“Per quella ammistà ch’ebbero fra di lor sempre le penne e i pennelli”. Intorno ai dipinti tasseschi di Camillo Gavassetti

In her important article on Camillo Gavassetti (Modena 1596 – Reggio Emilia ? 1630) published in ‘Prospettiva’ in 1990, Paola Ceschi Lavagetto lamented the loss of a number of works based on subjects by Torquato Tasso mentioned in the sources, an absence that made it difficult to imagine in what terms the painter approached the figurative representation of the latter’s famous epic poem, the Jerusalem Delivered. The Horatian principle of ut pictura poësis was evoked in continuity with the literary ‘vocation’ of Gavassetti who, in the introduction to Gabriel Corvi’s Lam[ English Abstracts] 199 brusche di Pindo (Piacenza, 1626), a collection of poems he himself edited and commented on, was keen to emphasise the close “ammistà ch’ebbero fra di lor sempre le penne e i pennelli” (the close friendship that had always existed between the pen and the brush). The recent appearance on the antique market of two canvases depicting episodes from Canto VII of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered now allows us to recommence from where we left off. In the first part, starting with an analysis of the paintings and comparison with the works of artists like Guercino and Alessandro Tiarini, the article attempts to answer two fundamental questions: what was Gavassetti’s relationship with Tasso’s poem and in what terms and to what extent did it condition his formal choices? In the second part, in the light of the literary trends in vogue in Emilian literary circles in the early decades of the 17th century, the article explores the dynamic relations between painting and poetry that emerge from a reading of the little-studied Lambrusche di Pindo.