Federico zeri biography
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Obituary: Federico Zeri
FEDERICO ZERI was at once doyen, black sheep and chief scourge of the Italian art-history world, building up his huge international reputation through painstaking research into the art of the 14th to 16th centuries, and refusing point blank to conform to the dictates of academe.
In a recent international survey Zeri ranked amongst the world's top 10 experts on Italian art. But, for all that, he was never given a university chair, and was feared and even hated by his fellow historians in Italy. The feeling was mutual: "He was the opposite of the small-minded, dreary, hide-bound Italian intellectual," recalled his close friend Roberto D'Agostino, with whom Zeri co-wrote the controversial satire Sbucciando Piselli ("Shelling Peas") in 1990. "He held them in utter contempt."
Unlike his fellow Italian art historians, the flamboyant Zeri - who in recent years took to appearing on television clad in flowing kaftans as a statement of the gulf separating him from t
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Federico Zeri
I was born in Rome in Via XXIV Maggio on 12 August 1921, a step away from the Quirinal and the statues of the Dioscuri. Federico Zeri links Papal Rome and Imperial Rome in connecting his cultural boundaries to an early vocation for art and classical antiquity, a dual thread which would run throughout his career as a scholar.
When at the University of Rome in the early 1940s, Zeri followed the courses of Pietro Toesca, under whom he graduated in 1945. It was an encounter which would change his life. Zeri's unconventional approach to the discipline made an early appearance in his degree thesis, where the subject was Jacopino del Conte, a painter of Roman Mannerism to whom little importance was given at the time. Zeri would often choose obscure viewpoints from which to ask innovative questions on the great themes in art history. Evidence of this is given in his book Pittura e Controriforma (Einaudi, Torino 1957) which, though the subtitle bore a reference to S
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Federico Zeri
Italian art historian
Federico Zeri (12 August 1921 – 5 October 1998) was an Italian art historian specialised in Italian Renaissance painting.[1][2] He wrote for the Italian newspaper La Stampa, and was a well known television-personality in Italy.[3]
Zeri was born in central Rome, and graduated from Sapienza University of Rome in 1945. Not wishing to enter the academic world, he worked in the Ministry of Public Education until 1952.[1] In 1948 he was nominated director of Galleria Spada in Rome.[4]
In 1963 Zeri was among the founding members of the Getty Villa's board of trustees. He left in 1984, after his argument that the Getty kouros was a forgery and should not be bought, was rejected.[1][5]
Following this episode, Zeri became notorious for denouncing forgeries and misattributions. In 1984, when four students in Livorno hoaxed both the city and Modigliani experts into believing th