“Il più bello gabinetto delle stampe che esiste”: a (failed) project for the Ortalli collection of prints at the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma

Abstract

After having been valued mainly as conveyors of visual information, prints in nineteenth-century western Europe came to be recognised as works of art. In some cases this led to a reconsideration of the location of print collections in public institutions, but moving them was not always easy. This article reconstructs Paul J. Kristeller’s (failed) project to hand over Ortalli albums of prints from the Biblioteca Palatina to the royal art museum in Parma (1893–1898) by tracing arguments used to support or oppose the relocation. By studying local events in the context of a national plan designed to reorganise print collections following foreign examples, the article shows the extent to which the status of prints and print collections grounded the Palatina director’s opposition to the project, and how this contributed to the preservation of the collection’s historical memory and the shaping of current frameworks of public print collections in Italy.