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Title: L'Inventario settecentesco dei disegni degli Uffizi di Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni : Trascrizione e commento Author: Petrioli Tofani, Annamaria Price: $275.00 ISBN: 9788822262486 Description: Firenze: Olschki, 2014. 4 vols. 25cm., pbk., 1822pp. Summary: These four volumes by Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, director of the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe of the Uffizi from 1981 to 2005, lead through the history of the entire collection of drawings owned by the Gallery. Philology is the method of choice: the edition of the XVIIIth century inventory compiled by Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni, then director of the collection, being her starting point, Petrioli Tofani succeeds at reconstructing the original arrangement of the drawings through a critical apparatus of notes, commentaries, and variants of the attributions. Pelli Bencivenni became a protagonist of the scenes of art collecting in Florence when he started to work together with Luigi Lanzi to the transformation of the ancient Museum of the Uffizi - still holding at the time the universal character of a Wunderkammer wanted by Francesco I de' Medici in the XVIth century - in a modern institution, with a rational organization of the objects. The times were those of the Lorrain domination and of Enlightenment, and the aim was to improve the knowledge of the collections by a clearer, more didactic display of the works, according to the new cultural mission of the institution. Pelli Bencivenni's enormous cataloguing work, accomplished when he was director of the Gallery (from 1775 to 1793), obeyed to the same purpose: this highly specialized undertaking is documented by an impressive amount of papers, that still result fundamental to the understanding of the most important events in the history of art collecting in the XVIIIth century. Such is the case of the manuscripts that witness what can be considered the first attempt of doing an inventory of the drawings collection. For its unprecedented contribution to the history of the graphic collections of the Medici and Lorrain dynasties, this book by Annamaria Petrioli Tofani will prove an essential instrument for every art historian. (Biblioteca dell' "Archivum Romanicum" Serie I: Storia, Letteratura, Paleografia, 419) Quantity: 1 Size: 250 X170 mm.

Edizione: edition originale.