Biography

Silvia Maria Sara Cammarata is a modern and contemporary art historian specializing in cultural identities and exhibition history in the second half of the twentieth century. She received her PhD from Roma Tre University, with a thesis on Arte povera and Italian cultural and national identity through exhibitions curated by Germano Celant. Her research was published as Arte povera e identità italiana. Le mostre di Germano Celant 1981–1994 (Postmedia Books, 2025). Her recent publications include essays on the Guerrilla Girls, Giulio Paolini, and exhibitions on postwar Italian art in the 1990s. An article on the impact of Gianni Vattimo’s Weak thought on contemporary art is forthcoming.
 

Project Summary

From 1962 onward, a group of artists based in Rome, later known as the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo—including Mario Schifano, Tano Festa, and Giosetta Fioroni—began to incorporate recognizable subjects and details from Italian Renaissance masterpieces into their work, or to draw on Renaissance sources. A decade earlier, in the United States, Robert Rauschenberg had already produced his first Mona Lisa, following his trip to Italy, and continued to reference Renaissance imagery in subsequent works. In the 1960s, several American artists, including Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Audrey Flack, and Marisol Escobar, likewise engaged with iconic figures and motifs by artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Titian. This research examines this renewed engagement with Renaissance imagery—well before postmodern citation practices—as a distinct and transatlantic phenomenon. It analyzes differences, relationships, and exchanges within their respective cultural, political, and technological frameworks, exploring how the Renaissance operates both as a marker of Italian national identity and as a symbolic bridge to the United States. It also investigates the theoretical and historical status of this reappropriation of Renaissance icons in both contexts and, through it, the redefinition of the Renaissance as a critical and transhistorical category in the 1960s.