MESOPOTAMIA IN ITALIAN MUSEUM COLLECTIONS AND EXHIBITIONS

Through three case studies, this paper analyzes the role of Mesopotamian antiquities in Italian museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the period of national identity building and the shaping of European nations as colonial powers. Due to the absence of a central archaeological museum in Italy, the holdings of Mesopotamian objects were scattered in many local public and private collections. The first case study examined is the Museo Barracco in Rome, founded on the initiative of Giovanni Barracco for his own collection of antiquities. Here, the works of the ancient Middle East were exhibited in the same room along with Egyptian, Greek, and Roman pieces in order to foster comparison between the artifacts of different cultures and emphasize the contribution of Mesopotamian art in the genesis of classical art. In the Museo Correr, and later the Museo Archeologico in Venice, on the other hand, Egyptian and Mesopotamian antiquities were only considered as the primeval beginning of an evolution culminating in Greek and Roman art, and were thus relegated to marginal rooms or even placed in storage. The last case study is the Mesopotamian collection of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence, whose main body originates from the first Italian excavation in the Middle East in Kilizu (1933). These objects, however, were only exhibited in 1966 in a display that underlined the connection between the cultures of the Middle East and that of the Etruscans. As a whole, the neglect of Mesopotamian objects in Italian museums must be seen in the context of the priority given to classical (and, in the case of Florence, Etruscan) antiquity as the climax of Western civilization, an approach that has never really been questioned.