Millard Meiss: Tra Connoisseurship, iconologia e Kulturgeschichte

A member of that first generation trained in the golden age of American history of art between the 1920s and 30s, Millard Meiss (1904-1975) developed a new and multi-faceted methodological approach. On the one hand, the connoisseurship he learned from his first mentor, Richard Offner, was applied in the essays on Tuscan Trecento, from Francesco Traini in Pisan Camposanto, to the disputes between Duccio and Cimabue, to the Assisi problem. On the other hand, his study of the connections between Italy and Flanders and their stylistic crossroads in French illumination was, conversely, stimulated by his encounter with Panofsky, together with a reconsideration of his method now aimed at analysing the meaning of the artwork. A course which led Meiss to focus on the influences of the philosophical and religious climate on art in his famous Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, whose problematic reception in the Anglo-Saxon and Italian milieus sparked a debate on the social history of art. This was coupled with a sensibility for the study of art techniques and restoration resulting in Meiss’s personal involvement in the committees for the recovery of the works damaged by the war (ACRIM) and, once again, to rescue Florentine and Venetian heritage after the flood in 1966 (CRIA). Finally, some useful elements to consider the scholar’s critical fortune may be seen in his relationships with Italian art historians, within the framework of the likewise difficult acceptance of iconology in Italy.