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the Palette 190 3.4 The Myth of “True Fresco” 199 3.5 Tempera Painting 209 3.5.1 Vasari and Egg Tempera: Revival of an Outdated Technique 212 3.5.2 Glue-size Tempera: Tüchlein, guazzo, chiaroscuro 220 3.6 Oil Painting 231 3.6.1 Preparazione and Imprimitura 238 3.6.2 The Execution of a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