Tracce d’arte contemporanea a Cortina d’Ampezzo Dall’archivio digitale del Museo Mario Rimoldi

Abstract

In 1974, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art named after Mario Rimoldi, hotelier and former mayor during the 1956 Olympics, opened its doors in Cortina, as part of a much older institution, the Regole d’Ampezzo. Thus was born one of the first private museums dedicated to 20th century Italian art, the virtuous outcome of Rimoldi's own collecting activity. The Museum enriched the Ampezzo community with a patrimony that was committed to enhancing the overall artistic heritage of the Dolomite basin, projecting Cortina’s role far beyond that of nature and hospitality. However, the Museum's archival materials, including correspondences and photographs tracing the vicissitudes of one of the most refined collectors of the mid-twentieth century with masters such as Giorgio de Chirico, Filippo de Pisis, Fortunato Depero, Alis Levi and Mario Sironi, had remained unexplored until now. This volume is the result of the project to analyse and adapt the digital identity and computer systems to manage, study and enhance the rich heritage of works and archival materials of the Regole d’Ampezzo on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Rimoldi Museum. In view of this milestone, the Museum, together with the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, has carried out a thorough reorganisation of its heritage by reorganising the archival fonds and transferring them to a relational database. This catalogue accompanies the new public database as a useful tool to retrace the stages and areas of the reorganisation work, while at the same time tackling stringent methodological aspects in the debate on the digitisation of the art sector. If, on the one hand, the volume provides a moment of reflection on best practices in the Digital and Public Humanities, especially in the field of relational database creation, on the other it offers a privileged opportunity to discover previously unpublished material from the Museum, capable of shedding light on its birth as well as on the Ampezzo artistic context in the 20th century. As a concrete outcome of the relational methodology adopted in the creation of the new museum database, the catalogue presents for the first time a vast iconographic apparatus composed of letters, works, documents and photographs through which to indicate research paths and valorise artistic firsts in the heritage of the Regole d’Ampezzo.