'Let agents be sent to all the cities of Italy'. British public museums and the Italian art market in the mid-19th century

The essay deals with the material history of the circulation of Italian Renaissance artefacts in major British public museums, such as the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, between the late 1850s and early 1860s. The revived interest in Renaissance art which pervades the cultural consciousness of Victorian Britain owes largely to the extensive and important purchases both of paintings and crafted artefacts (majolica, furniture, textiles, ecc.). These acquisitions were made without regard for the preservation of the Renaissance legacy in contemporary Italy, on the eve of its reunification. The strategies of the British museum curators and agents in the Italian art market are considered along with the political implications of the ‘plunder’, focusing on the ambiguities about the preservation of the Italian art heritage which reigned both in Great Britain and in the still confused Italian political and cultural debate.