Criminals and tourists: prison history and Museum Politics at the Bargello in Florence

• Autores: Allie Terry
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 33, Nº. 5, 2010, págs. 836-855
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Focusing on the Bargello, this essay interrogates the use of violence as an aesthetic frame for tourists to Florence and examines the architectural transformation of the prison through attention to the cultural agenda of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento and its manipulation of the material culture of the city. The replacement of a historical blemish, such as the corporeal violence associated with the Bargello prison, with a new historical monument, the Bargello museum, in the nineteenth century effectively drew on the power of the place to project both backward into the past and forward into the future. By transforming the site into a cultural institution that still retained its architectural shell, the museum displayed its institutional past to expose its foreignness to the present moment and initiated the creation of a new meta-narrative of Italian judicial, and cultural, history.