Clash of Titans. Venturi, Kondakov, and the Staging of Late Medieval Venetian Painting in the History of Art History

The emergence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European nationalisms led the continents' old powers to exploit art history - only then emerging as a discrete discipline - in their broader nation -building strategies. Separate countries' multifaceted historical traditions brought the development of different artistic paths and, consequently, distinct interpretations of the same artistic phenomena. This article presents an example of this dynamic by concentrating on the divergent views of late medieval Venetian painting proposed in the early twentieth century by two giants of art history, Adolfo Venturi and Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov. By contextualizing their opposing ideas in the wider debate on Giotto and fourteenth-century Italian art, this study ultimately reveals the close connections between the two scholars' theoretical positions and the cultural propaganda of their respective states, the Kingdom of Italy, and the Russian Empire.