MUSEOLOGY

The course is scheduled among the core educational activities for art-historical disciplines in the degree course in Economics and administration of arts and culture.
It is designed for students with a humanistic and/or an arts management education at the B.A. level.
It provides 6 CFU and is the first part of a 12-CFU course ("MUSEOLOGY AND CURATORSHIP", EM3A14).

- Familiarity with exhibition history, and an in-depth knowledge of the institutional history of the French Salon. A historical understanding of museum displays;
- Familiarity with the French art in the 18th and 19th century;
- Basic notions of reception theory.

No specific requirements for this course.

The French Salon can be considered the most important public exhibition of contemporary art in France, if not in 18th and 19th century Europe. From an elitist event in which it was exclusively reserved for members of the academy to present their works, it turned into a mass spectacle during in the run of the nineteenth century. With changing format of the exhibition, the nature of the art exhibited changed as well. One can even go so far as to claim that the institution of the salon generated its own kind of art work.
The seminar analyses a selection of the most sensational paintings and sculptures shown in the Salon, focussing on their presentation and their reception by the public. In addition, we will also take a look at other, alternative exhibition formats of the time, such as the one-picture shows, popular at the beginning of the 19th century, exhibitions in commercial galleries or the exhibition pavilions erected by Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet in occasion of the world exhibitions held at Paris.

A. Bibliography
Thomas Crow: Painters and public life in eighteenth-century Paris, New Haven u.a. 1985;
Patricia Mainardi: The End of the Salon. Art and the State of the Early Third Republic, Cambridge u.a. 1993.

B. Optional Reading
Andrée Sfeir-Semler: Die Maler am Pariser Salon 1791-1880, Frankfurt a.M. 1992.

The evaluation considers individual presentation (12 minutes) and a paper (about 12 pages) to be handed in within a month after the seminar.
The final note considers:
70%: the paper;
30%: presentation and interventions during the seminar.

scritto e orale

Lectures and seminar. Further materials (sources, bibliography, links, PowerPoint presentations projected in class) will be shared through the platform moodle (http://moodle.unive.it ).