Intellettuali e artisti russi in visita all’Accademia Carrara: gli incontri con Giuseppe Diotti

The essay femphazyses the role of the Carrara Academy and its Pinacoteca in the fascination exercised by Italian art on the Russian intelligentsia in the 1830s and 1840s.
In particular, we focus our attention on the impressions that the meeting with the director of the Carrara Academy , Giuseppe Diotti, and the visit to the Art Gallery aroused in the soul of some of the greatest Russian artists and intellectuals of the time: the painter Aleksandr Ivanov (1806-1858), the poet Vasily Zhukovsky (1783-1852) and the scholar Fyodor Tchizhov (1811-1877). Through the analysis of memories and letters, published and unpublished, we proceed, case by case, to the reconstruction of works actually admired by travelers: it is a work complicated by vague descriptions, titles and transcripts of the names of the authors inaccurate and approximate. These all inconveniences are mainly due to nature strictly private documents.