Per Giuseppe Bossi conoscitore: memorie dai soggiorni a Roma del 1810

Renown painter Giuseppe Bossi (1777-1815) shaped his experience as a connoisseur by personally seeing the artworks, and during several journeys through Italy. The unpublished memoirs from his stay in Rome in 1810 constitute an insight on his considerations on Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and, episodically, Michelangelo. After reporting the presumed theft of Leonardo’s Libro di pittura (cod. Lat. Urb. 1270), Bossi works to dismantle the traditional attributions of works to the artist, starting with a critical analysis of the notorious frescoed lunette from the convent of Sant’Onofrio al Gianicolo. The individuation of Raphaelian elements brings to the identification of a possible preparatory sketch carelessly attributed to the painter from Urbino. The episode exemplifies the miscues of Bossi’s early attribution practice on Raphael’s drawings, and particularly on the corpus of the Libretto veneziano, now at the Cabinet of Drawings of the Venice Academy. Following Bossi along his Roman journey, we find him innovatively interested in Michelangelo’s production as a poet, which he examines on the manuscripts, with a striking philological approach.