Alessandro Baudi di Vesme e la scoperta dell’arte in Piemonte

Like Adolfo Venturi and Corrado Ricci, Alessandro Baudi of Vesme (1854-1923) belonged to the last generation of scholars and self-taught officials who worked, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the delicate process of affirmation of the historical-artistic discipline in Italy. Historical director of the Royal Pinacoteca of Turin and first superintendent of galleries and art classes in Piedmont and Liguria, Vesme added to his institutional commitments an intense activity of study of the local figurative culture with a privileged look on the events of the painting of the Four and the sixteenth century, in full alignment with the guidelines of the European historiographic debate of those years. Underlined by a perspective of cultural rehabilitation aimed at redeeming the subalpine region from the ranks of the suburbs of art, those investigations gave rise to a project of philological edition of the sources that still today is considered the documentary reference par excellence in the history of the arts in Piedmont: Schme Vesme, published posthumously between 1963 and 1982. The volume traces the critical and professional profile of their author through the thread of mutual interaction between the research plans and the protection initiatives promoted by him, relating and legitimizing his individual experiences in the light of the comparison with the Italian and foreign interlocutors and the requests, methods and peculiarities of the Piedmontese context.