That was in 1913, to be fair, before Venturi or anybody else had heard of Giorgio Morandi, colossal exception to the Italian-still-life rule, and to most others. If you love him, as pretty much ...

“I knew the man before the artist,” the composer, Beethoven scholar and collector Luigi Magnani wrote of Giorgio Morandi, in his memoir “Il Mio Morandi.” “I was little more than a boy ...