The Doria Table - by Louis Godart

by Federico Giannini (Instagram: @federicogiannini1), published on 18/05/2013
Categories: Books / Disclaimer

Before I begin my review of the book La Tavola Doria by Louis Godart, published by Mondadori, I feel obliged to thank the author for quoting me in a passage of the book in which he discusses Leonardo da Vinci’s Battle of Anghiari, the events of which constitute one of the main cores of the volume. But let us go in order.

What, meanwhile, is the Doria panel? It is the painting around which the whole book revolves: a panel that some believe to be a Leonardo autograph and others a more or less late copy, whose vicissitudes are told to us by Godart in the book’s first pages. Recorded in the seventeenth century in the collections of the Doria family of Genoa, where it arrived as a result of gift exchanges with the Medici of Florence (Giovan Carlo Doria and Cosimo II were good friends), in 1940 the panel was sold by the Neapolitan branch of the Doria family, following an auction, to Marquis Giovanni Niccolò De Ferrari of Genoa, and just two years later it passed into the hands of a Florentine antiquarian. Following several events that brought the Doria panel illegally out of Italy, the painting arrives in Japan, at the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum. The museum, however, learns that the work is notified (that is, in simple terms, the Italian state recognizes it as being of high cultural interest and for this reason it cannot be sold abroad) and therefore cannot exhibit it. Therefore, an agreement is reached between the Japanese museum and the Italian state: Japan donates the work to Italy, which in return grants to have it on loan for limited periods of time.

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The Tavola Doria is inextricably linked to the events of the Battle of Anghiari in the Palazzo Vecchio: the painting, which in the seventeenth-century inventories of the Doria collections was moreover assigned to the hand of Leonardo da Vinci, is one of the works through which we know what Leonardo’s design for the wall of the Palazzo Vecchio should have looked like (Godart, in his analysis, also offers us all the other drawings and engravings taken from the Battle of Anghiari). We then know that Leonardo himself painted a preparatory panel depicting the Battle of Anghiari: what we are trying to figure out is whether the Doria panel is the preparatory work executed by Leonardo, or whether it is instead a copy.

The Doria Table by Louis Godart

Historians, Godart lets us know, are divided: some consider it to be a copy by a 16th-century master and some, like art historian Friedrich Piel, leave open the possibility that the painting is by Leonardo’s hand. Even the author of the book declares himself a possibility. In the chapter entitled Who Painted the Tavola Doria?, Louis Godart summarizes the reasons why it can be assumed that the work may have been, at least in part, done by Leonardo. The reasons given by Godart are to be found in the seventeenth-century inventories that assign it to Leonardo da Vinci (and assign a really high economic value to it), in the scientific analyses that have revealed a way of preparing the panel similar to that adopted for Leonardo’sAdoration of the Magi, in the stroke that in certain parts of the preparatory drawing is the same as that attested in several Leonardo drawings, in the fact that Leonardo made a preparatory panel for the Battle of Anghiari, in certain stylistic features of the painting. Bottom line: we cannot say with certainty that the Doria panel is the work of Leonardo da Vinci, but neither can we close the door to the possibility.

The book closes with two chapters devoted to a lengthy reflection on the media implications of certain research that has little scientific merit but gets prominence in the media. Starting with an assumption: says Godart that “those engaged in laboriously advancing knowledge of history and art often find themselves cut off from the channels of communication under the absurd pretext that science does not make ’audience’.” Thus adducing examples from theories that have concerned the history of ancient art, a subject well known to Godart since the author of the volume is an expert on Aegean civilizations, one inevitably ends up devoting a chapter of the book to Maurizio Seracini’s research in the Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio, in search of the Battle of Anghiari. Events that we at Finestre Sull’Arte have talked about at length. Citing studies and articles (including my own dedicated to the “Search Finds” inscription published on our website), Godart arrives at the conclusion (“easy,” according to the author) that Seracini’s search is defined as a “vain hunt,” a search with by far more media flavor than scientific and philological. With an important and wise reflection: “those who want to defend the seriousness of scientific research have a task: they must promote the dissemination of knowledge by convincing people that it is the adventure of rigorous scientific knowledge that is the most beautiful of adventures. It is not necessary to invent mysteries [...] to thrill the public.”

Louis Godart’s book stands precisely as an excellent and clear work of popularization, suitable for a wide audience that thanks to La Tavola Doria can familiarize itself not only with the contents of the painting (a chapter is also devoted to the possible political messages of the table) and with Leonardo’s art, but also with the procedures of art historical research, which are often unknown to most. And although the reasons for attributing the Doria table to Leonardo may seem shaky and insufficient (but then again, Godart himself does not go off the deep end), with The Doria Table we read a book that is certainly intelligent, one that distances itself from art history understood as a way of sensationalism with unlikely scoops.

Then there is another merit to be found in this book by Louis Godart: in addition to being, as already mentioned, a good example of popularization, the volume makes the public realize that a painting can be important even without it being an original. Copies play a decisive role in art-historical research (and thanks to the examples we find in the book we will understand why), and this aspect goes against the “big name” cult that interests the media talking about art history. Because art history is not made up only of those three or four great artists whose works have become almost pop icons (think of the Mona Lisa or David). Art history is not the worship of the great masterpiece that cancels out everything else: it is something much more serious, rigorous, profound, and fascinating, and Louis Godart’s La Tavola Doria goes precisely in this direction.

La Tavola Doria
by Louis Godart
Mondadori, 2012
163 pages

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