IL FONDO AMORETTI: ARTE, ERUDIZIONE E COLLEZIONISMO TRA SETTE E OTTOCENTO

Among the most fascinating-and perhaps least known-personalities of Enlightenment Milan can be counted Carlo Amoretti (1741-1816), a scholar from Liguria by birth but Milanese by adoption. Best known to his contemporaries as an agronomist and naturalist, he also distinguished himself as a polygraph and tireless traveler. He was the first Italian translator of Winckelmann, and as a doctor of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana he dealt on several occasions with Leonardo da Vinci. The thesis aims to investigate his antiquarian and art-historical interests, starting with the numerous manuscripts preserved at the Istituto Lombardo - Accademia di Scienze e Lettere in Milan, which in recent years have emerged as a mine of unpublished information. Through six thematic sections, accompanied by an anthology of texts and images, it is intended to shed light on Amoretti’s affairs, particularly delving into his relationship with the figurative arts. The aim is to draw a complete picture of the dense web of relationships he weaved and the context in which he operated, as well as to restore little-known pieces of the complex cultural scene of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Milan. These are pages that do not originate as sources for art history, but which we have tried to place in a broader horizon, that of the history of erudition, in which the polygraph was able to carve out a prominent role, long neglected by studies. Indeed, his notes on artistic spoliations at the time of the French Revolution, the rediscovery of the Middle Ages and Lombard primitives, or local collecting allow us to add new elements to the understanding of the “still enigmatic Italian diagram between the arts and Enlightenment thought”.