RENAISSANCE RIVALS
DONI, Antonio Francesco.
Disegno … partito in piu ragionamenti, ne quali si tratta della scoltura e pittura; de colori, de getti, de modegli …
Venice, Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1549.
12mo (150 x 95 mm), ff. 63, [1]; italic letter, woodcut Giolito devices to title-page and final leaf verso, historiated woodcut initials; sporadic light foxing; but a very good, crisp copy; bound in eighteenth-century Italian vellum, gilt lettering-piece to spine, pale blue edges; later purchase note ‘Haym ...’ to front free endpaper.
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Disegno … partito in piu ragionamenti, ne quali si tratta della scoltura e pittura; de colori, de getti, de modegli …
First edition of an important art-theoretical text by the polyglot scholar Anton Francesco Doni (1513–1574) on the Renaissance concept of disegno in contemporary sculpture and painting, a notable source text for scholars of Michelangelo and his lifelong rival, Baccio Bandinelli.
The book is divided into two parts, the first consisting of six essays discussing disegno – in the form of dialogues featuring Nature, Art, Painting, Sculpture, the Painter (Paolo Pino), the Sculptor (Silvio Cosini), and, as mediator, Bandinelli (referred to here as ‘il cavaliere’) – and the second containing several letters from Doni to scholars and artists discussing contemporary works of art, Pietro Aretino and Francesco Sansovino amongst his interlocutors. Doni’s Disegno is particularly ‘important for a number of quotes given by Michelangelo and printed here for the first time’ (Wittkower, trans.), among them his praise of paintings which resemble reliefs and his condemnation of sculptures resembling paintings (f. 40v); Michelangelo’s Aurora, Moses, and the Sagrestia Nuova are all explicitly mentioned. ‘Beyond the defence of sculpture ... identifying design as “divine speculation”, and from anti-Venetian and pro-Michelangelo positions, Doni reveals a subtle and innovative taste’ for techniques including mosaic and goldsmithing, and for materials such as ivory (DBI, trans.).
Doni also had access to the then-unpublished treatise Libro del disegno by Michelangelo’s great rival, Baccio Bandinelli (Vasari writes of Bandinelli tearing a cartoon of Michelangelo’s to shreds), and incorporates a number of Bandinelli’s views in his text. The last chapter in Doni’s Disegno is entirely given over to Bandinelli, where he discusses art patronage, the paragone between painting and sculpture, and the proportions of the human head (ff. 39–44). Bandinelli’s Libro del Disegno was only published in 2004.
EDIT16 CNCE 17679; USTC 827607; Cicognara 114; Wittkower/Steinmann, Michelangelo Bibliographie (1927), no. 570; Bestermann, Old Art Books, p. 31; Schlosser-Magnino, p. 245–6.
