AZG Armenian Daily #104, 08/06/2005

Obituary

ADRIANO ALPAGO-NOVELLO PASSED AWAY

On 4th June, at 6 p.m. Prof. Adriano Alpago-Novello passed away. Having been
suffering for many years, his health conditions quickly deteriorated in the
last days.

With Alpago Novello’s departure, the studies of Armenian Art, and especially
of Armenian Architecture, lose one of their most prestigious and most active
scholars of the last forty years. The late could unite to an intense
research activity an equally intense teaching and popularizing action of a
rare extension and of great quality.

He as the main conceiver and promoter of the exhibition of Medieval Armenian
Architecture which visited several Italian cities and more than eighteen
countries from South America to Iran. It is now preserved in Yerevan at the
Museum of Architecture.

Adriano Alpago Novello has always been eager of inviting to collaboration,
for his many projects, as many forces as possible, and especially of
involving in them young promises whom he considered with great sympathy and
trust. He matured, during the long years of his brilliant career, an
empathetic comprehension of the Subcaucasian Arts and Architectures. He
could perceive their inner dynamics and singularities without any temptation
of reductivism, even though he always moved in the sphere of the most
rigorous criticism. He had a particular, almost tender love for Armenia, for
its culture and people, so that he was known among friends as Alpaghian.
This name is also the title of the voluminous Miscellany on line in his
honor, edited by Prof. Gianclaudio Macchiarella, which was presented to him
on 27 April at the presence of the Ca’ Foscari Rector, Prof. Pier Francesco
Ghetti, as well as of many Colleagues, friends, and students.

Adriano Alpago-Novello was Doctor honoris causa of the National Academy of
Sciences of the Republic of Armenia.