Representing from Life in Seventeenth-century Italy 9789048533268

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Representing from Life in Seventeenth-century Italy

Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Dr. Allison Levy, an art historian, has written and/or edited three scholarly books, and she has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, the Getty Research Institute, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library of Harvard University, the Whiting Foundation and the Bogliasco Foundation, among others. www.allisonlevy.com.

Representing from Life in Seventeenthcentury Italy Sheila McTighe

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Claude Lorrain. An artist studying from nature. 1639. Oil on canvas. Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, USA / Gift of Mary Hanna / Bridgeman Images. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Newgen/Konvertus isbn e-isbn doi nur

978 94 6298 328 1 978 90 4853 326 8 10.5117/ 9789462983281 685

© S. McTighe / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Acknowledgements This book grew out of a very long project, which was focused on the role of genre imagery in French and Italian seventeenth-century art. Chapter 4 in particular, on Claude Lorrain’s View in Rome with Trinità dei Monti, was initially written while I held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship awarded for that book on genre, and I am very grateful for the Leverhulme Foundation’s support. The book on genre depictions, however, has taken on a separate life as its own publication. It became clear that the issue of depicting from the live model, as Caravaggio was said to do, needed its own book-length study, set apart from the broader topic of depicting everyday contemporary scenes. This book took shape alongside that project on genre art. The material I present here has also been part of my teaching in courses on Seicento painting and on print culture for a number of years. I am grateful to more people than I can thank individually, particularly the many BA and MA students who listened to various ideas and whose queries and comments helped to develop my thoughts. In particular, I owe a great deal to PhD students, now scholars and curators in their own right, who gave material help in preparing the book: Dr. Giulia Martina Weston speeded the project on with editing of illustrations and bibliography, Dr. Ketty Gottardo and Dr. Naomi Lebens supplied invaluable references, Dr. Edward Payne and Dr. Anita Sganzerla at many points offered helpful feedback. Colleagues helped me by reading and responding to earlier versions of these chapters. I am grateful to Prof. Denis Ribouillault for his enthusiasm and interest in the first version of chapter 4. Prof. David M. Stone’s and Prof. Stephen Ostrow’s readings of the first chapter on Caravaggio and physiognomy gave me thoughtful criticism and saved me from making some errors (those that may remain will be my fault, not theirs). Dr. Mark McDonald’s readings of the two chapters on the etchings of Jacques Callot, as indeed his characteristically generous and kind help with print issues throughout the project, were invaluable. These studies benefited from comments of colleagues in America and in France. For the invitation to speak in Houston in March 2013, I thank Prof. Diane Wolfthal, who, along with Prof. Colin Eisler, Dr. James Clifton, and Prof. H. Rodney Nevitt, helped me to understand the British Museum album of topographic drawings discussed in chapter two. At the Rouen Musée des Beaux Arts, December 2015, I learned much from the comments of Dr. Frédéric Cousinié and other specialists in French seventeenth-century painting, in discussing Claude Lorrain’s creative practice. I thank them all for their insights and criticisms. I would like to thank Erika Gaffney of Amsterdam University Press for her support and guidance at all stages of the book’s production, and also Allison Levy, series editor, for her helpful comments. To all the editorial staff at Amsterdam University Press I am grateful for their scrupulous care with the manuscript. Prof. Genevieve

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Warwick’s close reading of the manuscript during peer review was both insightful and enabling. My thanks also to staff at the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, at the Courtauld Institute’s Book Library, the Warburg Library, the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Frick Art Reference Library and the New York Public Library. In addition to the generous three-year Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Foundation, I benefitted from funds for photographic illustrations from the Courtauld’s Research Committee. Finally, the book is dedicated to my children Elizabeth and Catriona—skeptical and tolerant, argumentative and extremely opinionated, endless source of delight and enlightenment, with thanks for their patience.

Table of Contents Introduction: Depicting from Life

15

1.

41

Caravaggio’s Physiognomy

2. Jacques Callot, Drawing Dal Vivo around 1620: Commerce in Florence, Piracy on the High Seas

91

3. Jacques Callot’s Capricci di varie figure (1617): The Allusive Imagery of the Everyday, Represented ‘from Life’ and Emulating a Text

145

4. The Motif of the Shooting Man, and Capturing the Urban Scene: Claude Lorrain and the Bamboccianti

179

5. The Absent Eyewitness: the Revolt of Masaniello and Depiction Dal Vivo in the Middle of the Seventeenth Century

221

Conclusion

245

Index

249

Illustration List Fig. 1:

Fig. 2:

Fig. 3:

Fig. 4: Fig. 5:

Fig. 6:

Fig. 7: Fig. 8: Fig. 9: Fig. 10: Fig. 11: Fig. 12: Fig. 13: Fig. 14:

Fig. 15:

Caravaggio. The Supper at Emmaus. c. 1601–1602. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, London. Presented by the Hon. George Vernon, 1839. © 2019. Copyright The National Gallery, London/Scala, Florence. Caravaggio. Victorious Love. c.1602. Oil on canvas. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Photographer: Joerg P. Anders. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence/bpk, Bildagentur fuer Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin. Roelant Savery. Drawing of a Tyrolean peasant, labelled naer het leven. c. 1603–1607. Courtauld Gallery, London. © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, London. Albrecht Dürer. Rhinoceros. 1515. Woodcut. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Simon Novellanus, after Pieter Bruegel. Landscape with Mercury and Psyche. 1595. Engraving. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Roeland Savery. Mountain landscape with an artist sketching. 1603–1606. Drawing. Courtauld Gallery, London. © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, London. Caravaggio. The Sacrifice of Isaac. c. 1602. Oil on canvas. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence ‒ courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali e del Turismo. Caravaggio. Still Life: Basket of Fruit. c. 1599. Oil on canvas. Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence. Floris van Dijk. Still Life with Fruit and Cheeses. 1613. Oil on canvas. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Photo Open Access,Wikimedia Commons. Caravaggio. The Lute Player. c. 1596–1600. Oil on canvas. The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence. Caravaggio. Bacchus. c. 1596–1600. Oil on canvas. Museo degli Uffizi, Florence. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence. Clara Peeters. Still life with Metal Vessels. 1612. Oil on canvas. Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. The Artchives/ Alamy Stock Photo. Jan Brueghel. Still life with Flowers. 1606. Oil on copper. Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan. Prisma Archivio/ Alamy Stock Photo. Caravaggio. St. Matthew and the Angel. 1602. Oil on canvas. Formerly Berlin, Kaiser Friedrich Museum, destroyed 1945. Image courtesy the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Caravaggio. Rest on the Flight into Egypt. c. 1598–1600. Oil on canvas. Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, Rome. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence.

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Fig. 16: Caravaggio. St. John the Baptist (also called Laughing Isaac, or Boy with a Ram). c.1602. Oil on canvas. Rome, Musei Capitolini. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence. Fig. 17: a. Illustration comparing man and donkey; b. Illustration comparing man and sheep. Giovanni Battista della Porta, Della Fisionomia dell’huomo.1598. Photo the author. Fig. 18: Cristofano Bertelli. The Seven Ages of Man. 1560. Etching. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 19: Pieter de Jode after Maerten de Vos. The Sanguine Temperament. c. 1595. Engraving. Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Photo Wikimedia Commons. Fig. 20: Ottavio Leoni. Portrait of Caravaggio. c. 1621. Chalk on blue paper. Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence. Photo Open Access,Wikimedia Commons. Fig. 21: Caravaggio. David with the head of Goliath. c. 1606–1610. Oil on canvas. Galleria Borghese, Rome. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence. Fig. 22: Caravaggio. Portrait of Fillide. c. 1602–1604. Formerly Berlin, Kaiser Friedrich Museum, destroyed 1945. Photo: bpk Gemäldegalerie, SMB / Jōrg Anders Fig. 23: Francesco Villamena. The Battle of Bruttobuono. 1602. Engraving. Open Access, National Gallery of Art Washington, DC. Fig. 24: Achille Bocchi. ‘Pictura gravium ostenduntur pondera rerum. Quaeq latent magis, haec per mage aperta patent’, in Symbolicarum quaestiones. 1597. Photo the author. Fig. 25: Caravaggio. Salome with the head of St. John the Baptist. c. 1607–1609. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, London. © 2019. Copyright The National Gallery, London/Scala, Florence. Fig. 26: Caravaggio. The Taking of Christ. c. 1602. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. © National Gallery of Ireland. Fig. 27: Giovanni Battista della Porta. Illustration comparing man and bull. Della Fisionomia del’huomo. 1598. Photo the author. Fig. 28: Guido Reni. David with the head of Goliath. 1606. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © 2018. Photo Josse/Scala, Florence. Fig. 29: Jacques Callot. The Fair at Impruneta. 1620. Etching. Open Access, Cleveland Museum of Art. Fig. 30: Jacques Callot. Sketch of figures outside, drawn from life: two women spinning yarn. c. 1617. Red chalk and graphite on paper. Open Access, The Metropolitan Museum. Fig. 31: Filippo Napoletano. The Fair at Impruneta. Oil on canvas. 1618–1619. Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence. © 2013. Photo Scala Archive, Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali. Fig. 32: Jacques Stella. The Fair at Prato. c. 1618–1619. Drawing. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

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Fig. 33: Jacques Callot. Study for The Fair at Impruneta. c. 1617. Drawing. Florence, Museo degli Uffizi. © Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. Photo Ivo Bazzechi. Fig. 34: Attributed to circle of Giulio Parigi (formerly attributed to Jacques Callot). San Marco d’Allunzio. 1620. Drawing with watercolour from album of Mediterranean sketches. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 35: Attributed to circle of Giulio Parigi (formerly attributed to Jacques Callot). “Milazzo in Sicilia”. 1620. Drawing with watercolour from album of Mediterranean sketches. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 36: Attribured to circle of Giulio Parigi (formerly attributed to Jacques Callot). View of port of Cercelli, right side. 1620. Drawing with watercolour from album of Mediterranean sketches. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 37: Attributed to Giulio Parigi. View of San Quirico, 11 April 1616. 1616. Drawing from an album depicting a voyage in Tuscany. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy Getty Research Institute. Fig. 38: Attributed to circle of Giulio Parigi., formerly attributed to Jacques Callot. View of a coastal town. 1620. Drawing. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 39: Remigio Cantagallina. The Fair at Impruneta. c. 1615. Drawing. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 40: Remigio Cantagallina. View of the Convent of St.-Pierre and the Hal Gate, Brussels. 1613. Drawing. Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. © RMFAB, Brussels/ photo: J. Geleyns ‒ Art Photography Photo Musées Royaux de Belgique. Fig. 41: Remigio Cantagallina. View of Pratieghi. 1616. Drawing. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 42: Jacques Callot. The Fan. 1619. Etching. Open Access, Metropolitan Museum, New York. Fig. 43: Filippo Napoletano. Captured Barbary ship. c. 1617. Drawing. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/ Michèle Bellot. Fig. 44: Jacques Callot. Florentine ship of the Order of Sto. Stefano defeating the Barbary pirates. 1617. Etching. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 45: Ercole Bazzicaluva. View of the Port of Cartagena. c. 1645. Drawing. Courtauld Gallery, London. © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, London. Fig. 46: Jacques Callot. Detail of right side foreground, The Fair at Impruneta. 1620. Etching. Open Access, Cleveland Museum of Art.

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Fig. 47: Jacques Callot. A man urinating against a wall. Drawing. c. 1617. © 2019. Photo Scala, Florence. Fig. 48: Giovanni de Pauli. Le Bararie del Mondo. 1583. Etching. Royal Library Print Room, Windsor. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018. Fig. 49: Jacques Callot. Title page. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 50: Jacques Callot. Dedication page. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Fig. 51: Sebastien Stoskopff. Still life with a print from Callot’s Capricci. c. 1635. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/ Michel Urtado. Fig. 52: Jacques Callot. A peasant defecating and urinating in the countryside. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Fig. 53: Jacques Callot. A violinist, in outline and with modelling. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 54: Jacques Callot. The almshouse. 1617. Capricci di varie figure. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 55: Jacques Callot. A ruined house. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 56: Jacques Callot. The duellist with sword and dagger. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 57: Jacques Callot. Piazza SS. Annunziata. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 58: Jacques Callot. Piazza della Signoria, Florence. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 59: Jacques Callot. Bringing in the hay at a farmhouse. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 60: Jacques Callot. Peasant attacked by bees. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 61: Stefano della Bella. Playing card: King Louis XII. Etching from a set of cards designed for King Louis XIV as a child (Le Jeu des Rois de France). 1644. Etching. Open Access, Metropolitan Museum, New York. Fig. 62: Jan Stradanus. Title page. Speculum Principum. 1597. Engraving. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 63: Stefano della Bella. A Classical Muse. 1646. Etching. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island.

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Fig. 64: Claude Lorrain. View in Rome with Trinità dei Monti. 1632. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, London. © 2019. Copyright The National Gallery, London/Scala, Florence. Fig. 65: Claude Lorrain. View of Trinità dei Monti. c. 1632. Drawing, recto. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Fig. 66: Jan Asselijn (attributed to). Bentvueghels drawing and painting outdoors. c. 1630. Drawing. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. © bpk/ Kupferstichkabinet SMB/ Jörg P. Anders. Fig. 67: Claude Lorrain. Artist sketching and man milking goat (verso drawing View of Trinità dei Monti) c. 1632. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.ss Fig. 68: Claude Lorrain. Landscape with a Mill. c. 1632–1633. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Seth K. Sweetser Fund/Bridgeman Images. Fig. 69: Claude Lorrain. Landscape with artist drawing and men shooting. Liber Veritatis. c. 1635. Drawing. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 70: Matthias Merian I. Topographic view. Topographia Bavariae. 1644. Etching. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 71: Jacques Callot. The Siege of Breda, lower left corner. Etching. 1625–1628. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Fig. 72: Pieter Paul Rubens. Landscape with Women Milking Cows and a Man Shooting. c. 1635–1640. Oil on panel. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Photo Scala, Florence/ bpk, Bildagentur fuer Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin. Fig. 73: Johannes Lingelbach, also called ‘Master of the Small Trades’. The PretzelSeller. c. 1640. Oil on canvas. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome. © Archivio Fotografico Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Romano/ Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica. Fig. 74: Claes Jansz. Visscher after Pieter van Laer. The Large Limekiln. c. 1650. Engraving. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 75: Attributed to Pieter van Laer. The Small Limekiln. c. 1630. Oil on canvas. Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest. © Szépmúvészeti Múzeum, Budapest, Photo Dénes Józsa. Fig. 76: Claes Jansz Visscher after Johannes van Doetecum, the Elder after Lucas van Doetecum after Master of the Small Landscapes. Town Gate. 1612. Etching. Open Access, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 77: Jan Both. View of limekiln on the Tiber. c. 1630. Drawing. Statensmuseum for Kunst, Copenhagen. © Statensmuseum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

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Fig. 78: Jan Asselijn. View of limekiln on the Tiber. c. 1630. Drawing. Niedersächsisch Landesmuseum, Hannover © Niedersächsisch Landesmuseum, Hannover (catalogued as Willem Bemmel). Fig. 79: Diagram of Claude Lorrain’s perspective recipe juxtaposed with Alberti’s costruzzione legittima. Photo the author, from Hubert Damisch, ‘Claude: A Problem in Perspective’, p. 30–31. Fig. 80: Claude Lorrain. View of Villa of Maecenas at Tivoli, with superimposed perspective orthogonals. c. 1640. Drawing, formerly Norton Simon collection, present whereabouts unknown. Photo the author, from Rothlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, II, p. 511. Fig. 81: Claude Lorrain. An artist studying from nature. 1639. Oil on canvas. Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, USA / Gift of Mary Hanna / Bridgeman Images. Fig. 82: Michelangelo Cerquozzi. The Revolt of Masaniello. 1648–1649. Oil on canvas. Galleria Spada, Rome. © Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali. Fig. 83: Domenico Gargiulo, called Micco Spadaro. The Revolt of Masaniello. c. 1652. Oil on canvas. Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Naples. © 2018. Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali. Fig. 84: Michelangelo Cerquozzi, etched by François Collignon. Illustration: De Bello Belgico, 1632. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 85: Claude Lorrain. The Sermon on the Mount. Liber Veritatis. 1656. Drawing after the painting. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. Fig. 86: Claude Lorrain. Preparatory drawing for The Sermon on the Mount, verso, with annotations giving measurement of distances. Drawing. 1656. Teylers Museum, Haarlem. © Teylers Museum, Haarlem. Fig. 87: Catasto map. Late 17th century. Archivio di Stato, Rome. © Archivio di Stato di Roma. Fig. 88: Stefano della Bella. Prince Cosimo III de’ Medici Drawing the Medici Vase. Romae in hortis Medicæis. vas marmoreum eximium. 1656. Etching with engraving. Open Access, Metropolitan Museum, New York. Fig. 89: Michael Sweerts. Artist Sketching Bernini’s Neptune Fountain in the Villa Montalto. 1646. Oil on canvas. Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam. © Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

Introduction: From Life Abstract What place does an eye-witnessing form of representation have in the development of European arts since the Renaissance? How can we make sense of images that clearly depart from actuality but nonetheless were labelled or described as ‘depicted from life’? The relationship between natural history illustrations and religious icons, portraiture and the reporting of news, inform our view of this distinctive practice of representing. Long associated solely with Dutch and Flemish art in this period, Italian practices of working dal naturale go beyond the infamous example of Caravaggio and help to put his art in a new perspective. Keywords: indexical signs, Renaissance mimesis, imago contrafactum, ad vivum, Dürer’s rhinoceros

Is it ever really possible to depict something ‘from life’? When artists work in direct confrontation with their model in the workshop, or while immersed in the very landscape that they are depicting, their creative process differs from the depiction of imagined or remembered models. It yields a different result, as well, ending usually with a more detailed image. The painting or drawing made from life may, in the end, convey more of that elusive sense of presence we get from actual people and sites. But even while painting or drawing with the model before their eyes, the artist is never quite depicting ‘from life’. Every time their gaze turns away from the model and towards the paper or canvas, they leave behind the model’s living presence to enter the realm of memory and imagination. They may reduce the distance between observation and memory, but the gap will persist, and it is in that gap that representation takes place. In that gap, as well, is born the personal style of an artist, their distinctive ‘handwriting’. Even if representation in any period or any medium is always mediated through an individual’s thought and memory, the urge to create images in direct contact with the model, and to make images that seem unmediated, was a distinct feature of early modern arts. It may now be more easily discerned as part of Northern art, inherent in Dutch and Flemish practices. Yet it had a particular surge in popularity across Europe at the end of the sixteenth century. Speaking the language of semiotics, we could call it a search for an indexical image, one perfectly transparent to its subject. What follows from creating the indexical image is the suppression of authorship or artistry: McTighe, S., Representing from Life in Seventeenth-century Italy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/ 9789462983281_intro

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nature made the image, not the human hand and mind. This aspect of depicting ‘from life’ had a paradoxical relationship with artistic ambition. To succeed at this form of artistic activity was to deny the very signs of a distinctive style by which an artist could be judged.1 As a practice, it carried a burden of assumptions about representation, about the artist, and about the viewer. The essays that follow will address the practice of depicting from life in seventeenth-century Italy, in order to explore its possibilities and contradictions, its contexts and reception. The focus is on Italy, because it is in Italian cities that the artists resided who are the subject of the five chapters that follow. Even though originally French-speaking and born in the Duchy of Lorraine, Jacques Callot and Claude Lorrain practiced their art in the cultural context of Florence and Rome, for an Italian and an international audience, just as the Dutchman Pieter van Laer or his Italian follower Michelangelo Cerquozzi worked in that same milieu and for a similar combination of local and international patrons. My interest in these artists and this artistic practice is not focused solely on the way that images were made, nor on the realist appearance that some of them achieved, nor on the literal relationships between images and actual realities. I am interested also in its reception, in the effect that images made from life were thought to have on their viewers. It was evidently a difficult effect to capture in words. Early modern treatises on the arts, even those sympathetic to the practice of depicting directly from the model, were for the most part silent on its visual effects—except when they complained about too much naturalism. The critical response of Giovan Pietro Bellori to Caravaggio’s work, for example, blended disapproval with wonder when he spoke of Caravaggio creating art ‘miraculously without art’. Imaginative inventions, particularly those that aimed to narrate stories, were more amenable to the practice of ekphrasis, the rhetorical description of an image on which most art writing relied.2 Even long after their creation paintings, drawings and even prints that have been made from study of the live model seem to have a distinct effect on viewers. I first became interested in this effect when I saw a small, apparently informal oil sketch by the nineteenth-century painter Thomas Eakins that depicted his sister-in-law’s face twisted in profound grief.3 Trying to analyze why I found this work so riveting when I encountered it in the midst of a group of American paintings on view in Paris, I thought it was because it presented an impossible scenario for the artist and his model. There was a paradoxical gap between the immediacy and the apparent spontaneity of the model’s expression of grief, and the dispassionate care and slow work it must have taken for the artist to capture it. How could one confront that look 1 For depicting from life in Northern Europe, see Parshall, ‘Imago Contrafacta’; Swan, ‘Ad Vivum’; Melion, ‘Hendrick Goltzius’s Project’ and ‘Karel van Mander’s Life of Hendrick Goltzius’, For the role of style in Italian art writing, Sohm, Style (2001). 2 Alpers, ‘Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes’. 3 The Thomas Eakins oil sketch appeared in Silver, Birdsall and Lee, Un Nouveau Monde.

INTROdUC TION: FROM LIFE

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of grief over hours, perhaps days, in order to painstakingly convey its utter abandonment to feeling? How could the model persist in the emotion long enough to be captured in paint? The painting made a claim for its instantaneous apprehension of what it represented, even as its subject made that instantaneity seem improbable. Yet this improbability heightened to a curious degree the emotional effectiveness of the painting, even though it was a relatively informal oil sketch. Years later, I encountered in another exhibition an oil sketch by Antonie van Dyck made ‘from life’, depicting a model posing as an apostle.4 The sketch was paired with a more finished copy of the same image of the apostle. How puzzling it seemed that the sketch from life appeared so much more alive, so much livelier than the second, more finished work. The second, copied work looked more authoritative, and more perhaps like a painting of a Biblical figure. The oil sketch made from life, by contrast, evoked the seventeenth-century model playing the role of the apostle— acting, feigning, and yet somehow more immediate. I went back to the paintings again and again, peering at the paint surface to see if it was on the microscopic level of paint strokes that this effect of liveliness and immediacy was produced. Perhaps it was. The brushstrokes in the work made directly from life tended to be laid on the canvas more haphazardly, changing in direction, more visibly distinct rather than melded into one another. By contrast, there was more system, less serendipity, in the brushwork of the copied image. In the sketch from life, the movements of the brush seemed to indicate, even if on almost a subliminal level, a sense of ongoing discovery. Finally, it was in working with students in front of paintings by Caravaggio that these thoughts about the effect of painting from life came together into the idea for this book. The National Gallery of London’s Supper at Emmaus exemplifies Caravaggio’s practice of observing posed models (Fig. 1). There are few unblended brushstrokes here—Caravaggio erases the passage of his brush, and he seems to efface his own presence as the maker of the work. Explaining to students that his seventeenth-century biographers criticized his failures in composition, I ask them to find some glaring disparities in the relationship of the figures to one another. It always takes a surprisingly long time to notice them. Once students seem them, they are shocked by their own failure to notice that the hand of the pilgrim at right, thrusting into space away from us, is immense in relation to the other hand in the foreground. Then they see that the foodstuffs on the table are tiny in relation to the figures at the table. Why do we not see this immediately, I ask the students? There is no absolute answer to the question. It seems that this jump of scale from one motif to another results from Caravaggio’s repeated scrutiny, that is, from the sequence of many moments of perception that make up his depiction. Yet somehow as we look at the painting the disparities of scale 4 The two van Dyck paintings appeared in Brown, The Genius of Rome; for a discussion of Van Dyck’s head studies made from the live model, see Eaker, ‘Van Dyck’, p. 173–191.

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fig. 1: caravaggio. The Supper at Emmaus. c. 1601–1602. oil on canvas. national gallery of art, London. presented by the hon. george vernon, 1839. © 2019. copyright the national gallery, London/scala, florence.

disappear under the onslaught of convincing surface details. I would go further even, to propose that the very jump between one form and another, like the unblended brushstrokes in van Dyck’s oil sketch, somehow make the image more compellingly life-like. On a level perhaps slightly below our conscious awareness, these disparities engage us in the process of perception that the artist himself followed. Our viewing follows along the path of the artist’s making, which is, mysteriously, the source of a great deal of pleasure. I know that there are parallels between this kind of viewing and what Roland Barthes wrote about as the pleasures of a scriptible or ‘writerly’ as opposed to a ‘readerly’ text—the kind of text that is both complex but somehow open, inviting an ongoing intervention by the reader rather than a passive consumption.5 I have left that parallel implicit in the essays that follow, in order to focus on the relations between the artistic practice of depicting from life and its early modern viewers. We tend to identify the art of the seventeenth century in Italy and, by extension the art made by French-speaking artists working in Italy and emulating Italian classicism, with terms that describe stylistic trends, like ‘Baroque’ and ‘classic’, which categorize the appearance of the artworks, or their ‘style’. I want to set these categories aside, at least temporarily, in order to look at this phenomenon, which has less to do with the finished appearance of the works and more to do with the processes 5

Barthes, S/Z.

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by which they were made. When working ‘from life’ enjoyed a vogue across Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century, it was called by a number of names that were of much longer standing: depicting ad vivum, dal vivo, au vif’, and naer het leven, that is, representing from life or from the live model. Depicting from life often—though not always—created an image that appeared more naturalistic than stylized, and at times so much so that we might call the result a form of realism.6 Dutch and Flemish art has been closely associated with the terms and the practice, so closely that the investigation of working ad vivum has rarely gone outside of northern Europe. One of my aims in this book is to correct that situation. It has been discussed as part of a Dutch ‘art of describing’, as a characteristic of a visual culture of mapping and of recording, and as caught up in the methods of new sciences as well as the realm of curiosity and wonders. In the Italian and French examples that I will be looking at, depicting from life was also bound up with religious and political aims, and a courtly context, all aspects that have been less explored in relation to northern European art. The one artist from southern Europe who was infamous for his reliance on live posed models was Caravaggio. An enormous literature on Caravaggio and his followers has burgeoned over the last two decades, with an important strand of technical studies focused on his practice of painting from life. An odd aspect of the Caravaggio-mania of the present day, however, is the isolation it has imposed on this very singular artist. Only recently has more information emerged about the relations between Caravaggio’s practice of painting from life and those of his contemporaries, mainly in relation to Caravaggist artists who emulated his manner. Overall, the elevation of Caravaggio to the status of maverick genius has meant there is little appetite to relate his methods to work done dal vivo, from life, by his contemporaries or later artists who were not explicitly Caravaggist. The realism of plein-air painting and drawing as it was practiced in the early Seicento in Italy has had less appeal than Caravaggio’s art, not only in Italy but also in the Anglo-Saxon world. An example of Caravaggio’s work around 1601–1602, Victorious Love, juxtaposed with a near-contemporary drawing probably made in 1606‒1607 by the less wellknown Flemish artist Roelant Savery gives us an entry to the central issue of representing from life around the turn of the seventeenth century. Neither artist is only representing the posed model. But both have taken pains to present their images as the product of direct and unmediated transcription (Figs. 2 and 3). In the case of Caravaggio, as we will see, the artist took care to keep the image’s portrait-like resemblance to the individual model, his studio assistant. The confrontational pose and gaze, and the proximity of the body to us as viewers, lends immediacy to the staging of the composition. And the quantity of transcribed details—down to the feathers delicately tickling the leg of the model—go further toward convincing us that the 6 Some historians of early modern art avoid using the term realism, as opposed to the more generic term naturalism, and some claim it simply doesn’t exist in early modern art except as a category of subject matter. Summers, The Judgment of Sense, p. 3.

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fig. 2: caravaggio. Victorious Love. c.1602. oil on canvas. gemäldegalerie, Berlin. photographer: Joerg p. anders. © 2019. photo scala, florence/bpk, Bildagentur fuer Kunst, Kultur und geschichte, Berlin.

artist is translating lived experience into paint. In Roelant Savery’s drawing, by contrast, we see a less individualized, more generalized figure of a peasant sketched in typical rural dress from his region. The visual observations are, however, augmented by the Flemish inscriptions on the sheet. They tell us that the man is observed naer het leven, from life. And they render in words the invisible but apparently eye-witnessed details of the colours of the costume. The drawing and painting are united by a deliberate invocation of paradox, however. Both not only root their work in direct observation, but also insistently recall earlier works of art. The pose of the nude Cupid or Amor in Caravaggio’s painting recalls the twisting nude figures or ignudi that decorate Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, which were not only visible in Rome, but were being widely disseminated in engravings at the end of the sixteenth century (including several prints made by Caravaggio’s friend, Cherubino Alberti). Printed images of the ignudi mediated the enormous influence of Michelangelo’s flame-like spiraling bodies on sixteenth-century art. It is highly likely that Caravaggio’s audience would recognize his allusion to Michelangelo and juxtapose his work dal vivo with his predecessor’s idealized figures.

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fig. 3: Roelant savery. drawing of a tyrolean peasant, labelled naer het leven. c. 1603–1607. courtauld gallery, London. © the samuel courtauld trust, London.

Prints also magnified the impact of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s figures on later art. Roelant Savery’s peasant figure doesn’t just loosely imitate his predecessor’s manner and the characteristic peasant subjects. So closely did Savery’s drawing imitate Bruegel that they were thought to have been drawn around 1560 by that great founding figure of Netherlandish art rather than, as we now know, to have been executed on Savery’s travels in Bohemia and the Alps in 1603–1607, at the behest of the great collector Emperor Rudolf II. The so-called naer het leven drawings were attributed to Bruegel until the 1970s, when two art historians established their link to Roelant Savery.7 Today one still sees Savery’s Bruegelesque drawings sometimes referred to 7 Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, p. 285–288, gives the history of this change of attribution, proposed nearly simultaneously by Joaneath Spicer and Frans van Leeuwen between 1967 and 1971. Orenstein suggested reattribution of the Tyrolean landscape drawings from this group of Bruegelesque works to a ‘Master of the Mountain Landscapes’ rather than to Savery. I would rely more on the evidence of Joachim von Sandrart’s discussion of Savery’s mountain landscapes for Rudolph II, and would be wary of any attribution based solely on style, as the very concept of style is what these drawings made from life while emulating Bruegel are calling into question.

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as forgeries, made to trick collectors and to capitalise on the upsurge in taste for collecting Bruegel’s works around 1600. The sophisticated court patronage of Savery by Emperor Rudolf II in Prague shows, however, that Savery’s play with working simultaneously from life and from exemplary works of past art was likely to have been deliberate. Rudolf II collected many representations made naer het leven in the framework of his vast Kunst- und Wunderkammer—specimens of rare animals and objects figured in the collection, and also vivid images drawn or painted after the same things. In sponsoring works by Joris van Hoefnagel, Jacques de Gheyn, and others, Rudolf showed his passion for images that blurred the boundaries between the arts and natural history. But at the same time he was putting enormous effort into collecting works by the great Northern artists of the past who were renowned for their naturalism, particularly Albrecht Dürer but also Pieter Bruegel. And here lies an important aspect of representing from life around 1600: to combine references to exemplary past art with extreme fidelity to the model, which appealed to a very cultivated taste. So too Caravaggio’s dual imitation of the human model and the model in past art, setting his painting against that earlier namesake Michelangelo, addressed a sophisticated Roman collector who purchased the Victorious Love, marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani. It was Giustiniani who was to cannily define this practice of combined imitation and emulation. In his Discourse on Painting, the nobleman remarked that both Caravaggio and his great contemporary Annibale Carracci had worked dal naturale, from live models, but at the same time ‘con l’esempio davanti’, with the example of past art before their eyes.8 I will return to the comparison of Caravaggio and his Flemish contemporary Savery. If here at the outset of my study I stress the sophistication and internationalism of this practice of representing from life in the early seventeenth century, it is in part because there is a tendency among historians of Italian art either to discount the veracity of early modern claims to work from life (although most seventeenth-century writers on art have an opinion about its worth), or to see it, when it does occur, as too simple and too common a part of artistic practice to need scrutiny.9 On the other hand, the role of observation from life has been at the very heart of more philosophical or theoretical discussions of representation, cognition, and style. It is part and parcel of any discussion of the nature of artistic realism, and it drives the arguments about the historicity of perception. This study moves between the historical and pragmatic issues of artistic practice and the philosophical issues raised by

8 Vincenzo Giustiniani, letter to Teodoro Ameyden ca. 1620–1630, published as ‘Vincenzo Giustiniani al signor Teodort Amideno’, [Letter on Painting to Teodoro Ameyden], in Raccolta di Lettere sulla Pittura, ed. by Giovanni G. Bottari, 6 vols., (Milan: Per Giovanni Silvestri, 1822) 6, p. 121. 9 For an example of someone downplaying or denying the significance of artists depicting dal vivo, see Ebert-Schifferer, Caravaggio.

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representation from life. Both the art historical context and these issues of representation require a brief introduction here.

Art, Miraculously, without Art The time frame for the material presented here extends roughly from the 1590s through the 1640s. In Italy this is a period of great changes in the practice of painting and printmaking, accompanied by the rise of new forms of writing about the arts among elite collectors and intellectuals. These texts tended to present contemporary art in relation to the arts of classical antiquity as well as the Renaissance. And the ideal of beauty embodied in classical sculpture was the intellectual model used to measure the value of artistic practice in the present day. An ideal synthesis of forms from nature and past art, using the example of antique figures, was prescribed by such writers as Franciscus Junius (François du Jon) or Giovanni Battista Agucchi. To represent from the live model was, to such writers, merely a stage in the production of this synthesis of forms. Remaining with this way of depicting and not passing further into creative idealization, according to their views, a debasement of art and a failure to use the artist’s intellect and judgment. It is fair to say that the parallel view among many artists at the time was that it took greater education, and social skills, to become such an artist of ideals and ideas. Thus the rise of a classicizing ‘theory’ of the arts (which Panofsky long ago investigated as an odd hybrid of neoPlatonic ideas and Aristotelian doctrines) accompanied the creation of the art that I will investigate in the five essays that follow.10 There was probably a degree of opposition to these ideas among the artists that play a role here—it is difficult to know for certain as they left little verbal testimony. Within their images, we will see at times a self-aware play with the very idea of depicting from life, which may seem a kind of theorizing without words, a theorizing within the visual image itself. They may thus have been well aware they were placing their works slightly apart from the mainstream history of the arts, as Giorgio Vasari had defined it, though often their divergence was expressed playfully or ironically. The idea that Nature was author of the image was a challenge to the principles of Italian Renaissance art and the aspirations of Renaissance artists. Nonetheless, artistic ambition and self-expression found their way back into the practice of depicting from life, both subtly and overtly. Self-advancement through self- denial was a strategy that many of these artists had in common. A crucial social context that unites many of these artists, in both Florence and Rome, is that of court culture and the notion of the artist as an aspiring courtier rather than a would-be intellectual.

10 Panofsky, Idea; Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy.

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To use modern terminology, the essays investigate the creation of images that were to some degree indexical, in that their origins were supposed to lie not in the artist’s invention but in nature itself.11 The image was made to seem transparent to nature, not to be (on first sight) expressive of the artist’s style or identity. There is therefore one issue that all five essays raise to one degree or another, namely that the artistry involved in creating these works was paradoxically best revealed by being hidden, as in the old adage ars celare artem. When Jacques Callot drew Florentine courtiers in the street during festivities in 1617–1620, or when Filippo Napoletano painted on site the waterfalls at Tivoli near Rome around 1622, or when Claude Lorrain painted a wooded view while working outside in the Vigna Madama in the 1630s, they knew they were engaging in a distinct form of artistry. Their biographers commented on the origins of these images, noting it as significant that they were made in the presence of the model or motif that they represented. In the Italian context, depicting from life was a practice that was relatively unusual at the time. There was more at stake in it than fidelity to appearances. Some of the artists studied here represented on site and in front of their model in order to give a compelling vivacity or vivezza to the finished image. Others worked in this way to give a particular kind of authority to their subject, to verify its truth, and to make images that serve as witness to events, rather than testimony to the artist’s imagination. And yet in many instances what was important was a foregrounding of artistry, a display of skill in mimesis, paradoxically achieved by withdrawing the overt signs of artistry to leave an image seemingly made by nature itself. The essays that follow will look at how some seventeenth-century paintings, drawings and prints functioned in relation to their viewers, as a result of this creative process. My claim is that many images drawn from life were staged in such a way as to communicate ideas and to express values, using a range of visual tactics. For example, we will see images by Jacques Callot and his contemporaries in Florence with elaborate framing motifs at the edges and tops of image, a trait that makes for tension between self-conscious artistry at the margins and the self-effacing indexical image at the centre. Striking contrasts of opposites, to give an example of a technique used many times by Caravaggio, was another way of composing images that signified through juxtaposition. This sort of technique is amenable to structural analysis. It needs to be combined, however, with an investigation into the social and intellectual context of the artist and audience, which restores to us a part of the contemporary associations with depicted figures and places. Historical research allows us to see the practice of visually foregrounding motifs that were charged with contemporary meaning. The most common function of these tactics, whether we reach them 11 Further on the indexical sign, see Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotic’, in his The Philosophy of Peirce, p. 98–119; Kraus, ‘Notes on the Index’, p. 58–67.

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through structural analysis or contextualisation, was to make the image communicate by means of figural allusion, rather than to use the play of substitutions of forms for ideas or emotions, which would lead toward allegory or narrative. These were ways of making an indexical image ‘speak’, and we will see them a number of times in the pages that follow. Yet during this same period, the writing about art increasingly vilified representation from life for being bereft of all communication. The so-called ‘classicizing idealist’ critics, ranging from Giovanni Battista Agucchi in the early seventeenth century to Giovan Pietro Bellori and André Félibien in the 1660s and 1670s, stressed instead the value of creating ideal forms, whose model was to be found in antique art. These critics usually adopted the notion of the sisterhood of painting and poetry, or the ut pictura poesis tradition, and they exalted the use of expressive faces, the affetti, and gestures within narrative images. Their notion of expression, whether of ideas or emotion, was presented as antithetical to depicting ‘dal naturale’ as Bellori made clear in his life of Caravaggio. When Bellori describes Caravaggio rejecting the study of classical sculpture, he says the artist took a random gypsy woman off the street and put her in his workshop to paint from life. Requiring the model’s presence so that he might depict from life, Caravaggio’s mind went empty when the model was not in front of him—at least, according to Bellori. This practice of depicting in the presence of a model was under particular critical stress throughout this period, when it was seen as anti-intellectual and uncultured. Caravaggio’s career as Giovan Pietro Bellori presented it is only the best known of such examples—but even he was willing to admit of Caravaggio’s work that he ‘made art, miraculously, without art’. To depict from life in Italy was nearly always a deliberate counter-current, knowingly adopted in opposition to textual accounts of how the visual arts should work. At times the inspiration to represent from the live model came from Northern works of art, particularly prints, for which there was a lively market in southern Europe. And, as we will see in chapter four, Northern artists in Rome created complex and appealing paintings for a local audience, based on working from life. But it is by no means merely due to the stylistic influence of Northern art that artists working in Italy took up the practice of representing from life. There is a great deal more than style or influence to the exchange between North and South on this issue, as we shall see. In seventeenth-century Italy, the practice of drawing or painting in the presence of a model inspired a small lexicon of terms, most of which are now translated by the English phrase ‘to depict from life’. Italian and French-speaking artists had a similar, but not identical vocabulary for this. It was called depicting dal vivo, dal vero, dal naturale, d’après la nature, après le vif or au vif—from life. The verbs used were a cluster of terms: dipingere (to depict), but also ritrarre (to portray) and colorire dal vero (to colour from the real), and in French the phrases tracer d’après la nature, (to trace from nature), and tirer au vif (to pull [an image] from a living being), were terms

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that—as we will see in chapter four—lent themselves to some visual-verbal punning in representations that were made from life. The term contrafactum in Latin and conterfeytsel in Flemish was clearly in widespread usage in Northern Europe through the sixteenth century, and its significance has been investigated in relation to Northern arts, as we shall see shortly. The term pointed to a particular form of portrayal from life, functioning as a witness to something observed. The term itself also existed in an Italian form, contrafatta, but in Italy its use seems to have been very rare, and never to have been used as a verb to signify a certain kind of making. Instead we find 16th-century Italian texts using other words to signify portrayal in effigy and the creation of a simulachrum—ritrarre dal naturale, for example, which yields the noun ritratto or portrait. In France, too, the terminology based on contrafactum became less common by the middle of the 16th century. In place of that word and its connotations of vivid presence, the phrases for nature and life as the source of the image became more important. By the time of Michel de Montaigne’s essays in the third quarter of the 16th century, the phrase for portraying from life was most often tirer au vif, which was exactly the same phrase used for hunting and shooting a wild animal. Jean Nicot’s 1606 Trésor de la langue française cites the terms au vif and d’après la nature, giving the example ‘Images faites au vif, et naifvement’ (images made from life, and naively). But under the term tirer, Nicot also states that ‘Tirer signifie aussi Pourtraire’ (to pull also means to portray). Examples of its usage included ‘Tirer un homme au naturel, le tirer en vif, le tirer en cire, le tirer en plâtre, il s’est fait tirer par un excellent Peintre’ (To trace a man from nature, to trace from life, to fashion in wax, to fashion in plaster. He had his likeness taken by an excellent painter). The slight shift in language toward the terms tirer and tracer au vif in French and ritrarre dal vivo in Italian, accompanies a shift of emphasis at the turn of the 17th century, at the point where my study begins. Depiction from life, whatever it might be called, sometimes took place in a workshop, where a posed model was studied intently by a group of artists. Or it might take place out in the countryside, on a mountain top, or on a city street, with a draftsman sketching a panoramic view of a town or a well-known site. Depicting from life is often associated in early modernity with draftsmanship, but it was also at times used in painting in oil on canvas, famously in the case of Caravaggio, but also by other seventeenth-century artists, who even carried awkward equipment out into the field to paint in front of the motif, long centuries before the Impressionists with their tubes of commercial pigments. It is of course not uncommon that artworks begun with images sketched on site, in the presence of the model, were finished and embellished later in the workshop. It was, however, the very origin of the image in that primary moment of its capture on paper or canvas that defined its essential nature as work from life.

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Life drawing was taught at an advanced stage of any artist’s training. It led to the institutionalization of the type of figure study called an ‘academy’, so called from the site of life drawing work, which in Italy was called the ‘accademia del nudo’, a place where the live model could be posed for several artists to work from. Given how ubiquitous such life-drawing training was, it may seem that I am stressing a banal aspect of artistic practice in early modernity. So banal that it has become a modern cliché of how pre-modern artists work, standing in front of the easel or the sheet of paper staring at their model. But it was exceptional to produce the finished work of art by this means in sixteenth and seventeenth century Italy and France. Drawn studies from life were usually an early part of the creative process that led to the final work. In seventeenth-century Italy, the effect of the real was supposed to be mitigated, as it was filtered through a process of idealization and stylization, and moulded into expressive forms. A well-known example of an artist who was criticized for moving too quickly from a drawing made from life in the workshop to the finished altarpiece is found in Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s Lives of the Carracci. He described older artists in Bologna carping at how Annibale Carracci had depicted a facchino, a market labourer, in his 1583 altarpiece of The Baptism of Christ. The semi-nude young boy, depicted lifting his shirt over his head, made his way only slightly altered into the figures around the baptism scene, whereas according to these painters his effigy should have been suited only to the accademia del nudo, not a church.12

Art and Illusion: the problematic history of representing the real The image made in the presence of its model may have been only one part of the process of making a work of art in the seventeenth century, and idealization may have gotten far more press at the time. However, within twentieth-century thought about the role of naturalism in European art, representing from life is the very paradigm of pre-modern depiction. To make an image in this way, constantly striving toward greater accuracy in rendering the model, was the process that seemed to drive forward the history of art between Cimabue and Michelangelo, and subtly or overtly coloured the achievement of later periods of art as deviations from the norms of nature or persistent ‘returns’ to nature. This development supposedly found its end point in the 19th-century invention of the photograph. The history of styles was famously analyzed in this way by E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion (1960). Gombrich presented a dialectical process of ‘making and matching’, wherein artists both matched a visual impression against images from past art, and made new images that matched their own visual impression. Period style is one result from this dialogue between the direct vision of the model and an awareness 12

Malvasia, Felsina Pittrice, 1, p. 267

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of past images. And a notion of period style helped to explain why artists in the past somehow couldn’t achieve a proto-photographic naturalism, or at least not to our modern eyes. In Gombrich’s argument, artists working in direct confrontation with their model were the engine for artistic momentum, in the quest for ever more perfect illusions of the real. There have been brilliant refutations of that paradigm, perhaps most strikingly in studies of photography, and in Joel Snyder’s demolition of the idea of photography as the culminating point of naturalist representation in his study ‘Picturing Vision’ (1980).13 Nowhere does Gombrich’s work retain its appeal more strongly, however, than in discussions of the disparity between pre-modern images and their models. How could such un-naturalistic pictures claim to be made from direct observation? The thirteenth-century drawing of a lion by Villard de Honnecourt, often reproduced, is perhaps the most famous example mentioned in Gombrich’s text.14 The inscription proclaimed the beast in the drawing, despite its schematic underlying geometry that was evidently drawn by a compass, to be ‘contrefais al vif’ or portrayed from life. Gombrich remarked of the ‘curiously stiff picture of a lion’ that the late medieval artist ‘can have meant only that he had drawn his schema in the presence of a real lion. How much of his visual observation he allowed to enter into the formula is a different matter’. Villard’s lion-formula nonetheless stood at the ‘beginnings of illustrated reportage’ according to Gombrich. More recent studies of Villard’s drawings have refuted this idea that Villard was a medieval version of a documentary photographer. They have pointed instead to a different range of meanings for the phrase ‘al vif’ in French usage between 1300 and 1500, namely that it did not mean Villard drew while confronting an actual lion, but that it denoted a life-likeness in the image, and a liveliness in its effect, all while conveying information about the animal that had been gleaned from textual sources.15 The recent literature on depicting from life, from Villard’s time through the early seventeenth century, is in agreement about a paradigm shift that took place during the sixteenth century. If in the 13th century Villard’s term al vif signified a Pygmalion effect of bringing the inert image to life, increasingly from the year 1500 the phrase signified an indexical, that is causal, relation between the image and its prototype. The other term Villard used, contrefais, has also been explored as part of the language used to describe the practice of working from life, and has been tied to this larger issue of defining early modern naturalism. Peter Parshall’s 1993 study of the term ‘Imago Contrafacta’ in relation to sixteenth-century representation from life brought 13 Snyder, ‘Picturing Vision’, p. 499–526. 14 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 78–79. 15 Turel, ‘Living Pictures’, p. 163–182; Bugslag, ‘Contrefais al Vif’, p. 360–378. Turel’s argument is far wider ranging than Bugslag’s, though both point to the notion of vividness as the connotation of “al vif” in the 13th century. For the view that Villard’s term contrefais al vif conveyed negative connotations, see Perkinson, ‘Portraits and Counterfeits’, p. 13–28.

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fig. 4: albrecht dürer. Rhinoceros. 1515. Woodcut. metropolitan museum of art, new york.

out its ties to the rise of empirical observation and to the value of objectivity in the emerging natural sciences.16 The modern English cognate to the term contrafactum is counterfeit, signifying today a thing that is inauthentic and false. But it denoted the opposite in sixteenth-century terms. It was instead the image seemingly stamped by nature or by divine agency in its own shape, without the intervention of human subjectivity. An imago contrafacta was so designated because it had a role different to that of aesthetic portrayal. It was an effigy or simulacrum, a substitute for the living thing, giving an enhanced sense of presence. Its earliest usage may have been primarily in inscriptions on portraits, to certify their living likeness to their sitters. But the term spread in the early sixteenth century to religious portrayals and to landscape, as well as to the broadsheet dissemination of wondrous or uncanny events. Above all, however, the term contrafactum and its vulgate variants were applied to images of naturalia, in the context of authenticating and disseminating knowledge of the natural world.

16 Parshall, ‘Imago Contrafacta’, p. 554–574.

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The sixteenth-century corollary to Villard’s lion is thus Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinoceros, drawn in 1515 and inscribed ‘Das hab jch dir van wunders wegen müsen abkunterfet shicken’ (because it is such a wondrous thing, I had to send you its counterfeit) (Fig. 4). Despite implying that he had drawn the rhino from life, calling it abkunterfet, an imago contrafacta, Dürer had never actually seen the animal. He probably drew from a sketch sent from Lisbon to Nuremburg by a German printer. Despite the many inaccuracies—the animal’s improbable armour plating, for one—Dürer’s rhinoceros was not only made into a woodcut, published as a broadsheet and widely disseminated in a series of sixteenth-century editions, it continued to be copied in various formats through the nineteenth century, even as an illustration in natural history texts.17 It had the stamp of authenticity in the artist’s own assertion of its life-likeness. According to Parshall’s argument, the term contrafactum was used primarily in relation to Northern art in the sixteenth century, although as Villard de Honnecourt’s inscribed lion shows, the French version of the term was current in the late medieval period. The term imago contrafacta alerts us to images ‘specially designated as bearers of visual fact’, and the intention to convey ‘some particle of information deemed transmissible through a picture’. The image so designated is thus not determined by the degree of faithfulness to its subject, but rather by its function. Other studies of early modern representations from life make the same point, but with greater focus on the parallels between empiricism in the natural sciences and the value—economic as well as intellectual—given to the image drawn in the presence of its model. Claudia Swan’s 1998 essay ‘Ad Vivum, Naer het Leven, From the Life’ extends Parshall’s focus beyond the sixteenth century and beyond Northern realism.18 She points out that terms for the concept of depicting from life were international. To use the phrase ad vivum or its local counterparts was ‘to exercise an internationally valid password in a community spread across a continent and joined by correspondence and publications’. Swan looked at the way such images worked not only within the networks of natural scientists but also within the curiosity cabinets and wonder collections of the time. She stressed the substitution value of the image made from life, its function as simulachrum, so closely was it modelled on its prototype. This was, as Swan put it, ‘vital in relation to the esthetics of possession’. Owning the album of drawings or prints of animals made ad vivum was thus on the same footing as owning the menagerie of rare animals themselves. She points out that collectors like the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague would have not only the real exotic animals in their menageries, but also a multitude of wondrous representations of them in their kunstkammer, many of them labelled as images made naer het leven, ad vivum, from life. 17 Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer, chap. 11 on Dürer’s rhinoceros drawing and its long afterlife; Dackerman, Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge. 18 Swan, ‘Ad Vivum’, p. 353–372. Taking up the theme most recently: Balfe, Woodall, Zittel, Ad Vivum? (forthcoming, 2019). Although I participated in the conference at which these essays were presented, I have not seen them in written form; my understanding is that they are focused primarily on Northern European art, and continue the exploration of ad vivum depiction in relation to the empirical study of nature.

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Parshall’s and Swan’s research overlapped in the area of natural science and the early modern wonder cabinet. But there are two groups of images discussed by Parshall that go beyond the realm of early science. They focus attention on the suppression of authorship in indexical images, an issue that has an important bearing on several of the essays in this book, and thus I would like to look more closely at them here. The first is a pair of engravings made between 1495 and 1500 by Israhel van Meckenem, both depicting an Imago Pietatis, Christ crucified. The inscription on both prints assures us that ‘Haec imago contrafacta est’, (this image is portrayed from life). In what sense portrayed from life? The prints were based on a sacred image in Rome’s Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme, a mosaic that had been commissioned by St. Gregory the Great to commemorate his vision of Christ during Mass, in one of the miracles most associated with his reign as pope. Thus Israhel’s print is perhaps the very earliest ‘reproductive print’: it copies an already existing image in order to disseminate its appearance. But the print also portrays the spiritual vision ‘from life’—for an image, too, can be depicted ad vivum in another image, that is, the image can be a product of eye-witnessing and yet a copy of that image can equally serve as an authentic account of that initial experience. Further complicating the relation between engraved images and their prototype, the sacred image in Rome had also been drawn from life after a fashion. That is, it was drawn from a vision witnessed and verbally authenticated by Gregory the Great himself. Neither the saint nor the anonymous artisan who crafted the image in Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme could be called authors of the image, whose true origin lay in the supernatural rather than the natural world. Israhel’s images are caught up in what Christopher Wood has called an ‘iconic chain’.19 The engravings themselves existed in two versions, drawn on two different plates; each version then existed in multiple impressions. Beyond that, each impression individually was a copy of a copy. Nonetheless, at the same time each was still an indexical stand-in for a vision in the mind of a saint. Printed images always complicate the distinction between copy and original, to be sure; Wood describes this as prints’ ‘disruption of the iconic chain’. But the print as imago contrafacta, as Israhel labeled his print with this term, involves above all a suppression of the function of the artist, as agent of the image’s making. Israhel’s crafting of the image was not overtly its raison-d’être. At every point in the chain of images engaged by the print, the reference is to an ineffable, immaterial prototype, the divine vision. There are clear parallels between the status of an imago contrafacta, as Israhel’s engravings proclaimed themselves to be, and that of the sacred icon in the Byzantine church. St. Luke’s original depiction of the Madonna served to ground subsequent icons in a chain that referred the viewer toward a single, originating sacred referent. What is new here in Israhel’s images is the coming together of the sacred referent with this term contrafactum and its connotation of verifiable experience. The word could 19 Wood, Forgery, esp. p. 15–17 concerning ‘pre-modern culture’ with its ‘presumption of artifacts’ mutual substitutability’ versus the binarism of original and replica in the modern era.

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apply in the realm of spiritual ‘realities’ as well as in the empirical study of nature. In one very influential work made from life that will be discussed in chapter 2, Jacques Callot’s The Fair at Impruneta, the nature of sacred icons is alluded to in both the printed image—where a miraculous icon of the Madonna is carried in procession— and its dedicatory inscription. The analogy between icons and images made from life was probably quite apparent to 16th and 17th-century artists. Another group of prints that Parshall refers to in his study of the 16th-century imago contrafacta, become important toward the end of the period his study covers, and is quite different in subject to Israhel’s engravings. The so-called Small Landscapes series of engravings was first published in Antwerp by Hieronymous Cock in 1559.20 The prints depict villages, roads and fields typical of the Brabant region. There are no specific identified places, and the emphasis is on the typical and local identity of the land. The title page does not give an artist’s name, and we know from the few surviving drawings for the series that the anonymous draftsman’s work was freely altered and added to by the publisher—augmented with some figures, and certain motifs emphasized or minimized. The authorship of the images was apparently less important than the nature of their subject. Their title page declared the images to be ‘Al te samen gheconterfeyt naer dleven’ (altogether portrayed from life). That phrase naer het leven was rising in popularity, alongside the term conterfeyt. Several decades later (and a great deal of warfare having ravaged the province depicted in the prints), the images were republished in 1601 by Theodor Galle. They were still not attributed to any particular artist. But perhaps due to nostalgia for a lost peace represented in the scenes, which showed the landscape that was no longer accessible to many Flemish exiles to the northern Netherlands, the series proved immensely popular for a Dutch urban public. In Amsterdam during 1612, Claes Jansz. Visscher produced a new set of prints closely copied from the Cort 1559 publication, but the title page now attributed the series to the great 16th-century figure, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. This publication in turn set off the production of numerous print series of landscapes, by Willem Buytewech, Jan van de Velde and others. As if to underscore the idea that the scenes were drawn from life, these series now sometimes included figures of draftsmen at work within the landscapes. They draw what they, and we, are engaged in seeing. They verify or authenticate the new terrain of man-made farmland, but also make visible the objects of nostalgia, the lost landscape of the past. In several studies in this volume we will see similar topographic landscapes and imagined views, which were presented as images made from life, complete with artists at work in the landscape sketching what we see. The motivations for topographic view-making in Florence and Rome were also, like the Small Landscape series, caught up in a sense of regional identity and the needs of local authorities. Yet when 20 The literature on the Small Landscapes series includes Freedberg, Dutch Landscape prints; Onuf, ‘Envisioning Netherlandish Unity’; Onuf, ‘Small landscapes’, p. 190–193.

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we look at a topographic work such as Claude Lorrain’s Siege of La Rochelle made for a French king to celebrate a French victory, it clearly diverges from the suppression of authorship that was such a striking feature of the early versions of the Bruegelesque landscape views. Claude represents a draftsman at work in the foreground of his painted siege view. The figure is generic rather than serving as a literal self-portrait. The motif of the draftsman at work, busy sketching the scene before our eyes, had long been used in sixteenth-century maps and topographic views to signify that the view was witnessed and verified. In that context, it was not the authorship of the scene that was stressed by this motif, but the transparency of the image to its model in nature, as in the Small Landscapes series. However, Claude brings the authorship of the scene to the fore: a reward for the viewer’s close looking is the appearance of a small signature, ‘Claudio’, written upside down on the sheet held by the seated draftsman. Inverted, the signature both does and does not belong to the represented draftsman. It signifies instead the role of authorship that Claude retains for himself, a sign for artistry and representational cunning that balances with the indexical function of a siege view. Working from the motif or the model should be an act of eye-witnessing, yet it isn’t. The artist’s fictional presence and literal absence from the topographies he created is one issue raised by the studies that follow. That some such unity of imitation and imagination is always at work in the practice of representing ‘from life;’ is my basic premise. In the final decade of the sixteenth and opening years of the seventeenth century the motif of the draftsman quickly comes to be a shorthand statement about the origins of the image in work from life. I will have more to say about how this motif of the draftsman at work is elaborated by both Italian and French-speaking topographic draftsmen, Jacques Callot, and Claude Lorrain. Here I want to introduce it as one of the ways in which a revival of Pieter Bruegel’s art at the turn of the 17th century, and not just in the Small Landscapes series, was a conduit for new ideas about representing from the model, ideas that had on effect on art produced in Italy, whether by Italians or French artists. Just as the emperor Rudolf II in Prague ignited a revival of interest in Albrecht Dürer’s art around 1600, so too did his voracious collecting seem to set off a Bruegel Renaissance. One example of the way the Netherlandish master’s art is reworked to make it even more strongly connected to the practice of working naer het leven can be found in Simon Novellanus’s 1595 engraving after a Pieter Bruegel Alpine scene (Fig. 5). It represents the tiny draftsman at work, engulfed within the panoramic mountain and river view that opens before our eyes. In the sky directly above the draftsman, Novellanus inserts the mythological figures of Mercury and Psyche. The fanciful realm of myth is juxtaposed with the ordinary earthly realm of the artisan making his image. These particular mythological symbols were a favourite motif for Rudolf II, where Mercury and Psyche were represented within his collections in sculptures and in virtuoso prints by Adrian de Vries. It has been suggested recently that the figures of Mercury and Psyche

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fig. 5: simon novellanus, after pieter Bruegel. Landscape with Mercury and Psyche. 1595. engraving. British museum dept. of prints and drawings, London. © trustees of the British museum.

were employed in the context of Rudolf’s fascination for alchemy, where they stood as symbols for the alchemical transformation of matter. In Novellanus’s reworking of Pieter Bruegel’s landscape, the draftsman seated on the ground transforms nature into art, as in a celestial realm the gods make matter into gold. Their combination here in one Bruegel-like print makes for an image that both effaces Novellanus the executor of the scene behind the persona of the great Netherlandish artist, while it also makes great artistic claims for the process of representing from life. Depictions of the artist at work, within the very work he seems to be making, form a common thread joining a number of works studied in this book. A particularly rich example occurs in the commission Rudolf II gave to the Flemish specialist in animal and floral painting, Roelant Savery.21 As we saw earlier, from about 1603 to 1608, Savvery made drawings that he labelled ‘naer het leven’, made from life, but which had the appearance of being in the manner of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Some of these drawings date from the time of a study trip to the Tyrol region, which Joachim van Sandrart later described as a mission given to the artist by Rudolf II himself. Savery’s task was to collect images of rare flora and fauna for the emperor’s collection. The drawings 21

On Savery’s art, see Bartilla, Roelant Savery; Mai, Roelant Savery.

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Fig. 6: Roeland Savery. Mountain landscape with an artist sketching. 1603–1606. drawing. Courtauld Gallery, London. © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, London.

that Savery produced, however, were on the one hand studies of Bohemian peasants inscribed ‘nae’t leven’, and on the other Alpine landscape views, some including that pointed motif of draftsmen sketching (Fig. 6). It is easy to see why Savery’s drawings were confused with those of Pieter Bruegel the Elder for centuries, as we saw earlier.22 The Courtauld Gallery’s Alpine landscape by Savery even has an old inscription attributing it to Bruegel. The visible similarity of Savery’s drawing to Bruegel’s famous Alpine scenes, so praised in Karel van Mander’s life of Bruegel, is no accident. Savery drew a landscape that presented itself as made on site, in direct transcription of the view—with an image of the artist at work included within the scene, as a stamp of authentic witnessing. And yet the drawing also imitated Bruegel’s views to a degree that resembles forgery of the earlier artist’s work. Intense mimesis of a view coincided with intense emulation, in a paradoxical blending of two forms of imitation. The type of viewer that Savery had in mind, however, was probably meant to savour the paradoxical link made in the drawing between imitation of nature and emulation of past art. The presence of the artist at work in this context becomes not only a marker of eye-witnessing, an indicator of veracity, but also a pointer toward the self-conscious display of artistry that was at play in this dual form of imitation, and a self-conscious form of viewing. 22 Spicer, ‘The Naer Het Leven Drawings’, p. 63–82. See also Spicer, ‘Referencing Invention’; Spicer, ‘A pictorial vocabulary’, p. 22–51; Spicer, ‘The Star of David’, p. 203–224.

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The role of Rudolf II’s court in Prague in promoting this novel form of representing from life, predicated on the emperor’s taste for Dürer and Bruegel, is a rich topic that goes beyond the bounds of my present study. There has been fascinating work done on the Rudolfine court, its collecting and its patronage, and the ties between the aesthetics of curiosity and the taste for new forms of artistic naturalism based on study from life. The relationship between artistic ideas at the court in Prague and artistic practice in the United Provinces at the turn of the 17th century is still being clarified. In all of these areas, natural science and its adoption of empirical study has been presented as the common ground underlying the artistic practice of representing from life and a new realism in Dutch and Flemish art. However, for my purposes in the studies that follow, it is essential to stress a different context for representing from life in the early 17th century. The bridge between artists like Savery in Prague around 1600 and artists in Italy at roughly the same time is primarily court culture, albeit courts that gave protection and patronage to scientists such as Tycho Brahe and Galileo Galilei as well as to artists. In some of the studies that follow I will be looking at how the practice of working dal vivo or tiré au vif was embedded in courtly artistic cultures that prized complexity, representational wit, and virtuoso artistic performance. Several elements in court life that have a bearing on the popularity of representing from life. One is simply the resonance of artistic style with the self-styling of a courtier, and thus the nonchalance—sprezzatura, the deliberate self-effacement of the skilled courtier—seemed to be aligned with the self-effacement of the image made as if from life. The very style-lessness of the image made from life was the subject of intense interest in the circle of Rudolf II, reaching an apogee in the achievements of Hendrick Goltzius. Van Mander’s life of Hendrick Goltzius portrays him as a Proteus figure, a shape-shifter who could take on the artistic identity of any master. His style was the appropriation of all styles. His virtuoso emulation of famous artists’ work in his Master-pieces print series, for example, was a witty extension of the notion of a reproductive print, which entailed not copying a pre-existing image but rather adopting the manner of the earlier artist so completely as to fool the eye of connoisseurs.23 His Circumcision of Christ engraving in the Master-pieces series radiates the manner of Dürer, and recalls the composition of Dürer’s woodcut of the same subject. However, Goltzius does not cross the line toward outright plagiarism, like the infamous early example of Marcantonio Raimondi pirating Dürer’s woodcuts in his engravings made in Venice in 1506. Goltzius instead does something even more difficult, a metamorphosis of his own hand into that of another artist’s, and a transformation of his own artistic vision into someone else’s way of seeing the world. This Protean quality had comic as well as serious manifestations in van Mander’s biography of Goltzius. Travelling disguised as a cheese-salesman, under an assumed name, Goltzius hid himself and eavesdropped on people discussing his works, in 23 Melion, ‘Hendrick Goltzius’s Project’, p. 458–87; Melion, ‘Karel van Mander’s Life’, p. 113–33.

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order to hear the unvarnished truth of their criticism—an anecdote derived from a story in Pliny, which Van Mander also recounted of Pieter Bruegel. The trope at work in both biographies emerges from the paradox of great skill at imitation. In Van Mander’s lives, artistic identity for both Bruegel and Goltzius involved suppression of their identity. Nonetheless, in his Circumcision scene engraved in the manner of Dürer, Goltzius inserted a self-portrait looking out at the viewer from the right background. Though striving to be invisible at the level of handling or manner, the artist’s self re-emerges, as if paradoxically portrayed by his long-vanished predecessor, Dürer. The self-effacing and self-promoting functions of Goltzius’s Master-pieces joined the properties of individual style and the properties of the indexical image, in a display that was both serious and playful. Similar displays characterize Jacques Callot’s drawings made from life for the Medici court in Florence between 1617 and 1621, as we shall see. If a notion of sprezzatura might inform courtly taste for self-effacing artistry in the realm of image-making, a different aspect of court life sheds light on other aspects of drawing and painting from life in Florence during Callot’s time there. The verbal contests or intellectual debates that were such a feature of polite society in a number of European courts shaped the presentation of scientific discoveries, which had to be couched as witty, inventive performances. So too were there friendly contests at drawing from life in Florence, in which Callot and his friend Filippo Napoletano participated. It is controlled performance that links these competitive displays of skill to the court. Virtuoso performance was a key element in any courtier’s rise to prominence at court, and it was a type of artistry that led musicians, actors and dancers to rise far more dramatically than artists or artisans in a court setting. Performers could not be separated from the product of their art, which was embodied and ephemeral: how could you separate the dancer from the dance? Poet and writer could also read and discourse in person, uniting their presence with their works.24 The ephemerality of performance at court inspired the prince to honour the performer themselves. But the visual artist did not need to be present for their fruits of their artistry to be appreciated, and if they were uneducated or uncouth, the separation of their performance from their actual presence was all the more apt. Taking their cue from musicians and actors, some artists would present their skills as an enactment of their art, in the presence of the prince. Goltzius would paint in the presence of Rudolf II, in a room next door to erotic paintings that had been made from life. And so too would Filippo Napoletano produce his miniature images at the bedside of the mortally ill Grand Duke Cosimo II in Florence, who found them a source of virtuous entertainment. The court was one social context in Italy and France for the creation of images made from life. The other pertinent social context is less well-defined. The urban environment in which artists openly competed for patronage and custom also gave some notoriety to 24 Welch, ‘Painting as Performance’, p. 9–18.

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the practice of representing from life. Rome and Paris had thriving markets for realist paintings and prints in the seventeenth century, served by Dutch and Flemish emigrés but also by indigenous artists. A smaller subset of these artists became renowned for their naturalistic representation of low life. It is in the context of the urban artists’ academies, first in Rome and later in Paris, that we find the critical backlash against the supposedly ignorant and unlearned practice of realism. Caravaggio’s fame for working dal naturale, from the model, was first mentioned in print in 1606 by Karel van Mander, and set the stage for later debates about its value as a practice. Chapter five studies Claude Lorrain’s work from life in relation to the phenomenon of the Bamboccianti and the Bentveughels, Northern painters working in Rome between 1620 and 1660, whom critics sought to denigrate with the same tools used against Caravaggism. The Northern artists in Rome flaunted their practice of working in the presence of their models, and engaged in overt opposition to the rhetoric of idealization and—importantly—to the professional taxation of Rome’s Accademia di San Luca. It was in this urban marketplace for images that battle lines were drawn between images made idealized and perfected, which were supposedly for elite patrons, and images depicted from life, raw and unmediated, which were supposedly for the low in society. Caravaggio’s practice of painting from posed models in actuality refuted that scenario. His meteoric rise to fame was brokered through the great and the good in Rome between 1598 and 1606. He was then guided through the process of attaining a knighthood on Malta and a return to the papal court in Rome by very high patronage indeed. Chapter 1 will discuss Caravaggio’s retention of the portrait likeness of his models and his juxtaposition of their faces with those of animals and plants, studying his practice in the context of popular ideas about physiognomy. The idea that Caravaggio’s realism grew out of his earliest Roman patrons’ involvement with the natural sciences has dropped out of recent scholarship on this most studied of 17th-century artists. Here I want to bring it back under discussion, but in the context of his practice as a painter. The longstanding relation between work ad vivum, dal naturale, and the transmission of knowledge comes to the fore in this study. But I will argue that Caravaggio undermines the belief that images made from life give unmediated access to nature, and that the imago contrafacta conveyed privileged knowledge of the visible world. Physiognomy gives one account of Caravaggio’s models’ faces, but their painted contexts work against that account. Caravaggio’s practice of depicting his models, whether from life or from memory, is rarely placed into the large context of other 17th century artists working from life. I hope in doing so to shed light on the strongly divided reception of Caravaggio’s realism as well as the very curious way his paintings address the viewer. If Karel van Mander praised Caravaggio’s painting solely from nature, naer het leven, the initial reception of the Lombard artist’s images by artists in Rome put the emphasis instead on his hidden reliance on previous artists’ work and his overt rejection of past art. ‘I see nothing here but the ideas of Giorgione’, Federico Zuccari is reported as saying on visiting the Contarelli Chapel with its cycle of St. Matthew paintings. Joachim von Sandrart noticed Caravaggio’s use of Dürer’s and Holbein’s

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prints. It was not until Bellori’s life of Caravaggio much later in the century that Caravaggio was presented as relying exclusively on painting from the posed model, scorning any model in classical sculpture and past art. Bellori wanted to schematize the development of seventeenth-cenetury century arts, with Caravaggio representing one flawed side of its achievement, the return to naturalism after an overemphasis on maniera or style. Stereotyping Caravaggio’s dal vivo realism was a necessary step in the creation of Bellori’s notion of the artist’s Idea, the all-important process of idealization, defined in opposition to depicting dal naturale, from life. Much good work has been done to clarify the false dichotomy of real versus ideal in Northern seventeenth-century art. What the artist and writer Karel van Mander extracted from Netherlandish practice around 1600 did not so much hierarchize as alternate the two ways of working, finding value in both. The more polemical Italian writing asserted a clear hierarchy of imaginative creation over ‘mere’ imitation of the real. Giovan Pietro Bellori’s writings in Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century hardened the position of earlier writers when he summed up this view in his lecture on the ‘Idea’ or ideal beauty in art, delivered at the Académie Française de Rome in May 1664. The use of the terms ad vivum, naer het leven, dal vivo, au vif, d’après le naturel, which became so frequent at the turn of the seventeenth century, falls to near silence by the final decades of the century. This could be interpreted as the triumph of classicising idealization in both theory and practice, in a so-called ‘academic’ doctrine of the arts, even if in the realm of natural history illustration the terminology remains common. We who have come after that watershed have accepted Bellori’s account of seicento art as the pursuit of ideal beauty too literally. As a result we may have written out of our history of this period the examples of a different attitude and a different set of artistic practices, indeed a different form of address to the viewer.

Works Cited Alpers, Svetlana, ‘Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s Lives’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960) 190–215. Balfe, Thomas, Joanna Woodall and Claus Zittel, eds. Ad Vivum? Visual Materials and the Vocabulary of Life Likeness in Europe before 1800 (forthcoming Leiden: Brill, 2019). Barthes, Roland. S/Z (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970). Bartilla, Stefan, ed., Roelant Savery, Painter in the Service of Rudolf II (ex. cat. Prague, Nàrodni galerie, 2011). Bartrum, Giulia ed., Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy (ex. cat. London, British Museum, 2002). Blunt, Anthony. Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1600 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Brown, Beverly Louise, ed., The Genius of Rome (ex. cat. London, Royal Academy and Rome, Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Venezia, 2000). Bugslag, James, ‘Contrefais al Vif: Nature, Ideas and Representation in the Lion Drawings of Villard de Honnecourt’, Word and Image 17 (2001): 360–378. Dackerman, Susan, ed., Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (ex. cat. Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass. and New Haven, 2011). Eaker, Adam, ‘Van Dyck between Master and Model’, The Art Bulletin 97 (2015): 173–191. Ebert-Schifferer, Sibylle. Caravaggio The Artist and his Work (Los Angeles: Getty Museum Publications, 2012).

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Freedberg, David. Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century (London: British Museum, 1980). Giustiniani, Vincenzo, ‘Vincenzo Giustiniani al signor Teodort Amideno’, [Letter on Painting to Teodoro Ameyden], in Raccolta di Lettere sulla Pittura, ed. by Giovanni G. Bottari, 6 vols, (Milan: Per Giovanni Silvestri, 1822) 6, p. 121. Gombrich, Ernst H., Art and Illusion (2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). Kraus, Rosalind, ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America, Part 2’, October 4 (1977): 58–67. Mai, Ekkehard, ed., Roelant Savery und seiner Zeit (ex. cat. Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1985 Malvasia, Carlo Cesare, Felsina Pittrice, ed. Giampietro Zanotti, 2 vols. (Bologna: Guidi all’Ancora, 1841). Melion, Walter, ‘Hendrick Goltzius’s Project of Reproductive Engraving’, Art History 13 (1990): 458–87. Melion, Walter, ‘Karel van Mander’s Life of Hendrick Goltzius: Defining the Paradigm of Protean Virtuosity in Haarlem around 1600’, Studies in the History of Art 27 (1989): 113–133. Onuf, Alexandra, ‘Envisioning Netherlandish Unity: Claes Visscher’s 1612 Copies of the Small Landscapes Prints’, Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art 3 (2011) online publication (http://jhnalive. pielabmedia.com/index.php/past-issues/vol-3-1) consulted 11 April 2019. Onuf, Alexandra, ‘Small landscapes in seventeenth-century Antwerp’, The Burlington Magazine 150 (2008): 190–193. Orenstein, Nadine., ed., Pieter Breugel the Elder: Drawings and Prints (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). Panofsky, Erwin. Idea, A Concept in Art Theory (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968). Parshall, Peter, ‘Imago Contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance’, Art History 16 (1993) 554–79. Peirce, Charles S., The Philosophy of Peirce (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1950). Perkinson, Stephen, ‘Portraits and Counterfeits: Villard de Honnecourt and Thirteenth-Century Theories of Representation’, in David S. Areford and Nina Rowe, eds., Excavating the Medieval Image: Manuscripts, Artists, Audiences; Essays in Honor of Sandra Hindman, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004): 13–28. Silver, Janet G., Derek Birdsall and Martin Lee, eds., Un Nouveau Monde: chefs-d’oeuvre de la peinture américaine 1760–1910 (ex. cat. Paris, Grand Palais, 1984). Snyder, Joel, ‘Picturing Vision’, Critical Inquiry 6 (Spring, 1980): 499–526. Sohm, Philip. Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Spicer, Joaneath, ‘A Pictorial Vocabulary of Otherness: Roelandt Savery, Adam Willarts and the Representation of Foreign Coasts’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 48 (1997): 22–51. Spicer, Joaneath, ‘The Naer Het Leven Drawings, by Pieter Bruegel or Roelandt Savery?’, Master Drawings 8 (1971): 3–30; 63–82. Spicer, Joaneath, ‘Topographical Drawings of Central Europe by Artists from the Netherlands: the Case of Pieter Houck’, Master Drawings 26 (1988): 351–356; 422. Spicer, Joaneath, ‘The Star of David and Jewish Culture in Prague ca. 1600, Reflected in Drawings by Roelandt Savery and Paulus van Vianen’,Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996), 203–224. Spicer, Joaneath, ‘Referencing Invention and Novelty at the Court of Rudolf II’, in Novita. Das Neue in der Kunst um 1600, ed. Ulrich Pfister (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2011). Spicer, Joaneath, ‘The Significance of Drawing Naer het Leven, or “From Life”’, Center 21: National Gallery of Art Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Research Reports 2000–2001 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2011): 160–163. Summers, David. The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Swan, Claudia, ‘Ad Vivum, Naer Het Leven, From the Life: Defining a Mode of Representation’, Word and Image 11 (1995): 353–372. Turel, Noa, ‘Living Pictures: Re-Reading “Au Vif” 1350–1550’, Gesta 50 (2011): 163–182. Welch, Evelyn, ‘Painting as Performance in the Italian Renaissance Court’, in Stephen Campbell ed., Artists at Court: Image Making and Identity, 1300 – 1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 9–18. Wood, Christopher S. Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of the German Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

1.

Caravaggio’s Physiognomy Abstract His biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori stressed Caravaggio’s reliance on painting directly from the posed model, saying that when Caravaggio’s eyes left the model his mind went empty. Using studies of his painting technique that allow us to look beneath the surface of his paintings, we can see some of the paradoxes of his realism. His reliance on contemporary studies of physiognomy, comparing animal and human faces, helps us understand why he chose certain models and then repeated their features from one painting to another. Yet he also changed his models’ features from the underpainting to the finished work. The upper surface belies the unseen depths of the painting, just as human identity is not always apparent in individuals’ physiognomy. Keywords: underneaths of painting, Giovanni Battista della Porta, Italian still life, music in painting, models in art Casting over his works a look at once that of a stranger and a father, [Balzac] suddenly decided, shining a retrospective light upon them, that they would be more beautiful brought together in one cycle where the characters would return again and again, and thus he added to his work under this conjecture the last and the most sublime brushstroke. —Marcel Proust, In Pursuit of Lost Time1

1 This quotation from Proust’s La Prisonnière is also the epigraph used by Hubert Damisch in ‘The Underneaths of Painting’, p. 197–209. Damisch probed the phrase ‘the last and most sublime brushstroke’ for his meditation on Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, where it concerns the horrifically overpainted portrait of La Belle Noiseuse. In the present essay, the last brushstrokes versus the underneaths of Caravaggio’s paintings are one concern. But it is Balzac’s and Proust’s interest in unifying their multi-volume works by repeating their protagonists throughout that most touches on my aims in this essay. In A la Recherche du temps perdu, Proust deliberately emulated the recurrence of Balzac’s characters in his Rougon-Maquart cycle. Despite his use of many early modern works of art as his inspiration, most notably Vermeer’s paintings, Proust seems never to have encountered Caravaggio’s recurrent figures. What I think is most revealing in this quotation is the flash of joy that the author felt as a result of this insight about repeated characters. It was first in his essay ‘Contre Sainte-Beuve’, that Proust discussed this joy: ‘Such effects are only possible thanks to the admirable invention of Balzac, to have kept the same personages in all his novels […] Balzac’s sister tells us of the joy he felt the day he had this idea, and I too find it as great an idea as if he had it before he composed his oeuvre. It is a ray of light that appeared, and came to rest at the same time on various parts of his creation that were lacklustre before this, and unified them, brought them to life, illuminated them, but this ray of light is nonetheless an integral part of his thought’. McTighe, S., Representing from Life in Seventeenth-century Italy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi: 10.5117/ 9789462983281_ch01

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The models who posed in Caravaggio’s workshop were central to his art.2 His figures painted dal vivo, from life, retain the individualized appearance of their models, even when they were meant to represent Biblical or mythological figures. The writings of churchmen had advised against representing saints in the form of recognizable real people.3 Renaissance artists before Caravaggio drew from models in the early stages of preparing a painting, but in their finished work the models were transformed. North Italian artists in particular had bypassed preparatory drawings to paint directly from posed models. Their fictional protagonists did not often retain the look of real individuals, however. By contrast, Lombard portraitists like Giovanni Battista Moroni in the mid-sixteenth century also sometimes painted their sitters dal naturale, composing their likeness in pigment directly on the canvas, and achieving extremely detailed likenesses.4 Two generations later, Caravaggio’s distinction was to bring from Milan to Rome a Lombard technique of painting live, posed models. He used it to depict still life, religious and mythological subjects, and intensified the vivid effects it yielded, with a new focus on addressing the viewer’s presence in front of the image. His rendering of models who posed for his Biblical or mythological characters was painstakingly portrait-like. His practice corresponded to the literal sense of the term ritrarre dal naturale, portraying from life. His early biographers, admirers and critics alike, stressed that he worked dal vivo, dal naturale, or dal vero, in contradiction to the late Renaissance goal of working from the intellect, dall’idea. The same writers also recorded that Caravaggio absolutely needed the presence of the posing figure in order to represent the human body. This trait seemed quite distinctive to early commentators such as the rival artist Giovanni Baglione, collectors Vincenzo Giustiniani and Giulio Mancini, and critics such as Giovan Pietro Bellori, who saw it as a source of both the strength and the weakness of his art.5 Mastery of narrative painting in 2 Recent scholarship on Caravaggio accepts the centrality of the live, posed model for his art, although studies are not always in agreement about the effect on his practice of painting. Christiansen, ‘Caravaggio and ‘l’Esempio’, p. 421–445, brought technical study of the paint surface to bear on this issue, changing the course of scholarship toward a reconsideration of Caravaggio’s practice and its significance for his art. Further technical studies that followed on from Christiansen’s work will be cited below. Because of the sheer size of the recent bibliography on the artist, I am restricting my citations to those that are most pertinent to my topic. Scholarly introductions to Caravaggio’s career can be found in the most important monographs and exhibition catalogues in English, Italian and German: Stone and Pericolo, Caravaggio; Ebert-Schifferer, Caravaggio; Franklin and Schütze, Caravaggio; Spezzaferro, Caravaggio; Varriano, Caravaggio; Carr and Christiansen, Caravaggio; Langdon, Caravaggio; Puglisi, Caravaggio; Gilbert, Caravaggio; Bologna, L’incredulità del Caravaggio; Calvesi, Le Realtà del Caravaggio; Hibbard, Caravaggio; Röttgen, Il Caravaggio; Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies. 3 Notably Gabriele Paleotti in his Discorso. 4 Christiansen, ‘Thoughts on the Lombard training’, p. 7–28, discusses his relationship to Moretto da Brescia and Moroni; Fachinetti and Galansino, Giovanni Battista Moroni, cf p. 76: Carlo Ridolfi reported that Titian damned Moroni with faint praise for his portraits done from life, implying that only middling members of society should have Moroni paint their portrait dal naturale. 5 For English translations of the early biographies of Caravaggio, see Langdon, The Lives of Caravaggio (2005); Appendix II in Hibbard, Caravaggio, p. 343–387.

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this period should have involved visual memory, an ability to synthesize forms, and the capacity to imagine an ideal body.6 These were supposedly the gaping holes in Caravaggio’s abilities. His critical biographer Bellori wrote that without the model in front of his eyes, Caravaggio’s mind went empty. Many years before Bellori’s account, Vincenzo Giustiniani, a banker and collector in Rome with far more catholic taste, took a different view of Caravaggio’s use of his models. In a letter to his friend Teodoro Ameyden, he distinguished twelve categories of painting.7 Painting of imagined forms was in the tenth category, described as ‘painting by manner, that is, from fantasy’ (dipingere di maniera, cioè di fantasia), while painting dal vivo was in the eleventh: ‘painting with the objects in front of oneself’ (dipingere con avere gli oggetti naturali davanti). The twelfth and most praise-worthy category, into which Giustiniani put both Caravaggio and his contemporaries Annibale Carracci and Guido Reni, was described as ‘painting by manner, with the exemplary placed in relation to working from life’ (dipingere di maniera, con l’esempio davanti dal naturale). Giustiniani acknowledged what modern scholarship has also affirmed. Far from rejecting the art of the past, Caravaggio frequently posed his live models to echo exemplary compositions of the greatest artists before him, often using printed images as the intermediary.8 As we saw in the introduction, the Victorious Love painted circa 1602 depicted its young model in a pose derived from Michelangelo’s spiralling figures, recalling St. Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel Last Judgement and the nude youths from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, examples of which had been engraved by Caravaggio’s friend Cherubino Alberti (Fig. 2). Between 1603 and about 1607, but in the court of Rudolf II at Prague, the Flemish artist Roeland Savery was adopting the same hybrid procedure, drawing peasant figures and alpine landscapes while travelling long distances to view them in the flesh, drawing images that were painstakingly labelled naer het leven, made from life. These drawings were so close to the subjects and manner of Pieter Bruegel the Elder that they were mistakenly attributed to him for centuries.9 Both Caravaggio and Savery used a paradoxical approach to representing from the live model. They allied intense observation of real figures with intense emulation of the greatest art in their native traditions—and here I would stress that it is the greatest of all models that they chose from their respective cultures. There is no evidence 6 Pericolo, Caravaggio. 7 Vincenzo Giustiniani’s Letter on painting to Teodoro Ameyden was first published in Bottari, Raccolta; English translation in Enggass and Brown, Italy and Spain, p. 17. 8 On Caravaggio’s emulation of past art: Hibbard, Caravaggio and Röttgen, Il Caravaggio examine at length his allusions to the art of Michelangelo. Gregory, ‘Caravaggio’, p. 167–191, asserts that Caravaggio’s subjects reveal a link to works praised by Vasari, an intriguing idea but not well supported in all examples. Christiansen, ‘Thoughts on the Lombard training’, p. 7–28, looks at his use of printed images after Michelangelo and Raphael. Hermann Fiore, ‘Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ’, p. 24–27, also looks at the artist’s emulation of printed images, as does Gage, ‘Illness’, p. 337–362. 9 Spicer, ‘The Naer Het Leven Drawings’, p. 3–30.

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fig. 7: caravaggio. The Sacrifice of Isaac. c. 1602. oil on canvas. © 2019. photo scala, florence – courtesy of the ministero Beni e att. culturali e del turismo.

the two artists were aware of each other or of their common method. Yet Savery’s and Caravaggio’s simultaneous adoption of what Giustiniani described as working with the exemplary while also working from life was not a random coincidence. A number of Flemish artists travelled between the two courtly centres of Rome and Prague in the early years of the seventeenth century. A sophisticated patron with an international outlook such as Giustiniani, who knew Caravaggio well and owned some of his most extraordinary paintings, shared with the emperor Rudolf II a lively appreciation for how clever the representation of figures painted from life could be. Caravaggio’s painting dal vivo seemed to many seventeenth-century observers intimately related to his chiaroscuro, the juxtaposition of light and darkness that gave such vivid relief to his depicted forms. The two together formed his signature manner.10 We now know from technical studies of his canvases that for some multi-figgure compositions Caravaggio posed and reposed the same model, who would serve as more than one protagonist. His Sacrifice of Isaac (Fig. 7) shows this quite well. The 10 Ebert-Schifferer, Caravaggio, rightly calls Caravaggio’s innovations in chiaroscuro his ‘trade secret’, as the distinctively new element in his painting practice. Christiansen, ‘Caravaggio and ‘l’Esempio’, with equal justice focuses on the novelty of his work from the live model.

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boy who posed for Isaac seems to be the same model as the figure posed as Amor Victorious; he was Isaac in the foreground here, but re-posed in profile to serve as the angel who stays the hand of Abraham. Infrared imaging of the painting show that the boy’s distinctive curved profile lies underneath the angel’s face, overpainted with a straighter silhouette.11 There is a rough consensus in Caravaggio scholarship that the same model is seen in the several versions of his Boy with a Ram (Fig. 16), another of Caravaggio’s figures that alludes to Michelangelo’s ignudi. This model’s youthful physiognomy appears in a large number of Caravaggio’s paintings. In a different example of this practice of re-posing the model, in Judith Beheading Holofernes, Caravaggio first painted Holofernes’s head attached to his body—as he saw it while painting dal vivo in his workshop. Only in the upper layer of the painting did he then move the model and paint his head at the appropriate angle for his beheading. As Keith Christiansen noted in his seminal study of Caravaggio’s painting technique, even in the pursuit of extreme realism it is not advisable to actually kill your model. It is of interest, though, that Caravaggio’s procedure at this point in his career involved two campaigns of painting, a primary abbozzo in the underpainting that was very much done dal vivo, then a second moment of overpainting that left the more literal version of his model hidden by the upper surface of the painting. The version hidden underneath the visible image was an important step in Caravaggio’s creative process nonetheless. Working from the posed model in his darkened rooms, in order to maintain the relationship of figures to the pattern of light and shadows Caravaggio sometimes incised into the painting’s ground some brief outlines that fixed key forms and shadows, but would become nearly invisible as the paint surface was built up. These incisions have been used in the Sacrifice of Isaac to place the difficult, foreshortened pose of Isaac, for example. Study of this practice has helped to contextualize the complete absence of drawings by the artist. He apparently ‘drew’ his compositions directly onto the canvas with brush and pigment, but also with the butt end of his brush indenting the painted ground.12 The incisions were a temporary scaffolding, giving a framework that allowed him to re-pose the model and re-situate the light and shadows, thus to reconstruct an experience that was already partially in his memory as well as in the present moment. Caravaggio’s work dal vivo—in fact, any artist’s work from the model—required him to shift back and forth, alternating between gazing at his model and marking a surface. This was a move from presence to absence, from motif to memory, with that crucial gap opening up between lived experience and its reconstruction in representation. Caravaggio’s art lay in making the viewer forget that there was such a gap. 11 The infrared reflectogram is illustrated in Christiansen, ‘Caravaggio and ‘l’Esempio’, p. 432. 12 There is now a large literature on technical studies of Caravaggio’s painting practice: A useful summary is given by Larry Keith, ‘Caravaggio’s Painting Technique’ (2014). Study of Caravaggio’s use of incisions to re-pose his models began with Christiansen, ‘Caravaggio and ‘l’Esempio’. Further studies based on examination of the paintings’ surfaces and underpainting continued in Gregori, Michelangelo Merisi, cf Lapucci, ‘La tecnica del Caravaggio’, p. 31–51.

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As if to destroy the distance between the viewer and his models, Caravaggio often chose to depict models who gazed back at him, whether on their own or from within a depicted group. They thematize the activity of observation, while their detailed individuality gives a vivid illusion of their psychological presence. In this essay, I want to shift the discussion of Caravaggio’s use of models to reveal a more deliberate strategy for their portrayal. The first place we may see that strategy is, curiously, in his inanimate models for still life elements in his Roman paintings, the fruit, flowers, and printed pages. These models have in common with his human models a vividly individualized appearance, yet also reveal the artist’s deviating from that appearance in an act of secondary revision. Caravaggio’s use of his human models also suggests a pattern of revision as well as repetition. I will propose that he may have selected them for their physiognomic resonance, choosing faces that were associated with a certain temperament or character. We will see that Caravaggio used his models’ faces sometimes in reinforcement of a physiognomic type, while at other times he represented them in roles directly contradicted by their physiognomy. Some of his figures are repeated again and again through many paintings, and the fact that they recur even after Caravaggio left Rome shows that what began in scrutiny of the live model ended in the evocation of memorable types. Another way of putting this would be that Caravaggio’s figures balance between being identifiable individuals, represented characters, and physiognomic studies. As we will also see in the chapters that follow, depictions ‘from life’ that present themselves as an instantaneous and seamless reflection of the real have a complex genesis, which results in the painting’s complex relationship to both the model and the viewer.

Caravaggio, dal vivo and naer het leven. Fruit, flowers, and books as models Not every modern commentator agrees that there is something significant in these resemblances of faces from one painting by Caravaggio to another.13 However, even in the seventeenth century the fact that the viewer could recognize their features from one canvas to another drew comments, and sparked attempts to identify the models as scandalous figures in real life. An English traveler in Rome between 1649 and 1650, Richard Symonds, saw the Victorious Love then on view in the Borghese collections (Fig. 2). Nearly half a century after the work’s execution, artists in Rome still talked of the model for this image, according to Symonds: ‘Checco del Caravaggio tis calld among the painters Twas his boy […] Twas the body and face of his owne 13 Riccardo Bassani and Fiora Bellini’s book Caravaggio Assassino reconstructed (and in several instances falsified) the biographies of several prostitutes who served as models for Caravaggio; there has been an understandable backlash against their inaccuracies and their overemphasis on the scandalous aura of his figures. By contrast, Sibylle Ebert-Schifferer, in her monograph Caravaggio (2012), does not think that the models have any real bearing on the significance of the paintings, which may be going too far in the other direction.

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boy or servant that laid with him’.14 Oddly, this bit of belated gossip had some basis in truth. The model has been plausibly identified as Francesco (Cecco being a common diminutive of Francesco), a boy who is documented in Rome’s Easter census, the stati delle anime of June 1605, as a servant or assistant (garzone) in Caravaggio’s workshop and lodgings on the Vicolo del Divino Amore.15 He went on to become a Caravagggesque painter in his own right, called Cecco del Caravaggio.16 I am less concerned here with details of the models’ biographies, although there is some good evidence concerning a few of them, including Cecco. An erotic relationship of the artist and his models is also not at issue here, although the erotic nature of the subjects in which they appear certainly is. Caravaggio followed the social norms that applied to most artists of his day. In this period, no woman of any social standing would work displaying themselves as a painter’s model, which would be a grave breach of moral decorum. Women of easy virtue would pose, whether clothed or in the nude, and working men or beggars who needed the money, or—for sheer availability—the apprentices and assistants who populated the artist’s own workshop.17 Giovanni Baglione, Caravaggio’s rival and biographer, implies that at the beginning of his career, the artist resorted to using his own face as a model, seen in a mirror, a point to which we will return. It would be easy to believe that there is no more to Caravaggio’s choice of models than a commonsensical need to find usable figures in his own environment. This is what Giovan Pietro Bellori asserts in his critical biography of the artist, published in 1672. He described a deliberately random process of selecting a model when he wrote about Caravaggio’s Gypsy Fortune Teller, one of his very earliest works, from about 1595. He claimed that Caravaggio chose his models in the streets of Rome, with disdain for the superb marbles of the ancients and the paintings of Raphael which are so celebrated, he took nature alone for the object of his brush. Thus when he was shown the most famous statues of Phidias and Glycon, so that he might base his studies on them, his only response was to gesture toward a crowd of people, indicating that nature had provided him with masters enough. And to lend credence to his words, he called out to a gypsy woman who chanced to be passing in the street and, taking her to his lodging, he portrayed her in the act of telling fortunes, as these women of the Egyptian race are wont to do […] Thus in the course of finding and composing figures, when he happened to see one around the city that pleased him, he would stop at that invention of nature, without otherwise exercising his creative powers.18 14 15 16 17 18

Wiemers, ‘Caravaggios Amore Vincitore’, p. 51–61. Marini, ‘Un ignoto aiuto del Caravaggio in Roma’, p. 180–183. Papi, Cecco del Caravaggio; see also Papi, ‘Caravaggio e Cecco’, p. 123–134. Cropper, ‘The Real Studio’ p. 401–411. Bellori, The Lives, p. 180.

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To call his choice of models random, to assert that he chose someone who merely ‘chanced to be passing’, allowed Bellori to build an image of Caravaggio as passively mirroring the visible world rather than creatively inventing new beauties. To reveal that physiognomic ideas governed some of Caravaggio’s choices for his models casts a new light on his creative process. Before turning to the physiognomic investigation of character and appearance, we need to re-examine what working from models, dal vivo, allowed Caravaggio to achieve. And I want to begin with his non-human models, the inanimate protagonists that play such an important role in his works—the still life elements of fruit, flowers, vases, books, musical scores—to see why Caravaggio’s participation in the development of the very earliest still life paintings has a bearing on his portrait-like rendering of fictional characters. His patron Giustiniani once again captured something important about Caravaggio’s practice when he quoted him as saying ‘it took as much craft for him to make a good picture of flowers as one of figures’ (tanta manifattura gli era a fare un quadro buono di fiori, come di figure).19 My aim in reopening some questions about Caravaggio painting fruit, flowers and books dal vivo is to place him in relation to the practice of depicting ad vivum or naer het leven by Flemish artists who were Caravaggio’s contemporaries, such as Roelant Savery, Jan Brueghel, Floris van Dijk and Clara Peeters. Caravaggio did not need the example of the Flemish to know about painting dal vivo, given his early training in Milan and the living tradition in Lombardy of Moretto da Brescia’s and Giovanni Battista Moroni’s work in this vein. And the common ground shared by Caravaggio and Flemish artists was not necessarily always due to direct contact between them or mutual knowledge of each other’s works—although he did, in fact, as we’ll see, have a significant encounter with Floris van Dijk, a Flemish painter of fruit and flowers while in his earliest years in Rome he worked in the workshop of Cavaliere d’Arpino. But the strong relationship between Caravaggio’s still life motifs and Flemish work naer het leven was more likely due to a fashionable trend in several European courts around 1600 for images of extreme naturalism combined with self-aware, witty artifice. To discuss Caravaggio’s relationship to Northern realism fell out of fashion for a while. Some recent studies of his sole example of still life painting, the Basket of Fruit (Fig. 8), have again focused on this issue of Caravaggio’s knowledge of Flemish pracitice.20 Yet it has always seemed important that the Flemish emigré artist and writer

19 Giustiniani, Discorsi, p. 42. 20 Ebert-Schifferer, ‘Caravaggios Früchtekorb’, p. 1–23; Welzel, ‘Wettstreit zwischen Kunst’, p. 325–342. See also Ebert-Schifferer’s more general study Still Life: A History, and the more specialized studies of Caravaggio and still life by Franco Paliaga, Natura; Gregori, La Natura Morta. In calling the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana’s Basket of Fruit Caravaggio’s ‘sole surviving independent still life painting’, I follow a consensus of scholarly opinion that the Still Life of Fruits on a Stone Ledge attributed to Caravaggio by John T. Spike and exhibited for a time at the Denver Art Museum is probably not by the artist. Spike, Caravaggio: Still Life.

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Karel van Mander was the very first to refer in print to Caravaggio, and specifically zeroed in on his representation ‘from life’.21 Karel van Mander wrote this earliest account of Caravaggio in Alkmaar during the year 1603. When the manuscript of Het Schilder-boek was published in Haarlem in 1606, Caravaggio was a potent phenomenon worthy of mention even in this history devoted solely to Netherlandish artists. What van Mander stressed about Caravaggio was that he provided a lesson to young Dutch artists: ‘His belief is that art is nothing but a bagatelle or child’s play […] unless it is made from life [nae ‘t leven], and that we can do no better than to follow Nature. Therefore he will not make a single brushstroke without the close study from life [nae ‘t leven] which he copies and paints. This is surely no bad way to a good end, for to paint after drawing, even if close to [working from] life, is not as good as following Nature’. Van Mander’s Schilder-boek returns again and again to the issue of working naer het leven, in the context of many great Flemish artists and in particular his epitome of artistry, Hendrick Goltzius., as well as the artists who worked in the orbit of the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague around 1600–1603.22 Van Mander got his information about Caravaggio from a fellow Fleming who had recently returned from Rome, Floris Claesz van Dijk, who went on to have a career as painter of still life compositions.23 Both Caravaggio and Van Dijk had spent time in Rome working within the large workshop of Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavaliere d’Arpino. Van Dijk seems to have left Rome to return to the north in 1601 or 1602, and he thus witnessed not only Caravaggio’s early work as a specialist in fruit and flower painting for the Cavaliere d’Arpino, but also his rapid rise to fame with his first public altarpieces, the St. Matthew cycle in the Contarelli Chapel and the two canvases of St. Paul and St. Peter in the Cerasi Chapel, all painted between 1599 and 1602. At the time Floris Van Dijk left for the north, Caravaggio had entered the household of the wealthy and powerful Mattei family, where he produced large religious paintings for their private collection, including The Supper at Emmaus with its basket of fruit (Fig. 1). At some point, probably just before 1600, Caravaggio painted a still life with a carafe of flowers for Cardinal del Monte, in whose household he lived until that year. Baglione, later echoed by Bellori, described it as a wonder, with an extraordinary handling of light and reflections in the water of the carafe. It was listed among del Monte’s possessions in the inventory at his death in 1627, sold in 1628 but then disappeared thereafter. We

21 Van Mander, Het Schilder-boek inserts his comments about Caravaggio into a general description of contemporary painters at work in Italy. After praising Carracci’s paintings for the Farnese family, he gives a lengthy account of Caravaggio’s behaviour in Rome around 1600. For the original Dutch as well as the English translation, see Hibbard (1988) p. 344: ‘after a fortnight’s work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with him’. 22 Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon. 23 Caravaggio’s relation to Floris van Dijk is discussed by Ebert-Schifferer, ‘Caravaggios Früchtekorb’.

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fig. 8: caravaggio. Still Life: Basket of Fruit. c. 1599. oil on canvas. pinacoteca ambrosiana, milan. © 2019. photo scala, florence.

don’t know when Caravaggio’s one surviving independent still life painting, The Basket of Fruit, was painted (Fig. 8). By 1607 it was in Milan in the collection of Cardinal Fedlerico Borromeo. It could have been commissioned by Borromeo when he was in Rome between April 1597 and May 1601; he was even a guest in the house of Caravaggio’s patron Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte during 1599, when Caravaggio was probably also still there. Or it could have been commissioned by del Monte and given as a gift to Borromeo in Milan, independent of the cardinal’s stay in Rome. The repetition of a very similar fruit basket in The Supper at Emmaus, which is firmly dated by payment records to 1601, makes it plausible that The Basket of Fruit was made not far from that time also (Fig. 1). The reason the dating is of such interest is that still life was in its very infancy in the year 1600, and its imagery was undergoing a very rapid development in precisely these years, mainly in the hands of Flemish artists. Of Floris van Dijk’s still life paintings, nothing survives from before 1610 in Haarlem, and very little from after that. Despite his contact with Caravaggio in Rome, we can’t point to the ‘influence’ of one artist over the other. It does seem likely, however, that the Flemish painter was more than the means by which news of Caravaggio reached the Netherlands. He was also one means by which Caravaggio could learn about depicting from life as it was practiced by Flemish artists.

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fig. 9: floris van Dijk. Still Life with Fruit and Cheeses. 1613. oil on canvas. frans hals museum, haarlem. photo open access,Wikimedia commons.

Given their common work for the Cavaliere d’Arpino’s studio, it is not surprising that Floris van Dijk’s later baskets of fruit in some of his banquet still lifes do bear a slight resemblance to Caravaggio’s Basket (Fig. 9). The large green and gold leaf poised like a banner at the left of the fruit, flattened and crisply silhouetted, is one such point of comparison. The illusionistic motif of vessels protruding over the near edge of a table, similarly, occurs in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus and the Basket—where the upper surface of the painting first seems to coincide with its painted “base,” only to have the cast shadow force it to recede back into the fictional space of the image. Recent studies of this earliest phase in the development of still life painting as a genre in European art have stressed how rapidly motifs and compositions migrated between Rome, Antwerp, Madrid and Amsterdam in a very few years around 1600. The depiction of carafes containing flowers was one such motif, rivalled in popularity by baskets or bowls of fruits. The only such Italian work that seems to predate Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit was painted by Ambrogio Figino in Milan during the late 1580s; it depicts a shallow plate of fruit. Milan was also where Arcimboldo, working for Rudolf II’s court in Prague, used highly naturalistic flowers and fruit to build up illusionistic portraits, a curious and witty variant of still life. By 1603 in Prague, Roelant Savery depicted a carafe of flowers for the emperor Rudolf II; his compatriot Jacques de Gheyn followed suit in images that combined

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precious flowers such as tulips with apparently moralizing motifs such as human skulls. Savery’s still life coincides in date with his 1603 turn to topographic landscape drawing and renderings of peasants in the manner of Pieter Bruegel. As we have already noted, Rudolf II’s collecting practices, creating a Brueghel revival as well as a Dürer renaissance, are a framework for what Savery does with the practice of working from life. Jan Brueghel was in Rome during the mid- to late 1590s, though there is no account of his having had contact with Caravaggio. Brueghel’s earliest flowerpiece was made after he had returned to Antwerp, in 1605, while in 1606 he made an ambitious flower still life painted on copper for Cardinal Borromeo in Milan, well documented by Brueghel’s letters from Antwerp to his Italian patron (Fig. 13). His flower painting continued in collaboration with Rubens in works for the Spanish court in Madrid. We find artists in different urban centers working simultaneously on this novel type of imagery because of their patronage at important courts across Europe. The emigration of Flemish artists away from their war-torn homeland toward more peaceful artistic centres gave impetus to the international taste for this new imagery. In Rome, Floris van Dijk’s presence until 1601–1602 was reinforced by the presence of Frans Snyders, who departed by 1608. Snyders went to Milan and painted his first still life works there, which reflect his memory of Caravaggio’s figures with fruit, and allude to the flowerpieces of Jan Brueghel on view in Borromeo’s collection. A wonderful but as yet anonymous still life of a carafe of flowers, probably by a Flemish artist, was in the Borghese collection in Rome either by 1607 or 1613, where it remains to this day. Its relation to Caravaggio’s lost painting of a carafe is unclear. Caravaggio’s own paintings from the late 1590s, the Bacchino Malato and Boy with a Basket of Fruit, with their fruits combined with youthful models, were brought into the Borghese collection when in 1607 Cavaliere d’Arpino’s workshop and its contents of sale-able paintings were seized by Scipione Borghese. The various still life works that were in this haul of paintings shows that the new genre had already caught on with high patronage in Rome. The same is true in the North. In Antwerp, during 1608 we get the first painting by the very young Clara Peeters in Antwerp, working for rich patrons, seemingly inspired by the examples of Jan Brueghel and Savery. Then came the work of Floris van Dijk and Nicolas Gillis in Amsterdam after 1610. Thus Caravaggio’s single extant still life comes at the earliest moment in this wave of experimentation. It is important to keep in mind that similarity of motifs and of patronage does not necessarily point to a uniformity of meaning attributed to this type of still life work, whether as Christian allegory, vanitas imagery, the revival of antique xenia (images of fruit given as gifts), or explorations of natural history and objects of wonder. However, it does seem possible to posit as the substratum under these different manifestations of still life painting one common idea. The artistry of extreme naturalism lay in apparent self-effacement before the artistry of nature itself. Nature was the ‘author’ of such imagery. At the same time, the artist as author found ways in the presentation of the image to transcend nature’s artfulness with human wit. We will see in chapter two that Callot and his contemporaries put a great emphasis on shaped frames for

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topographic views, or in creating more stylized and artificial forms at the edges of their highly naturalistic images, in order to reassert their artistry. Caravaggio’s method of achieving this effect, I will argue, is not only to arrange the composition in relation to its viewers and thus appeal for a visual participation in the image, but also to assert his artistry in the very choice of the models he depicted. There are several aspects of Caravaggio’s relationship to contemporary Flemish still life painting made naer het leven that could help us understand his manner of working from life more generally. One important practice that is now at the centre of great controversy is Caravaggio’s habit of making variants or copies of his own works.24 The two versions of his Lute Player that are thought to be by Caravaggio himself, one in the Hermitage Museum (Fig. 10) and the other in the Wildenstein collection, are the best known examples.25 There are also two accepted versions of his Boy Bitten by a Lizard, in Florence and in London, and two well-documented variant versions of The Gypsy Fortune Teller, in Rome and Paris. In most if not all of these examples, Caravaggio reposed his models in order to paint the new version, while also tracing from the first work onto the second canvas, in order to establish the contours of the composition. In these cases, both the original and its variant are widely accepted now as being by Caravaggio, but there are many more instances where good seventeenth-century versions of his known works contend for recognition as authentic, without documentary evidence or a provenance leading securely back to an early seventeenth-century Roman collection. I don’t aim to explain away the difficulties of connoisseurship and documentation in these cases, most of which must be copies made by followers of Caravaggio or later imitators. Caravaggio did not keep a workshop that trained younger artists. As the record of his trial for libeling Giovanni Baglione shows, Caravaggio was rather more concerned with threatening other artists to keep them from profiting from his distinctive style through copying the look of his paintings. He could not stop copies and variants of his works being made to respond to the demand for his images. He made copies of his own work, and within the literature on Caravaggio this is presented as a surprising phenomenon, particularly for an artist committed to working from live models. As we have seen in the introduction, the notion that an image made as a ‘contrafactum’ could generate new images that were equally ‘made from life’ has deep roots in sixteenth-century northern European practice. (And in Chapter 3, we will see that for Callot in his Capricci print series of 1617, working dal vivo yields just such a generative force, a fecund image that begets more images.) That such a copy or variant would retain its status as made dal vivo or naer het leven was part of the conceit that 24 For a succinct statement of protest about the issues in Caravaggio connoisseurship today, one with which I wholeheartedly agree, see Stone, ‘Caravaggio Betrayals’, p. 13–30, and Spear, ‘Caravaggiomania’, p.116–125. 25 Mahon, ‘The Singing Lute-player’, p. 4–20; Christiansen, ‘Some observations’, p. 21–26. A third version of The Lute Player, formerly at Badminton House in the U.K., has been sold into a private collection in the last few years. It is not widely accepted as being by Caravaggio.

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fig. 10: caravaggio. The Lute Player. c. 1596–1600. oil on canvas. the hermitage museum, st. petersburg. © 2019. photo scala, florence.

the author of the image was nature itself, not the artist. Any image made ‘from life’ was already a replica of the image made by nature; a replica made from that image simply retained the same status as made dal vivo, being neither original nor copy, merely a variant on the theme of imitation. In his making of variants of his own inventions, Caravaggio probably exploited this idea, which was so antithetical to Italian Renaissance notions of originality. This is not an idea that has previously been proposed in relation to Caravaggio’s art. Instead, discussion of relationships between his work and Flemish or Dutch art has focused on the iconographic readings of Northern realism via contemporary emblems or handbooks of allegory and personification. Caravaggio’s still life motifs have been read as if they were derived from Dutch proverbs and emblems.26 More generally, the reference to Dutch and Flemish realism has supported the idea of ‛hidden’ meaning in Caravaggio’s still life motifs, usually in the form of Christian allegory.27 I will come back to the processes of interpretation that Caravaggio’s use of 26 Heimbürger, ‘Interpretazioni’, p. 3–18. 27 Calvesi, ‘Caravaggio’, p. 93–143. This model of iconographic reading is echoed by Laura Teza’s discussion of Caravaggio’s fruit and flowers in Caravaggio e il frutto della virtù, although placed in a different moralizing context, that of an academy of intellectuals.

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fig. 11: caravaggio. Bacchus. c. 1596–1600. oil on canvas. museo degli uffizi, florence. © 2019. photo scala, florence.

models seems to demand, but I do not think that Christian or moralizing allegory can adequately describe what he learned from his Flemish contemporaries. Motifs shared between Caravaggio’s Roman paintings with still life elements and the Flemish and Dutch examples have to do with an illusionism that calls on the viewer to play an active role. When Caravaggio painted still life motifs in his larger compositions in the late 1590s, reflective surfaces capture the image of sunlight coming through windows, as if the painting is mirroring the room beyond the painting’s surface. But this motif that links the inside of the painting and its fictional outside is also joined to human figures who gaze out of the image into our space. The motif of reflection is best known from its appearance in The Lute Player made for Vincenzo Giustiniani (Fig. 10) and The Boy Bitten by a Lizard, perhaps made for Cardinal del Monte, both likely to date to the final years of the 1590s. Similar vessels are found in Bacchus, painted around 1599–1600 (Fig. 11), and—the only work in which no one looks out at us—The Supper at Emmaus (Fig. 1). A portrait of Maffeo Barberini recently attributed to Caravaggio also places the transparent and reflective glass vase 28 Christiansen, ‘Caravaggio’s Portrait’, p. 43–57.

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fig. 12: clara peeters. Still life with Metal Vessels. 1612. oil on canvas. Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. the artchives/ alamy stock photo.

of flowers in close relation to the sitter.28 It is a motif that calls attention to the work’s illusionistic presence. But it is also, I think, a play on the notion of the painting’s dual role of revealing its human sitter and connecting that sitter to the viewer. Like the vase that is both transparent and reflective, the expressive physiognomy of the model allows us to look through a surface into a depth beyond, while simultaneously reflecting a world exterior to the painting, in which its viewer stands. The play of reflected light rarely occurs in the early still life paintings of Jan Brueghel. By contrast, it becomes a major theme in the works of Clara Peeters, who also worked in Antwerp. In a number of her virtuoso paintings, each metallic bump on the surface of a highly-wrought ewer reflects a tiny image of the artist herself, at work before her easel (Fig. 12). So too in Caravaggio’s Bacchus, the carafe of red wine to the right side of the god reflects a small figure, resembling the artist seated in front of his canvas, next to a window (Fig. 11). The motif rarely shows up in photographs of the painting but can be observed in front of the work. By this clever proposition that the painting captures, like a mirror, the room in front of the canvas and even the artist at work, Clara Peeters’ still life paintings make their represented subjects function as indexical signs, pointing to the exterior reality

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of the space in which the viewer stands. They exploit the conceit that the painting is a mirror reflecting rather than creating forms, and that the image seems made by nature rather than by the human hand. These reflections in a mirroring surface also show the artist literally absorbed into her own depicted world, and this in some ways reveals a novel sense of the artist’s status.29 Not a heroic maker of imaginary worlds in the Italian Renaissance manner, Clara Peeters’ depicted self—and Caravaggio’s reflected head—show an artist modestly engulfed within their own mirror-like images. And yet, in another sense, this inclusion of the tiny, hidden figure within the still life scene is far from modest. The claim of perfect mimesis, of complete illusion of the real, hovers over the canvas that seems to mirror rather than to represent. (It is a trope that goes back far in the history of European painting, famously represented in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait.) Caravaggio’s Medusa, painted on a tournament shield and thus a simulacrum of Perseus’s shield reflecting the head of the Gorgon, makes such a claim. Reference to the ancient painter Zeuxis and his still life of grapes that fooled the birds into pecking at its surface was not the only way to ground a mirror-like image in the realm of perfect imitation. What we have seen with other images made ‘contrafactum’, as indexical counterfeits, is true of Caravaggio’s or Clara Peeters’ work as well. The artist withdraws on one level, while on a second level the artist returns as consummate maker, quasi-divine. As Bellori wrote, Caravaggio ‘made art, miraculously, without art’. This is an artistic form of courtly sprezzatura, a nonchalance that disguises great effort at self-presentation. Comparisons are frequently made between Jan Brueghel’s still lifes and Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit; the differences in their approaches make a fruitful exercise in visual analysis for students of both artists’ work. Here I would like to isolate just one particular relationship between their works made naer het leven or dal vivo: they collected together in one image motifs that would not easily appear together in actuality. This may not be true of Caravaggio’s carafes of flowers. In The Lute Player (Fig. 10), the bouquet topped by a white iris contains mainly spring-flowering blossoms, common rather than exotic, which might have been possible to see together at a single point in time. By contrast, Jan Brueghel’s painting for Cardinal Borromeo, which still hangs in the same collection together with Caravaggio’s still life, collects together a wide variety of precious flowers and collectible artefacts such as shells and Oriental porcelain (Fig. 13). The spring-flowering irises and tulips were as precious as the exotic Pacific shells, and also came from distant lands, as they were newly introduced to Europe from Turkey and the Levant. Together with the summer roses and autumnal chrysanthemums, they form a collection of blossoms that would never appear together in a vase in everyday life. In his letters to Cardinal Borromeo about these works, Brueghel vaunted his own skills in thus tracking down blooms, collecting together the rare and

29 Brusati, ‘Stilled Lives’, p. 168–182.

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fig. 13: Jan Brueghel. Still life with Flowers. 1606. oil on copper. pinacoteca ambrosiana, milan. prisma archivio/ alamy stock photo.

the beautiful in a painting that would also become rare and beautiful.30 The painting that thus unites these disparate motifs represents a heightening of vision’s powers, a visible proof of the power of painting (and painter) to represent what nature cannot achieve unaided. Although it is much more subtle in Caravaggio’s mundane baskets of fruit, his images also gather items that appear at different moments of the growing season. Bellori, more sensitive than modern viewers to this element of the improbable, complained about the out-of-season fruit in his comments on The Supper at Emmaus, as an element breaking the logic of decorum in painting. The fruits are predominantly those that come ripe in autumn—apple, grapes, and quince (Fig. 1). They were inapp propriate, perhaps, for a Biblical story associated with the passion of Christ, celebrated in spring. But there are also fruits here that are harvested at a different time: 30 Elizabeth Honig, Jan Brueghel (2016). On Jan Brueghel’s relations with Cardinal Borromeo and Cardinal del Monte during his Italian sojourn in the 1590s, see Amendola, ‘Jan Brueghel il Vecchio’, p. 63–74. On Brueghel’s letters to Borromeo, see Brenninkmeyer-de Rooij, ‘Zeldzame bloemen’, p. 218–248, and Cutler, ‘Virtue and Diligence’, p. 202–227.

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the peach, the pear and medlar are fruits of high summer. The gap between the earliest summer harvesting time for peaches and the latest harvesting time in OctoberNovember for quince in Italy could stretch across almost half the year. Caravaggio’s peach is shown as perfectly ripe and unblemished, however, while the apple, though appearing usually much later in the growing season, shows rot and wormholes. It would be rare indeed in the Seicento, if not impossible, to see all of these fruits united in this form, in one basket. As with Jan Brueghel’s flowerpieces, to transcend time and nature may be a motive for thus collecting various items together. It exalts, in a wittily oblique way, the role of the artist. But there is perhaps an even more important point to be made about this gathering. One result of this approach to working from life is an aesthetic of collection, a process of composing a picture through aggregates of small individual parts, rather than starting from a unified composition that is then sub-divided into its constituent forms. In chapter four, we will see that in the realm of topographic view-making, artists united several views of sites into a composite view that was impossible to see from any one actual viewpoint—Claude’s View of Trinità dei Monti springs to mind, and Remigio Cantagallina’s views of Brussels. For Jacques Callot’s Fair at Impruneta, discussed in Chapter 2, the topography studied from life serves as a unifying container for hundreds of tiny figures studied separately and individually in his sketchbooks. Perhaps to point out this trait of dal vivo work is simply to acknowledge that to represent what one sees always results in a collection of many moments of perception. But the key thing here is that this aesthetic of collection leaves permanent traces in the finished work that were apparently sought by Caravaggio, and that have an effect on the way we receive the image. A number of Caravaggio’s works seem to play with a deliberately dis-unified composition. His Supper at Emmaus (Fig. 1) is perhaps the best example. The basket of fruit at the foreground, and the chicken on its platter, are painted on a smaller scale than the four human figures. The two hands of the pilgrim on the right with outstretched arms are represented the same size, although one should be diminished in scale by its distance from the viewer. Once one notices these discrepancies of scale, the principle of aggregated parts rather than unity of composition becomes clear. One clue as to Caravaggio’s attraction to this form of composing lies in the pose of the pilgrim at left, his back to us, elbow jutting out into our space. X-rays show Caravaggio adjusting this pose, while moving the contours of the figure at right as well, in order to open out the space in front of the table, and to leave it available for our own entry into the scene as viewers. Faced with a composition such as this one, the viewer actively enters, and actively gathers its disparate motifs. We make adjustments for the isolation of its parts and the breakage of scale because the verism of detail is so compelling. Above all, our role is active and it is we who unify the image through our visual activity.

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The role of the viewer, and the function of physiognomy, is part of the very subject of this picture, taken from the story of Christ’s apparition in an unrecognizable guise to two disciples after his death. Caravaggio represents the moment when Christ is suddenly revealed to the two. But to us as viewers his unusual presentation—beardless, with a highly individualized rather than idealized face—poses an obstacle to recognition. An altered physiognomy is the very subject of the Biblical story, the Gospel of Matthew describing Christ as appearing ‘in alia effigia’, in an altered appearance.31 In Caravaggio’s image, the two disciples have already perceived his identity through the veil of that altered appearance, and are reacting with shock. But we as viewers are still confronted with an unknown face. The vulnerable position of the basket of fruit, ready to fall from the table’s edge, creates a visual parallel to the immanent change in our view. An important difference between Caravaggio’s still life and those of his Flemish counterparts lies in this, that his works call even more attention to the viewer, who is conceived of as a bodily presence in front of the painting. Jan Brueghel, by contrast, although separating each flower and silhouetting it against a dark ground for maximum visibility, nonetheless makes no other overt gesture toward the viewer who will eventually take it in. Another element that sets apart Caravaggio’s approach to still life is his insistence on the flaws in his fruit and vegetation. The perfection of each bloom in Brueghel’s work stands in stark contrast to the wormholes, bruising, and fly-blown leaves of Caravaggio’s fruit. This has sometimes been taken to indicate his still life has an allegorical intention, with moral or religious significance, as if it signified the passing of all worldly things. I am less certain of an overt intention toward allegory in Caravaggio’s motifs, although it is easy to see how such an allegory could be made of them. It seems to me that Caravaggio treated his flowers and fruit as portraits of models, with each hole, bruise or wilted leaf as an element that individuates and distinguishes the sitter, like the physiognomy of an individual human being. This process of portraying the still life elements in his works is true for his depiction of printed books in his paintings as well. Caravaggio’s first version of The Inspiration of St. Matthew (now destroyed) contains a portrait of the Hebrew Gospel of St. Matthew, which the illiterate, crude figure of the evangelist is in the very act of writing the opening verses of the Gospel of Matthew while his hand is lovingly guided by an angel (Fig. 14).32 And it is such a detailed portrait of the Hebrew script on the page that the erudite viewer could actually read what it said. Moreover, it was so accurately copied that the very publication that Caravaggio painted dal vivo can be identified. Irving Lavin was able to pinpoint Caravaggio’s textual model as the 1589 edition by Sebastien Münster, the most recent in time to the altarpiece’s creation.

31 Scribner III, ‘In Alia Effigie’, p. 375-338. 32 Lavin, ‘Divine Inspiration’, p. 59–81; on Caravaggio’s depiction of the 1589 Sebastian Munster edition of the Hebrew gospel of St. Matthew, p. 66.

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fig. 14: caravaggio. St. Matthew and the Angel. 1602. oil on canvas. formerly Berlin, Kaiser friedrich museum, destroyed 1945. image courtesy the Witt Library, courtauld institute of art, London.

Not only, however, did Caravaggio portray that single edition and no other, he also amended the text to correct one of the Hebrew characters as printed in Münster’s text. Thus the artist altered the book that was his model, to make it reflect the latest reasoning about Matthew’s gospel text. The book as model was first portrayed ‘from life,’ in all accuracy and in all recognizability. Then, in a second moment, the book was altered—perfected, perhaps—in one small but highly meaningful detail. The printed musical part books depicted in Caravaggio’s two autograph versions of The Lute Player, made for the music-loving friends Cardinal del Monte and Vincenzo Giustiniani in the late 1590s, also share this trait. They were depicted so clearly that the musically-literate viewer can read the score, and they closely resemble recognizable published editions. The version for Vincenzo Giustiniani, now in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, was made first (Fig. 10). The printed score in the part book in its foreground shows Jacques Arcadelt’s mid-sixteenth-century Libro primo di madrigali, a publication that contained several other composers’ works as well. Arcadelt’s love madrigal, ‘Voi sapete ch’io vi amo’ is the composition whose tenor part is displayed, while the lute player accompanies himself with the bass

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counterpoint. The decorated initials of the score are so carefully portrayed that it can be identified with the edition of the Libro primo put out by a Roman publisher, Valerio Dorico.33 However, in that edition, the madrigal of ‘Voi sapete’ is not laid out on the page in the same way. Caravaggio has altered his model. It may be that the precise printed edition that Caravaggio painted has simply not been found. The same process of depicting a legible score in the manner of a specific publisher is repeated in Caravaggio’s second version, apparently made for Cardinal del Monte (now in the Wildenstein collection). This one substitutes musical instruments and a caged bird for the carafe of flowers. The part-books lying open in the foreground reveal four separate madrigals, also from Arcadelt’s Libro primo, but this time the depicted songs were by Francesco de Layolles and Jacques Berchem. Again, they were copied from a known publication, that of Antonio Gardano in Venice in 1539. But they too had been significantly altered in one small respect. Though Caravaggio depicted the decorated initials of the Gardano edition, and its format of two madrigals to a page, he represented four songs that were not printed on the same or adjacent pages in Gardano’s publications. Perhaps they were specifically requested by del Monte, as songs that he loved particularly well. We now know a great deal about del Monte’s and Giustiniani’s musical culture and their sponsorship of cutting-edge musical performance in Rome. The two neighbors owned many musical publications, and the two editions of Arcadelt’s Libro primo di madrigali that ‘posed’ for Caravaggio were probably the ones in their possession. Caravaggio’s use of these two printed texts is similar to his treatment of the Hebrew text of the Gospel of Matthew published by Münster, which show Caravaggio’s approach to the book as a model painted dal vivo or dal vero. At first glance, the depicted pages seem to offer a perfect copy of a recognizable thing, painstakingly accurate in its portrayal. But on closer examination, they deliberately deviate or swerve away from the model. This double move, to create a detailed portrait of the model and then to change that portrait, is an important part of Caravaggio’s approach to depiction dal vero. It makes the model signify, to those who had eyes to see its significance. It could be seen as a trope of the artistic power to go beyond mimesis, by pushing mimesis itself to an extreme degree. These examples of fruit, flowers and books as models give us another way to approach Caravaggio’s human models and their role in his art.

33 The printed sources of Caravaggio’s painted musical part books were simultaneously discovered by three researchers: Slim, ‘Musical Inscriptions’, p. 241–263, reprinted in Slim, Painting Music; and Trinchieri Camiz and Ziino, ‘La musica’, p. 198–221; and Trinchieri Camiz, ‘Per prima cosa’, p. 75–79. The music in The Rest on the Flight into Egypt was studied in Trinchieri Camiz and Ziino, ‘Caravaggio’, p. 72–74. Both Slim and Trinchieri Camiz/Ziino pointed out the closeness of Caravaggio’s part books to known editions and yet their failure to match completely with those editions. Both suggest that Caravaggio may have worked from editions that are now unknown; Trinchieri Camiz/Ziino also raise the possibility that he worked from manuscript copies of the music, which Slim thought unlikely.

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Faces, Vessels Caravaggio’s models are recognizable from one canvas to another because their physiognomy is so distinctive. The ‘science’ of reading physiognomy had ancient roots, and there was a steady stream of sixteenth-century texts that revived classical ideas about analyzing character and identity reflected in faces. The 1586 work of the Neapolitan polymath Giovanni Battista della Porta, De Humana Physiognomia, took up a particular strain of physiognomy, comparing animal and human faces, which had its classical source in a text then attributed to Aristotle.34 Della Porta’s book was evenn tually republished many times across Europe and translated into several languages, with its detailed illustrations perhaps accounting in part for its popularity through the end of the seventeenth century. Della Porta’s text was, however, considered dangerous by the church when first published in Latin in 1586, and when an Italian translation was first proposed in 1592 Roman authorities balked at giving it a printing privilege. For a time it was put on the Index of proscribed books.35 In the astrological and magical realm of Della Porta’s studdies of nature, the ‘science’ of physiognomy came too close to the forbidden arts of divination, or foretelling the future. The Roman Church’s rejection of physiognomy was due to the view that human bodies alone cannot determine human behaviour. To see one’s physical makeup as irrevocably shaping one’s spirit or temper would be to deny the possibility of future salvation. In the Church’s view, physiognomy was not destiny. When the Church authorities relented and took Della Porta’s works off the Index in 1598, his De Physiognomia was brought out in Italian-language editions with an expanded array of illustrations, evidently with a view to a much wider readership. So the text and its all-important images were newly available in Rome in the year 1598, and it seems that this was exactly when Caravaggio began to work with a small group of models with distinctive and recognisable features. Many of della Porta’s illustrations, from wild animals to classical portrait busts, were labelled as made ad vivum, from life, in keeping with the use of the term by natural historians as a marker of verified knowledge. Because Giovanni Battista della Porta was a friend of Caravaggio’s patron Cardinal del Monte, his many works on natural science, optics and magic have made sporadic appearances in the scholarly literature on Caravaggio. Surprisingly, this most popular of his books has not been put in relation to his art. Several paintings from the height of Caravaggio’s career in 34 Della Porta, De Humana Physiognomia (1589) and Della fisonomia dell’huomo (1598). General literature on physiognomics in the sixteenth century: Porter, Windows of the Soul; Schmölders, Das Vorurteil im Leibe; Campe and Schneider, Geschichte der Physiognomik. Specifically on della Porta, see Balbiani, La Magia Naturalis; Orsi, Giovan Battista della Porta. 35 On della Porta’s troubled relationship with the Inquisition in Naples, see Aquilecchia, ‘Appunti’, p. 3–13, and on the halt of publication for an Italian translation of his De Physiognomia in 1592, see Eamon, Science and the Secrets, p. 202–03.

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fig. 15: caravaggio. Rest on the Flight into Egypt. c. 1598–1600. oil on canvas. galleria Doria-pamphilj, Rome. © 2019. photo scala, florence.

Rome place human and animal faces in close proximity, raising the question of how physiognomic lore might shed light on his aims. Let’s begin with a few striking details. In Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, painted before 1606 in Rome, the aged Joseph’s face is oddly, impossibly close to the head of the donkey beside him (Fig. 15). Their proximity underscores their resemT blance. Poised at the same angle, the gaze of their dark eyes directed in parallel fashion toward the violin-playing angel, the faces of old man and donkey convey similar expressions of dumb patience. We have already seen the young red-headed boy who poses as the angel with his curvaceous back to us. The model was Cecco, the boy who assisted Caravaggio in his workshop and grew up to become a painter himself. His depiction in another work of around 1602, the painting sometimes called St. John the Baptist or simply Boy with a Ram, yields another striking detail (Fig. 16). The head of the boy and the ram, in close juxtaposition, reveal a play of similarities like those in Joseph and the donkey’s head. Where the ram has curling horns, the boy has curling locks of hair. Where the boy’s nose has a distinctive arch, the ram’s profile mirrors its flattened curve. This proximity of human and animal

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fig. 16: caravaggio. St. John the Baptist (also called Laughing Isaac, or Boy with a Ram). c.1602. oil on canvas. Rome, musei capitolini. © 2019. photo scala, florence.

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heads is prominent in the painting, but its significance has until recently been buried, thanks to the challenging iconographic problems posed by the image. There is no record of how the painting’s subject was understood by its first patron, Ciriaco Mattei. There are records of Mattei’s payments in 1601 to Caravaggio for a work that can only be the painting now in the Capitoline museum, but no description or title is associated with those payments. In early inventories of the collections in which the painting was housed, as in guidebooks to Roman collections, it was given various titles, from the pastoral shepherds ‘Pastor Friso’ and ‘Corydon’ to ‘St. John the Baptist in the wilderness’. Not long ago, Steven Ostrow and Conrad Rudolf argued that this painting was actually intended to be an image of the Biblical Isaac. The laughing visage of the boy is one clue: Isaac means ‘laughing’ or ‘smiling’ in Hebrew, and the expression thus defines the represented identity of the youth. A pile of wood for the burnt offering, vestige of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac to his demanding God, lies in the bottom left corner of the canvas. The boy embraces the ram who was sent to be sacrificed in his place, and he laughs in joy. In the absence of the specific attributes that would be needed to link this figure to a pastoral shepherd or St. John the Baptist, Ostrow’s and Rudolf’s re-identification of the picture’s subject as Isaac seems to me quite plausible. When in 1603 Cecco models again for The Sacrifice of Isaac, in a more recognizable form of the iconography, the boy again appears with his head in closest juxtaposition to the ram (Fig. 7). It is completely appropriate to the depicted story of Isaac’s sacrirfice: the story itself equates the boy and ram as sacrificial offerings. But again the visual play of resemblance between the human and animal heads goes beyond the needs of the iconography, forming an invitation to compare closely the two faces with their curiously similar profiles. What might it mean, in physiognomic terms, for the young model, his character as Isaac, and the ram to so resemble one another in these two examples, or for the older male model, St. Joseph and the donkey to look alike in The Rest on the Flight into Egypt? The comparison of human faces to sheep and donkey had been made by Della Porta’s text on physiognomy (Fig. 17). There, the man who resembles a ram or sheep was not, as we might think in modern terms, a docile or unassertive character, but rather the opposite. Sociable and serene, even joyous, the sheep-character was an example of how the dominant humour of hot, moist blood yielded the sanguine temperament. That temperament in turn, stamped its nature on the faces of both the sheep and the human that resembled it. Della Porta’s version of physiognomic theory was, in fact, an extension of the Galenic doctrine of the four humours of blood, bile, choler and phlegm circulating through the body, each with its combination of the qualities of heat, cold, moisture and dryness. The predominance of one humour over the others shaped human character and physical appearance. Della Porta’s De Physiognomia took this doctrine further, to encompass animal temperament, and in a further publication, Phytognomonica (1588), he included the temperament of plants, which made for a comprehensive system of resemblances between the human and natural worlds. The

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fig. 17: a. illustration comparing man and donkey; b. illustration comparing man and sheep. giovanni Battista della porta, Della Fisionomia dell’huomo.1598. photo the author.

sanguine temper, considered the ideal temper of the four, was linked with vigorous plants and herbs, with the gods Jupiter, Apollo and Venus, with the season of spring in the cycle of the year—and with youth in the life cycle, making the young boy Cecco an apt model for this temper, and the Biblical character of young Isaac a likely bearer of that same temper. In his text on physiognomy, della Porta’s discussion remained close to the widespread understanding of the traditional imagery of the four humours. Nowhere is this clearer than in his discussion of the sheep-man as an example of the sanguine temperament. At the turn of the seventeenth century various prints in both northern Europe and Italy represented the sanguine man with the image of a sheep. Raffaele Schiaminossi’s undated etching, probably from Rome just after 1600, depicts him as a lute-player, to show his affable and harmonious temper, but also with a sheep in the background. In very much the same vein, Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, published in the entourage of Caravaggio’s patron Cardinal del Monte in the 1590s, portrays the Sanguine Temper as a lute-playing youth accompanied by a ram.

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fig. 18: cristofano Bertelli. The Seven Ages of Man. 1560. etching. British museum Dept. of prints and Drawings, London. © trustees of the British museum.

The donkey-man resemblance illustrated in della Porta’s physiognomy, which seems to find a parallel in Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, was also part of a larger, popular tradition. Their similarities rested on the predominance of cold and dry qualities, combining melancholic and phlegmatic traits. Poor Joseph with his donkey in The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, stolidly gazing at the wondrous music-playing angel, is unflatteringly portrayed by his resemblance to the beast as ignorant and dull-witted. We can mitigate this view of Christ’s foster father somewhat, however, by noting the other popular context in which both sheep and donkey were likened to human characters. They both appear in the imagery of the ages of man. Cristofano Bertelli’s mid-sixteenth-century etching depicts this widespread and longstanding iconography of the ages in the form of ascending and descending steps on which stand figures embodying the change from babyhood to old age and death (Fig. 18). Under each step stands an animal associated with that time of life. The young boy at lower right stands over a sheep. The old man closest to death, at lower left, is paired with a donkey. Age brings on cold, dry humour, just as hot blood belongs to youth. So Caravaggio has portrayed his models next to their animal likeness in such a way as to bring out this underlying common ground, of humour, temperament, and age.

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Two of these paintings in which human heads and animal heads are juxtaposed, The Boy with a Ram and The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, share another, more marginal feature: the sparse plants depicted at the base of both paintings are verbascum, commonly called mullein. Caravaggio’s depiction is quite accurate, and closely resembles illustrations in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century herbals. The same fleshy leaves radiating from a central base are found in a similar position at the base of the composition in The Entombment of Christ painted for the Chiesa Nuova, and St. John the Baptist in the Borghese collection. This vegetal motif seems at first to be Caravaggio’s minimalist way of representing the natural world, reducing it to a single green plant in an otherwise darkened human space. Investigating this plant in light of della Porta’s physiognomic system, however, it appears to play a more active role in the paintings’ interplay of resemblance. In The Boy with a Ram the plant’s shape even echoes the posture of the young protagonist. Della Porta’s Phytognomonica, as well as various contemporary herbals, defined it as a plant governed by heat and moisture, and put its natural habitat in Ethiopia and the Levant, making it an apt marker for the location of Biblical stories in Egypt and the Holy Land. This may explain why Caravaggio so carefully places it in the foreground of all of these Biblical scenes. In The Boy with a Ram, if the verbascum plant is indeed a geographical marker, it helps support the identification of this painting with a Biblical subject rather than with any pastoral shepherd. And in a representation of Isaac laughing, the temperament of verbascum also rhymes with that sanguine temperament characterising the boy-ram resemblance and the boy’s joyous affect. Della Porta emphasises the furry down on the plant’s leaves as a key feature denoting its temper, for an abundance of hair was one sign of the sanguine temperament. That trait of hairiness makes for a subtle and secondary play of resemblance between the boy, the ram, and the plant, all alike subject to the interactions of heat and moisture. Cecco must have seemed an uncannily useful assistant to Caravaggio, presenting as he did the multiple outward signs of a single predominant humour, the sanguine. Even the russet colour of his hair was fortuitous; della Porta (as well as other Renaissance texts on the four temperaments) noted that red hair too was considered an attribute of the sanguine humour. When the artist represented him, naked and again grinning broadly, as Eros triumphing over attributes of arts and culture in the Victorious Love painted for Vincenzo Giustiniani around 1603, he retained the highly individualized features of his studio assistant (Fig. 2). But because Cecco’s physiognomy in itself already ‘represented’ the sanguine temper, the artist had only to be faithful to the model’s appearance in order to draw on a body of ideas that would enrich his subject here, just as in the Isaac depictions. The mythological Eros or Cupid, by virtue of being a young boy, would be characterized by the sanguine temper, and thus be aptly modelled by the red-haired Cecco. Propensity to sensual love was an attribute of the sanguine temper, which was associated with the goddess Venus. In his role as the child-god of love, Cecco sits above

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a messy pile of books, printed music, lute and violin, architectural tools, armour and crown, which represent his patron’s noble and intellectual endeavours. He represents the adage Amor vincit omnia, love conquers all, asserting that Eros, the great leveler, is more compelling than these noble past-times. The sheer sensuality of Cecco as winged Cupid has preoccupied most commentators on the image. The artifacts carelessly strewn at love’s feet are perhaps even more significant, however, as they are metonyms for the patron himself, showing his various cultured activities. These still life elements embody (in Bellori’s words) ‘la virtù di un vero nobile’, the virtue of a true nobleman.36 And here is where Cecco’s physiognomy as a pure example of the sanguine temperament, the most jovial, sociable and joyous humour, plays its role. If the cultural activities that were markers of nobility were privileged and praiseworthy, they were nonetheless also the predilections of intellectual men prone to melancholic temper. Cold, dry melancholia had two faces, as the temper suited to intellect, genius, creativity and mental acuity, but also as the temper of old age and bitter outlook, life-denying and sterile.37 Was there a remedy for too much melann choly? Della Porta’s De Physiognomia repeats the advice of many Renaissance texts on the four humours, that contact with the hot, moist elements that made up the sanguine temper, melancholia’s opposite, could serve as antidote. Cecco’s physiognomy as he rises above Giustiniani’s cultivated possessions reveals more than the impudent god’s sensual pleasure: gazing at him offers the patron, his first viewer, a joyous counterweight to the melancholy burden of culture. Curing an excess of any one humour was the main theme of della Porta’s physiognomy, but this was true of other early modern treatments of the subject as well. Usually a cure is achieved by exposing the patient to the opposite qualities to those he or she already possessed to excess. There was a certain amount of agreement that holding to the joyful activities of youth would preserve the heat and moisture of the body, while staving off that drying, cooling of the body that brought the afflictions of old age and of melancholy.38 In the realm of imagery, a therapeutic relationship between painting and viewer was discussed by Giulio Mancini, physician and amateur of the arts, to whom we owe an early commentary on Caravaggio’s art in his Cosiderazione sulla pittura of around 1620.39 Something of this aim to lift the spirits of the cultured melancholic may inform the imagery of Caravaggio’s The Lute Player for Giustiniani (Fig. 10), as well as the version he painted for Cardinal del Monte as well, now in the Wildenstein Collection. The two variants are believed to date from the period around 1598. This was almost certainly before the advent of Cecco as assistant in the artist’s workshop, but it was also the time when the Italian translation of della Porta’s De Physiognomia was first published, thanks to the text’s removal from the Index of prohibited books. The composition of 36 Enggass, ‘La Virtù’, p. 13–20. 37 See Wittkower, Born under Saturn, for a classic discussion of the effects of melancholia. 38 For sixteenth-century writings about a therapeutic use of youthful laughter as remedy to both melancholia and old age, see Vredeveld, ‘That Familiar Proverb’, p. 78–91. 39 For Mancini’s text and the Seicento belief that painted images could have therapeutic benefits to viewers, see Barker, ‘Poussin’, p. 659–689. and Gage, Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome (2016).

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fig. 19: pieter de Jode after maerten de vos. The Sanguine Temperament. c. 1595. engraving. Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, amsterdam. photo Wikimedia commons.

the paintings places the half-length figure of the musician before a table containing assembled significant objects. In the second version for Cardinal del Monte, the musical instruments strewn before the singer correspond to ones owned by the cardinal. In the Giustiniani version, there is both a carafe of flowers and a basket of fruit. Many writers have suggested over the years that these still life motifs together make reference to the senses of sight and smell, as the lute player refers to the sense of hearing.40 These motifs had all come together in images made before Caravaggio’s paintings, in sixteenth-century print representations of the sanguine temperament.41 They are depicted together in a print by Pieter de Jode I after Martin de Vos, one of a series depicting the four temperaments (Fig. 19). In the Flemish image, Venus accompanies the lute player, indicating the sanguine man’s propensity for love and sensuality. Caravaggio’s 40 On Caravaggio’s use of Northern prints series of the Five Senses, see Costello, ‘Caravaggio, Lizard, and Fruit’, p. 375–385. 41 Slatkes, ‘Caravaggio’s Painting’, p. 17–24. Slatkes identified the Capitoline painting as depicting the sanguine temperament through the combination of boy and ram; his main focus was on the iconographic identification of Caravaggio’s figure as Pastor Friso.

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musicians don’t have the red hair or rosy complexion of Cecco as embodiment of this temperament. Their dark hair and very white skin were not attributes of the sanguine temperament, but rather of the choleric and melancholy humours. Yet the way that Caravaggio’s two Lute Player paintings correspond to the composition and details in de Jode’s print raises the question of whether in this case, too, the paintings were to serve as a sanguine display and to counteract their viewers’ cultured melancholia. There have been several arguments about who served as model for the singer. The figure resembles the fleshy dark-haired youths in Caravaggio’s Musicians, and he is sometimes lumped together with dark youths in the Sick Bacchus, Bacchus, The Boy Bitten by a Lizard, and The Boy with a Basket of Fruit. The most restrictive identification of the model for The Lute Player paintings was that of Franca Trinchieri Camiz, whose research on the music in Rome sponsored by Caravaggio’s patrons illuminated the then-fashionable mode of single-voiced madrigal singing that these images portray. She suggested that the figure in the two images reflects a specific castrato singer, the Spaniard Pedro de Montoya, who was then, like Caravaggio, living in the household of Cardinal del Monte.42 She wisely refrained from defining The Lute Player images as true portraits of Montoya, seeing them instead as evocations of a particular musical culture. But her hypothesis still begs one important question. If meant to evoke the general appearance of a castrato singer like Montoya, why then does the model for the lute players so strongly resemble the other figures in Caravaggio’s paintings of the 1590s, which are unlikely to depict Montoya or any other castrato? Christoph Frommel had argued that Caravaggio used the features of his friend the Sicilian artist Mario Minniti as model for all these fleshy, full-lipped and darkhaired youths.43 Frommel relied on a nineteenth-century printed portrait of Minniti to make this point, however, and that seems inadequate as evidence about Minniti’s appearance in the 1590s. The alternate theory concerning a single model for all these different paintings, proposed early on in modern Caravaggio scholarship, was that these were the works that Giovanni Baglione’s biography tells us Caravaggio made ‘da lui nello specchio ritratti’, that is, they were made from his own face, portrayed as he saw it in a mirror.44 It has seemed plausible that Caravaggio’s own features underlie the appearance of these dark youths, in part because they all resemble one another closely, just as Caravaggio’s other recognizable and repeated models do. But the features of this model are deliberately smoothed and regularized. The polished face of The Lute Player, for example, has evenly curving arcs for brows, eyes and lips, smooth 42 Trinchieri Camiz, ‘The Castrato Singer’, p. 171–186; and her ‘Music and Poetry’, p. 213–216; see also the collection of essays edited by Stefania Macioce and Enrico de Pascale, La Musica al Tempo di Caravaggio. 43 Frommel, ‘Caravaggio’, p. 21–56. 44 The idea that Caravaggio’s early single-figure paintings were based in self-portraiture is discussed in many publications on Caravaggio, with reference to Baglione’s phrase about portraying himself from a mirror. Most recently see Fried, The Moment, with references to the earlier literature on the question; for the figures’ Bacchic references see Hermann Fiore, ‘Il Bacchino Malato’, p. 95–132.

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and unblemished skin covering a face painted broadly rather than in fine detail. If these early youths tease us with an air of resemblance to the artist, they frustrate any easy identification with his other known portrayals of himself. When Caravaggio depicted himself as a recognizable face among other figures, as he did in a number of his public works starting with The Execution of St. Matthew, he gave a detailed account of his appearance, with all its irregularities and flaws. When Ottavio Leoni made his portrait drawing of Caravaggio around 1620, it was derived from the St. Matthew painting, but its resemblance to the late artist satisfied many living people who had known him (Fig. 20). When Caravaggio painted his own features as the dead Goliath in his David and Goliath (Fig. 21), Bellori recognized it as the artist’s self-portrait, and analyzed his character as reflected in this version of the artist’s face. I will come back to the question of how Caravaggio ‘physiognomized’ his own features, as opposed to how Bellori interpreted his physiognomy. My question here concerns an idea proposed by Mina Gregori about these early single-figure works by Caravaggio.45 Were these Caravaggio’s experiments in idealization? Did he begin with his own posing body seen in a mirror, and then in his own characteristic fashion ‘swerve’ from the model, as he did when depicting books and musical texts, or when depicting Cecco as the angel in The Sacrifice of Isaac, where he altered his appearance in the upper layers of the paint? Thanks to the disappearance of most of the portraits that we know Caravaggio painted, it is difficult to judge his usual methods for flattering a sitter, of finding a way of creating both a likeness and a more perfected depiction. However, David Stone has shown that Caravaggio’s portrait of Alof de Wignacourt, Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of St. John on Malta, ‛perfected’ his sitter by the simple expedient of turning his head so that a large wart would be hidden. If he was finding his own way toward the goal of an idealized human body, Caravaggio would seem to be closer to the norms of late Renaissance art than we thought. And yet this procedure that I call ‘swerving’ was not the recommended procedure for creating an idealized figure, since it was not that intellectual and synthetic process that, according to the artist and founder of the Roman artists’ academy Federico Zuccari or later Giovan Pietro Bellori, created an imagined unity of beautiful parts, refined through the medium of preparatory drawings. Caravaggio instead imagined in and through paint, passing nearly always through a first stage of depicting detailed resemblances. Caravaggio’s sense of how those resemblances could be made to signify was probably grounded in the fashion for physiognomic study around the year 1600.

45 Gregori, ‘Caravaggio Today’, p. 28–48.

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fig. 20: ottavio Leoni. portrait of caravaggio. c. 1621. chalk on blue paper. Biblioteca marucelliana, florence. photo open access,Wikimedia commons.

Me, myself and my opposite Caravaggio used the sanguine appearance of his model Cecco to good effect in several of his Roman paintings, as Amor and as Isaac. It is disconcerting to notice that he also used Cecco extensively as model for the angels in his public altarpieces and paintings for private collectors. Perhaps the earliest work in which Cecco played this role was The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Fig. 16). That work is often dated on stylistic grounds as quite early in Caravaggio’s Roman career; I suspect that it is slightly later as the model Cecco seems to have come into Caravaggio’s workshop only around 1600, appearing as an angel descending with the palm of martyrdom in The Execution of St. Matthew, and again as the inspiring angel in The Inspiration of St. Matthew in its second version, and another angel in flight in the Conversion of Saul in the Odescalchi collection. Even after Caravaggio departed from Rome and presumably from Cecco, his red-haired likeness reappears in angelic form in Naples’s Seven Acts of Mercy, in The Nativity with Adoration of the Shepherds in Palermo, and The Annunciation in Nancy. How could the fleshy sensuality and warm-blooded temper of a

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fig. 21: caravaggio. David with the head of Goliath. c. 1606–1610. oil on canvas. galleria Borghese, Rome. © 2019. photo scala, florence.

sanguine youth represent the utterly immaterial essence of angels? The answer may lie in Counter-Reformation ideas about representing angels with traits so earthly, so sensual, that the very opposition between their spiritual essence and their visualized appearance would be a signal to the viewer of their un-representable nature.46 However, Cecco as an angel is not the only model who recurs in pictorial roles that were the opposite of their physiognomy or character in life. The women who posed for Caravaggio and who have been identified through court documents were apparently all prostitutes, but in his paintings their faces adorn sacred women including the Virgin, Mary Magdalene, and female saints. Caravaggio seems to have flirted with disaster by rendering them as portrait likenesses. The most securely identified is a high-class courtesan called Fillide Melandroni, whom Caravaggio painting in a portrait (now destroyed) where she holds white orange blossoms next to her heart (Fig. 22). Fillide’s will in 1614 listed the portrait as belonging to one of her lovers, the poet Giulio Strozzi; it was probably sold on to Vincenzo Giustiniani, as a ‘ritratto di 46 Ostrow, ‘Caravaggio’s Angels’, p. 123–148.

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fig. 22: caravaggio. Portrait of Fillide. c. 1602–1604. formerly Berlin, Kaiser friedrich museum, destroyed 1945. photo: bpk gemäldegalerie, smB / Jōrg anders

Fillide’ was later listed in an inventory of the Giustiniani collection. The same face appears in the role of Judith, in The Beheading of Holofernes, and in the Saint Catherine made for del Monte, as well as in The Conversion of the Magdalene where she once again holds the white orange blossoms next to her heart. Portraits of women with an emblematic or heraldic flower were not unusual. But it was not common to include the emblematic motif together with the recognizable model in order to depict a sacred figure in a religious painting. Women’s faces were rarely the subject of physiognomic analysis in early modernity, though in the ‘ages of man’ iconography a female progress through life was represented by pairing them with various different species of birds. Caravaggio seems to have chosen to pair Fillide with the orange blossoms as a way of characterizing her physiognomy. Della Porta’s Phytognomonica, which related physiognomy to the appearance of plants, repeated the lore commonly given in herbals about orange flowers: their leaves were heart-shaped, signifying that they had healing powers for that organ. Fillide’s heart was what Caravaggio called attention to with his placement of this motif against her chest. The white hue of orange blossoms signified purity of

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heart, a useful reinforcement of their role in marriage ceremonies, where they conveyed the idea of feminine virtue. This was in keeping with the pictorial roles that Fillide played, if not true of her role in Roman society. Fillide as Judith is portraying the Biblical heroine most identified with purity of religion and female morality, whose reluctant seduction and murder of Holofernes saved the Jewish people. As St. Catherine, she represented an early Christian saint martyred to maintain the purity of her faith. As the Magdalene, Fillide aptly portrays a prostitute, but the context is her conversion from sensuality to faith. Pictorially, then, Fillide as a model is constantly linked to qualities that were opposed to her actual status in life as a prostitute. It was possible that Caravaggio made a moral point by depicting Fillide as both herself and her fictional opposite, converting the prostitute to the saint. It may be that the very theme of religious conversion—which we know was greatly stressed as a key concept by the Church in the Jubilee year of 1600—was also the key to understanding Caravaggio’s odd use of his models to portray the opposite of their character in life. Just as the Church insisted in its initial condemnation of della Porta’s De Physiognomia in 1592, too slavish an understanding of human physiognomy would deny the possibility of redemption. Conversion was the central theme of Caravaggio’s depictions in his first public religious paintings in San Luigi dei Francesi, that Christ’s calling confirmed sinners to convert. The first public altarpiece that Caravaggio painted in San Luigi dei Francesi, The Inspiration of St. Matthew in its first version of 1601–1602, has already been tangentially related to one contemporary idea about physiognomy and a type of conversion (Fig. 14). Bellori objected to the inconsistency of the saint’s appearance in the three different paintings of his life that Caravaggio provided for the Contarelli Chapel. Above all, the critic objected to the saint’s vulgar appearance in the first version of the altarpiece, where he seemed to be an illiterate old man with dirty bare feet. Matthew seems barely able to write the gospel as the angel guides his hand. The painting was either rejected by the church authorities, or was only ever intended to be a temporary altarpiece; in any event Caravaggio replaced it with a depiction that makes St. Matthew look more like the distinguished older man who is being martyred in The Execution of St. Matthew. The rejected canvas simply travelled across the narrow Roman piazza San Luigi dei Francesi to Giustiniani’s palazzo, to become part of his private collection. Lavin’s study of the two St. Matthew altarpieces in 1974 pointed out that Bellori should have known better than to dismiss the figure as vulgar. Caravaggio used an ancient bust of the philosopher Socrates as his model for St. Matthew—probably the bust that was in Giustiniani’s collection, and Caravaggio painted it dal vivo.47 The pug nose, bulbous features and proletarian demeanour all came from a distinguished 47 Grimm, ‘Caravaggios Evangelist Matthäus’, p. 253–262.

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source, for Socrates was renowned for his crude appearance. Even the simple-minded, astonished expression of the saint, Lavin showed, intentionally represented St. Matthew in Socratic guise as the ‘holy fool’, the man whose supreme wisdom consisted of realising that he knew nothing. This was the occasion for a memorable pun, as Lavin declared that Caravaggio didn’t democratize St. Matthew, he ‘Socratized’ him. In the course of his long article, Lavin touched only in passing on the other salient feature of Socrates’ appearance. His ugliness had played a large role in the reception of classical portrait busts of the philosopher and had featured in commentaries on the text of Plato’s Symposium. Socrates’ face broke the paradigm of physiognomics, as it did not correspond to his inner reality. If his appearance was repellent, which would normally predict an equally repellent character, Socrates had nonetheless worked long and hard through the discipline of philosophy to elevate his character far above its roots in his inborn temperament. Socrates was the example that showed the limits of physiognomy as a science, for he contradicted its basic tenet of resemblance as the source of significance. Plato’s Symposium revealed this aspect of Socrates through the discussion of Alcibiades towards the end of the dialogue. There, Alcibiades’ defense of Socrates referred to the little boxes known as Sileni, which were carved images of Silenus, the ugly rotund companion of Bacchus. The Silenus boxes could be opened, and on the inside were found beautiful golden images of the gods. Alcibiades asserted that the Sileni were a parallel for Socrates, who was also a gross figure on the outside while concealing wisdom in his depths like some golden image of divinity. By using Socrates’s crude features for St. Matthew, Caravaggio merely alluded to a widespread concept that added classical resonance to the image of the Christian gospel-writer. Matthew had been, after all, a mere tax collector before his conversion and martyrdom. Caravaggio was not alone in using a Socratic physiognomy in the years during which he painted the Matthew cycle in the Contarelli Chapel. A fellow artist living in the same household and working for the same patron as Caravaggio also alluded to the idea of the ugly but virtuous Socrates in 1601. The printmaker, print publisher and antiquarian Francesco Villamena engraved a genre print depicting a street battle in Rome that had killed a servant in the Mattei household whose sobriquet was ‘Bruttobuono’, that is, ‘ugly-good’ (Fig. 23). His thick features and pug nose, as he battles for the Spanish political faction in Rome and is beaten by a crowd of French ruffians, bear a resemblance both to Caravaggio’s first St. Matthew and to busts of Socrates. Like Socrates, Bruttobuono is brutal looking but (as the dedication on Villamena’s print tells us) he is morally good. Curiously, a detail that Villamena first depicted in this engraving reappears in Caravaggio’s painting for their mutual patron Ciriaco Mattei, The Taking of Christ in 1601–1602. A cloak swirls over the head of a figure at right in Villamena’s print; a similar cloak arches over the juxtaposed heads of Christ and Judas in The Taking of Christ (Fig. 26). The face of Judas in Caravaggio’s image, pressed up against the face of Christ, is another version of Bruttobuono, with an inverted moral significance, as someone who is both ugly and evil.

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fig. 23: francesco villamena. The Battle of Bruttobuono. 1602. engraving. open access, national gallery of art Washington, Dc.

The equivocal physiognomy of Socrates seems to have led Caravaggio to new ideas about the choice of models. Most importantly, the Socrates effect may have refined his ideas about how pictures made dal vivo, from live models, elicit interpretation. Della Porta’s De Physiognomia mentioned the disjunction between Socrates’ face and his character, but it was the exception to the physiognomic rules della Porta was seeking to define. The more specific idea from Plato’s Symposium, that Socrates was like the Silenus box of Alcibiades, was not an esoteric or erudite image in 1600. Erasmus’s repeated use of the Silenus of Alcibiades in his writings, particularly the Enchiridion, In Praise of Folly, and the Adagia, had certainly disseminated the image throughout sixteenth-century humanist circles. The enduring point of Erasmus’s reflection on the image of the Silenus box was that it was an ideal metaphor for Christian interpretation. Holy Scripture was rough and plain, lacking magnificence on the exterior, but it opened through exegesis into visions of divinity. A very similar metaphoric appropriation of the Silenus box was made by the popular emblem book of Achille Bocchi, published in Bologna in 1555 with illustrations originally designed by Giulio Bonasone and later re-engraved by Agostino Carracci (Fig. 24). Socrates is represented as an artist before his easel. He is depicting a human figure, with his hand guided by an angelic daemon. The emblem’s motto expressed, as Lavin noted,

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fig. 24: achille Bocchi. ‘pictura gravium ostenduntur pondera rerum. Quaeq latent magis, haec per mage aperta patent’, in Symbolicarum quaestiones. 1597. photo the author.

‘the very idea of conveying an underlying meaning through images’.48 Bocchi wrote: ‘In the painting of weighty matters the burden of things is shown, and through it, those which are most hidden are most revealed’. If Erasmus saw the Socratic image of the Silenus box as an image of textual exegesis, Achille Bocchi worked it into the image of pictorial and emblematic exegesis. The outsides of images are like boxes. They enclose a meaning that is inaccessible to the eye, but when opened by the mind they lead into new realms. The Silenus box of Plato’s Symposium and of sixteenth-century humanist writings was thus a model of how figurative interpretation might function in general, working from an outside to an inside, a visible to an invisible realm. 48 Lavin, ‘Divine Inspiration’, p. 74.

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The problem with this version of Socrates’ ugly physiognomy as a hermeneutic model, a figure for how interpretation works, is that it contradicts Socrates’ own explanation, that his crude face was essentially a contradiction of his character or soul. When Michel de Montaigne wrote his essay ‘On Physiognomy’ in the late 1580s he mused about just this contradiction: ‘A face is a poor guarantee; nevertheless, it deserves some consideration. And had I the scourging of sinners, I should deal hardest with those who belie and betray the promises that nature has planted on their brows; I should inflict sharper punishment on wickedness when in a meek disguise’.49 Montaigne’s musings on physiognomy hover over alternative ways of drawing a relationship between a human face and the spirit behind the face. It was a much finer, subtler perception of that spirit, peeking out through its sometimes ill-fitting mask, which offered the possibility of judging someone’s character. How could this divergence of an inside and outside be made visible in painting? Caravaggio’s rejected first version of St. Matthew—if indeed it was rejected, and not intended to be temporary—was interpreted later by Bellori as crude and inappropriate, which shows that, after all, the irony and paradox of a Socratic saint could be lost even on a rather learned critic. It took a certain sophistication to recognize that in Matthew Caravaggio depicted a face that was deliberately out of alignment with its invisible character. We have seen that in The Supper at Emmaus Caravaggio deliberately shows us Christ’s face in an unrecognizable guise, but there the attentive viewer who knew the popular story of Jesus’s appearance to the pilgrims at Emmaus would easily see through the unexpected physiognomy. In most other depictions after 1600, it seems to me that Caravaggio’s chosen tool for eliciting this recognition from his viewers was to double the faces he represented. Over and over in his mature paintings, he juxtaposed one physiognomy with another, a heightened form of contrapposto or the rhetorical play of contrasting types. Sometimes Caravaggio’s entire compositions are based on a single striking contrast. His Judith beheading Holofernes plays off one lovely but lethal woman and the fiercely grimacing old woman beside her. In London’s Salome with the head of John the Baptist, the head of an old hag seems almost to emerge out of the neck of the beautiful young protagonist, a clear, emphatic juxtaposition of opposites (Fig. 25). Contrasts of this sort not only offered the visual piquancy of opposing beauty and ugliness, youth and age. Even more importantly, they served to externalize an invisible trait, a state of the soul, and implied a development of character over time, transcending the static nature of painted images. Contrasts of another sort emerge from Jesus and Judas, cheek to cheek in The Taking of Christ, and the pale St. Ursula opposite her dark executioner in The Martyrdom of St. Ursula. Caravaggio has taken pains to create a series of simple formal oppositions, of profile set against three-quarter poses, dark colouring versus heightened pallor, wrinkled and thickened skin versus refined features. One sees the same contrasting qualities repeated in Caravaggio’s Passion scenes with the flagellation of Christ, or in his 49 Montaigne, ‘On Physiognomy’, p. 358.

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fig. 25: caravaggio. Salome with the head of St. John the Baptist. c. 1607–1609. oil on canvas. national gallery of art, London. © 2019. copyright the national gallery, London/scala, florence.

several scenes of John the Baptist’s death. Again in the London Salome, for example, if the heads of the two women form one kind of contrapposto, the faces of the saint and his executioner form another: dead and alive, light against dark, oblong against squared form, ascetic suffering opposed to feral satisfaction (Fig. 25). In these doublings, stark differences between closely juxtaposed heads make visible two sharply differing moral states. They show one identity and its opposite. What he could not show as a difference between the external face of a model and their invisible spirit, Caravaggio could nonetheless make visible as a difference that was depicted on the surface of the painting itself.

Caravaggio physiognomizes himself. There are two models in addition to the boy Cecco whose features were repeated not only in Caravaggio’s paintings made in Rome but in Naples, Malta and Sicily as well. The first such model is Caravaggio himself. In The Taking of Christ (Fig. 26), as in The Raising of Lazarus and The Martyrdom of St. Ursula, he depicts his features in either

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fig. 26: caravaggio. The Taking of Christ. c. 1602. oil on canvas. national gallery of ireland, Dublin. © national gallery of ireland.

in profile or three-quarter view, while he peers over the shoulders of other figures as if struggling to see. In The Taking of Christ he holds high a lantern, shedding light on the scene, his role being not just a passive witness but a revealer of the truth. (And his use of a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer for this composition was reinforced by that lantern, for Dürer had likened the sacred role of the artist to that of a lantern-bearer.)50 These self-portraits in his religious works serve as a figural counterpart to the practice of working dal vivo. (As we will see in Claude Lorrain’s Campagna drawings during the 1630s, or in Jacques Callot’s siege prints, the artist’s presence authenticates the experience captured by the image, and verifies its reality). By contrast, the other face that recurs both in Roman works and later paintings is a less benign presence. The executioner who lifts the cross of St. Peter in the Cerasi Chapel painting—dark haired, thick-necked, with cauliflower ears like an old boxer—takes the same bit part in The Flagellation (1607), Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (c. 1607–1609), and The Burial of St. Lucy (1609) among other late works. This torturer and executioner figure resembles the self-portrait of Caravaggio in The Execution of St Matthew. There Caravaggio had depicted himself as fleeing the scene 50 Hermann Fiore, ‘Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ’, p. 24–27.

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fig. 27: giovanni Battista della porta. illustration comparing man and bull. Della Fisionomia del’huomo. 1598. photo the author.

of Matthew’s murder in an Ethiopian church. Thomas Puttfarken suggested that Caravaggio inserted himself in the scene not in his role as witness, but as the killer of Matthew, who looks back over his shoulder regretfully at the sword he has left behind.51 It is an intriguing suggestion, though far from universally accepted. The executioner figures depicted by Caravaggio, perhaps most memorably embodied by the killer in Salome and the Head of St. John the Baptist, also resemble an illustration in della Porta’s De Physiognomia of a man compared to a bull (Fig. 27). The flaring nostrils and protuberant eyes of the bull-man attracted della Porta’s interpretive attention, as did his thick neck and broad head. These features were explained by the pervading humour of choler, with its predominant character traits of rage and violence. Caravaggio’s executioners and torturers seem to me the purest example of a borrowing from della Porta’s text. It is difficult to know for certain if Caravaggio painted his version of this belligerent face from a model in Rome, and then painted him from memory after his departure, or if he once again used his own face as the scaffolding for the creation of a physiognomic type. To my eye, it seems that both the image of himself as witness to sacred events and the image of the bullish executioner are derived from using himself as a model, although both faces ‘swerve’ away from their origins, the one toward a more attractive appearance and the other toward a more debased appearance. It is clear, however, that Caravaggio uses this bull-man in a characteristic doubling of physiognomies, when in Salome with the Head of John the Baptist he sets the dead saint’s head in opposition to the live, cruel face of his killer. 51

Puttfarken, ‘Caravaggio’s “Story of St Matthew”’, p. 163–181.

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Perhaps the most memorable of all these physiognomic oppositions is found in Caravaggio’s David with the head of Goliath (Fig. 21). As his biographer Bellori noted, the slain head was ‘il suo proprio ritratto’, his own self-portrait. It is a version of Caravaggio’s face that brings it far closer to the executioner type than the figure of the artist as witness. It contrasts most strongly with the beautiful and pensive face of David. The very story hinges on a comparison between the two protagonists, a small boy set against a monstrous giant, weak against strong, youth against age, native against foreign, all contrasts that point to the divine virtue given to David in this heroic killing—despite his sorrowful, introspective appearance. Perhaps too much has been made of Caravaggio’s choice to place his own physiognomy into this balancing act on the side of the evil Goliath. It has also been suggested that the figure of David is based on Caravaggio’s self-portrait as well. This is a hypothesis that I agree with, although as in the case of the early figures possibly ‘painted from himself in a mirror’, it may not be amenable to proof. Artistic tradition does support this idea. Many artists had depicted themselves in the form of David, notably Giorgione in the early sixteenth century and, most famously, Bernini in his sculpture of David for the same patron who bought Caravaggio’s painting, Scipione Borghese. But Goliath was rarely if ever portrayed by an artist’s self-portrait. The unusual choice to portray himself very recognizably as Goliath, together with the circumstances of Caravaggio’s later career, combine to make a perfect storm in the scholarship: the painting has been viewed as an outgrowth of the artist’s biography and thus a confessional work. The dating of this painting, too, fed into the problems of its interpretation. Was it made in 1606, either before or after Caravaggio murdered Tomassoni and fled Rome? Or was it made in 1610, perhaps as the penultimate painting before he died, with its imagery of self-decapitation a kind of primitive penance and appeal for clemency?52 I am inclined to think that the painting was made in 1606, based on its similarities to works painted by Caravaggio in Rome, which I won’t rehearse here.53 Even if it was made in 1610, however, it is not necessary to restrict its context to Caravaggio’s biographical circumstances. His artistic rivalries and even his understanding of physiognomy may have played a role in how he conceived of this juxtaposition of faces. Around 1605, the young Guido Reni had arrived in Rome from Bologna and was set up by a patron, Cardinal Sfondrato, to pick an artistic fight with the greatest painter then at work in the city, Caravaggio. Reni painted an altarpiece of The Crucifixion of St. Peter in 1605, which was a response to Caravaggio’s painting of the same subject for the Cerasi Chapel, Sta. Maria del Popolo in 1601–1602. The Bolognese artist subsequently painted his David and Goliath as nearly life-sized, echoing classical sculpture in its idealized figures, but using a version of Caravaggio’s signature chiaroscuro (Fig. 28). His David is an adaptation of the young bravo figures from Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew, stripped 52 Langdon, Caravaggio, p. 384–386, discusses the David and Goliath as one of his final works, and sums up the literature on its role as a pictorial confession and plea for clemency. See also Pacelli, L’ultimo Caravaggio and Calvesi’s entry in Benedetti, Caravaggio, p. 24. 53 The discussion of the 1606 dating in Stone, ‘Self and Myth’, p. 36–46, is detailed and convincing.

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fig. 28: guido Reni. David with the head of Goliath. 1606. oil on canvas. musée du Louvre, paris. © 2018. photo Josse/scala, florence.

to the waist but with a feather in his hat. Anyone who saw Reni’s painting in 1606 would see it as a deliberate appropriation of Caravaggio’s manner, and an effort to correct it through idealization and the overt referencing of antiquity. Modern scholarship has seen Reni’s work as a critical reworking of Caravaggio’s David.54 The relation between the two has been used as evidence that Caravaggio’s painting must have been done by 1606 for Reni to imitate it, rather than being painted in 1610.55 54 Pepper in The Age of Caravaggio, catalogue entry 97. Spear, The Divine Guido, p. 282–288. 55 As in Stone, ‘Self and Myth’.

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However, there is no reason to assume that Caravaggio’s was done first, to be subsequently emulated by Reni. We may tend to assume this because Reni is now thought to be the less important of the two artists. Is it not equally possible that Caravaggio’s David and Goliath is a response to Reni’s idealised David, in which he reasserts his superiority, correcting Reni’s prettified figures by reworking even the dead from life, dal vivo? In David’s face, Caravaggio may build from his own physiognomy toward an effect of greater beauty and virtue, while in Goliath’s he re-imagined his own face in its most physically and morally corrupt state. Perhaps the painting is not a confession of guilt, but rather the representation of two paths, two possibilities that lead on from one physiognomy. There is no doubt that his self-portrait as Goliath was recognized as such, and that it was used to physiognomize the artist. Bellori wrote in summation at the end of his biography, in the section often used by biographers to describe the physical appearance of their subject, that Caravaggio’s manner of painting was in harmony with his physiognomy and appearance: he was dark in colour and his eyes were dark, black his hair and brows, and this also naturally came out in his way of painting.

The fisionomia with which Bellori ends his life of Caravaggio was rarely referred to in his other lives of artists. He went on to say that, in contrast to the early works ‘pure and sweet in colour,’ Caravaggio’s later works ‘fell into a different darkness, driven to it by his temperament, which was disturbed and contentious’. Even his seventeenth-century critics wanted, as so many modern viewers also want, to explain the darkness of Caravaggio’s art through the darkness of the artist.56 I have tried to present the view that Caravaggio’s version of physiognomy was not nearly so determinist. It led him to work from the very specific faces of things and of people, and was part of a larger exploration of how realist painting functions in relation to its viewers. In The Sacrifice of Isaac or Judith and Holofernes, imaging technology showed us that Caravaggio first painted what he saw and then overpainted it with what he imagined. In his version of working dal vivo, the flawed model and the sacred figure it represents can coexist, one below the other. The singular, individual models remain at the origins of Caravaggio’s faces, even when hidden underneath the surface. The perfected upper surface of paint, the image that we face, is a skin stretched over the invisible and sometimes contradictory realm of character and identity.

Works Cited Amendola, Adriano, ‘Jan Brueghel il Vecchio a Roma: Nuove date e qualche proposta per l’identificazione dei rami appartenuti al Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte’, Bollettino d’Arte 96 (2011): 63–74. Aquilecchia, Giovanni, ‘Appunti su G.B. della Porta e l’Inquisizione’, Studi secenteschi 9 (1965): 3–13. Balbiani, Laura. La Magia Naturalis di Giovan Battista della Porta: Lingua, cultura e scienza in Europa all’inizio dell’età moderna (Bern: Lang, 2001). 56 Sohm, ‘Caravaggio’s Deaths’, p. 449–468.

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Barker, Sheila, ‘Poussin, Plague and Early Modern Medicine’, The Art Bulletin 86 (2004): 659–689. Bassani, Riccardo and Fiora Bellini. Caravaggio Assassino: la carriera di un ‘valenthuomo’ fazioso nella Roma della Controriforma (Rome: Donzelli, 1994). Bellori, Giovan Pietro. Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, ed. and trans. Alice and Helmut Wohl (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004). Benedetti, Sergio. Caravaggio, The Master Revealed (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 1993). Bologna, Ferdinando. L’incredulità del Caravaggio e l’esperienza delle ‘cose naturali’ (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1992, 2nd ed. 2006). Brenninkmeyer-de Rooij, Beatrijs, ‘Zeldzame bloemen, fatta tutti del natturel door Jan Brueghel I’, Oud Holland 104 (1990): 218–248. Brusati, Celeste, ‘Stilled Lives: Self-Portraiture and Self-Reflection in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Still-Life Painting’, Simiolus 20 (1990/1991): 168–182. Calvesi, Maurizio. Le Realtà del Caravaggio (Milan: Einaudi, 1990). Calvesi, Maurizio, ‘Caravaggio o la ricerca della salvazione’, Storia dell’Arte 9/10 (1971): 93–143. Campe, Rüdiger, and Manfred Schneider, eds. Geschichte der Physiognomik: Text Bild Wissen (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach Verlag, 1996). Carr, Dawson and Keith Christiansen, eds. Caravaggio: The Final Years (ex. cat. London, National Gallery, 2004). Christiansen, Keith, ‘Caravaggio and “l’Esempio davanti dal Naturale”’, The Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 421–445. Christiansen, Keith, ‘Some observations on the relationship between Caravaggio’s two treatments of the Lute-player’, The Burlington Magazine 132 (1990): 21–26. Christiansen, Keith, ‘Thoughts on the Lombard training of Caravaggio’, in Mina Gregori, ed., Come dipingeva il Caravaggio (Florence, Galleria Palatina, and Rome, Fondazione Memmo, 1996): 7–28. Christiansen, Keith, ‘Caravaggio’s Portrait of Maffeo Barberini in the Palazzo Corsini, Florence’, in Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone, eds., Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions (Farnham: Ashgate 2014): 43–57. Costello, Jane, ‘Caravaggio Lizard and Fruit’, in Art the Ape of Nature, Studies in Honor of Horst Janson, ed. by Moshe Barasch and Lucy Freeman Sandler (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1981): p. 375–385. Cropper, Elizabeth, ‘The Real Studio and the Suffering Model’, in Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrift für Matthias Winner, ed. byVictoria von Flemming and Sebastian Schütze (Mainz am Rhein:, P. von Zabern, 1996): 401–411. Cutler, Lucy, ‘Virtue and Diligence: Jan Brueghel I and Federico Borromeo’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 54 (2003): 202–227. Damisch, Hubert, ‘The Underneaths of Painting’,Word and Image 1 (1985): 197–209. Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille. Caravaggio The Artist and his Work (Los Angeles: Getty Museum Publications, 2012). Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille, ‘Caravaggios Früchtekorb: Das früheste Stilleben?’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 65 (2002): 1–23. Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille. Still Life: A History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999). Enggass, Robert, ‘La Virtù di un Vero Nobile: L’Amore Giustiniani del Caravaggio’, Palatino 11 (1967): 13–20. Enggass, Robert, and Jonathan Brown. Italy and Spain 1600–1759, Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970). Facchinetti Simone, and Arturo Galansino, Giovanni Battista Moroni (ex. cat. London, Royal Academy of Arts, 2014). Franklin, David, and Sebastian Schütze. Caravaggio and his Followers in Rome (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011). Fried, Michael. The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Friedlaender, Walter. Caravaggio Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955). Frommel, Christoph Liutpold, ‘Caravaggio und seine Modelle’, Castrum Peregrini 96 (1971): 21–56. Gage, Frances. Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016).

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Gage, Frances, ‘Illness, Invention and Truth in Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin’, in Gifts in Return: Essays in Art in Honor of Charles Dempsey, ed. by Melinda Schlitt, (Toronto: Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012): 337–362. Gilbert, Creighton. Caravaggio and his Two Cardinals (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). Giustiniani, Vincenzo, ‘Vincenzo Giustiniani al signor Teodort Amideno’, [Letter on Painting to Teodoro Ameyden], in Raccolta di Lettere sulla Pittura, ed. by Giovanni G. Bottari, 6 vols., (Milan: Per Giovanni Silvestri, 1822) 6, p. 121. Gregori, Mina, ed. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: Come nascono i capolavori (ex. cat. Florence, Palazzo Pitti, and Rome, Palazzo Ruspoli 1991). Gregori, Mina, La Natura Morta al tempo di Caravaggio (ex. cat. Rome, Musei Capitolini,1995). Gregori, Mina, Luigi Salerno, and Richard E. Spear, eds. The Age of Caravaggio (ex. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985). Gregori, Mina, ‘Caravaggio Today’, in The Age of Caravaggio (ex. cat. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1985): 28–48. Gregory, Sharon, ‘Caravaggio and Vasari’s Lives’, Artibus et Historiae 32 (2011): 167–191. Grimm, Günter, ‘Caravaggios Evangelist Matthäus und der Sokrates Giustiniani’, Antike Welt 30 (1999): 253–262. Heimbürger, Minna, ‘Interpretazioni delle pitture di genere del Caravaggio secondo il metodo neerlandese’, Paragone 41 (1990): 3–18. Hermann Fiore, Kristina, ‘Caravaggio’s Taking of Christ and Dürer’s Woodcut of 1509’, The Burlington Magazine 137 (1995): 24–27. Hermann Fiore, Kristina, ‘Il Bacchino Malato autoritratto del Caravaggio ed altre figure bacchiche degli artisti’, Caravaggio: Nuove riflessioni, Quaderni di Palazzo Venezia 6 (1989): 95–132. Honig, Elizabeth Alice. Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press 2016). Keith, Larry, ‘Caravaggio’s Painting Technique: A Brief Survey Based on Three Paintings in the National Gallery, London’, in Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions ed. by Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone (Farnham: Ashgate 2014): 31–42. Langdon, Helen. Caravaggio: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998). Langdon, Helen. The Lives of Caravaggio by Giulio Mancini, Giovanni Baglione and Giovanni Bellori (London: Pallas Athene, 2005). Lavin, Irving, ‘Divine Inspiration in Caravaggio’s Two St. Matthews’,The Art Bulletin 56 (1974): 59–81. Macioce, Stefania, and Enrico de Pascale, eds. La Musica al Tempo di Caravaggio (Rome: Gangemi, 2012). Mahon, Denis, ‘The Singing Lute-player by Caravaggio from the Barberini Collection, painted for Cardinal Del Monte’, The Burlington Magazine 132 (1990): 4–20. Mancini, Giulio. Considerazioni sulla pittura, 2 vols., eds. Adriana Marucchi and Luigi Salerno (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1956–1957). Marini, Maurizio, ‘Un ignoto aiuto del Caravaggio in Roma’, Antologia di Belle Arti 19/20 (1981): 180–183. Melion, Walter. Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Orsi, Laura. Giovan Battista della Porta (1537–1614). His Works on Natural Magic, Oeconomy, and Physiognomy (PhD diss., Warburg Institute, University of London, 1997). Ostrow, Steven, ‘Caravaggio’s Angels’, in Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions ed. by Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone (Farnham: Ashgate 2014): 123–148. Pacelli, Vincenzo. L’ultimo Caravaggio: Dalla Maddalena a mezza figura ai due san Giovanni (1606–1610) (Todi: Ediart, 1995). Paleotti, Gabriele. Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582) ed. Stefano della Torre; trans. Gian Franco Freguglia. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Cad & Wellness 2002). Paliaga, Franco. Natura in vetro: studi sulla caraffa di fiori di Caravaggio (Rome: De Luca 2012). Papi, Gianni. Cecco del Caravaggio (Florence: Opus Libri, 1992, and Soncino: Edizioni dei Soncino, 2001). Papi, Gianni, ‘Caravaggio e Cecco’, in Come dipingeva il Caravaggio ed. Mina Gregori (Florence, Galleria Palatina, and Rome, Fondazione Memmo, 1996): 123–134.

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Pericolo, Lorenzo. Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative: Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting (London: Harvey Miller, 2011). Porta, Giovanni Battista della. De Hvmana Physiognomia: libri IIII. (Vici Aequensis: Cacchius, 1586). Porta, Giovanni Battista della. Della fisonomia dell’huomo (Naples: Tarquinio Longo,1598). Porter, Martin. Windows of the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture 1470–1780 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Puglisi, Catherine. Caravaggio (London: Phaidon, 1998). Puttfarken, Thomas, ‘Caravaggio’s “Story of St Matthew”: A Challenge to the Conventions of Painting’, Art History 21 (1998): 163–181. Röttgen, Herwarth. Il Caravaggio: Ricerche e interpretazioni (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974). Schmölders, Claudia. Das Vorurteil im Leibe: Einleitung in die Physiognomik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995). Scribner III, Charles, ‘In Alia Effigie: Caravaggio’s London Supper at Emmaus’, The Art Bulletin 59 (1977): 375-338. Slatkes, Leonard, ‘Caravaggio’s Painting of the Sanguine Temperament’, Actes du XXIIe Congrès International d’Histoire de l’Art (Budapest:Akademiai Kiado,1972) 3 vols., II, 17–24. Slim, H. Colin, ‘Musical Inscriptions in Paintings by Caravaggio and his Followers’, in Music and Context: Essays for John M. Ward (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Department of Music, 1985): 241–263. Slim, H. Colin. Painting Music in the Sixteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Sohm, Philip, ‘Caravaggio’s Deaths’, The Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 449–468. Spear, Richard. The Divine Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). Spear, Richard, ‘Caravaggiomania’, Art in America 98 (2010): 116–125. Spezzaferro, Luigi. Caravaggio (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana, 2010). Spicer, Joaneath, ‘The Naer Het Leven Drawings, by Pieter Bruegel or Roelandt Savery?’, Master Drawings 8 (1971): 3–30; 63–82. Stone, David M., and Lorenzo Pericolo, eds. Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions (London and New York: Ashgate, 2014). Stone, David M., ‘Caravaggio Betrayals’, in Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions ed. David M. Stone and Lorenzo Pericolo (London and New York: Ashgate, 2014): 13–30. Stone, David M., ‘Self and Myth in Caravaggio’s David and Goliath’, in Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception, ed. by Genevieve Warwick (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006): 36–46. Terzaghi, Maria Cristina, ‘Caravaggio tra copie e rifiuti,’ Paragone 59 (2008): 32–71. Teza, Laura. Caravaggio e il frutto della virtù. Il «Mondafrutto» e l’accademia degli Insensati (Milan: Electa, 2013). Trinchieri Camiz, Franca, ‘Music and Poetry in Cardinal del Monte’s Household’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 213–216. Trinchieri Camiz, Franca, ‘Per prima cosa guarda la lira, per vedere se è dipinta correttamente’, in La Natura Morta al tempo di Caravaggio (Naples: Electa, 1995): 75–79. Trinchieri Camiz, Franca, ‘The Castrato Singer, From Informal to Formal Portraiture’, Artibus et Historiae 18 (1988): 171–86. Trinchieri Camiz, Franca, and Agostino Ziino, ‘Caravaggio: aspetti musicali e committenza’, Studi musicali 12 (1983): 72–74. Trinchieri Camiz, Franca, and Agostino Ziino, ‘La musica nei dipinti di Caravaggio’, in Caravaggio: Nuove riflessioni. Quaderni di Palazzo Venezia 6 (1989): 198–221. Varriano, John. Caravaggio: The Art of Realism (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). Vredeveld, Harry, ‘“That Familiar Proverb”: Folly as the Elixir of Youth in Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium’, Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 78–91. Welzel, Barbara, ‘Wettstreit zwischen Kunst und Natur. Die Blumenstilleben von Jan Brueghel d.Ä. als Triumph des Bildes’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 65 (2002): 325–342. Wiemers, Michael, ‘Caravaggios Amore Vincitore im Urteil eines Romfahrers um 1650’, Pantheon 44 (1986): 51–61. Wittkower, Margot and Rudolf. Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (New York: Random House, 1963).

2.

Jacques Callot, Drawing Dal Vivo in 1620: Commerce in Florence, Piracy on the High Seas

Abstract In Florence during the early years of the Seicento, the Medici court prized Flemish art and the practice of drawing from life. Jacques Callot, the young printmaker from Lorraine, and his friend Filippo Napoletano from Naples, were encouraged to represent court festivities and local topographies in direct confrontation with their models outside in the streets of the city. They entered into friendly competition with each other and with other court artists, to produce artistry that would amuse the ailing Grand Duke Cosimo II. Their eye-witnessing was also put to the service of publicising political successes, such as Tuscany’s victories over the Barbary pirates ravaging Mediterranean coasts and the Grand Duchy’s regulation of urban commerce. Keywords: market scenes, Michelangelo Buonarrotti the Younger, espionage in art, Ottoman Turks in Florence, drawing albums, Giulio Parigi

The etchings of Jacques Callot (1591–1635) won him fame across seventeenth-century Europe, far beyond the boundaries of his native duchy of Lorraine, a state now absorbed into eastern France. He was, with Rembrandt, among the most famous printmakers of the century, whose impact was enormous on subsequent prints but also on every aspect of the visual arts. His career spanned cultures and countries. Callot grew up within Lorraine’s heterogeneous court society of French, Flemish and German speakers. His father held the position of herald at court in Nancy and was also a painter of heraldry for the court and the city.1 In Callot’s childhood a number of artists and skilled craftsmen socialized with his father. However, just as Claude Lorrain was to do a decade later, Callot left his native Nancy to travel southward to Italy for his artistic education. In Rome he learned to engrave in the workshop of a Frenchman, Philippe Thomassin. His Florentine biographer Filippo Baldinucci tells us that 1 Bruwaert, La Vie, p. 15–24, gives a detailed account drawn from documents in Nancy’s archives of the ennoblement of Callot’s father and the social context of his family. Bruwaert’s biography is at times careless of documentation and should be taken with caution. For modern literature on the career of Jacques Callot: Wolfthal and Woodall, Princes and Paupers; Choné, Jacques Callot; Russell, Jacques Callot; Ternois, Jacques Callot, as well as his L’Art de Jacques Callot and Jacques Callot; Ternois, ‘Callot et son temps’, p. 249–252. McTighe, S., Representing from Life in Seventeenth-century Italy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi: 10.5117/ 9789462983281_ch02

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Callot was then drawn to the Medici court by the fame of the architect and engineer Giulio Parigi’s teachings at his scuola on the via Maggio.2 Moving to Florence where he remained from 1612 to 1621, and working for the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici from 1614, he made etchings for the most brilliant court in Europe at the time. The crowning achievement of his art in this period, for which he received the gold chain of honour from Cosimo II, was his very large etching The Fair at Impruneta (Fig. 29). It was a hugely influential image, across Europe and among both artn ists and collectors during the decades that followed. In general, the subjects of the prints he began producing in Florence, and then continued to print in Nancy, caught the imagination of the public: peasants and pageantry, dwarfs and comic dancers, markets, feast days, gypsies and the rag-tag crowds of beggars that populated the margins of cities. He depicted novel subjects, but he also used novel techniques. In this chapter I want to address Callot’s practice of realism, focusing on his biographer’s claim that he drew dal vivo, from life. We will see in the case of Callot that the eye-witnessing, authenticating function of work done from life had a courtly and political context. Within that context, the small-scale and less formal media of drawing and printmaking took on the status of finished, highly prized works of art, not so much subordinate to the medium of painting as able to surpass it in courtly effects. Callot learned in Florence to sketch out of doors, in crowds of people who were not posed but were instead captured informally within their own ambience. Many of the surviving red chalk drawings in this vein seem to have come from a single sketchbook, now dismembered. Their freshness of observation, and their very small scale, typify Callot’s Florentine experiments in drawing from life (Fig. 30). Callot may have been aware that the Carracci carried sketchbooks on the streets of Bologna in the 1590s to record scenes from daily life. In Florence between 1610 and 1620, however, there was a different context for this practice. Florentines had a taste for Northern naturalism, particularly in small landscapes with figures, and both Ferdinando I and Cosimo II de’ Medici invited Flemish artists such as Matthias Bril to work in Florence. They also collected works by Dutch and Flemish artists living elsewhere. It was in this context that Callot began drawing directly from the live model around 1616, and during the same year he also began to draw cityscapes and landscapes on site. Callot’s drawing from life has sometimes been discussed in terms of his progressive mastery of naturalism, which is only partly true.3 His figures for the 1617 series of etchings called Capricci di diverse figure, for example (which will be the subject of the 2 Baldinucci, ‘Notizie di Jacopo Callot’, p. 372–390. 3 Ternois, L’Art; p. 122–125, has an insightful discussion of the evolution of Callot as draftsman during his last three years in Florence, stressing the variety of graphic means at his disposal. However, his statement on p.16 about the Capricci series as divided between earlier mannerism and later naturalism is problematic: ‘plusieurs mois, deux années peut-être, ont séparé la composition des différentes pieces, car on remarque au moins deux styles qui s’opposent l’un à l’autre, l’un maniériste, l’autre plus naturel’. Ternois here, and throughout his work, seems to downplay the relationship between the subjects Callot was depicting and his graphic vocabulary.

fig. 29: Jacques callot. The Fair at Impruneta. 1620. etching. open access, cleveland museum of art.

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fig. 30: Jacques callot. sketch of figures outside, drawn from life: two women spinning yarn. c. 1617. Red chalk and graphite on paper. open access, the metropolitan museum.

next chapter) are sometimes highly stylized and sometimes very naturalistic, but not necessarily because they date to earlier or later phases of the etcher’s acquisition of skills. A peasant in a landscape in this 1617 work looks different to a commedia dell’arte performer or an elegant courtier because Callot aligned effects of the ‘natural’ with different types of subject, to different ends. In Callot’s Florentine masterpiece, the large etching of The Fair at Impruneta made in 1620, the sheer number of different figures depicted in the marketplace masks the various degrees of naturalism and artifice in their portrayal. This naturalness is all the more astonishing given the miniature scale at which the figures were drawn. Seemingly made with a magnifying lens (and Galileo’s lenses and telescopes were an important cultural treasure in Florence), these forms still astonish us with their detail when blown up to larger scale.4 We know that Callot used and reused his 1616–1620 red chalk sketches from life, inserting the figures, miniaturised, several times into crowd scenes in the Impruneta print. One effect that the print seems to seek from a reliance on the live model is precisely this great variety of human types and a similar variety of artistic means used to capture them.

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Two artists who worked alongside Callot at the court in Florence entered into friendly rivalry in the area of drawing or painting from life, perhaps at the instigation of their princely patron, Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici. The draftsman Remigio Cantagallina, who worked alongside Callot to record Medici pageants from about 1615, sketched Impruneta’s fair several times from various viewpoints and with varying emphasis on topography or human activities. The painting of the Fair at Impruneta by Filippo Napoletano (c. 1587–1629), a work usually dated to 1618–1619, represents the same village church and its annual market for cattle and pottery, but it inserts portraits of the Grand Duke and his court, as well as a self-portrait, into the array of figures on display (Fig. 31). Filippo’s painting of the fair was presented as made from life, dal naturale, in an alla prima attack on the canvas, without any preparatory drawings. The recently rediscovered large drawing by Jacques Stella of The Fair at Prato, made around 1619–1620 during the French artist’s stay in Florence, could have been conceived as pendant to Callot’s etching and uses some of the same motifs (Fig. 32). Thus within a short period of time in Florence all of these artists produced encyclopaedic images of a market, in three different media of etching, painting, and drawing. Their similar subjects were probably not the result of coincidence. In Florence, working dal vivo from the same or similar models seems to have been made into a courtly and competitive game, an issue to which we will return. Callot’s drawings show that he sketched the topography of Impruneta several times from direct observation on the site, over several years of work. A drawing from early in the process, now in Florence, shows us the juxtaposition of faint but firm topographic drawing in graphite, rendering the church and distinctive site at the top of the sheet, with the masses of figures attending the fair rendered with more vivid but minimal strokes of the pencil at the bottom (Fig. 33). The combination of working dal vivo and working in the studio is made clear in this sketch, but subtler gradations from plein-air work to imaginary reconstitution can be found in most of his preparatory sketches. Judging from the number of drawings that survive today in Florence, and their variations on the composition of the landscape, he seems to have frequently travelled the day’s journey to Impruneta, to study the site at first hand. Callot and his fellow draftsmen in Florence were surely aware of the prized status of topographic views in the realm of cartography, collected by many viewers who would never travel to the sites depicted. They were also undoubtedly aware of the Netherlandish practices of working ad vivum or naer het leven, that is, in the presence of the model, a term that had become quite popular after 1600, frequently appended to Dutch landscape prints. The fashion for making drawings of journeys through landscapes naer het leven was part of the revival of Pieter Bruegel’s art at the turn of the seventeenth century. Bruegel’s trip through the Alps in the 1550s was played up by the writer and artist Karel van Mander in his 1606 publication on Netherlandish artists, where he famously said that Bruegel ‘vomited forth’ the Alps onto paper.

fig. 31: filippo napoletano. The Fair at Impruneta. oil on canvas. 1618–1619. galleria palatina, palazzo pitti, florence. © 2013. photo scala archive, courtesy of the ministero Beni e att. culturali.

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fig. 32: Jacques stella. The Fair at Prato. c. 1618–1619. Drawing. ashmolean museum, oxford. © ashmolean museum, university of oxford.

fig. 33: Jacques callot. study for The Fair at Impruneta. c. 1617. Drawing. florence, museo degli uffizi. © Kunsthistorisches institut in florenz. photo ivo Bazzechi.

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Bruegel’s art was popular in the court in Florence, and the practice of drawing views dal vivo there also received some impetus from the afterlife of his landscapes. The prints after Bruegel’s kermess scenes were certainly a source of inspiration for the Fair scenes by Callot, Filippo Napoletano and Jacques Stella. The link between early seventeenth-century artists emulating Brueghel and the realism of Callot, however, is that both were appreciated within court culture, with its emphasis on wit and complexity. The practice of making a Bruegel-like ‘draftsman’s voyage’, depicting the unfolding experience naer het leven or dal vivo, arose around 1610 as part of a Bruegel revival. At the court in Florence it is clear that there was a political as well as a cultural value given to such drawn journeys. It is this combination of realist practice and political need that I want to explore through Callot’s drawings from life.

Jacques Callot and drawing in Florence Callot’s biographer Filippo Baldinucci stressed that Callot learned how to draw dal naturale or dal vivo, from Giulio Parigi while he worked in Florence. This new lesson in drawing from first-hand observation has implications for our understanding of Callot’s entire oeuvre, not just his Fair at Impruneta. However, I want to approach the particular type of realism Callot adopts in the Impruneta scene through juxtaposing it with a rather more obscure object. Housed in the British Museum today is an album of small drawings. The album has an old attribution to Jacques Callot, and one of its early owners pasted into its binding Abraham Bosse’s printed tribute to Callot, which Bosse made in 1636 just after Callot’s death. Forty-five drawings in pen and ink, red chalk, and watercolour, mounted on thirty-seven pages, were evidently taken from a sketchbook and bound together to form a series within an album. The subjects depicted are Mediterranean ports and coastal views (Figs. 34 and 35), rendered as views taken from a ship at sea, and also a bird’s-eye view in two images that, put together, constitute a topographic view of the north African port of Cercelli (Figs. 36 and 37). The inscriptions give the location of almost all the subjects, and the precise dates on most of the sketches inform us that they were drawn between the middle of August and early October of the year 1620. Daniel Ternois, who catalogued Callot’s drawings, rejected these twice over from Callot’s oeuvre, first seeing them as produced by a clumsy beginner and an artist of no skill, and then later also dismissing them as the work of Albert Flamen, a late seventeenth-century Flemish emulator and copyist of Callot.5 Neither of those two 5 Ternois, Jacques Callot, p. 15: ‘il est vrai que ce carnet porte la date de 1620, mais c’est visiblement l’oeuvre d’un débutant’, and ‘en réalité il s’agit d’une imitation, postérieure à Callot’. Ternois also suggested the drawings were the work of Albert Flamen, a late seventeenth-century draftsman who made topographic views. Comparison of the album’s drawings with those of Flamen shows, however, little resemblance in draftsmanship, and only the broadest similarity based on the conventions of topographic views.

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fig. 34: attributed to circle of giulio parigi (formerly attributed to Jacques callot). san marco d’allunzio. 1620. Drawing with watercolour from album of mediterranean sketches. British museum Dept. of prints and Drawings, London. © trustees of the British museum.

fig. 35: attributed to circle of giulio parigi (formerly attributed to Jacques callot). “milazzo in sicilia”. 1620. Drawing with watercolour from album of mediterranean sketches. British museum Dept. of prints and Drawings, London. © trustees of the British museum.

assertions can be correct. The drawings themselves show every sign of having been produced by a very accomplished draftsman, with an effortless abbreviation of forms, often using eccentric viewpoints and complex compositions. And, as we will see, circumstantial evidence from Florentine documents suggests that the series of drawings came from within the milieu of Jacques Callot in Florence during 1620. I will argue that this album of Mediterranean drawings can with high probability be attributed to the circle of Callot’s Florentine mentor, Giulio Parigi (1571–1635), the architect, engineer, and theatrical impresario for Medici festivities in Florence. Recent research raises the possibility that we can identify the artist with greater

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fig. 36: attribured to circle of giulio parigi (formerly attributed to Jacques callot). view of port of cercelli, right side. 1620. Drawing with watercolour from album of mediterranean sketches. British museum Dept. of prints and Drawings, London. © trustees of the British museum.

fig. 37: attributed to giulio parigi. view of san Quirico, 11 april 1616. 1616. Drawing from an album depicting a voyage in tuscany. getty Research institute, Los angeles. photo courtesy getty Research institute.

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Fig. 38: Attributed to circle of Giulio Parigi., formerly attributed to Jacques Callot. View of a coastal town. 1620. drawing. British Museum dept. of Prints and drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

accuracy as another of Parigi’s students, the engineer and draftsman Cesare Antoniacci.6 An album of drawings with an old attribution to Giulio Parigi, very closely related to the drawings of Antoniacci, represents a voyage from Tuscany to Rome in the spring of 1616. Now in the Getty collection, this album of travel sketches shows a profound similarity to the album of sketches in the British Museum album. The ‘handwriting’ of Parigi’s or Antoniacci’s pen and ink view of San Quirico from the Getty album is very close to that of the artist who penned the view of a coastal town from the 1620 voyage (Figs. 38 and 39). However, Parigi’s attractive, calligraphic penrwork was handed on to his apprentices at the scuola on the via Maggio in Florence. In the present state of our knowledge of Parigi and his circle, it is hard to distinguish his hand from that of his student Cesare Antoniacci, whose work has only recently been rediscovered.7 Several of Parigi’s pupils, not only Antoniacci but Ercole Bazzicaluu va and Remigio Cantagallina, became engineers and were employed by the Medici court for their skills at topographic landscapes and mapping. First, though, why should we bother studying this so-called Callot album? The small scenes of seaside towns may seem merely charming at first sight. On closer view, they depict the most dangerous coastlines in the known world in the year 6 Giulio Parigi’s activities as architect and theatre designer are better studied than his work as a draftsman, on which there is almost nothing written. See Berti, Giulio e Alfonso Parigi; Linnenkamp, ‘Giulio Parigi’, p. 51–63; Nagler, Theatre Festivities; Blumenthal, Giulio Parigi’s Designs; Baroni, ‘A scuola d’incisione’, p. 88–93. 7 Rinaldi, ‘Cesare Antoniacci’, p. 335–354. Thanks to Stefano Rinaldi for his thoughtful responses to my query about the authorship of the British Museum album of Mediterranean drawings. We are in agreement that Parigi’s students’ topographic drawings were so close to Parigi’s manner that it is best to exercise caution in the attribution of this album to Antoniacci. We agree that the draftsman of the British Museum album is very close to that of the album at the Getty Research Institute now attributed to Giulio Parigi. Thanks to Dr. Ketty Gottardo for signalling the appearance of Rinaldi’s study, which sheds much light on the material in this chapter.

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fig. 39: Remigio cantagallina. the fair at impruneta. c. 1615. Drawing. open access, national gallery of art, Washington, D.c.

1620, under continuous attack by Muslim corsairs, the dreaded Barbary pirates. At this time, the Maghreb region was under Ottoman rule, and was known as the Barbary coast. Algiers, Tunis and the smaller ports along the Mediterranean coast were fortified strongholds for fleets preying on Mediterranean shipping and capturing Europeans to serve as slaves or for ransom money.8 Italian, French and Spanish ships returned the favour; Muslim slave labour fueled the galleys of west European states. The draftsman of the British Museum’s album has annotated many of the views with information about the effects of recent incursions, such as the depiction of San Marco d’Allunzio, attacked by Turkish ships from Algiers and Biserta in 1619 with great loss of life (Fig. 34). In his view of the Sicilian port of Milazzo, and in several other views in the album, the draftsman has depicted cannon-fire between a European galley and two Barbary ships (Fig. 35). To have studied such scenes from life was not likely to happen on just any journey. The artist who depicted these coasts went on a perilous circuit of the western Mediterranean. The danger involved puts into 8 Tinniswood, Pirates of Barbary; Weiss, Captives and Corsairs. Among primary sources on Mediterranean piracy and the enslavement of Europeans, see Dan, Histoire; Button, Algiers Voyage.

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high relief what value was placed on drawing dal vivo while on a journey. The British Museum drawings shed light on this practice in Florence, while also illustrating the practice of creating albums of drawings that were united around the concept of a voyage in time and space. Ultimately, this practice and its context in Florence will shed light on Callot’s Fair at Impruneta, completed in 1620, the same year in which the Mediterranean album was made. Drawing with the model constantly before one’s eyes had long had a role in Florentine workshops.9 But there is a new value given to it in the years after about 1610, in the workshops of painters but especially in the realm of topographic draftsmanship, which we can see reflected in the drawings Callot made while he lived and worked there. Pen and ink over graphite sketches, and red chalk drawings from about 1616–1617 show Callot working from posed models. He often placed two figures on a sketchbook page, and frequently posed them in profile. A number of these sketches from life remained in his workshop in Florence when he left the city in 1621 (Fig. 30). More spontaneous-seeming red chalk drawings made between 1617 and 1620 depict un-posed models, sketched rapidly at outdoor gatherings, in groups and often seated on the ground. Many of these seem to have come from one sketchbook, with the majority of them now found in the Hermitage Museum. Callot inserted numerous figures from this group of drawings into both of the great prints of 1619–1620, The Fan and The Fair at Impruneta. At the same time, Callot had to learn the skill of topographic drawing from actual sites, for his work on print publications that recorded the magnificence of Florence’s festivities, which had been designed and orchestrated by the architect Giulio Parigi. From the sketchy urban settings of his festival prints such as the War of Love in 1616 to the more complex settings of his final Florentine masterpieces, such as The Fan and The Fair at Impruneta, Callot needed to depict the recognizable face of Florence and its surroundings. In these prints a vividly observed depiction of human bodies in crowds and a topographic rendering of their environment come together in one virtuoso image. How Callot came by his new Florentine skills at drawing from life is a story told by both of his seventeenth-century biographers. The French historian, André Félibien, thought that Callot was first trained in Florence by Remigio Cantagallina (1582– 1656), a Tuscan draftsman who specialised in topographic landscape drawings.10 9 The practice of life drawing in sixteenth-century Florence has recently been discussed by Pierguidi, ‘Vasari, Borghini’, p. 171–174; Brooks, ‘Drawing in Florence’. 10 Félibien, Entretiens, 3, p. 367. Félibien placed Callot’s initial training with Cantagallina during a youthful attempt to run away from Nancy to Italy, not during the years 1612–1622 when the artist is documented as working in Florence. Félibien’s text is roughly contemporary with the life written by the Florentine Filippo Baldinucci, as in note 12 below, but there is no evidence that the two authors were aware of each other’s accounts. The French royal historiographer is thought to have gotten his information from Israël Henriet, Callot’s close friend and publisher in Paris, while Baldinucci knew only of Callot’s Florentine years, relying on two Italian acquaintances of the artist for his information.

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Before Callot arrived in Florence, Remigio Cantagallina was producing etchings of Medici festivities, a job that Callot would take on in 1616. According to Félibien, it was Cantagallina who introduced Callot to the workshop and informal scuola or technical school of Giulio Parigi, the great impresario and architect, master of engineering, surveying and geometry. Topographic realism called on different skills than drawing the figure from life, particularly some form of linear perspective to render architecture and the measured recession of land masses into deep space. Callot and Cantagallina both would have practiced these technical skills in the entourage of Giulio Parigi, with whom they both collaborated to produce prints of theatrical settings. In 1616, both men etched scenes for the pamphlet commemorating the War of Love pageant orchestrated by Parigi. And before Callot’s earliest studies of Impruneta, Cantagallina had made highly finished topographic drawings of the site (Fig. 39). There are no documents that corroborate Félibien’s statement that Remigio Cantagallina was the teacher of Callot, and we know now that Cantagallina was absent from Florence during 1612 and 1613, when Callot first settled there. In fact, Cantagallina was on a long voyage during those years. He left Florence for the Lowlands, perhaps travelling in the entourage of a Flemish nobleman named Alexandre de Bournonville, who was returning home from a visit to the Tuscan court.11 In the north, the artist created numerous topographic drawings of Flemish sites, some inscribed with commentary about the place and buildings in the depiction, and often dated. The finished album comprised one hundred fifty-five views of Brussels and its environs, with the drawings were mounted in chronological order, forming a visual diary of Cantagallina’s voyage. Cantagallina’s View of the Couvent St.-Pierre with the Hal Gate and an artist sketching is typical of his topographic views at this time (Fig. 40).12 Frequently on two sheets glued together to form a long rectangular surface, Cantagallina’s sketches place the Flemish city or village along the horizon line in the middle distance, framing the scene in the foreground with ornamental trees. Each drawing is set off by a neatly drawn frame, and many bear an inscription at the top of the sheet with the name of the site. The drawings often, as in this image, underscore their claim to be made from life by the inclusion of a draftsman at work in the foreground (whose semiotic and rhetorical role we will examine more closely in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5). Together or separately, these two elements of written inscription and drawn draftsman were indicators to the viewer that the drawing had the status of trustworthy visual evidence, having been represented from life. Both motifs had a longer history, going back to the mid-sixteenth century, when Flemish artists began to draw topographic views of cities for inclusion in atlases. The best example of this is the work of Joris Hoefnagel for the great sixteenth-century 11 12

Houtekeete and de Smedt, ‘Remigio Cantagallina’, p. 212–214. See also Goldschmidt, Le vieux Bruxelles. Rinaldi, ‘Il Viaggio in Fiandre di Remigio Cantagallina’.

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fig. 40: Remigio cantagallina. view of the convent of st.-pierre and the hal gate, Brussels. 1613. Drawing. musées Royaux des Beaux-arts de Belgique. © RmfaB, Brussels/ photo: J. geleyns – art photography photo musées Royaux de Belgique.

atlas of Braun and Hogenberg, the Civitates Orbis Terrarum published in Antwerp in six volumes from 1572 to 1617. In Hoefnagel’s cityscapes we can see the type of topographic view Cantagallina emulated, down to the inscription at top or bottom with the name of the site, and the frequent inclusion of the figure of a draftsman at work. This was a genre strongly associated with Flemish artistry, so there is a logic to Cantagallina’s adoption of this mode while on his journey to the north. Like some of Hoefnagel’s city views, the townscapes drawn by Cantagallina often include kermesses and local feast days. In this, too, Cantagallina was following in the vein of humanist geography and chorography seen in the Braun and Hogenberg atlas. The drawings document the characteristic activities of the inhabitants, so foreign to the Tuscan artist visiting a new land. There is, however, one way in which Cantagallina’s work during his Brussels sojourn differs from the atlas precedent. He not only inscribed the name of the site on the sheet, but often put the exact date on which the drawing was made. The album’s chronological order then made it not only a geographic record of various towns, but a record of a journey taken over time. As an artefact, the album forms a visual diary, but also a virtual journey, which might allow the viewer to recreate mentally the artist’s movement through time and space. From this point in time up to the end of his career, Cantagallina seems to have created albums of landscape drawings that were thus joined together by the theme of the voyage. The records brought back from his travels were poised between the pleasures of artistry and the demands of knowledge. This is precisely the type of drawing that was fashionable at several European courts at the time. Exactly when Cantagallina returned to Florence is not known, but the next dated drawings by him are from 1615, and they depict the town of Impruneta just a few miles from Florence. Among these sketches are a large and highly finished drawing of the church and its annual Fair, and it is squared for transfer, which might mean it was made in preparation for a print. Sketched five years before Callot’s etching of

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fig. 41: Remigio cantagallina. view of pratieghi. 1616. Drawing. British museum Dept. of prints and Drawings, London. © trustees of the British museum.

The Fair at Impruneta, Cantagallina’s composition resembles Callot’s, with a topographic view enclosing a lively rendering of market activity. However, there is no known printed impression of Cantagallina’s version. It was either a print project that was aborted, or perhaps was never meant for print. In the majority of his work, the Tuscan draftsman’s sketches were not made as preparation for prints. Cantagallina did etch, particularly for the purpose of recording Medici festivities in Florence, and he made an early series of six landscape etchings in 1603.13 However, prints by him are the smaller part of his oeuvre. His drawings were usually an artistic end in themselves. Cantagallina’s view reveals his characteristic way of composing his topographic landscapes, balancing the recognisable site in the distance with foreground framing motifs that are artificial, even formulaic. Another pen, ink and wash drawing by Cantagallina gives a sense of how codified this type of topographic landscape became for Tuscan artists between 1610 and 1620 (Fig. 41). It depicts a place called Pratieghi, as the inscription at the top of the sheet informs us. Its composition frames the rural view with architectural structures, just as the framing tree is used in his view of Impruneta. Again, he emphatically darkens the forms nearest the viewer with vigorous pen-work, particularly in the ornamental frilled foliage. The pen marks indicating the middle distance grow progressively lighter and more delicate in touch, opening up the space to the far hills. In the Pratieghi view, foreground figures evoke both the world of work and of travel, with 13

Negro Spina, ‘Le incisioni’, p. 403–411.

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fig. 42: Jacques callot. The Fan. 1619. etching. open access, metropolitan museum, new york.

a saddled horse being watered at a trough, while to one side men look down at cut masonry at their feet; beside them the artist has inscribed on a stone the date 1616. The drawing is a record of a particular place and its people, similar in that sense to Cantagallina’s Brussels views. The un-naturalistic frilled lobes and parallel strokes used to indicate clumps of foliage, in the trees so prominently placed in the foreground, seem consciously juxtaposed to the sober accuracy of the topography. Though more subtle, it is not unlike the contrast achieved by Callot in the ornate and ornamental frame of his The Fan, juxtaposed to the naturalism of the Florentine view it encloses (Fig. 42). The formula for creating topographic views began with the artist determining the spatial recession of the depiction. In the vast majority of topographic drawings, this entailed using a simple system of bifocal perspective: the artist would place a horizon line, and then draw orthogonals not to a centric point but to two ‘distance points’ along the horizon line, or (very commonly) at the points where the horizon line intersects the edge of the sheet or canvas. (Bifocal perspective and its use in topographic views will be discussed further in Chapter 4.) Typically, the diamond-shaped grid these orthogonals created favoured the depiction of topography or buildings receding along a steep diagonal in one or two directions. And typically, such a perspective

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structure left a blank area, or blind zone, at top and bottom of the image. It was extremely common for these areas to then be elaborated, perhaps later in the artist’s workshop, with the insertion of figures and of imagined motifs. The result was this dialogue of opposites, between the topographic image with its recognizable reality, and the framing motifs around it, which are often the product of fantasy. Callot’s topographic views apparently follow the same procedure, and he utilizes the same divided structure: the highly naturalistic view dal vivo in the center, and artifice and invention displaced to the margins, turned into framing motifs. Filippo Baldinucci’s Notizie dei professori del Disegno, published in Florence in 1681, gives a different account of Callot’s Florentine training to that of André Félibien, substituting the influence of Giulio Parigi for that of Cantagallina. Baldinucci asserted that Callot was first attracted away from Rome to the court at Florence by the reputation of Parigi. The great impresario then nurtured Callot’s talent, but noticed that his figures were mannered and false.14 He struggled to teach Callot a truer method of imitation: ʻhe did not stop trying to persuade him to draw more and more from life’, and thus conoscere le ultime perfezioni del vero, ‘to know the ultimate perfections of [drawing] the truth’.15 Baldinucci first clearly relates this practice of life drawing with study of the human figure, or as he put it ʻsmall figures, groups, and anecdotes.’16 But then he notes that Parigi’s workshop also introduced Callot to the other subject of dal vivo representation: the vaghissimi paesaggi, or beautiful landscapes, as Baldinucci calls them, that Parigi and Cantagallina had begun to create at this time. The recent reappearance of the album of drawings attributed to Giulio Parigi but also strikingly close to the handwriting of his pupil Antoniacci, purchased in 2015 by the Getty Museum, allows us to compare Parigi-school. draftsmanship with that of Callot and Cantagallina, and to define more clearly the nature of these beautiful landscapes drawn from life. The Getty album’s thirty-one sketches depict a journey from Tuscany to Rome in the spring of 1616. One of the pen and ink drawings depicts a view of San Quirico, inscribed ‘S. Chirico a di 11 aprile 1616’ (Fig. 37). When we comu pare it to a pen and ink sketch of a coastal town from the British Museum’s album (Fig. 38), the flexed lines that give the elegant elongation to the rooflines, the broken lines that give the sense of flickering light along the buildings’ contours, and the long, decorative parallel lines that contour the foreground land mass all have their counterpart in the ‘Callot’ album. They are similar to the handling of line and contour in Callot’s and Cantagallina’s drawings, but the character of Parigi’s penmanship is decidedly more theatrical, more artificial and pronounced. The very idiosyncratic way that human bodies in the middle distance are formed—a quick loop for the head, and the figures left almost as stick figures but animated with highly expressive

14 Baldinucci, Notizie, 14, p. 372–390. 15 Baldinucci, Notizie, 14, p. 131: ‘non cessava di persuaderlo a disegnare molto e molto da esso natural’. 16 Baldinucci, Notizie, 14, p. 131: ‘piccolo figurine, gruppi, e storiette’.

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gestures—confirms the British Museum sketches as Parigi’s. There is nothing quite like these forms in Callot’s or Cantagallina’s works. The drawings in the Getty’s album also reveal the formula that governs the composition of these topographic views, a formula that Parigi passed on to his other students at his scuola in Florence such as Cantagallina. As in Cantagallina’s view of Pratieghi, Parigi frames his delicately sketched naturalistic view of the town with a darker, heavier, more artificial frame. The contrast between dark framing elements and the core image of the site expands the depth to the scene and heightens the sense of light and space. These decorative framing elements call attention to themselves: looping strokes outline foliage and are filled in with parallel strokes of the pen, while similar long curving pen strokes give volume to the tree trunks and rocks. The compositions of Parigi’s work recall the painted landscapes popularized by Flemish émigré artists at the turn of the century, particularly those of Paul and Matthias Brill. However, the novelty in Parigi’s landscapes was the switch of medium from painting to drawing, and the new tension between imagined landscapes and the depiction of real places, as well as between the artifice of the frame and the luminous naturalism of the depicted view. Little wonder that when Baldinucci wrote the history of this period, he saw the so-called vaghissimi paesaggi, lovely landscapes, as a distinct genre associated with a small group of artists in the orbit of Giulio Parigi. The group would disperse and the coherence of their work would disappear when Duke Cosimo II died in 1621 and a new austerity scattered artists like Callot to distant courts. The recipe for drawn topographic views in the circle of Giulio Parigi clearly informs Jacques Callot’s masterpieces of 1619 and 1620, The Fan and The Fair at Impruneta (Figs. 42 and 29).17 They have their origins in the artist’s experience on the site, in the first-hand transcription of the view as seen and witnessed. They share the darkened foreground that heightens the sense of distance, and the artificial frame with its large decorative motifs in the foremost plane. The sharp contrast between the naturalistic core of the image and its stylized margins (particularly in the elaborate organic fantasy of The Fan’s frame) creates order and art out of the raw data of topography. As if to mediate between the viewer of the image and the world that the image makes visible, the stylized framing elements assert an artistic presence that might otherwise be overlooked or underestimated. But at the same time, that artistic presence in the framing elements is linked to the labelling of the scene: the inscriptions with precise dates for the events depicted. The inscribed frame then also functions to document and bear witness, rather than to assert an artistic personality. A key element shared by Callot’s prints and Florentine vaghissimi paesaggi is their documentation of a particular place at a specific date. Like many of Cantagallina’s Flemish views, Callot’s etchings pair the view of a site with a characteristic local festivity. 17

The Fan: Lieure 302.2; Meaume 617.2.

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The date in July 1619 inscribed on The Fan (Fig. 42) records the annual mock battle between weavers and dyers guilds on the Arno. Similarly Callot’s dedication at the bottom of The Fair at Impruneta asserts that it represents the feast of St. Luke, 18 October 1620, when the miraculous icon of the Virgin of Impruneta was celebrated alongside the annual Fair where local pottery and cattle were marketed. If Callot’s two prints, unlike Cantagallina’s landscapes, do not depict the figure of the draftsman sketching, they do contain witty allusions to the viewing that went into the making of the image. At the left foreground of The Fan, a man holds aloft a telescope. It is one of Galileo’s new and highly valued instruments, often given as diplomatic gifts, and closely associated with the brilliance of the Medici court. But it also alludes to the great power of sight that the etching evokes, by pulling our vision deep into a tiny image that somehow captures in a few inches the wide open spaces of the river and the city. Play with scale and references to the power of vision also structure The Fair at Impruneta. The scene is rendered in astonishing miniaturization.18 When David Teniers the Younger painted a copy of the famed print, he claimed to have counted one thousand one hundred thirty-eight figures, forty-five horses, sixty-seven mules and a hundred thirty-seven dogs portrayed in it. In an area equivalent to a square inch, Teniers found fifty-four people. There is a miraculous quality to Callot’s depiction, parallel to that of Impruneta’s sacred icon, which he termed ‘fecund in miracles’ in the print’s inscription. No doubt Callot wished to recall the fecund and miraculous properties of sacred images to the ailing, soon to be dead Grand Duke when he dedicated the etching and presented it on the first day of the Florentine new year in March 1621. But underlying the quasi-miraculous appearance of the print was the solid veracity of topography, drawn from life. The authority given to such an image made dal vivo, its rhetorical power to persuade, lay behind Callot’s practice and the Florentine taste for views from life.

The ‘Callot’ album of 1620 and Callot’s Florentine work of 1617–1620 The album of Mediterranean views now in the British Museum depicts a world we do not associate with Jacques Callot. Impruneta was a short journey from Florence; the artist could travel there frequently. Did he also voyage to Corsica, north Africa, Sicily and Sardinia between August and October of 1620? It is possible that Callot drew these small sketched views, in the sense that there is no document that places Callot elsewhere and thus rules him out as the possible author of the drawings. Students of Callot’s work will know, however, how frequently his images and his manner were copied, emulated, and even forged from an early date.19 Was this group of drawings 18 19

Serebrennikov, ‘Spectacularly Small’. Griffiths, ‘Jacques Callot’, p. 282–283,

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made by Callot, or even made in 1620? The reappearance of a similar album of travel drawings by Giulio Parigi, dated to spring 1616, lays to rest Ternois’s query about the date and authenticity of the British Museum’s album. The technique of these drawings relies on the work of Callot’s teacher and collaborator in Florence, and the similarities to Callot’s drawings from life thus sheds light on the close association of these two figures and their common enterprise. We know at this point very little about Parigi’s activities as a draftsman working dal vivo. In what follows, I will point out the ways in which the images can be compared to Callot’s documented works, and discuss how closely they mesh with the work he did in Florence in the three year period leading up to 1620. My main point, however, goes beyond connoisseurship and the attribution of these sketches. The album’s images were made by an artist travelling on a ship that belonged to a Florentine chivalric order. These sketches give us an insight into the use of images drawn from life in support of the Florentine political goal of dominance over the Barbary coast and the Levant. A project and a voyage that must have been similar to that of the British Museum album was made by the engineer-draftsman Cesare Antoniacci in 1613–1614: he travelled to the region of modern-day Lebanon, recording views of Lebanese cities and ports in an act of military espionage commissioned by Cosimo II de’ Medici, who was then fomenting a revolt against the region’s Ottoman ruler, Fakhir al-Din II.20 Sadly, these drawings have been lost. But even the description of this spy voyage and its political context gives us a way to understand the British Museum album recording the Mediterranean voyage of 1620. They give us a context for drawing dal vivo in Florence at this time that transcends the artistic realm. This then allows us a fresh look at Callot’s aims in The Fair at Impruneta, a representation that presents itself as made from life in late October 1620, the same month the draftsman of the British Museum’s Mediterranean views came home to Tuscany. From 1617 onward, Callot was deeply engaged in learning to draw landscapes and seascapes, some of which made their way into his first major print series, the Capricci di varie figure of that year.21 Several times in 1617, Callot represented important naval battles between Barbary pirates and the Tuscan ships of the chivalric order of Santo Stefano. These seascapes are the works most closely related to the Mediterranean album of 1620. The Order of Santo Stefano was founded by the Medici court in 1562 with a mission to fight Islamic piracy at sea.22 It was a chivalric order, similar to the Order of the Knights of St. John on Malta. Their ships sailed under a white banner with a red Maltese cross, and 20 Rinaldi, ‘Cesare Antoniacci’, p. 343. 21 Lieure 244; Meaume 826. 22 On the Order of Santo Stefano, see Angiolini, I Cavalieri. Earlier accounts by Guarnieri Le Imprese guerresche dei cavalieri di Santo Stefano and Fontana I Pregi della Toscana […] de’ cavalieri di Santo Stefano, are closely based on primary documents, such as the Relazioni giving accounts of Tuscan victories. A helpful listing of literature on the order is found in Bernardini and Zampieri, ‘Bibliografia antica’, p. 194–241. In the same volume, Renzo Mazzanti’s ‘La Rappresentazione cartografica del litorale toscano’, despite its relevant title, is not actually relevant. See also Strunck, ‘Ein Machtkampf’, p. 167–202, concerning the Order’s church in Pisa and its Medici patronage.

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were decorated with the Medici insignia of the palle, or balls. Virtually all of the naval battles depicted in Florence from the end of the sixteenth through the seventeenth century have to do with the Order and their confrontation with the Muslim world. Callot’s first work in relation to the Order was an unsuccessful commission to etch two views of a battle that took place off the coast of Calabria. The two scenes Callot drew of the event were etched on the same plate, and survive in only one impression, now in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence.23 They were meant to accompany a small news pamphlet, or Relazione, to publicise the Tuscan victory. From the turn of the century under Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici these small four- to six-page pamphlets were put out by various publishers, describing in plain language but in great detail the victories achieved by ships of the Order of Santo Stefano. There may have been logistical reasons behind the failure to use Callot’s two etchings, which are of a size appropriate to an octavo book. The plate was returned to the artist, burnished clean and reused for the frontispiece that Callot etched in 1619 for the play on a Turkish theme: Il Solimano by Prospero Bonarelli.24 The inscription from the original naval scene shows through faintly on some of the impressions of this frontispiece. It is revealing of the court’s preoccupations during these years that this print, too, is a production concerning Tuscan relations with Islam and the Levant. Bonarelli’s play is set in the court of Suleyman I, and the Ottoman scene is implicitly contrasted with the Medicean court and its manners. The Florentine preoccupation with the Turks and with the Barbary pirates was high in the years leading up to 1620, as the Medicean court welcomed an emissary from the Lebanon, Fakhr ad-Din, in the hopes of negotiating for better trade with the Levant, and a joint enterprise to put an end to the pirates’ reign of terror over the Mediterranean.25 Then, in November of 1617 Callot was again asked to represent a victory over Barbary pirates, this time in a series of four etchings with a brief text describing the events at the bottom of the sheets. Baldinucci’s life of Callot described these prints as having been published in a Relazione commemorating the battle. The pamphlet related to Callot’s four etched images was titled Relazione della presa di due Bertoni di Tunisia fatta in Corsica, da quattro Galere di Toscana quest’anno 1617, li 23 di Nov.26 Relazioni were rarely accompanied by any visual illustration; indeed with their minuscule type and sparing use of paper, they were the cheapest level of published news. They were often put out simultaneously in several different cities as well as in Florence itself, occasionally in French or Spanish as well as Italian. They had a clear propagandistic role to play in publicizing the successes of Florentine military action against piracy. For the first time in 1617, the Florentine firm of Pietro Cecconcelli, 23 Lieure 300–301; Meaume 554–555: Edmond Bruwaert published the two prints in their only known impression, in his ‘Estampe unique’; this was also published separately as an eight-page pamphlet in 1913. 24 Callot’s frontispiece to Il Solimano (Florence, 1619): Lieure 363.II; Meaume 434.II. 25 Cuffara, ‘Fakhr ad-Din’, p. 209–217. Interestingly, the Lebanese emissary wanted to bring back Giulio Parigi to Beirut, to serve as court architect there. 26 Relazione della presa di due Bertoni di Tunisi fatta in Corsica, da quattro Galere di Toscana quest’anno 1617, li 23 di Nov. (Florence, 1617); copy in the British Library.

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fig. 43: filippo napoletano. captured Barbary ship. c. 1617. Drawing. musée du Louvre, paris. © Rmn-grand palais (musée du Louvre)/ michèle Bellot.

called Alle Stelle Medicei, began to publish the Relazioni. It would seem that initially they hoped to make their versions of a higher grade with the inclusion of Callot’s prints. He was providing the firm with other illustrations for publications in these years, including etchings for funeral pamphlets. There is no evidence that the surviving four etchings from the series Callot designed in 1617 were ever folded into the small pamphlet of the Relazione to be distributed together. Nonetheless, it was this context of court publicity for Tuscan victories over the Islamic pirates in 1617 in which Callot etched his first seascapes, which were also his first representations of battles. The prints were based on a drawing that was in part made dal vivo, probably sketched in the presence of the actual Turkish ship, with the additional Tuscan ships placed around it in accordance with the Relazione’s description of the battle. But it was not a drawing made by Callot himself. Callot took the representation of the Turkish galleon from the drawing of another artist at court, Filippo Napoletano (Fig. 43). 27 As Wolfgang Vitzthum proposed in 1968, the ties between this very beautiful and highly finished drawing of a Turkish ship and 27 Walter Vitzthum pointed out the relationships between Filippo Napolitano’s drawing and Callot’s 1617 etching: Vitzthum, ‘Jacques Callot’, p. 25–27; see also Vitzthum, Jacques Callot.

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fig. 44: Jacques callot. florentine ship of the order of sto. stefano defeating the Barbary pirates. 1617. etching. British museum Dept. of prints and Drawings, London. © trustees of the British museum.

Callot’s etchings are most overt in the series’ second print (Fig. 44).28 Callot then parrtially reused the motif of the large Turkish galleon listing to one side and a smaller Tuscan ship with its bow forward, in smaller form in the fourth print of the series. Filippo used his own drawing to compose his image of the same battle of November 1617, painted on patterned marble, which was commissioned by Cosimo II. The captured Turkish vessel was brought into Livorno after the battle, and Filippo —who only arrived in Florence in July of 1617—would have been able to study it there. Filippo spent much time in Livorno, where he was able to draw naval scenes dal vivo, and there he produced a large number of drawings of ship-building and the fitting-out of war vessels. There is quite a distance from his dal vivo work in the open air and the end result in his image painted on marble. Filippo’s work is representative of early seventeenth-century taste for curiosities in which painted forms interact with a patterned or reflective surface such as rock or glass. Nature and artistry joined hands, but here both served to commemorate an historical event, which must have doubled the curiosity or wondrous quality of the painting. Callot appropriated Filippo’s drawing once again, though on a smaller scale, in a series of Florentine landscapes in 1618. The most recent scholarship has cast doubt on the attribution to Callot of this series, which is a project with a complicated history.29 The drawings 28 Lieure 194–197; Meaume 550–553. 29 Lieure 268–277; Meaume 1187–1196. Griffiths and Chapman, Israël Henriet’, p. 273–293, argue from their study of the Israël Silvestre album of drawings at Chatsworth that the landscapes in this series Diverse vedute were not drawn by Callot, but were a pastiche of Callot-esque drawings made around 1630 in Paris by Silvestre.

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are very much rooted in Callot’s interactions with Filippo Napoletano in Florence, however, and I follow earlier scholars in my belief that Callot made the designs for the prints in Florence during 1618, and probably etched them himself there.30 But they were only printted after he returned to Lorraine, as the earliest impressions are on Lorrenese paper, and their publication in Paris in 1630 by Israël Henriet under the title Diverse vedute disegnate in Fiorenza, with an embellished title page by Francois Collignon. The series reflects Callot’s ongoing experiments with drawing from life, while simultaneously quoting images drawn by other artists at court, particularly those of his friendly rival, Filippo Napoletano. The composition of the Barbary ship and its surrounding Tuscan galleys, however, shows Callot’s continued reliance on Filippo’s drawing of the Barbary ship in 1617. Filippo Napoletano was not formed in the entourage of Giulio Parigi or Remigio Cantagallina, but in Naples and Rome. His drawings and paintings from Florence show him quickly adapting his own practice of drawing dal vivo, for example in his studies of male nude models from the years 1617–1621, which are strikingly similar to those of Callot in this period. The two may have worked side by side in front of the posed figures. Filippo also adapted his landscape drawing to the kinds of motifs that Parigi’s students used in depicting Tuscan topography, though he never really used the formula of darkened frame and lightened area of topography in the middle ground. Nonetheless, Callot’s and Filippo’s sketches of Tuscan farmhouses and of the water mill at San Niccolò near Florence reveal them to be drawing the same motifs from life.31 This particular motif of the mill with its arches jutting into the river made its way into the Diverse vedute disegnate in Fiorenza, in a view of a watermill, and in a second scene of bathers in the Arno that frames the view of Florence with the double arches of the now-vanished mill at San Niccolò.32 A drawing attributed to Giulio Pariigi of a similar water mill has recently resurfaced, and may be a version of this same Florentine motif. It had also been drawn by Federico Zuccari in Florence during the 1570s, which may indicate merely that this was a site considered to be picturesque and worthy of sketching.33 Callot’s and Filippo’s sketches of the site, however, are only one example of many such parallels in the two artists’ Florentine oeuvres from 1617 to 1621. When Filippo painted a very unusual depiction of a Man with Snails, for example, it is clearly made as a painted version of Callot’s elaborate drawing of the same subject.34 Their argument gives a resume of previous literature on this vexed topic, and their views on the relationship between Henriet and Silvestre and the issue of the Chatsworth drawings supposedly made for Gaston d’Orleans are very convincing overall. However, I think that evidence from Marco Chiarini’s studies of Filippo Napoletano’s drawings (as in note 26), and the way the two artists’ works are twined together during their stay in Florence, should be taken into account when considering the Florentine versus Parisian origin of the scenes. 30 Russell, Jacques Callot; Paulette Choné, Jacques Callot, p. 299; Wolfthal and Woodall, Princes and Paupers, p. 96–99. 31 Chiarini, ‘Filippo Napoletano’, p. 133–139. Within Chiarini’s catalogue of Napoletano’s drawings in this volume, see his numbers 158–287, p. 371–416, all in the Uffizi, Florence, for the drawings of Florentine farmhouses and male nudes closest in relation to Jacques Callot. 32 Lieure 277 II/II; Meaume 1196. 33 Russell, Jacques Callot, p. 275–276. The Zuccaro drawing is in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, inventory 4625. 34 Chiarini, Teodoro Filippo, p. 128–129.

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Filippo Napoletano had come to the Grand Duke’s attention in Rome because of his work in the entourage of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, Caravaggio’s patron and the Medici representative to the papal court. His works before 1617 show him to have been touched not only by the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio but also by the moonlight landscapes of Adam Elsheimer in Rome. Like Elsheimer, Filippo preferred to paint on a small scale with a very fine touch. Documents in Florentine archives refer to his work ‘in piccolo’. Cosimo II seems to have called him to Florence precisely in order to pair him with Jacques Callot, whose tiny images in the Capricci prints of 1617 revealed his talent for the same kind of miniaturisation. Baldinucci paints a verbal picture of the bed-ridden, moribund Grand Duke inviting Filippo to his sickbed to ‘depict beautiful inventions in small figures’ for his ‘virtuous amusement’.35 Like the emperor Rudolf II who enjoyed watching Goltzius paint, Cosimo II seems to have found the performance of drawing or painting by artists working in his presence to be a pleasant entertainment, a kind of virtuous theatre. This may be the key to understanding some aspects of the artistic practice of both Filippo Napoletano and Callot in Florence, not only their work from life but their friendly competition that led to the Impruneta depictions of 1618–1621. Félibien and Baldinucci concur that Callot and Filippo became close companions.36 The two artists depicted the same subjects, and they seem to have shared drawings between them, using one another’s work. They remained close until both had to leave the court in Florence on Cosimo II’s death at the end of the year 1621, when Filippo went southward to Rome and Callot northward to Nancy. Though they were from different backgrounds and artistic formations, they were both somehow changed by their training in representing from life as it was practiced in Florence. When Filippo returned to Rome in 1621, his biographer Giovanni Baglione tells us he depicted dal naturale, on site, the beauty spot of Tivoli and its waterfalls. His were the paintings that set off the subsequent fashion for depictions of this picturesque place in the later 1620s, 1630s and 1640s, when it was sketched and painted from many viewpoints by Claude, Gaspard Dughet, and others. What can we learn about working dal vivo or dal naturale in Florence from the relationship between works by Callot and those by Filippo Napoletano? If we look at the wider Florentine context in which their common subjects were received, it suggests that the practice of working dal vivo quite overtly brought into play both friendly competition at mimesis, and competition in emulating past art. For example, Filippo painted The Temptation of St. Anthony on marble, and Callot made an ambitious etching of the same subject, which was destroyed because the plate was ruined by an error in the etching process. Both artists were taking up a subject associated with northern artists, Bosch and Bruegel in particular. Perhaps by providing 35 Chiarini, Teodoro Filippo, p. 129. 36 Chiarini, ‘Du nouveau’, p. 139–160.

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the chance for the Grand Duke and his court to compare their imitation of the same subjects, the two artists put on a performance of sorts: they could thus display their different, rival skills at imitation from life, in their rival media of paint versus print. Their artistic talents could then also be appreciated by pitting their efforts against works by their illustrious Flemish predecessors. What I would like to stress, however, is that when both young artists represented The Fair at Impruneta and the Tuscan victory over the pirates in November 1617, they were rivalling each other in producing images in painting and in print of subjects that were politically important, and their images must have served not only as an advertisement of artistic prowess in Florence, but also to publicize the successes of Medicean policies. At times the same subjects were also represented by literary figures at court. Just after the two artists were both put to work representing the Order of Santo Spirito’s victories over the pirates, one in painting and the other in print, a Florentine court poet, Gabriele Chiabrera, published a volume of poems also celebrating the same phenomenon, the voyages and battles of the Order of Santo Stefano.37 There is a simm ilar coming together of visual and literary representations in the case of The Fair at Impruneta. The courtier, poet and dramatist Michelangelo Buonarotti the Younger portrayed the same theme of the market or fair, as represented ‘from life’. His lengthy intermezzo titled La Fiera was performed at court in 1619—I will return later to its representation of the market and its commerce. Here it must be stressed that these various representations of Mediterranean piracy, fairs and feast days were rooted in topical issues at court, and were seemingly part of a competition in mimesis ‘from life’, which crossed between media and between images and texts. The practice of holding public debates at Cosimo II’s court gives a context in which we may place Jacques Callot’s and Filippo Napoletano’s friendly rivalry, demonstrated by their parallel representations of the Fair at Impruneta. In general, the practice of staging a confrontation of two opposing points of view was common in private salons and academies during these years. As an aspect of civility, however, polite contests of wit had a deep root in Renaissance court culture and is featured in Castiglione’s Libro del Cortigiano (1528) and Stefano Guazzo’s La Civil conversazione (1574). After the Duke’s death, Michelangelo Buonarotti the Younger recorded in his Elogio of Cosimo II that he organized many such academic disputes at court.38 The same praise is repeated in an anonymous Elogio, an emphasis that makes one think that Cosimo’s love of this sort of event was particularly strong.39 Similar disputations took place in the court at Mantua in this period between 1610 and 1620, but such after-dinner ‘questions’ were especially frequent in the Medici court. In Florence, the court debates often concerned natural philosophy and ethics, with Galileo in a 37 Chiabrera, Canzoni. 38 Michelangelo Buonarotti the Younger, Elogio di Cosimo II (Florence, 1621); cited by Biagioli, Galileo, p. 164. 39 Elogio di Cosimo II, Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Miscellanea Medicea 359, insert 9, p. 19, a reference I again owe to Biagioli, Galileo, p. 164.

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starring role. The disputes served both as education for the younger Medici princes and as public spectacle and entertainment. Galileo had to shape a number of his discoveries to fit into the witty responses called for in these displays, and his efforts occasionally got him into trouble with the narrow-minded Grand Duchess in the years between 1613 and 1618. The contests were a public performance and a difficult one at that.40 It was apparently not common for artists to participate in this kind of performance, and in proposing them as a context for Callot’s, Filippo’s, Jacques Stella’s and Michelangelo Buonarotti’s representation of the fair ‘from life’, I do not mean that the artists made these works simultaneously, while in front of an audience at court. It must have been a more diffuse kind of performance, taking place over several years, with the works completed, brought before the Grand Duke and judged in relation to one another. And in 1621 the winner was Callot for his Fair at Impruneta, his prize the golden chain of honour and the portrait of Cosimo II to wear next to his heart.

Unseen Topographies A different aspect of Callot’s dal vivo topographical work emerges from the landscape projects that Callot took on during 1618 for the general Giovanni de’ Medici, a great soldier and dissolute bon vivant who had been banished from the court. In 1618, Callot wrote him two letters in which he sent apologies for his struggles with the creation of his first landscapes and his slowness in fulfilling commissions for him.41 Giovanni de’ Medici was clearly interested in harnessing the skills of Giulio Parigi’s scuola in Florence to the task of making topographic views. For example, a letter to Giovanni de’ Medici from a correspondent in Brussels in 1616, mentioning Giulio Parigi’s workshop, reveals plans to create an atlas of Tuscan sites, similar to the illustrated editions of Ludovico Guicciardini’s famous description of the Lowlands.42 The taste for topographic views had Antwerp as its epicentre, and Flemish artists were the acknowledged masters of such work. Giovanni de’ Medici wanted Florentine draftsmen to rival their Flemish peers. In his correspondence with his factotum

40 In addition to Biagioli, as above, see Tribby, Of Conversational Dispositions’. 41 Edmond Bruwaert discovered the two letters, and it is his proposal that they refer to the views made in Florence published later by Henriet ‘Jacques Callot’, p. 118–127. The correspondence of Giovanni de’ Medici does indicate his commission to Callot of an etching of the Siege of Gradisca, but no scholar after Bruwaert has accepted his assertion that the letters refer to the Diverse vedute disegnate in Fiorenza of 1618. The letters are published in full in the original Italian, together with French translation, by Ternois, L’Art, p. 218–219. 42 Letter of 10 June 1616 from Paolo Franceschi in Brussels to Giovanni de’ Medici in Florence. Paolo Franceschi talks about a project by Cosimo Baroncelli to create prints of all the notable places in Tuscany, to be sponsored and regulated by the Accademia del Disegno: see Medici Archive Project, online database consulted 6 April 2019: http://bia.medici.org/DocSources/Home.do

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about commissioning Callot to make etched landscapes for him in 1618, he asked for representations of his own lands in and around Florence. Bruwaert, who discovered the two letters by Callot, wanted to believe that they referred to Callot’s Diverse vedute disegnate in Fiorenza. It is unlikely that Callot’s letters refer to this series, which doesn’t correspond to the description in this correspondence. However, there is reason to think that Giovanni de’ Medici’s patronage spurred Callot to take on several topographic projects in 1618, most of which have disappeared. From his correspondence we learn that Giovanni de’ Medici commissioned Callot’s first siege view, The Siege of Gradisca, of which no drawings and impressions survive. (Later he was said to have recommended Callot to the Infanta Isabella for the commission to represent the Siege of Breda, in which his earlier experience with Gradisca bore fruit.) The siege of Gradisca took place in Friuli in 1617, and its battles included naval combat. Callot was asked to represent the siege months after it had ended, and he was to work not from study of the site itself but from drawings of the siege made by a military engineer, Gabriello Ughi. Those drawings have also not survived. This task of using someone else’s drawings made on site in order to create an accurate topographical view is common enough in early modernity, particularly in representing battles and siege views. Callot followed it himself later in the Siege of Breda, when he worked with another military engineer, Giovanni Francesco Cantagallina, relative of Remigio Cantagallina. He participated in the same form of collaboration when he provided etchings for a 1619 Florentine publication by Bernardino Amico on the topography and architecture of sites in the Holy Land. Antonio Tempesta had provided illustrations for this volume titled Trattato delle piante e imagini de i sacri edificii di Terra Santa. The first edition of Amico’s text had come out in 1610 and was dedicated to Philip III of Spain, but the second, Florentine edition of 1619 with Callot’s reworking of the illustrations was dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo II. This was a key publication within the Grand Duke’s strategic aim of taking the Holy Land from the Turks, and in so doing to bring back to Tuscany the Holy Sepulchre that had held Christ’s body. Callot’s participation in this project was limited; he re-etched the images drawn by Antonio Tempesta in Rome, reducing them to a smaller scale, and adding figures to some of the scenes. However, the nature of this project as well as its subject involved him in current assumptions made about accurate rendering of distant sites and events. Tempesta’s designs were dictated by data given to him to reproduce. In the treatise, Amico wrote that he had taken detailed measurements of the key sites, and that these measurements would allow the recreation of the buildings in models or reconstructions. Despite the fact that Amico was merely supplying numbers, he claimed in his preface to have thus ‘sketched’ the true and real portraits of these most sacred places. Here in the realm of sacred buildings we find the same principle at work as in the siege view. Buildings like topography could be reduced to numbers, measurements

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and proportions, and then reconstructed as a visual image through collaboration between the engineer/surveyor and the artist. Callot did not see the siege of Gradisca, any more than he was witness later to the sieges of Breda, La Rochelle and the Ile de Ré for which he drew and etched large, complex and accurate views. However common this process was in the seventeenth century, as a form of representation it needs a little unpacking to appreciate its relationship to the practice of working from life that we have been following. To recreate an image of something far distant on the basis of abstract measurements, or even verbal descriptions (as we will see in Chapter 5, in the case of the Revolt of Masaniello by Michelangelo Cerquozzi) was the artistic role of a paradoxically absent eyewitness. The same principle is at work in Callot’s etchings of the sea battles of the Order of Santo Stefano, as well. It is the mirror reversal of the process of drawing from life, but they are (to mix the metaphors of representation) two sides of the same coin. In one, the imprint of the real has been translated into numbers or quantifiable data, and the visual artist must work backwards from the abstract realm of mathesis to recreate a subjective view. In the other, the imprint of the real world is made on the subjective experience of the artist, who works from that image toward a visual construction that will—in theory—yield empirically verifiable information. Between the realm of visible nature and the realm of abstract number stands the maker of the image, skilled but self-effacing. In both his skill and his effacement lies the authority of the image, which seems as if made by the world itself rather than mediated by subjective human perception. If these projects in the years 1617–1620 show Callot working actively on producing topographies of various kinds, they also show his ongoing involvement in creating images of the Turks and the Barbary pirates. One of three Florentine publications related to the Levant that Callot worked on in these years was the play by Prospero Bonarelli, Il Solimano, set in the Ottoman court of Suleyman the Great, for which Callot provided a frontispiece and five etchings. Callot drew many sketches from models in Turkish dress, presumably to prepare his images for Bonarelli’s play, although some of the life drawings of Turks made their way into his later series of Varie figure produced in Nancy around 1622. The Solimano frontispiece itself, with its depiction of Turkish costume, can be compared to another of the projects given to Callot in 1619–1620, an etched title page to a pamphlet publishing the Statutes of the Order of Santo Stefano, an image embodying their fight against the Barbary pirates at sea. Callot’s etching contains the figures of standing Turks alternating with their seated European slaves. In the background we see a coastal view with ships and a fortified cityscape with minarets. Atop a pedestal the figure of Minerva, armed and warlike, waves a banner with the insignia of the Order, a red Maltese cross on a white ground. One of the red chalk drawings in the British Museum Mediterranean album depicts a Florentine galley under sail; flying at its stern is the same distinctive banner of the Order of Santo Stefano. This detail, as well as the recorded itinerary in the

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drawings, gives us the essential context for the Mediterranean album. The sea journey depicted was almost certainly an endeavour of the Order of Santo Stefano, in one of their regular voyages in the western Mediterranean. Following the massive European victory over the Ottoman navies at Lepanto in 1571, the incursions of Barbary pirates around the Tuscan shore had only grown more frequent, and more disruptive of trade. Great battles against them had been won. Florentine Relazioni detail the number of artilleries captured, the number of Turks killed and taken prisoner, the dead and wounded Tuscans, and the number of Christian slaves freed. But the monetary value of all this was low, the damage to trade was ongoing and the human cost high. By 1620, the situation had become intolerable to the larger European powers, and France, Spain and England were separately involved in campaigns to free the western Mediterranean from the scourge of Islamic piracy. Callot’s early twentieth-century biographer, Edmond Bruwaert, wrote that the artist was invited by the Order’s admiral Giulio Barbolani di Montauto to take part in a 1620 expedition around the Mediterranean, as recompense for the etched frontispiece for the Order’s statutes. Supposedly Callot travelled in the ship called the Santo Stefano, captained by Tomasso Fedra Inghirami. Montauto was indeed admiral at the time, and Inghirami was indeed a captain in the order and did sail the Santo Stefano, this much can be documented from the Relazioni and from archival records. Bruwaert, however, did not record the whereabouts of the document in the Florentine archives on which he based his statement about Callot’s journey, and it is likely that none exists. Giulio Parigi’s participation in the voyage of summer 1620, if my attribution is correct, indicates the high level of importance given to this venture by the Tuscan government. Parigi was a figure of enormous standing at the Medici court, as the impresario who built palaces, staged hugely successful outdoor spectacles, decorated rooms, organized gardens, supplied the hydraulics for fountains. He had the surveying and map-making skills, moreover, that were needed to create accurate views of foreign ports. By examining the Mediterranean drawings themselves, and placing them in their political context in Parigi’s Florence, we learn something even more valuable about this particular voyage. Florentine efforts to deal with the threat of piracy were bound up with the need to represent them dal vivo. There are signs that the draftsman was a sophisticated courtier. The view of Milazzo on the north coast of Sicily (Fig. 35) depicts Mount Etna on the horizon emitting its volcanic smoke, and below in the harbour a Florentine galley at left firing cannons at two Barbary vessels under sail at right. The pirate ships are caramuzels, large craft, with high platforms fore and aft for firing down at enemy vessels. In the Milazzo view, Etna’s plume of smoke creates a parallel to the smoking cannons in the foreground: upheaval in nature coincides with warfare in human affairs. The drawing is topped

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by a banderole inscribed ‘L’un a me noce, e l’altro altrui’, the one hurts me, the other hurts him (or her). The line comes from a Petrarch poem, Canzone 125 from his Rime: Because love weakens me, And robs me of my skill, I speak in harsh rhymes, devoid of sweetness. And yet the branches do not always show their natural worth In bark, or flowers, or leaf. Let love, when he sits in the shade, And those lovely eyes, See what the heart conceals. If the grief that’s freed Should overflow in tears and laments, The one hurts me, the other Her, in that I have no art.

The one hurts me, the other her: the inscription is perhaps a witty way of pointing to the mutual hurt inflicted by the battling ships in the foreground. The Petrarch verse comes from a poem about the failure of art, and the hurt caused by the poet’s inability to express his thought and feeling adequately. If the text is not only a reference to the battle, but is also a form of self-reflection on his work, the draftsman’s quotation gives the very simplicity of his drawing a rather artful, courtly turn. The simplicity of the Milazzo view is typical of the majority of the drawings in the album. In all of the port views like that of Milazzo, the format, framing and size of the images are the same: they were made to form a series. Many are in watercolour over black chalk, though there are several pen and ink sketches, and red chalk sketches of local figures at work and of local vessels also appear. The views of ports are enclosed within drawn frames. Each has been inscribed with a place name and a precise date, and these inscriptions are consistently in the same hand, which is not that found on the title page of the album. On the opening page, an inscription gives the death date of 1635 for Callot, so it is clear the volume was put together well after the date of 1620 that recurs on the sketches mounted inside it. The inscription here is written in Italian, but the same hand has inscribed the backs of some drawings in English. The album was owned in England in the nineteenth century, so perhaps was acquired by an English collector on a Grand Tour. Abraham Bosse’s 1636 commemorative portrait of Callot with its eulogy for his great achievement in print has been cut in two and pasted in to serve as a frontispiece. The chronological order of the inscribed dates is not respected in the album as it is now put together, and there are vestiges of two systems of numbering on the sheets. It seems that what was once a sketchbook of views in chronological order was first mounted in one album and then remounted in another, probably English, collector’s album.

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The itinerary represented in the drawings, if we piece together the inscribed dates, goes from Fort Mahon in Minorca on 19 August, to the island of Formentera near Ibiza, dated 22 August 1620, south to the Algerian shoreline on the 24th, then north-eastward to Sardinia, along the north coast of Sicily, toward Calabria and as far southeast as Castello d’Augusta, then back northward up the Tuscan shore, touching land at Bonifazio in Corsica on 2 October, then presumably reaching Livorno, the home port of the Order of Santo Stefano, as final destination. The voyage is a circuit, travelling first westward, then south, east, and north again. The conditions under which the draftsman made his image are indicated in one drawing, which is only partially completed. There the artist was looking up the stern of the ship as it descends from the crest of a wave, looking past two seated men and a reclining figure, out onto the sea and the harbour beyond. Contrary to Ternois’s opinion that the draftsman who made these works had the trembling hand of a beginner at drawing, these seem to be self-assured works, not hesitant or unskilled. The compositions are more innovative than conventional, often taking an eccentric view on a steep diagonal that renders deep space within the small image. The largest of the topographic views in the album consists of two drawings that, although mounted separately, should form one continuous panorama of the harbour of Cercelli, known today as Cherchell, on the shore of present-day Algeria (Fig. 36 shows one of the two sheets). Cercelli had long been a stronghold of the Islamic Corsairs, or Barbary pirates, fortified by the notorious Barbarossa brothers in the sixteenth century. The Cercelli panorama shows us a larger scale view than those in the other drawings. It is closer to a map, seen from a greater distance and from a very high bird’s eye viewpoint, allowing the artist to represent the widely spaced buildings enclosed around courtyards, and the minarets of the town, all distinctive features of a Muslim townscape. The inscription at the top of this drawn panoramic view declares it to be ‘Cercelli in Barberia’ and says that the ship remained there on 24 August 1620 ‘a Libeccio’. The Libeccio is a Libyan, westerly or southwesterly wind, the opposite of the Tramontane winds that blows winter storms from the north. It seems that the expedition was delayed by a disadvantageous offshore wind, which allowed the artist to draw an extensive panorama of the port. This two-part sketch of Cercelli stands out in the album not only because it is the only such large, complex panorama, and the only view of a north African port. The use of it here separates the drawings in the album from the category of Florentine pen or chalk landscape drawings and brings the album closer to the type of topographic view that would be part of an atlas. Printed views like those in the great Civitates orbis terrarum would often be hand-coloured. The stylised palette of colour in these city portraits would mediate between the drawn landscape and the conventions of map-making, where shifts in colour would indicate changes in topography and differentiate between land and water. The use of watercolour in the British Museum album views may have had to do with the ultimate aims for the drawings.

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The format of these Mediterranean harbour views would suit an album of drawings organised around a voyage, such as those created by Remigio Cantagallina. And yet with their watercolouring as a prototype for coloured prints, they would also suit a print publication such as an atlas. And the two were not mutually exclusive: the album of drawings could serve as a gift presented to a patron such as Giovanni de’ Medici or the Grand Duke Cosimo II, even if it were also the basis of a published work dedicated to that patron. Given the history of Callot’s etchings of the Order’s naval battles, there is reason to believe that these drawings were made to be published. But even if they were meant to form an album of drawings like those of Cantagallina, the album’s evident roots in observation from life would lend a particular authority to the situation they depicted. The impetus behind this voyage of 1620 probably came from the need to know what Cercelli looked like, its resources, the number of its inhabitants and the numbers of boats in its harbour. There were military and political reasons to send a respected surveyor and engineer to represent this site dal vivo. A similar motivation stirred the general Giovanni de’ Medici’s desire for such views—a desire he brought back from the Lowlands, and thus similar to the curiosity that sent Remigio Cantagallina northward to the court in Flanders in 1612. In this case, it was absolutely of the essence that a surveyor and draftsman was there to witness the state of the Mediterranean’s defences.

Topographic landscapes as evidence: espionage In the Florentine court, the issue of fighting the Barbary ships through the Order of Santo Stefano had never been more topical than in 1620. The stream of Relazioni publicising their victories masked some severe defeats: a major manoeuvre organised with Spanish forces out of Naples to capture the port of Susa in 1619 was a failure due to information leaked to the enemy.43 In 1620, a battle fought by the Order alone near the Sicilian island of Lampedusa had ended with Florentine victory but the death of the ship’s captain, Alessandro Sozzifanti.44 There are indications that during these years the financial drain of maintaining the fleets of the Order and actively attacking the Turks was being weighed in the balance with the benefits of alliance with the Turkish regency in north Africa. Certainly more money could be gained from trade with the Turks than by the capture of a few isolated Barbary warships. The French had followed a similar route earlier, with their ill-fated alliance with the Barbarossa brothers. And any resolution to the question of the Barbary pirates was dependent

43 Fontana, I Pregi, see p. 173 on the failure of the Susa campaign. 44 The Lampedusa battle and its aftermath in 1620 are described in Guarnieri, Le Imprese, p. 240–241. See also Sozzifanti, ‘Una battaglia navale’.

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on the largest issue in foreign policy, how to balance delicately between the major threats posed to Tuscan sovereignty by France and Spain, in which their mutual efforts to control piracy played a constant role.45 From the coast of north Africa to the Holy Land, the capture of Islamic lands was at various times in the sights of the Medici Grand Dukes’ ambitions. Ferdinando I had the idea to invade Sierra Leone,46 while Cosimo II very seriously planned to use Cyprus as a staging ground for an assault on the Holy Land. The Medici cultivated several hoped-for alliances with Ottoman figures, from the supposed brother of a sultan who had been baptized Christian, to the Druse leader, Fakhr al-Din, leading a revolt in the Lebanon.47 The ideal of bringing the Holy Sepulchre back to Tuscany might sound rather unrealistic to us today, but it remained a serious part of Tuscan foreign policy for a number of years. The real issue for Tuscany around 1620, however, was whether the ideological advantage of freeing Christian slaves and launching a new form of crusade against the Turks was worth more or less than the economic advantage of joining forces with them to do business. Commerce or crusade? Florentine merchants had been asking for the first option since the 1580s. Looming austerity during Grand Duke Cosimo II’s reign made the upkeep of the Order of Santo Stefano seem a burden; his sudden death in 1621 put the question on hold for a time. It would still haunt the discussions of foreign policy under Ferdinando II for years afterward. It is not surprising, then, to find that the port of Cercelli represented in the British Museum’s album was one of several ports on the Barbary coast that were under frequent discussion in the Florentine court. A thick folder of documents classed under the secretariat of war and the handling of the port of Livorno in the Archivio di Stato in Florence reveals that from the late sixteenth century onwards Cercelli as well as nearby Gigeri and Bona were targets for Florentines to capture and to use as strongholds against the Turkish.48 The French and the Spanish established such outposts in north Africa at various times during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though they were not always successful in holding on to them. The successful capture of Bona in 1607 by Tuscan forces must have given impetus to this line of reasoning. Within this context, it seems likely that the task of recording the details of Cercelli was one of the aims of the voyage recorded in the British Museum album. The two linked drawings were made in the early part of the voyage, according to its date of 24

45 In general, on Medici diplomacy during this era, see Diaz, Il granducato. Nuancing Diaz’s views considerably on the question of the diplomacy of Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici is Capponi, ‘Le Palle di Marte’, p. 1105–1141. I am grateful to Naomi Lebens for drawing my attention to this very pertinent study. 46 Hair and Davies, ‘Sierra Leone’, p. 61–69. 47 The story of ‘the Sultan’s brother’ Jascha ben Mehmet’s visits to the Tuscan court in the reign of Cosimo II, and the promise he held out to Christianize the Muslims has been the subject of some recent research: Rosen, ‘Son of the Sultan’. On Fakr ad Dun’s dealings with the Medici court and the Druse revolt in the Lebanon, see Mariti, Istoria di Faccardino; Carali, Fakhr-ad-din 2. 48 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, F 2077.

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August. The panoramic images give the topography of the site, its fortifications just at the water’s edge, and the steep rise of the land up to the Atlas mountains. They also show that the terrain is dotted with trees. These cork oaks and pines were one of the major resources of Cercelli: up to the middle of the seventeenth century they provided the wood for Turkish shipbuilding, which was centred in Algiers.49 Capturring Cercelli would not only insert another Tuscan toehold along the Barbary coast, it would disrupt the shipbuilding trade on which Islamic piracy depended. All of the other fortified sites depicted by the draftsman in 1620, from Fort Mahon on Menorca to Castello d’Augusta on the east coast of Sicily, are representative of Spanish outposts set up in the mid to late sixteenth century as strong places to resist the incursions of the Turk. They represent an old and somewhat discredited approach toward Barbary piracy, the idea that defensive walls would suffice to keep the slavers and raiders away from the local population.50 The order of Santo Stefano itself was an embodiment of the opposite approach, of aggressive warfare against the Turks. The drawing of San Marco with its inscription detailing the port’s destruction by four galleys out of Algiers and Biserta demonstrates the ambiguous state of affairs in 1620: walls did not deter the pirates, and the fleets of Tuscan galleys patrolling the coasts were often not adequate protection (Fig. 34). The album of drawings was made at a moment when there were serious questions raised about the sites and activities represented. The theme that unites the views into a series is that they make visible the front line in the battle to hold off Barbary marauders. They would have been useful evidence in the argument for maintaining the Order of Santo Stefano in its mission. The entire series of drawings as presented now in the British Museum album shows much more than Mediterranean ports. It also represents the events and activities that accompany such a voyage: careening a ship on the shore (removing encrustation from its hull); rescuing food barrels from a ship that sinks near the shore; interacting with the fisherwomen and laundrywomen of coastal communities. In including these scenes, the album resembles the kind of reporting that was done in the Tuscan Relazioni about the voyages of the Order of Santo Stefano. They too speak of landfalls for taking on water and food, and work undertaken on the boats. It may be that the series of views was conceived to be a visual equivalent to a Relazione, much as Callot’s etchings of the Order of Santo Stefano’s victories in 1617 and 1618 were deliberately composed to amplify the texts of their Relazioni. It is not possible, however, to match the dates of this drawn voyage with a particular Relazione of actions taken ships of the Order of Santo Stefano. And the dates of the drawings from mid-August to early October are unusually late in the sailing season. The Order’s best-publicized voyages to hunt Barbary ships typically set off in April 49 Belhamissi, Histoire, p. 49–50. 50 Camps, ‘The Ottoman’, n.p.

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through June, when winds in the western Mediterranean were more favourable, and before the great heat of summer. The sailing season ended in October. In June of 1620, the admiral Montauto was taken ill while on a manoeuvre off the coast of Sicily and the fleet was stuck for a time in Siracusa. In mid-July of 1620, the official sent to carry new orders to the fleet returned to court with news of their victory at Lampedusa and the deaths incurred. The ship or ships that set out in August of that year get no mention at all. There are some precedents for a voyage taken in secrecy, however. In 1617, the captain with whom Callot was said by Bruwaert to have sailed, Tomasso Fedra Inghirami, was chosen to sail his ship the Santo Stefano to Corsica in order to test a secret device called a celatone or testiere, created by Galileo Galilei.51 The device interested Grand Duke Cosimo II because it enhanced the vision of sailors over great distances, allowing enemy ships to be detected while still far away, which implies perhaps that it was a variation of Galileo’s telescope. Unlike a telescope, the celatone was designed to then calculate the exact distance between the two ships. It may not have fulfilled its promise on the 1617 voyage, for there is no mention of the instrument again until the 1630s, when Galileo tried to interest the Spanish court in its utility. Secrecy about this incident highlights another aspect of the Order of Santo Stefano’s work, the conjunction of cartography and espionage. In a later episode, another artist from the entourage of Giulio Parigi made a similar sea voyage to the one depicted in the British Museum album. Ercole Bazzicaluva drew a series of pen, ink and wash drawings of Spanish coastal fortresses and harbours in the mid-1640s, as seen in a sheet now in the Courtauld Gallery (Fig. 45). The similarities in format to the views in the British Museum album are obvious; both relied on the same tradition of city views in atlases. Bazzicaluva’s drawn frames may be more elaborately shaped than those in the ‘Callot’ album, but his labelling of each scene at the center top of each sheet is similar. Bazzicaluva made the sea voyage on a ship of the Order of Santo Stefano at the behest of Grand Duke Ferdinando II in Florence.52 In addition to their artistic qualities the drawings gave up-to-date knowledge of key points in Spain’s coastal defenses, including arsenals. Here, dal vivo draftsmanship taken from the training of Giulio Parigi had its direct military uses as evidence brought back from foreign sites by espionage. Espionage also provided the framework for several other well-known voyages by draftsmen working ‘from life’. Later in the seventeenth century the gentleman draftsman Willem Schellinks made several voyages recorded in sketches that were made, as he wrote it in Dutch, naer het leven, including one trip in 1645–1646 along the 51 Inghirami, ‘Figure minori’. 52 Navarrete Prieto, ‘Views’, p. 345–363. See also Ribouillaut, ‘Artiste ou espion?’ for sixteenth-century examples.

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fig. 45: ercole Bazzicaluva. view of the port of cartagena. c. 1645. Drawing. courtauld gallery, London. © the samuel courtauld trust, London.

Loire river in France together with his fellow artist Lambert Doomer.53 Between 1661 and 1665 he travelled across Europe and Britain, under commission from the collector of topographic views Laurens van der Hem. Schellinks kept written journals of his travels as well as sketches, and when he voyaged in England in 1661–1662, he noted down such points of interest as arsenals and fortifications. Fueling modern suspicions that he worked secretly for Dutch intelligence, Schellinks happened to be present at the mouth of the Medway River just south of London in June 1667, when the Dutch admiral de Ruyter led a flotilla of Dutch war ships in a surprise raid on the British fleet. Though it was not made into a print and thus not made public, this drawing made ‘from life’ contains a detailed key to the events of the raid. It gave a compelling, authoritative form of visual evidence, similar in that sense to the British Museum album of Mediterranean piracy.

Commerce or virtue? The Fair at Impruneta Tuscan commerce is the context for both the British Museum’s album of Mediterranean views and also for Callot’s extraordinary print, The Fair at Impruneta (Fig. 29). In government circles, commerce in the form of trade with the Turks was being weighed in the balance against the cost of the campaigns against Islamic piracy. The successful battles of the Order of Santo Spirito, including those that Callot depicted 53 Schellinks’ journal and drawings from his voyage with Doomer are documented extensively in Alsteens and Buijs, Paysages, for his biography and a discussion of his drawings, p. 40–55.

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in his 1617 etchings of the capture of Turkish ships, taking over their goods and their slaves, represented a form of commerce to a Florentine audience, but one that was perhaps too risky and not lucrative enough. The question of whether commercial activities were in themselves a debased activity or a source of civic virtue was a topic of conversation and debate at court, and it was the subject of theatrical representation in Michelangelo Buonarotti the Younger’s intermezzo titled La Fiera, performed in 1619 during carnival in Florence. That a prominent writer as well as three court artists should all represent the theme of the fair within the space of a few years is not just evidence of an artistic fascination, and a local response to Dutch or Flemish images of kermess or carnival scenes. They were all responding to a current political issue. Their choices in making their various representations are revealing of specifically artistic concerns, however, and perhaps of a rivalry that led to ingenious and self-reflexive artistry. Callot’s and Filippo Napoletano’s versions in print and painting should be seen in conjunction with the large, highly finished drawing of The Fair at Prato by Jacques Stella (Figs. 31 and 32). Stella, then a very young artist from Lyon on a study voyage to Italy, was well known to the other two artists. As Félibien remarked in his life of Callot, ‘He often went to see Cantagallina, his first master, Alfonso Parigi, painter and engineer, Philippe Napolitain, and Jacques Stella of Lyon, both painters who were then in Florence; and having bonded in friendship with them, [Callot] tried to instruct himself more and more and to profit from their advice’.54 The subject of the market at Impruneta made its way into Florentine graphic arts in 1615, when Cantagallina made at least one of his drawings of the event. We probably owe to Cantagallina’s Flemish experience the idea of drawing a kermess à la flamande in a topographic view of a Tuscan town, probably fueled by the emulation of prints after Bruegel’s kermess scenes. The later versions of a Tuscan market take the view drawn from life into a more complex format, and into artistic competition. Filippo Napoletano’s painting may date to 1618, when a payment is recorded during the month of September, though the work itself is not dated.55 Stella’s drawing can only roughly be dated to 1620, the same year that Callot dated his large etching. We do know that Callot’s Fair was presented to Cosimo II on the first day of the Florentine new year in March 1621, and that his etching triumphed over the other contemporary depictions of the subject, including the drama La Fiera penned by Buonarotti the Younger. His etching won Callot the highest sign of distinction from the Grand Duke, the gold chain of honour hung with Cosimo’s portrait to wear near his heart. Despite being made over a number of years, Callot’s print, Filippo’s painting and 54 Félibien, Entretiens, III, p. 367: ‘il alloit souvent voir Cantagallina, son premier maître; Alfonso Parigi, peintre et ingénieur; Phillipe Napolitain, et Jacques Stella de Lyon, tous deux peintres, qui étoient alors à Florence; et ayant fait amitié avec eux, tâchoit de s’instruire de plus en plus et de profiter de leurs avis […]’. Cited also by Ternois, L’Art, p. 24, who points out that Félibien was confusing Alfonso with Giulio Parigi. 55 Chiarini, Teodoro Filippo, p. 78.

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Stella’s drawing all have common ground, and they have a mutual relationship to the dramatic actions depicted in Buonarotti’s intermezzo. Even the stage drama was grounded in an interest in the ethics of commerce, the role of art at court, and the aesthetic of representing ‘from life’. Filippo Napoletano’s painting was a vivid performance of working dal vivo (Fig. 31). There were no preparatory drawings for the figures in the scene, which include portraits of the Grand Duke, his wife, and other court personalities. He showed off a Caravaggio-like ability to capture likeness spontaneously, working directly in paint on canvas. He depicts the Grand Duke at right, his wife Maria Maddalena of Austria and her young daughter at center foreground, and his own self-portrait at the left, recognisable from his later portrait by Ottavio Leoni in Rome. Filippo stands in closest proximity to a snail-seller from the market, and gazes toward the oddly-dressed, mollusk-bedecked tradesman as if to join the artist and the market vendor together in one figure.56 To the other side of the artist we see a man and woman in the dress of market traders, kneeling and presenting a gift of foodstuffs to a nobly dressed couple, as if in an act of fealty. The artist’s two-way juxtaposition places court figures in relation to the market, and then sets them both against the religious ritual of the feast of St. Luke, patron saint of artists. Through his placement between the snail-seller and the exchange of gifts between market traders and the nobility, the artist embeds himself and his painting in the exchange between the low realm of the marketplace and the high realm of the court. Jacques Stella’s drawing is less complex (Fig. 32). It depicts the church at Prato on the feast of the Virgin’s birth on September 8, when its relic of the Virgin’s girdle were taken from the church and displayed outside in the small aedicula on the building’s façade. Like Callot’s image, Stella’s drawing juxtaposes the market crowds with the feast day and its rituals, and like Callot, Stella has also mediated between the religious display and the market commerce by representing in their midst a scene of punishment. A criminal hangs by his bound arms, tortured by the strappado. In Callot’s etching, it is easier to make out the market scales that hang from the man’s feet: his crime was to short-weigh his goods and thus cheat his clientele. The same can probably be inferred from the strappado scene in Stella’s drawing; deception and falsehood in the marketplace are thus made visible in the midst of the throng of trade.

56 Chiarini connects this figure in The Fair at Impruneta to Filippo’s painting of the so-called ‘Man with Snails’ (Chiarini, Teodoro Filippo, cat. 72), itself clearly a version of Jacques Callot’s drawing of the same subject in the Uffizi (rejected by Ternois from Callot’s oeuvre, but accepted by most others, including Chiarini). In the painting and Callot’s drawing, as well as in a later French print by Charles David, the visual play on snails’ horns, forked beards, forked roots and the cornuto gesture, point to the figure’s comic and erotic significance. The key to these representations lies in contemporary discussions of food and sex and in the proverbs that refer to this lore, but it goes beyond the scope of this present chapter to analyse how the motif of the snailman entered into the relations between Callot and Filippo.

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fig. 46: Jacques callot. Detail of right side foreground, The Fair at Impruneta. 1620. etching. open access, cleveland museum of art.

Callot’s print explodes the scale of the topographic view, capturing more of the landscape than any of his rival artists, and cramming it full of figures and incidents. And yet an important element that Callot adds to his crowded market scene is found nearly hidden in the foreground closest to the viewer, in the darkened ‘framing’ area, in the righthand corner of the print (Fig. 46). On a trestle stage, two snake-handlers perform, with an audience attending to the spectacle. The snake-handler was a quack doctor and a frequent accompaniment to the commedia dell’arte performances put on in marketplaces. He would typically end his performance by selling his snake-oil medicament to gullible consumers in the crowd. The performance of a pleasurable deception, the tricking of a willing audience that we see in this darkened framing area serves as a metaphor for the commercial activity in the rest of the image. At the centre foreground, to the left of the stage but still in the dark frame to the scene, is a group of gamblers playing cards, again associating the exchange of money with the theme of cheating and deception. This is not entirely Callot’s own invention. Debased commerce and its deceptions had been the overriding themes of Buonarrotti’s La Fiera. Callot may also have intended a polemical contrast between theatrical and topographic representations. The reasons for this polemic come out when we compare Callot’s image with the play, put on in Florence at the teatro degli Uffizi on 11 February 1619. The long intermezzo by Buonarrotti, the prominent Florentine poet and nephew of the divine Michelangelo himself, epitomized the interest in low-life comedy among the Florentine

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intelligentsia. Its ties to various visual representations of the marketplace have been noted.57 It was attended by an enormous and enthusiastic audience in the Uffizi. Yet in the days following its performance, the play raised severe criticisms in the circle of the prudish Grand Duchess, as it had shown the public such vulgarities as a pregnant prostitute and her procuress mother, and many other indecorous, low things associated with base, dishonest trade. The main themes of the intermezzo, however, were high-minded and timely. Buonarrotti was treating in half-allegorical and half-realist manner the subject of legitimate commerce and good trade under Medici rule. Through personifications of good and bad practice in the marketplace, figures who speak directly to the audience from the recognizable setting of a Florentine market outside the city gates, the writer brought out the witty conceit that good commerce depends on the controlling hand of the government, which legitimizes the tainted world of commerce through its manipulation of the populace. Good markets require, in other words, the right kind of deceit, and thrive on a legitimate form of enticement and illusion. The notion of illusion and its effect on an audience cleverly tied the representation of commerce to the role of theatre itself. Callot’s inclusion of one revealing motif in this nearest foreground area shows that he had perhaps also found this idea of high and low deceptions in another realm, in a printed image. In front of the trestle stage where the charlatans perform, a prominently placed man urinates (Fig. 46). Merely a realist motif? Callot’s red chalk drawing of this motif is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection; the motif is subsequently repeated in several other of his etched crowd scenes (Fig. 47). There is a close parallel in an Italian etching dated 1583, attributed to Giovanni de Paoli, that sheds light on Callot’s image. Le Bararie del Mondo, or Cheats of the World, gave Callot several important motifs and a thematic structure (Fig. 48). At the top left margin of the print, a man with his back to us urinates in the entrance to a covered hall. The sequence of figures to the right of this urinating man continues with the comedians on a trestle stage, and a cut-purse at work. Beside the urinating man is the inscription ‘Non c’è miglior arte’, a proverbial phrase meaning ‘there is no better trade’. Remembering that the comedy enacted here is the commedia dell’arte, the comedy of the trades, the conjunction of the two motifs is significant. The man producing urine is ironically described as a person engaged in commerce, while the actors of the commedia dell’arte preside over the illicit trades of false begging and robbery. Both the actors and the man relieving himself come together under this theme of a thieving fakery. And Callot takes them in this sense as well, when he puts the figure

57 Limentani, ‘Introduction’, p. 10–23. For Buonarotti’s context in Florentine literary circles, see Rossi, ‘Capricci’, p. 151–80. See also Varese, ‘Ideologia’, 2, p. 585–610; Fratellini, ‘Appunti’, p. 51–62.

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fig. 47: Jacques callot. a man urinating against a wall. Drawing. c. 1617. © 2019. photo scala, florence.

fig. 48: giovanni de pauli. Le Bararie del Mondo. 1583. etching. Royal Library print Room, Windsor. Royal collection trust / © her majesty Queen elizabeth ii 2018.

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of man urinating alongside the trestle stage with its charlatan comedians at the very forefront of his composition. ‘Non c’è miglior arte’ is the sarcastic message of the popular print. But Callot’s reverses that proverbial phrase, and claims a higher sort of arte for himself. For on close examination, the etching proves to be structured in a series of alternative representations of human behavior in the marketplace. In the foreground where the commedia goes on, we also see figures at left being lowered down the wall of the house in order to steal birds’ eggs. In the next layer of space, however, better lit and more open, we find figures engaged in morally better acts, a man helping a woman to descend from her horse, people helping the crippled and maimed in their small carts—echoes, in reverse of their moral sense, of the feigned deformities in the Bararie print. Beyond them, in the third zone, come further examples of transgression, fighting and cheating, which include the figure of the man urinating repeated a second time. Further along still, at the left of the crowd, we find the man punished by the strappado for falsifying the weights of his merchandise. Each spatial layer of the print alternates between licit and illicit activities; to underscore that alternation Callot has also alternated zones of shade and light, which serve neatly to give a rational recession of space but also a moralised organisation of the represented activities. Callot thus seems to have reached into low art, into the least virtuoso, anonymous level of printmaking, to find raw material for his technically innovative and artistically masterful print. And in this, too, he may be emulating and outdoing the example of Buonarrotti’s La Fiera and other theatrical and musical productions in Florence. It had long been an affectation of the Florentine nobility to appropriate rustic or vulgar language or activities and to enjoy them in the context of high culture. In the quattrocento, Lorenzo de’ Medici himself had written versions of canti carnescialeschi, the robust songs of itinerant tradesmen crying their wares at carnival time. Much later, the writer Filippo Baldinucci himself was known to enjoy lazzi contadinesca, comedies in the rural manner. The earliest musical intermezzi, the productions of the most advanced composers in Italy, appropriated the carnival and market cries of vendors as a continuation of the canti carnescialeschi tradition, a phenomenon that then went on recurring in Italian operatic works until the nineteenth century.58 La Fiera of Buonarrotti the Younger worked within that tradition by its incorporation of the itinerant tradesmen and their market cries into the carnival atmosphere of the fair. Callot’s reference to a popular print that satirizes the false trades of cheats and beggars comes within a well-defined tradition of appropriating the popular imagery of the marketplace. Callot’s print thus resembles the painting by Filippo and drawing by Stella in dealing with the theme of commerce in contrast to virtue. It met, however, with much more success than the other works of art or Buonarrotti’s play. In fact, the poet in 58 Ghisi, ‘Carnival Songs’, p. 325–333; Gatti, ‘L’iconografia musicale’, p. 303–333.

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later years may have been conscious that he had lost a contest over the powers of visual representation as opposed to the powers of poetry. Buonarotti kept on revising and reworking his own manuscript, enlarging it with so many characters and incidents that it became near-illegible as well as impossible to perform. But in so doing he may have emulated Callot’s marvelously encyclopaedic vision of the market, his hundreds of tiny figures and episodes. It has been suggested that the tiny scale and the multiplicity of Callot’s figures was a deliberate call for viewing them through a magnifying lens, which would be highly appropriate in Florence, where Galileo’s lenses were a much-prized feature of local culture. It is clear that Callot’s manipulation of scale and his juxtapositions of near and far, the miniature and the massive, was never going to be rivalled within the world of literature or theatre—the development of illusionistic scenography under Giulio Parigi notwithstanding. The apparent contest between visual artists and dramatist was won by a printed image, which had the advantage not only of revealing Callot’s high artistry, but of being capable of dissemination across Europe, carrying with it the fame of the Tuscan court. At the core of the contest between these versions of the market, however, is the challenge of representing within an image the idea that images could argue and persuade, that they could enter into public debate. Their role in that debate was supported by the authority of images made dal vivo, in the act of eye-witnessing. In that sense, Callot’s print is, quite simply, about the power of images. The icon of the Madonna dell’Impruneta, invisible in the print’s far distance, but governing the movements of the crowd in front of the church, models the truly legitimate form of representation in visible, not legible form—the sacred image, with its direct and miraculous link to divine presence. The market’s many forms of representation, true and false, are played out against this invisible reference point.

The icon as model for the image made dal vivo: the fecundity of images made ‘from life’ Topographic views and figures sketched from life were the underpinnings of Callot’s great works in Florence, and also later in Nancy. The sense of authoritative evidence that pertained to such acts of eye-witnessing made them a useful political tool, as in the case of Callot’s contributions to the Relazioni, news pamphlets about victories over the Islamic pirates. The proto-journalistic function of such images in Florence, however, should not make us overlook the curious aesthetic consequences of this approach to imitation. There are further attributes of views drawn from life, which we can define by looking at Callot’s works in relation to those of Flemish artists who were his contemporaries. To begin with, I’d like to suggest that they shared common ground in court culture, and in an effort to join simple mimesis of real things to a more complex, artful form of allusion.

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The research done on the term naer het leven around 1600 has followed the story of its spread across Europe through the emigration of Flemish artists, who fled their war-torn homeland during the 1580s and 1590s, and who were specialists in the creation of topographic views and vivid images of naturalia, which were sometimes inscribed with the phrase naer het leven.59 Although the term itself is found in texts as early as the 1530s, it became much more popular in the wake of prints made after Pieter Bruegel’s works in the 1560s.60 In the years just after the turn of the seventeenth century, at a moment when Bruegel’s work underwent a revival, the phrase became downright fashionable. Karel van Mander employed the term in his 1606 lives of the Netherlandish artists, and even—as we have seen—used it to praise the work of Caravaggio in Rome The most interesting examples of the term came in a court that had strong ties to van Mander and to the artists that he championed, that is, the court of Rudolf II in Prague, exemplified by the works of Roelandt Savery. Flemish draftsmen such as Antonie Mirou or Pieter Houck worked in a similar vein in the same years for a princely patron at court in Salzburg, Konrad van Reitenau.61 I would like briefly to integrate the works of Callot and his friends in Florence with those of their Flemish contemporaries, as well as to place Callot and Florentine work from life in relation to Caravaggio’s realism, in order to bring out some aspects of the image made from life that were particularly suited for the culture of curiosity and the playful wit prized in courtly life at the turn of the century. In 1606, shortly after van Mander’s publication, the Hapsburg emperor Rudolf II sent a Flemish artist, Roelandt Savery, to the Tyrolean Alps, to bring back views that were so like Pieter Bruegel’s that they passed for the old Netherlandish artist’s work for several centuries. As we saw in the introduction, Savery’s sketches of local views as well as local peoples performed a curious dual role, as seen in a sheet now in the Courtauld Gallery. It cannily evokes the personal style of Bruegel. The Courtauld’s drawing even has an old inscription asserting it was made by Bruegel himself. The prints of Bruegel’s landscapes certainly show us why the mistake would be made. And yet Savery’s sketch also presents itself as a spontaneous and direct impression of 59 Spicer, ‘The “Naer Het Leven” Drawings’, p. 3–30; 63–82; Joaneath Spicer, ‘Topographical Drawings’, p. 351–356; 422; Spicer, ‘A Pictorial Vocabulary’, p. 22–51; Spicer, ‘The Significance’, p. 160–163. 60 Swan, ‘Ad Vivum’: ‘Among other things, images made ad vivum bear witness to what they represent, and their mimetic promise came to be negotiated for artistic as well as scientific ends; from 1530 onward we find a concentrated dependence on this qualifying term in the context of natural history, by 1604 the term naer het leven had been integrated into Dutch art theory’ (p. 354). The effort to assimilate the term to a binary opposition of work from life opposed to work from the mind (uyt den gheest) took Dutch studies in an unfortunate direction. The counter-effort to assimilate the issue of making images from life into a broader discourse of natural science has been a helpful alternative; for this see most recently Balfe, Woodall and Zittel, Ad Vivum? (2019), as cited in the Introduction. For another way of approaching the issue and its relation to artistic practice, relying on the French term au vif in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, or the term contrafetsel, counterfeit, see the works by Turel and Parshall, cited in the Introduction; Parshall’s article was the inspiration for the apporach I am taking here. 61 Diefenbacher, Die Schwalbacher Reise. See also Ribouillaut, ‘L’Artiste en berger d’Arcadie’.

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a real site, inserting the tiny image of an artist sketching the view that we are looking at. The Alpine scene thus becomes simultaneously the product of a pure mimesis, an intense copying of what the artist saw on the site and in the flesh, and the product of intense emulation of a past artist, Bruegel, who had copied an Alpine view nearly fifty years before. The visual echoes of Bruegel were the portal through which the knowing, cultivated viewer was expected to enter into an experience of the Savery view. In that sense, it functions in the same way as the ornamental framing motifs in the vaghissimi paesaggi of Giulio Parigi, Cantagallina, and Callot. Emulation of the visual language of past art lifts the realist image into the realm of artistry. The emphasis on artifice and fantasy at the edges of the topographic views produced in Florence also put the emphasis on the artist’s hand and his imagination. Nowhere is this more evident than in Callot’s Fan of 1619 (Fig. 43)., with its organic curvilinear framing and its grotesque masks. If copying the real is an act of self-effacement on the artist’s part, on the other hand the framing of the real by both allusion and artifice reasserts the presence of a self-aware artist. Other, similar plays on creating naturalistic images that were couched in the manner or style of past artists were popular at Rudolf II’s court or among artists who worked for him. One thinks of Hendrick Goltzius’s Masterpieces print series during the 1590s, in which he cunningly engraved scenes in the manner of Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, Parmigianino, Barocci and Cort. The play of absent and present artistry is not unlike the sprezzatura of the ideal courtier, which is a self-effacement serving as self-promotion within the economy of the court. We need to leave court culture behind, however, to follow another trait of dal vivo work by Callot and his Florentine colleagues that was also an aspect of views made naer het leven by their Flemish contemporaries and by later Dutch artists. A relatively small group of artists appears to have adopted the notion that images drawn from life lent themselves to a chain of further replications, each also worthy of designation as made ‘from life’. The image made dal vivo had a particular creative potency, to judge by the afterlife of Savery’s Bruegelesque Alpine drawings. Savery put a group of his topographic naer het leven sketches into an album, which he brought with him to Utrecht when he departed the court in Prague after 1613. When Savery died in 1639, Rembrandt bought the album, which is described in the inventory of his goods as ‘a great book with drawings of the Tyrol by Roelant Saveri drawn nae’t leven’. Lambert Doomer, who worked in relation to Rembrandt’s workshop in the early 1640s, probably as a student, seems to have been affected by the album in Rembrandt’s hands He bought it, probably when Rembrandt’s collection went up for sale in 1658. Even before that he undertook a long journey to France during 1645–1646, together with Willem Schellinks, as if in emulation of Savery’s Tyrolean journey.62 The two 62 Alsteens and Buijs downplay the link of Doomer to Rembrandt and to Savery’s album of drawings, but more generally the account given by Schulz, ‘Doomer and Savery’, p. 253–293, is accepted as accurate.

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Dutch artists sketched views naer het leven of French sites along the Loire river, often sketching each other sketching the view, as a mark of that first-hand eye-witnessing of foreign lands. They titled and dated their drawings, making them into a visual journal, which Schellinks accompanied by a written journal of the voyage. Both artists continued after this point to make journeys for the purpose of topographic view-making. As we have seen, some of Schellinks’ work in England during the 1660s may have been for the purposes of espionage for the Dutch military. In 1663, Doomer made another voyage along the Rhine river, again making numerous topographical drawings. Doomer kept the Savery album in mind, and indeed kept it at the heart of his practice as a draftsman, for he copied a number of Savery’s drawings, assimilating his own drawing style to that of Savery, and sold the copies as well as some of Savery’s originals to the avid collector of drawn topographies, Laurens van der Hem. He also drew copies after his own naer het leven drawings, and traced some of the monuments or architectural features that he had drawn in France or Germany, to make them the core of a new drawn composition. Striking examples of this procedure of generating new images from on-site drawings come from a series of sketches Doomer made of the Renaissance fountains in the city of Tours. A sheet now in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem represents the fountain in the Grand-Marché, with a backdrop of hills that contemporary maps reveal were apparently an imaginative addition to the view. A second sheet in the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam shows the same fountain in reverse to the Haarlem sheet, with a street scene as backdrop.63 The very method that Doomer used in this and other cases seems revealing. He pressed the first drawing, done primarily in black chalk, onto a blank sheet as if to imprint it, in effect making a counter-proof. Then he worked up the faint lines impressed there to elaborate a new scene. The image made as a result of working from life, naer het leven, was an imprint made by hard realities on the artist’s mind and on his graphic materials. To make another imprint from that drawing did not evidently diminish the initial impression of ‘life-likeness’. The copying of a drawing that had been made from life was a process of invention through repetition. New images formed in the studio from the first naer het leven view were no less made from life, even if they were created in the workshop thousands of miles from the lands that were depicted. Image spawned image, in a chain of causation that rivalled the causal relation between the landscape and the dal vivo view that copied it. There may be drawn draftsmen in the image, with their back to us, hard at work sketching the scene we are looking at. But the real artist as active agent seems to disappear, in order to make the image take on full authority as an indexical record of the real. It is the very notion of the image made from life that leads to and justifies this form of copying. 63 Alsteens and Buijs, Paysages, on the Tours fountain drawings, p. 158–163. On Doomer’s repetitions of his own work, and on his counter-proof copying, Alsteens and Buijs, p. 32–33.

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We will see in Chapter 4 that this form of drawing from life made its way to Rome in the 1630s and 1640s, in part inspired by Filippo Napoletano’s painted views of Tivoli, made dal vivo. The practice was adopted by Claude Lorrain, and by Flemish and Dutch artists in his orbit in Rome. But here it is worth pointing out what a selfaware group of artists was engaged in this practice, and how restricted in number they were. Jan Asselijn and Jan Both sketched side by side the Roman limekilns along the Tiber near the Porta del Popolo. The drawings brought back to the United Provinces, discussed in chapter four, were also copied and reused on a number of occasions, in subsequent paintings by Asselijn and Both, and in drawings and paintings by other artists. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Willem Schellinks also drew a copy of Asselijn’s drawing of the Roman view.64 As a draftsman working in the same mode, he would have appreciated the drawing’s status as made from life, and probably understood the act of copying it not as a derivation from an image, but as a further act of representing naer het leven. Callot in several instances copied his own etchings, recreating on new plates the entire run of fifty images from his Florentine Capricci di varie figure once he had returned to Nancy in 1622, for example. There could have been several different reasons for this, but the attitude toward copies shared by other artists who practiced drawing from life raise the question of whether such large-scale reproduction of his own plates was not also caught up in the phenomenon. From copying and repetition could come inspiration and invention. Claude Lorrain’s drawn copies of his own paintings in the Liber Veritatis, also called his Libro d’Invenzione, certainly turned repetition into new invention, as he could use the images to create new works for later patrons. Caravaggio’s practice of making second versions of his paintings, when he depicts a second Lute Player, for example, probably comes from the same attitude toward the source of the image in the real world. It did not vitiate his commitment to working directly and solely from the model in front of his eyes to make such a traced copy. Indeed, it might be said to be the ultimate instance of that commitment to working dal vivo. For the second version was an imprint taken from a powerful mould, traced from the canvas that held the first imprint of his experience. The visual memory was verified by the artist’s studious gaze, repeated again and again in front of the model, a model that was now a real image, not a real person. This complicates our modern urge to value the original and devalue the copied image. There is a corollary to this positive link between first version and copies, within drawn work done dal vivo. It is the relationship between sacred icons and their prototype in the icon of the Virgin made by St. Luke. Each icon has its origin in that prototype, and thus each new icon participates in the authentic reality captured by the original act of sacred representation. The drawing made from life forms a similar 64 Jan Asselijn’s sketch naer het leven is now in Hannover, in the Niedersächsische Landesgalerie; Schellinks’s copy of Asselijn’s sketch of a Roman limekiln is British Museum reg no. 1957,1214.2.

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iconic chain. From direct experience of a scene, fixed by the drawn image, flow out further images, which in turn beget more, as if by a process of natural generation rather than artistic creation. The after-effects of a direct confrontation with the real motif, place or person was that the resulting image had a generating force. It lent authority and power to further images that descend in a genealogical sense from that initial encounter. At least in part, this authority of the real worked through its power to inspire the artist as well as to convince its viewers. Imitation of the real was thus the matrix for a particular type of creativity. This set of ideas associated with the practice of drawing from life may lie behind some of the curious exchanges of motifs between Callot and Filippo Napoletano in Florence around 1620. We have seen that Callot based his etchings of Tuscan ships battling the Turks on a drawing by Filippo, seemingly made from life. In the same vein, Baldinucci asserted that a drawing made from life by Filippo of the village of Impruneta was subsequently given to Callot to use in his own work. The drawing has never been found, and we know that Callot made his own drawings on site. But perhaps the Florentine biographer was pointing to a broader process of exchange between the two friends. When the two shared a single drawing made from life to generate their own individual works on the theme of the Barbary pirates, or when both artists time and again represented the same motifs of nudes in the studio and buildings in the landscape, perhaps drawing side by side, was it not in the first instance the visible world itself that generated the images? And thus the image made from life by one would serve just as well for the other. The image of the real world and the real world itself were made equivalent in this practice. In conclusion, from Flanders to the courts of Florence and Prague came the practice of drawing naer het leven or dal vivo, and it was fashionable at court for a time in the early years of the seventeenth century. It is highly likely that when Callot was introduced to the the practice of drawing dal vivo it was as a form of self-aware artistry that involved a distinct notion about the generation of images from the natural world and from past art. The practice of drawing as a form of eyewitnessing could serve to authenticate experience, and that authority given to images made dal vivo could serve as part of a broad political debate, as we saw in the case of the album of Mediterranean views and Tuscan debates about commerce versus piracy. Callot may have the last word here. His dedication to Cosimo II of The Fair at Impruneta calls attention to the icon of the Madonna della Spina, usually housed within Impruneta’s church. We know from the religious procession in the far background that the icon is there, probably sheltered under the canopy just visible within the procession. Invisible within the image, the icon’s presence is evoked in words: ‘The market of Impruneta which on St. Luke’s feast day innumerable people and merchants frequent, near the church that the Buondelmonti family erected, where the image of the Virgin mother of God, made by that same St. Luke, is fecund in miracles’, the dedication

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begins.65 What the image made from life shared with the miracle-working icon was that fecundity, an inexhaustible source of images to come. When in 1617 he dedicated his earlier print series the Capricci di varie figure to the young prince Lorenzo di Ferdinando I de’ Medici, he plays elaborately on the concept of fertility and the artist’s genius. ‘The first flowers that I have picked in the fields of my sterile genius’, he calls the prints, ‘the harvest of my labors, which I owe to you by an obligation of servitude’.66 One recalls that in his Fair at Impruneta Filippo Napoletano inserted his own self-portrait next to a man and woman kneeling to offer foodstuffs to a noble couple: the obligations of servitude did indeed entail giving harvests to an overlord, and just so did an artist offer the work of his hands. If his works seem worthy to bear the fruit of some virtuous action, Callot’s dedication continues, it is because they have been made fertile by the rays of his patron’s glory. It may be couched in the language of courtly obligation, but the metaphor of organic fecundity also resonates in the practice of representing dal vivo, from life, in its generous, seemingly endless generation of images.

Works Cited Alsteens, Stijn, and Hans Buijs, Paysages de France dessinés par Lambert Doomer et les artistes hollandais et flamands des XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Fondation Custodia, 2008). Angiolini, Franco. I Cavalieri e il principe: l’Ordine di Santo Stefano e la società Toscana in età moderna (Florence: Edifir, 1996). Anonymous. Relazione della presa di due Bertoni di Tunisi fatta in Corsica, da quattro Galere di Toscana quest’anno 1617, li 23 di Nov. (Florence: n.p.,1617). Baldinucci, Filippo, ‘Notizie di Jacopo Callot’, in his Notizie dei professori del Disegno di Cimabue in qua (Florence: Gio. Battista Stecchi e Anton Giuseppe Pagani, 1767–1774), 21 vols., XIV, 273–290. Baroni, Alessandra, ‘A scuola d’incisione da Giulio Parigi, Remigio Cantagallina e altri’, Paragone 84–85 (2009): 88–93. Belhamissi, Moulay. Histoire de la marine algérienne (Algiers: Entreprise universitaire d’etude et de publication, 1983). Bernardini, Ridolfo, and Laura Zampieri, ‘Bibliografia antica e moderna sull’Ordine e sui cavalieri di S. Stefano, Primo tentativo di catalogazione’, in L’Ordine di Santo Stefano nella Toscana dei Lorena (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1992): 194–241. Berti, Luciano., ‘Giulio e Alfonso Parigi’, Palladio I (1951): 161–164. Biagioli, Mario. Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Age of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1993). Blumenthal, Arthur, “The Stage Designs of Giulio Parigi,” (PhD diss., New York University, 1984). Blumenthal, Arthur. Giulio Parigi’s Set Designs: Florence and the Early Baroque Spectacle, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1986). 65 ‘Nundinas Imprunetanas quae in divi Luce festa quotannis innumerabili populi frequentia atque affluenti variorum mercium copia celebrantur, iuxta Templum insigne a Nobilissima Bondelmontium Familia olim in propria solo extructum, fundatumque vbi Deipare Virginis Imago, miraculorum faecunda ab eodem Diuo Lucem ut fertur depicta’. I thank Elizabeth Biggs for her translation of the Latin dedication, and beg her pardon for omitting the thorny second half of the text. 66 ‘[…] le stampe che io umilmente presento […] sono per cosi dire I primi fiori che io ho colto nel campo del mio sterile ingegno […] il dono è, per dir meglio, le primitie delle mie fatiche, dovute a lei per obligo di servitu […].

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Brooks, Julian, ‘Drawing in Florence, circa 1600: The Studio and the City’, in Graceful and True: Drawing in Florence circa 1600 (ex. cat. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, 2003): 23–40. Bruwaert, Edmond, ‘Estampe unique de Jacques Callot à la Bibliothèque Nationale de Florence’, Rivista d’Arte 8 (1912): 115–120. Bruwaert, Edmond, ‘Jacques Callot à Florence’, La Revue de Paris (1914): 827–849. Bruwaert, Edmond, ‘Jacques Callot et Don Giovanni de’ Medici’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 9 (1924): 118–127. Bruwaert, Edmond. La Vie de Jacques Callot: biographie critique (Paris: H. Laurens, 1927). Button, John. Algiers Voyage (London: B. Alsop, 1621). Buonarrotti the Younger, Michelangelo. Elogio di Cosimo II (Florence: Pietro Cecconcelli, alle Stelle medicee,1621). Buonarrotti the Younger, Michelangelo, ed. Umberto Limentani. La Fiera (Florence:L.S. Olschki, 1984). Bussens, Hélène and Véronique Van de Kerckhof, eds. Le Peintre et l’arpenteur: Images de Bruxelles et de l’ancien duché de Brabant (Bruxelles: La Renaissance du Livre, 2000). Camps, Miguel Angel Casasnovas, ‘The Ottoman and Barbary Attacks on the Balearic Islands during the XVIth Century’, in Making Waves in the Mediterranean, ed. by D’Angelo, Harlaftis, Vassallo (Messina: Istituto di studi storici Gaetano Salvemini, 2010), n.p. Capponi, Niccolò, ‘Le Palle di Marte: Military Strategy and Diplomacy in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under Ferdinand II de’ Medici (1621–1670)’, The Journal of Military History 68 (2004): 1105–1141. Carali, Paolo. Fakhr-ad-din 2. II principe del Libano e la corte di Toscana, 1605–1635 (Rome: Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1936–1938). Chiabrera, Gabriele. Canzoni per le galere della religione di Santo Stefano (Florence: Zanobi Pignoni, 1619). Chiarini, Marco. Paesisti, Bamboccianti, e vedutisti nella Roma seicentesca (ex. cat. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, 1967). Chiarini, Marco. Artisti alla Corte Granducale (ex. cat. Florence, Palazzo Pitti, 1969). Chiarini, Marco, ‘Filippo Napoletano, Poelenburgh, Breenburgh e la nascita del paesaggio realistico in Italia’, Paragone 23 (1972): 18–34. Chiarini, Marco, ‘I quadri della collezione del Principe Ferdinando di Toscana’,Paragone 26 (1975): 301–305. Chiarini, Marco. I dipinti olandesi del Seicento e Settecento (ex. cat. Florence, Galleria e Musei Statali di Firenze, 1989). Chiarini, Marco, ‘Du nouveau à propos des relations entre Jacques Callot et Filippo Napoletano’, in Jacques Callot (1592–1635): Actes du Colloque organisé par le Service Culturel du Musée du Louvre et de la ville de Nancy, ed. by Daniel Ternois. (Paris, 1993): 139–160. Chiarini, Marco, and Alessandro Marabottini, eds., Firenze e la sua immagine: Cinque secoli di vedutismo (ex. cat. Florence, Forte di Belvedere, 1994). Chiarini, Marco, ed., Splendore dei Medici: Firenze e l’Europa (ex. cat. Florence, Palazzo Pitti, 1998). Chiarini, Marco. Teodoro Filippo di Liagno detto Filippo Napoletano 1589–1629 (Florence: Centro Di, 2007). Choné Paulette, ed., Jacques Callot 1592–1635 (ex. cat. Nancy, Musée Historique Lorrain, 1992). Cuffara, Rosangela, ‘Fakhr ad-Din II alla corte dei Medici (1613–1615). Collezionismo, architettura e ars topiaria tra Firenze e Beirut’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 37 (2010): p. 209–217. Dan, Pierre. Histoire de la Barbarie (Paris: Ricolet, 1637). Diaz, Furio. Il granducato di Toscana. I Medici (Turin: UTET Libreria, 1987). Diefenbacher, Jörg. Die Schwalbacher Reise, gezeichnet von Antonie Mirou, in Kupfer gestochen von Matthias Merian der Ältere, 1620 (Mannheim: J. Diefenbacher, 2002). Félibien, André, [The Life of Jacques Callot] in his Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes, Quatrième partie (Trevoux: Imprimerie de S.A.S, 1725) 6 vols., III, p. 358–387. Fontana, Fulvio. I Pregi della Toscana de’ cavalieri di Santo Stefano (Florence: Pier Maria Miccioni e Michele Nestenus, 1701). Fratellini, Bianca Maria, ‘Appunti per un’analisi della commedia ‘La Fiera’ di M. Buonarotti il Giovane, in rapporto alla cultura di G. L. Bernini’, in Barocco romano e barocco italiano, ed. by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco and Maria Luisa Madonna (Rome: Gangemi, 1985): 51–62. Gatti, Andrea, ‘L’iconografia musicale popolare nell’opera di Jacques Callot e Stefano della Bella’, Rassegna di Studi e di Notizie 13 (1986): 303–333.

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Ghisi, Federico, ‘Carnival Songs and the Origins of the Intermezzo Giocoso’, Musical Quarterly 25 (1939): 325–333. Goldschmidt, Ernst. Le vieux Bruxelles: Vingt-deux dessins de Remigio Cantagallina (Bruxelles: Dietrich, 1935). Griffiths, Antony, ‘Jacques Callot and Copies’, Print Quarterly 19 (2002): 282–283. Griffiths, Antony and Hugo Chapman, ‘Israël Henriet, the Chatsworth Album and the Publication of the Work of Jacques Callot’, Print Quarterly 30 (2013): 273–293. Guarnieri, Giuseppe Gino. Le Imprese guerresche dei cavalieri di Santo Stefano (Livorno: Formichini, 1914). Hair, Paul E. H., and Jonathan D. Davies, ‘Sierra Leone and the Grand Duke of Tuscany’, History in Africa 20 (1993): 61–69. Houtekeete, Stefaan, and Raphael de Smedt, ‘Remigio Cantagallina’, in Le peintre et l’arpenteur: Images de Bruxelles et de l’ancien duché de Brabant eds. Helena Bussers and Véronique van de Kerckhof (Brussels: La Renaissance du Livre, 2000): 212–214. Inghirami, Ludovico, ‘Figure minori dell’Ordine Stefaniano: note biografiche su Tommaso Fedra Inghirami’, Quaderni Stefaniano—Anno Quarto, Giornata di studio dell’Accademia di Marina del S.M.O. di S. Stefano P. M. Prato, 18 maggio 1985; consulted online 25 August 2019 at http://www.inghirami.it/Articoli_storici/ Figure_minori.pdf Linnenkamp, Rolf, ‘Giulio Parigi architetto’, Rivista d’arte, 33 (1960): pp. 51–63. Mariti, Giovanni. Istoria di Faccardino Grand-Emir dei Drusi (Livorno: Tommaso Masi, 1787). Lieure, Jacques. Jacques Callot (Paris: Editions de la Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1924–1927) 5 vols., II partie, Catalogue Raisonnée. Meaume, Edouard. Recherches sur la vie et les ouvrages de Jacques Callot (Paris: Renouard, 1853–1859). Mazzanti, Renzo, ‘La Rappresentazione cartografica del litorale toscano nel periodo dei combattimenti sul mare dell’Ordine di Santo Stefano (1563–1716): 176–184. Nagler, Alois Maria. Theatre Festivities of the Medici 1539–1637 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964). Navarrete Prieto, Benito, ‘Views of Spanish Ports by Ercole Bazzicaluva’, Master Drawings 45 (2007): 345–363. Negro Spina, Annamaria, ‘Le incisioni di paesaggio di Remigio Cantagallina’, in Studi di Storia dell’arte in memoria di Mario Rotili (Naples: Banca Sannitica, 1984): 403–411. Pierguidi, Stefano, ‘Vasari, Borghini and the Merits of Drawing from Life’, Master Drawings 49 (2011): 171–174. Ribouillaut, Denis, ‘Artiste ou espion? Dessiner le paysage dans l’Italie du XVI siècle’, Les Carnets du Paysage 24 (2013): 131–147. Ribouillaut, Denis, ‘L’Artiste en berger d’Arcadie: le paysage d’après nature de Dûrer à Poussin’, in Arte dal naturale, ed. by Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Annick Lemoine, Magali Théron, Mickaël Szanto (Rome: Campisano editore. Quaderni della Bibliotheca Hertziana 2, 2019): 177–207. Rinaldi, Stefano, ‘Il viaggio nelle Fiandre di Remigio Cantagallina’, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia serie 5, 3 (2011): 465–495. Rinaldi, Stefano, ‘Disegnare Prato: Sull’iconografia della città nel primo Seicento’, Prato Storia e Arte 119 (2016): 45–57. Rinaldi, Stefano, ‘Entre Borgo San Sepolcro et Florence: Les débuts de Remigio Cantagallina’ and ‘L’album de Bruxelles: un travail à quatre mains ou l’œuvre de Cantagallina?’ in Remigio Cantagallina, il viaggio nelle Fiandre. Le voyage d’un artiste Florentin dans les Pays-Bas Méridionaux, ed. by. Pierre Lozeund and Dominique Vautier, (Ghent: Editions Snoek, 2017): 25–32 and 113–114. Rinaldi, Stefano, ‘Cesare Antoniacci: Landscapist and Engineer from the School of Giulio Parigi’, Master Drawings 56 (2018): 335–354. Rosen, Mark, ‘“Son of the Sultan”: Jachia ben Mehmet and the Medici Court’, paper delivered at the Renaissance Society of America, Los Angeles, March 2009. Rossi, Massimiliano, ‘Capricci, frottole e tarsie di Michelangelo Buonarotti il Giovane’, Studi Seicenteschi 36 (1995): 151–180. Russell, Helen Diane, ed., Jacques Callot: Prints and Related Drawings (ex. cat. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 1975). Schulz, Wolfgang, ‘Doomer and Savery’, Master Drawings 9 (1971): 253–293.

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Serebrennikov, Nina, ‘Spectacularly Small: Jacques Callot at the Medici Court’, Midwestern Arcadia: Essays in Honor of Alison Kettering (2015) DOI:10.18277/makf.2015.12.Consulted online 7 April 2019. Sozzifanti, Alessandro, ‘Una battaglia navale sulle coste dell’Affrica nel 1620’, Bullettino storico pistoiese 14 (1912): 35–39. Spicer, Joaneath, ‘The Naer Het Leven Drawings, by Pieter Bruegel or Roelandt Savery?’, Master Drawings 8 (1971): 3–30; 63–82. Spicer, Joaneath, ‘Topographical Drawings of Central Europe by Artists from the Netherlands: the Case of Pieter Houck’, Master Drawings 26 (1988): 351–356. Spicer, Joaneath, ‘A Pictorial Vocabulary of Otherness: Roelandt Savery, Adam Willarts and the Representation of Foreign Coasts’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 48 (1997): 22–51. Spicer, Joaneath, ‘The Significance of Drawing Naer het Leven, or “From Life”,’ Center 21: National Gallery of Art Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Research Reports 2000–2001 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2011): 160–163. Strunck, Christine, ‘Ein Machtkampf zwischen Florenz und Pisa: Genealogische Selbstdarstellung der Medici in der Pisaner Ordenskirch Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 32 (2005), 167–202. Ternois, Daniel, and Paulette Choné, eds. Jacques Callot (1592–1635) (ex. cat. Nancy: Musée Historique Lorrain, 1992). Ternois, Daniel, ed., Jacques Callot (1592–1635): Actes du Colloque organisé par le Service Culturel du Musée du Louvre et de la ville de Nancy (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993). Ternois, Daniel. Jacques Callot: Catalogue complet de son oeuvre dessinée (Paris: de Nobèle,1962). Ternois, Daniel. Jacques Callot: catalogue de son oeuvre dessiné, supplément (1962–1998) (Paris, 1999). Ternois, Daniel. L’Art de Jacques Callot (Paris: de Nobèle, 1962). Ternois, Daniel, ‘Callot et son temps: dix ans de recherches (1962–1972)’, Le Pays Lorrain 4 (1973): 249–252. Tinniswood, Adrian. Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in Seventeenth-Century North Africa (London: Vintage, 2011). Tribby, Jay, ‘Of Conversational Dispositions and the Saggi’s Proem’, in Documentary Culture in Florence and Rome from Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander VII, ed. by Elizabeth Cropper, Giovanna Perini, and Francesco Solinas eds. (Florence: Olschki, 1992) 3 vols. III, 379–390. Varese, Claudio, ‘Ideologia, letteratura, e spettacolo nella Fiera di Michelangelo Buonarrotti il Giovane,’ in Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del ‘500 (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1983) 3 vols., II, 585–610. Vitzthum, Walter, ‘Jacques Callot et Filippo Napoletano’, L’Oeil 159 (1968): 25–27. Vitzthum, Walter. Jacques Callot, Incisioni (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1971). Weiss, Gillian. Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford, CA., Stanford University Press, 2011). Wolfthal, Diane and Dena Woodall, Princes and Paupers: The Art of Jacques Callot (ex. cat. Houston: Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 2013).

3.

Jacques Callot’s Capricci di varie figure (1617): The Allusive Imagery of the Everyday, Represented ‘from Life’ and Emulating a Text

Abstract Callot’s mentor at the Medici court, the impresario and engineer Giulio Parigi, insisted that he learn how to draw figures dal vivo. The series of fifty small etchings called Capricci that Callot produced in 1617 were a gift for a young prince, Lorenzo di Ferdinando I de’ Medici. Were they a kind of draftsman’s manual, as Callot’s biographer Félibien later suggested? Study of their sequence and subjects within their original bound format shows that Callot likened his prints to the genre of ‘mirrors of princes’, modelled on Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince. Callot put together his series of images made from life so that they would unfold like a text, turning the etchings into a witty address to a ne’er-do-well prince. Keywords: speculum principium, caprices, Sébastien Stoskopff, Stradanus, prints of festivities If one speaks of their usefulness for educating those who love them, or for forming the mind of a young Prince, it is certain that Prints, well chosen and well arranged, pleasantly give knowledge not only of the Sciences, and of all the beaux Arts, but of all things imaginable.1 —Abbé Michel de Marolles (1600-1691), preface to the catalogue of his print collection, Paris,1666

In Italy during the early seventeenth century, the practice of drawing and painting from life nearly always raised issues of artistic originality, seen in opposition to the repetitive copying of nature or past art. The interplay of vivid naturalism, overt allusions to past art, and a creative play with the viewer’s perceptions all had a role in Caravaggio’s compositions. In the following decade, Jacques Callot’s and Filippo 1 ‘S’il faut parler de leur utilité pour l’instruction de ceux qui les aiment, ou pour former l’esprit d’un jeune Prince, il est certain que les Estampes bien choisies & bien disposées donnent agréablement la connoissance, non seulement de toutes les Sciences, & de tous les beaux Arts, mais encore de toutes les choses imaginables’, Michel de Marolles, Catalogue, p. 9. I am grateful to Paris Spies-Ganz for bringing this quotation to my attention. McTighe, S., Representing from Life in Seventeenth-century Italy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi: 10.5117/ 9789462983281_ch03

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Napoletano’s playful exchange of each other’s sketches from life went along with their ambitious competition to create the most original version of the fair at Impruneta for courtly favour. In this chapter, we will see another example of this balancing of copying and originality in Callot’s first great print series of 1617, the Capricci di varie figure. Callot’s biographers Baldinucci and Félibien connected the Capricci with Callot’s Florentine training in representing dal vivo. We will see that the series is also caught up in the process of allusion, in images’ relation to texts, and the creative fecundity of printed images. Callot’s career in Florence was in its earliest years when he made a series of fifty tiny prints, dedicating them to a sixteen-year-old prince, Lorenzo di Ferdinando I de’ Medici. Callot’s dedication describes them as the ‘first fruits’ of his ‘sterile genius’ (Figs. 49 and 50). They were certainly the first fruits of his new manner of drawing from life, about which his Florentine biographer Filippo Baldinucci informs us. According to Baldinucci, the Medici impresario and architect Giulio Parigi insisted that Callot reform his manner of drawing by working dal naturale. We have seen in the last chapter how Callot’s drawings, and the etchings he made from them, give vivid testimony of the young artist’s new approach to the live, posed model and the topographic view around 1616–1618. The Capricci di varie figure were etched in Florence, probably during the spring and summer of 1617, and indeed represent a varied mix, as the title proclaims.2 Even the manner in which Callot portrays the human figure in the series seems to veer erratically between stylized, elongated preciosity and a more robust realism, drawn from life. The series is rarely given any overall characterization except as a miscellany of images.3 Callot’s miniature scenes represent mundane activities and court costume, theatrical spectacle and warfare, interspersed with one another in what has seemed a random sequence. That very randomness may make them seem all the 2 For an overview of the modern scholarship on Jacques Callot, see Wolfthal and Woodall, Princes and Paupers (2012); on the series Capricci di varie figure, Ternois and Choné, Jacques Callot; p. 233; Gianvittorio Dillon, ‘La vie artistique à Florence au début du XVIIe. siècle’, p. 147–182; and Sara Mamone, ‘Le Miroir des spectacles: Jacques Callot à Florence (1612–1622)’, p. 183–224. On the rationale for assigning a date of 1617 to Callot’s Capricci di varie figure, see Ternois, Jacques Callot, p. 233, where he gives a resumé of the arguments and evidence laid out in 1939 by E. Bruwaert; Ternois’s earlier statements on the dating to 1617 can be found in his L’Art, p. 24 . 3 In her 1975 catalogue entries on a selection of etchings from the Capricci, H. Diane Russell nuances this view of the print series, very briefly suggesting a relationship between the dedicatee and Callot’s imagery and an educational, literary theme: ‘The usual interpretation is that the individual prints are related to each other whimsically and (indeed) capriciously, and this may be correct […] He may have conceived them both for Don Lorenzo’s amusement, and if some of the prints have literary sources […] for the young noble’s education’ (Jacques Callot, p. 19). I believe this suggestion is correct, and the present study develops it further. A variation on the idea that the series has a random structure and no overall theme has entailed focusing solely on the opening prints, defining them as a kind of drawing manual: Auclair, ‘Les Capricci’, p. 81–100. This idea goes back to André Félibien’s description of the Capricci in his 1685 biography of Callot in his seventh Entretien (Entretiens, II, p. 152–173, excerpted in Ternois and Choné, Jacques Callot, p. 86. ‘Il fit, pour l’instruction des Peintres, un livre de Caprices, où dans chaque planche on voit le trait simple de la figure, et la figure finie’.

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Fig. 49: Jacques Callot. Title page. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 50: Jacques Callot. Dedication page. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

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more ‘everyday’. The mixture of more mannered depictions with figures portrayed in a new naturalism has led scholars to define this as a transitional work, leading by degrees to a more modern style. If we go back to the surviving presentation volume that Callot gave to young Lorenzo de’ Medici and take account of the order in which he arranged the prints there, we see a different sort of project emerge. As etchings, the Capricci di varie figure had a very serious role to play in the history of printmaking. They were the turning point in Callot’s technical revolution in etching, the first production for which he adopted his hardened vernis dur etching ground and his new tool, the échoppe, both of which allowed him to transform the etching process, and yielded an exceptionally delicate, nuanced image.4 However, if the series is given any importance today, it undoubtedly comes in large part from its impact on later art. Rembrandt was first inspired to etch by Callot’s early works, with his prints of beggars in the late 1620s drawing not only from Callot’s beggars in Les Gueux but also from some of the most vulgar of the lowlife peasant scenes from the Capricci, a relationship seen in their urinating or defecating figures.5 More generally, Callot’s title displayed the word capriccio, and it was among the very first works of visual art to use this evocative term. Capriccio as a designation of a general type of fantastic, inventive creation was to have a widespread popularity in prints and paintings as well as in drama, poetry, and music from Callot’s day to ours.6 Inevitably Callot’s series is mentioned most by those who see its imagery of fantasy and warfare as a precursor to Goya’s Caprichos. In the literature of Romanticism, Callot’s theatrical and courtly caprices were given an equally dark character: they inspired a novella by E.T.A. Hoffmann in an early conjunction of fantasy and horror and then, in the guise of Gaspard de la Nuit, echoed through nineteenth-century musical salons.7 Given that it inspired so much further creativity in so many different cultural arenas, it seems strange that Callot’s series should not have a more important place in the history of prints and printmaking, let alone in the study of early modern arts. 4 On the Capricci as Callot’s first extensive use of his vernis dur, Ternois, L’Art de Jacques Callot, ‘Les deux langages’, p. 35. He discusses both the vernis dur and the échoppe at greater length in his earlier study, L’Art, p. 96–105. 5 Fowler, ‘Rembrandt’s Faceless Faces’; Bevers, Schatborn and Werzel, Rembrandt; Stratton, ‘Rembrandt’s Beggars’, p. 77–82; Held, ‘A Rembrandt “Theme”, p. 21–34. 6 Préaud, ‘Réflexions’, p. 149–155 gives a helpful account of French print series following Callot during the seventeenth century that adopted the title ‘capriccio’. For general accounts of early modern usage of the term, in the arts, literature, and music, see Mai, Das Capriccio; this exhibition catalogue with its accompanying essays takes a very broad view of the concept of the capriccio in early modern art, cf. Busch, ‘Der Graphische Gattung Capriccio’, p. 55–81. For a more precise and illuminating philological investigation, see Campione, La Regola del Capriccio. Broad consideration of the term capriccio and its changing aesthetic contexts in Italy can be found in Kanz, Das Capriccio, with a short section on Callot’s series on p. 245–300, seeing it as a random miscellany, without any determined sequence. For the Florentine context of the term in the sixteenth century, see Rathé, ‘Le Capriccio’, p. 239–54. 7 Clodon, ‘Gaspard de la Nuit’, p. 77–80.

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Modern scholarship on Callot, however, has largely passed by this early work by the artist. I would like to put the series back at the heart of Callot’s oeuvre, and to propose that it contributed to a new understanding of the power of sequentiality in prints designed to be sold together as one series. It may be that Callot sought to give to the popular form of a print series the intellectual weight of a written book, which also must convey its ideas through a careful sequencing of words and ideas. Moreover, there is an iconographic innovation that can now be pointed out in relation to the Capricci di varie figure. Its genre imagery of a theatrical, mundane comedy is highly allusive in its references to an established textual tradition of a more elite type. The Capricci series is among the first representations within printed imagery of the popular literary genre of ‘mirrors for princes’, wittily echoing the advice given to young would-be rulers, republished in many forms from the time of Erasmus’s early 16th-century Education of a Christian Prince. The various publications that take up this genre in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century have been defined as a Counter-Reformation response to Machiavelli, as so-called ‘anti-Machiavellian’ tracts on the morality of rulers.8 Callot’s interest in didactic texts addressed to the education of rulers leads into new questions about his works and career, indeed leads to new questions about the culture of print in the first half of the seventeenth century. This discovery of the theme of the Capricci illuminates the political dimension of Callot’s art. It points us toward new questions about the way that Callot manipulates his images to communicate ideas and values, including his prints’ distinctive relation to emblematic imagery. On a broader level, the Capricci may also open up new questions about the seventeenth-century print series as a mode of communication. Callot’s Capricci magnified the poetic resonance of the word capriccio, and its ambitious exploration of the boundaries of the theatrical and the everyday was also to extend the role of printed genre imagery in the Seicento as a site of invention, inspiration, and artistic change. On a fundamental level, Callot’s drawing dal vivo for the Capricci series created images that generated more images: a curious attribute of the picture drawn dal vivo was its fecundity.

The Printed Series as a Sequence Callot etched the Capricci as a series of fifty prints not once, but twice. When he left Florence at the death of Grand Duke Cosimo II in 1621, the artist seems to have left behind the plates for the Capricci. Or it may be that the first plates were too 8 The reception of Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince is intermingled with the phenomenon of a later sixteenth-century backlash against Machiavelli. My proposal here is that Callot’s print series refers specifically to Erasmus’s text, which remained popular through the seventeenth century. On anti-Machiavellian writings, see Birely, The Counter-Reformation Prince; Rupp, Allegories of Kingship.

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soft a copper and thus produced few impressions before breaking down. At any rate, the Florentine plates have not survived. It is certain that among the first works he produced as soon as he arrived back in his native Lorraine was a second, entirely re-etched set of Capricci. The Nancy set is nearly line-for-line identical with the Florentine version, its images oriented as in the first set, with only two images reversed. The plates produced in Nancy seem to have allowed a large print run, for the work made its way into many collections and still exists today in relatively high numbers. Callot had thirty seven copies of the entire series in his workshop when he died in 1635. It was also reprinted from the Nancy plates after Callot passed away in 1635, and in the early eighteenth century an editor named Fagnani added numbers to the plates in a posthumous second state. And from this posthumous edition Callot’s cataloguers Edouard Meaume and Jacques Lieure took the numbered sequence in which the Capricci are now usually presented.9 Before looking at how the series might originally have been put into a sequence, the first point to make about the Capricci volume is that it moved from being a gift to a Medici prince at court, and thus initially having a rather restricted audience, to being a work produced for a very wide audience on the open market, although it retained its dedication page inscribed to the young Lorenzo de’ Medici. However, as we shall see, Callot may have realized even when it was first printed in Florence that the etchings of the Capricci made an ideal bridge between a high audience and a broad one. Its imagery of theatre and of everyday life addressed both a very specific local court and a far-flung print-buying public. The Capricci have for the most part been torn apart from their original context as a series. Such collections of prints produced under a single title were increasingly popular at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The example of the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae in Rome is well known.10 However, unlike the wide variety of prints by many different designers sold in Rome out of Lafréry’s shop with the Speculum’s title page, which could be selected and arranged by individual buyers, a series such as the Capricci would have been sold as one fixed set of fifty images. From what we know about the sale of prints in this period, it seems that in the majority of cases, the sheets making up the series were given to purchasers unbound, and the final choice of how to present the series lay with its new owner, whether to be stitched into a volume, or left as sheets in a box or folio to be browsed in any order.11 Collectors could, and did, arrange their prints thematically rather than by maker or source, and thus there was no guarantee that a print series would be kept together in one place by its owner. Callot, 9 Meaume, Recherches, 1, p. 27–28, and 2, p. 364–387, cat. nos. 768–867. Lieure, Jacques Callot, II, p. 85–130. 10 Huelsen, ‘Das Speculum’, p. 121–170. A digitized exhibition of prints from the Speculum is now available online at www.speculum.lib.uchicago.edu, consulted 21 October 2012. 11 Extremely useful information about how print series were sold, and how early collectors mounted and stored prints is found in Griffiths, ‘The Archaeology’; invaluable information about the production and dissemination of prints in the period of the early seventeenth century may be found in Bury, The Print in Italy.

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however, throughout his career seems to have done his utmost to create rather idiosyncratic and inventive series, which would by their very nature resist such a practice of intermingling prints from different sources into the collector’s own thematic order.12 Callot’s biographer Filippo Baldinucci wrote of his Florentine series of the Capricci as forming libretti, little books. Meaume refers to several such bound volumes of Callot’s Capricci that survived in some nineteenth-century Florentine collections, including the volume in the Uffizi collection that will be my focus here.13 Meauu me implied that the Florentine examples were unusual in having been produced as bound volumes by the artist. However, there is evidence that even after he left Florence, Callot himself sold some ready-bound volumes of his print series in addition to unbound sheets. The inventory of Callot’s possessions at his death included a detailed list of print series and their numbers of copies, in the midst of which is added ‘fifteen bound volumes of works by the late gentleman’.14 It was lucrative for later dealers to break such volumes apart, selling them as separate sheets. A tiny number of the bound volumes survive to the present day, some of which were evidently not put together until long after Callot’s death. Such is the case with a bound volume of the Capricci now at the Getty Research Institute, which contains the Fagnani edition of the numbered, sequenced plates made in Nancy. The survival of this posthumous version, and its enshrinement in Meaume’s and Lieure’s catalogue numbers, has had a direct impact on a modern response to the Capricci as a random set of comical and festive images. I want to question this idea by going back to one surviving album, today in the Uffizi’s collections, which had a sequence determined by Callot himself: this is the very presentation album given to the dedicatee, prince Lorenzo di Ferdinando I de’ Medici. However, if Callot put his own presentation copy into a certain sequence it is not, in itself, proof that such a sequence was meaningful. Lacking greater numbers of the bound series from which to draw conclusions, we should probably at first limit an interpretation of its sequence to the first level of the works’ reception, that of the young prince himself. Before turning to the Florentine example, however, a painted representation of a bound volume of the Capricci gives a vivid example of how it was perceived far from Florence, not long after Callot completed the work. A still life painting by the Alsatian artist Sébastien Stoskopff, painted in the mid1630s in Strasbourg (Fig. 51) depicts the little rectangular volume at the right margin of the composition, open to one of the most vulgar of Callot’s prints, the defecating and urinating peasant (Fig. 52). The printed image is in piquant contrast to the objects represented around it: a classicizing statuette, closed books, Venetian-style 12 Antony Griffiths and Hugo Chapman, ‘Israel Henriet, the Chatsworth Album and the Publication of the Works of Jacques Callot’. 13 Meaume: ‘La première suite’, 2, p. 233. 14 ‘Quinze livres reliez des ouvrages du Sieur deffunt’: Inventory drawn up and dated 23 April 1635, transcribed in full in Marot, ‘Jacques Callot’, p. 82.

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Fig. 51: Sebastien Stoskopff. Still life with a print from Callot’s Capricci. c. 1635. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/ Michel Urtado.

Fig. 52: Jacques Callot. A peasant defecating and urinating in the countryside. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

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blown glass, exotic shells—items that reflect a vanitas theme but also evoke preciosity and curiosity.15 The tiny scale of Callot’s Capricci prints is well portrayed here. In the very smallness of its compass lies one bridge between the print of such extraordinary vulgarity and the items of high value with which it is surrounded. Callot’s print was an example of virtuosity in printmaking, uniting subtle drawing with the basest of subjects, and able to capture a vast world on a miniature scale, using print to expand the powers of the human eye. During the 1620s and 1630s, starting almost immediately after Callot’s Capricci series was made, Sébastien Stoskopff painted a number of other still life paintings that include prints, not only other examples by Callot but also etchings of exotic subjects by Rembrandt from the late 1620s and 1630s. I will return to the question of what Stoskopff’s painting communicates about the artistic reception of Callot’s print series. For now, its portrayal of the small ‘book’ of prints is my concern, and above all the focus on this one unusual print, which we will see was at the centre of the Capricci sequence. Even a cursory look through the series gives the sense of distinct groups of imagery that are thematically linked. After the title page and dedication there are six categories of subjects. The groups of images consist of (1) doubled figures that display local costume and at the same time display a virtuoso, innovative technique of drawing and etching (Fig. 53); (2) male peasants alone in the countryside, in mundane and humorous poses (Fig. 52); (3) scenes of rural poverty in Tuscany, including the probclems of banditry, the workhouse and the tavern (Figs. 54 and 55); (4) urban or courtly entertainment including commedia dell’arte dancers and dwarves, localised as Florentine forms of entertainment; (5) battle scenes that commence with duelling but move into the role of the military leader on foot, on horseback, and in hand-to-hand combat (Fig. 56); and finally (6) Florentine festivities, beginning with swimmers in the Arno and moving through the festivities in Piazza Santa Croce, a gathering of beggars in Piazza Annunziata (Fig. 57) and the tribute to Medici rule on the feast of St. John the Baptist (Fig. 58). In contrast to the modern cataloguing of the series, which jumbles these categories of images in a seemingly random order, the little bound volume of Capricci that was presented to the young prince groups the images quite coherently. The binding is modest, but its leather is stamped on spine, front, and back with gilt Medici fleurde-lys, and it is the sole copy of this series now in the Gabinetto di Disegni e Stampe of the Uffizi, which received it directly from Medici heirs in the 18th century. The individual sheets are no longer stitched into the binding, although they have been stored in the binding and still have the strips of paper to which they were once glued and sewn. At the time the volume came apart, each print was carefully numbered. These numbers in the lower right corner of each etched sheet look to have been written in 15 Heck, Sébastien Stoskopff, p. 210, reproduces the painting, which was not exhibited. Within the catalogue, however, two essays are particularly relevant in this present context: Sylvia Böhmer, ‘Imitation et invention picturale: Les gravures peintes dans les natures mortes de Sébastien Stoskopff;, p. 94–107; and Hanns-Ulrich Mette, ‘Oeuvres d’art et curiosités: à propos des natures mortes aux coquillages de Sébastien Stoskopff’, p. 126–130.

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Fig. 53: Jacques Callot. A violinist, in outline and with modelling. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 54: Jacques Callot. The almshouse. 1617. Capricci di varie figure. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Fig. 55: Jacques Callot. A ruined house. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 56: Jacques Callot. The duellist with sword and dagger. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Fig. 57: Jacques Callot. Piazza SS. Annunziata. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Fig. 58: Jacques Callot. Piazza della Signoria, Florence. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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an eighteenth-century hand, consistent with the general date when the prints were transferred into the Uffizi’s collection. The title page and dedication page are followed by a series of figure or costume studies, in the majority of which there are two identical figures juxtaposed. In most of these, one figure is etched in outline only, while the other is modelled with a distinctive parallel hatching (Fig. 53). The figures are drawn in contemporary court dress or in the habit of servants and workers, and they stand in a wide variety of poses, including several seen from the back. In this respect, Callot’s first group of images resembles a series of costume prints. But the effect is also not dissimilar to the didactic etchings of Odoardo Fialetti’s Il vero modo et ordine per dissegnar tutte le parti et membra del corpo humano (Venice, 1608), which set off a vogue for such manuals, meant for young artists or perhaps for well-to-do amateurs. It is thus not surprising that Callot’s French biographer André Félibien presented the Capricci as a training manual for young artists.16 However, unlike Fialetti’s and other such drawing manuu als, Callot’s work does not dismember the human body into units like eyes or limbs in order to reveal a correct approach to drawing human anatomy. Instead Callot duplicates whole bodies, demonstrating his technique for creating relief and modelling with a characteristic economy of means and verve that reveals Callot’s training in life drawing under Giulio Parigi at this time. The twinned figures in each etching are similar to the mise-en-page of Callot’s own sketchbook pages from this period of his Florentine career, many of which are preserved in the Uffizi and in the Musée du Louvre, which characteristically place two figures to a page in a kind of visual counterpoint. It is also likely that a quality other than Callot’s draftsmanship is being demonstrated in these prints. The doubled figures show the very finesse of touch and stroke in the rendering of light and volume that he was suddenly able to achieve with his new vernis-dur etching ground and his new tool the échoppe, which replaced the etching needle. The hardened ground gave good resistance to the passage of the shaped tip of the échoppe, allowing a new control over the depth and width of the etched lines produced once the plate was bitten in its acid bath. This is particularly apparent in the figures which pair an outlined form with a modelled form (Fig. 53). There the hatching lines and disciplined parallel contouring lines that create volume and mass have an exquisite tapering, swelling profile, reminiscent of the virtuoso curving lines of engravers of a previous generation, such as Hendrick Goltzius and Cornelis Cort. Technical expertise in drawing, and technological innovation in etching, are both on display at the very start of the series. The last of these scenes of juxtaposed or doubled figures represents a tall young woman in court dress facing a short old woman in working dress. Tall and short, noble and plebean, young and old: this play of social and physical contrasts forms a deliberate bridge from the twinned courtly figures of the first category of images to 16 Félibien, Entretiens, p. 86, as in note 3.

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the next group, which consists of peasant men, alone, represented in the countryside. Throughout the Capricci series as presented in Florence, Callot created such deliberate visual and thematic contrasts between the last image in one group of prints to the first image in the next category. The visual delight of this group of peasant landscapes comes from the extraordinary rendering of vast space in a tiny compass, space in which shrewdly observed peasants carry a shovel, remove their shoes, or shake their fist at a swarm of bees (Fig. 60). Within only a few centimetres, Callot’s etched line on the blank sheet evokes a sweeping gaze into the distance, which is inhabited by miniature goats and herders, with infinitely small towns bathed in sunlight on the far hills. Among the prints in this group, almost exactly halfway through the series, should be found the most surprising image of this group, the defecating peasant that Stoskopff’s still life painting singled out for representation (Figs. 51 and 52). But this one image has been removed from the Uffizi’s Medici volume and is no longer found at all in the Uffizi’s collection. The careful numbering of the prints continues across this gap. The absence of the etching of the defecating peasant raises two alternative possibilities. The artist may have chosen not to include the scatological scene in his presentation volume because it was an image that might shock its noble recipient. Or it was removed at a later date, when it may have seemed an offence to good taste. In the immediate aftermath of Callot’s series in the 1620s, this particular peasant seems to have been the focal point of the series for some viewers—artists such as Rembrandt and Stoskopff, for example. For reasons that will become clear, I think the etching was probably also very much to the taste of the young prince and his entourage. It is likely to have been removed in the eighteenth century at the time the volume was transferred to the Uffizi, and possibly it was in order to remove the vulgar scene that the volume’s binding was then undone and the hand-inscribed numbers added to the sheets. At the end of this category of country scenes and peasant behaviour come four images that treat issues in rural life that were of overt political concern in the early seicento: the workhouse or hospital for the poor, sick and indigent; the ruin of agricultural properties; murderous banditry on a rural road; and the tavern, with its population of women and children reduced to begging while idle men vomit, urinate on a tree, and concentrate on their drinking. Among these etchings we can see Callot’s effort to create a sequence out of the images, by creating linking figures that are echoed from one print to the next. For example, a ragged figure sits in shadow at the right of the image, stretching out a hand to point towards an almshouse surrounded by crippled and aged figures who gravitate toward the charity (Fig. 54). In the middle ground a woman and small child stand, hatched in a rapid shorthand and forming a dark silhouette. Next in the Uffizi volume’s sequence comes a depiction of a ruined casale or smallholding, with another woman and child forming a similar silhouette, but moved to the left in the composition, while the child is larger and older. In place of the pointing figure as a darkened repoussoir in the foreground, there is the

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tramping beggar, moving into the scene at right (Fig. 55). By means of these visual bridges, Callot brings out the relationship of the two scenes: the almshouse was an institution that aided those suffering from the ruination and impoverishment of the countryside, exemplified by the desolate casale in the next print. When the sequence of images moves from one theme to another, the technique of visual ‘echoes’ becomes a technique of meaningful opposition. In one image, a rural tavern scene juxtaposes drinking men and the figures of a woman and her children, begging for alms. Men and women are divided by the effects of drink and poverty. The next etching in the sequence of the Medici volume leads abruptly from this image of rural degradation to a courtly pair of lovers represented arm in arm, in the countryside outside a distant town seen across a river. The countryside as a locus amoenus of earthly love then shifts again to the raucous activities of men and women in urban theatre and courtly spectacle. Nobleman and lady then immediately find a grotesque counterpart in the pairs of dancing Pantalone figures in the next etchings, followed by gyrating dwarves in couples. After these scenes of costumed dancers comes another form of courtly spectacle, the duel. Callot devotes two etchings to this subject, and once again the order of the Uffizi volume helps us to see his play with sequence in the images. First the two duelists at battle with both rapier and dagger show the moment when one is touché on the ear. Next, the same man is run through by the rapier, clearly the deadly aftermath to the preceding image. In the modern catalogue of Callot’s Capricci, this sequence is oddly reversed, showing the duelist first killed, then wounded. Callot’s bound volume of the Capricci, given to prince Lorenzo, took care to present them in the proper sequence. Still under the aegis of theatre, the following four scenes are devoted to the spectacle of warfare, with a general on foot with his baton of authority leading an infantry charge, and then a military leader on horseback leading a cavalry charge. The repetition of the baton brings out a common theme within these images devoted to Florentine spectacles. The baton embodies the organizational power of authority, the power that lay behind both military and theatrical deployment of large groups of people. This is carried forward into the final group of prints in the Medici volume, the often-reproduced topographical scenes of Florentine festivities. They represent a year’s worth of Florentine social occasions, from the diving contests in the Arno through the racing of horses near the Prato, to the spectacle of cripples and beggars seeking charity on Piazza Annunziata (Fig. 57), to the tributes paid to the Grand Duke in Piazza della Signoria on the feast of St. John the Baptist (Fig. 58). The volzume ends with Florence itself as a protagonist. Once again, the similarly structured compositions and the placement of a large repoussoir figure seen from the back at left or right, gesturing into the urban view, creates a unified, harmonious sequence of images to end the volume of prints. The structure of topographic rendering in each

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Fig. 59: Jacques Callot. Bringing in the hay at a farmhouse. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

of these scenes firmly locks into place the relation of costumed interlocutor figures to their setting. Thus, to sum up, the sequence of images in the volume that Callot presented to young Lorenzo di Ferdinando I de’ Medici is unlike the random display that the eighteenth-century Fagnani numeration and Meaume’s modern catalogue numbers might suggest. Each group of imagery is coherent in itself, and Callot creates visual and thematic links from one group to the next. And yet, despite the harmony of the final crowd scenes and their stunning, miniaturized display of topography drawn from life, if we follow the sequence of the Uffizi presentation volume, the flow of images was to end in something oddly anticlimactic. The last etching in the volume was an image of a rural casale, typical of most Tuscan farms, portrayed neither in ruin nor in festivity, but in a fruitful and peaceful scene of work: hay is brought in for winter feed, ensuring the future survival of the smallholding (Fig. 59). Why this scene should be in final position, giving the young Medici prince a curiously undramatic finale to such a structured display of imagery, may become clear when we turn to the larger context for Callot’s Capricci in Florence during the years around 1617. However underwhelming this scene appears, its intimation of peaceful prosperity in the Tuscan countryside was part of the gift Callot wished to bestow on his young dedicatee.

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Exhortations to a young prince Callot’s scenes of Florentine festivals at the end of the Capricci series were quite overtly derived from a series of frescoes designed by the Flemish expatriate Jan van der Straet, known as Stradanus, in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. These works of 1560–1561 represent some of the same local events found in Callot’s series, such as the tribute to Medici rule on feast of St. John the Baptist in Piazza della Signoria.17 They, too, painstakingly portray the topography of Florence’s most renowned urban sites. Callot’s echo of this painted imagery shows him to be emulating an artist of a previous generation, a man who had made a fine career in the Florentine court despite being a foreigner like Callot himself. In a similar vein, Callot inserted among the scenes of warfare and theatre a single etching of many different tiny horses, in an array of bucking and galloping poses. On a much larger scale, Stradanus before him had etched a series of such vivacious horses. In Callot’s image, however, each of the tiny horses has been painstakingly imitated from a well-known series of prints of only a decade before by Florentine painter-printmaker Antonio Tempesta.18 The act of homage and of emulation takes on all the greater a resonance when seen in the flesh, as Callot’s adaptation of Tempesta’s very large steeds has been accomplished on the smallest of scales, rendered as seen through a lens, and perhaps to be enjoyed through a lens as well. Callot’s neighbour in the court, Galileo Galilei, may have given some impetus to Callot’s miniaturization in the Capricci. His new, powerful telescopic lenses were not only celebrated in Florence, but were hotly demanded as courtly gifts in other centres across Europe. There was a taste for lens-looking in these years, whether for magnification or miniaturization. And Galileo and his lenses were a source of pride for the Florentine court, as were the recent artistic innovations of Stradanus and Tempesta. In thus transforming Tempesta’s horses, Callot rooted his own achievement in an insistently Florentine context. And, no less important, it is Callot’s own innovative artistic performance that is put on view, framed within these surrounding prints of theatrical performances. The courtly modesty displayed in the dedication, which speaks of the ‘first fruits’ of his ‘sterile genius’, is belied by the artistic ambition showed by these acts of homage and imitation. Parallel to artistic emulation and arguably more important to Callot’s dedicatee, the print series directs the prince to emulate his father and his Medici forebears. It is not just that theatrical spectacle on a massive scale in an urban setting—like those represented by Stradanus and Callot—had become tightly associated with the Medici dynasty, reaching an apogee at the wedding of Ferdinando I de’ Medici with

17 On Stradanus’s fresco designs, see Gregg, Panorama. 18 Ternois, L’Art, p. 62, discusses Callot’s emulation of both Stradanus’s and Tempesta’s print series depicting horses.

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Christine of Lorraine in 1589.19 The Grand Duke also had a quieter presence in the pages of Callot’s series. Among the final images of the series is the view of Piazza Annunziata filled with beggars and cripples (Fig. 57), Giambologna’s equestrian statd ue of Ferdinando I gazes out toward the viewer behind the screen of needy citizens gathered before the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the foundling hospital. And again, in Callot’s view of the crowds gathered for an annual tribute to the Medici, on a dais close to the facade of the Palazzo Vecchio, the near invisible figure of the Grand Duke looks down at the procession snaking through the piazza (Fig. 58). It was part and parcel of the political agenda of these early years of the seicento to stress the dynastic continuity of the Medici in their assumption of an ever more absolutist control over their Tuscan realm.20 The repetition of Grand Ducal names— Ferdinando I and II, Cosimo II—is one of these traits meant to stress the calm stability and enduring strength of Medicean absolutism. It is pertinent, as well, that the Medici court had in these years repeatedly addressed issues of rural poverty and charitable institutions such as the workhouse/hospital that Callot represents in the series. Yet there was a downturn in their involvement with such charities from the turn of the century, and a sense of decline in the countryside.21 Callot’s imagery of Medicean Florence, dedicated to a young scion of the family, reports on the suffering in Medici lands, simultaneously alluding to the continuity of their dynastic rule, however lightly and allusively. Callot’s Capricci di diverse figure was probably made for the birthday of Lorenzo di Ferdinando I de’ Medici on the first day of August 1617. Documents record Callot’s purchase of a large quantity of paper in the preceding months, and a significant honorific payment was made to the printmaker in September of that same year. Why was this collection of printed images an appropriate birthday gift for the young prince? The rich collection of documents in the Medici archives depict a young man caught between the high hopes placed in his future by his mother, Christine of Lorraine, and the hard diplomatic realities of Florence at a crossroads in the years between 1615 and 1625. His eldest brother had inherited the grand dukedom as Cosimo II; another elder brother, Francesco di Ferdinando I de’ Medici, died of a sudden illness in late adolescence after showing much promise in military skill at the head of Florentine armies. The younger Lorenzo, seventh son of the Grand Duke, was made of different stuff. The imagery of comedies and combats in the Capricci corresponds on one level with the information about Lorenzo di Ferdinando I de’ Medici that we can glean from the archives. The prince’s future role in the Medici dynasty was an area of persistent worry between 1615 and 1625, laid bare in numerous letters from the entourage of his mother, Christine of Lorraine. She sought for Lorenzo first a role as naval general-at-sea at the head of the Spanish Hapsburg fleet, then a role as head of some princely army, 19 Saslow, The Medici Wedding. 20 Strunck, ‘Ein Machtkampf’, p. 167–202. 21 Terpstra, ‘Competing Visions’, p. 1319–1355.

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whether on the Italian peninsula or in Spain.22 Letters between Medici diplomats discussed his suitability to govern Swiss Catholics in the rebellious Valtelline area in Switzerland, as emissary of the Spanish Hapsburg court, a position that would have required great delicacy of touch given its involvement in fiery religious disputes and its importance to the papacy.23 No such role at the head of army or a regional government was to come his way, although Lorenzo di Ferdinando I de’ Medici did carry out a few diplomatic roles. He accompanied his sister Caterina to her marriage to Duke Ferdinando Gonzaga in Mantua in 1617. In 1623, together with his sister Claudia de’ Medici, who was the widow of the Duke of Urbino, he was part of the Florentine delegation that sought to negotiate Urbino’s annexation to Tuscany. This was a mission of huge importance, which would have made Florence a major power again on the Italian peninsula. It met with complete failure. In 1626, Lorenzo again accompanied a sister to her marriage, this time the widowed Claudia de’ Medici, who travelled to Innsbruck to marry a Hapsburg prince. A briefing document for this trip, dated 30 March 1626, gives some insight into the young man’s character. He is instructed to abstain from talking over-much about his horses, dogs, and weapons, to avoid expressing too much amazement at foreign things, to maintain his dignity and not ruin his reputation as some other princes had done on similar travels abroad.24 The advice may have been applicable to many young noblemen, but it does echo the tone of comments about Lorenzo in family letters of the period between 1615 and 1620, which describe his love of the Florentine comedies, and gifts that he delighted in receiving and giving, of fine horses, dogs, timepieces and other curious mechanisms. These were the same avocations that shaped the prince’s later collections, together with his love of prints that would lead to his patronage of Callot’s successor as prominent printmaker in Florence, Stefano della Bella. Callot’s inclusion of the Tempesta-derived steeds in the Capricci may have been calculated to please Lorenzo, referring both to his love of horses and his taste for prints. At some time before 1620, Lorenzo’s mother seems to have requested aid concerning her son’s future from a family friend and ally, Duke Ranuccio Farnese in Parma. A curious document that exists in two manuscript copies in the Medici archives outlines Ranuccio’s advice on the education of the prince.25 The elements of the prince’s 22 Archivio di Stato, Florence, letter by Andrea Cioli dated 24 November 1619 records that Christine of Lorraine seeks a military post for Don Lorenzo: excerpts of this and following Medici documents cited below may be consulted online at http://documents.medici.org (consulted 7 April 2019). 23 Giulio Inghirami (from Medici embassy in Spain), letter to Curzio di Picchena (Medici court secretary) dated 20 September 1621. 24 Document dated 30 March 1626, a copy of instructions given to Don Lorenzo de’ Medici on etiquette for his trip to Germany. 25 The document [5079, folio 987], undated, is found among letters and documents for the year 1620. Another version of this program of study for Don Lorenzo can be found in a document by Ranuccio Farnese in Miscellanea Medicea 475/1.

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education as recommended by the Farnese duke are echoed in the imagery of Callot’s print series. The prince was not to study ‘theory’ of mathematics, which might lead to sophistry and passivity. Farnese advised that he should know enough practical mathematics to assist in the practice of warfare: that is, mathematics as it pertained to cosmography, geography, topography, and those aspects of civil and military architecture that might help the career of a virtuous soldier. To this end he should above all have a good knowledge of drawing—disegno. This concept of drawing as a tool of warfare is one that has not been much studied in art historical literature, but had a particular currency in Florence at the turn of the Seicento. Carrying on with the theme of what knowledge a good military leader should have, Farnese wrote that Lorenzo should have the company and conversation of good, experienced men, who were half soldiers of experience and half men of letters. He should read books about politics and warfare, and should also study dueling. Farnese explicitly recommended books such as those by Astorre Albergati and Girolamo Muzio; although the text doesn’t spell out the reasons for reading these authors, they were well known for their popular treatises on dueling. Dueling itself was a fad sweeping across Europe in these years, and fed into the cultivation of male bodily discipline in a newly belligerent society at court. Following this course of study, Ranuccio Farnese concluded, the young prince would learn self-discipline, to emulate greatness and to avoid the pitfalls of lasciviousness. That this type of education might stand in contrast to the young prince’s actual character may be seen in a letter of 1620 by the Florentine court secretary Curzio Piccheno, in which Lorenzo is said to have a sore head and stomach from drinking too much cold Flemish beer.26 His mother’s aspirations for this seventh son were, in the end, not realized. Lorenzo di Ferdinando I de’ Medici remained in his castello near the Prati until his death in 1645, never marrying, never going to war, amusing himself as a patron of local craftsmen, among his clocks, his prints, his horses and his dogs. But at the moment of the young prince’s birthday on 1 August 1617, those aspirations were very current and pressing. Callot’s birthday gift to prince Lorenzo was made before this written project for his education: although the Farnese text is undated, it is filed among papers from 1620. However, Callot’s imagery like Farnese’s recommendations has its context in these years in which his mother sought some way of educating the young man, one that would suit his love of theatre and leisure, but that would lead him toward a respectable military career. We find similar traits praised in Lorenzo’s elder brother Francesco. After a promising start to his military duties, the young prince had died suddenly of a fever. Francesco’s funeral in 1614 was accompanied by a pamphlet with frontispiece attributed to Callot.27 26 Letter written by Curzio di Picchena, dated 12 March 1620. 27 Adimollo, Esequie.

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In the funerary text, the many imprese that decorated Santa Croce’s walls during the ceremony were explained as representing the virtues and skills he so briefly deployed in life. These virtues seem to underlie Callot’s imagery in the Capricci as well. Design, or reasoned drawing, which allows the enlightened leader to plan warfare, was presented as a skill essential to the young prince. This was not just an abstract idea: we are now increasingly aware of the training of noblemen as amateur draftsmen from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth. Nor was this solely a pragmatic education for military use. Noble, amateur drawing in this period parallels the Florentine, Vasarian notion of Disegno as an intellectual practice, set apart from the manual craft of painters or sculptors or printmakers by its less messy and less laborious processes, and by its relation to abstract thought It would seem that Callot’s Capricci opens with the innovative presentation of drawing and etching skills in this context of a skill that united the artist and the prince. The baton of the military leader recurs in Francesco de’ Medici’s funerary text and Callot’s images as well. It was emblematized in the funeral imprese, as the symbol of Francesco’s authority and leadership in battle. If noble aptitude for military leadership may be referenced obliquely in the first group of prints that didactically portray the process of drawing and etching, we then see the theme more overtly in the prints of dueling and warfare with the baton of the general so prominently displayed. Finally, an important overlap between the imagery dedicated to the late Francesco de’ Medici and the imagery Callot dedicated to his brother was the praise in the funerary apparatus for his knowledge of his family’s imprese, his wit in discerning the heraldic and symbolic imagery that embodied familial aspirations. As we shall see, the allusive imagery of the Capricci also demands that its viewers decode a prominent familial impresa. Certainly the Florentine festivities that are the penultimate group of images in the volume take the prince’s love of such celebrations and direct it toward the serious role these celebrations played within Medicean rule of the city. Did the subjects of peasants and rural poverty lowlife also have some role to play in this collection of prints that allude so lightly to the education of the prince?

The Prince’s mirror The tone of Callot’s images is light indeed, and the atmosphere of comic grotesqueries is more likely to strike the viewer at first than are the serious references to the formation of a prince. One of the peasant images at the centre of the series exemplifies Callot’s canny balancing of comic and didactic aims (Fig. 60). The old goatherd, with his dog bothered by a swarm of bees, seems at first no more pointed a scene than the preceding image of a peasant with a flute. The combination of the herdsman’s zampogna or bagpipes, which produces a distinctive drone, juxtaposed with the implied

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Fig. 60: Jacques Callot. Peasant attacked by bees. Capricci di varie figure. 1617. Etching. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

drone of the bees, is a witty little musical allusion. It goes well with the capering goats in the distance, alluding in their turn to the supposed root of the word capriccio in the random, playful leaps of the capre or goat. However, the man with his feathered hat and bagpipe also bears a strong resemblance to the personification of Capriccio in Cesare Ripa’s very popular handbook of allegories, Iconologia, first published in 1593. Some aspects of his costume resemble the illustration in the 1603 edition and subsequent versions. Ripa defines Capriccio as a spirited and extraordinary idea, akin to artistic invention: ‘What are called capricci are ideas that in painting, or in music, or in another medium, manifest themselves in ways that are far from the ordinary mode’.28 His explanatory text stresses the figure’s feathered hat, similar to that worn by Callot’s peasant, as showing the variety of ideas expressed in the term capriccio. However, the Iconologia figure carries a spur and a bellows, glossed as an exhortation to virtue, not the bagpipe that we see on Callot’s peasant. Yet it is unlikely to be a coincidence that Callot costumes his old peasant in a way reminiscent of Ripa’s capriccio. Transforming the bellows into a peasant bagpipe 28 ‘Si dicono capricci le idee, che in pittura, 6 in musica, 6 in altro modo si manifestano lontane del modo ordinario’, Ripa, lconologia. See also the discussion of Ripa’s figure by Rees, in Mai, Das Capriccio, p. 195; and Campione, La Regola del Capriccio (2011).

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altered allegory into a semblance of actual peasant practices. The bagpipes in Florence as in later European courts served as a reference to low, rural types of music that were appropriated by a high courtly theatre.29 And the wit of this allusion to Ripa’s capriccio was heightened by transforming the bland abstraction of the allegorical figure into a crude old peasant set against tiny goats in the Tuscan landscape. As we shall see, the multivalent term capriccio had strong, deep roots in Florence. Any early seventeenth-century viewer, however, would probably have recognized the allusion to Ripa’s extremely popular handbook of allegories, and seen it as wittily reinforcing the title of Callot’s series. However, there is another and equally central reference in this image of the old man swatting at a swarm of bees. In the context of Florence and the Medici Grand Dukes, the swarm of bees was probably instantly recognizable as a reference to prince Lorenzo’s father, Ferdinando I de’ Medici. The impresa of a swarm of bees was one devised for the Grand Duke by the Sienese courtier and intellectual, Scipione Bargagli, and it became so closely associated with Ferdinando that it was cast in bronze and placed on the base of Giambologna’s equestrian statue of him in Piazza Annunziata in Florence, a statue which was itself represented in Callot’s Capricci (Fig. 57).30 Even in the funeral apparatus of prince Francesco de’ Medici, the bees as emblem of kingship are referenced, and his father Ferdinando I refered to as the ‘Rè dell’Api’. The basis of the Medici bee impresa was a text from Pliny’s Natural History, on the ‘king-bee’ and good government, which was widely repeated in classical texts. Pliny thought that the king-bee governed by persuasion, as it had no sting. It was a symbol of rule by rhetoric and negotiation rather than overt force, and an apt image for the form of absolutist rule that was espoused by the Grand Dukes. The angry old man, dressed like a personification of capriccio, is goaded by the swarm of bees, and the allusion to the king bee’s control of his people suggests that here, too, control will be imposed over the ‘capricious’. And the reference to the prince’s father, ‘king of bees’, alludes to emulation and continuity within the Medicean dynasty. The very same passage from Pliny about the character of bees gave rise to a metaphor for good government in a famous sixteenth-century text. Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince, first published in 1516, recommended that young rulers learn best through pithy aphorisms, images, and fables based on the natural world, such as Pliny’s image of the bees.31 At the very outset of his treatise, he wrote that life-like images of homely things, such as Aesop’s fables and stories of ants and bees were particularly apt for reaching the mind of young princes and imprinting an ethical image on their spirit. Erasmus then returned to the king of the bees no less than three times in his short text, making it a core image of the behaviour that the young prince 29 For the later seventeenth-century manifestation of courtly taste for the bagpipes, see Leppert, Arcadia at Versailles. 30 Erben, ‘Die Reiterdenkmäler’, p. 287–361. 31 Jardine, Erasmus’s Education; Born, The Education.

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should be taught to emulate. The king has no sting and dominates over his society by persuasion; he lives at the heart of the hive and does not spend time away from his domain; and his wings are short in relation to his body, meaning that, again, he may not fly far and leave behind the hive and his dependents. It seems no accident, but multiply over-determined, that Callot has used the swarm of bees here. Not only was it well-known in Florence as the impresa or personal device of Ferdinando I de’ Medici, but it drew Callot’s own collection of images into the orbit of Erasmus’s immensely popular text about educating rulers, which used the same image of the society of bees. Erasmus’s book was, of course, only one of the two most famous texts in the genre that came to be so popular through the sixteenth century, known as the speculum principum, or mirror of princes. The other example, first published in 1532, was Machiavelli’s The Prince. And that most infamous mirror of princes, Florentine in origin and inspiration, was like Callot’s Capricci dedicated to a Lorenzo de’ Medici. It is likely that the entire series of Callot’s etchings given to Lorenzo di Ferdinando I de’ Medici in 1617 was a deliberate translation of a mirror of princes into visual form, to educate a young prince in the emulation of his Medici forebears. And it followed the Christian, moralising content of the Erasmian tradition rather than the Machiavellian notion of reason of state. Just as Erasmus had recommended, the print series encapsulates the lessons of good rule into a light, pleasant, abbreviated form. Callot was not the first printmaker to create a ‘mirror of princes’ in visual form. Jan Stradanus, his predecessor at the Florentine court, had designed a much smaller series of prints on this theme, entitled Speculum Principum, for the Piedmontese ruler Carlo Emmanuele of Savoy. It was engraved by Raphael Sadeler and published in Venice in 1597. The imagery of Stradanus’s series relies on the personifications of virtues in the foreground of the four prints, backed by scenes of human activities that exemplify the prince’s actions in fostering good Marriage, the arts of Warfare, the noble practice of Hunting, the sponsorship of Religion, and the patronage of the Arts and Letters. It is more straightforwardly didactic, and finds a more traditional way to translate from text to images through personification and allegory, rather than using the allusive mode of Callot’s series. After Callot’s work, there were to be further, and more varied, examples of printed images on the theme of the education of princes. It became a rich subject for thesis prints designed for students’ thesis defences within Jesuit institutions like the Collegio Romano, where the notion of an education in virtue could be visually expanded to suit the candidate for a degree.32 The mirror of princes theme would also create a link between the education of the student and the intellectual virtue of his noble sponsor, who was the print’s dedicatee. Although thesis prints became a widespread phenomenon through the seventeenth century, thanks to the Jesuits, it is striking that in general the mirror of princes as a theme in both texts and in printed images was born in the 32 Rice, ‘POMIS SUA’, p. 195ff; Gottardo, ‘Cardinal Francesco Barberini’, p. 293–297.

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Fig. 61: Stefano della Bella. Playing card: King Louis XII. Etching from a set of cards designed for King Louis XIV as a child (Le Jeu des Rois de France). 1644. Etching. Open Access, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

same milieu as Callot’s Capricci series, and continued to serve as inspiration for Florentine printmakers. Perhaps the most striking example of printed images made to serve as a speculum principum was designed by Callot’s one-time Florentine colleague and pupil, Stefano della Bella, although these prints were executed in Paris. Della Bella’s etched sets of playing cards were designed circa 1644 at the request of Cardinal Mazarin to serve as an educational tool for the very young Louis XIV. One set depicted good and bad kings from France’s past (Fig. 61), another was devoted to virtuous and vicious queens, while further sets of cards were devoted to Fables from antiquity and to the Geography of the known world. The programme for the cards’ imagery was drawn up by the writer and courtier Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, and its Erasmian inspiration seems clear. The cards had an extensive reception beyond their use in playfully educating the child king. Sets of them were reprinted and sold to the public through the end of the seventeenth century, and uncut sheets of them were published in book form as well.33 Little wonder, then, that the foreemost collector of prints in France, the Abbé Michel de Marolles, should state in the text introducing his collection to the public that prints served excellently well to form the spirit of a young prince, as well as to instruct in all manner of things under the sun. 33 I am indebted to the 2010 Courtauld MA dissertation on Della Bella’s playing cards by Paris Spies-Ganz, and its publication as ‘A princely education through prints’ (2017). The card series are reproduced and discussed in Salamon, Stefano della Bella.

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Callot himself seems to have been intrigued by the genre of the mirror of princes. In the inventory of his goods after his death in Nancy during 1635, the list of the most valuable books that he owned included not just one but several texts, in both Italian and French, which were later versions of Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince.34 Tracing the titles given in the inventory to specific translations and editions we find that Callot owned Matthieu Coignet’s Instructions aux princes pour garder la foy promise (the British Library holds an edition of Paris, 1584), an explicitly Erasmian ‘mirror of princes’. The ‘discours du Reverendo Monsigner Francisco Patricii Senese’ listed in the inventory may refer to Patrizzi’s abridged paraphrase of Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince published in 1591. And a ‘Traté [sic] de la religion que doibt tenir les prince [sic] chrestien en langue italienne’ seems to refer to the popular anti-Machiavellian text of Antonio de Guevara, which was translated into French as well as Italian in the early seventeenth century. Callot’s library holds the key to many of the core ideas expressed in his prints, and his books have perhaps been under-utilized in studying his oeuvre. It has been noticed that he owned a copy of Ripa’s Iconologia, which is hardly surprising. Here I would propose that Callot’s ownership by the time of his death in 1635 of not just one but several textual ‘mirrors of princes’ shows his ongoing involvement with the notion that the education of rulers was an important theme, and one that would appeal not just to princes but to their subjects as well. The ‘mirror’ in the title given to this long textual tradition is of course as conventional and meaningless a term as the word ‘theatre’ used in equally many types of early modern titles. And yet it had a resonance as well. According to Erasmus, the virtue that was to be reflected in a textual mirror for princes was not just for his benefit, but of use to the populace whom he ruled, who should know the traits to be sought in order to produce benign government. The text was a mirror that reflected the governed as well as the governor. Stradanus’s title page for his Speculum Principum series of 1597 shows an allegorical figure holding a convex mirror turned outward toward the viewer (Fig. 62). This translation of Erasmus into printed imagery could spread the ideal of good government even more widely than did the vernacular treatises and translations of his Education of a Christian Prince. It seems that Callot took this lesson on board by 1617, and yet clothed it in a playful, theatrical form that would appeal to the taste of one young Medici scion, who was then casting about for his future role in political life. Later, the wide dissemination of the Capricci would make this imagery of education and government available to a broad audience, clothed in a light veil of the comic and the everyday.

34 The inventory of Callot’s possessions at his death in 1635, Marot, ‘Jacques Callot’.

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Fig. 62: Jan Stradanus. Title page. Speculum Principum. 1597. Engraving. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Capriccio: Caperings of Goats, a Fecal Fecundity of Wit, and ‘Sterile Genius’ There is a larger context for low images of peasants and crude behavior in Florentine representations of the early seicento, of course. The taste for vulgar, rural comedy and its crude Tuscan dialect was long established in the academies of Florence and Siena, and was a major feature of court drama around 1620, particularly exemplified by Michelangelo Buonarotti the Younger’s play La Fiera of 1619, at which—the letters of court secretary Curzio di Piccheno tells us—the young Lorenzo di Ferdinando I de’ Medici enjoyed himself tremendously.35 Callot’s own large etching of The Fair at Impruneta of 1620 would later rival the epic scale and vulgar imagery of Buonarrotti’s comedy (as we saw in Chapter 2). This Florentine fascination with theatrical vulgarity may have been one context for Callot’s inclusion of the peasants in their landscape settings here, even the defecating peasant. There is another but equally Florentine, 35 Curzio da Piccheno, letter dated 12 February 1619, describing Don Lorenzo’s enjoyment of the performance of La Fiera, performed the day before.

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Tuscan context, for the word capriccio itself. Usage of the term from the early sixteenth century onward brought together the imagery of dynastic allegory, the mirror of princes, and the mysteries of artistic or poetic creativity. The supposed etymology of the word capriccio in the movements of capre, goats, in the sixteenth century is well known if somewhat mysterious in its origins. However, it has been clearly documented that the term first appeared in late medieval translations into Italian of the Latin word for horror. (Thus Romantic artists in their use of the capriccio were merely returning to this substratum of the word, invoking the uncanny, as in E.T.A. Hoffman’s work, and re-reading Callot’s works as if they were horrifying.) Capo riccio, accapricciare and raccapricciarsi, words englobing the root term capriccio, even today translate the sensation of one’s hair lifting off of one’s skin in a moment of extreme fear or revulsion. However, it was in the early sixteenth century in Florence that the term capriccio took on a different semantic range, becoming associated with invention derived from fantasy, and with comedy as inventive wit. Early in the century, the Medici pope Leo X enjoyed Fra Mariano, a court jester or buffone said to perform capricci, that is, inventive jokes. By mid-sixteenth-century Florence, Giorgio Vasari used the word capriccioso, even capricciossissimo of numerous Tuscan artists in his Lives of the Artists.36 The idea of being set apart by some quality of originality of intellect and/or bizarre behavior forms the substratum of most of these references. And allegorical invention was the product that Vasari most associated with artists’ curious performances. Vasari’s most pertinent use of the term capriccio appeared earlier than the Vite, in a letter of 1534. Glossing his own portrait of his patron Alessandro de’ Medici, Vasari termed capriccio the allegorical means by which the painting embodied the various (supposed) strengths of this despot. In essence, the capriccio transformed the lifelike portrait of Alessandro into a mirror of his princely virtue, a speculum principum. It is not clear to me, however, that Callot would have known of this earlier Florentine application of the term capriccio to a mirror of princely virtues. Two years earlier, in 1532, the word capriccio had already made another appearance in Tuscan letters that would inflect the sense of the term for years to follow. The poet Francesco Berni used it a single time in his Capitolo in laude di Aristotele, in order to describe his own curious form of poetic invention: his ideas ‘son capricci / Ch’a mio dispetto mi voglion venire’, i.e., ‘they are caprices that will come to me against my will’. This was an image of compulsive poetic invention that would be repeated again and again over the next century by quantities of Berni’s followers. A flood, an overflow of squalid, vulgar, sexual and scatological imagery characterised Bernesque verse, couched in this imagery of quasi-automatic writing that welled up, as it were, against the poet’s own discretion. The poems on food or defecation, dedicated to bodily functions, embodied in the image of a urinal made cosmic in scale, 36 Rathé, ‘Le Capriccio’.

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characterized this poetics of the capriccioso. High poetic invention is portrayed as a version of low outpourings, and invention itself characterized by this quality of bodily compulsion. Callot is highly likely to have known of this sense of the term capriccio. Berni’s poetry of the previous century was a predilection of some figures at the Florentine court in the period during which Callot composed his print series. It was an obvious Tuscan precedent for the new dramatic focus on peasant vulgarity by Michelangelo Buonarrotti the Younger. Galileo, while teaching at the university in Pisa, composed verses in the manner of Berni, and letters reveal that Francesco Berni was his favourite poet.37 The young prince Lorenzo de’ Medici’s brother-in-law, Ferdinando Gonzaaga, a frequent visitor at court around 1615–1620, prized and quoted Berni’s poems.38 In Bologna during 1616, geographically further away from Callot, but close in time, the Bolognese poet Giulio Cesare Croce published La Topeide, a comic poem about frogs’ weddings, subtitled a ‘Capriccio’ with the term glossed as ‘poetic furore’, evoking just this Bernesque imagery of poetic compulsion to write in comic form.39 It is thus entirely possible that it was the scatological precedent of Francesco Berni’s poetry on which Callot relied when he made his etching of the defecating, urinating peasant (Fig. 52). The image may well have alluded, in Bernesque mode, to the capriccio as a forceful evacuation of the poet’s creativity. We must see in this print, so offensive to later taste that it was removed from the Medici presentation volume, a conceit that was absolutely central to the print series dedicated to the young prince Lorenzo. The vulgar imagery of defecation is made to refer to the high quality of ingenious poetic invention. Callot’s title with its reference to the ‘first fruits’ of the etcher’s ‘sterile genius’ emphasized the fecund power of invention that he laid claim to through the rich word capriccio. It was a courtly conceit of enfiguring the high through the low. And the etcher’s modesty in presenting the volume through this reference to his own sterility comes from that quintessentially courtly conceit of nonchalant self-negation, sprezzatura. All the while he was, of course, actually laying claim to an entire century of local artistic and poetic heritage and transforming it into new visual wit. In Callot’s later career, the Capricci di varie figure did prove to be a cornucopian overflow of invention, and a demonstration of the riches to come in his later career. Many of the scenes and figure types would recur in later series such as the Balli di 37 Reynolds, ‘Galileo Galilei’s Poem’, p. 330–341. She refers to Galileo’s letter of 15 March 1615, where he wrote: ‘Continui perci6 V.S. Ecc.ma la lettura del Berni et di Ruzante, et lasci per hora da una parte Aristotile et Archimede’. A further indication of Galilei’s knowledge of Berni is to be found in his statement possibly dated to 1615: ‘Io non posso usar cavilli, perche sostengo il vero, e l’arguzie si mostrano nel difender paradossi; come le piacevoli lodi del Berni acalzano in lodare suggetti magrissimi, come l’orinale, la peste, il debito, Aristotile, etc., ma non tornerebbono bene lodandosi il sole, la giustizia, etc.’ 38 Chambers, ‘The “Bellissimo Ingegno”’, p. 113–147. 39 Croce, La Topeide, referring to ‘furor poetico’ that corresponds with capriccio.

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Sfessania, the Gobbi, Les Gueux, and the Varie Figure produced during the 1620s in Nancy. The scenes of Florentine life from his Capricci would be sold across Europe in these years, though perhaps only to some courtly viewers would their allusive embodiment of the Erasmian mirror of princes have been evident. However, if we return to the way that Callot’s scenes were received by an artist such as Sebastian Stoskopff or Rembrandt, we may see that the print series’ capricious invention was understood and highly prized. Stoskopff’s still life paintings of the mid- 1620s to 1630s combine Callot prints with bronze or marble figurines and books, as in the still life with his Capricci now dated to roughly 1635 (Fig. 51).40 The play of open and shut volumes, the self-enclosing whorls of the shells, and the delicate transparence of the glass all evoke a sense of looking at, into, and through the collected objects. It is not so much the vanity of earthly goods that they draw our attention to, but the meaningfulness of their sequence and their juxtapositions. The bound volume open at Callot’s defecating peasant is adjacent to the statuette of a classically-draped woman. There is no known specific sculpture on which Stoskopff based this figurine.41 I would argue that she is likely to represent one of the Muses, derived from the antique sculptures of the Muses in the Vatican, as popularized by the engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi. Stefano della Bella’s series of Muses, from the late 1640s, emulates the Marcantonio figures as well as the Vatican statues, and helps identify Stoskopff’s represented figure as a well-known sculptural type (Fig. 63). The painter was likely to have seen these small table-top statuettes, which two of his other paintings also juxtapose with Callot prints, as a renowned product of Florentine artistry. Many such figurines, mainly in bronze although also in marble or plaster, were produced in the workshop of Giambologna by his Flemish students and followers during the late sixteenth century and start of the seventeenth. Often they were used as diplomatic gifts, both precious and portable, becoming signifiers of advanced Florentine artistry and courtly refinement. In this sense, it is apt that Stoskopff places the statuette and Callot’s peasant side by side: they were parallel products of this Florentine crucible of late Renaissance ideals. Despite the high preciosity of material and classical theme in the one, and the cheap humility of means and everyday vulgarity of the other, both were alike in their ability to travel far and to disseminate the notion of Florentine invention.

40 Stoskopff’s still life with Callot’s print of the defecating peasant is discussed in Ternois and Choné, Jacques Callot, p. 232. See also Böhmer, ‘Imitation et invention’, p. 94–107. 41 Hahn-Woernle, Sebastian Stoskopff, p. 186–187, reports that the Louvre file on this still life painting contains a letter from J.-R. Gaborit written in 1983, in response to a request to help identify the statuette, describing it as marble or plaster, seeming Flemish, dating to the early seventeenth century.

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Fig. 63: Stefano della Bella. A Classical Muse. 1646. Etching. Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island.

Above all, both statuette and print represent in their functions and in their contexts the very notion of inspiration. Muses of different forms of reverie, both invite the viewer toward further invention and the display of wit. When Rembrandt follows Callot’s peasants and beggars into a life-long fascination with etching and the everyday, he took up a Callotesque challenge, one that Stoskopff understood and rose to as well. One role for Callot’s print series, presented as a tiny but potent book, was didactic. But its comic and everyday imagery did not just educate a young Florentine prince in his duty to emulate his great forebears, like Erasmus’s mirror of princes. It did not just teach a callow youth how to decode his family’s impresa or emblematic imagery, when it was embedded in everyday imagery such as swarms of bees, rooting the family identity in emblems of good government. The Capricci seems to address its audience, princely and plebeian, through the sheer movement of images, one after another, unfolding in a cascade of associations and linkages. To call it proto-cinematic does not do justice to the novelty of Callot’s idea, this ‘first fruit’ of his genius. He had innovated in the tools of his trade, to create a new form of etching. He shrank

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the images’ size, even while expanding the visible space in his representations, and exploding the scale of a print series to a very long sequence of fifty images. In every dimension of his work, Callot’s Capricci pushed against the boundaries of representation and its restrictions on the communication of ideas. Ultimately this was his gift, to the prince and to the wider public. He made the print series into a container for aspiration and change, and a permanent appeal to the arts of inspiration.

Works Cited Adimari, Alessandro. Esequie dell’Illmo. Eccmo. Principe Don Francesco Medici celebrate dal Sermo. Don Cosmo II, Gran Duca di Toscana IV (Firenze: G. Donato and B. Giunti, 1614). Auclair, Valerie, ‘Les Capricci di varie figure, ou Callot dessinateur’, in Guillaume Peureux, ed., Le Caprice (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2004), 81–100. Baldinucci, Filippo, ‘Jacopo Callot,” (1681) in his Notizie de’ Professori del Disegno, Da Cimabue in qua (Florence: V. Bertelli, 1846) 5 vols., IV, 372–390. Bevers, Holm, Peter Schatborn, and Barbara Werzel. Rembrandt the Master and the Workshop: Drawings and Etchings (New Haven: Yale University Press and London, National Gallery, 1991). Birely, Robert. The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellian or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Böhmer, Sylvia, ‘Imitation et invention pictural: les gravures peintes dans les natures mortes de Sébastien Stoskopff’, in Sébastien Stoskopff 1597–1657: Un Maître de la nature morte (ex. cat. Musée de l’Oeuvre Notre Dame, Strasbourg, 1997): 94–107. Bruwaert, Edmond. La Vie de Jacques Callot: biographie critique (Paris: H. Laurens, 1927). Bury, Michael. The Print in Italy 1550–1620 (London: British Museum, 2001). Busch, Werner, ‘Der Graphische Gattung Capriccio: der letztlich vergebliche Versuch, die Phantasie zu Kontrollieren’, in Das Capriccio als Kunstprinzip. Zur Vorgeschichte der Moderne von Arcimboldo und Callot bis Tiepolo und Goya. Malerei—Zeichnung—Graphik ed. by Ekkehard Mai (Cologne, 1996): 55–81. Campione, Francesco Paolo. La Regola del Capriccio: Alle origini di una idea estetica (Palermo: Centro Internazionale Studi di Estetica, 2011). Chambers, David S., ‘The ‘Bellissimo Ingegno’ of Ferdinando Gonzaga (1587–1626), Cardinal and Duke of Mantua’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 50 (1987): 113–147. Clodon, Francis, ‘Gaspard de la Nuit et le pictural’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1988): 77–80. Croce, Giulio Cesare. La Topeide ovvero Capriccio curiosissimo (Bologna: Bartolomeo Cochi, 1616). Dillon, Gianvittorio, ‘La vie artistique à Florence au début du XVIIe. siècle’, in Jacques Callot 1592–1635: Actes du Colloque organisé par le Service Culturel du Musée du Louvre et de la ville de Nancy ed. by Daniel Ternois,(Paris: Klincksieck, 1993): 147–182. Erasmus, Desiderius, trans. Lester K. Born. The Education of a Christian Prince, with an Introduction on Erasmus and on Ancient and Medieval Political Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). Erben, Dietrich, ‘Die Reiterdenkmäler der Medici in Florenz und ihre politische Bedeutung’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz 40 (1996): 287–361. Félibien, André, [The Life of Jacques Callot] in his Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes, Quatrième partie (Trevoux: Imprimerie de S.A.S, 1725) 6 vols., III, 358–387. Fowler, Caroline, ‘Rembrandt’s Faceless Faces’, The Seventeenth Century 33 (2018): 133–159. Gottardo, Ketty, ‘Cardinal Francesco Barberini and the Specula Principum Tradition’, Print Quarterly 28 (2011): 293–297. Gregg, Ryan E. Panorama, Power and History: Vasari and Stradano’s City Views in Palazzo Vecchio (PhD diss., John Hopkins University, 2009).

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Griffiths, Antony The Print before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550–1820 (London: British Museum, 2016). Griffiths, Antony, ‘Jacques Callot and Copies’, Print Quarterly 19 (2002): 282–283. Griffiths, Antony, ‘The Archaeology of the Print’, in Christopher Baker, Caroline Elam and Genevieve Warwick, eds., Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe 1500–1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003): 9–28. Griffiths, Antony, and Hugo Chapman, ‘Israël Henriet, the Chatsworth Album and the Publication of the Work of Jacques Callot’, Print Quarterly 30 (2013): 273–293. Hahn-Woernle, Birgit. Sebastian Stoskopff: mit einem kritischen Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1996). Heck, Michèle-Caroline, ed. Sébastien Stoskopff 1597–1657: Un Maître de la Nature Morte (ex. cat. Strasbourg, Musée de l’Oeuvre Notre Dame, 1997). Held, Julius, ‘A Rembrandt “Theme”’, Artibus et Historiae 5 (1984): 21–34. Huelsen, Christian, ‘Das Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae des Antonio Lafreri’, in Collectanea Variae Doctrinae Leoni S. Olschki (Munich: Rosenthal, 1921): 121–170. Jardine, Lisa, ed., Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Kanz, Roland. Das Capriccio in der italienischen Kunst und Kunsttheorie des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2002). Leppert, Richard. Arcadia at Versailles: Noble Amateur Musicians and Their Musettes and Hurdy-gurdies at the French Court. c1660-1789; A Visual Study (Amsterdam: Swets and Zellinger, 1978). Lieure, Jules. Jacques Callot (New York: Collectors Editions, 1969). Reprint of edition published in Paris, 1924–1929, 8 vols. Mai, Ekkehard, and Joachim Rees, eds. Das Capriccio als Kunstprinzip zur vorgeschichte der Moderne: von Arcimboldo und Callot bis Tiepolo und Goya (ex. cat. Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1996). Mamone, Sara, ‘Le Miroir des spectacles: Jacques Callot à Florence (1612–22)’, in Jacques Callot 1592–1635: Actes du Colloque organisé par le Service Culturel du Musée du Louvre et de la ville de Nancy ed. by Daniel Ternois (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993): 183–224. Marolles, Michel de. Catalogue de Livres d’Estampes et de Figures en Tailledouce avec un dénombrement des pièces qui y sont contenuës (Paris: Frédéric Léonard,1666). Marot, Pierre. Jacques Callot d’après des documents inédits (Paris/Strasbourg: Berger-Levrault, 1939). Mette, Hanns-Ulrich, ‘Oeuvres d’art et curiosités: à propos des natures mortes aux coquillages de Sébastien Stoskopff’, in Sébastien Stoskopff, 1597–1657: Un maître de la nature morte, (ex. cat., Strasbourg: Musée de l’Oeuvre Notre-Dame, 1997): 126–130. Meaume, Édouard. Recherches sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de Jacques Callot: Suite au Peintre-Graveur Français de M. Robert-Dumesnil (Paris: Jacques Renouard, 1860). Préaud, Maxime, ‘Réflexions primesautières sur le Caprice gravé’, in Le Caprice ed. Guillaume Peureux (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2004): 149–155. Rathé, Alice., ‘Le Capriccio dans les Écrits de Vasari’, Italica 57 (1980): p. 239–254. Reynolds, Anne, ‘Galileo Galilei’s Poem Against Wearing the Toga’, Italica 59 (1982): 330–341. Rice, Louise, ‘“Pomis Sua Nomina Servant”: The Emblematic Thesis Prints of the Roman Seminary’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 70 (2007): 195–246. Ripa, Cesare. Iconologia, ouero, Descrittione di diuerse imagini cauate dall’antichità, & di propria inuentione (Rome: Lepida Facii, 1603). Rupp, Stephen. Allegories of Kingship: Calderon and the Anti-Machiavellian Tradition (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Russell, Helen Diane, ed., Jacques Callot: Prints and Related Drawings (ex. cat. Washington, D.C.:National Gallery of Art, 1975). Sadoul, Georges. Jacques Callot: Miroir de son temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) Salamon, Silverio, ed., Stefano della Bella: Firenze 1610–1664 (ex. cat. Turin, Arte Antica Silverio Salamon, 2000).

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Saslow, James. The Medici Wedding of 1589. Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Spies-Ganz, Paris, ‘A Princely Education through Print: Stefano della Bella’s 1644 Jeux de Cartes Etched for Louis XIV’, Getty Research Journal, no. 9 (2017): 1–22. Stratton, Suzanne, ‘Rembrandt’s Beggars: Satire and Sympathy’, Print Collector’s Newsletter 17 (1986): 77–82. Ternois, Daniel, and Paulette Choné, eds. Jacques Callot (1592–1635) ex. cat. Nancy: Musée Historique Lorrain, 1992). Ternois, Daniel. L’Art de Jacques Callot (Paris: de Nobèle, 1962). Wolfthal, Diane, and Dena Woodall, eds. Princes and Paupers: The Art of Jacques Callot (ex. cat. Houston, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 2013).

4.

The Motif of the Shooting Man, and Capturing the Urban Scene: Claude Lorrain and the Bamboccianti

Abstract In his early career, the Lorrenese painter Claude Lorrain was immersed in the society of Northern artists in Rome. Joachim van Sandrart later claimed it was he who taught Claude to sketch from life in the Campagna around Rome. In Claude’s View in Rome with Trinità dei Monti he applies this lesson to painting an urban scene viewed from his house. The sketches for this view reveal Claude’s use of a verbal-visual pun for the term ‘tirer au vif,’ tracing from life. The shared perspective structures used by Claude and his friends, Dutch and Flemish followers of Pieter van Laer, support the notion that even Claude’s later Arcadian landscapes were grounded in a particular notion of depicting from life. Keywords: Accademia di San Luca, Bentveughels, costruzzione legittima, bifocal perspective, visual puns

A small painting by Claude Lorrain, dated 1632, is generally described as painted dal naturale, from life (Fig. 64).1 It represents a scene that was visible from Claude’s house on Rome’s via Margutta, up the slope that was later to become the Spanish Steps, toward the church of Sta. Trinità dei Monti and the streets between the Pincio and the Quirinal hills. A preparatory drawing for the painting depicts the upper part of this view with its recognizable topography (Fig. 65). However, in a dark lower

1 Humphrey Wine, entry on Claude Lorrain, View in Rome with Trinità dei Monti, The French SeventeenthCentury Paintings (2001). For more on Claude’s depiction of recognizable sites and buildings, see Kennedy, ‘Claude Lorrain and Topographies’, p. 304–309; and ‘Claude Lorrain and Architecture’, p. 260–283. Modern study of Claude is rooted in the work of Michael Kitson and Marcel Röthlisberger, and particularly indebted to Kitson’s Studies on Claude and Poussin (2000), and Röthlisberger’s Claude Lorrain: The Paintings and Claude Lorrain: The Drawings. The best general introduction to his work is Langdon, Claude Lorrain (1989). Exhibitions have inspired most recent work on Claude’s art, the most significant being Sonnabend and Whitely, Claude: The Enchanted Castle; Boyer, Claude Le Lorrain; Wine, Claude Lorrain: The Poetic Landscape; Russell, Claude Lorrain. The themes now in Claude scholarship tend toward discussions of Claude and antiquity, on the one hand, and on the other an exploration of the material context of the Campagna. Though these are fascinating areas of research, this present study focuses on Claude’s creative processes in working dal naturale, including his use of perspective, and thus will restrict referencing to these areas. McTighe, S., Representing from Life in Seventeenth-century Italy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi: 10.5117/ 9789462983281_ch04

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Fig. 64: Claude Lorrain. View in Rome with Trinità dei Monti. 1632. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, London. © 2019. Copyright The National Gallery, London/Scala, Florence.

corner, Claude’s painted composition flows seamlessly into a low-life scene of prostitutes with their clients. These figures perform their transactions in front of a ruined temple and antique sculpture. Evocative of ancient Rome, the setting is nonetheless entirely out of place in Claude’s neighbourhood. This darkened area forms a counterpoint to the actual topography, an eruption of imagination into a scene that was otherwise meticulously observed from life. Ancient and modern Rome, the real and the imagined, religious buildings and immoral actions, give the sense of juxtaposed registers and differing modes of address to the viewer. In these early years of the Lorrenese artist’s long career in Rome, he depicted a number of topographic or partially topographic views, such as his View of Castel Gandolfo and View of the Port of Santa Marinella for Pope Urban VIII (Metropolitan Museum, New York, and Petit Palais, Paris) or his View of Genoa (Louvre Museum, Paris). At this point in his career, Claude sometimes participated in the vogue for topographic views of a patron’s properties and lands, which we have seen was a speciality of Flemish artists working for aristocratic patrons from the end of the sixteenth century, and had inspired Jacques Callot and Filippo Napoletano in Florence before 1620.

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Fig. 65: Claude Lorrain. View of Trinità dei Monti. c. 1632. Drawing, recto. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

Claude’s early biographers don’t tell us much about the early moments of his career to which the View in Rome with Trinità dei Monti belongs. He had arrived in Rome around 1627. Working for a time with landscape painters Agostino Tassi, and Goffredo Wals, Claude also crossed paths with Filippo Napoletano, who was in Rome between 1627 and his early death in 1629 or 1630.2 Through Filippo, Claude encounn tered that mode of drawing landscape dal naturale that was so admired in Florence, as we saw in chapters two and three. Soon after leaving Florence in 1621, Filippo Napoletano had famously painted the beauty spot of Tivoli in the Roman Campagna en plein air, that is, dal naturale, supposedly the first artist to do so according to his biographer Filippo Baldinucci. Filippo Napoletano thus set in motion the vogue for representing the waterfalls, temples and hillsides of Tivoli that Claude, too, was repeatedly to portray in sketches from life and in paintings throughout his career.3 During the 1630s, Claude also worked in close association with Flemish, Dutch and German painters. Joachim von Sandrart, eminent printmaker and painter himself, recalled sketching in the Campagna with Claude, together with Pieter van Laer (called by his satirical nickname Bamboccio, ‘big ugly puppet’). With characteristic 2 Cavazzini, ‘Claude Lorrain et le milieu Romain’; Cavazzini, ‘Claude’s Apprenticeship’, p. 133–146: Röthlisberger, ‘From Goffredo Wals’, p. 9–37; Chiarini, ‘The Importance’, p. 13–26. 3 For Claude’s Tivoli and Campagna sketchbooks, the remains of which are in the British Museum, see Kitson, ‘Claude’s Books of Drawings from Nature’, p. 252–257.

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hubris, Sandrart claimed it was he himself who met Claude precisely at Tivoli while he was attempting to capture the waterfalls and steep cliffs of that beauty spot, and it was on this site he instructed Claude in how to work ‘nach dem Leben’. Both Sandrart and Baldinucci, writing their texts in the 1670s, are the biographer-critics who were most attracted to the practice of working from life. Both wrote lives of Dutch, Flemish and French artists alongside those given to Italian artists, with an eye toward the constant interchange between migrant artists whose careers crossed the Alps. In their two accounts, the art of Claude Lorrain and Bamboccio were linked. Both the German and Italian author brought together their practices of drawing from nature with the practice of perspective. Sandrart, for example, whose lives of Bamboccio and Claude Lorrain are only a few pages apart in his text, wrote of both artists not only that they worked outside in the Campagna, but that they observed the view toward the horizon with particular care and accurate measurement. This junction between drawing and painting in nature with the abstract schema of perspective is the element I wish to focus on in this chapter. Northerners in Rome were loosely associated in a group called Bentvueghels or ‘birds of a feather’, giving each other comic names as a badge of membership; Claude’s nickname was Orizzonte, or ‘horizon line’, according to Filippo Baldinucci.4 The followers of van Laer / Bamboccio were among the Bentvueghels, many of whom were landscape painters. The painters of everyday life around van Laer have come to be called Bamboccianti, as emulators of his small paintings of Roman cityscapes with scenes of vulgar daily life. However, the Northerners, whether landscape specialists or genre painters, shared the practice of working from life. An anonymous drawing, probably by Jan Asselijn, labels a group of Northern artists Bentvueghels, showing them seated at work on sketching and even painting at an easel outdoors in the landscape (Fig. 66). Their practice of depicting from the live model, and from the site in the city or country, was an essential element of their group identity as foreigners in Rome.5 As Sandrart asserted, Claude went sketching with Pieter van Laer; he also painted alongside another member of the Bent, the landscapist Harmen van Swanevelt.6 The imagery of Claude’s early period isn’t simply influenced by the style of Dutch and 4 Baldinucci, [Claude life, orizzonte, perspective recipe] 5 On the Bentvueghels as a social institution for Northern artists in Rome, see Hoogewerff, De Bentvueghels. Recent PhD dissertations have explored the social networks that linked Northern artists and Roman patrons: Downey, The Bentvueghels; Ackx, Bentvueghels and Bamboccianti; and Baverez, La Schildersbent. On the Bamboccianti, the best overview is another PhD thesis, Thompson, ‘Pigmei pizzicano dei giganti’. To place their work in the context of seventeenth-century genre painting, see the catalogue entries of Laura Laureati in Porzio, Da Caravaggio a Ceruti, and in Ludovica Trezzani’s essay, ‘La pittura con scene di genere a Roma nella prima metà del Seicento: I Bamboccianti’, in the same text, p. 313–339. Older literature includes Levine The Art of the Bamboccianti and ‘The Bentvueghels: Bande académique’, in Lavin, IL60, p. 207–219; Levine and Mai, I Bamboccianti. Briganti, Laureati and Trezzani, I Bamboccianti; Briganti, ‘Pieter van Laer’, p. 185–198. 6 Kitson, ‘Swanevelt’, p. 215–220; 259–266.

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Fig. 66: Jan Asselijn (attributed to). Bentvueghels drawing and painting outdoors. c. 1630. Drawing. Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin. © bpk/ Kupferstichkabinet SMB/ Jörg P. Anders.

Flemish landscapes, or by Bamboccio’s low subject matter. There were fundamental practices that they shared. This chapter will look at the parallels in their creative processes, and propose a different way of understanding Claude’s art in light of their common ground. In the first place, we will see that Claude’s practice of drawing and painting from life is illuminated by a motif that recurs in his early work of the 1630s and also in paintings, drawings and prints, made by artists as diverse as Pieter Paul Rubens and Jacques Callot in the same decade. This motif consists of a musket-shooting man within a landscape, sometimes placed next to the image of an artist at work sketching the view. Discovering how this shooting man became a reference to the work of drawing from life leads to an exploration of the common practices shared by Claude and fiamminghi in Rome. The second section of this chapter explores how the genre scenes of Pieter van Laer and his followers bend the practice of working from life toward the almost anthropological aim of documenting the human geography of modern Rome. In the final section, we will examine the schema for perspective that Filippo Baldinucci describes Claude following, and compare it to the simple bifocal perspective structure that shaped the compositions of Callot and the Florentine draftsmen as well as Claude’s Dutch and Flemish colleagues. It allowed the Bamboccianti, like Claude, to create a zone of recognizable topography along the horizon of a landscape or cityscape, framed with a ‘blind zone’ of fictional human activity in the

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foreground and margins of the image. This perspective structure has implications for how the view drawn from life was meant to be received by the attentive beholder.

Tirer au vif: shooting at live prey, a visual-verbal pun On the verso of Claude’s preparatory drawing for the View of Trinità dei Monti (Fig. 67) is a rapid sketch of a few figures, which seems at first glance unrelated to the view on the recto. An artist sits outside, drawing the scene in front of him, which consists of a man milking a goat. Two cloaked and hatted men stand on either side of the draftsman, one playing a rustic flute and the other resting his arms on an implement that may be a musket or a walking stick. The horse who looks with interest at the artist’s work adds a note of humour, and also reinforces the idea that this sketching is being performed out of doors in front of the motif. There is a scrawled inscription above the draftsman, but its message has proved to be indecipherable. Context helps us understand the imagery here. The motif of the artist working from life outside in front of the natural motif is one that Claude frequently uses throughout his career, but particularly in his sketches after nature.7 It is a motif of self-reflection and an acknowledgment of the artistic means of representing within the representation itself.8 So the act of drawing from life unites, however loosely, the topographic Roman view depicted on the recto and the figures sketched on the verso. The verso drawing was apparently preparatory work for another painting of about the same date, circa 1632–1633. Claude’s Landscape with a Mill, now in Boston (Fig. 68), contains the goat-milking motif combined with the artist sketching and his human onlookers. There is no overtly topographic element to the landscape, which includes an odd and prominent detail of a rope that stretches from the trees behind the artist across the river to a window in the mill on the far shore. The verso of the Hermitage sketch is also related to another painting, which has been lost, but was evidently made in this same period around 1632. Its composition and probable date is known through Claude’s Liber Veritatis sketchbook, which recorded paintings that he had completed and sold (Fig. 69).9 This lost painting, noted on the Liber drawing as “per Napoli,” also focused on the artist working outside, dal naturale, but it no longer associated the artist drawing from life with the milking of a goat. Instead the Liber Veritatis drawing pairs the draftsman sketching with a man shooting a musket across the river, and with another man behind him loading his musket in preparation to shoot. The two shooting men and the artist are given equal weight in the image in the foreground and are in closest proximity to one another.

7 8 9

Ribouillault, ‘De la pratique au mythe: la figure du dessinateur dans les paysages de Claude Lorrain’. Rand, Claude Lorrain: The Painter as Draftsman, p. 47–56. Kitson, Claude Lorrain: Liber Veritatis.

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Fig. 67: Claude Lorrain. Artist sketching and man milking goat (verso drawing View of Trinità dei Monti) c. 1632. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.ss

Fig. 68: Claude Lorrain. Landscape with a Mill. c. 1632–1633. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Seth K. Sweetser Fund/Bridgeman Images.

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Fig. 69: Claude Lorrain. Landscape with artist drawing and men shooting. Liber Veritatis. c. 1635. Drawing. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Claude’s image can be understood as a witty play on words, and a visual-verbal pun. He was referring to a common phrase used both for sketching from life and for hunting: tirer au vif, or ‘to shoot live prey’. As we have seen, the French phrases used to indicate representing from the live model included ‘d’après la nature’ or ‘d’après le vif’ or ‘au vif’, which were cognates of the Latin, Italian and Dutch terms ad vivum, dal naturale or naer het leven. However, by the time of Michel de Montaigne’s essays in the third quarter of the 16th century, the phrase for portraying from life was most often tirer au vif, which was exactly the same phrase used for hunting and shooting a wild animal. Montaigne’s essays famously sought to capture a self-portrayal, to ‘tirer’ an image of that fluid and intangible identity. The word ‘tirer’ in this context was as much a novelty as Montaigne’s self-examination in the novel form of ‘essais’. Not long after Montaigne’s work, Le Trésor de la langue française, a dictionary published by Jean Nicot in 1606, cites the terms au vif et d’après la nature, giving as examples ‘Images faites au vif, et naifvement’. But in his definition of the verb tirer, to pull, Nicot gives the alternative: ‘Tirer signifie aussi Pourtraire’, that is, ‘To pull also means to portray’. Here, the connotations of the word pourtraire are parallel to those of the Italian ritrarre, point us away from the imaginative act of depicting, dipingere, and towards the more mechanical—or more faithful—‘pulling’ or tracing of a likeness.10 10 On the term ritrarre in Italian art theory, with reference to Vincenzo Danti and Michelangelo, see Summers, Michelangelo, p. 532–533; Armenini, De’ veri precetti.

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Nicot then gives as examples of this sense of tirer: “Tirer un homme au naturel, le tirer en vif, le tirer en cire, le tirer en plâtre, il s’est fait tirer par un excellent Peintre” (to pull/portray a man’s likeness from nature, to portray him in wax or plaster, he had himself portrayed from life by an excellent painter). The example of the idiomatic ‘tirer’ that sheds most light on Claude’s depictions of 1632 is ‘tirer au vif’, meaning to ‘pulling [a portrait] from life’. But in the exact same wording, in which tirer means not to pull but to shoot, the phrase had long denoted the act of ‘shooting at a live animal’, that is, hunting. Claude’s man shooting his musket beside the artist who is depicting from life is a visual translation of the phrase, a witty union of word and image in a motif that draws the viewer’s attention to the claim that Claude’s own image is a scene drawn from life. And if we return to Claude’s Boston Landscape with a Mill (Fig. 68), the oddly prominent detail of a rope stretched across the river above the artist at work takes on another punning sense of the word tirer—for the rope must be a pulley to pull, tirer, in order to transport objects from one side of the river to the other. What of the curious motif of goat-milking, depicted twice in conjunction with the figure of the artist at work? Another play of word and image is likely intended here: the word for milking, traire, is the root of pourtraire, to make a likeness. What the motif of milking has in common with the artist’s activity is that they both extract something from the natural world. And that common ground between draftsman and his subject integrates the figure of the artist into the pastoral world of farmers and herdsmen. The motif of the musket-shooter is foregrounded in other works by Claude as well, and in works by his Flemish colleague Harmen von Swanevelt. The man shooting ducks in the foregrounds of several etched views by Jacques Callot may be due to his awareness of the pun. Even without the accompaniment of the artist at work, some allusion to the activity of working from nature may be implied in such images. All the more so, perhaps, when one realises that there is another term that lends itself to both drawing from life and the activity of pursuing wild animals: the artist can be said to tracer, to trace being a synonym for drawing. And the verb tracer also means to hunt. This pun might have worked in several of the languages spoken by the artists in Claude’s circle in Rome during the 1630s: in Italian, as well, tracciare can refer both to drawing and to hunting. The plethora of landscape paintings, prints and drawings from the early part of the century that depict duck hunting and shooting motifs may all, to some degree, allude to this pun expressing the idea of representing from life, tirer au vif.11 However, before we risk reading every hunting scene in seventeenth-century landscapes as an allusion to depicting from life, we should note that the placement of the shooting 11 For examples of duck hunting scenes drawn in Florence in the orbit of Giulio Parigi, dependent on Flemish examples, in Rinaldi, ‘Cesare Antoniacci’, as in chapter two.

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man in Claude’s works, off to one side, in the near foreground, not far from the edge of the image. There is some evidence that this motif of the shooting man placed at the farthest edges of the image became a convention within topographic drawings and prints in the first half of the seventeenth century. One example of this is the view by Matthias Merian in the 1644 publication Topographiae Bavariae (Fig. 70). The shooting man in this print context, placed as if entering the scene from the bottom right margin, is put in close proximity to the print’s inscription where the origin of the scene in life study was often indicated—as factum ad vivum. In this way the shooting man may have become a conventional sign taking the place of the phrase ad vivum, indicating the origin of the image in topography drawn from life. In a similar position at the margins, Jacques Callot ‘s hugely influential topographic Siege of Breda in 1625 juxtaposes the artist at work and a shooting man in a subtle but unmistakable pairing (Fig. 71). The artist sits sketching the view that unfolds in front of him, paired with a surveyor holding his compass, in the bottom left corner of the large six-sheet print. And close by, in the depicted space that stretches between the artist and the scene of warfare, a soldier shoots his musket in the same direction as the artist’s gaze. Again at the margins of the image, the shooting man takes on a more humorous role in Pieter Paul Rubens’s Landscape with Milkmaids (Fig. 72) dated to the late 1630s Rubens’s augmentation of the motifs allow us to glimpse further associations with this visual-verbal pun, tirer au vif. The middle ground of the scene teems with buxom milk maids and their cows, with some maids and animals coquettishly gazing out at the viewer. The duck hunter’s musket explodes enthusiastically from the lower corner of the scene, aimed somewhat improbably toward the beautiful milkmaids. Rubens plays with a humorous side to the notion of tirer au vif—the erotic, phallic role of the musket, as if capturing the likeness of nature were somehow like an eruption of sensual rapture.12 Like Claude, Rubens combines the shooting man with the activity of milking, where the women’s extraction of this natural essence is combined with the masculine hunt for animal foods. Capturing the likeness of the landscape ad vivum thus gives (artistic) nourishment, and yields to human use some of the gifts of nature. This understanding of the pun tirer au vif may lie behind another of Rubens’ uses of the shooting man, in his Landscape with Chateau of Het Steen, in which he depicts his own feudal lands at the foreground of a panoramic view toward Antwerp. The figure of the hunter at the centre lower edge of the large panel, with his musket pointed toward a group of ducks in the foreground, draws the eye into the deep rush of space from foreground fields to the distant spire of Antwerp’s cathedral. Moving in the opposite direction, from the chateau out toward the viewer, is a cart laden 12 I owe this point to the comments of Frédéric Cousinié at the 2015 conference entitled Du corpus à l’exégèse: Interpréter la peinture du XVIIe held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen.

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Fig. 70: Matthias Merian I. Topographic view. Topographia Bavariae. 1644. Etching. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 71: Jacques Callot. The Siege of Breda, lower left corner. Etching. 1625–1628. Open Access, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

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Fig. 72: Pieter Paul Rubens. Landscape with Women Milking Cows and a Man Shooting. c. 1635–1640. Oil on panel. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Photo Scala, Florence/ bpk, Bildagentur fuer Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin.

with farm produce, the gifts of the land. Farmer and hunter extract something of human value from the landscape, and in making his image the artist is engaged in some parallel activity. The shooting man is a stand-in for the artist, perhaps, but the sense of the motif is not so much sensual or erotic possession, as in the Landscape with Milkmaids, but rather a taking hold of the depicted lands in feudal ownership. To conclude, the presence of these motifs that recall the terms tirer au vif and pourtraire shows a certain conception of representing from life. Their repetition in drawings and paintings shows us how preoccupied Claude was in these years from 1632 to 1635 with the very idea of depicting dal vivo. These motifs imply that the image is somehow pulled or extracted from its source in nature, as if by some process of rustic work parallel to that of the milkmaid or duck hunter. In this period, there were, of course, long-standing aristocratic associations with the right to hunt, but Claude’s shooting men are not dressed as noblemen, nor are Callot’s soldier or Rubens’s huntsman. In one sense, the motif of the shooting man implies that the image is produced by nature, not by human hand—no more can the hunter be said to create his prey. The artist, like the hunter, is the conduit, not the creator of the landscape’s value. In another sense, the artist does not just efface himself before nature’s creativity. He is not there as intellectual author of the image. Yet the artist sketching from life in the landscape does show his wit in working with this play on words that is the expression tirer au vif.

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There is an irony in the use of this figure of the man who shoots. ‘Life’ and lifelikeness are evoked in the act of shooting to kill. Capturing the live model in effect puts it to (figurative) death. And this poetic play with bringing to life and putting to death is, perhaps not coincidentally, precisely the trope that preoccupied Seicento poets such as Giambattista Marino, in imagery of Pygmalion and Medusa, first vivifying those bodies that are absent and invisible within the poem and the work of art, and then killing that body, or turning it to stone, in the fixed image and unchanging poem.13 The motif of the shooting man, paired with the artist sketching from life, is a poetic and paradoxical defence of the powers of representation dal naturale. It is a defence of image-making made by an image, within the very image that has been made ad vivum. Claude has often been seen as an unintellectual and by extension for some an uninteresting artist, particularly in comparison to his neighbour and friend Nicolas Poussin. His use of this visual-verbal pun helps us to see Claude, by contrast, as a self-aware creator with a distinct pictorial intelligence. It was not solely by styling himself as an intellectual or a courtier that an artist could argue for the high status of the visual arts. Claude, Callot and others in this century, make that argument through the visual sophistication and high self-awareness of their image-making. We modern commentators need to keep in mind that Claude’s adoption of a certain kind of naturalism, of representing from life, pushed against the currents of seventeenth-century art criticism with its focus more narrowly on the relations of painting to poetry and narrative history. It is not surprising that Claude should play with this visual-verbal pun of shooting as drawing from life, when one remembers the insistence of early modern treatises on the superiority of imaginative depiction over capturing appearances. After the turn of the seventeenth century the critical rupture between imitation and invention, copy and creation, mirrors the unhappy opposition of Northern artists in Rome to their Italian contemporaries in 1632, as we shall see. The figure of the artist representing from life, depicted next to the shooting man, is a meta-figure, a form of reflection on artistic practice in opposition to what were becoming the dominant artistic ideas in Rome.

Northerners sketching and painting from life in 1630s Rome: the human geography of the city Claude Lorrain’s image of Trinità dei Monti, painted from his window or rooftop, seems at first an apt example of what the seventeenth-century writer G.B. Passeri famously said of the Bamboccianti as genre painters at work in Rome: their works ‘seemed an open window through which one was able to see what went on without 13

Cropper, ‘The Petrifying Art’, p. 193–212.

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any deviation or alteration’.14 And yet, with Claude’s juxtaposed scene of venality in the lower corner of the painting, his image thoroughly deviates from the model of the transparent window and its assertion of an uncomplicated rendition of the real. The transformative power of this ‘window’ needs some elucidation in Claude’s art and in the paintings of his colleagues the Bamboccianti. Who were the Bamboccianti? In modern scholarship they have a low profile, as an outpost to the mainstream history of Dutch and Flemish painting, for nearly all the artists who followed Pieter van Laer (Bamboccio) were from the north of Europe but worked in Italy for a large part of their careers. Artists such as Jan Both or Jan Asselijn have also been studied in the context of Roman art in this period, not least because they contributed to the development of landscape painting as well as genre art, but as foreigners they are placed on the margins and in the shadows of the more spectacular development of Baroque arts in Rome. And, lumped under the heading of realism or of low-life painting, the bambocciata (as this type of urban genre scene was called) has been difficult to separate from the story of Caravaggism.15 After all, in his life of Caravagggio, and with the Caravaggisti in mind, the seventeenth-century critic Giovan Pietro Bellori wrote, ‘Now began the depiction of vile things, the search for filth and deformity’.16 His complaint was only in part about Caravaggio’s practice of painting directly from the posed model and his apparent failure to idealize. It was also about his effect on his followers, and their lack of moral decorum in their life as in their art—complaints that fit all too well with the behaviour of the Bentvueghels and Bamboccianti in Rome. Bellori’s targeting of Caravaggism was a red herring. Caravaggist paintings largely remained within the bounds of moral decorum. It was the young Dutchman from the city of Haarlem, Pieter van Laer, Bamboccio, who arrived in Rome around 1626 and whose depictions of very low behaviour opened the city gates to ‘vile things’. Unlike Caravaggio’s depiction dal vivo of figures posed in darkened interiors, Bamboccio’s focus was more often on the exterior view, the recognizable landscape and cityscape, combined with Romans engaged in everyday but vulgar actions.17 His View of the Acqua Acetosa, for example, represents the bend in the river where these famous 14 Passeri, Die Kunstlerbiographien, p. 74: ‘Questo è certo, se ogni pittore (esprimendo però, attioni nobili, e decorose) usasse il gusto di tingere e d’imitare il vero del Bamboccio, si potrebbe chiamare degno di lode, e d’amiratione, perche egli era singolare nel rapresentar la verità schietta, e pura nell’esser suo, che li suoi quadri parevano una fenestra aperta, per la quale si fussero veduti quelli suoi successi senza alcun divario, et alteratione’. (This is certain, that if all painters (but while they expressed noble and decorous actions) followed Bamboccio’s mode of coloring and imitating from life, they would be called worthy of praise and admiration, because he was singular in representing the naked truth in its pure essence, such that his paintings appeared to be an open window, through which could be seen all events without any deviation or alteration.) 15 This elision between Caravaggism and the Bamboccianti persists, as recently as the 2014 exhibition Cappelletti and Lemoine, I Bassifondi. 16 Bellori: ‘All’hora cominciò l’imitatione delle cose vili, ricercandosi le sozzure, e la diformità’ translation A.and H. Wohl, Bellori’s Lives, p. 185. 17 Blankert, Nederlandse 17-eeuwse italianisierende landschapsschilders (1978); Janeck, ‘Untersuchungen’; Steland-Stief, Jan Asselijn; Kultzen, Michael Sweerts.

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springs to the north of Rome were to be found, enlivened by a crowd of people vomiting and defecating in response to the purgative powers of the waters. One of the most often-reproduced of bambocciata, once attributed to Pieter van Laer, now attributed to Johann Lingelbach, can serve as a less extreme example of the genre (Fig. 73). The Roman street scene, with a monumental limekiln in the backdrop, portrays the small trades of street merchants, in this case a pretzel-seller (ciambellaro) and his customers. Prominently displayed on top of the vendor’s wares is an illegal gambling device like a roulette wheel, adding an aura of low-level criminality to the scene. It is not a dramatic scene, but rather one of calm and distanced observation. The Bamboccianti in Rome frequently seem to have taken this proto-ethnographic stance, describing the local peculiarities of everyday life in the eternal city. And the limekiln, one of the most often repeated structures in bambocciata paintings, in this sense refers to a fact of everyday life: it produced lime from waste stone, which was required to make concrete and mortar for Rome’s building trade, the main industry in the city after the tourism or trade in pilgrimage. A print after one of Pieter van Laer’s own depictions of the limekiln, and a painting of limekiln and workers that is now attributed to him, juxtapose the monumental structure and the mundane activities around it (Figs. 74 and 75). The limekiln, a feature of the Roman landscape near the Piazza del Popolo, a monumental entry to the city, became a stock subject for Northern artists in Rome in much the same way that city gates became a frequent subject in Northern print series characterizing urban views (Fig. 76). In a seminal article on the imagery of the bambocciata as a genre, David Levine argued that there were no limekilns in Rome, and that the motif was a sign instead of the satirical, poetic imagination of Pieter van Laer and his followers.18 But the Bamboccianti were not, by any contemporary account, emulators of poetry. And the limekilns were decidedly real. The kilns were in fact a prominent topographic feature along the Tiber, and one could be seen in the neighbourhood between the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di Spagna, depicted—with smoke rising from its walls—in Antonio Tempesta’s 1593 map of Rome. This is the same neighbourhood in which both Pieter van Laer and Claude Lorrain were living only a few streets away, as many northern European artists did at this time. The very presence of the smoke-producing, rubbish-fueled limekiln is a marker of the poverty of this working-class neighbourhood in the seventeenth century. There were limekilns to be seen by the Northerners in Rome, but were they depicted from life? There are few securely attributed drawings by van Laer. We can, however, examine two bambocciate drawings of a limekiln by his followers, depicting the same Roman site and, as Anne Charlotte Steland has suggested, apparently drawn from life.19 A pencil-and-wash drawing of the Tiber’s banks that was once attributed to van Laer, and is now given to his younger follower Jan Both, sheds light on the 18 Levine, ‘The Roman Limekilns’, p. 569–589. 19 Steland-Stief ‘Drawings’, p. 43; idem, ‘Zu Graphik’, p. 94–98. More generally on Bentvueghel drawing in Rome, see Schatborn, Drawn to warmth.

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Fig. 73: Johannes Lingelbach, also called ‘Master of the Small Trades’. The Pretzel-Seller. c. 1640. Oil on canvas. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome. © Archivio Fotografico Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Romano/ Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica.

Fig. 74: Claes Jansz. Visscher after Pieter van Laer. The Large Limekiln. c. 1650. Engraving. British Museum Dept. of Prints and Drawings, London. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Fig. 75: Attributed to Pieter van Laer. The Small Limekiln. c. 1630. Oil on canvas. Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, Budapest. © Szépmúvészeti Múzeum, Budapest, Photo Dénes Józsa.

Fig. 76: Claes Jansz Visscher after Johannes van Doetecum, the Elder after Lucas van Doetecum after Master of the Small Landscapes. Town Gate. 1612. Etching. Open Access, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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creative processes shared by the Bamboccianti (Fig. 77). It represents a row of buildings receding toward the left of the sheet, flanked by the open space of the riverbanks, and dominated by the curving protrusion of a limekiln with a rough cone-like furnace on its rooftop. Jan Both later used this drawing with very few changes as the basis for a signed painting.20 The same riverbank scene was also depicted in a pencil-and-wash drawing by Jan Asselijn (Fig. 78). The two artists seem to have been drawing side by side, from the same view and under the same light. It is highly unlikely that one drawing is a copy of the other. The exact same motifs occur in both drawings, but with quite individual handling. The slight variation in the angle of the buildings’ recession is one such example, as is the different understanding of the limekiln’s roofline in each drawing, and their divergent treatment of rocks and gates in the foreground. And each draftsman has inserted different figures into the scene. Jan Asselijn, like Jan Both, used his drawing after his return to the Netherlands to create a signed painting, now in a private collection. His drawing was subsequently copied in yet another drawing, by Asselijn’s colleague Willem Schellinks (a topographic draftsman discussed in chapter two).21 Like Jan Both’s painting of the limekiln scene, Asselijn’s work expands the vista captured by the drawing to include the river itself, and he also expands the scale and emphasis given to the figures in the foreground. In Both’s painting derived from his drawing of the Roman limekiln, the figures are also aggrandised and made a focal point of the scene, with card players and the ciambellaro, or pretzel seller, who was a figure common to many prints of street tradesmen as well as many bambocciate. Here, then, are motifs very similar to those that we see in Lingelbach’s street scene with a pretzel-vendor and Pieter van Laer’s versions of the limekiln scenes, his Small Limekiln and his lost Large Limekiln, The gamblers in Both’s painting play cards rather than the finger game of morra that we see in Pieter van Laer’s painting, but the gamblers occupy a similar position juxtaposed to a limekiln. Not less important, in my view, is the juxtaposition of the limekiln structure with the river, just as the actual limekilns relied on proximity to the river for transporting the stone that fed their ovens. The distinctive spatial structure that Both and Asselijn, these two followers of van Laer, imposed on their drawings, is an issue to which I will return. For the moment, the importance of these examples is that they show us the process of drawing outside in front of the motif, in act of seemingly faithful portrayal. How do we reconcile their views of the limekiln by the Tiber with those of Pieter van Laer, who depicted the kiln as an angular fortress-like structure isolated from other buildings? 20 Christopher Brown dated Jan Both’s painting to the mid-1640s, after the artist’s return to Utrecht. The painting’s support of an oak panel, not used in Italy but common in the North, is strong evidence for this later dating. See Maclaren and Brown, Catalogue, p. 50–53. 21 Steland-Stief, in Inspired by Italy, p. 43; there she also gives complete references to her studies of the drawings of Both, Asselijn, Schelink, and others.

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Fig. 77: Jan Both. View of limekiln on the Tiber. c. 1630. Drawing. Statensmuseum for Kunst, Copenhagen. © Statensmuseum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

Fig. 78: Jan Asselijn. View of limekiln on the Tiber. c. 1630. Drawing. Niedersächsisch Landesmuseum, Hannover © Niedersächsisch Landesmuseum, Hannover (catalogued as Willem Bemmel).

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Van Laer’s two best-known depictions of a Roman limekiln possibly show the same building from two different vantage points: in the Visscher engraving of The Large Limekiln we see it from the side, where its attached porticos form an opening into the kiln; in The Small Limekiln we see it head on, with its curving section of facade hidden behind its high retaining wall. This variation in viewpoint is supported by comparison with many other of the bambocciate depicting limekilns: in most cases—not only in the paintings and drawings by Both and Asselijn, but also those by Jan Miel and Thomas Wijk—it is a structure on the riverbank, built into a wall, with flanking lower porches that frame one side. Were these drawings of limekilns and the paintings made from them are exceptional among the bambocciate in deriving from direct observation of an actual site? Many other examples show us what seem to be radical departures from the actual topography of Rome. This does not preclude their origins in work dal naturale, however. In market and carnival scenes by such followers of van Laer as Jan Miel or Johannes Lingelbach or even Claude Lorrain himself, the topography of the city was at times fragmented and reordered, collapsing familiar buildings and sites into a single impossible view. While Jan Miel represents carnival in Rome, with revelers dressed as commedia dell’arte characters dancing in the streets, in Piazza Colonna, it is a more or less straightforward depiction of Roman city practices in an actual Roman setting. But when Johannes Lingelbach represents the charitable work of feeding Rome’s poor, he unites a distant vista of the neighborhood of Piazza del Popolo, Piazza di Spagna, and Trinità dei Monti with a view of the Capitoline hill, placing one of the Capitoline’s Dioscuri statues in the foreground.22 And when Claude Lorrain represents a bambocciata view of The Campo Vaccino, or Roman Forum, in drawing, engraving, and painting, it is topographically accurate, and quite close to the painted view of the Forum by his Dutch companion Hermen van Swanevelt.23 But Claude’s pendant painting to his Campo Vaccino scene, the Seaport with View of the Capitoline, rearranges the recognizable palazzo from the Campidoglio to fit an imagined seaside location. These examples could be multiplied many times further. Another characteristic process is found in both Jan Miel’s and Karel Dujardin’s views of the Roman Forum combined with charlatan tooth pullers. These two didn’t recombine bits of topography so much as simply eliminate most of it, depicting only one recognizable feature of the markets held in the Forum at this time: the looming structure of the Torre delle Milizie by the Forum of Trajan. What is common to these three examples is the juxtaposition of a low or everyday scene (the market, the dentist, or feeding the poor) with an architectural motif that conveys both Rome’s antiquity and its governmental authority. The name of the Torre delle Milizie is explained in seicento guidebooks as a reference to its ancient use as barracks for Emperor Trajan’s army troops. In juxtaposition with the squalor of the charlatan and the market it seems to convey 22 Welu, ‘A Street Scene’, p. 10–16. 23 Kitson, ‘Swanevelt I, p. 215–220; idem, ‘Swanevelt II, p. 259–266.

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a contrast between the city’s ancient military power and its modern undisciplined vulgarity. The Campidoglio and its statues—so strongly associated with the seat of Roman civic government—forms a similar contrast to the array of low- life figures Claude paints in the foreground of his seaport, where a gypsy fortune teller and various merchants ply their trades. The practice of drawing from life by no means precluded the imaginative reconstitution of the world within the painted scene. Bambocciata genre scenes are, in this sense, architectural capricci: they build an imaginary view out of isolated structures, taken out of their context in the actual fabric of the city, pieces of the real or recognizable world.24 The basic principle behind the use of the topography seems to be one of juxtaposition or opposition: lawlessness of human actions takes place against the backdrop of civic authority embodied in the recognizable buildings of ancient and modern Rome. As with Callot’s capricci, there is a method and a structure in the fantasy, which is what I would like to define more closely here. What seems clear is that the juxtaposition of the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ within paintings such as Claude’s View of Trinità dei Monti is that it is not parallel to the critical division between crude naturalism and correct idealization in classicizing art theory from Agucchi to Bellori. There is some other operation at work. Joachim van Sandrart was in Rome from 1629 to 1635. When wrote that Claude and Pieter van Laer, sometimes together with Nicolas Poussin, went out into the Campagna to sketch together, he was recalling a time when all four young artists were newly arrived in the eternal city.25 This friendship had its most visible effect on Claude’s art during the 1630s, but we shall see that it endured, if more subtly, in Claude’s art till the end of his life. Sandrart describes the young Claude as at first labouring at a ‘hard and burdensome’ method of working, and not getting very far in his art. Sandrart supposedly put Claude on a better path. He had been walking out into the Campagna and lying in the fields from dawn to dusk: ‘then preparing his colours accordingly, [he] returned home and applied them to the work he had in mind’.Sandrart implies that the naturalism that Claude sought with this difficult, two-step procedure was aimed at capturing the evanescent impressions of coloured light. Perhaps, as Marcel Röthlisberger and Lawrence Gowing have speculated, what Sandrart described in this passage was a method of either making colour studies from the motif or simply mixing colours on a cloth palette to bring back to the workshop and use in painting.26 Gowing saw this process of studying colours from nature and then constructting paintings with them from memory later in the workshop, as the origins of Claude’s 24 This is the capriccio understood in its limited sense as a fantastic or imaginary architectural composite, for which see Mai and Rees, Das Capriccio, as in chapter two. 25 Joachim van Sandrart, from his life of Pieter van Laer, Teutsche Academie, 1, part 2, p. 311. This passage as translated by Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain, p. 48: ‘At another time we, Poussin, Claude Lorrain and I and van Laer rode to Tivoli to paint or draw landscapes from nature’. On Sandrart, see Heck, Théorie et pratique. 26 Gowing, ‘Nature and the Ideal’, p. 91–96.

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characteristic lifelong blend of ‘nature’ with the ‘ideal’ in representation. But according to Sandrart, this was not how Claude continued to paint from nature. As the German writer put it, to reconstruct such impressions of nature by drawing from memory alone meant one had to ‘go too far back’. Claude only made progress, said Sandrart, when he met me, with the brush in my hands, in Tivoli, in the wild rocks at the famous cascade, where he found me painting from life and saw that I painted many works from nature itself, making nothing from the imagination. This pleased him so much that he applied himself to the same method.27

The new method that Claude supposedly learned from Sandrart was to represent in paint, by direct observation in front of the very motif to be depicted. Sandrart’s statement did not differentiate between painting and drawing, leaving the impression that he himself had advocated that Claude paint, in oil on canvas, while he was outside in the landscape. He emphasized this point in a curious, imagistic way. In the section on landscape painting in the Teutsche Academie, Sandrart engraved his own version of Claude’s View of the Campo Vaccino in Rome, nearly identical to Claude’s painting and engraving of the subject. However, in place of the group of pointing, chatting onlookers at the right foreground of Claude’s painting, Sandrart represents an artist painting the view, on a canvas, holding a palette. We find it easy to see Claude’s extraordinary output of drawn landscape studies from the 1630s to the 1650s, from the so-called Tivoli sketchbook or the Campagna sketchbook, as done outside and dal vivo. It is harder for modern art historians to credit him with painting in oil-based pigments on canvas outside—we have heard so often that this type of plein-air work was the innovation of the nineteenth-century Impressionists with their portable tubes of modern paints. And it is true that the logistical problems of carrying oil paints should make us pause before accepting Sandrart’s statement about Claude. How many Seicento artists would want to transport pigs’ bladders filled with oil and ground pigments, as well as large stretched canvases, for miles out into the Campagna on foot or on horseback? Would artists really choose to struggle with bringing a wet canvas the long miles back to their rooms after such a plein-air session? Yes, according to some reliable seventeenth-century sources. Claude’s nephew and heir, Joseph Gellée, reported to his biographer Baldinucci that Claude made one small painting outside in the gardens of Rome’s Villa Madama and kept it by him in his workshop for the rest of his life in order to see how to paint foliage and trees. This is the small Landscape with a Goatherd and Goats now in the National Gallery, London.28 Claude may have prized it precisely because it was unusual in being painted 27 Sandrart, Teutsche Academie; trans. Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain, 1, 48. 28 The National Gallery website for this work asserts that “This picture is related to the left-hand portion of a landscape-format drawing in the Liber Veritatis, no. 15 (London, British Museum) which is inscribed ‘faict pour/monsre Roispiose/Roma’ (Made for Monsieur Rospigliosi, Rome), a reference to Giulio Rospigliosi

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out of doors in front of the motif, but his statement to Joseph Gellée makes it clear that its having been made from life allowed it to serve as a simulacrum for the actual experience of seeing the trees in situ. The View in Rome with Trinità dei Monti, also a relatively small-scale canvas, could have been made from life far more easily, from a comfortable seat on the rooftop or from an easel set up by the open window of Claude’s own rooms. However, the question isn’t solely whether paintings by Claude and the Bamboccianti were directly and completely made dal vivo. Contemporary sources say so, but it will be difficult or impossible to verify in most cases. Claude’s use of his Vigna Madama painting in his workshop leads rather to the question of how these artists conceived of the generative power of images drawn or painted from life, how a function of these depictions was to inform or to inspire further works of art, as we have seen in earlier chapters. And this in turn implies the peculiar authority that images had when they were created in direct confrontation with the living model or actual topography. What the case of Claude and the Bamboccianti can add to what we have already seen in the art of Caravaggio or Callot is the way this approach to depiction could be reconciled with rather than opposed to the increasingly hardened doctrines of artistic idealization and classicism in the Roman art world. Pieter van Laer’s practice of drawing and painting from life has been difficult to assess because there are relatively few works that are securely attributed to him.29 It is nonetheless clear that one of the appeals of his paintings to both his artist followers and their elite patrons was their vivid depiction of recognizable settings in Rome and its surroundings. Such bambocciate, as critics dubbed these vulgar, lowlife cityscapes and landscapes, were made in Italy largely for Italian patrons. But, undeniably, in 1626 Pieter van Laer brought with him a Haarlemer’s appreciation for the vivacious and direct depiction of local scenes and the way that such views are imbued with shared memories and associations. Like all of his generation of Dutch artists, van Laer had grown up with an awareness that working from nature, naer het leven, was a defining feature of Northern European artists’ practice. It had been repeatedly invoked by the writer and artist Karel van Mander in writing his 1606 history of Northern artists, Het Schilderboek.30 Karel van Mander, writing in response to the scorn shown by Vasari to Netherlandish artists, had defined the very longstanding practice of working nae’t leven in his Schilder-Boek of 1604. In his famous passage on Caravaggio’s work in Rome, the earliest biography of the still-living artist, van Mander had described Caravaggio’s practice of working directly from the posed model as ‘no bad way to a good end’ and (1600–1669) who would become Pope Clement IX in 1667.” The entry goes on to reject the assertion that this was painted en plein air, without referring to the evidence of Claude’s nephew Joseph Gellée quoted by Baldinucci. 29 Janeck, ‘Naturalismus und Realismus’, p. 285–307. 30 Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon.

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a worthy approach for Dutch artists to emulate in Rome. But van Mander’s definition of work done nae’t leven is nonetheless difficult to correlate with an Italian sense of painting dal vivo as Caravaggio practiced it. For van Mander, depicting nae’t leven went well beyond the practice of painting in the physical presence of the live model.31 In his Schilder-Boek, Van Mander pairs the term nae’t leven to its twin practice of depicting uyt zijn zelven, ‘from one’s self’, or uit den gheest, or ‘out of the spirit/from the mind’. But the pair of terms in Dutch for ‘from life’ and ‘from the mind’ seem to function in a very different manner to the Italian opposition of dal vivo and dall’idea. In the Italian juxtaposition, ‘mere’ copying of appearance is contrasted to ‘true’ representation via the selection of beautiful parts, which the artist then unites into a beautiful whole by means of a synthesizing idea or ideal in the intellect.32 To work uit den gheest, on the other hand, referred primarily to work from a vivid visual memory, to represent things that were observed in the past and held present in the mind’s eye.33 This practice in no way relied on the overt transformation of imperfect natural forms into new perfections. Instead of functioning by opposition, and instead of hierarchizing one practice over the other, van Mander’s terms evoke complementary processes—the artist worked from observation in both cases. From Walter Melion’s analysis of van Mander it is clear that to depict things nae’t leven implied, as he put it, the ‘simultaneity of seeing and recording’, and it thus conferred ‘immediacy, guaranteeing the documentary value of the image’.34 Lucia Nuti has explored the sense of the term ad vivum when it is used in mapmaking and the creation of city views, where it also refers to the value of firsthand observation.35 Claudia Swann’s investigation of the terms ad vivum and nae’t leven in the context of natural sciences in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also points out this function of the term: the nae’t leven image was especially suited to the production and dissemination of some forms of knowledge about the physical world.36 As we saw in chapter two, despite this notion of seeing and recording as simultaneous processes in the image made from life, nae’t leven work could be copied and repeated by other artists, and yet still be defined as done ‘from life’. When Willem Schellinks copied Jan Asselijn’s drawing of a Roman limekiln some twenty years after Asselijn’s departure from Rome, Schellinks was appropriating it in the context of 31 For van Mander, see Miedema, Den Grondt; for van Mander’s 1604 text with modern commentary, see Miedema, The Lives. The finest analysis of Van Mander’s text is that of Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish. 32 Svetlana Alpers makes this distinction between the idea in Italian tradition and uit den gheest in the North, in The Art of Describing, p. 40–41. 33 Walter Melion’s writings have shed much light on this issue of visual memory in Karel van Mander’s texts. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, p. 63–67; Melion, “Memory, Cognition”, p. 203–212; Melion, “Memory and the Kinship”, p. 48–70. 34 Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, p. 63–67. 35 Lucia Nuti, Ritratti di città, chap. 5, ‘La pianta prospettiva’, p. 134ff. 36 Swann, ‘Ad Vivum’, p. 353–372.

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his own drawings of topographic views made nae’t leven. The status of the second drawing would still be ‘made from life’, since it was conceived as an imprint made by nature on the sight of the draftsman. That is, nature itself was the author of the image in both the first drawing and its second version. Both versions seemed to give unmediated access to the real, rather than the second having a diminished link to that visual experience of the actual scene. This version of the imago contrafacta, the image made as if by nature itself, had well-known manifestations in the sixteenth century among Northern artists. We know that when they returned from Rome, Maarten van Heemskerk and Hendrick Goltzius reused their own sketches, creating second versions or variants that were in appearance as much observed from life as the originals. Other artists, in Rome as well as in the Lowlands, copied sketches done nae’t leven by colleagues or predecessors; Bartolomeus Breenbergh wrote that he had copied drawings by Paul Bril for years.37 But there was a further essential character to the nae’t leven drawing or painting, even when it was derived from copying a previous work: it framed within itself the process of looking at the motif. This inclusion of the act of viewing within the image embodied the process that it then allowed the viewer to perform themselves. In this light, it is not surprising that such images often included a viewer within the scene, as for example in Hendrick Goltzius’s extraordinary engraving of the Farnese Hercules in Rome.38 As we shall see, this practice of representing someone in the act of viewing, as a motif within the scene itself, continues to manifest itself in Roman nae’t leven drawings that include the image of the draftsman at work. The aim of the artist in creating the drawing or painting probably played a determining role in his choice to present the image as one derived nae’t leven. The famous panoramic landscape drawing by Hendrick Goltzius, whom van Mander presents in his Schilder-Boek biography as the ideal artist, is a case in point.39 Its high, bird’seye viewpoint was not possible to achieve from any actual vantage point within the low-lying landscape. But the resulting representation of the unframed horizon with its subtle recession into depth still gives us the effect of observation and lived experience. Observation in this case belongs to a particular realm of experience, though. Goltzius’s panoramic drawing follows a distinct set of conventions—in this case, the conventions for cartography and topographic city views such as were made in conjunction with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps.40 37 Schatborn, ‘Dutch Artists in Italy’, in Drawn to Warmth, p. 11–19. 38 Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, p. 63–64, gives an illuminating description of Goltzius’s creative process leading to this engraving, showing its relation to prior drawings done from life. He notes that even the direction of Goltzius’s hatched lines capturing the volumes of the massive sculpture were determined by the depicted onlookers’ line of sight: ‘By drawing and engraving nae’t leven Goltzius could claim to have represented the process of viewing itself’. 39 Melion, ‘Karel van Mander’s Life of Goltzius’, p. 113–133. 40 Alpers, The Art of Describing, p. 139.

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In a different context, the same artist could produce work that looks substantially more stylized, to use a modern term. Goltzius’s drawings include Arcadian scenes shaped into rolling landscapes with dramatic and foreign forms. He could draw on remembered observations and evoke the terrain of Italy, and thus in van Mander’s terms would be working uit den gheest. At the same time, the drawing’s coupling of human lovers and idyllic setting could evoke the conventions of literary pastorals and the artifice of a stage set. These aspects of the image, too, belong to the realm of memory. But it was the same term uit den gheest that could be used to describe working from this realm of literary and theatrical remembrance as well. An image drawn from visual memory, while taken from the mind, could nonetheless be indistinguishable from a portrait rendered from life. Such was the case, for example, with Pieter van Laer. Joachim Sandrart tells us that ‘although [van Laer] did sometimes draw from life, in his paintings he consulted only his mind and his memory’.41 When in the next breath Sandrart goes on to describe the sketching expeeditions shared by van Laer, Poussin, Claude, and himself, he may be quite conscious that, from an Italian point of view, he is paradoxically crossing the attributes associated with these artists. He portrayed Bamboccio the low-life realist as working from the mind, and Poussin the classicist, as well as Claude, as working from direct observation from life. Bamboccio’s mental image, however, was not an imaginative invention but the vivid image of the real that was stored in memory. Within Northern visual culture, Sandrart could be read as using Bamboccio and Claude to exemplify the complementary, not contradictory, process of working from life and from the mind, nae’t leven and uit den gheest.42 In Haarlem, in the years between 1610–20, that high estimation of the value of depicting from life manifested itself in landscape paintings, and also in several print series depicting the routes and monuments in and around the city. The Haarlem series generally emulated the ‘Pleasant Places’ print series published by Hieronymus 41 Sandrart, Teutsche Academie, p. 183–184. 42 This trait of lifelike work from memory, which recalls van Mander’s description of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘vomiting up the Alps’ after his Italian voyage, was noted also of the German landscape painter Adam Elsheimer and the only Roman-born follower of Bamboccio, Michelangelo Cerquozzi: these artists and van Laer seem both to have had what we might today call a photographic memory. Interestingly, both van Laer and Elsheimer were praised by Sandrart for their capacity to miniaturize such figures drawn from memory, while still achieving a believable monumentality within a tiny compass. This issue of small scale in seemingly real figures and scenes belonged to a longstanding polemic about scale and nobility in art, which runs alongside the Italian polemic about idealization. It is reflected in Michelangelo’s famous dismissal of Northern painting in the mid-sixteenth century—in which he claimed that Italians work large and thus nobly, while Flemings render minutia without meaning. In the Italian context of topographic low-life scenes, however, the vivid miniaturization of the real was to become part of the positive reception of Jacques Callot’s works, but a negative part of the reception of the Bamboccianti. Wendy Thompson has highlighted the issue of small size in the low-life bambocciata, contrasting it with the call for large scale paintings in the classicizing grande manière after 1640, particularly interesting in relation to Poussin’s relatively small cabinet paintings, in ‘Fare in grande: The Polemics of Scale in mid-17th Century Rome’,chap. 10 of ‘Pigmei pizzicano dei giganti,’ p. 379–434.

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Cock in Antwerp in the middle of the sixteenth century. These earlier engravings of Brabant scenes, as mentioned in my Introduction, had been republished by Claes Jansz. Visscher in Amsterdam after the turn of the century, with an attribution to Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the phrase ad vivum, made from life, on the title page. The later Haarlem print series published by Visscher left any explicit visual links to Bruegel behind, with images of scenes such as the city gate, which capture a typical city view (Fig. 76).43 Their rootedness in observation from life was established, rather, through the recognizable topography of local landscapes. Topography and memory go hand in hand here, in a way that is parallel to the topographic views produced by the circle of Giulio Parigi and Jacques Callot in Florence. The local, vernacular Haarlem views inform Pieter van Laer’s work in Rome, and those of his followers. The topography was now Roman, and its denizens were not Haarlem’s farmers and merchants but Rome’s working poor. Van Laer’s lost painting The Large Limekiln, known only through prints made after it, and his Small Limekiln painted in 1636, became the prototypes for such an outdoor genre scene set in Rome (Figs. 74 and 75).44 The simple compositions of Pieter van Laer’s limeekiln scenes bear a certain similarity to the Haarlem landscape series; it has been suggested that they resemble the depiction of city gates in those Dutch views.45 In Rome, these paintings had the appearance of something exotic and new, however. They inspired dozens of painted limekilns. Like Johannes Lingelbach’s Pretzel Seller (Fig. 73), which is one of the most often reproduced bambocciate, these are Roman scenes anchored around a monumental kiln for burning stone into mortar for the local building trade. The smoking lime kilns anchored the working class neighbourhood in which the artists themselves lived, between the Porta del Popolo and Piazza di Spagna. What the lime kiln bambocciate have in common with Claude Lorrain’s topographic painting of Trinità dei Monti is their rootedness in the two processes of depiction, working from life and from memory. Processes that were not incompatible with one another, and not placed within a hierarchy of imagination over transcription, these aspects of their naturalism were put to use in evoking topical references and associations. The way that Claude’s work, and that of his Bamboccianti colleagues, evoke issues and ideas will be the final topic of this chapter. Before turning to that question, one further aspect of their creative practice needs to be added to the mix: their use of perspective systems and its relation to their habitual compositions for landscapes.

43 Levesque, Journey through Landscape; Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints; Onuf, ‘Envisioning Netherlandish Unity’, e-journal DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2011.3.1.4. Consulted 27 February 2017. 44 Cornelis Visscher also produced an engraving after The Small Limekiln. The attribution of the painting now in Budapest has at times been called into question, with some of the literature presenting it as a version of van Laer’s composition painted by Andries Both. See Levine and Mai, I Bamboccianti. 45 Thompson, ‘Pigmei pizzicano’.

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Topography and the Blind Zone: Bifocal Perspective in the Works of Claude and the Bamboccianti Baldinucci’s biography of Claude ends with a discussion of his practice of perspective. It is not the part of Claude’s art stressed by modern commentators, but his seventeenth-century biographers noted the artist’s unusual skills at perspective.46 Sann drart praised Claude’s aerial perspective, the subtle gradation of his colours creating a sense of distance within the landscapes. More strikingly, the very final lines of Filippo Baldinucci’s life of Claude Lorrain are devoted to describing Claude’s formula for creating perspectival space. His remarks are tacked on to an appreciation of Claude’s artistic legacy, emphasising his generosity in instructing younger artists such as Viviano Codazzi in perspective. Baldinucci then wrote: He placed the eye [l’occhio] where he pleased; but he used to divide the height of the picture into five parts, the horizon—that is the axis of the visual rays—being the second from the bottom; fixing then the occhio on this line, he took a thread, and pinning it in this point, turned it round over the picture, circumscribing it completely in that circle; fixing then the distance in that point where his horizon cut the circle. And he used the same procedure in drawing the views from nature, there observing the horizon so much that by the Flemish he was nicknamed Orizzonte.47

The system that Baldinucci describes can be diagrammed and contrasted with onepoint perspective, the costruzzione legitima that Leon Battista Alberti described in the 1430s (Fig. 79). Claude’s system has no human body in it establishing the height of the horizon (and establishing the human proportions governing the picture). Claude’s occhio, or eye-point, is not the vanishing point as in the costruzzione legittima, for the point to which orthogonal receding lines are drawn is not central in the image, opposite the eye of the viewer, but lies outside the picture entirely, to one side or to both sides. This is perhaps the most surprising aspect of Claude’s perspective recipe, the string and pin compass used to draw a circle outside the rectangular surface of the image. Pinning his string to the occhio or eye-point, the artist found a point of intersection between his horizon line and the circle, and drew orthogonals from within the depiction to this point outside the image. Why did the artist have to go outside the bounds of the picture’s surface to find these points governing spatial 46 Damisch, ‘Claude and Perspective’, p. 29–41. 47 Baldinucci, Notizie,: ‘Metteva egli l’occhio ove gli pareva; ma era solito dividere l’altezza del quadro in cinque parti, delle quali dava le due inferiori all linea orizzontale, o vogliamo dire asse de’raggi visuali: poi mettendo l’occhio in essa linea, pigliava un filo, e ponendo un capo nell’occhio, giravalo in tondo sopra il quadro, comprendendo in esso tondo tutto il medesimo quadro, poi mettendo sua distanza in quell luogo, ove la sua linea attraversava il tondo: e lo stesso modo teneva nel disegnar le vedute al naturale: la qual linea in tale occasione osservava tanto, che da’ Fiamminghi per sopranome era chiamato orrizonte’.

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Fig. 79: Diagram of Claude Lorrain’s perspective recipe juxtaposed with Alberti’s costruzzione legittima. Photo the author, from Hubert Damisch, ‘Claude: A Problem in Perspective’, p. 30–31.

recession? This seems like an awkward procedure, particularly if we try to imagine the artist proceeding this way outside within the landscape, sketching. Yet Baldinucci tells us that this is what Claude habitually did in his sketches from life. It is hard to know if what Baldinucci described was Claude’s actual practice in every sketch from life, or a general account of the structure of his images. We will see in a moment that one can indeed map this structure onto his drawings from the Tivoli and Campagna sketchbooks, and it does govern the recession in a painting such as his View in Rome with Trinità dei Monti. And there are also practical advantages of his system for creating topographic views. Above all, inherent in this system of perspective are assumptions about the relation of the image to the viewer. To begin with the practical function of Claude’s perspective, the receding lines drawn from the base to points outside the image at each side yield a bundle of fine orthogonals in the zone at the horizon line, where topographic view-makers can use them to lay in the profiles of recognisable buildings and landscape features. To have the distance points determined by the circumference of a circle drawn around the image means that, by varying the radius of that circle, the artist can create a greater or lesser distance from the viewer to the horizon line, opening up a panorama or closing in to a more intimate view. To the top and bottom of the image, the system leaves the space relatively blank: a ‘blind zone’ as Axel Janeck termed it when he saw this structure in drawings by Pieter van Laer and his followers.48 Into this blank area at the base of landscapes and topographies, many artists insert staffage figures, who animate the scene without creating a narrative or expressing meaningful actions. Or who, like the shooting man, embody a visual-verbal pun that illuminates the nature of the image. 48 Janeck, ‘Naturalismus und realismus’, p. 285–307.

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Baldinucci frames his account of the artist’s perspective with reference to the fiamminghi, and to their nickname for Claude, Orizzonte, horizon line—which does sound much like the satirical nicknames, such as Bamboccio, given to artists of the Bent at their notoriously ribald initiation feasts in Rome. The nickname may have been meant to tease Claude, but it also points to this perspective as a point of similarity between them, as much as the practice of drawing from life out of doors. Claude’s use of distance points to the sides of his landscapes resembles the bifocal perspective systems favoured by Northern artists from the fifteenth century onward.49 And we see that distance-point system at work in the cityscapes of the Bamboccianti. Pieter van Laer’s Limekiln is one example (Fig. 75). And the Pretzel-Seller of Johannes Lingelbach or the Master of the Small Trades depicts the limekiln in Rome with its massive structure at oblique angles to the picture plane, lines of recession sinking to the horizon line at each side of the view (Fig. 73). A very early perspective treatise of 1508 from northern Europe by Jean Pélerin or Viator describes such a bifocal perspective and illustrates these oblique views. One of Viator’s most striking illustrations also shows the horizon laid out as a circle, which the text says conveys the entire 360-degree field of vision, of which the artist chooses just a segment to lay out flat on their sheet or canvas. The use of bifocal perspective wasn’t unknown to Italian artists, but it was not recommended in Italy; Giacomo Vignola’s discussion of it in his Due Regole of 1583 nonetheless has elements in common with Claude’s practice.50 But Vignola attempted to show that this second version of perspective recession did not actually differ from costruzzione legittima, although he felt it was inferior in its composition of views around obliquely placed forms. We can see the accuracy of Baldinucci’s description best by testing it on the topographic drawing that Claude made in 1632 for the Trinità dei Monti painting (Fig. 65). This sketch shows only the view that is at left and centre in the finished painting. The horizon line is two-fifths of the way up the picture plane, as in Baldinucci’s account. Some of the architectural details of the church have been reinforced with ruled lines in ink. The receding lines descend down to the horizon line but only intersect it at two points beyond the edge of the frame on either side. Using these two points to establish the perimeter of a circle, we can inscribe the rectangular view within a circular field. In this drawing, then, the composition is consistent with the perspective practice that Baldinucci took such pains to describe. 51 49 H. Diane Russell has discussed Claude’s use of bifocal perspective for capturing topography: ‘Claude Lorrain’s drawings’, p. 49–52. 50 Kaori Kitao, ‘Prejudice in Perspective’, p. 173–194. 51 Hubert Damisch wrote that in the majority of his work Claude probably did not literally sit down with the pin and string described by the biographer (Damisch, ‘Claude and perspective’, p. 29–46). Damisch saw the perspective recipe functioning as a kind of dispositif, a mental tool that Claude had internalized. Richard Rand, in Claude Lorrain, p. 40–41, also says that there is no evidence that Claude employed this perspective formula literally within his drawings from nature, but rather that he used it as an ‘intuitive process’. Marcel Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Paintings, I, p. 62, points out that Claude did seem to use this perspective

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While it may not have carried the intellectual baggage of Alberti’s costruzzione legittima, this form of perspective did entail a substantially different notion of how pictures address the eye of a viewer. It had a distinct genealogy in northern Europe, and its critical fortunes in modern art history have been caught up in the debates about the distinctive character of Northern painting, through the writing of Erwin Panofsky on perspective as symbolic form, and more recently in Svetlana Alpers’s influential book on Dutch painting.52 Claude’s system seems somewhat laborious, particularly in using the pin-andstring compass to draw a circle around the rectangular frame. But this circle is itself an indicator of how Claude perceived the process of translating a motif viewed in nature onto the flat plane of a drawing or painting. Another Northern perspective treatise illustrates a similar procedure. Jan Vredeman de Vries opens his text with what looks like a geometric elaboration of a circle. He explains that this is the circle of vision turning around three hundred and sixty degrees: “la veue se tournant sur son estre, ne faict point de ligne angulaire orisonnale, mais le tout en rond” (vision turns on itself, and does not make an angular horizon line, but the whole in a circle). Then, giving a diagram of bifocal perspective, with lines drawn out to two points at either side of a rectangle, Vredeman de Vries defines it as one segment of that circle of vision, an angle of vision bounded at either side by two points along the horizon, which has been laid flat onto a sheet of paper: “il faut seulement tenier un poinct de veue, et quand la veue tourne, on fait derechef un autre poinct” (one only has to fix a point of view, and when the eye moves, one makes then another point).53 Just in this way, Claude’s system begins with the assumption that the view to be transcribed is one segment of the full circle of potential vision in the world. It is arbitrarily delimited by two end points at the edges of one’s vision, and then laid down onto the sheet or canvas. The consequences of this perspective system for the viewer are quite important. In Alberti’s system, the vanishing point was also the ‘counter-eye’ to that of the spectator, who was to be fixed in front of the depiction, immobilized in the position from which the perspective was ideally visible. From this ideal point of view, the beholder

method, but he believed one could verify it only in those drawings and paintings that had architectural elements, which would create recessive orthogonals. He wrote that he did not know of pure landscape drawings without architecture that could be proven to follow this procedure. But he thought that perhaps Baldinucci was referring to ‘the numerous, extended almost topographical views with a pronounced horizon’ in Claude’s drawn oeuvre. 52 Panofksy, Perspective; Alpers, The Art of Describing. 53 Vredeman de Vries, Perspective, unpaginated, first two plates. See also Borggrefe, Hans Vredeman de Vries; and idem, Hans Vredeman de Vries und die Folgen. Martin Kemp (‘Simon Stevin and Pieter Saenredam’, p. 239) has described de Vries’s work as the least abstract and most pictorial of such perspective treatises in the North. Kemp notes that de Vries’s reliance on two lateral distance points in a bifocal system means that he does not pay systematic attention to the viewer’s precise relation to the dimensions of the object, the ground plane, and the picture plane.

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could (in theory) take in the image as a unified and instantaneously comprehended whole. Dramatic unity and visual unity were both well served in this version of perspective space. But in the bifocal system used by Claude, the painted or drawn surface is conceived, rather, as a flat plane on which a virtual and disembodied image of the world is projected or mapped.54 Its accuracy does not depend on the fixed stance of the viewer. This bifocal structure encourages viewers to scan across the scene from one distance point to another.55 Moving their gaze across the along the horizon line, the beholder collects the elements of the view in a sequential unfolding. Baldinucci tells us Claude could place the occhio or eye-point wherever he wanted it along the horizon. If he placed the occhio not near the center of the horizon line, where it would usually be within the Albertian system, but rather at one side, the circle drawn around this eye-point would be skewed, with its larger portion off to one side. This in turn means that the orthogonal lines drawn from architectural elements toward the distance points on the circle’s perimeter will be unequal in length, resulting in an angle of vision turned obliquely toward one side of the depiction. This is exactly what happens in Claude’s painting of Trinità dei Monti, as we see when we examine its perspective structure. In the drawing, the orthogonals recede equally toward either side of the depiction, which means that the occhio at the pinpoint of Claude’s compass was placed at or near the centre of the horizon line. But in the painting, it is only the orthogonals at the left that converge on the horizon outside the left edge of the depiction, where the architecture of the monastery replicates closely the recessive forms found in the drawing. The orthogonals at the right converge on the very edge of the frame. The sense of deep space plunging toward the viewer’s left is heightened by this closure of the perspective structure on the right side. 54 Alpers in The Art of Describing uses this diagram by Vredeman de Vries to analyze the way Dutch paintings characteristically retain a sense of the painting as a flat surface, on which the circular field of vision is laid out or projected, and the characteristic function of framing such a surface, both of which stand in high contrast to the Albertian window frame and the illusionistic destruction of the painting’s surface by its creation of fictive depth (‘Ut Pictura Ita Visio: Kepler’s Model of the Eye and the Nature of Picturing in the North’, in The Art of Describing, p. 26–71). 55 Jean Pélerin (Viator), De Artificiali Perspectiva; Brion-Guérry, Jean Pélerin Viator; Ivins, Jr., On the Rationalization of Sight. On the issue of the eyes’ mobility in viewing perspectival images, see Frangenberg, ‘The Image and the Moving Eye’, p. 150–171, in which he analyzes the difference between the Albertian model of a perspectival image constructed around its centric point and the actual process of viewing it. He notes that Viator specifically addresses the problem of the viewer’s mobility of gaze, and he summarizes Viator’s two methods of perspective (p. 156). According to Viator, a frontal view of an object yielded a view constructed in something like Alberti’s costruzzione legittima, organized around its centric point. But an oblique view at an angle yielded a view to be framed in what Frangenberg summarizes as ‘bifocal perspective’. Frangenberg presents this type of angled view in Viator’s work not as provoking a mobile, scanning gaze, but as the artist’s choice to move his vision to an angle, and then to reproduce the contents of that vision in a perspective organization that nonetheless fixes the eye opposite a centric point. The contrary opinion, that the bifocal system deliberately evokes a scanning gaze, is presented by Brion-Guérry, “Le ‘De Artificiali Perspectiva’”, 1, p. 307–323.

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Fig. 80: Claude Lorrain. View of Villa of Maecenas at Tivoli, with superimposed perspective orthogonals. c. 1640. Drawing, formerly Norton Simon collection, present whereabouts unknown. Photo the author, from Rothlisberger, Claude Lorrain: The Drawings, II, p. 511.

In the painting, the horizon line ends in the base of the imaginary classical sculpture, and the standing marble figure gathers all the orthogonal lines into its upright closed form. This asymmetry in the perspective system, extending beyond the frame on one side and ending within the margins on the other, allows for complete continuity between the deep open vista at left and the closed, intimate space at right. It thus creates logical, if unreal, continuity between the topographic view and the imagined scene of prostitution. This system allowed Claude easily to expand his topographic drawing into a more elaborated painting. Indeed, this transformation allows us to see the real fluidity of boundaries between painting and drawing, their symbiosis, and the parallel but equal roles they played in Claude’s art, as Michael Kitson pointed out.56 But both the topographic drawing and the imaginatively elaborated painting use the same system of bifocal perspective. We can see some further implications of this use of the occhio in several of Claude’s drawings done from life during the 1630s and 1640s. For example, in a sketched view of Tivoli, Claude combines the topographic view of the townscape with an apparently imagined figure of a viewer, lying at the right of the scene and gesturing toward the view (Fig. 80). If we trace the recessive lines of the architecture, we once again find 56 Kitson, ‘The Place of Drawing’, p. 95–112.

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them leading out of the representation at the left, converging toward the horizon line at some distance from the left border of the scene. But they converge at right into the figure of the depicted viewer, as though the view itself were generated by the figure’s gaze. The occhio that allows for this skewing of the view does not really open the view that we ourselves see from our vantage point outside the image. Instead, it orients the view as seen by a body from within the representation. The occhio in Claude’s system does not function as a vanishing point. It was instead the fulcrum for levering open a vista from inside the overall view. It creates alternate viewpoints, and these secondary viewpoints are physically embodied within the representation by gazing figures. It is true that there are important examples of both paintings and drawings in which Claude uses a different system. His painted seaport scenes were nearly all composed in something more like the costruzzione legittima, around vanishing points placed near the centre of the horizon line. The architecture that bounds these lightfilled harbours recedes strictly toward that point. However, apart from his seascape and harbour views, in the majority of his drawn and painted landscapes, Claude’s perspective develops an extraordinary aspect of the traditional distance-point construction. He seems to have recognised that, using his scheme, new vistas could be opened up from within the field of each representation, vistas within vistas, views within views, and all could be aligned with the position of figures within the painting or drawing. In the majority of Claude’s paintings and in his drawings, figures within the scene are placed exactly where such views emerge, as if they animate or personify the possibilities of vision.57 Sometimes the vista is embodied differently in two versions of the same subject, with different types of human figures as the origin of the view. In Claude’s 1648 painting Landscape Capriccio with the Arch of Constantine (private collection), the viewing figure is a shepherd standing in the very foreground in the lower right corner of the painting, who points into the deep space toward the horizon. In the Liber Veritatis drawing that records the composition, and in a variant painting from around the same date, that gesturing figure is replaced by the figure of the artist drawing the scene. Both the painted shepherd gesturing inward (as if to articulate ‘look at the view!’) and the sketching draftsman (whose presence declares ‘I am transforming my looking into a making of the view’) function in a similar way. They are the origins and the embodiment of the view. As in Northern artists’ nae’t leven work, the draftsman at work marks the simultaneity of seeing and recording. We can verify Claude’s consciousness of this function for his figures. At times, as in Claude’s long, narrow drawing of a coast landscape with an artist sketching, now in the British Museum, one can see on close examination a faint ruled pencil line 57 Lubbock, ‘Claude’s extras’, p. 20–22, discusses Claude’s placement of figures at key openings of vistas in his landscape compositions.

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Fig. 81: Claude Lorrain. An artist studying from nature. 1639. Oil on canvas. Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, USA / Gift of Mary Hanna / Bridgeman Images.

that runs from the eyes of a depicted figure, the draftsman at work, toward a point on the horizon line. This coincidence of the draftsman’s gaze with the perspective structure governing the drawing itself shows how Claude conceived of this equation of seeing, perspective and drawing. It was evidently an important idea for the artist. Claude made two versions of this drawing, created an etching based on the same composition, and also painted a landscape of the same harbour scene, also with the draftsman at work (Fig. 81). Claude’s perspective was fundamental not only to his way of structuring a view, but to the significant placement of figures within his works. It was moreover fundamental to the two-dimensional composition of his landscapes.58 This is particularly 58 This perspective network could be displaced from depth onto the surface of the depiction. Claude often drew over landscape sketches in his notebooks with an even grid of diagonal lines forming diamond shapes. There is as yet no consensus in the literature about why Claude laid this diagonal grid over some of his drawings, but the most plausible suggestion has been that it demonstrated the overall balance of mass and void within the composition. It also could have showed him the points of convergence between a symmetrical net of diagonal lines on the surface of the representation and the network of diagonal orthogonals leading into measured space. The Tivoli drawings, still recognizably topographic when compared to a photograph of the site today, shows us that the perspective organization of organic shapes into this grid did not distort the irregular features of the landscape, but rather allowed for its orderly unfolding.

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striking in his topographic views. The recessive lines of the architecture form a very slim, closely packed bundle of lines close to the horizon line. His perspective thus leaves a curious amount of the field of representation blank or inchoate. The empty foreground area becomes the arena for imagined human actions, such as the prostitutes in the painted view of Trinità dei Monti. It is a structure that creates possibilities for juxtaposition, and oppositions, in a process that elicits comparison as much as it allows for subjective participation in the creation of the view. In semiotic terms, a sign communicates in its difference from another sign, and in its repetition within recognizable structures. Turning to some of the major works of the Bamboccianti in Rome, we find that they follow the general formula for bifocal or distance-point perspective, placing the recessive lines of their obliquely placed buildings so that they recede laterally. As in Claude’s procedure, the orthogonals formed by buildings in bambocciata scenes converge outside the picture at points on the level of the horizon line, although sometimes it is at the very edges of the drawing or painting. In Jan Both’s drawing of the Roman limekiln on the Tiber, for example, the recession of the buildings along a diagonal sinking from upper right to lower left makes a bundle of orthogonals that meet at a point outside the left edge of the sheet (Fig. 77). Jan Asselijn’s, on the other hand, places the orthogonals so that they converge roughly at the drawing’s edge (Fig. 78). There is nothing erudite or unusual about this structure, which corresponds generally to the system described and illustrated by Viator in 1505. The hallmark of this distance-point structure is the oblique angle of the architectural elements, which recede away from the centre of the composition toward the distance points at the sides. And this we find over and over again in bambocciate paintings.59 In his study of van Laer’s drawings, Axel Janeck noted parallels between Claude’s and van Laer’s landscape sketches, particularly in drawings made at Tivoli. The difficulty is that van Laer’s drawings are still largely unaccounted for, and there are few securely attributed landscape sketches to which we could compare Claude’s. We have had to look to van Laer’s close followers instead. The most revealing comparison Janeck was able to make in this vein was with a drawing of Tivoli by Jan Asselijn.60 59 G. B. Passeri in writing about the “open window” of the bambocciata may be making a rather specific and technical comment about their use of perspective. Bamboccio created this highly convincing world without the geometric “alteration” of the real that was performed in an Albertian costruzzione legittima. In Alberti’s perspective picture, which was also likened by the humanist writer to an open window, two cones of visual rays and two sets of orthogonals, at right angles to one another, intersect. Their point of intersection forms the picture plane, the transparent window through which we look. And from the intersection of this lateral point of view with the frontal point of view are drawn the proportionately spaced transversals that recede in true geometric perspective to the centric vanishing point. The all-important endpoint of Alberti’s rather abstract account of perspective is precisely this ‘alteration’ that is the intersection of two points of view. What Passeri perhaps alludes to in his reference to Bamboccio’s open window without alteration is Alberti’s fictional perspective window onto an ideal world. Van Laer’s was a window without the transforming lens of Albertian geometry, but a window all the more revealing of a visible truth. 60 Steland-Stief, Die Zeichnungen.

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Janeck noted that in bambocciata views made from life, the recognizable buildings that signal a topographic intent are located in a narrow band along the horizon line, leaving their “blind zone” in the lower area of the landscape. This is as true of the two drawings of limekilns by Jan Both and Jan Asselijn, as it is of Claude’s View of Rome with Trinità dei Monti, and Callot’s Fair at Impruneta or the Fan. Janeck, like other writers about Northern drawing practice, generally sees the blank foreground in such drawings or paintings as a kind of pictorial or stylistic choice, useful in distinguishing sketches made in front of the motif from those drawn or copied in the studio.61 However, this contrast between the architectural detail at the horizon and the relative emptiness of the rest of the depiction is not a matter of style per se. The ‘blind zone’ is a residue of topographic depiction, a space not chartable within the perspective orthogonals and thus cast out beyond the band of the mappable world. Compositionally, the blind zone functions as a repoussoir, pushing back the horizon and mediating the sense of depth. In topographic city views this was the place for representing human figures, representatives of various offices, customs and local dress. In Claude’s work as in Callot’s, the blind zone forms a second frame for the image, within the drawn frame, and it thus reinforces the sense of artistry at work on an image that might otherwise seem artless. But I would suggest that the blind zone in Claude’s topographic painting, and in many a bambocciata as well, also served to organize a set of thematic juxtapositions between the two zones of the image. In rhythmic opposition, real structures and imagined figures create a counterpoint in the mind of the viewer. It is the topography itself that is made to signify, to communicate through this process of juxtaposition. Similarities may exist between Claude’s working procedures in drawing and painting and those of his Flemish and Dutch friends in the 1630s, yet we also must note that they ended in significantly different kinds of composition. Claude used his perspective, as Sandrart noted, to study the vista toward an open horizon. Nearly always the works of Bamboccio and his followers close off the horizon, as they place buildings near the center of the composition. The limekiln depictions by Pieter van Laer, Jan Both, and Jan Asselijn that we have already discussed also serve as good examples of this trait. The effect of their compositions, however, is similar to the effect of Claude’s View of Rome with Trinità dei Monti. It allows the artists to juxtapose real architectural or urbanistic structures with imagined human bodies in the blind zone. The bambocciata blind zone is, however, the front and centre stage, hulking against the topographic backdrop. The inhabitants of the blind zone are all the more clearly set in close relation to the city structures behind them. This topographic imaginary in the bambocciata also, as in Claude’s work, makes the real cityscape ‘speak’ through a process of juxtaposition. In Claude’s early work, the topographic imaginary embodies a 61 Schatborn, Drawn to Warmth, p. 15–16.

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subtle meditation on his very means of representation, at this moment of ferment and change in his own art. But I will be suggesting that what it speaks of in many bambocciate has to do with the physical, human and social geography of Rome itself.

A ‘Speaking’ Topography Finally, when we return to the painted View in Rome with Trinità dei Monti it is with the awareness that, as he was composing this scene in the year 1632, Claude was engaged with thinking about the process of depicting d’après nature, of images tirés au vif (Fig. 64). We can perhaps see how he made this view, which was so innocently visible from his window, into an image that speaks, that communicates. The composition is divided between light and dark, the actual and the imagined. The buildings along the luminous horizon line take on significance through their juxtaposition to the dark scene of prostitution beneath. One meaningful site is the house here, close to the centre of the horizon, midway between the church at left and the distant image of the pope’s residence at Palazzo Quirinale, both of them associated with religious authority. This is the house of Federico Zuccari (now the Biblioteca Hertziana). By the 1630s this had become the meeting place of the Accademia di San Luca and a hostel for young artists, and thus associated with artistic authority. It was here that life-drawing sessions were held. And it was here that in 1631–32 the Flemings rebelled against the imposition of a tax to support the cost of these life-drawing classes. They could draw from life anywhere, without paying for the right to do so. Many northern artists as Protestants were excluded from full membership in the Accademia—but were still taxed for this access to the accademia del nudo, as the Italians called it. It is no coincidence that in 1632 Claude in his experiment in painting from life, balances his image between the commerce of love and money on the one hand, and the institutions governing religion and the arts on the other. It is no coincidence that he made this painting at the moment when drawing from the live model was the subject of a dispute in the very buildings that he was depicting from life. It is a thought-provoking painting. It calls for a type of interpretation that can address not just the appearance of the image but its ties to a creative process, and its idiosyncratic linkage of words and images. Claude’s art subsequently leaves behind any overt trace of his relationships to the Northerners after about 1640, as if he had outgrown youthful indiscretion and grown into classical decorum. Low-life scenes such as the prostitutes in the Trinità dei Monti view or market vendors and gypsies in his early harbour scenes give way to Biblical and classical stories. Recognizable topography, however, continues to play a role in Claude’s art to the very end of his career, even if his landscapes became ever more classicized in subject during the decades from the 1640s to his death in 1682. We can move beyond the apparent dichotomy between idealization and naturalism, however, to see that Claude’s approach to drawing and painting from life continued to be rooted in

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practices that he shared with Northern artists in Rome. Their approach to representing Rome and its surrounding Campagna shows that even topographic depictions contain imagined worlds—or, conversely, imagined worlds can be depicted ‘from life’ as well.

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Freedberg, David. Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century (London: British Museum, 1980). Gowing, Lawrence, ‘Nature and the Ideal in the Art of Claude,’ Art Quarterly 37 (1974): 91–96. Heck, Michèle-Caroline, ‘Sandrart à Rome’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 93 (1979): 153–166. Heck, Michèle-Caroline. Théorie et pratique de la peinture: Sandrart et la Teutsche Academie (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2006). Hoogewerff, Godefridus J. De Bentveughels (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1952). Hoogewerff, Godefridus J. Neederlandsche Kunstenaars te Rom (1600–1725): Uitreksels uit de parochiale archieven (The Hague: Algemeene Landsdrukkerij, 1942). Ivins, Jr., William. On the Rationalization of Sight (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975). Janeck, Axel, ‘Naturalismus und Realismus: Untersuchung zur Darstellung der Natur bei Pieter van Laer und Claude Lorrain’, Storia dell’Arte 28 (1976): 285–307. Janeck, Axel. Untersuchungen über en holländischen Maler Pieter van Laer (PhD diss., Würzburg, 1968). Janeck, Axel, ‘Naturalismus und Realismus: Untersuchung zur Darstellung der Natur bei Pieter van Laer und Claude Lorrain’, Storia dell’Arte 28 (1976): 285–307. Jansen Guido, and Peter Sutton. Michael Sweerts (1618–1664) (ex. cat. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2002). Kaori Kitao, Timothy, ‘Prejudice in Perspective: A Study of Vignola’s Perspective Treatise’, The Art Bulletin 44 (1962): 173–194. Kemp, Martin, ‘Geometrical Perspective from Brunelleschi to Desargues: A Pictorial Means or an Intellectual End?’, Proceedings of the British Academy 70 (1984): 89–132. Kemp, Martin, ‘Science, Non-science and Nonsense: The Interpretation of Brunelleschi’s Perspective’, Art History 1 (1978): 134–161. Kemp, Martin, ‘Simon Stevin and Pieter Saenredam: A Study of Mathematics and Vision in Dutch Science and Art’, The Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 237–252. Kennedy, Irene, ‘Claude Lorrain and Architecture’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 260–283. Kennedy, Irene, ‘Claude Lorrain and Topography’, Apollo 90 (1969): 304–309. Kitson, Michael, Studies on Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin (London: Pindar Press, 2000). Kitson, Michael. Claude Lorrain: Liber Veritatis (London: British Museum, 1978). Kitson, Michael. The Claude Lorrain Album in the Norton Simon Museum of Art (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971). Kitson, Michael. ‘Claude’s Books of Drawings from Nature’, The Burlington Magazine 103 (1961): 252–257. Kitson, Michael, ‘The Place of Drawings in the Art of Claude Lorrain’, in Studies in Western Art: Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963): 95–112. Kitson, Michael. ‘Swanevelt, Claude Lorrain et le Campo Vaccino [Parts I and II], Revue des Arts 8 (1958): 215–220 and 259–260. Kultzen, Rolf. Michael Sweerts Brussels 1618-Goa 1664 (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1996). Langdon, Helen. Claude Lorrain (Oxford: Phaidon, 1989). Langdon, Helen, ‘Claude and the Roman Landscape’, Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 73 (2004): 130–132. Levesque, Catherine, Journey through Landscape in 17th-century Holland: the Haarlem Print Series and Dutch Identity (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). Levine, David, and Ekkehard Mai, eds., I Bamboccianti: Niederländische Malerrebellen im Rom des Barock (ex. cat. Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1991). Levine, David, ‘The Bentveughels: Bande académique’, in Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, ed., Il 60: Essays Honoring Irving Lavin on His Sixtieth Birthday (New York: Italica, 1990), 207–226. Levine, David, ‘Pieter van Laer’s Artists’ Tavern: An Ironic Commentary on Art’, in Holländischen Genremalerei im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Henning Bock and Thomas W. Gaehtgens (Berlin: Mann, 1987), 169–191. Levine, David, ‘The Roman Limekilns of the Bamboccianti’, The Art Bulletin 70 (1988): 569–589. Lubbock, ‘Claude’s extras: What’s Lost if you Lose the Figures from Those Pure Landscapes’, Modern Painters 7 (1994): 20–22. Maclean, Rosemary, ‘“O gran Principe o gran Prelato”: Claude’s Roman Patrons and the Appeal of his Landscape Easel Paintings’, Gazette des Beaux Arts 126 (1995): 223–234.

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Mazzetti di Pietralata, Cecilia, ‘Sandrart a confronto con Lorrain e Swanevelt: Disegni inediti e riflessioni sul paesaggio’, Storia dell’Arte 112 (2005): 91–118. Melion, Walter, ‘Memory and the Kinship of Writing and Picturing in the Early Seventeenth Century Netherlands’, Word & Image 8 (1992): 48–70. Nuti, Lucia. Ritratti di città: Visione e memoria tra medioevo e Settecento (Venice: Marsilio, 1996). Onuf, Alexandra, ‘Envisioning Netherlandish Unity: Claes Visscher’s 1612 Copies of the Small Landscapes Prints’, Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art 3 (2011) online publication (http://jhnalive. pielabmedia.com/index.php/past-issues/vol-3-1). Onuf, Alexandra, ‘Small landscapes in seventeenth-century Antwerp’, The Burlington Magazine 150 (2008): 190–193. Panofksy, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form trans. Christopher Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991). Pélerin, Jean (Viator). De Artificiali Perspectiva (Toul: 1505; 2nd ed. 1509). Porzio, Francesco, ed. Da Caravaggio a Ceruti: La scena di genere e l’immagine dei pitocchi nella pittura italiana (Milan: Skira, 1998). Rand, Richard. Claude Lorrain: The Painter as Draftsman; Drawings from the British Museum (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006). Ribouillault, Denis, ‘L’Artiste en berger d’Arcadie: le paysage d’après nature de Dûrer à Poussin’, in Arte dal naturale, eds. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Annick Lemoine, Magali Théron, Mickaël Szanto (Rome: Campisano editore. Quaderni della Bibliotheca Hertziana 2, 2019): 177–207. Ribouillault, Denis, ‘De la pratique au mythe: la figure du dessinateur dans les paysages de Claude Lorrain’, Flâneurs et regardeurs dans la peinture de la Renaissance, actes du colloque ed. Anne-Laure Imbert (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015): 147–168. Röthlisberger, Marcel. Claude Lorrain: The Drawings (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968). Röthlisberger, Marcel. Claude Lorrain: The Paintings. 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). Röthlisberger, ‘From Goffredo Wals to the Beginnings of Claude Lorrain’, Artibus et Historiae 32 (1995): 9–37 Russell, Helen Diane. Claude Lorrain, 1600–1682 (ex. cat. Washington, D.C., National Gallery, 1983). Sandrart, Joachim von. [Life of Claude Lorrain] in Der Teutschen Academie der Bau- Bild- und Mahlery Künste 2 vols. (Nuremberg: J.P. Mittenberger, 1675–1679) I, 331–33; [Life of Pieter van Laer] Teutsche Academie, I, 311–312. Schatborn, Peter. Drawn to Warmth: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Artists in Italy (Amsterdam: Waanders, 2001). Sonnabend, Martin and Jon Whitely. Claude The Enchanted Landscape (ex. cat. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2014). Steland-Stief, Anne. C. Die Zeichnungen des Jan Asselijn (Fridingen: Graf Klenau Verlag, 1989). Steland-Stief, Anne. C. Jan Asselijn: Nach 1610 bis 1652 (Amsterdam: Van Gendt, 1971). Steland-Stief, Anne. C., ‘Drawings by Dutch Italianate Painters’, in Inspired by Italy: Dutch Landscape Painting, 1600–1700 (ex. cat. London, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2002). Steland-Stief, Anne. C., ‘Zu Graphik und Zeichnungen der Bamboccianti’, in David Levine and Ekkehard Mai, eds., I Bamboccianti: Niederländische Malerrebellen im Rom des Barock (ex. cat. Cologne, Wallraf-RichartzMuseum, 1991): 94–98. Summers, David. Michelangelo and the Language of the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Swan, Claudia, ‘Ad Vivum, Naer het Leven, from the Life: Defining a Mode of Representation’, Word and Image 11 (1995): 353–372. Thompson, Wendy. ‘Pigmei pizzicano dei giganti’: The Encounter Between Netherlandish and Italian Artists in Seventeenth-century Rome (PhD thesis Johns Hopkins University 1997). Verberne, Judith, ‘The Bentveughels (1620/21–1720)’, in Peter Schatborn, Drawn to Warmth: 17th-Century Dutch Artists in Italy (Amsterdam: Waanders, 2001): 22–32. Vredeman de Vries, Hans. Perspective (Leyden: Hondius, 1604–1605). Welu, James, ‘A Street Scene by Johannes Lingelbach’, Worcester Art Museum Bulletin 6 (1977): 10–16. Wine, Humphrey. The French Seventeenth-Century Paintings (London: National Gallery of Art Publications, 2001). Wine, Humphrey, ed. Claude Lorrain: The Poetic Landscape (ex. cat. National Gallery of Art, London, 1994).

5.

The absent eyewitness: the Revolt of Masaniello and depiction dal vivo in the middle of the seventeenth century

Abstract When Michelangelo Cerquozzi, the sole Italian follower of Pieter van Laer, depicted the Neapolitan uprising in 1648, Masaniello’s revolution was still ongoing. A topographic view of the market in Naples’ s piazza del Carmine, Cerquozzi’s composition resembles Callot’s Fair at Impruneta in its capturing of a recognizable market setting crowded with people. Much was made in later scholarship of its being an eye-witnessed depiction, a journalistic first-hand report. Contemporary commentators, to the contrary, stressed that Cerquozzi was not there, and found it an object of wonder for being made from life in a curious form of absent witnessing. In this, the painting resembles seventeenth-century printed siege views, which were often topographically accurate, but reconstructed from maps, plans and verbal accounts. Keywords: Cardinal Spada, Siege of Breda, curiosity collections, Siege of La Rochelle

One painting by an Italian follower of Bamboccio seems to gather together several issues that recur within the practice of painting from life in Italy. Perhaps the best known bambocciata of all, Michelangelo Cerquozzi’s The Revolt of Masaniello represented from life the infamous uprising of the poor in the city of Naples during 1647 (Fig. 82). It has been called the first painting of contemporary history, as if it anticipated The Death of Wolfe or The Raft of the Medusa. To its contemporaries, its significance lay elsewhere, in the premise that it had the peculiar authority of images depicted dal vivo, ad vivum, made in the closest proximity to its models. Whether or not it was actually depicted on site, the painting’s composition was certainly also modelled on Callot’s famous print The Fair at Impruneta, discussed in Chapter 2 (Fig. 29). Unlike Callot’s peaceful image combining a secular fair with a religious procession, Cerquozzi’s painting shows a market that is veering from commerce into violence. The fisherman-revolutionary, red-capped Masaniello, has mounted a donkey at the bottom center of the composition, and surges toward the people’s foes, the Spanish tax collectors in the left corner, who are coming under attack from bystanders. Avvisi, or diplomatic reports, said that the revolution started over the tax on a container of figs, which we see thrown down on the ground at the McTighe, S., Representing from Life in Seventeenth-century Italy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi: 10.5117/ 9789462983281_ch05

fig. 82: michelangelo cerquozzi. The Revolt of Masaniello. 1648–1649. oil on canvas. galleria spada, Rome. © photo scala, florence. courtesy of the ministero Beni e att. culturali.

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very bottom edge of the scene. Despite the individuation of Masaniello riding into the fray on his donkey, the market scene around him has the anonymity of bambocciata street scenes, and the random violence of brigand and battle paintings that were so popular among Neapolitan patrons in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.1 The Revolt of Masaniello has been seen as an exceptional painting within the genre of bambocciata scenes of the urban poor. Where the bambocciata depicts repeated everyday activities in the recognizable cityscape, Cerquozzi’s painting shows a very singular event. Michelangelo Cerquozzi himself was exceptional, as one of the only Italian painters to emulate the manner of Pieter van Laer, and certainly the only one who was Roman-born. And this particular work by Cerquozzi departs from the norm of bambocciate made on spec to be sold to any taker. The Revolt of Masaniello was made on commission for a prominent patron. The revolution in Naples had begun in July 1647 and had not yet ended when Cerquozzi finished his painting in February 1648. It was commissioned from Cerquozzi by Cardinal Bernardino Spada in Rome, a supporter of the French against the Spaniards, and a man likely to rejoice in the embarrassment of Naples’ Spanish governors caused by the revolt. Cerquozzi painted an accurate view of Naples’s Piazza del Mercato and the church of Santa Maria del Carmine where the revolt began. His care in re-creating the topography is matched by his accuracy in relating the sequence of events that started the uprising. A group of tax collectors demanded payment from a farmer just bringing his harvest of figs to the market. The hugely unpopular tax had brought on a simmering unrest in the days before, and an angry confrontation rapidly escalated into outright battle. In the church of the Carmine, the religious festivities for the Virgin of the Carmine preceded the uprising, with the mock battles on the feast day of the Virgin providing a kind of rehearsal for the real violence in the following weeks. Later, it was in the Carmine that Masaniello, seemingly unhinged and paranoid, predicted to his followers his impending death. As Peter Burke has proposed, the political revolt was in many ways shaped and understood through the processes of religious ritual.2 However, Cerquozzi’s image remains quiet on this front. His painting does not really juxtapose the sacred and the profane, but rather sets violent bodies against a violent nature. Behind the market square at right is Mount Vesuvius, which is ominously emitting smoke as if erupting. Like Callot’s Fair at Impruneta, Cerquozzi’s work uses the recognizable topography allusively. Its juxtaposed market, church, and volcano are meant to portray the character of the city of Naples. But they also signify the contradictions in the character of the popolo minuto, who are exploding 1 For more general accounts of the uprising see Villari, The Revolt and D’Alessio, Masaniello. On the taste for anonymous battle scenes see Saxl, ‘The Battle Scene’, p. 70–87. For the theatrical representations of Masaniello see Meier Drees, ‘The Revolt of Masaniello’, p. 207–213. 2 Burke, ‘The Virgin of the Carmine’, p. 191–206.

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into rebellion against the Spanish government, but remain in the shadow of church authority. The volcanic eruption parallels the uprising, as if the revolt were another natural, inevitable upheaval, and one that would, like a volcanic eruption, eventually subside. The painting was destined for a private aristocratic collection that brought together curiosities of art and nature, for a patron whose family had been supporters of Galileo and had longstanding interests in the natural sciences.3 Perhaps that made Cardinal Spada more open to the metaphoric parallel of natural and social eruptions. In a period where news travelled slowly from Naples to Rome, descriptions of the revolt came in dribs and drabs to Roman ears. It must have been exciting to have a visual account of the events, making the revolution visible and vividly present in Rome even while it was still ongoing.4 It was, in a way, like the report that Galileo’s telescope gave of the distant face of the moon. Seeing the painting as a forerunner of eighteenth-century history paintings of contemporary events, Wendy Roworth proposed that Cerquozzi’s painting represents the Neapolitan revolution as a curiosity for a collector of curiosities, a wondrous painting of a wondrous event. More specifically, she saw the representation of Masaniello himself as evoking meraviglia, showing the fisherman-leader as ‘a prodigy who rose above his class to accomplish fabulous deeds’. She supported this idea with the evidence of a contemporary written account by the papal ambassador, Cardinal Ascanio Filomarino, who refers to Masaniello in uncommonly positive terms as a wondrous figure. And she supported the definition of Cerquozzi’s painting as a marvel and wonder with evidence from another painter who depicted scenes from the 1647 revolt, Domenico Gargiulo, called Micco Spadaro. Gargiulo, too, painted a view of the revolt of Masaniello very close in time to the actual uprising (Fig. 83). In addition to scenes of the Masaniello uprising, Gargiulo made two other paintings of Neapolitan disasters: the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631 and the plague of 1656. In these two paintings, Gargiulo had included miraculous apparitions in the skies over Naples, Saint Januarius in the one, and the Virgin in the other. Roworth thought the smoking Vesuvius in Cerquozzi’s Revolt was parallel to Gargiulo’s apparitions, and thus a sign that he, too, placed the uprising in the category of heaven-sent disasters. Unfortunately for this interesting argument, the parallels between Gargiulo’s works and Cerquozzi’s fall apart on closer view. Christopher Marshall has shown the distinct context for Gargiulo’s natural disasters in Neapolitan patronage, and shown them to be unrelated to his own Masaniello painting. As he put it, they are paintings that ‘differ […] in the framework for interpreting events that [they] offer to the viewer.’5 What is not on view in the Masaniello scenes is any form of divine intervention. 3 The wunderkammer elements of the Spada family’s collecting and patronage are discussed by Giulia Martina Weston, Niccolò Tornioli. 4 Wendy Roworth, ‘The Evolution’, p. 219–234, argues that Cardinal Spada’s view of the uprising was informed by the letters sent between Naples and Rome by Cardinal Filomarino. 5 Marshall, ‘Cause di stravaganze’, p. 478–497; quotation from p. 484.

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fig. 83: Domenico gargiulo, called micco spadaro. The Revolt of Masaniello. c. 1652. oil on canvas. museo nazionale di san martino, naples. © 2018. photo scala, florence. courtesy of the ministero Beni e att. culturali.

There is, however, a way that Roworth’s sense of The Revolt of Masaniello as a painting of a marvel, destined for a collector of curiosities, may be salvaged, along with her sense that political and natural upheaval are linked in the painting. There is another account in which Cerquozzi’s depicted Revolt was a marvel and a curiosity, written by Cerquozzi’s biographer. In his life of the artist in the Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua (1681), Filippo Baldinucci makes the curious nature of The Revolt of Masaniello the centerpiece of his account. He begins by isolating a single trait of Cerquozzi’s art: his great visual memory, and his ability to paint the most lifelike scene from memory, even from a verbal account. When he writes about the Masaniello painting, Baldinucci emphasizes that Cerquozzi was not present in Naples for the uprising, and indeed that he had never visited the city at all. His was a miraculous image for being made so vivid as to seem as if made from life. Baldinucci implied that Cerquozzi worked from someone else’s description of the uprising, which supports Roworth’s idea that Cerquozzi’s painting bears direct relation to Cardinal Filomarino’s letters to the papal court. Baldinucci’s biography set off a long tradition of trying to prove that either Cerquozzi or Viviano Codazzi, said to have assisted in depicting the architecture, was present as eyewitness to the July uprising. By the nineteenth century, it was even claimed that one or the other had participated in the revolt. (It was certainly

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important to Romantic critics that the artist be a revolutionary hero, immersed in the battle that he represented.) But for Baldinucci in Florence at the end of the seventeenth century, the painting was the more wondrous for not having been witnessed. The painter worked dal vivo, but he was not there to see the scene. He was absent, but has made us present at this rare event—in this paradoxical situation of absent witnessing, the painting demonstrates the curious power of realist representation. This, oddly enough, rather than a focus on the politics of the revolution, was the seicento view of Cerquozzi’s achievement. This kind of absent eye-witnessing we have seen before as an attribute of the image made from life, the imago contrafactum. It makes Cerquozzi’s painting a corollary to Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1515 woodcut of The Rhinoceros, discussed in the Introduction. Despite knowing of the animal only from a written account, Dürer declared his image abkunterfet, made directly from life. It was so designated, as Peter Parshall pointed out, because of such images’ function to serve as ‘specially designated as bearers of visual fact’. The function of The Revolt of Masaniello was perhaps less clear than that of Dürer’s fabulous beast. However, this sense of absent eye-witnessing was part of the painting’s value to its patron: it served to transmit curious knowledge in visual form. If the appeal to Spada’s attraction to curiosities was one aspect of this eye-witnessed scene, it is nonetheless odd that Baldinucci should find so wonderful or curious that the topography and actions had been reconstructed from a verbal account or from memory. For there is an entire popular category of early modern images, often labelled ad vivum, made from life, whose genesis lay in precisely such an abstract transmission of information to the distant artist who was not physically present at an historical scene. This was frequently the case with printed siege views or battle scenes, with which The Revolt of Masaniello has much in common.6 Its composition resembles Callot’s Fair at Impruneta, but it also bears a strong resemblance to the illustrations of battles for Famiano Strada’s book on the Spanish conquest of Flanders, De Bello Belgico, some of which were designed by Michelangelo Cerquozzi himself and etched by François Collignon for a republication of the text in Rome during 1632 (Fig. 84). These prints recreate the topography of battles from Strada’s descriprtions, with some help from pre-existing city views or atlases. The Revolt of Masaniello and the illustrations of De Bello Belgico emerge from a sixteenth-century tradition of depicting battle scenes using data from geographies, atlases, and verbal accounts. In effect, they make a claim to be done ad vivum, but somehow without the agency of a witnessing artist. This is the final aspect of working dal vivo, the role of the absent eyewitness, that we need to address in order to understand this phenomenon. In Italy and ultimately across Europe, during the decade of the 1640s the anti-naturalist doctrines of classicist, idealist art theory rose 6

For siege views, see Pollak, ‘Siege Views’, p. 109–54; McDonald, ‘Cesare Bassano’s’, p. 288–292.

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fig. 84: michelangelo cerquozzi, etched by françois collignon. illustration: De Bello Belgico, 1632. British museum Dept. of prints and Drawings, London. © trustees of the British museum.

to prominence, and the notion of painting from the live model, connected to the manner of Caravaggio, became widely discredited. However, depicting dal vivo or dal naturale was still very much at issue in landscape depictions as well as in the bambocciate that remained popular among elite patrons at mid-century. It is to the conjunction of landscape painting after 1640, city views, painted and printed siege views, and the imago contrafacta that we need to turn now.

Artist and military engineer, chorography and geography Cerquozzi’s painting would have raised expectations common to ad vivum, dal vivo depictions, namely that it was an image serving as conduit for information and knowledge, in which accurately recording the visible world took precedence over asserting the authorship of the image, and the image’s function was more important than its artistic expression. As Peter Parshall wrote in his seminal article on the Renaissance notion of an imago contrafacta, images labelled made from life or ‘counterfeited’ were ‘a class of representation that came to be determined by function […] most often employed within the emerging genres of portraiture and topography for images reporting specific events and for portrayals of both natural and supernatural

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phenomena’.7 That is, even a spiritual vision could be copied ad vivum, for the purpose of conveying knowledge of that vision. And another way of putting this is that within this tradition, even imaginary worlds have a topography, and thus can be rendered accurately ‘from life’. Jacques Callot’s Siege of Breda, finished in 1627–1628, was perhaps the most famous and widely disseminated siege print of the entire period. Commissioned in 1625 by the Infanta Isabella of Spain to commemorate a very significant victory of the Spanish over the Dutch forces, the plans that mapped the city walls and the location of the troops were conveyed in drawings by a military engineer, Giovanni Francesco Cantagallina, given to Callot by his patron.8 Callot did make a trip to the Netherrlands in 1627, but it is not known if he studied the actual site of the siege in order to portray the complex events that transpired there. He made use, however, of the memoirs of Hugo Hermannus, who was present at the siege, to portray the sequence of events during the year-long siege. The printmaker’s use of plans and drawings made by a military engineer who worked, not for him, but rather for the commissioner of the siege view, was common practice. The same was true of Callot’s first siege view, depicting the Battle of Gradisca, made while he was still in Florence and in the employ of the Medici court. All impressions of this siege print are now lost, but documents show that Callot received the pertinent plans and measurements from his patron, Don Giovanni de’ Medici, who had commissioned them from a military engineer.9 And similar collaborations took place for the creation of Callot’s Siege of La Rochelle and his view of the battle of the Ile de Ré, conflicts fought and won by Louis XIII of France.10 The two roles of artist and engineer were visualized by Callot in the lower left corner of his large six-sheet etching of the Siege of Breda, as the figure of draftsman at work sketching the view, together with a second figure standing to his right, wielding the engineer’s compass for proportional measurement (Fig. 71). The representation’s claim to accuracy of observation depended on both the role of the draftsman and that of the engineer. From the engineer, however, came that most fundamental attribute of accuracy, measurements. The relative distance of landscape features and buildings, the relative height of hills and depth of valleys, could be established through numbers, through surveying techniques deriving the relationship of various topographic elements by triangulating from just one established measurement of a building or landscape. And once transmitted to an artist, this information could then be the basis for a re-construction from abstract numbers back into visual representation. 7 Parshall, ‘Imago Contrafacta’, p. 586. 8 Zurawski, ‘New Sources’, p. 621–639, cf. p. 623. 9 Bruwaert, ‘Jacques Callot’, p. 118–127. 10 Griffiths, ‘Non-Commercial State’, p. 321–323, on Callot’s subsidies for the siege prints and the provision of plans for his designs by his patron. For both the Siege of La Rochelle and the view of the Ile de Ré, Callot’s contract reveals that he was to make the prints “following the designs given by His Majesty” (p. 323).

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This process of rooting a depiction of the ‘real’ within numerical relationships had a long history that is well known in other media and in other spheres of scholarship. For the medieval period, for example, Richard Krautheimer long ago demonstrated that the relationship between sacred buildings in the Holy Land as prototypes to their copies in European churches was established through numbers and proportions.11 In just this sense, Callot contributed to a Florentine publication illustrated with images of the Holy Sepulchre and the topography of the Holy Land, in which the measurements of the buildings underpinned the accuracy of the images as depicted from life.12 In a different realm, there were printed indulgences based on the ‘misura’ or measured outline of the Virgin’s foot, which established the indulgence’s claim to be a true icon of that sacred limb because they replicated the measurements from Spanish relics of her shoe.13 A related idea about accuracy of representation established through measurement probably lies behind the printmaker Abraham Bosse’s assertion in his teachings on geometric perspective during the 1640s to 1660s that ‘one must not draw as the eye sees’.14 By this he proposed that, instead of transcribing the contents of his subjective vision, the artist trained in perspective would use measured units of recession in his drawing, which will subsequently elicit from the viewer a correct, undistorted vision of the represented subject. Although Bosse does not stress the concept, his perspective recipes presuppose the suppression of the artist’s authorship (a product of his subjective judgment) in favour of allowing the image to be generated by the dimensions of the visible world itself. It may sound at first as if with this procedure Bosse repudiates representing ad vivum. But in fact he recommends a particular form of naturalism, in which the most accurate counterfeit of nature reproduces the conditions of viewing in the natural world, via the realm of number. In this he is not very different from another, earlier writer on perspective, Simon Stevin, whose work was published in both French and Dutch, and which Bosse may have known. Stevin more explicitly argued for underlying relationships of number and measurement that give the authority of verified experience to the image drawn in perspective.15 If measurements underlie the accuracy of the topographic view, subjective experience of the visible world informs the depiction of the battle’s actions. The human drama of warfare was transmitted to the artist through first-hand accounts, as in Callot’s use of Hugo Hermannus’s memoir in the Siege of Breda. The two aspects of topographic siege-views pertain, then, to the different roles of artist and engineer (Fig. 71). And they belong to the two registers of space often laid out on the print’s surface, the frontal 11 Krautheimer, ‘Introduction’, p. 1–33. 12 Callot reworked the illustrations for Bernardino Amico’s Trattato delle piante et imagini de i sacri edificii di terrasanta (Florence, 1619). 13 Bury, ‘The Measure’, p. 121–134. 14 Bosse, Manière universelle; overview of Bosse’s career found in Préaud and Join-Lambert, Abraham Bosse. 15 On Simon Stevin, see Devreese and Berghe, Magic is no magic; Sinisgalli, Il contributo. I am grateful to Lorne Darnell, PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute, for pointing me towards Stevin’s work as relevant to my concerns.

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vision of the actions and the flattened, map-like layout of the bird’s-eye view. Callot’s Siege of Breda finesses the joint between these two registers, allowing the plan-like area to rise gradually up the surface of the sheets until it resembles a map. In the middle ground the drama of warfare enlivens the blind zone of the topographic view. In the topographic siege print, the merger of the two types of realist representation allowed for both lived experience and tactical knowledge to play their part in the enjoyment of the distant battle. Troops’ movements in relation to the fortifications are laid out in legible and near-geometric form, but the tumult and pageantry unfold from the witnesses’ subjective vantage point as well.16 This role of the artist as witness to contemporary life has a relation to the mode of ‘absent eye-witnessing’ that I have been trying to define, which could be dubbed the ‘topographic imaginary’, that is, the fruitful collision of the measured, surveyed view of a real site and the actions of imagined figures. In the next decade, Stefano della Bella’s Siege of La Rochelle of 1641 creates an illusionistic break between the two spatial registers, representing them as if on two different sheets, with their edges rolling up. This approach merely plays with the different purposes of the spaces, one belonging (as Ptolemy defined it in antiquity) to chorography or description of things seen, and the other to geography, mapping lands as they are known through measurement. The chorographic elements of a topographic view are also intimately related to theatrical scenography, while the geographic description of lands pertain to military knowledge. We can see them come together in other examples of the topographic imaginary, such as Diego Velazquez’s famous depiction of The Surrender of Breda in 1634–1635 for Philip the IV of Spain. There, beyond the foreground meeting of two armies and two leaders, the distant land rises up and flattens itself into a compromise between a map and a bird’s-eye view, as Velazquez would have seen it and copied it from Jacques Callot’s printed siege view. But the handshake between the Spanish and Flemish leaders was an invention that came from Calderon de la Barca’s theatrical masque representing the events in the Lowlands. The painting plays with the two aspects of topographic prints of such warfare, the view as a participatory experience, most like theatre, and the tactical diagram of topography and the deployment of troops. For Velazquez as for Callot, the sign of artistic virtuosity lay in the ability to entwine the two realms. The same skills were deployed by Michelangelo Cerquozzi in his painted battle scene, The Revolt of Masaniello. All that has changed is the medium, but the shift from print to painting apparently entailed the loss of audience expectations of a certain kind of eye-witnessing, and that loss made Cerquozzi’s work seem even more curious and rare. During the period early in Claude’s Roman career when he was first employed by Pope Urban VIII as a topographic artist, he also produced the kind of painted view of the patron’s properties and projects that was better known in print media. 16 Zurawski, ‘New Sources’, p. 621–639, traces the kinds of siege maps and plans that Callot had at hand when creating his view of the siege; she also traces its source in the verbal descriptions and anecdotes found in Hermannus Hugo’s Obsidio Brediana, which Callot could well have had at hand.

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The View of Castel Gandolfo, a Barberini property then, and its pendant, View of the Harbour of Santa Marinella, show us the same sort of subject that draftsmen such as Remigio Cantagallina, Stefano della Bella and Ercole Bazzicaluva undertook for the Medici Grand Duke, in Livorno and across Tuscany. Even more related to the print genre of topographic siege views, Claude’s Battle at La Rochelle of 1631, one of a pair of battlefield views, also contains the image of an artist at work depicting the scene. Where Callot’s figures of artist and engineer remain anonymous, with their backs to the viewer, Claude seems to identify himself with the draftsman at work in his painting. He signs the drawing being made by the artist in the picture, inscribing ‘Claudio’, upside down—as though both to claim it as himself working dal vivo, and to estrange the figure from his literal self by inverting the direction of the signature. This is an unusual move, not found elsewhere in his oeuvre, where the figure of the artist at work in front of the motif is nonetheless frequent in his drawings. Despite the signature identifying himself with the draftsman in front of the battlefield, Claude himself never set foot in La Rochelle, despite the great accuracy in his rendering of the scene. He reconstructed it from maps and prints. As in Callot’s Breda, this insertion of a draftsman within the depiction, replicating the act of representation within the representation, deliberately invokes the terms dal vivo / ad vivum, only to complicate the meaning of those terms. But if we cannot understand Callot’s or Claude’s work in this topographic manner as a literal eyewitness account, their draftsmen nonetheless invoke a demonstrative tone, a cognitive mode—to borrow terms from an essay by Claudia Swan on the concept of working ad vivum. But it is a cognitive mode that implicitly valorized the artist’s craft at creating a simulacrum, engaging a realism beyond the ‘mere’ imitation, the blind aping of nature, which the classicizing critics of the 1640s refer to in the bambocciata. The perfect witnessing-from-a-distance that Cerquozzi’s Masaniello painting performed in 1648 was a heaven-sent opportunity for a Bamboccianti response to this charge of blind imitation. It is a response made, not in writing or in speech, but within the practice of painting and within the painting itself. The Revolt of Masaniello is perhaps most important as a bambocciata in making a claim for the power of the whole genre’s realism, a singular power of witnessing without being present. The presence and simultaneous absence of the artist goes in tandem with the way these works shift the artists’ points of view into the outlook of the patron or consumer of the view.

Claude Lorrain’s classicism: topographies of the imaginary The followers of Pieter van Laer did not often depict the motif of the draftsman/ artist at work within the genre scene, as so many Northern landscapists did. Michael Sweerts and to a certain extent Michelangelo Cerquozzi were the exceptions to this rule. On the whole, however, the Bamboccianti were evidently fond of representing

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themselves, but not as draftsmen at work but as revelers in extreme forms of play. Cerquozzi depicted drinking parties of artists in the open air, on the Pincio, evidently including portraits of himself and his actual fellow painters in their drunken revels. The most pointed examples in this genre are the paintings and drawings of Bentvueghel induction rites, such as the Tavern Scene by Pieter van Laer’s brother Roland. Several depictions of the inductions by various artists survive, which suggests that painting the actual scene naer het leven was part of the ritual. They include recognizable portraits of individual artists: Roland van Laer has been plausibly identified as the figure standing at the right edge of the drunken melee.17 The common ground between these Bamboccianti self-portrayals and their depictions of Rome’s poor lies in their shared participation in festivity that was so extreme as to be transgressive. Gaming and drinking under the warm Italian sun, both groups opted for idleness over work. Both the beggars and the foreign artists alike could be seen as a challenge to the civic order. It was not the artist as literal eyewitness that interested these painters, but rather the artist as a low-life figure himself with therefore a direct, subjective, and participatory viewpoint on the poor. Claude’s drawings and paintings included less revelry, and tended to include the artist at work as a figure for the act of viewing taking place inside and outside the image. In his first recorded paintings, drawings and etchings of the 1630s, Claude includes the image of the artist at work with great frequency. His visual pun on the phrase ‘tirer au vif’ with the figure of the shooting man emerges from this period of reflection on the very means of creating a naturalistic landscape. The narrative we tell about Claude’s development recounts that he left all this behind in his sketchbooks after about 1640, or after the period in which he participated in an important series of landscapes commissioned for the Buen Retiro, the Spanish royal retreat.18 The story then continues with Claude’s increasing turn to classical subject matter of myth and Roman history, as well as narrative religious scenes, and his mastery of atmospheric luminosity that bathed these stories in Arcadian light, whether dawn or twilight. Claude, in short, became a painter of the classicist ideal. We acknowledge that his version of classicism was not exactly like that of his neighbour and friend, Nicolas Poussin. But we see the change in his art during the 1640s as caught up in an international moment of change toward classicism of subject and classicism of manner, whether in Rome or in the English and French courts (Orazio Gentileschi’s paintings for London and Paris at this time, or those of ‘Attic’ painters in Paris such as Eustache Le Sueur and Laurent de La Hyre). Caravaggism went out of fashion; a certain kind of naturalism seemed passé. However, in Claude’s career, the concern for topography and for depicting from life did not disappear with the advent of ‘classicism’, even if it did take different forms. 17 Kren, ‘Chi non vuol Bacco’, p. 63–80. 18 Langdon, Claude Lorrain; Röthlisberger, Claude Lorrain; Kitson, Studies. For recent accounts of Claude’s art and life in new contexts, see Beneš, ‘Claude Lorrain’s Pendant Landscapes’, p. 37–90; Beaven, ‘Cardinal Camillo Massimo’, p. 23–36.

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There is nonetheless a lasting impact of the topographic on Claude’s art, which continues to inform the naturalism of even his most classicizing and literary of views. The contemporary realities of Rome and the Campagna were often scrupulously transformed in these later works. We owe to Mirka Benes the remarkable analysis of how Claude’s paintings erase the harsh realities of misery in the Campagna, and in so doing collapse into single paintings the topographic traits of several distinct rings of feudal and pastoral lands around the city.19 In that sense, we have to see Claude bidding gooddbye to the realm of the literally topographic. But it might be more accurate to point to an evolution in the topographic imaginaire, based on the principle of witnessing without being present, of staking a claim to topography that one has not literally seen. For example, in both classical and biblical landscapes, Claude placed the narrative subject in relation to the topography of its historical setting. For those stories that took place in Rome or in the Campagna, the setting could be based on Claude’s own knowledge of the terrain. The Burial of Saint Serapia by Saint Sabina, for example, depicts the Aventine hill with the Colosseum at its base.20 But in other cases, Claude reconstructs the topography, taking great pains to find information about a distant site. Claude apparently followed this procedure in his 1656 painting The Sermon on the Mount, sometimes called Christ Preaching on Mount Tabor. Neither the painting itself nor the meticulous record drawing made for Claude’s Liber Veritatis would seem to be recorded ‘from life’ (Fig. 85). A preparatory drawing for the painting reveals that Claude had used a map of the Holy Land, copying from it two topographical views of the site— the second a clearer, corrected version of the first (Fig. 86). He inserted the names of the relevant places: gierusalem, monte tabor, monte Libano, Nazarette, lago tibiriano, la cita tiberiade—and the distances ‘from the mount to Jerusalem 70 miles, to Nazareth 3 miles, to the lake 20 miles’.21 As in his Siege of La Rochelle, or as in Stefano della Bella’s siege views, or as in Callot’s Siege of Breda (as well as in his prints of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem), Claude here translates the measurements as well as visual data of maps and views into a new topographic vista of a place he had never actually seen. And into the topographic blind zone he places the figures of the story. The topography of certain sites was of crucial interest to the patrons of Claude’s works. The subjects of Claude’s later pictures came increasingly to reflect the interests and circumstances of his high-born patrons.22 Their feudal holdings in the Campagna made their way into the topography Claude depicted in paintings for them: The Nymph Egeria Mourning Numa Pompilius, for example. This work for Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna depicts the site of Numa Pompilius’s death at Lake Nemi, just as described in Ovid. Numa, ancient king of Rome, may have alluded to Colonna’s own hereditary rank as viceroy of Naples. 19 Beneš, ‘Pastoralism’, p. 88–113. See also her essay ‘Claude Lorrain’s Pendant Landscapes’. 20 Röthlisberger, ‘The Subject’, p. 209–224; p. 221 for this painting. 21 Roethlisberger believes the drawing in the Teyler Museum, Haarlem, to be by an imitator of Claude, but copied from an original that Claude used in preparing the painting of Mount Tabor; ‘The Subject’, p. 221 n 29, p. 224. 22 Maclean, “O gran Principe”, p. 223–234; Boyer, ‘Claude Lorrain’s Rape of Europa’, p. 261–263.

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fig. 85: claude Lorrain. The Sermon on the Mount. Liber Veritatis. 1656. Drawing after the painting. British museum Dept. of prints and Drawings, London. © trustees of the British museum.

Even more pointedly, however, the view at the left shows nearby Lake Albano as seen from Castel Gandalfo toward Marino, the country seat of the Colonna. And on the right, the picture is framed by a single large column, the heraldic column of the Colonna family.23 Feudal lands in the Campagna may appear in Claude’s later work in homage to the patron, but indirectly these depictions also reflect the transformation of Rome’s topography in the wake of social change. Mirka Beneš has illuminated this process with great clarity. Over the course of the century, the newly wealthy papal families and their entourages bought off casali, or working farms on feudal lands, from the failing medieval nobility. The parvenus were Borghese, Giustiniani, Barberini, Pamphilj. Their policies were to invest in land as a stable commodity, but to move it away from agricultural use toward grazing. Landowners may have made money from this policy, but the impact on the economy was devastating: unemployment, grain shortages, the deepening of rural misery, depopulation in the Campagna, and the armies of the itinerant poor recorded in Rome by the middle of the century resulted from it. The shepherds and goatherds of Claude’s late landscapes may not accurately reflect the poverty of the Campagna’s inhabitants, for the real shepherds and goatherds were hole-dwellers, 23 Röthlisberger, ‘The Subject’, p. 221.

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fig. 86: claude Lorrain. preparatory drawing for The Sermon on the Mount, verso, with annotations giving measurement of distances. Drawing. 1656. teylers museum, haarlem. © teylers museum, haarlem.

starving, malaria-ridden labourers facing a short and brutal life. But Claude’s herders do reflect the new pastoral use of what once were rich agricultural lands. Arcadia with its shepherds did in actuality fit itself onto Rome’s topography, but it was an Arcadia of misery, much closer to the realities of a harsh Greek Arcadia before Virgil poetically transformed it. This change tells us a good deal about the reverse side of the represented landscape, so to speak, giving us the reality that was carefully erased by Claude in his idyllic rural dances and pastoral scenes. But the social and geographic alterations to the Campagna also tell us in very direct ways about the functions of the topographic imaginaire from the 1640s onward. As Benes has pointed out, the loss or gain of feudal lands in the Campagna was more than a monetary transaction. The ability to hold office in Rome was tied to these fiefs, and beyond even aristocratic titles or the rank that such offices and attendant wealth brought to the parvenus in Rome’s ever-changing papal court, ownership of these lands was the bedrock of social identity.24 We see this demonstrated 24 Beneš, ‘Pastoralism’, p. 100.

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fig. 87: catasto map. Late 17th century. archivio di stato, Rome. © archivio di stato di Roma.

in another form of landscape representation that played a crucial role in mid-century Rome: the catasto map (Fig. 87). Such maps employed agrimensori, or surveyors, in charting rural properties for tax purposes. Nearly five hundred survey maps recording precise boundaries of fiefs and casali made up the Catasto Allesandrino, drawn up for Pope Alexander VII in 1660–1661. They are often quite pictorial, putting small vignettes of fishing and hunting as well as goat herding into the surveyor’s map. Their ostensible purpose was to calculate taxes charged to landowners to pay for communal roads; their actual use was to document and halt the changeover from agricultural use of the land to grazing herds, and thus to boost the Roman grain supply.25 The catasto map was a surveyed drawing, and despite its pictorial additions, such as leaping goats and shepherds, it is obviously closer to a map than to the kind of topographic view that I have been likening to Claude’s and Bamboccio’s works. But its importance in mid-seicento Rome runs parallel to the concerns for topography I have been documenting in their paintings. In focusing on the limekiln at the gates of the city, Bamboccio and his followers portray the topography of Rome at the edge of the city, at the point where rural ownership of land gives way to civic authority. And the bambocciata shows the border between labour and indigence, a border 25 Benes, ‘Pastoralism’, p. 100, p. 364 n 21; Passigli, “Ricostruzione cartografica”, p. 161–184.

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threatening to break down as Rome’s civic authority failed to control the indigent poor. The links between Claude’s techniques of representing and the arts of surveying, as seen in his View of Trinità dei Monti, allowed for his creative transposition of the real topography in relation to an imagined world of poverty and crime. Claude may have been aware of the parallels between his arts and those of the agrimensori who charted the dimensions of property in the Campagna. Certainly he was aware of serving those landowners by inserting the imagined dimensions of their identities and ranks into the measured landscapes of his later paintings. Claude perpetuates his early trait of including some contemporary sign of the patron’s identity within his landscapes: the banners that fly on ships’ masts portray the family heraldry, the stories enacted create moral parallels to the activities and identities of his patrons. Röthlisberger has pointed out how this trait expands in Claude’s later career, and informs the majority of his paintings for the ‘gran principe o gran cardinale’, the elite of Europe for whom Claude exclusively worked.26 The topography that Claude gathers for them from his sketches and from prior paintings such as the Trees in the Vigna Madama, kept by him in the studio for years, no longer yield work done literally dal vivo, but nonetheless remain rooted in the contemporary realities of Rome—a reality more ineffable, a topography more internal than that of his Bamboccianti colleagues. It is the topography of his patrons’ wishes, dreams, and aspirations. Across Europe, the role of the draftsman had ancient roots in the activity of measuring land for patrons and feudal lords: delving into the etymology of the words for ‘draftsman’ (rather than artist or craftsman) and ‘surveyor’ shows their near-identical social role as servants within a feudal household, a remnant of the official role of the agrimensores of Roman times. They measured and charted the ownership of their patron, an ownership that was the very foundation of citizenry, authority, and social identity. The draftsman in the landscape sketched in by these Seicento artists was a relic, but an important one, of this now-invisible role, somewhat different to that which we now think of as the artist. From being the sign of authenticity in nae’t leven drawing of antiquities, the depicted draftsman became a sign of rebellious Northerners’ identities in Rome. But by about 1640, the motif underwent another sea change, and Claude’s work is not alone in revealing it as the role of servant of patrons’ desires, draftsman of feudal identity. Parallel to Claude’s depictions, and equally emerging from the tradition of topographic landscape drawing, Stefano della Bella’s representations of the artist at work in the landscape date to his years in Rome during the 1640s. They do not show us the draftsman sketching the landscape itself; instead, his prints depict the artist sketching a monument to his patron. In one of his prints, it is a young Medici prince who sits drawing from the great Medici Vase and representing a side of it not revealed in the primary view of the engraving (Fig. 88). This is a playful motif, to be sure, but it still appears that della Bella was aware that this form of dal vivo work had come to 26 Röthlisberger, ‘The Subject’; the theme is taken up again on a more general level in Maclean, “O gran principe”, p. 223–234. See most recently Beaven, ‘Cardinal Camillo Massimi’, p. 7–22.

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fig. 88: stefano della Bella. prince cosimo iii de’ medici Drawing the medici vase. Romae in hortis Medicæis. vas marmoreum eximium. 1656. etching with engraving. open access, metropolitan museum, new york.

indicate something else—a form of witnessing that recorded not only visible realities, but also unseen dimensions of his patrons’ identities. In his later years, as well, the Pisan artist/engineer trained by Parigi, Ercole Bazzicaluva turns his topographies from the surveying of actual Medici property to the representation of ‘rare and imaginary lands’ offered to the Grand Duke in homage. If the emphasis within the topographic imaginary in the early seventeenth century was on topography and the artist as surveyor of the real, by the 1640s it had evolved toward the imagined, and the invisible, the realm of identity and dream, but especially the realm of the patron rather than the artist. The difference between Claude’s later topographic motifs and those of the Bamboccianti can perhaps best be brought out by one final example of the topographic imaginary in Roman painting. Michael Sweerts shows us the same motif as Claude’s draftsman surrounded by low-life working figures, in his painting of 1646–1647 The

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fig. 89: michael sweerts. Artist Sketching Bernini’s Neptune Fountain in the Villa Montalto. 1646. oil on canvas. Boijmans museum, Rotterdam. © museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

Artist Sketching Bernini’s Neptune Fountain (Fig. 89). In Sweerts’s image, the artist sits and sketches in the grounds of the now-destroyed Villa Montalto, which was located near the Baths of Diocletian, just off of Piazza de’ Termini in today’s Rome. We know from seicento maps, as well as from a brief description by the artist and writer Giovanni Baglione, how the grounds of the villa were originally laid out.27 From these sources we can deduce that Sweerts has imaginatively rearranged the topography, opening out the walls of the villa to the street, bringing the actual tradesmen’s workshops, which were at the gates of the villa, into an impossible visual juxtaposition with Bernini’s sculpture inside the grounds. These boutiques for tradesmen were themselves a legacy of an earlier market on the spot. The Fiera di Farfa, the local equivalent of Tuscany’s Impruneta fair, had been temporarily transferred from Farfa to this site during the reign of Pope Paul V. As Laura Laureati pointed out, Sweerts, in representing his laborers around the artist at work, may be drawing from the actual people who worked in this place, but also remembering the heritage of the Fiera that had sometimes occupied the site. 27 Giovanni Baglione wrote that the Villa Montalto had a ‘nobil portone verso la piazza di Termine’ that had ‘gran numero di cassette, e di botteghe in cima alla piazza, acciocché servissero per uso della fiera, che in questo luogo volea si tenesse’. Cited by Laura Laureati in her catalogue entry on Sweerts’s painting, in Porzio, Da Caravaggio a Ceruti, p. 334.

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Around the draftsman are grouped the kinds of tradesmen so often represented in the arti di Roma prints: a knife grinder at his wheel; a stone cutter who lies back against his stones and dreams; a butcher who brings his cleaver, as if to have it sharpened; a woman spinning with her distaff. Some at work and some at rest, several of these craftsmen are conspicuously idle, their arms folded, hands stilled. Why has Sweerts put his draftsman at work in this crowd, and why put them all into relation with Bernini’s Neptune sculpture? As with Claude’s joining of the draftsman with the motifs of milking and shooting, the answer to this question may lie in a play of words and a corresponding play of concepts about the work of representation. It is striking how many of the tradesmen Sweerts depicts are involved with the activity of cutting and carving. The knife grinder who sharpens the blades for cutting is at the centre of the group. But the knife grinder at his wheel had a dual and ambivalent pictorial context. On the one hand, he was the commonest feature of the arti or cris de Paris prints of workers and itinerant tradesmen; texts such as Tomaso Garzoni’s Piazza universale di tutti le professioni in 1585 make it clear that this job was the most painful and exhausting of all the petty trades. The grinder’s work yielded literally nothing—it only subtracted material from the blades he honed. The knife grinder next to Sweerts’s draftsman is a figure of the most abject poverty, according to this Italian vision of work. On the other hand, Dutch emblems of the knife grinder’s wheel represent a notion entirely opposite to the Italian evaluation of knife grinding as an actual trade. Jacob Cats’s emblem Dat, nec habet, from his Sinne- en Minnebeelden of 1627, is one of several examples that present the knife grinder as a symbol of the repetitive labour of education, of ‘practice sharpening wit’.28 The idea came into the emblem literature through rather distinguished sources, from a passage in Horace’s Ars Poetica. Sweerts’s Roman depictions of artists at work in drawing studios and academies show his awareness of this idea of education as repetitive work. He represents artistic practice as a constant repetition of traces that would slowly yield mastery over the represented forms of nature.29 This is a view of learning and of craft not likely to appeal to Italian viewers, 28 Jacob Cats, ‘Dat, nec habet’, Emblem XXV, Sinne- en Minnebeelden (1627) as cited in Henkel and Schöne, Emblemata, cols. 1411–1413. 29 Sweerts’s Roman paintings contain several motifs that seem to refer to a very specific notion of study and practice in the arts, particularly in his paintings that represent the artist at work, including The Artist’s Studio with a Woman Sewing, Collection Rau—Fondation UNICEF, Cologne (Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, p. 110), where the woman’s repetitive gesture in sewing has been compared to the repetition of forms by the young artists (Wieseman, in The Age of Rubens, p. 442). One of Sweerts’s paintings of artists at work studying plaster casts of antiquities was originally paired with a pendant scene of Roman low-life, card players in the street with brawling figures behind them; as Jansen and Sutton note, this unusual pairing may have been meant to illustrate the opposition of industry (the artists at work) with idleness (men idling at cards or fighting); Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, p. 99. Sweerts also pairs a woman with a spindle at work with a man holding a jug of drink as pendants likely embodying the opposition of industry and idleness. Jansen points to this opposition between work and sloth in the Dutch translation of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (Amsterdam, 1644), p. 347, under the heading ‘Studio, Naerstighheyt, Soeckt oefninge in de konsten’, or ‘Studio, Diligence, Seeks practice in the arts’. Kultzen, Michael Sweerts, had also pointed out this connection, and

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however. In this view, labour does not lead to degradation: on the contrary, repeated work leads to skill, as the draftsman practices his skills, to achieve some artistic end represented by the modern achievement of Bernini in sculpture. The sculpture, though, is the product of those sharpened tools that labourers use as well—the activity of carving seems to unite the sculpture and the trades that Sweerts has arrayed around the artist at work. There may well be a reference here to the tradition of the paragone, or contest between sculpture and drawing, as has been suggested for Sweerts’s pictures of the artist’s workshop, where painting and drawing are so prominently contrasted with casts of classical sculptures. But going beyond the tradition of the paragone, Sweerts here creates a play of ideas about the notion of sharpness: Bernini’s work is a product of his infamous sharpness of wit—his agudezza—as well as the sharpness of tools. It is entirely possible that, as Wendy Thompson suggested, Sweerts was inspired by the publication of Carracci’s drawings of itinerant tradesmen in the Arti di Bologna in 1646.30 This is the first year that Sweerts is documented in Rome, where the volume was published. G.B. Agucchi’s polemical preface to this volume of prints after Carracci was a very strong statement against naturalism, repudiating the vulgar art of depicting flawed realities. Perhaps it was as a response to that preface stating that naturalistic art was for low people, Sweerts painted his image in which workers, not just the uomini intendenti, the men of learning, have the chance to lean on their idle hand and think about education, wit, and craft.31 In this bambocciata, uniting the figures of low people, artist, and recognizable site and monuments yields a cunning juxtaposition of ideas, turning the topographic view into an imagined reality that harmonizes two conflicting visions of art and work. Sweerts’s artist absorbed into this world of idleness and industry stands at the crossroads between the labourer and the man of wit and learning, between a Northern valuation of craft within the social hierarchy and an Italian definition of the artist as man of intellect, not mechanical servitude. This is an ambivalent bambocciata indeed. It makes a complex image out of Roman trade and poverty, within the recognizable topography of wealth and privilege at the Villa Montalto. The artist within the topographic imaginaire was caught at these crossroads, suspended between the low-life scene and the high viewer. When the Bamboccianti and Claude depict the put it in relation to the Rotterdam Artist Sketching Bernini’s Neptune Fountain. Another study that highlights Sweerts’s depiction of the artist at work in the context of his ideas about work and practice is Pestilli, ‘The Burner of the Midnight Oil’, p. 119–133. Finally, Wendy Thompson’s thesis discusses Sweerts’s place among the Bamboccianti in Rome, and quite rightly in my view stresses that his works in Rome seem to respond to the 1646 publication of Carracci’s Arti di Bologna and its polemical preface by Massani; Thompson, ‘Pigmei pizzicano dei giganti’, p. 504–580. 30 Thompson, ‘Pigmei pizzicano dei’Giganti’, suggests that the specific city tradesmen shown in Bambocciate of the 1640s were inspired by the Carracci Arti di Bologna. 31 The preface to their publication in 1646 juxtaposes the figures of workers in the Arti with such huomini intendenti (McTighe, ‘Perfect Deformity’, p. 75–91).

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topography against which the poor of Rome practice their work and their idleness, it is no coincidence that their practice as artists is haunted by the paired images of the idle labourer and the draftsman at work, the herdsman who leans on the shoulder of the artist. Their imagined figures of artists, translating topography into speaking images, define the artistic sign—and the sign of the artist—as an empty ‘shifter’ in linguistic terms, moving between representations of the real world and the dreams dreamed by a leisured elite. Surveying the Roman scene, the artists of the topographic imaginaire mapped the desires of several generations of Europe’s wealthy. Yet they did so through the act of tracing and measuring, with clarity and objectivity, the territory of the city, its tradesmen and its poor.

Works Cited Amico, Bernardino. Trattato delle piante et imagini de i sacri edificii di terrasanta (Florence: Pietro Cecconcelli, 1619). Beaven, Lisa, ‘Cardinal Camillo Massimi: Amateur Draftsman and Pupil of Poussin’, Master Drawings 41 (2003): 14–29. Beaven, Lisa, ‘Cardinal Camillo Massimo and Claude Lorrain: Landscape and the Construction of Identity in Seicento Rome’, Storia dell’Arte 112 (2005): 23–36. Beneš, Mirka ‘Pastoralism in the Roman Baroque Villa and in Claude Lorrain’, in Mirka Beneš and Dianne Harris eds., Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001): 88–113. Beneš, Mirka, ‘Claude Lorrain’s Pendant Landscapes of 1646–50 for Camillo Pamphilj, Nephew of Pope Innocent X. Classicism, Architecture, and Gardens as Contexts for the Artist’s Roman Patronage’, Storia dell’Arte 112 (2005): 37–90. Bosse, Abraham, Manière universelle de M. Desargues pour pratiquer la perspective (Paris: Pierre Des Hayes, 1648). Bruwaert, Edmond. ‘Jacques Callot et Don Giovanni de’ Medici,’ Gazette des Beaux-Arts 9 (1924): 118–127. Burke, Peter, ‘The Virgin of the Carmine’, in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987): 191–206. Bury, Michael, ‘The Measure of the Virgin’s Foot’, in Debra Higgs Strickland, ed., Images of Medieval Sanctity: Essays in Honour of Gary Dickson (Leiden: Brill, 2007): 121–134. D’Alessio, Silvana, ‘Masaniello’s Revolt: A “Remedy” for the English Body Politic’, Restoration and EighteenthCentury Theatre Research 17 (2002): 10–19. Devreese, Jozef T., and Guido Vanden Berghe, Magic is no magic. The wonderful World of Simon Stevin 1548– 1620 (Southampton: WIT, 2007). Griffiths, Antony, ‘Non-Commercial State’, in The Print before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550–1820 (London: British Museum, 2016): 321–323. Henkel, Arthur, and Albrecht Schöne, Emblemata: Handbuch der Sinnbildkunst des XVI und XVII Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1967). Kitson, Michael, Studies on Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin (London: Pindar Press, 2000). Hugo, Hermannus. Obsidio Brediana (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1626). Jansen, Guido, and Peter Sutton, Michael Sweerts (1618–1664), ed. Duncan Bull (ex. cat. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 2002). Krautheimer, Richard, ‘Introduction to an Iconography of Medieval Architecture’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 1–33.

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Kren, Thomas ‘Chi non vuol Bacco: Roland van Laer’s Burlesque Painting about Dutch Artists in Rome’, Simiolus 11 (1980): 63–80. Langdon, Helen. Claude Lorrain (Oxford: Phaidon, 1989). Maclean, Rosemary, ‘O gran principe o gran prelato: Claude’s Roman Patrons and the Appeal of His Landscape Paintings’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 126 (1995): 223–234. McDonald, Mark, ‘Cesare Bassano’s 1635 Siege of Valenza’, Print Quarterly 28 (2011): 288–292. McTighe, Sheila, ‘Perfect Deformity, Ideal Beauty and the Imaginaire of Work: The Reception of Annibale Carracci’s Arti di Bologna in 1646’, The Oxford Art Journal 16 (1993): 75–91. Meier Drees, Marijke, ‘The Revolt of Masaniello on Stage: an International Perspective’, in Theo Hermans and Reinier Salvedra, eds., From Revolt to Riches: Culture and History of the Low Countries (London: UCL Press, 2017): 207–213. Parshall, Peter, ‘Imago Contrafacta: Images and Facts in the Northern Renaissance’, Art History 16 (1993): 554–574. Pestilli, Livio, ‘The Burner of the Midnight Oil: A Caravaggesque Rendition of a Classic Exemplum—An Unrecognized Self-Portrait by Michael Sweerts?’ Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 56 (1993): 119–133. Pollak, Martha, ‘Siege Views’, in her Cities at War in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 109–154. Porzio, Francesco, ed. Da Caravaggio a Ceruti: La scena di genere e l’immagine dei pitocchi nella pittura italiana (ex. cat. Brescia, Museo di Santa Giulia, 1998–1999). Préaud, Maxime, and Sophie Join-Lambert, Abraham Bosse savant graveur (ex. cat. Tours, Musée des BeauxArts, 2004). Röthlisberger, Marcel. Claude Lorrain: The Paintings. 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). Röthlisberger, Marcel, ‘The Subject of Claude’s Paintings’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 55 (1960): 209–224. Roworth, Wendy W., ‘The Evolution of History Painting: Masaniello’s Revolt and Other Disasters in Seventeenth-Century Naples’, The Art Bulletin 75 (1993): 219–234. Saxl, Fritz, ‘The Battle Scene without a Hero: Aniello Falcone and His Patrons’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3 (1940): 70–87. Sinisgalli, Rocco. Il contributo di Simon Stevin allo sviluppo scientifico della prospettiva artificiale ed i suoi precedenti storici (Rome: L’Erma di Breschneider, 1978). Thompson, Wendy. ‘Pigmei pizzicano dei giganti’: The Encounter Between Netherlandish and Italian Artists in Seventeenth-century Rome (PhD diss. Johns Hopkins University 1997). Villari, Rosario. The Revolt of Naples (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). Weston, Giulia Martina. Niccolò Tornioli (1606–1651): Art and Patronage in Baroque Rome (Rome: Artemide, 2016). Sutton, Peter and Marjorie E. Wieseman, eds. The Age of Rubens, ex. cat. Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1993. Zurawski, Simone, ‘New Sources for Jacques Callot’s Map of the Siege of Breda’, The Art Bulletin 70 (1988): 621–639.

Conclusion Abstract The implications that follow on from this study may cause us to question more deeply the art theory or art criticism of this period. Representing from life involved different norms for judging the value of copies versus originals, of overt artistry versus a selfeffacement before nature, and of equating images with words. Keywords: Bernini The Impresario, Giambattista Marino, The Domenichino Affair

Sculptor and impresario, Gianlorenzo Bernini was no enthusiast of Caravaggio’s naturalism or of northern artists’ working practices. His transformations of his own models apparently owed more to study of Annibale Carracci’s Roman work, with its naturalism mediated by a dynamic emulation of Raphael and classical sculpture. However, Bernini did once make a theatrical comment on the practice of drawing ad vivum, dal vivo. His comedy I due Covielli, put on in 1637 on an improvised stage in Piazza San Pietro, was created at a point when the popularity of Caravaggism and of other forms of naturalism had peaked in Rome. Bernini typically wrote, directed and acted in the play. The curtain opened to reveal to the audience that there was another audience depicted on the other side of the stage, and this second audience was also seated in the familiar terrain of the Vatican. Bernini and his brother then came on stage. The two men sat down, one facing the ‘real’ audience and the other facing the ‘feigned’ audience. Each then proceeded to sketch the view from where they sat, thus depicting, ad vivum, both the real and the represented topography.1 Bernini and his brother enacted the by-then well-known motif of the draftsman at work within a drawing, and in putting it on stage, they exposed it as a comically empty cliché. The represented artist, representing things that we can see ourselves, is hardly a riveting sight on the stage. Doubling this action, and positioning each artist so that they faced the real and the represented audiences simultaneously, at least made a witty play on the old theatrical pleasure of tricking the eye of the beholder. Which of these two divided realities was an imitation, and which the real? It was a common poetic trope of the Seicento, calling the spectator’s self-awareness and self-sufficiency into question. Giambattista Marino’s poem on viewing his portrait by 1 Bernini, The Impresario (1985); Beecher, ‘Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Impresario’ (1984). The trope of the world and its mirror image is discussed in Richard Bernheimer, ‘Theatrum Mundi’ (1986).

McTighe, S., Representing from Life in Seventeenth-century Italy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press doi 10.5117/ 9789462983281_concl

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Caravaggio turns on the same doubling and division: ‘I saw another self, my very self / Almost as a new Janus [I was] divided in two’.2 Bernini’s appropriation of the motif of the draftsman at work, sketching not just a landscape view but the audience themselves, made the viewer and their representation of the scene into the very subject of the play. In one sense, this was the central theme in Bernini’s art. The surviving fragment of his play La Fontana di Trevi demonstrated that for Bernini the real source of vivid illusion was the artist’s mind or hand, but the perceptions of viewers themselves. In I Due Covielli, Bernini also vividly demonstrated to his expectant audience just how boring and undramatic were the contents of ‘merely’ mimetic works of art depicted from the live model. It must have been as dramatic as watching paint dry to look at Bernini’s two draftsmen at work. Bernini exposed the represented draftsman as a paradoxical sign for the realism of imitation dal vivo, whose ultimate referent was no longer ‘life’ itself, but the person for whom life was represented, the patron/beholder. His joke illuminates this mode of representation I have been calling the topographic imaginary, which through allusion and associations with the real people and real topographies manipulated the beliefs of its audience. What Claude’s serious use of the sign and Bernini’s satire both claim is that the depicted draftsman serves as a kind of empty container for the vision of the beholder, a ‘shifter’ as linguists call such signs, moving between the authentic vision of the artist who represents the visible world and the secondhand vision of the patron/viewer who witnesses that world ‘as if it were seen in life’. Representing from life in seventeenth-century Italy, which has been approached here through the art of Caravaggio, the drawings and etchings of Callot and Claude Lorrain, and the naturalism of Flemish and Dutch artists working for primarily Italian buyers in Rome, puts the emphasis on the role of the viewer as much as on the artist as eye-witness. This is the case even when, as with Cerquozzi’s The Revolt of Masaniello, the artist is an absent eyewitness: the audience for this wondrous painting was meant to be moved precisely by this paradoxical junction of apparent presence and actual absence. Bernini’s comic motif of the two artists at work points to the appeal of this paradox, but also points up the absence of human drama that was its liability. The definition of working dal vivo or dal naturale that I have tried to capture in these essays diverges from the current scholarship focused on Dutch practices of working naer het leven.3 This difference in approach comes in part from my emphasis here on the viewer’s response, and the play of wit or ingegno, agudezza that both artist and viewer were invited to join in with. Scholarship on Dutch art and its practice of depicting naer het leven has focused on the proto-scientific exploration of nature, a visual culture of techne or craft that was botanic and cartographic, microscopic and telescopic. From the studies presented here, it seems that depicting dal 2 3

Cropper, ‘The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio’. Claudia Swan, ‘Ad Vivum’.

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vivo for Caravaggio or Callot was, in contrast, a courtly play with representation. It often involved pushing at the boundaries of representation, by suppressing signs of artistry and heightening the sense of the image as made by nature itself—only to simultaneously reassert high artistry through an overt emulation of past art. We have seen that representing from life became a performance art, with Callot and Filippo Napoletano working to entertain Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici in Florence. Different modes of self-effacement, or artful artlessness, led to devious forms of artistic self-assertion. Sometimes, as we have seen, that artistry is reintroduced into the dal vivo image through a juxtaposition of extreme naturalism with motifs that break from the logic of naturalism, motifs identifiable as coming not from life but from the imagination. The image made from life in seventeenth-century Italy communicated to its contemporary audience through such juxtapositions, and by alluding to actions and ideas associated with recognizable places and motifs. The studies here have also shown that Italian examples shared traits with Dutch and Flemish arts. This is striking in the case of the practice of replicating images made from life. Caravaggio’s two versions of The Lute Player, his two versions of The Boy Bitten by a Lizard, his variants of the The Gypsy Fortune Teller, can now be seen as parallel to Dutch examples such as the limekiln drawings by Jan Asselijn and Jan Both, made on site in Rome, then copied numerous times and painted in the Netherlands—but still retaining their status as ‘made from life’, because the ultimate author of the image was not the artist by nature itself. Callot’s practice of replicating an etching or a whole series of etchings made by drawing dal vivo (the Capricci, The Fair at Impruneta) grew out of his exchange of drawings with Filippo Napoletano, and their practice of replicating and reworking each other’s drawings made from life. These practices of replicating nature and then replicating the representations of nature, show a marked deviation from contemporary art critical concerns about artistic invention. This hallmark of artistic genius came to the fore of critical discussions of painting at a time when the practice of working dal vivo was very popular. It was in the 1620s that the legal case around Domenichino’s supposed plagiarism of Agostino Carracci’s altarpiece of The Last Communion of St. Jerome pointed up the crucial issue of artist’s display of invention—or lack of it.4 The legal case did not succeed, and later artists including Poussin used Domenichino’s altarpiece as an example of good invention, that both referred to its model in past art but surpassed it in its novel and subtle exploration of expression. Artists emulating antiquity and the Renaissance needed to rework old narrative subjects in new ways. Yet this stress on invention shows a backlash against the taste for vivid naturalism and topographic depictions which were not inventive but appeared to be repetitive.

4

Cropper, The Domenichino Affair (2005).

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A major difference between northern and southern Europe in the practice of working in the presence of the model is its relationship to cultural tradition. In the north it was seen as fundamental to northern practice, with Karel van Mander placing it in a tradition going back centuries to Jan and Hubert van Eyck. By contrast, working dal vivo was continually called into question in Italy as a foreign element. Copying from nature, ‘mere’ aping of the visible world, was described as mute or inert, failing to communicate and failing to assert the creative presence of the artist. Above all, working as Caravaggio was said to do, in the presence of the model, was portrayed as marginal to the Renaissance practices of idealization and of pictorial narrative, in critical writings on the arts in Italy, from Giovanni Battista Agucchi to Giovan Pietro Bellori. It is ultimately in the relation of words to images, more generally the ut pictura poesis tradition in Italian art, the sisterhood of painting and poetry, that we most clearly see the oppositional quality of representing dal vivo. Rather than engage with this high practice of representing narrative histories, artists in Italy working from life took an alternative route to bring words and images together. This is the clearest path that opens out from the present study, toward countering the dominant views we have inherited from authoritative Seicento writers such as Bellori. Bellori’s anti-Caravaggism, his sense that naturalism was vulgar and illiterate, has hidden a plethora of interesting art from modern view, and we need to question the assumptions we inherit from his writings in order to understand the intelligence and complexity of naturalistic representation in this period. With Claude Lorrain’s verbal-visual punning on the phrase tirer au vif we see a response to the ut pictura poesis tradition from an eccentric angle. We are likely to find more examples of this kind of visual wit with future research. But it is one of several openings initially explored in the present studies, which I hope will allow new approaches to Italian naturalism. Other ways of enfolding words and images may emerge from the apparently mute topographies of naturalism in seventeenth-century Italy.

Works Cited Beecher, Donald, ‘Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Impresario: The Artist as Supreme Trickster’, Uni versity of Toronto Quarterly 53 (1984): 236–247. Bernheimer, Richard, ‘Theatrum Mundi’, The Art Bulletin 38 (1956): 225–247. Bernini, Gianlorenzo, The Impresario, D. Beecher, ed. and trans.,(Toronto: Carleton University Centre for Renaissance Studies, 1985). Cropper, Elizabeth. The Domenichino Affair: Novelty, Imitation and Theft in Seventeenth-Century Rome (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). Cropper, Elizabeth, ‘The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal 26 (1991) 193–212. Swan, Claudia, ‘Ad Vivum, Naer Het Leven, From the Life: Defining a Mode of Representation’, Word and Image 11 (1995): 353–372.

Index Agucchi, Giovanni Battista 23, 25, 199, 241, 248 Alberti, Cherubino 20, 43 Alberti, Leon Battista 206–207, 209–210, 214 n.59 Ameyden, Teodoro 22, 40, 43, 89 Amico, Bernardo 119 Antoniacci, Cesare 101, 108, 111, 143, 187 Arcadelt, Jacques 61–62 Arcimboldo 51 Asselijn, Jan 139, 182–183, 192, 194–198, 202, 214–215, 219, 247 Baglione, Giovanni 42, 47, 49, 53, 72, 89, 116, 239 Baldinucci, Filippo 91–92, 98, 103, 108–109, 112, 116, 140, 145–146, 151, 182–183, 206–208, 210, 225–226 Bamboccio see Laer, Pieter van Barberini, Maffeo (Pope Urban VIII) 55, 230 Bargagli, Scipione 167 Barthes, Roland 18 Bazzicaluva, Ercole 127–128, 143, 231, 238 Bella, Stefano della 142, 163, 169, 174–175, 177–178, 230–231, 233, 237–238 Bellori, Giovan Pietro 16, 25, 39, 41–43, 47–49, 57, 58, 70, 73, 77, 81, 85, 87, 192, 199, 248 Beneš, Mirka 233–235 Berchem, Jacques 62 Berni, Francesco 172–173 Bernini, Gianlorenzo 239–240, 254–256 Bocchi, Achille 79–80 Bonarelli, Prospero 112, 120 Bonasone, Giulio 79 Borghese, Cardinal Scipione 52 Borromeo, Cardinal Francesco 52, 57 Bosch, Hieronymus 116 Bosse, Abraham 98, 122, 229 Both, Jan 139, 192, 194–198, 214–215, 247 Bournonville, Alexandre de 104 Brahe, Tycho 36 Breenburgh, Bartolomeus 203 Brill, Matthias 109 Brill, Paul 109, 203 Bruegel the Elder, Pieter 21, 32–37, 43, 52, 60, 95, 98, 116, 136–137 Brueghel, Jan 48, 52, 56–60, 87–90 Bruwaert, Edmond 121, 127 Buonarotti the Younger, Michelangelo 117–118, 129–135, 142–143, 171, 173 Buytewech, Willem 32 Callot, Jacques 16, 24, 32–33, 37, 52–53, 59, 83, 91–144, 145–178, 180, 183, 188, 201, 215, 221, 226, 228–230, 247 Camiz, Franca Trinchieri 72 Cantagallina, Giovanni Francesco 119 Cantagallina, Remigio 11, 59, 95, 103–110, 114–115, 119, 129, 137, 141, 231 Caravaggio, Michelanglo Merisi da 16–17, 19, 22, 24, 26, 38, 41–90, 139, 145, 192, 201–202, 227, 247–248

Carracci, Agostino 79, 92, 247 Carracci, Annibale 22, 43, 47, 92, 241, 245 Castiglione, Baldassare 117 Cavaliere d’Arpino, Giuseppe 48–49, 52 Cecco del Caravaggio 47, 64, 66, 69–70, 74–75, 82 Cecconcelli, Pietro 112 Cerquozzi, Michelangelo 16, 120, 221–231 Chiabrera, Gabriele 117 Christiansen, Keith 44 Christine of Lorraine 162 Claude see Lorrain, Claude Cock, Hieronymus 32, 204–205 Collignon, François 115, 226 Cort, Cornelis 137, 157 Croce, Giulio Cesare 173 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin 169 Dijk, Floris Claesz van 48–52 Domenichino 247 Doomer, Lambert 128, 137–138 Dorico, Valerio 62 Dughet, Gaspard 116 Dujardin, Karel 198 Dürer, Albrecht 22, 30, 36, 38, 83, 137, 226 Dyck, Antonie van 17 Eakins, Thomas 16 Elsheimer, Adam 116 Erasmus 79–80, 145, 149, 167–168, 170, 175–176 Eyck, Jan van 57 Fakhir al-Din II 111, 125 Farnese, Ranuccio, Duke of Parma 163–164 Félibien, André 25, 103–104, 108, 116, 129, 142, 145–146, 157, 176 Fialetti, Odoardo 157 Figino, Ambrogio 51 Flamen, Albert 98 Frommel, Christoph 72 Galilei, Galileo 36, 94, 110, 117–118, 127, 141, 161, 173, 177, 224 Galle, Theodore 32 Gardano, Antonio 62 Gargiulo, Domenico 224–225 Gellée, Claude see Lorrain, Claude Gentileschi, Orazio 232 Gheyn, Jacques de 22, 51 Giambologna 162, 167, 174 Gillis, Nicolas 52 Giustiniani, Vincenzo 22, 42–44, 55, 61, 70, 75 Goltzius, Hendrick 36–37, 116, 137, 157, 203–204 Gombrich, Ernst 27–28 Gonzaga, Ferdinando duke of Mantua 163, 173 Gowing, Lawrence 199

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Goya, Francisco 148 Guazzo, Stefano 117 Guevara, Antonio 170 Guicciardini, Ludovico 118 Heemskerk, Maarten van 203 Hem, Laurens van der 128 Henriet, Israël 115 Hermannus, Hugo 229 Hoefnagel, Joris van 22, 104 Hoffman, E.T.A. 148, 172 Holbein, Hans 38 Houck, Pieter 136 Hyre, Laurent de la 232 Inghirami, Tomasso Fedra 121, 127 Janeck, Axel 214–215 Jon, François du 23 Junius see Jon, François du Laer, Pieter van 16, 182–183, 192–198, 201, 204–205, 207–208, 221, 223, 231, 236 Laer, Roland van 232 Lafréry, Antoine 150 Lavin, Irving 60, 77–78 Layolles, Francesco de 62 Le Sueur, Eustache 232 Leoni, Ottavio 130 Levine, David 193 Liagno, Filippo Teodoro di see Napoletano, Filippo Lingelbach, Johann 193, 198, 205, 208 Lorrain, Claude 16, 24, 33, 38, 59, 83, 91, 139, 179–218 Lucas van Leyden 137 Malvasia, Cesare 27 Mancini, Giulio 42, 70, 86, 89 Mander, Karel van 35, 36–38, 49, 95, 136, 201–202 Marino, Giambattista 191 Marolles, Michel de 145, 169 Mattei, Ciriaco 64, 66, 78 Meckenem, Israhel van 31 Medici, Alessandro 172 Medici, Cosimo II de’ 37, 92, 109, 111, 116, 119, 124–125, 127, 129–135, 140, 149, 247 Medici, Ferdinando I de’ 112, 125, 161–162, 167 Medici, Ferdinando II de’ 127 Medici, Francesco di Ferdinando I de’ 165, 167 Medici, Giovanni de’ 118, 124 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 134 Medici, Lorenzo di Ferdinando I de’ 141, 146, 151, 159–160, 162–163 Medici, Maria Maddalena de’ 130 Melandroni, Fillide 75–77 Melion, Walter 16, 36, 40, 49, 89, 201–203, 219 Merian, Matthias 188 Miel, Jan 198 Minniti, Mario 72 Mirou, Antonie 136 Montaigne, Michel de 26, 81, 186 Montauto, Giulio Barbolani di 121, 127 Monte, Cardinal Francesco Maria del 49–50, 55, 61–63, 70, 116

Montoya, Pedro 72 Moretto da Brescia 48 Moroni, Giovanni Battista 42, 48 Munster, Sebastian 60–61 Napoletano, Filippo 24, 37, 95, 98, 113–117, 129–135, 139–141, 146, 180–181, 247 Nicot, Jean 26, 186 Novellanus, Simon 33 Ostrow, Steven 64 Parigi, Giulio 92, 98–99, 101, 103–104, 108–109, 111, 115, 118, 121, 127, 137, 145–146, 157 Parmigianino 137 Parshall, Peter 28, 30, 226–228 Passeri, Giovanni Battista 191–192 Peeters, Clara 48, 52, 56–57 Piccheno, Curzio 164, 171 Porta, Giovanni Battista della 63–72, 84 Poussin, Nicolas 199, 204, 232 Raimondi, Marcantonio 36, 174 Reitenau, Konrad van 136 Rembrandt van Rijn 137, 148, 174–175 Reni, Guido 43, 85–87 Ripa, Cesare 166–167, 170 Röthlisberger, Marcel 199, 237 Roworth, Wendy 224 Rubens, Pieter Paul 183, 188–190 Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor 22, 33, 36, 43, 51–52, 116, 136 Rudolf, Conrad 66 Sandrart, Joachim van 38, 179, 181–182, 199–200, 204 Savery, Roelant 21, 34, 36, 43, 51–52, 136–137 Schellinks, Willem 127, 137–139, 196, 202–203 Snyder, Joel 28 Snyders, Frans 52 Sozzifanti, Alessandro 124 Spada, Cardinal Bernardino 221, 223–224, 226 Spadaro, Micco see Gargiulo, Domenico Steland, Anne Charlotte 193 Stella, Jacques 95, 98, 129–135 Stevin, Simon 229 Stone, David 72 Stoskopff, Sébastien 151, 153, 158, 174 Strada, Famiano 226 Stradanus, Jan 161, 168, 170 Straet, Jan van der see Stradanus Strozzi, Giulio 75 Swan, Claudia 30, 202 Swanevelt, Harmen van 182, 187, 198 Sweerts, Michel 231, 238–242 Symonds, Richard 46 Tassi, Agostino 181 Tempesta, Antonio 161, 163, 193 Teniers the Younger, Daniel 110 Ternois, Daniel 98

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INDEx

Thomassin, Philippe 91 Thompson, Wendy 241 Vasari, Giorgio 172 Velázquez, Diego 230 Velde, Jan van de 32 Viator, Jean Pélerin called 208–209 Vignola, Giacomo 208 Villamena, Francesco 78–79 Villard de Honnecourt 28

Visscher, Claes Jansz 32, 205 Vitzthum, Wolfgang 113 Vredeman de Vries, Hans 209 Vries, Adrian de 33 Wals, Goffredo 181 Wijk, Thomas 198 Wood, Christopher S. 31 Zuccari, Federico 38, 72, 216