Biography:
Francesco Nevola
Francesco Nevola
Francesco Nevola is an independent scholar based in Cortona, Italy. He is currently working on the catalogue raisonné of the drawings in public collections by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Since 2016 he has collaborated regularly with the Gemälde Alter Meister department of Dorotheum GmbH & Co KG.
Francesco is the author of Giovanni Battista Piranesi: the Grotteschi, the early years1720-1750, Rome 2009 (Italian translation: Giovanni Battista Piranesi: i Grotteschi, gli anni giovanilli 1720-1750 ‘troppo pittore…per essere incisore’ Rome 2010): this work is an extensive text-based elucidation of Piranesi’s suite of prints from the 1740s positioning these ‘perplexing works of fantasy’ as both pivotal works in the artist’s career and as a significant contribution, in the form of contemporary allegory, to the socio-political events that shaped his age. He is also the author of the architectural monographs Il Palazzo della Consulta e l’architettura romana di Ferdinando Fuga, Rome 2004 and Soane’s Favourite Subject: The Story of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London 2000 (published to accompany the exhibition, curated by the author, held at Dulwich Picture Gallery, May – July 2000).
He is the contributing editor, organiser and project initiator of Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Predecessors, Contemporaries and Successors. Studies in honour of John Wilton-Ely, a cura di Francesco Nevola, in Studi sul Settecento Romano XXXII / Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, Roma 2016 and with Anne Marie Leander-Touati he was co-organiser of the symposium Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Predecessors, Contemporaries and Successors, hosted and sponsored by The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, Stockholm: 2nd to 4th September 2015.
He is the copy-editor of The Drawings of Giorgio Vasari, Florian Hearb, Rome 2015 and The Drawings of Pietro da Cortona, Rome (forthcoming). He is the translator of several monographic art books including: I dipinti del Guercino, Luigi Salerno, Rome 1988, new edition revised and enlarged by Nicholas Turner, Rome 2017; Storia di Una Galleria Romana. La Genealogia degli Dèi di Jacopo Zucchi e le Famiglie Rucellai, Caetani, Ruspoli, Memmo, a cura di Anna D’Amelio, Rome, 2013; Opere d’Arte dalle Collezioni di Ascoli Piceno: la Pinacoteca Civica e il Museo Diocesano. Scoperte, ricerche e nuove proposte, a cura di Stefano Papetti, Rome 2012.
Francesco was previously co-director of the commercial project space Teverina Fine Art, Cortona, Italy a platform for emerging Italian and international contemporary artists (2009-2014); he has catalogued old master works held by English Heritage in London and the South East for the National Inventory Research Project (2004-2008); he curated the exhibition Celebrating the Sea (December 2005 – June 2006) at the Russell-Cotes Museum and Art Gallery, Bournemouth; he was assistant curator of Dulwich Picture Gallery, from 1996 to 2001. He studied at University College London and at the Courtauld Institute.
February 2021