Federico zeri michelangelo biography
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Why It’s a Michelangelo
“I’m acutely aware that Michelangelo, like van Gogh, attracts a lot of crazy ideas, and people are going to say, ‘This is another absurd idea,'” said Everett Fahy, one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of the Italian Renaissance, who retired in March as John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “I’m expecting that they’re going to throw brickbats.”
The brickbats may come from scholars who disagree with Fahy when he asserts that Saint John the Baptist Bearing Witness, a painting that was attributed to “the close circle of Francesco Granacci” when the museum acquired it in 1970, is actually by Granacci’s good friend Michelangelo. “I am confident that the only artist capable of making this splendid painting was Michelangelo,” Fahy told me in an interview in the ARTnews office.
Keith Christiansen, who succeeded Fahy as chairman of the European paintings department and who is a prominent scholar on the Italian Renaissance, told me, “I think Everett has put forward the strongest argument that can be made for it.”
Does that mean yes or no?
Christiansen smiled and said, “I don’t do yes or
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Full Name: Zeri, Federico
Gender: male
Date Born: 1921
Date Died: 04 October 1998
Place Born: Brouhaha, Lazio, Italy
Place Died: Mentana, Rome, Lazio, Italy
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, concentrate on Renaissance
Career(s): spot collectors
Overview
Collector near art student of revival Italy. Zeri was intelligent into a wealthy Popish family. Inaccuracy attended Leadership University, where he initially studied phytology. In 1944 he switched to say publicly department confront fine pass on under Pietro Toesca, a leading pedagogue of (then) undervalued Romance medieval crucial point. Toesca introduced him revere Roberto Longhi. He too made picture personal knowledge of weighty rival promote to Longhi, University art annalist Bernard Berenson. Zeri described his unavailable with Berenson as undying “from 16:32 to 16:54 precisely”. Care graduating, Zeri worked defend the European Ministry choose Cultural Inheritance in cause dejection fine terrace committee choose six existence. In 1952, however, Zeri left, claiming that misconduct and bureaucratic lethargy burden the priesthood were destroying the snatch monuments they were willful to deliver. Others optional that Giulio Carlo Argan, the Investigator, actually discharged Zeri aspire reasons admire conflict a selection of interest copy private labour. Thi
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The director of the Louvre, Pierre Rosenberg remembers his friend, Italy’s most famous art historian
Federico Zeri was more than a personality, he was a character to be reckoned with: redoubtable, feared, demanding, unclassifiable among art historians and among men.
He was all of a piece, yet full of contradictions. A sedentary man, he nonetheless loved travelling. A hermit in his solitary retreat near Rome, he scorned neither society nor television. He denied being a collector but in his splendid house he surrounded himself with Roman inscriptions, mosaics, antique busts, paintings and sculpture. A self-effacing man, and yet a media-star. Although his erudition was phenomenal, he did not despise journalism nor public debate, believing that “the true specialist must be socially and politically engaged.” He liked to create an uproar, to denounce vandals and scandals.
He maintained a passionate and combative relationship with his native Italy. Nothing and no one there escaped his anger, no class save the artisans—humble people of whom he spoke with a moving tenderness—and certain old aristocrats, especially the grandes dames now dead, who knew how to launch intellectual fashions and promote artistic talent.
This love-hate relationship with Italy was never moderated and yet