Mapping artistic mobility in Europe
H16:00-19:30
“I Pomeriggi” series
H16:00-19:30
“I Pomeriggi” series
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Istituto Svizzero
Via Liguria 20, Roma
The conference will be held in Italian and English
Curated by Luca Piccoli (Fellow Roma Calling, Architecture)
Mapping artistic mobility in Europe (18th and 19th Centuries): methods and perspectives in digital history
The conference, as part of the research project Visibility Reclaimed. Experiencing Rome’s First Public Museums (1733-1870). An Analysis of Public Audiences in a Transnational Perspective (SNSF project no. 100016_212922) directed by Carla Mazzarelli (USI), intends to provide a reflection on the methods of filing and analysis of sources in the study of cultural mobility and artistic cosmopolitanism in Europe between the 18th and 19th centuries. While the most recent scholarship has placed a particular attention on reconstructing the provenances and gender of Grand Tour travelers, the diversity and fragmentary nature of the available sources – from correspondences to visitors’ books, from artists’ lists to museum access requests – poses multiple challenges to a unified understanding of this phenomenon. The event is intended as a moment of interdisciplinary discussion between specialists in the fields of digital history, art history and cultural history, who in recent years have been engaged in research projects that have focused on the implementation or realisation of databases. Methodological approaches will be questioned, but also the possibilities of permanence and thus of historical legacy in the long term of the collected data.
With the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation
Programme
H16:00 Institutional greetings from Istituto Svizzero
H16:15 Carla Mazzarelli, Luca Piccoli (Università della Svizzera italiana)
Per un database dei pubblici in visita al Museo di Roma (1733-1870)
H16:40 Maria Pia Donato – Online (Directrice de recherche CNRS / IHMC Paris)
Il progetto LETTRESART, i database e non pochi dubbi
H17:05 Georg Schelbert (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, München), Susanne Adina Meyer (Università di Macerata)
Artisti stranieri a Roma. Tra edizione delle fonti e modellazione dei fatti
H17:30 Discussion
H17:50 Break
H18:00 Keynote Lecture – Giovanna Ceserani (Stanford University)
Travelers and Museums’ Visitors in the 18th-Century: a digital approach
H18:40 Round Table with Alessandra Celati (Università di Torino), Chiara Piva (Sapienza Università di Roma) and participants
H19:10 Discussion
H19:30 Conclusion
Biographies
Alessandra Celati received her Ph.D. from the University of Pisa and was a Marie Curie global fellow between Stanford University and the University of Verona, where she conducted research for several years. She is currently a research fellow at the University of Turin on a project related to “Un caso particolare di violenza di genere: prostitute e prostituzione nella Venezia di età moderna.” For years she has been working on religious dissent, heretical movements and witchcraft in the modern age, topics that she has interdisciplinarily interwoven with the history of medicine and the history of women, also through the application of Digital Humanities tools. On these topics she has published articles in Italian and foreign scholarly journals. Her first book The World of Girolamo Donzellini, a network of heterodox physicians in 16th century Venice came out for Routledge in 2023. In June 2025 her second book will be published for Einaudi, Donne che creano disordine. Storia di Caterina ed altre eretiche nel Cinquecento.
Giovanna Ceserani is Professor of Classics and (by courtesy) of History at Stanford University. She is the author of Italy’s Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology (OUP 2012) and the director of the Grand Tour Project, on which, in addition of A World Made by Travel (SUP 2024), she has also published two co-authored studies: ‘Historical Research in a Digital Age: Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project’, and ‘British Travelers in 18th-century Italy: The Grand Tour and the Profession of Architecture.’ Her research focuses on the classical tradition with an emphasis on the intellectual history of classical scholarship, historiography and archaeology from the eighteenth century onwards. A recipient of the Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship as well as of a Getty Research Grant, she is now the Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Spatial and textual Analysis (CESTA), working to bring new technologies to serve humanistic inquiry.
Maria Pia Donato is Director of research C.N.R.S. at the Institut d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine in Paris, specialist in cultural history and the history of science and medicine. Among her most recent publications: Morti improvvise. Medicina e religione nel Settecento (2010) and Atlante storico dell’Italia rivoluzionaria e napoleonica(coordinated with al., 2013), and L’Archivio del Mondo. Quando Napoleone confiscò la storia (2019, published in French translation in 2020). Between 2017 and 2021 she directed with G. Capitelli the research program Lettres d’artistes. Pour une nouvelle histoire transnationale de l’art (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles) at the Ecole française de Rome in partnership with various European institutions. The project produced a database, which merged into the Early Modern Letters On-Line platform at Oxford University, and several publications, most recently Lettere d’artista. Per una storia transnazionale dell’arte (XVIII-XIX secolo) (Silvana Editoriale, 2022).
Carla Mazzarelli is Adjunct Professor at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio. She has been directing since 2023 the Swiss National Fund-funded research project Visibility Reclaimed. Experiencing Rome´s First Public Museums (1733-1870). An Analysis of Public Audiences in a Transnational Perspective. A member of numerous international research projects, her studies focus in particular on the culture of the classical tradition between the 17th and 19th centuries and on issues related to artistic reception, experiential forms of the museum, and the transmission of models and artistic reproducibility in the early modern age. Recent publications include: Roma fuori di Roma. L’esportazione dell’arte moderna da Pio VI all’Unità (with G. Capitelli and S. Grandesso, 2012), Dipingere in copia. Da Roma all’Europa (1750-1870). I. Teorie e pratiche (2018); Il carteggio d’artista. Fonti, questioni, ricerche tra XVII e XIX secolo (with S. Rolfi, 2019); Leggere le copie. Critica e letteratura artistica in Europa (with D.G. Cueto, 2020). Leonardo nel Novecento. Arti, lettere e scienze in dialogo (2023); Quale Gotico per Milano? I materiali della giuria per il concorso della facciata del duomo (1886-1888) (with A. Windholz and M. Moizi, 2023).
Susanne Adina Meyer is associate professor of Museology and Art and Restoration Criticism at the University of Macerata. From 2005 to 2020 she served as a scientific collaborator at the “Lineamenta – Research Database for Architectural Drawings” and “Zuccaro” databases of the Hertziana Library. She has published several studies concerning the vast and articulate production of historical-theoretical texts between the 18th and 19th centuries and collaborated on the volume La Storia delle Storie dell’arte, edited by O. Rossi Pinelli (2014). In addition, she has devoted several contributions to the Roman art system between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Italian and foreign journals and volumes, focusing on promotional strategies, artistic mobility and the role of the public and critics. She is currently conducting research on the history of teaching Art History in Italian schools (Cenerentola a scuola. Il dibattito sull’insegnamento della storia dell’arte nei licei italiani (1900-1943), Macerata 2023).
Luca Piccoli graduated in architecture from the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Università̀ della Svizzera italiana. He then pursued work experiences in Paris in urban planning and public space design. He is currently an assistant-doctoral student at the Institute of the History and Theory of Art and Architecture as part of the research project Visibility Reclaimed. Experiencing Rome’s First Public Museums (1733-1870). An Analysis of Public Audiences in a Transnational Perspective (SNSF project no. 100016_212922) directed by Professor Carla Mazzarelli (Università della Svizzera italiana), in co-tutorship with Professor Chiara Piva (Sapienza Università di Roma). His research explores the origins of the first public museums in Rome through the experiences of the visitors who accessed them.
Chiara Piva is associate professor in the field L-ART/04 “Museology, Art Criticism and Restoration” at “Sapienza” University of Rome. She conducts research mainly around issues of history of art criticism, museology and history of restoration, with a view that privileges the mutual connections between these fields and with a particular focus on the 18th century. She has investigated issues of ordering and setting up museums of antiquities in Rome between the 18th and 19th centuries, reconstructing theories and practices of sculpture restoration in the museum context. She later devoted attention to the figure of Anton Maria Zanetti il Giovane (1706-1778), an art critic of recognized importance and a historiographical model for Luigi Lanzi, the first Inspector of Public Paintings of the city of Venice in the eighteenth century. More recently she has devoted some in-depth studies to color art publishing in the 18th century, investigating systems of production and critical reception of this peculiar type of engravings. From her earliest years of research she has combined her interest in archival investigations with an interest in computerized tools for art history.
Georg Schelbert studied art history, medieval history and philosophy in Munich and Bonn. From 1997 to 2003 he was personal assistant to Christoph L. Frommel, Director of the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, and wrote a dissertation on cardinal palaces of the Quattrocento in Rome, for which he was awarded a PhD in Munich in 2005. Until 2011, he worked on the project “Lineamenta – Research Database for Architectural Drawings” under the direction of Elisabeth Kieven at the Bibliotheca Hertziana and was responsible for the development of the data model, among other things. He worked as a research assistant at the University of Trier from 2005 to 2011 and at the l’Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte (IKB) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin from 2011 to 2023. Since October 2023, he has been head of the Photothek/Collections and Digital Humanities department at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. His research focuses on the history of architecture and urbanism in modern times as well as documentation in the field of art history.
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Jacques-Henri Sablet, La Stanza degli Animali, 1786-92 ca., Musei Vaticani