Marco Boschini

Marco Boschini was born in Venice, and was educated in the school of Palma il Giovane. He also studied engraving, with Odoardo Fialetti from Bologna. He painted The Last Supper for the sacristy of San Girolamo at Venice. He also distinguished himself as an engraver; for example, he engraved and tinted in aquaforte paintings of Bartolo Ceru. Boschetti engraved also portraits, stage sets and maps (e.g. Il regno tutto di Candia, Venice, 1644; L’arcipelago con tutte le isole, Venice, 1658). His most original work consists of 25 inventions of imaginary paintings by such 17th-century Venetian artists as Pietro Liberi and Pietro della Vecchia, each with a descriptive poem attached. Boschini was friendly with many painters, mostly Venetian, including Pietro Liberi, Nicolas Régnier, Pietro della Vecchia and Dario Varotari the Younger; he met Pietro da Cortona, Giuseppe Maria Mitelli and Velázquez on their visits to Venice. As a writer on art, he was the author of several publications, such as La Carta del Navegar pittoresco (1660), a panygeric poem about Venetian painting; Le minere della pittura veneziana (1664) and Le ricche minere della pittura veneziana (1674), two city guides of Venice; and I gioieli pittoreschi (1676), the first guidebook to Vicenza. As an art dealer, and in collaboration with della Vecchia and Paolo del Sera, Boschini encouraged the export of paintings, a practice that he had vigorously condemned in the ‘Breve instruzione’. His clients included Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici and Alfonso IV d'Este. The Carta was dedicated to the voracious collector Leopold Wilhelm, Archduke of Austria, presumably as a business promotion.

Boschini's place in history rests firmly on the poem La carta del navegar pitoresco (Venice, 1660). It is an intensely patriotic and polemical defence of Venetian painting written in Venetian dialect and directed against those Roman and Tuscan standards represented by Giorgio Vasari. As the full title suggests, Boschini is enamoured with Giambattista Marino’s metaphoric language and frankly espouses a personal reading of art history from the perspective of an artist (he who ‘understands compasses’). The apparently unstructured exposition rejects objective, comprehensive and logically organized theories of art in favour of an eccentric art criticism that attempts to capture the immediacy and pleasure of vision itself. In his argument against Vasari, Boschini rejected more than Tuscan artistic ideals, notably the classicizing standards of disegno (linear delineation, ancient statues and ideal proportions). He looked at paintings more with the artist's eye for formal problems than the humanist’s understanding of content. The ekphrastic tradition that emphasized narrative had little appeal for him; he revelled instead in the beauty of movement (only loosely attached to narrative) and in pure, sensuous form (what does the colouring taste like? what does the light sound like? what does the pigment feel like?). He also dismissed Vasari’s interest in the biographical component of art criticism as irrelevant to the image itself. The Carta dominated Venetian art criticism into the 18th century and, despite the obstacles presented by the Venetian dialect, also prompted considerable comment throughout Italy, notably in the work of Filippo Baldinucci, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Luigi Pellegrini Scaramuccia and Francesco Scipione Maffei.