Federico Zeri a provocative genius

Federico Zeri was born one hundred years ago, in August 1921, and was one of the greatest figures of the Italian twentieth century: an outstanding art historian and internationally acknowledged critic, and, furthermore, the most invincible of connoisseurs - a word used to define art and antiques aficionados, a quality required when dedicating themselves to the task of attribution.

He worked tenaciously on the philological mapping of forgotten and underrated treasures of Italian art, yet he was also a character, meaning one of the so-called «celebrities». In addition to his genius, amazing ability to memorize, and to his unbeatable visual culture, he was also immensely curious, imaginative, and creative. Of impeccable elegance in his couture clothes, he enjoyed extravagant or provocative outfits (television interviews granted in a robe with ikat designs or in black and white striped prison-like pyjamas). He was also a master of invectives and creative insults, aimed especially against the incompetent Italian bureaucracy (and who knows what whirlwinds of tweets would have been spun if he had lived in the era of social media).

Described by Alberto Arbasino: «The melancholy of Zeri’s character came from afar. Like the great Mario Praz, the great Federico was (and wanted to show himself) ingenuously brilliant, extremely sinister, and alone. That is to say, solitary and unique. A giddy connoisseur. Gifted (and also trained) with staggering strengths of memory and delirious knowledge, both historical and artistic, interconnected and immeasurable. Even in the cheapest and trashiest culture and literature, with an ostentatious temperament that overwhelmed every elegant and chic manner (...). Among extreme snobbery: in the common vernacular vulgarity of fierce jokes, televised or ancestral, and preferably anti-religious and filthy. In the perfectionistic and obsessive erudition regarding apparent marginal and remote minutiae, which are suddenly covered with a dazzling meaning or a derogatory staging». He concludes, «His normal state was one of indignation». Born in Rome, to a father who was an internist and professor of medical pathology who died when Zeri was eighteen, he found himself moving from a situation of affluence to the need to capitalize on talent and knowledge.

After beginning his career in the administration of cultural assets, by the end of the 1950s he had begun a fortunate and profitable career as an advisor to great collectors like Vittorio Cini, as a curator of private artistic heritages like that of Princess Elvira Pallavicini, as creator and board member of private museums (the Getty in Malibu), as well as a creator of catalogs of the international collections of museums like the Metropolitan in New York. His favorite subject matter was the decadence of ancient Rome, as well as a vibrant passion for the study of peripheral cultures. Alvar González-Palacios, an art historian specializing in the minor arts, who hung out with him for a long time before falling out with him, wrote that Zeri possessed «a mind of an absolute classifier. He liked bizarre things. He was animated by a destructive attitude towards things. He was in constant dispute with everyone. Brilliant and unhappy. And like all unhappy people, he was capable of making others unhappy (...). Federico knew by heart all the paintings of Titian or Masaccio. Whether he really loved them is another matter. The established authority bothered him». For Zeri, the most important century of Italian culture was not the Renaissance, but the period from 1230 until the black plague of 1348: Federico II, Giotto and his school, the Rimini and Spoleto painting schools, the mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci, the excellent sculptors Giovanni Pisano and Arnolfo di Cambio, the Supreme Poet Dante. Culture was not the heritage of large cities, but was widespread everywhere. Only starting from the following century the dominion of the cities and the concept of province were created. As professor Andrea De Marchi, his student and collaborator, says («I had about 1,500 lunches with him»), Zeri was not a stylist of writing, he had a type of Anglo-Saxon prose, clean and simple, anti-academic. Pittura e controriforma was his most important book and dealt with the issue of the divide between art and sacred art. «Zeri the critic is different from the others, first of all because he has never adhered to a method. He never left a school behind him because he was intelligent enough to understand that no system alone can explain reality.

As for his human aspect, he had a desperate emotional and loving void, an enormous solitude that he filled in a creative and constructive way with the fire of knowledge fed with enormous vigor». In the sixties, Zeri bought ten hectares of land in Mentana - about twenty kilometers from Rome - and had a large villa built there by architect Busiri Vici. The villa was intended to house his collections: paintings, sculptures, a substantial collection of Roman epigraphs (400 pieces), Antiochian mosaics, sculptures from Palmyra, Roman marbles, the library. That’s not all. In television interviews, we see Zeri seated at a long desk with large volumes behind his shoulders, all bound in leather in the same way.

They are not books but containers that hold one of the largest photo libraries in the world. Only black and white images, because, as Zeri used to say, «color doesn’t show restoration. I work very well with paintings or photographs in black and white». Supported by his endless archive, 290,000 photographs of sculptures and paintings, Zeri trained his visual memory for judgments and attributions («It’s not crust but workshop», or vice versa). González-Palacios writes: «I understood that I was in front of a complex mechanism that had been put in the body of a man. I was not dealing with a critical intelligence that was expressed in a logical and consequential way, but rather with a being in the possession of an energy which made him act beyond his own self. As soon as I showed him a photograph I was overwhelmed by a flow of information that I didn’t have time to write down; sometimes it seemed to me that this volcanic eruption was set in motion before the photo was in front of his eyes: he knew without seeing. I was faced with a force beyond all human control - Matthew writing under the education of the Angel. I believe I have known and seen in action almost all the art historians of my time but no one had such an instantaneous, such a mysterious relationship with the artworks». Federico Zeri died in 1998, after the University of Bologna had awarded him an honorary degree. And it was to this university that Zeri left his villa and all of his precious archives and library. Today, the Zeri Foundation is housed in the Bolognese convent of Santa Cristina and the Mentana archives have been catalogued and digitized and the photo library put on line. The villa, on the other hand, is in a state of serious abandonment, and some of the Roman epigraphs have been removed and stolen. The University of Bologna considered it too expensive to create a center for specialized training in art history. An attempt was made to sell the property, but it failed. The small town of Mentana does not have the means to restore it. All that remains is the hope for a substantial donation that will make it accessible again. In the meantime, we imagine Zeri’s heavenly insults, to those who have not respected his will.