Mission and objectives

The Centre for visuaL hIstOry (CLIO) is part of  IMAGINeS: Images and History (IMAGINeS: Immagini e Storia), a project deriving from funding awarded by the Ministry of Universities and Research (MUR) 2023-2027 to “University Departments of Excellence”. The centre is based on the awareness that the image – in its broadest sense, encompassing artistic artefact, illustration, photography, holograms and the new frontier of NFTs – is first and foremost a historical product, not separable from the contexts of production, fruition and the broader media system. History, therefore –  no longer simply a “service” discipline compared to iconography, aesthetics or art criticism when faced with the study of the visual – becomes the fulcrum of an exploration of the polysemy of images and their various functions, beginning with those that are informative, analytical, performative and that deal with the construction of reality.

CLIO is an interdisciplinary project, innovative on a variety of levels:

• thanks to the researchers of the University of Milan’s Department of Historical Studies (Dipartimento di Studi storici dell’Università degli Studi di Milano), many of whom are recognized experts in the field of iconographic sources and visual culture, the centre aims to inspire a lively dialogue between specialists in heterogeneous thematic areas, ranging from political history and political thought to economic history, from religious history to the history of science, from cultural history to book sciences and diplomatics;
• the activities carried out cover a broad chronological span, from ancient times to the contemporary age, thus activating a virtuous circle between the study of the present time and that of more distant eras, helping us to rethematise and better understand the great questions of the ancient world and the world around us today;
• cooperation is encouraged with a number of prestigious national and international research centres in the historical-artistic and iconological fields;
• frontier approaches are contemplated in order to move towards the computational analysis of visual sources and the visualization of historical data.

CLIO works in a number of directions and intends to:

• contribute a wide-ranging cultural investment through annual colloquia, conferences and publications, in order to become an international point of reference in the field of Visual History and to open up collaborations with other national and international centres and joint participation in competitive applications aimed at the integration of different skills;
• organize a regular program in the teaching field for visiting professors and activate modules included in the degree courses originated by the Department;
• award an annual scholarship for the doctorate in Historical Studies reserved for the study of Visual History.