Dipinti tra sguardo e pensiero. Studi attorno a Giorgione, Morazzone e Tiepolo

Alessandro Rossi’s Ph.D. thesis is divided into three essays concerning the sixteenth- and eighteenth-century Venetian painting (Giorgione and Tiepolo) and the seventeenth-century Lombard painting (Morazzone). The titles are: I) Giorgione, Titian, Sebastiano. A problematic picture in the Detroit Institute of Arts: a new interpretation; II) Angelic migrations, from origin to vortex. The question of the model; III) The Old Man Embracing a Maiden. From Tiepolo to Warburg and back. History of Art as History of Symptomatic Intensity. Through an interdisciplinary approach each essay will try to investigate the rules of the hermeneutic procedure. The aim of this research is to try to give traditional Art History some possible methodological tools with which to face the anthropological complexity of images. The (artistic) image which is the principal object of this research has been conceived as a temporal stratification of multiple fusions of horizons, or as an elaborate formal and conceptual container of gazes and thoughts. Overlaying one another, these create strata that are not geologically crystallised but, on the contrary, porous and constantly (if not easily) permeable to other, novel forms of looking and thinking. This porousness of the object of study is especially expressed on a methodological level, in an attempt to cross between two disciplines such as History and Philosophy, using as a guiding principle what Georges Didi-Huberman (2002) wrote regarding Aby Warburg’s method: “Being a philologist beyond the facts (because the ultimate value of facts lies in the fundamental questions they activate) and being a philosopher beyond the systems (because the ultimate value of fundamental questions lies in their individual applications to history)”.