Pietro Poppi

His work stands at the intersection of artistic training, photographic commerce, heritage documentation and the visual recording of urban transformation in post-unification Italy. It consists of about 3,200 glass-plate negatives, made with collodion and gelatin silver processes, mostly in the 21 × 27 cm format, together with about the same number of albumen prints. The archive documents works of art and architecture in Bologna and its surroundings, as well as sites across Emilia-Romagna, from Piacenza to the Adriatic coast, and includes a substantial group of photographs devoted to the Republic of San Marino. Although closely associated with Bologna, Poppi's repertory extended to Ravenna, Ferrara, Urbino, Florence, Rome, Mantua, Brescia, San Marino and other centres. His photographs include monuments, churches, palaces, works of art, urban views, restoration sites, landscapes, still lifes, cloud studies and commissioned documentation, including views of Rocchetta Mattei and of San Marino.

• Name — Pietro Poppi • Born — 29 April 1833 • Birthplace — Cento, Papal States • Died — 21 April 1914 • Place of death — Bologna, Kingdom of Italy • Field — Photography; painting • Training — Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna • Movement — Nineteenth-century landscape painting; architectural and documentary photography • Works — Fotografia dell'Emilia; Album di fotografie della Repubblica di San Marino

Poppi was born in Cento, then in the Papal States, on 29 April 1833. He came from a modest family and was the third of seven children. In 1850 he enrolled at the Scuola di Ornato of the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna (now the Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna), where he also attended courses in perspective. In 1868 he married Francesca Buriani. Their daughter Aurelia was born the following year, but both Francesca and Aurelia died in 1870 within a few months of one another. Poppi continued to live and work in Bologna, where he died on 21 April 1914.

Before becoming known as a photographer, Poppi was trained and active as a painter, especially as a landscape painter. During his brief period at the Accademia di Belle Arti he encountered artists such as Luigi Serra, Luigi Bertelli and members of the Guardassoni family, and he was influenced by the academic environment of mid-nineteenth-century Bologna. Between 1852 and 1864 Poppi took part in exhibitions at the Accademia di Belle Arti with paintings, mainly landscapes. Several of his works were sold in those years, and by the mid-1850s he had already achieved a measure of recognition as a painter. One of his landscapes, Campagna lambita da corrente di fiume, was acquired before 1857 by Princess Letizia Murat. Poppi's painterly formation remained important for his later photographic work. His photographs show a marked concern for perspective, architectural legibility, urban space, landscape framing and the faithful rendering of monuments and places. This background helps to explain why his studio concentrated much more on views, architecture, artworks and documentary subjects than on portraiture, an area in which other Bolognese studios became more specialised.

Fotografia dell'Emilia was active under Poppi's direction for several decades and became a professional photographic establishment specialising in urban descriptions, architectural views, reproductions of works of art, monuments and landscapes. Its business was based on the production of photographs for sale through printed catalogues, which placed Poppi's work between artistic production, documentary photography and the commercial photographic trade. The studio's early subjects included the monuments and churches of Bologna, the Certosa cemetery, sculpture, the collections of the Regia Pinacoteca (now the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna), and views of Ravenna. It also produced reproductions of paintings, drawings, sculptures and architectural details, making photography a tool for the circulation of artistic and architectural knowledge. In 1871 Poppi issued the first catalogue of Fotografia dell'Emilia. It included about 400 images, with views of Bologna and Ravenna and reproductions of paintings in the Regia Pinacoteca. Its most substantial section was devoted to the principal monuments of Bologna, with additional views of Ravenna and Rome and subjects such as the Certosa cemetery, the new Cassa di Risparmio building designed by Giuseppe Mengoni and the railway station. The photographs were offered in several commercial formats, including 21 × 27 cm prints, cabinet cards, cartes de visite and images for stereoscopic devices; the principal views were also available as 36 × 45 cm collodion photographs. The 1879 catalogue was published in French as Catalogue de la photographie de l'Emilia de Pietro Poppi peintre-photographe, and presented Poppi as a painter–photographer. The use of French reflected the commercial ambition of the studio and its desire to address a wider audience, including foreign travellers and collectors. Later catalogues expanded the repertory to subjects beyond Bologna, including Ferrara, Urbino, Florence, Rocchetta Mattei, San Marino, Mantua, Brescia and other centres. According to Cavanna, Poppi's French catalogue helped to place him among the suppliers of the Bibliothèque photographique Giraudon of Adolphe Giraudon by 1880, alongside major Italian photographic firms such as Alinari and Brogi. This connection indicates the ambition of Fotografia dell'Emilia to operate within a wider market for photographs of monuments, architecture and artworks, rather than only within a local Bolognese context. In 1907 Poppi transferred the firm to Luigi Monari and Armando Bacchelli. After further changes of ownership, the business was definitively closed in 1921.

Bologna and its monuments formed the core of Poppi's photographic enterprise. His work documented the city during a period of major transformation after the Unification of Italy. The Fondo Poppi is used as a visual source for the urban, architectural and social history of nineteenth-century Bologna and its territory. Poppi's Bologna included both monumental and everyday subjects: the Two Towers, Piazza Maggiore, the basilicas, the Certosa cemetery, palaces, porticoes, railway spaces, institutional buildings, urban views and architectural details. The documentary value of these photographs became especially important thanks to the 1889 master plan for Bologna, whose implementation helped transform the historic city into a modern expanding urban centre. The documentary value of the Bologna images lies also in their number. Through repeated views, architectural details, catalogued series and urban descriptions, Poppi produced a visual inventory of the city before and during phases of modernisation. His archive therefore preserves information on buildings, streets, monuments and decorative elements that were later altered, restored, demolished or recontextualised.

Alongside monuments and urban views, Poppi also produced photographs of still lifes and natural subjects. A record for the photograph Camelie describes it as part of a group of still lifes begun by Poppi from the 1870s, with some subjects of this type already traceable in the 1879 printed catalogue; their presence increased in the catalogue of 1888. A further group of works consists of cloud studies. A glass negative titled Studio di nubi, dated 1888–1890, is listed in the Fondo Poppi as a gelatin-on-glass negative taken in Bologna. The catalogue record notes that the plate appeared in the first appendix to the general catalogue in 1890, where eight similar images were grouped under the heading Studi di nubi with the indication preso dal vero, "taken from life". Another catalogue entry on cloud imagery observes that Poppi made eight such studies, some focused on clouds alone and others including the urban profile of Bologna with towers, domes and bell towers in the background. These works broaden the understanding of Poppi's visual interests beyond topographical documentation, connecting his photographic practice with studies from nature, atmosphere and direct observation.

The Rocchetta Mattei series was one part of Poppi's broader activity as a photographer of architecture, monuments and places in transformation. It combines architectural documentation, commercial catalogue production and the representation of a private architectural project. Among the most distinctive architectural subjects documented by Poppi was Rocchetta Mattei, the eclectic castle built by Count Cesare Mattei near Riola, in the Bolognese Apennines. A surviving negative entitled Rocchetta Mattei – Dall'interno e Rupe is dated 1879–1883 and described as a black-and-white collodion-on-glass negative measuring 27 × 21 cm. The place of the photograph is given as Grizzana Morandi. Poppi's photographs of Rocchetta Mattei are valuable as historical documentation because they were made during Mattei's lifetime, while the complex was still being enlarged and altered. The Carisbo catalogue notes that Mattei laid the first stone of the Rocchetta on 5 November 1850 and that Poppi's photographs recorded additions, alterations and transformations of the complex. Poppi's Rocchetta photographs were first listed in his 1879 catalogue among landscapes and town views, where seven views of the building were included. A larger group appeared in the 1883 catalogue, and the 1888 general catalogue included a section devoted to a third photographic series on the Rocchetta. The Italian national catalogue of cultural heritage similarly records that Poppi, owner of Fotografia dell'Emilia, included seven views of Rocchetta Mattei in 1879 and a larger group of views in the 1883 catalogue. According to Benedetta Basevi, Count Cesare Mattei commissioned Poppi, then established as a photographer in Bologna, to produce three photographic series of the Rocchetta. Cavanna also interprets the series as a collaborative or agreed project, writing that Poppi devoted numerous views to the Rocchetta during the years of Mattei's greatest electrohomeopathic success, apparently in agreement with Mattei, who could use the photographs for the many patients and visitors who came to Riola for his treatments. The Rocchetta series also included the nearby Albergo della Rosa at Riola di Vergato. Cavanna notes that the hotel was photographed in several views, with an evident promotional function for the visitors and patients who travelled to the area. The catalogue shows a sustained photographic relationship with the Rocchetta, including repeated photographic series, access to the building and a connection with Mattei's broader public image and medical enterprise.

Poppi's activity extended beyond Bologna and its province. In September 1888 the government of the Republic of San Marino commissioned him to make photographs of Mount Titano, monuments and civil and military costumes, including those of the Captains Regent, for San Marino's official participation in the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris. The surviving correspondence shows that Poppi carried out the San Marino photography in October 1888, accompanied by his nephew Angelo Marzoli, and that the crates containing the photographs and albums reached San Marino in April 1889. After the commission, Poppi was declared Fotografo del Governo, Photographer of the Government. A catalogue devoted to San Marino was published in 1889 and included 36 views. The San Marino series is an example of photography used for diplomatic, institutional and representational purposes. It combined views of landscape and monuments with the representation of civic identity, historical documents and official costumes, and was connected with a universal exhibition.

Poppi's photographs were used not only as commercial views, but also for architectural documentation and restoration. Cavanna identifies a particularly fruitful relationship with the architect Alfonso Rubbiani, especially from the restoration of the church of San Francesco in Bologna onward. In that context, photographic prints were used as instruments of knowledge, metric verification, geometric construction and restoration planning. This role places Poppi within the wider nineteenth-century use of photography for the study, documentation and conservation of artistic and architectural heritage. His work on Bologna, Rocchetta Mattei, San Marino and other sites combined the commercial logic of the photographic catalogue with the documentary needs of architects, scholars, collectors and institutions. The breadth of his repertory also made the studio useful to designers and scholars of architecture and ornament. Cavanna records the use of Poppi's photographs by figures connected with eclectic architecture and architectural collecting, including Melchiorre Pulciano, Guido Tirelli, Francesco Azzurri and other architects or collectors who used his images as repertories of forms, monuments and decorative details.

Poppi came into contact with photography in Bologna in the early 1860s. In 1863 he opened a stationery shop in Via Mercato di Mezzo 56 with Adriano Lodi. The same building also housed photographic activity connected with the French photographer Emilio Anriot and with Roberto Peli, formerly associated with Anriot. The proximity of these early photographic studios, together with the artistic environment of Bologna, provided a context for the beginning of Poppi's photographic activity. From 1865 Poppi is recorded as the proprietor of Fotografia dell'Emilia. In 1866 Poppi and Peli formed the firm Peli, Poppi & C., based in Via San Mamolo 102. The partnership remained active until 1867, after which Poppi returned to the Mercato di Mezzo premises and continued independently. According to the Italian national catalogue of cultural heritage, Poppi officially took over Fotografia dell'Emilia in 1869, moving the business from Via Mercato di Mezzo 56 to Via San Mamolo 101 (now Via d'Azeglio), in Palazzo Rodriguez, with which he had been connected from 1866. A notice published in Il Monitore di Bologna on 17 April 1866 refers to Poppi as director of the Stabilimento Fotografico dell'Emilia in Via Mercato di Mezzo 56. The same notice praises the establishment for reproducing works of art, including plates from Gustave Doré's illustrations for Dante's Inferno. Poppi's transition from painting to photography was therefore a gradual professional shift within the artistic, commercial and technical environment of Bologna in the 1860s.

Poppi's photographic activity developed during a period in which professional photography in Italy became increasingly important for the reproduction of works of art, the cataloguing of monuments, the circulation of views and the documentation of cities and landscapes. In this context, Fotografia dell'Emilia operated not only as a local studio, but also as a producer of catalogued photographic material intended for artists, scholars, architects, collectors, institutions and travellers. Pierangelo Cavanna has placed Poppi's early catalogues within the commercial and documentary culture of nineteenth-century photographic studios. He notes that, in the early 1870s, a photographic studio of this type would have been expected to publish a repertory of monuments, paintings and drawings rather than portraits, and that Poppi's first catalogue belonged to this tradition. The historical reassessment of Poppi has emphasised this broader dimension. The 2015 exhibition catalogue edited by Cinzia Frisoni and published by Bononia University Press formed part of a wider project devoted to the conservation, digitisation, cataloguing and study of the Fondo Poppi. The International Center of Photography in New York preserves a group of works by Poppi, including albumen views of Bologna and related subjects, while the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Institut national d'histoire de l'art and the Musée d'Orsay also record works or authority data relating to him. Poppi's dual identity as painter and photographer was central to his work. His photographic catalogues presented him as a painter–photographer, and he retained a strong concern for perspective, architectural legibility, composition and the faithful description of place. This background helped to distinguish his studio from portrait-based photographic establishments, orienting it instead toward views, monuments, reproductions of artworks and the systematic documentation of built heritage.

The repertory of Fotografia dell'Emilia was not limited to Bologna. Poppi's catalogues progressively expanded to other cities and territories, including Ravenna, Ferrara, Urbino, Florence, Rome, Mantua, Brescia, San Marino and other places in Emilia-Romagna and central-northern Italy. Cavanna notes that the 1883 catalogue greatly increased the number of non-Bolognese subjects, including groups of photographs from Urbino and Ferrara and the first views of Rocchetta Mattei. The Ravenna photographs were already present in the first catalogue and formed part of the studio's early interest in monuments, churches, ancient and medieval remains and works of art. The inclusion of Ravenna, Ferrara, Urbino and later Mantua and Brescia placed Poppi's activity within a broader tradition of photographic series devoted to cities, monuments and architectural heritage. The documentation of Mantua provides an example of this expansion. A photographic record preserved in the Italian national catalogue notes that Poppi included a group of Mantuan photographs in the first appendix to the general catalogue in 1890, dedicating 54 photographs to the city; only three Mantuan images had appeared in the 1883 catalogue. The same record identifies several photographs of details of the ceilings of Palazzo Te. Brescia was also incorporated into the studio's repertory. According to the Italian national catalogue, the city first appeared in Poppi's catalogue in 1883; the 1888 printed catalogue included seven photographs of Brescia, while the second appendix to the general catalogue, published in 1896, presented a larger group of 43 images. The archive and catalogue records also show that Poppi's repertory included works from or relating to places outside Emilia-Romagna, including Lombardy, Tuscany, the Marche and the Veneto, either through his own photographic work or through album collections and the circulation of photographic repertories. This confirms the function of Fotografia dell'Emilia as a supplier of architectural and artistic images rather than a purely local view studio.

Poppi participated in exhibitions and received recognition during his career. In 1881 he took part in the National Exhibition of Milan, and in 1883 he published his third catalogue. In 1888, on the occasion of the Grande Esposizione Emiliana in Bologna, he was appointed the official photographic concessionaire of the exhibition, received a gold medal and was awarded a special prize by the Queen of Italy. In 1889 he received the title of government photographer for the Republic of San Marino, and in 1890 he was awarded a silver medal at the Italian Exhibition of Architecture in Turin. The historical importance of his work has been reassessed through archival and exhibition projects. In 2015–2016 the exhibition Pietro Poppi e la Fotografia dell'Emilia was held at the Biblioteca d'Arte e di Storia of San Giorgio in Poggiale in Bologna, promoted by Genus Bononiae and Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna. The accompanying catalogue, edited by Cinzia Frisoni and published by Bononia University Press, was part of a project of conservation, digitisation, cataloguing and dissemination of the Fondo Poppi. Works by Poppi are listed in the archives or authority files of several institutions outside Bologna, including the International Center of Photography in New York, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Institut national d'histoire de l'art and the Musée d'Orsay.

After Poppi transferred the business in 1907, the firm passed through later ownerships until its closure in 1921. Poppi's professional archive was acquired in 1940 by the Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna from Alfonso Zagnoli, the last successor of the photographic firm. It is now preserved by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna as the Fondo Poppi – Fotografia dell'Emilia. The archive is a major source for the visual history of nineteenth-century Bologna and Emilia-Romagna because it preserves a large repertory of glass negatives and albumen prints documenting architecture, monuments, works of art, landscapes, and urban transformation. It also allows the reconstruction of Poppi's working method through catalogues, negative numbers, formats, subjects and later prints. The historical importance of the archive has been reinforced by modern conservation and digitisation projects. The 2015 exhibition and catalogue were connected with the recovery, study and dissemination of the Fondo Poppi, one of the principal photographic resources for the history of nineteenth-century Bologna. The Fondo Poppi demonstrates the relationship between painting, photography, commerce, heritage documentation and the printed photographic catalogue in nineteenth-century Italy. It also preserves evidence of a professional model in which the photographer was not only an image-maker but also a cataloguer, publisher, supplier of views and intermediary between monuments, institutions and the public.