An essay written by Fabio Franz has been published in the proceedings of the prestigious conference on Andrea Schiavone which took place in 2016 at the Giorgio Cini Foundation and at the Marciana National Library (Venice).

In Schiavone nelle carte pietroburghesi di Cavalcaselle Franz argues that scholarship has never paid enough attention to Cavalcaselle's critical approach to Schiavone's work, and that archival sources indicate that even if he never published any article or book chapter on Schiavone, Cavalcaselle could have developed a broad and nuanced connoisseurship of Schiavone's oeuvre. During his stay in Saint Petersburg (1865), for example, Cavalcaselle drew some noteworthy sketches and took some important notes about the technique, the conservation, the attribution and the provenance of some specific paintings placed in Russia that were then assigned - by him or other contemporary experts - to Schiavone. These materials, now kept in the Marciana National Library (Venice), enhance the comprehension of the ways in which Cavalcaselle, as well as his editorial partner, the British connoisseur Joseph Archer Crowe (1825-1896), studied and evaluated Schiavone's drawing, painting and etching skills.

The paper aims to shed more light on the availability to 19th-century scholars of the Barbarigo Saint Sebastian by Titian (State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg). Moreover, this essay’s purpose is to provide some unknown elements on the collecting and critical fortuna of some cassoni dipinti and other specific paintings on panel or canvas that were once assigned to Meldola in Russia and in Western Europe.

This work will help scholars to improve the understading on how Cavalcaselle's and Crowe's method challenged some other major 19th-century European experts of Old Masters, such as Gustav Friedrich Waagen (1794-1868) or Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891), in relation to Schiavone’s style and technique.