Miro Martini Archive

The collection was established in spring 2002 following the donation by the Martini family of Miro Martini’s handwritten and typed materials, preserved at Palazzo Schinchinelli, his residence in Cremona.

Martini (1905–1951) had briefly studied Law at the University of Pavia before transferring to the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at the University of Milan. There, he studied under, among others, Remo Cantoni and Antonio Banfi, completing his degree in 1941. He contributed to Studi Filosofici and the early issues of Pensiero critico, edited by Cantoni. Martini is the author of a substantial and complex essay entitled La deformazione estetica, a profound reflection on the aesthetic act as an act of distortion.

After an initial arrangement by Simona Chiodo, the archive was reorganised in summer 2015 during the digitisation of the inventory.

Archive Content

The archive consists of 194 documents and 110 loose sheets.

It primarily contains Miro Martini’s working papers, particularly essays - many unpublished - on aesthetics (140 documents and 110 loose sheets); drafts of the volume La deformazione estetica (29 documents); and a second, unfinished work on early 20th-century Italian aesthetics.

The archive also includes part of Martini’s correspondence, featuring both professional letters and exchanges between the editors of the posthumous edition of La deformazione estetica (21 documents), along with a small section of studies and commemorative texts about Martini (4 documents).

These materials were preserved at Palazzo Schinchinelli in Cremona by Martini’s daughter. While initially arranged in a personal order that differed from the one Martini had left, the first reorganisation by Simona Chiodo divided the archive into four series—an arrangement largely maintained thereafter. Within each series, the documents were reordered where possible to reflect Martini’s original structure, especially in the case of drafts of La deformazione estetica. Chiodo’s philological and content-related notes, prepared during the first reorganisation, have been preserved and included as annotations in the digital inventory, ensuring the information is not lost.

The four archival series are titled as follows:

• Essays
• Correspondence
• Drafts of La deformazione estetica
• Studies and commemorations

Due to the near-total absence of dates on the documents and the limited amount of published material available for comparison, the archive could not be arranged in a reliably chronological sequence. Where possible, approximate dates were inferred from content or from comparisons with Martini’s other writings. In most cases, however, a chronological sequence could be established within sets of documents relating to the same work.

The material has therefore been organised alphabetically, as most documents were titled by the author—these titles are presented in quotation marks.

An exception was made for the third series (Drafts of La deformazione estetica), where a chronological order was followed both for listing the different versions and for structuring the individual documents within them. This decision was taken to provide a coherent view of the development of the work, which might otherwise have been lost.