A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

HINTS FOR READING

Comprehensive Histories of Italian Painting. For English speaking readers the greatest resource for reference is Crowe and Cavalcaselle, A New History of Painting in Italy, which covers the Central Italian field up to about 1500. I prefer the three volume edition by Edward Hutton, published by J. M. Dent and Co., London; and E. P. Dutton, New York, (1908–9) to the fuller six-volume edition annotated by Langton Douglas and published conjointly by the Murrays of London and the Scribners of New York. For the North Italian field Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s History of Painting in Northern Italy, re-edited in three volumes by Tancred Borenius, John Murray-Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912, is indispensable. Both works are ordinarily cited as “C. & C.” The Italian articles in A. Michel’s Histoire de l’Art, Paris, are excellent.

Manuals. Bernard Berenson’s four Handbooks, Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance, and Northern Italian Painters of the Renaissance, New York and London, G. P. Putnam and Sons, are uniquely useful. Each contains a thorough critical discussion and lists of the works of the more important painters. The latest editions should be used.

A Short History of Italian Painting, by Alice van Vechten Brown and William Rankin, Dent-Dutton, 1914, offers brilliant, if uneven, characterizations and able summaries of contested points.

Technique. Consult the delightful The Book of Art by Cennino Cennini, edited by Christiana J. Herringham, London: George Allen, 1922, for methods of painting in tempera and fresco.

Biography. Giorgio Vasari’s picturesque Lives of the Painters may most profitably be read in the translation of Gaston DuC. de Vere, in ten volumes, London: Philip Lee Warner; New York: The Macmillan Company. There are many color-prints. The matter is available inexpensively in the handy “Everyman’s Library.” Mrs. Ady, “Julia Cartwright,” has epitomized the chief lives agreeably, with necessary corrections, in The Painters of Florence, E. P. Dutton and Company, 1916.

Periodicals. The reader may most profitably cultivate the habit of paging over the files of The Burlington Magazine and Art in America, Rassegna d’Arte and L’Arte, which contain good reproductions of many fine Italian pictures in private collections.

Historical Background. Excellent the many Italian Chapters in Henry Osborn Taylor’s The Mediaeval Mind, in two volumes, The Macmillan Company, 1911. For Florentine conditions consult Guido Biagi, Men and Manners of Old Florence, Chicago, A. C. McClurg and Company, 1909, and The Builders of Florence, by J. Wood Brown, London, Methuen and Company, 1907.

Photographs, etc. The ideal way to use a handbook would be to skim it before visiting a great European gallery and to reread it carefully while the impression of the pictures themselves was still vivid. But the student must also depend much on photographic reproductions. For Italy those of Messrs. Alinari at Florence and of Dominick Anderson at Rome are comprehensive, finely made, and remarkably cheap. Alinari has most of the Italian paintings of the Louvre and Dresden Gallery; Anderson, those of the Prado, Madrid, and National Gallery, London. The collections of Hanfstaengl and of Bruckmann, Munich, cover most of the galleries of Northern and Central Europe. Photographs of the Italian pictures in the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass., and the Jarves Collection, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., may be purchased from those museums. Besides these four main collections of Italian pictures in America, that of the New York Historical Society, New York, and of Mrs. John L. Gardner, Fenway Court, Boston, occasionally open to the public, are noteworthy. The art museums of Worcester, Mass., Providence, R. I., Cleveland, O., Indianapolis, Detroit, Chicago and Minneapolis have Italian pictures of quality. There is something in the Wilstach Gallery, Philadelphia, and whenever the John G. Johnson Collection shall be worthily exhibited, Philadelphia will be rich indeed in Italian art. The student should not fail to utilize such local resources, however slight they may seem, for one minor original thoroughly enjoyed is worth days of poring over reproductions.

For students who cannot afford a considerable number of photographs the University Prints, Newton, Mass., afford a tolerable substitute. For quick reference the numerous cuts in Venturi’s monumental Storia dell’ Arte Italiana, Milan, Ulrico Hoepli, are very useful. The halftones in the “Künstler Monografien,” Leipzig, Velhagen and Klasing, and the larger prints in the “Klassiker der Kunst,” Stuttgart and Leipzig, serve a similar purpose. Details may be had from any importing bookseller.