Documenta | 2025 | N. 8

The essay reflects on the contemporary relevance of certain elements of the subject-based arrangement known as peroniano, which took shape in Milan between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It highlights the original aims of its designers, Ilario Corte and Luca Peroni: to create a close correspondence between the subject-based criteria used to classify and file current government records and the order applied to pre-existing records, treating subjects as metadata to support what today would be called integrated management of records flows. A further modern element is the use of subject for subject access to archival materials, creating multiple entry points to holdings, a pressing requirement for the online use of archival resources. Finally, in born-digital archives, where there is no tangible physical structure of the records, subject can become one of several criteria for the logical organization of data. Subject-based retrieval of records and aggregations, supported by specific metadata prescribed by current regulations, can therefore sit alongside the structure derived from the classification schedule used to map the functions of the records creator. The latter remains fundamental to the logical organization of archival holdings, but it has lost the exclusivity it enjoyed in the analog context, where it also played a central role in the physical arrangement of records.

After having dealt with the evolution of the Este Archive during the eighteenth century, the article focuses on the genesis of the Arti belle archival series, offering some case studies. The examples shown in this paper are useful for reconstructing the strategies employed by generations of archivists in the shaping of this archival fonds.

The essay analyses the use of the papers of the archival collection called Arti Belle of the Archivio di Stato of Modena for the research of artistic historiography in the second half of the 19th century, starting from 1861, year of the opening of the institute to scholars, including the marquis Giuseppe Campori (1821-1887). Through new documents, cross-referenced with a re-reading of the works published by the marquis, the study attests to a progressive enlargement of this archival collection during the 19th century and the interest of senator Luigi Cibrario (1802- 1870) in those papers.

The Carteggio di artisti preserved in the Florence State Archives is a deliberately assembled miscellany of documents selected for their artistic content, offering invaluable insights into exchanges, commissions, and collecting practices that shaped Medicean patronage over more than two centuries. This contribution focuses on reconstructing the process of its formation, which began in the eighteenth century with archival explorations and selective extractions from Medici family records, often linked to the institutional and cultural projects of the Uffizi Gallery. Finally, in 1872, under the supervision of Cesare Guasti, the Carteggio was formally transferred to the State Archives. This transition took place during a crucial season for Tuscan and Italian archival practice, marked by a growing recognition of the intrinsic value of archival documents and by the affirmation of their organic nature as parts of coherent fonds.

The recovery of documents published by Johannes Gaye in his Carteggio inedito d’artisti (1839-1840), carried out within the EpistolART project at the University of Liège, offers an opportunity to outline the principles that guided both his research and my own. Gaye, a German scholar with solid academic training, arrived in Italy in 1830. After travelling across the peninsula and Greece, he settled in Florence, which became the main centre of his archival research. There, he published an extensive corpus of documents drawn from the archives of Florence, Siena, and other repositories in Central and Northern Italy. Almost two centuries later, the analysis of these documents has revealed issues linked to the dispersion and reorganisation of archival fonds, caused both by the creation of collections organised by subject and by the transformations that archives underwent after Italian unification. The study focuses on examples from the State Archives of Siena and Florence, where many of Gaye’s transcribed documents are preserved. In Siena, the subject-oriented classification led to the dismantling of some registers, dispersing documents such as the letter by the painter Fede di Nalduccio ; at the same time, other documents previously thought to be lost were recovered, including a letter by the painter and architect Baldassarre Peruzzi. In Florence, nineteenth-century reorganisation did not compromise the preservation of documents, but the passage of time and human neglect caused some losses : letters by Bronzino, Buontalenti, Giambologna, Ammannati, and Vasari are now kept in foreign institutions, removed from the original files of the Florentine archive, where in some cases the corresponding overscripts remain. Thanks to the EpistolART project, some of these documents have been virtually reunited: although their physical parts are held in different locations, digital images of all sections make it possible to present them as a single, coherent whole online.

On the basis of an early sixteenth-century court document regarding the loan of medical books, the article reconstructs the biography of Pietro Andrea Morsiani, an Imolese physician and professor at Bologna University, and his relationship with the surgeon Jacopo Berengario da Carpi. Morsiani was part of the cultural circle gathered around Andrea Bentivoglio, whose main expression were Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti’s Porretane novelle, but he was killed in 1501 by Bentivoglio partisans. Morsiani and Berengario are inserted into the complex political events that affected the city of Bologna between the end of the Bentivoglio rule and the restoration of papal power by Julius II. The document, including the list of medical texts loaned, is published in the Appendix.

Starting from a brief investigation into the ideal of pilgrimage and Holy Jerusalem in fifteenth-century Bologna and from some writings by Saint Catherine Vigri, a «pellegrina francescana» in the monastery, we are publishing an unpublished eighteenth-century manuscript belonging to the Sezione manoscritti e rari of the Corpus Domini monastery in Bologna, a text in the Bolognese vernacular from the eighteenth century, called «Codice Accarisi», a title taken from the note of ownership added at the end of the manuscript. The text of the spiritual pilgrimage invites readers to retrace the places of the Bolognese monastery as a sort of sacred representation, in which, based on the canonical Vangeli, but also drawing on the apocryphal texts and the Legenda aurea, the places of the life of Jesus Christ and his virgin mother Mary in the Holy Land are retraced.

Beginning with the fortuitous discovery of an eighteenth-century manuscript concerning notariat, within the archive of one of the most significant Franciscan monasteries in Sicily – and arguably in Italy – in the early modern age, the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Palermo, historically known as la Gancia, this study undertakes a complex historical-archival investigation into the surviving components of that documentary corpus. On the one hand, it examines the traditional methods of archival maintenance and recordkeeping employed by the religious community itself between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating in a reconstructive hypothesis regarding the original structure of the archive. On the other hand, it addresses the specific procedures of transfer and deposit into the State Archives – alongside inventorying, processing, and weeding practices – adopted in the early post-Unification years, following the enactment of the laws suppressing ecclesiastical orders.