Introduction: Ghiberti and the Courtauld

Abstract

The sections of Ghiberti's Commentarii published here were translated by staff at the Courtauld Institute of Art in the late 1940s.1 Together with Creighton Gilbert's translation of the second commentary, this is one of the few versions of Ghiberti's text available in English, even if it too is partial, rendering the entire second commentary but including only select passages from the first and third commentary with interpolated precis.2 Various selections had also been made available in two anthologies by Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, and Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, the dates of which - 1945 and 1947 - may be significant in relation to the Courtauld translation.3 The translation itself is a period piece as much for its deference to the Vienna School as for the institutional context that it served. It was based on Julius von Schlosser's transcription of the only-known manuscript of the text, preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (II, I, 333), which he had published in 1912.4 A critical edition of the Commentarii has since been edited by Lorenzo Bartoli (1998) and a full English translation is now urgent.5The names of the translators are not recorded, although the typescript acknowledges 'the staff' and implies a group effort. Its purpose was presumably pedagogical, although several staff members also had an early interest in Italian writing on art. Anthony Blunt, who had been director since October 1947, published Artistic Theory in Italy 1450-1600 in 1940 and could have occasioned the translation, even if it seems unlikely. Inspired by Schlosser's considerably larger and more comprehensive study of Die Kunstliteratur (Vienna, 1924), Blunt's book was nonetheless dismissive of Ghiberti's writings and failed to address them with any substance. Indeed, Ghiberti is only mentioned briefly in passing, and is described as a predecessor to Alberti, who had in fact produced Della pittura over a decade before Ghiberti began work on the commentaries.6 The error was predicated on the widespread prejudice that Ghiberti remained an essentially 'Gothic' sculptor, who must perforce precede the 'Renaissance' humanist.Johannes Wilde could also have prompted the translation. Blunt had been quick to appoint the emigre scholar to the Courtauld in 1947. Wilde emerged from the Vienna School under Max Dvorak, whom Schlosser replaced in 1922 as chair of the art history department. Wilde's efforts, however, seem to have focused on Michelangelo in these years, to judge from his public lectures.7 Peter Murray was then also teaching at the Courtauld, preparing a translation of Wolfflin's Die klassische Kunst and reading for his doctorate, which he submitted in 1956 with the title 'Studies in Tuscan Sources for the History of Art'. The third part is a 'Prolegomenon to Ghiberti's Second Commentario' and constitutes a philological quest to identify and correct corruptions in the manuscript by comparison with passages in Vasari, the Anonimo Magliabechiano, the Libro di Antonio Billi and Giambattista Gelli, on the assumption that they all ultimately derived from a common (lost) source.8 A similar preoccupation is evident in the Courtauld translation, in which apparent errors are corrected from the 'original classical sources', principally Pliny. This unsatisfactory method is, admittedly, different to Murray's, even if it betrays a similar anxiety. Murray would seem, then, to be one of the most likely candidates for translator were it not for a footnote (n. 6a) in which he writes of the 'Courtauld Institute ed.' as if it were a separate enterprise, and provides an alternative reading of one passage in particular. Nevertheless, even if Murray never took explicit ownership of the translation, it appears to have been understood by those who knew him that he was the author.9Its translator might have been uncertain, but its function is clear. The edition had an immediate impact on teaching and was presumably produced for that purpose, even if it is not always possible to determine the exact curriculum in the late 1940s and 1950s. …