The cultural clashes on art in Italy from the end of the 1940s to the end of the 1950s, which found a genuinely privileged decanter in the conference Arte figurativa e arte astratta of 1954 at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, are reconstructed through the archives of two exceptional figures: the collector Guglielmo Achille Cavellini of Brescia and the Venetian art critic Giuseppe Marchiori. The former not only collected important works by Italian artists like Giuseppe Santomaso, Emilio Vedova, Renato Birolli, Afro Basaldella, and foreign ones then in vogue such as Maurice Esteve, Hans Hartung, Sebastian Matta, Edouard Pignon and Alfred Manessier; but, in the 1960s he then ceased to be a collector and turned himself into an artist. Giuseppe Marchiori — one of the leading figures in the most progressive part of art criticism during fascism, being among the first to grasp the importance of abstraction - was also a great admirer of the Cavellini collection, helping to make it known to art historians like Giulio Carlo Argan, Iionello Venturi, Palma Bucarelli and Rodolfo Pallucchini. Marchiori himself was also given important consideration between the 1950s and 1960s by the founder of the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan.