"Questa faccenda delle edizioni". La storia di Electa Editrice tra 1944 e 1952 (circa)

[Machine translation] Through an unpublished corpus of archival documents selected after a long exploration of the Black Heirs Archive and other private and public archives, the research of Patrizia Zambrano and Marco M. Mascolo reconstructed for the first time the genesis, the birth and the events of the first decade of life and activity of the Electa publishing house (in Florence first, then in Milan after 1949). The essay proceeds on two registers: the first is the reconstruction of the historical events of the publishing house and of the characters who founded, directed and animated it in the first decade. In the second, the authors read and interpreted, based on archival sources, the history of Electa's publications and therefore (by diachrony and type) the series, the monographs, the volumes of essays, with the aim of investigating/analyzing the form of the book and its evolution in the crucial decade of its foundation. The course of the essay also keeps an eye on the authors active for Electa, scholars (art historians, architects, writers, writers, writers) with whom, since its inception, Electa knew how to weave a dense network of relationships, both in Italy, in Europe and in America, where regular contacts were with directors and curators of the great public art collections. The result is an unprecedented, complex and articulated fresco, which sees some figures emerge in particular, starting with those of the two founders, Paola Moroni and Dario Neri, the real souls of the first Electa publishing project. In addition to and alongside them, the essay outlines the figures of the great authors, consultants and collaborators, from Bernard Berenson, whose publishing house published almost all the works of the decade under review, to Géza de Fràncovich, to Enzo Carli, to Kenneth Clark, to Max J. Friedlander and many others., The double register has made it possible both to follow the historical events of the publishing house, and therefore also of art publishing in Italy, and to reconstruct, from a completely new point of view, the decisive transformations that took place in the world of Italian cultural production in the post-war decade. The change in relations with the authors, the progressive organization and standardization of production (corresponding to the transfer of the publishing house from Florence to Milan), the very rapid decline of cultural projects in the years immediately following the Second World War and the need to transform the art book into a real 'product' accessible to everyone are all phenomena that the essay focuses on.