Curating Knowledge: A Year of Art, History, and Science

December 03, 2025

Exhibitions promote a multisensory experience of artworks, encouraging the viewer to directly interact with them and offering unique insights into the past and the present. In this past year, Hertziana members have embraced the role of curator for a diverse range of exciting exhibitions that have made their scholarship accessible to the public and demonstrated the relevance of art-historical research. In Venice, a project linking the Hertziana to AMO/OMA and the Fondazione Prada used a stunning selection of Diagrams to investigate how such epistemic images communicate data and thereby serve as powerful tools for constructing – and manipulating – meaning, while Corpi moderni: The Making of the Body in Renaissance Venice drew upon art, science, and material culture to explore how Venetian culture in the crucial years around 1500 fashioned a new conception of the human body. At the Hertziana, the exhibition Disegnare per capire: Franz Wolff-Metternich e la genesi della nuova Basilica di San Pietro featured drawings from the art historian’s bequest that document his extensive research on Saint Peter’s, thus illustrating the potential of drawing to serve as a tool for advancing knowledge about the history of architecture in all its complexity. Furthermore, This Is Not the Rome I Expected to See zeroed in on a selection of fifteen guides from our library’s antique book collection to examine how both the urban landscape and the way it is described and imagined has evolved, what the impact of mass tourism has been, and how contemporary tourists now experience the eternal (but forever changing) city. The complementary online exhibition Roma in tasca. Guide e racconti di viaggio dalla Collezione Rara della Bibliotheca Hertziana explores the image of Rome conveyed by guidebooks and travel writings, privileged sources for understanding how the experience of visiting the city evolved in the early modern period. At Via Gregoriana 9, in a building that will soon host part of our book and photographic holdings, the exhibition Chi esce entra – A Tribute Exhibition to a Disappearing Building featured sculpture, painting, photography, installation, video, and performance art from over twenty Italian and international artists. Presented in an unconventional, derelict setting, the artworks – several of them site-specific – reactivated the building’s architecture and echoed its multifaceted history.