«Col maestro negli anni della tenebra». Giuseppe Galassi e la Storia dell’arte italiana di Adolfo Venturi: da Melozzo a Raffaello giovane

The historian and journalist Giuseppe Galassi (San Biagio di Argenta, 1890 – Roma, 1957), one of the most important critic and expert of Byzantine art and late antiquity sculpture and architecture during the first half of the last century, did not have the notoriety he should have been merited with Italian studies. Yet, since his youth, he played a leading role in art Italian literature, as testified by the words dedicated to him by Carlo Ludovico Ragghinati in his famous work Profile of art criticism in Italy(Second edition, Florence 1973), but now him has been forgotten from a academic world. An omission that this essay hopes to compensate by focusing on the beginnings of Galassi's career. When was in Rome, as a young student about to graduate with Adolfo Venturi, he helped the professor, who was suffering from cataracts and therefore practically blind, in the drafting of two volumes of the VII book of the Storia dell’arte italiana dedicated to the painters from North and Central Italy from the 15 th century (edited between 1913-1914). Thanks to that occasion, Galassi participated as protagonist in the debate on the possible participation of the young Raphael in the frescoes by Perugino at the Collegio del Cambio in Perugia.