The Photo Library of the Fondazione Ragghianti is accessible by appointment with Angelica Giorgi, who is in charge of it (angelica.giorgi@fondazioneragghianti.it).
The photo library of the Fondazione Ragghianti includes the collections of Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Licia Collobi, Pier Carlo Santini and the Lucca Photo Library.
Ragghianti Photo Library
The archives are a donation given, together with the library, to the Fondazione by Ragghianti and his wife and maintain the subdivision made by the givers themselves. They consist of about 160.000 images between photographs and clippings collected by Ragghianti himself over about forty years (1940-1980). More than 60.000 images are now inventoried and available online.
The archives consist above all of prints loose and clippings and only in a small part, of negatives on sheet of glass, slides and negatives on film. The Ragghianti Photo Library contain photos of works of art of the 19th and 20th centuries subdivided and ordered by author and country. The other sections are ordered by different themes: ancient and modern painting and sculpture, architecture, design, exhibition design, glasses, pottery, furnishing and other subjects.
Pier Carlo Santini Photo Library
The Santini Photo Library consists of about 20.000 pieces prevalently collected from the sixties to 1992 by Pier Carlo Santini, the first director of the Fondazione Ragghianti. It is a fund mainly dedicated to contemporary art, neither catalogued nor inventoried.
The material of the Santini collection can be consulted directly from the original.
Lucca Photo Library
The section of Lucca consists of 5.000 images among photographic prints, slides and negatives on film.
It includes the following photographic archives:
- Ghilardi Photo Library with 700 photographic prints. It was established in October 1995 and collects the reproductions of a large part of negatives on glass plate realized by the Lucca photographer Eugenio Ghilardi (Lucca, 1910-1985), granted for study use by his family.
- Fanelli-Trivisonno Photo Library with 330 photographic prints donated by Giovanni Fanelli and realized by the donors in the sixties.
- Santini Photo Library with 659 photographic prints
- Ragghianti Photo Library with 118 photographic prints.
- Fondazione Ragghianti Photo Library with 2.115 photographic prints, consisting of purchases and photographic campaigns carried out for exhibitions, meetings and/or activities of the Fondazione Ragghianti.
Digitalization and cataloguing of the Photo Library
The Fondazione Ragghianti initiated in 2002 under the direction of Vittorio Fagone a project to computerize the photographic archive, in a first phase, with the collaboration of Lucense SCpA, Meta and Gruppo Liberologico di Pisa (Centro Ricerche Informatiche Beni Culturali-SNS, Pisa in charge of the scientific project).
From 2015 under the direction of Maria Teresa Filieri, the Fondazione Ragghianti requested the scientific advice of the Fondazione Federico Zeri in Bologna to activate a project of enhancement, reorganization and cataloguing of the Ragghianti photo library. Under the coordination of Francesa Mambelli – expert consultant in the evaluation of photographic archive materials – the digitization and cataloguing of the materials began, in accordance with the criteria adopted by the Zeri Photo Archive. IDS Unitelm developed the software. The cataloguing through the software, carried out by Elisa Bassetto and Agata Insana, started from the MEDIEVAL ART section, and in particular from SCULPTURE.
The decision to start cataloguing from medieval art was a consequence of the fact that from 2010 to 2012, thanks to a project of collaboration with the Scuola di specializzazione dell’Università di Firenze, some students had drawn up the scientific sheets of all the medieval sculptures and paintings, in order of author, contained in the Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti photo library.
Along with the cataloguing of the MEDIEVAL SCULPTURE, a directory of the works of the CONTEMPORARY ART (XIX-XX CENTURY) is also available. It comes from a transfer to the new software of data and digital images from the first 2002 project of computerization. The section Contemporary art, unlike the other materials of the photo library, has been the subject of a sorting and identification project on initiative of Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti at the time of the founding of the Centro Studi named after him. His aim, in accordance with the method «see and then read (if you still feel like it) », was to realize a photo library not only for specialists, but also for a wide public with an educational purpose. For this reason, we have chosen to report the information on the back of the cards conservatively without additions or updates. Information on the repertoire Contemporary art (author, title of the photographed work, location) are, therefore, deduced from the label on the rear of the card on which the photo is glued, or from eventual handwritten annotations. Which is why some information might not be consistent with the results of the most updated historiographic research.
