L’insegnamento della Storia dell’arte
nelle Accademie e Istituti di Belle Arti
1923-1943
Susanne Adina Meyer
This essay examines the teaching of art history in Italy’s Academies of Fine Arts and their attached artistic
lyceums between the 1923 Gentile reform and the fall of the Fascist regime. It reconstructs the new legal
framework distinguishing “artistic” from “general culture” subjects, the differing curricula of Storia e
storia dell’arte (lyceums) and Storia dell’arte e del costume (academies), and quantitative data on the
eight (later nine) recognised Regie Accademie, their students and staff. Drawing on ministerial yearbooks
and institutional archives, it profiles the eighteen academy instructors active in the period—ranging
from Venturi-trained specialists such as Costanza Lorenzetti and Eva Tea to painter-theorists and Fascist
appointees such as Francesco Sapori—highlighting the discipline’s uneven professionalisation and its
entanglement with the regime’s cultural politics