Opere d'arte perdute e ritrovate: Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle in visita alle collezioni Abati, Albani-Noli e Frizzoni a Bergamo e Bellagio

The essay describes three of sixteen private collections from Bergamo visited by Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1857-1869), availing itself of the contribution of new documentary and bibliographical resources. These collections contained artworks of famous masters of the Italian Renaissance, which due to their subsequent dispersal, helped to enrich some of the major collections of Italian and international museums (the National Gallery in London, the Petit Palais-Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Bob John University Museum in Greenville, the Detroit Institute of Art in Chicago, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna). This research begins by identifying, reading and contextualizing Cavalcaselle's manuscripts, which are preserved in Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice; and the Crowe-Cavalcaselle documents of the National Art Library archives of the V&A Museum in London. The essay is divided into paragraphs that correspond to each individual collection and includes a two-fold approach: the first –historical – that contextualizes the collectors, clarifying their biographical profiles and reconstructing the acquisitions and dispersals of their endowments; the second – critical – that aims to identify the work depicted in Cavalcaselle and Crowe's manuscripts.