Thesis title: Catalogazione e studio di una raccolta romana di incisioni (XVIII-XIX sec.). Il fondo di matrici Monte di Pietà-Ministero del Tesoro (Istituto Centrale per la Grafica)
This dissertation investigates the history and significance of the engraved copperplates that entered the Calcografia Regia in 1913, originating from the Monte di Pietà of Rome—an episode that had never before been examined. Starting from this historiographical gap, the research reconstructs the circumstances under which engraved copperplates, belonging to celebrated print series and associated with leading engravers and publishers, were pledged as collateral at the Monte di Pietà. It explores their provenance, the economic and institutional contexts of their deposit, and the subsequent processes that led to their incorporation into public collections.
The study is grounded in extensive, unpublished archival documentation preserved in the Archivio Storico della Fondazione Roma and the Archivio di Stato di Roma. It examines the mechanisms of pawnbroking applied to works of art, focusing particularly on engraved copperplates, and situates these financial practices within the broader landscape of nineteenth-century Roman printmaking and publishing. Through the analysis of documents and correspondence -including the cases of Carlo Losi, Giuseppe Antonio Monaldini, and Giovanni Pietro Campana- the research reconstructs the institutional procedures and the artistic and economic valuation criteria employed by the Monte di Pietà. It demonstrates how access to credit represented, for engravers and publishers, a crucial strategy of economic survival during a period of decline in the print trade.
The second part of the dissertation focuses on the collection “Monte di Pietà - Ministero del Tesoro”, now housed at the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica, which comprises 1,979 engraved copperplates of exceptional historical and documentary importance. The research provides a detailed account of the collection, with particular attention to conservation and restoration issues, and documents the restoration campaign conducted in collaboration with the Institute. A total of 168 copperplates were restored according to new technical protocols developed by the Institute’s Diagnostic Laboratory for Plates. These interventions, aimed at recovering legibility and preserving the metal supports, made it possible to identify many previously anonymous copperplates and to link them to their corresponding archival records.
The dissertation concludes with a critical catalogue of the identified copperplates, divided into reproductive and serial engravings, and with two documentary appendices containing full transcriptions of the archival sources consulted.
Taken together, the results provide the first comprehensive reconstruction of the relationships between credit, art, and institutional structures in nineteenth-century Rome. They reveal the Monte di Pietà as a crucial site of economic and cultural mediation in the history of printmaking. Within this framework, engraved copperplates emerge not merely as tools of artistic production but as historical and cultural artefacts-witnesses to the changing value of the image and to the transition from the economy of engraving to the construction of Rome’s graphic memory, later integrated into the public collections of the newly unified Italian state.