Italy in a Global Context
Profile
The Research Priority Italy in a Global Context aims to recast our understanding of Italian early modern and contemporary art by studying artistic developments that occurred outside of the predominantly urban centers of the Italian peninsula. This challenges the paradigm of the centrality of artistic capitals and the subsequent reception of their breakthroughs in subordinate peripheries, proposing instead a pluralistic view with an eye towards a global understanding of art. A specific focus of the section is Latin America and its idiosyncratic reinventions of the Baroque, which builds on previous research on the interactions between Rome and the Viceroyalty of Peru in the seventeenth century, as well as the Latin American actualization and renewal of German-language art theory and historiography in the twentieth century. The Department has built up an open-access collection of 13k photographs documenting 6k items of Latin American art and architecture from precolonial times to the present.
Furthermore, in relation to the Ventennio fascista, the question of the imperialist aspects of modern architecture, urbanism, and art in the territories occupied by Italy are explored. By means of a comparison of regionalisms in young nations such as Brazil and Argentina, which fought against a Western modernist ‘neocolonialism’, fascist colonial architecture can be observed as regionalist constructions of the Other. Thus, a more complex picture of global Modernisms can contribute to a new political geography of art. The Research Priority includes the research unit Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture: From Nation Building to Now and the Max Planck Partner Group Sport, Body, and Race in Fascist Visual Culture.
Report 2022–2024
In the Department’s Research Priority Italy in a Global Context, which has grown to become the largest in terms of the number of participating scholars, two overlapping perspectives merge, one addressing Latin America and its interrelations with Italy since the colonial age, and the other fostering the decolonization of Art History, which includes the study of fascism and thereby consciously defies current political trends in Italy and abroad. Moreover, the Paris x Rome Fellowship supported research mostly dedicated to Franco-Italian connections in the field of modern and contemporary art.
Latin America
In the past three years, understanding Brazil from a decolonial viewpoint has been a main endeavor within this Research Priority. The Art and Power – Decolonizing Art History project, co-directed with Jens Baumgarten (UNIFESP), Maria Berbara (UERJ), Ana Gonçalves Magalhães (MAC-USP), and Vinicius Pontes Spricigo (UNIFESP), and supported by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories program with 200k EUR administered by UNIFESP, culminated in the 2023 Art and Power School, which welcomed 14 Brazilian Ph.D. students and six professors to the Institute. The group included another two Brazilian Ph.D. students from USP and UNIFESP, who won the six-months São Paulo x Rome Fellowship that the Department co-funded with the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories program, which contributed 29k EUR: one studied the bodily discourse of power in Seicento Italy and France, the other Italian art critics in Brazil. Art and Power has been supported by the Department’s Postdoctoral Fellow Fernanda Marinho, who organized two exhibitions and one Workshop on the cultural exchange between Brazil and Italy under Empress Teresa Cristina, studied Brazilian indigenous artifacts in Rome’s Museo delle Civiltà (Muciv) with the support of the Organizzazione Internazionale Italo-Latino americana (IILA), organized the Workshop Literary and Cultural Circulation Between Italy and Brazil with the DFG-funded network Brazilian-Italian Cultural Contact (BRICC), and received a SNSF Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship with the project Displacement, Translation, Desire: Italian Art in Brazil during the Fascist Era, hosted by Weddigen at the UZH.
With the aim of training emerging scholars of Latin American art and architecture, the Department participated in two Transregional Academies led by Lena Bader, Thomas Kircher, and Peter Geimer of the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (DFK), Paris, supported by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories program with 135k EUR. Plural Temporalities: Theories and Practices of Time took place in 2022 at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, and Contesting Objects: Sites, Narratives, Contexts was held in 2024 at the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), Peru.
Early modern indigenous uptake of western visual culture, colonial Humanism, colonial materiality, and racial theories in the Enlightenment have been discussed in Research Seminars, culminating in the Workshop Picturing Sainthood: Images and the Making of Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism organized by Raphaèle Preisinger (UZH) with her ERC and SNSF project Global Economies of Salvation. Art and the Negotiation of Sanctity in the Early Modern Period (GLOBECOSAL), while contemporary topics have been discussed in relation to the artist Antonio Dias, with the artist, critic, and curator Luis Camnitzer, and in the Workshop Connected Constellations. Networks of Artistic and Political Solidarity with Chile, held on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Chilean Coup.
The Department’s Latin American Special Collections now hold 13k photographs of 6k buildings and artworks from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines. It is one of the most comprehensive, openly accessible collections, enriched with CIDOC-CRM-based metadata, available for art historical scholarship.
The research topics of Fellows have included the Jesuit and mannerist painter Bernardo Bitti’s work for the Society of Jesus in Peru, the notion of a pre-Colombian antiquity, the Latin American iconography of the Last Judgment, the use of drawings in court cases, the dissemination of statues of the Virgin throughout the Hispanic world, the notion of scale across the Spanish Empire, Latin American and Spanish artists in Rome around 1900, cultural and political connections between Brazil and fascist Italy, the solidarity networks between Chile and Italy, diasporic narratives between Italy and Latin America, Roberto Matta’s work in Italy, queer art in Brazil and Peru, and the contemporary concept of Spielraum between Brazil and Europe.
Decoloniality
Since 2022 the Department has devoted attention to the history and afterlife of Italian fascism through the new informal research unit Decolonizing Italian Visual and Material Culture, coordinated by Carmen Belmonte (Roma Tre University). Belmonte, who studies the art and material culture of Italian colonialism and the reception of fascist heritage, edited the volume A Difficult Heritage. The Afterlives of Fascist-Era Art and Architecture in 2023 with the Institute. The unit is an active member of the network project SPAZIDENTITÀ – Spazialità materiale e immateriale dell’italianità dalla Repubblica Cisalpina al Fascismo, directed by l’École française de Rome and dedicated to the study of post-unitarian constructions of Italian identity. It has also established a cooperation with the Museo delle Civiltà (Muciv), heir of the former Museo coloniale, then Museo africano, at E.U.R., to develop provenance research and organize joint scientific events. In the past three years, the unit, which includes Giulia Beatrice, an SNSF Doc.CH grantee at UZH working on Africa and colonialism in Italian Futurism, has organized Research Seminars on topics such as racial identity politics in fascist Italy, and decolonization in museum contexts. Another member of the unit, Sara Vitacca, now maîtresse de conférences at the université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, after investigating male hetero- and homosexual corporeality in the fascist era and organizing the Workshop New Leisure for a New Nation. Art and Entertainment in Italy, will direct the five-year Max Planck Partner Group Sport, Body, and Race in Fascist Visual Culture.
Fellows’ projects have examined Armando Brasini’s architectural projects during the ventennio, the history of the DUX Obelisk, Italy’s evolving attitude towards its fascist heritage, contemporary art interventions with Alto Adige’s Mussolinian heritage, Mediterranean petro-Modernity Italy, and postwar Egyptian art. Other projects dedicated to art in a global context, without a connection to Latin America, decoloniality, or fascism, have included research on early Egyptomania, which was dealt with in the Workshop Immortal Egypt. The Afterlife of Egypt in Early Modern Visual Arts, co-organized by Luisa Capodieci (université de Lorraine, Nancy), artistic exchanges between Italy, Yugoslavia, and the Eastern Block, and Soviet visual culture, the latter two contributing to the #ScienceForUkraine initiative.
The Paris x Rome Fellowship
In the past three years, the six-month Paris x Rome Fellowship for the history of modern and contemporary art, inaugurated in 2018 in partnership with the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (DFK), has supported research on transnational, mostly Frenco-Italian phenomena in modern and contemporary art, more specifically, seven projects dedicated to the interwar reception of the primitivi, the postwar reception of Eastern European prewar avant-gardes, the impact of 1968/69 on art institutions and art criticism, and the collecting of Surrealist art.
The Paris x Rome Fellowships were discontinued at the end of 2024. The 2019–2024 Fellows have been:
- Elena Blázquez, Predoc, 2019: The Educational and Career Path of Spanish Film Director Helena Lumbreras in Italy in the 1960s
- Vincenza Benedettino, Predoc, 2019: Werner Haftmann as Director of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Temporary Exhibitions and Accession Policy (1967–1974)
- Debora Alcaine, Predoc, 2020: Porter-Camnitzer’s Studios: Print as Resistance (1964–1978)
- Martina Caruso, Postdoc, 2021: Anti-Americanism and Cold War Conspiracies in French and Italian Painting of the Korean War
- Juliane Debeusscher, Predoc, 2021: Enrico Crispolti - Alternatives and Decenterings in Italian Art Criticism and Exhibitions (1960s–1970s)
- Benjamin Fellmann, Postdoc, 2022: Pier Paolo Pasolini in Contemporary Art. The Politics of Art Practice
- Ana Redondo Plaza, Predoc, 2022: Intentional Gazes at the Quattrocento in France and Italy in the Interwar Period: Art, Politics and Cultural Institutions. An Approach to the Construction of Modernity
- Duccio Nobili, Postdoc, 2023: The First Words from October. The Rediscovery of Russian and East-European Avant-gardes in the Years of the Protest
- Elisa Bassetto, Postdoc, 2023: «Roma = Parigi». The 1968 Movement and the Art Institutions in France and Italy: A Comparative Perspective
- Frida Sandström, Predoc, 2023: Art Criticism as Social Critique. The Disintegration, Deculturalization, and Objection of Art Criticism in 1969
- Christina Heflin, Postdoc, 2024: Le radici francesi: The Parisian Origins of Arturo Schwarz’s Surrealist Collection in Rome
Outlook
In 2025, funding opportunities for organizing another Transregional Academy will be sought out. Three Workshops are planned: Transnational Circulation of Devotional Objects through Religious Orders: Between the Iberian World and Rome, co-organized by Luisa Elena Alcalá (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), which will study early modern networks of objects; Decentering Transnationality in Post-War Europe, co-organized by Elize Mazadiego (University of Bern), which will re-read postwar genealogies; and one on artistic encounters between Italy and the rest of the Mediterranean, addressing contemporary global contexts. The Department will continue to search for a French partner institution to resume the Paris x Rome Fellowships
