Paola Barocchi (1927-2016) - In Memoriam

Paola Barocchi (1927-2016) - In Memoriam

On Paola Barocchi see in this blog also: Paola Barocchi: Statements and controversies on Fine Arts in Italy 


by Giovanni Mazzaferro

I never met Paola Barocchi. But her books started to enter my house before I was born and have accompanied me for half a century.

I hope Orietta Rossi Pinelli will not be displeased if I am proposing hereafter the page that she dedicated to her in La storia delle storie dell'arte (p. 482) in 2014.

Paola Barocchi
Excerpt from La storia delle storie dell'arte (The History of Art Histories) (p. 482)

A protagonist who has chosen a path of her own, different from the panorama of historiography sketched that far, was Paola Barocchi (1927), another Professor at the Scuola Normale in Pisa. Scholar of history of art literature and among the foremost exegetists and connoisseurs of Giorgio Vasari, with her history of art criticism entered and established itself in the Italian universities. In her tireless activities, she recovered and edited the critical edition of many sources for art history from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. In the early eighties she studied the connections between art history and museum studies, focusing primarily on the Uffizi, to which she dedicated essays and a historic conference. But what made a seminal and truly unique contribution in those decades, was the early understanding of the inexhaustible possibilities that information technology could offer to the history of art in cataloging and research. That experimental project was consolidated with the creation of the Computer Research Centre for Cultural Heritage (CRIBECU), born in the wake of the first international conferences organized by the scholar in Pisa (1978 and 1984). Since then, in the Scuola Normale, a structure was established that led to the electronic storage of sources and documents, to the extrapolation of historical lexicons, and to the design and creation of integrated archives data and images. That process was continued by the other teachers of the school. In particular, it brought to the creation of the Laboratory of Visual Arts directed by Massimo Ferretti (1949), current professor of art history, the Laboratory for the Analysis, Retrieval, Protection, Technology and Economy for Cultural Heritage led by Salvatore Settis, and the Memofonte Foundation (in Florence) for the study of digitized sources.