PINO, Paolo.

First edition of this attractively printed work on painting by the Venetian painter Paolo Pino (1534-65), ‘one of the first pieces of art theory in Venice’ (Oxford Companion to Western Art). It takes the form of a dialogue between a Venetian and a Tuscan painter, in which the Venetian promotes the importance of colour (‘colore’), while the Tuscan insists on the predominance of ‘disegno’ or design. ‘The relationship between colore and disegno in the draughtsmanship of Venice … has a storied past. Undeniably most fundamental are the remarks made by Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) suggesting that Venetian artists neither possessed talents as draughtsmen nor placed due emphasis on preparatory drawing within their working practices … The counterpart to this denigrating perspective is the Dialogo di pittura of Paolo Pino, which praised the means by which Venetian artists harnessed colore to imbue their paintings with a striking immediacy’ (Genevieve Verdigel, ‘Colore in Disegno’ in Master Drawings, 58.2 (2020), p. 149).  

More than this, Pino attempts to present an idealised unification of the two elements of painting. His interlocutors discuss the properties of natural beauty, especially that possessed by women, describing the idealised or ‘sensual’ portrait of feminine beauty perfected by the great colourist and Venetian artist Titian during this period. Such proportionality could only be conveyed by an art that unites painting, which is artificial, with the divinely ordered mathematics, hence the need for disegno. However, one cannot hope to convey the natural and life-like beauty of human anatomy in a painting without colour, which is the third part of painting, after design and ‘inventione’ or invention. Attempting to reach a compromise between the two competing schools, Pino invokes Michaelangelo – chief representative of Roman and Florentine mannerism and therefore of disegno – and Titian as the twin paragons of Italian art; if they could be joined in one person, one of the interlocutors says, ‘he would be called the god of painting, and anyone who believes otherwise is the worst sort of heretic.’

Pino’s work functions as a catalogue of contemporary taste, influenced, of course, by his polemical stance. The preface to the reader mentions contemporary tracts on art by Leon Battista Alberti, Albrecht Dürer and the sculptor Pomponio Gaurico. Besides Titian and Michaelangelo, Pino lists a large ‘second division’ of painters, dead and alive: Perugino, Raphael, Giotto, Giorgione, Bellini, Dürer, Sebastiano del Piombo, Parmigiano, Andrea del Sarto, Bronzino, etc. etc. Amongst these, Pino identifies his own ‘maestro’ or teacher as Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, a painter of the Venetian school.

‘Quest’ elegante Opuscoletto’ (Cicognara).