Painting the Truth?
A significant proportion of the artists painting for the market in Rome during the 1620s came from countries North of the Alps, such as modern-day Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Germany. The purpose of their visit to Italy was to study painting; however, they ultimately left an indelible mark on the nation’s artistic culture by compelling Italian artists to confront a new approach to painting and to the sale of their works. The realism in paintings by these Northern European artists has been naturally compared to that of Caravaggio and his followers, starting with the 17th century antiquarian and biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) (fig. 1). The former represented the landscape and humanity with an unfiltered gaze unfamiliar to Italian painters, while Caravaggio and his followers depicted sacred and historical episodes using the language of reality. This led to history, seen through the eyes of the present, being set in stone. Two aspects of truth — namely, the natural and the historical — became crucial themes in the cultural and scientific debate of the seventeenth century. However, while the first aspect has been extensively investigated, the question of historical truth and fidelity to it in the seventeenth century, appears largely unexplored. The present study aims to demonstrate that a divergent approach to the veracity of facts gave rise to a distinct inclination towards the depiction of truth. I will also briefly address the contributions of artists Jan Miel (ca. 1599–1663), Michelangelo Cerquozzi (1602–1660) and Jacques Courtois (1621–1676) to the discussion on painting from reality, and truth as a theme that became a substitute for history painting.
Following the completion of the frescoes in the Sala dei Fasti Farnesiani (fig. 2) by Francesco Salviati and Taddeo Zuccari in 1566, the decoration projects in the Farnese Palace in Rome entered a prolonged period of dormancy.[1] It was not until 1595 that Odoardo Farnese (1573–1626) (fig. 3), the great-grandson of the maecenas Cardinal Alessandro (1468–1549, also known as Pope Paul III), resumed plans to renovate the main hall of the palace. He had intended to illustrate the deeds of his father, Alessandro Farnese (1556–1592), who led the siege of Antwerp in 1585 during the height of his 14-year term as Governor of the Spanish Netherlands. A history of the Flanders Wars was therefore commissioned from the humanist Antonio Querenghi of Padua (1546–1633).[2] However, Querenghi, a close advisor and secretary to cardinals and popes from the Farnese to the Borghese to the Este,[3] never composed the long-awaited work, citing the challenges involved in locating reliable primary sources that would ensure his work was a true documentation and not mere propaganda. His stance revived a debate that would become pivotal in the seventeenth century — one that pits truth against verisimilitude, history against poetry. It is also indicative of the value he attributed to the work of an historian: ‘Princes pursue their affairs with such great secrecy that penetrating them to the marrow of their bones is much more difficult than solving the riddle of the sphinx. Furthermore, it is illogical to assert that writers are assigned the secretariats, which not only document the correspondence of ambassadors, but also the negotiations pertaining to peace, truces, and wars.’[4] In other words, Querenghi’s ultimate abandonment of the project was due to the lack of any objective documentation of the history of this campaign.
An intriguing turning point coincided with the marriage of Odoardo’s brother Ranuccio I (1569–1622) and Margherita Aldobrandini, the pope’s niece, in 1600. Annibale Caracci and his studio was summoned to create a sumptuous fresco ceiling for the Farnese Palace that celebrates the triumph of love through the stories of the gods (fig. 4) by invoking Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), the influential poet of the Italian Baroque.[5] This signified a break from the centuries-old tradition of depicting the battles and achievements of the Farnese family on the walls of their palaces.[6] In essence, Odoardo sought to affirm the Roman identity of his family and its authority by referencing the tales of the gods rather than the triumphant military conquests under Philip II of Spain. From this moment onwards, mythological poems and triumphal allegories set the new trend for the decoration of Roman palaces.[7]
History and Chronicles
While brushes were turned away from modern history in Rome, work on Alessandro’s history in the Flanders Wars did not cease, and finally in 1633 the first volume of Famiano Strada’s De Bello Belgico was printed by the Lorraine publisher François Langlois, known as Ciartres (1589–1647). The timing was significant: it coincided with the eve of the First War of Castro — a power struggle between Odoardo I and the other Roman papal families. This seminal history of the Low Countries included engravings of drawings (fig. 5) by the Strasbourg-born miniaturist and painter Wilhelm Baur (1607–1640), a member of the society of mostly Dutch and Flemish artists known as the Bentvueghel (Dutch for ‘Birds of a Feather’) in Rome, recommended to Langlois by Jacques Stella.[8] In addition to Stella, Langlois was in close friendship and business with Anthony van Dyck and Claude Vignon,[9] both of whom painted beautiful portraits of him playing bagpipes (fig. 6),[10] as well as his compatriot and fellow engraver François Collignon (1609–1687),[11] the publisher of Annibale Carracci’s celebrated drawings of street life in Bologna, I mestieri di Bologna (1646) (fig. 7).
The second and final volume of Strada’s De Bello Belgico came out in 1647, also published by Langlois, accompanied by illustrations from drawings this time by Jan Miel (fig. 8), Michelangelo Cerquozzi, and Jacques Courtois, three artists linked, like Willem Baur, to the Roman bambocciante circle—a brotherhood of Dutch and Flemish artists in Rome founded by Pieter van Laer (fig. 9), taken after his own nickname ‘Il Bamboccio’ (‘the chubby little boy’).
Almost a decade later, around 1655, Jacques Courtois was employed to paint a cycle of historical battles to decorate Mattias de’ Medici’s recently acquired villa Lapeggi in Florence. The four canvases were dedicated to Mattias’ military victories in the Thirty Years’ War (at Nördlingen and Lutzen [fig. 10]) and the First War of Castro (at Mongiovino and Pitigliano), the war that had ended with the glorious peace signed by his ally Odoardo I Farnese on 3 March 1644.[12] The link with the edition of De Bello Belgico, the War of Castro and Lapeggi’s cycle is evident, but it is also significant that the victories of Odoardo and Mattias, like those of Alessandro in his time, found no place in the decoration of their Roman palaces.[13]
The Bamboccianti
In Rome, the artists involved in the illustrations of Famiano Strada’s text were not asked to execute history paintings, but rather to illustrate the festivities, receptions and rituals of everyday Roman life, popular and aristocratic, set in the context of an urban and suburban landscape described with the richness of detail and acute observation of a chronicler.
The tension that arose within the aesthetic and cultural debate of the seventeenth century between the ideal and the real, between the truth and the verisimilar, effectively relegated the expression and representation of the everyday to the margins: the hoggidì (today), which the olivetan monk Secondo Lancellotti [14] defended in his magnum opus of the same title, was not inferior to classical antiquity. These margins, on the other hand, were entirely dedicated, according to Bellori, to depicting not the best nor the equal, but the worst, or rather puppets intent on grooming themselves, begging, gorging themselves, and playing dice (fig. 11).[15]
If Bellori even spotted the symptoms of this humble school of painting in Jacopo Bassano, the 16th-century Venetian painter, it was only in the course of the 1620s and 30s that everyday life, with its anecdotes and daily happenings, became an increasingly frequent subject in painting, together with a new attention to the more ordinary and truthful depictions of nature. The naturalism of the bamboccianti – whom the modern art critic Roberto Longhi described as ‘caravaggeschi a passo ridotto’[16] – conquered not only Rome but also other areas where there was a strong Caravaggesque presence,[17] such as Naples, Lombardy and Florence. The protagonists included not only foreigners like Jan Miel (fig. 12) and Jan Both but also the Roman Michelangelo Cerquozzi (fig. 13), and Neapolitans Aniello Falcone (1607–1656), Domenico Gargiulo (1609/10–1675) and Salvator Rosa (1615–1673). Contrary to their appearance, their paintings are not naturalistic per se, for they make reference to current events, theatre, satire, dialect poetry — namely, popular subjects of an elitist culture.[18]
Certainly what most of these painters, active between Rome and Naples, have in common is an immediate style focused on reality, with rapid strokes capturing anecdotal details of urban life: squares and alleys, ports, ruins and the countryside are captured live, with snapshots that, in some cases, give a journalistic feeling to the images. These daily insights can be found in examples such as Piazza Mercatello durante la peste by Domenico Gargiulo (Museo di San Martino, Naples) (fig. 14), and Rivolta di Masaniello by Viviano Codazzi and Michelangelo Cerquozzi (Galleria Spada, Rome) (fig. 15).
The portrayal of real events painted with naturalism and journalistic immediacy is accompanied by the vindication of a pictorial method that was unheard of in the Italian context until the beginning of the 17th century, that is, painting ad vivum, or en plein air. With the same immediacy with which artists approached actual events while trying to remain faithful to the facts and places, the Northern bamboccianti, and to a lesser extent the Neapolitan ones, placed themselves in front of the urban, natural and human landscape of the city and its countryside.
notes 14–18
Painting ‘ad vivum’: Geography of the Countryside and Everyday Life
In the 1620s, Dutch artists Cornelius van Poelenburgh (1590–1667) (fig. 16) and Bartholomeus Breenbergh (1598–1657), along with Herman van Swanevelt (1603–1655), would often leave their studios in Rome to study directly from life, using pen and brush to observe light effects, and the particular formations of rocks, trees, clouds and ruins. However, the fact that an Italian painter like Filippo Napoletano (ca. 1578–1629) would go out to do the same between 1617 and 1621 must have been exceptional, if his contemporary biographer Giovanni Baglione felt compelled to emphasize the fact so strongly.[19]
Between 1629 and 1635, the practice of studying nature and landscape from life must have been very common among Northern artists in Rome, though it was not fully understood by other local painters or those from elsewhere in Europe. The Frankfurt-born painter and historian Joachim von Sandrart, in recounting excursions beyond the Porta del Popolo in the company of Nicolas Poussin, Pieter van Laer and Claude, tells us that Claude learned from him how to mix colors and paint atmospheric effects directly on to the canvas en plein air. Rare as they are, a few surviving works by these artists attest to this practice. For example, a drawing by Jan Asselijn, now in Berlin, showing a group of artists setting up to paint outdoors. At least two paintings by Claude further confirm this account: View of Rome with Trinità dei Monti (1632, National Gallery, London) and Landscape with a Mill (1632–33, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) (fig. 17), in which the artist depicts himself as a peasant milking a goat. Claude, like Breenbergh and Poelenburgh before him, also left several beautiful drawings of himself sketching directly from nature (fig. 18), as well as a beautiful seascape with a boat in pencil and ink that retains all the fresh spontaneity of a live sketch. One might argue that these are drawings, not paintings, but the insistence with which Claude returns to the motif of the artist studying nature from life could well indicate that this was a routine practice and that there is some truth in Sandrart’s account after all.
Art historian Sheila McTighe has recently analyzed the symbolic significance of the artist engaged in painting or drawing from life in several artworks,[20] including an especially interesting one by Sweerts depicting a painter portraying Bernini’s Fountain of Neptune (fig. 19). This was also the subject of a previously unpublished painting by Jan Miel (fig. 20) in which a painter (himself) is portraying a street musician at his easel in the street.
Furthermore, as we know from a series of drawings by Pier Francesco Mola – a landscape draftsman from life himself – carrying canvases and easels around the streets of Rome was a widespread custom, not only for painting from life but also for displaying one’s works to collectors and connoisseurs (figs. 21-22). Thus, we might say that in the 1620s and 1630s, while the landscape from life enters painting, painting itself also enters the landscape.
Mola’s friend Salvator Rosa was also a keen observer and painter from life in Naples, Rome, and Florence (fig. 23). But only after his definitive return to Rome in 1651 did he become a fierce critic of the very painting from life he had practiced in his youth – denouncing it in a satirical poem written around 1655:
And these paintings are so esteemed, /That they are seen in the studios of the great, / Framed with proud ornamentation, / While the living beggars, afflicted and naked, / Find not a single coin from those colors, / Though in painted form they earn crowns. / So I too learn from those rags, / That modern Princes are lavish in luxury, / But stingy in pity. / What they abhor alive, they love in paint, / For in the courts it is old custom /To value only the false. / . . . But these are not their only faults, / For searching the world far and wide, / They find only paupers for their subjects, / And every place teems with the poor, / Because Princes now, / with their taxes, / Have reduced the world to begging. /Princes, I feel compelled to cry out, / But I am told softly by Clinio and Geminio, / That with you, /one must either remain silent or pretend, / So let the examination and scrutiny of you/ Be made by those devoted to grand endeavors, / I return to criticize white lead and vermilion. [21]
What had happened to cause Rosa to change his position so radically?
The Art Without History of Giovanni Pietro Bellori
In the 1640s, Giovanni Pietro Bellori began his great project The Lives, starting with his biography of Caravaggio.[22] After a long gestation,[23] the final version was not published until 1672, by which time there was a radically different climate. One of the consistent themes running through Bellori’s writings is a veiled polemic against the Northern followers of Van Laer, accused of having taken Caravaggio’s open path and carried its interpretation to further degeneration. He adapted a comment from Pliny, with regard to Caravaggio and Pieter van Laer: ‘Pausone and Pierico were most condemned for imitating the worst and the most vile, just as in our time Michelangelo da Caravaggio was too natural, painting the lowly, and Bamboccio (fig. 23) the worst.’[24] Behind these criticisms lies a deeper reflection on the role of history and its narration in art, demonstrated by Bellori’s innovative decision to abandon the traditional historiographic model of Vasari’s Lives.[25]
Between the 1640s and the publication of Bellori’s Lives, another important voice entered the debate on truth and historical painting: that of Giulio Mancini (1559–1630), the Sienese physician to pope Urban VIII, as well as art collector, dealer and critic. In his text, Considerazioni, owned by Fabio Chigi, the future pope Alexander VII (then held in the Vatican), we read: ‘Fiction, creation, and composition are essential to the poet, if he is to be a poet. Thus, Lucano [Lucan, 39–65 AD] is excluded from the ranks of poets and placed among historians, for he recounts events and commanders as they were, not as they should have been. One cannot bestow the title of true painter on Caravaggio with the rigor and perfection due, for he excelled more in copying than in drawing.’[26]
The distinction between poetry and painting on the one hand – both rooted in invention and fiction, especially in selective representation – and history on the other, as a narrative of truth, recalls the complex debate around arte historica that a few years later was addressed by Pietro Sforza Pallavicino (fig. 24), the powerful prelate made cardinal by Alexander VII in 1657.[27] In his 1644 book Del Bene, published in Rome, Pallavicino compared poetry to inventive painting and historiography to likeness in portraiture. For him, the purpose of art was to stir emotion and move the viewer. The goal, therefore, was to bypass the logical discourse of historical narrative. While history retained its value based on fidelity to truth and relevance to the present, it was definitively separated from art – whether oratory, poetic, or pictorial. With Agostino Mascardi (fig. 25), who published in 1636 his influential five-volume treatise Dell’arte historica, Pallavicino marked a decisive break between poetry and history – subjects that, at the end of the previous century, had still appeared intertwined in Torquato Tasso’s Discorsi dell’arte poetica and Lodovico Castelvetro’s Poetica di Aristotele. If the historian enjoyed adhering to factual truth, the painter – like the poet – ought to seek plausibility and skillfully employ rhetorical devices to manipulate truth.
In this perspective, truth – whether historical or everyday life – was pushed to the margins and stripped of artistic dignity, ultimately betraying the premises from which both Bellori and early theorists of classicism had started, when I mestieri di Bologna by Annibale Carracci was still being printed in 1646.[28] By the 1660s, the chorus of condemnation of the bamboccianti painters involved everyone, including those same artists – like Salvator Rosa (fig. 26) and Nicolas Poussin – who had once been familiar with Van Laer and his followers. Yet the true story of this battle, which relegated many skilled Northern artists to the rank of mere bamboccianti, was not fought between purists and revolutionaries, libertines and the powerful, dissenters and academicians. It took place later (I believe during or closely following the Chigi papacy, and not before), when Caravaggio had long been dead and the bamboccianti had mostly returned home.
What impelled this later condemnation was an academic and absolutist design, created only after the age of naturalism and historical painting had long passed. Bellori, when considering Odoardo’s change of plans for the Palazzo Farnese, remarked: ‘Alexander did not have his Apelles.’[29] We might say that he didn’t have one because there was no longer a Ptolemy capable of providing the greatest painter of antiquity a brush with a historical agenda: history had, for the time being, vanished from literature and from the grand Roman decorative tradition.❖