Shape of Change: Negotiating institutional identity in modern Italy's art and archaeology museums

'The Shape of Change' shows museum identity as transient, born of instability, negotiation, and ceaseless transformation. Focusing on the period from Italian Unification to the postwar era, it traces how the National Museum of Palermo and Civic Museum of Padua navigated instability and the shifting forces of material constraints, disciplinary paradigms, political authority, and social expectations in ways that repeatedly unsettled their institutional identities. By attending to reforms actioned, contested, or abandoned, this study treats instability as an analytic lens revealing the gravitational fields shaping museum trajectories. It draws on archival records, institutional publications, and visual documentation to reconstruct the way museum directors negotiated competing pressures to shape displays and narratives that secured provisional coherence. Far from timeless temples of permanence, museums can be seen here as living, adaptive institutions whose authority and identity are continually forged through negotiation and recalibration, sustained in the friction between continuity and change.