The project is to study and reappraise the photos contained in the Zeri Foundation folders devoted to 15th and 16th century Tuscan drawings, especially those depicting lesser-known drawings that have ended up on the market, in private collections and in local museums.
The Federico Zeri photo archive still contains some sections that have not undergone specific cataloguing and upgrade projects, and one of the most important of these is the one devoted to Drawing. This series comprises 13,000 phototypes, largely gelatin and silver nitrate prints dating from the 1950s, as well as albumin and carbon prints. Zeri arranged these according to the criteria he used for the Italian Painting section, in chronological order, by city and geographical area, including monographic folders on individual authors. The materials document drawings by Italian and foreign artists across the 14th and 15th centuries.
The biggest collection of thus-arranged materials is the one covering Italian drawings from the 14th to the 18th century, composed of over 9,000 photographs of drawings by artists working in Venice, Rome, Naples, Genoa and in Emilia, the Marche, Central Italy and Tuscany. There are, besides, more than 300 prints (mostly albumin and carbon) of large-format drawings which Zeri kept separate from the rest of the folders in the Photo Archive.
The section photographically documenting Florentine and Tuscan Quattro- and Cinquecento drawings is especially rich in interest. More thant 3,600 photographs reproduce drawings by artists such as Beato Angelico, Filippino Lippi, Piero di Cosimo, Fra Bartolomeo, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, alongside which is detailed documentation of the graphic output by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael - works kept in Italian Cabinets of Drawings and Prints (Florence, Milan, Rome), European and American counterparts (London, Oxford, Paris, Windsor, New York, Cleveland, Princeton), and others that have ended on the market or in private collections.
The photos come from photographic studios (chiefly Alinari, Brogi, Anderson), Italian and foreign museums, auction houses and antiquarians. Often they bear notes on the back, some anonymous, others in Zeri’s hand, regarding attribution and bibliography.
The study operation will fall into three stages
- Exploring the materials in the folders selected for the project. Selecting and identifying the most significant photos
- Cataloguing and digitalizing some 1,800 photographs
- Drawing up a final report and a short text for the general reader