Appunti sulla nozione di macchia negli scritti di padre Resta

Roberto Longhi considered macchia a precious word and already in 1968 he dreamt of reconstructing the history of this term. Far from walking through this history, the aim of the essay is to lead the reader understand what exactly Father Resta meant when he referred to the technical notion of macchia in the light of the occurrences contained in his writings and of the main attestations in the artistic literature of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, focusing on those writers so close to him as Filippo Titi, Luigi Scaramuccia and Carlo Cesare Malvasia. To systematize the technical meaning of the word macchia was only Filippo Baldinucci, who connected macchia to the notion of franchezza, as previously done by the marquis Giustiniani and the count Malvasia.