Riccardo Nobili

Passion for collecting art travels to France—The Florentine Republic and the fate of a statuette by Michelangelo—Italy supplies antiques to France and other countries—The fair of Frankfurt—A famous sale—In England the passion for collecting art and curios may have originated in France.

While the passion in Italy for collections of art still goes on enriching museums more through the impetus of the past than from a genuine cult, and produces occasionally, together with many illustrious patrons of contemporary art, some old type of collector fond of the antique with the characteristic greed for all kinds of rarities, France, and later almost every other nation of Europe, awakens to the passion for art and curios. It is no longer a question of monarchs and princes, as was the case in Italy, nobles and the bourgeois as well come to the fore. Even at the beginning of the sixteenth century, France may quote the names of Grolier and Robertet, both financiers employed at Court, both lovers of fine things. The former is a specialist in rare editions and fine bindings, the latter a keen-eyed, eclectic collector, as may be gathered from the inventory of his excellent collection kept in his castle of Bury.

It must be said, however, that Italy still remains a sort of El Dorado of fine art and the inexhaustible mine to which collectors come for their finds. The French had discovered this fact from the time they came to Italy with Charles VIII. Later on Grolier visits Italy and takes back with him some of its treasures. When he has no opportunity to come to Italy himself, his friends and agents continue the search for him; they know his taste and his speciality and are very alert in the hunt for fine and rare editions. Robertet bargained with the Florentine Republic to exchange his political influence for a statuette by Michelangelo. The Republic had great interest in remaining friends with the French monarch and accepted the bargain, and as the statuette had been left unfinished by Michelangelo, who had moved to Rome by this time, Benedetto da Rovezzano is charged to finish the work and cast it. This statuette of a David was placed by Robertet in the cour d’honneur of his castle and afterwards, in the year 1633, removed to the castle of Villeroy, and it is now lost. Only a design of this statue, by the great Michelangelo, is now in the Louvre Museum, and from this we can gather how the statue looked.

What was not bought was carried away from Italy after the fashion of the old Roman conquerors. In the year 1527 a ship arrived at Valencia loaded with artistic and valuable booty from the famous “Sack of Rome.” Curiously enough, considering the age, the Spanish municipal authorities of Valencia did not grant the vessel permission to unload her cargo. This fact, quoted by Baron Davillier in his Histoire des faÏences hispano-moresques, is commented on by Edmond BonnaffÉ, a French collector of our times, thus: “I love to think that the captain changed his course and found more hospitable municipalities on the French coast.”

The rich artistic booty promised by Italy made it almost obligatory for an orthodox French amateur to undertake a journey to Italy. It is surprising that the Voyages de Montaigne en Allemande et en Italie, 1580–81, makes no allusion to this fad and contains very few comments on art. However rich Montaigne’s work may be in valuable observations on the life of the time, we should nevertheless have desired him to have a touch of the art lover in him, a leaning to the artistic and beautiful, and we would willingly have exchanged a few words with him on the art and collections of art in the Italy of his day, instead of his long, detailed descriptions of his cures and his eternal search for medicinal springs, etc. An important annual meeting, one that the true collector was likely to visit, was the fair of Frankfurt. According to H. Estienne this must have been one of the most frequented art markets of Europe. Italy, says Estienne, contributed all kinds of antiques, faiences, old medals, books and brocades; Germany furnished wrought iron and artistic prints, Flanders sent tapestry, Milan its fine arms, Venice goods from the East. Estienne also states that Spain used to send to this fair American products, weapons, costumes, shells and silver-work.

It was not a market exclusively for the genuine, as copies and imitations were to be found there for the economical or the foolish, easily duped amateur. Above all there were those deplorable casts from fine originals that have ever since deceived so many collectors and which so enraged the good Palissy, who laments the fact and stigmatizes it with the saying that it cheapens and offends sculpture, “mespris en la sculpture À cause de la meulerie.”

This glimpse of the creation of a market of antique art and bric-À-bracs of high quality would not be complete without some typical sale of a famous collection. Among others that took place towards the end of the sixteenth century, we may quote a notable one, the sale of Claude Gouffier (“Seigneir de Boisy,” duc de Reannes and Grand-Écuyer de France), an intelligent gentleman who, with his mother HÉlÈne de Hargest-Genlis, is responsible for one of the finest types of French pottery, the faience d’Oiron. Besides spending considerable sums of money on the factory of this ware, Gouffier was such a liberal patron of art and artists that he ruined himself in the gratification of his noble passion. At his death the creditors seized upon his rare collections and objets de virtu and put them up to auction. This sale was not only the artistic event of the day but, perhaps, the most important sale of the second half of the sixteenth century. All Paris of the time seems to have been there. Plates, paintings, works of art, bibelots, toute la curiositÉ, passed mercilessly under the hammer of the auctioneer—which by the way was not a hammer, a usage originating in England, but as a rule a barguette, a small rod, with which the auctioneer struck a metal bowl. Nothing was spared by the creditors, even the wearing apparel and furs of the deceased were offered to the highest bidder. Of these, strange to say, the Duke d’Aumule (Claude de Lorrain, third son of Claude, first Duc de Guise) bought a second-hand manteau de cerimonie with the evident intention of wearing it at Court. By a curious coincidence, this sale took place only twenty-five days after the tragic night of St. Bartholomew (September, 18th, 1572), an event that did not prevent Catherine de MÉdicis from appearing at the sale with her ladies-in-waiting, to dispute with other buyers the spoils of the deceased gentleman.

One of the conspicuous buyers at this auction was a Florentine living in Paris, Luigi Ghiacceti, called by the Frenchmen le seigneur d’Adjacet or d’Adjoute. Beside “ung harnois d’homme d’armes complect, gravÉ et dorrÉ À moresque” he bought many other things, the portrait of Henry II and also “sixty pictures painted in oils.” This Florentine was not only an esteemed collector of his time, but a man of taste who had built one of the finest mansions in Paris, which he showed to visitors, together with his fine museum, “for a sou,” so says Sauval, the chronicler quoted above.

While France appears to have been the first country to follow Italy in the artistic movement, about this time, as we have said, all European nations had more or less perfected their taste and acquired the love for art collecting. The English invasion of France is perhaps responsible for the awakening of this passion in England. Warton (Hist. of Poetry, II, 254) is of the opinion that after the battle of Cressy (1346) the victorious army brought home such treasures that there was not a family in England, modest though it might be, that did not own some part of the precious booty, furniture, furs, silk stuffs, tapestries, silver and gold works, etc., the pillage of the French cities.

More than two centuries later, part of this artistic booty may have come back to France. Gilles Corrozet tells us that on the MÉgisserie, the quay constructed by Francis I, where artistic sales usually took place, “in the year one thousand five hundred and fifty, in the month of August, there were publicly sold in the MÉgisserie several images, altar-pieces, paintings and other church ornaments, which had been brought and saved from the churches of England.”

Imitation and faking do not seem to find suitable patrons at this time. Collectors are cold and methodical, and a well-established commerce in antiques, an abundance of objects offered for sale, seem to have precluded a demand for other fakes than those of the past, and a few clumsy imitations. The imitations of this period are hardly convincing. Restorers of the antique were without skill, which fact plainly tells that their patrons were not excessively particular. They were satisfied with a Roman bust, repaired by a sculptor who does not give himself the trouble to disguise his own art.

About the time of which we are speaking, that is to say when the merits and demerits of the sixteenth century had delineated themselves and had reached the summit of the curve that anticipates decline, the work of Michelangelo, Raphael and a few others—if there were any others of that calibre—produced their natural effect. To be a sculptor meant to copy all the defects of Michelangelo, to indulge in over-ripe forms, turgid muscles and exuberance in general; to be a painter did not mean so much servility because Raphael’s influence was less extended, but very few escaped imitating or recalling the painting of the fine master of Urbino, more especially as the public was naturally attached to Raphaelite traditions. This was so much the case that not only was Giulio Romano accepted, and a legion of other painters who aimed more or less successfully to imitate Raphael, but later the honour that should have belonged to Raphael was given to Sogliani simply because he had deceived the public by his craft and virtuosity, winning the name of Raphael reincarnated. In our opinion, part of the energy that was keenly given in olden times to the imitation of the antique was now bestowed on “faking.”

It is true that France was coming to the fore about the middle of the sixteenth century with indisputable superiority in art, while Italy turns to inevitable decadence. France had had a “school of Fontainebleau” disposed to exercise the tyranny of genius, but Rosso was not Raphael, and the Italian influence, though of great benefit to the French school, was, after all, a mere passing incident in the course of art in that country. Yet it is surprising that even in France, at a moment when the mania for collecting art was on the increase, the collector does not seem to have been either victimized or annoyed by faking.

It must be said though, with Edmond BonnaffÉ, that “the French buyers were regarded somewhat as novices, and everyone did his best to exploit them.”

The French art lover, with all his progress and enlightenment, was at this time naive, and easily exploited by trickery. It is easy to imagine that if faking did not become as rampant as before, it must have been because it did not pay as formerly.

Yet H. Estienne remarks on this subject:

“To-day the world is full of buyers of old lumber (antiquailles), at whose expense many rogues are prospering. For so little do they know how to distinguish the antique from the modern, that no sooner do they hear the word which so often makes them dip their fingers into their purse, etc.”

By this remark, even without other documents, one is entitled to conclude that even at this period, which seems to have been less given than the others to imitation and faking, victims existed and were ready, like the novice or the unwise to-day, to pay fancy prices supported by a name.

Although ranking second in the movement of art—France, England and Germany have risen up and improved their taste, indulging in the true patronage of art—Italy is still the inexhaustible source of antiques, in spite of the fact that the decadence afflicting the country had destroyed the real love of art in the collector. Italian villas and palaces are replete with paintings, the best often in garrets, the bad art of the time in full honour in the important rooms. The Barocco, with its gorgeous errors and few merits, is about to prepare the funeral of Italian art. The seventeenth century is approaching.