An Entirely Different Paradigm: Rethinking Pictorial Photography through Sentimento between National and International Exhibitions in Italy (1898–1911)

This thesis examines the changing status and institutional positioning of photography in Italy between 1898 and 1911, a period marked by its systematic inclusion in major exhibitions and by intense critical debate. Through four case studies—the photographic sections of the Italian General Exhibition (1898, Turin), the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts (1902, Turin), the International Exhibition of Artistic Photography in Rome (1911), and the International Exhibition of Industry and Labour (1911, Turin)—the research reconstructs photography’s shifting position between the Liberal Arts and the Fine Arts. Rather than framing Italian photographic history as a linear progression from document to art, the thesis highlights photography’s persistent oscillation between technical, scientific, and artistic domains. Exhibitions are analysed as key institutional sites where this negotiation became visible through spatial, symbolic, and discursive strategies. Based on a new reading of exhibition catalogues, congress proceedings, prize lists, and photographic journals, the study argues that photography’s artistic legitimation in Italy was not achieved primarily through comparison with painting, but through the category of sentimento. Functioning as both an aesthetic and discursive tool in dialogue with strands of European idealist philosophy, sentimento distinguished artistic photography from technical production by foregrounding subjectivity, interiority, and emotional expression. This interpretative framework challenges the historiographical category of Pictorialism, traditionally applied to Italian photography of the period. Instead, the thesis proposes sentimento as a more historically grounded paradigm for understanding the heterogeneous practices of Italian artistic photography and the role of exhibitions as laboratories in which photography’s artistic identity was constructed between 1898 and 1911.