Raffaello Borghini’s Il Riposo (review)

In his translation of Raffaello Borghini’s Il Riposo, first published in Florence in 1584, Lloyd H. Ellis Jr. makes available to English-speaking readers substantial sections (according to the translator’s count, approximately 60 percent) of one of the most illuminating texts to have been written on painting and sculpture during the sixteenth century. Specifically devised for an audience made up of laypeople—that is, readers who are not practicing artists—Borghini’s book aims to offer all the intellectual preparation that to his mind is required to discuss art on solid foundations. Borghini is, to my knowledge, the first writer to suggest that talking about art can be an artform in its own right, a point that has become increasingly clear in more recent art literature. Borghini includes in his work some philosophical background, not least regarding the respective merits of painting and sculpture, technical information, art theoretical criteria and their art critical application, and an art historical survey. Written during a period when plagiarism did not yet have any strongly negative connotations, and the compilation of paraphrases and excerpts was one of the principal modes of communicating knowledge, substantial sections of Borghini’s text are based on the writings of others, including Varchi, Leonardo, Gilio, and Vasari.

Ellis is not sympathetic to the richly textured fabric of Borghini’s book, and he excises what he considers “boring and almost incomprehensible” or derivative (p. 36). Throughout the translation, the reader is instructed to consult Ellis’s dissertation, which presents the text in full. In the published text, the translator focuses on what he posits is “most important in the treatise”: Borghini’s recourse to Counter-Reformation notions regarding the production of appropriate religious imagery; his reaction to the style of the Maniera; and his additions to Vasari’s Lives, particularly concerning artists who came to prominence after Vasari had published the second edition of his book in 1568 (p. ix).These issues are unquestionably fundamental to most of today’s readers of Il Riposo, and it is Ellis’s merit to have re-emphasized them. However, no amount of excisions will transform Il Riposo into what would today be called a riveting read. Il Riposo in its entirety does, on the other hand, provide privileged access to what one late-sixteenth-century author conceived of as a fully rounded introduction to painting and sculpture.

Ellis’s translation beautifully renders the flavor of Borghini’s prose. However, closer attention to detail, grammatical and otherwise, might have been beneficial. Bottari, the author of the first annotated edition of Il Riposo (1730), points out in his edition of Vasari’s Lives (1759–60) that mistakes are unavoidable in undertakings as vast as collections of artists’ lives, and he explicitly accepts such shortcomings for editorial work as well. In Ellis’s translation, for example, disregard for word order places the symbols of the motto of Cosimo I de’ Medici, festina lente, in the hands of the wrong sculpture by Ammannati (p. 286) and the sow (troia) in the Paris and Helen group by Vincenzo de’ Rossi is made into a Trojan (p. 288). More consistency could have been displayed concerning technical terms and names, which are sometimes modernized or explained, and sometimes left in the occasionally idiosyncratic forms given by Borghini.

In the four books that constitute Il Riposo, Borghini presents the text without any subdivisions into chapters. Marginal notes, however, point out the subjects that are being addressed. Ellis uses these as subheadings, adapting the text to modern expectations by subdividing it into small chapters. Most of these work well, but some are confusing. In a number of lives a monument is singled out by a marginal note, and the life resumes after the discussion of the latter. The translator himself does not always display awareness of the fact that the marginalia were not intended as subheadings, but as pointers. In one instance...