Carlo Cesare Malvasia's Florentine Letters: Insight into Conflicting Trends in Seventeenth-Century Italian Art Historiography

Abstract

Malvasia's antagonism to seventeenth-century Florentine writers on art has little to do with mere campanilismo or personal animosities, nor is it centered on Vasari: it stems, rather, from essential methodological and theoretical disagreements. Malvasia certainly read and used his Vasari a lot, as his preparatory notes for the Felsina pittrice prove; but he was also aware of the latest trends in historiography outside the narrow field of art history, namely in the works of Mabillon and the Bollandists. In adopting and adapting the gist of their lesson to the narration of art history in Bologna, he supported the evolution of a genre “invented” by Vasari — the biographies of artists — into art history as we now know it. The Florentines (especially Baldinucci and Dati) and their Roman friend Bellori were following different paths: although they did not ignore the evolution of historiography at home and abroad, they tried to work within the classical biographical frame, giving special emphasis to facts (Baldinucci), rhetoric (Dati), and theory (Bellori), rather than the historic and aesthetic interpretation of works of art. Hence arose an endless polemic between them and Malvasia, which has not helped the understanding of the latter's work.

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Notes on contributors

Giovanna Perini

Giovanna Perini's higher education was at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where she specialized in the history of art criticism. She has taught for two years at The Johns Hopkins University, held a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, and currently is a Fellow at I Tatti. Many of her publications have focused on Malvasia and Marcello Oretti; she contributed a long essay to the exhibition catalogue Giuseppe Maria Crespi (1986) on the collecting of genre painting and more recently has completed a study of Joshua Reynolds' sketchbooks. [Villa I Tatti, via di Vincigliata 26, 50135 Florence, Italy]