Dictionary of Art HistoriansProfessor of art history, University of Turin; specialist in Italian Renaissance; work in late 19th and early 20th century art; influenced, like his father, by Benedetto Croce, later by Riegl and Wölfflin. Venturi was appointed at the University of Turin at a very young age. Among his first students was Mary Pittaluga, who wrote her ground-breaking thesis on Eugène Fromentin under Venturi. Probably the first to write a history of art criticism; exiled from Italy after refusing to swear loyalty to Mussolini; professor at Johns Hopkins University; University of Mexico (1942); associated with the école Libre des Hautes études (1943); chair in Art History at the University of Rome (1945-1955); Bampton Lectures at Columbia University (1955). His father was the art historian Adolfo Venturi. Venturi early expounded the works and concepts of Heinrich Wölfflin in an article "Gli schemi del Wölfflin," in the journal L'Esame (1922).
Full Name
Venturi, Lionello
Gender
Date Born
1885
Date Died
1961
Home Country
Overview
Selected Bibliography
Camille Pisarro: son art-- son oeuvre. Paris: P. Rosenberg, 1939.; Cézanne, son art, son oeuvre. Paris: P. Rosenberg, 1936; Impressionists and Symbolists. Translated by Frances Steegmuller. New York: Scribner, 1950.; Les archives de l'Impressionisme. Paris and New York: Durand-Ruel, editeurs, 1939.; "Gli studi di storia dell'arte medioevale e moderna." Saggi di Critica. Rome: 1956: 277-306; Art Criticism Now. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941; Storia della critica d'arte/ History of art criticism. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1936.
Sources
Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 3; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l'histoire de l'art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 437.