Skip to content

Pedretti, Carlo

    Full Name: Pedretti, Carlo

    Other Names:

    • Carlo Pedretti

    Gender: male

    Date Born: 06 January 1928

    Date Died: 05 January 2018

    Place Born: Casalecchio di Reno, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

    Place Died: Lamporecchio, Tuscany, Italy

    Home Country/ies: Italy

    Subject Area(s): documentaries (documents), documentary (general concept), Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance


    Overview

    Prominent scholar of Leonardo da Vinci and Renaissance painters. Carlo Pedretti was born in Casalecchio di Reno, Italy, near Bologna, in 1928. As a boy he became fascinated with Leonardo da Vinci after reading Leonardo by Clemente Fusero (1913-1975).  At 13 he had taught himself to write left handed and backward, as Leonardo did.  Too young to fight in World War II, he continued to study Leonardo’s works, primarily his texts. He published his first datable scholarly article at age 16,  “Leonardo fu amico di Machiavelli?” in La Settimana di Paicenza. He graduated from the Liceo Laura Bassi in Bologna.  During this time he submitted his Leonardo research to area newspapers such as Giornale dell’Emilia rather than art journals, though also to  ones of higher profile such as Corriere della Sera and L’Osservatore Romano, the latter the Vatican newspaper (RSA). He entered Università di Bologna (University of Bologna) but due to war privations, the University closed. He studied privately with the Leonardo scholar and engineer Federico Sergio Bassoli (n.d, n.d) and many others.  Between 1943-1949 he worked with Nino Namore, Director of the Civic Museum of Bologna. Giorgio Nicodemi, editor of the magazine l’Arte, was also influential.  He remained a journalist for papers Settimana di Piacenza, Giornale dell’Emilia, and Posta sera.  Pedretti used his artistic skills to illustrate the 1948 Dove la neve cade d’està by Walter Maestri. He found a mentor in the German Leonardo scholar in 1949 Emil Möller, who guided him in his studies; Möller willed his personal library to Pedretti at Möller’s death in 1955.  In 1953, Pedretti authored the exhibition catalog Documenti e memorie riguardanti Leonardo da Vinci a Bologna e in Emilia at the Biblioteca comunale dell’Archiginnasio in Bologna.  Pedretti’s Leonardo da Vinci: Fragments at Windsor Castle from the Codex Atlanticus, 1957, was dedicated to Möller’s memory.

    Kate Steinitz, a German ex-patriot scholar working as a librarian for the private Leonardo book collector,  Elmer Belt, MD, (1893-1980) brought Pedretti to the United States in 1959.  Belt’s collection was slowly being donated to UCLA as the Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana;  Pedretti was given a position in the Art History Department in conjunction with the collection in 1960. Lacking any formal art history degree, Pedretti attended the Claremont Graduate University, graduating with an A.M. in art history in 1961.  His thesis, A Chronology of Leonardo da Vinci’s Architectural Studies after 1500, was later published as a book. He was appointed professor in 1965 in the Art History Department at UCLA.  He taught at UCLA for the rest of his career, continuing to gain recognition as a major Leonardo scholar.

    In the United States he was awarded a Congressional Citation and published Leonardo: A Study in Chronology and Style, both in 1973.  The Chronology has been credited as, “arguably… the most important single contribution to the understanding of Leonardo the artist.” (Marani). Between 1980 to 1987, Pedretti collaborated with a medical historian, Kenneth D. Keele, M.D., (1909-1987) to reorganize Windsor castle drawings of Leonardo. In California Pedretti became close to art- and Leonardo-collector Armand Hammer (1898-1990) and, in 1985, Hammer created the Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA naming Pedretti its first director.  In 1988, Pedretti founded the journal Achademia Leonardi Vinci as an organ of the Armand Center, which ran for ten years.  He retired from UCLA in 1993 as Professor Emeritus, retaining the Armand Hammer Chair in Leonardo Studies at the University. The following year he recorded a segment on Leonard for the video series Art on Film, Film on Art series.  He retired from editing the Achademia Leonardi Vinci in 1997 returning to Italy permanently in 2013 to found The Rossana and Carlo Foundation in the Villa di Castel Vitoni, Lamporecchio, Italy, opened in 2015.

    Pedretti was principally a manuscript scholar which he used to write about other Renaissance media.  His direct study of Leonardo original writings and drawings resulted in his lifetime accomplishment, reassembling chronologically Leonardo manuscripts. Hence, his pioneering and prophetic work was the catalog of 1957 of the fragments of Leonardo drawings at Windsor from the Codex Atlanticus at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (Renaissance Society of America).  Not all his authentications were universally accepted, particularly his opinion of a painting in a Swiss collection Pedretti declared, “There are no doubts that the portrait is the work of Leonardo” (Sheets).  Pedretti never held a Ph.D., though he was named doctor honoris causa from three Italian universities, Ferrara (1992), Urbino (1998), and Milan (Cattolica, 1999), and the University of Caen, France (2003).  His students include Constant Moffatt, Sara Taglialagamba, and Margherita Melani.


    Selected Bibliography

    • [complete bibliographies] Ludmer, Joyce Pellerano, compiler. Carlo Pedretti: A Bibliography of his Work on Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance [1944-1984]. Los Angeles: Belt Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984.
    • Guttmann, Nathalie. Carlo Pedretti’s Publications 1985-1995. [includes supplemented bibliography for the years 1946-1998]. Florence, 1998.
    • Melani, Margherita. Bibliografia completa di Carlo Pedretti (1928-2018).  Prato: Poggio a Caiano, 2019.

    Pedretti author:

    • “Leonardo fu amico di Machiavelli?”  La Settimana di Paicenza (September, 1944): 5.
    • Documenti e memorie riguardanti Leonardo da Vinci a Bologna e in Emilia. Bologna: Editoriale Fiammenghi, 1953.
    • Leonardo da Vinci: Fragments at Windsor Castle from the Codex Atlanticus. London: Phaidon, 1957.
    • Studi vinciani; documenti, analisi e inediti leonardeschi. Geneva: E. Droz, 1957.
    • [A.M. thesis] A Chronology of Leonardo da Vinci’s Architectural Studies after 1500,  Claremont College, 1961; published, A Chronology of Leonardo da Vinci’s Architectural Studies after 1500. Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1962.
    • Leonardo da Vinci on Painting: A Lost Book (Libro A) Reassembled from the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas 1270 and from the Codex Leicester. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.
    • Leonardo da Vinci: The Royal Palace at Romorantin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.
    • Leonardo: A Study in Chronology and Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

    Pedretti as illustrator:

    • Maestri, Walter. Dove la neve cade d’està.  Bologna: L. Cappelli 1948

     


    Sources

    Festschriften:

    • Frosini, Fabio, ed. “Tutte le opere non son per istancarmi:”  raccolta di scritti per i settant’anni di Carlo Pedretti.  Rome: Edizioni associate, 1998;
    • Illuminating Leonardo : a festschrift for Carlo Pedretti celebrating his 70 years of scholarship (1944-2014). (The Brill Series of Leonardo Studies 1.) Leiden: Brill, 2014.
    • Moffatt, Constance J., Sara Taglialagamba. 2016. Illuminating Leonardo a festschrift for Carlo Pedretti celebrating his 70 years of scholarship (1944-2014).


    Contributors: Lee Sorensen


    Citation

    Lee Sorensen. "Pedretti, Carlo." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/pedrettic/.


    More Resources

    Search for materials by & about this art historian: