GX1993.463

olio su tela

After a brief youthful phase of interest in music, Matteo Marangoni (Florence 1876 - Pisa 1958) graduated in anthropology from the Faculty of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences in Florence in 1905. In 1913, he was appointed inspector and later director of the Superintendency of Galleries, Medieval and Modern Museums and Art Objects in Florence; he then held temporary posts as director of the Brera Art Gallery (1920) and the Parma Gallery (1924). In the meantime, he devoted himself to university teaching at the Universities of Pisa and Milan. Specialising in the study of seventeenth-century painting, Marangoni often dedicated himself - favouring direct reading and stylistic and formal recognition of the work (in 1927 his book “How to Look at a Painting” was published) - to the rediscovery of forgotten authors and the critical reinterpretation of some of the leading artists of the time.
The portrait that the Florentine painter Baccio Maria Bacci dedicated to Marangoni reveals, in the details of the scene and the art historian's relaxed pose, the intimate atmosphere of their friendship and the intensity of the intellectual relationship that bound them together. In fact, the painting is set in a crucial phase of Bacci's pictorial experience that, after a significant and intense period of Futurist experimentation, thanks also to Marangoni's lesson, he returned to embrace a figuration of classical matrix, thus anticipating his later adhesion to Novecento pictorial culture. Portrait of art historian Matteo Marangoni, caught leaning casually against his desk.