An online project to catalogue and enhance the collection of 3,600 photos depicting the paintings, drawings and etchings of the Carraccis at Bologna, neoclassical decoration in Emilia and Romagna, as well as the output of the painter Felice Giani from the Anna Ottani Cavina photo archive.

Thanks to a contribution from the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna

The unusual feature of the Anna Ottani Cavina photo archive, compared with other sections of the Foundation photograph archive, is the way it neatly complements Federico Zeri’s own.
The material comprising it focuses on themes and geographical areas that figure less in Zeri’s own documentation; in particular, the 17th-century Emilian school, the neoclassical age, landscape painting, and 18th-century etching and drawing.
Over 5,000 photos relate to Felice Giani and neoclassical decoration, a key area in  Anna Ottani Cavina’s own research, only 1,500 of which are contained in her splendid 1999 monograph on that painter. The same goes for the materials relating to other Emilian and Romagnolo artists like Tommaso Minardi and the Gandolfis, or foreign artists working in Italy, such as Louis Gauffier, François-Marius Granet or Thomas Jones. These were almost entirely lacking from the Zeri archive.

The cataloguing project has concentrated on the sections that most neatly complementi Zeri’s already catalogued photographs. The focus is on  art from the Emilian and Romagnolo hinterland, especially the provinces of Bologna and Ravenna.

Many of these 3,600 photographs are hitherto unpublished, or show works that are hard to come by. Particular examples include :

  • the extremely detailed photo shoot on the Carracci frescoes in Palazzo Magnani carried out during restoration, and the whole sequence of Villani photos covering the frescoes in Palazzo Fava prior to their being detached
  • the paintings and drawings of Annibale Carracci and artists like Domenichino, Giovan Francesco Grimaldi and Francesco Albani, which feature the birth of landscape painting in Italy; and in addition complete coverage of the etchings based on Carracci landscape drawings from the  Everhard Jabach collection at the Louvre
  • sections on  neoclassical decoration of palazzi and private homes in Bologna, Faenza, Modigliana and Ravenna. These include the splendid black and white photos taken by Paolo Monti for the exhibition held at Faenza in 1979
  • the section of  drawings by Felice Giani and other neoclassical artists from the Lanciani manuscripts, preserved at the Archaeology and Art History Library of Palazzo Venezia. Some of them have been stolen, making these the only existing photographs published on line
  • the section of Felice Giani drawings from the New York Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

The project set out to swell the Zeri Foundation’s online catalogue with unique, unpublished or lesser-known images, thus enhancing our knowledge of the art heritage of Emilia-Romagna. This will make the data base even more of a benchmark for the international scientific community, as well as for scholars and amateur historians of Bologna and its surrounding area.