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Fellowship Project
Dr. Giulia Pra Floriani spent one year (August 2023 – August 2024) at the Museum of Civilizations and the “IsIAO Library” – National Central Library of Rome, to research the collection of Giuseppe Tucci (1894 –1984) and the Italian discourse on Asian Art History during the first half of the twentieth century. During her Fellowship, Giulia approached the objects collected by Tucci and other archaeologists and scholars in Asia, as well as a selection of the Museum’s 14,000 photographic items. She identified, dated, and captioned some of the uncatalogued photographic images in the collection of the “IsIAO Library” and completed research on the book Collecting, Displaying, and Writing East Asian Art History in Italy: Alberto Giuganino and Giuseppe Tucci at IsMEO.
Biography
Dr. Giulia Pra Floriani is Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral researcher at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. Her current project investigates the role of photographs in shaping knowledge of Asia in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. After training in Chinese language and art history at Xi’an Jiaotong University and Peking University, she received a DAAD scholarship to complete her PhD at the Institute of East Asian Art History, Heidelberg University, with a study on photojournalistic practices in 1900s–1910s China. Giulia has published on modern and contemporary Chinese art and photography, and is editor, with Sarah E. Fraser and Kuiyi Shen, of the forthcoming volume Ink and Oil: Chinese Artists Trained in Europe (1920–1960).
Recent Development and Achievement
Dr. Giulia Pra Floriani is preparing the exhibition titled “Reframing Silk: Giacomo Caneva’s photographs of the 1859 expedition to Asia,” planned for January–April 2026 at the Museum of Oriental Art in Venice. The Rome-based photographer Caneva traveled to India and China (Shanghai, Hangzhou, Huzhou) with a scientific and commercial expedition led by Giovan Battista Castellani and Gherardo Freschi. The expedition aimed to collect healthy silkworm eggs to contrast an epidemic disease that had spread over Europe, creating a crisis in local silk production. In the Venice exhibition, thirty-two of Caneva’s early photographs of China held in two Italian private collections will be displayed together for the first time after the collection’s dispersion.
Selected Publication(s)
