Malvasia's Life of the Carracci: Commentary and Translation. (Reviews).

Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Malvasia's Life of the Carracci: Commentary and Translation.

Comm. and Trans. Anne Summerscale. University Park, PA The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. xv + 14 color pis. + 35 blw pls. + 395 pp. $85. ISBN: 0-271-01899-2.

In this volume, Anne Summerscale provides an excellent translation and commentary for one of the most fundamental and difficult primary source texts for seventeenth-century European art history. First published in 1678, Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia's Felsina Pittrice ("The Paintress Bologna") includes the biographies of Bolognese artists from the twelfth century down to his own time. Malvasia (1616-1693) was a Bolognese lawyer and man of letters, who carefully researched the lives of these artists, collecting and publishing primary sources and gathering anecdotal information from eyewitnesses, weaving these into rivetingly detailed biographical narratives. Summerscale's book presents only one of the "Lives," the story of Ludovico Carracci (1555-1619) and his cousins Agostino (1557-1602) and Annibale (1560-1609), founders of the Carracci academy of Bologna, and by all accounts inventors of the new naturalistic style we call the Baroque.

The first part of Summerscale's book, titled "Context," could practically serve as an introduction not only to the Life of the Carracci but also to the Felsina Pittrice as a whole. For in addition to an analysis of the structure and content of this particular biography, it provides an excellent overview of Malvasia's education, the origins of his biographical project, his reliability as a historical source, the nature of his literary style, the history and reception of the book, and the literary genre of artists' "Lives" in the seventeenth century. For those just entering into the study of Malvasia, this introductory section is a true bibliographical treasury, bringing together the indispensable primary and secondary sources, and especially featuring the numerous publications of Giovanna Perini, whose findings are put to excellent and often highly original use.

Part Two contains Summerscale's English translation. Malvasia himself contrasts his "low," rough and rambling style with the "high," classically dignified prose of his Roman counterpart Giovanni Pietro Bellori, whose Vite had been published somewhat earlier, in 1672. Malvasia's prose is surely the harder to translate, as suggested for example by the typically tortuous line: "Ne rammentare gia qui vogl'io la irragionevole golosita di quel gatto da quelle finte carni deluso, quando l'unghie anch'ei stendendovi, altro non ne ricavo che confusione ...," which Summerscale accurately and wittily renders as: "I am scarcely inclined to mention in detail here the deranged greed of the cat that was taken in by those simulated pieces of meat and on stretching out its claws only clutched at confusion ..." (277). In her notes Summerscale observes that, beyond Malvasia's other rhetorical distortions, this line exemplifies the trope of praeteritio, highlighting precisely what the writer pretends to exclude. With commentary easily outweighing text, Summerscale must have faced some difficult choices in deciding what to comment on, and one might quibble with some of her decisions. In the text of Lucio Faberio's funeral oration for Agostino Carracci, which Malvasia reproduces in its entirety, there is, for instance, an important passage where Faberio lists the disciplines studied in the Carracci academy -- life drawing, anatomy, proportion, perspective, trompe l'oeil, anatomy, and literary invention -- but this passes without comment. In most cases, however, the notes address the major points in a completely satisfying and informative way.

Malvasia's Life of the Carracci is of interest to all scholarly readers in early modern European studies, and the translation makes it accessible to a wider audience, potentially including advanced undergraduate and graduate students, or even a general audience. Indeed, the biographer's clever characterizations of the Carracci (including hilarious accounts of Annibale's and Agostino's practical jokes and witticisms) make for amusing reading, and the inspiring stories of their brilliant theoretical, practical and pedagogical achievements are, after all, no less entertaining than historically valuable. Covering only three of Malvasia's 123 artists, and without a critical edition of the Italian text to accompany the translation, Summerscale's book is perhaps of limited use to specialists. But the extraordinarily high quality of Summerscale's work makes one wish she could join a larger team of scholars to produce a complete critical text accompanied by a similarly excellent introduction, translation and commentar y.