Biography

Alice Ottazzi has a doctorate in art history from the University of Turin and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. As a Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Paris-Nanterre (2022-2024), she also taught at the universities of Aix-Marseille, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Franche-Comté. Winner of the Wolfgang-Ratjen-Preis (2020), her research focuses mainly on the history of drawing and printmaking, with an emphasis on the relationship between the material and theoretical dimensions, on British and French art (17th-18th c.) and on the history of collecting. Her book Trésors d’une île. La ricezione della scuola inglese a Parigi nel XVIII secolo was published in 2024 (Polistampa) with the support of the Tavolozza Foundation.

Project Summary

While the use of gold in early Renaissance painting is a well-known phenomenon, its use in drawing has gone somewhat unnoticed and catalogued, sometimes erroneously as a gold point, or merely as a highlight. Although such a classification gives it an auxiliary role, an initial investigation of a few drawings shows some distinctive features compared to the use of the same material in 15th- and 16th-century painting. In fact, it would seem that there is no systematic correspondence between a preparatory drawing in which the artist decided to use gold as a scriptural/pictorial material and the subsequent painting explicated by it. In addition, its use in drawing seems to be governed by practical and theoretical issues independent of the pictorial field, thus giving it conceptual autonomy and highlighting projectual, ornamental, symbolic, and referential functions, which will allow for reflection on the duality of the drawing/pictorial gesture and the color/matter connections. This project intends to analyze the technical, stylistic and theoretical outcomes of the use of gold in 15th- and 16th-century Italian graphic production, and to bring out of the shadows a drawing practice that allows the artist to grasp, through a drawing/pictorial gesture, the intermediality of a technique that finds autonomy in Renaissance graphic art.