XIV - The Power of the Image. Portrait of the Banca Nazionale in 1868edited by Marina Miraglia

The volume explains a still unexplored section of the Bank of Italy's archives, that of photographic funds. It allows to reconstruct a page of the history of photography particularly significant that marks the crossing point from small to large format in the field of nineteenth-century portraiture. It does so, intertwining the history of photography with the much broader history of Italy and that of the timid appearance of pre-unification States with the epochal problems induced by the advent of industry and capitalism. A central point is also the investigation of aspects generally considered secondary, but not of slight weight in the historical judgment, namely the social rise of the bourgeoisie as well as the non-indifferent role played by the Banca Nazionale nel Regno d'Italia at the time of its establishment and of the contrasted path towards the aggregation of the various emission banks into a single central institute, as if to indicate an underlying parallelism between the political resurgence and the economic resurgence of the Country. The analysis of individual portraits and that of the album - understood in its meaning as an indissoluble documentary unit - have highlighted a double register, individual and collective, of representation and self-representation, revealing also the extraordinary power of the photographic image that, maintaining itself in unstable equilibrium between referent and its figural reshaping, it is a driver of the most widespread instances and ideologies of its epoch.