Vasari, Prints and Prejudice

Abstract

During the last few months, while preparing the section of the forthcoming Venetian exhibition at the Royal Academy devoted to sixteenth-century Venetian print-making, I have had to admit to fellow art historians more often than I care to remember that I was not going to include an impression of the print after Titian's lost picture of the Martyrdom of St Peter. The idea of a print being 'original' as opposed to a 'reproduction', of its being a work of art in its own right, conceived in the first place as an expression of an aesthetic thought which is better represented in this form rather than in a drawing or painting, does not seem to occur as often as the question: who or what is this print after? It is a fact that the vast majority of old master prints are 'after' something, that they reproduce another work of art. But it is also true that most photographs are of children in a garden or grandparents at a party, and they are never confused in the minds of the general public, let alone the minds of art historians, with photographs by Arbus or Cartier-Bresson. The belief that prints were in their early history exclusively a means of reproducing drawings or paintings, that they were the photographs of the sixteenth century, is so deeply rooted that hardly a single original print by Parmigianino or Cranach has escaped the fate of being associated at least once with a 'lost' painting or drawing. Adam Bartsch called his magnum opus, Le Peintre Graveur, the painterengraver, dedicating it to those artists who chose print-making as their medium-sometimes their only medium-to produce original works of art. Surprisingly enough, his efforts have not really made any great impact on art historians, and by consequence on the general public, and the reasons for that are many. Statistically, as I have already said, there are many more 'reproductive' than 'original' prints among the so-called old masters, possibly several hundreds of the former for each of the latter: moreover, it is the experience of any print scholar that, with few exceptions such as Diirer or Rembrandt, editions of original prints must have been far smaller than those of reproductive prints. Hence the greater difficulty in becoming acquainted with original prints in some number. A further point to be borne in mind here is that prints present themselves as an artistic medium in black and white, and it is psychologically easy to equate them with photographs. After all, students of the history of art are far more used to working from photographs of paintings and drawings than to studying the originals themselves! It is obvious, however, that the greatest responsibility for this situation goes back several centuries, to a man whose views on art have shaped those of art historians of many generations and, seemingly, of many different convictions-Giorgio Vasari. His Lives have been the vade-mecum of the formative years of endless students, connoisseurs, art lovers or historians and, as far as prints are concerned, have only confirmed for them what seemed already to be a truism, that in the Renaissance prints were the only available means of reproducing other works of art. From the very outset of the Lives Vasari makes his position clear. In the Proemio, in which he discusses at some length the problem of supremacy between Sculp ure and Painting, one of the arguments he mentions which could tip the balance in favour of the latter is the variety of forms Painting can take. After discussing qualities peculiar to Painting, such as foreshortening and perspective, Vasari goes on to list all the branches of Painting, beginning with tempera, fresco, oil on wood, stone or canvas, and then illumination and glass-painting, mosaic, intarsia of coloured woods, graffito decoration of house-facades and, eventually, nielli and prints. These are followed only by a few categories such as maiolica-dish-painting or enamel. The position of prints in this list is in itself revealing of their standing in the author's mind. Moreover, in the general chapter Della Pittura, where Vasari discusses the various techniques, prints have slipped to the very bottom of the list: the section on engraving, mentioned as a corollary to ni llo, takes up not more than five lines (as opposed to several pages, for instance, devoted to glass painting); that on woodcuts and chiaroscuro woodcuts is the very last, and is also very slim. Throughout the Lives, when prints are mentioned, it is almost only in connection with their use as reproductions of other works of art. In the Proemio, again, prints are called the 'stampe delle pitture' (prints of paintings); in many of the Lives paintings or frescoes are judged as good by saying that, because of their quality, prints had been made of them. A similar instance is described in the biography of Andrea del Sarto when Vasari recounts that a painting of his, a Man of Sorrows, had been so praised by th se who had seen it that he eventually yielded to th ir insistence that a print should be made of it, and commissioned Agostino Veneziano. Andrea was not pleased with the result and never had another painting eproduced. It is interesting to note that Vasari provides us with a different version of the same story in Marcantonio's Life, where the role of the engraver is more clearly portrayed. Agostino is here described as having gone from Rome to Florence precisely in