La figura di Daniele Farsetti collezionista negli epistolari

The last setting of the Farsetti picture gallery, the least studied part of the collection owned by this Venetian family, was already attributed to Daniele. Now, two unpublished letters written by Daniele to the Bergamasque Sebastiano Muletti not only confirm his role, but also portray a figure of connoisseur of manuscripts, printed books, artistic literature and, of course, painting. It seems that two main motivations led Daniele in his purchases of paintings: their presence in artistic literature and their state of preservation. These criteria were broadly recognised in late eighteenth-century Venice.

Fake or Fortune? Alexander Dorner and the Weimar Reproductions Debate

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.

Recreated Subjects, Reconstructed Copies: Considerations on the Photographic Process

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.

Opere moltiplicate, opera aperta Serialità e anonimato nelle ricerche cinevisuali degli anni Sessanta

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.

Originali e copie nella Lettera di Filippo Baldinucci a Vincenzo Capponi

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.

Tra originali e copie: note sui ritratti di Ottomani della collezione Giovio

This article aims to further discuss the relationship between originals and copies within the collection of the historian Paolo Giovio from Como. Particular attention is paid to a nucleus of portraits of Ottoman Sultans, the existance of which is also attested in Giovio’s Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium (Florence, 1551). Among the series of copies made, the first one, painted by Cristofano dell’Altissimo for Cosimo de’ Medici and now preserved in the Uffizi Galleries of Florence, is taken into consideration. The final remarks concern the echo and influences that Giovio’s collected portraits might have had in the Ottoman territories.

The Original – ‘Again’ Historical and Contemporary Strategies for Writing and Re/Constructing Dance

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.

Dalla copia al falso al ‘secondo originale’ Percorsi di slittamento di senso e di significato tra materiale e virtuale

The article investigates the relationship between ‘copy’ and ‘fake’ and the ambiguous status of these definitions in the artistic practices of recent decades. Episodes narrated in art history primary sources are compared with twentieth and twenty-first-century episodes. Thus, one comes to the notion of fake in contemporaneity, which no longer has a negative meaning. On the contrary, it has become an acknowledged artistic practice, a means that reveals the mise-en-scène that each image represents by declaring itself as ‘true’. Also, the notion of a ‘second original’, obtained thanks to contemporary technologies, calls into question the Benjaminian notion of the artwork’s ‘aura’.

Tiziano e la duplice metamorfosi di Callisto Il punctum attorno a cui ruota l’originale

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.