Abstract

Paolo D’ancona was among the first university Professors of art History in italy. He taught at the università degli Studi in Milan from 1908 to 1954 and while there he formed a large number of pupils. today his activity as a teacher and divulgator has to be regarded as more important than his scholarly one: starting in the mid-1920s D’ancona, who until then had focused mainly on the History of illumination, devoted himself especially to the divulgation of art History, constantly updated and expounded in a very clear manner in schoolbooks and printed works that were meant to have a large circulation. this article is centered mostly around a brief foreword to Benvenuto cellini’s Vita, in which D’ancona drifts away from adolfo Venturi’s and igino Benvenuto Supino’s well-established critical patterns in order to define the artist’s Mannerism in very modern terms, also by accurately appraising his sculptures, that he came to fully appreciate for their formal and intentionally refined elegance. the echo of this short, yet very appropriate art History lesson cannot be found in contemporary art literature, but only in the pages by the philologists and scholars that from that moment on wrote a foreword to cellini’s Vita: enrico carrara, Bruno Maier, ettore Bonora, carlo cordié. D’ancona owes the surprisingly modern interpretation of these works of art to honest pedagogical practice, rather than to rigorous disciplinary orientation: he was strongly influenced by the personality of his father, alessandro D’ancona, an italian literature professor at the normale di Pisa for almost half a century, and followed his model by taking cues from the method of the faded historical school and by updating it thanks to the warm bond he had struck up with lionello Venturi as well as with other scholars of his time