Carla Mazzarelli

Carla Mazzarelli is Professor at Università della Svizzera italiana, Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio (ISA)  in Museology and History of Modern Art. She studied History of Modern Art and Museology at the University  of Rome Tre and the University of Florence, and received scholarships from the Foundation "Roberto Longhi", the Accademia di San Luca-British Academy, and the Accademia dei Lincei at the Courtauld Institute in London.  She received in 2014 the Research Support Grant of Paul Mellon-Centre for British Art (Yale University). In 2023 she was Visiting Research Fellow at Durham University. Since 2024 she is member of AcademiaNet (The Portal of Excellent Women Academics) nominated by the Swiss National Foundation.

The project

Title: 

The Public of the First Public Museums between Rome and Paris (18th-19th Centuries). Institutional Sources and Open Questions in a Transnational Perspective.

This project is partly based on an ongoing Research Project, under my direction, financed by the Swiss National Foundation at the University of Lugano (Switzerland, since February 2023) entitled Visibility Reclaimed. Experiencing Rome's First Public Museums (1733-1870). An Analysis of Public Audiences in a Transnational Perspective (2023-2027; FNS 100016_212922). The period from the Enlightenment to the emergence of nation-states has been defined as the "age of museums." Since the 1990s, numerous studies have focused on the transition period between the princely collection and the public museum. The history of each institution has been the subject of extensive research, mainly in France and the United States, with a particular focus on Paris and the founding of the Louvre in 1793 as a "public and national" institution. However, we still lack an ambitious study at the European level on the evolution of access conditions and exhibition practices as well as visitor experiences both in the princely galleries and in a growing number of museums that, from the mid-18th century onwards, opened to the public. The objective of this project is therefore to fill this gap by analyzing the concrete practices and the diverse and varied ways in which these spaces have come to fruition. The starting point is Italy, and in particular the city of Rome since the founding of the Capitoline Museums in 1733, which I intend to compare with France, particularly Paris, especially between the Revolution and the Restoration. Rome presents itself as a laboratory of practices and notions. According to an interdisciplinary method that includes the history of cultural institutions, social sciences, the history of literature, anthropology and material culture, the history of economics and of cultural consumption, the project places a corpus of primary sources, mostly unpublished, at the centre of the research, including the requests formulated and the permissions granted to access museums, requests for visiting, copying and studying museums and ancient monuments, and visitors’ books. This research project focuses, from a comparative perspective, on the role of public museum institutions in Rome and Paris in defining their publics, with particular reference to access practices, regulations concerning access and the protection of artifacts, and the quantitative and qualitative analysis of visitors. The comparison and circulations between the “Rome model” and the “Paris model” are particularly interesting in this regard and deserve to be explored further, taking into account both the institutional and cultural discontinuities and continuities that characterize this decisive phase in the evolution of museums in Europe. However, to go beyond simple comparison, it is also a question of analyzing the dialogue between the institutions themselves, that is to say the exchanges across borders between the directors and staff of museums and galleries, in the definition of practices and standards shared between the two countries around the management of audiences.

Hosting institution: l’IHMC - l’Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, UMR 8066, Université Paris 1, in Paris.

Selective Bibliography

• La pittura di storia in Italia ( with G. Capitelli) Cinisello Balsamo 2008
• La Copia. Connoisseurship, storia del gusto e della conservazione, Rome 2010
• Roma fuori di Roma. L’esportazione dell’arte moderna da Pio VI all’Unità (with G. Capitelli and S. Grandesso) Cinisello Balsamo 2012
• Dipingere in copia. Da Roma all'Europa (1750-1870). I. Teorie e pratiche, Rome 2018
• Il carteggio d'artista. Fonti, questioni, ricerche tra XVII e XIX secolo (with S. Rolfi) Cinisello Balsamo 2019
• Leggere le copie. Critica e letteratura artistica in Europa (with D.G. Cueto) Rome 2020.
• Leonardo nel Novecento. Arti, lettere e scienze in dialogo, Cinisello Balsamo 2023.
• Quale gotico per Milano? I materiali della giuria per il concorso della facciata del Duomo (1886-1888) (with A. Windholz e M. Moizi, 2023)