title: The musealisation of prints and drawings and the birth of Gabinetti disegni e stampe in Italian State museums (1860-1909)
Creators: name: Massa, Silvia
Publisher: name: IMT Alti Studi Lucca
Year: 2019

description: Today fully recognised as works of art in their own right, prints and
drawings are amongst the most fragile objects and can only be displayed
for a limited period of time. For this reason, public collections of
drawings and prints are stored in special departments usually referred
to as Gabinetti disegni e stampe. These collections can be found not only in
museums but in libraries, art academies and archives too; and in Italy
their distribution is even more fragmented than elsewhere because of the
country’ political and cultural history, causing practical problems to the
management of these artefacts.
The reasons behind this complex situation have never been fully
explored as scholars have mostly focused on the attribution of the sheets
and on the reconstruction of individual collections’ origins and history
(the collector, his taste and his choices); moreover, drawings and prints
have traditionally been approached separately - although they now
share the same storage and display systems. In the last two decades, the
two most important public collections of graphic art in Italy (the Istituto
Centrale per la Grafica in Rome and the Uffizi Gabinetto Disegni e
Stampe in Florence) have been studied from the museological point of
view, but failed to analyse these collections in a broader, national
perspective.
Rooted in these recent developments of the field, the present dissertation
deals with the musealisation of collections of prints and drawings and
with the foundation of Gabinetti disegni e stampe as independent sections
of Italian State museums (Regie Pinacoteche) in Italy between the
Unification and 1909. The objective of the research is to combine various
areas of scholarship – namely, the histories of art, collecting, and
museums; legislation of cultural heritage – to understand the complex
relationship between the reception and appreciation of prints and
drawings and the choices taken both at local and at national level to
organize public collections of drawings and prints stored in Italian
cultural institutions.
The thesis does not only scrutinise the way collections of works of art on
paper were catalogued, stored and displayed; it widens its scope by
looking at regulations issued by the Ministry of Public Education; at the
origin and mission of hosting institutions; at the evolution of the
historical studies on prints and drawings. The analysis is not structured
with few selected case studies; instead, a broader, horizontal stance is adopted and 9 different State museums are observed, located in Rome,
Florence, Bologna, Parma, Venice, Milan, Naples, Turin, Modena.
Thereby, this dissertation aims to provide a better understanding of the
issues and processes which, at national and not only local level, affected
the ‘musealisation’ of art on paper and the ‘institutionalisation’ of this
kind of collections.
This research aims at answering three main questions that can be
summarised as follows: To which kind of institutions did prints and
drawings belong in the decades following the Unification of Italy? Which
was the mutual relationship of prints and drawings collections in State
museums compared to the structure of national museums of art? How
did the department Gabinetto disegni e stampe develop in Italian
museums?
An archive-based study was conducted at the Central State Archive in
Rome and locally in State museums and State libraries’ archives.
Archival records, mostly previously unpublished, shed light on the
process that, starting from the 1860s when graphic art was still mostly
valued for its documentary significance, led to the establishment of the
museum department Gabinetto disegni e stampe in Italy. I argue in fact that
the structure and typology of this department was not yet defined in the
1890s with the formalisation of the name Gabinetto disegni e stampe for
the Uffizi collection of graphic art or with the foundation of the Gabinetto
Nazionale delle Stampe in Rome; this kind of department was rather
established between 1906 and 1909, following the acknowledgment of
the primacy of conservation over display, which resulted in
reorganisation of the two main Italian collections which until that
moment had prioritized display causing great damage to the precious
and fragile sheets.