The Lives of the Old Masters: Reading, Writing, and Reviewing the Renaissance

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Acknowledgment

I am grateful to the following people for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this essay: Professor Barrie Bullen, Professor Marc Gotlieb, Dr. Luisa Calè, and Dr. Felicity James. I would also like to thank the anonymous reader of Nineteenth‐Century Contexts for his or her very helpful and constructive comments on my essay. Finally, the Lincoln College Zilkha Fund generously paid for the costs of reproduction and copyright permission for the picture inserted in my essay.

Notes

[1] See for instance Bullen, Fraser, and Ferguson.

[2] The OED traces the appearance of the phrase “old master” back to the seventeenth century, in John Evelyn’s Diary, for the year 1696: “Dined at my L: Pembroke L. Privy‐Seale, a very worthy Gent: shewed me divers rare Pictures of very many of the old & best Masters, especially that of M: Angelo, a man gathering fruite to give a Woman, & a large booke of the best drawings of the old Masters” (Evelyn v:245). Later, Reynolds also uses the phrases in his Discourses, including in his eighth discourse: “Want of simplicity,” he writes, “would probably be not one of the defects of an artist who had studied nature only, as it was not of the old masters, who lived in the time preceding the great Art of Painting; on the contrary, their works are too simple and too inartificial” (Reynolds 152)

[3] Earlier lives of sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century Italian painters had appeared in the works of Peacham, Aglionby, as well as in the English translation of De Piles’ Abrégé.

[4] See for instance Rogers.

[5] Duppa was right in asserting that no fully‐fledged biography of Raphael had been published in English by 1802. However, various anecdotes about him had already been circulating in various works, including in the Cartons of Raphael d’Urbin.

[6] For a discussion of Roscoe’s Life of Lorenzo, including its publishing success in the nineteenth century, see Gaja.

[7] On Wordsworth’s skills as a translator from Italian, see Mortimer.

[8] James Northcote’s 1830 Life of Titian is another example where the author adopted a much more panoramic approach.

[9] Pater Irenea Affo found the frescoes of Correggio in the convent of San Paolo, at Parma.

[10] In his Life of Raffaello, Duppa also writes that “when he arrived at Florence…. [Raphael] began to regret the time he had spent in acquiring a primitive style of composition, with the dry and hard manner of his master” and tried to “unlearn a bad habit” that had marked his early artistic education (Duppa 1816:11).

[11] This dedication is replaced in the 1807 by the following Latin phrase: “ioanni symmons r.s.s. bonarvm atrivm favtori eximio d.d.d. richardvs dvppa.”

[12] This was the principle adopted by Fuseli for his “History of the Schools in Italy”, see Knowles, 3^rd volume.