Adelaide Maraini: Rediscovering a Lost Figure of Nineteenth-Century Italian Sculpture
Super, Allyson
Super, Allyson
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Abstract
This thesis aims to reconstruct the professional trajectory of Adelaide Mariani (1836- 1917), addressing the systemic historiographic neglect that has rendered a highly successful artist absent from nineteenth-century art history. The primary objects of analysis are her most critically acclaimed sculptures: the monumental marble Saffo (1877) and the high-relief bronze Saffo (frammento) (1822). Despite achieving peak institutional recognition, Maraini remains underexamined in scholarly literature; her presence is largely confined to error-prone reference dictionaries and reduced to a footnote within broader studies, which obscures the extent of her success and importance to the field. Employing a feminist methodological framework, this study combines rigorous archival reconstruction with a critical analysis of the extant historiography to interrogate the paradox of Mariani’s contemporaneous prominence and subsequent erasure from the history of Italian art. Archival research conducted at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma Emeroteca provides access to her correspondence and late nineteenth-century periodicals and exhibition reviews. Carlo Dossi’s publications, including Fricassea critica di arte, storia e l etteratura and Note azzurre further situates her within an intellectual milieu shaped by salon culture, highlighting her use of social and cultural networks as forms of mediation between domestic and public spheres. Maraini’s success was predicated on a strategic negotiation of social capital and an engagement with might be termed psychological realism, through which she articulated female agency through the classical figure of Sappho. Her later marginalization is linked to the emergence of iconoclastic modernism and movements such as Futurism, which systemically devalued academic and didactic frameworks, reshaping the criteria of artistic legitimacy. By exposing the mechanisms through which recognition is produced, sustained, and withdrawn, the research demonstrates that Maraini’s absence from canonical narratives is structurally determined rather than incidental. Her career becomes a site through which broader patterns of inclusion and exclusion in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art history are made visible.
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Master of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Spring 2026.
Date
2026
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Adelaide Maraini, 1836-1917
Citation
Super, Allyson. "Adelaide Maraini: Rediscovering a Lost Figure of Nineteenth-Century Italian Sculpture". Master's Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2026.