Francesca Romana Posca

Francesca Romana Posca has been a contract doctoral student at Université Bordeaux Montaigne since 2022. Her dissertation project, Au-delà de la Péninsule : la scène artistique internationale, espace d’affirmation des artistes italiennes (1870-1915), is being carried out under joint supervision with the Università degli Studi Roma Tre. She has a degree in the history of contemporary art from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, and has worked in a number of Italian and international cultural institutions, including the Musée du Louvre and the Vatican Museums. With the latter, she recently published the article ‘La Malaria di Maria Martinetti, un quadro e un’artista ritrovati’. She has also collaborated on various exhibition projects as assistant to the curators and authors of the catalogues, and recently took part in the colloquium La vache, le cheval et la lionne. Être artiste, femme, et vivre avec les animaux au XIXe siècle organised by the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature and the association AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions.

Her project at Villa Medici

→ Thesis: Beyond the Peninsula: the international art scene, a space for Italian artists to assert themselves (1870-1915).

In residence at Villa Medici, Francesca Romana Posca will be developing a research project on the role of Italian artists in the post-unitary state and the link between their professionalisation and their integration into the international art scene. The starting point for this study is the way in which their careers are embedded in a context of increased circulation of works and artists. Indeed, during the period under study, international exhibitions multiplied and entrepreneurial freedom, linked to the history of feminism, coincided with the creation throughout Europe of associations of women artists, whose events promoted the idea of a ‘feminine art’ beyond national borders.
More specifically, the aim is to investigate the careers of some of these women, who lived and worked in Rome. In the nineteenth century, the city was a privileged artistic centre for training and artistic exchange, not least because of its artistic and cultural heritage and the presence of foreign academies that enlivened Roman cultural life. With the foundation of Roma Capitale as a capital city in 1870, the city established itself on the Italian political and artistic panorama, thanks to the numerous projects and commissions it received. The migration of artists to the capital intensified, a phenomenon that also affected women, who were given official commissions. However, the work of these artists remains little known today, if not unknown, despite the fact that their works are held in Italian and international institutions. This study is part of Francesca Romana Posca’s doctoral research, and is based on an analysis of public and private archives in situ, accompanied by a visual study of certain works held in Roman museums and institutions.

© Francesca Romana Posca

Caption:
Giacomo Balla, La Famiglia Stiavelli, 190, private collection
Maria Martinetti Stiavelli’s studio in Rome, private collection