Since 2019 cataloguing has been in progress on the most important core of Everett Fahy’s photo archive. It comprises over 13,000 photographs relating to 15th-century Florentine painting, which go to complete the Zeri Archive’s own coverage of the period.
Every week since 2020, the Foundation’s online database has published new images and materials from the American scholar’s extraordinary research output in this field.
Via the search tool Explore the collections, one can access a description of the whole collection and surf the contents even of parts of it that have not yet been catalogued.
Among the over 6,000 images currently consultable online one should note:
500 photographs documenting the large artistic output of Alessandro Botticelli, over 1,100 relating to other leading figures in 15th-century Florentine painting such as Beato Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Lorenzo Monaco, Filippo Lippi, Paolo Uccello, Francesco Botticini and Piero di Cosimo.
Then there are over 1,000 photo-objects concerning Ghirlandaio’s followers: Bartolomeo di Giovanni, il Maestro di Apollo e Dafne, il Maestro dell’Epifania di Fiesole, il Maestro di Marradi, il Maestro del tondo Borghese, il Maestro del tondo Holden, il Maestro della Natività Johnson (Domenico di Zanobi), il Maestro della Madonna Naumburg, il Maestro di S. Lucia sul Prato, il Maestro dei pannelli Campana, il Maestro del tondo Lathrop (Michelangelo di Pietro Membrini), Biagio d’Antonio and Bastiano Mainardi. Fahy catalogued these in his book Some Followers of Domenico Ghirlandaio (1976).
The core of the archive is made up of documentation on Domenico Ghirlandaio: more than 1,500 photos are to be entirely catalogued thanks to the support of Emanuela and Silvano Merlatti, the project being named PATRONS FOR GHIRLANDAIO.
Fahy’s numerous handwritten jottings on the back of photos, giving bibliographical references and details of the collectors whose hands works passed through, added to the abundant hard-copy documentation attached to the photos, have enabled the fact-sheets on 15th-century Florentine painting already in the database to be updated. The database is now the richer by 2000 photographs of works that the Federico Zeri Photo Archive did not possess.
Scientific cataloguing of the Fahy Photo Archive was greatly enhanced by the close correspondence with antiquarians, collectors and art historians preserved in the folders, and the famous lists of individual artists compiled by Fahy. Where these exist, they have been included in the fact-sheets on catalogued works.
This wealth of materials has enabled Fahy’s critical thinking to be reconstructed, as well as helping to decipher the ordering system and complex cross-references underpinning the sheaves and envelopes in his archive.