New and Improved: Repetition as Originality in Italian Baroque Practice and Theory

Author(s): Maria H. Loh

Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 3 (Sep., 2004), pp. 477-504
Published by: College Art Association
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New

and

Baroque

Improved: Repetition
and
Practice
Theory

as

Originality

in

Italian

Maria H. Loh
In her essay "The Originality of the Avant-Garde,"Rosalind
Kraussconcluded with a brief discussion about Sherrie Levine's original photographs of reproductions of other artists'
photographs (Fig. 1). Originality and repetition, Kraussargued, could not exist without each other. The former was the
basis for both the myth of the avant-gardeand, in a somewhat
ironic pairing, the authority of institutional bodies-that is,
the museum, the historian, and the artist. The repression of
repetition, moreover, was crucial for the perpetuation of its
twin. Endless replication, from Auguste Rodin's multiple
original bronze casts to Levine's deliberate repetitions, challenged the modernist obsession with the originality of the
avant-garde.
In a similar move, Abigail Solomon-Godeau identified "seriality and repetition, appropriation, intertextuality, simulation or pastiche" as the primary devices employed by postmodernist artists.2More generally, Craig Owens subsumed
these practices under the "allegorical impulse." The postmodern artist or allegorist, Owens suggested, appropriates,
interprets, and confiscates images not to "restorean original
meaning that may have been lost or obscured"but instead to
add, replace, supplant, and supplement one meaning with
another.3 This is evident, for instance, in Levine's photographs after photographs, which are no longer about the
objects photographed but instead about repetition as an
essential aspect of the act of representation in and of itself.
Commenting on her own work, Levine borrowed Roland
Barthes's pronouncement on the death of the author; substituting "painter" for "author," she suggested that "the
viewer is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up
a painting are inscribed without any of them being lost. A
painting's meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination.
The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter."'
At bottom, there is a desire to subvertthe institutionalization
and commercialization of artistic production by denying
unique authorship and objecthood to the work of art. Two
epistemological transformationscan be noted here. The first
is the displacement of an antiquated and somewhat reactionary understanding of originality as an essential quality of the
omnipotent, self-sufficientartisticgenius as manifested in the
unique object(the singular autograph painting, the authorized photograph, sculpture, and so on). The second is an
alternativeinvestment in a modified notion of the work of art
as a contextwith its own intentions, in which the possibilityof
originality is continuously negotiated between the producer,
the object, and the spectator with each new viewing experience.
Keeping these issues in mind, this essay will explore repetition as a critical strategy in both Baroque practice and
theory."With the renewed interest in and quotation of Venetian Renaissance art at the beginning of the seicento,
originality and repetition, as we shall see, were intimately

bound to one another in the painting and artistic discourse

of this period. Even though Krauss's essay has acquired its
own mythic status, the myth of originality maintains its hold
on art historical discourse, especially when it is concerned
with a period, like the seventeenth century, populated by
Geniuses and Great Masters. One often makes the assumption, for instance, that originality is an immanent category of
judgment, but the term "originality" is itself an eighteenthcentury invention.6 This is not to say that a concern with, an
abiding interest in what we now call originality did not exist
prior to its formulation as a word. In order to gain a better
understanding of the historical context in which the term
"originality" came into being, we must listen more closely to
the discourse that brought it into existence and that it eventually replaced. Repetition played an important role in the
formulation of both Baroque practice and theory. Rather
than a classic modernist axis of originality versus repetition,
premodernist discourse addressed the question of artistic
innovation within the limits of imitation and emulation. Seventeenth-century beholders articulated their reception of an
aesthetic mode that embraced demonstrative repetition
through its own historically bound terms, among which we
will consider mixture (misto), wit (acutezza), novelty (novita),
theft (furto), and pastiche (pasticcio).
If Barthes and Levine speak about the birth of the reader/
viewer at the expense of the death of the author/painter, we
can also entertain the prospect of a more fluid and less binary
relationship between the two categories, for in all cases the
author/painter is his or her own first reader/viewer, and in
many cases, subsequent readers/viewers are also themselves
authors/painters.7 This is the situation, in any case, for the
specific group of Italian Baroque artists on whom we shall
concentrate here. It may come as no surprise to art historians
of the dubiously termed "early modern" that many postmodernist attitudes about artistic production and interpretation
find a certain resonance in both the practice and theory of an
earlier premodernist age; this may not, however, be so evident to scholars of subsequent periods.
When Julia Kristeva referred to the text as a "mosaic of
citations, which absorbed and transformed its individual components," or when Barthes called it a "tissue of quotations"
and a "multidimensional space in which a variety of writings,
none of them original, blend and clash," or when Jacques
Derrida described it as an archive of "alwaysalready transcriptions" (or the "always-already-read," according to Fredric
Jameson), these authors were all drawing from a classical
topos of eclectic imitation outlined by authors long before
them.8 Predating postmodernism by over three hundred
years, the Baroque theorist Secondo Lancellotti pointed out,
"There are many books in one book, and many authors speak
through the mouth of one author." Crediting Aristotle as his
own point of reference, Lancellotti explained that this type of

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1 Sherrie Levine, After WalkerEvans (no. 21), black-and-white

photograph. Collection of the artist

invention elicits a certain type of pleasure from us because

"we feel great delight when we see two equal forces (or two
forces between whom we are unable to detect too much
difference) come together in competition."9 In spite of the
historical and ideological differences that necessarily separate Lancellotti from Kristeva and the others, a useful parallelism can nevertheless be drawn from the postmodern appreciation of repetition and early modern theories of
intertextuality.
It goes without saying that imitation is an embedded practice that can be traced in one form or another throughout
the history of Western art. Although specific motivations and
ends necessarily change, imitative practices remain essentially
the same. In certain periods, artistic creation is said to be
burdened by an "anxiety of influence."10 For generations of
post-1789 artists, the urgency of establishing a new culture
that disassociated itself from the past may have contributed to
a very real anxiety of influence, but this was not always the
case for Baroque practitioners and spectators. In this regard,
because postmodern theory is sensitive to the creative possibilities of pastiche, appropriation, and repetition, it offers us
an alternative way to appreciate seventeenth-century art,
which is more generous and appropriate than the Romantic
myth of artistic genius and the early modernist obsession with
originality.
If imitation is a general category of artistic activity, repetition is an insistently demonstrative species of imitation. Repetition, to be more precise, is a particular type of imitative
creation that intentionally glosses, appropriates, or recontex-

tualizes previous works (as Levine does) and that builds into
the logic of the work of art the moment of recognition of the
repeated elements. Repetition cannot be compared, for instance, to forgery, which is a form of imitation that does not
seek identification; the forger does not want the viewer to see
the deception, whereas the artist of repetition does." Rather
than pursuing originality in the utterly new and hitherto
unseen and unheard, premodernist artists, as in the case of
some of their postmodernist successors, enacted a certain
type of originality that was located precisely in the imitation
of great masters and in the competitive repetition of eternal
tropes. It is both the production and articulation of this
alternative aesthetic of repetition that concerns us.
This is not to suggest that Baroque artists and theorists
were unanimously receptive to an aesthetic of repetition, or
that repetition was somehow the dominant mode of an overgeneralized Baroque perception, rooted in a Baxandallian
notion of a period eye. Against such an understanding, these
remarks attend to the idea of a culturally and group-specific
lens or, more appropriately (as we shall hear below), telescope. The recognition of pastiched materials in works of art
appealed to a particular mode of aesthetic pleasure that
coexisted with others at a given point in the past. If an artist
like Federico Zuccaro accused Caravaggio of imitating Giorgione, there were also other spectators, like Giovanni Pietro
Bellori, who praised the Milanese artist for the same.'2 In
some instances, repetition was perceived positively as wit and
novelty and in other instances negatively as theft-although
even theft could itself be considered a good thing when in
the hands of an able thief. The focus of the argument that
follows is precisely the fine line between praise and censure
and the problematized distinction between originality and
repetition in early-seventeenth-century practice and theory.
A Tale of Two Cities: Venice, Rome, and Neo-Venetianism
In 1614 a virtually unknown Venetian artist, Alessandro Varotari (b. 1588, Padua-d. 1649, Venice), who would later be
known as Il Padovanino, arrived in Rome, where he copied
Titian's Bacchanals in the palace of the Aldobrandini family
(Figs. 2-4). On that occasion the twenty-six-year-old Padovanino also painted a fourth picture (Fig. 5), which was a
proficient pastiche of works by Venetian, Roman, and Bolognese masters of the sixteenth and very early seventeenth
century. Padovanino was not alone in copying the Bacchanals. Many artists of diverse talent and for different motivations did the same. Giovanni Andrea Podesti dedicated
his engraved copies to Cassiano dal Pozzo and Fabio della
Corgna in order to gain influence with members of the
Barberini papal circle. The Florentine painter Giovan Battista
Vanni was paid 200 scudi for his copy of the Bacchanal of the
Andrians." Peter Paul Rubens copied the two Titian paintings
for the king of Spain.'4
Others made replicas as an aide-m~moire for future use.
Domenichino made two drawings (now lost) of Titian's Baccanaria, which he might have consulted as he painted his own
Diana and the Nymphs (Fig. 23) for Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, who in 1616 was the owner of Titian's Bacchanals.'"
Nicolas Poussin and Francois Duquesnoy made sculpted copies of Titian's Worship of Venus.16 This influence was not
overlooked. Baroque spectators were quick to make the con-

ITALIAN

2 Padovanino (Alessandro Varotari),

after Titian, Worshipof Venus,oil on
canvas, ca. 1614. Bergamo, Accademia
Carrara

3 Padovanino, after Titian, Bacchanal

of theAndrians, oil on canvas, ca. 1614.
Bergamo, Accademia Carrara

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4 Padovanino, after Titian, Bacchus

and Ariadne,oil on canvas, ca. 1614.
Bergamo, Accademia Carrara

nection between the seventeenth-century artists and their

Renaissance forefather: Orfeo Boselli compared the tenderness of Duquesnoy's sculpted infants with Titian's; Andre
Felibien and Gianlorenzo Bernini connected Poussin's style
with Titian's.17Anthony Van Dyck similarly transcribed the
Andriansin his sketchbook (Fig. 6) and repeated many of
these figures and compositions in paintings like Amarilliand
Mirtillo(Fig. 7).18 As late as the second half of the seventeenth century, the Neapolitan artist Luca Giordano likewise
copied Titian's Bacchusand Ariadne(Fig. 8) and immediately
reused the figures in the numerous paintings after the same
theme that he produced in the 1670s and 1680s (Figs. 9, 10).
The painted copies made by Padovanino and the others
after the Bacchanalsare not demonstrative, creative, or competitive repetitions per se. They belong to another category
of imitation that fulfills a documentary purpose in an age
before cameras, photocopiers, and digital reproductions.
The works like Domenichino's Diana or Van Dyck's Amarilli
that resulted from these imitations, however, are proper repetitions. Padovanino's fourth painting certainly was. Marco
Boschini, the most outspoken seventeenth-centurychampion
of Venetian painting (and a good friend of Padovanino's
family), effused in front of the four works. Titian's Bacchanals, he wrote, "arethree in total, but Padovanino of his own
invention added a fourth, which is so beautiful and good and
which, next to the others is a unique construction.... It is a
fantastical invention, currency minted from the finest of
metals." Roman virtuosi and artists, he continued, went to
watch the young artist as he painted, and jealous rivals,who

mistook the picture to be by Titian himself, were converted

into admirers. There was such intelligence in his own invention that in seeing this painting people were astonished.'9
Manyof the details in the Triumph(Fig. 5) are paraphrastic
repetitions from Titian's three Bacchanals. For instance, the
tree that extends into the scene from the right-hand edge is
transplanted from Titian's Bacchusand Ariadne.The ring of
putti dancing in the top right corner against the shadow of
the tree and the little winged putto crawling onto the plate
on the left are kidnapped from the Worshipof Venus.The ship
in the background of Titian's Andrianshas sailed into the
background here. The bacchanalian crowd and luscious
nudes are rented from the Andrians.The musculature and
tonality of the men in the lower right-hand corner are reminiscent of the bearded figure in Titian's Bacchusand Ariadne
(itself a quotation of the Laoco6n).
At the same time, new actors discovered in Rome also
perform on this cinquecento Venetian stage. Michelangelo's
Sistine Adam (Fig. 11) carefully reclines in the lower lefthand corner of the Triumph.The merriment in Raphael's
Farnesina Galatea(Fig. 12) is also at work in this Baroque
production. The conch-blowing figure, for instance, has been
hired for a similar role in Padovanino's party.The fluttering
cape of the seated goddess in the Triumphis a hand-me-down
from Annibale Carracci'sGalateain the Farnese Gallery (Fig.
13) or perhaps Guido Reni's airborne Aurora in the Casino
Rospigliosi (Fig. 14). Although the two young recumbent
women in the foreground are clearly inspired by a Titianesque ideal, the immediate reference may have been

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5 Padovanino, Triumph,oil on canvas, ca. 1614. Bergamo, Accademia Carrara

from one of Francesco Albani's many mythological and allegorical paintings of this period in which a similar grouping is
used.20
Although the trio to the right seems to draw its inspiration from Tintoretto and Palma Giovane, it also points to
certain religious images that Padovanino would have seen
in Rome in 1614. The attenuated musculature is Titianesque and classical, on the one hand, and thoroughly Roman and modern, on the other. The tension between the
push and pull of the figures may have been influenced by
dramatic post-Tridentine death scenes such as Caravaggio's Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (Fig. 15). The strangely
bent leg of Padovanino's female victim appears like a
disrobed revision of Annibale's triumphant Virgin in the
Cerasi Chapel (Fig. 16). Annibale's was a highly unusual

design in 1601, and one that did not go unnoticed by other

artists. Domenichino, his own pupil, repeated the pose (in
reverse) for an octagonal ceiling painting in S. Maria in
Trastevere of the same subject fifteen years later (Fig. 17).
One might suggest that Annibale's Cerasi Assumption similarly inspired Padovanino. The bizarre positioning of the
woman's foot, which tries to gain purchase on the aggressor's back in the Triumph, resembles the Virgin's step on
the putto's head in Annibale's Assumption. This is not to
conclude that they are indisputably Padovanino's sources;
instead, they give us an impression of the general visual
vocabulary of a relatively well-informed early-seventeenthcentury spectator.
To modern eyes, Padovanino's Triumph may appear to be
nothing more than an amusing cut-and-paste job. In his

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6 Anthony Van Dyck, after Titian,

Bacchanal of theAndrians, pen and ink
drawing, 1622. London, The British
Museum (photo: ? Copyright The
British Museum)

7 Van Dyck, Amarilli and Mirtillo,oil

on canvas, 1631-32. Pommersfelden,
collection of Graf von Sch6nborn
(photo: Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)

own time, however, this "invention"and "unique construction" (to quote Boschini's earlier words of praise) was seen
not negatively as empty derivation or servile pastiche but
instead as an improvement on the Bacchanals."Thereare the
copies in Venice," Boschini remarked, "of an admirable style

and of elevated and celebrated virtue"that are "bythe perfect

and dignified hand of the Vice-Author (as he is called)."21
When Boschini refers to the "perfect and dignified hand of
the Vice-Author,"he simultaneously acknowledges Padovanino's presence in the paintings and points to a certain amount

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8 Luca Giordano, after Titian, Bacchus

and Ariadne, pencil and pen, 1665-70.
London, The British Museum (photo:
? Copyright The British Museum)

9 Giordano, Bacchus and Ariadne, oil

on canvas, ca. 1685-86. Norfolk, Va.,
The Chrysler Museum of Art, Gift of
Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.650

of identifiable stylisticmasquerading that was going on in the

picture. In acknowledging Padovanino's agency as the "ViceAuthor," Boschini categorically read the Triumphas a pastiche-or, one might venture, as a "mosaic of citations," a
"tissueof quotations,"a "multidimensionalspace,"an archive
of "alwaysalready transcriptions,"the "always-already-read,"
and, as Lancellotti (Boschini and Padovanino's contemporary) would have said, books within a book.22
Mixed Metaphors and the Objects of Repetition
Aside from Boschini's effusive if not deliberately provocative
remarks,we have very little written record of what contemporary viewers thought of Padovanino's Bacchanals. There

are, however, plenty of comparanda.Creative or demonstrative

repetition achieved through selective imitation was, as we saw
with the various repetitions of the Bacchanals, a standard
practice. The objects of imitation, meanwhile, were various.
In some instances, an artist chose to imitate another artist's
style (maniera); in other cases, similar themes (concetti) and
even specific details (figure) were repeated. Several authors,
for example, observed that Rubens consciously painted the
altarpiece for the Oratorians in Rome in the style of Paolo
Veronese. Bellori wrote that it was based on the "intentions
[intentione]" of Veronese.23 Other Baroque art critics, such as
Filippo Baldinucci and Roger de Piles, said it was in the style
or "taste [gusto/gouste]" of Veronese.24 And still other paint-

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10 Giordano, Bacchus and Ariadne,oil

on canvas, ca. 1675-77. Coventry,
Herbert Art Gallery and Museum
(photo: ? Herbert Art Gallery &
Museum)

11 Michelangelo, Creationof Adam,

fresco, ca. 1511. Vatican, Sistine
Chapel

ings by the Flemish master were seen as interpretations of

Titian's "ideas [idea]."25
In other cases, different referential layers might be distinguished. According to the seventeenth-century Bolognese
biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasia,Reni painted a girl in "the
taste [gusto] of Raphael," an older woman in the "taste of
Correggio,"a shepherd in the "tasteof Titian,"and a nude in
the "taste of Michelangelo," all in the same fresco at S.
Michele al Bosco.26 Seventeenth-century artists and works
were not the only ones to be placed under this taxonomical
gaze. Looking at Tintoretto's Assumptionof the Virginin the
church of the Gesuiti, Boschini concluded that "all of the
styles [maniere]are united here: there is Paolo Veronese,
Titian, Schiavone, and Bassano.""27Giulio Mancini, the
Sienese art writer and papal doctor, referred to El Greco as
"thatGreek [artist]who operated in Titian's style [maniera],"
which seems to suggest that, in the first decades of the
seicento, some authors still considered Tintoretto's style
(withwhich the Greek painter is more commonly aligned) as
an extension of Titian's late style.28
The term "mixture"or "mix" (misto)was often used to
describe stylistic repetition. In a letter to Bellori, Albani
specified that his master, Annibale Carracci, successfully
"combined into one style" the art of Correggio, Titian, Raphael, and Michelangelo, producing a perfect mistothat ac-

commodated the best quality of each individual artist.29At

the beginning of the eighteenth century, Pellegrino Antonio
Orlandi would similarlyuse mistoon numerous occasions to
explain stylisticpolyphony. He wrote, for instance, that Giulio
Procaccini found his "own,true, and natural style"through a
"Raphaelesque, Correggesque, Titianesque, and Carraccesque misto";that Annibale's style consisted of a "greatCorreggesque, Parmigianesque, and Titianesque misto";that
Lodovico Carracciadded to his study of worksby old masters
a certain "Lombardmisto";that Cammillo Rama's paintings
betrayed both the style of his master, Palma Giovane, and a
Misto,therefore, articulateda model of
"Tintoresquemisto."30
based
on
judicious selection or eclecticism.
repetition
Good literary style was acquired through the discriminating imitation, recombination, and transformationof previous
and existing authors. This was a recurrent theme in Renaissance treatises on imitation. Writing in the 1550s, Giambattista GiraldiCinzio identified Virgil as the "ruleofjudgment"
because "knowinghuman imperfection to be as it is, that a
single man could not accomplish on his own the virtue of
composing great things," Virgil, he wrote, "with marvelous
judgment chose all of the good things that were to be found
in all of the other Greek and Latin authors and gathered
them into one" and in doing so provided "an utterly truthful
example of the synthesisof Heroic grandeur."From the dark

ITALIAN

shadows,Virgil gathered together the best examples of poetry

and "marvelouslycomposed them in one beautiful body."
Like painters who want to form a single image of female
beauty, Virgil proceeded by "looking at all the beautiful
women that they can and then by taking from each of them
their best parts"in order "to achieve the Idea that they have
in their minds" of "ultimateperfection."31
In his explanation of Virgil's exemplarity, Giraldi resorted
to a number of tropes that were standard fare in writings
about imitation. Above all was the notion that absolute perfection ("l'ultimaperfettione") or the Idea that preexisted in
the mind of the artist ("1I Idea c'hanno nell'animo") consisted in the choosing ("scieglier"),taking ("togliono"),gathering ("accogliesse"),and synthesis ("lavirti' del comporre")
of those parts that would produce a beautiful body ("un
bellissimo corpo"). This "body,"moreover, was gendered in
Giraldi's passage as the heroic exemplum ("della grandezza
Heroica") in masculine terms and as idealized beauty ("la
donnesca bellezza") in feminine terms.
There was nothing particularlyoriginal in Giraldi's using
female beauty as a metaphor for good imitation. The locus
classicusfor this type of judicious imitation was the tale of the
Crotonian maidens told by Pliny and Cicero and reiterated in
just about every text on imitation thereafter.32 Raphael
glossed the Zeuxinian metaphor almost verbatim in the description of his own artisticpractice, and Giorgio Vasariused
similarterms to praise Raphael."3There was also nothing new
in Giraldi's using heroic grandeur as metaphor for good

12 Raphael, Galatea,fresco, ca. 1511. Rome, Villa Farnesina

(photo: ? Alinari / Art Resource, NY)

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13 Annibale Carracci, Polyphemusand Galatea,fresco, 15971600. Rome, Galleria Farnese

imitation. The image of the Hero served as a masculine

parallel to the Zeuxinian woman, and Torquato Tasso, more
than any other late-sixteenth-century author, would be responsible for consolidating Renaissance theories of eclectic
imitation into a new definition of the epic hero as a sort of
Ubermenschwho possessed the best virtues drawn from all
previous heroes.
Whether the artist alluded to the Zeuxinian Virgin or the
Epic Hero, his preference for this style of composition in the
late Renaissance extended from the theory of selective imitation that Gianfrancesco Pico advocated at the beginning of
the sixteenth century in opposition to Pietro Bembo's preference for the imitation of a single exemplary model for each
genre.34 In the following century, the Carracci would be cited
as the paradigmatic masters and proponents of the first technique. In Malvasia's biography, Lodovico is heard telling
Annibale: "to imitate a single master is to make oneself his
follower and his inferior, while to draw from all of them and
also select things from other painters is to make oneself their
judge and leader."3" In the same vein, Piles pointed out that
the "perceptive Annibale took from these Great Men everything that was good" and "converted it into his own substance."36 Bellori praised Annibale's art for combining the
"virtues of previous masters" and unifying that perfected style
with the Idea and with nature.37
The advantage of a combinatory method also corresponded to a belief in the inherent imperfection of both man
and nature. Cicero explained that Zeuxis selected five maidens precisely because "he did not think all the qualities which
he sought to combine could be found in one person, because

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14 Guido Reni, Aurora,fresco, 161214. Rome, Palazzo PallaviciniRospigliosi, Casino dell'Aurora

15 Caravaggio, Martyrdomof Saint

Matthew,oil on canvas, 1600. Rome,
S. Luigi dei Francesi, Contarelli
Chapel

in no single case has Nature made anything perfect and

finished in every part.""38
Writing about painting in the years
just before Giraldi'streatise, Lodovico Dolce added that only
through art is it possible to display "withina single body ...
that entire perfection of beauty which nature barely exhibits
in a thousand bodies." Hence, because "there is no human
body so perfectly beautiful that it is not wanting in some
respect,"selective imitation was a matter of necessity.39The
eclectic principle, therefore, was at once an aesthetic and a
moral one (and this may have had particular significance in
a post-Tridentine era, when the Church encouraged the
imitation not only of Christbut also of the Virgin and saints).
The popularityof this model of imitation is reflected in the
various metaphors that Renaissance and Baroque authors
generated to describe the process.40In the 1590 treatise the

Idea del tempio di pittura, for instance, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo constructed an elaborate astrological system, in which
each of the seven celestial sectors-Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the
controlled by
Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon-were
seven governatori-Michelangelo, Gaudenzio Ferrari (Lomazzo's uncle and master), Polidoro da Caravaggio, Leonardo,
Raphael, Andrea Mantegna, and Titian.41 Elsewhere, Lomazzo wrote that the perfect painting would be an Adam and
Eve in which Adam was drawn by Michelangelo and painted
by Titian and Eve was designed by Raphael and colored by
Correggio.42
The immediate source for this version of the Zeuxinian
story may have been a passage from Lucian, as Charles Dempsey discovered, in which a statue of an ideal woman was
described as a collaborative production undertaken by the

ITALIAN

best artists: "Euphranor giving her the hair he gave his Juno,
Polygnotus the delicately tinted brows and cheeks of his
Cassandra, Aetion the lips of his Roxana, and Apelles painting the body as he had painted Campaspe."43 This was a
significant and essential modification of the topos, for the
peccadillo of imperfection was transferred from the source
material (that is, nature) to the artist himself (that is, human
nature). Hence, when Orlandi wrote that the Venetian
painter Pietro Liberi developed his well-grounded style
through "a perfect mistd' of the great masters of the past, he
implied (as Pico had centuries before) that no one master
could provide the artist with a complete model of perfection.44
For Lomazzo, the collaboiation of the best styles provided
the foundation for good painting. For other writers, such as
Francesco Scannelli, it was a question of absorbing the very
essence of each of these paradigmatic masters. Scannelli's
ideal painter in I1 microcosmo della pittura (Cesena, 1657)
possessed organs represented by different artists: Raphael was
the liver (which receives from the blood of the mother its
composition and perfection), Titian the heart (for the nourishment provided to it by the liver makes the heart more
vigorous and forceful, which makes everything in turn more
natural and sane), and Correggio the brain (for a healthy
liver and heart enable the brain to order its thoughts and
compose its arguments).45
Boschini commenced
the Carta del navegar pitoresco
with
an
(Venice, 1660)
image even more esoteric than both
Lomazzo's and Scannelli's models: Venetian painting as a
"pictorial ship." On Boschini's metaphoric ship of ideal style,
individual artists simultaneously symbolized different structural parts of the vessel and held specific roles on board.
Giovanni Bellini was at once the structure and the builder of
the ship. Giorgione was the rudder that provided direction
and the patron who nurtured the crew. II Pordenone represented the ribs of the hull; Jacopo Bassano the captain's
quarters as well as the storerooms and the night guard;
Giovanni Battista Zelotti the mast; Giuseppe Salviati the sail
and watchman; Paris Bordone the stern; Paolo Veronese the
navigation light and manager; Andrea Schiavone the caulk
and Palma Vecchio the tar that held the structure together
and also the helmsman and assistant captain. Tintoretto's
fierce style made him the cannons and the commander of the
artillery, and Boschini's hero, Titian, was the supreme navigator and captain of the metaphoric boat.46 Even Padovanino
was given a role, as the standard-bearer of the squadron.47
At bottom, it seems that Lomazzo, Scannelli, and Boschini
were concerned with defining ideals: painting, the painter,
and style; in spite of their different approaches, all three
resorted to metaphors of eclecticism. This type of metonymic
classification was based on two ancient sources, the first being
the passage from Lucian already mentioned above. The second point of reference was the twelfth book of Quintilian's
Institutio oratoria, in which he lists the stylistic strengths of
individual painters and sculptors as a parallel for the various
styles of oratory (Polygnotus and Aglaophon for their simple
coloring; Zeuxis and Parrhasius for their special attention to
line; Protogenes for his accuracy; Pamphilius and Melanthius
for their soundness of taste; Antiphilius for his facility; Theon

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16 Annibale Carracci, Assumptionof the Virgin,oil on panel,

1601. Rome, S. Maria del Popolo, Cerasi Chapel

of Samos for his depiction of imaginary scenes; and Apelles

for his grace).48
Following Quintilian's formula, seicento authors similarly
enumerated lists of ideal models. Bernini's admiration for
Annibale Carracci was summarized in a metaphor of gastronomic mixture:
[Annibale] had combined the grace and draftsmanship of
Raphael, the knowledge and anatomical science of Michelangelo, the nobility of Correggio and this master's manner
of painting, the coloring of Titian, the fertile imagination
of Giulio Romano and Andrea Mantegna. His manner was
formed from the ten or twelve greatest painters as if by
walking through a kitchen he had dipped into each pot,
adding from each a little to his own mixture.49
Bernini may have based his comments on a passage from
Malvasia's biography of Annibale in which he specified that
in order to become a good painter, one must acquire "Roman disegno, the movement and shadowing of the Venetians,
and the dignified colors of Lombardy," or, more specifically,
one must take "from Michelangelo the awesome way, the true
and natural from Titian, the pure and refined style from
Correggio, decorum and structure from Tibaldi, invention

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17 Domenichino, Assumptionof the

Virgin,oil on canvas, 1616-17. Rome,
S. Maria in Trastevere

from the wise Primaticcio, and a bit of grace from Parmigianino."50

Baroque authors, it would appear, took special pleasure in
compiling their own canon of ideal models. Piles, in particular, loved this sort of game, even if his pantheon was populated by the usual suspects: Raphael for his invention, Michelangelo for drawing, Giulio Romano for nobility and
magnificence, Correggio for force and vigor, Titian for color,
composition, naturalism, and grace, and Paolo Veronese for
his invention, the nobility of his figures, the magnificence of
his drapery, and the facility, beauty, and movement of his
forms.5' The strangely Cartesian charts that Piles graphs in
the Balance des peintres (Paris, 1708), where artists are judged
on a scale of one to twenty for their composition, drawing,
color, and expression, can be seen as an extreme manifestation of this taxonomic impulse.52
In spite of the popularity of such "mixed" metaphors, it
does not follow that an established doctrine of eclecticism
dominated seicento theory and practice.53 This was oneway of
theorizing practice, and while some artists might have practiced this theory, not everyone was convinced of the effectiveness of the eclectic method. Pietro da Cortona considered it
faulty, for who would find beauty in a figure composed of
parts melded together from two antithetical painters such as
the Cavaliere d'Arpino and Caravaggio?54 Despite his own
the
metaphor, Scannelli questioned
anthropomorphic
soundness of Lomazzo's fictive Adam and Eve: Titian, he

argued, would try to correct Michelangelo's drawing in his

own style, and Michelangelo would not stand for it.55 Bernini,
in spite of his admiration for Annibale, was also wary of the
success rate of the eclectic method, fearing that the overall
effect would be one of fragmentation.56 Against the Zeuxinian Virgin, writers would posit the grotesque Horatian monster-the human with the head of a horse, the woman with
the body of a fish-as an example of the dangers of eclecticism. This indicates that the stitching on Zeuxis's Virgin was
more evident to some viewers than to others, and to her
critics she appeared more like Frankenstein's bride than a
vision of beauty.
A more moderate point of view advised artists against making a grotesque hodgepodge of collected bits and bobs that
did not belong together and to proceed, instead, like an
"ingenious bee" that extracts "sweetness from all the flowers
of painting" and turns it into honey.57 In the metaphors of
the "mixed" style, it was a question of ensuring, in the first
place, that the components chosen for imitation would be
compatible one with the other and, secondly, that this eclectic imitation would enable a more independently achieved
transformative imitation. In other words, while repetition was
the modus operandi, the final product had to be ordered by
a unified idea del bello. Critics borrowed the apian metaphor
and similar ones involving digestion, fathers and sons, and
singers and choruses from Seneca's eighty-fourth letter to
Lucilius, "On Gathering Ideas."58

TALIAN

Underlying the discourse, which circumvented the explanation of the artist's practice of eclectic imitation and the
visual exegete's processof recognizing the "mixed" style, was
an acute consciousness of a copresence of different identities
within one entity. Seneca's parallel between fathers and sons
was one of the most poetic metaphors about imitation. Some
centuries later, Francesco Petrarch (glossing Seneca) would
explain that in imitation the similarity should be not like that
of a portrait to the man it is portraying but like that of a child
to his parent, for "in this case, even though there may be a
considerable dissimilarity in features, yet there is a certain
shadow ... [that] ... recalls to our mind the memory of the
father.... something hidden there has this effect.""59In seventeenth-century terms, Matteo Peregrini referred to this
interpretative optic that successfully identified that "certain
shadow" as "amphibolia [Amfibolia]"or as an ability to see the
"double sense [senso doppio].,'60
Through the Looking Glass of Acutezza: Speaking
Metaphorically, Seeing Metaphorically
Baroque spectators were open to the type of aesthetic experiences based on sharp, associative, lateral thinking, which
looked for shadows of the father in the son, which engaged
with the "double sense," which embraced the metaphor and
the double entendre, and which looked for the intertext and
engaged with intentional play. David Freedberg argued that
the first quarter of the seicento witnessed an intense curiosity
about optical devices such as telescopes and microscopes.61
The development of these new instruments normalized the
concept of multiple perception; spectators were capable of
seeing and, more important, of expecting to see more than
meets the eye. This very curiosity has specific implications for
our understanding of repetition in the visual and literary arts.
In classical rhetoric, the vehicle for demonstrating artistic
ingenuity was the witticism (acutezza). A witticism was a
pointed saying, an expression that generated wonder, and an
oratorical device that functioned like what Quintilian called
sententias, which are pithy statements that "strike the mind
and often produce a decisive effect by one single blow, while
their very brevity makes them cling to the memory.""62Witticisms pushed the listener and viewer to think metaphorically
since, as Aristotle wrote, "metaphors must be drawn ... from
things that are related to the original thing, and yet not
obviously so related-just as in philosophy also an acute mind
will perceive resemblances even in things far apart.""63Seventeenth-century literary critics, like Emanuele Tesauro, turned
Aristotle's appreciation of metaphor into a Baroque theory of
acutezza, for both the metaphor and the witticism say one
thing while suggesting another. Such rhetorical ornaments
multiply the listener's delight since, as Tesauro explained,
"seeing many objects from an unusual angle is more curious
and pleasing than seeing the same things passing directly
before our eyes. Ajob (as our author [Aristotle] says) not for
a dull mind but for a most acute one."64 This delight is
magnified by novelty, which is when "the sound is known and
only the meaning is new" or when something is "old in
substance and new in manner." The leading Baroque theorist
of acutezza, Tesauro, still glossing Aristotle, asserted that the
metaphor packs "objects tightly together in a single word and
almost miraculously allows you to see one inside the other."""65

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489

At bottom, seeing metaphorically was all about being able to

see several things at once (for example, the new in the old
and vice versa) and to see one thing in several ways (such as
originality in repetition).
Through the Baroque looking glass of acutezza,knowledgeable spectators proceeded both microscopically and telescopically when viewing images, moving from one detail to another in order to see the larger whole. The ability to see
strategic repetition was particularly enjoyable for certain viewers, for, according to one writer, "Imitation lies hidden; it
does not stand out. It conceals rather than reveals itself and
does not wish to be recognized exceptby a learned man."66Like
the humanist reader (and the postmodernist reader/author
as well) who was able to identify the mosaic of quotations
within a given text, the "learned man" found gratification
through intellectual snobbery and the pleasure of untangling
difference from repetition.
Tesauro wrote that "wit loses its insight when a saying is too
clear." However, he continued, "Stars sparkle in the darkness,
but become dim in the light," meaning that certain types of
literary conceits function only when the author and reader
are aware of the rules of engagement. Since witty images "are
sketched rather than finished," as Tesauro further elaborated, "the listener supplies what is absent in the voice of the
speaker." Because of these collaborative efforts, witticisms
and metaphors necessarily possess a "double pleasure," for
the "one who forms a witty concept and another who hears
it. For the first enjoys giving life in another intellect to a
noble product of his own, and the second enjoys grasping by
his own ingenuity what the ingenuity of another furtively
hides.""'67When the Lucchese painter Paolo Guidotti, for
example, set about composing his (unrealized) poem La
Gerusalemmedistrutta in emulation of Tasso's epic La Gerusalemme liberata (Venice, 1581), he intended and expected his
readers to notice that the last line of each octave was in fact
the same as in Tasso's poem.68 Witty conceits, in short, were
reserved for the quick of mind, for an audience attentive to
the possibility of double meanings and on whom allusions
would not be lost.
Again, the use of witty conceits was a matter of taste.
Galileo, inventor of the telescope, preferred the clarity of
Lodovico Ariosto's style to the allegorical mode (or "impulse") of Tasso's poetry.69 Giambattista Marino, the selfprofessed poet of extravagance whose hero was Tasso, reveled
in the use of witticisms. The Jesuit orator Sforza Pallavicino,
in his Considerazionisopra l'arte dello stile e del dialogo (Rome,
1646), cautioned against the overuse of rhetorical ornaments. Baltasar Gracian, the Spanish courtier and author of
Agudezay arte de ingenio (Huesca, 1649), saw wit as an essential
human quality. Peregrini's two treatises Delle acutezze(Genoa,
1639) and Ifonti dell'ingegno ridotti ad arte (Bologna, 1650)
tried to outline a guide to the invention of witty expressions
that would prevent the abuse of such ornaments. Tesauro, on
the other hand, was wholeheartedly of Marino and Graciin's
persuasion.
Boschini, too, was a big fan of acutezza. An unabashed
Venetian patriot, he had a tendency to see Venetian quotations, allusions, themes, and stylistic borrowings in everything, but he was not alone. With the neo-Venetian revival of
the early seicento, artists and critics participated in various

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18 Caravaggio, CardSharps,oil on canvas, 1594. Fort Worth,

Tex., Kimbell Art Museum (photo: @ 2003 by Kimbell Art
Museum)

ways in the reinvigoration of Venetian style.70 Standing in

front of Annibale Carracci's Assumption, Malvasia, for instance, commented that Annibale "looked at Tintoretto" in
order to paint his altarpiece, but that when it came to "the
more learned and magnificent drapery folds," Annibale
"sought out Veronese."71 "Venetianness" became increasingly
popular, and with this change in taste a sensitivity for such
repetition also became more widespread.
The two objects of repetition in Malvasia's passage-Tintoretto's style and Veronese's folds-also
provide a good
distinction between following another artist's style (maniera)
as opposed to repeating an actual figure or iconographic type
(figura, concetto)from a painting. Figure and concetti,however,
were sometimes conflated with maniera. One example of this
slip is the association of half-length male portraits as a quintessentially Giorgionesque referent. Looking at Caravaggio's
Card Sharps (Fig. 18), both Baldinucci and Bellori described
it as an imitation of Giorgione's "pure" style ("modo
d'inventare schietto"; "schietta maniera").72 Likewise, Pietro
della Vecchia's soldier portraits (Fig. 19) were considered as
Giorgionesque "extractions [astratti]," and the seicento Venetian painter was even called Giorgione's "twin [gemello]."73
Baldinucci and Bellori were probably looking at the Del
Monte version of the Card Sharps painted for Cardinal
Francesco del Monte (or a variant copy of it); Boschini was
looking at one of the many bravi portraits for which della
Vecchia was famous.74
When we look at the paintings of Caravaggio and della
Vecchia next to each other today, the stylistic difference is as
great as that between works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. In both Caravaggio and della Vecchia's depictions
of half-length male figures dressed in fancy hats with feathers,
a thematic or iconographic resemblance-that
is, of figure or
concetti-is evident, but the style-that is, the technique-is
intrinsically different. Caravaggio's stark naturalism gives way
to della Vecchia's painterly Venetian brushwork; Caravaggio's carefully studied faces dissolve in della Vecchia's sketchy
physiognomies; and Caravaggio's balanced lighting melts in
della Vecchia's smoky haze.

19 Pietro della Vecchia, Soldier,oil on canvas, ca. 1660.

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

In spite of this remarkable stylistic gap, viewers still saw

brothers who shared
Giorgione lurking about-Senecan
their father's features in different ways. Did the artists want
the viewer to see Giorgione in these paintings? Did these
artists want the beholder to acknowledge their mastery of and
over the Renaissance master? Both painters were attentive to
Giorgione's art in their own practice. Caravaggio, as Zuccaro
and Bellori remarked, seems to have studied his works in
Venice or elsewhere, and della Vecchia was responsible for
the seventeenth-century restoration of Giorgione's Castelfranco altarpiece and for a number of portraits that subsequent connoisseurs mistook for authentic Giorgiones, even
in della Vecchia's own time.
Caravaggio did not directly confirm an admiration for the
Venetian Renaissance painter, but della Vecchia explained to
Boschini that he had made one of these Giorgionesque pictures "off the top of his head without using a model and
without copying from Giorgione" in order to "demonstrate
his knowledge" to his father-in-law, the Flemish caravaggista,
Nicolo Renieri.75 By admitting that he painted it "without
copying from Giorgione," della Vecchia nevertheless invoked
the name of the artist that he believed his viewers would see
in his painting. By stating that he painted it in order to
"demonstrate his knowledge," della Vecchia seems to suggest
that he hoped his viewer would recognize his-namely, della
Vecchia's-virtuosity precisely in his ability to paint like another.
In some paintings, this form of stylistic repetition operated
through ambiguous allusion to maniera, gusto, intentione, idea,

ITALIAN

figura, concetto, or a combination of these elements, which

viewers recognized as being something "old in substance and
new in manner," to quote Tesauro again. And viewers did
make this distinction when looking at such paintings. Boschini, for example, insisted that della Vecchia's "imitations"
were not mere "copies" after Giorgione but were "extracted
from his own intellect," underlining at once della Vecchia's
stylistic dexterity and individual agency.76 True imitation, as
Tesauro insisted, did not entail taking metaphors and witty
expressions exactly as you heard or read them, for "that way
you would not be praised as an imitator but blamed as a
thief." Imitating Praxiteles'"Apollo, he continued, did not
mean literally taking it from the Cortile Belvedere into one's
own home but "carving another piece of marble to the same
proportions, so that Praxiteles on seeing it would marvel and
say, 'This Apollo is mine, yet it is not mine.""'77Again, we seem
to be returning to the theme of resemblance that is encapsulated in the father and son, or the generational trope.
Boschini claimed that della Vecchia's bravi portraits could
be found in the "galleries of princes and gentlemen," where
"the virtue of della Vecchia [sto Vechia] is masked." "Who,"
Boschini concluded, "could ask for a more beautiful, cunning
device that tricks those who see his canvases?"78 It goes without saying that Boschini's own acutezzais demonstrated here
in the play on Vechia (a double reference to the artist's name
and to his intentional stylistic archaism) and on the word tele
(meaning both canvases and veils). Like Boschini, who says
one thing while intending another, della Vecchia's braviwere
not just portraits of soldiers but also "cunning devices [inzegno artificial]" that pleased the spectator by making evident
that what he saw was not necessarily the only thing that he
got. Beneath the mask of one image another image was
revealed.
The competitive paragone of authors and artists appealed
to an aesthetic disposition, which looked on a specific work
of art as a physical element within a larger conceptual work
of art produced from the mental comparison and contrast of
the physical object on hand with an entire repertoire of
previous and similar works. Writing about Padovanino's ceiling tondo in the Marciana, which was made to replace Battista Franco's destroyed picture, Carlo Ridolfi noted that
A specific work is
Padovanino "alluded to Franco's concetto."79
referenced
in
this
and
here
slide from the
we
being
example,
repetition of style in all of its ambiguous guises to the repetition of particular motifs and entire compositional passages
tout court.
With even more precision, Annibale Roncaglia at the end
of the sixteenth century described Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne simply as "a painting in which the Laocoon is painted"
(referring to the bearded figure with the snakes in the foreground on the right).80 Evidently, Roncaglia saw Titian's
figure as a repetition of the central figure in the Laoco6n
group and, more important, he expected his reader to understand and also see his reference. In front of Van Dyck's
equestrian portrait of King Charles I of England (Fig. 20),
Bellori had no problems identifying the quotation therein of
Titian's equestrian portrait of Charles V (Fig. 21).s8 Likewise,
in referring to Rubens as "the new Titian [el nuevo Ticiano],"
the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Lope Felix de Vega was

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20 Van Dyck, EquestrianPortraitof CharlesI, oil on canvas,

1638. London, National Gallery

also making a direct connection between Rubens's lost portrait of Philip IV and its Titianesque referent.82
There is an interpretative a priori that binds these isolated
examples together. I allude to the expectation of an informed audience whose members share a common knowledge of the visual codes and references called into play.
Pallavicino explained in his seicento treatise on acutezza that
"admissable witty remarks produce wonderment by showing
the contrary to what is expected, the different from what is
expected, or the astonishing despite it being nonetheless
expected."83 In all three scenarios, acutezzaaddressed itself to
the listener's expectations. Looking at works of art in this
manner corresponded with a type of aesthetic pleasure in the
redundant and predictable and also in the redundant and
unexpected. A certain notion of originality as repetition,
therefore, can be discerned within the Baroque concept of
acutezza. Originality, in this sense, resided in the way something was presented and the way that mode of presentation
pushed the viewer to see things in a different and unanticipated way.
Consider the following example: when Domenichino
painted a picture of the expulsion of Adam and Eve (Fig. 22),
he clearly recast Michelangelo's Divine Father from the Sistine ceiling (Fig. 11) in a new role as Adam's judge rather
than as Adam's creator. The obvious allusion could not have
been lost on the erudite Roman audience for whom Domenichino (or another artist) repainted this image several
times.84 The numerous replicative versions document the

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21 Titian, Portraitof CharlesV on Horseback,oil on canvas, 1548.

Madrid, Museo del Prado

existence of a particular taste for such pictures, which seem

to have been appreciated precisely because they were pastiches of well-known images.85
Domenichino's own imagery, too, was subjected to unauthorized repetition. In a painting (questionably) attributed to
Carlo Maratti, the artist reused the bold reclining nymph in
the foreground of Domenichino's Diana and the Nymphsas an
unlikely model for the virtuous Susanna (Figs. 23, 24).86 In
Domenichino's painting, the nymph is but a minor character
within the larger tale of Diana and her numerous nymphs.
She looks out at the spectator while reclining in a shallow
pool of water with another nymph at her side. In the alleged
Maratti painting, on the other hand, she is the main character. With the composition cropped, her intense gaze becomes
more emphatic. Her nude body is highlighted against the
dark shadows of the grove, where the two elders peer through
a space in the trees to the left. The composition gives the
effect of looking at Domenichino's Diana through a telescope
and glimpsing instead Maratti's surprising twist on Domenichino's concetto.
From these examples we might draw several conclusions.
First, a witty painting could be thought of as a performance,
a theater in which figure and concetti, like stock characters
from the Commedia dell'Arte, enact a known drama to an
audience interested not so much in the way the story ends
(for it always ends in the same way) as in the way that story is
represented. Second, repetition necessarily discloses the operation of time in the construction of historical consciousness
and reveals how one work situates itself in relation to an-

other. Repetition turns backward in order to advance forward. At the same time, repetition is neither nostalgic nor
bound by a morose alterity. This brings us to our third
conclusion. An ambition to succeed and surpass one's predecessors is the drivingforce behind the emulativeimpulse of
repetition as paragone.Whether the artist was successful or
not is an issue of individualjudgment, but an inspired oneupmanship usually motivated repetition, even in those instances where pastiche blurred over into outright parody.
Maratti'sconceit, for instance, was tweakedyet again as his
lascivious Susannaregained her form as a nymph in a painting representing Diana and Acteon(Fig. 25), which came out
of Maratti'sstudio. Here, the majestic goddess stands above
her nymphs as the frightened Acteon flees into the dark
woods. The young women huddled in Diana's shadow scramble to cover themselves, turning their heads away from the
male intruder. Even Acteon raises his right hand in an attempt to blind himself from the forbidden spectacle. One
figure, however, sits alone in the foreground, unaware of or
unconcerned by the commotion around her. That figure is
our nymph, whose bold gaze functions like a sly, complicit
wink to the implied viewerof the painting. She is also the only
literal quotation from Domenichino's painting of the same
subject to appear in the picture; the other figures are paraphrases from works by Annibale and Albani.87
Without a good sense of humor, an appreciation of the
ironic, and an ability to see one thing for another, a viewer
would have found the double entendre of a female nude as
both the chaste Susanna and a lasciviousnymph meaningless.
Luca Giordano's out-of-context quotations of Michelangelo's
Dawnfrom the Lorenzo de' Medici Tomb and Nightfrom the
Giuliano de' Medici Tomb and Titian's Bacchus (Fig. 4) in
his own Bacchanal paintings of the 1670s and 1680s similarly
manipulate "old substance"in a "new manner." In one version (Fig. 9), two members of Bacchus's entourage are seen
lifting a red cloth under which a sleeping woman is revealed.
The unlikely coupling of the stony reclining female referent
being discovered by the effeminate, sun-kissedBacchus glowing in his Venetian colors must have provided a surprise
based on a stylistic and gender reversal of the usual representation of the two protagonists, as if Michelangelo and
Titian's figures were somehow represented in drag.
In another painting of the same theme (Fig. 10), Giordano's Ariadne looks like Titian's figure seen from another
angle or as a mirror image. Her legs are in the same position,
her back is arched in the same manner, and her hair has
been gathered in the same style. The drapery flows in a
similar pattern, although in the later painting more of her
back is exposed to us. Titian's Ariadne faces Bacchus, who
leaps from his chariot to greet her; in Giordano's picture, she
turns her back on him and glances instead outward to the
viewer,while with her left arm she gestures forward,almost as
if she is leading the animated cortege that follows.
Giordano's painting reads as a remake of Titian's painting,
with some help from Annibale Carracciand the generation of
imitators that followed him. In the earlier rendition, Titian
depicts Silenus in the background, asleep and slumped over.
The muscular "Laocoon"figure is seen advancing from the
side as he struggles with a snake. The nymph next to him
raises her cymbals.The two leopards stop in their tracksand

ITALIAN

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493

22 Domenichino, Adam and Eve, oil

on copper, ca. 1623. Grenoble, Musae
de Peinture et de Sculpture (photo:
Art Resource, NY)

look at each other. In Giordano's version, Silenus has awakened. The bearded figure twists to face us as he frees himself
from one of the snakes. The cymbals have sounded, and one
of the leopards has turned to look at a goat harassing a putto
in the foreground. The whole composition is recognizably
Titianesque, but as Francesco Baldinucci remarked about this
work, the invention ("il tutto d'invenzione") was beautiful
and Giordano was at his best here.88
Novitd and Furto: Sibling Rivalry and Paternity Suits
The parentage of Giordano's bacchanals is evident. Similarly,
the paintings of Padovanino, Poussin, Van Dyck, and Rubens
point to Titian as the shared figurative father. Siblings, however, were often prone to rivalries, and in the section below
we will consider a specific incident that introduces to our
discussion the notion of repetition as novelty (novita) and as

theft (furto). Tesauro, with his usual flair for metaphors,

elaborated:
Novelty is necessary for every witty production, and without this, marvel is diluted as well as grace and applause. I
therefore call imitation a type of wisdom whereby you
propose to yourself a metaphor or some other flower of
human ingenuity; then you attentively consider its roots;
and transplanting it into different categories as though
into well-ploughed and fertile soil, you cause other flowers
of the same species to be generated, but not the same
individuals.89
This passage makes evident, first, the intimate connection
between novelty, wit, imitation, and metaphor and, second,
how the concept of novita articulated a type of originality

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23 Domenichino, Diana and the

Nymphs,oil on canvas, 1616-17. Rome,
Galleria Borghese

24 Carlo Maratti, Susanna and the

Elders,oil on canvas, ca. 1640s? Rome,
Galleria Corsini

based on repetition. In each of Tesauro's examples, something new results from something old. The new is necessarily
different from the old, but it is the careful investment of the
old that ensures the survival of the new.
Tesauro's metaphors also recall the Senecan/Petrarchan
trope about sons resembling their fathers yet acquiring their
own faces. The detection of that "certain shadow" of difference between the father and son became for many seicento
beholders a delicious exercise and display of one's knowledge. But under different circumstances the visibility of rep-

etition could become the bete noir that spoiled a picture.

"The spirit of allusion," one critic has written recently, "is at
the furthest remove from envious malignity, though the possibility of envy and malignity must alwayshang around any
allusion."90Professional jealousies, for instance, sometimes
intervened, problematizing the dialogic viewing process. One
such case unfolded between Domenichino and Giovanni
Lanfranco.
When Domenichino made the Adamand Eve paintings in
the 1620s and 1630s, the Bolognese painter (then in his

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25 Studio of Carlo Maratti, Diana and

Acteon,oil on canvas, before 1675.
Oxford, Christ Church Picture Gallery
forties) had already become a celebrated artist in his own
right: The pastiches, therefore, were made for a pleasure not
tied to the urgency of proving himself in the competitive
Roman art world. This, however, was not the first nor the last
time that Domenichino would repeat the invention of another artist. In fact, such blatant appropriation was quite
common in Domenichino's practice.
In 1614-the year that Padovanino was in Rome-Domenichino unveiled his Saint Jerome altarpiece in the Roman
church of S. Girolamo della Caritai (Fig. 26). Approximately
ten years later Lanfranco, who had been a student in the
Carracci workshop with Domenichino, attacked him, claiming that the artist had stolen the idea from a work of the same
subject, which was in the Certosa in Bologna, by their master,
Agostino Carracci (Fig. 27). Here Lanfranco clearly showed
himself to be one of those viewers who did not think such
citations were particularly witty or ingenious. Lanfranco even
ordered one of his own pupils, Francois Perrier, to go to
Bologna to etch a copy after Agostino's painting so that all of
Rome could see the theft.9'
Rome did not respond as Lanfranco hoped. Instead, artists
and critics alike applauded Domenichino's appropriation,
which was, ironically enough, confirmed by the print. The
encounter was retold decades later as a story of "intense
competition [grandissima emulatione]" between Lanfranco
and Domenichino. The former, as Bellori explained, condemned his colleague's altarpiece as a "theft [furto]" that was
"lifted [tolta]" from "the invention [inventione]" of their master.92 Bellori himself decided enthusiastically in favor of
Domenichino, for even though Domenichino "followed
Agostino Carracci's motif," even Agostino would have recognized that Domenichino's design and expression possessed
"great merit above all other painters of this century.""93
Andrea Sacchi also praised Domenichino's altarpiece, and
Poussin, overwhelmed by its beauty, even compared it to
Raphael's Transfiguration.94Giovanni Baglione found it "very
beautiful [bellissimo]"and "greatly pleasing [molto piacuto] ."95

An official papal report suggested that "Domenichino of

Bologna's very beautiful painting" was "praised by everyone."96
We must not conclude too hastily that all Baroque critics
ruled in Domenichino's favor. Opinions, as always, were divided. Pietro da Cortona, for one, wrote to his friend Paolo
Falconieri that "all the painters said bad things about it."97
Malvasia criticized Domenichino's painting for being belabored, hard, and ungraceful, but added, "and what painter in
some way does not steal? Either from prints or reliefs or
nature or works by others, reversing postures, twisting an arm
lower, displaying a leg, changing a face, adding a drapery-in
sum, judiciously hiding the theft?""98 Luigi Scaramuccia followed the same line, making a special note of all the materials
that Domenichino borrowed from the Carracci. But he drew
a still different conclusion, arguing that Domenichino deserved great praise precisely because he succeeded in being a
thief without appearing to be one.99 In the 1670s Giovanni
Passeri wrote that opinions had been divided between "who
was against Domenichino, who against Lanfranco, according
to hatred or affection."100
These observations serve to underline the complexity and
variety of tastes in seventeenth-century Italy and to point to
how the perception of originality and good judgment was
often altered by social and political alliances rather than
theoretical or stylistic principles.101 In a strange anecdote
repeated by Antoine Coypel, in his Discours sur la peinture
(1708-21) addressed to the Academie Royale de Peinture et
de Sculpture, he claimed not only that Domenichino had
been the "victim of an unjust conspiracy" but also that many
artists, including Bernini, were scared to get involved in the
affair.'02 Others were not so fearful. To cite a case in point,
Passeri sided with Domenichino:
Even though Domenichino used some of the figures from
the Farnese Gallery by Carracci in those pictures, it does
not deserve to be censured on account of this. Nor should

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26 Domenichino, The Last Communionof SaintJerome,oil on

canvas, 1614. Vatican, Pinacoteca

it be accused of weakness in invention, nor lacking in good

structure because through his theft, Domenichino makes
us discover a greater truth [una saggia avvedutezza], which
knows how to use a pose, applying it in such an adept
manner as it deems necessary and appropriate. Adapting
[the figures] to a precise end that renders them perfectly
placed and successful, Domenichino always gives a clear
demonstration of a profound knowledge and a most perfect taste in all of his works.103
Reading Passeri's passage against the grain, it would seem
that artists were indeed subject to censure for the repetition
of figures from another work of art: if carried out unsuccessfully, their work could be seen as weak in invention and
lacking in structure. However, because Domenichino transforms the old motif and allows the viewer to appreciate it in
a different light, the repetition is judged to be successful.
Elsewhere, Passeri pointed out Domenichino's "sharp wit
[acutezza d'ingegno]" in all things related to painting.104 A
good artist did not necessarily have to be someone who

27 Agostino Carracci, The Last Communionof SaintJerome,oil

on canvas, 1590s. Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale

introduced something never before seen-he

could equally
be someone who gave new life to old forms.
In spite of the resemblance of Domenichino's Saint Jerome
to its referent, or precisely because of it, Domenichino's
painting was considered the revelation of a "deeper truth."
This second-degree interpretation required the viewer to
engage in some mental acrobatics, which would push him to
look beyond the immediate picture and beyond the initial
similarity so as to perceive at once Agostino's picture, Domenichino's painting, and the paragone that ensued from the
confrontation between the two.
Central in the debate surrounding the positive reception of
the Saint Jerome altarpiece was the idea of novelty (novitca).
Poussin, speaking about Domenichino's painting, put it like
this: "Novelty in painting does not consist above all in choosing a subject that has never been seen before but upon a
good and novel arrangement and expression, thanks to
which the subject, though in itself ordinary and worn, becomes new and singular."'05 In this passage on novelty, itself
lifted more or less verbatim from Tasso's definition of novelty
in poetry, written some decades before, Poussin at once

[TALIAN

endorses Domenichino's work and justifies his own imitative

practice vis-fi-visTitian and other sixteenth-century artists.106
In 1625 it may have seemed that Lanfranco had made his
point-at least with some spectators. However, by the time
Bellori, Passeri, and the others were rewriting the story of that
confrontation, Domenichino proved himself to be the more
ingenious artist, at least in the eyes of his colleagues who
rallied to his defense. This form of repetition or visual citation may or may not have suited the taste of every spectator,
but it was certainly inscribed in the practices of seventeenthcentury artists and in the responses of viewers.
The question of invention through repetition manifested
itself in other domains as well. In the 1620s, at about the same
time as the Domenichino-Lanfranco conflict, a similar controversy about novita erupted surrounding Marino's epic
poem L'Adone (Paris, 1623). Generally speaking, in seventeenth-century editions of the Vocabolariodegli Accademicidella
Crusca, novita was defined as "a new, unusual thing, which
comes about unexpectedly."'107 More specifically, Monsu
Capellano (Jean Chapelain) defined two forms of "natural"
novita in his 1625 defense of Marino: the first and more
perfect type of novelty referred to new discoveries, objects
and subjects that had never been seen or heard before; the
second and less perfect species of novelty was used to describe discoveries of new ways of saying or using old things (as
when Domenichino changed Michelangelo's God the Creator into God the Judge and when Maratti transformed Domenichino's indecent nymph into the virtuous Susanna- or,
indeed, when Levine appropriated the images of earlier photographers) .108
Capellano's "perfect form" of "natural novelty" would eventually develop into our modern notion of "originality," with
all of its qualitative demands on originary primacy. And yet,
perfect forms, in the seicento, were rare occurrences. One of
the dangers of this type of novelty, as Capellano explained,
was that it slipped into "unnatural" forms, presenting itself as
truly novel but ultimately grotesque inventions (like satyrs
and hermaphrodites, which although never seen before were
nonetheless unnatural forms).109 The perfect form of natural
novelty was more applicable to scientific discoveries and inventions than to poetic and artistic ones. The imperfect form
of natural novelty, on the other hand, was closer to the more
commonly accepted usage of novita as applied to the creative
arts in the seventeenth century.
Crucial to this form of premodernist originality was the
concept of wonder (maraviglia)-in contrast, for example, to
the idea of singularity. Tesauro linked novith closely with an
unexpected presentation of things that generates the marvelous.110 Likewise, Girolamo Aleandri wrote that the novith of
Marino's phrases and concepts consisted in the "marvel [maraviglia]" that was produced in the way he presented his
subject matter, regardless of whether it was new or borrowed."' This emphasis on maraviglia, then, underlines the
importance of the presentational or performative nature of
the work of art for seventeenth-century audiences-old
in
new
in
manner-and
the
substance,
explains
popularity of
Domenichino's repetitive works.
Marino's most vehement critic was Tomaso Stigliani, who
in 1627 published in Venice a meticulous analysis of L'Adone
entitled The Telescope (Dello occhiale). Through his critical

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loupe, Stigliani observed four different areas in which

L'Adonefailed: the story (favola),the presentation (locuzione),
the composition (sentenza), and the decorum (costume).
Within each of these realms of censure, Stigliani identified
more flaws:the characterswere not heroic enough. The plot
did not have a clear beginning, middle, or end. No less
problematic, the episodes were poorly developed and badly
linked. Certain events were not credible and the story lacked
a happy ending. Stylistically,the language was riddled with
neologisms and foreign terms, and the composition was muddled by excessive ornaments. Finally, the tale was wanting of
a proper moral.
These categories of censure provide us with rich information regarding the complexity of aesthetic tastes in this period. Even Stigliani was not entirely consistent. On the one
hand, he complained because Marino slid into the repetitious, because he recycled similar episodes throughout his
work, and because he failed to transform the presentation
and development of the story.112But then, in another passage, Stigliani was dissatisfied with L'Adonebecause Marino
presented an unconventional twist on the standard, expected, traditional tale of Venus and Adonis. Instead of telling the tale from the perspective of the hero, Adonis, and
instead of focusing on his courtship of and union with Venus,
Marino created a disjointed, fragmented text riddled with
citations, paraphrases,and a narrativethat constantly lost its
way in endless digressions.""3Stigliani looked on Marino's
a "confused
poem as a "messypile [un mucchiodisordinato],"
heap [una massaconfusa]," and a Horatian monster lacking in
"unity [il tuttointegrale],"much like the painting of his day,
Stigliani added.114Thus, although Marino retold the story of
Venus and Adonis from a novel point of view (from that of
Venus), Stigliani found it both inappropriate and unsuccessful.
The fifth transgressionunder Stigliani's third rubric-presentation (sentenza)--hadto do with novitai.Novelty, Stigliani
explained, was "when the concept is not torn away from
another but is born from one's own body [viscere]."115The
violence of this image points to the underlyingjealousy Stigliani felt toward Marino. Marino's Adonewas immensely popular and Stiglianiwas surelyhurt by this, claiming throughout
the Occhialethat Marino stole many of his ideas. To underline
the injury,Stigliani compared Marino's rapacious method of
composition with those anatomy books in which amputated
limbs hang on pages to be collected and reassembled by
young painters.'16
The overwhelming response in support of Marino expressed itself in letters, treatises, and even parodies of Stigliani. Aleandri wondered whether Stigliani's "telescope"might
not need adjusting, and Scipione Herrico entitled his response The Blurry Telescope(L'occhialeappanato)to ridicule
Stigliani's pedantic optic."7 Robusto Pogommega sneered:
"Listento me, Stigliani, as a good friend, without going into
a rage and fury, your Mondonuovoisn't worth a fig .... the
style is low, insipid, and dated; it lacks knowledge and flavor."8

And to humiliate Stigliani further, one writer even

published a list of authors who unreservedly supported

Marino.1"9
Like Domenichino, Marino was praised not only for being
a good poet but also for being an excellent thief. Following

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Marino's outline on poetic inspiration, Herrico explained

that when a writer borrows from the ancients, he should be
called an "imitator" rather than a "thief," for such citations
serve as ornament within the story.120 Herrico distinguished
between simple plagiarism and commendable expropriation
when the stolen tale is improved, better when retold.121
Marino, he concluded, "needs to be not excused but praised
for knowing how to turn shit into gold."122
Herrico's last comment marks a significant shift from the
late Renaissance theories of imitation, which permitted only
the imitation of the best sources. In the literary debate
around Marino, it was commonly acknowledged that being
able to improve a bad model was as praiseworthy as transforming an old classic. Some decades later, the Jesuit author
Daniello Bartoli wrote that "it is not theft" if one is able to
produce something beautiful from "useless and vile materials" (Venus, he went on to explain, was herself created from
sea foam and sperm).123 In the end, the manner in which one
reused the repeated matter was more important than the
quality of the matter in and of itself, for as Marino was quick
to point out: "Ancient statues and relics of destroyed marbles,
placed in a good location and with care, give a good measure
of majesty to a new building."'124
If Marino "stole" from insignificant authors of his own
time, he was surely doing them a service. Vincenzo Foresti
wrote in The Fraud (L'uccellatura)that while Marino could be
charged with thousands of "thefts [furti]," he was able "to
conceal and color them better, adorning, amplifying, and
composing them" so that no one could possibly recognize
them as Stigliani's words.125 In the end, Aleandri compared
Stigliani's complaints to those of a foolish painter who sees
his own figures everywhere in the works of better artists-and
here we seem to have come around full circle again.'26
Pasticcio: Stylistic Indigestion and the New Taste for

Originality
Although Stigliani, like Lanfranco, believed that one author
had burgled the artistic property of another, the larger intellectual community did not seem to agree. And, as with Lanfranco, the immediate response only demonstrated the professional jealousy, insecurity, and churlishness of the critic
who dared to claim originality (or the perfect natural form of
novitci) for himself. It is not immediately clear why critics
came to Marino's defense. There is no question that Marino
was the superior poet of the two, but even this does not really
explain the vehement backlash that ensued. Perhaps it had to
do with the fact that Stigliani's attack on L'Adone was published after Marino's death, and it was simply beyond the
limits of acceptability to attack someone who could not defend himself. Or perhaps it was a sign of things to come.
By the end of the seventeenth century, a new term had
come into play to describe the mixed style: pasticcio. Filippo
Baldinucci, for instance, claimed that "even men of good
taste" who were not victim to "any passions" were unable to
resist the pasticci of a certain unnamed painter.'27 Piles explained that pastiche came from the Italian word for pastries:
Paintings that are neither Originals, nor Copies, are called
Pastiches, from the Italian pastici, which means pastries,
because as the different things that flavor a dish are mixed

together in order to produce a single taste [un seul goftt],

so, too, all of the imitations that compose a pastiche aim to
make one truth appear [une v&ritW].128
If we read Baldinucci's comment against the grain, it would
seem to suggest that the epistemological division between
repetition and originality was already in the works, for his
words imply that under normal circumstances a "man of
good taste" should not be seduced by pasticci. Piles, however,
did not explicitly criticize nor endorse pastiche as a practice;
instead, he simply explained that the goal of the pastiche was
"to produce a single taste" and "to make one truth appear."
Other authors were not so generous. In REflexions sur la
poesie et la peinture (Paris, 1719), L'Abbe Dubos condemned
pastiches as nothing less than forgeries produced by "imposter painters."'29 In 1771, Francesco Milizia wrote (echoing
Piles's formula) that in architecture, as in painting, "pastiches
are neither originals, nor copies, but composed of different
parts taken from here and there."'130 The result for Milizia,
however, was a confused mess without any organic unity. By
the late eighteenth century, pasticcio had increasingly come to
be seen as something lacking in another quality, one that
In his
would come to bear greater importance-originality.
comments about the Salon of 1767, Denis Diderot acknowledged the rift that was beginning to develop between imitation and innovation, lamenting, "I am angry with this word
pastiche," which not only had become "a mark of contempt"
but also was threatening to "discourage artists from the imitation of the best old masters."'31
For many critics, the term "pastiche" embodied the unacceptable indigestibility of stylistic mixing. As with so many of
the other tropes used to describe the "mixed" style, the point
of reference for this type of food metaphor was Seneca's
letter "On Gathering Ideas":
The food we have eaten, as long as it retains its original
quality and floats in our stomachs as an undiluted mass, is
a burden; but it passes into tissue and blood only when it
has been changed from its original form. So it is with the
food which nourishes our higher nature, we should see to
it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to
remain unchanged, or it will be no part of us. We must
digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and
not the reasoning power.'32
According to classical theory, good imitation, like good cookery, involved the judicious combination of ingredients that
would blend into one delicious flavor. Demonstrative repetition, on the other hand, appealed to the expert who took
special pleasure in identifying the separate spices in a dish. In
the aftermath of the Pico-Bembo debates of the Early Renaissance, Paolo Cortesi concluded that the digestive metaphor
provided the perfect argument against eclecticism, for indigestion was the obvious result from the intake of too many
different, rich foods.'33
Pastiche was potentially unpalatable for the man of refined
tastes, but the individual who did not particularly like spicy
foods was not qualified to judge for all gastronomes that spicy
foods were universally bad. Marino himself confessed that his
poetry aimed to please the modern taste for excitement and

ITALIAN

novelty and was, therefore, somewhat dangerous for those

critics with no taste. "This is also the style," he concluded as
a final jibe at his potential critics, "which I do not deny to be
according to my natural genius and which pleases me as
much as it annoys you."'134 When it came to the enjoyment of
art, as with food, it was ultimately a question of personal taste.
Novita, like pastiche, appealed to a certain audience capable
of discerning how old ingredients could be used to produce
new flavors and how the same ingredients could be used to
produce different flavors.
Dubos, Milizia, and Diderot, among other eighteenth-century critics, rejected pastiche and eclecticism. A century earlier, however, attitudes were more flexible. This is not to
suggest that an irreversible epistemological rupture had occurred after Padovanino, Domenichino, and Marino's generation. As always, tastes were variable and judgments could be
reversed. In the summer of 1901, for instance, FdelicienFagus
wrote in the Revue Blanche about a "brilliant newcomer" in
whom "many likely influences can be distinguished-Delacroix, Manet (everything points to him, whose painting is a
little Spanish), Monet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Forain, Rops." Thirteen years later, however,
another critic condemned the same painter as an "imitator"
who "after making pastiches of everything and finding nothing more to imitate, perished in his own Cubist bluff." And
again in 1923, another spectator complained that "Steinlen,
Lautrec, Van Gogh, Daumier, Corot, negroes, Braque, Derain, Cezanne, Renoir, Ingres, etc. etc. etc. Puvis de Chavannes, neo-Italian ... these influences prove the [artist's]
lack of seriousness, in terms of construction and sureness."'35
That artist-the "brilliant newcomer," "imitator," and consummate pasticheur-was Pablo Picasso.
Picasso's critics reproached him for an inability "to forge a
personal style" (Fagus's words). In her own account of Picasso's imitative practices, however, Krauss argued that "dissembling and mimicry" had become the "medium" of Picasso's
art; pastiche was the means to that end."36 Through pastiche
as demonstrative repetition, Picasso was able to make the
form and content of the materials that he appropriated his
own. The "work" of art was not the physical object of the
painting or drawing in itself. Instead, it was realized in the
confrontation of the thing repeated (that is, the image or
style, figure or maniera), as in Picasso's mechanical drawings
after photographs and after works by other artists, such as
Auguste Renoir, and in his Return from the Baptism, after Le
Nain, which was rendered by Picasso in the style of his contemporary Georges Seurat after a painting by the French
Baroque painter.'37
Krauss's reading of Picasso and pastiche resonates with her
earlier comments on Levine's work. What Krauss seems to
suggest about both Picasso and Levine and what I am offering
in conclusion about Baroque practice and theory is that not
only are originality and repetition intimately bound in the
practice and theory of a certain type of artwork, but also that
repetition was a necessary condition for the aesthetic quality
that would later come to be understood as "originality."
Gerard Genette once wrote that the components that make
up the utterance "Pierreest venu hier soir, Pierreest venu hier soir,
Pierreest venu hier soil' differ from each other both materially
and conceptually in that their copresence and succession

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499

identify these phrases as the first, the next, and the last.138 It
is in this difference-the
"certain shadow" of which Seneca
and Petrarch wrote-that originality and repetition are simultaneously brought together and separated one from the
other.

Maria H. Loh is lecturerof Renaissance and Baroque art at University College London and Joanna Randall-Maclver Junior Research Fellow at St. Hilda's College in Oxford. She is currently
finishing her book Strategies of Repetition and researchingher
next project, The Tears of Eros: Disciplining Desire in PostTridentine Italian Art [Departmentof History of Art, University
College London, 39-41 Gordon Square, London, WCIE 6BT,
United Kingdom].

Frequently Cited Sources

Aleandri, Girolamo, Difesa dell'Adone, poema del Cav. Marini ... per riposta
all'Occhiale del cav. Stigliani (Venice: Scaglia, 1629).
Baldinucci, Filippo, Notizie dei professoridel disegno da Cimabue in qua, vols. 3, 4,
ed. Ferdinando Ranalli (Florence: S.P.E.S., 1974).
Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, Le vite de pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Rome:
Mascardi, 1672).
Boschini, Marco, La carta del navegar pitoresco, ed. Anna Pallucchini (Venice:
Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1966).
Dooley, Brendan, ed. and trans., Italy in the Baroque: SelectedReadings (New
York: Garland, 1997).
Piles, Roger de, Dissertations sur les ouvrages des plus fameux peintres (Geneva:
Minkoff Reprint, 1973).
Sohm, Philip, 1991, PittorescoMarco Boschini, His Critics, and Their Critiques of
Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-CenturyItaly (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press).
-,
2001, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Spear, Richard, Domenichino, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
Stigliani, Tomaso, Dello occhiale opera difensiva del Cavalier Fra S. T. scritta in
riposta al Cavalier G. B. Marini (Venice: Pietro Carampello, 1627).

Notes
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to H. Perry Chapman for
accepting an earlier version of this essay, to the anonymous readers whose
helpful criticisms forced me to rethink the question of repetition beyond the
parameters of the Venetian seicento, and to Marc Gotlieb, who kindly accepted the overdue manuscript and offered additional comments. I would
also like to acknowledge Philip Sohm, Alina Payne, Alex Nagel, Evonne Levy,
Elizabeth Cropper, Francesco Guardiani, Richard Spear, Anthony Colantuono, Mieke Bal, Alastair Wright, Sherrie Levine, Ketty Gottardo, Eve Sinaiko, and Lory Frankel for their various contributions. Funding from the
Getty Research Institute, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the
Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellowship at St. Hilda's College,
Oxford, supported this project. Translations (unless otherwise indicated) and
all mistakes are my own.
1. Rosalind Krauss, "The Originality of the Avant-Garde," October18 (fall
1981), reprinted in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and OtherModernist Myths
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 170.
2. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Photography after Art Photography," in Art
afler Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992), 80.
3. Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," in Wallis (as in n. 2), 205.
4. Sherrie Levine, "Five Comments," in Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of
Writingsby ContemporaryArtists, ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1987), 92.
5. The author recognizes that the usage of "Baroque" throughout this essay
poses its own anachronisms since, like "originality," it, too, has an 18thcentury provenance; nevertheless, "Baroque" shall be used as a generalized
term of convenience to refer to the late 16th and the 17th centuries. On the
historiography of the "Baroque," see Otto Kurz, "Barocco, storia di una
parola," LettereItaliane 12 (1960): 414-44; and Bruno Migliorini, "Etimologia

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e storia del termine 'barocco,'" in Manerismo, barocco, rococo:Concetti e termini

(Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1962), 39-49.
6. Concerning this claim, see for instance the entries for originalith in
Salvatore Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Turin: Unione Tipografico-editrice Torinese, 1981), vol. 12, 103; for originalitMin the Trisor de
la langue franfaise, vol. 12 (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 638-40 (significantly
enough, it does not appear in Emile Littr6, ed., Dictionnaire de la langue
franCaise [Paris: Gallimard, 1957]); for originality in J. A. Simpson and E. S. C.
Weiner, eds., Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 10 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989), 935; or for originalitat in Joan Coromines, Diccionari etimologicicomplentari de la llengua catalana, vol. 6 (Barcelona: Curial Edicions Catalanes, 1986),
113.
7. On this aspect of spectatorship and Rezeptiongeschichte,see Wolfgang Iser,
The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1979); and Hans RobertJauss, Toward an Aestheticof Reception:
Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1982).
8. Julia Kristeva, Recherchespour une sLmanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 146;
Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image, Music, Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 146;Jacques Derrida, L'lcriture et la
difference(Paris: Seuil, 1967), 314; andJameson, quoted in David N. Rodowick,
The Crisis of Political Modernism, Criticism, and Ideology in ContemporaryFilm
Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 286.
9. Secondo Lancellotti, L Hoggidi overo il mondo non peggiorene piit calamitoso
del passato (Venice: Giovanni Guerigli, 1627), n.p.
10. The anxiety thesis is most passionately argued by Walter Jackson Bate,
The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970);
and Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1975). For a more balanced history of imitation and
influence in this period, see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy:Imitation
and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982);
and Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002).
11. For an excellent discussion on the parallel distinction between allusion
and plagiarism in poetry, see Ricks (as in n. 10), 219ff.
12. Zuccaro, quoted in Giovanni Baglione, Le vite de' pittori, scultori ed
architetti,ed. Valerio Mariani (Rome: Calzone, 1935), 137: "Io non vedo altro,
che il pensiero di Giorgione nella tavola del Santo" (I don't see anything in
the painting of Saint [Matthew] except for Giorgione's ideas); and Bellori,
202: "giunse in Venetia, ove si compiacque tanto del colorito di Giorgione,
che se lo propose per iscorta nell'imitatione. Per questo veggonsi l'opere sue
primi dolci, schiette, e senza quelle ombre, ch'egli us6 poi; e come di tutti li
pittori Venetiani eccellenti nel colorito, ffi Giorgione il pifi puro, e'l pifi
semplice nel rappresentare con poche tinte le forme naturali, nel modo stesso
portossi Michele, quando prima si fiss6 intento a riguardare la natura" (He
arrived in Venice, where he was so pleased by Giorgione's color that he chose
him as a guide in imitation. As a result, his first works are sweet, pure, and
lacking those shadows that he used later on. And because Giorgione was the
purest out of all the Venetian painters excellent in coloring and the simplest
in the representation of natural forms with just a few tones, Caravaggio
followed in the same manner, whereas previously he was satisfied just looking
at nature).
13. Baldinucci, vol. 4, 539.
14. Francisco Pacheco, El arte de la pintura, ed. Bonaventura Bassegoda i
Hugas (Madrid: Catedra, 1990), 198-201; Bellori, 232; Baldinucci, vol. 3, 696;
and Roger de Piles, Vie de Rubens, in Piles, 19-20, "le Roy luy fit faire les copies
de quelques-uns des plus beaux Tableaux du Titien qui sont A Madrid, &
pens]e
de
entr'autres de l'enlevement d'Europe, & du Bain de Diane, dans la
faire un present des Originaux au Prince de Galles qui en avoit thmoigne une
grande envie. Ce Prince estoit a la Cour d'Espagne pour le mariage de
l'Infante: mais comme cette affaire ne se conclut pas, les copies demeurerent
a Madrid avec les Originaux"; anecdote repeated in Piles, Abregl de la vie des
peintres, 2nd ed. (Paris: Jacques Estienne, 1715), 387.
15. On the lost drawings, see Spear, vol. 2, 193; on Domenichino's painting
as a possible pendant for Titian's Bacchanals, see Anne Sutherland-Harris,
"Domenichino's 'Caccia di Diana': Art and Politics in Seicento Rome," in Shop
Talk: Studies in Honor of Seymour Slive, ed. Cynthia P. Schneider, William W.
Robinson, and Alice I. Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), 93.
16. Bellori, 271, 412: "Espresse Titiano mirabilmente i putti nell'eti pifi
tenera, e con delicatezza si avanzh sopra ciascuno. Se ne invaghi Francesco, e
li tradusse in varij gruppi di mezzo rilievo, e seco insieme li modelleva Nicolo
Pussino sif la creta" (Titian wonderfully expressed putti at their most tender
age and surpassed all others in [his representation of their] delicacy.
Francesco fell in love with them and translated them in various groups in
relief. He also made models in clay with Nicolas Poussin); "li Amori essendo
di ammirabile bellezza, Nicolo non solo copiavali in Pitture, ma insieme col
compagno li modelleva di creta in bassi rilievi, onde si acquisito una bella
maniera di formare li putti teneri, de' quali si sono veduti alcuni scherzi, e
baccanali a guazzo, & ad oglio di sua mano, fatti in quel tempo" ([because]
the putti were of admirable beauty, Nicolas Poussin not only copied them but
also together with his friend made bas-reliefs of them in clay. He acquired
from this a beautiful manner of creating tender putti. At that time he made
in his own hand [some examples, which include] some playful images and

bacchanals in gouache and in oil). For similar accounts, cf. Andr6 F61ibien,
Bellori, Frlibien, Passeri, Sandrart: Vies de Poussin, ed. Stefan Germer (Paris:
Macula, 1994), 160; Baldinucci, vol. 3, 701; Piles, 1715 (as in n. 14), 460, 486;
and Giovanni Battista Passeri, Vitede'pittori, scultori, ed architettianno lavorato in
Roma morti dal 1641 fino al 1673 (Rome: Gregorio Settari, 1772), 86, 92, 351.
At least two (highly contested) canvases after Giovanni Bellini's Feast of the
Godsand Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne have also been attributed to Poussin; see
Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin (London: Pallas Athene, 1995), pl. 94; and
Claudia Cieri Via, ed., Immagini degli Dei: Mitologia e collezionismotra '500 e '600
(Venice: Lombardo Arte, 1996), cat. no. 13, 130-31.
17. Orfeo Boselli, quoted in Anthony Colantuono, "The Tender Infant:
Invenzione and Figura in the Art of Poussin," Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins
University, 1986, 38: "... li moderni si sono presi la licenza di farli di minore
eta, et e certo che riescono pift graziosi. L'honore di questa bella licenza &di
Tiziano, il quale ne le sue mirabili Baccanali, et altri lochi ha dimostrato ci6
che si pu6 far di bello ne Putti. Sopra l'Opere di lui studi6 questa parte
Francesco di Quesnoy fiamengo scultore incomparabile, et si avanz6 tanto,
che poi tutti hanno seguitato il di lui stile" (Modern [artists] have taken the
liberty of making [putti] at a younger age, and it is certain that they turn out
more graceful. This beautiful license is Titian's, who has demonstrated in his
marvelous Bacchanals and in other places that he is capable of beauty in [the
representation of] putti. The incomparable Flemish sculptor Francesco Duquesnoy studied his works and advanced so much that afterward everyone
followed Duquesnoy's style). Andre Fhlibien (as in n. 16), 160, 263, commented, 'je vous ai parlk tant de fois de son intelligence a bien faire toutes
sortes de paysage et a les rendre si plaisants et si naturels qu'on peut dire que
hors le Titien on ne voit pas de peintre qui en ait fait de comparables aux
siens" (I have spoken to you many times about [Poussin's] intelligence in
making all sorts of landscapes and in rendering them so pleasant and natural
that one can say that, except for Titian, one does not see any painters who
have made landscapes comparable to Poussin's). Gazing on one of Poussin's
paintings, Bernini similarly remarked to Paul Frhart de Chantelou, in the
Diary of CavaliereBernini's Visit to France, ed. Anthony Blunt and trans. Margery
Corbett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 147: "'This is a beautiful picture.' I said it must be more than forty years since it was painted. 'That
doesn't matter, it is painted and colored in the manner of Titian."' For
Titian's influence on Poussin's imagery, see the discussion about imitation in
Richard T. Neer, "Poussin, Titian and Tradition: The Birth of Bacchus and the
Genealogy of Images," Word and Image 18, no. 3 (2002): 267-81.
18. See David Jaffe, "New Thoughts on Van Dyck's Italian Sketchbook,"
Burlington Magazine 143, no. 1183 (2001): 614-24, for his insightful interpretation of "the sketchbook as a record of artistic process, rather than of painted
sources.
19. Boschini, 199: "Sti Bacanali xe tre pezzi in tuto. / Ma el Varotari pur de
so invencion / Gh'ha zonto el quatro, che & si belo e bon, / Ghe apresso a
quei l'&d'unico construto. / Qua se vede Ciprigna trionfante, / Con Tritoni,
Nereide e Galatea. / Capriciosa invencion, d'una monea / De fin metal, de
peso trabucante. / L'ha da saver, che a Roma alcuni disse / Che '1 giera
valoroso de copiar; / Ma tal sazo el ghe d& del so inventar, / Che ancora, in
veder questo, i se stupisse." Cf. Boschini, 199, 718: "El Varotari inventa el
quarto Bacanal, per confonder i emuli invidiosi"; "di tal gusto gli imit6, che
quei Virtuosi di Roma professori dell'Arte lo andavano a vedere ad operare,
facendo stupori e maraviglie. ."
20. On Albani, see in particular Catherine Puglisi, Francesco Albani (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
21. Boschini, 198: "Gh'&le copie a Venezia d'amiranda / Maniera, e d'altra
e celebre Virtfi. / Quest & dela perfeta e degna man, / Anzi del Vice Autor
(cusi el se chiama), / Che corse a Roma, inamora per fama, / A far ste copie,
quel gran Padoan."
22. I shall not expand on the iconographic and allegorical implications of
the "Triumph" theme here, which I discuss in greater detail in Maria H. Loh,
Strategies of Repetition (forthcoming).
23. Bellori, 222-23: "Andosense dopo a studiare a Venetia, vi si fermo, e
rivolse tutto il suo studio sopra Titiano, e Paolo Veronese; onde tornato a
San Gregorio
Roma dipinse nella Chiesa Nuova di Padri dell'Oratorio....
Papa, e San Mauro Martire in habito militare eseguite con l'intentione di
Paolo Veronese."
24. Baldinucci, vol. 3, 693: "nella chiesa nuova per li padri dell'oratorio
colori la tavola del maggiore altare con gli angiolo, che adoran la Vergine, e
ne' lati del coro gli altri due gran quadri con piu santi, i quali condusse in sul
gusto di Paolo Veronese"; and Piles, 1973 (Vie de Rubens), 9: "ces Figures sont
d'une grande noblesse, & peintes dans le goust de Paul Veronese.
25. Boschini, 81: "El pass& per Fiorenza int'el partir; / Dove se vede dele so
memorie/ Su l'idea de Tician diverse istorie."
26. Malvasia, quoted in Sohm, 2001, 35.
27. Boschini, 362: "La tute le maniere ghe xe unie: / Gh'e Paulo veronese,
gh'& Tician, / Ghe xe '1 Schiavone, gh'& Giacomo Bassan: / Certo che 1a el
gh'ha messo e man e pie."
28. Giulio Mancini, Considerazionisulla pittura, vol. 1, ed. Adriana Marucchi
(Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1956), 230: "quel Greco che opero
con la maniera di Titiano."
29. Albani, quoted in Bellori, 80: "Nh si puo dire che dall'opere solamente
del Correggio apprendessero lo stile, perche andavono a Venetia, & ultimamente a Roma; e piu tosto si puo dire che anche da Titiano, & ultimamente

ITALIAN

da Rafaelle, e da Michel Angelo insieme conseguissero una maniera, che

participava di tutti li piui rari maestri, un misto che pare conformarsi con tutti
li piui eccellenti."
30. Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi, Abcedario pittorico (Bologna: Costantino
Pisarri, 1704), 236, 87, 259, 106-7.
31. Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, Discorsi (Venice: Gabriel Giolito, 1554),
32-33: "Perche Vergilio si pote veramente chiamare la regola del giudicio
delle cose gravi, et magnifiche, che parve proprio che la natura. Conoscendo
la imperfettione humana essere tale, che un huomo solo non poteva da se
perfettamente compire la virtui del comporre le cose grandi, producesse
Vergilio, che con meraviglioso giudicio si desse a scieglier tutto il buono, che
in tutti altri auttori et Greci et Latini si ritrovasse, et in uno le accogliesse, per
sopporlo a gli occhi di quelli, che dopo lui devessino scrivere, come veracissimo essempio del componimento della grandezza Heroica. Perche a quel
tempo nacque Vergilio, che la Maesta Romana era in guisa cresciuta, che non
potea piu oltra andare, et le cose della Poesia, sparse nella motitudine delle
compositioni de gli altri, erano tali, che solo vi mancava uno, che le levasse
delle tenebre, et le facesse conoscere tutte insieme raccolte et maravigliosamente disposte in un bellissimo corpo et me pare che Vergilio in ci6 imitasse
gli eccellenti dipintori, iquali volendo formare una imagine singolare, che
rappresente la donnesca bellezza, mirando tutte le belle donne, che mirar
ponno: et da ciascuna togliono le parti migliori, et accoltene tante, quante lor
paiono bastare a compire la Idea c'hanno nell'animo, si danno poscia a fare
la conceptua figura, laquale essendo composta delle eccellenti parti di molte
bellezze riesce ella non pur bella, ma eccellentissima: tale che non si trova
forma humana, che in viva donna le si possa rassimigliare, tanto desiderano
i nobili artefici asseguire l'ultima perfettione."
32. Pliny, Natural History 35.64; Cicero, De Inventione 2.1.3. On the significance of this repetition in Renaissance criticism, see Leonard Barkan, "The
Heritage of Zeuxis: Painting, Rhetoric, and History," in Antiquity and Its
Interpreters,ed. Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 99-109.
33. Raphael, in Baldassare Castiglione's The Courtier, quoted in Eugenio
Battisti, "Il concetto d'imitazione nel cinquecento," Commentari7 (1956): 181:
"'Le dico, che per dipingere una bella, mi bisogneria veder piti belle,
con questa conditione, che V.S. si trovasse meco a far scelta del meglilo.
Ma essendo carestia e di buoni giudici, et di belle donne, io mi servo di
certa Idea, che mi viene alla mente'" ("I'm telling you, in order to paint
one beautiful woman, I would need to see many beauties, assuming that
you would choose the best with me. But since there is a shortage of
good judges and of beautiful women, I make use of a certain Idea that comes
into my mind"); and Vasari, quoted in idem, 180: "'I1lgraziosissimo Raffaello
da Urbino; il quale studiano le fatiche de' maestri vecchi e quelle de'
moderni, prese da tutti il meglio, e fattone raccolta, arrichi l'arte della pittura
di quella intera perfezione che ebbero anticamente le figure di Apelle e di
Zeusi, e pi6i, se si potesse dire, o mostrare l'opere di quelli a questo paragone"
(The most graceful Raphael, who, studying the works of the ancient masters
and those of the modern masters, took from all of them the best. And having
collected them together, enriched the art of painting with that total perfection which Apelles' and Zeuxis's figures possessed in antiquity. In fact, if one
dares to say so or show it to be so, the work of [the ancients] compete with
[Raphael]).
34. For an extensive and rich discussion of the Pico-Bembo debate, see
Battisti (as in n. 33), 177ff.; and Martin McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the
Italian Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 249-74.
35. Malvasia, quoted in Anne Summerscale, Malvasia's Life of the Carracci:
Commentaryand Translation (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2000), 74: "Oh che giubilo n'ebbe Lodovico! oh questo, dicono gli
dicesse,
lo stile, Annibale mio, che mi piace: questo hai da tenere, perch&
l'imitare un solo oun farsi du lui seguace, e'l secondo, che il tor da tutti, e
sceglier dagli altri, & un farsi di essi il giudice, e '1 caporione."
36. Roger de Piles, L'art de Peinture, de C. A. Du Fresnoy, Traduit en Franfois,
Enrichy de Remarques, & augmentl d'un Dialogue sur le Coloris (Paris: Nicolas
a pris de tous ces Grands
Langlois, 1673), 84-88: "Le soigneux ANNIBAL
Hommes ce qu'il en a trouve de bon, dont il a fait comme un pressis qu'il a
converti en sa propre substance."
37. Bellori, 80: "I1 suo proprio stile fi l'unire insieme l'idea, e la natura,
accumulando in se stesso le pit degne virtui de' maestri passati."
38. Cicero, "De inventione," in Cicero in Twenty-eight Volumes, trans. H. M.
Hubell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), vol. 2, 169
(2.1.3).
39. Lodovico Dolce, Dolce's Aretino and Venetian Art Theoryof the Cinquecento,
trans. and ed. Mark Roskill, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2000), 130-31.
40. On this, see esp. Sohm, 2001, 139-42.
41. On this aspect of Lomazzo's writings, see Martin Kemp, "'Equal Excellences': Lomazzo and the Explanation of Individual Style in Visual Arts,"
Renaissance Studies 1, no. 1 (1987): 18ff.
42. Lomazzo, quoted in Denis Mahon, "Eclecticism and the Carracci: Further Reflections on the Validity of a Label," Journal of the Warburgand Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953): 316: "Ma diro bene che a mio parere chi volesse
formare due quadri di somma profetione [Perfezione] come sarebbe d'uno
Adamo & d'un Eva, che sono corpi nobilissimi al mondo; bisognarebbe che
l'Adamo si dasse a Michel Angelo da disegnare, a Titiano da colorare,

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501

togliendo la proportione, & convenienza da Raffaello, & l'Eva si disegnasse da

Raffaello, & si colorisse da Antonio da Coreggio: che questi due sarebbero i
miglior quadri che fossero mai fatti al mondo."
43. Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginning of Baroque Style
(Glfickstadt: Augustin, 1977), 63.
44. Orlandi (as in n. 30), 118-19: "studi6 a Roma l'opere di Raffaello, in
Parma quelle del Correggio, e del Mazzola, in Venezia quelle di Tiziano, e del
Tentoretto, e con un misto perfetto di si alti Maestri si fece una ben fondata,
e spiritosa maniera."
45. Francesco Scannelli, Il microcosmodella pittura, ed. Guido Giubbini (Milan: Labor, 1966), 11-15.
46. Boschini, 3-4: "quando me xe vengui pensier de fabricar sta mia Nave
Pitoresca... . E de pi u el me ha anche provisto d'un squero capace per tal
efeto, che xe Venezia, sun el qual con ogni diligenza Zambelin gh'ha pianta
el primo sesto; avendo per agiutanti so fradel Zentil e Vetor Carpaccio. El
Tentoreto ha da el dessegno; perche l'abia forma tal, che la resista in ogni
Mar. Zorzon gh'ha aplica el timon, per poderla orzar e pozar segondo i
bisogni. El Pordenon xe anda a formando i corbami a mesura, col scurzarli e
slongarli, come comporta la bona forma. El Bassano gh'ha fato le boche
porte, per dar lume a la giave e camera del Patron. El Ziloti gh'ha pianta
l'alboro dreto e sodo. El Salviati el trincheto. Paris Bordon gh'ha indora la
pupa. Paulo Veronese l'ha adorna d'un fan6, tuto inzogela. El Schiaon, bon
calafao, gh'ha calci le stope. Palma Vechio l'ha impalmada, azz6 che la scora
piui veloce ... assistendo a tute ste fonzion el peritissimo Tician, vero Armiragio dela Pitua. E subito alestida, Tentoreto l'ha armizada de tuto ponto, con
tre man de bataria... . Tician Peota, come quelo che cognosse tuti i venti,
dove che no'l puol falar la strada; Palma Vechio, so consegier e assistente;
Zorzon Parcenevole, come quelo che ha sborsa i primi talenti, per fabricar la
Nave; Timonier el Schiaon, per el pisi fiero e teribile; Capo de Bombardieri
el Tentoreto. .... El Bassan tien in man el batifuogo, per impizzar le Michie
e '1 feral in tempo de note. Sora cargo Paulo Veronese, come quelo che sa
tegnir i conti giusti e dar satisfazion a tuti."
47. Boschini, 4: "Alessandro Varotari Alfier dele soldadesche."
48. Quintilian, The Orator'sEducation, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1979), 451-55.
49. Chantelou (as in n. 17), 52 (July 5, 1665).
50. Malvasia, quoted in Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory
(London: Warburg Institute, 1947), 208: "Chi farsi un bon pittore cerca, e
desia / Il disegno di Roma habbia alla mano, / La mossa, coll'ombrar Veneziano, / E il degno colorir di Lombardia. / Di Michel'Angiol la terribil
via, / Il vero natural di Tiziano, / Del Correggio lo stil puro, e sovrano, / Del
Tibaldi il decoro, e il fondamento, / Del dotto Primaticcio l'inventare, / E un
p6 di gratia del Parmigianino."
51. Piles (as in n. 36), 84-88; and Piles, 1973, 19-21.
52. Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (Paris: Gallimard, 1989),
236-41. Piles gave Guercino and Rubens the highest marks for composition
(18/20); Raphael ranked highest for drawing (18/20), followed by the Carracci, Domenichino, Michelangelo, Polidoro da Caravaggio, and Poussin
(17/20); Giorgione and Titian tied for coloring (18/20); and Raphael dominated with 18/20 for expression, with Rubens and Domenichino close behind (17/20). Very few Os were given, although Jacopo Bassano, Giovanni
Bellini, Palma Vecchio, and Caravaggio all received 0/20 for expression;
Pietro Testa for coloring; and Giovanni Francesco Penni ("Fattore") for both
composition and expression.
53. See Mahon (as in n. 42), 318.
54. Pietro Berettini and Giovanni Domenico Ottonelli, Trattato della Pittura,
e scultura, uso, et abuso loro (Florence: Giovanni Antonio Bonardi, 1652), 26:
"sperimentarsi arduissimo negotio il poter haver unite insieme in un solo
soggetto le buone maniere, che si veggono separate in molti. Pongasi per
esempio un'operante, che voglia in un suo lavoro unire insieme la maniera di
Michel'Angelo da Caravaggio, e la maniera del Cavalier Giuseppe d'Arpino,
certo egli non trovera facile tal'unione, stante la differenza di que' due
valent'huomini nella maniera dell'operare."
55. Scannelli (as in n. 45), 68-71, esp. 70.
56. On Bernini, see Sohm, 2001, 37.
57. Malvasia, quoted in Summerscale (as in n. 35), 75, 304.
58. Seneca, Seneca in Ten Volumes:Ad Lucilium Epistulae morales, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 27781: "We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and
cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and
assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says,
Pack so close the flowering honey, and swell their cells with nectar sweet...
We should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that,
even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing
from whence it came"; "Even if there shall appear in you a likeness to him
who, by reason of your admiration, has left a deep impress upon you, I would
have you resemble him as a child resembles his father"; "'What,' you say, 'will
it not be seen whose style you are imitating, whose method of reasoning,
whose pungent sayings?' I think that sometimes it is impossible for it to be
seen who is being imitated, if the copy is a true one; for a true copy stamps its
own form upon all the features which it has drawn from what we may call the
original, in such a way that they are combined into a unity. Do you not see
how many voices there are in a chorus? Yet out of the many only one voice
results." For the food metaphor, see below.

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SEPTEMBER

2004

VOLUME

LXXXVI

NUMBER

59. Francesco Petrarch, quoted in Kemp (as in n. 41) 4.

60. Matteo Peregrini, Delle acutezze, che altrimenti spiriti, vivezze, e concetti,
volgarmente si appellano (Genoa: Giovanni Maria Farroni, Nicol6 Pesagni, e
Pier Francesco Barbieri, 1639), 136: "Della Amfibolia, o senso doppo, Cicerone disse: ex ambiguo dicta argutissima putantur. La ragione e, perche il senso
doppio forma l'Ingannevole, ch'i fra i fonti dell'Acutezza il pidi vezzoso di
tutti."
61. David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
62. Quintilian (as in n. 48), 477 (12.10.48). On sententias, see Peregrini (as
in n. 60), 16-18, 162-76; on scherzo(joke or game) as a visual parallel for this,
see now Anthony Colantuono, "Scherzo:Hidden Meaning, Genre, and Generic
Criticism in Bellori's Lives," in Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and
Cultural Politics in Seventeenth-CenturyRome, ed. Janis Bell and Thomas Willette
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 239-56.
63. Aristotle, The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, trans. W. Rhys Roberts
and Ingram Bywater (New York: Modern Library, 1984), 191 (3.11).
64. Emanuele Tesauro, in Dooley, 486; on Tesauro's influence on art
writing, see esp. Sohm, 1991, 126, 134-35.
65. Tesauro, quoted in Dooley, 487, 469.
66.Johannes Sturm, De imitationes oratoria (1574), in G. W. Pigman, "Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance," Renaissance Quarterly33, no. 1 (1980):
11.
67. Tesauro, quoted in Dooley, 462; cf. Emanuele Tesauro, II cannocchiale
aristotelico, ed. Ezio Raimondi (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 15. Both Dooley's
translation and Raimondi's edition reproduce Tesauro's Cannocchiale aristotelico in abridged form; correspondences between English and Italian references will be given when possible.
68. See Elizabeth Cropper, The Ideal of Painting: Pietro Testa's Dfisseldorf
Notebook (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 11.
69. Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1954), 16.
70. The term "neo-Venetian" is also a modern invention, referring to
renewed interest in Venetian High Renaissance painting (both its style and
iconographic motifs) in the first half of the seicento; see Anthony Colantuono, "Titian's Tender Infants: On the Imitation of Venetian Painting in
Baroque Rome," I Tatti Studies 3 (1989): 207 n. 2.
71. Malvasia, quoted in Sohm, 2001, 36: "Ebbe in questa la mira Annibale
al tintoretto, ancorche ne' panneggiamenti pif erudito e piu magnifico
cercasse Paolo."
72. Baldinucci, vol. 3, 682: "e volle in questo quadro, siccome in altri, che
fece poi questo pittore, accomodarsi al modo d'inventare schietto del suo
Giorgione"; Bellori, 204: "Sono questi li primi tratti del pennello di Michele
in quella schietta maniera di Giorgione, con oscuri temperati."
73. Boschini, 710: "E queste imitazioni non sono coppie, ma astratti del suo
intelletto. ... si vede in meza figura un uomo con berettone, vestito all'antica,
con abito di raso bianco, che pone la mano sopra un pugnale, che in fatti chi
lo vede dice quello esser gemello di Giorgione."
74. Bellori, 204, adds that Caravaggio's painting was made for Cardinal
Antonio Barberini but that del Monte bought the "contested painting [il

giuoco]."

75. Boschini, in a letter to Leopoldo de' Medici, quoted in Lucia Procacci and Ugo Procacci, "Carteggio di Marco Boschini con il Cardinale
Leopoldo de' Medici," Saggi e Memorie di Storia dell'Arte 4 (1965): 107-8:
"mi racont6 che lo fece ad istanza del gia Sig' Nicol6 Renieri gia anni
trenta due, e che in vero per servire a detto pittore per far tutto il suo
sapere e che lo fece di sua testa senza valersi alcuna cosa, n? meno di
copiarlo da Giorgione."
76. Tesauro, quoted in Dooley; and Boschini, 710: "E queste imitazioni non
sono coppie, ma astratti del suo intelletto" (Boschini then lists the names of
illustrious persons who own della Vecchia's paintings).
77. Tesauro, quoted in Dooley, 468; cf. Tesauro (as in n. 67), 34-35: "Egli
Svero che l'imitare non b usurpar le metafore e le argutezze quali tu le odi
o leggi: per6 che tu non ne riporteresti laude d'imitatore, ma biasmo
d'involatore. Non imita l'Apolline di Prassitele chi transporta quella statua dal
giardino di Belvedere nella sua loggia, ma chi modella un altro sasso alle
medesime proporzioni: talche Prassitele, vedendolo, possa dir con maraviglia
<<cotesto Apolline none il mio, e pur e mio."
78. Boschini, 537: "In Galarie de Principi e Signori / La virth de sto Vechia
b immascherada; / Savendo lu calcar l'istessa strada / De molti ecelentissimi
Pitori; / A segno tal, che ognun certa la crede, / Senza dubio nissun, vera e
real. / Chi vuol pid bel inzegno artificial, / Che ingana quei, che le so tele
vede?"
79. Carlo Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell'arte overo le vite de glillustri pittori veneti,
vol. 1, ed. Detlev von Hadeln (Rome: Societa Multigrafica Editrice SOMU,
1956), 367: "Ma il primo essendosi guasto, fui ridipinto dal Signor Alessandro
Varotari, il quale alluendo al concetto di Battista, ha rappresentato Atlante col
globo celeste in ispalla, appresso il flume Nilo co' bambini intorno e
l'Astrologia, che ffi dal medesimo Atlante riportata nell'Egitto."
80. Annibale Roncaglia, quoted in Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past:
Archaeologyand Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999), 13: "un quadro grande dove era dipinto il Laocoonte."

81. Bellori, 260: "Dipinse il Van Dyck li ritratti del R&medesimo, & il R&A
cavallo ad imitatione di Carlo Quinto espresso da Titiano."
82. Lope Felix de Vega, quoted in Larry Ligo, "Two Seventeenth-Century
Poems which Link Rubens' Equestrian Portrait of Philip IV to Titian's Equestrian Portrait of Charles V," Gazettedes Beaux-Arts 75 (1970): 351.
83. Sforza Pallavicino, quoted in Arturo Zarate Ruiz, Gracidn, Wit, and the
Baroque Age (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 100.
84. There are several versions of Domenichino's Adam and Eve; see Spear,
vol. 1, 239-41, 264-65, 279-81.
85. The commercial implications of replication in 17th-century painting are
discussed in Richard Spear, The "Divine"Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in
the Worldof Guido Reni (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), esp. pt. 3; for
cinquecento comparanda, see Miguel Falomir, "Tiziano: Rbplicas," in Tiziano
(Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2003), 77-91. For the market context of
the pastiches in particular, see Maria H. Loh, "Originals, Reproductions, and
a 'Particular Taste' for Pastiche in the Seventeenth-Century Republic of
Painting," in Mapping Marketsfor Paintings, Europe and the New World, 14501750, ed. Neil de Marchi and Hans Van Miegroet (forthcoming).
86. Denis Mahon, ed., Classicismoe natura: La lezione di Domenichino (Rome:
G. Mondadori, 1996), 185-86; it is proposed that this painting might have
been made when the young Maratti was under the protection of Corinzio
Benincampo, Taddeo Barberini's secretary. There is a second version of the
Susanna painting in the Liechtenstein Gallery, Vienna.
87. Another version of this picture, attributed to Carlo Maratti and Gaspard
Dughet and found in the Chatsworth Collection, exists in which the same
figures reappear in a different vertical composition; see John Byam Shaw,
Paintings by Old Masters at Christ Church Oxford (London: Phaidon, 1967), 90.
88. Francesco Baldinucci, quoted in Oreste Ferrari and Giuseppe Scavizzi,
Luca Giordano: L'opera completa, vol. 2 (Naples: Electa, 1992), 289: "il tutto
d'invenzione bellissima accompagnata da un correttissimo disegno da un
colorito meraviglioso, e da un innanzi e indietro regolatissimo, ed e oppinione che di quadri istoriati e grandi non abbia mai Giordano fatto di
meglio."
89. Tesauro, quoted in Dooley, 468; cf. Tesauro (as in n. 67), 34-35: "Oltre
che, ad ogni parto arguto b necessaria la novita, senza cui la maraviglia
dilegua, e con la maraviglia la grazia e l'applauso. Chiamo io dunque imitazione una sagacita con cui, propostoti una metafora o altro fiore dell'umano
ingegno, tu attentamente consideri le sue radici e, traspiantandole in differenti categorie come in suolo sativo [coltivato] e fecondo, ne propaghi altri
fiori della medesima spezie, ma non gli medesimi individui." On Tesauro and
metaphor, see esp. Sohm, 1991, 126, 134-35.
90. Ricks (as in n. 10), 147.
91. On this event, see Spear, vol. 1, 34; and Evelina Borea et al., eds., L'idea
del bello: Viaggio per Roma nel seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori, vol. 2 (Rome: De
Luca, 2000), 328.
92. Bellori, 309: "Hora per tornare all'opera, non sapendo altri che notarvi,
la condann6 di furto; come tolta l'inventione da Agostino Carracci nella
Certosa di Bologna. Questa voce ffi accresciuta da Giovanni Lanfranco, per la
grandissima emulatione contro Domenico; egli disegn6, e fece intagliare
l'inventione di Agostino da Francesco Perrier Borgogne suo discepolo pratico
all'acqua forte, proclamando il furto. Ma tanto sono differenti li moti, gli
affetti, e l'attioni delle figure, che se pure vi &qualche idea, non merita nome
di furto, ma di lodevole imitatione."
93. Ibid., 304, 307: "In questo quadro Domenichino seguit6 il motivo
d'Agostino Carracci.... MA chi potrebbe mai parlare degnamente, ed A
bastanza d'un opera si stupenda; se si riguarda il disegno, e l'espressione,
queste sono le parti, che sopra ad ogn'altro pittore di questo secolo, vengono
communemente concesse al merito del Domenichino."
94. Ibid., 309: "Onde quest'opera donando quanto pu6 produrre lo studio,
e contribuire un gran genio, con ragione Nicol6 Pussino rapito dalla sua
bellezza soleva accompagnarla unitamente con la Trasfiguratione di Rafaelle
in San Pietro Montorio, come le due piu celebri ravole per gloria del pennello. L'istesso confermava Andrea Sacchi, fin dal tempo ch'egli era ritornato
di Lombia, dilatandosi nelle maggiori lodi."
95. Baglione (as in n. 12), 382.
96. Avviso of Oct. 1, 1614, quoted in Spear, vol. 1, 176.
97. Pietro da Cortona, quoted in ibid., vol. 1, 34 n. 94.
98. Malvasia, quoted in ibid., vol. 1, 35.
99. Luigi Scaramuccia, Le finezze de' pennelli italiani, ed. Guido Giubbini
(Milan: Labor, 1965), 179-80: "mi non percio gli diedero biasimo alcuno,
anziche per havergli esso saputo trasportare, e servirsene cosi bene S tempo,
prestarongli gran lode sapendo quanto sia difficul cosa nella Pittura il far ben
da ladro, e non parerlo" (no one criticized him for [borrowing from the
Carracci], instead they showered him with much praise for having known how
to transfer these [motifs] and to make such good use of them, knowing very
well how difficult it is to be a good thief in painting without appearing to be
one).
100. Giovanni Passeri, quoted in Spear, vol. 1, 35.
101. Ibid.; and cf. Elizabeth Cropper, "Imitation, Novelty, and Theft in
Seventeenth-Century Rome," CASVA (Members'Reports) 5 (1985-86): 49.
102. Antoine Coypel, in Alain Mbrot, ed., Les conftrencesde l'Acadlmie Royale
de Peinture et de Sculpture an XVlIIesicle (Paris: Ecole Nationale Superieure des
Beaux-Arts, 1996), 411: "Le Dominichin a etb obligb de quitter Rome et
Naples pour y avoir fait des ouvrages trop bclatants. Quelle destinbe! Travail-

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503

ler pour ne se faire que des ennemis! Son fameux tableau de SaintJer6me de
la Charite que l'on regarde a present comme un des plus beaux tableaux du
monde l'a rendu victime d'une injuste cabale faite par un cardinal qui
protegeait d'autre peintres; il n'y avait dans Rome qu'une voix pour decrier
ce chef-d'oeuvre au moment qu'il a parut, tant il est vrai que beaucoup de
gens courent apres les sentiments des autres et croient ce qu'ils entendent
dire plut6t que ce qui est.Je me souviens que le cavalierBernin m'a dit dans
majeunesse en voyant ce tableau qu'il demandait pardon a Dieu de n'avoir
jamais os6 dans ce temps-ladire ce qu'il en pensait, de peur de se brouiller
avec ce grand seigneur qui etait un de ses amis" (Domenichino had to leave
Rome and Naples for having made works that were too spectacular.What a
destiny!To workonly to make enemies! His infamous painting in S. Girolamo
della Carita,which we now see as one of the most beautiful paintings in the
world, made him a victim of an unjust conspiracy led by a cardinal who
protected other painters. In Rome, there was but one voice that condemned
this masterpiece when it first appeared. It is true that many people follow
other people's sentiments and believe what they hear rather than what is true.
I recall that Bernini told me as a child that on seeing this painting he asked
God's forgivenessfor not daring to say what he thought at that time for fear
of falling out with the great lord who was one of his friends).
103. Passeri (as in n. 16), 4: "Bench&in quelle Istorie egli si servisse
d'alcuna figuradel Carraccidella GalleriaFarnese,non e per questo degno di
biasmo, ne dee incolparsi di debolezza nell'invenzione, o di mancanza d'un
buon ricapito:poiche in quel suo furto fece scoprire una saggia avvedutezza,
che seppe valersi d'una attitudine molto a proposito per il suo bisogno,
applicandola cosi adattamente. Diede puo sempre chiarissimi segni d'un
profondo sapere, e di un gusto perfettissimoin tute le opere sue, riducendo
le ad un fine esattissimo,che le rendeva bene stabilite, e concluse."
104. Ibid., 8.
105. Nicolas Poussin, "Osservationidi Nicol6 Pussino sopra la pittura,"in
Bellori, 462: "Lanoviti della Pitturanon consiste principalmente nel soggetto
non piaiveduto, ma nella buona, e nuova dispositione e espressione, e cosi il
soggetto dall'essere commune, e vecchio diviene singolare, e nuovo."
106. Torquato Tasso, DiscorsidelSignorTorquatoTasso(Venice: G. Vasalini,
1587), 2-3: "la novita del poema non consiste principalmente in questo, ci6
che la materia sia finta e non pia udita; ma consiste ne la novita del nodo e
de lo scioglimento de la favola.Fu l'argomento di Tieste, di Medea, di Edippo
da vari antichi trattato;ma variamentetessendolo, di commune proprio, e di
vecchio novo il facevano; si che novo sari quel poema in cui nova sara la
testura dei nodi, nove le soluzioni, novi gli episodi, che per entro vi saranno
traposti,ancora che la materiasia notissima,e da altri prima trattata"(novelty
in poetry does not consist primarilyin this, that is, that the subject matter is
invented and has never been heard before; instead it consists above all in the
noveltyof the weavingand the development of the story.The plot of Thyestes,
Medea, and Oedipus was treated by various ancient writers,but weaving the
story differently with one's own agency, one makes from something old
something new so that the poem in which the weaving of the threads is new,
in which the solutions are new, and in which the episodes are new shall also
be new. All the while they will be transposed even though the materialsare
well known and have been treated previouslyby others); on Poussin'ssources,
see Anthony Blunt, "Poussin'sNotes on Painting,"Journalof the Warburg
and
CourtauldInstitutes1 (1937-38): 344-51.
107. Vocabolario
dellaCrusca(Venice: G. Alberti, 1612), 548degliAccademici
49: "Cosanuova, insolita, e che avviene improvvisamente."The term novit&h
originated in the 14th century as a term referring to "news"(an equivalent to
the modern word notizie).Novith then appeared as a critical term in the
Domenichino controversy and the Marinisti debates in the 1620s, and it
eventuallybecame associated with "originality"in the 18th century; see Battaglia (as in n. 6), vol. 11, 613-14.
108. Monsu Capellano, Discorsodi Monsu'Cappellano... Nel qualed&il suo
pareresopral'AdonePoemaDel CavalierMarino(Venice: Giacomo Sarzina,1625),
139-40: "Lanovita ch'b naturale, e anco di due sorti. La prima perfetta nella

would be called perfect in its imperfection, as when one attaches a body of

one nature to another body of another nature, such as the satyrsof antiquity
and, in our own time, figures that are half man and half dog. Novelty in this
case is excessivelymonstrous. The second could be called imperfect, as when
a body of one nature is coupled to another body of similar nature without
however completely uniting and merging the two, so that they do not seem
like two distinct operations which are independent one from the other, as in
the case with two-headed men, hermaphrodites, and infants joined at the
head. In this case, novelty is purely monstrous without being excessive).
110. For example, Tesauro (as in n. 67), 67-68: "Edi qui nasce la maraviglia, mentre che l'animo dell'uditore, dalla novith soprafatto, considera
l'acutezza dell'ingegno rappresentante e la inaspettata imagine dell'obietto
rappresentato"(The marvelousis born in that moment when the spirit of the
listener, of the novelty considers the wit and acuity of the thing that is doing
the representing and the unexpected image of the object that is represented)
and 83-84: "Per6 che un obietto rattamente illuminato dall'altro ti vibra
come un lampo nell'intelletto, e la novith cagiona maraviglia,la qual e una
reflessione attenta che t'imprime nella mente il concetto" (an object quickly
illuminated by another shines before you like the lamp of the mind, and
novelty causes marvel, which is an attentive reflection that engraves the
conceit in your mind).
111. Aleandri, 65: "variandonecosi felicamente la descrittione sempre con
nobile novith di frasi, e di concetti di modo che maggior diletto, e maraviglia
produce, che se diverse materie trattarse."
112. Stigliani, 50-51: "Cadeper reiterazione,perche non varian&nodi, ne
scioglimenti, ma si serve spesso de' medesimi, sicche chi legge un caso pu6 far
conto d'averne letto cinque, o sei, e di non aversia meravigliaresalvo che del
primo, se quel non & rubato, come quasi sempre suole essere." Contra,see
Aleandri, 66-68; and Scipione Herrico, L'occhialeappanato,dialogodi S. H. nel
qualesi difendel'Adonedel CavalierG. B. Marinocontral'Occhialedel CavalierT.
Stigiliano(Messina:Giovanne Francesco Bianco, 1629), 21.
113. Stigliani, 27-28: "I1vero principio doveva in questo Poema essere....
l'innamoramento d'Adone, il vero mezzo i travaglidi quello, ed il vero fine il
congiugnimento con Venere. ... la presente favolanon sia un tutto integrale,
quale dovrebbe essere s'avesse A dilettare, e quale la desiderano i predetti
maestri:ma sia un tutto aggregato,il quale per so S cosa sazievolissima.I1tutto
integrale S quello, il quale componendosi distintamente di parti certe, e
limite, non pu6 essere n&scemato, n&accresciuto, n&mutato, ch'egli non si
distrugga, o almeno non si danneggi."
114. Ibid., 28-30, esp. 29, on the link with painting: "E testificato similmente la pittura, la quale, se ben pare, ch'oggidi abbia pur qualche valente
artefice ha per6 perduta affatto ancor'ella la sua scienza" (This can also be
seen in painting,which has lost all its art in spite of the few good men that are
around today); and 33, where Stigliani invokes Horace: "Humanocapiticervicempitor equinan ." Aleandri, 14, responds that several artists in Rome
... Stigliani'scharge and that in any case "he probablyknew
would disagree with
as much about painting as he did about poetry."
115. Stigliani, 104: "quando il concetto non &involato da fuori, ma nasce
dalle stesse viscere..... Puossi questa violar per ladroneccio, e cosi fa perpetuamente l'Adone, carpendo i concetti da diversi scrittori,ma piu'spesso dalle
mie Rime, e dal Mondo Nuovo."
116. Ibid., 117: "unlibro di disegni stampati,nel qual non sia figuraveruna,
ma separati membri (cioe occhij, orecchie, braccia, gambe, e simili) fatti da'
pittori per insegnare a' giovani di disegnare." Stigliani was referring to
Odoardo Fialetti's1608 manual, IIveromodoetordineperdisegnar,and Giacomo
Franco's 1611 De excellentiaet nobilitatedelineationis,both of which were illustrated by Palma Giovane;see Sohm, 1991, 124-25; idem, "Lacriticad'arte del
seicento: Carlo Ridolfi e Marco Boschini,"in La pitturanel Veneto:Il seicento,
vol. 2, ed. Mauro Lucco (Milan: Electa, 2000-2001), 733-35 on the significance of Stigliani and seicento aesthetic theory; and David Rosand, "The
Crisisof the Venetian RenaissanceTradition,"L'Arte11-12 (1971): 12-24, on
Fialetti and Franco.

sua perfettione, quando una cosa non mostruosa, che non e giamai stata, &
viene ad apparire, come all'hora, che in un luogo, dove non mai si e vista
acqua, si vede forgere in un tratto qualche fonte di acqua viva; l'altra meno
perfetta e, quando in una cosa gia trovato, doppo qualche tempo si venisse a
scoprire alcuna virtus particolare, della quale niuno se ne fossero accorto
avanti" (There are two sorts of novelty that are natural. The first is perfect in
its perfection and occurs in a nonmonstrous thing that has never existed
before and has just appeared, as when one suddenly sees water rising forth in
a place that has never had water before. The other type is less perfect and
occurs when one reveals a particular virtue in an object, which has already
been discovered for some time, but that nobody noticed before).
109. Ibid., 138-39: "Quella, che e contra natura, e di due sorti. La prima si
chiamarebbe perfetta nella sua imperfettione, che e all'hora, che a un corpo
d'una natura vien congiunto un'altro corpor d'un'altra natura; come si son
visti de'Satiri nell'antichita, & a nostri tempi de'mezzi huomini, & mezzi cani,
& all'hora la novita e in eccesso di mostruosita. La seconda si potrebbe dire
imperfetta, & e quando a un corpo d'una natura si accoppia un corpo della
medesima natura, senza pern unirsi, & confondersi, tanto che non apparischino due operationi distinte, & independente una dall'altra, come si son
veduti de' mostri d'huomini con due testi, d'Ermafroditi, & di fanciulli
attaccati per la fronte; & all'hora la novith S puramente mostruosa senza
eccesso" (There are also two sorts of novelty that are unnatural. The first

117. Aleandri, n.p.: "Del titolo del libro"; and Herrico (as in n. 112).
118. Robusto Pogommega, Le strigliate a Tomaso Stigliano (Nuremberg: Joseph Stamphier, 1642), cxi: "Ascoltami, Stiglian da buon' amico, / Senza
montar in colera e furore, / I1 tuo Mondo per me non vale un fico. / E tu
pensi ritrarne oro & honore. // Lo stile S basso, insipido, ed antico,/ E privo
di sapere, e di sapore.
119. Masoto Galistoni, I1 Vaglio Critico ... Sopra II Mondo Nuova Del Cavalier
Tomaso Stigliani da Matera (Rostock: Isaac Steinman, 1637): "Autori Che
Hanno Scritto, E Stampato Contro l'Occhiale del Sig. Cavalier FrS Tomaso
Stigliani" (Authors who have written and published against Sig. Cavalier Fri
Tomaso Stigliani's Occhiale) and "Autori Che Hanno Scritto, E non hanno
Stampato Contro l'Occhiale del Sig. Cavalier Fri Tomaso Stigliani" (Authors
who have written but not published against Sig. Cavalier Fri Tomaso Stigliani's Occhiale) (Galistoni, an anagram of Stigliani's name, is the pseudonym of
Lodovico Angelico Aprosio).
120. Herrico (as in n. 112), 30-31: "non S biasmevole il furto, quando si
prende da Poeti Latini, o Greci, e da scrittori d'altro linguaggio .... lo prender da gli antichi non si dice furto, ma pii) tosto imitatore."
121. Ibid., 29: "quando la favola rubato S migliorata, et in piu belli versi
descrita cosi S l'astutia di Marino."
122. Ibid., 30: "In questo si deve non scusare, ma lodare molto il Marino,
per haver saputo cavare l'oro dal fango."

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123. Daniello Bartoli, "Dell'uomo di lettere difeso ed emendato" (1645), in

Trattatisti e narratori del seicento, ed. Ezio Raimondi (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi,
1960), 330: "Non &rubare sapere quasi con un po' di leggiera schiuma di
mare mescolar il seme celeste del suo ingegno, si che quella ch'era inutile e
vile materia divenga non meno d'una Venere, formandosene componimento
di piiu che ordinaria bellezza."
124. Marino, quoted in Dooley, 459; cf. Giambattista Marino, La Sampogna
(Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 1993), 52: "le statue antiche et le reliquie
de' marmi distrutti, poste in buon sito et colloate con bell'artificio, accresscono ornamento et maesta alle fabriche nuove."
125. Vincenzo Foresti (Nicola Villani), L'uccellatura di V. F. all'Occhiale del
cavaliere fra T. Stigliani contro l'Adone del cavalier G. Marini e alla difesa di G.
Aleandro (Venice: Antonio Pinelli, 1630), 68: "Quanto poi appartiene a i furti
Ma non per
del Marino, io confesso, che egli ne ha fatti pifi di millanta....
tanto gli ha egli saputi per lo pii ben colorire, e ben celare, adornandogli,
ampliandogli, e componendogli: si come appare nella favola di Filauro, e di
Filora; della quale parte da Eliodoro prendendo e parte da altri, ne ha
composto un tutto suo; quale etiamdio da voi Signore Stigliano non & stato
riconosciuto per roba d'altri."
126. Aleandri, 89-90: "E se pure s'havesse A credere, che dal Marini fosse
veramente letto il Mondo nuovo; e imitatone alcuna cosa, la quere la dello
Stigliano non sarebbe quella dissimile, che un goffo pittore da scabella faceva,
non ha molt'anni poscia che havendo dipinto un quadro di Latona, che se ne
stava co' suoi bambini presso al lago, nel quale i vilani diventan ranocchie,
l'havea fatto in si bella maniera, ch'a pensa la sembianza di que' bambini da
quella delle ranocchie si discerneva il che veggendo un valente nostro pittore,
volle la stesa favola in altro quadro figurare; e havendolo fatto in eccellenza
diede per ci6 occasione al pittore goffo d'andarsi dolendo, che l'inventione
gli fosse stata rubata, e cercatosi d'offuscargli la gloria si che ne nasceva quel
riso, che hora da' suoi rammarchi fa nascer lo Stigliani" (Even if we were to
believe that Marino actually read the New World and imitated something
from it, Stigliani's complaints would not be dissimilar to those made by a
foolish painter of Scabella [a type of three-legged chair and also the name of
a musical instrument worn on the foot] who made a painting of Latona with
her children by the lake in which their enemies were turned into frogs. He
painted this in such a "beautiful" style that one could hardly distinguish the
children from the frogs. A worthy painter seeing these figures wanted to
represent the same story in another painting. Having done this extremely

well, it caused the foolish painter to whine that the invention had been stolen
from him and that [the worthy painter] tried to steal his glory; this was so
obviously silly because [the foolish painter's paintings] were unworthy and his
attitude was laughable, just like Stigliani's).
127. Baldinucci, quoted in Ingeborg Hoesterey, Pastiche: Cultural Memoryin
Art, Film, Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 3:
"Dicevano che egli era un pasticciere die quadri; ma gli uomini di buon gusto,
e privo d'ogni passione non lascivano pero mai di provvedersi de' suoi
pasticci."
128. Roger de Piles, L'idLedu peintre parfait, ed. Xavier Carrhre (Paris: Le
Promeneur, 1993), 111: "les Tableaux qui ne sont pas ni Originaux, ni
Copies, lesquels on apelle Pastiches de l'Italien, Pastici, qui veut dire,
PNits: car comme les chose diffhrentes qui assaisonnent un Pit6 ne sont
mel6es ensemble que pour faire sentir un seul gofit, de mime toutes les
imitations qui composent un pastiche ne tendent qu'a faire paroitre une
v6rit6."
129. L'Abbe Dubos, quoted in Littre (as in n. 6), vol. 5, 1533: "On appelle
communiment pastiches les tableaux que fait un peintre imposteur en imitant la main, la manihre de composer et le coloris d'un autre peintre, sous le
nom duquel il veut produire son ouvrage."
130. Francesco Milizia, quoted in Battaglia (as in n. 6), vol. 10, 791: "Pasticci
non sono n6 originali n6 copie, ma composti di differenti parti prese di qua,
di 1A."
131. Denis Diderot, quoted in Littr6 (as in n. 6), vol. 5, 1533: "Je suis ffiche
contre ce mot pastiche qui marque du mepris et qui peut decourager les
artistes de l'imitation des meilleurs maitres anciens."
132. Seneca (as in n. 58), 281.
133. Paolo Cortesi to Poliziano, passage discussed in Pigman (as in n.
66), 7.
134. Marino, cited in Sohm, 1991, 122.
135. Felicien Fagus in 1901, unnamed critic in 1914, and Robert Delaunay
in 1923, quoted in Rosalind Krauss, The Picasso Papers (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1998), 201, 96. For a detailed account of the relation between
pastiche and modernism, see Alastair Wright, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 1.
136. Krauss (as in n. 135), 210.
137. See discussion and illustrations in ibid., 142ff. and 204ff.
138. Ghrard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 146.