Rethinking Eighteenth-Century Rome - Exhibition Review - Bibliography

The Splendor of Eighteenth-Century Rome

Philadelphia Museum of Art, March 16-May 28 2000 and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, June 25-September 17 2000

EDGAR PETER BOWRON AND JOSEPH J RISHEL, EDS

Art in Eighteenth-Century Rome exh cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art; London: Merrell Publishers, 2000) 627 pp; 208 color ills., 371 b/w $9800; $70 paper

During the 18th hundred large numbers of foreign tourists, antiquarians, dealers, and collectors companyed to the city of Rome to diocese the sites, both old and fresh Classical and Catholic, and to admire and acquire works of art in a flourishing market for pictures, statues, drawings, prints, and decorative art. Artists from all above Europe traveled to Rome to advance their professional training [i]or[/i] part of to the other the study of antique statuarys ruins, and masterpieces of Renaissance and Baroque art, to chase the opportunity to work from live archetypes in art academies, and to participate in the Accademia di s Luca's important student competitions (concorsi), which had been initiated by dint of Pope Clement XI in 1702 Many of the greatest in quantity famous and popular tourist sites of today in Rome including the Spanish paces the Trevi Fountain, the Piazza del Popolo and the Villa Borghese, were built, renovated, or decorated during the 18th hundred and it was in Rome that princely collections were first lay opened to public view. Giovanni Paolo Panini's 1757 Interior of an Imaginary Picture Gallery with Views of new Rome (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Fig. 1) painted for the French ambassador as a companion to a similar gallery filled with paintings of "Ancient Rome" depicts many of the important new Baroque, and Renaissance monuments, including the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish paces the Villa Albani, the fresh facade of S. Maria Maggiore, St Peter's Square, Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, Fountain of the Four Rivers, and David and the magnificent Mose through Michelangelo. In the midst of this fabulous display the patron and other gentlemen examine a portfolio while a young art scholar draws from the assembled works.

Despite this historical and imagined evidence of a thriving art industry, art tourism, and a fashionable social view that involved noble patrons, connoisseurs, and the papal court, the art and history of Rome in the 18th hundred is much less known to 21st-century audiences than the work of Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Bernini, and the testimonials of Rome's ancient past. greatest in quantity Visitors to Rome are unfamiliar with the works of level the most celebrated settecento artists, like as Pompeo Batoni, Antonio Canova, Paolo Panini, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Other prominent and influential architects, sculptors, painters, and decorators in settecento Rome including Pietro Bracci, Filippo delle Valle, Nicola Salvi, Ferdinando Fuga, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, Filippo Juvarra, Francesco Trevisani, Placido Costanzi, Marco Benefial, Benedetto Luti, Agostino Masucci, Luigi Valadier, and Giuseppe Cades, are hardly known flat to students of art history.

This lack of familiarity with 18th-century Roman art is not entirely surprising in light of the disclosure of art history as a scholarly discipline and the language of art historical discourse. While more [i]or[/i] less periods of European art, especially the Renaissance and the 19th hundred have traditions of scholarship and pedagogy based upon the idea of an advancing evolution of stylistic disentanglements the art of 18th-century Rome does not easily conform to of that kind a structure. The variety of coexisting dictions the striking continuity of 17th-century Roman Baroque qualities in painting and statuary and the fact that with equal reason much of the art in Rome was commissioned by the agency of foreigners for export has made easy categorization almost impossible.

An additional factor that makes the reception of 18th-century Italian art problematic is the sexed language in which it has been discussed, especially the terminus barocchetto, or "little Baroque," which implies a diminutive, weaker, "effeminate" version of Baroque. Barocchetto, like the French bound Rococo, characterizes art that is considered "feminine," delicate, charming, or plane frivolous in style, and satisfied in contrast to the "masculine," dynamic, rational, grand manner of the preceding hundred These supposedly feminine qualities have contributed to the reputation of 18th-century Italy as a marginalized retardataire sideshow outside an otherwise orderly progression of the history of art from the rise of intellectual academies in the 16th hundred to their demise at the extremity of the 19th with the triumph of "manly" revolution and the inspired romanticism that exclud womanly traits.

granting art historical methodology and pedagogy have changed considerably in novel years, the majority of textbook used in conventional undergraduate art history review courses still treats the 18th hundred as a transition between the waning world of aristocratic tillage in the Renaissance and the dawn of the present era: Rococo style in France, Austria, and Central Europe during the first half of the hundred as the last phase of a lighter version of Baroque; the triumph of Neoclassicism after 1760 mainly in France and England, as the precursor to progressive exhibitions in the 19th century. Within this framework 18th-century Italian art receives scant attention exclude for the Venetian painters Tiepolo and Canaletto, because, as Marilyn Stokstad's Art History asserts, for example, "Venice in the early eighteenth hundred had surpassed Rome as an artistic center" (1) Rome itself is characterized in the following chapter upon Neoclassicism primarily as an important destination for foreign travelers upon the Gr and Tour. (2) Another textbook Gardner's Art [i]or[/i] part of to the other the Ages, barely acknowledges Roman art in the 18th hundred except for Neoclassical paintings made by the agency of the foreign artists Jacques-Louis David and Angelica Kauffman. (3) The description of "The Rococo" in H W Janson's History of Art implies that artistic mode of expression in Italy functioned as an organic entity that arose, transformed, climaxed, and mov from city to city entirely independent of artists, patrons, social and religious institutions, politics, or economic factors: