The Belgian reception of Italy at the 1885 Antwerp world exhibition: Converging artistic, economic, and political strategies on display

The multifaceted context of the relationships between Italy and Belgium, before and after the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, has been the subject of renewed interest for historians who have investigated the broader cultural relationships between the countries as well as more narrow topics such as Belgian participation in Italian cultural events including the Venice Biennale. 1 The general picture offered by these studies is that Italy viewed Belgium as a sort of experimental “laboratory” from which to draw inspiration and to encourage or legitimize its own future, while Belgium considered Italy a developing country; a territory to conquer, whose own political, social, and economic identity was rarely acknowledged. 2 These views stem from a number of perceived differences between the two countries that developed during the nineteenth century. After achieving national independence in 1830, liberal Belgium rapidly adopted a stable institutional structure and reached a level of economic development that established the country among the more advanced European powers. In a pre-unified Italy struggling with industrial backwardness, the formation of a Belgian national state was therefore considered an aspirational model. Cultural exchanges-adopted on the Belgian side through the tradition of the voyage en Italie 3 -began to be forged around political, economic, and social issues. While earlier historiography has often studied these links in isolation, this essay will try to reunite the artistic, political, and social dimensions of these interactions through the examination of the debates that took place in Belgium and Italy during the second half of the nineteenth century concerning the relationship between art and industry, specialized training, and the quality of industrial products, 4 which were pressing issues across all of Europe at the time. 5 From an historical perspective, these debates are symptomatic of the positions that the governments of these young nation-states forged in relation to their artistic history and their cultural roots as they envisioned and launched processes of political and productive modernization. © 2018 selection and editorial matter, David Raizman and Ethan Robey; individual chapters, the contributors.