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Paragone Arte 104

Anno LXII – Terza serie – Numero 104 (749) Luglio 2012

Marco Simone Bolzoni: Il cantiere della certosa di San Martino: riflessioni sulla grafica di Giuseppe Cesari, Belisario Corenzio e Avanzino Nucci
Anna Mazzanti: Golden Days. Artisti americani in Toscana all’inizio del Novecento

ANTOLOGIA DI ARTISTI

Per Giovan Battista Ricci disegnatore: progetti decorativi per palazzo Colonna a Roma (Patrizia Tosini)
Una precisazione su Giacinto Gimignani (Silvia Benassai)

APPUNTI

Leonardo in Milan in London (Paul Joannides)

SUMMARY

MARCO SIMONE BOLZONI
The move from Rome to Naples, for the redecoration of the Certosa di San Martino, of the leading figures from the lively milieu of Sixtus V — Giuseppe Cesari, Giovanni Baglione, Andrea Lilio, and, later on, Avanzino Nucci — marked a turning-point for painting in the Spanish Viceregal capital. Among the many Neapolitans who were present at the Certosa, and may have participated in its decoration, Belisario Corenzio and Bernardino Azzolino benefited in a special way from the presence of the rising star of Roman painting, the then twenty-year-old Giuseppe Cesari (later known as the Cavalier d´Arpino). This article seeks to examine the progress of work in the choir vaulting of San Martino, reconsidering its chronology, and using unpublished drawings by Cesari to show how his art influenced painting and drawing in late sixteenth-century Naples.

ANNA MAZZANTI
American cosmopolitan culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is reflected in visual media, offering an image of Italy and Tuscany as complex and faceted as its literary equivalent. Thus for every kind of expatriate intellectual, turning towards Italy meant sharing a “sentimental pilgrimage”. This essay makes a series of comparisons drawn from both the genre of illustrations for travel literature — which saw an extraordinary revival after its eighteenth-century beginnings — and the work of artists tied by strong bonds of friendship and common points of view with writers, as in the celebrated friendship between John Singer Sargent and Henry James. This provides the occasion for an unpublished study of Tuscan artistic and critical culture of the period, showing the involvement of Anglo-American foreigners and their most cosmopolitan counterparts such as Carlo Placci and Ugo Ojetti; new light is also cast on Anglo-Saxon publishers (Heinemann, The Century, et al.).

PATRIZIA TOSINI
This article identifies five new drawings in the Horne Foundation in Florence, here attributed to Giovan Battista Ricci, destined for a ceiling project in the apartment of Cardinale Ascanio Colonna in the family´s Roman palace at Santi Apostoli. On the basis of this attribution, another decorative project for the same ceiling (now in Stockholm) can be added to the graphic oeuvre of Ricci, thus augmenting his youthful catalogue. Further considerations regard the role of individual artists in these frescoes (Giovan Battista Ricci and Ludovico Lanzone), and Vincenzo Conti is identified among them.

SILVIA BENASSAI
This article presents a new painting by the Pistoiese painter Giacinto Gimignani, and connections are made between the canvas (for which a preparatory drawing has been identified in the British Museum, London) and the city of Pistoia. It seems probable that the work was the preparatory model for an altarpiece destined for an important church in the Tuscan city — perhaps the Basilica of the Madonna dell´Umiltà — but which in the end was never executed. Hypotheses are made about the work´s patronage, in the light of the strong ties between Gimignani and the Pistoiese Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi, who became Pope Clement IX in 1667.

PAUL JOANNIDES
La recensione della mostra londinese Leonardo da Vinci Painter at the Court of Milan inizia discutendo l´allestimento e la scelta delle opere esposte, per poi soffermarsi sulle due versioni della ´Vergine delle rocce´, in precedenza mai viste insieme. Avendo recenti indagini tecniche stabilito che il disegno della tavola di Parigi era inizialmente identico a quello della tavola di Londra, si argomenta, seguendo alcuni schizzi presenti sulla tavola londinese poi abbandonati, che Leonardo si applicò allo stesso tempo a entrambe le versioni. Fu portato avanti per primo il dipinto del Louvre, nel corso degli anni ottanta, e vennero operati dei cambiamenti alla composizione, probabilmente per ordine di un altro committente. In seguito venne ripresa la versione di Londra, forse in sostituzione della precedente, intorno al 1490.
Si nota che le novità riguardanti la composizione originale della versione parigina della ´Vergine delle rocce´ supportano l´autografia leonardesca del controverso ´Angelo´ di terracotta del Louvre. La recensione contiene commenti anche su altre opere in mostra.

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