«Saper vedere»: su due scritti poco noti di Pietro Toesca

The article examines two little-known articles by the Italian art historian Pietro Toesca (1877-1962), published in the journal Annali della istruzione media: Una lezione su Giotto (1929) and «Saper vedere» (1932). Giovanni Romano (1996) mentioned them as rare examples of Toesca’s methodological reflections after the pivotal introduction to his Il Medioevo (1927, but the first section of the volume had already been published in 1913). Roberto Longhi (1950), who had studied with Toesca at the University of Turin, briefly praised «Saper vedere», while Una lezione su Giotto was republished in Paragone, the very journal founded and directed by Longhi himself, in 1967, with a few preliminary notes by Giovanni Previtali, who highlighted its exemplary value. Following the recent renewed focus on Toesca’s two articles by Gianni Carlo Sciolla (2009), Manuela Gianandrea (2020), and Marco Ruffini (2020), this contribution fully analyses both texts, investigating the meaning and origin of Toesca’s consideration that the direct observation of artworks and the comprehension of their peculiar stylistic qualities laid the foundations of art history.