Collaborative Painting Between Minds and Hands: Art Criticism, Connoisseurship, and Artistic Sodality in Early Modern Italy

The intention of this dissertation is to open up collaborative pictures to meaningful analysis by accessing the perspectives of early modern viewers. The Italian primary sources from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries yield a surprising amount of material indicating both common and changing habits of thought when viewers looked at multiple authorial hands working on an artistic project. It will be argued in the course of this dissertation that critics of the seventeenth century were particularly attentive to the practical conditions of collaboration as the embodiment of theory. At the heart of this broad discourse was a trope extolling painters for working with what appeared to be one hand, a figurative and adaptable expression combining the notion of the united corpo and the manifold meanings of the artist’s mano. Hardly insistent on uniformity or anonymity, writers generally believed that collaboration actualized the ideals of a range of social, cultural, theoretical, and cosmological models in which variously formed types of unity were thought to be fostered by the mutual support of the artists’ minds or souls. Further theories arose in response to Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s hypothesis in 1590 that the greatest painting would combine the most highly regarded old masters, each contributing their particular talents towards the whole. Presented with this ideal involving inimitable hands and minds, Francesco Scannelli, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, and Marco Boschini each reflected on the practical conditions and possibilities of such a scenario. Collectors and connoisseurs, meanwhile, often discerned multiple hands in a single picture, leading to dubious attributions of collaborative authorship, particularly when the social circumstances supporting the collaboration were thought to be projected in the subject matter. The connoisseur’s fanciful tendency could even be exploited by the art market, a phenomenon that is especially observable in a group of half-length figures that was purportedly made by Giorgione, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Titian. Finally, a case study of the Venetian painters Palma Giovane and Aliense, whose families were bonded in marriage on the eve of a series of joint projects, tests the implications of those values in criticism, theory, and connoisseurship when collaboration was put into social practice.

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