“Six short stories”: a school project for work experience at the Poldi Pezzoli Museum.

A work-experience project run by a secondary school for the telling of the story of works of art through narratives written collectively by students.

The watchwords of this project, for the accomplishment of which a museum (Museo Poldi Pezzoli), a high school (Liceo Classico Beccaria di Milano), and a philanthropic entity (Fondazione Bracco) have joined forces, are art, science, learning, writing, communication, and collaboration.

Thirty final-year  students from “Beccaria” High School and their Italian, art history, and science teachers are participating in a multidisciplinary project for the study and in-depth analysis of six works of art housed in the Poldi Pezzoli Museum. The students will be divided into teams and will jointly compose an original work that will then be published.

The first stage of the project takes place on Friday 30 November and Monday 3 December 2018 with visits to the Poldi Pezzoli Museum, where students and teachers will be put in the company of a guide who will show them and talk about the work of art that is their object of study. They will also hear from Professor Isabella Castiglioni of CNR [the National Research Council], who will explain in detail the diagnostic tests that are carried out on art treasures.

In the next stage, the students divide into six teams, one for each work of art, concerning which the teams must collate historical, literary, and scientific knowledge. The teams then make up stories, each to be developed in a different narrative style, but always accompanied by technical descriptions of the works, including a close analysis of the diagnostic tests. The works written by the teams will be published as a collection by Fondazione Bracco.

In addition to learning about a painting, sculpture, or other artefact, the students will also benefit from being invited to talk to and ask questions of professionals and scholars (art historians, communicators, researchers, etc.), and will gain first-hand experience of the complementarity potential of art and science.