Chiara Franceschini

Chiara Franceschini has been Professor of Modern Art History at the University of Munich (LMU) since 2016. She works on Italian and European art in the Renaissance, the role of images, artists and spaces in the social, political and religious conflicts of the premodern era, and the visual geographies of the sacred from comparative perspectives. Her publications include Storia del limbo (2017), Chapels in Roman Churches of the Cinquecento and Seicento (2020, co-editor), Sacred Images and Normativity: Contested Forms in Early Modern Art (2021, editor). She is currently writing on art and the inquisition in the early modern Mediterranean and co-editing a volume entitled The Other Side of the World: Early Modern Sacred Images in Japan and Europe.

We generally study works of art from the point of view of the intentions that led to their creation and the contexts for which they were conceived and executed. The Recycled Art project concerns artifacts and works (in different media and materials, from sculpture to painting, ceramics, metal or wood) that have, at different times, been manipulated and reused in contexts and for purposes other than those for which they were intended. The notion of “recycling” is used to emphasize not only reuse, but also material “saving”, which, however, has often resulted in aesthetic “gain”. The cases that will be examined will therefore be mainly, but not exclusively, recycling that can be defined as intentional, and not merely functional, although it is often difficult to distinguish between these two categories.