Trame forti e orditi deboli: storiografia e stereotipi sull’arte medievale del Basso Adriatico tra Ottocento e Novecento.

This article reflects on the ways in which the medieval art of southern Italy—and more specifically that of Apulia—has been interpreted since the unification of Italy, within the broader context of the emergence of nationalisms. In general, the Middle Ages assumed a central role in the political and academic cultures of Europe between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as it was regarded as the period foreshadowing the formation of the European nation-states. The study examines the historiographic choices that, in this period, reveal a confrontation among different cultural traditions and scholarly methodologies, as well as divergent ideological stances. From the nineteenth century onward, the art of southern Italy attracted the attention above all of German and French scholars—such as Heinrich Wilhelm Schulz, Émile Bertaux, and Martin Wackernagel—and, later, of the American scholar Arthur Kingsley Porter. These figures placed the monuments of southern Italy within a broader framework, contributing to the emerging European debate on art history, which had only recently been institutionalized as a university discipline. The diversity of the artistic heritage of Southern Italy stood in contrast to contemporary attempts to define a unified Italian artistic identity, which were grounded in the search for a single stylistic model—typically the Lombard style—believed to have shaped a cohesive visual language across regions that were in reality diverse in their histories, geographies, and cultural exchanges. This complex interplay of perspectives reflects the experimental nature of the nascent discipline of art history and its plurality of methods, and it also involved an entire generation of Italian art historians, beginning with Adolfo Venturi, who held the first academic chair in art history in Italy.