Il Sassoferrato copista di Federico Zeri

The lecture on Sassoferrato copyist was held by Federico Zeri on 26 September 1986 in San Severino Marche and was published on the occasion of the first anniversary of the death of the art historian, on 5 October 1999. With this essay, already anticipated by previous studies on the artist and written in an icastic, synthetic but very effective style, Zeri totally overturns the consolidated idea of the painter as mere copyist to make him “a great painter of the sacred art of Catholicism, from the sixteenth century to today”, a conscious seventeenth-century re-proposer of the successful formula of Giovanni Andrea Gilio’s “regulated mixture”. It is from Zeri’s pages that an idea of Salvi as “copyist” emerges not in the commonly accepted meaning of this term, but, rather, as an “author” as Luciano Canfora used it, i.e. as a refined, true artist, who cre- ated works of invention but who produced, more often and intentionally, copies from famous masters of the Renaissance and of his own times, also using engraving as a figurative medium, to satisfy the requests of a very thriving market and demonstrating unusual inventive and capacity for the reinterpretation of the original works.