Cesare Ripa

Cesare Ripa (in the 1624 edition of Iconologia )

Cesare Ripa (* around 1555 in Perugia , † 1622 in Rome ) was an Italian cook, writer and scholar .

Ripa traveled to Rome as a young man. There he worked for a long time as a servant and cook for Cardinal Anton Maria Salviati and after his death for his relatives. Ripa's work, the Iconologia of 1593, is an iconographic dictionary that has become an inexhaustible source for art and literature of the Baroque era .

After the great success of his book, which he had written in his spare time, he was honored with a title of nobility.

The Iconologia

Clemenza (1603)

The Iconologia overo Descrittione Dell'imagini Universali cavate dall'Antichità et da altri luoghi was a successful and momentous book. The book, which is based on Egyptian, Greek and Roman image and written sources, was used by rhetoricians , visual artists and poets to give shape to abstract concepts such as virtues and vices, affects and passions, the arts and sciences. The book was arranged alphabetically, not systematically, in accordance with a procedure customary in the Renaissance. Each term in the book corresponds to a description of the allegorical figure or personification , specifying the type and color of their clothing and their various attributes , including evidence from the Bible or ancient literature. Several different variants are presented for some personifications. An illustrated version with 151 pictures did not appear until 1603. Numerous translations into Italian, French (1644, 1677, 1681 and 1698), Dutch (between 1644 and 1750), German (1670, 1704, and 1758–1760) and English (1709, 1779, 1785) attest to the great demand. The text and illustrations of the individual issues vary widely. The Hertel edition in Augsburg around 1758–1760 with little text but excellent copperplate engravings by Jeremias Wachsmuth is one of the most beautiful. It was only the classicist Johann Winckelmann who spoke critically about Ripa.

Ripa's work is still of importance today for deciphering both baroque allegories and allegorical representations of classicism and historicism, as well as for emblematics . Especially in the work of Johannes Vermeer and his painting The Art of Painting , Ripa's Iconologia is used for interpretation.

Works

• Iconologia overo Descrittione di diverse imagini cavate dall 'antichità, e di propria inventione . Reprograph. Reprint d. Ed. Rom, Faeij, 1603. With an introduction by Erna Mandowsky . Hildesheim ; New York: G. Olms, 1970

literature

• Thaler, Alice: The signature of the Iconologia des Cesare Ripa: fragmentation, sampling and ambivalence: a hermeneutic study, Basel: Schwabe Verlag 2018, ISBN 978-3-7965-3751-6
• Cesare Ripa and the conceptual images of the early modern period , ed. by Cornelia Logemann and Michael Thimann, Zurich-Berlin: diaphanes 2010, ISBN 978-3-03734-134-6

See also

Andrea Alciato

Web links

• Literature by and about Cesare Ripa in the catalog of the German National Library
• Illustrations from the adaptation by Cesare Orlandi (1764), with English and Italian index
• The Hertel Edition
• Cesare Ripa at arthistoricum.net - the historical context and digitized works in the "History of Art History" portal

Individual evidence

1. ^ Maser, EA (1971) Cesare Ripa. Baroque and Rococo. Pictural Imagery. The 1758-1760 Hertel edition of Ripa's "Iconologia" with 200 engraved illustrations, SÜ. viii-ix.
2. ↑ The loving discovery of Minerva, the goddess of art. Augsburg, 1704.
3. ^ Maser, EA (1971) Cesare Ripa. Baroque and Rococo. S. xiv.