Academies of Drawing from an Italocentric Perspective to a European (and International) Calling in Federico Zuccari’s 'Lettera ai Principi' | Art Academies: Europe and the Americas, c. 1600–1900 | Virtual Seminar: CASVA, Washington - Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, München | 19 November, 2021 (original) (raw)

In 1605, at the end of his long career as an artist, academician, and art theorist and compelled by personal and dire economic circumstances to leave Rome and the Academy of Drawing for Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, which he had helped found and to inaugurate in 1593, Federico Zuccari wrote his 'Lettera a Principi et Signori Amatori del Dissegno, Pittura, Scultura, et Architettura, scritta [...] nell’Academia insensata detto Il Sonnacchioso. Con un Lamento della Pittura [...]'. Published in Mantua by the press of Francesco Osanna, publisher of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, this letter represents one of the most impressive, yet neglected, documents in the history of academies of art—in Italy and beyond. Discussed with Cardinal Federico Borromeo, and influenced by the transnational character of the courts and cities that Zuccari frequented between 1603 and 1605, the letter was addressed to Italian and European leaders. It constituted the most significant of the open letters that Zuccari circulated in both manuscript and printed form between 1586 and 1609, the year of his death. It is at once a programmatic manifesto and a polemical pamphlet in defense of contemporary art academies, and it was accompanied by a brief chronicle, entitled the 'Lamento della Pittura', which rehearses in verse the principal artist in the history of Italian painting, from Gentile Belllini to Paolo Veronese. With this letter Zuccari addressed himself to world leaders as well as cultural mavens and patrons of the three arts of 'disegno', in order to signal to them the urgent need to support the birth of academies, both public or private, in cities everywhere. The goal was not only to sustain the cause of painting, sculpture, and architecture, but also to offer to youths who intended to undertake the difficult path to the knowledge and the practice of the arts, a modern educational structure on the example of the academies of drawing in Florence, Rome, and Venice.