“For the last hundred years art history has been the history of that which can be photographed,” wrote André Malraux in 1949. As the French critic’s observation suggests, art history has been bound up with photography since the mid-nineteenth century. This is particularly true of Italy, which has provided a rich repository for scholars seeking to understand the history of art, as well as for artists and photographers responding to that history in new and different ways. Heinrich Wölfflin’s investigation of Roman sculpture in the 1880s, for example, based on photographs of art projected through lantern slides, introduced the process of comparative analysis. Bernard Berenson used photographs to aid his study and attribution of Italian Renaissance paintings. Italy’s artistic patrimony has also offered photographers some of their most compelling subjects, from Robert MacPherson’s mid-nineteenth century views of Rome’s ancient monuments, to the Alinari brothers’ photographs of Michelangelo’s sculptures, to Luigi Ghirri’s photographic renditions of paintings by the Bolognese modernist Giorgio Morandi. Although longstanding and intimately intertwined, the prolific, if complex, relationship between art history and photography in Italy is just beginning to be explored.

This one-day conference, in English and Italian, brings together leading scholars of art history, photographic history, and contemporary artists to consider how photography has shaped the evolution of art history, how the study of art has influenced photographers’ choice of subject, style, and technique, and the unique role Italy has played in the process.

Speakers in the program include Marco Andreani (Macula - Centro Internazionale di Cultura Fotografica, Pesaro), Maria Francesca Bonetti (Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome), Martina Caruso (Art Historian, London and Rome), Monika Faber (Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna), David Forgacs (New York University), Francesco Jodice (Artist, Milan), and Maria Antonelli Pelizzari (Hunter College, New York).

Organizer: Lindsay Harris, American Academy in Rome.