The History of Painting in Italy, Vol. 2 (of 6) / From the Period of the Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the Eighteenth Century

J. M'Creery, Tooks Court, Chancery Lane, London.

The other painters who resided in Rome, and followed the principles of that school, I shall neither attempt to add to, nor to subtract from the number of its followers; adopting it as a maxim not to interfere in the decision of disputes, alike idle and irrelevant to my subject. Still less shall I ascribe to it those who there adopted a totally different style, as Michelangiolo da Caravaggio, an artist whom Lombardy may lay claim to, on account of his birth, or Venice, from his receiving his education in that city, though he lived and wrote in Rome, and influenced the taste of the national school there by his own example and that of his scholars. In the same manner many other names will occasionally occur in the history of this school: it is the duty of the historian to mention these, and it is, at the same time, an incomparable triumph to the Roman School, that she stands, in this manner, as the centre of all the others; and that so many artists could not have obtained celebrity, if they had not seen Rome, or could not have claimed that title from the world unless they had first obtained her suffrage.
I shall not identify the limits of this school with those of the dominions of the church, as in that case we should comprise in it the painters of Bologna, Ferrara, and Romagna, whom I have reserved for another volume. In my limits I shall include only the capital, and the provinces in its immediate vicinity, as Latium, the Sabine territories, the patrimony of the Church, Umbria, Picenum, and the state of Urbino, the artists of which district were, for the most part, educated in Rome, or under the eyes of Roman masters. My historical notices of them will be principally derived from Vasari, Baglione, Passeri, and Leone Pascoli. From these writers we have the lives of many artists who painted in Rome, and the last named author has included in his account his fellow countrymen of Perugia. Pascoli has not, indeed, the merits of the three first writers; but he does not deserve the discredit thrown on him by Ratti and Bottari, the latter of whom, in his notes to Vasari, does not hesitate to call him a wretched writer, and unworthy of credit. His work, indeed, on the artists of Perugia, shows that he indiscriminately copied what he found in others, whether good or bad; and to the vulgar traditions of the early artists he paid more than due attention. But his other work, on the history of the modern painters, sculptors, and architects, is a book of authority. In every branch of history much credit is attached to the accounts of contemporary writers, particularly if they were acquaintances or friends of the persons of whom they wrote; and Pascoli has this advantage; for, in addition to information from their own mouths, he derived materials from their surviving friends, nor spared any pains to arrive at the truth, ( see Vita del Cozza ). The judgment, therefore, which he passes on each artist, is not wholly to be despised, since he formed it on those of the various professors then living in Rome, as Winckelmann has observed (tom. i. p. 450); and, if these persons, as it is pretended, have erred in their judgment on the Greek sculptors, they have certainly not erred in their estimate of modern painters, particularly Luti, to whom I imagine Pascoli, from esteem and intimacy, deferred more than to any other artist.