Abstract

The article sheds light on Enrico Castelnuovo's role as an editorial consultant for Einaudi, from his early contacts with the Turin-based publishing house to well into the Seventies, before the great enterprise of "Storia dell'arte italiana", edited by Giovanni Previtali and Federico Zeri. He was the first art historian permanently attending the famous Wednesday's meetings, as he replaced Giulio Carlo Argan after a decade of his consultancy. The meetings' minutes and the dense correspondence documented in the historical archives of the publishing house (stored in the "Archivio di Stato" in Turin) show the scholar's contribution, not only as author, to changing the discipline by aptly singling out foreign authors (namely Klingender and Otto Pächt) whose work could shake the exhausted beliefs of the Italian humanistic "milieu". In this respect, Castelnuovo also promoted a younger generation of Italian critics, as evidenced by Giovanni Romano's "Casalesi del Cinquecento".