LAUNCH OF IartNET PORTAL 

On 9 June 2026, the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera will officially present the IartNET portal (www.iartnet.it), a new international platform dedicated to artistic research and the enhancement of the cultural heritage preserved within Italian Higher Education Institutions in the Arts, Music, Dance, Design, and Conservation (AFAM).

Speakers will include the project’s Scientific Coordinator Nicoletta Leonardi, General Advisors Giovanna Cassese and Goffredo Haus, together with the scientific coordinators of the partner institutions: Umberto Bellodi, Alessandro De Filippo, Luca Andrea Ludovico, Marcello Mazzetti, and Carlo Sassetti. 

The IartNET portal represents the central outcome of the PNRR project IartNET – An International Platform for Artistic Research and Cultural Heritage at Italian Higher Arts Education Institutions, promoted by the Brera Academy of Fine Arts as lead institution, in partnership with the Academy of Fine Arts of Carrara, the Academy of Fine Arts of Catania, the “Luca Marenzio” Conservatory of Music in Brescia, the Fondazione Accademia d’Arti e Mestieri dello Spettacolo Teatro alla Scala, and the University of Milan, in collaboration with an extensive network of approximately thirty Italian and European institutions.

Developed under the scientific coordination of Nicoletta Leonardi, IartNET is conceived as a shared space for research and knowledge exchange, fostering dialogue between Italian and international institutions and bringing historical heritage and contemporary artistic practices into conversation. The project contributes to redefining the role of AFAM institutions not only as places of education and training, but also as custodians of highly significant cultural heritage—much of it still little known—and as active centres of research, innovation, and cultural production.

The project builds upon and further develops the work carried out over recent decades by Giovanna Cassese on the recognition and enhancement of the historical and contemporary, tangible and intangible heritage of Academies, Conservatories, and ISIA institutions, as well as on the related artistic research and production within AFAM institutions. This work has been pursued through conferences, publications, and institutional initiatives inspired by the principles of the Faro Convention. The project also benefits from the scientific consultancy of Goffredo Haus in the development of the portal’s digital infrastructures and innovation strategies.

Based on the creation of an open and interconnected ecosystem, IartNET seeks to support innovation, strengthen research communities, and promote advanced educational pathways in line with European standards.

“The project stems from the awareness that AFAM institutions—the Italian system of higher education in the arts, music, dance, design, and conservation—preserve heritage of extraordinary historical and artistic value, much of which remains largely unknown and can now be returned to society through new tools of access and sharing. At the same time, these institutions have always been centres of research, experimentation, and cultural production, where the transmission of knowledge is intertwined with artistic creation. The objective is to bring these two dimensions—heritage and research—into dialogue, strengthening the role of these institutions within the international landscape, fostering European networks of collaboration, master’s and doctoral programmes, exchanges of expertise, and new modes of knowledge production and dissemination. In this sense, the IartNET portal is conceived as a permanent laboratory for research, accessibility, and cooperation.”

— Nicoletta Leonardi, Scientific Coordinator of IartNET, Brera Academy of Fine Arts

Accessible at iartnet.it, the portal has been conceived as an English-language open-access digital infrastructure designed to facilitate the international circulation of artistic research and make the heritage, projects, activities, and research practices of AFAM institutions widely accessible.

The portal also showcases the numerous research projects developed within the network, ranging from the digitisation and study of historical collections—including photographic archives, drawings, plaster cast collections, and documentary holdings—to the documentation and analysis of contemporary artistic production. In this way, heritage is not only preserved and enhanced but also reactivated as a living resource for research, education, and artistic creation.

The portal presents an initial selection of more than 3,000 cultural assets digitised according to the highest international standards and accompanied by newly created records containing up-to-date scholarly content. The platform was developed in response to the need to make a largely unpublished heritage accessible to both the general public and the scholarly community. The corpus, which is continuously expanding, is intended to progressively incorporate additional objects from collections and archives preserved across the various AFAM institutions.

The project places particular emphasis on inclusivity through a highly user-friendly interface and the adoption of the IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) technological standard. This solution enables the exploration of high-resolution images and allows users to examine documents in minute detail from any device.

Within the corpus, a significant nucleus of approximately 1,500 historical photographs from the Academies of Fine Arts of Milan and Carrara stands out. These photographs form part of a broader national project dedicated to the enhancement of teaching photography collections preserved in Italian art academies, developed in collaboration with ICCD (Central Institute for Catalogue and Documentation) and the Italian Society for the Study of Photography. The initiative has led to the cataloguing of approximately 30,000 photographs, now recognised not only as key resources for understanding the history of artistic education but also as exceptionally valuable museum objects. These holdings originate from the Academies of Fine Arts of Florence, Palermo, Turin, Milan, and Carrara. This nucleus is complemented by drawings—many previously unpublished—by Andrea Appiani, Napoleon’s premier peintre, as well as by historical plaster cast collections, painting collections, and the bibliographic and archival holdings preserved by the participating institutions.

Within an interdisciplinary framework open to dialogue between tradition and contemporaneity, this visual heritage intersects with the performing arts through videos, stage photographs, theatrical documents, and musical materials drawn from the Fondazione Accademia d’Arti e Mestieri dello Spettacolo Teatro alla Scala and the “Luca Marenzio” Conservatory of Music in Brescia.

The project extends into the present through original interviews with artists who formerly taught at AFAM institutions and with the institutions’ new doctoral candidates, produced by the Academy of Fine Arts of Catania. These testimonies highlight the central role of cultural heritage in shaping contemporary artistic practices and research trajectories.

With the launch of the portal, IartNET marks a decisive step towards a shared platform capable of connecting past and future, research and education, heritage and innovation, while strengthening the position of AFAM institutions within the European and international cultural landscape.

Alongside its digital dimension, the project contributes to the creation of an international hub for artistic research by connecting institutions, heritage collections, research practices, and diverse areas of expertise, thereby fostering new forms of interdisciplinary and interinstitutional collaboration.

The initiative forms part of the PNRR project IartNET – An International Platform for Artistic Research and Cultural Heritage at Italian Higher Arts Education Institutions, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, Mission 4. 

For further information:
iartnet.ricerca@fadbrera.edu.it