Giovanni Testori su la Semaine Sanglant e sulla retrospettiva di Manet del 1983
Paolo Emilio Antognoli
In 1983 the Italian writer Giovanni Testori (Novate Milanese, 1923 – Milan, 1993) published on «Paragone», the Roberto Longhi’s art journal, a short essay entitled Manet and the ‘semaine sanglant’, dedicated to an unpublished painting by Èdouard Manet: La barricade. The following text allows to broaden the topic framework from the single essay by Testori to the wider Italian reception of the great Manet’s exhibition held in Paris at the Grand Palais. Testori himself reviews the 1983 Parisian exhibition in the «Corriere della Sera». The text, proceeding by sampling and comparisons, through the writings, allows to illuminate Testori’s attention to a painter so apparently distant from his interests, in crucial years of change for European art culture, in the passage from the season of the neo-avant-gardes to the postmodern return to painting.