PsicoArt (Jan 2015)
Stendhal’s “Italian ideas” on pleasure in art
Abstract
Published in 1840 by G.-P. Vieusseux under the pen name of AbrahamConstantin, a painter of, and copyist onto, porcelain, Idées italiennes sur quelques tableaux célèbres owes so much to the pen of Stendhal as to have been included in the editions of his Complete Works. From a modest collection of entries on the paintings copied (12 ff.) that Constantin had submitted to his friend what ultimately developed - through a mosaic-like process of construction with additions and rearrangements made in the course of numerous revisions and cross-readings - was a sort of guide to Italian painting (358 pp.). But why - when Stendhal, at the age of 57, was already a great novelist, after he had already devoted to Italy and its painting his History of Painting in Italy, the two versions of Rome, Naples et Florence and the Roman Promenades; during the same years in which he wrote Lucien Leuwen, the Italian Chroniques and The Charterhouse of Parma, then Lamiel - did he conceive and write most of this book ceding its authorship to a friend? What drew him intothis? What novelties did he wish to add to what he had written on the conditions under which art is enjoyed? How did this grafting of his own writing onto that of another actually work? What were the dynamics of this process? A protracted study of over a thousand pages of manuscript has provided some answers. What emerge, in particular, are: the role of a friendship fostered by shared passions (for Italy, Italian painting and Raphael); the chance to carry out a project that had always been near to his heart, one coupling the esprit of the amateur with the technical experience of the copyist; the opportunity to return to the question of the appreciation of art from a different point of view in pursuit of a way of educating taste by educating the eye; and, finally, the personal pleasure of writing and of giving a gift.
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