Pittoresco: Marco Boschini, His Critics, and Their Critiques of Painterly Brushwork in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy.

One of the particularly welcome features of Philip Sohm's Pittoresco is its presentation to a wider audience of the art criticism of Marco Boschini, a minor artist but more interesting letterato of Seicento Venice. Boschini's monumental Carta del navegar pitoresco, published in 1660, is a long poem written in Venetian dialect; organized into eight venti, it presents itself as a dialogue between "un Senator venezian deletante, e un profesor de Pitura," in which--as its titular explanation continues--the Venetian ship embarks upon the high seas of Painting to demonstrate its absolute dominance. In charting the achievement of Venetian painting of the Cinquecento, Boschini found a descriptive and critical language adequate to the task of appreciating the pittura di tocco e di macchia of the great masters of that golden past: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Jacopo Bassano. Boschini's Venetian Marinismo celebrates the open brushwork of those painters with an ekphrastic skill that derives its particular descriptive strength and critical relevance from his own studio experience. For all his literary flamboyance, his imagistic exuberance, and shameless campanilismo, Boschini speaks as an artist; his pen smells of the studio, and it is just that professional experience that informs his writing with such authority and conviction.

Brushwork, what Venetian critical usage termed colorito, hardly fit comfortably into the aesthetic that dominated Renaissance writing on painting, that set of values founded on the centrality of disegno in both theory and practice. Visible marks of the painter's brush could only seem the signs of haste and lack of finish; such marks were characteristic of the sketch and acceptable in that context, but not in a proper painting. Although in the sixteenth century both Venetian partisans like Pietro Aretino and critics like Giorgio Vasari recognized the expressive potential of the independent stroke, not until Boschini's Carta was a sustained effort made to articulate a full aesthetic of the brush stroke. Sohm's summary of its basic tenets reveals the apparent modernity of that aesthetic: brush-strokes, he writes, are to be seen

as a record of the act of painting, what might be poetically described as the flight of a painter's hand or the traces of past gestures. These marks remind us of the painter's physical existence and his habits of movement. They record the responsiveness of paint to his touch and provide an intimacy with the artist as we watch his work progress sequentially, savoring it stroke by stroke (xv).

Sohm thus offers an exposition of a particular critical attitude, one founded in response to Venetian painting of the Cinquecento; fundamentally subjective and resistant to academic formulation, it is nonetheless an attitude that accompanies the development of painting in Europe and America to our own day.

But Pittoresco has another purpose and method: "As its title intimates, this book is an etymological study of a word (pittoresco) and its relatives (abbozzato, macchiato, sprezzato, spegazzoni, etc.)." And Sohm goes on to explain the larger scope of his study:

It grew from a larger lexicographic project, still in progress, that will catalogue the many terms used in Italian art criticism to differentiate and describe styles of painting and painters. By examining these semantic units in detail, I have tried to reconstruct the verbal preconditions of looking at brushwork.

Rehearsing the visual preconditions, rooted in sixteenth-century Venetian practice, leading up to Boschini, Pittoresco then follows the subsequent reaction to the painterly aesthetic and, more to Sohm's point, to the enabling vocabulary of its literary apologetics. Sohm traces the reception of Boschini's pittoresco in the late seventeenth century and the more strenuous objections to the concept and to painterly brushwork in the eighteenth, especially among the Arcadians.

This philological approach suggests an historical continuity, promising a certain kind of historical control, but it also reveals a certain flaw in Sohm's project. For it is not at all clear that the history of the usage of a word--pittoresco in this case--does indeed reveal deeper or more resonant truths. Sohm recognizes the genuine critical impulse that inspired Boschini, partisan and passionate as it was, and that infuses his writing with such vitality. He acknowledges the sense of academic decorum that distances subsequent writers from the Venetian. And he further acknowledges the major semantic shift that renders pittoresco as "picturesque" rather than "painterly," effectively bringing this lexical history to conclusion. Art historical scholarship, especially in Renaissance studies, has been giving increasing weight to the word, making the rhetoric of criticism its subject rather than the images that provoked such criticism. It is to Sohm's credit that, even as he contributes to such rhetorical scholarship, he evinces some discomfort with it. Like Boschini, in this fine book he too recognizes the truth of the painterly macchia.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY