Pierre-Jean Mariette

Ignazio Enrico Hugford (1703-1778) was a painter of English origin who was trained under Anton Domenico Gabbiani. As art dealer and connoisseur, he was among the most important collectors of works on paper in eighteenth-century Florence and had prolific and wide-ranging contacts throughout Europe. He was in close touch with Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri, and his correspondents also included Pierre Jean Mariette and Giovanni Gaetano Bottari. Among the over three thousand drawings bequeathed to his heirs and acquired in 1779 for the Uffizi by its director Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni, one hundred and five sheets were attributed to artists of non-Italian schools. The attentive descriptions of Pelli’s inventory, the characteristic framing applied by Hugford and his inscriptions on some of the sheets have made it possible to identify almost all of these drawings, now in the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi. Research has also revealed Hugford’s talent as connoisseur, his interest in certain artists, and how Northern European drawings were regarded in the Florence of his time. This group includes sheets attributed to the Germans Dürer and Holbein, the Flemings Spranger and Lucas van Leyden, the French Callot and La Fage, and the Portuguese Francisco Vieira. Although many of these attributions are no longer acceptable, the identification of individual drawings has made it possible to confirm their authorship, and in some cases to suggest new attributions.

Grande conoscitore e amico dei pittori, egli stesso dilettante d’arte, Anton Maria Zanetti di Girolamo (1680-1767) è ben noto pure per il suo album di caricature, una galleria di trecentocinquanta indimenticabili ritratti: dai famosi divi dell’opera agli anonimi popolani, irrisi senza distinzioni. Dopo il catalogo della mostra del 1969 e sulla base della bibliografia, la schedatura iniziata nel 2008 e condotta grazie al contributo fondamentale di Save Venice Inc., con la partecipazione dell’UNESCO Office in Venice e del Francis Haskell Memorial Fund, ha ricostruito la genesi della raccolta, confrontandola con i simili album del console Smith (Windsor Castle, collezioni reali) e di Francesco Algarotti (Gerusalemme, Israel Museum). Sono molte le novità del volume, edito da Lineadacqua, dedicato alla memoria di W. R. Rearick: le attribuzioni a Marco Ricci caricaturista, la cronologia e il montaggio dei disegni sulla pagina, l’identificazione di alcuni effigiati e del postillatore tardo settecentesco, i legami con le arti figurative, il teatro e la musica, aspetti che gettano nuova luce su Zanetti, sulla sua rete cosmopolita, su Venezia.

A note by Pierre Jean Mariette concerning drawings by Rembrandt owned by Prince Eugene of Savoy is published here for the first time. With other evidence, it establishes that an important group of sheets by the artist and his school in the Albertina, Vienna, came from Eugene’s collection by way of the Imperial Court Library. This is the oldest confirmed provenance for Rembrandt drawings in the Albertina and one of the earliest known provenances for drawings by the artist.

This contribution publishes a drawing in the Albertina that shows a skilful copy of Rembrandt’s etched portrait of Jan Six. The drawing’s early context of preservation can be reconstructed on the basis of archival material: It once formed part of the Rembrandt oeuvre which Jean Mariette and his son Pierre Jean assembled in 1717–18 for Prince Eugene of Savoy. There the drawing was openly declared to function as a substitute for the etching which – because of its great rarity – could not be supplied at the time. The presence of this drawing in the Albertina today and an analysis of the extant final draft of the Mariettes’ catalogue for Prince Eugene show that the interpretation of a document first published in 1969 needs to be revised. Contrary to the conclusion proposed then and in subsequent articles, Eugene’s Rembrandt oeuvre had not been bought for the Dresden print cabinet in 1743 but entered the imperial library in Vienna in 1738.

Explores the iconography of Henry Ferguson's Poussinesque landscape which includes a large fictive bas-relief after an "Adoration of the Shepherds" by Girolamo da Treviso, then attributed to Raphael. Identifies the patron as most probably the abate Salvatore Maria Rangoni; traces the fortuna critica of the "Adoration" from prints by Bloemaert and Pietro del Po commissioned by G.B. Franceschi through the literature on Raphael, with particular attention to Mariette and Bottari; explains the presence of St Charles Borromeo in a painting that was most probably intended as an advertisement .

This article focuses on a drawing, regarded by 18 th-century amateurs as a masterpiece by Michelangelo, and serves as a point of departure to illuminate the amateur's fascination with the artist's hand. This self-referential representation of the artistic process attracted much comment among connoisseurs. As virtually all amateurs had their say on the meaning of « les mains de Michel-Ange » the drawing sheds further light on the objects of desire which informed the amateur's discourse and the mediality such discourse needed in order to join word and image.

Résumé : Cet article porte sur un dessin, considéré au xviii e siècle comme un chef-d'oeuvre de Michel-Ange, et qui sert ici de point de départ pour éclairer la fascination de l'amateur pour la main de l'artiste. Cette représentation autoréférentielle d'un procédé artistique attira de nombreux commentaires parmi les connaisseurs. Comme tous avaient leur mot à dire sur la signification des « mains de Michel-Ange », ce dessin permet de mettre en lumière les objets du désir qui informent le discours de l'amateur et son médium spécifique, entre texte et image.

The correspondence from 1717-19 between the Parisian print and book dealer Jean Mariette and his son Pierre-Jean Mariette – today far better known as a connoisseur than his father – is a remarkable source of information. Originating in a milieu where ‘tacit knowledge’ has always been of great importance, the letters provide insights into the expertise of specialized dealers and its genesis, and they are also valuable documents for the history of collecting. The Mariettes’ untiring efforts to assemble artists’ oeuvres for the print collection of Prince Eugene of Savoy involved a variety of different practices, material and mental processes which are retraced here on the example of the Raphael oeuvre. At the same time, the present contribution demonstrates that the art market is a fruitful but still neglected source for the history of scholarship. Building on an investigation of artists’ oeuvres, of the catalogues compiled by the Mariettes, and of their later reception by Adam Bartsch, this article will also show that the history of the catalogue raisonné is a province of media history.

« […] en vérité c’est à Venise qu’il faut venir pour trouver de véritables peintres ». C’est par ces mots que le jeune Pierre-Jean Mariette s’enthousiasme pour l’art vénitien en 1718. La cité lacustre et ses territoires de terra ferma attirent au début du XVIIIe siècle de nombreux artistes français comme Louis Dorigny, Jean Raoux, Guy Louis II Vernansal et Nicolas Vleughels. Un surprenant moment d’échange se noue, marqué par une réciprocité intense. La régence de Philippe II d’Orléans (1715-1723) en est le point d’orgue. Soutenus par le mécénat des grands financiers et encouragés par la prospérité économique du Système, Rosalba Carriera, Gianantonio Pellegrini et Antonio Maria I Zanetti s’installent à Paris. Peu de temps avant, Sebastiano Ricci leur avait ouvert la voie. Qu’ils soient Français à Venise ou Vénitiens à Paris, ancrés dans une carrière à long terme ou seulement de passage, que recherchent-ils si loin de leur terre d’origine ?
Venise rencontre Paris, le Carnaval rencontre la Fortune. Mais la Folie de 1720, caractérisée par l’éclatement chaotique de la bulle spéculative et l’abandon des chimères financières de John Law, bouleverse ce fragile édifice. En cette aube des Lumières où les frontières s’atténuent pour favoriser la mobilité des hommes et des œuvres, une première République des Arts se dessine. L’auteur brosse le portrait de deux écoles artistiques tournées l’une vers l’autre, de leurs moments d’éclats communs à leurs inéluctables désaccords. Participant au renouveau pour une période injustement appelée « de transition », ce livre met en lumière la densité des échanges transnationaux et esquisse un peu plus les contours d’une première Europe esthétique avant d’être politique.

Il Recueil de peintures antiques, uscito a Parigi tra il 1757 e il 1760, rappresenta una pietra miliare nello studio della pittura antica nel XVIII secolo; nonostante il successo della pubblicazione presso i contemporanei, che ebbero a definirlo “le livre d’antiquités le plus singulier qui paraitra jamais” (Ch. Le Beau), rimane ancora oggi una delle opere meno note di Caylus.
Dopo aver rinvenuto a Parigi trentatré acquarelli di Pietro Santi Bartoli, Caylus li fece incidere al tratto e acquarellare in trenta esemplari, che, per la prima volta, sono stati in gran parte rintracciati dagli autori del libro.
Si propone qui una rilettura del Recueil e della sua fortuna attraverso l’esame della corrispondenza di Caylus – e dei suoi collaboratori Mariette e Barthélemy – con gli amici italiani padre Paciaudi e monsignor Bottari, corrispondenza che ha permesso di conoscere più da vicino la storia dell’edizione, la sua distribuzione, la sua fortuna presso i contemporanei. I bellissimi acquarelli di Bartoli ritrovati da Caylus sono oggi conservati nella Bibliothèque nationale de France, rilegati nel manoscritto che Caylus donò a Luigi XV nel 1764. A questi sono da aggiungere i trentadue esemplari del Royal Institute of British Architects di Londra che appartenevano in origine ad un’unica serie, acquistata dall’Accademia di Francia a Roma per conto di
Luigi XIV tra il 1685 e il 1694, come si è potuto accertare sulla base della documentazione archivistica reperita a Parigi.
I sessantacinque acquarelli di Bartoli, che riproducono affreschi antichi rinvenuti nelle vigne della Roma tardobarocca, riuniti insieme in questo libro, sono pubblicati per la prima volta a colori e analizzati in base al contesto archeologico di provenienza, in una sintesi che attraversa due secoli fondamentali per lo studio della pittura antica.

“The public therefore here in question, is limited to persons that read, and have a knowledge of theatrical entertainments, who see or hear people talk of pictures, and who have acquired by some means or other, that discernment which is called the Taste of Comparison whereof we shall presently have occasion to speak more at large.” Pursuant to abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos the public – a circle of amateurs – is reliant on the connoisseur‘s judgement that bases on a „goût de comparaison“, a taste of comparison. In my paper I seek to analyze how comparison in early connoisseurship on art is physically, materially and contextually situated. The prime concern is to study the preconditions, merits, implications, and limits of comparative vision. I argue that connoisseurs expand specific skills that besides a certain vocabulary („Sciences des mots“) enabled them to systematize and categorize the vast heritage of artistic artifacts. I will discuss particular strategies of comparison as for instance in Pierre-Jean Mariette‘s albums with rearrangeable engravings or in Gabriel de Saint-Aubin‘s tiny sketches in a Louvre exhibition guide.

This contribution publishes a newly discovered etched portrait of Pierre I Mariette, the founder of the “Mariette Dynasty“, of whom no portrait has been known so far. It forms part of the collection of prints supplied by Jean Mariette and Pierre Jean Mariette to Prince Eugene of Savoy today in the Albertina, Vienna; another impression of this etching is preserved in the portrait collection which Pierre Jean Mariette had arranged for the same patron, now in the Austrian National Library, Vienna. A reading of the correspondence between Jean Mariette and Pierre Jean Mariette, who was then in Vienna (1717/18), sheds light on the circumstances under which the portrait in the Albertina entered the prince’s collection. The letters also elucidate the genesis of the portrait catalogue today in the British Museum compiled by Pierre Jean Mariette for the same patron. Finally, the article sets the new portrait, made by the sitter’s grandson Jean Mariette after François de Poilly, in the context of other known portraits of members of the Mariette family.

Between the 16th and the 18th century, as the study of drawing emerged as a scientific procedure to write the history of European art, material cuts have transformed the way in which drawings were collected and studied. This essay examines various types of cuts, such as those operated on the drawings in the collections of Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) and Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774), and offers an explanation on how such treatment shaped the interpretation of scholars and connoisseurs through time. The case of the loose sheets by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) shows the impact of the cuts made since the 18th century on the study of an artist’s drawn oeuvre, and particularly on the ranking of pictorial genres.
Open access here: http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php?id_articolo=4082

This was originally an article manuscript that is now being transformed into a book project. Although focus is on four key figures, Philipp von Stosch, Pierre-Jean Mariette, Anton Francesco Gori, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, it is really a comprehensive history of eighteenth-century scholarship, collecting and popular reception, including the very interesting cultural phenomenon of the dactyliothecae (major gem cast producers such as Christian Dehn, Philipp Daniel Lippert, James Tassie, the Paolettis and others). The initial project phase was generously funded by the Fondazione Famiglia Rausing (Rome).