G. Briganti Biography
Giuliano Briganti (1918 - 1992) was born in Rome in 1918. His father, Aldo, a cultured merchant, humanist, was also an art historian; he was a student of Adolfo Venturi at the School of Specialization in Art History, recently created by Venturi himself in the Faculty of Letters at La Sapienza University of Rome. In 1936, Briganti obtained his classical high school diploma at the Ennio Quirino Visconti high school in Rome. In 1940 he graduated in Literature with a historical-artistic focus at the La Sapienza University of Rome, discussing a thesis on Pellegrino Tibaldi, a sixteenth-century Lombard painter (from the lake area). The thesis will take the form of a real monographic essay at the end of World War II, with the title Mannerism and Pellegrino Tibaldi. Briganti's activity as a scholar and art critic began very early, at less than twenty years old: the first art writings in the monthly "La Ruota" date back to 1937. On this magazine, of which he has been editor since 1940, alongside Mario Alicata, Antonello Trombadori, Guglielmo Petroni, Carlo Muscetta, he writes several texts and collaborates until 1941. From 1938 he began to publish essays and reviews on “La Critica d'Arte ”, the art magazine founded by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli. Between June 1944 and March 1946 he was editor in chief of the weekly "Cosmopolita", founded during the liberation of Rome. In addition to him, many of the most famous intellectuals of the Italian twentieth century wrote in that weekly, from Carlo Lizzani to Michelangelo Antonioni, from Enzo Forcella to Giorgio Bassani, from Renato Guttuso to Roberto Longhi, from Anna Banti to Guido Carli. The activity of writing in magazines and newspapers will accompany Giuliano Briganti throughout his life. From 1965 to 1968 he wrote the art column every week in L'Espresso. From 1976 he was the critic of "la Repubblica". He will be secretary of the master Roberto Longhi in Florence, from 1941 to 1943. From 1950, alongside Francesco Arcangeli, Ferdinando Bologna and Federico Zeri, he is part of the editorial staff of the newly founded magazine “Paragone Arte”, founded by Roberto Longhi. In 1949 he became a professor of university teaching. In 1972 he was called to teach history of modern and contemporary art at the University of Siena and in 1983 he arrived in Rome where, for a decade, he held the chair of history of modern art in what was then the Magisterium and is today the Third University of Rome.
