From 1871 onward the Vienna School of Art History’s Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik series, with original texts facing German translations and intimidating philological commentaries, left belletristic dabbling in artists’ writings floundering in its wake. But when Joaquim de Vasconcellos published the Portuguese artist Francisco de Hollanda’s De pintura antigua in 1899, he omitted the entire first book (occupying pages 67–152 of the present translation), restricting himself to the four dialogues in which Hollanda and others discourse with and about Michelangelo. The present edition offers, astonishingly, the first careful English translation of Hollanda’s whole work, by Alice Sedgwick Wohl. It also contains precise historical and philological notes by Hellmut Wohl and substantial essays by Joaquim Oliveira Caetano and Charles Hope on Hollanda’s biography (1517–84) and trip to Rome (1538–40), and his art theory, respectively.
The editors omit the received Portuguese text (the autograph manuscript is lost), compensating with notes on tricky passages. They also eschew the citing of “modern literature on artists, works of art, patronage, or artistic theory” (xv–xvi). Yet they provide an accurate English edition that locates Hollanda as writer and artist firmly within both Portuguese and Italian culture. Only through the first theoretical book of De pintura can one understand what Hollanda attempted in the different rhetorical structure of the dialogues. He composed the work in 1548, eight years after leaving Italy, and when few treatises on the visual arts were available. He names many of his sources, which include Vitruvius, Pomponius Gauricus, Dürer, Landino on the Divine Comedy, Serlio, Pliny the Elder, and several Roman poets read in Latin. More recondite sources are the Decretum of Gratian, Pseudo Dionysius, the Asclepius ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, and even Alcinous’s De doctrina Platonis. Charles Hope wrestles skeptically with how they were acquired; with Hollanda’s comprehension of the term idea, whether Platonic or not; and whether Hollanda’s views on Michelangelo are faithfully reported (probably not). Hollanda’s identification of a common “antique” style, embracing the “shared aesthetic principles” of both ancient and modern Italian art, is rightly described as original by Hope (59), as it predates Vasari’s similar conception in his Lives of 1550.
Hollanda seeks to relate “whatever is most important that is known of this most noble art” (67), telling his Portuguese audience of “something very new and rare” (70). His artist must absorb many sciences and be “reasonably instructed in Latin letters and Greek translations,” but also in theology and “the register of saints.” Importantly, he will know physiognomic theory and the superior rules of decorum practiced by Italian, rather than Spanish artists. Clearly, Hollanda’s immersion in religious attitudes to art is more profound than that exhibited by any Italian commentator before Gilio (1564), writing after the Trent decree of 1563. Caetano correctly notes that Hollanda’s notion of “artistic creation” has much in common with a “constant quest” for “direct union with the source of divinity” in Iberian mysticism in the sixteenth century (30). It is not just the chapters (27–33) of book 1 explicitly dealing with religious imagery that suggest this. Book 1, chapter 6 accounts for the Church’s motives in fostering painting. In chapter 2, Hollanda calls “sacred painting” “active contemplation,” and in 44, part 1 he describes illumination as “very chaste and spiritual” (147). He believes (book 2, dial. 1, at 180) that “good painting is nothing other than a copy of the perfections of God and a record of his painting.” Decisively, in a passage ( book 2, dial. 1, at 185) for which the editors do not identify a source, Hollanda outlines a method of pious pictorial contemplation patently modeled on a contemporary devotional treatise. Work remains to be done, then, on specific sources for this aspect of Hollanda’s intellectual formation.
Another lately revalued work is Giovan Paolo Lomazzo’s Idea of the Temple of Painting (1590), presented in a fine translation with commentary by Jean Julia Chai. Lomazzo (1538–92), a Milanese painter turned theorist after he went blind in 1572, was branded a tedious codifier of mannerist art practice by Julius von Schlosser (1924) and Rensselaer Lee (1940). Less prejudicial analysis (especially by Robert Klein) of Lomazzo’s Trattato della pittura (1584) and Idea during the 1960s and 1970s revealed a somewhat learned Counter-Reformation period critic of notable originality.
Lomazzo’s Idea is a challenging text based on a mnemonic fantasy of a temple, drawn from the writings of Giulio Camillo, one supported by column-like statues of seven Italian artists designated “governors of painting.” The diverse artists — Michelangelo, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Leonardo, Raphael, Mantegna, and Titian — testify to a partially localized Lombard critical paradigm, at variance with Vasari’s dominant Tuscan view. Lomazzo’s Italian text is not included in this edition, but his key term, discrezione (translated as “discernment”), is amply expounded in the introduction, which, in exploring the full range of his writings, traces Lomazzo in the cultural academies and artistic patronage of Milan. Idea is a rich brew of metaphysical speculation, a theory of planetary predetermination of individual artistic temperaments lifted from Cornelius Agrippa, balanced with systematic exposition of the theoretical and practical parts of painting. Chai correctly ties the latter to its sources in Vitruvius and certain earlier Cinquecento theorists of art (named in chapter 4), observing, however, that Lomazzo’s “associating discernment specifically with [his] nonmimetic sort of invention is unprecedented” in the sources (17). She ties Lomazzo’s “discernment” to both Vitruvius and to Daniele Barbaro’s commentary of 1567, saying: “Discernment is the ‘critical consciousness’ that regulates the vast network of harmonious correspondences among all the pictorial elements. Based on the requirements of the narrative, the rules of decorum, and the rational possibilities.” True, but as Chai’s language indicates, in her analyzing and paraphrasing the “principal parts” of discernment, decorum terms actually permeate every category. Everything “fit[s] together,” “suits,” “accommodates,” is “adapted to,” or “corresponds to” everything else (20). Chai states correctly that “some categories overlap,” but decorum’s absolutely dominant conceptual role is perhaps underestimated (20). This deep penetration cannot solely be attributed to Counter-Reformation pressures on Lomazzo, though he does criticize erotic art. It was perhaps equally generated in the ubiquity of decorum concepts among the sources of his art theory described in chapter 4.
What is startlingly new in both the Trattato and the Idea is Lomazzo’s theory of human movement and expressive emotions, and this contribution is expertly evaluated by Chai. She rightly says that Lomazzo’s “choosing the right expression in his theory of “represented emotions” “was not just a matter of proper decorum; it included dialoguing with the divine” (33). Overall, it is puzzling why Chai’s historiography of Lomazzo’s reception terminates with Roger de Piles. Some notes (e.g., 202n54) put Lee and others into critical perspective, but the reasons for early twentieth-century hostility to Lomazzo are avoided. His claims to rational argument, his alleged position as retrospective theoretical summarizer of a declining mannerism, and his addiction to decorum made him thrice repulsive for Schlosser and his followers. Today, with Chai’s guidance, we can read this author as an artist fascinated by the imagined and represented human body — and its subtle control through the pseudosciences of astrology and physiognomy — and the artistic and ecclesiastical decorum of the day.
