The musealisation of prints and drawings and the birth of Gabinetti disegni e stampe in Italian State museums (1860-1909)

Today fully recognised as works of art in their own right, prints anddrawings are amongst the most fragile objects and can only be displayedfor a limited period of time. For this reason, public collections ofdrawings and prints are stored in special departments usually referredto as Gabinetti disegni e stampe. These collections can be found not only inmuseums but in libraries, art academies and archives too; and in Italytheir distribution is even more fragmented than elsewhere because of thecountry’ political and cultural history, causing practical problems to themanagement of these artefacts.The reasons behind this complex situation have never been fullyexplored as scholars have mostly focused on the attribution of the sheetsand on the reconstruction of individual collections’ origins and history(the collector, his taste and his choices); moreover, drawings and printshave traditionally been approached separately - although they nowshare the same storage and display systems. In the last two decades, thetwo most important public collections of graphic art in Italy (the IstitutoCentrale per la Grafica in Rome and the Uffizi Gabinetto Disegni eStampe in Florence) have been studied from the museological point ofview, but failed to analyse these collections in a broader, nationalperspective.Rooted in these recent developments of the field, the present dissertationdeals with the musealisation of collections of prints and drawings andwith the foundation of Gabinetti disegni e stampe as independent sectionsof Italian State museums (Regie Pinacoteche) in Italy between theUnification and 1909. The objective of the research is to combine variousareas of scholarship – namely, the histories of art, collecting, andmuseums; legislation of cultural heritage – to understand the complexrelationship between the reception and appreciation of prints anddrawings and the choices taken both at local and at national level toorganize public collections of drawings and prints stored in Italiancultural institutions.The thesis does not only scrutinise the way collections of works of art onpaper were catalogued, stored and displayed; it widens its scope bylooking at regulations issued by the Ministry of Public Education; at theorigin and mission of hosting institutions; at the evolution of thehistorical 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 theissues and processes which, at national and not only local level, affectedthe ‘musealisation’ of art on paper and the ‘institutionalisation’ of thiskind of collections.This research aims at answering three main questions that can besummarised as follows: To which kind of institutions did prints anddrawings belong in the decades following the Unification of Italy? Whichwas the mutual relationship of prints and drawings collections in Statemuseums compared to the structure of national museums of art? Howdid the department Gabinetto disegni e stampe develop in Italianmuseums?An archive-based study was conducted at the Central State Archive inRome and locally in State museums and State libraries’ archives.Archival records, mostly previously unpublished, shed light on theprocess that, starting from the 1860s when graphic art was still mostlyvalued for its documentary significance, led to the establishment of themuseum department Gabinetto disegni e stampe in Italy. I argue in fact thatthe structure and typology of this department was not yet defined in the1890s with the formalisation of the name Gabinetto disegni e stampe forthe Uffizi collection of graphic art or with the foundation of the GabinettoNazionale delle Stampe in Rome; this kind of department was ratherestablished between 1906 and 1909, following the acknowledgment ofthe primacy of conservation over display, which resulted inreorganisation of the two main Italian collections which until thatmoment had prioritized display causing great damage to the preciousand fragile sheets.