Obiettivo seta | Reframing Silk La spedizione del 1859 in Cina nelle fotografie di Giacomo Caneva | Giacomo Caneva’s Photographs of the 1859 Expedition to China

“Reframing Silk: Giacomo Caneva's Photographs of the 1859 Expedition to China” displays thirty-two original photographs that the photographer and painter Giacomo Caneva (1813–1865) realized during the 1859 Castellani-Freschi Expedition to China. Its aim was to collect healthy silkworms to mitigate the effects of pébrine, a silkworm disease that had damaged silk production in Europe (Zanier 1993). The Caneva prints come from two private collections, one in Treviso (Giuseppe Vanzella collection) and the other in Como (Ruggero Pini collection), which have been brought together for the first time since the original collection was divided in the early 2000s. This catalogue interprets Caneva's photographs of Asia, of which there are only forty known examples, not only as images of the late Qing Empire (1644-1911) but also as objects that bear witness to a network of commercial and scientific exchange between Italy and China in the second half of the 19th century. The authors who contributed to this volume analyze Caneva’s images using different yet complementary approaches: Marta Boscolo Marchi's introduction focuses on the perception of photography in China and silk production in Zhejiang; Francesca Bonetti's essay explores Caneva's biography and his work in Rome; Giulia Pra Floriani's contribution investigates the people and places depicted in his Chinese images; and, finally, Vanzella's text reconstructs the history and provenance of the two collections.