INTERVIEWS

"Without the art of Gulio Romano we would have neither Rubens nor Poussin, and so on. In this secular perspective, Giulio Romano's art shows us to have been able to combine completely contrasting aspects, and to have offered new means to the human imagination. to give permanent form to the dreams and nightmares of our mind ". So writes Sir Ernst H. Gombrich in the introduction to the catalog of the exhibition on Giulio Romano, held in Mantua in 1989. It is an opinion matured in more than half a century of studies dedicated to the Italian Renaissance, started precisely with the thesis on the work of Giulio at Palazzo Te discussed at the University of Vienna in 1933 under the supervision of Julius von Schlosser. Gombrich's work is a masterful interpretation of the genius of Giulio Romano - who in Mantua, at the court of Federico II Gonzaga, reveals surprising results - but also an important testimony of the artistic literature of the twentieth century, which in the experience of the Vienna School, thanks to young researchers such as Ernst Kris, Otto Kurz, Hans Sedlmayr and Gombrich himself, he confronts himself with the novelties of psychological investigation, thus helping to define that intertwining between modernity and tradition essential for understanding the history of European culture.