Lo scheletro dell'arte nell'armadio: archivi di Ancien Régime tra pratiche collezionistiche e affermazioni di gusto

Lo scheletro dell’arte nell’armadio: archivi di Ancien Regime tra pratiche collezionistiche e affermazioni di gusto – Ancien Regime archives have gradually opened up providing materials for research on the reconstruction of collecting practices belonging to the mos nobilium, as well as on the identification of formal patterns adopted by various religious orders in order to exalt their own pietas and their specific apostolic mission. Archives are places where account books, ledgers, wills, inventories, and private cor-respondence are preserved. The very heterogeneous nature of such records allows a type of art historical analysis where philology and sociology mingle. Like the skeleton in art’s living body they help us retrieve “dubious” or “less noble” structural aspects of collecting practices, of display and of the dialectics between individual and institution-al taste, which only too often have stayed hidden.