temi di Critica e Letteraturaartistica

teCLa - rivista ospita articoli inerenti temi di critica e letteratura artistica, dal medioevo al contemporaneo, con attenzione alle riflessioni teoriche sugli aspetti del gusto, della metodologia, della storia del collezionismo, della museologia, del restauro e delle tecniche artistiche.
Diretta da Simonetta La Barbera, ha un Comitato scientifico internazionale, un Comitato di Referee anonimo e un Comitato di redazione.
La pubblicazione, a diffusione internazionale, fornita di codice ISSN e di codice DOI, ha cadenza semestrale.

Comitato Scientifico e comitato redazionale.

Per inserire i propri contributi è possibile contattare la redazione.

In fondo alla pagina le note legali, la pubblicazione etica e la dichiarazione di Malpractice relative a teCLa - Rivista.

Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti e la "Scuola di Vienna"
by Gianni Carlo Sciolla

In the critical work of Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, an interest in the “Vienna School” and the method introduced by its followers takes a leading role, though this interest was cultivated in an unsystematic way. From Alois Riegl, Ragghianti, like the philosopher Benedetto Croce, took the idea that the work of art, in its formal and structural essence, is the starting point for understanding the entire civilization which produced it, and that this was to be understood as a “formal civilization.” In his re-evaluation of the formalism of the “Vienna School,” Ragghianti denied the validity of a presumed separation between the “major” and “minor” arts and between traditional and industrial production. The essay also reconstructs his relations with the other Viennese great of the early twentieth-century, Julius von Schlosser, on whose methodological turn of the twenties, influenced by the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, Ragghianti looked favourably, and contrasts this conception with Max Dvořák’s idea of the history of art as the history of a culture and thus subject to the influence of external dogmas.

Lo studio degli avori bizantini in Italia tra '800 e '900 attraverso L'Arte di Adolfo Venturi
by Giovanni Gasbarri

Shortly after the sale of the celebrated Barberini Ivory to the Louvre Museum in 1900, Adolfo Venturi complained about this “deplorable exodus” in the pages of the magazine L’Arte, criticizing the total inability of Italian  law to protect artworks and accusing it of being essentially “silent regarding [...] the so-called minor arts.” It is an interesting and authoritative testimony to the emergence, at the turn of the 20th century, of a new interest in the study and preservation of early Christian and Byzantine ivory objects. L’Arte (like the Archivio Storico dell’Arte previously) became the chief spokesman for this sensibility in Italy, publishing a significant number of critical pieces specifically dedicated to ivories and encouraging the updating of international historiography on the subject, thanks to an extensive network of exchanges and contacts with foreign scholars, representatives and collectors. In the pages of the magazine, alongside accurate photoengravings, could be found Hermanin’s observations on the pieces of the Stroganoff collection, Graeven’s essay on the iconography of rosette caskets, or Wilpert’s innovative contribution on the clothing of the post-Constantinian age, which used many models taken from consular diptychs of late antiquity and Byzantine ivory reliefs. The various articles of the magazine presented references to important foreign publications, while the “Questions and Answers” pages provided the opportunity for scholars to discuss the artistic value and authenticity of many of the ivories held in major European collections.
Taking Adolfo Venturi’s L’Arte itself as a privileged vantage point, and through the analysis of other periodicals of the time (such as the Rassegna d’Arte), this paper aims to offer an unprecedented reconstruction of the state of studies on this topic.

"È stato Crapotti!" Ovvero la dispersione della collezione di Grigorij Sergeevic Stroganoff sulle riviste di storia dell'arte in Italia (1925-1926)
by Simona Moretti

Soon after the complete dispersal of the Stroganoff collection in the 1920s, Roberto Longhi, under the false name Bortolo Ghiner, published impassioned articles in Dedalo and Vita artistica. The main target of these writings were the “competent authorities” who had granted export permits for some of the works belonging to the famous Russian count.
These contributions are often cited when considering the dismemberment of that collection, but no one has ever examined the debate which took place in the pages of the magazine Vita artistica following Longhi-Ghiner’s criticisms.
In Dedalo.  Rassegna d’arte, founded by Ugo Ojetti in 1920 and directed by him until 1933, the year the final number was published, the Piedmontese scholar published a brief but scathing article in 1925-1926 with the ironic title, “‘A dispetto dei santi’. La dispersione della collezione Stroganoff” (pp. 479-480).
Vita artistica. Cronache mensili d’arte was short lived, coming out between 1926 and 1932, initially under the direction of Tullio Gramantieri, then, in 1927, under the direction of Longhi and Emilio Cecchi; between 1928 and 1929 it changed name (Pinacotheca), was interrupted for two years between 1930 and 1931, and had another change of management in 1932, before closing. During those years, it was an important “voice” in historical and artistic debate, also dealing with contemporary issues, such as the “destruction” of the Stroganoff collection (Bortolo Ghiner articles: “‘A dispetto dei santi’. Il disfacimento della collezione Stroganoff”, I, 1926, 1, pp. 12-13; “‘A dispetto dei santi’. Ancora del disfacimento della collezione Stroganoff, ovvero: è stato Crapotti”, I, 1926, 2, pp. 23-26; “ ‘A dispetto dei santi’, I, 1926, 3-4, p. 46).
An in depth analysis of the criticisms Longhi raised and the official responses he received, would provide me the opportunity to introduce some findings I have already published (in La Russie et l’Occident, Rome 2010, pp. 97-121), and others that remain unpublished, which form part of the correspondence on the Stroganoff heritage preserved in the Archivio di Stato in Rome, which appear to involve various officials of the Italian State.

Il catalogo della Biennale Arte di Venezia. Forme espressive, forme del contenuto
by Tiziana Migliore

The Venice Biennale catalogue, which has documented, for more than a century, art international events, currents  and exponents, has never been a historical recognition. This paper, Italian version
of a monograph in progress, show us its evolution, in the expressive forms as for the semantic features. The author explores, with a semiotic method, the ratio of tension and reciprocal presupposition between the catalogue and the exhibition, in a double movement: retrospective – from present to the past - and perspective - from present to future. This opens a debate on the kind of visitor that the catalogue prefigures and on the concept of cataloging work today.

La malattia dell'arte, ovvero al di là della body art
by Francesco Paolo Campione

Between the mid-1960s and late 1970s, body art broke up the mechanisms of traditional art, beginning from the medium of representation itself which was no longer the work in its canonical consistency, but the body of the artist intended as a space upon which to show the identity crisis of art itself, the “sickness of the world.” In its more recent offshoots, the performances of Marina Abramović, Orlan, Stelarc, Franko B return to questions regarding the fate of art and its ability to still convey meaning.

L'iter editoriale del "Mercurio siculo o sia collezione enciclopedica di materie, e argomenti relativi alle arti, scienze, e belle lettere" (1818)
by Roberta Santoro

The publication of the “Mercurio siculo” in Palermo in 1818, encouraged by “a society of scholars” and edited by the Stamperia Solli, fills part of the gap in the Sicilian periodical press between Domenico Schiavo’s literary journal “Memorie per servire la storia letteraria di Sicilia,” published in 1755, and “L’Iride,” founded in 1822 by a group of intellectuals including the erudite Giuseppe Bertini and the jurist and connoisseur Giuseppe Tortorici, which addressed artistic themes, with particular attention to antiques and archaeology,  within its encyclopaedic scope.

Musica nel “Poliorama pittoresco”
by Massimo Privitera

The topic of this article is music in the pages of “Poliorama Pittoresco,” a weekly magazine published in Naples from 1836 to 1860. The variety of topics covered by this Neapolitan periodical was truly unique: it included architecture, archaeology, agriculture, industrial and mechanical arts, biography, customs, natural curiosities, health, institutions, women’s work, music, morality, poetry, painting, sculpture, statistics, history, natural history, travel, landscapes, literary genres.
In "Poliorama," music is addressed from a general perspective and from different angles: as the triumphs of virtuosos (Mozart, Palestrina, Haydn, Rossini, Bellini); as the genuine expression of folklore; as inspiration for literary digressions, etc. So the modern reader, looking through the "Poliorama," can get a clear idea of what music was for the intellectuals who were writing and their readers - that is, for the Neapolitan bourgeoisie of the Romantic period.

La modernità raggiunta: il rinnovamento della vita musicale a Palermo tra Otto e Novecento attraverso la nuova stampa periodica specializzata (“La Sicilia musicale” 1894-1910; “L’arte musicale” 1898; la “Rassegna d’arte e teatri” 1922-1936)
by Consuelo Giglio

With the National Exhibition of 1891-92 Palermo entered into the life of la belle époque, a period characterized by the splendor of high society coupled with intense intellectual and artistic activity. Such a European atmosphere also involved musical life, stimulating the development of a more progressive musical taste and the birth of modern public concerts. As a consequence, opera began to lose its hold as the dominant form of musical entertainment. In the same years a new ‘urban’ genre flourished: the Sicilian song, a minor and forgotten ‘daughter’ of the Neapolitan one. One can obtain a clear picture of these changes and innovations through some long-lasting periodicals of a varied scope and, in more detail, through a couple of new specialized periodicals: The Sicilia musicale (1894-1910) and L’arte musicale (1898). Founded by the music publisher Luigi Sandron, The Sicilia musicale was the first music periodical to survive more than a couple of years. During the Nineteenth century, in fact, amateur journalism prevailed in Palermo, making the task of founding professional music periodicals more difficult (one reason was due to the scarcity of theatrical agencies and to the absence of important music publishers). Later, this kind of periodical is well exemplified by the long-lived Rassegna d’arte e teatri (1922-36), which reached a very high level of publication and which reflects in the details the lively cultural and musical context of the 1920s, characterized by an outstanding concert activity and the establishment of modern music institutions, such as the Associazione Palermitana Concerti Sinfonici, the local section of the Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche and the Amici della Musica which is stll active today.

Stefano Bottari direttore di "Arte antica e moderna" (1958-1966). Note sull'arte meridionale
by Giovanna Di Marco

The article on Bottari analyses the role of the Sicilian scholar in the journal “Arte antica e moderna” based on the cooperation between the Department of History of Art and The Department of Archeology at the University of Bologna.
After a short preface on the characteristics of the journal, has been examined the contribution of Stefano Bottari, who was its editor: what emerges is the complexity of the intellectual, attentive to issues concerning theory and art's criticism, but also reflection and, at times, rewievs on exhibitions or contemporary publications.
It has been particularly pointed out a certain interest in Southern art, which he revealed mostly in some contributions present only in the early history of the journal. The final work on “ Deposition” by Nicola Pisano, present in the left lunette of the portal of Lucca's Cathedral, seen as the result of a new tipically “ gothic” sensitivity, rises to a sort of bridge between the classicist Southern culture, where the sculptor was formed, and the new Tuscan sensitivity, which, both in figurative arts and language, managed to reflect the chancing times.
With the last article on Nicola Pisano, concerning the change in poetic of the great sculptor, Bottari's reflection, at least in the journal, will take leave of the issues related to the mostly medieval Southern art. 

“Collage”: un’esperienza di esoeditoria d’avanguardia nella Palermo degli anni Sessanta
by Marina Giordano

From a ‘spoken’ magazine to a printed one: Collage constitutes a rare example of ‘exo-publishing’, that is to say of a publication directly managed by artists in order to promote an alternative to the dominant culture, which came into being in Palermo in the sixties. If Collage. Dialogues of culture (1962-64), founded by Paolo Emilio Carapezza, Antonino Titone and Gaetano Testa, dealt with a big range of topics regarding Palermo culture on the basis of real indexes that acted as an outline for the oral interventions of the participants, the printed version (1963-70) was developed along a double line, that of the ‘new music’ (Nuova Musica) and of the visual arts, with two parallel editions and a dense network of prestigious international collaborators.
The experience of Collage remained unique in Sicily for the broad scope that characterized it and for its promptness in perceiving fundamental phenomena of contemporary art, from Pop Art to Arte Povera, to the happening and dance/theatre/action, and gives an interesting insight into Palermo in the sixties at the centre of a golden moment of cultural reawakening that has never been repeated.

Un grande corrispondente europeo. Aubin-Louis Millin tra Francia, Germania e Italia
by Monica Preti-Hamard - Bénédicte Savoy

Aubin-Louis Millin was one of the protagonists of French intellectual life in the nineteenth century. Curator of the Cabinet des Médailles et Antiques of the Bibliothèque Nationale, he was also Editor of the famous Magasin encyclopédique, a journal of European cultural and scientific life, and faithful correspondent with hundreds of scholars across Europe. This article examines the intermediary role Millin played between Rome, Paris and the principal cities of Germany, examining his correspondence with Karl August Böttiger and Francesco Cancellieri, his “art director in Rome.”

Scritti d’arte di Carmelo La Farina (1786 - 1852)
by Nicoletta Di Bella

This article examines Carmelo La Farina, a knowledgeable expert on local culture and one of the most interesting figures of artistic literature in nineteenth century Messina. It investigates some of La Farina’s publications, in particular his “artistic letters,” addressed to more prominent members of the island’s intelligentsia, which were collected in 1835 in a volume entitled Intorno le Belle Arti, e gli artisti fioriti in varie epoche in Messina – Ricerche ordinate in più lettere.

Appunti su uno scritto poco noto di Agostino Gallo
by Carmelo Bajamonte

This short essay, published in 1863 by the learned Palermitan Agostino Gallo, focuses on Sicilian decorative arts (silver and goldsmithing, inlaid marble, maiolica, etc.) and the work of the most important artists active during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The author’s declared intent is to rehabilitate the critical reputation of the Sicilian school of art within a wider historiographic context and to create a unifying moment, in the name of an Italian art, in the wake of Unification.

Giuseppe Agnello: contributi sulla stampa periodica allo studio della storia dell’arte siciliana dal tardo antico al Barocco
by Iolanda Di Natale

A man of letters, philologist, art historian, archaeologist and politician, Giuseppe Agnello was one of the most important Sicilian scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. A passionate and tenacious expert, he made a significant contribution to the development of the art of both Syracuse and Sicily as a whole, in particular regarding Byzantine and early Christian art, through his careful, deep, and broad research.

Vedere attraverso e oltre l’opera d’arte. Erwin Panofsky e l’educazione estetica in presenza di disabilità visiva
by Roberta Priori

The iconological method theorized by Erwin Panofsky has been employed in the context of aesthetic education for the visually impaired. The teaching method developed in the late nineties at the Anteros Museum of Tactile Ancient and Modern Painting of the Francesco Cavazza Institute for the Blind in Bologna involves phases of sensory perception (pre-iconographic reading), cognition (iconographic reading) and interpretation (iconological reading) of the artwork, leading to deeper understandings of works of art for blind and partially sighted people. By analyzing some of Panofsky’s early works and his Hamburg period which led to the systematization of his tripartite method, it is possible to outline the potential of his ideas for the aesthetic education of those with visual disabilities and the applicability of their educational-pedagogical aspects within the complex debate about the perception and signification of forms with aesthetic value.

Il museo negli scritti di Giulio Carlo Argan
by Marcella Marrocco

Museums, their structure and their social function, were the subject of study and critical reflection throughout Giulio Carlo Argan’s work, first as a scholar and then as a politician, leading him to devote himself to the Gesamtkunstwerk city as aesthetic object and as political subject. With an eye toward new museum models, this essay raises questions about the topicality of Arganian positions, from museum critique – museum logos, archisculpture – to the appreciation of those museums able to act as new “urban guides,” identifying in the Arganian positions insights which remain valid for contemporary debates.

Ne quid nimis: storia di un emblema umanistico da Achille Bocchi ad Alberto III Pio da Carpi
di Stefano Colonna

This paper analyzes the genesis and the use of the humanist motto “Ne quid nimis”, “nothing in excess”, in literature, miniatures, sculpture and architecture, examining this saying’s mode of transmission, from the miniatures in the books of the Bolognese humanist Achille Bocchi to the sculptures in the courtyard of the castle of the humanist-Prince Albert III Pio da Carpi, former student of Aldo Manuzio, the Elder. In the background is the intriguing presence of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Aldo’s friend, who shows an awareness of this motto and its hidden meanings in his Adagia.

La regola lo sguardo. La critica di Giuseppe Damiani Almeyda al libro dei cinque ordini d’architettura di Vignola
di Edoardo Dotto

In 1878 Giuseppe Damiani Almeyda published Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola ed il suo libro dei cinque ordini d’architettura, a booklet where he asserted to be pleased that the architectonic orders according to Vignola’s rules were left out of courses of ministerial studies.
Although the estreme clearness of Vignola’s design metod, issued in thousands of books, in Damiani’s opinion it was responsible for taking the students away from the straight study of roman and greek ancient architecture.
Differently from Vignola, in his educational works Damiani did not suggest any proportional scheme. Otherwise he taugth to observe with patience and sensitivity the ancient buildings with the aim to detect the deep meaning of figures and shapes. Only by attending directly to the study of greek and roman architecture students would be able to create genuine modern forms.
Even in a period marked by a linguistical experimentalism like the end of 18th century, Damiani’s major works, such as the Politeama of Palermo, distinctly show how the revolutionary, joyful and rigorous architectonic style he developed was straightly founded on his deep and scrupulous study of classical forms.

Winckelmann e il Sublime
di Giuseppe Pucci

This essay addresses a question of great prominence in Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s reflections: what is the Sublime? To untangle this knot, the author retraces the ideas of Gedanken and Storia delle arti del disegno, searching for a theoretical formulation that identifies the Sublime as a measure of fundamental importance for understanding the status of certain classical works of art. More than just a style, for Wincklemann it is an effect that resonates from the work to the viewer, a feeling of rapture that can transport the viewer of ancient sculptures to an ideal, superhuman dimension.

Processo a Praga la città, il testimone, la legge
di Gabriele Scaramuzza

The theme of this essay is the presence of Prague, never mentioned but always looming, in The Trial. The essay traces the story of the novel, focusing on places, people, and events, the troublesome tangles in which the life of the city is reflected. The city is not only a historical and geographical place of great interest, but indexes a number of situations, events and scenarios that are connected to or intersect with easily recognizable or ascertainable places. And finally, it is the place for one who intends to defend himself by writing, like Josef K in his memoir, or Kafka himself in his absolute devotion to literature. It is a space in which great literature has its roots, but also in which great artistic potential develops.

«…Si dica quel che si vuole, Raffaello c’entrato di certo»: Il cenacolo di S. Onofrio, un cantiere per la connaisseurship ottocentesca
di Alexander Auf Der Heyde

The article focuses on the controversy about Perugino’s Last Supper, uncovered in the former-refectory of the Florentine monastery S. Onofrio in 1843. The question of its authorship (often given to the young Raffaello) leads to a complex methodological dilemma: is stylistic analysis the only relevant prove of authenticity and which authority have historical methods such as epigraphy and diplomatics ? The author emphasizes the historical, political and aesthetical context of a discovery which, after gradually losing its sensational character, still plays a relevant role in the history of art historiography.

Storia e Arte, Forma e Colore nel primo insegnamento di Lionello Venturi
di Stefano Valeri

An overview of the beginnings and early development of Venturi’s teachings at the University of Turin, especially in light of the contentious relationship between Crocean aesthetics and a balanced endorsement of the neoidealist method of evaluating works of art that, in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, formed the basis for a modern conception of the critical history of art in Italy. What is neglected in Croce’s thinking, the analysis of form and colour in art, Venturi instead takes up and demonstrates to be historically fundamental in the expressive language of art in all periods, an indispensable resource for the formulation of judgements.

“Critica acritica” e altri temi. Un dibattito sulla critica d’arte in Italia 1970-1971
di Michele Dantini

This is the first-ever collection and historiographic analysis of a series of texts that appeared between 1970 and 1971 in the magazine “NAC” (Bulletin of Contemporary art) as contributions to a debate on the “crisis” of art criticism, its statutes, the audience it addressed and the practices of research, curatorship and writing that it entails. Participants in the debate included Germano Celant, Aurelio Natali, Piero Raffa, Paolo Fossati, Carla Lonzi, Italo Tomassoni, Marisa Volpi Orlandini, Vittorio Fagone, Tommaso Trini, Luciano Caramel, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (the latter as moderator and impartial elder). A few drawings of Giulio Paolini, focused on the topics of “description”, seem to subtly comment issues at stake. The discussion, at times heated, attacked the institutional model of pedagogical, ex-cathedra art criticism interpreted by Giulio Carlo Argan (defended solely by Tomassoni), invested the issue of the relatioshionships between art and art market and ended up involving the participants in a social and political reflection upon interpretation. If, how, why and at what condition are we authorised to interpret artworks in the limiting or “homologizing” context of the culture industry?

The posthumous attitude of the contemporary monuments
di Clarissa Ricci

Monuments today show a changed paradigm in the relation with temporality. The paper, addresses this change and defines it as the “posthumous” attitude of the “future anterior”.
The monuments taken into consideration for this analysis belong to a period after the 1989 and are characterized by a non-specific historical celebration, even though still maintain the “monument” rhetoric and name. The paper shows, through the methodological analysis of three artworks, the main characteristic of this temporal mode.
Two artworks, both by Illya and Emilia Kabakov, Monument to a Lost Glove and The Weakening Voice, underline how the position of the viewer determines the locality of temporality. Instead the analysis of Monument by Rachel Whiteread highlights in a discursive way how the constituency of a monument is conceived. The present, the actuality, is perceived as a constant movement, backwards and forward, between past and future, allowing the “after” to continuously takes place. The viewer, whom embodies the posthumous nature of contemporary monuments, is intended in these works as the one who “comes after”, the one who is let to see the end and at the same time a new becoming: the Future Anterior.
The empty pedestal, which all of these works refer to is the new actor of the “monumental”, enacting a platform for civic construction.

Storia e arte nel collegio della Compagnia di Gesù a Caltanissetta. Francesco Natale Juvarra e Giovanni Battista Marino nelle decorazioni marmoree della chiesa di Sant’Agata di Giuseppe Giugno

The article describes the history of the Jesuit college founded by the family Moncada in Caltanissetta at the end of the sixteenth century, focusing in particular on the role of the architectural complex in the process of the city's urban modernizing and on the architectural changes made ​​in the church during the eighteenth century with the involvement of important masters such as Francesco Natale Juvarra in the altar of St. Ignatius of Loyola and Giovanni Battista Marino with Domenico Battaglia in the apse of the church of St. Agatha.

Seicento ritrovato. Tre tele siciliane (quasi) inedite
di Vincenzo Scuderi

The paper by Vincenzo Scuderi presents three paintings of XVIIth  Sicily century, giving a possible assignation to as many artists who worked in Sicily around the first half centrury. These are a Pentecoste (1624) assigned to Giuseppe Schettino, an Immacolata (1634) perhaps by Giuseppe Reati, and a Madonna del Rosario (1647) by the Flemish Geronimo Gerardi.  These paintings, very spread in order of the pictorial quality, give an idea of the tricky landscape of the Sicilian painting in XVIIth  century, wherein the great and reclusive experience of Pietro Novelli coincides to some episodes at time delayed, at time updated to issues of the Monreale’s master.

La rivista “Sicilia” dell’editore S.F. Flaccovio (1953-1982)
di Carmelo Bajamonte

The edition of the magazine “Sicilia” was made from 1953 to 1982 Salvatore Fausto Flaccovio (Palermo, 1915-1989), bookseller, publisher, gallery owner and prominent figure in the Italian cultural scene of the fifties and seventies. Articles are published in scope only Sicilian and provide an interesting sampling of subjects and heterogeneous material: art, music and theater, folklore, archeology, etc. The discourse on Sicily is always highlighted in the reports by several international and supra-regional by many employees of the magazine enlisted, who offered, in a chronological framework and thematically very ample, their form of written disclosure cultured. The strength of “Sicilia” is the beautiful graphics that made ​​it a unique editorial product in those years.

“Qui arte contemporanea”: il presente nel solco della modernità
di Francesca Gallo

The study is a first glance on "Qui arte contemporanea", a periodical of Editalia, unique case for longevity and autonomy of interest among the bulletins of roman galleries of the Sixties. Animated by artists, art historians and critics, the magazine allows to follow the transformations of the Italian cultural climate, from 1966 to 1977. That is from the prevalence of analytical research, to the fascination for nature, the myth and the primary passions, up to performative practices (1966-72), to the reflow - after the 1974 - toward more properly pictorial and sculptural researches. Even the form of the magazine adapted  to such a change, going from adhering to the information model to the inside structuring around monographic themes.

…Has arte povera ever existed? sulla costruzione problematica di un movimento artistico
di Eleonora Charans

Despite being born with an often derogatory value, labels for artistic movements and tendecies possess the gift of simplifying and giving directions to write art manuals. But, while approaching the public of generic users to issues otherwise difficult to grasp; on the other hand artistic lables is intended to inform and nourish Art History debates. Arte Povera, in this sense, does not represent an exception.
Within the panorama of the Second Postwar, Arte Povera can be certainly considered the Italian movement received a lot of international attention, both in terms of critical feedbacks, museums as well as private collections. Questions arise: has Arte Povera really was based on shared formal, sociological, cultural intents by the artists belonging to it or is it more the result of a literary creation by Germano Celant? What are the main reasons for this success?
In response to these questions, this contribution aims to contextualize Arte Povera through the analysis of some artworks by Alighiero Boetti and Michelangelo Pistoletto. In fact these artists have distanced themselves to follow their own researches, independently more than any other from Arte Povera. The chosen artworks are bearers of an evidence able to argument a network of relationships and exchanges at the base of the art system behind them. Numerous references will be made to those contextual moments, exhibitions, in which the works are presented to the public, other artists and collectors.

La Net.Art e il museo ai tempi di Internet: la Tate Gallery di Londra
di Michela Ruggeri

The article investigates the artistic movement of Net.art. Officially born in the mid-nineties as self-referential artistic vanguard opposed to the institution, proposed a new way to conceive an art work created in the network. The Net.art works in fact raise the problem of conservation, being related to the technology that produced them, they are comparable to site-specific, which are valid only in the present of the network and in the semantics of the virtual space. The one of the Tate Gallery is considered one of the most interesting cases in Europe for the open attitude of the traditional historical museum towards the Net. Art and for the decision to invest in the option e-space of the museum: the Tate Online platform is the virtual space where you can enjoy new contents, exhibit new works. By the setting up of the online collection Intermedia Art, New Media, Sound and Performance, the London gallery therefore puts itself in close dialogue with the new artists, starting in 1999 the Net. Art commissions.

Antiporte e frontespizi incisi in Sicilia dal Barocco al Neoclassico
di Diana Malignaggi

The essay focuses on the art graphics of Sicily between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author has dealt with the production of books and illustrated title pages, which are explanatory documents of the local culture figurative. The editorial production of Palermo and Messina is investigated through the analysis of books on various subjects, for whose illustrations concurred architects, painters and engravers.

«…Sono ito come il cane dietro la traccia»: Paolo Giudice e la connoisseurship a Palermo nel primo Ottocento
di Roberta Cinà

This paper examines a peculiar aspect of the works of sicilian author Paolo Giudice (better known as Emiliani Giudici and for his literary and historiographic production) who, between 1836 and 1840, wrote a significant series of papers regarding artistic historiography and art criticism. The close examination of these works highlights some interesting angles, such as his harsh opinions in the matter of the attributions and of the perusal of stylistic parts. Furthermore, it is stressed what links the thought of Giudici to French Illuminism and to English Empiricism, as well as his relationship with coeval intellectuals in Palermo. This essay goes into depth on the research that the author, Roberta Cinà, had already carried out about Paolo Giudice as an art critic during his period as a correspondent for the “Gazzette des Beaux-Arts” between 1859 and 1861.

Charlot: eroe surrealista
di Ivan Arlotta

Between the two world wars, a character who monopolizes the world's attention rises: Charlot. Character born from the genius of Chaplin, Charlot embodies the man marginalized by the society. Everywhere the bowler hat, the cane, the baggy pants and big shoes refer to the image of an icon that has caught the attention not only of the public, but also of the avant-garde of the twentieth century and above all of surrealism. It is through the words of Desnos, Soupault and Goll that we relive the exploits and the influence Charlot brought in the history of cinema, in literature and, generally, in arts.

La faticosa affermazione del colore al cinema
di Roberto Lai

The history of the chromatic component in cinema fully testifies the struggle among the double matrix of the seventh art, documentary and artistic-expressive; to simplify, with reference to first twenty years of cinema, we have on the one hand the works of Lumiére’s brothers and on the other those of Méliès. But there are many reasons to follow this history: in particular, it expresses all the resistances that the novelties meet before being approved and it realizes the importance of the economic side in choices that will have repercussions in the formation of the imaginary, but also in men’s relationship with reality. The color, even if relegated in second floor and devalued, always carved out a place, not necessarily marginal, in the cinematographic representation; it has always been seen like a problem to be resolved, a knot to be extricated. Only after a run lasted more than sixty years, among successes and, above all, failures, with some turning moments and the fundamental contribution of revolutionary authors (from Méliès to Ejzenŝtejn), it becomes successful and reached a priority role in the representation, free to express all its formative power.

Mimì Quilici Buzzacchi a Ferrara tra arte e critica 1921 – 1942
di Raffaella Picello

The paper aims to examine the artist's pictorial production between the mid-1920s and the end of the 1930s in the light of cultural and political dynamics developed in Ferrara under the fascist regime. Notwithstanding the most recent studies conducted, some implications in both Mimi Quilici’s pictorial and critical output - which reveal a path very dense relationships and moments of confrontation with the most up-to-date instances in the national art scene - still deserve further investigation. The proximity to the circle of intellectuals who gathered around the "Corriere Padano", founded by Italo Balbo and directed by her husband Nello Quilici, favoured this exchange of ideas with artists such as Tato Sansoni, Filippo De Pisis, Mario Guido del Monte, Achille Funi. Guild commissions, mainly in the fields of illustration, do not hinder the elaboration of an updated and antiretorical visual concept, as is evident in the illustrated covers for the periodicals "Rivista di Ferrara" and "Libya".

L’arte trapassata: Gunther von Hagens e la fine dell’esperienza estetica
di Francesco Paolo Campione

The Works of Gunther von Hagens are the extreme case where arrived “artistic expression” in recent years. But up to that point Body Words’ exhibitions, the shows that the German pathologist exposes theirs “creations”, are a new phenomenon? The paper of Francesco Paolo Campione, retracing the history of dreadful aesthetic enjoyment starting from Herder, offers a Gunther von Hagens’ plastinations’ reading and describes their ineffectiveness from the point of view of Aesthetics.

the Throne of Grace Interlandi of the church of S. George in Caltagirone to the flemish painter of XVth Century Vrancke van der Stockt
di Giacomo Pace Gravina

The essay confirm the attribution of the Throne of Grace Interlandi of the church of S. George in Caltagirone to the flemish painter of XVth Century Vrancke van der Stockt. This attribution was at the first time advanced by Giovanni Carandente in 1968: by comparison with others paintings recently attributed to van der Stockt, many elements corroborate this attribution. The author investigates also the travel of the painting from Flanders to Sicily, and hypothesizes that the Throne of Grace was of a family from the town of Klinge (Klinge-land), who when came in Sicily changed the surname in Interlandi.

the Throne of Grace Interlandi of the church of S. George in Caltagirone to the flemish painter of XVth Century Vrancke van der Stockt
di Simone Ferrari

The article reviews the exhibition dedicated to the young Dürer (Nuremberg, 2012) and it emphasizes not only the significant interest of the works on display but especially the historical approach overall.

In particular, it should be noted the definition and the caliber of the master on the basis of literary sources and texts of the era. It also discusses some hypothesis attributive, and chronological, and it advances some stylistic comparisons (that refer to the production of Leonardo, Jacopo de’ Barbari and Baldung Grien).

The story of Luigi Guglielmo Moncada, prince of Paternò and duke of Montalto
di Giuseppe Giugno

The article describes the story of Luigi Guglielmo Moncada, prince of Paternò and duke of Montalto, focusing on his political work in Sicily and Spain, and on his role as client of artistic works. Political action and artistic patronage are in him the terms of an inseparable pair, opening the dialogue with eminent personalities from the sicilian and roman cultural landscape. Concerning this, it’s interesting the reference to drawings made by Gaspare Guercio about architectures realized by the prince in Sicily. The relationship with the roman world is attested by a bronze statue by Gian Lorenzo Bernini produced on behalf of prince. The dialogue with Bernini and with the roman curia will lead the Moncada to the cardinalate and its guide in Sicily of abbeys of Santa Maria in Novara and St. Michael the Archangel in Troina

The article explores the work of Ettore Gabrici as director of R. Museum of Palermo
di Carla Caruso

The article explores the work of Ettore Gabrici as director of R. Museum of Palermo. Based on the analysis of unpublished documents, it is able to identify both the will to provide appropriate inventory and cataloging of the Museum and its exhibition stands, and acquisition of works and the close relationship that Gabrici had with the government authorities.

the work of the sculptor Nino Franchina from the beginning of his career in the Thirties of the 20th Century to the end of the Forties
di Valentina Raimondo

The purpose of the paper is to study the work of the sculptor Nino Franchina from the beginning of his career in the Thirties of the 20th Century to the end of the Forties. The author evaluates the development of the artistic path and the peculiar approach of the sculptor’s art thanks to the drawings and sculptures in which the artist chooses as subject the Sammarcota, San Marco d’Alunzio’s woman pictured holding on the head a stone picked up from the Furiano river in Sicily. The female figure – decontextualised from her own original scenario – is represented as a huge Ποτνια Ματερ and it becomes the symbol of the sculpture’s origin. Studying the artworks with the Sammarcota, made from the 1935 until 1947, it is possible to evaluate the stylistic evolution of Franchina’s art and to understand the main steps of his career and the changes from a figural to an abstract art.

Sciascia’s texts on ancient and modern art
di Giuseppe Cipolla

Sciascia’s texts on ancient and modern art, written in a time span ranging from 1964 to 1987, were initially conceived as speeches and articles in periodicals, local and national presentations and forewords in art monographs. These contributions consist mainly of reviews or essays addressing topics related to Sicilian 15th century art (The Master of the Triumph of Death, Antonello da Messina, Francesco Laurana and Antonello Gagini) or to the influence of Caravaggio in late 16th and early 17th century Sicily (Filippo Paladini, Pietro d'Asaro). They are writings relative to the most important Sicilian old masters exhibitions of the 20th century (Antonello da Messina, Messina 1953, Paladini, Palermo 1967, Antonello da Messina, Messina 1981; Pietro d'Asaro, Racalmuto 1984, Caravaggio, Syracuse, 1984), and where we may find, in some instances, interesting considerations on figurative problems of the island, in keeping with contemporary art historiography.

The Voyage as a Discovery of the ‘Other’: Observations on the Painter Agostino Brunias (1730- 1796)
di Giuliana Tomasella

During the last years, the Roman painter Agostino Brunias has been the subject of some interesting studies abroad, but he’s yet unknown in Italy. This article concentrates, in particular, on the first part of his career, when he is recorded in Rome as a student at the Accademia di San Luca and was noted by the important Scottish architect Sir Robert Adam, who was impressed by Brunias’s drawing skills. In 1754 he won third prize in the institution’ second class for his drawing Tobias and the Angel, here published. Though known since 1989, when it was published for the first time, this drawing has been totally ignored by the Brunias’s scholars.

In 1758 Brunias accompanied Adam in London continuing to work as an architectural draughtsman till about 1763. In the Drawings Section of the John Soane’s Museum in London there are many drawings attributed to Brunias, some of them here published; they consent, for the first time, to study his style before the voyage to the Lesser Antilles, where he’s supposed to have accompanied Sir William Young, who had been appointed to the Commission for the Sale of Lands in the Ceded Islands after the Seven Years War. Brunias’s most famous pictures (preserved in many important Museums in Europe and USA) concentrate on subjects in the West Indies, with a particular interest on the description of the different “races” . The aim of this article is to underline the importance of academic and classical tradition of the Brunias’s background in defining the skills of representation of the life in the Lesser Antilles in the late eighteenth century.

Tra-Volti dalla Restaurazione. La ritrattistica dei Borbone delle Due Sicilie da Ferdinando I a Francesco II
di Giulio Brevetti

From the return on the Neapolitan throne of Ferdinand I in 1815 to the Roman exile of Francis II in 1860 forty-five years pass by, marked by a progressive qualitative lowering of the artistic production. For a better understanding of the reasons of it, and therefore to gather something more of the cultural choices and artistic taste of the Borbone of the Two Sicilies, very helpful appear the analysis of the most representative painted portraits of the different members, till now widely neglected by the studies. Marked by Napoleonic endurances and academic models, the bourbonian iconography of the Restoration won’t produce a real masterpiece and will meaningfully finish with the advent, in the Fifties, of the photography as new privileged representation medium.

Le tele per il Cappellone di San Sossio nella Basilica pontificia di Frattamaggiore e qualche nota sulla sfortuna critica della produzione sacra di fine Ottocento
di Almerinda Di Benedetto

The sacred production of the late nineteenth century southern area is still little explored by critics. Unless attention to numen Morelli, contributions are limited to sporadic and pioneering work, confined to important ecclesiastical orders. If the reception of the suggestions by the teaching Morelli long forty years of artistic history is often inconsistent and sometimes superficial, dividend artists among those who adopt a morellismo of ‘emulation’, to those who will try , instead, to release the sacred painting by the long echo of the formula purist and Nazarene, the key to understanding many works can be found relations with the proposals of international culture, and the exchanges and contacts with the best late nineteenth-century European academic production. Specimens are compared with those grounds , the works ordered by the Papal Basilica of St. Sossius in Frattamaggiore between 1873 and 1895, which were recruited for the most active artists on the religious production.

I rilievi didattici di Gregorio Izzi dei mosaici della Cappella Palatina di Palermo
di Edoardo Dotto

Between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, as a result of the radical change in the outlines of study for the technical school, in Italy quickly increased the offer of didactic books dedicated to the geometric and architectonic drawing. These works supplied basic knowledge of geometric tracking, a first approach to the various methods of representation and some introductory lessons on architectonic orders.

New ministerial outlines in 1876 made explicit reference to the works of Owen Jones, Auguste Racinet and Jules Bourgoin, so that a substantial part of the scholastic study regarded the analysis and the graphic reproduction of intricate geometric patterns of medieval inspiration.

The volume Elements of geometric drawing by Gregorio Izzi, published in Palermo since 1903, is distinguished in this publishing survey for a rare peculiarity. The book is characterized by an extraordinary graphical cure and a great attention to the quality of the plates. Many of them show the geometric mosaics from the Cappella Palatina in Palermo. These plates turn out to be a new version of some drawings pubblished in a ponderous book about the Cappella Palatina illustrated in 1872 by Andrea Terzi. In all probability, when Gregorio Izzi was young, he had been a member of his team.

Izzi’s work shows as in Palermo, at the beginning of 20th century, also in the narrow field of educational books, the publishing trade was animated by a deep cultural sprightlyness.

Aspetti della tutela del patrimonio artistico e monumentale in Sicilia nell'attività di Sebastiano Agati
di Valentina Di Fazio

The essay talks about Sebastiano Agati, architect and official superintendent for Eastern Sicily between 1900 and 1948. The research recovered unknown archival documents allowing to trace the whole activities completed, together with Paolo Orsi, in the conservation and monuments restauration fields between the two world wars. Agati's art essays, with areas often assigned to the architecture and sculpture magazines, gives useful ideas representing an interesting contribution to contemporary art history.

La chiesa del Collegio Massimo dei Gesuiti di Palermo: la lunga storia di una dismissione
di Giuseppe Scuderi

The History of the Church of Santa Maria della Grotta, annexed to the Collegio Massimo of Jesuits in Palermo testify on the one hand the Company’s building project in Sicily, direct to ensure the strategic places in the urban context; on the other hand a cultural heritage safeguard policy which, after the First World War, sacrificed a lot of monuments to a mistaken usage reconversion. Second War World’s destructions transmitted a building which had host not only the early artistic furniture, but also the original spatiality, irreparably unalterated by the new re-functionalization.

La trattatistica francese tra il XVII e il XVIII secolo. Dal collezionismo a una prima strutturazione delle scuole pittoriche italiane
di Gabriele Lo Nostro

The French art literature of the 17th and 18th centuries realised in the fragmentation of Italian schools of painting an opportunity for the study and reflection on the artistic variety of the whole European continent. However, this first analysis of the various Italian schools is guided by the strict rules of a central and dominant institution such was the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculputure (1648), its stylistic and critical models creating at the time a considerable influence not just on the artists themselves but on the market and public taste. Such influence is demonstrated in the many publications that since the late 16th century were commonly found in the cabinets and in the art collections of the time. Among these works are the academic and artistic writings of Abraham Bosse (1604-1676) and Roger de Piles (1635-1709) as well as the works of eminent academics of the era such as naturalist Antoine Joseph Dézailler d'Argenville (1680-1675), art connoisseur Denis Pierre Jean Papillon de la La Ferté (1727-1794) and philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-1784).
Far from being a complete and exhaustive rendition of the subject, this essay seeks to elucidate the different phases and dynamics that endorsed the first systematization of the Italian schools of painting.

Sul primo inventario della collezione del conte Agostino Pepoli a Bologna
di Eleonora Tardia

The Last Will and Testament of the Sicilian art collector Agostino Pepoli was accepted by the Municipality of Bologna in 1910. In the months that followed, the heterogeneous collection of art that had, until then, occupied the vast halls in the main floor of his residence in Bologna, went lost due to the local authorities’ will to divide the works between the existing museums rather than keeping them in their original home. This contribution sets to examine the features of the nineteen halls in Agostino Pepoli’s apartment as they appeared before the aforementioned dispersion, in the years closely preceding his return to Trapani; this task is pursued through a critical re-reading of the preexisting material and the assistance of unpublished documentary testimonies. A few years from the centenary of the departure of the collector and in the wake of the fervent interest repeatedly expressed by the academic community, the study of the legal inventory of the objects existing in Bologna attached to the heritage of the Noble Count Agostino Sieri Pepoli, preserved in the local notary records, allows to define the size of the collection and, when possible, to trace the works that have survived to this day in the public and private collections in Bologna, thus unveiling the potential lying in a systematic in-depth analysis which could be accomplished through an integral transcript of the document.

Sub specie aeternitatis. Architettura della memoria in forma di rotonda nel periodo tra le due guerre
di Gaetano Palazzolo

At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the need to find, in the arts, a new expressive figure for the construction of volumes and shapes, borrowed from nature as symbolic essences, Funerary architecture is enriched with new iconographical repertoires, allowing to explain some traditional geometric patterns, from communicative value, designed according to aesthetic parameters, inspired by new theories of art. Between the birth and the decline of modernist culture and in the wave of the epic rebuilding, started after the World War I, new project aims will explain with significant operations, agree with the fascist politics idea of ​​art revival. The expansion of monumental and funerary architecture remains a process of linguistic and formal articulation, expressive of one methodology that prefer the masses and the pure and primary volumes, linked to the new theosophical and anthroposophic theories of the early twentieth century. The typology of rotonda stands out as the core model of funerary architecture, best suited to perpetuate the memory of the “Unknown Soldier”, while, according to the guidelines of the Faracovi Plan, architects and artists increasingly tend to seek language purified by the “misleading signs” of the Eclectic style. On one side, therefore, some artists tend to simplify volumes, according to the cubist architecture spirit, crossing the purism movement and the astract expressionism, such as the project  by Agostino Griffini and Paolo Mezzanotte for Monument Competition to the “Italian Soldier”, example of cosmic memorial, characterised by radiation symbolic in the matter, on the other side, instead, the architectural production aims at finding a new construction type, according to the components and logic design, conceived in “middle ways”, that is adept at get better of the avant-garde architecture, partially appeased by the "mystique" of Fascism, sometimes prone to an academic formalism such as the project for the Grappa Underground Ossuary in 1927, or sometimes pushed on classical historicism such as the one by architect Giuseppe Torres for a Votive Temple at the Venice Lido in 1919, or sometimes also, conveyed to the “modern and eclectic” ways such as the oneby architect Francesco Fichera in Siracusa in 1932, called Pantheon for War Memorial.

Una proposta museologica per Villa Palagonia
di Irene Tedesco

To this day Villa Palagonia (Bagheria, Sicily), residence of the Princes of Gavina, is a uniqueness of architecture and decoration in the late Sicilian Baroque. After listing the key points of its history, the article puts forward a proposal about the enhancement of Villa Palagonia by a museological project on its fruition, real or virtual, and the use of new technologies and social media.
The villa is privately owned; it is open to the public without a defined museum itinerary. Therefore the article outlines a proposal for a museum of Villa Palagonia designing the possible tours and the setting of the interior spaces, with a view to offering the complex history of the villa to the visitors. For a greater appreciation of the villa, considering its critical fortunes in Italian and foreign films, a guided tour for mobile experiences of its entire cultural heritage is proposed too.

San Sossio di Miseno: da seguace a protagonista
di Mario Alberto Pavone

The study on the iconography of San Sossio between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, initially linked to that of San Gennaro, helped to identify the fundamental variations introduced by the major Neapolitan artists in the stages of transition from Naturalism to the Baroque and from Arcadia to the Rococo. By focusing on some unknown paintings, it was possible to identify both the different interpretations provided by Giordano (Nicola Malinconico, Giuseppe Simonelli) and Solimena’ s followers (Francesco De Mura, Nicola Maria Rossi), and the growing interest towards the autonomous iconographic formulations of the saint.

Archeologia e simboli della “romanitas” nella pubblicistica e nella grafica fascista: il caso de “La Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’Italia” (1923-1943)
di Priscilla Manfren

This essay discusses the presence of the Antique in the Fascist press; it specifically analyzes the case of “La Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’Italia”, which was published from the 1923 to the 1943 as monthly supplement of “Il Popolo d’Italia”, that was the daily newspaper founded by Mussolini. In the first section of the paper, after an introduction on the genesis, on the structure and on the authors of the magazine, the essay makes an overview of the art articles, focusing especially on those of archaeological theme. In the second part of the text, instead, are analyzed some plates and covers of the magazine; this analysis wants to highlight the presence of some iconographies and subjects closely related to the ancient Rome. The purpose of this essay is therefore to provide a further example of the fascist exploitation of the Roman past; the regime of Mussolini, in fact, transformed the illustrated press in a vehicle for the diffusion of a popular iconography of the Antique; in the fascist magazines, in fact, it was repurposed in more simple and pedagogical ways, which were at the same time evocative and fascinating.

Leonora Carrington e Remedios Varo. Due artiste surrealiste tra Europa e Messico
di Giada Centazzo

Almost unknown in the history of Surrealism, the life and art of Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington are a unique example of the so-called second generation of surrealist women artists.
Carrington and Varo come into contact with the surrealist universe through the founders of the movement: Leonora as the lover of painter Max Ernst; Remedios as the partner of poet Benjamin Perèt. Both women had been welcomed in the circle of Breton as muses. Their early works reveal a lot about the controversial relationship with the members of the group, and they also enlighten us about their juvenile artistic nature.
With the outbreak of World War II, Carrington and Varo had to face a turning point in their careers. Torn apart from the parisian milieu and from their fellow surrealists, the two painters were catapulted into a foreign land: Mexico. But it will be in Mexico and due to their extraordinary friendship that Leonora and Remedios will find the inspiration to write the most important pages of their works, subverting the conventional image of the feminine and proposing an alternative to the vision of the Woman of their male counterparts.

Distruzione/costruzione/decostruzione. Il flusso continuo dell’architettura contemporanea
di Michele Sbacchi

The space of contemporary architecture, in his twofold building and urban scale, is characterized by destruction. A condition that at the same time is real (discontinuities, emtpies, demolitions) and symbolic. Some artists run through reverse the creative process, and leave from destruction considered as an artistic procedure. Between them Gordon Matta-Clark, inspired to Burri’s destructive operations, or Gustav Metzger, in whose activities destruction turns in creative act.

«The raw visual feel». L’esperienza dell’opera d’arte nella prima formazione di Michael Baxandall
di Laura Pellicelli

The short time span running from 1954 to 1956 represents a turning point in Michael Baxandall’s formation and a beginning of his subsequent fundamental contribution to art history and criticism. It is in these years in fact that Baxandall decides no to continue his university education in literary criticism and to devote himself to the study of the visual arts. This article concentrates on the relationship between some aspects of the author’s literary critical education and his first approach to the visual arts, focusing especially on his critical attitude in the exploration of both Italian artistic heritage and landscape during the year that he spent at the University of Pavia (1955-56), following his graduation at the English Tripos at Downing College in Cambridge. Baxandall’s juvenile ambition to write novels, which will lead to the posthumous publication of A Grasp of Kaspar (2010), completes the picture.
Starting from the analysis of Baxandall’s own memories, recorded in Episodes. A memorybook (2010), and of some of the Papers of Michael Baxandall, held at Cambridge University Library archives, this contribution aims at tracing the roots of a specific feature of the author’s subsequent writings, namely his deep interest towards the visual experience of the art work. It especially throws some light on the relationships between Baxandall’s close observation of pictorial images and the critical sensibility he might have developed through the analysis of literary texts. The first encounter of the observer with the paintings, which will turn into an object of historical survey, as it happens in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (1972), is described at this stage as a personal experience and can be detected, as such, in the brief text about Piero della Francesca, published in 1966 as a part of the series The Masters. Furthermore the article suggests similarities between Baxandall’s reflections on the pictures’ visual feel and the impressions gathered in the Italian environment that he recorded in some manuscripts notes, which relate to his later writing of some of the novel’s passages.

Sulle tracce della pittura napoletana in Croazia tra Sei e Settecento
di Mario Alberto Pavone

The relationship  between the Neapolitan painters and the Croatian contractors  is  analyzed from  the early seventeenth century, reassessing  the figure of Nicolò  Radulovich, who came into contact with  Girolamo Imparato and Caravaggio. Subsequent works of Antonio De Bellis constituted the connecting link to the works of Stanzione, Ribera and Guarini. To this phase of renovation,  the changes introduced in the field of mid-seventeenth century  Neapolitan painting , was followed by  two large canvases by Andrea Vaccaro which were destined for  Dubrovnik. There were preferences towards a classicist tendency which  continued  through  the choices made by the Dominican Order in favour of Francesco De Maria, while the iconographic theme of the Evangelists,  was developed by Preti and  is identified in the two cycles of Carmine and San Biagio in  Dubrovnik.
The Neapolitan  painting scene of the eighteenth century  is characterised  by  the presence  of Solimena and his followers (Santolo Cirillo, Gaetano Garsia), Giacinto Diano and G.B. De Mari (student of De Mura), as well as landscapers such as Michele Pagano.

Precisazioni sulla presenza di Domenico Guarino nella penisola sorrentina
di Domenico Guarino

Domenico Guarino’s new works are inserted in his artistic career, particularly in relation to the Sorrento peninsula. After the latest studies, which pointed out the work done by the artist in Basilicata (Forenza, Genzano, Atella, Pomarico and Pisticci), through timely checks on the territory, it comes to the light a large group of autograph works, distributed in the main resorts on the Sorrento coast: Sorrento (Cathedral of Saints Philip and James), Schiazzano (Church of SS. Salvatore), Massa Lubrense (Church of the Annunziata and Santa Maria della Lobra), Preazzano Vico Equense (Church of St. Andrew). In addition there were Guarino’s traces in the Abbey of San Michele in Procida.

La presenza della tradizione pittorica italiana nei Salons di Diderot
di Michele Bertolini

The Italian picture plays a distinctive function in Diderot’s Salons. At first the article sets out to elucidate the artistic knowledge of Italian pictorial tradition (particularly the Art of Renaissance and Baroque) in Diderot’s thought. The great model of Italian Renaissance and Baroque allows formulating a complete judgement on the contemporary works of art; he works too as an invisible, unconscious pattern or generative scheme on the creative imagination and artistic memory, and he shapes an iconographic dictionary. Finally, in the Salon of 1767, Diderot seeks to outline an historical consciousness of the artistic process: beyond the imitation of the Nature and the imitation of the Antique, the Italian Renaissance shows the possibility of a third model, a synthesis between the memory of the Antique and the present of the Christian mythology.

Il metodo di Maria Accascina e gli affreschi di Saccargia
di Luca Vargiu

The essay deals with Maria Accascina’s article devoted to the apse frescoes of the Basilica of SS. Trinità di Saccargia (Codrongianos, SS), with the aim of investigating its methodological aspects. The article was published in 1953 in “Bollettino d’arte”, during Accascina’s stay, as a teacher, at the University of Cagliari. It is remarkable for being the first research completely dedicated to Codrongianos pictorial cycle, besides being the only one Accascina wrote on subjects related to Sardinian art. In that article Accascina’s theoretical approach clearly emerges, especially with regard to two aspects. The first one concerns the establishment of a close connection between documentary research and iconography in a historical perspective – as such, susceptible of providing useful elements for the dating of the works. The second one relates to the attention drawn to the status of the image, as it is deduced from a «will that is representative rather than narrative» that especially the Last Supper shows. The final observations regard Accascina’s problematic adoption of the thesis on the anti-classic character of Sardinian artistic culture: a thesis which, in her view, the Saccargia frescoes, too, reveal in their stylistic rendering.

La “Madonna Greca” di Alcamo. Un dipinto per Jacopo Siculo
di Antonio Cuccia

The essay studies the panel depicting called “Greek Madonna” kept in the church of the Minor of Alcamo. The painting is the subject of various ascriptions, including those that are accredited lead back to the School of Perugino and the other that considers it a product of the conjunction southern Iberian-Lombard. Here we advance the attribution to Giacomo Santoro, aka Jacopo Siculo (Giuliana 1490 - Rieti 1543), a painter whose work is known documented in Umbria. They also investigated the paintings of the palace Abatellis already assigned to the “Master of Pentecost”, for which it is assumed the authenticity of Jacopo Siculo.

Lo Spasimo di Sicilia di Raffaello e la sua fortuna. Diffusione di uno schema iconografico di Salvatore Mercadante

The presence in Palermo of Spasimo di Sicilia of Raphael Sanzio from Urbino meant for the local artistic production a very important moment. Many copies of the painting have been multiplied for all the Sicily, even if the most part of them of poor quality. The purpose of this article is to investigate and analyze the widespread diffusion of what was the main compositional model for the implementation of the generic theme of Christ Falling on the Way to  Calvary, not limiting the historical-critical investigation to the mere Sicilian artistic climate. It was also considered appropriate to examine the diffusion of the iconography of the Spasimo di Sicilia in the plastic arts, starting from the rich production of Gagini, concluding with the pietistic-devotional sculpture.

Novità su Jacopo Cestaro
di Edgard Fiore

The essay focuses on the latest news related to the painter Jacopo Cestaro (1718-1778) and on the discovery of some of his works in recent years. Examining “news”, you want to find, with the appropriate comparisons according to what parameters and stylistic references, the style of Cestaro has been developed and through what methods the painter has regained the Arcadian Solimena lesson for the purpose to relate what has been produced after the demuriana breakthrough. In this regard, it was necessary to use part of the vast pictorial intervention realized in the Church of Saints Filippo and Giacomo as a pictorial reference (1757-1759), in which the artist refers to the production of Luca Giordano, Pietro da Cortona and Mattia Preti, as well as to Lanfranco “Neapolitan”.

Una proposta attributiva a Riccardo Quartararo per il dipinto dei Santi Simone e Giuda Taddeo dal soffitto del “Parlatorio della Badessa” alla Martorana di Antonio Cuccia

The article is dedicated to a painted wooden ceiling kept in Archeological Museum "Antonino Salinas" in Palermo, from the architectural complex of the “Martorana”. Stylistic comparisons with the works of the painter Riccardo Quartararo, like the Saints Peter and Paul (1494) of Abatellis Palace, allow you to move forward in a new assignment in the catalog of Sciacca painter, one of the most innovative artists of the fifteenth century.

La Badia benedettina di Caccamo. L’inedito documento di allogazione della decorazione settecentesca (1754) di Elvira D'Amico

A recent documentary discovery reveals the paternity of the eighteenth-century decoration of the church of St. Benedict to the Abbey of Caccamo, crediting it to the little-known architect-designer Vincenzo Giovenco e Abbate. The document allows interesting reflections on the organization of the work site in the eighteenth century Sicily, especially in the relationship between the architect and creator of the project implementers of the decorations.

Le fontane del Museo “Salinas” di Palermo: oblio e riutilizzo di due vasche monumentali di Alessandra Carrubba

Following a previous essay already published in the Quaderni del Museo Archeologico Regionale “Antonino Salinas” (n. 8), the topic of two fountains  existing inside the Convent of the Filippini Fathers in Palermo, the current seat of the Museum Salinas, is now recovered. Based on some archive research, the authoress identifies the basins, which are separated and coupled with not relevant sculptures nowadays, with a single fountain which belonged to the citizen furnishings, at the age when Palermo was the Spanish viceroy headquarters. It is the so-called “amphitheater fountain”, one of the five fountains drawn by Mariano Smiriglio and realized along the “stradone di Mezzomonreale”, this fountain, disjointed and missing during the XIX century, was saved from an assured destruction thanks to the sensible care of Antonino Salinas, whom managed to get the two basins in order to enrich the external spaces of the old National Museum.

Il più antico dei moderni: un profilo di Igor Mitoraj
di Giuseppe Pucci

The article, dedicated to the sculptor Igor Mitoraj (1944-2014), presents a survey of the work of the main sculptural and iconographic themes used by the artist. What emerges is a person of extraordinary expressive and poetic force in constant dialogue with the past and with the old. A detailed appendix collects the main data of the Mitoraj (catalogs, shows and exhibitions) and a complete document summary of his sculptures.

Residenza d’artista. Un esempio di modalità di transizione
di Claudia Latino

The research work is the beginning of a new survey that for the first time is treated the phenomenon of residences, which has no reference bibliography.The survey started in Germany, specifically in Berlin during the years of the Cold War through the award by the Ford Foundation scholarship, from about a year; in this way born the residency program Berliner Künstlerprogramm. Artists, writers, musicians, film-makers and dancers have contributed through the residency program, to revive the German capital. The research analyses some of the most significant sicilian artists' residence projects, in the article will be deepened the role of the Brodbeck Foundation.

Erasmo, la polemica sull’Antico e l’Italia di Stefano Colonna

In 1528 Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote the Ciceronianus, a text on the purity of Cicero’s language which includes an invective against the use of antiquarian culture within the Christian sphere and reminds that it will no longer be possible to “represent the Virgin Mother as Apelles once depicted Diana”, or “Saint Tecla showing the features with which Laide was portrayed”, let alone adorn “[…] our churches with statues of the kind with which once Lysippos embellished the temples of pagan gods […]”.
Thus, a decisive attack was inflicted upon the practice of Ciceronianism carried out by Italian artists and men of letters, since the times of Petrarch, to those of Coluccio Salutati, Gasperino Barzizza and Angelo Poliziano and, furthermore, during the Renaissance, Pietro Bembo and Iacopo Sadoleto, and lastly, the less famous, yet fundamental for our studies, Martino Filetico, who, to the study of Cicero’s perfect Latin language, added that, equally important, of Greek language, creating an indissoluble binomial which will pave the way to the conceiving of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499.
This Ciceronian influence on Italian antiquarian culture was aided by the rediscovery of archaeology and classical literature, and especially by the myth of Rome, considered the ideal centre of the Antique and also, in the popes’ political plans during the Renaissance from Alexander VI Borgia onwards, the fulcrum upon which Italy was to be built.
In other respects, the Sack of Rome of 1527 was also animated by the intention of punishing the alleged excesses of the Eternal City, thus the Ciceronianus of 1528 seems to establish the immediate ratification of these historical events and aims to put an end to an era corresponding to the apex of the Italian Renaissance and the Renovatio Urbis.
Fulvio Orsini’s Third Roman Academy will try to re-establish this antiquarian culture in the Farnese Gallery around 1600, thanks to the “catechetical-didactic” paradoxes of Pomponio Torelli’s “Theory of the Affetti”, but it will fade and leave way to the raising proto-Baroque aesthetics.
Therefore, the Ciceronianus is an important text, even if it has been underestimated so far, as it marks the end of that season of prosperous combination of Christian culture and antiquarian aesthetics during the Renaissance, starting a long yet irreversible process of iconographic diversification under the sign of the Reformation and Counter Reformation.

Una scheda su un disegno raffigurante l’Andata al Calvario qui restituito a Polidoro da Caravaggio di Antonio Cuccia

The study proposes the attribution to the painter Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio (1499 ?-1543), a secure design in the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints of the Regional Gallery of Sicily in Palermo. The drawing in pencil and pen, depicting the Way to Calvary and the Cyrene lifting the cross, not only confirms the deep reflection on the work of the Lombard painter Raphael (the famous Spasimo present in Palermo since 1517) but also the great quality of its graphic tests.

Un prototipo delle riviste d’arte in Italia: la “Deca di Belle Arti” (1813) di Francesco Paolo Campione

Between 1806 and 1815 – because of the invasion of the Kingdom of Naples by Napoleon –Sicily was subjected to British military occupation, that made the Island a Crown protectorate. On the one hand, they had assumed the role of guardians of the Bourbons Kings to balance the forces on the chessboard of the Mediterranean; on the other, British had every intention of ensuring their commercial and financial interests in Sicily. It goes back to a brief interlude of this turbulent period the publication of one of the first Art Magazines in Italy, the “Deca di Belle Arti” published for a single year in 1813. His overt adherence to pro-British Party and the support to the liberal Constitution enacted the year before, they are also revealed in the articles published on the Magazine’s few numbers, which combine the art information to a vehement political animosity. The failure of the 1812 Constitution, wrecked by military disengagement by the British, and a gradual move away from readers, determined the end of the magazine and with it the disappearance of an interesting cultural experiment.

La ricognizione siciliana di Giovanni Morelli e Gustavo Frizzoni
di Maria Chiara Bennici

This work is dedicated to Giovanni Morelli and Gustavo Frizzoni Sicilian reconnaissance, it is contained in the Sicilian dossier pages of the binder S.161 Inf., kept in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana of Milan, which contains what appears as the handwritten version by Frizzoni of the so-called “double catalog” undertaken by Giovanni Morelli in 1874. The two scholars, firstly as a ministerial office, and then, after the fall of the government, as a desire to complete a still ongoing project and knowledge, embarked for Sicily, studied the art of the Island, and they recorded the most significant works of it, in order to add another piece of the mosaic that was a catalog of the main works of the national territory, drawn up in order to prepare an instrument that would facilitate the protection and conservation of masterpieces, more and more threatened by experts and foreign collectors’ desires.

La via di Palermo. Una sconosciuta copia del Maratti dell’Oratorio di S. Cita nella chiesa della Madonna del SS. Rosario di Milazzo
di Elvira D'Amico

The article analyzes a painting by an unknown eighteenth-century artist. Kept in the church of Madonna del SS. Rosario in Milazzo, the work is a copy of the Madonna del Rosario and Saints that the painter Carlo Maratta painted for the Oratory of SS. Rosario in Santa Cita in Palermo (1695).

La Maddalena penitente: un ritrovato dipinto di Paolo de Matteis di Pina De Angelis

The study attributes to the painter Paolo de Matteis (1662-1728) a painting belonging to the collection of the Museum of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. The painting, depicting the Penitent Magdalen, appears in archival documents allowing to trace and improve some information shown in the traditional sources.

La perduta decorazione a fresco della facciata della chiesa della Magione di Palermo. Un inedito del 1718 di Elvira D'Amico

The essay discloses an unpublished document dated 1715 for a lost fresco decoration of the medieval church of Magione in Palermo.

Intorno a “La Sicile illustrée”. Una rivista a Palermo agli albori del Novecento di Carmelo Bajamonte

The magazine “La Sicile Illustrée”, published from 1904 to 1911, is the manifesto of the belle époque season in Palermo. The article, in particular, investigates the writings dedicated to the figurative arts, to the protection of the artistic heritage and to the museums, from which a lively cultural debate emerges.

La Sicilia e la Grande Guerra. Il monumento ai Caduti di Francesco e Cosmo Sorgi a Caltanissetta (1813) di Giuseppe Giugno

The essay deals about the Monument to the Victims of the First World War wanted by a special committee of Caltanissetta which organized a competition for it. One of the members of the judging commission was Ernesto Basile, director of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Palermo. The committee selected the sculpture of a warrior in the arms of the Glory which represented the Homeland. This project, made by the sculptors Francesco and Cosmo Sorgi, was realized from 1920 to 1922 and placed in Viale Regina Margherita first, and at the end of the same street in 1964. The essay explains the reasons of the moving of the sculpture which had to be placed in the middle of an “Esedra” planned by Cosmo Sorgi, but this late project was not realized.

Protection and safeguard of the cultural heritage & landscape in the eastern Sicily of XX century: a case of civil commitment by the pages of the magazine “Le vie d’Italia” di Iolanda Di Natale

The relation between landscape and historic centre has been widely discussed in years following the Second World War. The problems of reconstruction and urban planning pushed the protagonists of Italian culture to wonder about the relation between new and old, keeping and expansion, reconstruction and modernizing. In these years, civil organisations and association play a very important role in national debate. The Italian Touring Club (TCI) was active in the moral and material reconstruction of the country. The tourism seems to be the most suitable sector to catalyse the hope of a return to an atmosphere of peace and development. Through its official magazine “Le vie d’Italia”, the Club fought important battles for the protection of cultural heritage. In Syracuse, Giuseppe Agnello was one of the most important protagonist of this debate. Often defined as a “Historic of Architecture”, in reference to a particular inclination that led him to investigate the native land monuments from the III century to the XVII century. He had a depth and mature understanding of the need of knowing and protecting the local historical, cultural and natural heritage. In two reportage write for “Le vie d’Italia”, Agnello denounced the building abuses, the dangers for the local monument and the massive destruction of the coastal landscape.

Inter-Art-in-GAM: un progetto di accessibilità museale. L’opera d’arte come strumento di riabilitazione dei disturbi dell’autismo
di Angela Giardina e Roberta Priori

The artwork's fruition has a central role in the museums educational programs, especially in activities for persons with physical, motor, sensory and cognitive disabilities. In recent years the Gallery of Modern Art “Empedocle Restivo” of Palermo has started a dense program for people with special needs. Inter-Art-in-GAM is a project dedicated to people with autism. Its purpose is to examine the artwork’s influence on the spatial – corporal dimension of youngsters with autistic spectrum disorders of medium functioning. The hypothesis of the study was that the observation of artworks, and their elaboration, could intervene on some dysfunctional areas in the autism. In other words, the visual arts, as tools in programs, could increase the relational skills of subjects with autism. To our knowledge this is the first interdisciplinary study carried out in Italy in this field of intervention.