Meetings and clashes between Francesco Malaguzzi Valeri and Adolfo Venturi (and sodalists): nsights from Corrado Ricci's Carteggio Corrispondenti

Abstract

The conquest, which characterised the 1910s and 1920s, of a new awareness of the historical-artistic heritage to be preserved and handed down, was also shaped by the contrasts and different methodological and interpretative contributions offered by the protagonists of the connoisseurship era. The three hundred and eighty-six letters that the art historian Francesco Malaguzzi Valeri (1867-1928) wrote and sent to the historian, archaeologist and politician Corrado Ricci (1858-1934) between 1894 and 1928 and today preserved in his Carteggio Corrispondenti in the Classense Library in Ravenna, they provide a previously unpublished cross-section of thoughts and reflections on this period of great disciplinary ferment, in which the art historian Adolfo Venturi (1856-1941) was a sure co-protagonist. Encounters and clashes that reveal, today as then, how much art history must be open to new reflections, renewed readings and counter-readings and the continuous verification and criticism of working hypotheses.