L’arte italiana tra promozione e
conservatorismo nelle aule e nelle sale
della Royal Academy of Arts di Londra
Eduardo De Maio
This essay examines the ambivalent status of Italian art within the Royal Academy of Arts in London, from
its foundation in 1768 through the early twentieth century. While antique sculpture and, subsequently,
the Italian old masters — above all Raphael and Michelangelo — were canonized as the normative
foundation of British artistic training, through pedagogical models such as Reynolds’s Discourses, the
teaching collections, and the Grand Tour-inspired Travelling Scholarships, contemporary Italian art received
comparatively inconsistent and unstable critical recognition. The essay argues that this asymmetry was
not incidental but the result of deliberate institutional choices — in acquisitions, exhibitions, and teaching
practice — that fixed Italian art to its Renaissance apex and shaped British perceptions of both artistic
canon and modernity for over a century