Phillipe Costamagna, The Eye: An Insider’s Memoir of Masterpieces, Money and the Magnetism of Art (New Vessel Press, 2018).
Phillip Costamagna is the Director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Ajaccio, Corsica; he is the author of books on Florentine paintings; he is also what the trade used to call an eye, that undefinable quality that characterises a person in the art world who can detect the sign of a specific artist’s style, by close study of the picture alone; not through archives, not by wild theorising, but complete immersion in the details of the painting itself. To become an eye one must embark on a long journey, which is what this memoir recounts.
It begins with the story of how the cream of curators in France and Italy trained and befriended the young Costamagna; an enviable corps of connoisseurs and experts such as his former teacher, the Raphael scholar, the late Slyvie Béguin, Michel Laclotte (Louvre Director for a while) and Mina Gregori, the Caravaggio scholar, as well as others from the curatoriat. At first I thought this was just going to be reminiscences about collecting and cataloguing amongst the magnifici; but while there’s plenty of that, the memoir delves far deeper. For one thing, Costamagna extends the definition of “eye” far beyond old master culture, out of art history itself into the world of photography, film and fashion; and within art history, into the realm of contemporary art whose appraisal does require acuity of vision, more seen in gallery owners – Costamagna says- than scholars who like to theorise contemporary art out of the gallery into the cloistral academic journal.
How does one get an eye like the “Holy Trinity” of Berenson, Longhi and Zeri? Costamagna never met Berenson; but he familiarised himself with I Tatti’s libraries and collections in his postgraduate work. As he notes, Berenson moved connoisseurship out of disputes about taste into the realm of aesthetics, and more notoriously, debates about attribution, that gnarly problem of who painted the picture. The fabled notes of Berenson with the names of artists set down, deleted, and then re-inserted; and the famous books that followed that set a new standard for the cataloguing and collocation of art. Longhi, a Caravaggio scholar who planted his ideas in the soil of historicity- unlike Berenson- provided the next eye movement, until his powers began to be doubted by some of his students. Costamagna expresses doubts about the so-called Caravaggio “Flagellation of Christ” in Rouen. Finally, Zeri, known to Costamagna, who on their first meeting dismissed the author’s interest in the obscure Florentine Allori as madness; it was a difficult relationship, but Zeri remains a looming presence in the story of Costamagna’s journey to the halidom of the perfect eye.
One of the best chapters is on the connoisseurship of drawings. That skill is very different from scrutiny of the paintings; drawings allow us to witness the first thoughts of the artist. Study of drawings is one of the foundations of an eye’s training since something of the artist’s personality can be discerned from deep study of the sheets in a print room. I can attest to that! Here, Philip Pouncey’s three grades of experts are wittily recalled: those who see immediately; those who see when they told what to see; and those who see nothing at all. This is the confrontation that engages the eye in drawings. It is separate from scrutiny of the brushstroke; there are only a few experts like Costamagna and his mentor Béguin who can occupy both spheres of painting and drawing expertise. But there are “grand dames,” Costamagna declares who only study drawings, and often neglect to upgrade their skills to paintings themselves; when they do, their abilities are “no better than a university student.” Hmmm- that might trigger a debate.
Another excellent chapter is on paintings and forgeries led off by a novel connection between the renaissance theorist Camillo’s memory theatre which was filled with symbolic images, including words and pictures corresponding to thoughts. This is seen as not only advantageous to students of cognitive science, but the art history eye whose head is filled with a systematic array of paintings and drawings assigned to different categories like style and period. Camillo’s theatre of memory precedes the great picture libraries of the world, the Witt and the Frick, though these could never compete with the dexterity of corpus builders like Crowe and Cavalcasalle, and Berenson who juxtaposed images in order to create the oeuvre; the pioneers dealt with groups of photographs objectively after seeing the actual work of art, a sine qua non, for the eye must see the photograph as a memory aid which allows the image to be placed in the mental repository. Another very interesting point: don’t try to remember the whole picture from “a misleading” reproduction,” but scour for details; also, don’t be afraid to use b/w illustrations because colours can be deceptive to an eye.
To Costamagna, in art history we have two eyes: “an eye that perceives the aesthetic, and the eye which comes with our profession.” Within art history, the eye is now generally purblind as is verified by the deluge of misattributions flooding over us, especially those claims targeted on the great painters; for if an ‘eye’ is to make an impact and gain status, then the focus must be on the greats- Raphael, Rembrandt, Leonardo, not the humble master Jacopino del Conte, a favourite of the author. Costamagna rightly celebrates souls who love the obscure artist like Jacopino, a pupil of Andrea dal Sarto who once dominated Florentine art history until a small and determined faction appeared with the aim of putting other painters like Pontormo and Bronzino on the map. Apart from the cover shot of recovering the “Mona Lisa,” the only reproduction in this book is Bronzino’s Christ on the Cross which was jointly found by Costamagna -with another colleague- in Nice, previously attributed to Fra Angelico.
Costamagna fills his lushly entertaining book with a delicious variety of anecdotes. My favourite was the divine Sylvie’s pursuit of a taxi driver who owned a missing Raphael angel, hereafter “Sylvie’s Angel.” And there are other concerns: meditations on technology which despite its usefulness simply cannot replace the eye; personal reminiscences of great finds, and villainous misattributions by weak eyes, even scholarly skulduggery by one who is named and shamed in the book; and some advice about dealing with picture owners who are equally capable of suing as saluting you. As an insider, Costamagna has much to convey to the public and even experts, though he forlornly concludes that the good eye is a rare thing today. One could say that instead of the six eyes of the “Holy Trinity” of Costamagna we have been reduced to the pagan trio of the Gorgon sisters who had only one eye to share between them. Connoisseurship is certainly not blind, but its vision is more occluded these days, mainly by money.
David Packwood
The book is published on August 14th 2018. I was sent an advance reading copy by New Vessel Press, for which many thanks.
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