Farewell to the great art historian and critic Maurizio Calvesi

The great art historian Maurizio Calvesi, who was also a critic and Academician of the Lincei, one of the greatest figures in art criticism of the 20th century and beyond, passed away today in Rome at the age of 92. Making the announcement in a Facebook post was art critic Alberto Dambruoso, a student of Calvesi.

Born in Rome in 1927, he had graduated very early, at the age of twenty-two, from the University of Rome La Sapienza, with Lionello Venturi, and in 1955, at the age of twenty-eight, he began working at the Soprintendenza di Bologna, later also becoming director of the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. In 1967 he began his work as a lecturer, teaching first at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. From 1970 to 1976 he taught art history at the University of Palermo, and for nearly three decades, from 1976 to 2002, he taught modern art history at the Sapienza University of Rome. Of his activity as an art historian, we recall the many interests that led him to write important pages on Caravaggio, the Carraccis, Piero della Francesca, the Sistine Chapel, Giambattista Piranesi, the Salento Baroque, and Futurism.

As an art critic he initiated important studies on twentieth-century art, which began, in the 1960s, with the research, mentioned above, on futurism and in particular on the work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Calvesi, well inserted in the intellectual circles of the time and a protagonist of the most heated debates, was among the first to grasp the historical bearing of Pop Art, of the works of Alberto Burri, of the great artists who frequented the Rome of the 1960s (from Pino Pascali to Jannis Kounellis, from Mario Schifano to Mario Ceroli), and was also one of the best interpreters of the art of Marcel Duchamp. In this capacity he also curated two editions of the Venice Biennale, the 1984 and 1986 editions, together with Marisa Vescovo (previously, from 1979 to 1982, he had been on the Biennale’s Board of Directors). Finally, Calvesi is also remembered for his collaborations with newspapers-L’ Espresso, La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera. From 1986 to 2001 he also edited the magazine Art & Dossier, and had then been editor of the scholarly journal Storia dell’Arte.

One of his most important studies, The Reality of Caravaggio, won him the Viareggio Prize in 1990. And among his art-historical awards, the prestigious Balzan Prize, won in 2008, “for his extraordinary work in the field of the history of modern and contemporary visual art, which has contributed both to a better understanding of the nature and development of modernism and to the study of the origin of new trends in modern art.”

Farewell to the great art historian and critic Maurizio Calvesi

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