27
nucci Zauli. Today the Alinari archives are in Florence,
Largo Alinari 15. Here are kept about 780,000 original
photographs by Italian photographers and those of other
nations, as well as old photographic equipment.
Silvia Paoli
See also: Ruskin, John; and Victoria, Queen and
Albert, Prince Consort.
Further Reading
Tentori, Piero, Alinari Giuseppe, in Dizionario biografi co degli
Italiani, II. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana G. Trec-
cani, 1960, 457–459.
Settimelli, Wladimiro and Filippo Zevi, eds., Gli Alinari fotografi
a Firenze. Florence, Alinari, 1977.
Zevi, Claudia, Alinari Fratelli, Alinari Leopoldo, and Alinari
Vittorio in Miraglia, Marina et al., Fotografia italiana
dell’Ottocento. Milan and Florence: Electa/Alinari, 1979,
137–138.
Ferretti, Massimo, Memoria dei luoghi e luoghi della memoria
nella riproduzione d’arte, in Fotografi e degli Archivi Alinari
in Emilia e in Romagna. Bologna: Alinari, 1980, 37–51.
Miraglia, Marina, Note per una storia della fotografi a italiana
(1839–1911), in Storia dell’arte italiana, 9, II, Turin: Einaudi,
1981, 458–461.
Tomassini, Luigi, Gli Alinari e l’editoria fotografi ca in Italia
fra Ottocento e Novecento. Primi appunti per una ricerca, in
“AFT. Semestrale dell’Archivio Fotografi co Toscano. Rivista
di Storia e Fotografi a,” III, 1987, 5, June, 59–71.
Tomassini, Luigi, Gli Alinari e l’editoria fotografi ca in Italia
fra Ottocento e Novecento. Parte II, in “AFT. Semestrale
dell’Archivio Fotografi co Toscano. Rivista di Storia e Foto-
grafi a,” III, 1987, 6, December, 62–71.
Falzone del Barbarò, Michele et al., Alle origini della fotografi a:
un itinerario toscano 1839–1880. Florence: Alinari, 1989
(exhibition catalogue).
Miraglia, Marina, Dalla ‘traduzione’ incisoria alla ‘documentazi-
one’ fotografi ca, in Moltedo, Alida, ed., la Sistina riprodotta.
Rome: Fratelli Palombi, 1991, 221–282.
Maffi oli, Monica, Il Belvedere. Fotografi e architetti nell’Italia
dell’Ottocento. Turin: SEI, 1996.
Weber, Susanna and Ferruccio Malandrini, Fratelli Alinari in Flor-
ence, in History of Photography, 20/1, Spring 1996, 49–56.
Paoli, Silvia, Edizioni Alinari, in Miraglia, Marina and Matteo
Ceriana, eds., 1899, un progetto di fototeca pubblica per
Milano. Il ricetto fotografi co di Brera. Milan: Electa, 2000,
171(exhibition catalogue).
Gli Alinari, ed., Il contributo iconografico degli Alinari
all’editoria mondiale. Florence: Alinari, 2002.
Quintavalle, Arturo Carlo and Monica Maffi oli, eds., Fratelli Ali-
nari Fotografi in Firenze. 150 anni che illustrarono il mondo
1852–2002, Florence: Alinari, 2003 (exhibition catalogue).
ALLEGORICAL PHOTOGRAPHY
The presence of a specifi cally allegorical photography
in the nineteenth century has been the subject of a
great deal of attention since the late 1970s, even if the
aesthetic category of allegory has not always fi gured in
the debates in question. Oscar Rejlander, Julia Margaret
Cameron and, perhaps, William Lake Price produced
self-consciously allegorical images; it has also been
argued that, works by William Henry Fox Talbot, Louis-
Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and Hippolyte Bayard are best
understood allegorically.
Allegory is the subject of extensive theoretical debate
and is not easy to defi ne; nevertheless, two key features
can be isolated for our purposes. Firstly allegory is a
‘twice-told tale,’ in which a literal, or explicit, level of
representation is accompanied by a second, implicit,
meaning. In order for there narrative content to be leg-
ible, allegorical images frequently require knowledge of
some prior representation (the Bible, Romantic poetry,
etc.). Secondly, allegory is typically contrasted with, an-
other aesthetic category, the ‘symbol’: whereas symbols
are said to convey meaning immediately, allegories un-
fold over time; the symbol is usually seen as an organic
whole, whereas allegory contains a gap, or disjunction,
between the literal depiction and the accompanying nar-
rative; the symbol is clear and transparent, allegory is
inherently ambiguous. These characteristics sometimes
fi gure prominently in hostile accounts of staged photo-
graphs: reviewing submissions to an exhibition by Lake
Price and Rejlander in 1856, Robert Hunt suggested:
‘They are all wonderfully clever, but after all they are
but images of actors posed for the occasion; they all want
life, expression, passion...’ (Hunt, ‘Photographic Exhi-
bitions’). Three years later, the poet and critic Charles
Baudelaire made much the same point about French
photography. These criticisms draw attention to the
fi ssure between what is actually depicted and narrative
allusions in the allegorical picture. The consideration
of a particular image will, no doubt, help to put fl esh
on these bare bones: in Rejlander’s double self-portrait:
Rejlander the Artist Introducing Rejlander the Volunteer
(c.1871) the artist at his easel gestures towards the same
person wearing military uniform. Seeing the same man
in two guises, we recognise that Rejlander was both art-
ist and member of the volunteer movement. However,
the literal presence of two Rejlanders is accompanied, at
another level of reading, by the suggestion that artist and
volunteer equally participate in patriotic defence of state
and empire: the artist records and glorifi es the deeds
of the citizen-soldier, while embodying the values that
require defending from the supposed barbarians. Here,
the probable date of 1871 is highly signifi cant (fi guring
as it does the Franco-Prussian war and the subsequent
Paris Commune). As an allegorical image Rejlander’s
picture goes beyond a portrait of a particular man (in
two forms), invoking the unity of the middle class in
face of both foreign and domestic threat, as well as the
solemn duty of the artist. The disjunction between the
two characters mirrors the gap between literal and al-
legorical meaning.
Work of this type was anathema to modernist critics
(from Helmut Gernsheim to John Szarkowski), because
it went against what they saw as the inherent proper-