The Old Woman as Art Critic: Speech and Silence in Response to the Passions from Annibale Carracci to Denis Diderot' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (2008)

THE OLD WOMAN AS ART CRITIC

SPEECH AND SILENCE IN RESPONSE TO THE PASSIONS

FROM ANNIBALE CARRACCI TO DENIS DIDEROT

Sheila McTighe

I

Representing the passions or the affetti was a primary concern of manyseicento artists It was a key area in which the visual arts competed with the

prestige of literature for expression was the very bond between the sister arts of painting and poetry Painting could be muta poesis only by virtue of silentlyand statically depicting the changing states of the human soul a task that poetrycould achieve more directly through passionate speech that unfolds over time1

For most seicento writers on art as well as for artists expression was a criticaltouch stone in evaluating the worth of paintings Yet even in this area of commonconcern the affetti sparked competition between writer and painter The Romancritic and biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori emphasised that his aim in discussingpaintings was to capture painted affetti in words In his introduction to Le vite dersquopittori of 1672 Bellori famously credited Nicolas Poussin with urging him to usethe rhetorical technique of ekphrasis or verbal description of artistic images2

Bellorirsquos form of ekphrasis consisted of describing only the sequence of passionsthat he observed within any given painting as if the visual image were a demateri -alised transparent window onto the figuresrsquo feelings and thoughts In an anec -dote that Bellori ascribed to Annibale Carracci however we may see a small butimportant rift opening between artists and critics in their attitude toward judgingthe affetti

An early version of this essay was presented at the 2003 College Art Conference in New YorkCity in a session organised by Giancarla Periti andGiovanna Perini It forms a part of my work towardsa book with the working title Annibale Carracci Nico -las Poussin and the End of the Renaissance which wassupported by a Leverhulme Major Research Grantduring the period 2005ndash2008

1 The two classic studies of the doctrine of thesister arts and the role of expression are R Lee Ut Pictura Poesis The Humanistic Theory of PaintingNew York 1967 and J Montagu The Expression of thePassions The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brunrsquoslsquo Confeacuterence sur lrsquoexpression geacuteneacuterale et particuliegraverersquoNew Haven and London 1994 The literature on bothtopics is now too vast to cite in full but relevant andrecent studies include M Fumaroli LrsquoEcole du silenceLe sentiment des images au XVIIe siegravecle Paris 1994and R Meyer ed Representing the Passions HistoriesBodies Visions Los Angeles 2003

2 G P Bellori Le Vite dersquo pittori scultori edarchitetti moderni ed E Borea Turin 1976 p 8 (firstedn Rome 1672) On Bellorirsquos use of ekphrasis see GPrevitalirsquos preface to the 1976 edition of Le Vite dersquopittori pp xl-liv E Cropper lsquo ldquoLa piugrave bella antichitagraveche sappiate desiderarerdquo History and Style in GiovanPietro Bellorirsquos ldquoLivesrdquo in Kunst und Kunsttheorie1400ndash1900 Wolfenbuumltteler Forschungen xlviii Wies -baden 1991 pp 145ndash73 On Agucchirsquos ekphrasis seeR Rosenberg lsquoVon der Ekphrasis zur wissen schaft -lichen Bildbeschreibung Vasari Agucchi FeacutelibienBurckhardtrsquo Zeitschrift fuumlr Kunstgeschichte lviii 1995pp 297ndash318 and N Land lsquoThe Anecdotes of G BAgucchi and the Limitations of Languagersquo Word andImage xxii 2006 pp 77ndash82 In chapter four of mybook Nicolas Poussinrsquos Landscape Allegories (Cam -bridge 1996) I examined the relationship betweenBellorirsquos and Poussinrsquos uses of ekphrasis

239

JOURNAL OF THE WARBURG AND COURTAULD INSTITUTES LXXI 2008

Annibale Carracci saidmdashor so the story goesmdashthat he had been asked tojudge the relative merits of two of his students3 Each had depicted the martyr -dom of a saint and their paintings were displayed opposite each other in the samechurch Annibale was at first unable to decide which one had achieved greatersuccess but he was set straight on the matter by a little old woman una vecchia -rella Looking at one painting she was silent In response to the other she spoke atlength happily describing the affetti of all the figures pointing out their actionsto the young girl who accompanied her In retelling Annibalersquos story Bellori doesnot doubt that Annibale meant the second painting the one that got the womantalking to be the winner in this paragone or debate But in its rhetorical functionas a paragone the story planted the seed for other viewpoints on the contest Theanecdote was first published in 1646 and then repeated not only by Bellori in1672 but by most Italian writers on art until the end of the seventeenth centuryLater French German and English writers and even travellers on the GrandTour learned from the old womanrsquos example how to weigh the sweetness of oneartistrsquos expressions against the harsh but powerful passions of another In all thisthe old woman and young girl would make an occasional appearance to demon -strate through descriptions tears or silence which of the two painters had greatermastery over the passions of the soul Finally even Denis Diderot called on thefictional old woman to judge the passions in his Salon of 1767 and she hauntsDiderotrsquos Penseacutees deacutetacheacutees sur la peinture of the same year The uses of the vecchia -rella story far transcended its original context

No doubt the wit of the story derived in part from the battle of the sexes aswell as the confrontation of social classes The distinguished male writer and artistbecame the disciples of an ignorant lsquoold woman of the peoplersquo as Diderot calledher each time the anecdote was retold a witty reversal of social dominance ontwo fronts But one reversal calls for another The staging of the vecchiarella talealso puts the spotlight on a hierarchy of responses to the affetti with reasonedspeech about the passions alternating with an impassioned if silent empathyBecause the setting for Annibalersquos anecdote was understood to be one of the verysame early Christian oratories in which Pope Gregory the Great wrote of sacredimages for the idiotae or illiterate it also set up a tension between religiousresponses to the painted image and what in modern terms might be called anaesthetic response Looked at in this light from its very first telling to its appear -ance in Diderotrsquos Salon the story of the old woman and the better depiction ofthe passions poses a serious question about the mass audience for high artCom municating to that public was a positive goal in the context of the Catholicreform and of religious art in general but for secular writers on the arts focusedon classical forms and ideal beauty how valid was the judgement of a masspublic when it came to a lsquoreadingrsquo of the passions

240 THE OLD WOMAN AS ART CRITIC

3 The story first appeared in Giovanni AtanasioMassani [pseudonym Giovanni Atanasio Mosini]Diverse figure al numero di ottanta disegnate di pennanellrsquohore di recreatione da Annibale Carracci Rome1646 a modern facsimile of Massanirsquos text is found in

Le Arti di Bologna di Annibale Carracci ed A Mara -bottini Rome 1979 The first modern discussion ofthis passage was in D Mahon Studies in Seicento Artand Theory London 1947

This anecdote has been examined as a key seicento text about the correctapproach to history painting which is successful when its passions can be verbal -ised even by the least intellectual viewer such as the old woman and her younggirl4 What has not been explored in the sequence of texts on the vecchiarella is herrole as a representative of the public and the significance of her silence I havetwo modest aims in revisiting the story of Annibale and the old woman Firstly Ipropose that it alludes to two classical sources one is the collection of ekphrasesin Philostratusrsquos Imagines the other a passage from Ovidrsquos Fasti concerning anold woman speech and silence Secondly I argue that changing values given tothe old womanrsquos silence in the later versions of Annibalersquos story bring up newquestions about who was to read the depicted passions not just how they were tobe read

II

After his death in 1609 Annibale Carraccirsquos anecdote may have circulated orallyfor several decades before it was written down In fact although for convenienceI call it Annibalersquos story it may be the creation of a writer and critic close toAnnibale in Rome Giovanni Battista Agucchi The first text in which we find it is the preface to the 1646 Roman publication of Annibale Carraccirsquos images ofBolognese street vendors a volume of prints entitled Diverse figure although inlater times the volume has come to be called Le arti di Bologna The preface waswritten by a man named Giovanni Atanasio Massani a letterato who served asmajor-domo in the household of Pope Urban VIII Barberini during the 1630sand 1640s5 But we are given to understand that most of the ideas and sentimentsexpressed in the preface are those of Agucchi the secretary to Cardinal Aldo -brandini at the turn of the century and a friend to Annibale Carracci in the finalyears of the artistrsquos life6 Agucchirsquos unpublished Trattato della pittura probablycomposed between 1610 and 1620 is cited verbatim and at length in Massanirsquospreface When he tells the anecdote of the vecchiarella it seems that Agucchi isimplicated in the story itself

4 Jennifer Montagu places the anecdote into the context of doctrines on representing the passionsMontagu (as in n 1) pp 58ndash59 The most probinganalysis of the anecdotersquos signficance remains FThuumlrlemann lsquoBetrachterperspektiven im Konfliktzur Uumlberlieferungsgeschichte der Vecchiarella-Anek -dotersquo Marburger Jahrbuch fuumlr Kunstgeschichte xxi1986 pp 135ndash55 see also Land (as in n 2) R Spearhas discussed the story in relation to both Domeni -chino and Guido Reni in Domenichino 2 vols NewHaven and London 1982 i pp 54ndash55 and 155ndash57The lsquoDivinersquo Guido Religion Sex Money and Art in theWorld of Guido Reni New Haven and London 1997pp 24ndash31 and lsquoReni contre Dominiquin dans la litteacute -rature drsquoart franccedilaise du XVIIe siegraveclersquo in Seicento Lapeinture italienne du XVIIe siegravecle et la France Paris1990 pp 190ndash98

5 Massani (as in n 3) p 20 Marabottini (as inn 3) pp lxxndashlxxi

6 Giovanni Battista Agucchi is given the pseu -do nym Gratiado Machati in Massanirsquos preface toDiverse figure (as in n 3) For the role of Agucchirsquosfragmentary Trattato in forming the ideas of GiovanPietro Bellori on ideal beauty see Mahon (as in n3) pp 111ndash54 and pp 241ndash58 For Agucchirsquos impacton individual artists such as Domenichino and PietroTesta see A Marabottini lsquoIl ldquoTrattato della pitturardquoe i disegni del Lucchesinorsquo Commentari iii 1954 pp217ndash44 C Whitfield lsquoA Programme for Erminia andthe Shepherds rsquo Storia dellrsquoarte xix 1973 pp 47ndash69A Vannugli lsquoLudovico Carracci un Erminia ritrovatae un riesame delle committenze romanersquo Storia dellrsquoarte lix 1987 pp 47ndash69 S Ginzburg lsquoThe Portraitof Agucchi at York Reconsideredrsquo Burlington Maga -zine cxxxvi 1994 pp 4ndash14

SHEILA McTIGHE 241

The story begins with a lsquoletterato dersquo primi di quel temporsquo or lsquoone of theforemost men of letters at that timersquo most likely Agucchi He begins the tale byasking for Annibalersquos judgement

He asked of Annibale who came out better in the work done by two painters in hisworkshop in a work that they did together for a Cardinal This consisted of a large historypainting that each made depicting the life of the same saint executed in fresco in a churchin Rome one on each side opposite each other To this question Annibale responded thatthese two history paintings were the occasion on which he discovered himself to be thegreatest fool because he had never known which of the two merited the greater praise untilhe was taught by a little old woman Holding a small girl by the hand she stopped one dayto look at one and the other of these histories and he observed her [Annibale continuedthat] she fixed her gaze on one of the paintings her eye roaming from one part to another inorder to take it all in yet never said a word and showed no sign of any passion [affetto] thatlooking at the painting might have caused in her Then turning to the other History shebegan to say to the young girl lsquoLook look girl at that man doing such a thingrsquo and withher finger she indicated the figure that she said represented the action And so regardingthe other figures hand in hand she pointed out the actions with gusto to the little girl whoalso seemed to take delight in them Now you see (said Annibale to the letterato) how Ilearned to know which of our two painters had expressed the passions more vividly anddefined the story more clearly7

The names of the two painters are not stated and the location of their paintingsis left unspecified Massani wrote that the reader would recognize the artists andtheir works without any need of explanation He was right for no later commen -tator on the story was in any doubt that it referred to Guido Renirsquos Crucifixion ofSt Andrew and Domenichinorsquos Flagellation of St Andrew frescoes on the side wallsof the small Oratorio di SantrsquoAndrea in the grounds of San Gregorio Magno inRome completed in 1608ndash09 the last year of Annibale Carraccirsquos life (Figs 1ndash2)8


7 lsquoUn letterato dersquo primi di questo tempodomandograve ad Annibale chi si fosse portato meglio didue Pittori della sua Scuola in un lavoro che insiemefecero per un Cardinale cioegrave unrsquoHistoria grande perciascuno della vita di un medesimo Santo dipinte agravefresco in Roma dentro una Chiesa nelle due lati lrsquounincontro allrsquoaltro Al quale quesito Annibale risposeche quelle due Historie erano state cagione che eglisi era conosciuto se stesso per un grandissimobalordo perche non haveva mai Saputo compren -dere quale di esse meritasse drsquoesser piugrave lodatasintanto che egli non imparograve agrave conoscerla da unaVecchiarella la quale havendo per mano una Fan -ciulla si fermograve un giorno agrave guardare lrsquouna e lrsquoaltra diquelle Historie et egli lrsquoosservograve che mentre ella aduna fissograve lo sguardo andograve voltando lrsquoocchio da ogniparte per mirarla tutta ma non disse mai una parolanegrave diede altro segno drsquoalcun affetto che in lei havessecagionato il guardar quella Pittura ma poi allrsquoaltraHistoria voltatesi cominciograve agrave dire alla Fanciulla Vedivedi figlia quellrsquohuomo che fagrave la tal cosa e col dittogli accennava la Figura che quellrsquoattione chrsquoella

diceva rappresentava e cosi di mano in manomirando lrsquoaltre Figure le additava e ne dichiaravacon gusto le attioni alla Fanciulla la quale ancoraparessa che se ne prendesse diletto Hor vedete (disseAnnibale al Letterato) comrsquoio hograve imparato agrave cono -scere quale delli nostri due Dipintori habbia piugravevivamente espresso gli affetti e piugrave chiaramente lasua Historia dichiaratarsquo Massani (as in n 3) p 20

8 E Fumagalli lsquoGuido Reni (e altri) a SanGregorio al Celio e a San Sebastiano fuori le murarsquoParagone xli 1990 pp 67ndash93 gives full informationabout the problems in dating the two frescoes inrelation to Renirsquos other projects in Rome See alsoSpear 1982 (as in n 4) i pp 54ndash55 Spear 1997 (asin n 4) pp 27ndash28 and D S Pepper lsquoAn Exchangeon the State of Research in Italian Seventeenth-Century Paintingrsquo Art Bulletin lxxi 1989 pp 305ndash09 D S Pepper (lsquoThe Roman Account Book ofGuido Reni II The Commissionsrsquo Burlington Maga -zine cxiii 1971 pp 372ndash86) argues for the dating ofthe paintings to 1609 rather than 1608

SHEILA McTIGHE 243

1 Domenichino [Domenico Zampieri] The Flagellation of St Andrew fresco Oratory of SantrsquoAndrea Churchof San Gregorio Magno Rome (AlinariAnderson Florence copy Alinari Archives)

2 Guido Reni The Martyrdom of St Andrew fresco Oratory of SantrsquoAndrea Church of San Gregorio MagnoRome (AlinariAnderson Florence copy Alinari Archives)

The first readers to respond to this anecdote as it was published in 1646 werealso in no doubt that the artist whom the vecchiarella judged the better of the twowas Domenichino Nonetheless as many later versions of the story pointed outGuido Renirsquos painting had won much greater acclaim from the general publicAlessandro Algardi the sculptor from Bologna who considered himself as work -ing in the tradition of Carracci wrote an angry letter disagreeing with the judge -ment of Annibalersquos vecchiarella The story is nonsense Algardi declared lsquoI myself rsquohe went on lsquohave observed at gatherings there that the mothers all show to theirchildren the beautiful mother that holds a baby in Guidorsquos painting saying ldquoOwhat a beautiful lady o what a pretty baby look look child at how the babyholds still look how much more beautiful he is than you arerdquo and I never sawthat look ing in the other direction [at Domenichinorsquos work] they made any fussyet I saw that they were horrified and saddened by the spectacle helliprsquo9 The letternot only makes old women prefer Renirsquos fresco for its sweetness and beauty itpoints up one of the contradictions inherent in the 1646 version of the story the old woman and the girl take active pleasure in describing the affetti of greatsuffering Algardi reverses the womanrsquos response making the pleasure she feelsat seeing Renirsquos lovely figures the sign of victory He makes the painting a moralexample to its female viewers lsquolook look child at how the baby holds stillrsquo Butfor Algardi the criteria for judgement remain the same as Annibalersquos the properresponse to the depicted history is speech while silence again indicates a failureto respond While he disparages the lsquochatter of the old womanrsquo Algardi stillrecognises her behav iour as a true indication of which painting is more success -ful Algardi had parti cipated in the Massani publication of 1646 contributing aportrait of Annibale to serve as frontispiece to the text His letter shows that hefelt the relative worth of the two paintings was inaccurately presented but this inturn suggests he felt that Annibalersquos own view was not being correctly representedby Massanirsquos preface

The Bolognese writer Carlo Cesare Malvasia reproduced Algardirsquos letter inhis Felsina Pittrice of 1678 within his life of Domenichino agreeing with Algardithat Reni was wrongly maligned in the anecdote10 But Malvasia called intoquestion the very distinction between silence and speech in the old womanrsquos testi -mony He depicted the vecchiarella as struck silent in front of Guidorsquos fresco byan almost excessive beautymdashin keeping with Algardirsquos account of women pointingto painted children who were more beautiful than their own infantsmdashbut capableof only tears and speechless wailing after she has turned to Domenichinorsquos work


9 lsquoLe chiachere della vecchia hellip sono fandaniesono inventioni io mi ci son presente delle feste etho osservato che le madri tutte mostrando arsquo suoiragazzi quella bella madre che in quella di Guidotiene il bambino dicevano ocirc che bella donna ocirc chebel pupo guarda guarda figlio come stagrave questoquanto egrave piu bello di tugrave ne osservai mai che guar -dando dallrsquoaltra parte ne facessero caso anzi osservaiche srsquoinorridivano e si attristavano agrave quel spettacolo

helliprsquo C Malvasia Felsina pittrice vite dersquo pittoribolognesi 2 vols modern edition ed G ZanottiBologna 1841 pp 225ndash26 (first edn Bologna 1678)J Montagu Alessandro Algardi 2 vols New Haven1985 i pp 58ndash63 The letter which Malvasia saidwas addressed to him was not dated in Malvasiarsquostext and there is no original however Montagu feltthat Algardirsquos letter was genuine

10 Malvasia 1841 (as in n 9) ii pp 225ndash56

Malvasiarsquos version of the story makes both frescoes successful in eliciting theappropriate affetti or passions although in quite different ways Domenichinorsquosmore painful scene drew compassion from what Malvasia termed the lsquotimid andpious sexrsquo but Guido Renirsquos scene (showing the saint in ecstasy adoring the crosson which he will be martyred) did not so much move as stupefy the viewer (lsquonondoveva muovere che stuporersquo) Stupore was a term that had a history and a reson -ance in art writing Vasarirsquos friend Vincenzo Borghese had used it in a positivesense substituting stupore for muovere as the highest of three terms in the dictumthat rhetoric should teach delight and move the public11 By this one term thevecchiarellarsquos silence was elevated to a poetic state of marvel it was a high form ofeloquence not a sign of unfeeling or incomprehension Malvasia noted the paral -lelism between the quiet figures in the painting and the reaction of the old womanoutside and felt that silence was appropriate to both But by changing the vecchia -rellarsquos happy description of Domenichinorsquos torture scene into inarticulate wailinghe characterised the affetti in that scene as too harsh The silence of sacred wonderwas preferable to her breakdown in tears

Both Algardi and Malvasia presented the affetti as drawing the old womaninto subjective participation in the emotions that she observes The response ofempathy not ratiocination marks the superior painting of the passions This wasnot the case when Massani first told the story nor was it true of the Roman writerGiovan Pietro Bellori He also placed the anecdote in his life of Domenichinobut used it to expatiate on that artistrsquos supremacy in creating clear narratives thatcould be read as a text in a sequence of calculated affetti At first his version lookslike an exact replica of the story as Massani told it in 1646 but there is at leastone crucial change Bellori gave a verbatim account of what the old woman sup -posedly said in front of the Domenichino fresco which neither Annibale nor anyof his other emulators had dared to do lsquoLook at that torturer [and how] he raiseshis whips with such fury Do you see that other one who threatens the saintfuriously with his finger And that other one who ties the knots around the saintrsquosfeet with such force Do you see the saint himself who raises his eyes to heavenwith such faithrsquo12 Not even qualifying the old woman as divota could justify suchan elegant turn of phrase in the discourse of an old woman of the people This is Bellori as ventriloquist speaking his ekphrasis through the mouth of the oldwoman and hoping that we will not notice In her the devout and the criticallyacute viewer coincide in a rather improbable way

In directly quoting her speaking words no old woman of the people wouldreally employ Bellori as critic is virtually merged with the foolish old woman ofthe people He had already made clear his dismissal of the volgo the lower ordersin a paraphrase of Agucchirsquos Trattato Using Annibale Carraccirsquos example howeverallowed Bellori to paper over the big cracks that had begun to separate a secular

11 D Summers Michelangelo and the Language ofArt Princeton 1981 pp 171ndash76

12 lsquoVedi quel manigoldo con quanta furia inalza iflagelli Vedi quelrsquoaltro che minaccia rabbiosamente

il Santo col ditto e colui che con tanta forza stringe inodi dersquo piedi Vedi il Santo stesso con quanta federimira il cielorsquo Bellori 1976 (as in n 2) p 319

SHEILA McTIGHE 245

and classicising criticism of the arts from the churchrsquos need for images to inspirereligious devotion Later writers not just Malvasia were rather scornful aboutthis procedure The Florentine writer Filippo Baldinucci follows Bellorirsquos textclosely but leaves out almost all of the old womanrsquos direct speech Moreover hementions Domenichinorsquos timidity and piety bringing the issue of religious view -ing back into discussion by drawing Domenichinorsquos religious devotion and theold womanrsquos response together13 Giovanni Battista Passeri writing in the sameyear as Malvasiarsquos publication (1678) was another champion of Domenichinorsquosart over Renirsquos He however wrote with acerbity about the Reni-Domenichino-vecchiarella story saying that to base a critical paragone on the lsquosimplicity of a stolidold womanrsquo did not give lsquovalid authorityrsquo in this or perhaps in any case14

The later versions of the vecchiarella story are caught up in the great dividebetween Bologna and Rome between Malvasia as a historian of Emilian paint -ing and Bellori as an advocate of Rome-based classicism a topic to which I willreturn But it was clearly understood from the first as a contest between twospecific painters in the recognizable Roman setting of San Gregorio Magno andits oratories The elements that change from one telling to another have to do withthe role of silence the characterisation of the old woman as delighted or movedto tears and the explicit allusion to the religious context of her viewing whichneither the AgucchiMassani version nor that of Bellori address The later versionsof the story acknowledge that the old womanrsquos response indicated the betterrepresentation of passions in Domenichinorsquos work but they note that this directlycontradicted the actual public response to the two paintings in which GuidoRenirsquos painting was considered far more successful

Can we be so sure that Annibalersquos own opinion about the two works in thisfictional form of the vecchiarellarsquos opinion was so straightforward and unequivo -cal Of course it is framed by ironymdashAnnibale discovering himself to be a greatfoolmdashand it is meant to be funny Yet there is more to the irony Within Massanirsquostext the literal outcome of the debate is undermined by its context The vecchia -rella story comes at the end of a series of anecdotes about Annibalersquos ingegno hisverbal wit and his practical jokes based on visual illusions which deflated thepretension and arrogance of his interlocutors The story of the little old lady whoproves him to be a fool follows on in the vein of a joke that deflates the highexpectations of the letterato By having the judges be the low ignorant old womanand a female child Annibale makes lsquowinningrsquo in this comparison hard to distin -guish from losing

On the other hand Annibalersquos Bolognese biographer Carlo Cesare Malvasiagives a good deal of evidence that Annibale not only preferred Domenichino overGuido Reni but also that in 1609 he was irked by Renirsquos financial and publicsuccess and particularly bothered that Reni was given the enormous payment


13 Filippo Baldinucci Notizie dei professori deldisegno da Cimabue in qua 7 vols Florence 1974ndash75iii pp 64ndash65

14 G B Passeri Die Kuumlnstlerbiographien G BPasseris ed J Hess Leipzig and Vienna 1934 p 28

of four hundred scudi for this very work at the Oratorio di SantrsquoAndrea15 Thestory of the vecchiarella if indeed it was told by Annibale in 1609 was a way ofunder mining the young Guidorsquos rapid ascent to fame In the 1670s Malvasiaedited this letter from Annibale including it in his life of Guido Reni The parti -san nature of his biographies has led modern writers to ask if Malvasia not onlyedited this letter but in fact forged it in order to make the rift between Annibaleand Guido parallel to the ongoing rift between critics favouring Roman or northItalian art16

The status of this letter as a document and its relation to the vecchiarellastory led to one of the great controversies within art-historical scholarship onthis period how shall we read the letters and supposedly eye-witness accountsadded to the seicento critical lives of the artistsmdashas outright lies useful fictionsgrafted onto real phenomena or as solid documentary evidence There is nodenying the partisan lack of lsquoobjectivityrsquo in the texts of Agucchi Bellori andMalvasia it has provoked an equally partisan debate among modern scholars ofseicento arts However despite heated or even ad hominem exchanges most of thewriting on this question has tacitly or explicitly advocated the same common -sensical middle course namely that all aspects of Malvasiarsquos text and those of theother critical biographers of the seicento require interpretation and demand thatwe be aware of their prejudices as well as the rhetorical codes that shaped theirwork The truly divisive issue in scholarship on seicento art not always acknowl -edged as such is not the status of these texts as sources of information but thenature of our own interpretive goals Ultimately the scholarly warfare over theseanecdotes and letters is due to our failure to agree on how to integrate the readingof such texts with our own response to the works of art

The rivalry between painters and writers provides a key to the links betweenthese stories of the old woman and the two paintings These texts shaped the anec-dote of the old womanrsquos responses into an artful form that mimics the setting andthe content of the paintings themselves the format of a paragone was the hingebetween the story and the images Annibale Carracci as well as his students Guidoand Domenichino deliberately sought opportunities to paragonare to contrastthemselves or their works17 The very linguistic strategies used by the writers were

15 Malvasia 1841 (as in n 9) ii p 1416 Malvasiarsquos reliability as a source has led to

consideration of wider historiographic issues in sei -cento studies for which see C Dempsey AnnibaleCarracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style Florence2000 and E Cropper and C Dempsey in lsquoThe Stateof Research in Italian Seventeenth-century PaintingrsquoArt Bulletin lxxvii 1987 pp 494ndash509 The views ofMahon are more sceptical of Malvasiarsquos alterationsand additions to documents such as letters but in no way does he advocate dismissing them or ignor -ing them see D Mahon lsquoMalvasia as a Source forSourcesrsquo Burlington Magazine cxxviii 1986 pp790ndash95 responding to R Zapperi lsquoThe Summons of the Carracci to Rome Some New Documentary

Evidencersquo Burlington Magazine cxxviii 1986 pp203ndash05 The exchange between D S Pepper andCropper and Dempsey polarised the discussion seePepper 1999 (as in n 8) See also D Mahon and DS Pepper lsquoGuercino and Reni Reflections on theInterpretation of Documents and Paintingsrsquo Burling -ton Magazine cxxxix 1997 pp 178ndash87 For more onthe subject of Malvasiarsquos use of artistsrsquo letters in hisFelsina pittrice see G Perini lsquoLe lettere degli artistida strumento di comunicazione a documento acimeliorsquo in Documentary Culture Florence and Romeed E Cropper Bologna 1992 pp 165ndash83 andlsquoBiographical Anecdotes and Historical Truth anexample from Malvasiarsquos Life of Guido Renirsquo Studisecenteschi xxxi 1990 pp 149ndash60

SHEILA McTIGHE 247

conscious emulations of the pictorial strategies of the artists about whom theywere writing However the artistrsquos choice to create juxtapositions and comparisonsin the display of their works had already based itself on rhetorical practice18 Theinterchange between image and word begins with the artists taking inspirationfrom the verbal sparring of virtuosi and letterati in their academies But in construc -ting their painterly versions of a paragone they presented the two items to be com -pared in such a way that the onlooker would ultimately be unable to judge in favourof one or the other The paragone without a winner was their forte Carracci involve-ment in the contentious comparison of north Italian colourism and central Italiandesign leading to a synthesis of the traits of both is one example of their engage-ment with one of the most important paragone of their day19This habit of thoughtalso seems to be bound up with issues of collaboration and competition within theCarracci workshop which have hitherto been dealt with more as a question ofconnoisseurship

Why does the story of the old lady in Agucchirsquos and Massanirsquos texts not makeAnnibalersquos choice of Domenichino open and unambiguous While Annibale didseem to prefer Domenichino over others in his workshop Massani tells us that asa teacher Annibale had a habit of deliberately praising first one student thenanother balancing them evenly Malvasia gives one such balancing act whenreporting on the two paintings by Reni and Domenichino that set off the fictionalvecchiarella story In this account when asked about the two works Annibaleresponded that lsquoGuidorsquos seems truly to be the work of a master and Domenchinorsquosthe work of a student but a student who knows more than the masterrsquo20

Annibalersquos responses to similar types of paragone questions are revealing Whenasked whether Tasso or Ariosto was the better poet he answered that Raphael wasthe best21 Undermining the relentless duality of such fashionable but at times sillycomparisons seemed to give Annibale pleasure It may have been a pleasure shared


17 Bellori refers to the juxtaposition of Guidorsquosand Domenichinorsquos paintings at the Oratorio di SantrsquoAndrea as a duello between the two Bellori 1976 (as inn 2) p 319 Malvasia also wrote of their pairing as aresult of interest in portraying their lsquodiversitagrave dellemanierersquo Malvasia 1841 (as in n 9) ii p 223 Oneaspect of Annibale Carraccirsquos career that I am nowexploring in my book project Annibale Carracci NicolasPoussin and the End of the Renaissance concerns thenew interest around 1600 in provocative juxtapositionsof works by two or more artists an interest demon-strated by patrons of the arts as well as writers Perhapsthe most prominent one was the Cerasi chapel of SantaMaria del Popolo in Rome where in 1600 the patrondrew together the three greatest names in RomeCaravaggio Carlo Maderno and Annibale CarracciThe same attitude is revealed by Agucchirsquos efforts tohave Annibale buried next to Raphael in the Pantheonwhich Bellori described as if it offered a topic for aparagone Malvasiarsquos writing set up numbers of para -goni between contemporary artists between modern

and antique artists and between stories that were told about past artists and those told in the lives ofBolognarsquos modern painters A Summerscale Mal -vasiarsquos Life of the Carracci Commentary and TranslationUniversity Park 2000 pp 53ndash54

18 M Baxandall Giotto and the Orators Human-ist Observers of Paintings in Italy and the Discovery ofPictorial Composition Oxford 1971 pp 31ndash32

19 There is now a large literature on the Carraccisynthesis of Lombard color and Roman design withthe best intellectual guide being C Dempsey AnnibaleCarracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (secondedn Florence 2000) which offers an alternative to theviews of D Posner Annibale Carracci A Study in theReform of Painting around 1590 2 vols London 1971

20 For the portion of Malvasiarsquos Felsina pittricedevoted to Annibale Agostino and Ludovico CarracciI have used the excellent translation and commentaryby Anne Summerscale Malvasiarsquos Life of the Carraccip 287

21 Summerscale (as in n 20) p 286

with others in the Carracci entourage in Bologna Malvasia recounts that whenAntonio Carracci was asked which of his two sons Annibale or Agostino was thebetter painter he said lsquoAgostino is better than Annibale and Annibale is betterthan Agostinorsquo22 Similarly when the Abbate Sampiero in Bologna responded to a query about whether Guido Reni or Francesco Albani would achieve greaterfame he said simply that Reni was more devout23 One could undo a paragone bychoosing both of the two contestants or by choosing a third option altogether sowhen Annibale makes the little old ladyrsquos ignorant response to the two paintingsthe criterion for deciding the worth of one painter over another we are entitled toview it as a witty evasion a way of making the outcome of the contest a test of thereaderrsquos critical judgement as much as his own

III

Annibalersquos choice of a protagonist was over-determined to say the least Oldwomen were typecast in Annibalersquos day The ruffiana a meddling old crone wasone of the set characters in commedia dellrsquoarte scenarios and an anonymous drawingof just such a theatrical crone labeled lsquouna Ruffianarsquo was reproduced at the endof the Diverse figure the very same book of 1646 in which the vecchiarella storywas published Again from the same volume Annibalersquos image entitled the Straordi-nario di carne portrays the cunning old woman as an irate customer complainingto the guild police of being short-weighed by her local butcher She also featuresin Annibalersquos painting of The Butcher Shop of c 1585ndash90 (Oxford Christ ChurchPicture Gallery) again as a client with an air of imminent dissatisfaction In castingthe vecchiarella as a judge in his anecdote Annibale plays on the cronersquos reputationas a tough customer to please

There is a more specific irony however in the idea of the old woman as teacherWe do not need to delve too far into sixteenth-century doctrines of the humoursand temperaments to find that the cold wet humour of women which supposedlymade the female gender particularly ill-suited for education became in degenerateold age all the more pronounced24 Popular science defined the physical tempercharacteristic of old women to be the least apt for intellectual endeavour The lsquooldwoman of the peoplersquo from the bottom of society and endowed with the leastresponsive of human tempers was the very epitome of ignorance and illiteracyamong the lowest social levels This is what Sofonisba Anguissola was representingwhen she provided Michelangelo with a sketch of an old woman mocked by ayoung girl for trying to learn to read25 It was probably the stereotypical stupidcunning of old womenmdashthe reverse of the classical sibylmdashthat would have madea contemporary laugh to hear of the vecchiarella as an instructor on the correctreading of history paintings

22 Ibid p 28823 Ibid p 28924 Z Filipczak Hot Dry Men Cold Wet Women

The Theory of the Humours and Western European Art1575ndash1700 New York 1997

25 Sofonisba Anguissolarsquos drawing is in the Gabi-netto dei Disegni e Stampe at the Uffizi GalleriesFlorence see also Sofonisba Anguissola e le sue sorelleed P Buffa Vienna and Washington DC 1994

SHEILA McTIGHE 249

Richard Spear suggested that Annibalersquos anecdote drew on a previous exampleof an old woman judging art in Paolo Pinorsquos Dialogo della pittura (1548) whichdescribes an old woman who foolishly criticises the naturalism of a portrait26Thatold woman does not perform in quite the same way as the vecchiarella howeverfor her incapacity as a judge is made immediately evident in the story and she isnot addressing the passions of the soul All the greater then is the contrast withAnnibalersquos old woman as critic who was not only involved in making a paragonewhen she looked at the two paintings but was also engaged in ekphrasis a publicrhetorical exercise It is hard to believe that Annibale much less Agucchi or Belloriwas unaware of the broad consensus of Renaissance humanists from Bruni to Viveseven lsquothose humanists most progressive in their advocacy of womenrsquos worthrsquo as onewriter has put it who all insisted that rhetoric and public speaking were anathemato women just as St Paul within the Christian tradition had forbidden women topreach27 From Aristotlersquos Politics Renaissance writers had often quoted his judge-ment that women should be forbidden entry into public life and public speechlsquosilence gives grace to women though that is not the case with a manrsquo28 In 1609the same year in which Annibale Carraccirsquos story may have been first told BenJonsonrsquos play Epicoene or The Silent Woman drew on that distinction between silentwomen and speaking men in a comedy about a youth impersonating a mute womanin order to marry a rich man who loathed chatter Heshe turns garrulous anddomineering after the wedding before being exposed as a man Silence and speechwere used not just by Jonson in 1609 but by many writers through the seventeenthcentury as distinctive markers of the feminine and the masculine29 One of Jonsonrsquoscharacters sums it up lsquoSilence in a woman is like speech in a man Denyrsquot whocanrsquo30

The old woman and young girl were not true to their sex in this respect Butthen these fictional figures too may only have been dressed as females31 Theyecho the old man and young boy in the best-known late antique text of ekphrasesPhilostratus the Elderrsquos Imagines Philostratus wrote that his aim was lsquoto describepaintings in the form of addresses which we have composed for the young that bythis means they may learn to interpret paintings and to appreciate what is esteemedin themrsquo32 He then stages each description as a dialogue between an older man


26 Spear 1997 (as in n 4) pp 27ndash2827 Karen Newman lsquoCity Talk Women and Com -

modification in Jonsonrsquos Epicoenersquo ELH lvi 1989 pp 503ndash18 (507) Ian Maclean The Renaissance Notionof Women Cambridge 1980 Conor Fahy lsquoThreeRenaissance Treatises of Womenrsquo Italian Studies ii1951 pp 30ndash55

28 Aristotle Politics i5 508 trans Horace Rack -ham Loeb Classical Library London 1972 p 65Constance Jordan lsquoFeminism and the HumanistsThe Case of Sir Thomas Elyotrsquos Defence of GoodWomenrsquo Renaissance Quarterly xxxvi 1983 pp 181ndash201

29 H Hallahan lsquoSilence Eloquence and Chatterin Jonsonrsquos Epicoene rsquo Huntington Library Quarterly xl

1977 pp 117ndash18 J Barish lsquoOvid Juvenal and theSilent Womanrsquo PMLA lxxi 1956

30 Ben Jonson Epicoene or The Silent Woman iiiii 123ndash24

31 Philippa Plock has argued that the vecchiarellastory represents a lsquotechnology of gendered viewingrsquo in seicento Rome through which male viewers took on a feminine viewing position lsquoRegarding Paintingthrough the Eyes of a Woman A Social Technology ofGendered Viewing in Seventeenth-Century Romersquo(2003) a web-based publication found at http wwwiash ed ac uk vkpublicationplockpdf (accessed April2008)

32 Philostratus the Elder Imagines i 1ndash5 translA Fairbanks Loeb Classical Library London 1931

and a young boy to whom he must explain the religious and mythological contentsof each picture Ekphrasis in this instance provided a moral education an aspectof Philostratusrsquos text that would not have gone unnoticed by Giovanni BattistaAgucchi or Giovan Pietro Bellori or Carlo Cesare Malvasia who all relied onekphrasis as a critical tool in their own writings It is not surprising that when aletterato writes the story down the winner of Annibalersquos paragone was the paintingthat elicited ekphrastic speech from the old woman But it is still surprising to makethat speech come from a woman and a girl rather than as in Philostratus an oldman and a boy

There was however another possible reason to make the storyrsquos protagonistan old woman A letterato such as Agucchi would have known a striking precedentfrom Roman literature for an old hag whose actions have to do with silence andspeech Book ii of Ovidrsquos Fasti contains a passage concerning an old crone andyoung girls His list of rituals for the month of February describes the hag whoperforms a magical ceremony aimed at silencing the tongues of evil slanderers Herritual overlaps with the offerings to the shades of the dead in the Feralia and it isfollowed in turn by an explanation of how the goddess of silence gave birth to theLares or household gods

This they call the Feralia because they bearOfferings to the dead the last day to propitiate the shadesSee an old woman sitting amongst the girls performs the ritesOf Tacita the Silent (though she herself is not silent)With three fingers she sets three lumps of incenseUnder the sill where the little mouse makes its secret pathThen she fastens enchanted threads together with dark leadAnd turns seven black beans over and over in her mouthAnd bakes the head of a small fish in the fire mouth sewn upWith pitch pierced right through with a bronze needleShe drops wine on it too and she or her friendsDrink the wine thatrsquos left though she gets mostOn leaving she says lsquoWe have sealed up hostile mouthsAnd unfriendly tonguesrsquo and the old woman exits drunk33

Ovid describes a witchcraft scene where sympathetic magic unites the most silentof creatures the fish with the stopping up of thresholds and of orifices and asealing-in of the hearth and home The 1640 English translation of John Gower iseven more vivid in its evocation of the supernatural scene lsquoLo now a granddamesits with maidens young And worships Silence with no silent tonguersquo34 It is a sceneof paradoxical opposites like Annibalersquos story of the vecchiarella in its inversion ofterms extreme age and youth are united the goddess of silence is invoked bygarrulous speech the ritual of preventing slander is accompanied by drunken loss

33 Ovidrsquos Fasti ii533ndash638 transl Sir JamesGeorge Frazer Loeb Classical Library London 1931See also Christopher Michael McDonough lsquoThe Hagand the Household Gods Silence Speech and the

Family in Mid-Februaryrsquo Classical Philology xcix2004 pp 354ndash69

34 John Gower Ovids Festivalls or Romane Calen -dar Cambridge 1640 pp 38ndash39

SHEILA McTIGHE 251

of control lsquoDeparting then wrsquo have tyrsquod the tongues of foes She cries then outin drunken garb she goesrsquo This represents a kind of education passed on from oldhag to young girls albeit not quite the high moral education found in Philostratusrsquosekphrases

The story of the vecchiarella may have been inspired by the parallels and starkcontrasts between Philostratusrsquos old man and young boy and Ovidrsquos old womanand young girl The common ground for the vecchiarella story and Ovidrsquos hag liesin the alternation of silence and speech and the goal of silencing destructive speechThis is what the anecdote itself performs by tying the tongue of the old womanbefore one of the paintings and setting it loose to gabble in front of the other TheAnnibale Carracci of Agucchirsquos and Massanirsquos stories silenced criticism of oneartist over the othermdashboth of them were products of his own training after allmdashby diverting speech into a description of the affetti

The value given to silence in Ovidrsquos passage bears an important relation to the vecchiarella tale Silence is found in a religious ritual and in the person of adivinity the passage in the Fasti gives us the goddess Taciturna or Dea Mutapropitiated by the old hagrsquos magic Any literate person in the seventeenth centurywould have been familiar with the association of silence with religious reverenceand with wisdom an association that undoes the negative associations of the oldwomanrsquos silence in Annibalersquos story Whether it was in the silencing gesture of theEgyptian god Harpocrates or the figure of Mercury god of eloquence with fingeron lips wisdom eloquence and silence were linked together in the popular pres-entation of classical ideas in emblem books and mythographies35 In the Christiancontext silence in the presence of the sacred was demonstrated in the theme of theMadonna del Silenzio in which the viewer is admonished to keep quiet while theChrist child sleeps in his motherrsquos lap36 Annibale himself had painted just such aMadonna now in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle If we look further at the twopaintings around which Annibale or Agucchi set up their story the silence of theold woman becomes more significant as an appropriate response to the religiouspassions of the soul

IV

The three small oratories in the grounds of San Gregorio Magno on RomersquosCelian Hill were refurbished between 1602 and 1607 under the patronage of CesareBaronio Oratorian church historian and author of the Annales Ecclesiastici Baroniodied in 1607 and the project passed to Cardinal Scipione Borghese the popersquosnephew and after Baroniorsquos death the new Abbate Commendatorio of the siteBorghese then commissioned Guido Reni to oversee the painted decoration with


35 L Bisello Sotto il manto del silenzio Storia eforme del tacere (secoli XVI-XVII) Florence 2003 CBenthien Barockes Schweigen Rhetorik und Perfor-mativitaumlt des Sprachlosen im 17 Jahrhundert Munich2006 R Waddington lsquoThe Iconography of Silence inChapmanrsquos Herculesrsquo this Journal xxxiii 1970 pp248ndash63

36 E Harris Frankfort lsquoEl Grecorsquos Holy Familywith the Sleeping Christ and the Infant Baptist AnImage of Silence and Mysteryrsquo in Hortus ImaginumEssays in Western Art ed R Enggass and M StokstadLawrence 1974 pp 103ndash11

others in the Carracci entourage working under him Domenichinorsquos relationshipwith the project is less clear Guido himself may have invited Domenichino toexecute the large fresco opposite his own work generously giving his colleague thechance to make a paragone of their two works as Passeri suggested in his biographyof Domenichino Or Annibale may have intervened with Borghese to give Domeni -chino part of the commission (Renirsquos account book shows that Domenichino wasnot paid by Reni so perhaps he worked there under the aegis of Borghese himself)Whether it was Guido Annibale or Scipione Borghese who arranged it the resultslook as if the artists quite deliberately set out to emphasise the similarities as wellas the differences between their two compositions The two paintings were meantin themselves to form a paragone The terms on which they were to be comparedinitially at least had less to do with the correct depictions of the passions and moreto do with the agenda that Cesare Baronio had set for the decoration

Inside the oratory the narrow space makes it impossible to see both paintingsat the same time One must turn onersquos back on one in order to see the other ( justas Andreacute Feacutelibien said Poussin turned his back on Renirsquos work in order to studyDomenichinorsquos spurning the crowd of other young artists who preferred the imageby Guido)37Visually the two frescoes form a counterpoint Domenichinorsquos com -position governed by the rectilinear architecture and paving is strongly geometricand severe in its simplicity while Renirsquos is a complex and curvilinear organisationof landscape Domenichinorsquos palette is light while Renirsquos dark as if they weresetting off the chiaro of one against the scuro of the other Domenichinorsquos figuresare arranged in isolated groups with the scene of St Andrewrsquos torture separatedfrom the onlookers by a large expanse of space allowing the painting to be readas a sequence of actions and reactions across space The faces of Domenichinorsquosprotagonists so crucial for a display of affetti are seen full on or in profile andmade clearly visible to the viewer while the pale architectural setting silhouettestheir gestures and actions for maximum visibility Renirsquos figures twist and turn inspace their bodies blending into the dark mass of the hill behind them and manyof the faces remain invisible or half-hidden Reni links figures in a graceful chainacross the foreground so that each is not so much an autonomous unit in the storybut part of a cunningly devised beautiful arrangement of forms Perhaps the mostcrucial element for this paragone was the artistsrsquo choice of the moment of theirstories to narrate Domenichino chose the moment of crisis a peak of physicalsuffering and internal anguish in which the saint suffers his torture and the onlook -ers surge forward in sympathetic protest Guido depicted the saint at rest on hisknees in prayer quietly adoring the cross at the far distant site of his crucifixionthe onlookers echo his stillness

The onlookers include none other than older women holding small childrenpictorial versions of the vecchiarella herself Annibalersquos anecdote had cunninglywoven together the contents of the images with the viewer who responds to them

37 Andreacute Feacutelibien Entretiens sur les vies et lesouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernesParis 1688 pt II p 320

SHEILA McTIGHE 253

In both works women and children are placed in the foreground as ideal witnessesto the religious events The passive women gazing at Renirsquos St Andrew on his wayto crucifixion are set off against the active passionate interventions of the womenand children in Domenichinorsquos flagellation scene paralleling Annibalersquos paragoneof passive silence and active speech as responses to the paintings38The women andchildren are versions of the interlocutor figure prescribed by Leon Battista Albertifunctioning as mediators between the painted narrative and the viewer39

Here in the oratory once used by Gregory the Great however the presenceof women and children may have been intended to recall something specific Thetwo frescoes were together probably intended to serve as ideal examples of sacredpainting in the tradition established by Gregory the Great in his comments onimages as the Bible for the idiotae or illiterate common people The women andchildren in the two paintings display the correct attitudes toward the actual scenethey are witnessing to be emulated by the modern day idiotae who would one daystand before the represented scene

The exemplarity of the images is underscored in a curious way by the inci-dental decoration Both paintings are surrounded by frescoed trompe lrsquoœil framesand illusionistic architecture They are presented as if they are not frescoes butwoven tapestries or paintings on canvas that have been tied to fictional pilastersby ribbons attached to hooks40 This framework never shown in the publishedillustrations of these paintings defines the two paintings as quadri riportati that isillusionistic simulacra of paintings hung on a lsquorealrsquo set of pilasters The trompe lrsquoœilarchitecture continues above the images into a view of a colonnade reaching upto the coffered ceiling as if there were a fictional antique building encased withinthe actual oratory

This is a vestigial reference to the high illusionism of Annibale CarraccirsquosGalleria Farnese where quadri riportati hung from the trompe lrsquoœil architecture ofthe vault vied with feigned sculptures to make a rich and dense image of a falsegallery of paintings hung above a real gallery of sculpture in the room below it Thetrompe lrsquoœil framework in SantrsquoAndrea although subtle and marginal sets the twopaintersrsquo works very much in the lineage of Annibalersquos great secular masterpieceAs at the Palazzo Farnese the trompe lrsquoœil frame suggests here that we are lookingat a painting of another painting a layering of both illusion and allusion in a soph -isticated form of pictorial quotation

What is quoted at SantrsquoAndrea in effect is the late antique building on topof which the new oratory rose The oratories indeed the entire complex of SanGregorio Magno had been built within the family palace of Gregory the Greatwith only ruins of the medieval walls standing when the refurbishment of the site


38 R Spear discussed the vecchiarella story in thecontext of these female figures in the two paintingsSpear 1997 (as in n 4) p 29 Thuumlrlemann (as in n 4 passim) also discusses the mother-child motif in relation to the vecchiarella

39 Thuumlrlemann (as in n 4) p 144

40 The trompe lrsquoœil detailing was described as aneffect of hanging tapestries by D S Pepper Pepper1971 (as in n 8) p 372 Passeri is the only one of theseicento commentators to mention this detail Hess (asin n 14) p 29

was undertaken at the turn of the century In incorporating the remaining vestigesinto the new structures Baroniorsquos aim was to maintain historical continuity andspiritual resonance with the original early Christian spaces which had been madesacred by the miracles and preaching of Gregory the Great41 The decoration of a site so prominently associated with the Churchrsquos stance on the issue of sacredpictures must have seemed an appropriate occasion to paragonare two differentmodern attempts to fulfill Gregoryrsquos aims for sacred pictures

Domenichinorsquos and Guidorsquos frescoes would be better regarded as representingvariant approaches to ambitious religious painting in 1608ndash1609 rather than goodand bad examples of representing the passions of the soul A century before theremight have been no particular reason to use different criteria to discuss a good reli-gious painting as opposed to any other kind of depiction It is true that Vasari lookeddown on the maniera divota of the young Raphael as a weakness cast aside oncehe reached Rome42 but the implication was that this was a manner of painting thatweakened any subject the artist took on not just religious art Similarly the well-known words attributed to Michelangelo by Francisco de Hollanda concerningthe weak painting of Flemings pleasing the devout as well as very old women andvery young girls but not men of intelligence points to an entire mode of paintingas tainted by a feminine religiosity but not to religious art as a category in itself43

Five decades later in the midst of the Catholic Reform it was a different storyWhen discussing the lsquoreformrsquo of painting for the needs of a Counter-Refor-

mation church art historians have tended to equate a return to simplicity of pic-torial effects with a turn toward clear pictorial narration through the affetti orpassions In this way it has seemed that there was no difference between the needsof the Counter-Reformation church and the demands of classicising critics likeAgucchi and Bellori But there were times when religious painting for the devoutand classicizing narrative history painting threatened to part ways whether ornot letterati like Agucchi and later Bellori acknowledged that fact The paragonebetween Guido Reni and Domenichino at the Oratorio di SantrsquoAndrea allowedthe comparison of two possible approaches to effective religious imagery Theirhandling of narration is an important point of difference in their original contexton the site of San Gregorio Magno Renirsquos stilled or suspended narrative contrastswith Domenichinorsquos emphatic dramatic sequence of actions It would take us toofar away from the vecchiarella to explore contemporary discourse about icons andnon-narrative images in relation to painted religious narratives but it is worth

41 H Brummer lsquoCesare Baronio and the Con -vent of St Gregory the Greatrsquo Konsthistorisk Tidskriftxliii 1974 pp 101ndash20 See also M Smith OrsquoNeilllsquoThe Patronage of Cardinal Cesare Baronio at SanGregorio Magno Renovation and Innovationrsquo inBaronio e lrsquoarte Atti del convegno internazionale di studied R de Maio Sora 1985 pp 145ndash71 and G Incisadella Rochetta lsquoCesare Baronio restauratore di luoghisacrirsquo in A Cesare Baronio scritti vari Rome 1963 pp330ndash33

42 C Dempsey lsquoMalvasia and the Problem of theEarly Raphael and Bolognarsquo Studies in the History ofArt xvii 1985 pp 57ndash70

43 Francisco de Hollanda Four Dialogues on Paint -ing trans A Bell London 1928 pp 15ndash16 P SohmlsquoGendered Style in Italian Art Criticism from Michel -angelo to Malvasiarsquo Renaissance Quarterly xlviii 1995pp 759ndash808

SHEILA McTIGHE 255

holding out for future consideration that Guidorsquos and Domenichinorsquos paragone atthe Oratorio di SantrsquoAndrea may have had roots in changing attitudes toward suchsacred imagery

The letters of Gregory the Great referred to sacred paintings as muta praedi-catio silent preaching and as a Bible for the idiotae the ignorant or illiterate44 Hisauthority underpinned the prescriptions of the Bolognese archbishop GabrielePaleotti in his unpublished treatise of the 1580s on the reform of religious art Pale-otti too mentioned Biblical images in front of which women point out details totheir children Inextricably caught up with the issue of sacred painting howeverwas the role of the common people in viewing it Paleotti went so far as to advocatethat the religious paintings destined for church walls should be displayed to thevolgo for their judgement before they were put in place45 Past scholarship on Anni-bale Carracci has connected the vecchiarella story with Paleottirsquos prescriptions forsacred painting that clearly narrated exemplary stories46 but that overlooks thecontext of the story in Massanirsquos and Agucchirsquos text Paleottirsquos positive view of thecommon peoplersquos judgement of art could not have been further from the opinionof the two letterato critics with whom we have been concerned thus far Agucchiand following his example Bellori

The fragment of Giovanni Battista Agucchirsquos treatise on painting that ispresented along with the vecchiarella story in Massanirsquos preface to the Diverse figurein 1646 includes a little polemic about high art and social stature The volgo esteema crude realism in images according to Agucchi who was thinking about thepopularity of Caravaggio lsquothings depicted and imitated from life please the com -mon peoplersquo because the imitation of what they know well delights them Butlrsquouomo intendente the man of understanding will raise his sights to the pure ideaof the beautiful which he will contemplate as divine in nature47 Shortly after tellingthe vecchiarella story the MassaniAgucchi text refers to Annibalersquos misfortunes innot being adequately celebrated and rewarded in his lifetime One might expectthis to be a reference to the infamous disdain shown by Annibalersquos Farnese patronsfor the masterpiece that he had made for them but the text fails to mention thatincident Instead Massani accuses the volgo the common people of not appreci-ating the genius of Annibale for they only value a crude naturalism rather than hisideal art


44 L Gougaud lsquoMuta praedicatiorsquo Revue beacuteneacute-dictine xlii 1930 pp 168ndash71

45 Gabriele Paleotti Discorso intorno alle imaginisacre e profane in P Barocchi ed Scritti drsquoarte delCinquecento 3 vols Milan and Naples 1971ndash77 i p503

46 A Boschloo Annibale Carracci in BolognaVisible Reality in Art after the Council of Trent TheHague 1974

47 lsquoLe cose dipinte e imitate dal naturale piaccionoal popolo hellip lrsquoimitatione di quel che agrave piene conosceli dilettarsquo Massani quoting Agucchi in Diverse figure

1646 (as in n 3) p 7 Marabottini (as in n 3) p xlviIn my work on Carraccirsquos Arti di Bologna images Ihave focused on the contradictions between Massanirsquosand Agucchirsquos texts about low art for common peopleand the actual prints of low people that the prefaceintroduced to its high audience lsquoPerfect DeformityIdeal Beauty and the Imaginaire of Work the Recep-tion of Annibale Carraccirsquos Arti di Bologna in 1646rsquoOxford Art Journal xvi 1993 pp 75ndash91 in revised andextended form in my The Imaginary Everyday GenrePaintings and Prints in Italy and France 1580ndash1670Pittsburgh 2007

In fact the reverse was true as Gianlorenzo Bernini pointed out many yearslater If his noble patron had failed to appreciate Annibalersquos finest work the generalpublic had certainly acclaimed it48 and Bernini used this point to underscore anattitude he must have felt he shared with Annibale He recalled Annibale recom-mending that any newly painted work be shown immediately to the commonpeople for judgement for lsquothe public did not err nor did it flatterrsquo49 Bernini notedthat Annibalersquos case showed that though the judgement of individuals in Romemight be unjust lsquothe public is certainly notrsquo However in 1609 Annibale wassmart ing over the rapid rise to public fame and high pay of his still immaturestudent Guido Reni If Annibale in 1609 actually did tell the story of the oldwoman as judge he may have been equivocating about the role of public opinionin judging works of art But his own case was powerful evidence for the benign rolethat public opinion could play in responding positively to new art

As a representative of the common people the old woman merely acts outthe responses that have been dictated to her by the paintings themselves silencebefore the scene Reni portrayed as silencing his onlookers speaking before thescene in which the women cry out their feelings about the saintrsquos torture In effectboth responses are appropriate to the paintings and the sacred site in which theywere viewed There are thus two sides to Annibale Carraccirsquos irony or wit in hisstory of the old womanrsquos silence and her speech before these paintings On the oneside the illiterate old woman was the most appropriate viewer of religious scenesand her reactions are grounded in the authority of an early Christian pope and aCounter-Reformation archbishop of Bologna On the other side the old womanand the girl were the very opposite of the erudite and masculine viewer whomAgucchi had proposed as the ideal beholder for an ideal art What Annibalersquos anec-dote holds together by force of wit are these two opposing figures for the viewer ascritic Later writers who tended to overlook the wit and seize on the literal senseof the story found holding these two figures together made for hard work At leastone Malvasia reversed the significance of speech and silence to make the oldwoman function as both the ideal religious viewer and as a stand-in for the idealart critic The later repetitions of the story reveal the writersrsquo sense of frustrationeven anger at times at this impossible conjunction of devout idiotae and learnedletterati that Annibale had handed down to them

IV

It would be very easy to conclude this discussion by having the story of the oldwoman as art critic simply collapse under the weight of its own contradictions Itde constructs itself It had no clear origin Annibale or Agucchi or Massani may have

48 Annibale lsquovoulait qursquoon exposacirct agrave la censurepublique un tableau aussitocirct qursquoil eacutetait fait que lepublic ne se trompait pas et ne flattait pointrsquo Journaldu voyage du cavalier Bernin en France ed M StanicParis 1981 pp 156ndash57

49 Ibid pp 83ndash84 lsquosi le particulier est injuste agraveRome le public ne lrsquoest pasrsquo

SHEILA McTIGHE 257

created the old woman but she was already there before their story in the paint-ings of the two artists Each time the story was told the terms of the comparisonchanged Silence and speech tears and delight secular and sacred muta poesis andmuta praedicatio high culture and mass publicmdashthe antitheses never consistentlyalign with one another but they do give a sense of an infinite play of opposites

There is possibly a different ending for the story however In the publicsecular context of the annual Salons of the French Acadeacutemie Royale de Peinture etde Sculpture Denis Diderot resuscitated the old woman as art critic Her presencein Diderotrsquos writings is not without its own contradictions but she allows us to seethe questions raised by Annibalersquos story as they emerge into the modern discourseof the arts She haunts him as he attempts to pin down his changing ideas aboutthe judgement of painting in the Penseacutees deacutetacheacutees sur la peinture It is at this timethat Diderot became most involved with the writings of Edmund Burke on thesublime In the same year that he lsquospeaksrsquo with the old woman in the Salon of 1767his frustration with the expressive power of language came to a peak lsquoI believe wehave more ideas than words to express themrsquo he wrote and lsquoLanguage does notgive me the appropriate expression of the truthrsquo The quality of silence in paintingtook on an increasingly appeal lsquoPainting can have a very eloquent silencersquo heremarks and lsquoIn general the silent scene pleases us more than the noisy onersquo50

He was equally frustrated with the language of the various texts on judging the finearts that he read and summarised for the Correspondance litteacuteraire In his compterendu of the Abbeacute Laugierrsquos work he asserts that surely a child would be a betterjudge of art than the learned critic armed with a formidable vocabulary of clair-obscur beau ideacuteal and the like

It was in two other such art writings that he met the old woman in C L de Hagedornrsquos Betrachtungen uumlber die Malerei (1762) and Daniel Webbrsquos Inquiryinto the Beauties of Painting (1760) whose ideas fed directly into the 1767 Salon andthe Penseacutees deacutetacheacutees Webb paraphrased Quintilianrsquos Rhetoric lsquo The learned saysQuintilian know the principles of an art the illiterate its effectsrsquo He presented theGuido-Domenichino comparison in terms of an artist whose skill was lsquotechnicalrsquoversus an artist who expressed ideas51 Diderot picks up on the distinction whenhe writes his resumeacute of Webbrsquos text and presents it through a woman who echoesthe vecchiarella

The multitude judge like the woman who looks at two paintings of the Martyrdom of StBartholomew of which one excelled by the execution and the other by its ideas She says ofthe first This one gives me great pleasure but that other one gives me great pain52


50 M Cartwright Diderot critique drsquoart et le problegraveme de lrsquoexpression Geneva 1969 p 188 quotingDiderotrsquos lsquoLa langue ne me fournit pas agrave propos lrsquoex-pression de la veacuteriteacutersquo from the Salon of 1767 DiderotPenseacutees deacutetacheacutees de la peinture (1767) in Œuvres com -plegravetes 20 vols ed J Asseacutezat Paris 1875ndash77 xii p 77lsquoJe crois que nous avons plus drsquoideacutees que de motsrsquo

51 Daniel Webb Inquiry into the Beauties of Paint -ing London 1760 p 14

52 Denis Diderot lsquoExtrait drsquoun ouvrage anglaissur la peinturersquo in Œuvres complegravetes xiii p 35 lsquoLamultitude juge comme la bonne femme qui regardaitdeux tableaux du martyre de St-Bartheacutelemy dontlrsquoun excellait part lrsquoexeacutecution et lrsquoautre par lrsquoideacutee Elledit du premier celui-ci me donne grand plaisir maiscet autre me donne grande peinersquo

As in Hagedornrsquos use of the Guido-Domenichino paragone as well the old womanwas dismissed here as having the common judgement of the multitude who speaksonly about her own sensations without reference to high ideals in painting How -ever Diderot had begun to part ways with the high ideals and stale classicism ofwriters like Webb and Hagedorn The old woman of the people entered into hisPenseacutees deacutetacheacutees as a brutally commonsensical critic of high art He asked her whatshe thought of a Raphael and she responded that Raphael was an ass lsquoI am notinventing a storyrsquo Diderot continued ingenuously and recounted that the oldwoman then condemned Annibale Carraccirsquos Madonna of Silence for its depictionof a monstrous deformed Christ child and lsquoshe was right about thatrsquo the criticconcurred53 The old woman is a humorous tool allowing Diderot to mock thepretensions of his sources

He had begun to wrestle with the question of which subjects draw out themost intense sensations in the viewer whether of horror or of pleasure His readingof Webb in 1763 led into the old comparison of the chreacutetien merveilleux and thepaien merveilleux the wondrous in Christian versus classical subjects54 Diderothowever disagreed with Webbrsquos assertion that pagan subjects are more conduciveto sublimity For Diderot the problem of eliciting extreme effects went further thanthe choice of subject he presented the flaying of St Bartholomew as a Christiansubject that should be sublime and makes the old woman of the people a judge ofits power to affect the viewer In both the Penseacutees and the Salon of 1767 he notedthat if the distance is too great between the viewer and the subject depicted theyfeel nothing lsquoIt is difficult to be strongly moved by a peril that one will perhapsnever undergorsquo55 The old woman of the people with her limited experience hadthe role of measuring sublimity for the mass public that attended the SalonDiderot gauges the distance between this kind of modern viewer and the Christiandepiction of the passions

Once two paintings were submitted in competition for a prize the subject was SaintBartholomew under the executionerrsquos blade An old peasant woman swayed the hesitantjudges lsquoThis onersquo said the old woman lsquogives me great pleasure but the other one causesme great painrsquo The first one left her outside the canvas while she entered into the secondWe like pleasure in our own persons and pain in painting56

Diderot was not being ironic He made the vecchiarella openly represent the ideaof public judgement of the arts because in this matter of assessing suffering in

53 Denis Diderot Penseacutees deacutetacheacutees sur la peinturein Œuvres complegravetes xii p 89 lsquoJe dis agrave une femme du peuple hellip Comment trouvez-vous celarsquo Later lsquoJenrsquoinvente point un conte je dis un faitrsquo

54 J Seznec lsquoDiderot and the ldquoGeacutenie du Chris-tianismerdquo rsquo this Journal xiv 1952 pp 229ndash41

55 Diderot Salon de 1767 ed E Bukdahl MDelon and A Lorenceau Paris 1995 p 199 lsquoIl estdifficile drsquoecirctre fortement eacutemu drsquoun peril qursquoonnrsquoeacuteprouvera peut-ecirctre jamaisrsquo

56 Ibid p 200 I use the English translation ofJohn Goodman Diderot on Art The Salon of 1767 2vols London 1995 ii p 103 The original text runslsquoOn avait exposeacute deux tableaux qui concouraient pourun prix proposeacute Crsquoeacutetait un St-Bartheacuteleacutemy sous lecouteau des bourreaux Une paysanne ageacutee deacutecida lesjuges incertains ldquoCelui-cirdquo dit la bonne femme ldquomefait grand plaisir mais cet autre me fait grand peinerdquoLe premier la laissait hors de la toile le second lrsquoyfesait entrer Nous aimons le plaisir en personne et ladouleur en peinturersquo

SHEILA McTIGHE 259

painting she is qualified to speak The passage echoed the opinions expressed bythe Abbeacute Dubos in his 1719 Reacuteflexions critiques sur la poeacutesie et sur la peinture wherehe broke new ground in French criticism of the visual arts by asserting that thegeneral public was capable of judging the arts they were more disinterested thanartists amateurs or other lsquogens du meacutetierrsquo57The public would use their sentimentto judge the evidence of their senses a union of both cognitive and affective skillsBefore Diderot Dubos had pointed out that the public would best be empoweredto judge paintings and to be moved by them when the subject matter would movethem in real life

This old woman has no child by the hand she openly educates the art criticrather than addressing herself to a young person Her role is no longer to providespontaneous ekphrasis of the passions but to locate the effect of sublime paintingin her own spirit Like Annibalersquos vecchiarella she takes pleasure in representedpain but that pleasure is not mediated through the rhetoric of describing theaffetti Diderot strips her of the layers of irony in which she had been encased inthe Massani text and she no longer needs the ventriloquism of the learned writerto provide her with words

The 1646 text in which this story first appeared had asserted that noble artcould only be judged by men of high standing and education without acknowl-edging that this credo contradicts the story of the vecchiarella as judge of the affettiHowever it is in the context of locating a common public for the arts and in thediscourse about sublimity that the vecchiarella makes one of her last appearancesin early modern writings on art Throughout this body of writings the anecdote ofthe old woman as art critic is a story set in the borderlands between seeing andspeaking between image and word where the domain of the painter gives way to the realm of the beholder The anecdote itself tells us much about artistsrsquo andcriticsrsquo attempts to control this frontier and its later reception illustrates the oppor-tunities that resulted from paintingrsquos capacity for silence For this later public theold woman was not the male art critic dressed in female clothing and not the verylow and illiterate viewer of religious images not a hybrid offshoot of muta poesisand muta praedicatio but that faceless ageless sexless figure the early modernimagination of the masses


57 Abbeacute Jean-Baptiste Dubos Reacuteflexions critiquessur la poeacutesie et sur la peinture 2 vols Paris 1719 ii pp303ndash07 See also Thomas E Kaiser lsquoRhetoric in the

Service of the King the Abbeacute Dubos and the Conceptof Public Judgmentrsquo Eighteenth Century Studies xxiii1989 pp 182ndash99

Courtauld Institute of Art

Annibale Carracci saidmdashor so the story goesmdashthat he had been asked tojudge the relative merits of two of his students3 Each had depicted the martyr -dom of a saint and their paintings were displayed opposite each other in the samechurch Annibale was at first unable to decide which one had achieved greatersuccess but he was set straight on the matter by a little old woman una vecchia -rella Looking at one painting she was silent In response to the other she spoke atlength happily describing the affetti of all the figures pointing out their actionsto the young girl who accompanied her In retelling Annibalersquos story Bellori doesnot doubt that Annibale meant the second painting the one that got the womantalking to be the winner in this paragone or debate But in its rhetorical functionas a paragone the story planted the seed for other viewpoints on the contest Theanecdote was first published in 1646 and then repeated not only by Bellori in1672 but by most Italian writers on art until the end of the seventeenth centuryLater French German and English writers and even travellers on the GrandTour learned from the old womanrsquos example how to weigh the sweetness of oneartistrsquos expressions against the harsh but powerful passions of another In all thisthe old woman and young girl would make an occasional appearance to demon -strate through descriptions tears or silence which of the two painters had greatermastery over the passions of the soul Finally even Denis Diderot called on thefictional old woman to judge the passions in his Salon of 1767 and she hauntsDiderotrsquos Penseacutees deacutetacheacutees sur la peinture of the same year The uses of the vecchia -rella story far transcended its original context

No doubt the wit of the story derived in part from the battle of the sexes aswell as the confrontation of social classes The distinguished male writer and artistbecame the disciples of an ignorant lsquoold woman of the peoplersquo as Diderot calledher each time the anecdote was retold a witty reversal of social dominance ontwo fronts But one reversal calls for another The staging of the vecchiarella talealso puts the spotlight on a hierarchy of responses to the affetti with reasonedspeech about the passions alternating with an impassioned if silent empathyBecause the setting for Annibalersquos anecdote was understood to be one of the verysame early Christian oratories in which Pope Gregory the Great wrote of sacredimages for the idiotae or illiterate it also set up a tension between religiousresponses to the painted image and what in modern terms might be called anaesthetic response Looked at in this light from its very first telling to its appear -ance in Diderotrsquos Salon the story of the old woman and the better depiction ofthe passions poses a serious question about the mass audience for high artCom municating to that public was a positive goal in the context of the Catholicreform and of religious art in general but for secular writers on the arts focusedon classical forms and ideal beauty how valid was the judgement of a masspublic when it came to a lsquoreadingrsquo of the passions


3 The story first appeared in Giovanni AtanasioMassani [pseudonym Giovanni Atanasio Mosini]Diverse figure al numero di ottanta disegnate di pennanellrsquohore di recreatione da Annibale Carracci Rome1646 a modern facsimile of Massanirsquos text is found in

Le Arti di Bologna di Annibale Carracci ed A Mara -bottini Rome 1979 The first modern discussion ofthis passage was in D Mahon Studies in Seicento Artand Theory London 1947


II





SHEILA McTIGHE 241








SHEILA McTIGHE 243















SHEILA McTIGHE 245














SHEILA McTIGHE 247












III






SHEILA McTIGHE 249



















SHEILA McTIGHE 251




IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259









II





SHEILA McTIGHE 241








SHEILA McTIGHE 243















SHEILA McTIGHE 245














SHEILA McTIGHE 247












III






SHEILA McTIGHE 249



















SHEILA McTIGHE 251




IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259















SHEILA McTIGHE 243















SHEILA McTIGHE 245














SHEILA McTIGHE 247












III






SHEILA McTIGHE 249



















SHEILA McTIGHE 251




IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259








SHEILA McTIGHE 243















SHEILA McTIGHE 245














SHEILA McTIGHE 247












III






SHEILA McTIGHE 249



















SHEILA McTIGHE 251




IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259




















SHEILA McTIGHE 245














SHEILA McTIGHE 247












III






SHEILA McTIGHE 249



















SHEILA McTIGHE 251




IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259














SHEILA McTIGHE 245














SHEILA McTIGHE 247












III






SHEILA McTIGHE 249



















SHEILA McTIGHE 251




IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259





















SHEILA McTIGHE 247












III






SHEILA McTIGHE 249



















SHEILA McTIGHE 251




IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259














SHEILA McTIGHE 247












III






SHEILA McTIGHE 249



















SHEILA McTIGHE 251




IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259



















III






SHEILA McTIGHE 249



















SHEILA McTIGHE 251




IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259









III






SHEILA McTIGHE 249



















SHEILA McTIGHE 251




IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259


























SHEILA McTIGHE 251




IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259















SHEILA McTIGHE 251




IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259











IV









SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259












SHEILA McTIGHE 253

















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259
























SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259















SHEILA McTIGHE 255












IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259



















IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259










IV




SHEILA McTIGHE 257


















SHEILA McTIGHE 259

























SHEILA McTIGHE 259
















SHEILA McTIGHE 259













