In order to contribute to the mapping of missionary collecting in Italy between the 19th and 20th centuries, this paper presents the history of the collection assembled at the convent of SS. Annunziata in Parma at the end of the 19th century and relocated in 1927 to the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Rimini, where part of it is still on display, divided between the convent and the municipal Museo degli Sguardi. The study, focusing on the period from 1893 to 1943, examines the objects selected by missionaries to represent the worlds they experienced, the meanings these objects came to embody, and the outcomes of encounters with Otherness within and beyond the threshold of the convent, particularly in public exhibitions. Through this case study, the research reflects on interpretations of the ʽOtherʼ in missionary spaces, outlining how both objects and museums have been interpreted over time as economic resources, symbolic thresholds, tools of legitimation and memorial devices.

In 2017, Mat Collishaw presented Thresholds , a cross-reality installation first exhibited at Somerset House, London. Wearing the VR headset, visitors are transported to William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1839 exhibition in Birmingham, encountering his experimental ‘photogenic drawings’. The artwork involves multiple thresholds: entering the installation, donning the VR headset, crossing spatiotemporal boundaries, and inhabiting the image itself as an unframed, immersive environment. This paper situates Collishaw’s artistic research within a broader historical and theoretical framework, arguing that Thresholds , precisely in taking the form of a virtual re-enactment of Talbot’s exhibition, serves as a critical reflection on the evolving relationship between image-making and technology – from the birth of photography to the advent of virtual reality.

Abstract: The article explores late-medieval vierges ouvrantes (hinged Virgins that reveal Christological or Trinitarian interiors) as thresholds between secrecy and revelation. They translate the porta clausa of Ezekiel 44:2 and the hortus conclusus of Song of Songs 4:12 into sculpture, illustrating the paradox of a body that is both inviolate and permeable. Their mechanisms turn the Incarnation into a visible event and also expose cultural fears about vision, curiosity and trespass. Patristic writers framed these fears in theological terms. Jean Gerson condemned the vierge ouvrante as ‘unwarranted exposure.’ Later comparanda, from illuminated manuscripts, obstetrical collections and the Mechelen Besloten Hofjes , repeat the same tension between revelation and restraint. The article argues that both the opening and the later sealing or destruction of these statues reveal a theology of thresholds that reshaped the act of seeing.

This article re-reads the Disobedience Archive through the notion of threshold at curatorial, institutional, and spatio-temporal levels. It posits the archive-as-device, activated differently by each display, and asks whether Rivoli’s parliamentary layout can turn the museum into a deliberative arena without neutralising dissent. By comparing it with, The Zoetrope (Venice Biennale, 2024), the paper examines how the shift to a spiral reshapes perception while preserving the archive’s nomadic, critical vocation and its genealogical, constellation-based logics.

The exhibition Magiciens de la terre, promoted by the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, remains a subject of controversy. In 2013, Hans Belting described it as an "intermezzo" or "rite de passage" between world art and global art, highlighting its nature by comparing it to Primitivism in 20th Century Art. However, Belting's viewpoint has faced criticism from authors such as Christian Kravagna and Monica Juneja. They argue for a different timeline regarding the processes of globalization in art and seek to systematize the historical and artistic research conducted over the past two decades on global and transcultural modernisms.

Having observed the repeated association, between the mid-13th and late 15th centuries, between the representations of the Annunciation and the offering of Cain and Abel on the triumphal arch of churches located in the eastern part of the subalpine arc, this article aims to examine some of the settings in which this association occurs, adopting a mixed approach combining seriality and case studies. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the effectiveness of this association of two liminal episodes with the triumphal arch, which can itself be described as a threshold in ecclesiastical space, since it separates the nave from the sanctuary.

La pala di San Girolamo conservata a Monopoli rappresenta un nodo centrale per la comprensione della diffusione della cultura figurativa veneta in Puglia tra Quattro e Cinquecento. L’opera, a lungo oggetto di dibattito attributivo, testimonia non solo la complessità dei rapporti artistici e culturali tra Venezia e l’Adriatico meridionale, ma anche il peso delle vicende politiche e sociali locali. In origine collocata nel duomo romanico monopolitano presso la cappella patronale della famiglia Ferro, la pala è stata in passato riferita a Gentile Bellini, fino alla definitiva attribuzione a Lazzaro Bastiani, avanzata da Berenson e sancita da Roberto Longhi nell’ Officina ferrarese (1934). La fortuna critica dell’opera, intrecciata ai “pellegrinaggi d’arte” di Bernard Berenson e alla corrispondenza con Gustavo Frizzoni, restituisce un quadro complesso di attribuzioni, oscillanti tra la cultura veneziana e possibili tradizioni adriatico-pugliesi. Il contributo intende ripercorrere vicende attributive inedite ( in primis legate alla figura di Berenson), sottolineandone il ruolo di cerniera tra Venezia e la Puglia e il valore paradigmatico per la comprensione dei processi di ricezione della cultura figurativa rinascimentale lungo le rotte adriatiche. La pala di Monopoli si configura come un’opera cardine per lo studio dei rapporti tra committenza locale e linguaggi artistici d’importazione, restituendo l’immagine di un centro strategico nella geografia artistica del Rinascimento italiano.