Pietro Testa

Pietro Testa (1612 – 1 March 1650) was an Italian High Baroque artist active in Rome. He is best known as a printmaker and draftsman. Most of his relatively brief career was spent in Rome in the circle of artists and scholars interested in Classical ideals, who grouped around Cassiano dal Pozzo. Although his public paintings were largely unsuccessful, he was among the finest and most renowned Italian printmakers and draughtsmen of the 17th century.

Early career: Lucca and Rome, to 1637

The son of a dealer in secondhand goods in Lucca, by the mid- to late 1620s Testa was in Rome, where he was known as ‘il Lucchesino’. The German painter and artists’ biographer Joachim von Sandrart, who was then in Rome supervising the project to engrave the ancient statues in the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani (published c. 1631 as Galleria Giustiniani), claimed to have discovered Testa drawing among the ancient ruins of the city and put him to work making preparatory drawings for the Giustiniani engravings. An inventory of 1638 also indicates that Giustiniani owned two paintings by Testa: Moses Striking the Rock and Laban Searching for the Idols Concealed by Rachel (both Potsdam, Sanssouci Picture Gallery).

By 1630 Testa was working in the studio of Domenichino. At this time he also made drawings of antiquities – filling five large volumes, according to Baldinucci – for dal Pozzo’s Museum Chartaceum (Paper Museum; hundreds preserved at Windsor Castle, Royal Library), and it was from the abilities he displayed in this commission that Testa earned a reputation and the appellation ‘il Lucchesino esquesito disegnatore’ (‘little Lucchese, the exquisite draughtsman’).

The many surviving drawings for his own inventions attest both to his skill and to the laborious mode of production learnt from Domenichino. Both the Giustiniani and dal Pozzo projects gave Testa an important early grounding in the works of Classical antiquity. His earliest prints (techniques for which he would have learnt from the excellent printmakers on the Giustiniani project) date from this period, including an engraved Elephant (1630, possibly recalling a lost painting by Testa owned by dal Pozzo) and the etched Three Lucchese Saints Interceding with the Virgin for the Victims of the Plague (c. 1630–31).

Testa’s friendship with dal Pozzo, to whom Testa dedicated his allegorical etching of the Dream of Joseph or Flight into Egypt with the Adoration of the Cross (c. 1635–7), continued for some years, although the fact that dal Pozzo had Testa jailed in 1637 on the suspicion that he was about to leave Rome without delivering two promised paintings suggests that the relationship had cooled. Through Sandrart, dal Pozzo and Domenichino, Testa gained entry into a group of artists that included Nicolas Poussin, François Duquesnoy, Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet, as well as the critic Giovanni Pietro Bellori; they shared and stimulated his interest in the Classical tradition, a thoughtful union of artistic practice and theory, and landscape. The notion advanced by several scholars that Testa’s theoretical classicism, acquired under the tutelage of dal Pozzo and others, was at odds with and suppressed a naturally romantic temperament to the disadvantage of his art and career has been justly rejected.

When Domenichino moved to Naples in mid- 1631, Testa entered Pietro da Cortona’s studio, probably with an introduction from dal Pozzo, as Passeri stated, and possibly enamoured of Cortona’s colourism, as suggested by Baldinucci. Testa’s difficult personality – noted by all his biographers – caused a rupture with Cortona, who threw him out of the studio. Testa subsequently returned to Lucca (before August 1632), invited to paint a fresco of Liberty in the Palazzo degli Anziani (Palazzo Pubblico), but he had no experience in the medium, and the work was not well received. He did, however, secure the patronage of the Lucchese collector Girolamo Buonvisi, cleric of the Apostolic Camera and a member of the circle around the family of the Barberini pope Urban VIII in Rome. Testa dedicated several prints to Buonvisi, including the Lyceum of Painting (c. 1638).

He returned to Rome (probably by the end of 1632), vowing, according to Passeri, to study and excel in colouring as he had in drawing so that his work might be properly appreciated by his compatriots. There he spent the rest of his life, apart from a brief sojourn in Lucca in 1637. In addition to the two Giustiniani paintings, several canvases can be dated to the mid-1630s, including the altarpiece of the Vision of St. Dominic of Soriano (c. 1636–7) in the church of San Romano, Lucca. The influence of Poussin, significant throughout Testa’s career, is evident in works from the 1630s such as the Venus and Adonis (c. 1631–7), of which there is both an etched and a painted version (Vienna, Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste). The image recalls Poussin’s own treatment of the subject from the late 1620s, in both style and iconography. Its mood is gentle and lyrical; the emphasis on landscape and the dozens of putti surrounding the amorous protagonists have led some to see it as part of a general ‘neo-Venetianism’ of the 1630s, although this concept remains problematic. The reversal of life and death in the figures of Adonis and the boar carries cosmological overtones (as discovered by Cropper) and is symptomatic of Testa’s tendency, throughout his career, to embellish narratives or inventively rework conventional subjects, for which he was criticized by some of his contemporaries.

In late 1637 Testa returned to Lucca, where his friend Pier Francesco Mola drew a dated portrait of him (Montpellier, Musée Fabre). Testa probably hoped to gain the patronage of the new bishop, Cardinal Marco Antonio Franciotti, whose arrival he celebrated in an allegorical etching and to whom he dedicated one other etching as well, the Allegory of Painting (c. 1637–8). However, Franciotti’s appointment proved disastrous; he was removed as bishop in 1639, and Testa’s renewed hopes for a powerful Lucchese patron were dashed.

原文较长，这里只摘了前面一部分，摘自英文维基百科「Pietro Testa」（暂时没有中文条目，下面是英文原文），按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用，去掉了参考文献、外部链接等尾部小节和表格，其余文字未作改动。