Caravaggeschi in the Anna Ottani Cavina Photo Archive

Thanks to a generous contribution from Emanuela and Silvano Merlatti, in June 2024 the project concluded with digitization and complete cataloguing of all 1,560 photographs (scheda OA and F).
The job of cataloguing was performed by a young scholar, Claudio Collari, on behalf of the Zeri Foundation on a collaboration basis.
The images may be accessed from the Foundation online database as of September. The project will in fact be presented during the seminar Il mestiere del onoscitore. Caravaggio curated by Anna Maria Ambrosini Massari, Andrea Bacchi and Tomaso Montanari, scheduled to take place at the Zeri Foundation on 19-21 September 2024. A special occasion that will bring together in Bologna some of the greatest scholars of Caravaggio and Caravaggism.

Anna Ottani Cavina is an emeritus professor of Modern Art History at Bologna University and honorary president of the Federico Zeri Foundation which she founded and directed until 2014, thereafter donating to it her professional photo archive, some 18,000 photos documenting her particular research areas. The most important sections regard the Caravaggian Seventeenth century, the Carraccis, painting and other graphic art in the 18^th century, interior decoration, the persisting cult of antiquity, and landscape.

After Roberto Longhi blazed the Caravaggio trail in the early twentieth century, culminating in the 1951 exhibition Caravaggio e i caravaggeschi , Anna Ottani Cavina toook up the Caravaggio School of painting as one of her hobbyhorses. From the Sixties on, with first her research into Marcantonio Bassetti (1586-1630) which formed her art history postgraduate thesis for the academic year 1962-1963, and then her work on Pietro Paolini (1603-1681) in 1963 and Angelo Caroselli (1585-1652) in 1965, she went on to investigate the artistic output of Carlo Saraceni (1579-1620), the subject of a monograph published in 1968. This is still the only one on that artist and the first in the Caravaggio school area after Roberto Longhi’s own on Serodine.

Her quest for wide-ranging documentation of these artists and their output is reflected in the extraordinary amount of her photographic material and attached documents assembled into a full-scale professional photo archive.

 1,574  of these photographs are devoted to Caravaggio-school painting. They feature paintings in churches and Italian and foreign museums, as well as works that came and went on the market and are in private collections.

Besides these are some 900 hard-copy documents pertaining to the photos (editorial extracts, handwritten notes) and plentiful correspondence witih antiquarians and collectors.

The photos Anna Ottani Cavina included in her photo archive series devoted to the Caravaggian seventeenth century and the Carraccis are a particularly important collection since they complete with some unpublished works the section on the Caravaggio School at the Zeri Photo Archive which can already be consulted on the Foundation website.

THE PROJECT AGENDA

Cataloguing and digitalizing 1,574  photographs divided as follows:

ENVELOPE TITLES                                                                                       PHOTO

Total cost 15,000 euros

These images will be available free of charge on the Zeri Foundation online data base.