La fotografia nel museo d\u2019arte a fine Ottocento: sovrapposizioni e occasioni per una rinnovata filologia visiva. Alcuni spunti

The article deals with the effects of photography on the practices of art historians, focusing on some German cases. Photography, defined by Paul de Saint-Victor in 1887 as the \u201cmus\ue9e en action de l\u2019art europ\ue9en,\u201d offered unprecedented opportunities for a renewed visual philology. Yet this evolution was more complex and less unidirectional than is generally thought. The illustrated publications of Gustav Scheuer in the 1860s attest to different ways of manipulating photographic images and illuminate the connections between photography and comparative methods, which initially concerned the relationships between original paintings and photographs much more than those among paintings themselves

Contested Space – Contested Heritage. Sources on the Displacement of Cultural Objects in the 20th Century Alpine-Adriatic Region

The online edition investigates the transfer of cultural assets during the 20th century in the Alpine-Adriatic area, one of Europe’s core regions, featured by moving borders and ethnic conflicts. The volume presents more than 80 commented documents which throw crucial light on a multitude of settings, motives, circumstances, agents, juxtaposed authorities and mechanisms of power, trajectories, and consequences of transfer processes. The contemporary views the records express allow insight into procedural mechanisms, reveal bureaucratic implementations of political expectations, expose complicity on behalf of professional caretakers of cultural heritage and scholars, detail the mindset of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, unveil agendas, and expose myths, legends and competing nationalist narratives. This research is to be considered within the context of present-day art historiography and museology, focussing on spoliation, circulation, provenance, and restitution of cultural assets, and in relationship with contemporary art, today reflecting on concepts of ‘migration’, ‘threshold’, ‘loss’, and symbolic ‘recovery’ of identities

'Let agents be sent to all the cities of Italy'. British public museums and the Italian art market in the mid-19th century

The essay deals with the material history of the circulation of Italian Renaissance artefacts in major British public museums, such as the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, between the late 1850s and early 1860s. The revived interest in Renaissance art which pervades the cultural consciousness of Victorian Britain owes largely to the extensive and important purchases both of paintings and crafted artefacts (majolica, furniture, textiles, ecc.). These acquisitions were made without regard for the preservation of the Renaissance legacy in contemporary Italy, on the eve of its reunification. The strategies of the British museum curators and agents in the Italian art market are considered along with the political implications of the \u2018plunder\u2019, focusing on the ambiguities about the preservation of the Italian art heritage which reigned both in Great Britain and in the still confused Italian political and cultural debate

ICT and Art Heritage: a Project of the University of Udine for the Dissemination of Knowledge

The article illustrates some activities of LIDA, the Information Laboratory for Art History of the University of Udine. It focuses on a regional pilot project on ICT and cultural heritage, InfoBC. The project is based on the integration of existing electronic databases on the cultural heritage of the Region Friuli Venezia Giulia and the diffusion of data through both Web and mobile phones. The project's aim is to develop a multifaceted tool which could be used by local Governments and institutions to preserve and promote the cultural heritage of an area

La \u201cStoria pittorica\u201d di Luigi Lanzi e i \u201cquattro Carli\u201d

The article deals with Luigi Lanzi\u2019s use of the topos of the \u201cquattro carli\u201d in his Storia pittorica within the frame of a discussion on the French school of painting. This case allows to shed light on how Lanzi used and manipulated art historical sources in order to offer a convincing and readable narrative to his readers. The change of the context of Lanzi\u2019s quotation of the \u201cquattro carli\u201d from the 1st (1792) to the 2nd edition (1795-1796) of the Storia pittorica suggests interesting clues on Lanzi\u2019s shift of approach towards a different national tradition (Charles Le Brun and the French Academy at Rome) and towards coeval artists, such as Jacques-Louis David