Un sentimento di libertà: Toward a transnational Italian art history

Abstract

When I received the editors’ invitation to contribute an article to this special issue of Forum Italicum on transnational Italian studies, I was delighted to have the opportunity to expand my thoughts—some still developing—on a question that has for many years shaped my scholarship and teaching on Italian art: how do we do art history today, on Italian art (in my case, on Italian modernism, postwar art, and contemporary art) without serious attention to histories of colonialism, empire, and decolonization that are foundational to Italian nationhood and identity? How do we do Italianist art history—the discipline of studying and writing histories of Italian art—without confronting the ideological constructions, and exclusions, of italianità? These questions feel especially important in the days following the election of Giorgia Meloni, when I am finishing this article. Meloni’s victory represents a milestone for the rise of national populism and far-right politics and culture in recent decades in Italy and broader Europe, not to mention the UK and USA. These questions also seem pressing, however, within art history as a discipline, as the field seeks to confront its long-held Eurocentrism. Indeed, the history of Italian art has been central to the discipline of art history and its methods from the field’s inception, beginning with Giorgio Vasari in the Cinquecento, through the work of foundational, field-shaping art historians and philosophers in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, including Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Hegel, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Bernard Berenson, to name a few. The Renaissance, or art of early modern Italy, remains essential to the Eurocentric art historical canon. With the rise of