Perfect Painting: de Piles' List

Ranking Artists "Rationally"
Without too much comment, I present the Louis XIV era French theorist Roger de Piles' rankings of artists according to a tally of their individual qualities; suffice it to say, while I'm intrigued by the idea, and sympathetic to de Piles' partisanship for "color" or the "Rubenistes," I would quibble with the particulars (how does Michelangelo wind up so far down, below Abraham van Diepenbeeck?).

Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes avec un balance de peintres (1708)

arranged from highest to lowest

Painter	Composition	Drawing	Color	Expression	Total
Raphael	17	18	12	18	65
Rubens	18	13	17	17	65
Annibale? Carracci	15	17	13	13	58
Domenichino	15	17	9	17	58
Charles Le Brun	16	16	8	16	56
Guido Reni	x	13	9	12	?
Van Dyck	15	10	17	13	55
Vanius	15	15	12	13	55
Correggio	13	13	15	12	53
Titian	12	15	18	6	51
Rembrandt	15	6	17	12	50
Tintoretto	15	14	16	4	49
Giulio Romano	15	16	4	14	49
Eustache Le Sueur	15	15	4	15	49
Leonardo da Vinci	15	16	4	14	49
Otho Venius	13	14	10	10	47
Primaticcio	15	14	7	10	46
Teniers	15	12	13	6	46
Taddeo Zuccari	13	14	10	9	46
Andrea del Sarto	12	16	9	8	45
Federico Barocci	14	15	6	10	45
Perin del Vaga	15	16	7	6	44
Sebastiano del Piombo	8	13	16	7	44
Francesco Salviati	13	15	8	8	44
Veronese	15	10	16	3	44
Guercino	18	10	10	4	42
Giovanni Lanfranco	14	13	10	5	42
Abraham van Diepenbeeck	11	10	14	6	41
Palma il Giovane	12	9	14	6	41
Jacob Jordaens	10	8	16	6	40
Lucas Jordaens	13	12	9	6	40
Daniele da Volterra	12	15	5	8	40
Giorgione	8	9	18	4	39
Holbein	9	10	16	3	38
Giovanni da Udine	10	8	16	3	37
Michelangelo	8	17	4	8	37
Parmigianino	10	15	6	6	37
Albrecht Dürer	8	10	10	8	36
Federico Zuccari	10	10	8	8	36
Murillo	6	8	15	4	33
Pietro Testa	11	15	0	6	32
Jacopo Bassano	6	8	17	0	31
Palma il Vecchio	5	6	16	0	31
Sebastian Bourdon	10	8	8	4	30
Cavalier D'Arpino	10	10	6	2	28
Caravaggio	6	6	16	0	28
Giovanni Bellini	4	6	14	0	24
Lucas van Leyden	8	6	6	4	24
Gianfrancesco Penni	0	15	8	0	23

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_de_Piles

The complete list is transcribed here from Manlio Brusatin, Histoire des couleurs (Paris: Flammarion, 1986, pp. 103–104), reproduced in Elisabeth G. Holt, Literary Sources of Art History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), pp. 415–416)

PERFECT PAINTING

Coming soon, a post on recovering the old idea of perfect painting....
In the meantime, for a sense of where this is going, see this from the Humanist Art Review a while back:
http://www.humanistart.net/reviews_pompeo.htm
A dopo,
E.

arts and crafts

The Artist and the Artisan

Cathedral, Civita Castellana (Lazio)

OK, so there’s the Romantic idea of the humble artisan toiling away anonymously for love of God and his craft. And then there’s reality: the Cosmati father and son who proudly signed their names in the architrave over the portico of the cathedral in Civita Castellana; the artisans who were, historically, just as likely to work for private patrons as the Church—think of wedding chests, picture frames, painted tiles, etc.; and as for craft, the distinction between art and craft is a modern construct that does just as much violence to the nature of craft as it does to art. At the level of the material object, there is no inevitable difference between art and craft in pre-Modern culture; what, perhaps, separates them is the intentionality, the conceptual idea and/or the meaning that is intended in the work. While the craftsman might or might not be knowing in what he does and how he decides to do it—he might be either an advancer of a traditional skill or he may simply be its continuer—the artist is expected, required even, to know how and why he does what he does. So, some (of course not all) craftspeople know exactly how and why they do what they do, and may be quite articulate about it; and they may also invest their work with meaning, a poetic intent that transcends mere form. Naturally not every picture frame needs to be meaningful, but an artisan who is conscious of the decorum a frame requires does indeed contribute to the contextualization, and therefore a part of the meaning, of the picture.
Witness the marvelous Florentine carver Carlo Puccini (http://woodcarving.altervista.org/?lang=eng); from a family of architects, his chosen artistic metier is carving in wood, something he does with a bravura freehand style, investing often complex baroque forms with a lively touch, and a bit of a rustic (“rustic” in the sense of the Baroque music of Corelli) edge. Carlo knows exactly what he’s doing when he makes a frame (see the quote from Frank Zappa at the head of his website—for the rest of the quote go here). Many of his clients are looking for copies of furniture, frames, etc., sometimes translated from other media (like stone or stucco); some, like me, present him with a design (for the frame holding my painting of Diogenes and Alexander, next to Carlo in the photo). He is also capable of invention, although it is the nature of most folks who want something new-traditional that they’re not prepared to take risks. I don’t want to Romanticize what is, in this modern world, a challenging life, but Carlo is an absolutely lovely human being as well as artist, and I attribute some of that to the satisfaction he gets from his work (of course, his work gives him satisfaction in part because he is a lovely human being). And, while not as aggressively self-promotional as the Cosmati, neither is he anonymous: he works on the ground floor in via Ghibellina, just up the street from the Casa Buonarotti, so he is “on show” to passersby.

Carlo Puccini in his shop in Florence

He is by no means alone in a country that still, despite the best efforts of our culture to kill them, is filled with active, talented, youngish (diversamente giovane), and knowledgeable masters of carving, painting, plastering, and intarsia—the latter perhaps best represented by the phenomenally able, and charming, Daniele Parasecolo in Todi: http://www.woodinlaysitaly.com/. These modern masters have to be smarter, more alert and articulate than their predecessors, partly in order to defend what they do. If these folks survive, it is because they are actively engaged in their craft; which means it is practically an obligation for those of us who love what they do to give them every opportunity to practice their art.