An excursus on notebooks in art history. Emanuele Pellegrini's book

An essay by Emanuele Pellegrini, of great density and wide range for how medium-sized the volume is, places at the center of a series of investigations the multifaceted reality of the Notebook, a privileged place where live observations, ideas and memories are fixed in various forms: a physical object that countless hands have wielded for different needs, and to which pertains a range of designations that have taken on various shades of meaning over time.

In the wake of a historical research attentive to the anthropological value of the object and its constant presence in culture and everyday life, Pellegrini follows a path that is articulated over time and in the diversity of situations, moving slowly toward figurative language and toward the model/travel/sketchbook, and, within that, toward the changing relationship between the sign of the image and the sign of writing.

The theme, addressed by contributions from various eras punctually scrutinized, is investigated in the multiple branches, having, however, a qualifying starting point in a selection of lexical references pertinent to Europe and the Mediterranean basin, and in an exhaustive review devoted to structures (the format), materials (the support of drawings), tools, and modes of use. This is an aperçu that prepares for the in-depth study of the earliest attestations of the Notebook as a collector ofdee, especially starting with the most famous and investigated one, the Book of Villard de Honnecourt.

Some of Villard’s drawings, studied by Pellegrini in the articulation of the outline, in the variety of views, and in the ascertainment of the cultures that transpire in them, reveal different ways of seeing, of receiving and of hoarding, to the point of foreshadowing that extraordinary method (practiced but not theorized) of seeing in order to know, which will have in Leonardo the most convinced, stubborn and not always recognized asserter. Among artists, some protagonists will seize the opportunity to manifest the ultimate creative drive, others, and Giorgio Vasari in primis, will tend to compress the inventive impulse and to institutionalize its use towards a discipline aimed at operational activity. Precisions scattered throughout various parts of the volume help to unravel problematic knots that lurk within seemingly simple designs: such as lavvio to see, in the sharp profile of Villard’s Swan, not the natural silhouette of the great bird, but the synthesis of its ability to move with full mastery between earth, water and sky; or to grasp in the effigy that Holbein draws from a sculpture of Jeanne de Boulogne, Duchess of Berry, not so much a portrait as the suggestion of an intangible beauty imprisoned in stone.

If the Livre de portraiture belongs to the area of work carried out in solitude, as the support of a peregrinatio of which we can only glimpse the trace and motivations, other personalities and other Notebooks reveal the presence of the artist in society, and the hypisodic surfacing of a commitment to sharing, and therefore aimed not so much at satisfying the needs of practice, regulation and didactics, but aimed at documentation and free research, always with an eye to the presence of an ideal public. Pellegrini punctually captures the moment when, between the late fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth century, copy and creation, sides of the same coin, begin to coexist and mix on the sheets in a growing process of hybridization.

Dominant personality from this point of view, Pisanello, in whose vast graphic oeuvre the observance of tradition and invention are happily inseparable: from the punctilious visuals of the Hanged Men to the Horse Heads with Engraved Nostrils, in which meticulous preservation does not exclude finesse and unprecedented acrobatics of the stroke. A master who stands as a hinge between certain exemplifications that the author proposes with lucid choice: the peculiarity of the sketch, a fleeting and incisive intervention that must be distinguished from the progressive execution of the drawing from the model; the consolidation in several voices of a grammatical stylization, where certain modules such as the cross-signature face find adequate recognition; then the area of stronger depth of the study dall’antico: a phenomenon so far-reaching, the latter, as to extend through multiple variants to the modern age, and which, at its initial stage, is emblematically summed up in the name of Ciriaco dAncona and his Commentaria, lost in the original, but fortunately preserved through fragments and partial copies.

Among the artists, Pellegrini points to the exemplary cases of Francesco di Giorgio and Giuliano da Sangallo, both architects but also masters and all-round men of culture, in whose folios the presence of the word grows, confirming a scholarly imprint that, though founded on a medieval tradition, asserts itself widely between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and which will see an intensification of the relationship between artists, men of letters and philosophers, also promoting a peculiar language to which Pellegrini looks carefully, keenly noting in it the emergence of a tendency to critical intervention; as opposed to collections of drawings and sketches projected primarily toward workshops and artistic activity, the sixteenth-century notebook looks rather to a circle of devotees of historical and philological research, and literature, among whom there is an awareness of operating out of a need for preservation and recovery; a path that promotes innovative forms of collecting: no longer and not only the collection of precious stones, coins and other rarities, but the fragment that stimulates the search for the identification of a figure, story or object, and its meaning.

With full possession of the historical-critical affair, the author pushes his inquiry toward those who addressed the problems of visual language through the verbal medium, identifying in Ghiberti the most representative voice of an approach that describes and analyzes limmagine availing itself only of the word. From the attention paid to the Commentaries emerges the broadening of a casuistry in which traits of equivalence and even mutual support between visual and verbal language are manifest: whether the Taccuino attests to acute experimental research (Leonardo’s little booklet), or whether diaristic limpronta prevails (Durer’s travel diaries or the intimate tale tinged with dinquietude of Jacopo Pontormo’s Libro mio).

After following an overall chronological thread in the first part of the text, in the second Pellegrini shifts his investigation toward the modern age, aiming his lens at topics that take the form of a series of short essays. It is worth mentioning the example of the notebook that, recovering the ancient didactic imprint and flanking the instances of the Academies, studies the visual language in the perspective of teaching: from the closed workshop to a technical-normative treatise to be associated in turn with the flourishing of the coeval theoretical treatise, that is, from the rib of the Notebook, the Book of models takes off, a formula that loses the personal imprint of famous precedents and acquires a marked institutional character, also availing itself of the decisive support of the engraving. The projection toward a cultured and demanding public, which by now includes the figure of the expert, signals a production increasingly dilated in size and systematic scope, from Scamozzi to Inigo Jones to Pirro Ligorio.

All this does not, however, overwhelm the tradition of the Taccuino dartista, that is, the manuscript (later a printed book) that, while open to teaching, sets a method legitimately linked to a personal style. This is the case with some famous bequests, such as Rubens’ Notebook, which although destroyed by fire fortunately survives through fragments and copies; and with two notebooks pertinent to the work of a master who was Rubens’ pupil, such as Anton van Dyck: two Notebooks (one of dubious autography) that are valuable in bringing the discourse back to the original structure of the notebook, that is, to its portable dimension, and here Pellegrini’s refined analysis insinuates itself into the stratifications of the sign and the thickening of the ink, reconstructing the author’s discontinuous drafting, the plausible original outline, and the resumption from memory, at a distance from the pause at the work that attracted the artist’s attention and oriented his digressions.

Concluding and completing the short review of voices from Northern Europe, Pellegrini introduces the multifaceted personality of Joshua Reynolds, active as a painter and as an art theorist, that is, one of the most representative witnesses of eighteenth-century culture of European range. However, in the numerous sketchbooks attributed to him, which have come down to us through a complicated conservative affair, the novelty is represented by the graphic interpretation of which the author of the Discourses on Art makes ample use: the more synthetic and interpretative the reproduction drawing is, the more valid and unprecedented will be the schematization Reynolds draws from it, and which validates his commitment as commentator and treatiseist. From this experimental extension of the written text that flanks the image (the blank page sometimes attests to its multiplicitous absence), Pellegrini will draw some of the most interesting conclusions: It is an important moment for the history of art criticism and for the history of vision... Indeed, it will be precisely the co-presence of visual and verbal languages that will make the notebook of the nineteenth-century connoisseur an unsurpassed working tool.

In contrast to the ample space devoted for a good part of the volume to notebooks of various types in whose pages artists deposited the results of their experiences and work, Pellegrini’slexcursus proceeds by also giving space to those who, lacking natural gifts and an education in the analysis of the image, nevertheless illustrated their texts by making use of figuration: no matter how elementary the solutions (the example of early Christian Rome described by Panvinio in the second half of the seventeenth century is worthwhile) the support of the image nevertheless proves valuable, and sometimes indispensable. Interpreting a casuistry that also contemplates a reference to scientific illustration, the author therefore reiterates the effectiveness of systematic recourse to a linguistic double track.

Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, two great intellectuals, Diderot and Goethe, both engaged in the study and reflection on art, confirm a dualism that is reflected in contemporary art criticism. The contribution of the former, actively present in the Salons, is expressed above all through words, whereas the latter makes use of drawing with skill and lively participation: although Goethe’s graphic exercise is delivered to unbound papers, Pellegrini acutely detects in them a proceeding that, in association with the text (see the Journey to Italy), reflects the original structure of the artist’s Notebook, the object at hand in which the movements, pauses, reflections and acquisitions of the possessor are poured.

From the Notebook to art history: the truly massive complex of readings and studies that prompted Pellegrini to work on the most intimate aspects of artistic elaboration (exemplified on the cover by a workshop boy seated on the floor drawing while resting a booklet on one knee), the treatment looks out over the beginnings of modern art history: Ruskin’s refined visual investigations, Giovanni Morelli’s pragmatic use of drawing, the mixture of sketch and word in the Crowe-Cavalcaselle workshop that is still striking in its lucidity and effectiveness, are just a few of the examples probed by Pellegrini, which often betray lineluctability of drawing. And over all lirruzione of photography and camera: moments that provoked revelatory reactions and that only provisionally conclude the sharp path traced by La memoria in tasca.

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