Artibus et Historiae no. 55 (XXVIII)
2007, ISSN 0391-9064Up
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MARZIA FAIETTI - The Rebus of an Artist. Agostino Carracci and "La carta dell'ogni cosa vince l'oro"
At its broadest, this essay is designed to stress the importance of prints to the artists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the particular role of erotic engravings. These can be (and were) understood as making up a kind of sample-book, perhaps the very richest, for figural poses. Taken as a group, they became almost a manual of the body and of its capacity for complicated movement, one moreover soundly based on the study of the Antique and of the most celebrated masters of the early Cinquecento.
To illustrate the point, attention is here focused on a single engraving: Agostino Carracci's Ogni cosa vince l'oro, probably executed in the 1580s. The sources for its specific motifs (Caraglio and Parmigianino) are identified, not least to distinguish them from the stylistic inspirations that the print declares (Tintoretto and Veronese). The literary source (Ovid) is equally important. By considering this range of source material, differently employed, we begin to understand the complex nature of Agostino's interpretation of this theme, and especially the way in which he melded the intellectual game of the rebus to parody. We see the way in which he denied the canonical myth of venal love - Danae - to re-set his scene in a much less elevated, more recognisably domestic context. This print can therefore be interpreted as a statement of the engraver's artistic freedom and his open-mindedness in Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti's Counter-Reformation Bologna.
The "carta dell'ogni cosa vince l'oro" could not pass unnoticed in the Rome of Clement VIII, probably for very similar reasons. Caravaggio, for example, clearly appreciated how Agostino's translation of existing images to place them within new iconographic contexts was accompanied by metamorphoses of meaning, the manner in which something might unexpectedly come to signify the exact opposite, and he seems to have admired the intriguing shifts between messages that were decipherable and those which remained coded. Caravaggio's painting in Berlin, the Amore vincitore shows how he was engaged by Agostino's Ogni cosa vince l'oro, above all by the riddle of the rebus and by the deliberate re-setting of a literary source into a crude reality of ordinary life.
