Mario Nunes Vais: l'opera di un fotografo ritrattista tra i Fondi dell'ICCD

• Autores: Giovanna Bertelli
• Localización: Bollettino d'arte, ISSN 0391-9854, Vol. 100, Nº. 28, 2015, págs. 97-112
• Idioma: italiano
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Mario Nunes Vais : The oeuvre of a portraitist photographer among the collections of the ICCD.

    Mario Nunes Vais (Florence, 1856–1932), a photographer not by profession but solely for pleasure, began to take photographs towards the middle of the 1880s with small cameras that permitted him to capture the daily life of society, but by the end of the century he had already chosen studio portraiture as his main photographic genre.

    It is not known how many plates he exposed in the circa fifty years of his activity, but an approximate calculation by default would be around 60,000 images, all of which realized with glass negatives. Those who posed before his lens were members of royal families, nobles, intellectuals, actresses, writers, diplomats, scientists and prelates. With his glance he was able to capture the individuality of his subjects, while his affability put all at ease during the sittings. His pantheon enables us to give a face to a society, an epoch, a lifestyle.

    Much of his archive was ruined or destroyed in the 1966 flood of Florence. What survived in good condition was donated by his daughter Laura to the GFN in 1971. The Nunes Vais collection, today conserved in the ICCD, consists of about 20,000 glass plates and 200 original photographs. In 2014–2015 the present writer was charged with making a survey of the collection. The photographs conserved in the ICCD are still requested for exhibitions and publications, and as regards the latter, the two GFN monographs realized after the acquisition of the collection remain crucial points of reference.