Photographs of Egyptian Antiquities for Art Studies: A Selection by Gaetano Lodi in the Wladimiro Dorigo Archive

Abstract

This paper focuses on a precious corpus of 19th century photographs with Egyptian subjects, kept in the Photo Library of the art historian Wladimiro Dorigo at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The research traces the production context and the acquisition origin of this corpus. Since no reference documents were available, the analysis was based on the photo-objects and a wide-ranging bibliography. The study shows that the corpus was acquired in Cairo by the painter Gaetano Lodi in the 1870s, and found by Dorigo more than a century later, following the path of his ‘master’, Sergio Bettini.

DOI: 10.4424/rsf2020-9