Farewell to Augusto Gentili, among the foremost experts on the Venetian Renaissance

Art historian Augusto Gentili, one of the foremost experts on the art of the Venetian Renaissance, a leading scholar on Titian and a master of several generations of art historians, passed away today at the age of 82. The news was broken by Ansa. Born in Rome on Feb. 17, 1943, he was one of the leading specialists on Venetian painting of the 15th and, especially, 16th centuries. Formerly a professor of Venetian art history at Rome’s “La Sapienza” University, he later taught modern art history at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, where he continued and consolidated a long course of research and training that profoundly affected Italian art-historical studies.

His teaching activity took place at “La Sapienza” University of Rome between 1983 and 1997, then at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice from 1998 to 2013, but it extended far beyond the institutional academic sphere. In fact, Gentili is also known as a mentor to generations of young scholars, trained in a dimension of continuous and rigorous dialogue, often evoked as his “garden of conversations” (this is also the title of a Festschrift, or celebratory book, published in his honor by his students in 2024), founded on critical confrontation, attention to detail and the art historian’s interpretive responsibility.

Gentili has dedicated his research to the historical-documentary and iconological-contextual investigation of Venetian painting, approached with a strongly multidisciplinary approach. Indeed, the Roman scholar has made a decisive contribution to renewing the history of 16th-century Venetian painting, introducing a method that interweaves iconology, cultural history, anthropology, history of institutions, and problems of theory and methodology. In this sense, his work has shifted the focus from the work as an isolated object to the work as a node of cultural, symbolic and social relations.

Throughout his career, he has published numerous studies on fundamental artists in the Italian figurative tradition, including Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Cima da Conegliano, Giorgione, Sebastiano Luciani, Lorenzo Lotto, Savoldo, Paris Bordon, Jacopo Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese. Some of his books have become indispensable reference points: The Gardens of Contemplation. Lorenzo Lotto 1503-1512 (1985), The Portrait and Memory: Materials (1989), The Stories of Carpaccio. Venice, the Turks, the Jews (1996) and The Archangel’s Scales. Seeing Details in Sixteenth-Century Venetian Painting (2009), a work that offers one of the earliest and most articulate critical praise of detail as a site of meaning and symbolic construction.

An absolute reference scholar for the work of Titian, Gentili has devoted a central and continuous part of his scholarly production to the Cadore master. From his early studies on mythological and allegorical images, which flowed into Da Tiziano a Tiziano. Mito e allegoria nella cultura veneziana del Cinquecento (1996), to the more mature and systematic works such as Titian (2012) and Titian. The Sensuality of Color (2023), Gentili has offered profoundly innovative readings capable of combining formal analysis, theoretical reflection and long-term cultural interpretation. He also made numerous contributions to Giunti’s Dossier d’Art series: Gentili has signed monographs on Titian, Veronese, Bellini, Tintoretto, Carpaccio, and Giorgione. His most recent contribution, Titian’s Infinite Painting, appeared in the catalog of the exhibition The Unfinished: between Poetics and Technique of Performance (2026), which opened Jan. 15 at the Pinacoteca Capitolina. Also a few weeks old (October 2025) is his latest book, Portraits in Detail. Venice and Environs, 1500 - 1575, published by Bulzoni Editore.

In 1991 Gentili also founded the six-monthly journal Venezia Cinquecento. Studies in Art History and Culture (later Venezia ’500), which he directed and edited until 2015 for a total of fifty issues. The journal has been one of the privileged sites of the widespread renewal of studies on Venetian figurative culture, and has hosted innovative research, methodological debates, and contributions from Italian and international scholars.

Farewell to Augusto Gentili, among the foremost experts on the Venetian Renaissance

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