Università Roma Tre

Artistic epistolography: the artist's correspondence and its historiographical tradition

The theme of the course is the analysis of a specific genre of literary source: the artistic epistolography, whose typology was codified in 1754 by Giovanni Gaetano Bottari emphasizing the potentiality of a useful tool to reconstruct the links between the works, the authors, the patrons and functional to the study of the circulation of the works and of the practice of connoisseurship.
During the course the use of artist's letters by the historiography of art, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, will be discussed, also in a seminar format, as a tool for constructing the artist's biography, but also as a source of the words of the practice. The letters allow to establish a stingent analysis on current artistic practices: a potential tool for the study and analysis of the circulation and translation of technical vocabulary and art practice in an international context such as that of the second half of the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the nineteenth century.

P. Barocchi, Fortuna dell'epistolografia artistica, in Studi vasariani, Torino, Einaudi, 1987, pp. 83-111

G. Perini, Le lettere degli artisti da strumento di comunicazione, a documento, a cimelio, in Documentary culture. Florence and Rome from Grand-Duke Ferdinando I to Pope Alexander VII, papera from a colloquium held at the Villa Spelman, Florence. 1990, a cura di E. Cropper, G. Perini, F. Solinas, Bologna 1992, pp. 165-184

S. Rolfi Ozvald, Sul carteggio d'artista, in Il carteggio d'artista. Fonti, questioni, ricerche tra XVII e XIX secolo, a cura di C. Mazzarelli e S. Rolfi Ozvald, Cinisello Balsamo, Silvana editoriale, 2019, pp. 10-25

C. Mazzarelli, Dalla lettere all'autobiografia d'artista: raccontarsi a Roma tra idea e realtà dell'esperire, in Il carteggio d'artista. Fonti, questioni, ricerche tra XVII e XIX secolo, a cura di C. Mazzarelli e S. Rolfi Ozvald, Cinisello Balsamo, Silvana editoriale, 2019, pp. 52-69

NON-ATTENDING STUDENTS EXAM PROGRAM
MANDATORY readings in addition:

Rolfi Ožvald, Oy-Marra, Susanna Pasquali, Carla Mazzarelli, in “Il carteggio d'artista. Fonti, questioni, ricerche tra XVII e XIX secolo”, a cura di C. Mazzarelli e S. Rolfi Ožvald, Cinisello Balsamo, Silvana editoriale, 2019, pp. 6-69

Lettere d’artista. Corrispondenze tra Roma e l’Europa dall’età dei Lumi alla Restaurazione, a cura di Giovanna Capitelli e Serenella Rolfi Ožvald, «Ricerche di storia dell’arte» 125, 2018