Francesco Mazzaferro, Giovanni Mazzaferro. Five Years of the Blog 'Letteratura artistica'

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Francesco Mazzaferro, Giovanni Mazzaferro
Five years of the blog ‘Letteratura artistica’.

Giovanni (left) and Francesco (right) Mazzaferro

Five years ago, with a review dedicated to Barbara Agosti’s book on Paolo Giovio.A Lombard Historian in XVI-Century Artistic Culture, we inaugurated, in a humble and artisan way, this blog on history of art sources, or Letteratura artistica to use the Italian technical term stemming from the German Kunstliteratur.

It was, in fact, a kind of homage to our father, Luciano, who had collected a fine collection of sources of art history in his personal library as from the 1950s. But if this were the only reason, today we would not be here, with almost six hundred published essays, both in Italian and in English (for a total of one thousand two hundred posts).

We felt, perhaps instinctively, that an empty space existed: books (and not only those about art history sources) were no longer reviewed in the newspapers. It could happen that they were discussed and presented, but it was evident (albeit with exceptions) that these were mostly 'courtesy' reviews, without an accurate critical analysis of the works being discussed. In this way, the fundamental elements of a book review were missing: giving the reader the key information about a volume, including both the positive impulses and critical doubts that the reading had aroused and (why not) also expressing an unfavourable judgment, when needed.

Evidently our concerns were shared, because today our blog is collecting (year on year) almost 85,000 unique users, more than 106,000 visit sessions and about 155,000 pages viewed. Besides such high numbers (for a niche blog), we are also surprised by the geographical distribution of the readers: about 52% from Italy, 12% from the United States, another 12% from England, Germany, France and Spain and the rest from a hundred countries around the world.

We do not know (except when they disclose themselves) who our readers are, but another element is remarkable: again on a year on year basis, the addresses from which users are connecting - when belonging to libraries, universities, museums, foundations, associations (and excluding local authorities) - are over seven hundred and truly include all the most important cultural institutions worldwide. Beyond universities from almost every part of the world, we are impressed to see in the list the non-episodic presence of museums such as the National Gallery, the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Kunsthistorisches, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brera, etc..

This means that Letteratura artistica is consulted by undergraduate and graduate students, university professors, experts of the subject and professionals of fine arts not only because, sometimes, they find their book reviewed, but because they consider the blog a useful tool for information, and this is really what we are very glad for: ultimately, it is exactly what we hoped when we started.

SOME KEY BEHAVIOURAL GUIDELINES

We are not trying here to summarize what we have published so far. You will find everything in the index of the blog (and this is also a distinctive element: it is difficult to find a blog with an updated index that allows you to navigate it). Just click here.

We would rather like to remember what are the lines of conduct that we have given ourselves and which have matured during these five years:

• first of all, we always publish texts in Italian and English, to allow the widest possible circulation of information;

• we try to consider publications not only in Italian, but also in English, French, German and Spanish;

• we try to identify, even considering the local specificities, the elements that unite people, rather than those that divide them;

• we highlight that, in every age and in every situation, the borders between nations, empires, etc. have always remained permeable to ideas. Ideas are the real protagonists of this blog: although one can try to control them, they always manage to cross borders; sometimes they may be manipulated by power (think, for instance, of the different forms of permanence of classicism in fine arts, and how it has been exploited as imperial canon by all dictatorships in the XX century), but, in the long run, they circulate freely. It is particularly interesting, moreover, to study the ways in which ideas sometimes disappear and then reappear elsewhere: purely by way of example, our point of view has never been to affirm an Italian chronological supremacy in the aesthetic debate on the comparison between the arts (the so-called ‘Paragone’), thereby devaluing all subsequent writings that dealt with it in Spain or France because they would be 'repetitive'. Instead, we want to understand how and in what respects that discussion evolved when it crossed borders and was re-proposed, perhaps fifty or a hundred years later, in a different context. 

We do not know if we have always managed to pass this kind of message. Nor do we know whether there will be another occasion to celebrate in five years. For the time being, we just feel compelled to thank all those who have read us.