Italy in a Global Context

The focus on Italy in a Global Context aims to recast our understanding of Italian art and its reception by studying artistic developments that occurred outside of the predominantly urban centers of the Italian peninsula. This challenges the paradigm of the centrality of artistic capitals and the subsequent reception of their breakthroughs in subordinate peripheries, proposing instead a pluralistic view with an eye towards a global understanding. A specific focus of this section is Latin America and its idiosyncratic reinventions of the Baroque, which builds on previous research on the interactions between Rome and the Viceroyalty of Peru in the seventeenth century, as well as the Latin American renewal of German-language art theory and historiography in the twentieth century. Additionally, in relation to the ventennio fascista, this research focus explores the question of the imperialist aspects of modern architecture, urbanism, and art in the territories occupied by Italy. Through a comparative approach to regionalisms in nations such as Brazil and Argentina which fought against a Western modernist "neocolonialism", fascist colonial architecture can be observed as regionalist constructions of the Other. This more complex picture of global Modernisms constructs a new political geography of art.