The Italian ministry of culture announced today, 18 August, the 20 new directors of Italy’s most important state museums. Out of the 20 posts—evenly split between men and women—seven have gone to non-Italian EU nationals (three Germans, two Austrians, one British and one French). The ministry made the selection from 1,200 Italian and 80 foreign applications with the help of a committee that included Paolo Baratta, the president of La Biennale di Venezia, and Nicholas Penny, the former director of London’s National Gallery.
Italy’s beleaguered state museums are famous for the strength of their collections but bogged down by outdated bureaucracy and insufficient funding. So the ministry decided to look for manager-directors with experience of the more financially attuned and efficient UK-US museum systems.
Three of the seven foreign candidates have been given the reins to institutions the ministry has listed as “first tier”. The Uffizi galleries will be run by the German art historian Eike Schmidt, formerly the head of decorative arts at the Minneapolis Institute of Art; Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera will be run by James Bradburne, the former head of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi; and the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, will now be headed by Sylvain Bellenger, the former head of European painting and sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
“The government has clearly signaled it wants to see change in the country's museums, and has understood that this change is best made by giving the museums much greater autonomy,” Bradburne says. This includes the power to raise funds independently and to invest these back into the institution. Previously, all proceeds would go back to the ministry in Rome and then be redistributed (but not necessarily to the museum that generated them).
“With these nominations, Italy is turning over a new leaf and is catching up on several decades worth of stagnation,” added Italy’s minister of culture Dario Franceschini.
Italy’s seven new foreign directors:
Eike Schmidt Uffizi Galleries (Florence)
Sylvain Bellenger Museo di Capodimonte (Naples)
James Bradburne Pinacoteca di Brera (Milan)
Cecilie Hollberg Galleria dell’Accademia (Florence)
Peter Aufreiter Galleria Nazionale delle Marche (Urbino)
Gabriel Zuchtriegel Paestum Archeological Park
Peter Assmann Palazzo Ducale (Mantova)
Other appointments include:
Paola Marini Gallerie dell’Accademia (Venice)
Anna Coliva Galleria Borghese (Rome)
Cristiana Collu Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Rome)