Dietrich / GiovanniMorelliAndRobertoLonghiAtPommersfelden

Giovanni Morelli and Roberto Longhi at Pommersfelden

Giovanni Morelli and Roberto Longhi at Pommersfelden

How much do art historians need to know about ornithology? Well, I don’t know, but having to deal with birds might be one way to become interested in Baroque art. Or the other way round: Having to deal with Baroque art might be one way to become interested in birds, art historians and the way we look at nature. Or: Having to deal with the biography of Giovanni Morelli might be one way to become interested in one particular bird: the African bearded vulture. Now, good gracious, how is that?

Well, one of the few things that we do know about Giovanni Morelli’s earliest childhood is that his father, who died, when young Giovanni was five years old, had this particular hobby of stuffing birds. Young Giovanni, one might imagine, grew up among stuffed birds. We do not know if his father allowed him to play in or with this cabinet of stuffed birds (probably not, you know how these adults are), but it might be that in his earliest childhood Giovanni Morelli’s fascination for nature and especially for animals started to grow.
What we do know is further that young Giovanni Morelli did visit Franconia in 1837/38, after having completed a doctoral degree at Munich. And he did visit Nurimberg, Schloss Weissenstein at Pommersfelden and probably Würzburg. His friend, the artist Bonaventura Genelli, at Munich, got to hear of young Giovanni’s discoveries. And although we don’t have the original letter – from Genelli’s reply to »friend Morell«, that we have, we do know that Giovanni Morelli had spotted an African bearded vulture somewhere on this trip and had provided his friend with a probably enthusiastic description of it. And this is how the Morellian African bearded vulture might about have looked like:

But where to spot this magnificent bird (see for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiUcnpfN7mk – this however is a bearded vulture/Lämmergeier/Bartgeier in a zoo) might be a trivial question, but biographers have to answer such questions, and this is how we become interested in Baroque art, ornithology and the way art historians do look at nature (if or if they do not read allegories as well, especially allegories of nature).

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Frankly, I have not found the African bearded vulture yet. He might be hidden somewhere within a wall of Baroque allegorical paintings. It might be that it crowds the sky somewhere in frescoes of Tiepolo at Würzburg or somewhere takes away a Ganymed. And I have looked hard to find it in the Pommersfelden staircase ceiling fresco, done by a little known Swiss artist named Johann Rudolf Byss (or Bys – the best work on Byss calls him Bys). And while researching Byss I came to know that this artist was sort of a real bird’s expert.
Because he did paint landscapes with birds, very much like those you find in Giovanni Morelli’s own collection that he assembled in his later years; he did paint hunting trophies, a courtyard with chickens, allegories of air (Luft) with all sorts of birds, paradise landscapes with all sorts of birds and and expulsions from paradise with all sorts of birds
But if Byss did ever paint an African bearded vulture, again, I do not know (or is it the very bird just above the head of the lion?). (Well, if someone would happen to find out with certainty, just send me an email. I’ll give you credit in my forthcoming Morelli book.)
While now doing this kind of research I was getting quite interested in these ceiling frescoes, due to their strange mix of ornithology and zoology in general, mythology, theology (?) and – allegorical – geography. Look at this magnificent ceiling fresco by Byss (and it is also a magnificent photograph, by the way, by Mr Kanngiesser).

(Picture: Klaus Kanngiesser)

Here he have it all in one frame. The Imax movie about birds and about flight demonstration sqadrons and whatever a sky may be crowded of; and if you look at it long enough (until you neck hurts) you might not even want to go to an Imax theatre anymore to see this:

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What has this all now to do with Roberto Longhi?
Well, it is well known among art historians that are concerned with the art of Italy and whose first language is not Italian that Roberto Longhi, art critic, but also writer, is an author particularly hard to translate. In fact Longhi has been little translated, which is a pity, and his status outside of Italy might be a completely different one than in his home country. And we are concerned here with one of Longhi’s writings, with one of his juvenilia, with a scherzo, written in 1922, and named: Un ignoto corrispondente del Lanzi sulla Galleria di Pommersfelden (see Scritti Giovanili I, p. 475-492). And this all because Morelli and Longhi are usually thought to represent rather opposits within the history of art history and connoisseurship, and this conventional thinking we would like to question.

Roberto Longhi (http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Longhi ; http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/longhir.htm), who obviously thought to have little in common with Giovanni Morelli himself, was certainly not aware that the latter, in his youth, had been actively writing various scherzi himself. Two of this writings have been edited in the mean time, the Balvi magnus of 1836 and the much longer Miasma diabolicum of 1839, but never been translated into Italian. And we already see that it is questionable that Morelli and Longhi had nothing in common. The truth is that Longhi, who had little information on Morelli at his time, except from the latter’s books, was simply mistaken, because he did not have a full picture of Morelli’s personality. At any rate: Morelli, especially in his youth, showed a passion wanting to be a writer, very similar to the passion of Roberto Longhi to play with literary means. And secondly: why would the two men have wanted to possess a work of one and the same rare artist, namely Giacomo Ceruti, called Il Pitocchetto (http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Ceruti), if they had absolutely nothing in common?

We don’t know if Roberto Longhi would have been interested to hunt the above mentioned bearded vulture at Pommersfelden. But it is worth imagining that Morelli would have read Longhi’s scherzo and vice versa, i.e. that Longhi would have been able to at least taking a look into the Balvi magnus and the Miasma diabolicum (not to mention the at least seven plays that Morelli actually did write, but this is still another subject). But the purpose of our, so to speak, zoological scherzo improvised above is also something very serious. We would like to imagine an encounter between Giovanni Morelli and Roberto Longhi, we stage this at Pommersfelden, to ask simply why these two art historians have been thought as representing opposits. And before we come to that question we have to recall a silent, but basic drama within Morelli’s life, the drama of switching languages due to switching between cultures.

Several times, if we manage to count correctly, three times, Giovanni Morelli switched the main language he was thinking in and working with. From Italian to German (the language the two scherzi are written in) and back. And back again. Because for his art historical writings, although having become a senator of Italy in 1873, he again did choose the German language. Some youthful plays he did write as a student were written in German (probably not extant) and some later comedies in Italian (some, apparently, extant). And, all in all, the hidden drama of Giovanni Morelli’s biography goes on, a drama that at his lifetimes was the seeking for a stable cultural identity between German and Italian culture, and in its aftermath a drama of not being known, nor for the drama of a complicated struggle for this identiy, nor for the writings that were part of and expressions of that struggle. This is the actual reason why Giovanni Morelli is, except for his books that have (if not all of them, i.e. not all of the last editions) been translated into Italian, not much known, as to his actual personality, in Italy. Because to know him well, one has to read his writings in German, his letters in German, and to follow the often not wanting to go public of a complicated personality that was torn beween the Italian and German culture.

[to be revised/completed as to how Longhi and Morelli have been seen in the past and are presently seen in contemporary art history and connoisseurship; compare for the moment my thoughts on the Berensonian culture of connoisseurship, seen against the backdrop of what Morelli actually had wanted and envisioned]

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If we would think now to have Longhi and Morelli meet at Pommersfelden, where Morelli especially did like, as he wrote to Genelli, the studies of the head of a »negro«, it is possible that they would have found a bond in their literary interests, for example in Shakespeare (because the liking of the »negro« head, for Morelli, was certainly associated with Othello, like Longhi, in his Caravaggio monograph did refer, on his part, to Macbeth). But one could also be tempted too think of these connoisseurs as being open for a mainstream pragmatism of connoisseurship, with Morelli on the one hand, shyly remarking that this might not be enough, while, on the other hand, Longhi might have thought that formalism and connoisseurship, rationalism and connoisseurship, never are going to fuse completely.

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A note to the introductory Morelli section: Right now (early summer of 2014) he have this controversy at the city of Basel about having an aquarium at Heuwaage, Basel, or not (some environmentalists would like to see rather an Imax theatre there instead of the aquarium and have proposed this as an alternative). To the left we give one example of how the aquarium project is imagined by those who have envisioned, planned and visually simulated it.

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NOW COMPLETED: THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH

The Giovanni Morelli Monograph by Dietrich Seybold

Go To:

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | HOME

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | Spending a September with Morelli at Lake Como

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | A Biographical Sketch

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | Visual Apprenticeship: The Giovanni Morelli Visual Biography

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | Connoisseurial Practices: The Giovanni Morelli Study

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | The Giovanni Morelli Bibliography Raisonné

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | General Bibliography

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI VISUAL BIOGRAPHY:

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI VISUAL BIOGRAPHY | Visual Apprenticeship I

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI VISUAL BIOGRAPHY | Interlude I

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI VISUAL BIOGRAPHY | Visual Apprenticeship II

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI VISUAL BIOGRAPHY | Interlude II

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI VISUAL BIOGRAPHY | Visual Apprenticeship III

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI STUDY:

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI STUDY | Cabinet I: Introduction

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI STUDY | Cabinet II: Questions and Answers

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI STUDY | Cabinet III: Expertises by Morelli

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI STUDY | Cabinet IV: Mouse Mutants and Disney Cartoons

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI STUDY | Cabinet V: Digital Lermolieff

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