Exhibition Catalogue
• December 2024
Poetry and Painting in the 17th Century. Giovan Battista Marino and the “Marvelous” Passion.
Author: Emilio Russo, Patrizia Tosini, Andrea Zezza
Publisher: Officina Libraria
Translation languages: Italian to English
Translators: Il Nuovo Traduttore Letterario
The exhibition, Poetry and Paintings in the 17th Century. Giovan Battista Marino and the ‘Marvelous’ Passion,currently at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, explores the connections between poetry and painting, the sacred and profane, and literature and art in the early 17th century (Galleria Borghese, 19 November 2024-9 February 2025).
Giovan Battista Marino’s life and literary works have close ties to the masters and masterpieces of early 17th century figurative art. Marino met these artists in the most important intellectual circles and courts of the period. This exhibition is an ongoing dialogue between literature and Renaissance and Baroque art, a game of mirroring and continuous expressive challenges between poetic texts and works of art, real or imaginary.
The richly illustrated catalogue is published by Officina Libraria, with essays by distinguished scholars and an anthology of texts that interact with the works on exhibit. The English translation of the catalogue is by Nuovo Traduttore Letterario.
Collecting Images, Works and Texts. Marino: Poet and Art Lover
Beatrice Tomei
Chronology, Limitations and Criteria of Marino’s Collecting
‘With the slightly ingenuous and superficial conjectures of one who does not properly allow for the chronology and limitations of Marino’s collecting’, Giorgio Fulco wrote in an unpublished manuscript, ‘one risks disposing of the very essence of the relationship of trust between the poet/collector and his readers’.[i] In this passage, the scholar is commenting on the diffidence with which critics viewed the writings of Marino at the time, a scepticism that risked altering the reception of the texts and reducing them to a repertory of flowery praise devoid of meaning. This was made possible, he added, by years of analysis that paid little attention to the facets of Marino’s dialogue with artists. It was a statement that only he could have made at the time, being the first to delve into Marino’s art collection through the documents in the Archivio del Monte Manso di Scala in Naples, where the poet’s wills and inventory are kept. Documents that he published in 1979 in an article that remains of fundamental importance for research on Marino,[ii] and that, although ‘without meeting all our expectations’, and ‘indeed sometimes making our disappointment with the vagueness or ambiguity of some sources even sharper and perhaps irreversible’,[iii] finally gave shape to the art negotiations carried out throughout the poet’s career, which constitute a sizable portion of the discussions in his correspondence.[iv] His acquisitions have not only stimulated scholars to reread the Neapolitan’s work with renewed faith in his activity on the art market but have also provided new material for the history of seventeenth-century collecting. And yet, as is clear from recent studies, Marino has only become the subject of research that goes beyond the boundaries of literature in the last few years,[v] and not just due to the matter of expertise but mainly due to the challenge of giving order to writings in which historical evidence is constantly threatened by the distortions of the poetic register. Taking on the subject of Marino the collector also means preparing oneself for the inevitable task of considering his poetry, with the aggravating factor of having to examine the validity of each of his commissions and judiciously distinguish between when it is the poet speaking and when it is the art lover.
[i] Giorgio Fulco, in Per la Galeria del Marino, typewritten manuscript, preserved in the Centro Pio Raijna, Rome, p. 3. Fulco’s observations were made in response to the publication of the critical edition of Galeria edited by Marzio Pieri and, specifically, the essay introducing Marino’s poems. The reference for Pieri’s positions is Pieri 1979, in the introduction to the 1979 edition of Marino 1620a.
[ii] Fulco 1979, republished in Fulco 2001.
[iii] Ibid, p. 84.
[iv] On the subject of art in Marino’s correspondence, see Emilio Russo’s observations in Russo 2018, p. 662.
[v] Art historians have been most interested in Marino in connection with the artists who were in closest contact with the poet (see especially Ciardi1968, pp. 71–92; Mason Rinaldi 1984, pp. 46–51; Stoppa 2003, pp. 59–63; Pavesi 2017, pp. 359–362). Recent initiatives that have brought together scholars from different disciplines, including a good number of art historians, include the conference on the poet held in 2019 at Palazzo Barberini, for which see Marino e l’arte 2021.
