This essay intends to introduce the readers of «Ricerche di Storia dell’arte» to the application of diplomatics to photographic archives. It consists of a retrospective foreword, an abridged version of   much longer essay which was written in response to Luciana Duranti’s challenge to find «new uses for an old science», and a bibliographical afterword. The central section surveys key concepts of diplomatics in the context of photographic form and function. Rather than dismissing this seventeenth-century discipline as arcane, outmoded, and of limited relevance to modern archives, it seeks to identify those analytical tools in the diplomatic toolkit, which are the most useful for teasing out the meanings embedded in photographic archives. Key diplomatic concepts are explored only in the context of analogue photographs and they remain to be fully investigated for the realm of digital images. The essay cautions that there are serious consequences of embracing a positivist tool in a postmodern world, and that it would be dangerous to accept and apply diplomatics uncritically to photographic archives. Nevertheless, diplomatic concerns can help to shift attention away from the content and focus on functional origins, authorial intentions, and presentational form. The essay concludes that photographs as documents must be situated, analyzed, and understood within both the evolution of communication and the changing roles and responsibilities of the archives.

Institutions preserving photographs contain materials that are invisible to historical narratives, to which we do not usually pay attention. But if we were willing to change our point of view and consider the materiality of the photographic objects and their sedimentation contexts as important, we would discover that it is possible to integrate the visual meanings traditionally attributed to photographs with other data useful to understand them. If we consider photographs as material objects to which things happen during their institutional life, we are allowed to trace their social biography. This is the case of Box 54, a miscellaneous box of photographs studied for the relations it has had over time with the practical activities of bureaucratic management, with the curatorial and critical intentions that have shaped its current form of presentation together with various interpretative acts. The authors thereby establish a methodological approach to identify what Foucault defined as the «rules of formation», useful for understanding the conditions of their realization.

Photographs are material objects that exist in space and time, endowed with a biography in large part transacted within the archive. So the archive is not only the place in which photographs are preserved, but also the one in which this biography can be restored to them. For this to happen, there needs to be a shift from the utilitarian approach based on the content of the photographic document to a broader understanding of the functional context of its provenance, production and sedimentation. In the archives, memory is not simply kept alive, but constantly shaped and reshaped, creating multiple narratives that always remain open and subject to revision. In this process of epistemic sedimentation and formation, archivists play an active role, whether consciously or not. This approach, conjugating theory and practice of photography and photographic archives, is applied to a group of photographs from the Gustav Ludwig bequest in the Florentine Photothek. The photographs presented here, whose card mounts, stamps, inscriptions etc. are an integral part, provide us with a rare glimpse into the mental and visual ‘laboratory’ of an art historian and an exceptional opportunity to reconstruct his daily routine – demonstrating at the same time the epistemological potential of photo archives of reproductions of works of art.

In a photograph does everything happen on its surface? Are there other interstitial dimensions and spaces through which it is possible to overcome the rhetoric of its mimesis? The text explores the possibility of considering the depth of the surface as a testing ground for new discussions on photography. The material body of the individual photographic objects, like the one of their sedimentations in the form of collections and archives, may lead to the theme of depth as an original dimension which would give rise to all the others. Starting with an approach based on the materiality of the photographs the ‘depth/surface’ relationship is identified, according to which there is no photograph without the support and there is no photographic image without the surface. This is thus the basis for a subsequent verification and nexus. From the material photographic object, from its being a palimpsest of the signs of social uses over time, it therefore shifts to the one of cosa (object, thing), which from the Latin causa (cause) refers to what we deem so important as to mobilize us in its defence, invested with meanings over time.

Long neglected by scholarship, Giuseppe Cesari (1568-1640), better known as the Cavalier d’Arpino, was one of the most important artists of papal Rome during his lifetime. While a young adolescent at work on the Vatican projects of Gregory XIII, his talent was recognised and his subsequent career was a succession of successes. Not much is known of his juvenile activity as a painter and even less as a draughtsman. In this article we will present to the readers a new drawing by the young Giuseppe Cesari, recently discovered among the anonymous sheets of the Louvre Museum’s graphic collection. The drawing, a pen and brown ink presentation project, was probably executed by the artist around 1585, when he was just seventeen years old, for a never executed commission, the decoration of the Sala dei Capitani in the Palazzo dei Conservatori.

The paper focuses on Bruce Nauman’s linguistic exploitations by means of a systematic analysis of his audio-installation Raw Materials: a site-specific work presented at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in 2004. Nauman’s work is mainly devoted to the understanding of the ‘functional limits of language’ and therefore to the deepening of all possible linguistic meanings of speech. This particular interest pervades Nauman’s corpus especially through the recurrence of dichotomous themes and conceptual pairs like public/ private, interior/exterior, meaningful/ meaningless, developing a constitutive tension that is the focal point of his work. The analysis of Raw Materials and all previous works flowing in it allows the individuation of a specific synchronic path that represents a distinctive feature of Nauman’s work: the recurring unbalance between language use and its meaning. In this contribution I will propose a new reading of the audio-installation by focusing on the recurrence of operational and expressive forms: the value of the context of use that recalls Wittgenstein’s theories; the perceptual ambiguity and the retroactive functionality of language; the sound materialization and manipulation as connotative functions of language; the author’s control over the viewer’s experience. Ultimately I will consider the role of language in Nauman’s work as a cohesive and privileged force within his corpus: a dialogic exchange between language and the totality of its possible visual exploitations.