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Abstracts 
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| Wiebke
Fastenrath Vinattieri: Sulle tracce del primo Neoclassicismo.
Il viaggio del principe ereditario Friedrich Christian di Sassonia
in Italia (1738-1740), in: zeitenblicke 2 (2003), Nr. 3. |
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| Friedrich Christian, Electoral
Prince of Saxony (1722-1764), makes a trip to Italy from 13th May
1738 through 7th September 1740. A travel journal, written by his
own hand, and his tutor’s reports afford profound insights into
the artistic currents of the time in Rome. Being taken under the wing
of the Cardinals Alessandro and Annibale Albani allows Friedrich Christian
to become acquainted with the intellectual elite and the most renowned
artists in Rome, as well as familiar with the art of Raphael and the
Bolognese-Roman baroque classicists. In Rome’s Accademia dell’Arcadia
and the Académie de France he comes into contact with the ideal
of simplicity and the 'imitation' of antiquity. His stay with Scipione
Maffei in Verona during the return journey from Rome to Venice is
equally characteristic of this. In Venice, in turn, Friedrich Christian’s
knowledge of the inventarisation of the local 'Statuario Pubblico',
the former collection of antiquities in the Antisala of the Library
of San Marco, is particularly notable. With these new impressions,
Friedrich Christian returned to Dresden, where Anton Raphael Mengs
started out in his career as an artist and where, a few years later,
Johann Joachim Winckelmann lived. In Rome, under the auspices of Cardinal
Alessandro Albani, Mengs and Winckelmann were to subsequently lay
the painterly and theoretical foundations of Neo-classicism. |
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| Christine
Fischer: Opera seria nördlich der Alpen –
venezianische Einflüsse auf das Musikleben am Dresdner Hof um
die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts, in: zeitenblicke 2 (2003), Nr. 3. |
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| The musical culture of the
courts of central Europe in the eighteenth century is characterised
by the success of the Opera seria, a musical and dramatic genre which,
notwithstanding its Italian origins, quickly spread to the whole of
Europe and was adapted to local requirements and conditions. This
paper examines the activities of Maria Antonia Walpurgis of Bavaria
(1724-1780), Electoral Princess of Saxony, who from her arrival in
Dresden in 1747 played a very active role in the musical life of one
of Europe’s principal courts. Thanks to her musical interests,
Maria Antonia built working relationships with some of the pre-eminent
musicians of her time, who became her teachers – above all Johann
Adolf Hasse, who had received part of his training in Venice before
being appointed as the director of music at the Saxon court in 1730.
Hasse, who has only recently been rediscovered as a composer, assisted
the princess in her Opere serie efforts. Equally important was the
association with Pietro Metastasio, who was not only the most famous
librettist of the Opera seria, but also an heir to the Arcadian tradition.
The Accademia dell’Arcadia made the princess an honorary member
in recognition of her Opere serie 'Talestri' and 'Il Trionfo della
fedeltà', which mark the apex of her activity as a composer.
This underlines the important role of the search for 'true good taste'
and the preference for the simplicity of ancient music, as Italian
music was understood in contrast to music in the French taste. After
1766, the works of the princess, which were marked by the influence
of the Venetian tradition on the musical life at the Dresden court,
came to be criticised in Germany for their Italian style. |
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| Jörg
Garms: Piranesi da Venezia a Roma, in: zeitenblicke
2 (2003), Nr. 3. |
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| The paper aims to provide
a synopsis and partial re-evaluation of the numerous individual themes
developed in the extensive Piranesi literature (including still unpublished
conference papers) on the question of the Venetian prerequisites in
the work of the 'architectus venetus' – as he continued call
himself for all of his life – and which of them remained relevant
in his glorification of Rome, his adopted home. It encompasses biographical,
artistic and humanistic strands, plus techniques, genres and motives,
methods, points of view and visualisations. In addition to the teaching
and the influences of older and contemporary Venetian art, parallel
developments in the two cities, convergences and subsequent divergences
of the artist in relation to the Venetian heritage are discussed.
Individual points concern his training, the key concept of 'magnificenza',
classical and anti-classical elements of his art, the compositional
principle of the candelabra etc. |
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Corinna
Höper: Bassano – Venedig – Rom: "Il
dolce intaglio di Volpato", in: zeitenblicke 2 (2003), Nr.
3. |
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The engraver Giovanni Volpato
(about 1735-1803), a student of Francesco Bartolozzi in Venice, moved
to Rome in 1770. He was an able and productive engraver of genre and
landscape prints in the Venetian taste, but his output is most notable
for his repertory in the Roman classical tradition, reproducing the
works of Raphael, Michelangelo, the Carracci and their school.
Volpato’s main claim to fame are the forty-six plates after
Raphael’s Vatican Loggie, published in 1776-1777, of which
a few hand-coloured examples also exist, and which profoundly influenced
European interior decorating tastes well into the nineteenth century.
In 1776, Alessandro Verri wrote to his brother Pietro of this publication:
“Dopo che si sono stampate in Roma le Loggie del Vaticano
tutto ha cambiato di gusto. Le carrozze, i muri, gli intagli, le
argenterie, hanno preso gli ornamenti di quel fonte perenne di ogni
varietà."
The collaboration with Gavin Hamilton for the 'Scholae Italia Picturae'
and the reproductions from the Galleria Farnese and the Cappella Sistina
as well as the Museo Pio Clementino and of antique statues in a repertory
for artists reveal his interest in artistic training. In a certain
sense, it could be said that Volpato acted as a counterpart to Piranesi
and that the two of them had a precise and well-considered division
of labour in terms of the various products in demand from the tourist
public, which flocked to Rome for cultural instruction and appreciated
engravings for their portability. The importance of engravings as
easily transported and distributed merchandise was recognised for
the first time by Luigi Lanzi when he defined the eighteenth century
as the “secolo di rame”. |
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| Susanna
Pasquali: Scrivere di architettura intorno al 1780: Andrea
Memmo e Francesco Milizia tra il Veneto e Roma, in: zeitenblicke 2
(2003), Nr. 3. |
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Andrea Memmo’s place
in the history of architectural theory was secured by his publication
of the 'Elementi d’architettura lodoliana, ossia l’arte
del fabricare con solidità scientifica e con eleganza non capricciosa'
(Rome, 1786), which was instrumental in recording for posterity the
novel architectural concepts that Venetian Franciscan Carlo Lodoli
had formulated verbally between 1730 and 1750.
Based on the – hitherto presumed lost – 'Piano Accademico',
which Memmo had developed around 1767 for the Venetian Academy with
the purpose of reforming the teaching of the visual arts (sculpture,
painting and architecture), this paper aims to clarify the importance
to Memmo of his stay in Rome. This can be substantiated through the
letters he wrote while preparing his work on Lodoli. In the Rome of
the 1780s, the relations with the Accademia di S. Luca on the one
hand and his friendship with the Spanish ambassador José Nicolas
de Azara on the other hand were of prime significance to Memmo. Azara
had encouraged him to write about Padre Lodoli in order to be able
to compare Lodoli’s thoughts with those of Azara’s friend
Francesco Milizia. |
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| Helga
Puhlmann: Eine Karriere im Schatten von Rosalba Carriera.
Felicita Sartori / Hoffmann in Venedig und Dresden, in: zeitenblicke
2 (2003), Nr. 3. |
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Felicita Sartori was born
around 1714 in Pordenone as the daughter of the notary Felice Sartori
and his wife Tommasa Scotti. She received her initial artistic training
from about 1724 in Görz from her uncle, the copperplate engraver
Antonio dall’Agata. He arranged for her, at the age of fourteen,
to join the household of Rosalba Carriera in Venice, from whom she
received instruction in painting miniatures and in pastel, as well
as in various printmaking techniques.
Together with Rosalba’s sisters, Felicita was one of the key
assistants to Venice’s most famous artist of the time, who
was being showered with commissions since her trip to Paris in 1720-1721.
The enormous productivity allows the assumption of a high degree
of assistant participation in the workshop’s output. Among
Felicita’s verifiably autograph works are her copies of Rosalba’s
pastels as miniatures. In the 1730s, she engraved numerous plates
for publications by Gaspara Stampa and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet,
as well as illustrations after designs by Giovanni Battista Piazetta
for Antonio Maria Zanetti.
In 1741, Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, plucked
Felicita Sartori from the obscurity of a studio assistant when he
appointed her to a position as a court artist in Dresden. Only a
few weeks later, she married the Hofrat Franz Joseph von Hoffmann,
whom she had presumably met in Rosalba’s studio in 1740. A
total of nineteen miniatures, fifteen of which are still in the
collection of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden today,
document her work for the Saxon court, where she enjoyed considerable
standing as an artist. One additional miniature, depicting Bathsheba
and formerly also in the Dresden gallery, has recently appeared
in a private collection in Munich.
After her husband’s death in 1749, the movements of Felicita
Sartori / Hoffmann become difficult to trace. While one report has
her move to Bamberg with her second husband, other sources confirm
her presence back in Dresden in 1753, where – according to
biographer Pierre Jean Mariette – she died in 1760, at the
age of only forty-six.
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| Steffi
Roettgen: Venedig oder Rom – Disegno e Colore.
Ein Topos der Kunstkritik und seine Folgen, in: zeitenblicke 2 (2003),
Nr. 3. |
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| When the concept of 'regionalism'
or regional identity – which originated with Fernand Braudel
– is applied to art history, Venice and Venetian art are considered
from a viewpoint with origins reaching back to the era of romanticism.
Nineteenth-century authors such as John Ruskin and Hippolyte Taine
were the fathers of an art historical method based on 'milieu' theory,
identifying the character of a place and its people with the art produced
there. The theoretical concept at the root of this method of interpreting
paintings, however, derived from Vasari and referred to the artistic
polarisation between Venice and Florence, with – in Vasari’s
eyes – 'disegno' emerging as the winner. After Vasari, the concept
was taken up by other Italian theorists, but in the early eighteenth
century, the debate moved to France, where de Piles, in the footsteps
of the 'débat des anciens et modernes', weighed in on behalf
of colour, crowning Rubens the victor over Poussin. Due to this new
taste for colour radiating from France into the rest of Europe, Venetian
art acquired a matchless reputation, from which the eighteenth-century
Venetian painters working abroad stood to gain the most.
Such a backdrop highlights the importance of Venice to the young
Mengs, who owed his first success to the pastels favoured by Saxon
ruler Augustus III. When chosen to paint an 'Ascension of Christi'
altarpiece for Dresden’s catholic church, the artist took
himself to Venice in order to study Titian’s 'Assumption',
the influence of which clearly shows in the picture executed for
Dresden. It was this encounter, and intense theoretical dialogue,
with the Venetian’s work that caused Mengs to include Titian,
on the merits of his perfect colour, in a 'trias' of the three foremost
artists in the history of painting. The re-evaluation of Titian
in Mengs’ writings led to a general revision of the academic
prejudices against the Venetian school on both the theoretical and
the practical level. In Venice, it fell to Andrea Memmo to outline
in his 1787 'Orazione' at the 'Accademia' a new vision – owing
much to Mengs – which abandoned the traditional hierarchy
of 'disegno', 'colore' and 'chiaroscuro', as well as the conventional
classification of the schools. Angelika Kauffmann, who portrayed
Memmo during her stay in Venice, perhaps came closest to the kind
of art that Memmo considered ideal: reuniting the qualities of the
great masters of the past and converging in a universal taste. It
was then left to Lanzi to introduce the concept of a school of painting
with a national character, exemplified by the 'Macchiaioli' of the
nineteenth century, who gave pride of place to 'colore' instead
of 'disegno'.
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