Italian Paintings in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Venus Mourning Adonis

Rome [ENA] The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm has launched a research project which aims to investigate 60 Italian paintings, dating from the 14th to the 18th century and attributed to artists from the Florentine, Roman, Neapolitan and North Italian schools. The project has been funded by Riksantikvarieämbetet and involves a group of scholars from different institutions, including Stockholm University and Uppsala Universtiy.

The aim of the project is to publish online extended object biographies, consisting of descriptive and reasoning texts in English, as well as high resolution images. As part of the research project, a campaign of scientific analysis has been carried out on a selected number of works, which has raised interesting questions in terms of conservation, technique, and workshop practices. In addition to a critical discussion of attribution and iconography, the entries will provide, when possible, a reconstruction of the provenance and exhibition history, which will also shed light on matters of taste and display. A clear and historically well-established picture of the Nationalmuseum's Italian painting collection through the sixty case studies,

chosen so that they in their diversity exemplify the scientific perspectives and new information. The ambition is also to develop a model for research in the history of objects that can be applied to other categories, and hopefully to other museum collections. A further ambition is that the discussions on provenance, materiality, museum practice and reception should arouse interest in older works of art as sources of historical knowledge as well as objects of aesthetic contemplation. The Nationalmuseum's collection of Italian paintings consists of about 900 works of art. It has for various reasons been deemed to be less valuable than the Dutch and French collections and has therefore only been systematically researched in recent years,

although, of course, individual artworks have been highlighted earlier. A first phase of the project was funded by the Swedish National Council for Culture 2009–2012. In 2015, the first part was published in a catalogue and digitally. Now all information from the project is also available in the Nationalmuseum's database. As illustrated in previous project descriptions and from the introduction to the catalogue Italian Paintings: Three centuries of collecting, vol I, the research has been based on provenance. The approach has contributed to a richer and more historically grounded context that ties the artworks to current research on the art market, reception, technical art history and museology.