The Museum will virtually bring to your homes a selection of photographs coming from our archive. Every week you will discover a new image.
Juvenile criminal from Sardinia, end of the 19th Century beginning of the 20th Century
Photographer Efisio Murgia, albumen print on cardboard, mounted in album.
The child portraited is depicted through the use of a mirror, a mug shot method frequently defined as the English one, that allows the subject’s front and profile to be viewed in one single frame.
The photograph belongs to series of 275 images preserved in the museum’s archive and part of a research on Cagliari’s juvenile delinquents, held between 1898 and 1903 by Lombroso’s collaborator and professor at the University of Cagliari, Mario Carrara, along with Sardinian pathologist and amateur photographer Efisio Murgia. The “picciocus de crobi”, poor and malnourished children and teenagers were brought to crime due to their difficult living conditions.