It’s in the bookstore for Happening today Books a fundamental volume to understand not only the greatness of Piero della Francescabut also the origin of modern Italian art criticism. The wise man who Adolfo Venturi dedicated in 1922 to the master of Sansepolcro is now reproduced in its entirety, edited by Enrica Fabbriin one edition (Adolfo Venturi, Piero della Francesca, pp. 112, Euro 14) which restores all the interpretative strength of one of the founding fathers of contemporary artistic historiography.
Venturi he was one of the first to conceive of art history as an autonomous discipline, based on method, direct observation, documentary rigor and aesthetic awareness. His definition of the discipline as “historical science of art” introduces a new form of approach to the study of works: no longer reproductions and abstractions, but visual contact with the original, to be observed and re-observed to grasp its style, structure and context.
In these pages, Piero della Francesca reveals itself in its deepest essence: painter of geometric and luminous shapes, of order and silencecapable of giving his characters a suspended stillness that speaks to the present with surprising intensity. Venturi reads his painting as a rational and visionary construction at the same time, made of light and space, of measurement and invention. It is in this essay that the modern image of Piero is consolidated, finally recognized as a central figure of the Renaissance, alongside Paolo Uccello and the other masters of visual harmony.
But the value of this volume does not end in reading an artist: it is also a high example of critical writingcapable of conveying the profound sense of vision and the role of knowledge in cultural formation. It is no coincidence that it was Venturi himself who fought for the introduction of the History of Art in high schools, convinced that educating the gaze was an essential part of the educational path.
Rediscovering this text today means returning to the roots of Italian critical thought, but also questioning – with tools that are still very valid – our way of seeing images, of interpreting heritage, of listening to what art continues to say about the time in which we live.
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Adolfo Venturi (1856–1941) was one of Italy’s greatest art historians and a founding figure for the discipline as we know it today. After being deputy director of the Kingdom Museums from 1891 to 1898, he took over the direction of the National Gallery of Ancient Art in Palazzo Corsini in Rome. In 1901, at a crucial moment for the institutionalization of historical-artistic studies in Italy, he left every public position to take up the first university chair of Art History, established specifically for him at the La Sapienza University of Rome.
Venturi was the teacher of entire generations of scholars and critics, including Cesare Brandi, Giulio Carlo Argan, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and his son Lionello, contributing decisively to the formation of an Italian school of art criticism, to which I myself belong. Author of the monumental History of Italian Art, published between 1901 and 1940, Venturi dedicated important essays to great artists of the Italian Renaissance, helping to reevaluate their centrality in an era in which new critical fashions tended to marginalize them. Among these, the figure of Piero della Francesca takes on particular importance, to whom Venturi dedicated a fundamental text, identifying his greatness in his perspective rigor, pictorial brightness and formal balance. In parallel with his academic and essayistic activity, he fought with conviction for the diffusion of visual culture, promoting the introduction of the History of Art into high school curricula. For Venturi, in fact, education in beauty was an essential factor of civil growth, capable of forming aware citizens through the experience of art.
Carlo Franza