«L’ho fatto tagliare a fette». Un progetto inedito di Enrico Castelnuovo per l’edizione italiana di A History of Painting in North Italy

In the early 1960s Enrico Castelnuovo, in collaboration with Mina Gregori and Carlo Volpe, conceived an ambitious editorial project, then left uncompleted: the translation and updating of the second edition of A History of Painting in North Italy by Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Joseph Archer Crowe. Castelnuovo wrote “I had it cut into slices”, referring to the division of chapters whose review of notes was entrusted to more than thirty collaborators. Despite the initial enthusiasm and the support of the publishing house Einaudi, the initiative was soon abandoned. This essay reconstructs how the original idea, developed under the influence of Roberto Longhi, was discarded before the mid-1960s. That revealing an implicit reflection on how to approach the “classics” of art history: should their re-edition prioritize textual updating or concentrate on critical commentary and scholarly apparatus? The editions of art-historical literature overseen by Paola Barocchi clearly exemplify a new approach. Castelnuovo himself adopted a different stance during the same period in his re-edition of La pittura e la miniatura nella Lombardia by Pietro Toesca and in the methodological statements clarified in the preface, although not without oscillations in the development of the «Biblioteca di storia dell’arte» series.