Authors:Orietta Lanzarini, Emanuela Ferretti Pages: 8 - 15 Abstract: The Madrid Conference of 1934 sanctioned the affirmation of a new idea of the museum with an enhanced educational and social scope, which was shared internationally. The main objective of the reform, already underway in the first decades of the 20th century, was to enable the general public entering museums to understand the value of history, of the arts and of sciences in the ‘construction’ of the present. This process of profound transformations involves various design and theoretical concerns, which are explored in this issue of the Journal in three sections and in a photo album. The first section highlights the role of some of the decisive figures in the development of contemporary museography and then moves on to the theoretical debate and the relationship between exhibitions and museums. The second section focuses on education and communication, both within the museum and in the development of methodologies for designing its spaces. Finally, the third part investigates the museum from a formal and functional point of view. The volume closes with a photographic ‘story’ of the evolution of some of the Uffizi’s most important exhibitions and a tribute to the memory of Delfín Rodríguez Ruiz. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14836 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Anna Chiara Cimoli Pages: 18 - 27 Abstract: The article describes the work of ethnographer Thérèse Rivière (1901-1970) at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, later Musée de l’Homme, in Paris. Analysing the scholar’s contribution, in particular the method she adopted during her fieldwork in Algeria among the Amazigh populations and its subsequent impact on the museum, the essay brings to light not only a half-forgotten profile, but also a relevant page in the history of the Musée de l’Homme. The analysis develops around the themes of gender, distance/proximity to the object of study, and adherence or non-adherence to a normativity imposed from above in the strongly hierarchical structure of the museum. What emerges is the figure of an ethnographer who entrusts relationships and imaginative power with the ability to understand and represent a culture. The collection of photographs, the letters, and the album of the ‘dessins indigènes’ show how her practice was not at odds with an unobjectionable scientific rigour. The long years in a psychiatric hospital, however, also suggest a reflection on the boundaries between truth and fiction, the relationship between sight and mental health, the impact of war and much more to be explored. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14837 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Irene Baldriga Pages: 28 - 39 Abstract: After World War II, the diffusion of Phenomenology was pivotal in inspiring a different consideration of the relationship between visitors and artworks, fostering Italian museological experimentation and the evolution of aesthetic thought. In this sense, the contributions of some art historians interested in promoting awareness and participation in museum experience were fundamental. By adopting a new perspective, the contribution analyzes some aspects of this cultural context, focusing in particular on the experience of Cesare Brandi and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14838 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Raffaella Fontanarossa Pages: 40 - 51 Abstract: The case of Franca Helg (1920-1989) is, in many respects, unprecedented: architect and museographer, alongside her intense academic and publicist activities, she designed and created some of the main post-war museums and around a hundred temporary exhibitions. However, her professional association with Franco Albini, with whom from 1951 (and until the architect’s death in 1977) she shared a studio, ended up obscuring her contributions. The Genoese museums of Palazzo Rosso, the Treasury of San Lorenzo, and Sant’Agostino, and the Eremitani in Padua, are in fact generally attributed to the hand of master Albini, while Helg, always in the background, is often not even mentioned. Even more seriously, her real contributions are never made explicit, at planning or theoretical level. This paper aims to initiate studies on Helg by highlighting her design and theoretical contributions to post-war museography and museology, also through her writings (published and unpublished) and an analysis of a part of her archive. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14839 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Alexis Joachimides Pages: 52 - 61 Abstract: In an effort to rehabilitate modernism in the eyes of the mainstream art public, rebalancing its repression as ‘degenerate art’ during the ‘Third Reich’, the documenta 1955 was a singular attempt to redefine the cultural climate in post-war Germany. While the choice of artists and artworks was largely retrospective, their radically modern display in the provisional setting of a war-damaged historical museum building essentially contributed to its perception as an epitome of the ‘contemporary’. Until recently, the many accounts of this display have not conclusively identified the possible sources of this innovation. The paper discusses to what extend innovative Italian museum displays of the post-war reconstruction period were an inspiration for German exhibition designers. It also identifies how these sources were transmitted, and situates the temporary result within a discourse of museum reform during the 1950s. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14840 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Eva Renzulli Pages: 64 - 73 Abstract: In the aftermath of World War II, the reopening of the Louvre Museum became an important issue. The process was long and complex, and the rationale not always obvious to the public. Newspapers played an important role in conveying the methods applied to achieve it. In 1951, the art historian André Chastel published, in Le Monde, a critical inquiry on the situation of the Parisian Museum. His analysis stands out for its accuracy in describing the state of the building, revealing the curators’ and architects’ challenges due to the modernization of display methods. His work also aspired to raise public awareness on the functioning of a museum, highlighting the process of implementing its internal services (libraries and avant-garde scientific laboratories). Drawing on Chastel’s analysis and, from a comparative perspective, those of other journalists and art critics, this study highlights the value of the engaged journalism of these well-informed critics as relevant sources to appreciate the different transformations used to put the Louvre’s modernization into practice. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14841 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Vincenza Benedettino Pages: 74 - 85 Abstract: This article aims to trace the history of the exhibition device created by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, used during the mandate of the museum’s first director, Werner Haftmann (1912-1999), from 1967 to 1974. The solution devised by the architect for the glass hall on the ground floor of the museum, intended for temporary exhibitions and characterised by a completely open space with no walls, consisted of a set of panels suspended from the ceiling by metal cables that could be freely mounted, modulated and dismantled. They were ideally intended to meet the specific museographic requirements of each exhibition and different types of artwork. By analysing the displays of some of the major exhibitions at the Neue Nationalgalerie, the role played by James Johnson Sweeney (1900-1986), director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in the realisation of Mies van der Rohe’s ideas and exhibition projects in Cullinan Hall, a wing of the museum built by the architect in 1958, and the relationship between museography, works of art, museum space and visitors will be discussed and critical issues will be highlighted. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14842 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Anna Rosellini Pages: 86 - 99 Abstract: When Mies began teaching at the Armour Institute, he defined a programme that would make technical and industrial developments in the United States problematic and theoretical. Some of the exercises concerned the relationship between painting, sculpture and architecture, and were transformed into museum projects. In the paper, the projects for exhibition spaces drawn up by Brenner, Jansone and Lippert for the Master of Science in Architecture are analysed from archive documents. The spatial, structural and material characteristics of these projects are reconstructed, as are their relationships to the programmes of the Department of Architecture, the design processes suggested by Mies, Le Corbusier’s projects for museums, and the Museum for a Small City designed by Mies together with Danforth. The theses of Brenner, Jansone and Lippert, united by the choice of a museum system that transfigured Le Corbusier’s model in the light of Mies’s vision, appear to be decisive documents not only for understanding the Department of Architecture’s didactic orientations, but also for accessing Mies’s unspeakable art of tracing and arranging lines and planes in space. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14843 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Martina Lerda Pages: 100 - 109 Abstract: This article reconstructs ministerial developments relating to the creation of educational exhibitions in Italian museums in the immediate post-war period and the first exhibitions of this type set up at the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa (exhibition dedicated to the Polittico dei Carmelitani by Masaccio) and at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome (exhibition on Nuragic bronzes). It is one of the first forms of reception and implementation in Italy of the principles promoted by ICOM on the educational function of museums and among its main promoters was Giulio Carlo Argan who dedicated articles to the ministerial initiative, not only in the Bolletino d’Arte, but also in Museum, the official journal of UNESCO. The aim of the paper is to bring the Italian experience into dialogue with contemporary international debate on the role of museums. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14844 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Cecilia Rostagni Pages: 112 - 121 Abstract: The paper analyzes the conception of the museum through Gio Ponti’s writings, projects and work. Although over the course of his long and intense professional career he only designed the Denver Art Museum, opened in 1971, Ponti began reflecting on the role of the museum as early as the 1930s. The creation of the new headquarters of the Faculty of Letters (Liviano) and the arrangement of the rooms of the Rectorate of the University of Padua anticipate themes that would only later become the subject of a wider critical discussion, not only in the museographic field, proposing an idea of the museum as a living place and a place of education in direct contact with works of art of every age and genre. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14845 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Germano Germanò Pages: 122 - 133 Abstract: The paper retraces the history of the exhibition designs of the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria (Italy), investigating the museographic and museological instances that inspired them, with a glimpse of the cultural context in which they flourished. The investigation period spans from the 1930s, when the architect Marcello Piacentini developed the original planning ideas for the building and the interior of the “first museum in Italy built for this purpose”, to the first exhibition presented to the public at the opening in 1958. The paper concludes with an analysis of the expansion of the museum sections in the 1960s with new criteria. Thanks to hitherto unpublished documents, the history of the museum and its protagonists has been reconstructed, revealing a spirit of collaboration between architects and archaeologists which provides an example of good museum practice and laid the basis for the subsequent development of this important institution in Southern Italy. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14846 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Francesca Giusti Pages: 134 - 145 Abstract: The story of the Civic Museum of Pisa, built by Piero Sanpaolesi in the former convent of San Matteo, and inaugurated in 1949 in the midst of the emergency of reconstruction, intertwines the themes of restoration and museography, representing a significant synthesis of the international debate on culture and museum practice. In this sense, the contribution aims to demonstrate the principle of unity between architectural structure and pieces of art that underlies the project of the museum of San Matteo, where the intent of Sanpaolesi to think the restoration of the building and the exhibition as a whole emerges clearly. Restoration as an opportunity to know the historical and artistic palimpsest that is part of the process of musealization of the building, in relation to an idea of ‘modernity’ compatible with the cultural values of which the building itself is the bearer. Where the idea of valorization acquires meaning not so much because the building ‘contains’ works of art, but because the same operation of rereading the historical narrative of the building is an integral part of the exhibition. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14847 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Veronica Locatelli Pages: 146 - 157 Abstract: “A museum of temporary exhibitions”: the architect-engineer Ignazio Gardella used this formula to describe the PAC (Contemporary Art Pavilion) in Milan, summarising the prerogatives and destiny of his first museographic project, opened in 1954, which stood out for its originality in the Italian cultural panorama of the immediate post-war period. The ambiguity of the architectural structure, precariously balanced between an uncertain museum identity, permanent by vocation, and a flexible space designed for a variable palimpsest, was coupled with the uncertainty of its content. The interweaving of the project’s documentary history and the specificities of its underlying cultural plan reveal the identity and political strategies of what, at least in its intentions, was to be the first civic museum of contemporary art in Italy. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14848 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Matteo Iannello Pages: 158 - 169 Abstract: The contribution describes the genesis of the project to enhance the archaeological area of ancient Himera and the construction of the antiquarium which begun in the early 1960s to a design by Franco Minissi. The antiquarium, built along the slope of the mountain, is characterised by a system of sloping terraces that follow the natural progression of the terrain, blending built architecture and natural scenery without any pretence. At the same time, the system of sloping terraces defines the internal museographic itinerary built around a continuous and unified system of ramps, a true architectural promenade, which articulate the space and organise the exhibition: “Double-height rooms and internal overlooks vary and enliven the visit itinerary; the void itself becomes an ‘exhibition machine’; its flow seeks to capture the attention of the visitors and draw them in. Diversified sequences, through a shrewd architectural as well as museographic design, where the exhibits are made to interact with the environment that contains them”. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14849 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Pablo von Frankenberg Pages: 170 - 175 Abstract: In 1962, the house in which German astronomer Johannes Kepler died in Regensburg/Ratisbona was transformed into a museum about the founder of astrophysics and discoverer of the laws of planetary motion. The refurbishment of the medieval residential building and its repurposing unveils an understanding of science, history, heritage protection, and museum that is characteristic of the time and, simultaneously, allows insights into the peculiarities of cultural politics in post-fascist Germany. The architectural approach that was taken to preserve the historic monument was creative rather than scientific. For instance, it assembled parts from other houses of the same epoch to replace missing ceilings in order to create an “authentic” historic atmosphere. This authenticity was also perceived by visitors to the exhibition. A house-museum evolved with furniture that only appeared to be Kepler’s and a building that was altered in a way that makes it hard to distinguish between the different layers of time. Both the architecture and the permanent exhibition blurred the boundaries between stage and museum, props and exhibits, and authenticity and make-believe. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14850 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Benedetta Cestelli Guidi Pages: 176 - 195 Abstract: A selection of photographs of the Uffizi’s renewals and displays, taken mainly before and after World War II, represent the core of the visual essay. The images belong to four distinctive photographic documentations of the gallery, commissioned in order to record the exhibition designs each time they were dismantled and renewed. The photographs were shot by the photographers of the Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi (1904-on going). The ones reproduced here are held in the central photo archive of the former Direzione Generale Antichità e Belle Arti. Their documentary value lies in both the image and its recto, where information such as the inventory number of the photography was printed. Many other traces of their afterlife can be found in the many notes, dates and comments which proved to be strategic in dating, even “to the month”, the renewal of the spaces and the arrangement of the pictures. The images are ordered in three discursive sections that link the on-going renewal of the Galleria in these decades to the contemporary critical debate on museum arrangements. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14851 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
Authors:Maria Grazia D’Amelio, Delfín Rodríguez Ruiz Pages: 196 - 199 Abstract: On 22 April 1629, the day of the canonisation of the Florentine Andrea Corsini, the apse of St. Peter’s was refigured and refunctioned with a scenographic ephemeral decoration designed by Giovan Lorenzo Bernini. It consisted of a wooden lining with a peribolos of architraved columns, all painted to simulate stone, bronze and gold, with the papal throne in the centre. The ceremony is immortalized in a description by Federico Cristofari, in an engraving (1625) from a reworked copper plate (1628-1629) and on two medals bearing, on the reverse side, a figurative scene in which some details of the canonisation can be glimpsed. A preparatory sketch for an uncoined medal (Raclin Murphy Museum of Art) and, in recent years, a second sketch for an unexecuted medal have also been traced back to the event. The latter sketch, which was destroyed during the Spanish Civil War and of which only a photographic reproduction is preserved (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid), offers further valuable information on the teatro aperto created to ensure that the ceremony was fully visible to the faithful present in the Basilica. PubDate: 2023-12-13 DOI: 10.36253/opus-14852 Issue No:Vol. 9 (2023)
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