We see here two different prints from the 1600s – both are statements on the training of painters. Both represent a classical approach to copying from Nature.
The image to the left is from a later English translation of the very influential emblem book, the Iconologia by Cesare Ripa. This was a book of allegorical personifications used by Baroque artists of the 17th and 18th centuries. The print for Imitation shows two artists working directly from Nature. The female figure imitates Nature through the eyes of tradition, with a concept of the Ideal. The little monkey imitates Nature by simply rendering a copy (realism) of what it sees with its own eyes.
The image to the right is a detail from the etching, The School of Painting by Pietro Testa. In the finished design, heavily influenced by Raphael’s School of Athens, he creates an allegorical commentary on the importance of balancing theory with practice in art. Included in the larger print is the inscription, ‘Theory by herself is chained with bonds, and Practice alone is blind in her liberty’. Testa also began a treatise on painting, rejecting Baroque illusionism and the concept of copying nature like those ‘dirty and ridiculous apes of nature,’ the Dutch Italianates.
The history of art has been a rich and curious dialogue between the two components of Imitation and Imagination.
*Click here to see the full print of Pietro Testa’s THE SCHOOL OF PAINTING
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