[Recensione a] Le tecniche della pittura medievale: materiali, lavorazioni e percezione visiva By Virginia Caramico. 244 pp. incl. 74 col. ills. (Einaudi, Turin, 2024)

The article is a review of 'Le tecniche della pittura medievale' by Virginia Caramico, a book that is a felicitous union of art-historical and technical expertise and a rare and welcome exception to the compartmentalisation of disciplines between art history and conservation-restoration and scientific research. In evocative prose, Caramico offers an exercise in the ‘philology of perception’ of the polytechnical and polymaterial surfaces of late medieval Italian panel and wall painting, ‘aimed at retrieving what is missing on the surface, what can no longer be seen, but also problematising what the painters never intended to be seen’ (p.xxiv). Her approach is to combine a discussion of the techniques described by Cennino Cennini in his Il libro dell’arte (written c.1400) with consideration of the condition of works and, above all, close looking, focusing not only on the way in which pictorial effects were achieved but also on why they were chosen.