Print Collecting

Este libro trata de la apreciación y la valoración de los grabados antiguos, en especial en relación con sus aspectos estéticos, técnicos y expresivos. A partir de una selección de obras de la colección del autor, realizadas por los más destacados grabadores de la historia, se nos explican los logros artísticos de las estampas en su realidad material, como obras que poseen determinadas cualidades visuales que podemos admirar. Muchos artistas del pasado demostraron su talento creando complejas y sutiles imágenes a través del grabado, un tipo de arte, sin embargo, no siempre bien comprendido y que suscita dudas y malentendidos. El arte del grabado antiguo pretende contribuir a su mejor conocimiento, y ofrece las claves para poder apreciarlo y disfrutarlo.

International conference dedicated to reproductive print between Italy and France from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The main purpose is to reflect on the role of print in the circulation of models between the two countries, as well as exchanges, influences and innovations that were developed thanks to painters, engravers and patrons. Scientific committee: Fabio Fiorani, Maria Antonella Fusco, Francesca Mariano, Véronique Meyer, Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò.

Convegno internazionale sulla stampa di traduzione tra Italia e Francia dal XVI al XIX secolo. Si analizzerà il ruolo dell’incisione nella circolazione dei modelli tra i due Paesi, così come gli scambi, le influenze e le innovazioni che vennero a crearsi grazie a pittori, incisori e mecenati. Comitato scientifico: Fabio Fiorani, Maria Antonella Fusco, Francesca Mariano, Véronique Meyer, Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò.

Colloque international sur la gravure de traduction entre l’Italie et la France du XVIe au XIXe siècle. Il portera sur le rôle de la gravure dans la circulation des modèles entre le deux pays, et se penchera notamment sur les échanges, les influences ou les innovations créées par les peintres, graveurs et mécènes. Comité scientifique : Fabio Fiorani, Maria Antonella Fusco, Francesca Mariano, Véronique Meyer, Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò.

The present article analyses the role of the Italo-French sculptor Baron Carlo Marochetti as a collector in London between 1848 and 1867. The figure of this many-sided artist (being sculptor, amateur and designer) has been for so long neglected and is here rediscovered and presented.
Marochetti’s originality and his approach to the collecting activity have been explored together with his great involvement in the lively and artistic London panorama. Baron Marochetti was an insatiable hard worker and he spent his life between Italy, France and England leading a great number of projects and commissions. He was actively involved in the art-life of his time, in the creation of the main Public Collections and Museums (i.e. National Gallery and South Kensington Museum) and member of several Art Clubs (i.e. Fine Art Club). The artist’s varied and eclectic collecting activity in England is here discussed taking as a starting point the dispersal of his collection following his death in 1868.

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.

Il saggio si propone di delineare le dinamiche di formazione, la struttura e il destino della notevole collezione di stampe (circa 10mila) composta da Alberico Belgioso d'Este nell'ultimo quarto del '700, effettuando acquisti sul mercato internazionale tra l'Inghilterra, Vienna e la Francia, in una complessa rete di relazioni con i collezionisti e gli eruditi del suo tempo, come gli abati Carlo Bianconi, e Pietro Zani, al quale fu affidato l'ordinamento della raccolta. La fisionomia della collezione ci è restituita dal prezioso inventario post mortem curato di Giuseppe Bossi, con fine senso del conoscitore di stampe. Una parte è confluita nelle civiche collezioni milanesi tramite l'acquisto Trivulzio del 1935 e oggi si conserva alla Raccolta Bertarelli di Milano.

Many eighteenth-century collectors of etchings and engravings housed their prints loosely in portfolios, or mounted them in bound volumes (known as ‘print albums’). The portfolios or albums were often located with books, in a personal library. In the last half of the eighteenth century, ‘print rooms’ – created by arranging and adhering prints onto walls – were a fashionable mode of high-end English domestic interior decoration. Adhered prints included a broad selection of eighteenth-century print production: from Hogarth’s satirical works to Piranesi’s vedute. Commercially-produced paper borders were available to ‘frame’ the prints, and tradesmen of renown could be engaged to artfully arrange prints for discerning households.

Why and how did prints leap from the secluded spaces of portfolios and print albums onto walls? While only a handful of extant print rooms remain, the multi-disciplinary nature of the print room – as a locus of print collecting and display, interior decoration, craft practice and marketing – means that the phenomena is a fascinating insight into the re-interpretation and re-location of prints in the eighteenth century.

This paper provides an introduction to the eighteenth-century print room in England and Ireland, within the inter-connected contexts of collecting, creativity and commerce. Referring to evidence from archives, diaries and house guides of the period, responses to print rooms by eighteenth-century audiences are also explored.

The collection of prints within Bath Spa University collection at Corsham includes a group of Italian prints from the sixteenth and seventeenth century. I have worked on the inventory of this group of prints in order to create a hypothetical exhibition. This essay will take the form of a scholarly catalogue, in which I will explain the possible role of this print collection as well as its significance.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, "print rooms"—created by pasting prints and paper ornaments directly onto walls—were a short-lived mode of fashionable English interior decoration. Concurrently, collections of prints continued to be bound into albums or stored in portfolios in private libraries. Although they took different forms, print rooms and print albums shared characteristics that marked them as "enlightened" cultural practices: both featured prints arranged in preconceived aesthetic or intellectual schemes that presented elite, pan-European cultural subjects, imagery, and ideas. Prints in albums or prints on walls could therefore operate as "museums of images"—each format ostensibly encouraged viewers to respond emotionally or intellectually to prints. Yet there is strong evidence to suggest that prints in print rooms and in print collections were perceived differently. This essay draws on the predominantly unpublished journals and correspondence of English collector Elizabeth Seymour Percy, first Duchess of Northumberland (1716–76), to reveal the very different ways in which she described prints in each setting. For her, albums or portfolios of prints were edifying "spaces of enlightenment," while prints in print rooms performed merely a decorative function.

The chapter investigates Archbishop Goold’s collection of I migliori Disegni del Barbieri da Cento detto il Guercino, engraved in 1764 by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Francesco Bortolozzi. Collected as part of a larger group of Piranesi volumes, these reproductions of exquisite Italian drawings bear witness to Goold’s fascination for the late Baroque, a key feature in the Archbishop’s collecting activity. By looking at Guercino’s drawings and their connection with canvases recently discovered as part of Goold’s collection, the chapter highlights how the Archbishop’s taste was informed by a preference for the Roman and Bolognese painting schools and specifically for what Wittkower defined as ‘classical Baroque’: a style developed in Rome by the Bolognese pupils of the Carracci Academy during the first and the fourth decades of the seventeenth century.

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.

Pioneering print collector and curator, Samuel P. Avery (1822–1904), donated a collection of 17,775 prints, including works by Cassatt, Whistler, Turner and Manet, to establish the Print Collection of the New York Public Library in 1900. Prior to his donation, Avery curated print exhibitions at the Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grolier Club, and Union League Club. Through an examination of Avery’s persistent efforts to exhibit exemplary prints in museum and gallery settings – including an unusual collection of prints by women – this article provides evidence that Avery’s ground-breaking curatorial efforts led to the institutionalization of print display in New York.

What motivated early modern collectors to mount their prints in albums and what was the purpose of compiling a comprehensive collection of print albums? To answer these questions is quite challenging, although albums have indeed served as most popular devices of print storage in early modern Europe. However, the changing pattern of both, print collecting and print conservation, have to a great extent led to their dissimilation. Fortunately, the print album collection of the Princes of Waldburg-Wolfegg has been preserved to this day and allows us an insight into its original compilation and intention. Under the aegis of Truchsess Maximilian Willibald (1604-1667), almost 300 print albums were compiled, mirroring his wide field of interest.
This talk intends to review the collection's encyclopedic overall structure and focuses on some exemplary albums to define their role as a visually operating 'archive of knowledge'. The concept of a print collection as 'image archive' can be traced back to the sixteenth century with the theory of collecting (Samuel Quiccheberg, 1529-1567), which also influenced collectors at the time of Max Willibald, for example the French abbé Michel de Marolles (1600-1681). Therefore, the Wolfegg collection can be perceived as a typical example for the era and may allow us to draw general conclusions about early modern print collecting.

L’intervento si incentra sulla collezione di stampe del marchese Luigi Malaspina di Sannazzaro (1754-1835), nucleo fondante degli odierni Musei Civici pavesi. Il nobile lombardo è una figura di collezionista peculiare nel panorama nord-italiano, grazie alle suggestioni derivate dalla conoscenza delle più celebri raccolte europee, in primis quelle viennesi, oltre che dal contatto con altri collezionisti ed eruditi italiani del calibro di Pietro Zani, Mauro Boni, Leopoldo Cicognara, etc. e con mercanti quali Storck e Del Maino, Innocente Gobbi, i fratelli Artaria, Samuel Woodburn...per citarne solo alcuni. La possibilità di disporre di fonti di prima mano relativamente alla raccolta Malaspina, dal punto di vista dell’organizzazione della collezione, della sistemazione delle opere, della loro conservazione, e il fatto di possedere preziose informazioni anche sul pensiero dello stesso marchese, grazie al Catalogo del 1824, al testamento del 1833, e, non ultimo, al carteggio pubblicato e oggi presentato, permettono di indagare anche aspetti meno noti. È dunque l’occasione, oltre che di dar conto delle provenienze di alcuni pezzi, di illustrare caratteristiche quali i montaggi di diversa tipologia con cui sono ancora oggi conservate le opere, assolutamente non usuali per stampe, ma che hanno l’ambizione di imitare quelli che i più celebri amateurs riservavano ai disegni. Questi elementi contribuiscono a delineare un collezionista attento alle soluzioni più moderne e che riservò alle stampe un ruolo primario nell’ambito delle sue raccolte, e consentono di apprezzare ancora maggiormente le modalità e gli obiettivi di un collezionare che ebbe «per iscopo più l’istruzione e l’erudizione che il diletto».

At the core of the present-day Musei Civici of Pavia lies the outstanding collection of the marquis Luigi Malaspina di Sannazzaro (1754-1835), one of the early 19th century’s most ambitious and informed collectors of works on paper. His collection was highly original because of its methodological conception, that was discussed in correspondance with such scholars as Pietro Zani, Mauro Boni, Leopoldo Cicognara, and expressed through the works of art’s display and interaction. Later, his innovative ideas were openly stated in his Catalogo di una collezione di stampe antiche (Milan 1824).
Originally a mineralogist, Malaspina “discovered” print between 1798 and 1808, during his sojourn in Vienna. When the marquis started collecting, he had an ambitious plan in mind: to meticulously trace the birth and development of European printmaking from its origins to the eighteenth century. To this end, he applied a strict methodology to his collecting. Unusually, Malaspina conceived drawings, paintings, xylographic books and applied arts masterpieces as mere “accessories” to his print collection. Invaluable for the history of print collection, Malaspina retained the original mounts on which the prints were pasted, thus enabling the provenance of some works to be traced. In his emphasis on completeness, Malaspina always had the larger public in mind, to whom he planned to make his collection available. The importance of the Pavia collection, therefore, lies not only in the quality and rarity of its works of art, but also in the organizational principals that shaped it.

Pioneering print collector and curator, Samuel P. Avery (1822–1904), donated a collection of 17,775 prints, including works by Cassatt, Whistler, Turner and Manet, to establish the Print Collection of the New York Public Library in 1900. Prior to his donation, Avery curated print exhibitions at the Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grolier Club, and Union League Club. Through an examination of Avery’s persistent efforts to exhibit exemplary prints in museum and gallery settings – including an unusual collection of prints by women – this article provides evidence that Avery’s ground-breaking curatorial efforts led to the institutionalization of print display in New York.