Revealing Giuseppe Bossi

The project Revealing Giuseppe Bossi: Conservation, Research, and Digital Enhancement focuses on the corpus of drawings by Giuseppe Bossi (1777–1815) preserved within the Historical Collections of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. Conceived as an integrated initiative encompassing conservation, documentation, and research, it aims to restore full legibility and understanding to this extraordinary graphic heritage.

The intervention, conducted by the School of Restoration, involves the completion of conservation work already initiated, which has engaged students in the preliminary stages of disassembly and initial cataloguing.

The project’s primary objective is the material and technological study of the drawings, beginning with a high-resolution photographic campaign. This includes images taken in visible, raking, and transmitted light, designed to highlight the material structure of the sheets and to detect watermarks or other features from the paper manufacturing process. Digital microscopy further contributes to the analysis of materials, particularly the types of paper and drawing media employed by the artist.

All collected data are entered into a dedicated database designed to integrate both technical and historical-bibliographic information concerning the drawings. Among other outcomes, this tool enables the virtual reconstruction of Giuseppe Bossi’s original sheets and sketchbooks, offering new insights into the artist’s methods for selecting and employing the materials available to him.

Another area of research concerns the collectors’ marks and inscriptions visible on the drawings, which are analysed to trace the history of the works prior to their inclusion in the albums assembled around 1884 by the Brera Academy, following the donation by Count Borromeo (1815–1885). These findings are also incorporated into the database, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of the conservation and collecting history of the corpus.

The database is conceived as an open and updatable tool, capable of accommodating data on Bossi’s drawings held in other collections as well. In this way, the project aims to establish a dynamic, shared platform that supports both scholarly research and heritage enhancement.

Finally, the project provides for the revision of existing catalogue records currently available on SIRBeCWeb and their migration to the SIGeCWeb platform, in compliance with the interoperability standards required by the Italian Ministry of Culture’s information systems.