Napoli-Boston via Firenze: appunti su Ashton Rollins Willard e la ricezione critica americana di Morelli
Fausto Minervini
The figure of the American author Ashton Rollins Willard has always played a mysterious and marginal role in the context of the critical reception of Domenico Morelli’s art. Today, some new verifications and in-depth studies in Italian and foreign archives allow us to redefine with more clarity the profile of the American biographer, recalibrating his entire affair and his consideration of Morelli’s manner in the center of a web of artistic-literary contacts and relationships, which, between the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth Century, related three seemingly distant realities such as Naples, Florence, and Boston, and in which took part some primary personalities such as John Singer Sargent and Edwin Austin Abbey.