The oratorian Sebastiano Resta (1635–1714) from Milan acted as a collector of artists' drawings in the network of scholars, artists and amateurs in early modern Rome. In the area of tension between imparting knowledge about the Italian history of art and the constantly developing collector market, Sebastiano Resta filled over thirty sticky albums with drawings. However, he sees the adhesive tape as more than just a means of organization. Rather, he designed his understanding of the development of the history of Italian art on the pages of the albums using his own handwriting, which he intended to convey through the medium of hand drawing. Through epigraphs, anecdotes, references and quotations from contemporary writings on art, Sebastiano Resta inscribed his individual understanding of the artist on the montage pages and, last but not least, encouraged the viewer to look at the associated drawings in more detail.
Even during his lifetime, Sebastiano Resta's individually designed and richly decorated adhesive tapes were perceived as knowledge systems in his environment and were often individually commissioned from him. However, in the 18th century, when the adhesive album as an organizing system gradually gave way to dynamic storage systems, Resta's albums were broken up and rearranged in cardboard boxes, especially in English collections. Most of the volumes can now only be understood through transcriptions that were made from Sebastiano Resta's texts when the drawings were reorganized. However, a few copies have survived intact.
The case study deals with one such more or less intact volume by Sebastiano Resta, which the oratorian wrote towards the end of his life. The album with the telling title Galleria Portatile (Portable Gallery/also Codice Resta) was preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. To this day, it reveals to the viewer a true cosmos of early modern scholarly knowledge about Italian art and style history based on the contemporary popular assumption that the individual talent of the artist is able to sustainably influence overarching developments in art. The aim of the work is not only to examine the value of drawing as an epistemic carrier of meaning through an interdisciplinary multifocal perspective, but rather to reveal Sebastiano Resta's sources and strategies for knowledge transfer in close reading of individual montage pages as case studies and to interpret them in the context of knowledge transfer around 1700.
