Descrizione
Storia dell’arte n. 155-156 – Nuova Serie 1/2 | 2021
Francesco De Carolis, Michela Giuntoli
Pietro Antonio Ferro fra Roma e Napoli: formazione teorica e pratica pittorica
In 2019 a copy of Trattato della pittura (1584) by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo was discovered in the John Rylands Library at University of Manchester. It had once belonged to the Lucanian painter, Pietro Antonio Ferro, who had noted that he had bought it in Rome in 1598. Alongside this finding, this study gives an account of the discovery of an example of La pratica della prospettiva (1568) by Daniele Barbaro in the Bibliothèque Universitaire de Montreal, bought by the same Ferro in Naples in 1600. On the basis of this new data, the article underlines the importance that artists active between the two centres had on the artist’s production, and the particular role played by some of the works left in Basilicata and Puglia by Francesco Curia.
The study also examines Ferro’s theoretical interests, focussing attention on the margin notes left in the two volumes, which allow us to extend the information about his studies on perspective and religious iconography to books such as Divina proportione by Luca Pacioli and Compendio degli Annali del Baronio by Francesco Panigarola.