Farewell to art historian Luisa Vertova, Botticelli scholar

Luisa Vertova, art historian, assistant to Bernard Berenson, scholar of Botticelli, Carpaccio, and Veronese, author of important essays, and historical advisor to Christie’s, passed away yesterday in Florence. Vertova had also amassed an important photo library with more than 700 phototypes, donated in 2018 to the Federico Zeri Foundation along with a collection of monographs, nearly 130 auction catalogs, and the scholar’s entire professional correspondence.

Born in Florence in 1921 (she had turned 100 a few months ago), daughter of philosopher Giacomo Vertova and descendant of a noble Bergamo family, she had spent her childhood and early youth in the Tuscan capital, studying art history and archaeology at the University. In 1943 he became assistant to the American art historian Bernard Berenson, whose publications he edited up to Lists of Venetian Painting (1957). At the end of 1959 she moved to England after marrying Ben Nicolson, son of Vita Sackville-West, a scholar of the European Caravaggesques and for many years editor of Burlington Magazine, England’s leading scholarly journal of art history.

Back in Italy, she was a consultant to Christie’s for years, editing its catalogs. In 1985 she was called upon by the German Institute of Art History in Florence to catalogue the thousands of photographs of Venetian painting left by Fritz Heinemann. Luisa Vertova’s publications include, in particular, monographs on Sandro Botticelli (1952), an artist to whom she later devoted other studies, Vittore Carpaccio (1952), Lorenzo Lotto (1955), Paolo Veronese (1959), the Florentine cenacles (1965), Carlo Ceresa (1984), and dozens of essays published in the journals Antichità viva, Apollo, The Burlington Magazine and Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz.

Vertova had also long been engaged in personal research in the connoisseurship groove and directed major publishing projects, such as the publication of Berenson’s work on The Drawings of Florentine Painters (1961) and Ben Nicolson’s Caravaggism in Europe.

“A very great art historian has left us,” says Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi, who expresses his and the museum’s condolences on Vertova’s passing, “who with her studies of Florentine, Venetian and Lombard painting, Renaissance and Baroque, marked the twentieth century. From the time of her research for her 1952 monograph on Sandro Botticelli to her last publications on Bernardo and Giulio Licinio, Luisa Vertova frequented the Uffizi assiduously for almost a century, contributing decisively to the knowledge of our collections.”

Farewell to art historian Luisa Vertova, Botticelli scholar

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