Per la fortuna critica di Ludovico Brea: una monografia inedita di Piero De Minerbi (1911-1912)

The archive of the Pinacoteca Civica in Savona preserved an unpublished typescript about the painter Ludovico Brea (Nice, 1450 c.-1516/1525): this work was written between 1911 and 1912 by the art historian Piero Hierschel De Minerbi, who belonged to a noble family from Trieste. The study of the text, illustrated by seventy-seven black and white photos, and four tables featuring sketches by the author, enables not only to add a new element to the critical history of Ludovico Brea but also to reflect on the state of the history of art criticism in Italy at the beginning of the Twentieth century. Particularly research tools used by the scholar belong to Historical and Philological method of the connoiseurship as was formulated by Adolfo Venturi (1856-1941) and Pietro Toesca (1877-1962): beyond the choice of a specific genre as the artist’s monograph, and of a research topic focused on an artist who belonged to a peripheral area of Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century Italian Art, De Minerbi’s method is characterized by the enhancement of the link between history and criticism, a deep attention to the formal and technical aspects of the paintings in order to identify Brea’s style and to reconstruct his catalogue, distinguishing his hands from those of his followers, and the use of research instruments as archival documents, photography and ink sketches of compositional and iconographic details. Finally, some unpublished letters written by Piero De Minerbi and the director of the Pinacoteca Civica in Savona, Poggio Poggi, between 1938 and 1940, enable to reconstruct the history of this typescripts and the reason of its presence in the archive of the museum.