Season’s greetings with our best wishes for the New Year
From the many threads that made up the fabric of research carried out at the Hertziana in 2023, we have chosen to highlight our current projects that revolve around women's perspectives. Early in the year, the film seminar series Il lavoro in città focused on Italian films from the 1950s and 60s that depict urban space and women's labor through their female protagonists. On March 8th, Now We Have Seen, a long-term research initiative on Italian women artists in the 70s was officially launched. Named after a famous phrase from the Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile of 1970 – “we have been looking for 4000 years: now we have seen!” – the project is organized in collaboration with the Italian Council and coordinated by Giorgia Gastaldon. Its program of events will culminate in a book due to be published in 2024. The project also provided an impulse for the upcoming episode of our video series Hertziana Insights, which combines historical footage with interviews of women artists and art historians. The video will be released in 2024 to mark the centenary of the birth of Carla Accardi, an Italian artist and one of the founding members of the feminist group Rivolta Femminile. Another remarkable woman was of course Henriette Hertz, who founded our institute only six months before her death in April 1913. In August we opened Giulio Romano – A Drawing from the Hertz Collection, a research exhibition that explored her art collection and curatorial practices. The exhibition closed in October, but its digital counterpart will remain active, so those interested can still explore her life, art, and curating from a distance. We want to conclude this overview with research group leader Sietske Fransen, who impressively demonstrated how the study of microscopic discoveries can provide significant insights into the Visualization of the Unknown. In September, she and her project partners organized a most interesting conference at the Royal Society on the Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and the development of microscopy in the 17th century. We look forward to the publication of the results. These and many more exciting projects will continue in 2024, and others will be started. To learn more about our research, stay in touch on social media and sign up for our monthly newsletter. We look forward to sharing more of our new projects with all of you.