Biography

Noemi Cinelli is Professor of Renaissance Art History at the University of La Laguna in Spain and Associate Professor at the Autonomous University of Chile. Her research focuses on artistic exchanges between Europe and Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular attention to sculpture and the circulation of artistic models. She serves as Director of the Arts&Architecture Study Group at the National Agency for Research and Development (Chile), and leads the research group ACIMETRIA. Art, Circulations, Transnational Mediations between Italy and the Americas (UA). She is Editor-in-Chief of Accadere. Revista de Historia del Arte (ULL). Her work advances new approaches to mobility, cultural transfer, and the reinterpretation of artistic canons.
 

Project Summary

This research examines and interrogates the transnational trajectory of Rebeca Matte Bello (1875–1929), the first internationally recognized Chilean woman sculptor and a key figure in the cultural circulation between Latin America and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Trained in Paris and Rome and later based in Florence, Matte was appointed Honorary Professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti in 1918—an exceptional distinction for a foreign woman artist within the Italian academic system. Drawing on archival and historiographical sources from Florence, and situated within the broader Anid Regular Fondecyt nº1240080 project (Marbles and Bronzes between the Mediterranean and the Andes: Italo-Chilean Artistic Relations in Sculpture, 1829–1929), this study repositions Matte not as a peripheral disciple but as an active cultural agent operating across diplomatic, pedagogical, and artistic networks. Her work, deeply engaged with Renaissance models—particularly the Michelangelesque idiom—reconfigures monumental sculpture through a gendered lens that challenges canonical hierarchies. Recent curatorial developments, such as the 2025 display of Donna giacente and Due teste (Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Palazzo Pitti), provide a critical framework to reassess her reception. From a transfeminist and transcultural perspective, Matte’s practice emerges as a diasporic modernity in which the Renaissance operates as a dynamic site of aesthetic, affective, and political negotiation.