Images of Italy (1480 to 1900) | National Library of Scotland
16 May - 2 November 2024

Co-curated with Graham Hogg (National Library of Scotland), this exhibition explores how visual representations of Italy developed from 15th-century woodcuts to 19th-century photography. It highlights how book illustrators and photographers saw Italy, and how their work provided an impression of the country of British and European audiences. The invention of photography in the 19th century provided a new technology to record Italy, and the display includes examples of photography from the National Library of Scotland's collections alongside John Ruskin's daguerreotypes from The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection.

This exhibition in the gallery at the National Library was accompanied by both printed and digital exhibition guides – the latter showing three films of the Italian cities recorded in John Ruskin's daguerreotypes in the exhibition ( https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/itpi/digitaltour#/tour/27/ ), along with a series of interactive Augmented-Reality postcards.

Ruskin himself described the daguerreotype as ‘the most marvellous invention of the 19th century’ and his appetite for this new technology ‘insatiable’. Dubbed ’the silver canvas’ or ‘sun pictures’, and named after the French artist and inventor Louis- Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1839, these extraordinarily detailed images are formed on the mirror-like surface of a silver-plated sheet of copper. The 125 daguerreotypes made, commissioned or purchased by John Ruskin and now housed at The Ruskin – Library, Museum and Research Centre at Lancaster University comprise one of the most important surviving groups of early photographs in the world. The NLS exhibition is part of a larger research project on the daguerreotypes.