Giulia Murace: Rome in the Building of South-American Art and Academies

Rome in the Building of South-American Art and Academies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Pio Collivadino in his studio in Rome, 1898 ca., Pio Collivadino Museum Archive.

Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, numerous Latin American artists arrived in Rome to perfect their artistic education. Giulia Murace’s project aims to investigate the mobility of artists in their status as “marginal cosmopolitans” and, from a transnational perspective, the different ideas that circulated in this period regarding contemporary artistic tendencies. She analyzes the education of these artists, the social networks that they built and the dynamics with which they developed their own careers. The project proposes to examine the different artistic and cultural manifestations in Rome at the end of the century from the point of view of the artists and South American intellectuals. It compares the pictorial and sculptural production of these artists with what was produced contemporaneously in Rome and in the rest of Europe, and with what South American artists produced in the other European centers. The objective of this research is to note, from a critical analysis, the relevance of Rome in the process of the construction of the South American artistic field, putting it in dialogue and, if necessary, in dispute with the recognized capitals of modernity, first among them, Paris. This project proppses that Paris was not the only cultural capital of reference for South America during the second half of the nineteenth century, and Rome has not been considered enough by the local historiography. Without neglecting the importance of the French capital for the whole century, the proposal is to outline a more heterogeneous view of world political-artistic geography.

Giulia Murace is a PhD candidate in history at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Instituto de Altos Estudios Sociales). Murace has a fellowship from the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET) with a research project on South-American artists in Rome between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, directed by Prof. Laura Malosetti Costa. Her studies in Art History started in 2005 at the Università della Calabria where she received the Laurea Triennale in 2009 with a thesis on Mannerism and Bella maniera exhibitions in the twentieth century (supervised by Prof. Carla Mazzarelli) and the Laurea Magistrale in 2011 with a thesis on sacred art exportation from Rome to Buenos Aires between 1870 and 1910, supervised by Prof. Giovanna Capitelli. From 2012 to 2014 she did an MA in Beni Storico-Artistici at the Università degli Studi di Siena. Her MA thesis about Pio Collivadino in Rome between 1890 and 1906 was written thanks to an Argentinian grant of the Ministerio de Educación, supervised by Prof. Enrico Crispolti.