Subproject 04
Ritratto di Marco Boschini
Discrepant Traditions, ‘Old’-‘New’-Hybrids and Genre Mixtures in Venetian Painting and Art Theory of the Seicento
Prof. Dr. Valeska von Rosen (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)
Under a modified title, the subproject seeks to investigate how traditions are constructed and how the recourse to these traditions is staged in the 17th-century Venetian discourse on art. This discourse becomes tangible both in actual artistic practice and in the form of theoretical and historiographical texts. Both types of media – image and text – thus constitute the objective of the repositioned subproject, whose emphasis is now twofold: on the one hand, it concentrates on the pictorial practice of Pietro della Vecchia, Francesco Maffei and Giovanni Battista Langetti, painters who mainly worked in Venice, but who travelled widely in Italy and were well connected at a supra-regional level; on the other hand, it examines the theory and historiography of art with a focus on the most important text of the Venetian Seicento, namely Marco Boschini’s monumental didactic poem, the Carta del navegar pitoresco (1660). Written in rhyming verse in the Venetian dialect, the poem operates on the boundary between poetic and technical discourse. While the project’s initial concern with theoretical treatises is to be continued, taking account of pictorial media will open up new perspectives in line with the research group’s general awareness of the need to integrate a comparative vantage point on various types of media. It thus falls to the realigned subproject to focus on the issue of how the negotiation of traditions and the staging of innovation/novelty in visual media become manifest in the first place, how the recourse to various inventories of tradition and the emphasis on ‘newness’ can be communicated in visual form, and in what shape a specifically image-based discursivity can be encountered in this context.
The link between the project’s two main lines of inquiry results from Boschini’s focus not only on the golden age of Venetian painting, the 16th century, but also on the works of his contemporaries – the ‘new’ or ‘modern’ style, as he calls it. What Boschini is interested in is the question of how the artists of his generation engage with the various strands of tradition in Venetian painting that he reflects in great detail; how they update traditions, or how they try to break away from them in order to demonstrate ‘newness’ or ‘modernity’; and how, in so doing, they position themselves in relation to the style of the naturalisti that was so successful all over Italy and in several other European countries. The painters most comprehensively discussed by Boschini include Pietro della Vecchia, Francesco Maffei and Giovanni Batista Langetti. Consequently, their works take centre stage in the project’s investigation of the specific ways in which the recourse to heterogenous traditions is realised. These processes are dependent on generic conventions, but they also involve a continuous emphasis on innovation/novelty. In order to engage with this phenomenon, there will be a close link between theory and practice in the repositioned subproject.