Per una storia dello sguardo: studi sulla ricezione in Italia tra storia dell’arte e antropologia (1945-2000)

The dialogue between art history and anthropology that has taken place in Italy since the post-World War II period remains a relevant issue today, within a broader reflection on decoloniality, as we seek to update the philological method through which we interpret the reception of non-Western cultures. Attempting an initial, certainly non-exhaustive, survey of the various forms of encounter and contact between Italian art and foreign arts in the second half of the twentieth century entails the necessity of working in an inhospitable field of inquiry, not only due to the geographical and cultural distance of the objects under examination, but also, in many cases, due to the format and nature of their documentation, which is often incomplete and of uncertain translation—in the case of African, Oceanic, Mesoamerican, and South American—but also radically different from the types of sources traditionally used in philology. It is therefore inevitable to resort to the prudence of “non-specialism,” not to be confused, of course, with a renunciation of the attempt to understand them and situate them within a historical perspective by fostering a dialogue between anthropology and art history.