Fragmenta

The author provides a new iconographic explanation of the Sibylla Erithraea on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The interpretation is based on the letter Q that is depicted in the book she is holding, which has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention to date. It is argued here that the letter Q was related to a text by Lactantius, who was well known among humanists and theologians. The letter Q, furthermore, emphasizes the Sibylla Erithraea’s special status among the other Sibyls. Her relation to the Last Judgement is confirmed by the images around her.

This chapter compares two sixteenth-century treatises on painting, Da pintura antiga / Do tirar polo natural (1548-1549) by Francisco de Holanda and Comentarios de la pintura y pintores antiguos (c. 1560) by Felipe de Guevara. Although both treatises represented contemporary Iberian ideas on painting, the two authors’ ideas were shaped differently by the particular artistic discourse and cultural context of Italy and the Netherlands respectively. De Holanda’s and De Guevara’s considerations about the defining factors of the art of painting were furthermore determined by their diverging backgrounds as court painter and collector.

The Villa d’Este in Tivoli is a prime example of the role of erudition in garden art and architecture. The villa is considered here as an artistic counterpart to Pirro Ligorio’s encyclopaedic writings that still offer much untreated material for historians of art and science. This article explores how the garden was discussed by contemporary humanists, referring to the real site and to the ideal setting of the garden as it was published in a corresponding engraving. Focussing on the centre of the garden’s composition, known as the Fountain of the Dragon(s), the argument demonstrates the flexibility of the art of the garden, which responded to political developments and discoveries in natural history.

The Dutchman Aernout van Buchel lived in Rome between November and March 1587-1588. Visiting ancient and contemporary monuments, he recorded his impressions and knowledge in small notebooks. Several years later he worked these into a full report, expanding his notes with information from a wide range of scholarly sources.

Focusing on his description of the Pantheon, this paper traces Van Buchel’s sources. Some were visual (prints and book illustrations) but the great majority were literary, ranging from ancient Greek and Latin writings to contemporary scholarly publications. In general, he used recent history books and guides of Rome as a first introduction proceeding to more specialized works. On the whole, he consulted over two hundred sources, usually quite critically. In the case of the Pantheon, he closely followed various guidebooks, adopting some incorrect information on the building’s history and original dedication, but also adding valuable information based on personal observation. His reconstruction of the original position of the Pantheon in ancient Rome is surprisingly correct.

This chapter focuses on the investigation of the Roman catacombs by two Early Modern scholars from the Netherlands - Philips van Winghe and Jean L’Heureux [Macarius]. Examining Van Winghe drawings and notes as well as Macarius’s treatise on early Christian Iconography (Hagioglypta), it discusses why these two foreigners in Rome exhibited a sensitivity to the style of the art of the catacombs absent in their Italian contemporaries, who appreciated catacomb art only for its value as historical evidence or holy relic. It proposes that it was Van Winghe and Macarius’s northern origins, experience living in a denominationally heterogeneous (Catholic-Protestant) region, and ‘outside’ status in the caput mundi that made them less committed to the confessional polemics of the Counter-Reformation and more open to an artistic style that deviated from the classical norms of the Italian Renaissance.

Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s writings (most notably the Trattato dell’Arte) provide striking illustrations of the tendency of writers on art in sixteenth-century Italy to consider theoretical knowledge as essential for artists. As both practitioner and theorist, Lomazzo embodies the need felt by Italian painters to gain a literary education and to be part of the intellectual life of the period. Focusing on Lomazzo’s activity as an academician, the article analyses the case of the Accademia de la Val di Blenio, where artists and artisans were well-received and held central roles. The main source on this academy is the peculiar book Rabisch (Arabesques), a collection of poems written by various members and published in 1589. The institution was characterised by the originality of its language as well as its structure and by the heterogeneity of its members. It offered to Milanese artists and artisans an environment where they could share opinions and write poems on different subjects.

Apart from being an exceptionally gifted artist, Rubens was also an intellectual who engaged in the study of antiquity at the highest level and who had a profound knowledge of architecture and architectural theory. As can be demonstrated by such magnificent works as The Massacre of the Innocents, of which two versions exist, Rubens often used architecture as an appropriate setting for the action depicted. In both paintings he based the architecture not just on first-hand observation, but also on specialist book publications. One such particularly interesting antiquarian publication, hitherto largely ignored by Rubens scholars, is the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae by Antonio Lafreri. In a catalogue of his print shop, Lafreri describes his customers as virtuosi, a concept related to the ideas of the Accademia della Virtù in Rome and to the efforts made by Renaissance artists to recover Roman splendour in art and architecture.

This paper explores the history of how a small mask was acquired by the Medici Collection, which is presently in the Palazzo Pitti, Museo degli Argenti, Inv. Gemme nr. 707. It tries to reconstruct the complex process in which different meanings were attached to a cross-cultural artefact, arguing that the Tuscan artists and viewers that were involved had a fairly good knowledge of the ancient cults of the West Indies. The object therefore represented the complex and multifaceted relationship of early modern Europe with pre-Columbian America. Whether genuine or a forgery, the mask became a repository of knowledge about the New World.

An unprecedented number of poems were written in praise of Guido Reni’s paintings during his lifetime. This paper explores the ways in which the engagement of the beholder with the artwork is thematized in these texts, and how they may relate to the paintings in question. Particular attention will be paid to the way the beholder deals with a tension that is evident in many of the poems on Reni’s paintings, namely that between the illusionism and liveliness of the painted scene and figures on the one hand, and the apparent material qualities of the paintings on the other. Through these texts, it will be argued, we get a sense of how the informed beholder may have looked at Reni’s paintings, or, in other words, what Reni’s paintings looked like through the poet’s lens.

Francesco Peparelli’s large collection of books not only lends us a detailed intellectual and professional understanding of a civilized artist, but also demonstrates his connections with the cultural world of his day and with his fellow artists. The library can be seen to represent the paper traces of memory, the tangible record of the relationship between the draftsman and the authors he has consulted and read. In Peparelli’s library - as in that of other architects - we can find a complete range of sixteenth and seventeenth-century architectural treatises, from Vitruvius to Serlio, from Rusconi to Tartaglia, but there are also works on the art of painting, poetry by Petrarch, Marino and Niccolò Franco, the Amadis de Gaula saga and works by Stefano Guazzo. The book collection of a master-builder emerges as a small universe responding to the ideal of complete proficiency in the liberal and mechanical arts.

The German scholar Barthold Nihusius, a famous convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism, wrote forty letters from Amsterdam, where he worked in Blaeu’s printing office, to Athanasius Kircher in Rome. These reveal how Dutch collections of antiquities and related publications contributed substantially to Kircher’s interest in Egypt. The view that the hieroglyphs expressed the original language in which God had spoken to Adam attracted him in particular. In addition, the exchange resulted in detailed images of Egyptian antiquities. The transfer of knowledge from the Middle East through the Low Countries to the Eternal City appears as an essential route in the rise of Egyptian studies as a new discipline.

On his way from Rome to Paris in February 1642, Gabriel Naudé visited the cabinet of curiosities of Gaspard de Monconys in Lyon, which the contemporary sources described as one of the richest in Europe. Impressed by its magnificence, he advised De Monconys to draft a catalogue of all his medals, to be sent to their mutual friend, the Roman collector Cassiano dal Pozzo, patron of the Museum Cartaceum. Eight months later, De Monconys launched an editorial project which intended to immortalize a part of his collection through a ‘paper gallery’ of forty copper-engraved portraits of cardinals. This recently rediscovered project typifies his position in a scholarly network and illuminates the importance he attached to visual imagery.

This article analyses one of Francesco Borromini’s sources for the facade of San Carlino (1660-1662). The architect derived an ornamental detail of the lateral windows from a drawing of an ancient tripod that had been discovered in Frejus in 1629. Information about this tripod circulated among scholars, collectors, antiquarians, and artists before reaching Borromini’s desk. In the façade’s design, then, the architect adopted a specific rational procedure along the lines of Ermenegildo Pini’s hypothesis, formulated in 1770: Borromini, like Descartes, created an “imaginary hypothesis”, an “exemplary system” from “mistakes”. The chapter thus aims to demonstrate that Borromini’s adaptation of the ancient motif for a sculptural element within the architectural structure of San Carlino’s facade was closely related to scientific methods of his time.

Francesco Bianchini’s treatise Hesperi et phosphori nova phaenomena (1728) was the first book to be published on telescopic observations of Venus. The present article examines the various strategies that gave Bianchini’s new discoveries their evidential force. Six different strategies of providing evidence come to the fore: the argument of technical and instrumental superiority; the proof of skill in seeing and drawing; the visualisation in images and models; the involvement of eyewitnesses; the exchange within a European scientific network; and the development of a nomenclature for the Venus markings. It will become clear that Bianchini’s publication - despite his inaccurate results - owed its considerable success to the effect of these principles. For a century and a half, it was considered the most important reference for the study of the planet Venus.

This paper explores the European artistic circle in Rome of the French architect Marie-Joseph Peyre (1730-1785), a little known yet important figure of the first generation of Neoclassical French architects. He occupies a central place in the genesis of Neoclassicism, notably through the publication in 1765 of his book Oeuvres d’architecture, explicitly as “the fruit of [his] studies in Italy”. The purpose of the article is to provide a more detailed account than previously published on Peyre’s three-year sojourn at the French Academy in Rome and his acquaintance with French, Italian (in particular Giovanni Battista Piranesi) and British artists and architects. The European group of artists and architects in Peyre’s circle shared a common taste and architectural culture, which constituted what might be called the Avant-Garde of the middle of the mid-eighteenth century and which was characterized by a renewed interest in the art and architecture of the classical past. Indeed the detailed and measured surveys of some of the major Roman monuments (notably Hadrian’s Villa and the Roman Baths) and other antiquities by this collective of artists indicate an artistic and architectural practice similar to the Renaissance, but which eventually led to the creation of Neoclassical art and architecture.