Farewell to Eugenio Riccomini, great art historian

Art historian Eugenio Riccomini, one of the greatest experts on Emilian art, especially of the 17th and 18th centuries, and a scholar with a long and fruitful career, passed away in Bologna on Christmas night. He was eighty-seven years old.

Born in Nuoro, Sardinia, on May 5, 1936, he grew up with some relatives in Bologna: his father, a naval engineer, moved often for work (the Riccomini family already moved from Sardinia to Viterbo shortly after Eugenio’s birth), and his mother, Anna Volpi, passed away very young. After the end of World War II, Riccomini moved to Parma, where he finished elementary school. Instead, his university education took place in Bologna, where Riccomini graduated in 1958 with Carlo Volpe and then obtained a postgraduate degree in 1961 and later a specialization in paleography, archivistics and diplomatics at the State Archives in Parma.

After her marriage she participated in the competition to enter the superintendency, passing it: her first assignment was as inspector in Venice. In 1967 he moved to Bologna where he worked at the Pinacoteca Nazionale collaborating with Cesare Gnudi, and later he was inspector in and around Ferrara, and in the Emilian city he began to deepen his studies on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Emilia, even going so far as to curate two exhibitions at the Palazzo dei Diamanti. His successes also as a curator led him to be commissioned in 1973 by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to organize an exhibition of 18th-century Italian painting at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Tret’jakov Gallery in Moscow and the National Museum in Warsaw.

In 1977 he became superintendent of Parma and Piacenza: under his direction of the institution, in 1980, the dome of Parma Cathedral was restored and the headquarters of the National Gallery of Parma designed by Guido Canali was completed. When his post in the superintendency ended, in 1989 he switched to university teaching, first at the University of Messina and then, from 1993, at the State University of Milan. Finally, between 1995 and 2001, the post as director of the Musei Civici d’Arte Antica in Bologna. In his Bologna he also conducted political activities, since he was a city councilor from 1970 to 1995 and also a culture alderman and deputy mayor in the 1980s.

He curated numerous exhibitions and organized cultural activities in Bologna and Emilia. Eugenio Riccomini also carried out an intense popularizing activity that was also expressed through books intended for a wide audience, with the conviction that there should be no limits to understanding art. “With Eugenio Riccomini,” Emilia Romagna President Stefano Bonaccini and Culture Councillor Mauro Felicori remember him, “an important figure for culture in our region disappears. An art historian, a proud civil servant, a university lecturer in Messina and Milan, with a particular focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he worked mainly in Parma and Bologna. Here he was also deputy mayor and councilor for culture. His program of artistic popularization gave him great popularity-they close. To his family go the utmost sympathy and condolences of the Emilia-Romagna Region and the entire community.”

“Eugenio Riccomini,” writes Bologna’s MAMbo on its social profiles, “has left us. One could omit the name; for everyone he was: the Professor and that’s all. His knowledge was vast, but fueled by an ever-living curiosity. ’What happened after Impressionism interests me less,’ he would say, but in fact he left unforgettable pages on Morandi, De Vita, Minguzzi, Mandelli, and not least Wolfango and Bertozzi & Casoni. In short, art was his life or, to paraphrase the title of one of his books, art was his friend and thanks to his teaching, art became the friend of many.”

Farewell to Eugenio Riccomini, great art historian

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.