Descrizione
Storia dell’arte n. 155-156 – Nuova Serie 1/2 | 2021
Patrizia Principi
“Luigi Garzi inventor”: stampe d’invenzione e di traduzione dall’Istituto Centrale per la Grafica
The activity carried out by Luigi Garzi as an inventor for prints made in collaboration with Italian and French engravers is a topic that, with the exception of very rare references, has not yet been examined by critics. To partially fill this gap, ten different prints, kept at the Central Institute for Graphics in Rome, are presented here – six of them reproduced here for the first time. They bear witness to the constant collaboration that the painter undertakes, from the beginning to the late maturity, with well-known engravers such as Albert Clowet, Pietro Santi Bartoli and Arnold van Westerhout. Five of these prints, engraved with Garzi’s invention, are published together with four different volumes of the time, three of which have so far been ignored by critics. One of these also contains a letter dedicated to Luigi Garzi “famous painter”, here transcribed in the appendix, which testifies to the high esteem of contemporaries for the artist and provides an ante quem date for his cited works. Furthermore, this graphic corpus shows that the fame of Garzi and his paintings is also attested by the circulation of d’aprés engravings, such as those carved by Francesco Faraone Aquila, by van Westerhout himself, by the Count of Caylus and Nicolas Le Sueur.