Italian Museums (ctd.)
August 18 2015
I mentioned the other day that the Italian government is taking steps to shake things up (at last) in the Italian museum sector. Today they announced some new appointments as directors of Italy's most important museums. And for the first time there's a slew of foreign appointments.
Ermanno Rivetti in The Art Newspaper reports:
Out of the 20 posts—evenly split between men and women—seven have gone to non-Italian EU nationals (three Germans, two Austrians, one British and one French). The ministry made the selection from 1,200 Italian and 80 foreign applications with the help of a committee that included Paolo Baratta, the president of La Biennale di Venezia, and Nicholas Penny, the former director of London’s National Gallery. [...]
Italy's seven new foreign directors:
Eike Schmidt Uffizi Galleries (Florence)
Sylvain Bellenger Museo di Capodimonte (Naples)
James Bradburne Pinacoteca di Brera (Milan)
Cecilie Hollberg Galleria dell’Accademia (Florence)
Peter Aufreiter Galleria Nazionale delle Marche (Urbino)
Gabriel Zuchtriegel Paestum Archeological Park
Peter Assmann Palazzo Ducale (Mantova)
Other appointments include:
Paola Marini Gallerie dell’Accademia (Venice)
Anna Coliva Galleria Borghese (Rome)
Cristiana Collu Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Rome)
Good news there's to be new leadership at the Uffizi. Step one, a decent website...
Many AHN congratulations to all those appointed.
Update - there's been a predictable backlash in Italy against some of the new, foreign appointments. Here's a choice line in The Independent:
Angelo Tartuferi, the head of the Gallery of the Florence Academy who was also replaced by a German – 48-year-old Cecilie Hollberg – hit out at [a] suggestion that the new managers had been hired “to make up for lost decades”. He said Italy had invented museum curation methods that German experts felt obliged to study.
Do the 'Italian curation methods' copied in Germany include useless websites, arbitrary gallery closures, lax security, and overly optimistic attributions? I doubt it.
