Chiara Franceschini

Chiara Franceschini is a 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 social, political, and religious conflicts in the premodern era, and visual geographies of the sacred in 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.

Project at Villa Medici

We generally study works of art in terms of the intentions behind 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 been, at different times, manipulated and reused in contexts and for purposes other than those for which they were intended. The notion of “recycling” serves to emphasize not only the reuse, but also the material “saving” which, however, often resulted in an aesthetic “gain”. The cases that will be examined will therefore be primarily, but not exclusively, recycling that can be defined as intentional, not merely functional, although it is often difficult to distinguish between these two categories.