Bartolomeo Pinelli Italian (1781-1835)

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Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Il Ciarlatano in Piazza, 1801 or 1831 Pen and Indian ink and wash over pencil 21.4 x 27.8 cm WA 19936.217

Now largely forgotten, Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1835) was one of Ottocento Italy’s most popular draftsmen. Living and working primarily in Rome, Pinelli studied at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, where he was supported financially by the nephew of Pope Benedict XIV.[i] Largely eschewing painting in favor of the more immediate and intimate medium of drawing, Pinelli associated himself with the vedutisti, who painted Roman views primarily for a foreign market of tourists and Italophiles.[ii] Perhaps due to his largely touristical customer base, Pinelli’s drawings of Roman life focus on everyday bucolic happenings. He is quick to include indicators of real sites and real people and nearly all of his drawings were done from life. In his lifetime he produced a volume of etchings, La Raccolta di Cinquanta Costumi Pittoreschi (Rome, 1809), and a visual popular history of the city, L’istoria Romana, based on Charles Rollin’s Histoire Romaine. In addition, he also illustrated editions of several classic texts including Don Quixote and Dante’s Divine Comedy.[iii] His perspective in his art was thus frequently that of a foreigner, presenting the city as a visitor would wish to see it with all of its local color, picturesque details, and anecdotal histories.

Il Ciarlatano in Piazza, drawn from life with pencil on paper and later finished in pen and ink wash is dated with some confusion as having been completed in 1801. The Ashmolean’s catalogue points to the smudged date on the drawing’s lower right, suggesting that perhaps the correct date is 1831.[iv] The virtuosity of the drawing at first glance appears to support the later date. A date of 1801 would connote that the drawing was completed when Pinelli was just twenty years old and was, it can be assumed, still a student. However, the drawing’s subject matter and style suggests that it was indeed completed in 1801 while Pinelli was studying in Rome’s historic district of Trastevere. Prior to his departure for Bologna, Pinelli primarily produced spontaneous sketches in watercolor or ink and grey wash with faint pencil underdrawings. After 1807-1809, however, he produced more finished albums in watercolor, never returning to the “vivid summary style” of his earlier work.[v] The spontaneous and sketchy quality of the draftsmanship suggests that Il Ciarlatano belongs to these earlier drawings of Roman life, not to the more finished productions of Pinelli’s later work.

The subject of Il Ciarlatano in Piazza is typical of Pinelli’s early drawings—a characteristically “Roman” street scene. A predominately working class group of onlookers assembles around a street hawker who stands upon an enormous antique marble foot. The foot is in fact an authentic Roman landmark: the foot of Serapis on the corner of the Via di S. Stefano del Cacco and the Via del Pie di Marmo, where it was placed in the sixteenth century.[vi] In order to enhance the drawing’s authenticity, Pinelli has included the street signs so that the viewer is immediately informed of where one might encounter such a scene. The crowd appears to be gathered in a circle around the foot, and a moderately sized gap in the foreground suggests that we too are included as witnesses to the spectacle. The hawker (or, as the title specifies, the charlatan) holds an amulet aloft and points to a banner, held by an assistant to the left, which depicts the various dangers against which the amulet offers protection: dog bites, snake bites, goring by bulls, and earthquakes.

In a hilarious twist, as the charlatan babbles on about the wondrous powers of the amulet (which, we can assume, he then offers to each onlooker for a “buon mercato” or a bargain price), various members of his entranced public are subjected to more realistic threats than being gored by bulls. The man—who, by his manner of dress, we can assume is a member of the middle class—standing on the right side of the foreground is about to lose his wallet to the deft fingers of the pint-sized pickpocket to his right, who stands innocently with his trusty dog and avails himself to the riches in the man’s pocket. The gnocchi chef, leaning in an archway to the right in the background listens attentively, oblivious to the fact that his neglected fire has set his shop alight. At once comedic and naturalistic, Pinelli’s drawing captures the romantically pastoral and quaint characteristics of Italian life that foreigners found so alluring. Despite the underlying melodrama, Il Ciarlatano in Piazza is still primarily a depiction of the bustle of daily life. Pinelli has drawn real people in a real place in a real situation and is bringing that moment to life on the page for the foreign viewer to remember his time in La Città Nostra.

In addition to accurately documenting Roman life and custom, Pinelli, in Il Ciarlatano in Piazza also satirizes the by-then extremely popular genre of history painting and the adulation of Rome’s Classical past. In a manner similar to other great satirists of the age—William Hogarth in particular—Pinelli presents the Classical past as a pebble under one’s boot-sole (more specifically, in the case of this drawing, as a colossal foot under the soles of a swindling street vendor). Pinelli openly expressed his disdain for history painting, which he viewed as an overrated genre, preferring popular, contemporary drawings and paintings.[vii] While he celebrated Rome in all of his works, the Rome he celebrated was the Rome of the present day, not shadows of its past imperial glories.[viii] Perhaps, in Il Ciarlatano Pinelli is suggesting that just as the onlookers are blinded to their perils by the spurious promises of the hawker, so visitors to Rome tend to be blinded to its modern marvels by an over-appreciation of its Classical heritage. Or, more specifically, maybe Il Ciarlatano also hints at the wild, fanciful tales told to visitors of the city by unscrupulous guides and vendors attempting to sell forged antiquities as the real thing for astronomical sums. Those who would exploit and panegyrize Roman antiquity are, the drawing might suggest, no better than the charlatan who stands atop the great foot of Serapis.

In his humorous, charming, and skillfully executed drawing Bartolomeo Pinelli thus brings the daily life of contemporary, everyday Romans to life complete with its dramas and its comedies, catering to a tourist’s interest in the picturesque without sacrificing the integrity of the scene. Parodying history painting by including an artifact of the past not as a relic but as a footstool, Pinelli anchors his vision of Rome firmly in the present, thumbing his nose at the romanticization of the city’s history. The Rome he peddled was thus quintessentially Italian, quintessentially homespun, and quintessentially of the moment.