Art can make life better, especially if you have the privilege of living in a nation like Italy that has gifted the world with great painters and sculptors for centuries. The art historian Stefano Zuffi had already reminded us of it in the volume "The story of Italian painting" (Hoepli 2020) dedicated to the era that goes from Giotto's masterpieces to those of Caravaggio. Now he resumes the discourse that began three years ago in his latest editorial work, "The tale of Italian art" (Hoepli, 2023, pp. 486, also e-book) in which he retraces the Italian artistic events from the early seventeenth century up to the beginning of the nineteenth century and the period preceding the unification of Italy .
Centuries marked by great artists, but also by significant historical transformations - it is the period of foreign domination - which affect our peninsula.
The volume stands out, as usual by Zuffi, for its narrative and engaging approach , an approach of a real story, in which the narration becomes a thread of Ariadne, ideal for moving from one artist to another, from a period to the other in a pleasant, indeed relaxed way.
The book is therefore a narrative journey that seeks to make people appreciate the pleasure of painting and that wants to help get to know not only works and artists, but also the human side of those who have often been proposed as unreachable geniuses, and are instead real people.
Precisely in this perspective Zuffi develops his story live by linking the lives of the artists to their era with details and anecdotes that make each chapter lively and compelling. At the same time the author offers us a wide-ranging picture of Italian art from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century .
The many artistic capitals (Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples and Sicily) offer a local declination to the great international movements such as the Baroque, the Rococo, the Neoclassical, determining a taste which is then found, with its own characteristics, in the small centers. In this picture there is no shortage of great personalities such as Guido Reni, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Luca Giordano, Bellotto and Canaletto, all objects of collection by the first travelers of the Grand Tour, or Tiepolo, revered throughout Europe. The great season of Italian art declines with the arrival of Napoleon who puts the system of small states into crisis, but it is precisely the awareness of the uniqueness of our cultural heritage, expressed by Canova's masterful activity, which becomes one of the strongest driven to the realization of the Risorgimento and national unity.
In short, a book that reads like a great novel and at the same time like an enjoyable essay in which history, art, social and cultural analysis blend harmoniously. A book that pushes us once again to reflect on how criminal it is that art struggles so hard to find its dimension in the school and also in today's Italian society.