Federico Zeri

Federico Zeri (August 21, 1921 – October 5, 1998) was an Italian art historian, a specialist in Italian Renaissance painting. He wrote for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, and was a well known television-personality in Italy. He had given lifelong effort to acquainting lesser known artists, schools and works.

Zeri was born in central Rome, and graduated from Sapienza University of Rome in 1945. Not wishing to entrench in the academic world, he worked in the Ministry of Public Education until 1952. In 1948 he was made director of Galleria Spada in Rome.

In 1963 Zeri was among the founding members of the Getty Villa's board of trustees. He had left in 1984, after his opinion, that the Getty kouros was a forgery and should not be bought, was not accepted.

He pointed at other forgeries and mis-attributions. In 1984, when four students, planting sculptures in a canal in Livorno, hoaxed both the city and Modigliani experts, he was among the few who called on the amateurish style. Regarding some frescoes at the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi, he argued they are works of Pietro Cavallini rather than Giotto. Zeri insisted that a painting can be attributed to an artist, by means of a careful examination or connoisseurship, without resort to external evidence such as documents or dates. The work is to be systematically characterised by its techniques and ideas, which in turn would evidence a circle of artists and schools that influenced the author's development, and from whom he borrowed, with their relative importance. An hypothetical biography can then be constructed, of an anonymous person that was able to meet all those influences and study their work. At which stage, historians might be inclined to attribute other known works to Anonymous. Finally, a matching historical person might be found in documentation.

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