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Marco Boschini (16021 January 1681) was an Italian painter and engraver of the early Baroque period in Venice.
Boschetti engraved also portraits, stage sets and maps (e.g. Il regno tutto di Candia, Venice, 1644; L’arcipelago con tutte le isole, Venice, 1658). His most original work consists of 25 inventions of imaginary paintings by such 17th-century Venetian artists as Pietro Liberi and Pietro della Vecchia, each with a descriptive poem attached.
Boschini was friendly with many painters, mostly Venetian, including Pietro Liberi, Nicolas Régnier, Pietro della Vecchia and Dario Varotari the Younger; he met Pietro da Cortona, Giuseppe Maria Mitelli and Velázquez on their visits to Venice.
As a writer on art, he was the author of several publications, such as: La Carta del Navegar pittoresco (1660), a panygeric poem about Venetian painting; Le minere della pittura veneziana (1664) and Le ricche minere della pittura veneziana (1674), two city guides of Venice; I gioieli pittoreschi (1676), the first Guide book to Vicenza.
As an art dealer, and in collaboration with della Vecchia and Paolo del Sera, Boschini encouraged the export of paintings, a practice that he had vigorously condemned in the ‘Breve instruzione’. His clients included Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici and Alfonso IV d'Este. The Carta was dedicated to the voracious collector Leopold Wilhelm, Archduke of Austria, presumably as a business promotion.
In his argument against Vasari, Boschini rejected more than Tuscan artistic ideals, notably the classicizing standards of Drawing (linear delineation, ancient statues and ideal proportions). He looked at paintings more with the artist’s eye for formal problems than the humanist’s understanding of content. The Ekphrasis tradition that emphasized narrative had little appeal for him; he revelled instead in the beauty of movement (only loosely attached to narrative) and in pure, sensuous form (what does the colouring taste like? what does the light sound like? what does the pigment feel like?). He also dismissed Vasari’s interest in the biographical component of art criticism as irrelevant to the image itself.
The Carta dominated Venetian art criticism into the 18th century and, despite the obstacles presented by the Venetian dialect, also prompted considerable comment throughout Italy, notably in the work of Filippo Baldinucci, Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Luigi Pellegrini Scaramuccia and Francesco Scipione Maffei.
The new audience also encouraged Boschini to adopt a different, less polemical theme: ‘Brief instructions on how to understand the styles of Venetian painters’ is the heading to the introduction, indicating that Boschini’s primary interest was connoisseurship. Hence the ‘Breve instruzione’ may be situated in a tradition started by Giulio Mancini and Abraham Bosse. Le ricche minere may not have been the first guidebook to painting in Venice but it was the most complete to date and served as the foundation for the later guides by Fioravante Martinelli, Antonio Maria Zanetti and Giambattista Albrizzi (1698–1777). It dealt only with paintings in public places; private galleries were to be covered in another book.
The major Venetian painters for which he has brief biographies in his text, and arranged in general chronologic order, are:
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