Giuseppe Cavalli

Giuseppe Cavalli:
the man who invented fine art photography
Carlo Emanuele
Bugatti
Giuseppe Cavalli was widely mourned when he died in Senigallia, in 1961, and everyone acknowledged the artistic
genius that had distinguished his untiring activity at a national level.
But although Cavalli had devoted much of his energy to teaching while part of the Misa group, there were no
artistic heirs who wished or were equipped to carry on his legacy at a theoretical level, except for Ferroni. He was
the only one who, despite his busy lawyer’s practice, found time to apply Cavalli’s lesson with such ideal rigour and
artistic skill that he was named Artist of the Year by the Italian Federation of Photographic Associations (FIAF) in
2006.
Mario Giacomelli and Silvio Branzi had deliberately caused a stir by breaking with the master linguistically some
time previously, choosing to follow paths characterized by powerful Neorealist images, which diverged completely
from Cavalli’s poetics based on intuition, harmony and luminous equilibrium.
The increasing international attention later given to Giacomelli’s particular brand of Fauvism put Cavalli’s cultivated
creativity in the shade for a long period. At least until historical research into the matrices of fine art photography
in the second half of the twentieth century gave due importance to Cavalli’s critical writings for the magazine
Ferrania, and Giacomelli himself returned to the theoretic roots of the dynamics of fine art photography, with a view
to engaging in innovative research and breaking new ground in the future.
This renewed focus on Cavalli was strengthened through the establishment of the collections and a body of documentation
at the Museo Comunale d’Arte Moderna, dell’Informazione e della Fotografia in Senigallia, and the
writing of the Manifesto del passaggio di frontiera (Crossing of Frontier Manifesto) by Mario Giacomelli and another
giant of Italian photography, Berengo Gardin, supported by Enzo Carli and other photographers from Senigallia,
whose premises, procedures and aesthetic principles were indebted to Cavalli’s methodology.
Later, the commitment undertaken by Cavalli’s son Daniele, who first alone and then in collaboration with the
Museum, embarked on the systematic cataloguing of the artist’s works and writings, greatly contributed to boosting
his father’s image.
Today, Cavalli’s fundamental role in the invention of Italian fine art photography in the second half of the twentieth
century is becoming increasingly clearer. A role that sprang from his seeing photography as an autonomous art
whose technical means distinguished it from painting but which was equally poetic. A role facilitated by the fact that
his brother Emanuele was not only one of the leading exponents of early-twentieth-century Italian painting, but also
a skilled photographer and familiar with the aesthetic debate on photography.
In the first catalogue of the Mario Giacomelli Civic Collection, I published some of the photographic prints
Emanuele used to send to his artist friends on special occasions or trips. Aside from these documents, it suffices to
say that Virgilio Guidi came out in favour of photography as an autonomous art at the Misa group’s first exhibition
in Rome, expressing a line of thought acquired in the most cultivated Rome circles, which was profoundly influenced
by Emanuelle Cavalli’s vision.
The important exhibition staged last year by the Museo di Roma - Palazzo Braschi, in the ambit of the fifth edition
of FotoGrafia – Festival internazionale di Roma, helped to establish Giuseppe Cavalli’s rightful role in the history
of contemporary art. A role that was recognized in many different milieus, even during the long period before
the cataloguing of his work was complete – although some excellent monographs were published on the occasion of
exhibitions both in Italy and England, despite the silence that followed his death and ended his preeminence as a
theorist of Italian fine art photography.
Daniele Cavalli donated the entire corpus of his father’s known photographs to the Museo Comunale d’Arte
Moderna, dell’Informazione e della Fotografia in 2004. This made it possible to create a digital catalogue that can
Director of the Museo
Comunale d’Arte
Moderna,
dell’Informazione
e della Fotografia
(MUSINF), Senigallia
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