Book Reviews A Bibliographical Repertory of Italian Private Collections. By Elizabeth Gardner. I: Abaco–Cutolo, xvi + 438 pp. (Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza, 1998), 49.06. ISBN 88– 7305–659–8; II: Dabalà–Kvitkta, 416 pp. (Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza, 2002), 50. ISBN 88–7305–950–3. Reviewed by BURTON FREDERICKSEN
must be counted among the most zealous and indefatigable contributors to the history of collecting, a field championed during the first three quarters of the last century by a relatively small number of enthusiasts who, without the benefit of automation, found very individual ways of coming to grips with the mass of relevant material, most of it lodged in a nearly bottomless reservoir of intriguingly obscure sources. Gardner came to this pursuit through her involvement with the paintings collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and from the start her participation was strictly pragmatic, beginning with a card file on everyone who had ever owned any painting in the collection, then, while narrowing her interest to Italian collectors, carrying her compilation into uncharted territory. With the intention of eventually turning her files into a reference book, she began to collect every useful allusion she could find to the possessions of any Italian collector from any time, a task, it must be admitted, well beyond the means of any one person to fulfil. Although dedicated to a much smaller geographical entity, among the works of Gardner’s predecessors it is probably Theodor von Frimmel’s Lexikon der Wiener Gemäldesammlungen of 1913–14 that this Bibliographical Repertory most resembles. The former never advanced beyond the letter ‘L’, but the goal of assembling everything the author could find on the collections of a single city was perhaps achievable, and nearly a century later we still miss the second half of the alphabet he was unable to complete. With the entire Italian peninsula in play, however, any hope of a definitive result is inevitably unfulfillable. Before her unexpected death in 1985 Gardner had compiled a remarkably large archive, and numerous colleagues had already been consulting it for many years, but it was obvious that an enormous effort would be required to put it into publishable form. Following Gardner’s death, Alessandro Bettagno of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini took the project in hand, assigning it to Chiara Ceschi to edit and standardise. The first volume, encompassing the letters A–C, appeared in 1998 under the primary sponsorship of the Cini and, in addition to having transformed Gardner’s cards into a relatively consistent format, Ceschi had also succeeded in incorporating a very large amount of new material published between 1985 and 1998. The second volume, comprising the letters D–K, has TH E L A T E EL IZ A B E T H G A R D NE R
material gleaned from sources published as recently as 2002, the year this book was printed, and once again, the efforts of Ceschi, this time assisted by Katharine Baetjer, Gardner’s longtime colleague, have added considerably to the value of the publication. The two volumes now consist of over five thousand entries. Large reference books are becoming increasingly rare, and those that are attempted are usually derived from automated sources, or at least compiled in automated form. Gardner’s Bibliographical Repertory may be the last to have been compiled on cards. No template was employed during compilation to make the information uniform, and the entries vary widely. In some, such as the one dedicated to conte Pietro de Terzi Lana of Brescia, more than a page is devoted to a description of a gallery, detailing approximately ninety paintings taken from Giulio Antonio Averoldo’s guide of 1700, but the majority consist of a brief paragraph or a sentence derived from a single source, leaving it to the reader to consult that source in order to learn what the collection contained. Obviously not every relevant source can have been found. In many entries the only reference is to individual paintings from early, usually Italian, exhibition catalogues, or to paintings in museums that have been traced to an Italian collection, and in such cases no explanatory text is attempted. Here one assumes that only a small portion of the potentially relevant paintings have been included. All this is very welcome, though it is not always clear why some sources deserved to be quoted at length and others not. One might imagine that the longest citations would come from the earlier and more obscure sources, but in fact many are taken from books published within the last ten or twenty years. Although edited and published in Italy, the book is in English because Gardner compiled her notes in that language. But the alphabetisation is Italian, meaning that Martino d’Anna is found under the letter ‘D’ and not ‘A’, while in the bibliography some German noble names are under ‘V’ for ‘von’, but some are not. There are no cross-references. Users will quickly adjust to this, but the change of language has led to errors. The Milanese collector d’Abbadia, for instance, represented by a single Dutch painting in an exhibition reviewed by Hoogewerff in 1922, is found as both ‘Abbadis’ in volume one and ‘d’Abbadia’ in volume two, each with the same reference. The bilingual nature of the publication is also the source of some inconsistency in the spelling of place names, such as Lione and Lyon when referring to the same book. A prominent feature is the lengthy bibliography, which consumes about one third of each volume, although a very large proportion is necessarily duplication. This was no doubt thought necessary because the volumes are being published at long intervals and would be of limited use without the bibliography, but it adds considerably to the bulk. A brief test does not indicate that this duplication has led to the correction of errors: Emmanuele Vaccaro’s 1838 catalogue of the collection of Antonio Lucchesi-Palli, principe
di Campofranco, for instance, is incorrectly dated 1888 in the bibliography of both volumes, but given correctly in the principal part of volume one under ‘Campofranco’ (which, if it were consistent with the rest of the volume, should have been placed under ‘Lucchesi-Palli’). However, under the circumstances, one is prepared to forgive such oversights. One might even enjoy Science in the Service of Art Mistery (I, p.308). Coverage can never be complete, but some inconsistencies are hard to explain. A valiant attempt has been made, for instance, to include a brief commentary on every inventory from Gerard Labrot’s Collections of Paintings in Naples, 1600–1780 published in 1990 and containing transcriptions of eighty-three Neapolitan documents. But for some reason, those collectors whose names begin with the letter ‘B’ are omitted. Other sources seem to have been incompletely mined as well, though it is hard to know how extensive this is. The contemporary Milanese dealer Gilberto Algranti is represented by five paintings cited in recent exhibition catalogues or monographs, but no mention is made of the catalogues published by his own firm containing dozens of his pictures. Scholars consulting these volumes will readily appreciate what an accomplishment they represent. In spite of the current wave of publications and the burgeoning popularity of the subject, the Bibliographical Repertory will stand as an essential guide to the history of collecting in Italy for decades to come. It is unlikely ever to be attempted again, but if it is, it will surely require a whole team of Elizabeth Gardners.
Inventaire Géneral des Dessins du Musée du Louvre. Ecole Espagnole, XVIe– XVIIIe Siècle. By Lizzie Boubli. 224 pp. with 232 b. & w. ills. (Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 2002), 85. ISBN 2–7118– 4492–7. Reviewed by NINA AYALA MALLORY THI S C ATALO GUE OF T HE holdings of Spanish drawings from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth in the Cabinet des Dessins of the Louvre is another important contribution to the study of this relatively undeveloped field. Lizzie Boubli has completed a work she started in 1991 with an exhibition that took place at the Louvre, Dessins Espagnols: Maîtres des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, the first show of such drawings to be held in France. The present catalogue looks again at the development of the collecting of Spanish drawings in France and also provides an account of the production of drawings in Renaissance Spain, starting with those of Yañez de la Almedina in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Yañez, who worked in the studio of Leonardo da Vinci, remained faithful to the methods he learned there (metalpoint on prepared paper), which were becoming less and less common, and throughout the sixteenth century Spanish drawing remained closely
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