MarcoNocca
Marco Nocca (Velletri, 1961), who holds a degree in Literature / Art History under Maurizio Calvesi, has been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome since 2008, where he teaches History of Ancient Art and Museography. Having passed a competitive examination, he has been a lecturer since 1995 at the historic Academies (Milan, Naples) and at the University of Tuscia from 2001 to 2009. He has researched the reception of antiquity in the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods, the history of collecting, 19th- and 20th-century art, and the foreign presence in Italy over these last two centuries, publishing scholarly articles and monographs (full list available at www.biblhertz.it, OPAC, ad vocem).
Having curated exhibitions in public museums, after three years of research, he reassembled The Borgia Collection for exhibition (Naples, National Archaeological Museum, 2001, Electa catalogue in 2 vols.). He has studied the history of the Academies and the model of classical education at these institutions, and for the modern reorganisation (2007), he reconstructed the history of the creation of the Gipsoteca (Plaster Cast Gallery) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, commissioned by Canova and Wicar. In 2010, on behalf of the Vatican Museums, he curated the relaunch of the Propaganda Fide Museum in the Borromini palace in Piazza di Spagna. He has been researching Nordic artists in Italy since the exhibition Impressionisti Danesi in Abruzzo, Rome, Andersen Museum, 2014, rediscovering and systematising the work of a significant community of Scandinavians active between France and central Italy in Impressioni e realtà. Il sogno scandinavo da Barbizon a Civita d’Antino, a scholarly catalogue of the Nordic art collection at the Imago Museum in Pescara (Fondazione Pescarabruzzo, 2021). In 2017, together with C. Di Bella, he published a catalogue of the marble busts in the collection of the Senate of the Republic (Pantheon di Pietra. Uomini illustri nella collezione dei busti del Senato del Regno d’Italia, Rome, Gangemi).
Her most recent exhibitions, all accompanied by a catalogue published by L’Erma di Bretschneider: L’Ombra e la Luce: Jean-Pierre Velly, Rome, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, 2016; La petite italienne: Juana Romani (with Gabriele Romani), Rome, Academy of Fine Arts, 2017; Felicità della Pittura: Edgardo Zauli Sajani da Forlì a Roma, Rome, Academy of Fine Arts, 2019; Arte nell’Orto di Claudio Marini, Rome, Academy of Fine Arts, 2021. Her most recent exhibition, featuring loans from the Statens Museum in Copenhagen, is Elisa M. Boglino da Copenaghen a Roma (Elisa M. Boglino from Copenhagen to Rome), Pescara, Imago Museum, 2024 (cat. Fondazione Pescarabruzzo).
Academic Year 2024/2025 – Future of the Classical World
General section
Aimed at students on the three-year course, this module seeks to provide the initial methodological tools and foundational knowledge for the study of the artistic expressions of Greek and Roman civilisation, from the 9th century BC to the 4th century AD. In particular, the study programme focuses on sculpture and painting, exploring their technical aspects and the historical, socio-economic and cultural dynamics that shaped their development. Students will need to be familiar with basic archaeological and art-historical terminology, as well as the periodisations of the Greco-Roman world, in order to be able to recognise, describe and correctly place the works in their historical context; a large number of images and monumental complexes will be presented during the lectures.
Recommended reading: Flaminio Gualdoni, Arte classica, Skira, 2007 (another textbook may also be used, if the student owns it).
In-depth study
Starting from an analysis of Futuro del classico, Salvatore Settis’ acclaimed book, the course will explore how classical art has cyclically reappeared throughout the various periods of Western culture, with a particular focus on the ruins of that civilisation, towards which, since the Renaissance (with Raphael’s famous letter to Pope Leo X, 1519), there has been a drive to protect and preserve them, lest their identity be lost. Taking into account the issues relevant to the students’ field of study, individual modules will examine topics such as the polychromy of ancient sculpture, the restoration of statuary from the Renaissance to the 18th century, the collecting of antiquities, plaster cast galleries as repositories of models, and the role of antiquity in Fine Arts Academies and museums.
S. Settis, Futuro del ‘classico’, Turin, Einaudi, 2004.
P. Liverani, I colori del bianco: mille anni di colore nella scultura antica, Vatican Museums, 2004.
A. Conti, Storia del restauro e della conservazione delle opere d’arte, Milan, Electa, 1988 (with a particular focus on the chapters on the restoration of ancient sculpture).
M. Nocca, ‘Nella creta la vita, nel marmo la Resurrezione: e nel gesso? La morte’. Storia e futuro delle gipsoteche delle accademie di belle arti, in ‘Patrimoni da svelare…’, proceedings of the Naples 2013 conference, ed. G. Cassese, Rome, Gangemi, 2015.
Academic Year 2024/2025 – The Form of the Museum through Time: From the Renaissance Studiolo to the Contemporary Art Museum
Aimed at students on the three-year CVPAC programme, this course seeks to provide an overview of the ways in which the impulse to gather and collect objects that ‘are displayed to the gaze’, according to Krisztof Pomian’s well-known definition, has been structured, before moving on to a historical examination of the forms taken by the museum, which from the 18th century onwards has been the main repository organised for the collection and safekeeping of works of art. From the Renaissance studiolo, where the intellectual organised, commissioned and arranged for himself works representing the ‘speculum mundi’, through the Baroque Wunderkammer and the seventeenth-century systematisation of aristocratic collections, we reach the pivotal moment of the birth of the public museum. The establishment, in 18th-century Rome, of the Capitoline Museums and the Pio-Clementino Museum, and above all the opening of the Napoleonic Louvre, brimming with masterpieces acquired through victorious military campaigns, paved the way for the new Enlightenment concept of the public museum as an educational tool to instruct the populace. In parallel, the notion of works of art as ‘public heritage’ emerged. The 19th century in Europe continued the development of this institution, with the establishment of the major national galleries and, at the same time, with the importance placed on municipal collections in Italy. The twentieth century, with the crisis of the nation-state and the explosive emergence of the artistic avant-garde (notably the Futurist call for the ‘destruction of the museum’), would profoundly rethink the concept of this institution, whose form, in every era, has proven to be a faithful reflection of the society that gives it expression.
Compulsory reading
Alessandra Mottola Molfino, Il libro dei musei, Turin, Umberto Allemandi e C., 1991.
Pomian, K., Collezione in Enciclopedia, Vol. III, Giulio Einaudi Editore, Turin, 1978.
Ferretti, M., La forma del museo, in ‘Capire l’Italia: i musei’, edited by A. Emiliani, Milan, Touring Club Italiano, 1980, pp. 46–79
Further reading for educational visits:
Collezioni di scultura antica, Palazzo Altemps (Electa guide).
Il museo d’antichità: I musei Capitolini (Electa guide).
Ferraris, P.R., Il Museo Mario Praz, Sacs Edizioni, 1996.
Recommended reading
Pevsner, N., I musei, Rome, 1985.
Clair, J., La crisi dei musei – la globalizzazione della cultura, Skira, 2006.
Clair, J., L’inverno della cultura, Skira, 2011.
Colombo, M., I Musei – I grandi temi dell’architettura, Hachette, 2015.
Associazione Nazionale Musei Italiani, Museo perché Museo come, De Luca editore.