Descrizione
Storia dell’arte 151-152, Gennaio-Dicembre 2019
Carla Subrizi
La Storia dell’arte di Giulio Carlo Argan
The paper aims to offer a fresh look on the seminal essay by Giulio Carlo Argan, published in the first issue of the magazine “Storia dell’arte” in 1969, not to understand its aspects considered to be more difficult to update today, but to attempt the reverse operation: to return to the essay in order to identify some issues that are still worth investigating. The essay attempted a synthesis of many concepts: on the one hand, they correspond to Argan’s continuous reflection about the discipline of art history; on the other hand they pose themselves as a sort of program between verified principles and questions yet to be investigated.
In light of the most recent debate on the history of art, between interdisciplinary, transnational studies and the dialogue among different cultures and global geographies, instead of placing the discipline in a “crisis” situation, these new approaches become the frontier for a field of study that, in the convergence of methodological perspectives, can continue to question the material and cultural multiformity of the artistic object as well as the complexity of a “history of ideas” that Argan faced with far-sighted reflections in his essays.
