Italian artists’ self-taught ‘compensation strategies’ for their lack of technical training: a study on Gino Severini

This paper discusses two main issues relating to art technological sources: literature sources and artists’ (self-taught) education and the way their painting practice, made more complex by the introduction of new colours and materials, responded to scholarly sources. It focuses on recently retrieved documents (books, notebooks, copybooks) by the Italian painter Gino Severini, which are particularly interesting as a rare case of a primary source recording the painting practice of an avant-garde artist. These manuscripts show Severini’s theoretical attitude to geometric order (consistent with the neoplatonic references of the French Purist movement) through a series of preparatory studies for paintings dating back to the years 1919‒20. Furthermore, papers, books and transcriptions from texts illustrate the extent of this artist’s interest in historical painting media and materials through his reading of treatises and eventually his shift towards coeval researches and to modern materials and commercial products.