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De Zeventiende Eeuw. Jaargang 11 (1995)

De Zeventiende Eeuw. Jaargang 11

(1995)– [tijdschrift] Zeventiende Eeuw, De–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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English Translations and Adaptations of Cesare Ripa's Iconologia: From the 17th to the 19th Century1.
Hans-Joachim Zimmermann

I

In 1593, when he was in his late thirties, Cesare Ripa published a slim octavo volume (without illustrations) which he called Iconologia overo Descrittione dell' imagini universali cavate dall' antichità e da altri luoghi. The wording of this title is significant. Ripa wanted to offer not just a heap of somewhat broken images but a description and explanation of universal pictures which were accessible to any educated man. And he pointed out that he had found them in antiquity as well as in other places. Some, by the way, he made up for himself when an allegorical figure was considered necessary but unfortunately missing from classical sources. The subtitle of the Iconologia makes it clear that such a collection must make a wide appeal to poets, painters and sculptors who wanted to depict virtues, vices, human feelings and passions. The public was evidently much interested in Ripa's compilation as the many revised and enlarged re-publications of the Italian text well into the 19th century demonstrate. Even the ecclesiastic censor of 1603 seems to have been delighted with the work submitted to his well-sharpened quill if we can go by his imprimatur:

... fidem facio, hanc Domini Caesaris Ripae Iconologiam, non solum nihil fidei Catholicae, aut bonis moribus repugnans continere; verum etiam opus esse elegantissimum, atque omnibus ad virtutem amplectendam, et fugiendam vitia profuturum.

I have quoted this, especially the bit about the ‘fides Catholica’, in full. It will come in handy when we discuss the first printed English Ripa of 1709 later on.

The real success story of Ripa's Iconologia started in 1603 when it came out as a magnificent quarto adorned with large format woodcuts. This edition and its successors became the standard handbook throughout Europe until the end of the 18th century as we can tell from its being in the older sections of our libraries. Literary and representational artists used this book not only in its original form but also in its many translations, adaptations and revamped versions. For the student of art and literature it is obviously important to know or to find out which version of Ripa's handbook served as the source of specific information on allegories in any given instance. It is therefore of paramount importance, in my opinion, to conduct the most painstaking, precise, well-documented and wide-reaching research into library and archive resources to reconstruct the history of the various editions of the Iconologia in the original Italian and also of its translations and transformations into other languages and genres. We still do not know nearly enough of all these ramifications.

When Ripa collected the material for his Iconologia he could rely on a long and

strong tradition of symbolic modes which had by no means been obliterated during the Middle Ages. Quite the contrary, though Ripa on the whole tried to reach back to what he considered the definitive origins of the common European symbolic tradition: Greek and Roman antiquity, and the Bible. An especially inexhaustible treasure-trove proved to be Roman sculpture and imperial coins. To this we must add two further sources: (1) The knowledge derived from ancient, i.e. fabulous zoology, handed down through the Physiologos and the Bestiarius to the 16th century zoographies in the style of Conrad Gesner's Historia animalium. (2) The Hieroglyphica of Horapollo - one of the strangest and most fanciful books on the symbolism of animals, plants and objects to have reached us from very late antiquity. Ripa used this hieroglyphical fairy-tale in a nightmarish expanded form cum explanations, the Hieroglyphica, sive de sacris Aegyptiorum literis commentarii (1556). The colossal folio of about 1,000 pages had been compiled by Ioannes Pierius Valerianus Bolzanius, a protonotary at the Holy See with apparently sufficient leisure on his hands which he turned to good use.

Our brief survey of Ripa's sources also helps to explain why his Iconologia was so enthusiastically taken up everywhere in Europe. This also holds true for countries where the guide-lines for religious and moralistic art as an educational weapon to regain lost Catholic territory - issued by the Council of Trent after lengthy deliberations in the final session of December 1563 - did not cut much ice, e.g. in Protestant England. Or to state it quite explicitly; the majority of Ripa's sources were text-books very well-known to every educated person in central Europe at that time, and it was mainly due to the culturally advanced position of Italy that the first systematic collection of allegorical figures saw the light of day in an Italian garb. When Ripa died in 1622 his reputation was firmly established. The study of his compendium was a must for the creative artist, the appreciative connoisseur and the self-respecting critic and scholar.

Only towards the end of the 18th century, with the waning of the anciens régimes in continental Europe, do we recognize a decline in Ripa's reputation though by no means of allegorical representations as such. The explanation for this seeming paradox lies quite simply in the fact that iconological information had by then found its way into modern updated handbooks and dictionaries (e.g. by H. Lacombe, J.-R. de Petity, F.-J.-M. Noël) which selected the most popular figures from the Iconologia and relegated the rarely used remainder to limbo. Apart from this selective process, however, we also encounter a decided animosity towards Ripa who did not pass the test of true classicism after 150 years of remarkable advances in scholarship.

I will only mention at this point - because it is of importance for the reappearance of Ripa in Richardson's English version of 1779 - the influential art critic and historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann who heartily despised Ripa and one of his pundits, Valerianus. On the Hieroglyphica Winckelmann observed with his customary scathing rigour: ‘He copied from older authors, his so-called commentary is mainly piffle - and the few good things are buried with an unnecessary verbosity to produce a sizable volume.’ Poor old Ripa did not meet a much friendlier fate at the hands of the German arbiter of the severely classical style. Winckelmann regards him as a plagiarist, an ignoramus and a lunatic:

His allegories are virtually useless, for he did not pay proper attention to genuine monuments of antiquity. Many of his inventions could not be more ludicrous, and I am almost certain, had he known the old French proverb ‘to piss into a sieve’ meaning to follow vain pursuits, he would also have tried to depict it verbatim.

Winckelmann's characteristic combination of scholarly erudition with high-spirited if somewhat rustic jokings marks the first programmatic step of supplanting Ripa by the new canon formulated, dictated and approved, of course, by the great Winckelmann himself.2.

II

During the 19th century the decisive Winckelmannian thrust finally finished Ripa's Iconologia, so much so that at the beginning of the 20th century he was completely forgotten as an author and had to be literally rediscovered. Before I focus my attention on the English versions let us quite briefly glance at publications in two other major European languages, viz. French and Dutch, and at some collections of ornaments. This is a necessary procedure, at least it is highly advisable, in order to place the English contributions in their proper context and not to attempt to evaluate them in splendid isolation.

The very first translation and re-illustration of the Iconologia came out in 1636 in Paris, not very long after Ripa's death. This French Iconologie was the project of the Flemish engraver Jacques de Bie from Antwerp who was a specialist in the graphic reproduction of antique coins. He had emigrated to Paris and now transformed the rectangular woodcuts in the Italian editions into round medallions which were immensely successful up to the medals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. De Bie's French was rather shaky and he employed a native speaker to supply a shortened translation of Ripa's articles into French: the Parisian hack-writer Jean Baudoin, a founder member of the Académie française. The second part of the Iconologie appeared in 1644 and the whole was reprinted several times, remade in a smaller format in Amsterdam in 1698, abbreviated and re-illustrated by Daniel de la Feuille at the same place in 1700, again reprinted several times, then translated into German and published in Augsburg in 1704.3. French was a language generally understood in Europe, and this facilitated the distribution of such books which in their later issues were often produced quite cheaply and accordingly look very ugly and can be found in many public libraries and private collections. - In 1644 Dirck Pieterszoon Pers published his remarkably faithful Dutch translation in Amsterdam with good copies of the Italian woodcuts by Jan Christoffel Jeghers. This book saw two reprints (of the woodcuts only) by Timotheus ten Hoorn right at the end of the 17th century and a remake by Cornelis Danckerts (about 1700) with much smaller etchings.

One of the most magnificent of all Ripa editions is Johann Georg Hertel's Augsburg publication Sinnbilder und Gedancken of about 1760 consisting of 200 copper plates with elegant rococo illustrations by Gottfried Eichler the younger and very brief Latin and German texts engraved on the plates. Ripa is here entering on his career as the adviser of decorative artists. Ten years later, two French maîtres

ornemanistes, Gabriel Huquier and Jean Charles Delafosse, supplied further examples of this by then popular tendency, and in 1779 George Richardson familiarized the genre in England and especially Ireland.

The middle of the 18th century, generally speaking, is a rich hunting ground for all sorts of Ripa editions, translations and remakes. With reference to my subject, Ripa in England, I can only mention Jean-Baptiste Boudard, a French sculptor working at the Bourbonic court at Parma. He found Ripa so indispensable for his classes at the local Academy of Fine Arts that in 1759 he published a French digest with a parallel Italian translation by a friend of his, the Abate Giuseppe Pezzana. The illustrations look a bit clumsy and in fact they were designed and etched by Boudard himself. The book was shortly afterwards pirated by Johann Thomas von Trattner in Vienna, then copied and extensively remodelled by Thaddaeus von Schmidtbauer in Vienna, 1798 and reprinted several times. Schmidtbauer's new plates accompanied by a Russian translation saw a licensed re-publication in Moscow, ‘chez Courtener & Comp.’, in 1803 - the only Slavonic Ripa.

The last title I will have to mention in this rapid survey, and it leads us full tilt into Ripa's fate in England, is also the last Italian edition and the only one with coloured illustrations. The author of the Italian text and of the illustrations was a gentleman quite famous in his days: Filippo Pistrucci, at that time working in Milan. Pistrucci was a political activist, a carbonaro agitating for the liberation of Italy from Austrian suppression. He was also a well-known improvvisatore, an impromptu poet-singer, who used these accomplishments to camouflage his insurrectionist activities. He published the 2 vols. of his Iconologia in 1819 and 1821 with a parallel French translation by another colourful political figure: the revolutionary Antoine François Sergent-Marceau, brother-in-law of général Marceau and one of the members of the convention who voted for the execution of Louis XVI. Sergent was living in exile at Milan during these years and must have been grateful for a potboiler job provided by his revolutionary confrère. Shortly after the completion of the Iconologia with gorgeously hand-coloured large format aquatints, Pistrucci had to flee from Milan to escape the enquiries by the surprisingly efficient Austrian secret service and went to London.4.

Living among the Italian colony of Soho, Philip Pistrucci as he now called himself tried to bring out an English version of his Iconologia to earn the necessary money to sustain a numerous family. The project folded up after two issues (1824f.) with 24 coloured plates and accompanying text. These are nowadays such absolute rarities that even the great Mario Praz during a long life of active research was unable to locate a single actual copy and, much as he disliked doing so, was reduced to quoting from a catalogue. But in two rather remote corners of London, you may rest assured, there still dream two copies - unread and half-forgotten and in one case even unidentified were it not for the omnivorous student of Ripa from Heidelberg.

III

And when and how does England enter the iconological scene for the first time? Up to the beginning of the 18th century English poets and artists who were

unable to use the Italian original had to rely on the French translation by Baudoin with the engraved medallions by de Bie which in an age acknowledging at least the cultural supremacy of France presented no major obstacle. In 1709 the London publisher Pierce Tempest brought out an English digest of Ripa's text with new illustrations. The history of this publication is highly complex so that I propose to leave it for the moment and will come back to it in the final section of my paper.

The next English Ripa, copiously and ably illustrated, remained in manuscript and never got anywhere near to being printed. The volume belongs to the ‘Additional Manuscripts’ of the British Library, and the printed catalogue overconfidently announces, ‘translated from the Italian edition printed at Venice 1669’. This is quite an erroneous statement. Armed with a solid knowledge of the major Ripa translations, it will not take the attentive reader very long before he has ascertained that this is the only direct English translation from Pers' Dutch Ripa of 1644. A linguistic analysis demonstrates that the anonymous author knew Dutch very well but that his command of English was rather shaky. The manuscript, by the look of it a first draft or foul copy of about 1700, may be ascribed to a Dutchman who perhaps came to England as a consequence of William of Orange's accession to the throne in 1689 or who may have been a refugee from a continent torn by interminable conflicts with le roi soleil. I would not at all rule out an affiliation of our anonym with Pierce Tempest; but at present this is nothing more than a conjectural assumption, perhaps even a case of scholarly myopia. A thoroughgoing scrutiny of the manuscript and of Tempest's manifold business transactions could provide us with useful elucidations of this otherwise mysterious case.

I will now direct my attention to the English version published in 1779 by the London architect and decorator George Richardson in four sumptuous folios dedicated to George III. Richardson was a member of the Royal Academy and apparently his colleagues had encouraged this new version to which they all dutifully subscribed. The list is headed by their president, the all-powerful Sir Joshua Reynolds. Richardson gives a rather full translation of Ripa's text for which he mainly used an Italian edition plus Boudard's French abridgment of 1759. Richardson was no scholar and his preface is a remarkable document of unashamed pilferage. He sets out to criticise Boudard, one of his unacknowledged sources, and then sings the praise of Ripa's allegorical figures quoting as his chief witness, believe it or not, the German Ripa adversary Winckelmann. How was this possible? Richardson quite simply took an English translation of Winckelmann's Gedancken über die Nachahmung, cut out all the critical aspersions and fabricated a eulogy on Renaissance iconology by the leading classicist and art critic of his day.5.

The illustrations in the English Iconology were not designed by Richardson, who was quite an able draughtsman, but by his friend William Hamilton who supplied very pretty and somewhat anaemic figurines in the taste of the Adam period, etched mainly by Edward Malpas with assistance from Francesco Bartolozzi and others. An important innovation in Richardson's Iconology consists in the grouping of four allegorical figures depicting related ideas on one plate so that the figures form a sort of ensemble facilitating the use of the book by interior decorators who not only found gracefully arranged figures but also connected allegories. Their

poses linked them together and made it convenient to apply them as decorative groups in stately homes or official buildings. We are by now familiar with this transformation of Ripa's Iconologia into a handbook for and by the maîtres ornemanistes.

A remake of Richardsons's Iconology in small octavo appeared in London in 1832, published by Robert Ash, but was discontinued after ‘Part One’ containing eight garishly coloured engravings. As you can imagine, this anonymous issue is again of the utmost rarity, this time even completely unknown to Mario Praz, and I have only been able to find one single copy in the course of many years of research.

A much less rare book is another remake of Richardson for educational purposes by William Pinnock which he published in London in 1830. Pinnock and his brother-in-law, Samuel Maunder, were the co-authors and publishers of the so called Catechisms, basic textbooks on all sorts of subjects ranging from mythology, history and heraldry to geology and biology. They were produced on the cheap and borrowed heavily from earlier publications no longer protected by copyright. These Catechisms are a real horror-show of educational procedures during the early 19th century, and they mercilessly cram an ill-assorted mixture of odds and ends into tender heads.6.

As far as iconology as a demonstration of virtues and vices is concerned, Pinnock's publication can be regarded as a very late and faint echo of the Orbis Sensualium Pictus by Johann Amos Comenius, first printed in 1658 in Nuremberg and one of the world's bestsellers until the end of the 19th century. The Orbis Pictus contains a section of allegorical figures for the moral instruction of young pupils. Comenius took these from Ripa via theological or edifying Christian literature including sermons. Examples of this use of allegory can also be encountered in Dutch moralistic tracts of the 18th century (e.g. Petrus Zaunslifer, 1722; Jan Pieter Broeckhoff, 1770), in Timotheus ten Hoorn's Dutch Iconologia of 1698 and 1699 for the artistic and moral instruction of youth, and in many similar publications elsewhere.

IV

Finally, let us return to the first English Iconologia of 1709 published by Pierce Tempest and printed by that well-known Tory entrepreneur, Benjamin Motte, who also published Pope's and Swift's work. Even a superficial glance at Tempest's 326 allegories reveals rather surprising discrepancies. The pictures are etched oval medallions in the style of late 17th century mannerism. They are highly original and well executed. The artists apparently worked from the woodcuts in an Italian Ripa edition which, however, they remodelled extensively. The texts accompanying these illustrations are generally extremely brief and equally poor. They give a sort of shorthand description, frequently incomplete, followed by meagre explanations without reference to source material. It follows that the artists cannot have used this deplorable hack production for their illustrations but a complete Italian Iconologia with accompanying illustrations. The title page announces that ‘I. Fuller, Painter, and other Masters’ were responsible for the illustrations, and an inspection of the signatures of individual medallions shows two monograms of

an I. Fuller (working sometimes in conjunction with J.K., the Amsterdam reproduction engraver Johannes Kip who lived in London), also a monogram HC and another CGC (the latter also collaborating with Kip).

It is not difficult to discover that a well-known and frequently inebriate English portrait and tavern painter, Isaac Fuller, was active in London at what is now Bloomsbury Square, and that by incontrovertible evidence he died in July 1672 and was duly buried at St. Andrew's/Holborn. HC is the elder Henry Cook, a neighbour of Fuller's, who died in 1700. CGC is the monogram of an until now unknown and unidentified draughtsman. Johannes Kip, apparently the youngest of the team, lived until 1722. These data will not fit the publication date of 1709, particularly as no connection between the publisher Tempest and any one of the artists is known to have existed.

To add to this mystery, the first English Iconologia displays a totally incomprehensible figurative frontispiece: warriors landing at an exotic port with two of their leaders ahead of them already examining the base of a gigantic column. The base contains a relief which cannot be identified, and the cartouche underneath this composition, most likely drawn and etched by Fuller, only contains the short title of the work and not, as was usual during the 17th and 18th centuries, the explanation of a somewhat enigmatic scene. To make matters still worse, an inspection of genuine etchings by Isaac Fuller leads to the obvious conclusion that Fuller etched in an utterly different technique and used a quite distinct and different monogram. - If you are hotfoot for academic laurels easily won and elegantly worn while you are still young and beautiful and can enjoy them, the obvious solution to problems like these is to let them alone and close the case, because an answer to such a Gordian knot of question marks can only be found some lucky day by sheer serendipity.

Let me supply you with a few postscript hints to get you out of this maze of conflicting evidence. When Edward Croft-Murray, late keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, compiled the biographical data for his Catalogue of British Drawings (published in 1960) he looked through the accounts of the City of London covering the rebuilding of the city after the Great Fire because many contemporary artists, architects as well as painters, were employed to repair the damage and redecorate the metropolis. For the period of 1678-83 he found receipts for an Isaac Fuller who naturally cannot have been the one who died in 1672. The deceased apparently had an (eldest) son with the same Christian name.7. Of Isaac Fuller the younger nothing further is known and his works disappeared during the 18th and 19th centuries and finally during the inferno of the Second World War. But it seems almost certain that the younger Isaac was the main illustrator of the Iconologia of 1709: his style presents a later development compared to that of his father, and his etching technique is much finer, even tremulous, and the composition of his figures strikes one as somewhat decadent. His monogram is an italic F, like his father's though of a different shape, or I.F.

What now remains is an odd discrepancy of dates. This I was able to sort out by unearthing the printer's copy of the Iconologia which slumbers peacefully in the rare book collection of Harvard University.8. The manuscript contains an integral translation of Ripa's Iconologia in Giovanni Zaratino Castellini's edition of Padua,8. 1630, the last fully authorised text after Ripa's death. What Tempest published

in 1709 is a brutally truncated and chopped digest of this translation. The illustrations in the Harvard manuscript are mostly identical to those of 1709, i.e. they were printed from the same plates, sometimes from an earlier state of production.9.

The printer's copy contains two particularly precious details: the imprimatur by the English censor Charles Alston, a representative of the Bishop of London, dated October 1st, 1694. This, of course, makes excellent sense and tallies with the biographies of the illustrators. The other important detail is the frontispiece which in the manuscript copy has a larger size as someone or other apparently planned a publication in folio or large quarto. The ruthless Tempest later clipped the plate to reduce it to small quarto and did not mind the loss of important pictorial detail. In its larger format the main item on the frontispiece begins to look familiar: it is the bottom portion of Christopher Wren's Monument in London's Fish Street commemorating the Great Fire of September 1666. A manuscript entry in the still empty cartouche underneath gives the explanation of the scene: it shows Aristippos of Cyrene with his companions cast ashore after a heavy storm on the Island of Rhodes. They did not quite know what to expect at the hands of the unknown Rhodeans, when Aristippos discovered some designs in the sand and optimistically conjectured that educated and therefore peaceful men and women could not be far away: ‘Fellow sufferers be not afraid, there are ingenious men on this island - so may be said of England.’ The recondite anecdote comes from Vitruvius' sixth book de architectura, and the sly joke of the frontispiece is that here Aristippos does not land at Rhodes but in London and does not point towards designs in the sand but towards Wren's Monument instead, to be precise, towards the relief in the base of this column which still today can be seen in situ. It contains a detailed allegorical composition with figures out of Ripa showing Charles II. succouring the City of London after the conflagration.

The artist of the Portland stone relief (1675) was the famous sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber.10. And he also turns out to be the monogrammist CGC who apparently helped the younger Isaac Fuller when he set out on an English Ripa in the early 1690s. Needless to say, Cibber also lived round the corner from Bloomsbury Square. A Danish citizen from Flensburg, Cibber had served his apprenticeship in Italy (studio of Lorenzo Bernini) and Amsterdam (studio of Pieter de Keyser) and he knew Ripa's collection at first hand before it became available in an English translation. He may even have been acquainted with Pers' Dutch Ripa of 1644. Cibber used the allegorical figures for the Monument and other plastic work, and it was he who possibly got the English Iconologia started before other obligations for William III. at Hampton Court made his extensive participation as an illustrator impossible or superfluous.

This astonishing identification also helps to explain a peculiarity which a more careful inspection of the London publication brings to light, viz. that all Catholic allegories (e.g. Confessione Sacramentale, Fede Cattolica, Purgatione de Peccati, Sacrilegio, Zelo) are missing and that the allegory Common-Wealth (Governo della Republica) is depicted as Britannia with a Union Jack on her shield. All the illustrators were outspoken Protestants, and Wren's Monument also commemorated the myth that Catholics had set fire to the City to take over power from, ironically, a crypto-Catholic Monarch. It was only in 1830 that a defamatory inscription to

this effect was finally removed from the Monument. You can still see the scars where it has been chiselled away.

For reasons unknown to us, probably a paucity of cash and small prospective sales figures for a complete illustrated English Iconology, in 3 vols. folio or large quarto, the manuscript text of 1694 never saw the light of day. Tempest, who also republished other works from older and reworked plates, must have acquired the unused plates (by Fuller and his collaborators) presumably quite cheaply about 15 years later, hired a penny-a-liner to concoct hasty texts and rushed this conflation of brilliant older illustrations with scurvy and quite recent articles into print in the spring of 1709. Among the many strange adventures which befell the various editions and translations of Ripa's Iconologia this by all counts is the crookedest and in my opinion the most surprising.


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