Sara Vitacca

Sara Vitacca, born in Brescia in 1988, lives and works in Paris. After graduating from high school in Italy in 2007, she studied art history at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. In 2018, she defended a doctoral thesis entitled Un mythe à l’œuvre: la réception de Michel-Ange entre 1875 et 1914, under the supervision of Pierre Wat. Winner of the Daniel Arasse scholarship in 2017, she was a lecturer in art history at Université Paris 1, then A.T.E.R. at ENS Lyon, and has also taught at Université Catholique de l’Ouest and Institut National du Patrimoine. In 2016, she co-curated and wrote the catalog for the exhibition Bacchanales Modernes! The Nude, Drunkenness and Dance in Nineteenth-Century French Art e siècle, presented at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux and the Palais Fesch, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Ajaccio, and in 2018 edited the proceedings of the colloquium accompanying the exhibition. Her research and publications focus on 19th-century painting, sculpture and art historiography, as well as on the reception of antique and Renaissance models in the contemporary period. Her residency project at Villa Medici focuses on representations of the male nude in early 20th-century Italian art, in the work of artists such as Aristide Sartorio, Adolfo de Carolis, Edoardo Gioja and Hendrik Christian Andersen. She studies the construction of the virile, heroic body in monumental painting and sculpture of the period, in order to examine the ideological, social and political issues involved in reinvesting the male body.
In parallel with this project, she is developing a series of podcasts for the general public, devoted to 19th-century art and the forgotten stories of the Villa Medici.