Directed by Elizabeth Cropper, dean of CASVA, this project will result in a full critical edition and annotated translation of Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice (Bologna, 1678), one of the most important early modern texts on Italian art. Felsina pittrice, or Lives of the Bolognese Painters, provides a history of painting in Bologna that both emulates and challenges Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550/1568). Indeed, it provides a seventeenth-century Bolognese alternative to Vasari’s Tuscan-Roman account of Italian painting. The Felsina pittrice has never been translated into English in full, and no critical edition has appeared since 1841–1844. This edition and translation, undertaken by a team of international scholars, will appear in sixteen monographic volumes. Each of the projected volumes will include transcriptions by Lorenzo Pericolo (University of Warwick) of the relevant manuscript notes made by Malvasia in preparation for his book, and now in the Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna. Professor Pericolo will also provide a new critical edition of the Italian text. The series is published for the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the National Gallery of Art by Harvey Miller Publishers.
Critical Edition and Project Coordinator: Lorenzo Pericolo
Postdoctoral Research Associate: Tiffany Racco
Assistant to the Program of Research: Elise Ferone