Museo, 1970-73

The first seven photographic images illustrate an equal number of places where famous artists from the past who are particularly dear to Paolini have worked, while the last plate reproduces an anonymous artist's studio. Each lithograph bears a date, which each time refers to a specific moment in the artist's activity recalled by the subject of the image.1
The places illustrated are associated with the dates as follows:
1. “Settembre [September] 1418”: the convent of San Domenico in Fiesole, where Beato Angelico was active;
2. “Aprile [April] 1504”: the house where Raphael was born in Urbino;
3. “Ottobre [October] 1636”: a reconstruction of the "small theatre" where Nicolas Poussin worked on his multiple-figure compositions;
4. “Marzo [March] 1807”: Raphael's house and studio in the park at Villa Borghese in Rome, portrayed by Ingres in Le casin de Raphaël, painted in 1807;
5. “Settembre [September] 1890”: the customs house at Porte de Vanves in Paris, where Le Douanier Rousseau worked as a customs officer;
6. “Febbraio [February] 1895”: Cézanne's studio in Aix-en-Provence;
7. “Giugno [June] 1917”: the Estense Castle in Ferrara, the city where Giorgio de Chirico worked for a short period of time;
8. “Ottobre [October] 1921”: the prototype of an imaginary artist's studio installed for a modern art exhibition in 1921.2
The plate with a text – situated at the centre of the installed work – instead features a text by Paolini, referring to the places illustrated. In the artist's own words: “Eight moments and eight places, discovered along the way during a mysterious and irreversible journey. From Fiesole to Urbino, from Rome to Paris, Aix-en-Provence and Ferrara, the Muse pays a visit to Beato Angelico, Raphael, Poussin, Ingres, Rousseau, Cézanne and de Chirico: she disappears in Ancona inside a lifeless studio, built as a scenario and exhibited as a model in a 1921 exhibition of interiors”.
“This is the journey of the Muse”, the author tells us, “and this is why I have chosen to call the work Museum. The Muse travels across those places at specific times and in the end arrives in a place where no artist is ready to welcome her”.3
The portfolio stems from a first version of Museo, made up of three photographs and made in 1970-71 in three copies (GPC-0183); the same theme can be found in the work from the same period with the same title made up of three photo canvases (GPO-0253) and in the corresponding version on paper (GPC-0236).

1 The months indicated in the subtitles are arbitrary, while the years harken back to works made by the artists recalled. Some dates refer to paintings already cited by Paolini in previous works: for Raphael the date 1504 corresponds to the year he made Lo sposalizio della Vergine (GPO-0157), while for Rousseau the year 1890 designates the date of the paintings Fleurs de poète and Moi-même. Portrait paysage (GPO-0135, GPO-0151).
2 The image is from the article L. S., "Una mostra d’arte marchigiana", in Emporium LIV, no. 322 (Bergamo), 1921, p. 243, and it illustrates “Lo studio di un pittore” [A painter’s studio] conceived by Luigi Panzini along with the artist Cesare Peruzzi.
3 G. Paolini interviewed by A. Madesani, in Rubare l’immagine. Gli artisti e la fotografia negli anni ’70, exhibition catalogue, Milan, Spazio Labs (Milan: Edizioni Tega, 2000), p. 73.