Editor’s Note

Abstract

The subject of this issue’s cover is a conversation. The painting, Il colloquio, by the Sicilian artist Renato Guttuso, isn’t in the Berenson collection by chance (fig. 1). When he painted it in 1952, Guttuso had known Bernard Berenson for at least several years; among his extant letters to Berenson is a postcard sent from Poland shortly after the war, with a photo ofWarsaw still in ruins. Painted while Guttuso was staying at the Neapolitan villa of Berenson’s friend ClotildeMarghieri, this image of two women deep in intimate conversation was dedicated to Berenson, as can be seen from an inscription on the back. Given the vague if suggestive setting, this encounter could be happening anywhere—even on the hills of the Vincigliata. Berenson was hardly the only Renaissance art historian with whomGuttuso was in frequent contact during the 1940s and 50s. Another was Roberto Longhi, who along with Berenson was one of the “due massimi ‘guru’ della critica d’arte italiana del ’900,” as Maria Cristina Carratù puts it in her review of Guttuso e gli amici di Corrente, an exhibition held in honor of Guttuso’s centenary. Longhi’s and Berenson’s connections to Italian Renaissance art may not have influenced the painter’s esteem for them one way or the other, or necessarily shaped his work. But as Carl Strehlke has pointed out, Guttuso was particularly fond of Caravaggio, with whose memorable works he contrasted (unfavorably) the unrealistic abstractness of contemporary art—a comparison Berenson and Longhi made as well. Roughly a decade after Il colloquio, a new movement appeared in the art world: Arte Povera, a term coined by the young Germano Celant. It flourished in no small part because of “colloqui” between artists and critics, as Teresa Kittler argues in her essay on Celant. And this conversation frequently invoked Renaissance art as a pathway to creativity, as Kittler demonstrates the extent to which Celant relied on the work of his erstwhile teacher, the art historian Eugenio Battisti. Celant’s “conversations” with Battisti himself as well as with his books produced a strong affirmation of the materiality of Arte Povera, its immersion within and connection to a natural world typified by forces beyond the artist’s control: magic, the elements, organic