Ian Greenlees e la sua raccolta di quadri. Incursioni nell’arte di un “gifted amateur”

Among the many activities of Ian Greenlees, collecting is with no doubt one of the least known and investigated. Yet, the director of the British Institute of Florence collected over the years an impressive gallery of paintings, showing a far from superficial knowledge of Italian and European art history and a very well defined taste. “It was pleasant – David Platzer wrote in a 1995 memoir – to enjoy a whiskey with Ian in his study, surrounded by seventeenth and eighteenth-century Italian pictures, many by masters such as Luca Giordano working in a smaller format [...] and modern Italians as Severini, Guttridge and Morandi”. Thanks to the analysis of some inventories preserved among the papers of the diplomat, this paper aims at delineating a brief history of Greenlees’ collection, in order to identify the principles that guided his artistic choices bringing within the walls of Casa Mansi in Bagni di Lucca works by Angelo Caroselli, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Joseph Wright of Derby.