Drafting the Canon: Art and Law in Florence and Rome, 1600-1800
Sara Petrilli-Jones

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, political authorities in Florence, Venice, and Rome drafted unprecedented volumes of law dedicated to the safeguarding (tutela) and circulation of artworks and antiquities. My dissertation seeks to unravel the political, cultural, and ideological developments that underpin this proliferation of patrimony laws. At the same time, it attempts to recover such laws’ dynamic relationship to the history of art and to artistic production and to reconstruct the parallel strategies for constructing, or solidifying, local identities and canons. Broadly, the goals of my project are twofold: to understand the roots of terms and categories traditionally used to organize and describe the history of Italian art; and to revise and deepen our understanding of patrimony as a legal and cultural phenomenon.