Full Name: Boschini, Marco
Gender: male
Date Born: 1605
Date Died: 1681
Place Born: Venice, Veneto, Italy
Place Died: Venice, Veneto, Italy
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): Ancient Italian, Early Western World, Mediterranean (Early Western World), painting (visual works), seventeenth century (dates CE), Venetian (Republic, culture or style), and Viennese
Career(s): art historians
Overview
Leading Venetian writer on art in the seventeenth century; wrote a patriotic and polemical defense of Venetian painting, La carta del navegar pittoresco, (The Map of Painting’s Journey), 1660). Le ricche miniere della pittura veneziana, 1674, (The Rich Mines of Venetian Painting). Boschini writing, like Ridolfi’s, countered Vasari’s claims that Florence was the birthplace of Renaissance art. However, Boschini’s books were more orderly and well-thought-out than Ridolfi’s. Instead of just biographical account of artists, Boschini focused on how the paintings were created, emphasizing color, the central element to the Venetian school (Bondanelli). Boschini drew from various sources. He appears to have used the first edition of Vasari (1550) and thereby restated a number of errors in attribution (such as giving Titian’s “Storm at Sea” to Giorgione).
Sources
Hope, Charles. “Historians of Venetian Painting.” in The Genius of Venice, 1500-1600. New York: Abrams, 1984; Hope, Charles. Giorgione or Titian? History of a Controversy. Council of The Frick Collection Lecture series. New York: Frick Collection, 2003, p. 13; “Literature and Art.” in Dictionary of Italian Literature. Peter Bondanella, Julia Conaway Bondanella, and Jody Robin Shiffman, eds. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996