published in the 1730s (Fig. 11.3). In light of the data he had collected, Passavant cast doubt for the first time on the authenticity of the Lille folio, though he stressed its quality, and catalogued it as a work executed “in the manner of Raphael” but not by him (Fig. 11.4). Instead, it was probably out of respect for Wicar’s judgment that both Benvignat and the Duke of Luynes attributed the folio, still in 1856 and 1858, on what were by then shaky grounds, to Raphael. To explain the authority of Wicar’s attribution, it should be remembered that in Rome the Lille painter was considered not only to be a collector of drawings by Raphael but also an expert in the master’s art, who was consulted by people to learn whether something was authentic or to get an estimate of the value of a work that had been unearthed or put up for sale. This is confirmed by Luigi Pungileoni himself, who described some evaluations Wicar had made in Rome of paintings by Raphael and his school: in particular the Holy Family in the Fesch collection, which Wicar dated to Raphael’s first Umbrian period;10 the Adoration of the Magi in the Ancajani collection in Spoleto; and the Annunciation in Mancini’s house in Città di Castello, which was restored by Palmaroli and authenticated by Wicar. 10  Pungileoni, Elogio, 13.

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figure 11.3 Bernard Picart after a drawing by Raphael, Head of the Madonna known as ‘La Perla’, in Impostures innocentes ou Recueil d’estampes d’après divers peintres illustres (…), 1734, tav. 7, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie

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figure 11.4 School of Raphael, Head of the Madonna known as ‘La Perla’, once in the Wicar Collection, Lille, musée des Beaux-Arts, © Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille— Jean-Marie Dautel

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Taking a step back to some general methodological issues, one might investigate if and how Wicar’s and his contemporaries’ idea of Raphael could still be valid and useful to modern art history and to our own knowledge of Raphael. Modern-day specialists do not seem to think so, having corrected and now globally canceled or forgotten the “errors” of the past. Actually, this knowledge allows us, firstly, to define a page in the history of taste and may also help us understand how we have reached our current definition of the corpus of Raphael’s autograph folios (a definition, needless to say, that will certainly not remain as it is at present, but which will continue to be updated as new discoveries are made). Wicar and his contemporaries saw Raphael through the eyes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criticism, through the eyes of Bellori and Félibien, to mention only the most authoritative critics, and also through the eyes of those closest to them, Luigi Lanzi and Antoine Quatremère de Quincy. Never had Raphael’s standing been so high nor his art so appreciated; the most important stages in his artistic development were thought to have been in Florence and especially in Rome, from the Stanze to the Transfiguration, including, of course, the cartoons for the Vatican tapestries: a monumental Raphael, superior to any other artist in the history of composition, expression and portraiture. Moreover, his works were at that time still seen as forming a whole, and it was only when studies began in the second half of the nineteenth century that distinctions started to be made between the works of Raphael and those of his school, which is still part of the current approach to Raphael’s production. It must be said that the years 1820–1850 were crucial for the relationship between new philological erudition and Pre-Raphaelitism and Primitivism, as well as the romantic vision of the painter, when his work and life became a subject of increasing interest. The 1858 print collection shows that Wicar was the only collector of his time who was able to make a synthesis of the various tendencies in criticism—from the most traditional to the most innovative—and after the two “pearls” (false, it is true, but so eloquent!) in his collection, the Duke of Luynes’ print collection also reproduces the drawings of Raphael’s Umbrian and Florentine period purchased from Wicar, as well as other masterpieces of his Roman years, which always remained undisputed. As for the “pearl” in Wicar’s collection, we cannot now just say that it was a copy. In fact, in this particular case, the history of the drawing, namely the study of how it was received, is equally, if not more, interesting than that of its production. For this reason, in analysing a work, its production cannot be separated from how it was received by the public. In other words, the attribution of a drawing, its date and its relationship with a painting should not be determined without taking into account complementary data emerging from its subsequent history: that is, without taking into account how it was judged by critics and commented on in various times after it was made; how it was kept,

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sold, purchased, copied, corrected or retouched, exhibited and sometimes, unfortunately, lost or destroyed. The philological approach and the historical approach are complementary and not distinct aspects of the study of a drawing (and more generally of a work), both being part of the same discipline. A new and unpublished element regarding Wicar’s collection in Lille illustrates once again the wisdom and pragmatism of his purchases. Recent research uncovered in the Museum of Lille the albums in which Wicar kept his collection, which had made the journey from Rome to Lille in 1835. Even in the most recent catalogs, the fact that the drawings arrived in Lille in albums is not even mentioned. Yet, the volumes were mentioned in old printed sources concerning the collections, most notably in an article by Charles Benvignat, the first curator of the collection, written when he made his appearance in the municipal arena. Benvignat’s article was published in the sixth volume of the Revue du Nord, in the year 1835–1836. Benvignat mentioned a first volume, containing approximately sixty drawings, a second volume entirely devoted to Raphael and containing fifty drawings,11 and “other volumes” containing about one thousand one hundred drawings. Benvignat then stated that an additional small volume contained a series of studies by Michelangelo. Finally, a second document dating from the early twentieth century, signed Léandre Vaillat, mentioned that the museum then had seven volumes: three large folio volumes; two slightly smaller folio volumes; a volume bound in red morocco containing drawings by Michelangelo, and another small volume, bound in red, consisting of thirty-nine folios. Afterwards, the volumes were forgotten in the museum storerooms, from where they were unearthed by Cordélia Hattori and studied during the preparatory work for the exhibition on Wicar’s collection in Lille.12 So far three large in folio albums have been found and two smaller ones, the latter clearly not produced by Wicar himself but purchased by him from one or more collectors, who had previously placed in them drawings from their collections. The first three large albums, however, were certainly reconstituted by Wicar, since they are the same in size, have the same title and bear the same inscription on the back: “Disegni antichi” and the Arabic numerals 1, 2 and 3. As regards the first volume, Benvignat says in the aforementioned article of the Revue du Nord: Le premier volume contient environ 60 dessins. Sur le premier feuillet, et comme pour servir d’introduction aux chefs d’œuvre de la belle époque de l’art, se trouvent 7 dessins de Giotto qui doivent dater de l’an 1300 11  On this albums’s first sheet was the so-called Madonna detta la Perla, mentioned above. 12  Hattori, “Introduction au legs de Jean-Baptiste Wicar,” in Traits de génie, 18–47.

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environ (…), viennent ensuite des peintures monochromates sur velin, de Francia, peintre du XVIe siècle, d’un fini admirable et formant une suite de compositions pleines de vie et de mouvement. Again according to Benvignat, on the album folios there were drawings by Giulio Romano, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Paolo Veronese, Palma, Titian, Annibale Carracci; Michelangelo’s design for the dome of St. Peter’s and a portrait of Gherardo delle Notte by Rembrandt (today still thought to be a portrait of Gherardo delle Notti but by an anonymous Dutch master). The first album contained the masterpieces, the “pearls” of the collection (the folios of the kind which, part of Wicar’s second collection and sold to Woodburn in 1823, Armano called i principali and which he said numbered seventy out of seven thousand). In making albums for his own collection, Wicar was following a certain vogue for building up collections in the eighteenth century, which favoured sixteenth- and seventeenth-century classicism and which was not afraid to mix schools when it came to including masterpieces, such as the “pearls” of the collection (Titian, Michelangelo, Annibale Carracci, Rembrandt). The criteria changed when it came to expanding one’s personal collections by adding works purchased in bulk, and built up using different criteria. This can be seen especially in the collector’s other surviving volumes: the small album bound in red and the volume of drawings of the Florentine and Bolognese schools. These two groups of drawings, which certainly originated in Florence, today give the Wicar collection a more specialized connotation, less centered on masterpieces. The first contained Filippo Napoletano’s fine collection of drawings, today in Lille. It’s not clear how this collection was gradually split up. An essential part of it was acquired by the museum, without knowing its provenance: only in 1991 it was connected to Filippo Napoletano by Marco Chiarini.13 It is clear, however, that Wicar kept the drawings together within the same album in his collection, and in fact he wrote in a folio: “those that follow are by the hand of Filippo di Liagno Napoletano;” thus the collector knew to whom they were attributed. He would have known this from one of the drawings in the collection, which bore the inscription: “drawings by the hand of Filippo di Liagno Napolit. together with the following,” probably the original front cover of the album, which Marco Chiarini and Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée thought might be written in the hand of Filippo Baldinucci (this hypothesis, however, remains to be proved). The second volume contained drawings of the Florentine school, and probably also of the Bolognese school, as we 13  See Marco Chiarini in Bellezze di Firenze. Disegni fiorentini del Seicento e del Settecento dal Museo di Belle Arti di Lille, exh. catalog ed. Chiarini (Milan: Fabbri, 1991), 120–152.

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figure 11.5 Jean-Baptiste Wicar, Portrait of Lamberto Gori, drawing, Rome, Museo Napoleonico

can read in some of the folios in the album. It was entitled: Disegni originali di diversi autori della Scuola Toscana Tomo II (original drawings of different artists of the Tuscan School Volume II). Inside, inscriptions written in the same hand indicated the author of the drawing, the school and the dates of birth and death. We can also add that many Florentine drawings listed in the index have a number appended in red ink, a number which Philip Pouncey and John Gere thought might indicate Lamberto Gori, whom Wicar knew, and of whom he drew a portrait, today in the Napoleonic Museum (Fig. 11.5) and who perhaps sold part of his collection to our painter (having certainly sold another part to William Young Ottley).14 This origin was enough to justify the early attributions of the drawings in the Lille collection to seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Florence, which have almost all been recognized as valid by today’s specialists. The last document on Wicar’s collection during his life also shows that the market offered opportunities for people like Wicar, who had limited resources, to significantly improve the quality of their collections.

14  Philip Pouncey and John Gere, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. III. Raphael and his circle (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1962) 129, no. 224.

Index Ackerman, James 38, 40 Acquaviva, Troiano 15 Adam, Robert 210 Addison, Joseph 117 Ago, Renata 5, 25 Aguatti, Cesare 154 Aikman, William 127 Ailesbury, Countess of see Boyle, Juliana Albani, Alessandro 9, 11, 13, 24, 26, 113, 167, 179, 183, 205 Aldrovandi, conte 212 Alexander VII, Pope see Chigi, Fabio Alighieri, Dante 40 Allan, David 12 Allegri, Antonio 56, 83–85 Allen, Brian 24, 187, 191 Alpers, Svetlana 43, 45, 46 Alsop, Joseph 41, 42, 51 Altemps, family 71, 83 Altoviti, family 172 Amadori, family 64, 65 Amadori, Felice 64–66 Amadori, Francesco 66 Amidei, Belisario 18 Ancajani, family 218 Ancus Marcius, King of Rome 126 Andrea del Sarto see Vannucchi, Andrea Angeloni, Francesco 54 Annesley, Francis 147, 165 Anselmi, Michelangelo 173 Antal, Frederick 32–36 Antonini, Annibale 192 Armano, Giovanni Antonio 211, 212, 223 Arthois, Jacques d’ 101 Arundel, 21st Earl of see Howard, Thomas Arundel, 22nd Earl of see Howard, Henry Ashburnham, family 139 Ashby, Thomas 147 Ashley-Cooper, Anthony 28, 117 Astley, John 142, 143 Astley, Richard 142 Autun, George 166 Azara y Perera, José Nicolás de 101 Backer, Jacob Adriaensz 101 Baderni, Baldassarre 83

Baglione, Giovanni 149, 179 Bailli de Breteuil see Tonnelier, Jacques-Laure Le Bailli, David 101 Baldeschi, Carlo 211 Baldinucci, Filippo 223 Bamboccio see Laer, Peter van Barbarossa, Giovanni 13, 18, 25 Barberini, Antonio 132 Barberini, Cornelia Costanza 15, 200, 207 Barberini, family 9, 131, 132, 135, 136, 168, 170, 175, 178, 179 Barberini, Francesco 77 Barberini, Maffeo 68, 76, 77 Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco 72, 76, 112, 131, 178, 179 Barocci, Federico 27 Barozzi, Jacopo 149 Barrell, John 38, 51 Barry, James 183 Bartoli, Francesco 18, 118, 120 Bartoli, Pietro Santi 118, 120 Bartolomeo, Fra 213 Bartolozzi, Francesco 179 Barzi, Bartolomeo 77, 80 Bassano see Da Ponte, Jacopo Basset, Francis 193, 194, 197 Batoni, Pompeo 120, 186, 190, 191, 194, 197, 208 Baur, Jena Guillaume 108 Baxandall, Michael 36, 44, 45 Beck, David 98, 108 Becker, Howard 42, 51 Beechey, William 136 Bella, Stefano della 101, 109, 111–113 Bellini, Giovanni 21 Belloni, Girolamo 8 Bellori, Giovan Pietro 53, 74, 77, 116, 149, 182, 221 Belting, Hans 44 Bembo, Pietro 53, 80 Benedict XIV, Pope see Lambertini, Prospero Lorenzo Benefial, Marco 27 Benucci, Bonaventura 25 Benvignat, Charles 214, 218, 222, 223

226 Berenson, Bernard 170 Berger, John 34, 45 Bergeret de Grancourt, Pierre-Jacques-Onéysme 16 Berggren, Lars 50 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 76 Berrettini, Pietro 27, 76, 85, 122, 123 Bertolotti, Antonino 69 Bialostocki, Jan 46 Bianchetti 212 Bianchini, Francesco 119 Bibiano see Codazzi, Viviano Bie, Cornelis de 88, 99, 113 Bighi, family 175 Blanchard 211 Blon, Michel Le 95, 97–99, 111 Blunt, Anthony 34 Boccapaduli, family 175, 209 Boeckhorst, Jan 98 Boime, Albert 39 Bonaparte, Joseph 218 Bonaparte, Napoleon, Emperor of France 4, 8, 199, 213 Bonarelli, Matteo 76 Bonini, Filippo Maria 21 Borbone, Carlos Antonio Pasqual 190 Borcht, Henry van der 101, 109 Borghese, Camillo 105 Borghese, family 9, 131, 169, 171 Borioni, Antonio 24, 25, 183 Bosboon, Simon 109 Botta, Nicola 80 Bourdieu, Pierre 42, 44, 45, 51 Boyle, Juliana 124 Boyle, Richard 120, 124, 125, 128 Bracciano, Duke of see Orsini, Paolo Giordano II Braemer, Leonard 101 Brancaccio, Francesco Maria 76 Brandi, Giacinto 153 Braschi, Giovanni Angelico or Giovannangelo 15, 204, 207 Braudel, Ferdinand 31 Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Ferdinand von 27 Brejon de Lavergnée, Barbara 215, 223 Brill, Paul 76 Broun, Francis 137

Index Brown, Jonathan 52 Bruni, Marco 163 Bruno, Giordano 50 Buonarroti, Michelangelo 27, 137, 208, 222, 223 Burckhardt, Jacob 29 Burke, Peter 2, 52 Burlington, 3rd Earl of see Boyle, Richard Bute, Earl of see Stuart, John Byres, James 113, 152, 162, 163, 167, 172–175, 196, 209, 210 Calabrese see Preti, Mattia 56 Caliari, Paolo 27, 223 Callet, Antoine François 158 Callot, Jacques 101, 109 Calonne, Charles Alexandre de 137 Calvaert, Denis 112 Camassei, Andrea 77 Campbell, Colen 129 Campiglia, Giovanni Domenico 120 Canova, Antonio 208 Cantarini, Simone 178 Capitelli, Giovanna 54 Capponi, Alessandro Gregorio 11, 13, 15 Caracciolo, Maria Teresa 20, 21, 22 Caravaggio see Merisi, Michelangelo Carlo Veneziano see Carlo Saraceni Carlos III, King of Spain 189, 190 Caroselli, Angelo 69, 77 Carracci, Agostino 132, 208 Carracci, Annibale 13, 27, 57–62, 71, 76, 77, 85, 136, 182, 213, 223 Carracci, Ludovico 132, 136, 170 Cassatt, Mary 47 Cassirer, Ernst 31 Castello, Bernardo 74 Castelnuovo, Enrico 1, 2, 28, 46, 49 Castiglione, Giovanni Benedetto 60 Castro, André de Melo e Castro 5 Catherine II, Empress of Russia 152, 166, 182, 189 Cavaceppi, Bartolomeo 19, 25, 154–156, 183, 201, 206, 208, 211, 212 Cavalier d’Arpino see Cesari, Giuseppe Cavarozzi, Bartolomeo 71 Cavazzini, Patrizia 5, 20, 21 Cavedoni, Girolamo 132

227

Index Cavendish, Ann 148 Caylus, Anne Claude de 18 Cecil, Brownlow 146–155, 157, 158, 162–167, 170, 172–175, 178, 179, 181–183, 186 Cecil, family 148, 149, 132 Cecil, John 148 Cecil, William 148, 153 Cellamare, Princess of see Del Giudice, Costanzia Eleonora Cesari, Giuseppe 74, 76 Charles I, King of England 108, 180, 216 Chatwin, Bruce 41 Chiari, Giuseppe Bartolomeo 122, 124, 126, 127 Chiari, Tommaso 122, 123 Chiarini, Marco 223 Chigi, Fabio 4, 76 Christina, Queen of Sweden 95, 98, 108 Cincinnatus, Lucius Quinctius 123, 209 Circignani, Antonio 80 Clark, Kenneth 34, 49 Clark, Timothy 39, 52 Clement XI, Pope see Corsini, Lorenzo Clement XIII, Pope see Rezzonico, Carlo della Torre di Clement XIV, Pope see Ganganelli, Giovanni Vincenzo Antonio Clive, Robert 183 Clodion see Michel, Claude Clunas, Craig 52 Cocke, Jerome 88 Codazzi, Viviano 60 Coen, Paolo 113, 141, 146, 196, 197, 208, 209 Coke, Thomas 19, 120, 122–124, 127 Collin, Richard 99 Colomer, Pascual 192 Colonna, family 9, 131 Colonna, Francesco 59 Commodus, Emperor 129 Conca, Sebastiano 11, 28, 122 Connor Bulman, Louisa 122 Coques, Gonzales 109 Corenhert, Theodore 101 Coriolanus, Gaius Marcius 123 Cornacchini, Agostino 15 Correggio see Allegri, Antonio Corsini, Lorenzo 7, 11, 13 Cort, Cornelis 101

Costello, Jane 68, 69 Cowper, George Nassau Clavering 183 Cozenz, John Robert 194 Crayer, Gaspar de 109 Crispi, Francesco 50 Crowe, Thomas 50 Cupertino 57 Curtius, Ernst 35 Curzi, Valter 18, 116 D’Angeli, Filippo see Di Liagno, Filippo Da Costa Kaufmann, Thomas see Kaufmann, Thomas Da Ponte, Francesco 83 Da Ponte, Jacopo 71, 83 Dal Pozzo, Cassiano 165 Dance, George 152 Dankerts de Ry, Corneille 101, 109 David, Jacques-Louis 211 David, Jacques-Louis 22 De Lilio, Pietro Paolo 85 De’Rossi, Giovanni Gherardo 183 Dejob, Charles 31 Del Giudice, Costanzia Eleonora 170 Del Monte, Francesco Maria 71 Derby, 11th Earl of see Stanley, Edward Deynum, Jan Baptist van 99 Di Liagno, Filippo 77, 223 Dijck, Jacob van 98 Doria, family 182 Dowyer, James 126 Dowyer, John 126 Dundas, Lawrence 166 Dürer, Albrecht 54 Durkheim, Émile 31 Dvořák, Max 29 Dyck, Antoon van 87, 89, 93, 95, 98, 105, 108, 109, 113, 139, 143 Edcumbe, family 137 Edcumbe, Richard 141 Eden, Martin van den 93 Edgerton, Samuel 44 Elisabeth, Queen of England 148 Elliott, John 52 Elsheimer, Adam 79, 105 Engels, Friedrich 29 Es, Jacob van 105

228 Este, Isabella d’ 48 Euphranor 204 Exeter, earl of see Cecil, Brownlow Eyck, Jan van 89 Fabri 140 Falcone, Aniello 59 Farnese, Alessandro 108 Fattori, Giovanni 49 Faustina, Empress 129 Febre, Lucien 31 Fedi, Antonio 211 Félibien, André 221 Ferdinand II, Emperor 108 Fernandi, Francesco 18, 118, 121, 130 Ferro, Dario 70 Fesch, Joseph 218 Ficoroni, Francesco 125 Finaldi, Gabriele 191 Fioravanti, Benedetto 77 Firth, Raymond 43 FitzPatrick, John 137 Floerke, Hanns 2 Floridablanca, Count see Moñino, José Forbes, John 24 Ford, Brinsley 148, 191, 192 Fordwich, Viscount see Cowper, George Nassau Clavering Foresta, Carlo 85 Foucart, Jacques 147 Fracanzano, Cesare 58 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 16 Francart, Jacques 101 Francastel, Pierre 31, 35, 37 Franchois, Pierre 99 Frederick II, King of Prussia 16 Freedberg, David 40 Freedberg, Sydney J. 39 Freeman Bauer, Linda 70 Frey, Dagobert 46 Fufetius, Mettius 126 Furini, Francesco 80 Furius Camillus 126 Gagliardi, family 12 Gainsborough, Thomas 137 Galle, Philip 88 Galli, Giovanni Antonio 74

Index Gallo, Daniela 15, 199 Galt, John 153 Gamboni, Dario 41 Ganganelli, Giovanni Vincenzo Antonio 15, 200, 204, 206, 208 Garbieri, Lorenzo 132 Garzi, Luigi 122 Gaulli, Giovanni Battista 153 Geertz, Clifford 45, 51 Gell, Alfred 43, 44, 51 Gellée, Claude 76, 77, 162, 197 Gentile da Fabriano 33 Gentileschi, Artemisia 47, 180, 182 Gentileschi, Orazio 180 George III, King of England 24, 191 Gerbier, Balthazar 108, 109 Gere, John 223 Gherardo delle Notti see Honthorst, Gerrit van Ghezzi, Pier Leone 23, 24, 139, 154 Gibbon, Edward 152 Gimignani, Giacinto 175 Ginnasi, Domenico 108 Ginzburg, Carlo 28, 35, 46, 52 Giordano, Luca 27 Giotto 222 Giraud, family 201, 206 Girolamo da Treviso see Pennacchi, Girolamo Giulio Romano see Pippi, Giulio Giustiniani, family 84, 168, 175 Giustiniani, Vincenzo 71, 74 Gloucester, duke see Hanover, William Henry Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 8, 25, 162 Goldthwaite, Richard 50, 52 Goltzius, Hendrick 101 Gombrich, Ernst 35–37, 39, 40, 44 Gonzaga, family 180, 216 Gori, Lamberto 208, 211, 223 Goya, Francisco 34 Grantham, II Baron see Robinson, Thomas Gray, Thomas 182 Grechetto see Castiglione, Giovanni Benedetto Greer, Germaine 47 Grey, Anthony 124–126 Grey, George 166 Gruzinski, Serge 52 Guercino see Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco

229

Index Guidiccioni, Lelio 54 Gustav III, King of Sweden 16 Habsburg-Lorraine, Leopold II 49 Habsburg, Leopold Wilhelm 108 Hackert, Jakob Philip 158, 162 Hackert, Johann Gottlieb 158 Hadjinicolaou, Nicos 38, 49 Hadrian, Emperor 129 Hambury Williams, Charles 182 Hamilton, Gavin 21, 26, 113, 114, 186, 209, 210 Hanbury-Tracy, Charles 166 Hanover, William Henry 191 Harold or Harrold, Earl of see Grey, Anthony Haskell, Francis 3, 4, 9, 19, 37, 39–41, 68, 70, 71, 114 Hattori, Cordélia 213, 222 Hauser, Arnold 32–37, 39, 52 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 136 Hayes, John 137 Hebborn, Eric 144 Heil, Leo van 108, 109 Helt Stockade, Nicolaes van 101 Hendricx, Gillis 93 Henriet, Israël 109 Herding, Klaus 49 Hess, Hans 39 Hewetson, Christopher 194 Hitler, Adolf 39 Hogarth, William 33, 117, 139 Hollar, Wenceslaus 101 Holzmann Wittkower, Margot 37 Homer 118 Hondius, Hendrick 101, 109 Hone, Nathaniel 142 Hone, Samuel 142 Honthorst, Gerrit van 98, 109, 179–182, 223 Hoock, Holger 50, 52 Horts, Nicolas van der 95 Howard, Aletheia 111 Howard, family 109 Howard, Henry 99, 112 Howard, Ralph 121 Howard, Thomas 111 Hudson, Kenneth 51 Hudson, Thomas 141, 143 Huygens, Constantijn 93

Imperiali, Giuseppe Renato 9, 13, 118 Imperiali, see Fernandi, Francesco Ingamells, John 122, 192 Irwin, David 21 Jacobs, Anna 112 Jacobs, Jan 112 Janssens van Ceulen, Cornelis 109 Jeminau, Isaac 166 Jenkins, Thomas 19, 25, 26, 113, 146–148, 152, 162, 167, 168, 172, 175, 178, 179, 182, 183, 186, 188, 196, 201, 206, 210 Jode, Pieter de II 99, 101 John V, King of Portugal 5, 12 Jones, Thomas 25 Jordaens, Jacob 98, 109 Julia Domna, Empress 129 Justi, Carl 3 Kauffmann 25 Kauffmann, Angelika 157, 158, 183 Kauffmann, Joseph Johann 157 Kaufmann, Thomas 47 Keiser, Henry de 101 Kemp, Wolfgang 40 Kempers, Bram 51 Kent, William 127, 128 Keppel, Augustus 138 Keyser, Hendrick de 105 Klingeder, Francis 33, 34 Knupfer, Nicolas 108 Laer, Peter van 70 Lalande, Joseph Jerôme de 20 Lalive or La Live de Jully, Ange Laurent 139 Lambertini, Prospero Lorenzo 8, 9 Lampsonius, Domenicus 88–90 Lanfranco, Giovanni 69, 77, 132 Langdale, Allan 27 Langlois, François 109 Lanzi, Luigi 135, 200, 221 Lauri, Filippo 27 Lawrence, Thomas 211 Leenhardt, Maurice 31 Legge, George 194, 197 Leicester, 1st Earl of see Coke, Thomas Lely, Peter 143 Lemaire, Jean 76

230 Lennox, Charles 129 Leo X, Pope see Medici, Giovanni Lorenzo de’ Leonardo da Vinci 30, 34, 132, 135, 170, 223 Leoni, Ottavio 105 Leopold II of Tuscany see Habsburg-Lorraine, Leopold II Leopold II, Emperor 27 Leopold Wilhelm, Archduke of Austria see Habsburg, Leopold Wilhelm Lerman, Peter 5 Lerner-Lehmkul, Anna 37 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 31, 43 Lewis, Lesley 3 Lewisham, viscount see Legge, George Leyen, Antoine van 99 Lint, Pieter van 108 Lippi, Alessandro 207 Lippi, Filippino 213 Livy 118, 122, 126 Lorrain, Claude see Gellée, Claude Lucas van Leyden 54 Lucretia 122 Ludovisi Boncompagni, Ippolita 15 Lukács, Georg 33 Luynes, Honoré Théodore Paul Joseph d’Albert de 214, 218, 221 Luzón Nogué, José Maria 190, 191 Machell, Willis 188 Machiavelli, Niccolò 40 Maffei, Paolo Alessandro 204, 209 Mâle, Emile 31 Malvasia, Carlo Cesare 112 Manchester, 4th Earl of see Montagu, Charles Mancini, family 218 Mander, Karel van 89, 93 Manfredi, Bartolomeo 76 Manius Curius Dentatus 126 Mann, Horace 188 Mannheim, Karl 30, 33, 35 Mannlich, Johann Christian von 158 Mantegna, Andrea 13 Maratta or Maratti, Carlo 21, 25, 27, 55, 116, 124, 149, 153 Maratti Zappi, Faustina 21 Marchi, Giuseppe 144 Marco d’Oggiono 170 Marcus Aurelius 129

Index Mark, van der 218 Maron, Anton von 163, 167 Maron, Theresia Concordia von 178 Martin, James 164, 167 Martinelli, Fioravante 53 Marx, Karl 29, 32–39, 43, 49, 52 Masaccio 33, 40 Massi, Pasquale 204 Matham, Jacobus 101 Mattei, Ciriaco 71 Mattei, family 85 Mauss, Marcel 31 Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria see Wittelsbach, Maximilian Mazzola, Francesco 213 McPhee, Saraha 76 McSwiny, Owen 129, 130 Mead, Richard 120 Medici, family 37, 83, 109 Medici, Giovanni Lorenzo de 9 Medici, Lorenzo de 109 Meiss, Millard 32, 33, 45 Mengs, Anton Raphael 137, 163, 165, 172–174, 182, 183, 189, 197 Merisi, Michelangelo 27, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 84, 85, 178–182 Meyssens, Jan 86, 88, 89, 93, 95, 97–99, 101, 105, 109, 111–114 Michaelis, Adolf 3 Michel, Claude 155 Michelangelo see Buonarroti, Michelangelo Millar, John 29 Mirri, Ludovico 24, 26, 208 Mitchell, William 45 Mola, Gaspare 63 Mola, Pier Francesco 70, 76 Monconys, Balthasar de 75, 76 Mond, family 132 Moñino, José 189–191 Montagu, Charles 123 Montfaucon, Bernard de 119 Montias, John Michael 3, 50, 51 Mordaunt Poyntz, Anna Maria 137 Morison, Colin 25, 113 Morisot, Berthe 47 Morselli, Raffaella 5, 26, 86 Mosman, Nicolas 26, 147, 148, 162–168, 170, 173, 174, 178, 179, 183, 186

Index Muesterberger, Werner 41 Müntz, Eugène 41 Muziano, Girolamo 55, 56 Napoleon, see Bonaparte, Napoleon Napoletano, Filippo see Di Liagno, Filippo Niccolò della Simona 57, 58 Nieulant, Guillaume de 105, 109 Nochlin, Linda 47 Noldus, Badeloch 95 Nollekens, Joseph 155, 165 North, Michael 3 Northumberland, Duke of see Percy, Hugh Northwick, Baron see Rushout, John Nulty, Matthew 158 Numa Pompilius, King of Rome 123 Oldrago, Karel 79 Opstal, Anthony van 95 Orange, Henry Frederick 108 Orbetto see Turchi, Alessandro Orford, 1st Earl of see Walpole, Robert Orlandi, Pellegrino Antonio 149, 170, 175, 176, 181–183 Orsi, Prospero 71, 74, 76, 80 Orsini, Paolo Giordano II 108 Ossory, 2nd Earl of Upper see Fitzpatrick, John Ottley, William Young 166, 170211, 212, 223 Ottoboni, Pietro 9, 13 Ovid 118, 124 Oxenstierna, Axel 95, 98 Paciaudi, Paolo Maria 18 Padovanino, Francesco 105, 109, 111–113 Padovanino, Ottavio 111 Page, Gregory 121 Palladio, Andrea 149 Palma il Vecchio 223 Palmaroli, Pietro 218 Pamphili, Camillo 76 Pamphili, family 9, 178 Panini or Pannini, Giovanni Paolo 13 Panofsky, Erwin 29, 30, 31, 34–37, 42 Paret, John 52 Parmigianino see Mazzola, Francesco Passavant, Johann David 214, 218 Passeri, Giovanni Battista 55, 56

231 Patch, Thomas 138 Patoun, William 150–152 Paul V, Pope see Borghese, Camillo Peeters, Bonaventura 105 Peeters, Joannes 101 Pellegrini, Giovanni Antonio 123, 124 Penna, Agostino 19 Pennacchi, Girolamo 132 Penny, Nicholas 191 Percy, Hugh 182, 183 Pereira de Sampaio, Manuel 5, 6, 12 Perini Folesani, Giovanna 20, 21, 131 Pesci, Pietro 59 Petit, Giacomo 75, 80 Petit, Stefano 75, 80 Petty, William 209, 210 Pevsner, Nikolaus 46 Philip III, King of Spain 109 Philip IV, King of Spain 108, 216 Phillips, Henry 142 Piazza, Carlo Bartolomeo 53 Picart, Bernart 218 Picasso, Pablo 32 Piccolomini, Costanza 76 Pierantoni, Giovanni 204 Pierino da Vinci 208 Pieter de Jode I 99, 101 Pietrangeli, Carlo 206 Pietro da Cortona see Berrettini, Pietro Pimentel, Marquis 189 Pinelli, Antonio 24 Pio, Nicola 120 Pippi, Giulio 27, 56, 57, 172, 218, 223 Piranesi, Francesco 16 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 16, 25, 153, 154, 179, 194 Pius VI, Pope see Braschi, Giovanni Angelico Piva, Chiara 210 Plekhanov, Georgi 32 Pliny the Elder 203 Ploos van Amstel, Cornelis 218 Plutarch 118, 126 Polignac, Melchior de 16 Pollock, Griselda 47 Pomarancio see Roncalli, Cristoforo Pomian, Krzysztof 41 Ponsonby, Frederick 194 Ponz, Antonio 189, 190

232 Popper, Karl 35, 36 Pouncey, Philip 223 Poussin, Nicolas 21, 69, 76, 77, 80, 85, 123, 174, 175, 197, 209 Pozzi, Stefano 163 Praxiteles 203 Preti-Hamard, Monica 212 Previtali, Giovanni 40 Procaccini, Andrea 21, 122 Procaccini, Giulio Cesare 174 Pungileoni, Luigi 215, 218 Quarantotti, family 201 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine 221 Quellinus, Erasmus 98, 99, 109 Raphael 9, 13, 21, 29, 40, 43, 56, 62, 83, 84, 101, 165, 170, 182, 203, 208, 211–216, 218, 221 Raphael, Max 32 Raspantini, Francesco 55–57, 59–63, 65 Ratzel, Friedrich 36 Read, Herbert 33 Reiffenstein, Johann Friedrich von 151, 158, 162 Rembrandt van Rijn 43, 111, 143, 223 Reni 55, 56, 59, 60, 80, 84, 85, 101, 109, 111–113, 164, 165, 175, 176, 182, 186 Renzi, Gabriele 70 Reynolds, Joshua 21, 209, 131, 132, 135–145 Reynolds, Suzanne 122 Rezzonico, Abbondio 208 Rezzonico, Carlo della Torre 8, 208 Ricci, Marco 123 Ricci, Sebastiano 123, 124 Richardson, Jonathan 116, 143, 197 Richmond, 2nd Duke of see Lennox, Charles Riminaldi, Giovanni Maria 154 Rivaldi, family 65 Robinson, Thomas 183, 188 Robusti, Jacopo 58 Roccatagliata, Giovanni Stefano 76, 77, 80 Roettgen, Steffi 147 Roncalli, Cristoforo 59 Rosa, Fabio 151 Rosa, Salvatore 57, 58, 60, 74–76 Roscoe, William 29 Rosenblum, Robert 116 Rottenhammer, Hans 79

Index Rubens, Pieter Paul 87, 89, 105, 108, 109, 112, 113, 134 Rumi, Giovanni 25 Rushout, John 166 Rysbrack, John Michael 128, 129 Sacchi, Andrea 21 Sadeler, Aegidius 98, 101, 109 Sadeler, Jan 101 Sadeler, Rafael 101 Salimbeni, Ventura 173 Salini, Tommaso or Mao 70 Salvi, Giovanni Battista 173 Salviati, family 76 Saly, Jacques 139 Sánchez-Járegui, María Dolores 191 Sánchez-Jáuregui, Lola 193 Sandrart, Joachim von 97–99, 101 Sandrart, Ursula 97 Sandys, William 193 Santacroce, family 169, 175 Santvoort, Antonis 79 Saraceni, Carlo 58 Sassetti, Francesco 31 Sassoferrato see Salvi, Giovanni Battista Savery, Roelant 105 Savini Branca, Simona 41 Savoy, Eugene of 13 Savoyen, Carel van 101 Scarsella, Ippolito 132 Scarsellino see Scarsella, Ippolito Schapiro, Meyer 32, 34, 35 Scheller, Robert W. 215–216 Schnapper, Antoine 41 Scipio, Publius Cornelius 123 Scorza, Sinibaldo 76, 77 Seghers, Gerard 99, 109 Septimius Severus, Emperor 129 Sergel, Johan Tobias 158 Serlio, Sebastiano 149 Servius Tullius, King of Rome 126 Shaftesbury see Ashley-Cooper, Anthony Sheehan, James 52 Shelburne, 2nd Earl of see Petty, William Simonelli, Nicolò 54, 70, 74, 76 Sintes, Giovanni Battista 5 Sirani, Elisabetta 178 Slatkes, Leonard 147 Soderini, family 175

233

Index Solario, Andrea 132 Spadarino see Galli Giovanni Antonio Galli Spencer, family 137 Spencer, Georgiana 137 Spezzaferro, Luigi 1, 54, 70, 71 Spierinck, François 98 Spierinck, Peter 98 Stamford, Earl see Grey, George Stanley, Edward 124 Stewart Gardner, Isabella 48 Stewart, Charles Edward 8 Stewart, family 6, 118 Stewart, James Francis Edward 7, 12 Stom or Stomer, Mathias 182 Stosch, Philipp von 113, 183 Stringherland, Cristiano 77, 80 Strozzi, Leone 154 Stuart, John 150, 163 Stuart, see Stewart Suárez Huerta, Ana María 191 Sudeley, Baron see Hanbury-Tracy, Charles Superville, David Pierre Giottino Humbert de 215 Swanewelt, Hermann van 70 Sweerts, Michael 74 Talman, John 165 Tarquinius the Proud, King of Rome 122 Tassel, Jean 182 Tassi, Agostino 70, 77 Tempesta, Antonio 76 Thomas Aquinas 42 Thomson, Samuel Wells 194 Thornhill, Thomas 167 Thornton, Peter 51 Thorpe, John 25, 191 Tietze, Hans 37 Tintoretto see Robusti, Jacopo Titian see Vecellio, Tiziano Tonnelier, Jacques-Laure Le 208 Tonson, Jacob 124 Topham, Richard 120, 165, 186 Toscano, Bruno 3 Totti, Pompilio 53 Townley, Charles 188 Trajan, Emperor 129 Trench, Henry 127 Trent, John 166 Turchi, Alessandro 69, 179

Urban VIII, pope see Barberini, Maffeo Utrecht, Adriaen van 108 Vaillat, Leandre 222 Valadier, Luigi 208 Valenti Gonzaga, Silvio 9, 13, 18 Valentin de Boulogne see Valentin, Jean Valentin, Jean 76, 77, 179 Valentini, Baron 175 Valeriani, Domenico 130 Valeriani, Giuseppe 130 Valerius Maximus 126 Valguarnera, Fabrizio 68, 69, 75, 76 Vanni, Francesco 173 Vannucci, Andrea 83 Varotari, Alessandro 105 Vasari, Giorgio 149 Vasi, Giuseppe 26, 153 Vecellio, Tiziano 80, 83, 85, 137, 143, 213, 223 Veen, Otto van 105 Veggetti, Serena 1 Velde, William van de 98 Venne, Adriaen de 101 Venturi, Franco 4 Veraecht, Tobias 105 Verdi, Richard 147 Vernansal II, Guy-Louis 127 Vernet, Joseph 138 Veronese, Paolo see Caliari, Paolo Verospi, Girolamo 200 Vierpyl, Simon 142 Vignola see Barozzi, Jacopo Virgil 118 Visconti, Ennio Qurino 203–206 Visconti, family 203, 208 Visconti, Giovanbattista 203, 206 Vivant-Denon, Dominique 211 Vlieger, Simon de 98 Vodret, Rossella 1 Volpato, Giovanni Battista 194 Vouet, Simon 76 Vrancquart, Jacques 101 Waagen, Gusta Friedrich 153 Wackernagel, Martin 36 Walpole, family 123 Walpole, Horace 182, 183, 188 Walpole, Robert 128, 129 Warburg, Aby 31–33, 37, 44, 45

234 Warnke, Martin 50 Weddell, William 166 Werckmeister, Karl 38 Wertenberg, Daniell 140 West, Benjamin 153 Wicar, Jean-Baptiste 22, 211–216, 218, 221–223 Willeboirts Bosschaert, Thomas 99, 109 William III, King of England 108 Williams Wynn, Watkin 182, 189 Wilson, Richard 121, 140, 142 Wilton, Joseph 142 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 116, 163, 200, 205

Index Wittelsbach, Maximilian 101, 109 Wittkower, Margot see Holzmann Wittkower, Margot Wittkower, Rudolph 37 Wölfflin, Heinrich 29, 30, 32, 33 Woodburn, Samuel 211, 223 Wouters, Frans 108 Yarker, Jonathan 147 Zampieri, Domenico 55–62, 76, 83, 147 Zanetti, Anton Maria 139 Zappi, Giovanni Battista 21 Zeri, Federico 34