Visibility Reclaimed. Experiencing Rome’s First Public Museums (1733-1870). An Analysis of Public Audiences in a Transnational Perspective

The dialogue between museums and the public begins in Rome with the foundation of the Capitoline Museum in 1733 and continues with the renewal and expansion of museums in the Napoleonic era and during the nineteenth century. Rome is here proposed as a laboratory for the constitutive dialogue (sometimes conflictual) between cultural institutions, museums and the visiting public during the early modern age. The research intends to conceptually study the evolution of the first public museums in Rome in relation to the different geographical origins and categories (social, cultural, gender) of the international and cosmopolitan public who directly accessed their collections. Following the famous formulation that Quatremère de Quincy coined in 1796, in which the entire city is presented as “The Museum of Rome”, an ‘immovable’ patrimony to be shared and protected ‘in its entirety’,here we intend to study its collections of antiquities, palatial galleries, patrician villas, ancient and modern monuments as a dynamic network of urban places, itineraries and circuits of visits on the city’s map. The research questions (how was the public museum defined and perceived at its origins, in terms of its ever greater significance as architectural space and shared experience? Which and how many publics accessed the first public museums? Which and how many publics were excluded?) place the ‘embodied encounter’ at the centre of historical and critical reflection on the museum, which invites us to go beyond the visual dimension that the exhibition space presupposes and to probe its characteristics and outcomes in light of the material experience of museum space and collectorship and the systems of disciplining the public itself implemented by the institutions during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. 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culture, the history of economics and of cultural consumption, the project places a corpus of primary sources, mostly unpublished, at the centre of the research, including the requests formulated and the permissions granted to access museums, requests for visiting, copying and studying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. The comparison with critical methodologies that have stressed the importance of mobility over ‘national’ paradigms, and provided a dynamic artistic geography of Rome in the 18th and 19th centuries is the foundation of the reflections on the project and lends itself to a transnational and comparative approach to other geographies.