S. Pierguidi – Abstract

Between april and october 1604, Federico Zuccari painted a fresco in the 'Salone' of the Collegio Borromeo in Pavia. In those months Zuccari should have written four letters published by Stefano Ticozzi in the nineteenth century edition of Giovanni Bottari's Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architettura. In the last fifty years no art historian has ever doubted of the authenticity of those letters. In 1928 Roberto Longhi had instead judged them as a forgery by Ticozzi, while in 1948 Walter Friedlaender wrote that Ticozzi could have manipulated original letters by Zuccari. Friedlaender's hipothesis was certainly right: Ticozzi must have interpolated Zuccari's letters, but some of them were written during the first North Italian sojourn of the painter (1563-65), not during the 1604. The passages added by Ticozzi were all in defense of the Lombard School of Painting, as a very late reaction to Vasari's Lives (1568).