Giovanni Guerra and Anton Francesco Doni's Zucca

Abstract

In her recent edition of Anton Francesco Doni's Pitture (Padua 1564) Sonia Maffei has correctly linked a large number of drawings with allegorical personifications in the camet De Rothschild by Giovanni Guerra (Modena 1544-Rome 1618) with this textual source. Most of Doni's figurative inventions in the Pitture were used by Cesare Ripa in his Iconologia (Rome 1593), and in some cases it is difficult to establish whether Guerra drew directly on Doni's book or on Ripa's more recently published. One would be tempted at first to link Guerra's drawings to the Iconologia, considering the fact that the artist executed some of the preparatory drawings for the woodcuts of the first illustrated edition of the popular personification handbook (Rome 1603). Moreover it is likely that Guerra had known Ripa personally, frequenting Antonio Maria Salviati's household, of which Ripa was part, or more simply through Giovanni Alberti, a very good friend of his. However, it seems that at least for the drawings named Furtuna, Crado di dignita and Rieheza Guerra drew on Doni's text, because the relative passages were not included in the Iconologia. It is possible, though, that Guerra had not used the 1564 edition, because the text of the Pitture was republished, from 1565, as the final part of Doni's Zucca, first published by Francesco Marcolini in 1550/51. Studying the De Rothscild camet since 1997, independently from Maffei's research, I had already put a large number of Guerra's drawings in relation with the Pitture, pointing out that a certain number of other drawings had a precise connection with some passages of the Zucca. In some cases these passages had been written in order to describe the woodcuts illustrating Francesco Marcolini's Sorti (Venice 1540 and 1550) that were reused in the princeps edition of the Zucca. These woodcuts do not appear in the second edition of the book that was printed by a different publisher, Francesco Rampazetto. Some elements suggest that Guerra was not looking at Sorti woodcuts when he realized those drawings in the camet De Rothschild, and therefore it is also likely that, for all the drawings that can be linked to the Pitture, he drew on one of the four editions of the Zucca published between 1589 and 1607.