Two new publications from Amsterdam University Press address issues pertinent to the study of Bolognese art of the seventeenth century: the availability of documentary and literary sources, and, by extension, the evaluation of their reliability and unique textual histories; and the interpretation of those sources for a critical assessment of artists, their activities, and the reception of their works. The impact of contemporary writings on art, be it Gabriele Paleotti's Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane (1582) or Malvasia's Felsina pittrice (1678), and how they potentially shaped the character of Bolognese painting or guided the collecting habits of patrons, also comes to the fore in both of these books. By virtue of their attempts to reframe and redefine our understanding of Bolognese art, they alert readers to the complexities and evolution of Bolognese art historiography, especially as it involves questions of style, criticism, and methods of interpretation.
The new archival material contained in the collection of seven essays edited by Bohn and Morselli is a true gift to Bolognese studies. As the editors state: “The central objective is not simply to present specific lucky discoveries, but rather to work on documents from a wide-ranging historical perspective, relating artists to their works, their clients, their collectors, and their native city, without neglecting any of the sources in which this information is found” (25). The painter Francesco Albani emerges as the champion of this volume, with his commissions and lively correspondence featured throughout. Morselli mines Albani's letters to reveal his nostalgia for the Roman art scene long after relocating back to Bologna: his celebration of Raphael and Annibale Carracci was as unrelenting as his scorn for Caravaggio and his followers, just as he was steadfast in stressing the importance to his students of rendering both thought and affect visible—the internal and external passions. Newly discovered inventories and gallery diagrams presented in a chapter by Joyce de Vries demonstrate how the noble Fantuzzi family of Bologna eagerly sought out and carefully arranged in their palace of San Domenico works by local Bolognese artists in a gesture of civic pride. The Fantuzzi enhanced the visual opulence of these works with gilded frames, which were often more costly than the actual art objects.
Notably, a 1749 inventory valued Elisabetta Sirani's Holy Family as the most expensive drawing in the collection. This should come as no surprise, as Bohn makes clear in her examination of the prominence of female artists in Bologna. We learn that Sirani probably served more as an inspirational model for women to take up the artistic profession, rather than being a direct teacher to those traditionally considered to be her followers. Bohn also advances some commendable attributions to supplement the often piecemeal evidence and paucity of references stemming from private collections for many of these female artists. In Mantua, the Gonzaga Nevers dukes called on numerous Bolognese artists to decorate their residences, and Roberta Piccinelli shows that this included a variety of activities, from fresco cycles to garden sculptures, fountains, and ornaments. Barbara Ghelfi scrutinizes the correspondence between the Albicini family from Forlì and their artistic representatives to shed light on the reputations, pricing, working methods, and specialties of Bolognese artists. The letters afford an exciting feet-on-the-ground perspective as the Albicini agents bring themselves up to speed on Bologna's changing artistic climate, determining the best deals when works by such stars as Guido Reni and Guercino were either unobtainable or unaffordable. Likewise, Elena Fumagalli's diligent study of inventories, letters, and payment records reveals a consistent appreciation of Bolognese art by members of the Medici family of Florence, who made a point of visiting the workshops of Reni, Albani, and Guercino. How wonderful to find that in 1635, the Florentine cardinal Luigi Capponi, archbishop of Ravenna, proclaimed to the Medici that Bolognese painters represented the pinnacle of artistic achievement, past or present.
Less concerned with the history of collecting, Unger's Redefining Eclecticism offers a critical historiography of style in period writing about the Carracci and their followers. For Malvasia, Ludovico Carracci was the ingenious bee, making his pictorial honey by studying, blending, and emulating those he judged to be the best masters. Like a modern-day Zeuxis, he envisioned and created his own artistic Helen. While Malvasia repeatedly emphasized that Ludovico and the Carracci academy admonished their students to follow nature and their intellects in order to forge their individual styles, Unger posits a “non-assimilated eclecticism,” or the “carefully planned combination of several different styles within a single painting, which do not relate to a specific source of influence” (48), as the hallmark of Bolognese painting. His point of departure is Malvasia's description of Ludovico's Saint Michael and Saint George altarpiece (1595), in which the seventeenth-century biographer professes to be driven crazy by the three different styles (unspecified) on display in the work. For Unger, this speaks to a contemporary preference for intentionally combining various pictorial styles in an independent work of art, one that warrants the eclectic label. He differentiates this stylistic phenomenon from what he deems the unified, homogenous, and original compositions of Raphael, and further endeavors to locate the impetus behind non-assimilated eclecticism in artistic ideology—namely, Paleotti's instruction to distinguish between the vero and verisimile, the actual and the possible, in religious paintings.
Two issues arise with this thesis. First, Paleotti's theological categories and definitions of earthly and heavenly traits were primarily aimed at curtailing decadent or errant artifice. Finding in his treatise a roadmap for artists to mine the history of art, let alone a license to practice eclecticism, is therefore philologically and historically problematic. Second, Unger duly admits that his attempt to rehabilitate eclecticism—a stylistic term that only entered the critical discourse in the eighteenth century—is a Sisyphean task, given all its negative connotations and recent condemnations with regard to Bolognese art. Indeed, in his seminal book Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of the Baroque Style (1977), Charles Dempsey administered eclecticism's last rites and pronounced it a “dead issue in modern criticism” (54). Instead of celebrating stylistic discontinuity, one can see Malvasia's verbal descriptions as serving the rhetorical and didactic purpose of articulating the moral and intellectual underpinnings of style, highlighting the Carracci's enterprise in producing an art that is verisimilar, able to convince the beholder of the reality of the unknowable, and unfathomable through uniting the effects of nature with the traditions of art.
Although Unger defends eclecticism as a means of judicious selection in early modern Bolognese art, drawing on postmodern sensibilities and the work of Maria H. Loh, his updated definition tends to displace the Renaissance principle of selective imitation as the key to imaginative creativity in the visual arts: “A painter does not have to imitate, emulate, borrow, or even be inspired by another artist in order to practice eclecticism, once he has developed a variety of styles” (23). The subsequent visual analysis of Bolognese paintings, while thoughtful in attending to the nuances of stylistic manipulation, risks characterizing artists as merely opportunistic. Take, for instance, Reni: Unger regards the depiction of various saints in his Pietà dei Mendicanti (1613–16) as “an opportunity to practice eclecticism” (128); whereas the portrayal of diverse figures in his destroyed Farmers Presenting Gifts to Saint Benedict (1604; known through copies and Malvasia's description) manifests the most unabashed version of eclecticism, a “pastiche” (51). Perhaps such observations regarding theory and practice should be weighed against Albani's pronouncements, cited by Morselli, that in viewing works by the Bolognese painter Domenichino in Rome, he saw the artist's “great mind,” and further advocated that “the important thing is to reason” and to “not fail to practice drawing” and to “[use] one's head” (39).
