Displaying Art : Exhibition Choices of Italian Museums Through Time

Displaying Art: Exhibition Choices of Italian Museums Through Time brings together a series of methodologically oriented studies that examine the history of Italian museum displays through the critical use of visual documentation. Developed within the PRIN 2022 project The Forms of the Museum: Pilot-Project for a Digital Atlas of Italian Museums, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) and the European Union, the volume explores the epistemic potential of a large, structured corpus of images for reconstructing and interpreting exhibition practices across time. Through case studies on the Uffizi, Brera, Parma, L’Aquila, and the American reception of Italian museums, the essays treat photographs, illustrated periodicals, postcards, guides, films, and other visual materials as primary documents rather than mere illustrations. In doing so, they show how museum displays were not only arranged and transformed, but also circulated, interpreted, and made meaningful for different publics, highlighting the role of images in shaping institutional narratives, public reception, and cultural value. At the center of the volume is the Digital Atlas of Italian Museums (DAIM), conceived not simply as a repository, but as a research tool that enables comparison, relational analysis, and new interpretative perspectives. The book offers an original contribution to museum history while demonstrating the broader interdisciplinary value of visual sources for the study of cultural politics, public memory, and the social life of images.