Between Taste and Historiography: Writing About Early Renaissance Works of Art In Venice and Florence (1550-1800)

My dissertation is an investigation of how early Renaissance paintings from Venice and Florence were discussed and appraised by authors and collectors writing in these cities between 1550 and 1800. The variety of source material I have consulted has enabled me to assess and to compare the different paths pursued by Venetian and Florentine writers, the type of question they addressed in their analyses of early works of art and, most importantly, their approaches to the re-evaluation of the art of the past. Among the types of writing on art I explore are guidebooks, biographies of artists, didactic poems, artistic dialogues, dictionaries and letters, paying particular attention in these different genres to passages about artists from Guariento to Giorgione in Venice and from Cimabue to Raphael in Florence. By focusing, within this framework, on primary sources and documents, as well as on the influence of art historical literature on the activity of collecting illustrated by the cases of the Venetian Giovanni Maria Sasso and the Florentine Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri, I show that two principal approaches to writing about the past emerged during this period: the first, adopted by many Venetian authors, involved the aesthetic evaluation of early Renaissance works of art, often in comparison to later developments; the second, more frequent among Florentine writers, tended to document these works and place them in their historical context, without necessarily making artistic judgements about them. A parallel analysis of these two approaches offers a twofold perspective on how writers and collectors engaged with early Renaissance art from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.