Collecting as Canon Formation: Art History and the Collection of Drawings in Early Modern Italy

  • Genevieve Warwick
Chapter

Abstract

This paper examines the role of cultural memory in determining the selection of works of art for a collection. It focuses on the collection of artists’ drawings by gentlemen amateurs in Rome circa 1700, centred around the figure of Sebastiano Resta. Traditionally, drawings were collected largely by artists who used them as aids in the creation of works of art in other media. However, the early modern period witnessed the rise of a new class of collectors for the drawing, gentlemen scholars and connoisseurs. These new owners selected and arranged their drawings according to new criteria. No longer primarily used as workshop tools, drawings became vehicles for scholarly reconstructions of the development of art. By arranging their drawings within albums in historical order, these early connoisseurs used their collections to put forward art-historical arguments about the development of artistic styles. The collection thus became a means of recollecting the past.

However, such representations of the past were not disinterested. Instead, a collection like Resta’s constituted the formation of a canon—a selective revision of history determined by his social and intellectual milieu. The purpose of the collection was to preserve, and to disseminate, this view of history and so to chart the future of the arts by shaping artistic memory. The paper seeks to analyse those aspects of Resta’s cultural inheritance that shaped his stylistic preferences and thus the formation of his collection.

Keywords

British Museum Early Modern Period Cultural Memory Stylistic Preference Immovable History 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    On Resta’s collection see especially A.E. Popham, “Sebastiano Resta and his Collections”, Old Master Drawings 10, 1936, pp. 1–19; N. Ivanoff, “Un ignoto codice Resta”, Emporium LX, 1963, pp. 168–70; G. Incisa della Rocchetta, “La ‘Galleria Portatile’ del p. Sebastiano Resta d. O.”, Oratorium, Archivium cal Writing in England”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 52, 1989, pp. 167–87; J. Wood, “Padre Resta’s Flemish Drawings. Van Diepenbeeck, Van Thulden, Rubens, and the School of Fontainebleau”, Master Drawings XXVIII, 1990, pp. 3–53.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    For general surveys on the history of drawing collecting see Charles de Tolnay, “Survey of the Development of Great Public and Private Collections”, History and Technique of Old Master Drawings: A Handbook, New York 1943, pp. 76–96; Joseph Meder, “Collecting”, The Mastery of Drawing, trans. Winslow Ames, New York 1978, vol. 1, pp. 47872–85.; Luigi Grassi, Il disegno italiano dal trecento al seicento, Venice 1956; Gianni C. Sciolla, (ed.), Il disegno: I grandi collezionisti, Milan 1992.Google Scholar
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    On this debate see Charles Dempsey, “The Carracci and the devout style in Emilia”, H.A. Millon, (ed.), Emilian Painting of the 16th and 17th centuries: A Symposium, Bologna 1987; and “National Expression in Italian Sixteenth-Century Art: Problems of the Past and Present” Richard Etlin, (ed.), Nationalism in the Visual Arts, (Studies in the History of Art, 29), Washington 1991, pp. 15–26. See also Jacques Thuillier, “Michelange au 17e siècle”, XVIIe siècle 36–7, 1957, p. 353. For further discussion of the debate within art criticism see Giovanna Perini, especially her study of Malvasia’s use of dialect, “Il lessico tecnico del Malvasia”, Convegno nazionale sui lessici tecnici del Sei e Settecento (Pisa, 1980), Florence 1981, pp. 219–53. For a classic interpretation of these debates in broader historical terms of shifting economic and political power centres, see Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg, “Centro e periferia”, Giovanni Previtali, (ed.), Storia dell’arte italiana. Questioni e metodi, Turin 1979, vol. 1, pp. 285–348.Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    On the issue of canon formation in literary criticism see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, Chicago 1994, for a call to examine the historical formation of literary canons. A special issue of Critical Inquiry 10, 1983–1984, was devoted to the issue of canon-formation, from which see, with reference to the visual arts, Michael Fried, “Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet”, pp. 510–42, where Fried analyses canons as a form of social or collective memory. The essays from this journal were later published as a book, Robert van Hallberg, (ed.), Canons, Chicago 1984. See also Walter Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander’s Schilderboeck, Chicago 1991.Google Scholar
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    Galleria Portatile, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, F.261 inf. A selection of drawings from the Galleria Portatile was published in facsimile by Giorgio Fubini, (ed.), Cento Tavole del Codice Resta, Fontes Ambrosiani, 29, Milan 1955, and the entire volume was published by Giulio Bora, (ed.), I disegni del Codice Resta, Fontes Ambrosiani, 56, Bologna 1976.Google Scholar
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    For example, Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie dei Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in Qua, (first published in Florence, 1681–1728), vols. 1–5 edited by F. Ranelli, vols. 6 & 7 edited by Paola Barocchi, Florence 1975; Carlo Cesare Malvasia, La Felsina Pittrice. Vite de’ Pittori (first published in Bologna, 1678), G.P. Zanotti (eds.), 2 vols., Bologna, 184; Marco Boschini, La carta del navegar pittoresco. Edizione critica con la “Breve Instruzione”, premessa alle “Ricche minere della Pittura Veneziana”, Anna Pallucchini (ed.), Venice & Rome 1966.Google Scholar
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    Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge 1983. See also Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vols., Paris 1984, Introduction.Google Scholar
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    See Francis Haskell, “The Market for Italian Art in the Seventeenth Century”, Past & Present 15, 1959, pp. 48–59; and of course Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations Between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque, (1963), rev. ed., New Haven 1980, Part II entitled “Dispersal”, pp. 169–244. Haskell’s analysis is based on that of the economic historian, Carlo M. Cipolla, “The decline of Italy-the case of a fully matured economy”, Economic History Review, 1952, pp. 178–87, who describes the ongoing decline of the Italian economy throughout the seventeenth century, attributing it to the loss of export markets in wool, silk, banking and shipping as northern Europe gained supremacy in these areas.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  9. 10.
    What remains of this collection is to be found in Madrid and, since the twentieth century, in British collections. The Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid owns a book numbered “XX” containing 44 drawings by seventeenth-century Neapolitan artists and 19 attributed to Aniello Falcone. See A.M. de Barcia, “El libro de dibujos llamado de Aniello Falcone”, Revista de Archivo, Bibl. y Museo IX, 1903, pp. 323–328. The remnants of a further four volumes are traceable in British collections: volume number 8, cited by Fritz Saxl, “The Battle scene without a Hero. Aniello Falcone and his Patrons”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3, 1939–1940, p. 76, is now at the National Gallery of Scotland as published by Keith Andrews, Catalogue of Italian Drawings. National Gallery of Scotland, 2 vols., Cambridge 1968, col. n. inv. D4890. It consists of 49 drawings and was evidently put together in Rome as the frontispiece states. Another volume of drawings variously attributed to Tintoretto and Domenico Tintoretto is at the British Museum, inv. 1907-7-17; yet another at the Society of Antiquaries in London according to Enriqueta Harris, “El Marqués del Carpio y sus cuadros de Vélazquez”, Archivo Espanol de Arte, 30, 1957, pp. 136–39. The fourth volume surfaced at a Christie’s London sale of 20 March 1973.Google Scholar
  10. 12.
    Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, 1966.Google Scholar
  11. 13.
    Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective, Paris 1951; and Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Paris 1952.Google Scholar
  12. 14.
    For general reviews of this literature see especially G.H. Bower, “Mood and Memory”, American Psychologist 36, 1981, pp. 129–138; and Paul H. Blaney, “Affect and Memory: A Review”, Psychological Bulletin 99, 1986, pp. 229–46. British Museum 1895-9-15-745. Nicholas Turner, Florentine Drawings of the Sixteenth Century. The British Museum, exh.cat., London, 1986, #134, published the drawing as Giorgio Vasari, following Paola Barocchi’s identification of it as preparatory to a lost Baptism of Christ painted in 1541 for the church of San Giovanni in Florence.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  13. 16.
    Galleria Portatile, 30; Bora, 1976, 30 as attributed to Franciabigio.Google Scholar
  14. 18.
    For the most concise statement of the refeudalisation thesis, see Philip Jones, “La Riscossa Aristocratica: L’Italia del Rinascimento”, Storia d’Italia: Dal feudalesimo al capitalismo, Turin 1978, pp. 355–372, who makes the case for both social and partial economic refeudalisation in the early modern period. Antonio Anzilotti, La Costituzione dello Stato fiorentino sotto il Duca Cosimo I de’ Medici, Florence 1910, was an early exponent of the refeudalisation thesis, limited to the personal power of Cosimo I de Medici. Ruggiero Romano, “Tra XVI e XVII secolo. Una crisi economical 1619–1622”, Rivista Storica Italiana LXXIV, 1962, p. 512; Rosario Villari, “Note sulla rifeudalizzazione del Regno di Napoli alia vigilia della rivoluzione di Masaniello” Studi storici IV, 1963 pp. 639–68; and a reply to the above by Gaetano Galasso, “La feudalità napoletana nel secolo XVI” Clio I, 1965, pp. 551–52, give the broadest interpretation of refeudalisation. Subsequently, Elena Fasano Guarini, Lo stato Mediceo di Cosimo I, Florence 1973, has argued for refeudalisation as a phenomenon of Florentine historical development, but in a more modified form, largely limited to Granducal government. See also, on the social manifestations of such developments, Peter Burke, “Languages and Anti-Languages”, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, Cambridge 1987, pp. 90–91, for his study of the increased formality of elite language and particularly the use of the polite pronoun, the lei.Google Scholar
  15. 19.
    David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427, Yale University Press 1985, pp. 337–360. For example, Marshall D. Sahlins, “On the Ideology and Composition of Descent Groups”, Man 95, 1965, pp. 104–7.Google Scholar
  16. 22.
    Giuliano Ercoli, Arte e fortuna del Correggio, Modena 1982, notes that the Carracci reevaluation of Correggio was crucial to the artist’s critical fortune, and that eighteenth-century critics also loved Correggio for his soft tender transitions, notably Mengs.Google Scholar
  17. 23.
    Ludovico Dolce and Mark W. Roskill, (eds.), Dolce’s “Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, New York 1968.Google Scholar
  18. 26.
    Pamela Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in Seventeenth-Century Milan, Cambridge 1992.Google Scholar
  19. 27.
    See P. Pietro Jacopo Bacci, Vita di S. Filippo Neri Fiorentino, fondatore della Congregazione dell’Oratorio (first published 1622), Rome 1694, pp. 171–172, for the account of Neri achieving spiritual ecstasy before Barocci’s Visitation.Google Scholar
  20. 29.
    On St Philip Neri and the Oratorians see Louis Ponnelle and Louis Bordet, Saint Philippe Neri et la Société Romaine de son Temps (1515–1595), Paris 1928.Google Scholar
  21. 31.
    From Ponnelle and Bordet (see Louis Bordet, Saint Philippe Neri et la Société Romaine de son Temps (1515–1595) note 29), 1928, p. 545.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1999

Authors and Affiliations

  • Genevieve Warwick
    • 1
  1. 1.Courtauld Institute of ArtUniversity of LondonUK

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