Una polemica situata e da situare. Dicembre 1963: Lonzi vs. Argan

A situated disputation still to situate. December 1963: Carla Lonzi vs. Giulio Carlo Argan MICHELE DANTINI A sharp disputation occurs in December 1963 between Carla Lonzi, art critic and pupil of Roberto Longhi, and Giulio Carlo Argan, maybe the most influential art historian in Italy at the time, Lionello Venturi’s heir at La Sapienza University, Rome. Lonzi strongly refuses Argan’s ex cathedra attitudes, that seem highly instrumental and authoritarian to her. But her polemic against cultural patriarchy goes beyond Argan and invests her Master and Mentor, Longhi himself. Argan never replies to Lonzi. But precisely his silence discloses both cultural and political ambiguities. Argan’s positions on contemporary art are deeply rooted in topics about Nation and Primacy developed in the late Thirties’, when he’s particularly close to Longhi and the then italian minister of culture Giuseppe Bottai. Through Argan, conventionally opposed to Longhi, Longhi’s inheritance appears much more complex and politically involved than his postwar self-stylization in terms of “straight connoisseur” allows us to recognize.