Lionello Venturi, Roberto Longhi and the Renaissance ‘primitives’

Abstract

By the time those two renowned Italian art historians and critics LionelloVenturi and Roberto Longhi focused on Italy's early schools of painting (Il Gusto dei Primitivi, 1926 and Piero della Francesca, 1927), the so-called ‘primitives’ had long since come back into awareness, especially in the context of those newly transformed and newly formed public art collections of the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries. Thus, we are bound to ask, what was the significance the ‘primitives’ held for the two critics? What values did they find embodied in such works? What motivated their concern during the 1920s for these early phases in the development of Italian Renaissance painting? How did this orientation relate to the conditions of contemporary art and culture and to the broader realm of national politics?