Dipartimento di Storia Antropologia Religioni Arte Spettacolo
Dipartimento di eccellenza 2023-2027

Géza de Francovich was born in Gorizia in 1902 to an aristocratic family of Hungarian origin. After World War I he moved to Florence where he studied art history with Pietro Toesca, graduating in 1925. He then attended the Postgraduate School directed by Adolfo Venturi in Rome. Between 1926 and 1928 he worked as inspector at the Superintendence in Perugia and from 1929 he collaborated with Toesca for the Enciclopedia Italiana. In the 1930s and 1940s he dedicated most of his publications to western medieval art, providing an important contribution to the study of wooden sculpture (Il Volto Santo di Lucca, 1936; Scultura medioevale in legno, 1943) and of Romanesque artistic production; his monograph Benedetto Antelami, architetto e scultore e l’arte del suo tempo (1952) became an important reference book for any research on the topic. After working as “libero docente” (lecturer) at Sapienza University from 1937, he was appointed full professor of Medieval Art History in 1956 after the retirement of Mario Salmi. In those years he had already begun to focus his attention on eastern Mediterranean artistic production. In 1951 the essay “L’arte siriaca e il suo influsso sulla pittura medioevale nell’Oriente e nell’Occidente” was the first of a group of publications in which he emphasized the role played by Persian and Syriac art in the development of the visual culture of the Middle Ages. In 1966, together with a team of architects and art historians, he organized a series of field trips in eastern Anatolia and the Soviet Republic of Armenia with the purpose of collecting photographs and plans of medieval monuments surviving in those areas; two years later, this material was presented in the exhibition “Architettura Medievale Armena”(Rome, 1968). His book on the interpretation of architectural images in late antique and early medieval art, Il Palatium di Teodorico a Ravenna e la cosidetta “architettura di potenza”, appeared in 1970. After his retirement, he published Santuari e tombe rupestri dell’antica Frigia (1990). He died in Rome in 1996.

Fernanda de’ Maffei, born in Cles in 1917, earned her first degree in philosophy at Padua in 1940 and then studied art history with Edoardo Arslan at the University of Pavia. In the early 1950s she attended the Postgraduate School of Art History at Rome where she met scholars such as Mario Salmi, Lionello Venturi, and Géza de Francovich. After some early studies on eighteenth-century Venetian painting, de’ Maffei focused on Gothic sculpture, publishing an important monograph on the Scaliger tombs in Verona (Le Arche scaligere, 1955). Between the late 1950s and the early 1960s she worked on the organization of several exhibitions and coordinated the section on medieval art in the Enciclopedia Universale dell’Arte. Her earliest studies dedicated to eastern Mediterranean territories date back to the late 1960s when she was appointed lecturer (“libero docente”) of Medieval Art History at Sapienza. In the same years, she participated in the field trips organized by de Francovich in Armenia; this experience opened a new phase in her research activity that included the publication of important essays dedicated to Byzantine and Armenian architecture (e.g., “L’origine della cupola armena”, in Corsi di Cultura sull’arte ravennate e bizantina, 1973). In 1976 de’ Maffei was appointed the first chair of Byzantine Art History in Italy.

While continuing to travel and systematically explore Byzantine monuments in the eastern Mediterranean territories in the following decades, she published on a wide range of topics, focusing particularly on Byzantine architecture of the Justinianic period (Edifici di Giustiniano nell’ambito dell’impero, 1988), illuminated manuscripts (in particular on the Codex Purpureus Rossanensis, and on theKludhov Psalter), apse mosaic before iconoclasm (St. Catherine at Sinai, church of Dormition at Nicaea etc.), and fresco cycles in southern Italy (S. Vincenzo al Volturno, S. Angelo in Formis). In 1988 she inaugurated the series Milion. Studi e ricerche d’arte bizantina. A collection of her most remarkable essays was published in 2011 under the title Bisanzio e l’ideologia delle immagini.

page under construction

page under construction

page under construction

page under construction

page under construction

page under construction

page under construction

pagina in costruzione

page under construction

page under construction

page under construction

pagina in costuzione