catalogue of the tiepolo drawings in the victoria and albert museumby george knox

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Catalogue of the Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum by George Knox Review by: Hylton A. Thomas The Art Bulletin, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Jun., 1966), pp. 261-263 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3048378 . Accessed: 11/06/2014 04:13 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.80 on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 04:13:12 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Catalogue of the Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museumby George Knox

Catalogue of the Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum by George KnoxReview by: Hylton A. ThomasThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Jun., 1966), pp. 261-263Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3048378 .

Accessed: 11/06/2014 04:13

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The ArtBulletin.

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This content downloaded from 194.29.185.80 on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 04:13:12 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Catalogue of the Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museumby George Knox

BOOK REVIEWS 261

However, one should recall that Miss Romanini could cope with the vast material scattered all over Lombardy and comprising both ecclesiastical and secular architecture only by focusing on one dominant issue-this leitmotif being what she views as the constant element of Lombard Gothic building. Whenever the material by its nature leads her beyond the frontiers of the Visconti do- main, she convincingly stresses the impact of and the links to related buildings, often far away, be they in Venice or north of the Alps. In this context her observations regarding the similarities in plan between the cathedrals of Milan and Saint Veit at Prague are of particular significance. So is her stress on the part played by Heinrich Parler rather than by Mignot, whose role has often been over- stressed; Miss Romanini, on the contrary, views Mignot, more correctly it seems to me, merely as the catalyst who unifies against himself the other- wise divided opposition of the local architects. The implications of her observations are extraor- dinarily stimulating for understanding the spread of the Parler style as an international phenome- non from the courts of the Luxemburg and the Habsburg to that of the Visconti and to cities and convents favored by these courts, from Saint Stephen in Vienna to the chevet of the church of the Holy Cross at Gmiind and perhaps to Saint Sebaldus at Nuremberg and to Kuttenberg.

Miss Romanini in recent years has contributed widely and valuably to periodicals and to the vol- umes of the excellent Storia di Milano. Still, this is her first important book and as such it has all the characteristics of a first major effort. To many a reader the analyses of the buildings may seem somewhat overwritten; the stylistic element over- stressed; the dominant note of the innate Lombard features too strictly adhered to. This reviewer, recalling the faults of his own first book and moreover used to the gusto with which any Italian handles his rich vocabulary, is not disturbed. He feels that this is a serious book into which much hard work has gone-an attempt undertaken with energy, intelligence and great sensitivity to under- stand and bring order into the heretofore chaotic mass of Gothic architecture in Lombardy and to bring to our knowledge a wealth of beautiful and heretofore poorly known buildings. Miss Roma- nini, it seems to me, has conquered a new province for the history of architecture, and I must apolo- gize for acknowledging it nearly two years after the publication of her work.

RICHARD KRAUTHEIMER

New York University

GEORGE KNOX, Catalogue of the Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1960. Pp. 111; 326 ills. ?3.3.0.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London pos- sesses, as one of its more unexpected treasures, over three-hundred drawings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo which were purchased in 1885. They then constituted two of the nine volumes of such draw- ings bought by Edward Cheney in Venice appar- ently in 1842 and 1852 that appeared in the Cheney Sale of 1885 at Sotheby's. Of the remain- ing seven volumes, only one other has come down to us presumably intact-the one owned by Fair- fax Murray now in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. The real indifference to, and neglect of, Tiepolo throughout much of the nineteenth century constitute one of the reasons why the ma- jor collections of his drawings are often found in out of the ordinary places like Trieste and Stutt- gart and Bayonne rather than in traditionally fa- mous collections of drawings. It is not by accident that the Museo Horne rather than the Gabinetto dei disegni of the Uffizi has the finest group of Tiepolo drawings in Florence, and that the Museo Correr in Venice rather than the Accademia again possesses the best and most numerous collection; in London, in the same way, the Victoria and Al- bert Museum takes precedence over the British Museum.

Critical interest in Tiepolo's drawings has de- veloped correspondingly late. First mentioned in extenso in Sack's great monograph of 1910, they are there listed by collection, and are definitely secondary to the paintings. Then in 1927 appeared Hadeln's two-volume monograph on the drawings, the first publication devoted solely to them. Han- dled chronologically and sumptuously illustrated with splendid collotype plates, it is nevertheless marred, as were other earlier studies on the artist, by the misreading of the date in the frescoes at the Villa Valmarana as 1737 rather than 1757; the error was so great it caused havoc in the picture of Tiepolo's development. Vigni's excellent mono- graph on the drawings in Trieste (1942) is the last of the more specialized publications that predates Mr. Knox's study. In it the author has succeeded, with considerably greater care and accuracy than earlier writers, in placing each drawing or re- lated group of drawings as exactly as possible in time, and he is, as well, consistently critical of the quality of the individual drawing. Lorenzetti's publication of the "notebook" containing chalk studies in the Correr Museum (1946), has unusu- ally fine reproductions, but, due to the disturbed

conditions prevailing at the time preceding its appearance, it makes little pretence at critical eval- uation of single drawings and remains primarily a picture-book. Mr. Knox, in turn, has refined upon his predecessors, using Vigni's method pretty much as the model for his own.

In this book a brief, almost too highly com- pressed, introduction discusses first the extremely complicated and not altogether clear history of the Cheney albums of Tiepolo drawings (Mr. Knox subsequently modified his statements to some extent, in an article in BurlM, 103, 1961, 269f., where he concludes that the Horne and Or- loff albums probably had a different history, pos- sibly coming from the Beckford collection. See also M. Levey, "Two Footnotes to any Tiepolo Monograph," BurlM, 104, 1962, 118f.; as Levey makes clear, the whole matter still remains "un- satisfactorily obscure."), then in sequence deals with the early drawings up to 1740, those of the 1740's, those relating to the two series of etchings, the Varii caprici and the Scherzi di fantasia, which pose unsettling questions of chronology, the draw- ings from the Wiirzburg period (1750-53), and the last drawings done in Italy before the Tiepolo family's departure for Spain in 1762. The cata- logue follows the notes to the introduction. It is handled, insofar as is possible, in chronological succession, often with comments under the first of a group of drawings and with the other related drawings listed immediately afterwards. The cata- logue also lists the remaining drawings from the albums by the family and/or school, and several more by Giambattista's son, Domenico, subse- quently acquired by the Museum. Concordance, bibliography and index follow the illustrations.

The collection is fortunate in having several lots of drawings which are studies for known major fresco or easel paintings, or which are closely re- lated to them; these often amplify considerably our knowledge of the finished works, especially so since Mr. Knox has investigated such connections with great care. His clarification of the tangled groups of works connected in one way or another with two of Tiepolo's early decorative fresco cy- cles, those in the Palazzo Sandi in Venice and the Palazzo Archinti in Milan (the latter unfortunately totally destroyed by bombing in World War II)- is masterly in its subtle acuity. No less lucid and satisfying is his discussion of the possible func- tions of the red chalk drawings from the Wiirz- burg period, and of the effect function has on the nature of these studies. (This problem has been taken up again by Mr. Byam Shaw in his recent monograph on the drawings of Domenico Tiepolo,

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Page 3: Catalogue of the Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museumby George Knox

262 The Art Bulletin

1962, esp. pp. 21-30, and most recently by T. Pi- gnatti in Master Drawings, 2, 1964, 413f. It is to be doubted if a final solution for all the drawings in this category by the various Tiepolos and their studio personnel can ever be reached.) In addition to the bodies of drawings mentioned elsewhere in this review, there are to be found in the Museum studies for the Maecenas Presenting the Fine Arts to Augustus painted for Count Briihl, others for the frescoes and the garden sculpture in the Villa Cordellina at Montecchio Maggiore, for the vari- ous versions of the Banquet of Cleopatra, for the frescoes of the Cappella Sagredo in San Francesco della Vigna at Venice, for the Death of Hyacinth now in Lugano, for the cycle in the Villa Soderini at Nervesa (destroyed in W.W. I), for the several cycles in the Villa Valmarana outside Vicenza (es- pecially richly represented), for the largely de- stroyed (W.W. II) frescoes in the Palazzo Trento- Valmarana at Vicenza, and lastly for the frescoes in the ballroom of the Villa Pisani at Stra, which was Tiepolo's last major commission before he left for Spain. Many of the remaining drawings can be put into fairly close context with drawings for these works, so that the author is able to define the date and purpose of a goodly number of them with much reasonability. Moreover he frequently includes supplementary pertinent material under the catalogue entries, a practice which makes nec- essary an attentive reading of all the text and one which gives unity to his presentation throughout the entire book.

Any single collection of drawings by a master is bound to be one-sided. In the Victoria and Albert Museum, for example, only two drawings from Tiepolo's Spanish period are to be found; they may always have been rare in comparison with those from other periods. Mr. Knox compensates for such inevitable shortcomings in the collection by bringing in complementary material from else- where, so that his volume covers Tiepolo as a draftsman with some completeness. (To the third fully authenticated drawing from Tiepolo's Span- ish years, mentioned by the author, in addition to the two in the Victoria and Albert Museum, can be added the Title-page in the Cooper Union Mu- seum in New York, whose subject and date were discovered by Dr. Bertha Wiles. See R. Wunder, Extravagant Drawings of the Eighteenth Century, 1962, No. 69.) Even before his book appeared in print, however, the picture had already begun to change. Many more early drawings, some of them in all likelihood among Tiepolo's earliest essays in draftsmanship, have come to light: the group from Danzig shown in Venice in 1958 (Mrozinska, Di- segni veneti in Polonia, Nos. 40-42); a group of

drawings in Paris published by Voss (Saggi e memorie, n, 1959, 314-22); a small group of finely executed preparations for prints, discovered among the anonymous Italian drawings in the British Museum by J. Byam Shaw; the extensive series of similar drawings for an illustrated book, which was presumably never published, recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum; a compa- rable series of tiny initials, also purchased a short time ago, in the Fogg Art Museum; the large de- tailed drawing (very important although unfortu- nately badly rubbed) after the Expulsion of Hagar in the Rasini collection at Milan, again made for a print, on the art-market in New York. In fact, Tiepolo's youthful period, extending into the ear- lier 1730's, is characterized by a much richer range and fluctuation of mood, style, subject, technique, and influences than can be imagined by anyone who has not devoted considerable time to it. In addition to the drawings noted above, the col- lections of drawings at Bassano, Bergamo and Udine, all of which have been to some extent pub- lished fairly recently (1956, 1963 and 1961, respec- tively), as well as Morassi's catalogue raisonne of Tiepolo's paintings (1962) and the very recent ex- hibition of his drawings at Udine (1965), further buttress this expanded view of Tiepolo's early activity. Mr. Knox does indicate the diversity in drawings from this period existing in the museum, but the drawings there are scarcely adequate nu- merically to do more than hint at such variety.

Even in a work as gratifying as this one is, queries must be raised. With regard to the tech- niques and media employed in the drawings, I find the author on occasion too diffident. It may be true that pencil or lead-point was more frequently used for underdrawings, instead of black chalk, than has been commonly imagined. What I felt Mr. Knox did not emphasize sufficiently strongly, however, is that, whatever the material may be, it is almost always handled like the characteristic Venetian underdrawing in chalk, i.e., it is stroked loosely over the surface with a blunt point, so that the line is vague, crumbly and uneven. Nor is the implication of rarity for the technique employed in drawing No. 3 in the catalogue (p. 44) neces- sary. The use of sanguine wash or of clear water over red chalk to give a rosy wash is a reasonably well-known method (cf. Meder, Die Handzeich- nung, 126).

When writing about the frescoes in the Villa Loschi at Biron, in the introduction, Mr. Knox finds them "lacking in freshness" and "relatively uninspired," and appears to attribute such quali- ties to Tiepolo's pedantic following of figures in Ripa's Iconologia (pp. 13-14). He suggests Tiepolo

behaved in that manner at the behest of his learned patron Count Niccol6 Loschi. When he states that the Marital Concord is a "barely modi- fied" repetition of Ripa's corresponding group, though, he goes too far. It is only necessary to compare the two versions (p. 14 and ill. 12) to see the considerable difference between the two and the great superiority of Tiepolo's transformation over its earlier source. Nor do I agree with the author's estimate of the frescoes themselves. Some of them are rather stiff and awkward, true, but the finest in the cycle, such as Virtue Crowning Honor, represent Tiepolo's first successful attempt to redo, in his own somewhat more arrogant and operatic manner (and to some extent through Sebas- tiano Ricci), the regal grandeur of Veronese. As such they are, if anything, touching, rather than boring, and constitute an historical document of the greatest significance for Tiepolo's subsequent evolution.

My only serious dispute with the author again concerns material that is peripheral to the draw- ings themselves. While discussing the two series of Tiepolo's prints, in the section devoted to the related drawings in the Museum, Mr. Knox states (p. 22) that there is "no very clear difference in style or subject-matter between the two sets" and that the drawings connected with them, in the mu- seum, "confirm the view that both sets were con- ceived and executed at much the same moment in the later forties." It is true that links can be es- tablished between the two series, but when the two sets are regarded as entities they are, in the end, definitely unlike one another in every sig- nificant way--figure style, scale of forms, compo- sition, technique, and even to a considerable extent in mood. In the Capricci the slender and at times eccentrically proportioned figures, the open, re- laxed and even sprawling compositions, the un- subtle bite of the lines and unfocussed sentiment, compared to the Scherzi, mean that the former come first. The much more noble and monumental figures, more compact compositions, more system- atic and economical etching, the more mysterious and much more poetic feeling of the Scherzi indi- cate a later date. (I do not pretend to be unique in this consideration of the respective datings for the two series; see M. Pittaluga, Aquafortisti vene- ziani del settecento, 1952, 165. I hope very soon to publish a documented chronological analysis of

Tiepolo's prints, and have already come to the conclusion that the earliest plates in the Capricci were bit shortly after 1733 at the latest.) If I am correct, the drawings related to the prints, lumped into the later forties by Mr. Knox, may have in part to be spread out over a longer period of time.

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Page 4: Catalogue of the Tiepolo Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museumby George Knox

BOOK REVIEWS 263

However, I believe it would be unfair at the pres- ent moment to criticize Mr. Knox's placement of individual drawings in this group because nearly all of them relate to the Scherzi, which are later in date. In addition, my point of view here con- cerns primarily the etchings, and my arguments about them have not as yet been published.

The point of separation between master and family, pupil and assistant in a group of drawings like the present one, in all probability compiled in the artist's studio, as the author points out, is one of the most difficult of all the problems that plague the connoisseur and historian. I can find

very little to quarrel about with Mr. Knox in this area, but if he accepts the knot on sheet No. 65 why reject the one on No. 3187 And if no one doubts the magnificent greyhounds in Trieste (Vigni, Disegni del Tiepolo, Nos. 186-89) how can one refuse to acknowledge the enchanting pair of sleeping cats (No. 322)?

Admitting the inescapable points of contention that exist between art historians, the text remains a truly estimable contribution to the study of Tie- polo and a worthy companion to Vigni's valuable publication. Sadly enough, the same cannot be said for the illustrations. Nearly all the drawings are reproduced; those not portrayed are some scribbles and inscriptions on the versos of a few drawings, the versos of some school drawings and the unrelated drawings by Domenico Tiepolo ac- quired after the Cheney albums were bought. It is not the lack of completeness that is so trouble- some, but the quality of the reproductions, which is nearly always disastrous. The possible excep- tions are some drawings in pure line, such as Nos. 50 and 51, where the line is so strong it still stands out clearly. Elsewhere, from beginning to end, the drawings look dreary. For some reason the white of the paper in almost every case appears as a fairly dark tone, so that the lighter washes fade out. The washes, light and deep, have gone muddy and flat, and line is usually fuzzy. The result is a real tragedy, a blurred travesty of one of the most important collections of Tiepolo draw- ings in existence. One has to know the drawings in some other way, through personal acquaint- ance or by photograph, in order to appreciate the often extraordinarily high quality they have and their infinite variety of wash and line. The plates are inadequate for scholarly use, and give little pleasure to the eye. The fault presumably occurred during the process of printing; the pa- per is satisfactory for good reproduction, and I have a set of the Museum photographs of the drawings which is uniformly fine in appearance. Whatever the reason for it, and whomever should

be blamed for it, the visual mediocrity of the book seriously damages its genuine merit.

HYLTON A. THOMAS

University of Minnesota

ANTHONY BLUNT AND PHOEBE POOL, Picasso, The Formative Years, Greenwich, Conn., New York Graphic Society, 1962. Pp. 32; 173 figs. $8.50.

The substance of this book, according to its fore- word, is a dissertation written by Miss Pool under the supervision of Professor Blunt, which they have decided to publish in "the form of a picture book with a long introduction," dividing the mate- rial so that "the latter would treat the literary background against which Picasso grew up, and the former would illustrate by means of visual parallels the sources on which he drew" (p. 4). The result seems at first to be that rare combina- tion, a scholarly picture book-attractive, visually oriented, and accessible to a popular audience, yet thoughtful, carefully researched, and stimulating to a professional one.

It soon becomes evident, however, that in some important respects the requirements of the second type of audience have been sacrificed to those of the first by the choice of this form of publication. Although the introduction is based on extensive reading in the literature and cultural history of the period, and is written with considerable liter- ary charm of its own, it provides no footnotes, no bibliography, and only occasional references, so that its interesting allusions and unfamiliar quota- tions cannot be verified and its relation to previous discussions of the subject cannot be determined. (Some of these references occur in Miss Pool's previous article, "Sources and Background of Pi- casso's Art, 1900-6," BuriM, 101, 1959, 176-82. See also her recent one, "Picasso's Neo-Classicism: First Period, 1905-6," Apollo, 81, 1965, 122-27.) Although the illustrations demonstrate a number of formerly unidentified sources or stylistic affini- ties of Picasso's work and some suggestive icono- graphic parallels, they are selected with no con- sistent purpose in mind, so that the valuable examples are obscured by others intended merely to characterize an artistic milieu, illustrate a minor colleague's work, or summarize a broad thematic development.

Despite these limitations inherent in the form of its presentation, this is the first important study of the character, sources, and background of Pi- casso's early art that we have in English, and as such deserves to be considered at some length.

Its underlying theme is that the intellectual and social background of Picasso's art in the formative

years before he painted the Demoiselles d'Avi- gnon also pervades its foreground, so that "one cannot understand his early art without consider- ing the Nordic 'decadence' in Barcelona, Nietzsche, Symbolism, the neo-classical reaction of Morbas, and perhaps the later cults of irrationalism and 'significant form' " (p. 28). This is not an entirely new position, for as early as 1922 Maurice Raynal, himself a former poet in the Symbolist tradition, had argued that Picasso was indebted to Rimbaud and Mallarm4 for his ideal of a conceptual and imaginative rather than naturalistic art and to Apollinaire for his determination to follow the dictates of intuition rather than external rules of art.

Nevertheless, it is a position from which the authors are able to shed new light on such topics as "the cult of the primitive mixed with sympathy for peasants and the poor" that appeared contem- poraneously in Picasso's early work and in the milieu of Els Quatre Gats and Nonell in Barcelona (p. 12), the striking parallels in imagery between the Blue Period pictures and the poetry of Andre Salmon, which "made use of the same characters ... harlequins, blind beggars, madmen and starv- ing mothers" (p. 18), and the influence on each other of Picasso and Apollinaire, who "also advo- cated the liberation of art from everyday logic and the exaltation of intuition and the creative role of the unconscious" (p. 24). Unfortunately, the same method is not applied to the Demoiselles d'Avi- gnon itself; although it is described as the "pic- ture to which the work of all these years leads up" (p. 5), very little is said about either its visual sources (on which, it is true, Barr, Golding, and others have already written) or its literary content and precedents (on which we might have learned much from an iconographic approach).

Less admirable is the authors' tendency to over- simplify this admittedly complex material in order to discover meaningful patterns within it. Since they provide no scholarly apparatus, it is difficult to check many of the sources they quote; but some of those which have been checked turn out to have been adapted so freely as to distort their original meaning. Indeed, the very first sentence-"Max Jacob said that Picasso and his friends were de- termined to make 'beaucoup de pastiches volon- taires pour etre setr de n'en pas faire d'involon- taires'" (p. 5)-is a case in point, since this quotation is actually taken from Jacob's Conseils a un jeune porte (Paris, 1945, 55) and from a con- text in which Picasso and his friends are not men- tioned. (The statement is not found in Jacob's memoirs, in R. Guiette, "Vie de Max Jacob," La nouvelle revue franCaise, 43, 1934, 5-19, 248-59.)

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