After Beating Back a Populist Surge, Italy’s Leaders Will Again Allow Foreigners to Apply for Museum Directorships

The fight over who controls Italy’s precious cultural heritage
has taken yet another turn.

On Wednesday, January 29, the Italian culture ministry announced
it was looking to fill 13 directorial and upper managerial
positions at national museums, and that the jobs would be open to
international applicants.

The call is overseen by Dario Franceschini, who was
reappointed as the country’s culture minister last fall. His plan
reverses a controversial policy undertaken by his
predecessor, Alberto Bonisoli, who preferred to take an
“Italians first” approach.

On Twitter, Franceschini called the move
“another step forward in the path of modernization” of Italian
museums. “Autonomy and quality directors are a winning mix for
museums and territories.”

Franceschini was reinstated as culture minister in September
after having held the position from 2014 to 2018. He was ousted
briefly through an election process in June 2018 that
elevated Bonisoli, a member of the nationalist Five Star
Movement, to the job.

While Bonisoli was in power, museums lost their independent
boards of trustees and the government undertook additional
oversight into their spending and loans. Among the spats that
erupted in the wake of the changes was a months-long battle with
France over the lending of artworks for the Louvre’s blockbuster
Leonardo da Vinci exhibition.

The German art historian Cecilie Hollberg, who was abruptly
fired last summer from her position as head of the Galleria
Dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy’s most visited museum and home to
Michelangelo’s David, has now been invited to return on
another four-year contract, according to a report in
Monopol. In related changes, the Galleria
Dell’Accademia will no longer be a subsidiary of the Uffizi,
another controversial change set in motion by Bonisoli last
summer.

The changes likely come as no surprise to those in the inner
circles of Italian museums. In an interview with Artnet
News after the Five Star Movement took over, Peter
Assmann, the former director of the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua,
said he expected Hollberg to eventually return to her post and
the Galleria Dell’Accademia and Uffizi to be made independent
once again.

The foreign-born Assmann, however, will not return to his post.
(He is currently the director of the Austrian National Museum
in Vienna.) His old job is one of the 13 now up for grabs.

Post in upper management are now open at the Galleria Borghese
in Florence and the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome.

Directorial roles are available at the Galleria Nazionale delle
Marche in Urbino; the Palazzo Reale in Naples; and the
Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna, among other institutions.

Interested applications must apply by March 3.

The post After Beating Back a Populist Surge, Italy’s
Leaders Will Again Allow Foreigners to Apply for Museum
Directorships appeared first on artnet News.