Within the Zeri Photo Archive, the series named "Varie" (Miscellanea) contains several photographic and documentary nuclei, left at the time of Zeri's death without any apparent order and separate from the other sections.
Recent research carried out as part of An Emanuela and Silvano Merlatti Fellowship 2025 has clarified the main characteristics of this collection, consisting of approximately 10,000 photographs; it reflects Federico Zeri's professional and intellectual career and reveals the complex network of his relations and acquaintances.
Certain folders bear the name Problemi. They contain material gathered during the most hectic part of his life as a connoisseur – the 1960s and 1970s – relating to difficulties of attribution on which he reserved judgement. In some cases later studies inclined him to suggestions that he felt able to share; in other cases they remain open issues over which the critics have failed to reach agreement, as with the Monaco con la croce (Monk with the Cross) from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection.
That they are divided by century and iconographic subject – unlike the classification by school and author adopted elsewhere in his archive – reflects the open-ended, fluid nature of the material which continued to tax his skills as a connoisseur.
Another part of the Miscellanea is comprised of photos and documentation, put together by Federico Zeri in the last decade of his life, which the pressure of a rapidly burgeoning archive probably left him no time to set in order. Apart from bloc acquisitions from other archives which he only partly divided under separate archival headings, the bulk of this material concerns Zeri’s dealings with auction houses, antiquarians and private collectors who sought his opinion and judgement, as in the case of the Ritratto di Borso d’Este (Portrait of Borso d’Este 1606-1657), which an attached Zeri expertise attributes to Ludovico Lana. There are also many photos to do with publishing ventures that Zeri had a hand in, some eventually published, others not. These range from Italian museum catalogues, such as the Bergamo Accademia Carrara or the Pesaro Museo Civico, to collections of Italian painting held by certain foreign museums.
189 photos from this series have been catalogued and are available on line. They were chosen as samples representing the wide-ranging types, chronology and iconography typical of this whole section, by way of gauging its potential for deeper research.
These photos afford evidence of provenance and collection history in the case of various works, such as the Croce dipinta signed “Michael”, held by the Cleveland Museum of Art since 1995, after a period in the Florentine Siviero collection; or again the Mother and Child which was once the central panel of a triptych to Sant’Antonino at Gesualdo (near Avellino), belonged to the Contini Bonaccossi family in the 1920s, and has now gone astray.
Likewise with the Natività della Vergine currently at the Feltre Museo Civico (province of Belluno) and hitherto attributed to Pietro Marescalchi. A detail of the backing board seen in one of these ‘sample’ photos has led to identification of the painting as one (of the same subject) figuring in a seventeenth century inventory from the collection of the Spanish Marquis Gaspar De Guzman y Haro, where it enjoys a more prestigious attribution: to Bartolomeo Schedoni.
At times the photographs document a state of conservation for which we would otherwise lack all evidence. This is so with the Madonna annunciata (Madonna of the Annunciation) now at the Blanton Museum in Austin, or the panel portraying St. Luke the Evangelist and St. Albertus at the El Paso Museum: both works are shown to have undergone prior framing as separate paintings.
There are very few notes in Zeri’s hand among the photos in this section. One significant exception regards an unstudied painting previously in the collection of the Sforza Cesarini household. This is attributed by Zeri as a work by the baroque painter Girolamo Troppa; he identifies it as the canvas depicting Lot and his Daughters which is mentioned in inventories but was so far thought to have disappeared.
Sometimes the way of classifying the material has led to new attributions or the reconstructing of units that had been divided up. One such is the two portions of predella: they have now been matched up as coming (probably) from one and the same polyptych some of whose other panels are documented in the Fahy Photo Archive and may be attributed to a painter from Lucca or thereabouts in the second quarter of the fifteenth century.
One last case in point regards an oil on copper featuring the Genealogia della Vergine (Dispute over the genealogy of the Virgin) which recently re-emerged onto the antiques market. The photographic detail of a by now illegible inscription, backed by stylistic analysis, has led to a new attribution: to Marco da Faenza.
The objective is to go ahead with re-ordering the complete series, as well as cataloguing and publishing on line the whole materials in this part of the Zeri Photo Archive which stands complementary to the other sections and still re-evokes the voice and method of Zeri himself.