Local Restitutions: Predatory Musealisations in Italy and the Ethics of Care

Since the nineteenth century the modern nation-state has appropriated select artistic patrimony and incorporated it into its system of social and identity control through musealisation. As a result of the decolonialization movement, scholarship has hitherto extensively addressed global colonial spoliations, yet the predatory musealisations committed locally by the European nation-states on their own patrimony have not been attended to. A closer look at the ethics of the most local level of domestic art spoliation and its reverberations in Europe is thus a necessity.

The project investigates how art history’s canonization and politics of care were channeled into the asymmetric power relations between the modern Italian state and the subjugated local communities within the national politics of musealisation of artistic patrimony after the Unification in 1861. It explores the disputes between the local custodians and the Italian authorities seeking to musealize regional patrimony and the responses of the deprived religious and civic communities. The cases of domestic restitutions of art objects from museums to their original local contexts, like the return in 1904, after four decades of dispute, from Museo Civico in Genoa to the church of Santa Maria in La Spezia of a Della Robbia altarpiece, are paradigmatic of how art history and art objects played a role in the Italian politics of identity and of modernisation at the moment, when the formation of the nascent Italian identity collided with local identities throughout the Peninsula. The aim is a deeper and holistic understanding of the complex entanglement of the cultural aggression of the Italian state-building and the epistemic violence of modern art canon and artistic patrimony protection policies.