A project made possible by a contribution from Emanuela and Silvano Merlatti
Anna Ottani Cavina is an emeritus professor of Bologna University and honorary president of the Federico Zeri Foundation, which she set up and directed until 2014. She has donated her professional photo archive comprising over 18,000 photographs documenting her own special fields of study.
The feature making Anna Ottani Cavina’s photo archive unlike other collections in the photo library is that it so complements Zeri’s own. The present project devoted to landscape painting will complete the cataloguing of the most important sections already available online.
After the 17th century with Caravaggio and the neoclassical-romantic 18th century (culminating with her 1999 monograph on Felice Giani), Anna Ottani Cavina’s sights switched to landscape painting – the birth of plein air - when the Italian landscape perceived as nature was translated onto canvas by major artists, becoming “that place in the imagination and memory that all of us since then, believing we always knew it, have called Italy”.
Research in this field was innovative from the outset, following unexplored avenues. These are outlined in the essay introducing the catalogue to the famous Paris exhibition Paysages d'Italie in 2001: «the birth of a new idiom, quintessentially about colour and synthesis, triggered by studies d’après nature», and the «bewitchment», the «fulmination», that nature, the perception of Italian landscape with its light and colour, aroused in artists not of Italian extraction – British, French, German, Scandinavian – «causing them to try out brand-new channels of communion with reality, namely painting en plein air».
The exhibition Paysages d’Italie staged at Paris’s Grand Palais (2001) and then in Mantua at the Palazzo Te, is considered the manifesto event for this new perception of landscape which led to other important exhibitions: Montagna, Arte e Scienza which ushered in Rovereto’s MART (2003); Granet, Roma e Parigi (2009) at the Villa Medici in Rome; John Ruskin, Le Pietre di Venezia (2018) at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice.
The section of photos of landscape painting draws on images artworks in Italian and foreign museums as well as private collections or ones that passed onto the market. It thus fully documents the activity of artists such as: Thomas Jones, François-Marius Granet, Louis Gauffier, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Joseph Mallord William Turner, John Ruskin.
Numerous hard-copy materials are included with the photographs: excerpts from publications, manuscript notes, correspondence with antiquarians and collectors and documentation put together by the scholar while preparing the exhibitions Paysages d'Italie and Montagna. Arte, scienza, mito da Dürer a Warhol, as well as her many memorable books on the subject, including:
I paesaggi della ragione (Einaudi 1994); Il diario di Thomas Jones. Viaggio d’artista nell’Italia del Settecento (Electa 2003); Geometries of Silence (Columbia University Press 2004); La pittura di paesaggio in Italia. Il Settecento (Electa 2005) Terre senz’ombra. L’Italia dipinta (Adelphi 2015); Louis Gauffier. Un pittore francese in Italia (Fondazione Federico Zeri 2022).
PROJECT DETAILS
Cataloguing and digitalizing some 1,500 phototypes (largely photographs, plus some digital hd files) divided as follows:
- Landscape. French. Authors various, arranged alphabetically (including Drolling, Ducros, Duprè, Fabre, Hubert Robert, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes)
- Landscape. French. François-Marius Granet, Noël-Thomas-Joseph Clérian (Pseudo-Granet)
- Landscape. French. Louis Gauffier, entourage of Louis Gauffier
- Landscape. British. Authors various, arranged alphabetically (including Cozens, Gainsborough, More, Parse, Towne, Wilson, Wright of Derby)
- Landscape. British. Thomas Jones
- Landscape. British. John Ruskin
- Landscape. Italian, Dutch, German. Authors various, arranged alphabetically (including Bagetti, Labruzzi, Lusieri, Friedrich, Hackert, Knip, Schilbach)
- Landscape. Mostra Paysages d'Italie. French, British, Italian, Nordic, German, Russian
Conclusion 2026
Overall cost 10,000 euros
The images will be made available free of charge on the online database of the Zeri Foundation.