Thesis: Reconsidering Crowe, Cavalcaselle and Waagen

Supervisor: Michael Hatt

Background

Fabio graduated (BA and MA) at the University of Udine, Italy, under the supervision of Donata Levi and Linda Borean. His previous research took him to Saint Petersburg (State Hermitage Museum, State Museum of the History of Religion, Rumyantsev Mansion) and Moscow (Pushkin Museum) under the supervision of Francesca Cappelletti and Irina Artemieva thanks to a grant from the Ermitage Italia Foundation (Ferrara, 2012). Fabio researched as well in Stockholm in 2012 (Nationalmuseum and Swedish Royal Academy of Art, under the supervision of Martin Olin) and 2015 (Centrum for Näringslivshistoria, under the supervision of Vadim Azbel) thanks to two different scholarships from the C. M. Lerici Stiftelsen. He also studied in Copenhagen in 2013 (Statens Museum for Kunst) under the supervision of Chris Fischer. In 2013 Fabio also published in the 19th issue of the Art Bulletin of the Stockholm Nationalmuseum an essay on G. B. Cavalcaselle’s 1865 Swedish journey.

Research interests

For his PhD in Warwick Fabio’s research will consider:

• J. A. Crowe’s connoisseurship and diplomatic activity
• G. B. Cavalcaselle - G. F. Waagen: alleged rivalry, journeys, legacy to European, Russian and American collections and experts
• Cavalcaselle-Crowe collaboration
• N. L. A. Høyen
• nineteenth-century Germanification of European museum and culture
• role of the cultural heritage in defining the European, Russian, Northern and Latin American identity
• relations between geopolitics and art market, art history, collections and museums
• photography (e.g. Ivan Bianchi in Russia, Victorian Raphaelesque corpus) as a source for the art history studies
• Imperial Saint-Petersburg collections of Old Masters
• formation, fortuna and dispersal of the art collection of the dukes of Leuchtenberg
• international art dealers, curators and experts (Trotti, Wertheimer, Beskow, von Bode, Berenson, Borenius, Siren) allegedly involved in the dispersal of the Tsarist Russian collections of Western Old Masters
• Sebastiano del Piombo

During his PhD at Warwick Fabio gave a paper at the Third Graduate Workshop of the Russian Art Culture Group (Jacobs University, Bremen, 26-27/11/2015) and at the international conference ‘Andrea Schiavone. Painting, printmaking and drawing in sixteenth-century Venice’ (Marciana National Library and Cini Foundation, Venice, 31/03/2016 – 02/04/2016). His article on the cosmopolitan Tsarist Saint-Petersburg collections of Western Old Masters is going to be published in the 2017 issue of the Brill journal of Russian culture Experiment.

Fabio’s research will focus on some recently-found papers in the Crowe Bequest to the National Art Library (V&A) in London and on some papers placed in the Cavalcaselle Bequest to the Marciana National Library in Venice. Other archival and museum surveys will be conducted in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Russia and hopefully in the USA and Argentina.