L’insegnamento della Storia dell’arte
nelle Accademie e Istituti di Belle Arti
dall’Unità alla riforma Gentile del 1923
Roberto Sani
This essay traces the institutionalisation of art-history teaching in Italy’s Academies and Institutes of Fine
Arts from Unification to the 1923 Gentile reform. It examines the discipline’s shifting nomenclature—
from Estetica e storia dell’arte to Storia delle belle arti—across sixteen (later nineteen) state-recognised
academies, and reconstructs three successive generations of chairholders: early politically-motivated
appointees drawn from patriots and men of letters, a subsequent cohort of more genuinely competent
scholars, and finally, from the 1890s onward, specialists trained through the new university courses and,
notably, Adolfo Venturi’s Roman school, which decisively professionalised the field.