Il Cinquecento dimenticato: dalle carte di Roberto Longhi

Il «Cinquecento dimenticato. Dalle carte di Roberto Longhi» aspires to gather what the main voice in 20th century Italian art history left behind on a century seemingly erased from his work. From the first glance at the documents, this potential «historical novel» appears rather as an «anti-novel», due to its lack of structure, made up of thoughts scribbled on scraps of blue paper.

The volume focuses on previously unknown documentary evidence parallelly studied with what could be gleaned from Longhi’s published oeuvre regarding the Cinquecento. Many questions guided this research. The first one concerned the 16th century as it appeared in Roberto Longhi’s secret writings at Villa Il Tasso in Florence. It seemed crucial to understand how he reorganised Tuscan artistic milieu – from Andrea del Sarto to the late-century «pittori dello Studiolo». Moreover, new lights arose on how Longhi conceived such abstract critical labels as «maniera», «mannerism» and «baroque», poised on the ridge between the 16th and 17th centuries and fiercely debated between Italy and Germany for at least half a century.

The answer lies in detached sheets, rewritten and corrected; in pages of travel notebooks and newspapers, in sketches of works seen, examined, cherished. Those materials are perhaps separated from one another by decades of reflection, picked up again in response to an exhibition, a book review, or a rediscovered painting. The privilege coincides with the method adopted in the research: to look at what he looked at, and to read what he read while he wrote and sketched on these papers. Emerging from invisible ink, the design of a forgotten century comes alive.