Katja Mahnič: Josip Mantuani and the Painting Collection of the Provincial Museum of Carniola (1909–1924)

Together with the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana we cordially invite you to the lecture by Katja Mahnič as part of this year Art Exhibiting in Slovenia, from the Early 19th Century to Today seminar.

The lecture is in Slovene.

Tuesday, 9 January 2018, 2.30 pm, Faculty of Arts (room 343), Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana

Katja Mahnič: Josip Mantuani and the Painting Collection of the Provincial Museum of Carniola (1909–1924)
In creating his programme of modernising the Provincial Museum of Carniola, Josip Mantuani was guided by his belief that the main mission of a modern museum is education, with its precondition being the appropriately ordered and researched collections that have to be suitably presented to the public. Throughout his management of the museum, he actively endeavoured to enlarge, order and present all museum collections. As an art historian, he devoted special attention to the painting collection. With a systematic acquisition of new works, he managed to enlarge the collection in only a few years. He presented it to the public in 1914. The spatial and financial constraints, however, did not enable him to present the collection in accordance with the modern exhibition principles and to fully implement the so-called art-historical principle of exhibiting works by arranging them chronologically and in view of their geographical or topical association. Instead of the ideal arrangement of exhibited works in one line at eye level, he had to fill the walls from top to bottom. Almost ten years after the opening of the new exhibition, he published the first two volumes of the collection catalogue, in which he presented the exhibited paintings.

In the lecture, we will present the 1914 exhibition of the museum’s painting collection – from Mantuani’s initial ideas to the preparations for the exhibition, insofar as it can be reconstructed from the preserved archival material. We will also place it in the historical context and compare it both with the theretofore practice of exhibiting paintings in the museum and some other contemporaneous exhibitions of art collections. At the end, we will trace the collection’s subsequent fate.
 

Katja Mahnič is an art historian employed at the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where she teaches courses in general art history and museology. In her research work, she focuses on the topics of interpreting and presenting fine arts and material culture, the history of studying and protecting cultural heritage, particularly movable heritage, and lately especially the beginnings of museum activity in Slovenia.

MORE ABOUT THE PROGRAMME

Organized by: Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory; Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
Supported by: ERSTE Foundation