Abstract

The competition between paper documents and works of art is a battle-field for modern historians. Style and external chronology are usually compared as prevailing evidences: an oversimplified confrontation that Grendi disliked very much. Romano suggests to shift the core of "the problem of evidence" above all to the technical and philological controls every historian needs to operate on each historical document (work of art or not). The historical personality of the painter Bernardino Bernazzano is a typical case-study of hard conciliation between sources, notary deeds and works of art. Romano proposes a possible though provisional solution.