Maniera and the absent hand: avoiding the etymology of style

The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegePeabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

Maniera and the Absent Hand: Avoiding the Etymology of StyleAuthor(s): Philip SohmSource: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 36, Factura (Autumn, 1999), pp. 100-124Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the Peabody Museum ofArchaeology and EthnologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20167478 .

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100 RES 36 AUTUMN 1999

Figure 1. Jacopo Bassano, St. Valentin Baptizing St. Lucy, circa 1575. Museo C?vico di Bassano del Grappa.



Maniera and the absent hand

Avoiding the etymology of style

PHILIP SOHM

A popular human-interest story early in 1999

involved the first successful hand transplant ever

performed in the United States. Photos broadly disseminated in the media show a nervous Mr. Scott

gingerly holding his foreign appendage as if it might misbehave and need restraint at any minute. His new

hand looks exactly like his own?a fine physiognomic match?and yet it intimates its dead donor. This happy

story of medical finesse appealed to the mass media

partly for the queasy feelings that it produced. Does

the donor's hand carry traces of his character? Will it

freely obey its new master, or will it carry ghostly traces of its former habits and deceased body? Shades

of Mary Shelley linger as we look at Mr. Scott. A

kidney recipient would not elicit such questions, but

hands are personal. They communicate feelings,

subject to the same expressive quirks as our faces, and

their signature assures banks and lawyers that we are

who we claim to be.

Artists' hands are the repositories of gestural habits

and in this sense may be said to embody their histories.

As artists train their hands to represent visual forms, they

develop a mimetic shorthand that becomes, over time, an efficient means of production. The artist's hand (and

sometimes, as in the case of Jackson Pollack, the whole

body) seems to act spontaneously and balletically, controlled as much by a corporeal knowledge as

consciously willed in each precise movement. Gradually habits develop that, even if they avoid the formulaic, at

least share a common morphology and syntax in the

ways that the brush dapples sunlight on foliage or

shimmers light over satin. If Oliver Sacks is to be

believed, the manual routines of artists become so

somatically embedded that they can even survive

traumas to the rational mind: "neurologically, [style] is

the deepest part of one's being, and may be preserved, almost to the last, in a dementia."1

Early modern writers heroized artists as masters of

their hands, rational and always in control as they mediated between ideas and materials, imagined and

visual form. According to Michelangelo, artists "paint with the head not with the hands" and express their

ideas "only by the hand that obeys the intellect."2 These

idealist assertions mask an underlying anxiety felt by the

hypochondriacal Michelangelo that his hands might

disobey his intellect and imagination, that his body was

an inadequate vessel for his mind. By positing the

dominion of mind over hand, he reveals a concern about

noncompliance. Setting aside artistic incompetence and

such medical disorders as tremors or failing eyesight, are

there other more universal conditions when hands resist

the artist's conceptions? A consideration of style partially affirms the obvious in this matter: artists do not

consciously will all the movements of the brush. Style was thought to be an inimitable, personal, and slowly

evolving mode of working, a kind of involuntary reflex or

Parts of this article are taken from a forthcoming book on Style in

the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press) I am

grateful for the careful readings and insightful comments generously

given by Elizabeth Cropper, Joseph Koerner, Alex Nagel, Francesco

Pellizzi, and Richard Spear. My research was funded by the Social

Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.

1. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and

Other Clinical Tales (New York: Harper Perennial Library, 1990), p. 20.

By style, Sacks means "artistic skill," "aesthetic and artistic feeling," and "personal (and artistic) identity." Robert Storr cited Sacks in order

to argue that Willem de Kooning's late works still maintained a psychic and artistic integrity despite the progressive neurological disorder that

inflicted the artist at the time. "At Last Light," in Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, the 1980s (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum

of Modern Art, 1995), pp. 50-53.

2. The first quote appears in a letter of 1542 to an unnamed

prelate at the court of Pope Paul III: "lo rispondo che si dipigne col

ciervello et non con le man i." // Carteggio di Michelangelo, ed. P.

Barocchi and R. Ristori (Florence: Sansoni, 1979), vol. 4, p. 150. The

second quote comes from the opening stanza of the sonnet: "Non ha

l'ottimo artista alcuna concetto." This sonnet has a long history of

interpretation starting most famously with Benedetto Varch i 's lecture

read to the Accademia Fiorentina in 1547: Due Lezzioni . . . nella

prima delle quale si dichiara un sonetto di M. Michelangelo Buonarroti. Nella seconda si disputa quale sia piu nobile arte la

scultura, o la pittura (Florence, 1549). The most complete discussion

of its meanings can be found in David Summers, Michelangelo and

the Language of Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,

1981), pp. 203-233.




habit that manifests itself in a stable gestural repertory.

Style was more than this, of course, but the style experts known as connoisseurs practiced their trade on the

premise, at least from the sixteenth century onward, that

painters employ a consistent, and indeed inescapable, set of forms and brushstrokes.

In early modern art literature, the hand became an

important site for perceived tensions between manual

habit and intellective deliberation, practice and theory,

making and thinking. Hands appeared most often as

laudatory metonymies: as agents of an artist's creativity,

originality, and individuality.3 The theology of the hand

as God's instrument of creation appealed to artists and

their supporters, because it elevated art above the

exigencies of a painter's materials and manual

production. Albrecht D?rer centered his Christ-like Self

Portrait (1500) on his divinae manus; and Nicolas

Poussin depicted Christ as Deus Pictor in The Healing of

the Blind (1650), where his healing touch cures the

blind just as Poussin's touch opens our eyes to divine

acts.4 Other ennobling meanings accrued to hands as

perceptual tools. Descartes likened seeing to touching? the rays of light serve the eye much as the sticks of the

blind serve the touch5?and touching was sometimes

understood even as a superior form of sight. Ghiberti, after looking at an ancient statue of Hermaphrodite,

discovered artistic subtleties that had remained invisible

to the eye only by running his hands over the marble

surface.6 Sculpture is inherently tactile?a fact deployed

against sculptors by painters in persistent paragone debates7?but viewers of paintings also resorted to

touching, most often to dispel optical deceptions. Matteo Colaccio, like other spectators of naturalist

paintings, sought reassurance from his hands after

looking at the intarsie in Sant'Antonio in Padua:

"Everything seems real to me, I cannot believe it is

feigned. I come closer, and run my hands over them all,

stepping back, I look at everything carefully."8 Marco

Boschini engaged in another sort of discernment when

he rubbed his hands across the surface of Jacopo Bassano's Martyrdom of St. Lucy and St. Valentin

Baptizing St. Lucy (circa 1575; fig. 1 ) hoping to discover

the truth about "those strokes, those stains [machie], those jabs [bote]."9 As if identifying with St. Lucy, whose

blindness brought insight, Boschini acted like a blind

man by feeling the painted surface. It is through touch

3. For a fascinating survey of the hand in art criticism, see R. Spear, "Di sua mano," in The "Divine" Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art

in the World of Guido Reni (New Haven and London: Yale University

Press, 1997), pp. 259-265. For a richly documented but conceptually

sloppy history of the dichotomies of touch in religious and

philosophical literature, see M. O'Rourke Boyle, Senses of Touch:

Human Dignity and Deformity from Michelangelo to Calvin (Leiden:

Brill, 1998).

4. For D?rer's Self-Portrait and Joachim Camerarius's discussion of

D?rer's divinae manus, see M. Kemp, "The 'Super-Artist' as Genius:

The Sixteenth-Century View," in Genius: The History of an Idea, ed. P.

Murray (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1989), pp. 41-42; and especially J.

Koerner, The Moment of Self- Portraiture in German Renaissance Art

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 149-152. For

Poussin's Healing of the Blind, see M. Fumaroli, "'Muta Eloquentia': la

repr?sentation de l'?loquence dans l'oeuvre de Nicolas Poussin,"

Bulletin de la Soci?t? de l'Histoire de l'Art fran?ais (1982):29-48, esp.

43-44; now in id., L'?cole du silence. Le sentiment des images au

XVIIe si?cle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), p. 176.

5. Descartes, La Dioptrique, Discourse VI, "De la Vision," in

Oeuvres, ed. Ch. Adam and P. Tannery (1897-1957; reprint, Paris: J.

Vrin, 1965), vol. 6, pp. 130-147. This passage is discussed in relation

to Poussin's Healing of the Blind by E. Cropper and C. Dempsey in

Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 211-212.

6. M. Pardo, "Artifice as Seduction in Titian," in Sexuality and

Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. J. G.

Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiy Press, 1993), p. 62;

translating Lorenzo Ghiberti, / commentari, ed. O. Morisani (Naples: R. Ricciardi, 1947), p. 55: "In this statue there were a great many delicacies [dolcezze], the sight discerned nothing [of them] if the hand

by touching did not find them."

7. For the identification of touch and sculpture, see Cropper and

Dempsey (see note 5), pp. 213-215.

8. Matteo Colaccio, letter to Canozzi da Lendinara, makers of the

Santo intarsie, in De fine oratoris (Venice, 1486), n.p. Seventeenth

century viewers responded to Carlo Dolci's miniaturist style in much

the same way. Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie de' professori del disegno dal Cimabue in qua (Florence, 1681-1728); edition cited: ed. P.

Barocchi (Florence, 1975), vol. 5, pp. 335-337. Dolci's depictions of

"every single wrinkle, every turn of the hair and the most tiny ligature"

required confirmation by the hand that it was painted and not real

("che la mano stessa del riguardante debba all'occhio servir? per testimonio verdico che elle sieno dipinte e non ver?").

9. Marco Bosch in i, La Carta del navegar pitoresco (Venice, 1660);

edition cited: ed. A. Rallucchini (Venice and Rome: Instituto per la

collaborazione cult?rale, 1966), pp. 302-303: "Quando per questo mi

son st? a Bassan, / Proc?rete d'aver bona licencia / D'inzegnochiarme con gran reverencia / Su quel altar, per tocar con le man // Quei colpi,

quele machie e quele bote, / Che stimo preci?se piere fine, / Perle,

rubini, smeraldi e turchine, / Diamanti, ehe resplende fin la note. . . .

// Ma queste serve pi? per confusion / A chi le guarda, e che le vede

apresso, / Perch? ognun dise alora: mi confesso, / Che qua no ghe

comprendo distinci?n." For a discussion of Boschini, see P. Sohm,

Pittoresco. Marco Boschini, His Critics and Their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991).



Sohm: Maniera and the absent hand 1 03

that he corrects the "confusion" of sight and comes

closest to Bassano's manual gestures that left their

impressions in the jagged pigment. He can literally feel

the movement of the artist's brush.

These divine and truthful hands coexisted with

corporeal and deceptive hands. This alternate tradition

assigned a servile status to the hand, one that rested on

religious and metaphysical beliefs in the mind/body

hierarchy where, in Marsilio Ficino's words, "nature has

placed no sense farther from intelligence than touch."10

It was hence applied to lower social classes: women, whose craft and understanding was often rendered as

manual and tactile, and artists, whose work was

necessarily handmade and, to some degree, crafted.

Various hierarchies of the senses and intellect circulated, but it was generally accepted that the relation was one

of "service," with touch and sight "serving" common

sense and the intellect.11 Normally the hand "obeys" the

intellect, and if it does not, at least according to

Benedetto Varchi's reading of Michelangelo's sonnet

quoted above, there are two possible causes: either the

hand has not received sufficient training and practice, or

it experienced some physical handicap or accident.12

This instrumental view of the hand assumes its

compliance. It is a responsive servant that does not

interject itself between the mind and the painting; in

theory, its masters are the mind and imagination. From

the artist's practical experience, the hand may not

submit so readily. Michelangelo's famous struggles with

stone originate, in Varchi's mind, from the fact that his

hand worked "in opposition to the desired effect."13

Because many Renaissance and Baroque artists and

theorists felt ambivalent about the supposedly menial

tasks of manual production and about the reality of

disobedient hands, they tried to move art away from

techne toward metatechne, out of the painter's studio

and into the humanist's study.14 Various kinds of evidence can be advanced to

explain how artists and writers dealt with their

ambivalence about the craft of art. I propose to use

language as my point of entry and, in particular, to

focus on definitions as the most privileged literary mode

of authority. I will ask how definitions of style excluded

or held in abeyance its etymology or, in other words, how early modern Italian and French art writers situated

the hand (mano, main) in style (maniera, mani?re). Two

interpretive strategies of style emerged during the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: one tended to

avoid references to the hand altogether or, at least, to

displace manual technique outside of style; the other

questioned whether artists have complete control over

their hands, thus undermining beliefs in artistic

autonomy and intentionality. * * *

Agostino Mascardi spent many wakeful nights during the 1630s reading disparate and competing explanations of style in historiography.15 He wanted to understand

why each historian had an individual voice despite all

10. Marsilio Ficino, De vita, 1.7, in Three Books on Life, ed. C. V.

Kaske and J. R. Clark (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance

Texts and Studies in conjunction with the Renaissance Society of

America, 1989), p. 125.

11. Vincenzo Danti, // primo libro del Trattato del le perfette

proporzioni (Florence, 1567), in Trattati d'arte del Cinquecento fra

manierismo e controriforma, ed. P. Barocchi (Bari: G. Laterza, 1960), vol. 1, p. 225, but see also pp. 228-229: "Tutte le membra, dico delle

quali ? composto il corpo umano, sono fatte al servizio dei sensi

esteriori e interiori; et i sensi esteriori al servizio degl'interiori; e

gl'interiori al servizio dell'intendere." For a discussion of the hierarchy of senses, see David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance

Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1987).

12. B. Varchi (see note 2); edition cited in Opere (Florence, 1590), vol. 2, pp. 618-619: "In due modi e per due cagioni non obbedisce la

mano all'intelletto, o perch? non ? esercitata e non ha pratica, e

questo ? difetto del maestro; o perch? ? impedita da qualche accidente. . . . E questo ? difetto d?lia fortuna o d'altri che del

maestro; ma in quai si voglia di questi duoi modi, non si possono esercitare in modo che ben vada l'arti manuali, perch? la mano ? lo

strumento delle arti." See also B. Varchi, Lezzione nella quale si

disputa d?lia maggioranza delle arti e quai sia pi? nobile, la scultura o

la pittura (Florence, 1547); edition cited in Barocchi (see note 11), vol.

1, pp. 28, 31-32. For a discussion of Varchi's m?tonymie use of the

hand to signify artistic practice or execution, see Leatrice Mendelsohn,

Paragon!. Benedetto Varchi's Due Lezzioni and Cinquecento Art Theory (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1982), pp. 100-102. For the

obedient hand, see also Ferdinando Leopoldo Migliore, Firenze citt?

nobilissima illustrata (Florence: Stella, 1684), p. 437. For the hand as

"servant of the mind," see Baldinucci (see note 8), vol. 6, p. 46. For

the hand as "servant of the mind" in gestural communication, see C.

A. Du Fresnoy, L'Art de peinture. Traduit en fran?ois. Enrichy de

remarques, reveu, corrig?, & augment? (Paris, 1684), n. 165, p. 127.

13. Quoted by Mendelsohn (see note 12), p. 102. Varchi excludes

Michelangelo from this human limitation.

14. R. Williams, Art, Theory and Culture in Sixteenth-Century

Italy From Techne to Metatechne (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1997).

15. A. Mascardi, Dell'arte hist?rica (Rome, 1636); edition cited:

ed. E. Mattioli (Modena, 1994), pp. 234-235. Interest in Mascardi's

treatise merited the publication of four editions (Rome, 1636; Venice,

1646; Venice, 1655; Venice, 1674) and a critical review by Paolo

Pi ran i in 1646: Dodici capi pertinent! all'Arte Hist?rica del Mascardi.




of the rules governing literary style. He found the topic to be elusive?he titled the chapter on style Digressione intorno alio stile (Digression around style)?in a way that reminded him of the "academic assemblies" where

the nature of love was debated without resolution. "I

met with the same thing in my work on style," he

concludes. One of the interpretive methods that he

essayed and rejected depended on etymology. Stile, he

tells us, derives from stylus, the sharp end of a writing instrument, whether pen or chisel, which captures

metonymically the essence of writing: creation (the

sharp end) and emendation (the blunt end).16 Mascardi

acknowledged this to be philologically accurate but

denied it any explanatory value because, he thought, it

assumed the writer to have complete control over what

is written. The stylus transcribes the words that are in

the writer's mind without any kind of intervention. Like

the hand that holds it, the stylus is a compliant instrument. Style's stylus thus proposes a mechanistic

model of literary production at odds with Mascardi's

belief that style is an innate, inner voice beyond the

reach of authorial intention. In his view, and it is one

that I concur with, the writer's hand betrays the mind.

Even though painters drew with pens, stile was

traditionally associated with literary rather than artistic

style. The term preferred by artists and art critics was

maniera. It was used over 1,300 times by Giorgio Vasari

in the Giunta edition of Le Vite, overwhelming the alternatives of stile (15 uses), gusto (16), and carattere

(8).17 Maniera pervades art literature as an absolute measure of quality, as an individual feature of an artist's

technique or expression, as a characteristic form, and as

a means to classify works, artists, schools, and periods. The virtual monopoly that it enjoyed in mid-sixteenth

century Florence eroded only slightly over the following decades and even centuries. Poussin tried to depose it

in favor of sf/7e but met with a generally apathetic

response. In drafting the Felsina pittrice, Carlo Cesare

Malvasia wavered between maniera, gusto, modo, and

carattere but ended up favoring maniera To gauge just

how popular maniera was, compare its frequency of

usage in Vasari's Vite to such canonical terms as disegno (about 800), giudizio (403), invenzione (389), imitazione (242), and fantasia (102).19 And yet, despite its linguistic centrality in art writing, no artist or art critic

before the eighteenth century discussed the etymology of maniera (mano) in their definitions of style. This

might be simply an oversight or evidence of disinterest, but I believe it was a strategy of avoidance, as tactical

and misleading as Mascardi's overt denial of stile's

etymology. I use "tactical" to refer to a polemical means

to appropriate certain meanings and exclude others, to

subvert competing views without directly

acknowledging their existence. In the case of style's

missing "hand" (mano), definers hoped to elevate style (and hence art) above manual production.

Maniera, like stile, also depends on metonymy.20 The mano of maniera reminds us that paintings are

handmade objects and that somewhere in the visible

form there are traces of the artist's manipulation of

paint and brush. Calligraphers, who by all rights should

call their style stile, preferred maniera, because their art

did not aspire to be anything other than manual. There were no malcontents like Poussin in their ranks who

wanted to claim the higher ground of literary stile, nor

was there the gradual erosion of maniera as the

dominant term for style. Because hands are factive tools, maniera's etymology

naturally refers style back to the act of making. This is one reason why most dictionaries from the sixteenth

16. Mascardi (see note 15), pp. 237-246.

17. P. Barocchi, S. Maffei, G. Nencioni, U. Parrini, and E. Picchi

eds., Giorgio Vasari. Le Vite de' pi? eccellenti pittori scultori e

architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568. Indice di frequenza, vol.

1 (Pisa: Scuola normale superiore, 1994), concordance arranged

alphabetically. 18. For Malvasia's emendations from draft to published text, see

Scritti originali del Conte Carlo Cesare Malvasia spettanti alla sua

Felsina pittrice, ed. L. Marzocchi (Bologna: ALFA, n.d.), p. 190.

19. Barocchi et al. (see note 17). I have had to approximate the

usage of disegno because many of the 1,025 uses of disegno refer to a

drawing as physical artifact rather than drawing or design as a concept. 20. W. Sauerl?nder gives the most complete etymological reading

of the historical semantics of style without, however, covering the

material presented in the present article. He accepts the etymology of

maniera and stile as implicitly present in all usages and does not

comment either on the absence or tactical use of explicit references.

"From Stilus to Style: Reflections on the Fate of a Notion," Art History 6 (1983):253-270. Quartrem?re de Quincy was the first to

problematize style as metonymy; in order to introduce his discussion

of style, he brings in handwriting, which he identifies as a m?tonymie

process wherein a mechanical activity is identified with and stands in

place of a mental activity, that is, "the art of expressing one's ideas in

the signs of writing." Encyclop?die m?thodique (Paris: Ranckoucke,

1788-1825), vol. 3, p. 410: "On appliqua par m?tonymie ? l'op?ration de l'esprit, dans l'art d'exprimer ses pens?es avec les signes de

l'?criture, l'id?e de l'op?ration m?canique de la main, ou de

l'instrument qui trace ces signes."




century onward defined maniera as a "way of working" (modo di fare or modo d'operare)?A Another reason is

that "way of working" borrows Aristotle's definition of

art, thereby elevating style above the manual. Initially a

"way of working" defers consideration of the object in

favor of the maker. Filippo Baldinucci's definition of

maniera, included in the first freestanding art dictionary {Vocabolario Toscano dell'arte del disegno, Florence,

1681), intermingles work (opra) and working (operar) in

ways that suggest causality without specifying exactly how the act of making translates into the product made:

Maniera. Mode, manner, form of working [operare] of

painters, sculptors and architects. One means by it that

mode that regularly restrains any artist in his work [operar]; whence it becomes very difficult to find a work [opra] by one master completely different from another work by the same master, which does not show any sign in the style of

being by the master's hand and not by another's.22

Baldinucci's rendition of the conventional phrase modo

di fare into modo & operare was rooted in a meaningful distinction between material and nonmaterial acts.

Sixteenth-century Florentines in the circle of

Michelangelo defined fare as a way of "speaking and

moving oneself and all other things that are done" that

does not result in a material object (poetry, music,

historiography, and so on).23 Operare is a subset of fare

that produces objects (painting, sculpture, and so on)

and, by virtue of its material limitations, was deemed to

be inferior. It was more than philological precision that

led Baldinucci to change modo di fare to moofo

& operare. He wanted to suggest causality between an

artist's action and the visible effects of that action. Every

painting may show some "sign ... of being by the

master's hand," but this does not necessarily mean that we literally see the artist's hand at work and in the

work. The hand serves either metonymically as the

artist's agent or etymological ly as the artist's style. (How

style might also serve as a visible sign of the hand's

action will be considered in the final section.)

Etymology was a common strategy of definition

because, as its own etymology would argue (etumos as

"true or real"), words testify to their origins, and in

their origins, essence and true meaning were thought to reside.24 The search for truth in origins and

especially in etymologies made Isidore of Seville's

Etymologiarum sive originum (circa 620) a

Renaissance best seller. One late-fifteenth-century

21. Ambrogio Calepino, // Dittionario dalla lingua latina nella

volgare brevemente ridotto (Venice, 1553), fol. 128v: "Maniera val

atto, & modo." Adriano Politi, Dittionario toscano (Rome, 1604), p. 487: "Maniera, modo, guisa

... per modo di proceder?, ? costume."

The standard seventeenth-century definition is found in the

Vocabolario degii Accademici della Crusca (Florence, 1612), p. 507, s.v. maniera: "Modo, guisa, forma. Lat. modus, pactum, ratio. 1 Per

ispezie, sorta. Lat. species, genus, t Per una certa qualit?, modo di

proceder?. Lat. institutum, natura. % Per usanza costume." The Latin

etymology cited for modo is modus. Amongst its many meanings, modus could signify a manner of speaking or performing: Cicero, De

oratore 3.117; Cicero, T?pica 54; Tacitus, Dialogus 26.2. It could also

indicate the part of speech in rhetoric that deals with manner: Cicero,

De inventione 1.27.41; Quintilian, Institutio oratorio 5.10.52.

Underlying the performative aspect of modus and modo di proceder?

may be Aristotle's identification of style with delivery: Rhetoric 3.1.5.

The Crusca definition of maniera as "modo di proceder?" is consistent

with sixteenth-century usage in art literature: G. B. Gelli, in discussing how "quella maniera . . . chiamata Greca" involves a repetition of

figures and expression, he says that the artists "seguirono questo modo

del fare." // Gello accademico florentino. Sopra que' due sonetti del

Petrarcha che lodano il ritratto della sua m. Laura (Florence, 1549), pp. 13-14. Vasari, writing of Domenico Puligo, notes that "tenne sempre il

medesimo modo di fare e la medesima maniera, che lo fece essere in

pregio." Le Vite de' pi? eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle

redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. P. Barocchi and R. Bettarini (Florence:

Sansoni, 1976), vol. 4, p. 249. The Crusca Vocabolario consolidated

and popularized the phrase modo di fare as an alternative for maniera.

For a full set of references for this meaning of maniera and for further

discussion, see my forthcoming book Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge University Press).

22. Baldinucci, Vocabolario Toscano dell'arte del disegno (Florence: Santi Franchi, 1681), p. 88: "Maniera f. Modo, guisa, forma

d'operare de' Pittori, Scultori, o Architetti. Intenndesi per quel modo,

che regularmente tiene in particolare qualsivoglia Artefice nell'operar

suo; onde rendesi assai difficile il trovare un'opra d'un maestro, tutto

che diversa da altra del lo stesso, che non dia alcun segno, nella

maniera, di esser di sua mano, e non d'altri."

23. Danti (see note 11), p. 262: "N? pu? essere cosa composta

artifiziata, che non sia propriamente manifattura, la quale abbia corpo e sia sottoposta al grande genere del fare o vero dell'azzione, e che

parimente opera non sia. Et in questo caso porremmo differenza fra il

fare e l'operare. Perch? sotto ?I fare, sempl?cemente detto, intender?

tutte le cose, delle quali non resta dopo il fatto alcuna cosa di loro, che abbia corpo; e sotto l'operare, ancor che l'operare dependa da

fare, intender? che sieno tutte le cose che dopo il fatto rimangono in

essere in corpi visibili. Verbigrazia, dir? che sia cosa di opera una

statua di marmo, perch? rimane di questa fattura in essere la statua.

Medesimamente dir? che fare semplicemente sia il parlare, ?I moversi, e tutte l'altre cose che si fanno, delle quali non rimane dopo il fatto

cosa che abbia corpo visibile." See also Benedetto Varchi, Della

Maggioranza e nobilit? dell'arti (Florence, 1546); edition cited:

Barocchi (see note 11), pp. 8-9. For further discussion, see Summers

(see note 2), pp. 347-351.

24. For etymology in the Renaissance, see M. Rothstein,

"Etymology, Genealogy, and the Immutability of Origins," Renaissance

Quarterly 43 (1990):332-347.




Venetian bookseller ordered a staggering eighty copies of the book.25 In the case of style, however,

etymology's truth introduced some level of discomfort.

For example, after telling us that the master's hand will

leave some sign in the work, Baldinucci introduces the

real meaning of style as a problem of aesthetic norms

and personal expression, all configured within the

general humanist rubric of imitation:

It follows by necessity, even with esteemed masters, that

with style they establish in their own way an ineffable distance from the agreed upon imitation of the true and

natural, no less of one than the other. From the root

maniera comes mannered which one says of those works

where the artist, distancing himself a lot from the true, draws entirely upon his own style as much in making human figures as animals, plants, draperies and other

things; these things could well appear to be made with ease and boldness, but they will never be good, nor will

they have much variety. And this vice is so universal that it

embraces, more or less, most all artists.26

Vasari and Poussin completely avoided any reference to

technique or manual production in their definitions of

maniera. They had different motives in excluding the

hand from style. Both wanted to promote their own

special interests: for Vasari, an aestheticized beauty of

transcendent grace; and for Poussin, a rhetorical

language suited to express ideas and stories.

The mano of maniera was often discussed outside of

definitions, starting with Antonio Filarete's statement that

figures by one painter share a style (maniera) because

they came from one hand (mano),27 but there was

something about a definition that engendered a protective

response. Definitions were (and still are) granted a

privileged status in philosophy that made them useful as

interpretive filters for what something really is. According to Aristotle, definitions explained a universal "essence"

by selecting and prioritizing its constituent elements:

Definition is generally held to be of the essence, and essence is always universal and affirmative. ... In order

to establish a definition by division, we must keep three

things in mind: (1) to select attributes which describe the

essence, (2) to arrange them in order of priority, and (3) to

make sure that the selection is complete.28

By these criteria of essence (stating what something "is") and division (situating that something within a

hieratic nexus of related things), there were few

definitions of pictorial style in Italian art literature

between 1400 and 1700: they are by Vasari (1550), Poussin (circa 1650s), Boschini (1660), and Baldinucci

(1681). The two unpublished definitions, by the

sculptor Orfeo Boselli (circa 1650-1657) and the

painter Giambattista Volpato (circa 1685), only describe

essence without dividing it into parts and so may not

qualify as formal definitions. All six definitions of style

legislate good art, and either exclude references to the

hand (Vasari, Poussin, Boselli, and Volpato) or admit

the hand into style obliquely. By defining style in terms

of their own favorite style, each one of these writers

effectively narrowed a broad theoretical category into

an expression of personal taste. The French naturalist

Georges Buffon did this by defining style as a "clear

and natural" order of thoughts, a quality that he thought all good writing (like his) should have.29

25. R. E. Taylor, No Royal Road: Luca Pacioli and His Times

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), p. 200. For

origins, see David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance

Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University

Press, 1983).

26. Baldinucci (see note 22), p. 88: "II che porta per n?cessita

ancora ne' maestri singularissimi una non so quai lontananza

dall'intesa imitazione del vero, e naturale, che e tanta, quanto ?

quello, che essi con la maniera vi pongono del proprio. Da questa radical parola, maniera, ne viene ammanierato, che dicesi di

quell'opre, nelle quali l'Artefice discostandosi molto dal vero, tutto

tira al proprio modo di fare, tanto nelle figure umane, quanto negli

animali, nelle piante, ne' panni, e altre cose, le quali in tal caso

potrano bene apparir f?cilmente; e francamente fatte; ma non

saranno mai buone pitture, sculture, o architetture, ne avranno fra di

loro intera variet?; ed ? vizio questo tanto universale, che abbraccia,

ove pi? ove meno, la maggior parte di tutti gli Artefici." There will

be further discussion of this definition in my forthcoming book (see

note 21).

27. Antonio Filarete, Trattato di architettura, ed. A. M. Finoli and L.

Grassi (Milan: II Polifilo, 1972), p. 28: "Che se uno tutte le fabbricasse,

come colui che scrive o uno che dipigne fa che le sue lettere si

conoscono, e cos? colue che dipigne la sua maniera delle figure si

cognoosce, e cos? d'ogni faculta si cognosce lo stile di ciascheduno; ma questa ? altra pratica, nonostante che ognuno pure divaria o tanto

o quanto, bench? si conosca essere fatta per una mano. . . ." For a

discussion of the hand as a sign of individual style in fifteenth-century

writing, see M. Warnke, "Praxis der Kunsttheorie: ?ber die

Geburtswehen des Individualstils," Idea. Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 1 (1982):54-56; and M. Kemp, "'Equal Excellences':

Lomazzo and the Explanation of Individual Style in the Visual Arts,"

Renaissance Studies 1 (1987):12-14; Spear (see note 3), pp. 253-274.

28. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 2.3.91 b4-6, 10.93b29-32.

29. Georges Buffon, Discours sur le style, ed. P. Battista (Rome,

1967), pp. 21-34 (lecture given in 1753); and L. Milic, "Rhetorical




* * *

Artists who had fought so long and hard to define art

as a liberal art rather than a craft were understandably reluctant to recall the origin for this ignominious

prejudice and absorb it into a concept so central to art

as style. Prejudices against craft survived well into the

sixteenth century. In 1591 the Genovese nobleman and

painter Giovanni Battista Paggi defended the status of

painting as a liberal art as if the matter were still in

doubt. He was particularly worried by what his peers

might think of his practice of painting and anticipated

charges that he was engaged in an arfe manovale:

And, to start with the staining of your hands, I say that it is not necessary to touch the paints with your hands, but that

when they come to be touched it is more by disgrace than

from need and greatly prejudices the nobility of the art.30

He tried to calm his discomfort with touching paints by

reminding readers that other noble arts like music,

fencing, and equestrianism involved manual dexterity.

Paggi's paintings show this aversion to messing with

paints: not wanting to soil his person, he barely dared to

play with pigments on the canvas, making his work look

as if they were "painted more with the breath than with

the brush."31 Titian, for one, thought otherwise and used

his fingers as brushes:

by rubbing his fingers and blending the highlights into the middle tones thus unifying one color with another; at

other times, with a smear of his fingers, he placed a stroke of shadow in some corner to reinforce it next to some

smear of bright red, almost a drop of blood. . . . And

Palma [Giovane] testified this to me as the truth, that in

finishing a work Titian painted more with his fingers than with his brushes.32

Vincenzo Borghini, an iconographie and literary advisor to Vasari and an art advisor to Cosimo I de'

Medici, exemplifies the kind of residual typecasting that

artists had to endure even under the most enlightened circumstances. He argued that artists in the Accademia

del Disegno should discuss art with art, not with words:

"When you enter into disputes, you leave your own

house, where you are in charge, and enter the house of

philosophers and rhetors where you do not have much

of a part."33 He proposed a motto of stricture for the

Choice and Stylistic Option: The Conscious and Unconscious Poles," in Literary Style: A Symposium, ed. S. Chatman (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1971), pp. 77-88.

30. Paggi, in a letter to his brother Girolamo: "E, cominciando

dalPimbrattarsi le mani, dico che non ? necessario toccare i colori con

le mani, ma che quando vengano tocchi, pi? per disgrazia ehe per

bisogno, pregiudica tanto alla nobilit? delle leggi, se, mentre un dottore

scrivegli vien tocco, o sia per caso, o per volont?; come pregiudica alia

nobilit? del cavali?re, se il cavallo, nel maneggiarsi, o con ispuma o con

sudore, o con far saltare ?I fango addosso al padrone, in qualche modo

lo imbratti." Published by G. G. Bottari and S. Ticozzi, eds., Raccolta di

lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architetti (Milan: G. Silvestri, 1825), vol.

6, p. 74. In his letters, Paggi used the terms meccanica and servile

interchangeably with manovale. For discussions on Paggi as a painter and the unfortunate events that led to the "Disputa," see Franco Renzi

Pesenti, "La disputa a Genova del 1590 sull'Arte della Pittura e Giovan

Battista Paggi," in La Pittura in Ligura. Artisti del primo seicento (Genoa:

Cassa Di Risparmio, 1986), pp. 9-22; and P. Lukehart, "Delineating the

Genoese Studio: Giovani accartati or sotto padre?" in The Artist's

Workshop, ed. P. Lukehart, Studies in the History of Art 38 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1993), pp. 37-57. For the most complete and sophisticated consideration, see Peter Lukehart, "Contending Ideals:

The Nobility of Painting and the Nobility of G. B. Paggi" (Ph.D. diss.,

Johns Hopkins University, 1987).

31. This is Federico Zuccaro's description of Lombard painting in

general but applies particularly well to Paggi's work: ". . . il tutto

fatto con tanta facilita, che si crederebbe piuttosto fatto col fiato che

col pennello." Undated letter to Antonio Chigi, in Bottari andTicozzi

(see note 30), vol. 7, p. 511.

32. Boschini, "Breve instruzione," in Le Rieche minere della pittura veneziana (Venice, 1673); edition cited included with Boschini's Carta

(see note 9), p. 712: "Ma ?I condimento de gli ultimi ritocchi era andar

di quando in quando unendo con sfregazzi delle dita negli estremi de'

chiari, avicinandosi alie meze tinte, ed unendo una tinta con l'altra;

altre volte, con un striscio delle dita pure poneva un colpo d'oscuro in

qualche angolo, per rinforzarlo, oltre qualche striscio di rossetto, quasi

gocciola di sangue, che invigoriva alcun sentimento superficiale; e

cos? andava a riducendo a perfezione le sue animate figure. Ed ?I

Palma mi attestava, per verit?, che nei finimenti dipingeva piu con le

dita che co' pennelli." 33. V. Borghini, Carteggio art?stico in?dito, ed. A. Lorenzoni

(Florence: B. Seeber, 1912), pp. 10-13. This statement along with the

motto quoted below are discussed by W. Kemp, "Disegno. Beitrage zur

Geschichte des Begriffs zwischen 1547 und 1607," Marburger Jahrbuch

f?r Kunstwissenschaft 19 (1974):236; Summers (see note 2), p. 532, n.

27; Z. Wazbi?ski, L'Accademia Medicea del Disegno a Firenze ne!

Cinquecento. Idea e istituzione (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1987), vol. 1,

pp. 162-164, 301; C. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci's Paragone (Leiden: E.

J. Brill, 1992), p. 126 (who notes the context of Borghini as

Michelangelo's response to Varchi's request: that is, rejection of literary

response that would take him away from his work wherein the real

answer to Varchi's question lies); R. Scorza, "Borghini and the

Florentine Academies," in Italian Academies of the Sixteenth Century, ed. D. S. Chambers and F. Quiviger (London: Warburg Institute, 1995),

pp. 137-163; and Thomas Frangenberg, Der Betrachter: Studien zur

florentinischen Kunsliteratur des 16. Jahrhunderts (Cologne, 1990). For

an excellent discussion of the "very marginal position" held by artists

in Cinquecento Italian academies and the implications for the state of

literacy in the artistic community, see the excellent article by F.

Quiviger, "The Presence of Artists in Literary Academies," in Italian

Academies of the Sixteenth Century, ed. D. S. Chambers and F.

Quiviger (London: Warburg Institute, 1995), pp. 105-112.




academy, one that carried a certain weight coming from

the Medici luogotenente to the academy: "Academy of

DOING and not of REASONING!" (Accademia di FARE e non di RAGIONARE!).34 In its majusculed stringency and exclamatory insistence, we can sense some of the

resistance faced by artists. He also dismissed the literary

pretensions of those artists responsible for

Michelangelo's funeral by calling them "baby sparrows," and elsewhere he "marvels" that "good men with an art

in their hands" should seek fame in writing.35 Regarding the academy's mandate, Cosimo I de' Medici said that

artists "need to produce works not words."36 Had

Borghini still been alive to see the satiric print from the

early seventeenth century of an analphabet art academy, he would certainly have enjoyed the emblematic hand

resting above the conspicuously misspelled inscription, Academia d Pitori (fig. 2). Whatever Borghini's motives, and I suspect they involved a resistance to artists

encroaching on his literary domain and thereby

undermining his status, he slagged artists because they make things instead of thinking about them, their art is

"in their hands" rather than in words. Paolo Giovio

applied an edgy sarcasm when he praised Vasari as

"fattivo, expedito, manesco et resoluto pittore." He is an

energetic maker of things (fattivo) and a handy painter (manesco), who, like many artists, he implies, is

unmanageable and truculent (also manesco). In order to compensate for the ignoble necessity of

manual production, artists and their supporters insisted

that the excellence of art rested more in the conception than the execution. Federico Zuccaro, for example,

unabashedly acknowledged in court that his assistants

painted the Porta virtutis, but that nonetheless, he

considered it to be his painting, because "truly, the

invention, the conception, and the idea were mine, and

it is quite true that I had it executed by that apprentice,

having other things to do myself."37 Authorship resided

in invention, not in manual production. By isolating

style from the hand, writers also protected it from the

damaging physiological effects of old age: eyesight and

physical coordination may decline, but the artist's spirit and sensibility remained intact.38 When Poussin defined

style as rhetorical expression without reference to

manual production, his shaky hand had just started to

show itself in his paintings. He had other motives for

shielding style from technique, but mixed amongst them

must have been some personal anxiety about the artistic

consequences of his tremors. By rendering style literary and rhetorical, he could postpone the admission that

"with age his hand weakened which he found to be an

impediment in painting."39 * * *

The explanations proposed here for the absence or

suppression of man ?era's etymology are valid only to the

extent that the hand was identified primarily with

practice instead of theory, with technique instead of

conception and expression. The hand was more

polyvalent than this. Its status as the "servant" of the

mind, to use Baldinucci's metaphor,40 was not always demeaned in such self-serving and polemical ways. Richard Spear has produced a wonderful cultural history of the hand and its fluid, pluralistic semantics

embracing technique, legal documents,

connoisseurship, art pricing, and a range of theoretical

issues such as originality, talent, "divine" creativity, and

style.41 How prejudices about the craft of painting clung

34. V. Borghini (see note 33), n. viii, pp. 12, 14: "voi uscite di casa

vostrea, dove voi siate patroni et ?ntrate in casa di filosofi et Retori,

dove voi havete non troppo gran parte . . . ? Academia di FARE et

non di RAGIONARE." For Borghini and the Accademia del Disegno, see the excellent article (with current bibliography) by Scorza (see

note 33). For other examples of "the superior attitude of the elite,

educated literato with respect to the artist," see P. Rossi, "Sprezzatura,

Patronage, and Fate: Benvenuto Cellini and the World of Words," in

Vasari's Florence: Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court, ed. P.

Jacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 60-62.

35. For a discussion of these statements, see C. Lucas, "L'artiste et

l'?criture: /'/ dire et /'/ fare dans les ?crits de Cellini," in Culture et

professions en Italie (XV-XVII si?cles), ed. A. C. Fiorato (Paris:

Publications de la Sorbonne, 1989), pp. 80-82.

36. W. Kemp (see note 33), p. 236: "S. Ecc. dice che bisogna far

con l'op?re, non con le parole."

37. Quoted by R. Klein and H. Zerner eds., Italian Art, 1500-1600:

Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966),

p. 171; and Spear (see note 3), p. 267.

38. For a recent discussion of senility in art, see Erin Campbell, "Old Age Style and the Resistance of Practice in Cinquecento Art

Theory and Criticism" (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1998).

39. Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le Vite de' pittori, scultori e architetti

modern i (Rome, 1672); edition cited: ed. E. Borea (Turin: G. Einaudi,

1976), p. 454: "Ma perch? nella nostra umana vita non si trova

intiera felicita, questi beni venivano interrotti dalle indisposizione del corpo che spesso lo travagliavano: aveva egli un tremore e

battimento de' polsi che gl'impediva il disegnare, e per questo alcuni

suoi disegni non hanno li tratti molto sicuri e paiono fatti da mano

tremante. Con l'et? s'indebol? poi maggiormente la mano, che al

dipingere trovava impedimento." 40. Baldinucci (see note 8), vol. 6, p. 46; see also Migliore (see

note 12), p. 437, who notes that artists must have "obedient" hands.

41. Spear (see note 3), pp. 253-274.



Sohm: Maniera and the absent hand 109

Figure 2. Pierfrancesco Alberti, Academia d Pitori, early seventeenth century. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of

Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949, 49.95.12.

to discussions of the "hand," despite such ennobling conceits as the "hand of God," will be considered here

by taking two definitions of style?one by Roger de

Piles, the other by Marco Boschini?that render the

hand in more ambivalent ways, neither celebrating nor

condemning, but strategically isolating its functions.

What conditions did de Piles and Boschini impose on

the hand in order to admit it to their definitions of style? In the case of de Piles, if we follow the trajectory of his

thoughts about style starting in 1667, we find him

engaged in a lexical shuffle that concedes greater semantic space for the hand in style and simultaneously

denies mani?re its usual position as the tradition label

for style. De Piles thus represents a trend of depriving stile of its canonical status in art writing. In the case of

Marco Boschini, who defined style in 1674 as a

handmade stain (macchia), we find a celebration of

manual dexterity that questions just how much an artist

really controls his or her medium. Boschini's "hand"

queries its status as servant of the mind.

In France the first definition of pictorial style was

written pseudonymously by Roger de Piles in 1667. It

appeared in a prefatory lexicon that was appended to

Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy's De arte graphica. The




semantic landscape as represented by de Piles's fifty four "terms of painting" slants toward technical matters,

probably to help outfit humanist readers with a

specialist vocabulary prior to reading Du Fresnoy's text.

And yet within the definitions of technique, the

problems of manufacture often take a secondary role to

issues of representation and imitation. Hue (teinte), for

example, is "an artificial or mixed color used to imitate

the natural color of some object." His definition of style is such an instance:

One calls style [mani?re] the habit that painters have

formed, not only in the handling [maniement] of the brush, but also in the three principal parts of painting which are

invention, design and coloring; and since this habit will have been acquired with more or less study of, and thought about, natural and artistic beauty, seen no less in painting than in sculpture, one speaks of good or bad style. By

means of this style that we now speak one gains a

recognition of a painter's work having seen various

paintings, just as one recognizes the character and style

[stile] of a man whose letter you have received. One also

says 'to know styles' to mean 'to recognize the work of a

particular painter amongst paintings by many others'.42

De Piles's syntax ("not only ... but also") seems to

distinguish between two kinds of stylistic habit: the

manual ("handling the brush") and the intellectual

("invention, design, and coloring"). Because invention

appears first in this list, it sounds similar to de Piles's

later Cours de peinture par principes (1708), where he

separates two kinds of style (stile): "styles of thought,"

referring to poetic and rhetorical modes of invention

(the heroic, pastoral, elevated, and so on), and "styles of

execution," referring to different techniques of

brushwork.43 Such a retrospective reading, which takes

the Cours de peinture as a guide to de Piles's intentions

forty years earlier, imposes an artificial barrier between

thought and execution. In 1667 he was more likely to

blur the lines drawn later between the manual and the

intellectual. Dessein, for example, is both design as

imitation, form, and proportion, and drawing as

materials and techniques. Instead of dividing style along a manual-intellectual axis as he would in 1708, de

Piles's syntax of "not only . . . but also" couples two

schools of thought about style. The dominant trend was

to understand style as manual habit, but as de Piles

notes, it is "not only" this. By broadening the meaning of style to include invention and hence ways of

thinking, he deprives manual execution of its

dominance of style. In a chapter on connoisseurship in the Abr?g? de la

vie des peintres (1699), de Piles seems to capitulate to

the predominant view of mani?re defined as "the

character of the master's hand" and as "the movement

of the brush":

In effect there are paintings made by pupils who have followed their masters very closely both in the learning [savoir] and in the style [mani?re]. One has seen some

painters who, having followed the taste [go?t] o? another

country, have changed from one style [mani?re] to another, changing this way and that. Thus are made some very

equivocal paintings whose creator is difficult to identify. Nevertheless, this problem has a solution for those who,

not content to attach themselves to the character of the

master's hand, have enough insight [p?n?tration] to discover it in the master's spirit [esprit]. An able man can

easily tell in what style he executed his drawings, but not so with the subtlety of his thoughts. It is thus not easy to discover the author of a painting, to know the movement of the brush, if one does not penetrate the spirit in it.44

42. R. de Piles, "Termes de peinture," in C. A. Du Fresnoy, De arte

graphica (Paris, 1667); edition cited: Du Fresnoy (see note 12), n.p: "Mani?re. Nous appelions Mani?re l'habitude que les Peintres ont

prise, non seulement dans le maniemant du pinceau; mais encore

dans les trois principales parties de la Peinture, Invention, Dessin &

coloris: & selon que cette habitude aura est? contract?e avec plus ou

moins d'?tude de coinnoissance du beau Natural & des belles choses

qui se voyent de Peinture & de Sculpture, on l'appelle bonne au

mauvaise mani?re. C'est par cette maniere dont il est icy question que l'on reconnoist l'Ouvrage du Peintre dont on a d?j? veu quelque

Tableau, de m?me qu l'on reconno?t les Mani?res, pour dire conno?tre

de plusieurs Tableaux l'Ouvrage de chaque Peintre en particulier." By

defining style as a "habit," he recalls Aristotle's definition of art as "a

rational habit of making" (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

6.4.1140a.32). M. Lacombe repeats De Piles's definition in his art

dictionary: Dizionario portatile delle belli arti; ovvero Ristretto di cid,

che spetta all'Architettura, alia Scultura, alia Pittura, all'lntaglio, alia

Poes?a, edalla M?sica (Venice: Stamperia Remondini, 1758), p. 222.

43. De Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (Paris: Jacques

Estienne, 1708), p. 258.

44. De Piles, Abr?g? de la vie des peintres (Paris: C. de Sercy, 1699); edition cited: Paris: J. Estienne, 1715, p. 96: "En effet, il y a des

Tableaux faits par des Disciples, qui ont suivi leur Ma?tres de fort pr?s, & dans le savoir, & dans la mani?re. On a vu plusieurs Peintres qui ont

suivi le Go?t d'un autre Pais m?me, ont pass? d'une mani?re ? une

autre, en changeant ainsi & en cherchant une mani?re particuli?re, ils

ont fait plusieurs Tableaux fort ?quivoques, & dont il est difficile de

d?terminer l'Auteur. N?amoins, cet inconv?nient ne manque pas de

rem?de pour ceux, qui, non contens de s'attacher au charact?re de la

main du Ma?tre, ont assez de p?n?tration pour d?couvrir celui de son




By conceding that style is a manual act, de Piles

engages in a tactical retreat that actually protects his

real interests. Connoisseurs, he tells us, who study only "the character of the master's hand" and "the

movement of the brush," will fail to attribute paintings

by artists who change styles. Instead, they should

attend to a transcendent and, hence, more stable

quality that he calls esprit: "the subtlety of his

thoughts" and "the character of his genius." By

studying esprit, they will "penetrate" the work, whereas

lesser connoisseurs of mani?re are said to "attach"

themselves to "the character of the master's hand." To

engage an artist's esprit is an active process that delves

into an inner and, hence, inimitable form of genius. The connoisseurs' engagement with mani?re, in

contrast, is one of "attachment," thus suggesting a

passivity and superficiality that is appropriate to an

external, manual, and mutable form. De Piles's

interpretive strategy relies mostly on nomenclature,

conceding to mani?re its lowest and most common

meaning in order to reserve a higher meaning for the

newly coined substitute. LaTeuli?re, writing in Rome

in 1691, engaged in a similar tactical definition by means of nomenclature when he relabeled style as

go?t and separated it from technique, which he called

op?ration or "a certain routine of the artisan."45

The restriction of maniera and mani?re to a

semantic terrain concerned primarily with technique and manual production or, as one of Baldinucci's

editors would have it "simple and superficial practice," became more common in the mid-eighteenth

century.46 Why maniera began to lose its domain over

the higher issues of spirit and learning can be variously

explained. Here are two possibilities. The first is linguistic. During the late seventeenth

century, an alternative vocabulary emerged that

allowed art writers to escape the etymological

implications of maniera. Poussin was pivotal in this

process. He proposed that stile, not maniera, should be

considered as the correct term for designating individual style.47 Before Poussin, writers who applied

sf/7e to painting tended to be literary critics or

philologists who simply transferred their terminology

Esprit; un habile homme peut facilement communiquer la mani?re

dont il ex?cute ses Desseins: mais non pas la finesse de ses pens?es. Ce n'est donc pas assez pour d?couvrir l'Auteur d'un Tableau, de

conno?tre le mouvement du Pinceau, si l'on ne p?n?tre dans celui de

l'Esprit: & bien que ce soit beaucoup d'avoir une id?e juste du Go?

que le Peintre a dans son Dessein, il faut encore entrer dans le

caract?re de son G?nie. . . ."

45. LaTeuli?re, letter to Villacerf, 4 September 1691, Anatole de

Montaiglon, ed., Correspondence des directeurs de l'Acad?mie de

France ? Rome avec les surintendants des b?timents (Paris, 1887), p. 215: "Mais il y a une grande distance du goust [which discerns and

selects good things] ? l'op?ration et, pour le goust m?me, il se l'est

form? plus tot sur une certaine routine d'artisan que sur les principes solides qui font les habiles Sculpteurs, comme les personnes qui ont

de bons yeux pourront voir dans ses deux figures, o?, parmy des

fauttes ass?s consid?rables, il y a de bonnes parties, mais qui ne sont

pas faittes les unes pour les autres, ayant mieux aym? les coppier sur

des parties s?par?es des figures antiques et modernes, tir?es de sujets

diff?rents, que faire des estudes de ces m?mes parties pour les unir

ensemble dans la v?ritable position des muscles suivant l'actione de

ces m?mes parties."

46. Giuseppe Piacenza advises artists that in imitating other artists

they should imitate the learning (sapere), otherwise they will acquire

only the style (maniera) and be reduced to painting by "una semplice

pratica superficiale." Notizie de' professori del disegno dal Cimabue

in qua, ed. G. Piacenzax (Turin, 1768-1817), vol. 2, p. 315, in

Piacenza's editorial comments to Baldinucci. See also A. M. Zanetti, Descrizione di tutte le pubbliche pitture del la citt? di Venezia (Venice:

Presso P. Bassaglia, 1733), p. 10: "II modo di adoperare il pennello che maneggio, o maniera si chiama"); and P. E. Gherardi, Descrizione

de' cartoni disegnati da Carlo Cignani e de' quadri dipinti da

Sebastiano Ricci posseduti dal Signor Giuseppe Smith Console d?lia

Gran Bretagna (Venice, 1749), p. 105: ". . . nel maneggio del

pennello, o sia nella maniera."). Relying on de Piles, Antoine Joseph D?zallier d'Argenville in the Abr?g? de la vie des plus fameux

peintres (Paris: De Bure l'aine, 1745) distinguishes between an artist's

propre style as a way of thinking and composing and the style of "his

hand," which is a way of manipulating the brush.

47. Bellori (see note 39), pp. 479-480. Erwin Panofsky claimed

that Poussin applied the term stile to painting for the first time and

that only thereafter was it used to describe individual style: "Here

[in Poussin's definition] the expression "style" is used apparently for

the first time to designate the individual ways of pictorial

representation that so far had been designated by the term

maniera." Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der alteren

Kunsttheorie (Berlin: B. Hessling, 1960), p. 115, n. 224; translated

by J. Peake as Idea. A Concept in Art Theory (New York, 1968), p.

240, n. 5. Sauerl?nder (see note 20), p. 258, concurs with Panofsky. This view was corrected by Charles Dempsey, citing examples by Delminio and Castiglione as evidence, but this has not dissuaded

others from maintaining Panofsky's position. Annibale Carracci and

the Beginnings of Baroque Style (Gl?ckstadt: Augustin, 1977), pp. 102-103. For a recent instance of the citation and acceptance of

Panofsky on stile, see C. van Eck, "Par le style on atteint au sublime:

The Meaning of the Term 'Style' in French Architectural Theory of

the Late Eighteenth Century," in The Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts, ed. C. van Eck, J. McAllister, and R. van de Vail

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 91: "The term

[stile] was applied to painting and sculpture from the time of

Poussin onwards."




for literary style to art,48 but after Poussin's definition was published in Giovanni Pietro Bellori's Le vite de'

pittori scultori e architetti moderni (1672), stile gained a broader circulation amongst art critics and historians, and in the eighteenth century, it entered the

mainstream.49 In part, this reflects Poussin's

authoritative stature, as well as the enduring influence

of Bellori's Vite where the definition was first published. It might also reflect how style became increasingly rhetoricized in the eighteenth century, and how writers

after Poussin felt an ever-greater need to separate style from the pejorative associations that had accrued to

maniera. Stile represented at least neutral ground or

possibly the higher ground offered by literary style. A second possible explanation for the waning

authority of maniera as a designation of invention and

creativity can be found in the evolving constituency of

professional connoisseurs. Throughout the sixteenth

century and most of the seventeenth century, when

collectors or dealers wanted to assign or confirm an

attribution, they usually turned to practicing artists.50 In a letter of 1681, published six years later in Rome, Baldinucci questioned this contemporary practice and

the conventional wisdom that it rested on.51 In

particular he doubted that brushwork and other visible

evidence of an artist's technique were the reliable

guides for attribution that so many assumed them to be.

Why would Baldinucci cast doubt on such a well

established and useful tool of connoisseurship? He was

writing to Vincenzo Capponi, Cosimo Ill's luogotenente at the Accademia del Disegno, and by so doing he

hoped to convince the Grand Duke of his qualifications to serve as art curator. He proposed to answer four

pertinent questions: (1) Can a dilettante judge art just as well as a professional painter? (2) What rules can

help decide whether a painting is an original or a copy?

48. In addition to the examples cited by Dempsey, one can add

Pietro Bembo, letter of 1 January 1505 to Isabella d'Est?: "La

invention, che mi scrive V.S. che io truovi al disegno, bisogner? che

l'accomodi alla fantasia di lui che l'ha a fare, il qu?le ha piacere che

molto signati termini non si diano al suo stile, uso, come dice, di

sempre vagare a sua voglia nelle pitture." G. Gaye, ed., Carteggio in?dito d'artisti (Florence: Presso G. Molini, 1840), vol. 2, p. 71. See

also the letters by Pietro Aretino, in C. Gandini, ed., Tiziano - le

lettere (Cadore, 1977), p. 62 (letter of 11 Feb. 1538 to Nicolo

Franco); and by Domenico Fiorentino to Pietro Aretino, dated 20

May 1541 and published in Lettere scritte al Signor Pietro Aretino da

molti Signori, Comunit?, Donne di valore, Poeti, & altri

Eccellentissimi Spiriti (Venice: Per Francesco Marcolini, 1552), vol.

2, p. 193: ". . . si come la figura di San Pier martire in San Giovan

& Paulo dal gran Tutiano [Titian] fatta, non si stracca mai farlo

grande, cosi l'opere da V.S. con tanta argutia, con tanta facondia, con si mirabil & nuovo stile. . . ."

49. Numerous passages using stile are presented and discussed in

my forthcoming book (see note 21). It should be noted that traditional

nomenclatures were maintained. Paolo de' Matteis, for example,

writing in the early eighteenth century still identified stile with the

literary domain and maniera with the artistic: "Quanto al suo

naturale stile (da noi detto: Maniera) si accost? sempre a Pietro da

Cortona." By noi, he meant painters. Matteis's text is quoted by Bernardo de' Domenici, Vite de' pittori, scultori, ed architetti

napoletani (Naples: Nella Stamperia del Ricciardi, 1742), vol. 3, p. 542. For the question of authenticity concerning Matteis's manuscript that was published by de' Domenici, seeT. Willette, "Bernardo De

Dominici e le Vite de' pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani. Contributo alla riabilitazione di una fonte," in Ricerche sul' 600

napoletano (Milan: L&T, 1986), pp. 255-273; (Milan: L&T, 1994), pp. 201-207.

50. For Pietro da Cortona as consultant on matters of authenticity, see H. Geisenheimer, Pietro da Cortona e gli affreschi nel Palazzo Pitti.

Notizie docum?ntate (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1909), pp. 21, 37. For

Livio Meus, see Bottari andTicozzi (see note 30), vol. 2, pp. 61-64.

For Justus Sustermans and Baldassare Franceschini, see E. Goldberg, After Vasari: History, Art, and Patronage in Late Medici Florence

(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 60. For

Denijs Calvaert as an expert of styles, see Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Felsina pittrice. Vite de' pittori bolognesi divise in duoi tomi (Bologna,

1678); edition cited: ed. G. P. Zanotti et al. (Bologna: Tip. Guidi

all'Ancora, 1841), vol. 1, p. 197. Although connoisseurship was first

discussed at length by a nonprofessional (Giulio Mancini), it was not

until later in the century that dedicated lay connoisseurs emerged,

including Baldinucci, Sebastiano Resta, and Francesco Algarotti. 51. Baldinucci (see note 8), vol. 6, p. 477 (letter to Vincenzo

Capponi): "Egli ? dunque necessario che chi vuol farsi giudice delle

maniere de' pittori, abbia vedute tante e tante pitture del maestro di

chi egli vuol giudicare la pittura; che gli sia ben rimaso impresso nel la mente tutto il suo fare; ne basterebbe, a chi volesse

esemplificare nel nostro caso, la similitudine del carattere, il quale da

ognuno si forma in un modo, ch'? proprio suo, e per? ? sempre in

qualche cosa diverso da quel lo d'ogni altro; onde ben si riconosce da

colui che ha in pratica i particolari scritti; la ragione ? perch? nel

carattere ci potiamo valere del confronto con altro carattere del la

stessa mano, parola con parola, e lettera con lettera, ma nel la pittura non ? cos?; conciossiacosach? ogni opera, e ogni parte di essa, se

pero non ? una copia, sempre ? diversa dall'altre, siccome anche

diversi furono i natural i, l'idee del pittore, le vedute delle figure, e

delle parti di esse." Despite Baldinucci's doubts, the

handwriting/brushstroke parallel continued to be popular during the

late seventeenth century. See Andr? F?libien, Des principes de

l'Architecture, de la Sculpture et de la Peinture (Paris: J. B. Coignard,

1676), p. 646: "Corne l'on reconnoist le style d'un autheur ou

l'?criture d'une personne dont on re?oit souvent des lettres, on

reconnoist de mesme les ouvrages d'un Peintre dont on a vu souvent

les tableaux et on appelle cela connoistre sa mani?re."




(3) What rules can help in attributing a painting to one

master or to another? and (4) What esteem should be

given to copies?52 In answer to the first, he concedes to

painters greater expertise in judging art, but not

unexpectedly, he tries to carve out for himself a new

professional niche as "expert dilettante" and

professional art curator for Leopoldo de' Medici. In

answer to the second and third questions, Baldinucci is

evasive as if to show that sometimes the differences

between copy and original or between master and

follower are virtually imperceptible. He rests his case

that brushwork as handiwork was an unreliable guide for attribution on Giulio Romano's famous error in

identifying Andrea del Sarto's copy of Raphael's Leo X as

the original.53 Since Romano had helped Raphael paint Leo X, he in effect mistook Sarto's work as his own. If

there are no rules for attribution, and if even the most

expert is deceived, then what hope is there?

Conventionally, artists believed that "it is nearly

impossible that, however good a copyist may be, he can

pass off his copy as an original to those who really can

see."54 Baldinucci claimed a superior position by virtue

of skepticism: "for these above-noted reasons it seems to

me to be absolutely impossible in our times always to

give a secure judgment whether a painting would be by the hand of a certain master, or not."55 By undermining the status quo, Baldinucci hoped to open a space for a

nonprofessional such as himself, who was trying to

usurp the painter's position as a style expert. Leopoldo de' Medici, to assuage his doubts about Baldinucci

before further entrusting him with an extensive

acquisition campaign, had a test administered to him

where he was asked to attribute two hundred

drawings.56 Baldinucci passed with distinction.

De Piles, as a nonprofessional claiming expertise in

art, was in a similarly vulnerable position when it came

to stylistic matters. By denying authority to "the

movement of the brush" as a reliable sign for

attribution, he too protected himself from charges that

he had no business dabbling in connoisseurship and

looking into studio technique. If, on the other hand, manual technique was not the trustworthy indicator of

style as generally assumed, then painters had no special

advantage over lay curators. By pulling style into the

realm of noncorporeal esprit, de Piles could stand more

firmly as an equal. * * *

Early modern Italian painting is a gestural art, even

when artists tried to conceal the visible effects of their

manual manipulations of the brush, and sometimes it is

extravagantly gestural as in the paintings of Tintoretto or

Magnasco. The question that concerned de Piles and

Baldinucci as connoisseurs was whether the artist's hand

always acted predictably and habitually despite the

dictates of the artist's will. Was the gesture of brushwork

fully under the artist's control as part of a self-conscious

rhetoric, or was it an unpremeditated habit and residue

from years of efficient production? In other words, to

what extent were artists thought to be in control of their

hands? Baldinucci claimed "servant" status for the hand, because he believed it to be a compliant instrument of

the mind. Artists deliberately sought certain effects, often learned from other artists, and hence manual

technique varied according to the artist's intentions. De

Piles agreed with this position and sought stability by

relocating style to the noncorporeal esprit. Gesture presented its interpreters with divergent

epistemologies similar to those given to style. I will call

the first "physiognomic" and the second "cultural." The

physiognomic view of gesture held it to be reflexive and

self-revelatory, an indelible and inescapable

psychological cast. For the gestural arts of calligraphy,

drawing, and painting, this proved an appealing premise to connoisseurs who sought such stability. Graphology and connoisseurship were first codified in the early seventeenth century by physicians (Camillo Baldi and

Giulio Mancini respectively) who were trained in

52. Baldinucci (see note 8), vol. 6, pp. 462-463.

53. Vasari (see note 21), vol. 4, pp. 378-380.

54. Abraham Bosse, Sentiments sur la distinction des diverses

mani?res de peinture, dessein & graveure (Paris, 1649); quoted by C.

Gibson-Wood, Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship from Vasari to

Morel'17 (New York: Garland, 1988), p. 53.

55. Baldinucci (see note 8), vol. 6, pp. 471, 475. Art literature is

littered with examples of connoisseurial errors. In addition to the

examples cited by Ferretti ("Falsi e tradizione art?stica," in Storia

dell'arte italiana [Turin: G. Einaudi, 1981], vol. 3, pt. 3) and Spear (see

note 3, pp. 265-274), see Malvasia (see note 50, vol. 1, p. 351), who

cites with relish the fact that Salvator Rosa, Francesco Scannelli, and

Marco Boschini were unable to differentiate the styles of Lodovico and

Annibale Carracci. Giulio Mancini noted that the most clever forger can always defeat "the most intelligent connoisseur." Considerazioni

sulla pittura, ed. A. Marucchi and L. Salerno (Rome: Accademia

nazionale dei Lincei, 1957), vol. 1, p. 135.

56. Francesco Saverio Baldinucci, in Zibaldone baldinucciano, ed.

B. Santi (Florence: S.P.E.S., 1981), vol. 2, pp. 14-15.




humoral psychology and in a diagnostics premised on

the revelatory truths of external, visible symptoms.57

Graphology and connoisseurship postulate that writers

and painters cannot fully control the action of the

hand; no matter what they are writing or painting and

even despite all efforts to mimic or forge, an

involuntary residue of themselves will remain. Copies are the best test for an artist's manual control. Luigi Lanzi, for example, believed that a counterfeiter may seek to sublimate his character to another's but will be

inevitably defeated in his deceit, because the servility that led him to faking inevitably superimposes itself

on the copy.58 The person who wants to counterfeit is

just the sort of person who is temperamentally unsuited to succeed, caught within a self-defeating

strategy. Critics with a less articulate psychology of

copying also believed that the copyist will always intrude into the copy, that the hand will never

completely obey the mind.

This is a physiognomist's view of style. Quartrem?re de Quincy, for example, called style a physiognomies that diagnoses the inner character of an individual, a

school, a country, or a period by means of the outer

features of the face and body.59 Trading on the

reputations of Aristotle and Polemon, physiognomies was once deemed to be scientifically and

philosophically legitimate, a pragmatics that held many

parallels to painting.60 Physiognomies interpreted the

structure of nature?"the faces and order of the whole

world"?in order to divine the "invisible world" from

the visible.61 It was, thus, a semiotic system that

structurally resembled style analysis: if inner realties of

character are projected outwardly?"all animate bodies

are material portraits of their souls"62?then the process

57. The connection of graphology and connoisseurship was first

discussed by Carlo Ginzburg and has received wide acceptance:

"Spie: Radici di un paradigma ?ndiziario," in Crisi della ragione, ed. A.

Gargani (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1979), pp. 59-106.

58. Luigi Lanzi, Storia pittorica dell'ltalia dal risorgimento delle

belle arti fin presso la fine del XVIII sec?lo (Bassano, 1789); edition

cited: Storia pittorica, ed. M. Capucci (Florence: Sansoni, 1968), vol.

1, pp. 14-16.

59. Quartrem?re de Quincy (see note 20), vol. 3, p. 411 : "Style . . .

devient synomyme de caract?re, ou de la mani?re propre de la

physionomie distinctive qui appartient ? chaque ouvrage, ? chaque

auteur, ? chaque genre, ? chaque ?cole, ? chaque pays, ? chaque si?cle." The idea can be traced back to Dionysius of Halicarnassus (De

compositione verborum, xxi), who wrote that style cannot be reduced

to classes, because they are as individual as our "physiognomies";

however, unlike Quartrem?re de Quincy, Dionysius seems not to have

applied his insight to stylistic analyses of oratory and writing. 60. Flavio Caroli, Storia della fisiognomica. Arte e psicolog?a da

Leonardo a Freud (Milan: Leonardo, 1995); Lina Bolzoni, La stanza

della memoria. Modelli letterari e iconograpfici nell'et? della stampa

(Turin: G. Einaudi, 1995), pp. 164-179. For the semiotics of

physiognomies, see U. Eco, "Introduzione," in J. K. Lavater, Della

Fisiognomica (Milan, 1993).

61. Giovanni Ingegneri, Fisionom?a naturale . . . nella qu?le con

ragioni tolte della Filosof?a, dalla medicina, & dall'anatomia si

dimostra, come dalle parti dell corpo humano, per la sua naturale

complessione, si possa agevolmente conietturare quali siano

l'inclinatione de gl'Huomini (Milan, 1607); published in Giovanni

Battista Della Porta, Della Fisionom?a dell'huomo (Venice: Presso C.

Tomasini, 1644), p. 350: "Perche tutte le cose farte da Dio, & tutte le

nature invisibili, in conseguenza di quella Divina bont?, & somma

sapienza, la quale spiega se stessa, & se manifesta nella fabrica &

nell'ordine di tutto il Mondo, nella virt? delle Stelle, nella vita de gli

animali, & nell'ingegno de gli huomini, imprimono nella materia, &

ne' corpi ? lor prossimi certi segni dell'esser loro, & delle loro

propri?t?, & disposition^', cos? fatti, che quasi mai non si vide, che

l'anima d'alcuna spetie d'animali havesse alcun accidente suo

naturale proprio, che nel copro dell'istesso animale non si scorgesse un'altro accidente corp?reo dimostrativo di quell'occulto

multiplicando, & communicando sempre, per Divina constitutione, le

sostanze, & propri?t? delle cose il loro essere; aile nature loro vicine."

See also Cornelio Ghiradelli, Cefalogia fisonomica (Bologna, 1630),

n.p., in introduction: "F? par?re de' Platonici, che la bellezza, di cui

veggiamo ornate le creature habitatrice della Terra, sia un raggio, che

derivando dalla incomprensibil luce della faccia del Creatore, per modo d'ldea, e per benignit? di lui, ad esse communicate sia. Ma qual

bisogno habbiamo noi della testimonianza de' Platonici, se dalla

bocea non mai mentitrice dello stesso Dio udito I habbiamo? Erasi di

gi? compita l'op?ra di questa machina mondiale, & il tutto coll'ordine

d'un'infinito sapere vagamente distinto, quando divisandosi nel

Concistoro dell'eterne menti di formar l'Huomo, che quella habitasse, e custodisse, f? decr?tate crearlo simile all'lmagine Divina ... la

quale, metaf?ricamente parlando, compartendo all'Huomo alcuna

scintilla della sua non imaginabile bellezza, per modo di gratiosa, e

benigna communione, di bellezza in qualche parte capace lo rende.

Quindi ?, che simil bellezza col capo ascoso fra le nuvole si dipinge,

per significara, che ella ? cosa del Cielo, e che ne da lingua mortale

esprimere, ne da intelletto humano, senza non poca malagevolezza,

comprender si puote. Nulladimeno, perche la vicendevole

corrispondenza, che tenogono insieme l'anima, & il corpo, dalle varie

forme de' lineamenti di esso manifestata, h? recato materia ? i Filosofi

di penetrare sio alle passioni di quella; di qui nasce, che l'arte del

Fisonomizare inventando, molti di essi ancora l'insegnaro. Et si corne

la bellezza altro non ?, che buona proportione al lor tutto; cosl la

buona Fisonom?a altro non ?, che misura delle membra, rispetto aile

potenze dell'anima, inquanto suoi organi, & instromenti. . . ."

Ghiradelli's treatise is particularly interesting for the art historian,

because he includes nearly one hundred engravings of heads, each

illustrating a different physiognomic aspect discussed in the text.

62. Ingegneri (see note 61), p. 350: "Onde che tutti I corpi animati

sono ?I ritratto nella materia delle anime loro. Perche s'ei fosse

possibile, che l'anima, la quale ? una sotanza invisibile, havesse una




must work in reverse, and the inner reality can be

adduced by examining external form. According to

Camillo Baldi, inventor of graphology and translator of

the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomica (1621),

physiognomy and style were closely related.63 Styles are

like faces, he tells us: each is different and yet beautiful; the differences are easier to observe than to describe

and explain; both express many things at once.64

The second epistemology of gesture and style held

them to be rhetorical arts of communication,

manipulated by the speaker or artist for specific

expressive effects. It takes gesture to be a cultural

construct similar to language. Whereas physiognomies had limited explanatory value, assuming as it does that

artists have as little control over the forms produced by brush or pen as they do over the way their faces look,

gesture as a cultural code introduces a more dynamic

mixture of innate and learned, habitual and

premeditated, reflexive and deliberate. Like

physiognomy, it was interpreted semiotically in early modern Italy, at least according to Giovanni Bonifacio, author of the first-ever gesture manual, I!Arte de' cenni

(1616).65 Gesture can be divided into two general classes: social codes of comportment, such as those

described in Castiglione's Cortegiano, and reflections of

personal, inner truths, such as those described by Bonifacio. Bonifacio was a lawyer and judge who used

gesture professionally in dealing with clients, witnesses, and rival lawyers. Because he thought that gesture never

lied, it could be used to separate what people say from

what they really think, "a window to the heart" that

unmasks "our most secret thoughts."66 His audience was

not restricted to the judiciary. Courtiers, he believed

(and recent studies have proved him right), must know

how to interpret gesture, because their profession involves dissimulation.67 If Castiglione's Cortegiano can

qualche figura determinata, ella non riceverebbe altro aspetto giamai, che quello dell'istesso animale, ? cui ella d? l'essere, non intendendo

pero qulalligar l'intelletto ad ?rgano veruno corp?reo, essendo egli da

materia, separate, come spirituale, immateriale, & ?ncorruttibile."

63. Camillo Baldi, Trattato come da una lettera missiva si

conoscano la natura e qualit? dello scrivere (Carpi, 1622). For a

discussion of Baldi, see the preface by Armando Petrucci to his edition

of Baldi's Lettera (Pordenone: Studio Tessi, 1992); and for a discussion

of Baldi in relation to Giulio Mancini, see Sohm (see note 9), pp. 76-77. Writers before Baldi had the insight that the style of writing reflects the character of the writer, but none set about to applying it to

handwriting. See, for example, P. Vettori, in Commentarii in librum

Demetrii Phalerei de elocutione, ed. P. Vettori (Florence: Apvd

Philippvm Ivritam, 1594), p. 201: "qui illam [epistolam] legit eodem tempore quasi apertum aspiciat pectus illius qui scripsit, et ?ntimos

suos sensus omnes notos habeat."

64. Baldi (see note 63), cap. xii, pp. 44-46: "Siccome non c'? cosa

che pi? dimostri e nella quale pi? rilucano le qualit? dello scrittore ed

i suoi costumi, quanto f? lo stile, cos? altra [cosa] non ? tanto difficile

da conoscersi, quanto esso [stile] e particolarmente, la sua difficolt?

consiste nel saper assegnare le cause della diversit? tra questo e

quello, ne mi pare, che esempio alcuno pi? dimostri l'essere suo di

quello della faccia umana. Hanno, per esempio, tutte le belle giovani donne la faccia bella, ma molta differenza ? fra l'uno e l'altro volto e

quantunque si conosca che vi ? differenza, pero non cos? f?cilmente si

sa dire quale sia questa differenza. . . . E' chiaro dunque come lo

stile ? atto a mostrare molte cose dello scrittore come f? il volto. Nel le

sue differenze son? difficili e, per conoscere come nascano queste variet? degli stili, si pu? avvertire che non solo diverse lettere

cagionano diverse sillabe, ma s?milmente le varia ?I variare la sede

delle medesime. . . . Se lo stile dunque sar? uguale, grave e chiaro, si pu? concludere che lo scrittore sia persona ragionevole, giudiziosa,

letterata, di buona creaza, piena d'affetto, verdica, e, probabilmente, si

potra ancor dire piuttosto parca, che liberale, considerata, onorata e

modesta, ed ? credibile che on sia giovane, ne donna, ma uomo

quieto, grave e severo."

65. G. Bonifacio, I!Arte de' cenni (Vicenza: Francesco Grossi,

1616), p. 516: "il Fisiognomo pu? ben conoscer l'altrui naturale

inclinatione. . . . Ma con l'intelligenza de' cenni, de' moti e de' gesti humani quello che di presente ciascuno habbia nell'animo suo

f?cilmente si pu? intendere." Bonifacio lays out his thesis in the full

title of his work: L'Arte de' cenni con la quale formandosi favella

visibile, si tratta della muta eloquenza, che non e' altro che un

facondo silentio. Divisa in due parti. Nella prima si tratta de i cenni,

che da noi con le membra del nostro corpo sono fatti, scoprendo la

loro significatione, e quella con l'autorit? di famosi Autori

confirmando. Nella seconda si dimostra corne di questa cognitione tutte l'arti liberali, e mecaniche si prevagliano. For discussions of

Bonifacio's treatise, see Mario Costanzo, / segni del silenzio e altri

studi sulle poetiche e ?'iconograf?a letteraria del Manierismo e del

Barocco (Rome: Bulzoni editore, 1983), pp. 47-54; and P. Casella, "Un dotto e curioso trattato del primo Seicento: Tarte de' cenni' di

Giovanni Bonifacio," Studi secenteschi 34 (1993):331-403.

66. Bonifacio (see note 65), n.p., in preface: "E chi haver? di

quest'arte perfetta cognitione -

leggiamo - non haver? bisogno di

desiderare nel petto degli huomini quella fenestra Socr?tica per veder

loro il cuore; poich? con l'intelligenza di questi cenni i pi? secreti

pensieri et i pi? celati affetti de gli animi de' mortal i si manifestano."

For the truthfulness of gesture, see also Quintilian 11.3.66; and

Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della pittura, ed. G. Milanesi (Rome:

Unione cooperativa ?ditrice, 1890), p. 43: "Voi, speculatori, non vi

fidate del I i autori che hanno sol co' I'imaginazione volute farsi

interpreti fra la natura e I'omo, ma sol di quelli che, non coi cenni

della natura, ma co' gli effetti delle sue esperienze hanno esercitati."

67. Bonifacio (see note 65), pp. 581-583. As proof of the courtier's

ability to dissimulate, see Gerolamo Cardano, De propria vita liber

(Paris, 1643); edition cited: Autobiograf?a, ed. and trans. P. Franchetti

(Turin, 1945), cap. v. Cardano claims to "simulate" feelings frequently,

although he disclaims this as "dissimulation," because they are

feelings he has experienced at some time in the past: "Mi sono




be read, in part, as a manual for simulation, a social code

book for a disciplined ease, then L'Arte de' cenni can be

read as manual to decode the truth that lies behind

public performance. It reveals what was intended to be

concealed. Bonifacio believed that a residue of true

feeling will leak through any attempt by courtiers to

control their movements and expressions, and that

gestures arise spontaneously from the soul and hence can

be only incompletely filtered or censured by the mind.68 * * *

Manual gestures by artists may be described as a

dialectic between the will and reflex, the mind and

body, the learned and innate. Marco Boschini's

definition of style as macchia introduces a related

dialectic of intention and accident, or art and nature.

With macchia, Boschini had in mind the densely accreted impasto by Titian, the scumbled clots of dry brush by Tintoretto, or the flecked splatter and drips by

Jacopo Bassano. More than any other writer defining

pictorial style at this time, Boschini welcomed the mano

of maniera by identifying it with the handling of the pen (il modo di . . . portar la penna) and the artist's

"touches" (tocchi) imprinted into the pigment.69

Macchia belongs to a semantic family designating open brushwork, whether a rubbing and caressing (sfregazzo, strisso), a touch (tocco), a smudge (spegazzone), or jabs and thrusts (bota, colpi de scrimia, sfodra), which was

thought to imprint the action of the hand as it

manipulates the painted surface. Because brushwork is

that part of painting where the manual gesture is most

visible, and because macchia was the most sketchy (and hence most visible) of brushstrokes, it was a perfect

place to question style's handiwork. Macchia techniques celebrate materiality?such as scrunchy smalt or the oily smear of unmixed palette colors?and the physical act

of painting. They border precariously on formal chaos

(figs. 3-5), whose melting or frothy forms invite

speculation about how much the painter was actually in

control of his or her medium. In macchie, we see the

painter's hand at work, but to what degree are the

unpredictable alpine peaks and scabby plateaux of

Bassano's work, for example, fully intentional forms?70

Are they not also somewhat accidental, like the

satisfyingly speckled splotches left by Protogenes's sponge after he hurled it in frustration at his

representation of a dog? What I would like to show in

this final section is how macchie are made by a happy

juncture of intention and accident, and how, as a term

of art criticism, macchia is as semantically transgressive as it is visually liminal.

The definition of style as macchia appears in a 1674

primer written by Boschini to help foreigners decode the

mysteries of Venetian painting. The primer introduced

the second edition of his guide book to Venice and

served, as his title tells us, as "Brief instructions" ("Breve

instruzione") before one visits The Rich Mines of

Venetian Painting (Le Rieche minere della pittura veneziana). Bosch in i had probed the Rich Mines more

deeply fourteen years earlier in his seven-hundred-page dialect poem called La Carta del navegar pitoresco

abituato a dare sempre al mio volto una espressione che non

corrisponde al mio sentimento: perc? posso simulare, non

dissimulare; il che pero mi riesce facile quando si tratta di dissimulare

disperazione perch? a questo ho dedicate i miei sforzi

ininterrottamente per quindici anni e ci sono riuscito. Cos? a volte

vado in giro malvestito, a volte tutto elegante; son? ora taciturno, ora

loquace, ora lieto, ora triste perch?, come ho dette, posso assumere

tanto un atteggiamento, quanto quello opposto." John Bulwer noted

that attending to gesture can help one become "a great discoverer of

dissimulation." Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand

(London, 1644); edition cited: ed. J. Cleary (Carbondale: Southern

Illinois University Press, 1974), p. 5. See also Torquato Accetto, Della

dissimulazione onesta, ed. S. S. Nigro (Genova: Costa & Nolan,

1984). For a broader consideration of aulic dissimulation, see Rosario

Vi I lar i, Elogio della dissimulazione. La lotta pol?tica nel Seicento (Bari:

Laterza, 1987); and Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation,

Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

68. Bonifacio (see note 65), pp. 7-8. He quotes in evidence

Cicero, Epistolae 1.9.

69. For Boschini in context, see Sohm (see note 9). The passages

quoted here come from Baldinucci (see note 8), vol. 6, p. 471.

Concerning the attribution of drawings, he wrote that one knows the

artist by "il modo di macchiare e portar la penna o lo stile," and in

paintings "nella franchezza e sicurezza del dintorno" and

"nell'impastar de' color?, nel posar le tinte, ne' tocchi, ne' ritocchi, nel

colorito, e molto pi? in certi colpi che noi diremmo diprezzati e quasi

gettati a caso, particularmente nel panneggiare. . . ."

70. Boschini (see note 32), p. 704. Bassano's paintings are virtually

impossible to copy: "perch? ? d'un colpo cos? franco e sprezzante,

tempestato di pennellatte cos? fiere, che chi non intende la scherma di

quel pennello non pu? colpire nel centro di tanta Dottrina." Boschini

(see note 9), pp. 305-306: "I quadri diligenti, ? cosa chiara, / Che con

paciencia ben se puol copiarli;/ E ho viste copie, e boni,/ che a

guardar!i,/ No ghe catava distinction, n? tara.// Ma l'imitar sti colpi de

dotrina [by Jacopo Bassano],/ Che con tal artificio fa el so efeto,/ Chi

non ?Venezian non ha inteleto/Ato a imitar aci?n cus? divina . . .

Oh questa ? chiara, senza dubitar, / Sia chi se sia, nissun quei colpi franchi/ Puol imitar, quei negri, n? quei bianchi,/ N? quele penelae si

ben copiar."




Figure 3. Jacopo Tintoretto, Last Supper (detail), 1547. S. Marcuola, Venice. Photo: Biblioteca Correr, Arch i vio Fotogr?fico.




Figure 4. Titian, Doge Andrea Gritti, 1546-1548. Oil on canvas, 133.6 x 103.2 cm. Samuel H. Kress Collection, ? 1999 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.




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ftiiV'';*St ' >?: .i'?*

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Figure 5. Titian, Doge Andrea Gritti (detail), 1546-1548. Oil on canvas. Samuel H. Kress Collection, ? 1999 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.




(Map of Pictorial Navigation). The "Breve instruzione"

opens with a short history of Venetian painting, starting with Bellini and ending with the "seven styles" of

contemporary art, followed by three sections on design,

coloring, and invention. In the section on coloring, he

defines the various parts of coloring in this way:

Sometimes color is used in a thick mixture [impasto], and this is the foundation; sometimes it is used for sketchy brush work [macchia], and this is style [maniera]; for the

blending [unione] of colors, and this is delicacy; for tinting and shading [ammaccare], and this is the distinction of the

parts; for raising and lowering the hues, and this is

rounding out [tondeggiare]; for the scornful touch [colpo sprezzante], and this is boldness of coloring; for the veiling, or as

they say caresses [sfregazzare], and these are

retouches to give greater unity.71

Syntactically, this series of linked sentences readily declares itself as a definition. Each sentence tells the

reader what something "is"; and, by means of a series of

semicolons, we are invited to read each as part of a

whole. Style is clearly situated within a semantic grid of

painting techniques. Although Boschini's intention was

not to define style but to use style to define macchia, the grammatical structure suggests that the reverse may also be true: if macchia is style, then so, too, style may be macchia. That style and macchia are synonymous

was an idea that originated in the Carta of 1660:

"Sketchy brush work [machia] is thus born from style [maniera], the touch of learned artifice."72

Defining macchia as style is a good example of a

tactical definition, that is, an appropriation of a potent word and the denial of its actual usage. Just as Vasari

wanted to claim for style those aspects of painting he most valued (design, ideal imitation, and grace), so, too,

did Boschini want to restrict style to his preferred

species: the painterly brushwork popularized by the

Venetians. Hence style was identified with other terms

for sketchiness: "But to arrive at the style [maniera] and

the sketchy brushwork [trato] of, for example, Veronese,

Bassano, Tintoretto and Titian, that is something, for

God's sake, to make you crazy."73 Macchia had a

similar disorienting and destabilizing effect on viewers:

"Venetian macchia is so important that it drives

foreigners crazy/'74 Also tactical was Boschini's use of

the pejorative expression di maniera. Venetian painters are "masters of style" (mistri de maniera), who enliven

paintings with thrusts of the brush (colpi) and with "a

single brushstroke loaded with color."75

As an art term signifying a sketch or sketchy painting, macchia never entirely shed its primary denotation as a

stain: "Sign that liquids leave and the mess on the

surface that they touch."76 In his Vocabolario toscano

del arte del disegno, Baldinucci repeated this definition

from the Vocabolario degli Accademici del la Crusca as

the first meaning of artistic macchia, thereby retaining its associations with a messy, superficial form.77 In 1623

the Accademici della Crusca emended their original definition of 1612 by introducing the idea of macchia as

71. Boschini (see note 32), p. 752: "Dir? adunque che, si come il

Dissegno ha molti membri, cos? anco il Colorito si dilata in varie

circostanze e particolarit?; poich? questo aile volte si riceve per

l'impasto, ed ? fondamento; per la macchia, ed ? Maniera; per l'unione de' colori, e questo ? tenerezza; per il tinere, o ammaccare, e

questo ? distinzione d?lie parti; per il rillevare ed abbassare d?lie

tinte, e questo ? tondeggiare; per il colpo sprezzante, e questa ?

franchezza di colorie; per il velare, o come dicono sfregazzare, e

questi son? ritocchi per unir? maggiormente." 72. Boschini (see note 9), p. 332. As parsed in the Carta, macchia

and maniera may not be identical, but they are intimately related "by birth" with priority given to style. Structurally, maniera and macchia

are also identified when Boschini wrote (p. 351) of the Roman ex

patriot Giuseppe Salviati: "Ha segu? la maniera generosa, / Ha esercit?

la machia artificiosa. . . ."

73. Ibid., p. 328: "Ma l'arivar ala maniera, al trato / (Verbi grazia) de Paulo, del Bassan, / Del vechioTentoreto e deTician, / Per Dio, l'?

cosa da deventar mato."

74. Ibid., p. 361 : "La machia veneziana ? si importante, / Che la fa

zavariar i Forestieri."

75. Ibid., p. 374: "Talvolta int'una sola penelada / Con el color

massizzo, sodo e duro, / I fa la meza tenta, el chiaro e'I scuro, / Che la

par carne viva, verzelada. // Questi ? colpi Mistri de maniera, / Fati ala

veneziana, e documenti / Dei nostri gran Pitori inteligenti, / Strada

perfeta, singular e vera." See also p. 469: "E l'? stim? si doto e cusl

franco, / Per i colpi esquisiti de maniera, / Dintorn?, destaca con furia

vera, / Come del Tentoreto, e niente manco"; p. 68: "L? ghe xe

manierosa maestria: / Ch?'l colpizar xe I'Arte del saver"; and p. 328:

"Ma l'arivar ala maniera, al trato / (Verbi grazia) de Paulo, del Bassan, /

Del vechioTentoreto e deTician, / Per Dio, l'? cosa da deventar mato."

76. Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (see note 21), p. 496. The first of four meanings of macchia is: "Segno, che lasciano i

liquori, e le sporcizie nella superficie di quelle cose, ch'elle toccano, o sopra le quali caggiono." The other three meanings are: "Per bosco

folto, e orrido. Lat. vepretum. . . . E da questa macchia diciamo,

immacchiare, e ammacchiare, che ? nascondere della macchia. 1

Diaciam C?vame la macchia, che ? il cavare di che che sia il pi?, che

si pu?, facendo bene il fatto suo. f Far che che sia alia macchia, ?

farlo nascostamente, furtivamente, come. Batter monete alia macchia.

Ritrarre alia macchia, dicono i pittori, quando ritraggono, senza avere

avanti l'oggetto." 77. Baldinucci (see note 22), p. 86; quoted below in note 80.




an accidental form: "Sign or coloring that rests on the

surface of objects, different from their own color, by whatever accident."78 In literary usage, macchia most

often designated a blemished visual form: an aberration

of an otherwise clean surface, such as the spot on soiled

clothing, or pustulant sores on the flesh of plague victims.79 Metaphorically, it could mean stained virtue

or a soiled reputation. Whether as a physical, moral, or

spiritual disfiguration, macchia suggested degradation and pathology. It was "filth." The intersection of the

literal, artistic, and ethical meanings of macchia are

recorded in Baldinucci's art dictionary:

Sign that liquids, colors and dirt leave on the surface of

things that they touch on top of which they fall. Latin

Macula. Painters use this word to explain the quality of various drawings, and sometimes also paintings, made with

extraordinary facility ... so that it almost appears to be

made by itself and not by the hand of the artist. ... In stones of various colors, one says macchia of that color

which appears on top more than underneath. . . . And

similar to these, one calls macchie those different types of color which sheets of paper are artificially colored, known as marbled paper. And macchia signifies a dense and

frightfully dark forest. . . . And from here, in whatever way brutes and thieves hide in the shadows [macchie] to engage in their malfeasance furtively,

one says, to make whatever it

may be alia macchia is to make it in hiding, secretly and

furtively; thus of printers, counterfeiters and forgers who

print and make money without any authorization, one says to print or mint alia macchia. Also amongst painters one

uses this term for representations that are made without

having the object in front of them, saying to represent alia

macchia, or this representation is made alia macchia.80

Baldinucci followed the wording and sequence of the

1612 edition of the Crusca Vocabolario, not because

that was his standard practice in writing his own

definitions (it was not), but because an essential aspect of macchia was pluralistic, contradictory, and

subversive. For its part, the Accademia della Crusca

ignored frequent uses of macchia as a sketch, and it was

partly this kind of exclusion of trade language that

motivated Baldinucci to write his corrective

Vocabolario.8] He turned macchia into a semantically

slippery term that included its denotation as an

unsightly, randomly formed stain, its artistic meanings as

a sketch and as tenebrism, and its moral dimension as

dishonest behavior.82

78. Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Florence, 1623), p. 485: "Segno, o tintura, che resta nella superficie de' corpi, diverso dal

lor proprio colore, per qual si voglia accidente. Lat. macula."

79. For stained clothing, see Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed.

N. Sapegno (Turin, 1956), p. 133; Vincenzo Borghini, Studi sulla

Divina Commedia, ed. O. Gigli (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1855), p.

303; Galileo Galilei, Opere, ed. A. Favero and I. Del Lungo (Florence:

Le Monnier, 1890), vol. 8, p. 493; and Federico Zuccaro, "Il Lamento

della pittura su l'onde venete," in Lettera a prencipi e signori amatori

del dissegno, pittura, scultura et architettura (Mantua, 1605), n.p.; edition cited: Scritti d'arte di Federico Zuccaro (Florence: L. S.

Olschki, 1961), pp. 127-128. For plague sores, see Boccaccio (see

above), p. 45; the physician-art critic: Antonio Cocchi (1695-1758),

Consult! medici (Bergamo, 1791), vol. 1, p. 28; and Antonio Maria

Muratori, Li tre governi politico, medico ed ecclesiastico in tempo di

peste (Milan, 1721), p. 228.

80. Baldinucci (see note 22), p. 86: "MACCHIA f. Segno che

lasciano i liquori, i colori, e le sporcizie, nella superificie di quelle

cose, ch'elle toccano, o sopra le quali cadano. Lat. Macula. 1 I Pittori

usano questa voce per esprimere la qualit? d'alcuni disegni, ed alcuna

volta anche pitture, fatte con istraordinaria facilita, e con un tale

accordamento, e freschezza, senza molta matita o colore, e in tal

modo che quasi pare, che ella non da mano d'Artefice, ma da per s?

stessa sia apparita sul foglio o su la tela, e dicono; questa e una bella

macchia. f Macchia nelle pi?tre di varj colori, dicesi quel colore, che

pare di sopra pi? a quel lo del fondo; e di qui chiamansi le stesse

pi?tre macchiate, ed ? una bella qualit? di esse pi?tre, con la quale si

rendono pi? vaghe. 1 A simiglianza di queste chiamansi macchie

quelle diverse sorte di colore con le quali artificiosamente son

macchiati i fogli, che si dicono marezzati. 1 E macchia significa bosco folto & orrido, e tal'ora semplice siepe. Lat. Vepretum. 1 E di

qu?, come che in tali macchie si nascondano, e fiere e ladroni a fare

furtivamente loro malefizj, dicesi, fare che che sia alia macchia, per farlo nascosamente, furtivamente; cos? del I i Stampatori, Monetieri, o

Falsatori di monete, che senza alcuna autorit? del pubblico stampano o lavorano, dicesi stampare, o batter monete alia macchia. Anche

appresso i Pittori usasi questo termine ne' ritratti ch'essi fanno, senza

avere avanti l'oggetto, dicendo ritrarre alia macchia, ovvero questo ritratto ? fatto alia macchia."

81. It was only in the 1691 edition that the Crusca dictionary added to macchia its primary artistic meaning. Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Florence, 1691), vol. 3, p. 977: "Abbozzo

colorito de' pittori. Bembo, 3. Parendo la macchia, e l'ombra aver

veduta, di belle, e convenevoli dipinture/'The truncation of Bembo's

sentence distorts Bembo's text but toward a particular end: it gives to

macchia associations of appearance and possibly deception. By

connecting it to "shadow" without telling us whether the shadow is

one depicted in paintings or a technique of shading, it evokes

ambiguity, a shadowy meaning. Because Baldinucci's associations

with obscuring shadows and hence tenebrism did not surface in art

critical practice until shortly before he wrote the definition, the

cautious Crusca academicians included this aspect only in their 1747

edition. Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (Florence, 1747),

vol. 3, p. 67: "Macchia, si dice anche la Maniera dell'ombreggiare, o

colorir? de' pittori." 82. Baldinucci's definition of macchia as a dark forest, a forgery,

and a deep, cloaking shadow opens another area of transgressive

meaning. As "a dense and frightfully dark forest," it is a place of




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Figure 6. Antonio Carracci, Madonna and Child with St. Francis and the Annunciation, before 1618. Museo Nazionale di

Capodimonte, Naples.

Macchia is a term defined by contrasts and

inversions: it is a form made by chance in nature (a

stain) and a form that appears to be made by chance in art (a quick sketch); it is a natural form that mimics

artistic production (patterns in marble) and an artistic

form that mimics nature (marbled paper); "it appears to

be made by itself and not by the hand of the artist."

Antonio Carracci's Madonna and Child with St. Francis

and the Annunciation (fig. 6) are good examples of

macchia. They are painted on two sides of a thin

alabaster slab with the alabaster left exposed in order to represent clouds, so that it is "painted" both by nature and the artist. Macchia stands in relation to

nature in two opposing ways: it is a form copied

directly from nature without emendation (marbled

paper) and a form "made without having the object in

front of them." Antonio's clouds not only "appear to be

made by [themselves]," they are naturally produced forms imbedded in the marble untouched "by the hand

of the artist."

malfeasance, presumably the place where counterfeiters mint their

coins in secret. The shadows of the forest both protect the illicit

activity from public view and emblematize its violation of laws and

social norms. In art criticism, painters like Caravaggio and Guercino, who were thought to hide their ignorance of anatomy and disegno in

shadows, were labeled "furtive" or "clandestine" macchia painters. Boschini rarely made reference to the concealing function of macchia, and then only to hiding labor with the seemingly casual forms: "La

[machia] d? de I'Arte i fondamenti veri, / Soto la quai sta ase?se

industrie tante" (see note 9, p. 361). Co-existing with the clandestine

art of macchia painters was another kind of macchia that

simultaneously composed and fragmented pictures by means of large masses of shadows. Occasionally in the late seventeenth century, and

then with greater frequency in the mid-eighteenth century, this

meaning of macchia as an obscuring shadow was transferred to the

realm of painting. Boschini did not discuss macchia as a dark tonal

mass or shadow, but the painter Luigi Scaramuccia put those words

into the mouth of "Boschini" in his artistic peregrination Le Finezze

dei pennelli italiani (Ravia: G. A. Magri, 1674), where "Boschini"

chaperones the "Spirit of Raphael" and a Perugian painter around

Venice. When they arrived in front of Titian's Martyrdom of St. Peter

Martyr (formerly in Venice, SS. Giovanni e Paolo), "Boschini" says:




The early history of macchia as an art term reveals an

inherently ambivalent semantics. According to Vasari, "we [artists] call sketches [schizzi] ... a preliminary kind of drawing that [is] made to determine poses and

the preliminary composition of the work; they are made

in the form of a stain [macchia]/'83 A macchia is not

itself a kind of sketch, as it would become later, but

expresses provisionally and improvisation.84 It is still a

"stain" in the original sense used by Leonardo to

describe the "spotted walls with various stains" that

artists might use to stimulate a flagging imagination.85 Stained walls helped Piero di Cosimo discover battles, fantastic cities, and landscapes, much as clouds did for

"Apollonius," who found, according to Philostratus,

figures in the "shapeless and haphazard" forms.86 Anton

Francesco Doni saw figures both in clouds and in una

macchia d'un paese, that is, equally in art as in nature.87

Stains and clouds were useful to imaginative viewers, because they were vague and indeterminate, opening instead of closing possible readings.

Macchie, for Boschini, transgressed a preconceived barrier that held them to be for private use as a kind of

studio aid. Before Boschini, when a stain jumped from

the page onto the canvas, critics identified it as a sign of

artistic failure. Whereas a disordered macchia was

appropriate for the studio because of its stimulating confusion, the public could not be expected to respond in the same way in looking at a "stained" painting.

Vasari criticized Andrea Schiavone's paintings in the

Carmine as "macchie or sketches without being finished

at all" and Titian's late work as "executed with broad

and bold strokes and stains [macchie]/' Other

Cinquecento writers assumed that macchie would be

"grossly done," "vile," "disordered," "confused,"

"obscure," or "unfinished" and hence in need of being

"brought to perfection."88 Giovanni Battista Armenini

singled out the effrontery of modern painters who chose

"to display in esteemed public places works with some

parts sketched [abozzate], some parts half finished, some things well made but many scarcely dabbed

[macchiate]."89 Bosch i ni came to the opposite conclusion. Critics who failed to look with the eyes of a

painter could not "read" Tintoretto's macchie: "Latin

letters that are incomprehensible to the unlearned and

hence attacked by the dolts."90 Schiavone "imprinted those Latin letters with macchie that drive the baboons

crazy for not understanding that which matters most."91

Vasari, who had attacked Schiavone's macchie, was just the "baboon" that Boschini had in mind.

Boschini did not try to conceal the pejorative

meanings of macchia but, like Baldinucci, embraced

both its virtues and vices: "Oh stains [machie] without a

blemish [machia], even splendors that brighten as if

they were light."92 "Whoever shrinks from machia will

soil his colors and stain [machia] them. . . ."93 Playing with such antiphrases and ironies was a favorite activity

"... being further away, one makes out a beautiful macchia or, as

we want to say, a mass produced by large areas of light and shadow

placed in the right tempo" (p. 95).

83. Vasari (see note 21), vol. 1, p. 117: "Gli schizzi, de' quali si ?

favellata di sopra, chiamiamo noi [artists] una prima sorte di disegni che si fanno per trovar il modo d?lie attitudini, ed il primo

componimento dell'opra; e son? fatti in forma di una macchia, ed

accennati solamente da noi in una sola bozza del tutto."

84. Vasari used macchia in both its literal sense as "stain" and its

figurative sense as "sketch." See Vasari on Schiavone's paintings in the

Carmine. Despite Baldinucci's definition, by the seventeenth century, macchia had largely lost its original meaning as stain; see, for example, the warning to painters by Andrea Pozzo {Perspective pictorum et

architectorum [Rome, 1693-1702], section 10) that in retouching their

frescoes they can sometimes "make a stain of your work."

85. "Inventions are seen in the stains . . . but they will not teach

you to finish any detail." Stains "may arouse the mind to various

inventions," but they must be "reduced to complete and well-drawn

forms." For references and quotes, see Sohm (see note 9), p. 38.

86. Ibid., pp. 38-41.

87. Anton Francesco Doni, Disegno (Venice: Appresso Gabriel

Giolito, 1549), p. 22: "Quando tu ritrai in pittura una macchia d'un

paese, non vi vedi tu dentro spesse volte animali, uomini, teste, e altre

fantasticherie. Anzi pi? nelle nuvole, ho gi? veduto animalacci

fantastichi e castelli." See Sohm (see note 9, pp. 35-41) for Dolce's

and Lomazzo's discussion of una macchia d'un paese.

88. Sohm (see note 9), pp. 38-39.

89. Ibid., p. 42.

90. Ibid., p. 43.

91. Boschini (see note 9), pp. 344-345: "Andrea Schiaon, vien qua con la to forza, /Vien qua con la bravura to infinita, / Con quel

impasto che ha calor e vita; /Vien qua, te prego, e 'I mi? parlar

rinforza; //Ti, che con quele machie de virt? /Ti ha ?mpresso quei carateri latin i / che fa zavariar dei Babuini / Per non intender quel che

importa pi?." 92. Ibid., p. 138. Tintoretto's Baptism (Venice, Scuola di San

Rocco) shows how original sin (machia original) was washed away

(p. 137). And he called the old masters of the sixteenth century

"jewels without blemish [machia] and without taint [fara]" (p. 162).

93. Ibid., p. 375: "E ehe chi de imbratar color teme / Imbrata e

machia si medemi, e insieme / Resta l'op?ra al fin quasi che niente." A

related contradiction appears several lines later: "Quasi che no i se

fida del? scorta, / Che a so muodo de lori ghe fa strada; /1 ha sempre

qualche dubio, che machiada / Resta l'op?ra soa, p?lida e smorta."




for Boschini, deliberately contradicting himself (or at

least appearing to do so) in order to challenge and

puzzle his readers with mirrored inversions. Venetian

painting is a "form without form, or rather form

deformed"; it finds its "true formation in fluid form."94

Boschini was thinking of radical foreshorten i ngs?it is

"through imperfection that perfection will appear"?but the paradox of a metamorphic form describes macchia

just as well. Like the representation of Venetian painting as "form without form," macchia is an antinomy, a kind

of subversive twin that undermines and contradicts the

conventional idea that contains it.

In this brief semantic history of macchia, I have tried

to show that a congruity exists between understanding its visual and verbal languages. Verbally, macchia is an

antinomous concept that disorients the reader. Visually, a painted macchia casts necromantic spells, confuses,

terrorizes, and terrifies viewers; it even drives them

insane.95 Macchia provided fertile ground for

misunderstanding: "If they [dumb foreigners] were to

know the value of sketchy brushwork [machia], they would apply all their talent to it and study that great foundation [of art] nor would they call it a blemish

[machia] but splendour."96 Another dimwitted foreigner

invented by Bosch in i asserts that "he who does not

apply pigment evenly makes his figures completely blemished [tute machiae]," to which Boschini responds: "Oh machie, like so many pure stars."97 These examples elide semantic contradictions and act as the

indeterminate form of an ink blot. What looked like a

stain becomes a figure when viewed by a painter or a

viewer who looks with the eyes of a painter. What one

took to mean "stain" or "sketch" or an inappropriately

sketchy painting turns out to be an aesthetic ideal. An

image seemingly made by chance, that "almost appears to be made by itself and not by the hand of the artist," to use Baldinucci's phrase, is revealed as the highest form of learning.98

Poised between nature and art, macchia is a liminal

form that "almost appears" to be a natural product but

whose nearly absent "hand of the artist," in fact, insists

on the gesture of painting. It is either an accident, or it

appears to be an accident that is actually controlled by the artist. It is either a liquid spill and hence a random

form, or it is a representation of nature made by an artist

without direct reference to nature. As a forgery of

nature's chaos, it disorients and confuses the viewer, who does not know whether to attribute the stained

forms to the artist's hand or nature herself. In other

words, its status as ?mage?what it looks like and how it

is made?is indeterminate. 94. Boschini (see note 32), p. 750. For further discussion of this

passage, see Sohm (see note 9), pp. 155-157. One antecedent not

mentioned comes from Giovanni Domenico Ottonelli and Pietro

Berrettini, Trattato della pittura e scultura, uso ed abuso loro,

composto da un Theo logo e da un Pittore, per offer i rio al Sigg. Accademici del Disegno di Firenze (Florence, 1652), p. 245. They discuss one type of pitture ridicole that is artificial (artifici?se), well

designed, and shows "la determit? non deformemente secondo

I'avviso dell'Orator Romano. 'Regio ridiculi deformitate quadam

continetur, quae d?sign?t turpitudinem non turpiter.' 2 de. Or [atore]."

For a sociological reading of deformity in seicento art, see the

important article by S. McTighe, "Perfect Deformity, Ideal Beauty, and

the Imaginaire of Work: The Reception of Annibale Carracci's Arti di

Bologna in 1646," Oxford Art Journal 16 (1993):75-91. For

perspective as deformity, see L. Massey, "Anamorphosis through Descartes or Perspective Gone Awry," Renaissance Quarterly 50

(1997): 1148-1189. For a discussion of the phrase "beautiful

deformity" used by Virgilio Malvezzi to describe Guido Reni's

Abduction of Helen, see A. Colantuono, Guido Reni's Abduction of

Helen: The Politics and Rhetoric of Painting in Seventeenth-Century

Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 159-160.

Colantuono traces the expression back to G. B. Agucchi and G. A.

Massani. Malvezzi located the deformity in the figure as subject rather

than in the artist's representation of the figure. 95. Boschini (see note 9), pp. 166, 302, 309, 361.

96. Ibid., p. 373: "Se d?la machia i savesse el valor, / I aplicarave tuto el so talento, / E studierave quel gran fundamento,/ N? i ghe dirave machia, ma splendor."

97. Ibid., p. 373: "[C]h? no carga ugual, / Resta tute machiae quele

figure. / Oh machie, che xe tante stele pure, / E forma el colorito

natural!"

98. For the latter phrase, see ibid., p. 373 (in the stanza following that quoted in the preceding note): "Quel toco, quei bei colpi de

p?nelo, / Quel botizar, quei strissi e descricion, / Che vien dal studio

grando e cognici?n, / Xe l'unico depenzer tanto belo."



Maniera and the absent hand: avoiding the etymology of style

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Transcript of Maniera and the absent hand: avoiding the etymology of style