Coming soon two books on Roberto Longhi and Giuliano Briganti. Their entire correspondence published

Coming to bookstores from Feb. 1, 2022, are two books that recount the long dialogue between two protagonists of 20th-century art history, Roberto Longhi (Alba, 1890 - Florence, 1970) and Giuliano Briganti (Rome, 1918 - 1992). Both are published by Archinto. The first, Roberto Longhi, edited by Giovanni Agosti, collects the writings Briganti devoted to the great scholar over nearly forty years: a kind of examination of conscience, in public, on the nature of relations between master and pupil. The second, Encounters. Correspondence 1939-1969, edited by Laura Laureati, contains the entire Longhi-Briganti correspondence and investigates the more private side of the relationship between the two scholars, which begins further back in time than the oldest of the texts that appear in the volume edited by Agosti: Giuliano in fact knew Longhi since childhood.

The texts collected in the first title cover the arc that runs from the celebration of Longhi, in 1955, in the pages of the Literary Fair, in which Briganti celebrated the master in the company of Cecchi, Toesca, Contini, Bassani, Bertolucci, Volpe, Pallucchini, and Soldati, to the many interventions published in the pages of la Repubblica, a newspaper to which Briganti devoted decades of his activity, trying to develop an accessible and clear style of information, not vainly polemical, but always traversed by a strong civil tension. In this sampler of writing, there is no lack of narrative evidence, in which the recourse to dreams is another way of dealing with the shadow of the Master. In the background runs the panorama of art history in Italy in the second half of the 20th century, between publishing, universities and the inexorable, progressive loss of cultural authority.

The volume Encounters, on the other hand, publishes the correspondence that began when Roberto Longhi was a forty-nine-year-old university professor already well known, and Giuliano Briganti (Aldo’s son, colleague and friend) a twenty-one-year-old student who would graduate a year later. The first document is a telegram from August 1939. The last, dated April 2, 1969, is an affectionate letter from Longhi, now in his eighties and close to death (June 3, 1970), sent to the son of his boyhood companion. Briganti is almost fifty and already a teacher, but he has not forgotten that “students and not only books [...] are made to bring men together beyond death and defend us against the most implacable enemy of all life: forgetfulness.”

Giuliano Briganti, who graduated from Rome with Pietro Toesca with a thesis on Pellegrino Tibaldi, was a student of Roberto Longhi and his assistant in Florence in the early 1940s. He taught History of Modern, first, and then Contemporary Art at the University of Siena and, since 1983 History of Modern Art at the University of Rome. He has written several seminal books: La Maniera italiana (1961), Pietro da Cortona o della pittura barocca (1962), Gaspar van Wittel e l’origine della veduta settecentesca (1966) and I pittori dell’immaginario (1977). From 1965 to 1968 he was a contributor to L’Espresso and, from 1976 until his death, to la Repubblica. Archinto in 2007 published Affinità, edited by Laura Laureati, a chronicle of encounters that marked the life of the man and the scholar.

Roberto Longhi, a student of Pietro Toesca and Adolfo Venturi, was an art historian and critic. From the very beginning he proved to be a leading personality in Italian culture, including through his collaboration with magazines such as La Voce and Vita artistica and the creation of new journals such as Proporzioni and Paragone. Most important were the essays devoted to Caravaggio (Last Studies on Caravaggio and His Circle, 1943 and the 1951 Catalogue of the Caravaggio and Caravaggeschi Exhibition) and Piero della Francesca (1927 and new editions until 1962). A professor of art history at the universities of Bologna and Florence, he contributed, often with fundamental critical contributions, to the organization of major exhibitions.

Pictured are the covers of the two books.

Coming soon two books on Roberto Longhi and Giuliano Briganti. Their entire correspondence published

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