Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana

Titelei

2025-03-11T14:43:02+01:00

Inhalt

2025-03-12T09:07:09+01:00

Petrus und der Philosoph. Ein attisches Grabrelief der Hochklassik in Bari und seine mittelalterliche Umarbeitung

2025-03-12T09:18:01+01:00

This paper discusses an Attic funerary relief carved around 425 BC that was recently discovered on the premises of the nineteenth-century villa Romanazzi Carducci in Bari. The relief has been substantially reworked in a remarkable fashion. Its left side, which depicts a seated bare-chested elderly man, has been preserved in almost exactly the state in which it was carved in ancient Greece – that is, a bas-relief of exceptional quality. The right side, however, is completely altered: a standing figure has been reworked into the apostle Peter. The authors attempt to retrace the relief’s object biography and suggest possible motives and messages that could be related to the re-carving of the spolia. They suggest that the reworking took place in Italy in the 13th or 14th century, and argue that the process of reworking itself should be considered as a form of artistic discourse with the ancient past. By juxtaposing old and new, and by partially destroying the ancient substance and adding the figure of the apostle, the worth of the antique carving is at once highlighted and put into question. The authors argue that the primary and motivating theme of the re-carving was the idea of discourse, and as such propose an interpretation of the scene as a dispute or didactic conversation between Peter and an ancient philosopher. A comparison with the pagan philosophers on the tree of Jesse relief of Orvieto Cathedral suggests that, in the course of re-carving, the seated male figure depicted in the relief of the villa Romanazzi Carducci was reinterpreted as a pagan prognosticator of Christianity.

Una lauda dipinta. Gli affreschi di Buffalmacco nel Camposanto di Pisa e la devozione dei disciplinati

2025-03-12T09:25:57+01:00

This contribution offers a new hypothesis for the genesis and function of Buonamico Buffalmacco’s famous fresco cycle in the southern gallery of the Camposanto di Pisa. It begins by reconsidering the commission of the sepulchral monument to hermit and frater penitentie Giovanni Cini (1270 –1335), which can be attributed ab initio to a flagellant confraternity. It then argues that Buffalmacco’s frescoes – which are spatially and semantically close to Cini’s tomb – should be read in correspondence with the devotional practices and funerary paraliturgy of the Pisan Companies of the Disciplined, who frequented the monumental cemetery from as early as 1343. It seems likely that the cycle would have served as an iconographic reference for the texts that were performed in the ceremonial context of a burial: the so-called laudes pro defunctis. The central themes in these texts – the destructive and equalizing power of death, the threat of eternal condemnation for sinners and the consequent call to penance – overlap significantly with the key subjects dealt with in the first two panels of Buffalmacco’s ‘triptych’ mural. Even the Thebaid can likewise be inserted coherently into a devotional path of a disciplinati sort: spurred on by the pastoral work of the mendicant orders, the lay brothers held the desert fathers as exemplars, and gave them and their experiences of corporal mortification and escape from worldly life cultic centrality.

Spolia e spazi urbani nel Rinascimento meridionale. Alcune riflessioni sulla committenza di Orso Orsini, conte di Nola

2025-03-12T09:39:18+01:00

The recent shift away from a monarchic-centric perspective in scholarship has led to a more balanced consideration of the role played by barons in the Aragonese Kingdom. Drawing on the Nolan humanist Ambrogio Leone’s Nola patria, printed in Venice in 1514, this paper explores the patronage of Orso Orsini (d. 1479). Orsini was the count of Nola and duke of Ascoli, as well as a capable and esteemed condottiere and prominent politician in fifteenth-century Italy. The paper focuses in particular on the public square of Nola and its setting up all’antica with Roman spolia. It offers some reflections on the process of construction involved in realizing Orsini’s ideas and also shows the inclusion of the Count of Nola in the cultural networks through which humanistic ideals were spread.

Representational Strategies in the Baldini Tomb at Sant’Agostino and in other Physicians’ Funerary Monuments in Baroque Rome

2025-03-12T09:44:51+01:00

When Giovan Giacomo Baldini died in 1656, he had no inkling that a funerary monument would be erected in his honor. A papal physician whose family had its origins in Apiro in the Marches Region, Baldini lived most of his life in Rome and, upon his death, was buried in the Basilica of Sant’Agostino. In his will, he furnished detailed instructions for his internment under a simple floor slab, an indication of his spiritual concern for the salvation of his soul rather than of a desire for the perpetuation of his memory. Soon after Baldini’s death, however, and contrary to his wishes, the project of a grandiose funerary monument was undertaken by his universal heirs, the Twelve Canons of the Collegiate church of Sant’Urbano in Apiro that had been founded in 1633 by the physician himself under the aegis of the then ruling pope, Urban VIII Barberini. The discovery of abundant and hitherto unpublished documentation regarding Baldini’s funerary monument sheds new light on this neglected personage. Even more importantly, it allows for the reconstruction of the complex stages of the monument’s creation, a lengthy process (1656–ca. 1678) involving artists and architects such as Francesco Borromini, Giovanni Somazzi and Pietro Papaleo, prolonged through interruptions, design revisions, the death of one of the artists, dissatisfaction on the part of the patrons, and even a legal dispute.To broaden the perspective of the present study and determine whether Baldini’s restrictive prescriptions regarding his burial were common among his contemporary colleagues, the paper takes into consideration several last wills of other physicians active in Rome, and examines whether and how they wished to be remembered, were it through a humble floor slab or a monumental tomb.

Domenichino Colorist? Malvasia, Modern Critical Reception, and a Letter to Angeloni

2025-03-12T09:54:52+01:00

Although Annibale Carracci has been championed for his synthesis of northern-Italian colore and central-Italian disegno, the innovations in colore of his prominent student, Domenichino, have been largely overlooked by modern critics. Yet his early biographers, Carlo Cesare Malvasia and Giovan Pietro Bellori, praised his innovations as a colorist. This essay examines three factors that have contributed to the negative assessment of Domenichino’s coloring. Beginning with an analysis of how Malvasia undercut his own positive assessment of Domenichino’s modernity and originality, I turn to Roger de Piles’s conception of what constitutes excellence in coloring and its persistence in modern views. To counter the prevailing notion that Domenichino’s letter to Francesco Angeloni was a manifesto of his anti-colorist stance, I provide a close reading of that letter and its debt to Aristotelian philosophy. The essay concludes with a brief look at Domenichino’s innovations as a colorist and proposes that his originality consisted of replacing the Carraccesque model of light and dark alternations with a unique way of grouping hues and organizing color in space.

Bedingend und bedingt. Heinrich Wölfflins geometrischer (Post-)Formalismus und das Sehen in der Moderne

2025-03-12T10:13:56+01:00

This article assesses and contextualizes Heinrich Wölfflin’s geometric formalism, a methodological facet of his scholarly work that has received little attention. Drawing on Wölfflin’s most important publications as well as on hitherto unknown university and public lectures, the article sheds light on Wölfflin’s lifelong interest in using research on form and measurement to investigate the aesthetics of paintings, sculptures, and buildings. In addition, Wölfflin’s efforts to pass on his form-analytical approach to his students will be discussed. The broader significance of geometric-formalist observation methods in art history and related fields of knowledge are addressed in order to contextualize Wölfflin’s approach and illustrate the solid anchoring and widespread dissemination of this method in the sciences and arts around 1900. The article’s core theses are that, on the one hand, form and measurement research represents a post-formalist phenomenon and, on the other, that the method’s enduring popularity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must be evaluated within the framework of a historical perceptology, in order to understand it as an integral part of the history of perception and aesthetic ideology of modernity.

Rinascimento industriale italiano. Marco Zanuso per la Olivetti brasileira

2025-03-12T10:20:36+01:00

The first phase of construction of the industrial complex built by Olivetti Industrial Sur America near São Paolo (1956–1959) coincides with one of the crucial historical moments in Italian architecture and industry in the last century.Designed by Milanese architect and designer Marco Zanuso (1916–2001), the complex had been commissioned by Adriano Olivetti with the aim of taking production of their typewriters overseas and making themselves more competitive in the US market. Zanuso’s design for their new complex was divided into several parts, with each formally and functionally characterized, and the plant equipment integrated into the structuralsystem. The site was inaugurated in November 1959, a few months before the sudden death of its patron in February 1960. Its opening was to be the final act of the crusade that the most enlightened Italian entrepreneur of the post-World War II period had led in the name of culturally and technologically advancing industry. This essay reconstructs the dynamics that led to Zanuso being appointed as architect of the Olivetti complex and outlines the chronology of its intermittent construction. It identifies the likely architectural reference models, situating Zanuso’s design both in the debate on industrial aesthetics that was dominant in Europe during the period and in the context of the exuberant Brazilian architectural scene of those years. The essay also explores the concept of the organic in architecture and argues that Zanuso’s highly innovative and inventive project reflects a specifically corporate approach to organicism, characterized by the hexagonal geometry of modular structures. The broader picture that emerges is one of a moment of intense brilliance in Italian industry and architecture which, despite its importance, is yet to be fully explored.

Open Participation in Piero Manzoni’s Living Sculpture and Magic Base: between Bodily Reification and the Spectacle

2025-03-12T10:25:33+01:00

In 1962, semiotician and writer Umberto Eco (Alessandria 1932 – Milan 2016) published his pivotal The Open Work, proposing a new awareness of the art object and developing groundbreaking perspectives on participatory art from both an aesthetic and a historical point of view. Concurrently, artist Piero Manzoni (Soncino 1933 –Milan 1963) designated his spectators works of art by applying his signature to their bodies or making them stand on ‘magic’ pedestals. In so doing, he forged a new dimension, both problematic and interactive, between author and audience. This article adopts Eco’s aesthetics to discuss Manzoni’s Living Sculptures and Magic Bases series, both from 1961. Reading Manzoni through the lens of Eco’s semiological model reveals the paradoxical nature of both series, works that disrupt the canonical opposition between audience activation and passive spectatorial consumption. The adoption of Eco’s theory, therefore, reveals the sarcastic raison d’être of Manzoni’s dystopian yet constructive practice. Manzoni will be also paralleled here with two contemporaneous Latin American artists, Alberto Greco and Oscar Bony, whose works manifest striking similarities but also fundamental differences. Manzoni’s approach will then also be investigated in light of the theories of Guy Debord and Julio Le Parc.

The Gendering of Men: Masculinity and Countercultures in the Work of Sottsass, Baruchello and Echaurren

2025-03-12T10:30:59+01:00

Since the mid-1990s, scholars active in North America and the United Kingdom have pioneered the integration of masculinity studies into the art history of the twentieth century. In Italy, however, the exploration of the male gender from a historical perspective has taken longer to gain purchase in academia. As a result, art historians have thus far hesitated to engage with the insights offered by the research conducted within this area of study. This article seeks to remedy this lacuna, aiming to open new vistas onto topics that currently occupy a blind spot in the history of Italian art. In particular, the analysis concentrates on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s as a social space that, for all its foibles and unresolved contradictions, allowed for a collective critique of what sociologist Raewyn Connell has defined as “hegemonic masculinities”. Conceptual tools derived from gender and masculinity studies are here deployed in order to shed light on the work of two artists deeply influenced by 1970’s countercultural milieus, Gianfranco Baruchello and Pablo Echaurren, as well as the architect/ designer Ettore Sottsass, who shared with them a pronounced interest in, and a sustained dialogue with, countercultural groups, especially in the 1960s. Through a focus on the motif of domesticity (in its material and imaginary dimensions) and a careful examination of the visual, medial and intellectual environments within which these three men operated – from 1977 fanzines to Rosso and from the Beat generation to the gay movement – this research will highlight semantic strategies, intellectual shifts, differences and similarities in the work of three artists whose production partly responded to the powerful and unsettling emergence of the second wave of feminism.

Native Americans in Visual Countercultures: Shaping Italianicity through Cultural Appropriation

2025-03-12T10:38:51+01:00

An examination of underground print culture within a decolonial framework highlights the important political role of the figure of the Native American in the Italian countercultural movement. Influenced by a West Coast hippie culture, the Italian underground appropriated Native Americanness in various ways, such as using nineteenth-century photographs of Native Americans in the zine culture or fetishizing indigenous lifestyles by performing “ethnic drag” within the Indiani Metropolitani movement in 1977. Underground artist Matteo Guarnaccia developed a psychedelic interpretation of Native Americanness in his zines whereas Pablo Echaurren used detournement to subvert the macho messages of Far West Italian comics like Tex. This article problematizes the widespread appropriation of Native American visual culture while also examining its complex anti-American role in forming a post-war Italian identity.

An Attempt to Create an Existential Community in 1970s Italy: Territorial Intervention, Cultural Decentralisation and Social Participation in Operazione Arcevia

2025-03-12T10:43:42+01:00

The attempt to repopulate the village of Palazzo d’Arcevia in the Marche region of Italy was initiated in the early 1970s by an Italian entrepreneur, assisted by architect and artist Ico Parisi. Parisi promptly turned the project into a utopian proposal for an existential community, involving thirty-three cultural operators and intellectuals including the art historians and critics Enrico Crispolti and Pierre Restany. Through archival and bibliographical research, this article contextualises Operazione Arcevia in the participatory moment that marked civic and cultural life in 1970s Italy, against the backdrop of movements of social and political contestation and cultural decentralisation. A rich corpus of critical writings, sketches of artistic interventions into public space and visual and written archival materials document the collective process and will here reconstruct the trajectory of this unrealised attempt. While outlining the singularity of Operazione Arcevia – in particular, the financing from the private entrepreneur, the unique convergence of artists with distinct trajectories and proposals and the participant’s elaborate communication and dissemination strategy – this study will also highlight the shared objectives and concerns of the proposal with other practices rooted in social and territorial action. Beyond Parisi, figures like Crispolti and Francesco Somaini with previous experience in similar projects operated as connecting agents between this project and others at the same time in Italy. The operation raised issues concerning architectural and artistic intervention and the risk of “cultural colonisation”, the relationship between avantgarde art and local artisanal and agricultural traditions and the relationship with local and national political representatives. This article examines the artistic proposals for Palazzo d’Arcevia and Parisi’s photographs of the process, which reflect the desire for self-representation and the valorisation of the work, but also reveal the gender imbalance and the lack of contact with the indigenous population. While underlining the contradictions and difficulties that eventually led to the project’s abandonment, this study highlights the exceptional confluence of cultural operators and their desire for social transformation at a complex time in Italian history.