“There is a profound relationship, a new relationship, between narration and photography. Narration gets the blame, photography the credit.”
Roberto Cotroneo

Genius Loci. Nel teatro dell’arte (“Genius Loci: In the theater of art”) is the title of a book published by Contrasto and of the first exhibition of photographs by Roberto Cotroneo, better known until recently as a novelist and essayist. For more than three years, Cotroneo has been observing and photographing museumgoers: their movements, postures and expressions, the way they cross spaces and thresholds. Genius Loci is the outcome of this lengthy process, made of words and images, of the relationship between viewers and art, between artworks and photography at galleries and museums throughout Italy: the Vatican Museums, Galleria Borghese, MAXXI, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Museo del Vittoriano in Rome; the Uffizi and Palazzo Strozzi in Florence; the Egyptian Museum in Turin; MART in Rovereto; Punta della Dogana in Venice and many more.

Art museums are where people look at art, not where people look at people. And the scene is not the artwork, but the viewers that cross that stage. Cotroneo’s lens captures museumgoers intent on looking at a painting by Edward Hopper or Piero della Francesca, a photograph by David Lachapelle or a work by Alberto Burri or Mimmo Paladino. In this act of observation he places his subjects inside another image—the photograph—which then combines the different arts with moving bodies, reflections, postures, sensuality. Many, if not all, visitors take pictures of what they see; others seem absent, find distractions, look at their smartphones and wait for news from their private worlds inside this extraneous space.

“Many,” writes the author, “adapt to the works: by choosing them, hesitating, pausing longer on one than on another. Many still, and this goes for large popular museums with universal masterpieces, move in groups, en masse, like migrating herds. Others, as if suffering from intermittent comprehension, stand open-mouthed before installations they don’t understand, or find eccentric, with the skeptical look of ‘I wouldn’t put that in my home, never mind in a museum.’ But Genius Loci is a project that can’t help crossing the line, albeit with some wariness and discretion, into the so-called sociology of art.”

Genius loci was made possible thanks to a 2014 law by Culture and Tourism Minister Dario Franceschini, which allows visitors to take photos in museums and galleries. The book also includes a picture taken by Mr. Franceschini at the Tate Gallery in London.

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