«Vasari, Paolo Giovio, le collezioni di ritratti e la retorica delle immagini», Giorgio Vasari e...

4

Giorgio Vasari, Paolo Giovio, Portrait Collections and the Rhetorics of Images

Nadia Cannata

Under the papacy of Julius II and Leo X and – though to a lesser extent – up to the Sack of 1527, Rome set itself as the seat of a new culture. It consisted of the study of the classical tradition, both Greek and Latin, its elevation to a paradigm and its reuse as a foundation for whatever new was to be done in contemporary art and literature. This new idea of ‘modernity’ was to be visually represented in the very architecture of the Papal palaces: Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo saw to that.

I have invested several years of research in trying to understand the lines along which this canonical representation of modernity was achieved, and – more to the point – in trying to pinpoint the elements which contributed to its grounding. I seem to have been able to conclude that there has been a time, albeit short, during which there was the idea that all arts, quae ad humanitatem pertinent, must concur to the materialization of this idea.1 During the first three decades of the Cinquecento, literati as well as architects and painters were called to Rome to cooperate – probably for the first time – to provide a unitary vision of a new system of the arts. Historians, too – like Giovio, for example – played an important role in that system.

Approaching the study of this period with such an interdisciplinary approach means that the focus of the investigation is no longer language, literature or art, but Renaissance culture as such which is a more complex theme, for the study of which a broader cultural approach is required. This is the standpoint from which I am analysing Giovio and Vasari and their respective visions of a museum: Vasari’s was virtual while Giovio’s was real, but both were achieved through the exhibition of texts and images. I would not, on the other hand, hold any competence to discuss them under any other point of view.

Giovio was of course no stranger to this Tuscan and Roman intellectual world, having lived in those very same years mostly in Rome with long intervals spent in Florence. His intellectual activity was shaped in these

ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com

giorgio vasari and the birth of the museum68

contexts and I should like to argue that the Elogia and the museum are in part a product of an intellectual path that had its roots in the Roman milieu. Both the Elogia and Giovio’s physical museum served as sources of inspiration for Vasari.

The life of Paolo Giovio spans across the end of the 15th and the first half of the 16th century. He participated in both the golden era of the Medici Popes and inspired – according to Vasari’s testimony – the first edition of his Vite. He therefore witnessed the birth of a new attitude towards fine arts in Rome in the years culminating with the death of Raphael and his celebration in Vasari’s work:

At that time, I was used to going in the evening, at the end of the day’s work, to see the most illustrious Cardinal Farnese at dinner, as did Molza, Annibale Caro, Messer Gandolfo, Messer Claudio Tolomei, Messer Romolo Amasseo, monsignor Giovio, and many other men of learning and distinction, of whom the Court of that Lord is ever full, all there to entertain him with elegant and honourable discourse. One evening we came to discuss Giovio’s Museum and the portraits of illustrious men that he had displayed there graced with inscriptions and ordered so beautifully. One word leading to another, as happens in conversation, Monsignor Giovio said that he had always had and still has a great desire to add to his museum and his book of Eulogies a treatise which would deal with the men who had been illustrious in the art of design from Cimabue to our own times.

As he further elaborated on this, it appeared clearly that he certainly had great knowledge and judgement in matters concerning our arts; even though, being satisfied with having a general idea, he did not consider each in detail, and often, in speaking of those artists he often confused their names, surnames, birthplaces, and works, not relating things exactly as they were, but rather, as I have said, very generally. When Giovio had finished talking, the Cardinal turned to me and said: ‘What do you say, Giorgio? Would that not be a fine work and a noble exertion?’ ‘It would, indeed, monsignore, illustrious Excellency’, I answered ‘if Giovio be assisted by someone of our arts to put things in order and relate them as they really are. That I say because, although his words were inspiring, he has confused and mistaken many things one for another’. ‘Then’, replied the Cardinal, being besought by Giovio, Caro, Tolomei, and the others, ‘you could give him a summary and an ordered account of all those artists and their works, in chronological order; and so your arts will receive from you this further benefit’. Even though I understood that undertaking to be beyond my might, I promised I would willingly carry it out to the best of my ability; and so, having set myself down to gather my memories and the notes that I had written on the subject from my earliest youth, as a sort of pastime and because of the devotion that I bore to the memory of our artists, on whom I cherished any piece of information, I gathered together everything that seemed to me relevant to the subject, and took the whole to Giovio. And he, after he had much praised my exertions, said to me:

‘My dear Giorgio, I would rather that it was you who undertook this task of writing everything in order in the manner in which I see that you will be most able to do it, because I have not the courage, not being sufficiently knowledgeable of the various arts, and being ignorant of many particulars that you are likely to know; without which, even if I were to write something, it would be at the most a treatise like that of Pliny. Please do what I ask you, Vasari, I have seen that it will prove something very fine’. And then, thinking that I was not very resolute in the matter, he made sure


Nadia Cannata 69

Caro, Molza, Tolomei, and others of my dearest friends spoke to me. Whereupon, having finally made up my mind, I set out to do it, with the intention of giving it, when finished, to one of them, that he might revise and correct it, and then publish it under a name other than mine.2

Vasari tells us in his preface that he wanted to record verbally the deeds of those who used images to express their skill, because the memory of the written word warrants a longer life than that entrusted to the eye, as the destiny of ancient painting demonstrates all too painfully:

Since, of the works that are the life and the glory of the artists, the first and then the second and third were lost, since time devours all things, and since at the time no one wrote about art, they could not, not even in that way, become known to posterity, their craftsmen as well came to be forgotten. However, once writers began to make record of things that were before their day, they could not speak of those for whom they did not get to know, therefore the first they wrote about are those of whom the memory had been the last to be lost.3

The preoccupation with memory and oblivion was as much a nagging thought for Giovio as it was for Vasari. There are numerous passages in Giovio’s work, as recurring as perhaps touching, in which he gives dramatic voice to his yearning not to be forgotten together with the deeds of the great men of the past. Their life and work constituted the foundations of his own human and intellectual experience and that of his own times: ‘it would be nice to be able to live even after our death’ (‘bello è dopo il morir, vivere ancora’) ‘since there is nothing else left to us than try to live after our death’ (‘poi che altro non c’è che campare dopo la morte’) wrote Giovio in 1546 to Vasari.

It is a preoccupation he shared with his contemporaries, carnalissimi homines as much as he was, many of whom dedicated their lives to ensure that time would not devour their names. They gave vivid symbolic images of that preoccupation, often inventing literary fables which are aimed at that purpose and also discussing meta-literarily their own purpose, as in Ariosto’s famous canto XXXV of the Orlando Furioso where he describes Astolfo’s journey on the moon and the process through which the names of those surviving in the works of the best poets are fished out of the River Lethe by swans and entrusted to immortality.

Giovio’s museum is in itself a challenge to oblivion, as any museum in a way is. The ways through which that challenge is met betray the culture within which that solution was conceived. We know that Giovio’s museum was imagined as an architectural replica of the villa Pliny the Younger described in his letter to Caninius Rufus (I, 3) and in Ep. II, 17 and V, 6,4 and that Giovio’s intention was to revive the glory of the old construction which could still be seen (in his brother’s words) as if through a broken mirror, lurking from the bottom of the waters of the lake (see Casini, Figure 6.1).5 We also know that the villa consisted of several rooms, the most important of which overlooked the lake via a terrace, and featured Apollo and the Muses depicted on its walls. Around it, other smaller rooms housed the library and contained the



pictures and brief texts which constituted his Elogia, a verbal complement to the display of the Museum. The former could not serve their purpose without the latter, as if text and image were both two-dimensional and only their combination could furnish the display with all the dimensions needed to enjoy the full experience whereby reading and vision came combined with the necessary historical perspective and the flow of time.

In the verbal descriptions of his project, images and poetry concur in supporting the construction of a temple to memory, built to ensure that the lives of deserving men – both ancient and modern – are not to be forgotten.

This is what Giovio wrote to Cosimo de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, on the 18th January 1549:

I am sending to you for your entertainment a catalogue of heroes famous for their military deeds, which I have diligently gathered together as paintings in the space of more than 30 years. I added some brief eulogies in prose writing, summarizing coincisely their lives, which are then enriched by verses written by great poets. I hope that the beauty of the likenesses of all these great men will bring pleasure to the eyes of those who will see them in the Museum, in the same way as the eulogies will bring pleasure to those who will read the book. And so that everyone will know that the likenesses are true to life and copies faithfully drawn from their originals, I shall quote the sources I used.6

But however much word and vision may concur to achieve the goal of defying time, it is the written word which has the greatest reliability in this respect. This holds for Giovio as much as it did for Vasari. Let us read the description of the Museum by his brother Benedetto:

But, since the Museum because of its nature cannot defy eternity (as historians know: what was born dies and what has acquired importance ages – see Ovid: O Time, thou great devourer, and thou, envious Age, together you destroy all things) the museum is entrusted to the memory of the word, so that if it dies of old age its name will be remembered. Think of old buildings of which only memory survives, not because there is any trace of them, but because they live in the written word. Where is today the splendid villa near the lake of Como which belonged to Caninius Rufus? Where is the breezy lodge? Where is the shadowy platanus?7

The whole passage is set within a framework of classical sources which function both for the images and the visual construction of his museum (the villa reproducing Plinian villas; the modern reproduction of the ancients’ habit of preserving portaits of great writers in libraries alongside the books), the idea of accompanying the images not only with a brief sketch of the life of the individual hero, but also to have it enriched by beautiful verses belonging to excellent poets (‘essornata poi con belli versi d’eccellenti poeti’).

The association of poetry with memory boasts a rather long history; but the habit of accompanying a funerary monument (such as the portraits we are talking about in a sense certainly are) with laudatory verses in the form of epigrams is of course directly derived from classical times: epitaphs in the form of short celebratory epigrams were used as funerary inscriptions and epigrams were placed at the bottom of statues.8


Nadia Cannata 71

Giovio’s museum was also a library; and the idea of providing an ideal and paradigmatic description of the deeds of great men and to display them alongside their books runs as a backbone through tradition: from Isidorus (circa VIIth) to Petrarch, down to Renaissance historians for whom the tradition of the De viris illustribus looms large.

The library in Alexandria contained statues and medallions of the authors whose texts were housed and preserved among its cupboards and shelves; so did apparently the library of Asinius Pollio in Rome, as described by Varro and in turn by Andrea Fulvio, Giovio’s illustrious contemporary, to whom I shall return. The image as a memento of greatness is surely a great classical theme. One can think of the Sala degli Uomini illustri in the Palazzo dei Carraresi in Padua, possibly designed by Petrarch, who features himself as a numen in one of the corners, and also in early Renaissance manuscripts such as the copy of the lives of the emperors by Suetonius now in Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale ms VE 1005, owned by Poliziano, which displays medallions of the emperors discussed in the text.9

Andrea Fulvio, a Roman antiquarian, who was very friendly – among others – with Raphael, in 1515 published in Rome a booklet entitled Illustrium Imagines, explicitly modelled upon the libraries of Atticus and Varro quoted by Pliny.10 According to Fulvio the images are necessary in order to inspire a desire to emulate the great men of the past, not just frequenti cogitatione, as would be normal in a library, but also aspectu. As a consequence, Fulvio endeavoured – having followed the example of many – to reproduce the images as found in ancient and trustworthy documents not just in wax, but in wax, paper and words.11

However the idea of conceiving of a library as a museum – and, in turn, of a museum as a library – and scattering it with images as part of its language is comparatively new and was enlivened by Roman intellectuals.

I believe that the novelty of Giovio’s museum can be broken down into four main features which of course are shared, partly, with other monuments of his age:

1. The architectural structure containing his galleries is directly derived from a renowned classical model;

2. The villa is imagined by Giovio as a library containing the images of the men whose lives and deeds constitute the object the museum is there to preserve;

3. The museum combines paintings, biographies and epigrams which only when seen together as elements of a single unit have the effect of affording an historical perspective and even a fourth dimension, that which projects memory through time, from antiquity to posterity;

4. The images of the men whose memory is to be preserved must be as close to their actual appearance as possible, irrespective of the quality of the paintings themselves and of their being an original work or simply a copy (as testified to by Giovio’s correspondence).



Let us try to analyse these elements one by one, contrasting them with narratives relating to the lives of the illustrious men of the past which have been passed on to us through classical, Christian and then Renaissance tradition, before we approach Vasari’s virtual museum, also framed by a classical structure.

Let us start from the most symbolic of all Renaissance palaces, the Vatican. Many years ago Ackermann demonstrated that when Bramante, architect of the Fabbrica di San Pietro, was asked to link the Vatican palaces with the Belvedere Hill,12 he decided to create a space inspired by the Plinian description of his villa and to link the two symbolic spaces – the Papal palaces and the modern Parnassus – via a court dedicated to mostly secular if not outright pagan entertainments, bullfighting and suchlike. This is because Tacitus in his Annales had described the area as devoted to such activities. According to Ackermann the whole concoction was in turn inspired by the Tempio della Fortuna in Palestrina and by modern sources. This contamination of sources is somewhat displayed in contemporary images such as, for example, the engraving shown in Figure 4.1. The horse battle contaminates the ancient (battle) with the modern (the new Belvedere court) and represents how around the years in which Giovio was part of the Roman court, they liked to imagine Rome to have been, rather than how it actually was.

The reconstruction of historical truth at the time consisted mainly in reviving what had probably never been – an ideal state which could and should have occurred and existed in everyone’s imagination whether or not it really had happened exactly in those terms.

Any historical work contains a narrative element and Vasari achieved a most coherent narration, perfectly stuctured and convincing, which holds – whether or not his reading of art as a history moving progressively from Cimabue to Michelangelo is the only possible interpretation of the events. Any history narrates a story by reordering it, giving it an incipit, an explicit and a sense by the historian. If the reader cannot accept this proviso there is no use in his/her reading any further. As Ginzburg once pointed out, technically speaking there is no difference between a true and a false statement. The rhetoric of the narration would prove or disprove the truth of the statements made.13

Let us move to my point two: the library enriched and complemented with the images of the men whose work the library itself preserves.

I have already mentioned the classical sources of this model: I should now add, perhaps, that Giovio did have at his disposal a magnificent modern example of a library intended chiefly as a celebration of the arts making up the arts, quae ad humanitatem pertinent, and featuring on the walls Apollo and the Muses as well as the very images of the men whose works that very library contained as well as celebrated: the Stanza della Segnatura, originally intended as Julius II’s library. In it, as if through an ideal projection through history, the present is united with the past and the modern palace is ideally and visually joined to the distant hill which – as they liked to think in Renaissance Rome


4.1 Étienne du Perac, Joust in the Belvedere Courtyard, engraving, 1565 (© Trustees of the British Museum)


4.2 Raphael, Parnassus, Città del Vaticano, Stanza della Segnatura 1511 (by concession of the Musei Vaticani)

4.3 Raphael, School of Athens, Città del Vaticano, Stanza della Segnatura, 1511 (by concession of the Musei Vaticani)


Nadia Cannata 75

– housed a temple devoted to Apollo in antiquity.14 But in this context it may also be interesting to recall that no archaeological evidence had ever emerged regarding such a temple, and that Raphael, Bramante, Andrea Fulvio and the others knew that full well. They also knew that Bramante first and then Raphael recreated in the Roman palace architectures as they thought they should have been rather than based on the evidence emerging of how they were (Figure 4.2).

But it is also worth recalling that a modern Parnassus populated by ancient and modern poets alike is an absolute unicum, and that early Renaissance painting has left us at least another Parnassus, Mantegna’s, which we can read and contrast with this one, itself placed in a studiolo, if not a library (that of Isabella d’Este) in which there is no trace of modern poets or Muses.

The conversation between ancients and moderns imagined by Raphael in this scene and in the accompanying School of Athens which represented philosophers and artists bears two elements that bring them very close to Giovio: a) they are ideal scenes offering a visual projection of a canon ignoring time and space and featuring ideal ancient spaces as they should have been; and b) essential to this rhetoric is the fact that the faces depicted are absolutely true to reality, enarghéis, evident, vivid, alive.

How do we know? Because Vasari in the second edition of his work added Giuliano da Sangallo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Bramante, Leonardo and so on as medallions at the bottom of his lives and their faces are identical to those left us by Raphael in the School of Athens (Figures 4.3, 4.4a–c). Why did Vasari do this? I believe he did it out of a Giovian idea of combining different languages to deliver his message. He combined, as much as Giovio had done, biographies, portraits and laudatory epigrams in order to bring to life and thus keep the memory of the men and their remarkable deeds. Which brings me to my third point. Each of these elements functions as a different dimension to the picture, and all together they provide the fourth dimension, the most difficult to deliver, that of time.

4.4a–c Giorgio Vasari, Details of Portraits from Le Vite dei piùeccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti (Florence: Giunti, 1568) (photosby author); (a) Michelangelo; (b) Leonardo; (c) Bramante



I have mentioned earlier the function that epigrams had in Hellenistic Alexandria, for example, as a complement to funerary monuments. While this is not the place to describe the revival of the Neo-Latin epigram, it is worth mentioning that the rediscovery of the Greek Anthology and the re-reading of the epigrams contained therein, and in particular the ekphrastic epigrams preserved in book XVI of the anthology, are the source of the story The School of Athens: Plato pointing at the stars and Aristotle to the earth.15 To an extent, the pope’s library afforded an ekphrasis a rebour since it reproduces as characters in the Parnassus – alive and breathing – figures which were dead, locked in the marble of their ancient reproduction: Homer with the face of the Laocoön and Calliope as Cleopatra.16

These precedents have much to do with Vasari’s concern – in the second edition of his Vite – to reproduce the faces of the artists according to their true likenesses. The matter is relevant not so much because he provided a visual support to his historical narration, but rather because the object which was portrayed and reproduced is the face of the artist ‘as it was’. Looking at the features of the artists portrayed in the Stanza della Segnatura, one finds that Giuliano di Sangallo has, indeed, the face we traditionally associate with him, as do Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Bramante – Michelangelo, who had the time to age, does not. Like Giovio, Vasari’s chief concern was the authenticity of the image. In my opinion, this aspect of Giovio’s museum and of Vasari’s lives needs to be related to the rhetorical function of ‘truth’ in historical narration, as elaborated in the early Renaissance. Philology is not a discipline which knows, as such, boundaries of languages, not even of the specific language of different arts. And the truth of an image is as relevant to the historian as is any documentary evidence. Indeed, this is how it was treated first by Giovio and then by Vasari.

The relationship between literary discourse and truth is an old historian’s concern, which had been debated for several centuries: the issue was perhaps first raised by Polybius, and by Giovio’s times had not ceased to be relevant. According to Polybius the aim of the historian is to return historical evidence in its enárgheia, that is to say clarity, or perhaps self-evidence. Plato, Philostratus and Plutarch apply the adjective enarghés to painting and through the verbal technique known as ékphrasis, whose aim is, again, to appreciate, through verbal means, a piece of visual art. The word enárgheia is translated by Cicero as ‘inlustratio et evidentia’ to describe ‘haec pars orationis quae rem constituat paene ante oculos’; Quintilian translates it as ‘evidentia in narratione’. The object of the ékphrasis should be first of all the enárgheia; which is in turn the chief rhetorical means in use by the historian, the very same function that inverted commas have when we quote a direct source of evidence in our historical arguing. Enárgheia is also the chief scope of ékphrasis as Trissino, another gentleman active in Giovio’s Roman and Florentine circles, tells us in his Poetica. According to Trissino, Dante was a master in enárgheia which consists of ‘trattare le cose tanto particolarmente che quasi si pongono davanti agli occhi’,17 the very same words Cicero applied to oratory.


Nadia Cannata 77

Images therefore became the rhetorical device needed to bring vividness to a historical narration, thus, in turn, also validating the truthfulness of the historian’s statements. However, once they became an integral part of a museum display, their evidence functioned also to purport the existence of an ideal canon: not just to bring it to life, thanks to the vividness of the images, but to make it real and confirm the existence in history of the paradigm the museum sets in front of the beholder’s eye.

Notes

1 Nadia Cannata, ‘“Evidentia in narratione.” Il Cupido di Michelangelo e l’iconografia della Stanza della Segnatura’, in Segni per Armando Petrucci, ed. by Paola Supino and Luisa Miglio (Roma: Bagatto Libri, 2002), pp. 53–76; Nadia Cannata, ‘Son come i cigni, anche i poeti rari: l’immagine della poesia fra umanesimo volgare e tradizione greco-latina’, Letteratura e arte, 8 (2010), 197–211.

2 In questo tempo andando io spesso la sera, finita la giornata, a veder cenare il detto illustrissimo cardinal Farnese, dove erano sempre a trattenerlo, con bellissimi et onorati ragionamenti, i Molza, Anibal Caro, Messer Gandolfo, Messer Claudio Tolomei, Messer Romolo Amasseo, monsignor Giovio, et altri molti letterati e galantuomini, de’ quali è sempre piena la corte di quel signore, si venne a ragionare una sera fra l’altre del museo del Giovio, e de’ ritratti degl’uomini illustri che in quello ha posti con ordine et inscrizioni bellissime. E passando d’una cosa in altra, come si fa ragionando, disse monsignor Giovio avere avuto sempre gran voglia, et averla ancora, d’aggiugnere al museo et al suo libro degli Elogi un trattato nel quale si ragionasse degl’uomini illustri nell’arte del disegno, stati da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri. Dintorno a che allargandosi, mostrò certo aver gran cognizione e giudizio nelle cose delle nostre arti, ma è ben vero che bastandogli fare gran fascio, non la guardava così in sottile e spesso, favellando di detti artefici, o scambiava i nomi, i cognomi, le patrie, l’opere, e non dicea le cose come stavano a punto, ma così alla grossa. Finito che ebbe il Giovio quel suo discorso, voltatosi a me disse il cardinale: ‘Che ne dite voi Giorgio, non sarà questa una bell’opera e fatica?’. ‘Bella’, rispos’io ‘monsignor illustrissimo, se il Giovio sarà aiutato da chichesia dell’arte a mettere le cose a’ luoghi loro, et a dirle come stanno veramente. Parlo così, perciò che, se bene è stato questo suo discorso maraviglioso, ha scambiato e detto molte cose una per un’altra’. ‘Potrete dunque’, soggiunse il cardinale pregato dal Giovio, dal Caro, dal Tolomei e dagl’altri ‘dargli un sunto voi, et una ordinata notizia di tutti i detti artefici, dell’opere loro secondo l’ordine de’ tempi. E così aranno anco da voi questo benefizio le vostre arti’. La qual cosa ancor che io conoscessi essere sopra le mie forze, promisi secondo il poter mio di far ben volentieri; e così messomi giù a ricercare miei ricordi, e scritti fatti intorno a ciò, infin da giovanetto, per un certo mio passatempo e per una affezione che io aveva a la memoria de’ nostri artefici, ogni notizia de’ quali mi era carissima, misi insieme tutto che intorno a ciò mi parve a proposito. E lo portai al Giovio, il quale, poi che molto ebbe lodata quella fatica, mi disse: ‘Giorgio mio, voglio che prendiate voi questa fatica di distendere il tutto in quel modo che ottimamente veggio saprete fare, perciò che a me non dà il cuore, non conoscendo le maniere, né sapendo molti particolari che potrete sapere voi, sanza che quando pure io facessi, farei il più più un trattatetto simile a quello di Plinio; fate quel ch’io vi dico, Vasari, perché veggio che è



per riuscirvi bellissimo, ché saggio dato me ne avete in questa narrazione.’ Ma parendogli che io a ciò fare non fussi molto risoluto me lo fé dire al Caro, al Molza, al Tolomei et altri miei amicissimi; per che risolutomi finalmente, vi misi mano con intenzione, finita che fusse, di darla a uno di loro, che rivedutola et acconcia, la mandasse fuori sotto altro nome che il mio. Giorgio Vasari, Vasari, Giorgio: Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. by Rosanna Bettarini with commentary by Paola Barocchi (Florence: Sansoni 1971), 9 vols, vol. 6, pp. 389–90. All translations from the Italian are the author’s.

3 Per che, poiché delle opere che sono la vita e la fama delli artefici, le prime, e di mano in mano le seconde e le terze, per il tempo che consuma ogni cosa, venner manco, e non essendo allora chi scrivesse, non potettono essere almanco per quella via conosciute da’ posteri, vennero ancora a esser incogniti gli artefici di quelle. Ma da che gli scrittori cominciorono a far memoria delle cose state innanzi a loro, non potettono già parlare di quelli de’ quali non avevano potuto aver notizia; in modo che primi appo loro vengono a esser quelli de’ quali era stata ultima a perdersi la memoria. Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite, ed. by Barocchi and Bettarini, vol. 2, p. 13.

4 See Sonia Maffei and Franco Minonzio’s editions of Giovio’s writings: Scritti d’arte: Lessico ed ecfrasi, ed. by Sonia Maffei (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 1999); and Elogi degli uomini illustri, ed. by Franco Minonzio (Turin: Einaudi, 2006). As for Giovio see also Paolo Giovio, Ritratti degli uomini illustri, ed. by Carlo Caruso (Palermo: Sellerio, 1999); Paolo Giovio, Lettere, 2 vols, ed. by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1958); Paolo Giovio: Il Rinascimento e la memoria. Atti del convegno (Como 3–5 giugno 1983) (Como: Società a Villa Gallia, 1985) and Barbara Agosti, Paolo Giovio: Uno storico Lombardo nella cultura artistica del Cinquecento (Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 2008). With regard to the theme of memory, writings and images see Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa (Turin: Einaudi, 1995); ‘Con parola brieve e con figura’: Emblemi e imprese fra antico e moderno, ed. by Lina Bolzoni and Silvia Volterrani with an introduction by Marc Fumaroli (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2009); Peter Burke, The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1998); Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Arts and Interpretation of the Past (London-New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Salvatore Settis, ‘Continuità, distanza, conoscenza. Tre usi dell’antico’, in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, ed. by Salvatore Settis, III, Dalla tradizione all’archeologia (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), pp. 373–486 and Ecfrasi: Modelli ed esempi fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. by Gian Antonio Venturi and Monica Farnetti, 2 vols (Rome: Bulzoni, 2004).

5 See Giovio, Elogi, p. xxvii, n. 3.

6 ‘Ecco ch’io vi mando per passatempo … il Catalogo degli Eroi Famosi in Arme, quali ho con estrema diligenza raccolti in pittura in spazio di più di 30 anni; e gli faccio sotto li Elogii in prosa, esprimendo con brevità laconica la lor vita essornata poi con belli versi d’eccellenti poeti. E spero che la vaghezza di tante varietà de visi d’huomini grandi porterà gran piacere agli occhi de chi li vedrà al Museo, così come gli Elogii ch’io scrivo daranno iocundità alli animi di quelli che leggeranno il libro. E acciò si mostri al mondo che li predetti ritratti son veri e fidelmente ricavati dalli originali loro, io citarò in testimonianza li lochi donde li ho cavati’, from Lettere, ed. by Ferrero, vol. 2, pp. 132–33.

7 ‘Sed cum id per se aeternitatem praestare non possit (iuxta illud historici: orta occidunt et aucta senescunt; et itidem Nasonis: tempus edax rerum, tuque invidiosa vetustas/ omnia destruitis) literarum memoriae commendandum est


Nadia Cannata 79

ut, si res vetustate pereat, nomen saltem non intercidat. Cogitemus antiqua aedificia quorum sola superest memoria, non ex illis, sed ex literis quibus tradita sunt. Suburbanum amoenissimum Canini Rufi ad Larium situm, ubi nunc est? Ubi porticus verna semper? Ubi platanus opacissima?’, from Giovio, Elogi, p. xxvii, n. 3.

8 See Maia Wellington Gahtan, ‘Neo-Latin and the Visual Arts’, ‘Ekphrasis’, and ‘Epigrams and Epitaphs about Art and Artists’, in Encyclopedia of Neo-Latin Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2013), forthcoming.

9 See for a broad introduction to the issue Maria Monica Donato, ‘Gli eroi romani tra storia ed exemplum. I primi cicli umanistici di uomini famosi’, in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, II, I generi e i temi ritrovati, ed. by Salvatore Settis (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), pp. 95–152 (p. 127); and on Suetonius’ manuscript, see Daniela Gionta, Iconografia erodianea: Poliziano e le monete di Lorenzo (Messina: Centro Studi Filologici, 2008).

10 See Giovio, Scritti d’arte, p. 155.

11 ‘secutus exemplum diversorum vultus ex probatissimis miraeque vetustatis numismatibus escribi effingique’ and not ‘cera solum, sed et cera et lino literisque interpretibus’, Andrea Fulvio, Illustrium Imagines (Roma: Giacomo Mazzocchi, 1517), dedication letter.

12 James S. Ackermann, ‘The Belvedere as a classical villa’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 14 (1951), 78–89 and by the same author, The Cortile del Belvedere, Studi e documenti per la storia del Palazzo Apostolico Vaticano, vol. 3 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1954).

13 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Eκφρασϊς and Quotation’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 50: 1(1988), 3–19.

14 See Cannata, ‘Son come i cigni …’.

15 Cannata, ‘Son come i cigni …’, p. 209.

16 This identification recurs in the bibliography, even though – apart from my contributions quoted above – it does not seem to have constituted the direct object of scholarly attention.

17 Gian Giorgio Trissino, Trattati di poetica e retorica nel Cinquecento, ed. by Bernard Weinberg (Bari: Laterza, 1970), vol. 1, pp. 21–158, e 590–98; vol. 2, pp. 5–90 and pp. 653–57; the quotation is on p. 85.


«Vasari, Paolo Giovio, le collezioni di ritratti e la retorica delle immagini», Giorgio Vasari e...

Documents

Transcript of «Vasari, Paolo Giovio, le collezioni di ritratti e la retorica delle immagini», Giorgio Vasari e...