Stefano Bardini’s Photo Archive, ‘il Bel Paese,’ and the Golden Age of Tuscan Art

This paper suggests a parallel between the Alinari mission of the 1850s on to document every monumental and scenic site in Italy, including people and customs, and Bardini’s campaign to demonstrate the value of Early Renaissance art and culture during a period when that “golden age” was disdained. Both agendas were promoted through photography. By dispersing images of “Il Bel Paese” and its inhabitants, Alinari produced a visual archive of ruined monuments and vanishing local customs, images that stimulated a sense of Italian identity among inhabitants whose national and local characteristics were so richly documented. Bardini, in turn, photographed sculptures and objects aesthetically displayed and evoking an artisinal past, a narrative as much fantasy as historical reality, leading to an increased regard for, and desire to acquire the items so evocatively displayed in his showrooms. Unlike Alinari and other firms, Bardini was not a professional but was the only dealer early on to develop an expertise in photography. These skills were crucial in promoting and marketing the Golden Age of Tuscan art in Europe and the USA. Costumed peasants, posed and placed within picturesque settings, and ‘portraits’ of sculptures or household furnishings against neutral backgrounds, entered into the mental and visual stock of observers by way of photographs. Italian identity was “above all imagined rather than lived, [...] At the time of the Risorgimento this imagined Italian identity was a literary and intellectual construction” (Valtorta). Photography played an important role in turning that imagined identity into a concrete reality.