Photographic Archive

The photographic archive contains the documentation relating to furniture, paintings, personal items and decorated surfaces of historical and artistic interest - often accompanied by images of the exteriors and interiors - of monuments and museums in Rome and Lazio included in the period from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. 

The Archive holds about 300,000 negatives on black and white film, 320,000 positives on black and white paper, 70,000 colour slides, more than 2000 negatives on glass plates. This huge heritage is for the most part in the form of photographic prints in b/w, 18x24cm format, on cards with a short information caption, inserted in drawers with topographic and alphabetical order in the case of the territory of the city of Rome, by inventory of the works in the case of museums. As for the colour documentation, this consists of slides of all formats (24x36mm, 6x6cm, 10x12cm, 13x18cm, 20x25 cm), stored in special albums according to the same criteria as the black and white photographs.

This analogue heritage is on its way to becoming historical, as it is the result of shots relating to cataloguing, restorations, exhibitions in the area and in museums conducted between the seventies of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century and above all of a technology that is no longer in use.

Added to this there is the digital photographic documentation, the result of photographic campaigns carried out since the 2000s, as well as the progressive acquisition in various definitions of the analogue photographic material. The Archive holds about 15,000 files from digital photographic campaigns and about 10,000 acquisitions from colour slides. 

The current Archive is divided into three main sections, flanked by minor sectors relating to exhibitions, constraints, diagnostic investigations and documentation from the technical office:

Territory
This core contains photographs of furniture, paintings, personal items, etc. relating to churches, palaces, villas, entities, taken during the course of cataloguing campaigns, documentation for exhibitions and studies conducted from 1970 until about 2000. 

Museums 
These photographs relate to the exteriors, interiors and works of the National Museum of the Palazzo di Venezia and of other Roman state museums, such as the Borghese Gallery, the National Ancient Art Galleries in Palazzo Barberini and Corsini, the Spada Gallery and the National Museum of Musical Instruments.

Restorations
This is the photographic documentation relating to the restorations carried out directly by the staff of the Restoration Laboratory of the Superintendence or by external restorers both on the works of the territory (years 1987-2002) and of the museums (years 1981-2006). 

This current part is flanked by the Historical Archive.  Consisting of silver bromide gelatine glass plates and large format prints (from albumen to aristotype prints), it covers a period between the end of the 19th century and around 1990 and includes seven distinct groups, which have been the subject of particular interest and revaluation in recent years. The collections currently inventoried are the Hermanin Collection, the War Damage Collection and the Studio De Lisio one; the inventory of all the others is in progress.

Hermanin Collection
Found in 1989 in the attic of Palazzo Venezia, the collection was classified as such because of its close link with Federico Hermanin (Bari, 1868 - Rome, 1953), superintendent of the Galleries and Museums of Lazio and the Abruzzi from 1913 to 1938 and director of the Museum of Palazzo Venezia from 1916. It can be dated between the end of the nineteenth century and about 1960 and is extremely important for the history of Palazzo Venezia, as it preserves photographs which document the appearance of the complex before the Palazzetto was moved, the layout of the museum rooms curated by Hermanin, the construction works of the “Scala Nova” and the preparatory models of the Scala and its capitals. Among the historical photographic collections of the Archive, the Hermanin Collection was the first to undergo an important promotion project, launched in 2011, which involved the inventory of the photographic assets, the creation of a database for research and consultation; a conservative review and the preventive archiving of positives and negatives on glass plates. Furthermore, thanks to a collaboration with the ICCU as part of the "Museums of Italy" project, in 2012 it was possible to digitise a large part of the Collection's material.

War Damage Collection
Found together with the Hermanin collection in 1989, the collection includes photographs of the damage suffered by Italian monuments during the Second World War. A first part, consisting of large-format photographs glued on rigid cardboard, is dedicated to the war damage in the provinces of Milan and Brescia; the second, consisting of loose photographs in various formats, some of which are pasted on a secondary support accompanied by inscriptions and contained in folders with generic geographical indications, concerns war damage in the rest of Italy. It was rearranged and inventoried in 2012-2013.

Studio De Lisio Collection
The collection consists of a small nucleus of albumen prints presumably made by the photographic studio De Lisio in Naples between the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. These prints portray buildings, squares, monuments in Rome, often accompanied by period figures. Inventoried and under study.

Export Office Collection
The collection includes the photographic cards that accompanied the documentation relating to temporary and definitive export and/or import practices at the Export Office in Rome between 1898 and 1990. In 2015, more than half of the collection was rearranged, cleaned and digitised.

Territory Collection
The collection, consisting mainly of photographs from other archives (GFN, Alinari, Anderson, Brogi, Moscioni, Vasari, etc.), also preserves the oldest prints of the Superintendence: these are positives on 18x24cm black and white paper on a cardboard support, datable between the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century. Its creation dates back to 2011 when the photos were removed from the current Archive for conservation reasons.

Museum Collection
Like the Territory collection, this collection was established in 2011 when the photos initially included in the current Archive were extrapolated for conservation reasons.

Italian and international artistic Heritage Collection
zThe collection is made up of photos that document part of the Italian and international artistic heritage: they are all positives on 18x24cm b/w paper on a cardboard support 

The photographic archive, which has grown in quantity and quality over the years, is unique in the panorama of the Roman archives, as it brings together two different aspects: on the one hand it constitutes a real corpus of historical value, which collects all the relative visual documentation of the individual works of art, starting from historical photographs of the early twentieth century, to the reflectograms and ultraviolet photos accompanying important restorations; on the other, it has become an agile and valuable tool for scholars, students, publishing houses, international museums and simple users, who can access it to consult its documentation and to use its services.