Davide Lacagnina is the Director of the Scuola di Specializzazione in Beni Storico Artistici at the University of Siena, where he is Professor of Modern Art History and Criticism. Qualified as Full Professor (ASN 2021/2023), member of the board of professors of the PhD Pegaso Programm in Art History of the Universities of Siena and Siena for foreigners (2022- ) and of the PhD Pegaso Program in Art History and Performing Arts History at the Universities of Florence, Pisa and Siena (2021- ), he is Advisor/Consultant of the American Academy in Rome (2023- ), member of the executive boards of the Research Center "SIC-Spazi e Immagini del colonialismo" (Universities of Siena and Padua) (2020- ) and og the Foundation Guido Lodovico Luzzatto in Milan (2024- ). In 2019 he was Visiting Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá (Colombia), in 2022 Wallace Fellow at I Tatti | The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, with the research project "Surrealist Renaissance: Old Masters, Art Histories, Other Modernities", and in 2024 Visiting Professor at the Universidade de São Paulo (Brasil).
He holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Palermo and specialised in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Siena. He attended postgraduate courses in museum studies and cultural heritage management at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and the École du Louvre. He was the recipient of several research grants: at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (2006), the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art in Paris (2007 and 2009), the Warburg Institute in London (2012), the Mart in Rovereto (2013-2014) and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm (2017). He coordinated the local unit of the 2012 FIRB research project "Diffondere la cultura visita: l'arte contemporanea tra riviste, archivi e illustrazioni" (2013-2017) (http://www.capti.it/).
He has authored numerous publications. His research interests include in-depth studies on Symbolism (and especially on Gustave Moreau), Futurism, Surrealism, Interwar Art in Italy, art criticism (Vittorio Pica, Juan-Eduardo Cirlot, Giulio Carlo Argan), art historiography, the reception of Old Masters in the 19th and 20th centuries and modern art collecting, with particular reference to the history of exhibitions and cultural institutions and the role of cultural diplomacy in international relations. More recently, he has addressed the issue of the difficult heritage and the memory of fascism in Italy, dealing with the resemantisation in the Republican era of two controversial buildings such as the Palazzo della Farnesina (first designed as the headquarters of the Casa Littoria and the permanent exhibition of the fascist revolution) and the Palazzo della FAO (first designed as the headquarters of the Ministry of Italian Africa) in Rome.
He is currently engajed in the following research programs: CODEC-COnstruction and DEconstruction of Colonial Imagery in 20th-Century Italy: Cultural Heritage and Forms of Representation (Prin 2022), Universities of Padua, Genova, Milan and Siena (2024- ), “Le canon artistique espagnol, entre littérature critique et culture populaire : propagande, débats, publicité (1959-1992), Madrid, Casa de Velázquez (2024- ), “ATLAS AV: La audiovisualización de la historia del arte y del museo”, Madrid, Universidad Complutense (2023- ), “ExoMuseo. Repensar la socialidad y la sostenibilidad en la museología del presente”, Universidad de Málaga (2023- ). Since 2020 he is the the University of Siena coordinator of the International Scientific Collaboration Agreement signed with the University of Milan and the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) for the study of artistic and cultural relations between Italy and Latin America during the 20th century and for the promotion of the mobility of lecturers and researchers.