Museo, 1970-73

Museo is conceived as a group of eight paintings, presented all together at the Galleria Notizie in Turin in 1975 and then divided up. On the verso of each canvas is the overall title of the work - "Museo" - followed in parenthesis by a specific subtitle: “Settembre 1418”, “Aprile 1504”, “Ottobre 1636”, “Marzo 1807”, “Settembre 1890”, “Febbraio 1895”, “Giugno 1917”, “Ottobre 1921”. The photo canvases reproduce places where famous artists from the past who are particularly dear to Paolini once worked. Each canvas is signed on the verso by a date, which in each case refers the canvas to a specific time in the activity of the artist evoked 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, taken from the October 1921 issue of the magazine “Emporium”.2
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”.3
“This is the journey of the Muse – and this is why I have chosen to call the work Museo – who travels across those places at specific times and in the end arrives in a place where no artist is ready to welcome her”.4
The group of eight paintings develops a previous version consisting of three photographs (“Settembre 1418”, “Febbraio 1895”, “Ottobre 1921”), executed in an edition of three in 1970-71 (GPC-0183). The work corresponds also to a print edition executed in the same year (GPE-0009).

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 (cf. GPO-0157), while for Rousseau the year 1890 designates the date of the paintings Fleurs de poète and Moi-même. Portrait paysage (cf. 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” conceived by Luigi Panzini along with the artist Cesare Peruzzi.
3 G. Paolini, Idem (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1975), p. 57, new edition (Milan: Electa, 2023), p. 83.
4 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. Elsewhere, Paolini has paused to discuss the final image in these terms: “The reproduction of a non-existent and inanimate studio for the purpose of concluding the work, in addition to indicating the last leg of the Muse's journey is a necessary image if we are to prevent Museo from becoming a historistic recording. The fact that the final results are a place that has never existed calls into question the existence of the previous ones” (G. Paolini in conversation with I. Bernardi, 12 December 2012).