"SeleArte" di Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti: lezioni di storia dell'arte su rivista

This essay presents the “seleARTE” magazine, founded and run by the critic Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti from Lucca, who worked on this project together with his wife Licia Collobi. This magazine was published by the Olivetti company from Ivrea and printed by Vallecchi publishing house. During almost 14 years, the magazine had thousands of readers in Italy as well as in the rest of the world. It was a daring attempt (which obtained anyway a huge and true success) of taking away the subject of art from the specialists and of fulfilling the interests and the expectations of a larger and vary audience, without the risk of superficial publications. Considering that Ragghianti was the director, the supervisor of the editorials and that he wrote by himself more than a half of the published articles on “seleARTE”, it is obvious that the magazine itself gives the chance to observe and analyze the work’s and everyday’s life of the critic. Some are the issues I wanted to deepen on this essay, such as the birth of “seleARTE”, how and when the collaboration among Ragghianti, Olivetti and Vallecchi took place, how the magazine structure worked; but above these all the methodological requirements, the contents and communicative conditions on which the critic’s project of artistic “information” and “formation” is based. It is explained how art pedagogy promoted by the critic is based on a orderly aesthetic and history-critic training of the readers. From the 1930’s Ragghianti was one of the most convinced supporter of Croce and the formalist philosophy and this tendency is very clear since those are the starting and final point of every “lesson” he writes on the magazine. The purpose of giving to the readers a huge but selected documentation about art and its vary expressions took place thanks to articles whose subjects are painting, drawing, architecture, photography, theatre, cinema, applied arts and industrial design. Since Ragghianti is an “universal” critic, he challenges himself with the most different geographical and time phenomenon, from prehistory to contemporary years, from Europe, to Asia, to Africa, to Oceania. The aim of the critic from Lucca is to promote a modern art consciousness that is meant to be an enrichment both for the individual and the society. At the end, two were the main purposes of Ragghianti’s didactic through the magazine: a democratized culture (art culture, in this case) and civilian improvement.