The revenge of color
At the turn of the century, faced with the exhaustion of the urgent need to reconnect with the truth of nature, new forms of expression were sought, capable of approaching its multiple forms of representation. "Things exist only in one way and appear in an infinite number of ways," Galileo wrote to Ludovico Cigoli in 1612, and the gaze, having explored its physiological potential, could be compared to the "innumerable worlds" predicted by Giordano Bruno.
The primacy of sight now conditioned the challenge between nature and painting, who, "emulated and rival of nature," came out victorious, for, as Marco Boschini wrote, "it is a deception of the eye and contains in itself the artifice," and constitutes "a genuine artificial reform," the "true example of all things," capable of surpassing reality.
In painting, the dialectic of the imitation of truth passes from the illusions of still life to the illusions of the distortions of the perspective of anamorphosis, on which the scientific treatises and the experiments of pictorial representation are concentrated.
From the precepts of the practical perspective was born the science of vision, which has benefited from technological advances in the Galilee telescope, and beyond the scope of research on the dark room, looked at the potential of the visual multiplication of lenses and mirrors, omnipresent in the title pages of Jesuit optical treaties, such as the Ars Magna lucis and umbrae of Athanasius Kircher, published in 1646. The art of perspective, as Andrea Pozzo later asserted, "deceives with admirable pleasure the most attentive of our external senses, namely the eye," which is transformed into a mobile observation point to amplify the effects of the visual experience. The wonderful illusions of painting are reflected not only in the magical perspective of the fresco vaults of Giovanni Battista Gaulli and Andrea Pozzo, but also in the new quest for likelihood centered on the skilful use of colour, used not only to enhance forms, but also to translate the changing and atmospheric aspects of reality. The supremacy of sight and painting over sculpture has now transferred the primacy of nature to color.
Having established the potential of imitation, among the reasons for the "power of representation of painting" advanced by theologian Gian Domenico Ottonelli and Pietro da Cortona in the Treatise on Painting and Sculpture published in Florence in 1652, the restitution of actions and emotions now prevails and, since painting "can be described as a powerful imitator of oratory art," its union with rhetoric is consolidated, aimed at reaffirming the persuasiveness and civic function of images that must respond to ethical and political implications. Beyond the prescriptions of the Counter-Reformation which determined its discontinuous historiographic destiny, the Treaty of Berrettini and Ottonelli, whose respective contributions were distinguished by critics through the analysis of articles censored by the Jesuit fathers who revised the draft, restores some of the critical positions of Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669), to be read in parallel with his figurative research, which may be functional to the theme of deception of sight and to the search for an alternative historiographic model which does not foresee the need for selective imitation.
Among the "gracious illusions" of painting listed in the "Sixth Question," after the traditional anecdote of Zeuxis and the authority of the ancestor attributed to the exceptional genius of Giotto, two significant examples appear: the dome of San Giovanni in Parma, decorated with frescoes by Corrège, "the most important of all the wonders of today, where the power of artificial representation triumphes by deceiving others," and the portrait of Paul III by Titian, who "seems more alive and breathing than painted and represented," about which Vasari tells passers-by the story of the illusion that would have been made, while the canvas was exposed to the outside to allow the varnish to dry. The boundary between reality and its representation is depicted here by the exquisite artifice of Corrège and the striking immediacy of Titian's brush, in a juxtaposition which rests on bases different from that formulated by Agucchi a few years earlier, because it reflects differently the concept of naturality expressed previously by Caravage and Annibale.
To restore this atmospheric likelihood, so often evoked by Giuliano Briganti, enabling the bodies, surfaces and vibrations of space to be enveloped, both natural and supernatural, the only option for the artists - the very ones that Briganti grouped under the name of "generation of 1630" - was the Venetian color of the Bacchanales of Ludeii. < sup > 7 </sup > It was precisely on the examples of color to follow that the first blows were made to the critical and figurative sequence that had linked the project stylistic Carrache and the theoretical formulations of Agucchi, to the point of encouraging the search for alternative historiographic reference models to support different stylistic solutions.
Pietro da Cortona thus invokes Giovan Battista Armenini, relying, with a slight exaggeration, on the initial argument concerning the difficulties encountered by artists in imitating Michelangelo's nudes if they deviate from other examples. Armenini presented two ways of achieving perfection: "one consists in frequently reproducing the works of several good artists, the other in referring only to those of one excellent artist." ⁸ Berrettini's reasoning was based on this second solution, which then repeated Lomazzo's arguments on the natural inclination of artists:
To acquire a good way of painting, one must observe or draw the works of many talented men, then, for colour, follow the way used by the painter who is known to be the most consistent with his genius and who he appreciates the most, for he who devotes himself to representing many different works in various ways ends up being lost in the palette and struggling to attain praiseworthy excellence, given the difficulty of bringing together in one subject the good manners found separately in several.
After the (more specious) demonstration of the distance between the works of the Rider of Arpin and those of Merisi (who "attained such a degree of perfection that the works he produced are wonderful"), distance that the comparison with San Luigi dei Francesi has shown irreconcilable, the reflection turns to Annibale and Ludovico and focuses on their difficulty in combining the style of the Corrège, followed to Bologna "as an Author of engineering in accordance with their genius, imitating it in color with such perfection that anyone without much experience, would judge their works as being made by the same, " with the very gentle way of Raphael followed in Rome that [Annibale]
[...] he achieved great perfection, which he then reduced in his own way, beautiful and personal, which is called the way and style of Carraccio. He was also very satisfied with Michelangelo Buonarroti's fine ideas and wished to imitate him in the same way; thus, by siding with these two eminent men, Annibale seemed to abandon his first way, by which he had imitated and assisted the excellent Corrège.
The conclusion was explicit and far-reaching:
if Hannibal, a man of such greatness that he could not be praised to his full value, could not combine his own perfection with a multitude of varied pictorial styles, what could an ordinary man hope to accomplish? He certainly could not claim the combination of styles so characteristic of the greatest masters.
For Pietro da Cortona (who adhered to the idea of a Roman Hannibal detached from his Bolonese origins), the Roman design and the Lombard color were incompatible, for stylistic reasons that took precedence over theoretical considerations. In the 1950s, for those who had been carried away by the great neo-Venetian wave, the normative authority of Annibale was no longer sufficient, even as a historiographic model, and the networks of selective imitation, if they still prevailed in drawing (father of all the arts for Pietro da Cortona also, taking into account his origins and his formation)which required the choice of a single master whose influence had to be followed, a master who, in this case, for Pietro da Cortona, could only be Titian.
The lever for undermining, from a stylistic and critical point of view, the presuppositions of this disciplined imitation of models and the ancient world that Bellori later reaffirmed, was based on the wave of neo-Venetian who had permeated figurative culture and influenced the preferences of collectors in the middle of the century.
The effects of the exhibition of the Bacchanales of Ludeii and the reflection on the color aroused by the layout of this room of Villa Pincio had far exceeded any forecast and, As is known, the careers of Poussin and Duquesnoy were influenced, young Andrea Sacchi, but also Berrettini and, among others, Van Dyck and Castiglione, paving the way for alternative currents to Bolonese classicism. 11. The idea that the different styles of the great masters of the sixteenth century can be combined in an eclectic way, in the name of the freedom of Venetian color, is also criticized in the Carta del Navegar Pitoresco (1660) by Marco Boschini (1602-1704), which drew its support and justification from its narrow assertions precisely from the expansion of neo-Venetian culture. The categorical refusal of the possibility of maintaining the unity of the different styles is one of the first theoretical arguments of the Carta and constitutes the motor of the praise of the Titian as the climax of the Venetian school and of painting: "The painting contains so many great things, and it is enough to make one," and again: "Oh! who could unite this palette, this Venetian painting with its charm? "
Trained in painting in the studio of Palma the Young, as an art dealer and intermediary, but also as a copyist and engraver, Boschini is inextricably linked to the world of collectionism ("it is so practical and so painted, and knows so well the customs of painters, that princes and other renowned personalities turn to him to enlarge their galleries and even constitute them, " wrote about him the writer Martinioni in 1663) and drew up a programmatic manifesto of the Venetian school, immersed in the dynamics of the contemporary market.13 The question is no longer that of the right of those who are not painters to judge paintings, but that of the possibility of identification, thanks to the improvement of the tools of the trade, the nuances between experts able to appreciate style and amateurs; a distinction which is clearly described in the preface "Breve Istruzione" of the Ricche minere della pittura veneziana (1664 and 1674), where the two figures appear ideally separated by a window which allows lovers to observe only the table with the delicacies of the painting from which the experts who had direct contact with the works feed.
