Biography

Marcello Calogero is adjunct professor at Bocconi University, Milan, where he teaches Renaissance art. He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore where he earned his PhD (2022). He has held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, and the Fondazione Zeri. As an assistant professor at the University of Bologna (2023-2026), he has taught courses on early modern art and its reception. He is the author of the monograph Alfonso Lombardi e i materiali della scultura (Trento, 2024) and an upcoming book on Antonello da Messina. His research focuses on early modern sculpture, the interplay between artistic patronage and politics in the 16th century, and the exhibitions of Renaissance painting in the postwar period.
 

Project Summary

In 1953, the exhibition Antonello da Messina e la pittura del Quattrocento in Sicilia sparked a sense of cultural rebirth amidst the rubble left by World War II in Antonello’s native city. This project investigates how this exhibition catalyzed a rethinking of Italian Renaissance art and contributed to the postwar European debate on Mediterranean painting in Italy, Spain, and France. By reconstructing the exhibition’s history through unpublished archival materials, this research shows how the focus on southern Italy pushed scholars toward a transnational perspective. The study will situate the 1953 exhibition within the broader European context of similar cultural events of the early 1950s and 1960s. Chief among these were the exhibitions I fiamminghi e l’Italia (Bruges, Venice, and Rome, 1951) and Primitifs méditerranéens / Primitivos mediterráneos / Primitivi mediterranei (Bordeaux, Barcelona, Genoa, 1952). This new interest in Mediterranean painting raises questions about its political background and scholarly premises in the wake of Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée (1949). By showing how an exhibition centered on a single artist problematized the understanding of figurative exchanges across the Mediterranean, this research highlights a key moment in the development of transnational approaches to Italian Renaissance art. Ultimately, the project will assess to what extent the current image of Antonello da Messina is rooted in the scholarship and museological narratives of the postwar period.