Founded in 1947 under the presidency of Giuseppe Fiocco and the scientific direction of Rodolfo Pallucchini, “Arte Veneta” has grown into one of the most important specialised publications in art history. This issue opens, in medieval studies, with contributions by Beatrice Alai and Dario De Cristofaro. The former presents a study of a little-known illuminated fragment from the Detroit Institute of Arts, which originally belonged to an evangelistary probably commissioned by Doge Andrea Dandolo for the high altar of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. The latter analyses the corpus of the fourteenth-century painter Stefano da Ferrara, with particular reference to the works in the Minerbi-Dal Sale residence in Ferrara and the Madonna del Pilastro in Padua.
This is followed by topics in Renaissance art dealt with by Mattia Vinco, with the presentation of a Christ Blessing formerly in the collection of Albert Figdor in Vienna, here attributed to the Veronese painter Francesco Morone and identified as the missing piece of the predella of the 1498 Avanzi altarpiece in the Veronese church of San Bernardino, and by Michele Guida Conte, who sheds light on the life of Girolamo Bencucci, bishop of Vicenza and papal nuncio, addressing the attribution of his funeral monument, erected in Vicenza cathedral after 1537.
The volume continues with interesting eighteenth-century essays, with new proposals for Giambattista Tiepolo. The first, by William L. Barcham and Gianluca Poldi, relates to the presentation of a sketch traced back to his youthful period; the second, by Denis Ton focuses on a little-known episode from the late output of the great Venetian artist, the creation of “half-figures of women a capriccio” for the Tsarina Elizabeth Petrovna.
The series of essays is brought to a close by Giuseppe Beretti’s contribution dealing with an interesting chapter in the early activity of Giovanni Battista Piranesi as a decorative painter in Rococo Venice.
This is followed by the ‘Reports’ section, featuring previously unpublished findings, including a text by Federica Giamattei that reconstructs the provenance of the fifteenth-century wooden sculpture of the Madonna della Misericordia in the Museo Correr, attributing it to Jacopo di Caterino Moranzone. The section closes with a series of contributions to the Archival Papers, including one by Anne Markham Schulz, who proposes, through the analysis of unpublished documentation relating to the creation of funerary monuments in Padua and Venice, their possible identification between Andriolo de’ Santi and Andrea da San Felice, who executed the tomb of Doge Giovanni Dolfin in the basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.
All the contributions are fully illustrated.
