Odd, gauche and undervalued
David Ekserdjian
ROSSO IN ITALY by David Franklin Yale, £45, pp. 326 omebody — it should have been Berenson — once observed that art history is a game, and he who has the most photographs wins. Since then, at least in the most bien-pensant circles in this country, the decks have been switched, connoisseurship is dead if not finally buried, and the emphasis is firmly on the history as opposed to the art. Documents rule OK, and contracts, wills and apostolic visitations are now the court cards in the pack.
Within this new dispensation, David Franklin holds most of the aces. He is not only utterly professional and highly assiduous in his pursuit of archival evidence, but he also has an unrivalled gift for it. Documents are seemingly attracted to him like iron filings to a magnet, and what is more they are by no means invari- ably dreary little footnotes of the sort posterity could well do without. The material in Rosso in Italy concerning the artist's `Pieta' in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is extraordinarily illuminating, and casts a startlingly immediate light on the perils and confusions of life in the aftermath of the Sack of Rome. It also tells us what Rosso thought his picture repre- sented, while the contract for the painter's altarpiece in Citta di Castello is even more instructive about its subject-matter. Allied to this rock-solid foundation in the primary Sources is Franklin's meticulous reading of Vasari's Vita of Rosso, which is one of the best informed — they knew one another and consequently most informative of his biographies. Time and again, Franklin is able to demonstrate how imprudent it is to believe one knows better than Vasari on the factual front, and he also employs con- siderable subtlety when it comes to under- standing the critical language. Perhaps the only trick missed here is in having failed to analyse in detail what Rosso's lengthy and fascinating letter to Michelangelo could tell us about his level of education. After all, Rosso was no ordinary painter: he got hold of a copy of Castiglione's Courtier when it was still hot off the presses, and took the trouble to start learning Latin in prepara- tion for his starring role at the court of Francois I.
For some of us, however, Franklin's mas- tery of the sources would not of itself make this a major contribution to the study of Italian renaissance painting. What really distinguishes this book from the mass of common or garden monographs is the author's ability to ally his accumulation of factual knowledge with a keen eye, espe- cially for matters of physical make-up and condition, and a profound understanding of the nature of the kinds of relationships that exist between artists and patrons. Although I would not agree with every- thing he says about Rosso's antecedents, he is extremely convincing on the extent to which he ignored such immediate precur- sors as Raphael and Fra Bartolommeo in favour of a kind of revival of late quattro- cento modes. Nevertheless, it is possible to borrow poses from another artist with whom one feels almost no stylistic affinity, and I believe this to be true of Rosso in `Virgin in Glory with the Christ Child' by Rosso Fiorentino, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg relation to Raphael. More generally, however, it is a good sign that Franklin writes so well about the portraits, none of which is documented, and orders them so convincingly.
Rosso is a hero within the art historical tradition that associates the so-called Mannerist painters with psychological disarray, and the result has often been to dislocate him from the practice of his age- Yet whether he was working for lay or for religious patrons, his productions were in the main made to measure and not off the peg. He tried, not invariably successfully, to satisfy his clients, and however bizarre and even irreligious some of his creations, per- haps especially early on in his career, may look to us, they were objects of devotion before they were works of art. It remains the case that the young Rosso, in spite of the lessons he learnt from Andrea del Sarto, was a genuinely odd and at times gauche painter. There is some- thing almost comic about his disastrous association with Leonardo Buonafe, the director of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, whose pet artist was the arch-conservative Ridolfo del Ghirlandalo, because it was bound to end in tears, but even dedicatedly avant-garde patrons might have been troubled by some of Rosso's eccentricities. Franklin arguably underplays this aspect of Rosso, typified by the gigan- tic angels in his Los Angeles 'Virgin and Child with the Baptist and St Elizabeth', and it is hard to deny the fact that with time he became markedly more proficient in the basics of his trade. Indeed, by the end of his years in Italy Rosso was a deli- ciously polished painter. Franklin was no doubt right not to follow Rosso to France, because his book is prin- cipally concerned with painting, and that aspect of his subject's activity was sub- merged by his role as a manager and inven- tor at Fontainebleau and elsewhere. He notes that Vasari, who is otherwise believed, says Rosso committed suicide, but is reluctant to take his word for it, which is more indicative of his crusading urge to rescue Rosso from the ranks of the crazies than of his usual historical sure- footedness. The only lapse I found really disconcerting, however, came in the discus- sion of the Naples 'Portrait of a Young Man seated on a Table', where Franklin writes that 'He is more posed than confi- dent amidst the luxury he can only have inherited'. The unease of Rosso's sitter is palpable, but it seems inconceivable that the poor little rich kid was already around in the 1520s. Even now, after all, there are plenty of sons — and daughters — of both the aristocracy and the plutocracy who lose precious little sleep over their inherited wealth. Fortunately, one infelicitous sentence in a book that is over 300 pages long is easily forgiven when the rest is so good. It can be recommended to anyone who wants to learn virtually all there is to know about a remarkable but still undervalued artist. As a colossal bonus, they will also gain a very special insight into the art of the Italian renaissance in general.
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