Italy searches for museum leaders as nationalism hangs in the air

In recent weeks, dozens of candidates faced a five-person committee in a dark, book-lined room at Italy’s Ministry of Culture, hoping to convince the panel that they should be selected to head some of Italy’s top museums , including the Uffizi in Florence, the Capodimonte in Naples, the Brera in Milan and seven others.

There are ten candidates available for each position. The committee will narrow each list to three, based on the interview and the candidates’ knowledge of a range of issues – new technologies, cultural heritage legislation, sponsorship opportunities – and their vision for each museum. The final selection will be made sometime next month by Gennaro Sangiuliano, Italy’s culture minister, and Massimo Osanna, the director of the ministry that oversees museums.

It has been eight years since a reform granted some Italian art institutions more autonomy and opened the position of museum director to people from outside the ranks of the Ministry of Culture. The then Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, sought applications from foreigners to shake up the museum sector, even publishing the job advertisement in The Economist magazine. Among the first twenty museums affected by the reform, Franceschini appointed seven foreigners and several Italians with experience abroad, who were hired for a four-year contract, renewable once.

“It was an opening that brought fresh air into the entire system,” said Luca Giuliani, an archaeologist who was part of the 2015 committee that selected these directors. However, many Italian art historians and archaeologists felt rejected and several colleagues stopped speaking to him, he said.

This time the atmosphere is different. Although the new minister, part of a nationalist, right-wing government, has said nationality was not an issue, of the 90 or so shortlisted candidates (some in the running for more than one museum) only a handful have succeeded. significant experience outside Italy. And two of the foreigners who want a job already run two top Italian museums.

Given the administration’s political leanings, “it would have been a surprise if they had been looking for international candidates,” Giuliani said.

In an email, Sangiuliano said there were “no exclusions regarding nationality.” What mattered, he added, was that a “director had to be good and have ideas.”

Yet culture experts say the prestige and benefits of running an Italian museum – which includes some of the world’s most celebrated art institutions – are tempered by disadvantages, including lower salaries compared to similarly important museums abroad, limited contracts and the many worries of the Italian bureaucracy.

“I think a colleague who has worked in the United States, or in England and Germany, might wonder whether it is worth it,” says Enrico Parlato, the president of CUNSTA, an Italian association of university art historians. “To put it bluntly, salaries cannot compete,” he added.

Critics also say that by giving the culture minister the final say on the choice of directors, the 2015 reform also gave the minister outsized influence, including on diplomatic issues such as lending rare works abroad, or dictating the content of exhibitions.

“The reform was intended to keep museum directors in line,” said Tomaso Montanari, rector of the University for Foreigners of Siena and a noted cultural critic. He cited the National Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery, which recently opened an exhibition on JRR Tolkien, the author whom Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has cited as an inspiration. “There is a very strong political intrusion,” Montanari added.

Under the Franceschini reform, twenty of Italy’s top museums – including the Galleria Borghese in Rome, the Accademia in Venice and the Archaeological Museum in Naples – were given greater administrative autonomy, shifting control of budgets from the Ministry of Culture to the directors, who also encouraged to raise money.

But the reform had an impact that went beyond that top layer. Museum revenues that were once given to the Ministry of Culture and redistributed to less visited locations now largely remain in the coffers of the autonomous museums.

Sixty museums now have a certain degree of budgetary and administrative autonomy. Montanari said financial independence had forced these museums to try to attract as many visitors as possible, “using a business logic,” which he said was the antithesis of their cultural mandate.

But some museum directors whose terms are ending said that without the reform, many of the changes they implemented over the past eight years would never have happened. Under the old system, requests for major changes had to go through long pipelines before being approved, just like requests for funding.

At the Capodimonte Museum in NaplesFrench art historian Sylvain Bellenger has restored and revitalized the surrounding 330-hectare park, transforming it from a neglected drug dealer’s haunt into an immaculately landscaped, much-visited park.

The revamp was only possible “thanks to the reform, when Italian museums looked at international standards for the first time and realized they were falling far behind,” says Bellenger, who has become so popular in Naples that thousands have signed an agreement. online petition He begs the Italian culture minister to renew the contract of “the man who changed the face of Capodimonte and our world.”

Eike Schmidt, the German-born director of the Uffizi Galleries, said the reform required directors to become “visionary”, and that financial independence required finding hidden sources of income through sponsors and donors.

Schmidt has been shortlisted to head the Capodimonte Museum, but might also run for mayor of Florence in the elections next year, a possibility that “I would not rule out under certain circumstances,” he said in a recent interview.

However, some directors said the 2015 reform fell short on a number of fronts, especially when it came to hiring staff, which still relied on an open competitive exam through the Ministry of Culture. That meant they couldn’t hire whoever they wanted. And the Italian bureaucracy also tempered efforts for large-scale change.

James Bradburne, the Canadian-born, British director of the Brera Museum, said he had struggled to overcome some of the museum’s “deeply flawed” structures, such as the way human resources were allocated, or administrative loopholes that delayed the acquisition of economic resources. These created “multiple moments of delay, change, errors and waste,” he said.

“When I raise this point, which I’ve been raising for eight years, they look at me and laugh and say, ‘Oh James, siamo in Italy,’” – we are in Italy – “the universal answer to things that are patently absurd, a waste of money and make no sense,” he said.

The culture ministry declined to say how many foreigners had applied for the jobs this time, but Montanari said the lack of foreign candidates on the shortlists indicated that at least top officials from similarly prestigious museums had not applied.

“You have a country like Italy, which has all the problems, without all the financial resources,” Montanari said, “even though you have politicians breathing down your neck. “

“It is no wonder that directors of foreign museums have not signed up,” he added. “They’re not stupid.”