Farewell to Lionello Puppi, great art historian, scholar of Venetian art and architecture

Lionello Puppi, one of the greatest scholars of Veneto art and architecture in recent years, has passed away at the age of 86. Born in Belluno in 1931, he had a very long career that began in 1971 with the chair of Art Historical Disciplines at the University of Padua, which the scholar held until 1973, and then taught, at the same university, History of Architecture and Urbanism until 1990. From 1991 he moved to Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, where he taught History of Modern Art and iconology and iconography. Puppi also held the positions of director of the Institute of Art History and the School of Advanced Studies in Art History in Padua, and also served as director of the Department of History and Criticism of the Arts and president of the degree program in Conservation of Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University.

The list of his publications is endless. Puppi’s scholarly studies on Andrea Palladio are especially remembered, which resulted in several thick treatises, such as the 1973 landmark monograph, translated into several languages, or again Andrea Palladio (Mondadori, 2006), written together with Donata Battilotti, or Palladianism. Teoria e prassi-Palladio (Arsenale, 2006), edited together with Werner Oechslin, but also in more agile works such as Il giovane Palladio published by Skira in 2008. Puppi was also the author of volumes in the historical series I maestri del colore (his are the monographic books on Bartolomeo Montagna, Dosso Dossi, Ercole de’ Roberti: of the latter, in 1995, he also published a Historical Catalogue), Dossier d’Art by Giunti (for which he edited the book on El Greco) and Le opere complete by Rizzoli (together with Giuseppe Berto he edited the one on Canaletto). Recent publications include Titian’s epistolary, which Puppi edited in 2012.

Among the exhibitions curated by Lionello Puppi, the last one to be remembered is the major review on El Greco held in Treviso in 2015, but his long curriculum includes several other exhibitions, such as the important monograph on Giorgione in 2010, which Puppi curated together with Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo and Antonio Paolucci, the exhibition of the graphic work of Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo held in 2012 in Rome and curated together with Nicoletta Ossanna Cavadini, not to mention exhibitions on Palladio, such as Andrea Palladio: The Text, the Image, the City in 1980.

Of Puppi we also remember a brief political interlude: between 1985 and 1987 he was in fact a senator in the 9th Legislature, elected in the ranks of the PCI (during his time in Parliament he was a member of the public education commission). Of recent times we recall his many articles against the phenomenon of commercial exhibitions (especially those that continue to be held in the Veneto region) and the recent publication, on the occasion of the exhibition on El Greco, of an unpublished painting depicting a Crucifixion and which Puppi attributed to Michelangelo.

Farewell to Lionello Puppi, great art historian, scholar of Venetian art and architecture

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