Search

Stefano Bardini (1836-1922) was a polymath figure; art dealer, collector, amateur architect and photographer. As an art dealer he dominated the scene of art collecting for fifty years, from 1875 until 1922, the date of his death. Stefano Bardini is considered as the art-dealer who reinvented the idea of mediaeval and Renaissance art in Italy. His work influenced the most important museums and private collections of his time and, in 1883 with the establishment of his showroom in his newly built Palazzo Mozzi Bardini, he created an ultra modern space that combined two important elements: the commercial and the museological. Bardini challenged his clients and their nowledge of art with his enigmatic and fascinating displays. He immortalised these displays in his photographs, using a sophisticated process that combined composition, lighting, perspective, symmetry and frames in a unique manner. This study is based on photographs from the Stefano Bardini photographic archive and is an investigation of the images and their composition as a distinctive language. The thesis will explore the visual language of the photographs as historical documents and investigate the influences of Stefano Bardini’s historical and cultural context in order to understand the creative process of his displays and illuminate how the photographic frame reveals his conscious and unconscious intentions. This study’s aim is to investigate how Bardini’s photographs reflect the original history of his time and how much he created a new historical point of view. Until now these photographs have been used to re-trace the destination of works of art sold by Bardini; this thesis has a different focus as its intention is to unfold the symbolic layers of the images and interpret their meanings with reference to the socio-cultural milieu of Bardini’s time. Letters from the Bardini archive and notebooks provide a more specific context for his innovative displays and show the personality of his clients, their art collecting interests and how photography as a relatively new medium for selling, proved to be a useful tool for the practice of art dealing.

Taxidermy is an organised craft which synthesises preserved animal skins with man-made materials to recreate a resemblance of living animals. As products of a cultural practice, displayed and interpreted in museums for the public, taxidermied animals are material manifestations of contingent value judgements. Despite the now widely held view in museum studies that the meanings of museum objects are constructed through their interpretation and reception, and therefore can have a multiplicity of meanings, many museums today continue to present and interpret taxidermied animals as objective species representatives. Although scientific themes continue to be privileged by many museums which maintain natural science as a discrete discipline, various social, ethical and political themes relating to the environment and to relationships between people have become more pronounced in recently redeveloped museums. Using Leeds City Museum, the Great North Museum: Hancock, and Museums Sheffield: Weston Park as case studies, this thesis investigates these changes to trace wider cultural shifts in politics, ethics, education and science. By analysing the frameworks within which museums and their staff operate, this investigation is concerned with the relationship between discourse and social practice in the form of museum exhibitions as a means of creating knowledge. It highlights how the public understanding of the natural world is more mutable than some of the enduring traditions of science may suggest, and how the discourses on science, and the objects through which they are articulated, are subject to cultural shifts which put their meanings in flux. This study is both part of, and a response to, an expanding field in museum studies and material culture studies which re-frames taxidermy objects as culturally contingent and therefore reflective of the subject positions of their makers, and the broader contexts of their making. In collating and investigating a diverse collection of archival material, this study recovers some of taxidermy’s histories, and contributes to the historical discourse on the display and interpretation of museum collections.

This thesis identifies and critically examines the teaching collection assembled for the Leeds School of Design, established in 1846 under the Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society. The nucleus of this collection was a generic set of plaster casts, prints and publications distributed by the Head School of Design at Somerset House in London, founded in 1837. This approved selection of pedagogic objects was augmented with local donations of paintings, prints, decorative arts and photographs. This thesis proposes that these supplementary objects, and the ways in which they were displayed, represented a resistance to standardisation and a renegotiation of the role of art and design education in relation to existing voluntary societies and their associated public exhibitions. Chapter one investigates the contested curriculum of the Schools of Design and the role of the Royal Academy in its construction. The question addressed concerns how the same reproductions of canonical antique statuary came to be deployed as vehicles for the transmission of a mutable set of ideological positions related to the concepts of art and its applications, industry and consumption and the division of labour. The distinction between the training of the artist and the artisan is also considered on a local level through the Leeds Academy of Arts, which was active between 1852 and 1855. Chapter two explores the philosophical, political and economic positions that informed the practice of the Leeds School of Design, beginning with a Foucauldian analysis of the behaviours and beliefs inculcated in the students through the regulation of space, time and work. The culture of autodidacticism and the associated approaches to political economy developed by Edward Baines Junior and Samuel Smiles are articulated as a means of understanding the climate in which state-sponsored education was received in a regional context. These intellectual conditions are further elaborated through the practice of the travelling public lecture. Chapter three considers the temporary exhibitions, conversazioni and soirées associated with art and design education in Leeds, beginning with the first polytechnic public exhibition organised by the Mechanics’ Institution at the Albion Street Music Hall in 1839. The strategic appropriation of architecture associated with commercial and industrial activity for the purpose of display is considered through the work of Henri Lefebvre on the social production of space. The fourth and final chapter considers the itinerancy of the pedagogic object and the emergence of circulating collections composed of applied arts, reproductions in plaster, fictile ivory and electrotype and photographs. The mobilisation of material culture through these didactic collections will be analysed through a variety of critical frameworks, including historical materialism, post-structuralism and social geography, as appropriate to discrete aspects of the archive.