GOING FOR BAROQUE Into the Bin - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

3.
Pompeo
Portrait
Girolamo Batoni
(Italian, Rome, 1708-1787)
of a Young Man, ca. 1760-65
Oil on canvas, 97%
x 69 Va in. x (246.7 175.9 cm)
Inscribed
(on books):
roma
/ an:e mo:; vite de
/ pittori;
odissea
/ di / omero / T:ii: ...
(Rome ; Lives of the
Painters; Odyssey
of Homer, Volume
2)
Rogers Fund, 1903 (03.37.1)
he was not familiar. And then, there was the sensual
beauty
and high-blown
rhetoric that an
artist such as Guido Reni
brought
to his
altarpieces.
Goethe
recognized
he was
going
to have
to put
some effort into these pictures
in order to to begin
understand what their creators
intended. It took, perhaps,
a jolt of the unfamiliar to make him realize how much of his taste
was merely
conditioned response.
The part played by reproductions?and guidebooks?in sustaining
the reputations
of
artists and
our
shaping responses to their works would make an interesting study.
Readers of
E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, published
in 1908, will remember what fun he had with
the cult of art and the necessary assistance of guidebooks (such
as the infamous Baedeker,
which constituted every tourist's vade mecum).
On her first trip
to Florence, Lucy Honeychurch
sets out, guidebook
in hand, to visit the great thirteenth-century
Franciscan church of Santa
Croce, where she anticipates seeing
the frescoes
by Giotto and experiencing
those "tactile
values" about which Bernard Berenson, the most influential writer on Italian art at the time,
had written. Her
companion,
the liberated Miss Lavish, urges her to abandon the book. "Tut,
tut! Miss
Lucy!
I hope
we shall soon
emancipate you from Baedeker. He does but touch the
surface of things.
As to the true Italy?he
does not even dream of it. The true Italy
is only
to
be found
by patient
observation."
Far more illustrious and better informed
people
than Lucy Honeychurch
have
depended
on guidebooks
to direct them to the great works of art. By
the eighteenth century visitors on
the grand
tour could turn to a work such as Roisecco's Roma Antica e Moderna
(perhaps
the
guidebook displayed
in Pompeo
Batoni's Portrait
of a Young Man or
[fig. 3])
Mariano Vasi's
Itinerario... di Roma. Both
provided ample information on the major sights,
whether a clas
sical
sculpture
in the Albani collection or Raphael's
fresco of the prophet Isaiah in the
church of Sant'Agostino. When, in 1858, Nathaniel Hawthorne made his first visit to Italy,
it
was with one of Murray's
Handbooks as his companion (citations
here are from the Handbook
for Travellers in Central Italy [1867] and Handbook of Rome audits Environs [1869]). Of
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