Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (22 January 1819 – 31 October 1897) was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 writer and art critic.

Biography

Cavalcaselle was born in Legnago

Legnago

Legnago is a town and comune in the Province of Verona, Veneto, northern Italy. It is located on the Adige river, c. 43 km from Verona.Its fertile land produces crops of rice, other cereals, sugar, and tobacco.-History:...

, Veneto

Veneto

Veneto is one of the 20 regions of Italy. Its population is about 5 million, ranking 5th in Italy.Veneto had been for more than a millennium an independent state, the Republic of Venice, until it was eventually annexed by Italy in 1866 after brief Austrian and French rule...

. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

. Cavalcaselle participated in the Revolution of 1848 and in the Roman Republic.

After the latter's fall, he lived in England for several years. There he published, together with Joseph A. Crowe

Joseph Archer Crowe

Sir Joseph Archer Crowe , was an English consular official and art critic, whose volumes of the History of Painting in Italy, co-written with the Italian critic Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle , stand at the beginning of disciplined modern art history writing in English,...

, their first joint work, Early Flemish Painters (1856), later followed by the History of Painting in Italy (3 vol., 1864-1866). Other important works by Crowe and Cavalcaselle are The Life of Titian

Titian

Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576 better known as Titian was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near...

(London, 1876), and The Life of Raphael

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

(London, 1883). He returned to Italy in 1857
to become the chief of the art department under the Minister of Public Instruction in Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

. He was subsequently inspector of the National Museum

Uffizi

The Uffizi Gallery , is a museum in Florence, Italy. It is one of the oldest and most famous art museums of the Western world.-History:...

 in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

.