The Saint Francis of Assisi with three angels crowning him in a day landscape and two donors in prayer has been known at least since the end of the seventeenth century in the church of San Francesco in Gallipoli, in the province of Lecce (currently the Saint Francis is relocated in the Diocesan Museum - section of Gallipoli “Mons. Vittorio Fusco”). In 1951 Giovanni Urbani brought it to the national attention of art history studies as the work of one of Titian’s greatest contemporaries, Giovanni Antonio de’ Sacchis known as Pordenone, based on an intuition of Sabino Jusco. Yet the provenance of the higher quality sixteenth-century work in a church in the Salento area remains mysterious. The direct inspection of the Saint Francis, including recent exhibitions and restoration interventions, made it possible to re-examine in depth or for the first time the issues concerning the genesis, chronology, paths and commissioning of the painting.

This contribution aims to analyse a cycle of frescoes at villa Spinola di San Pietro in Genoa. The paintings are attributed to some of the greatest artists who worked in the city in the 1620s and show a continuity of compositional, stylistic and thematic features that were typical of the sixteenth century. This article will also show the importance of Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara’s vernacular translation of the Metamorphoses by Ovid to the iconographic programme of the cycle.

attraverso un processo di revisione doppia anonima, sotto la responsabilit del Comitato scientifico della rivista.

This article considers the dichotomy of originals and copies in the specific context of photographs of objects that recreate an existing work of art or a documentary photograph. The examples span the period from the mid-nineteenth century to contemporary photographic practices. The traditional legal regulation of such copies is unsatisfactory compared with more recent theoretical approaches, as those proposed here. These approaches encompass the two modes of photographic copies after recreated realities: they simultaneously preserve identities and create original alterations.

A careful examination of Diana and Callisto, painted by Titian (London, National Gallery and Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland), its copy by Rubens (Knowsley Hall, Earl of Derby) and the version by Titian’s workshop in Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum) reveals details hitherto unrecognised by scholars. Although marginal, these take on extraordinary iconographic and communicative value, and it is precisely through these details that Titian evokes the mutations of the nymph Callisto narrated by Ovid in the Metamorphoses (2.401-530). The way in which the details are depicted and coordinated within the composition allows the beholder to experience the ‘graduality of discovery’. This is useful not only for lending the fixed image a temporality similar to that of literary narration (consisting of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’) but above all to induce, within the process of visual-perceptual discovery and its subsequent iconographic comprehension, the sequence of ‘desire-surprise-reward’ theorised by Daniel Arasse with regard to the revelatory power of detail, here applied to the polarity punctum/studium.

This article examines the copy of Paris Bordon’s Consegna dell’anello al doge painted by Antonio Guardi for the nobleman Pietro Gradenigo (1695-1776). The painting will be compared with other copies made by Guardi for Giovanni Paolo and Giovanni Benedetto Giovanelli, for Marshall Schulenburg and the Savorgnan family, in order to emphasise Guardi’s ability to translate masterpieces of other artists into his own language. It will also be highlighted how perfectly the Consegna dell’anello al doge fits into the collection of Gradenigo, who gathered in his palace paintings, sculptures and antiquities that documented the history of Venice and his family. This article looks into the possible contacts of Pietro Gradenigo with Antonio Guardi, starting from a newfound study of documents and the relationships of the nobleman with other scholars and Guardi’s patrons.

Writing and dance have been positioned by scholars in a contraposed play throughout the chronological period from the Renaissance to today: dancing begins when writing stops. Scholars have accused dance of ephemerality and have attempted to salvage it through notation. In postmodern and contemporary dance, some choreographers challenge traditional assumptions about the primacy and stability of text and documentation. They ‘write’ with dance in both conceptual and alphabetic ways, some exploring the dimension of race. This study tests theories by Mark Franko and André Lepecki through analysis of dance reenactment strategies and interventions by choreographers Trisha Brown and Christopher-Rasheem McMillan.

This contribution aims to analyse Filippo Baldinucci’s Letter to Vincenzo Capponi (Rome, 1681) in all its aspects, particularly its concept of original and copy, taking into account Baldinucci’s position in the Accademia del Disegno and in the Roman cultural milieu. Through some examples, the essay also intends to assess the Letter vis-à-vis the correspondence between the Medici agents in Venice and the court, in order to emphasise the relation between the artistic literature on copies and the practical experience of the individuals who had to secure paintings for demanding collectors such as prince Leopoldo de’ Medici.

In the early 1960s, groups of artists begin to develop collective research in kinetic art and visual perception. By combining art, industrial design and technology, these ‘aesthetic operators’ lay the foundations for a multiplied art, made for everybody. The aim of their work is to open art to a genuine democratization process since the viewer would interact with these manipulable objects. However, this point of view questions the art myth of the ‘unique and unrepeatable’ artwork, which is replaced by the ‘open work’, produced in series by an interdisciplinary team. Moreover, the theory of anonymity and the multiples increase the critical debate concerning the concept of authenticity. The paper proposes a reflection on the diffusion of multiplied art during the 1960s. Through the analysis of the archival documents – some previously unpublished – the study identifies the crucial passages in which the experimentations of programmed Italian artists have embraced the democratic ideology of seriality.

Between 1929 and 1930 the Der Kreis journal hosted a debate among art historians and museum directors on how art copies were changing the museum landscape. The so-called Hamburger Faksimile-Streit constitutes a crucial moment in the Weimarian theoretical debate on the categories of copy and original, culminating a few years later in Benjamin’s well-known essay on the work of art. After examining the theses of the main participants in the debate, this article focus on the position of curator and museum director Alexander Dorner – the only one advocating for the non-superiority of originals over copies in art museums – and on his relationship with Walter Benjamin’s later theories.