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Dudar, Helen. "The Grandeur That Was Rome - A new exhibition at the philadelphia museum of art showcases the eternal city as the artistic and cultural capital of 18th-century europe." Smithsonian Apr. 2000: 82. Fine Arts and Music Collection. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.

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The Grandeur That Was Rome - A new exhibition at the philadelphia museum of art showcases the eternal city as the artistic and cultural capital of 18th-century europe

Helen Dudar

Smithsonian. 31.1 (Apr. 2000): p82.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/

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We might begin with a meditation on the baroque audacity required to explore an entire century of art as a single museum event. Is it a unique form of institutional folly? Or might it be a venture so brave that it is doomed to success?

Without a visible tremor, a scholarly team at the Philadelphia Museum of Art has set aside great expanses of wall and floor space to celebrate the 18th century-and to demonstrate that in much of that time the true art capital of the Western world was the city of Rome.

The exhibition, "The Splendor of 18th-Century Rome," will be on view in Philadelphia from March 16 to May 28 and will then move on to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, June 25 to September 17. It is sponsored in part by Advanta and the American Water Works Company, Inc.

Until fairly recently, the notion of the artistic supremacy of 18th- century Rome has carried weight for little more than a small, lonely band of enthusiasts and historians. Even now the community of true believers is hardly overpopulated. France has dominated the academic narrative since the 19th century, when it nurtured crops of major schools of art that flowered seductively into Impressionism.

The pro-Rome contingent takes the position that the French, having occupied Rome after the Napoleonic conquest at the close of the 18th century, slyly managed to distort the record so that their importance edged backward into an age that did not belong to them. As Joseph Rishel, the museum's senior curator of pre-1900 European painting and sculpture, puts it, "In the literature, the general conception is that Italy is the dozy, sleepy place, as opposed to Paris as the great surging, energetic artistic center."

Now, to be sure, as the papal city, Rome had always attracted large numbers of the devout as well as streams of cultural explorers. But what Rishel is talking about is Rome as a magnet, a lure for traveling royalty and aristocrats, for untitled but importantly monied travelers, for writers hoping to enlarge their experience of the world in a city simmering with talent and, above all, for artists in quest of education, polish, recognition and clients. The rule laid down by Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1776 was unequivocal: "A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority."

In Europe, the 1700s were a time of relative prosperity and, more significantly, peace, which toward the end of the century would be shattered by Napoleon. In the decades before the appearance of the Napoleonic forces, Rome became the focus of what was grandiosely labeled the "Grand Tour."

Reaching the city in 1786 for the first of two long stays, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, at 37 already a major literary figure in his native Germany, recorded the thrill of his entry: "Now, at last, I have arrived in the First City of the World!"

He was a ravenous sightseer, overwhelmed by the glories of a fabled city, by the "palaces, ruins, gardens, wildernesses, small houses, stables, triumphal arches, columns." He appears to have visited them all and to have loved almost everything he saw.

An outing to the Vatican Museum found Goethe "swept...off my feet" by the sight of the cool, elegantly muscular Apollo Belvedere. An antique Roman copy of the Greek god, it was, in that day, considered a supreme masterwork. Goethe confessed himself "obsessed" by the piece. He was equally enthralled by the Pantheon, the great domed house of worship that had survived since ancient Rome. But, above all, he was held captive by the Sistine Chapel.

In fact, he seemed driven to return to the chapel again and again to feast on Michelangelo's Last Judgment. It was easier to be a culture vulture in Goethe's day than in these fevered, tour-guided, rigidly scheduled times. By tipping the custodian, he and his friends were allowed in whenever they liked. Sometimes he carried a snack to sustain him while he nourished his sensibilities on the glories of Michelangelo's genius. Once, exhausted by the demands of tourism, he managed a nap on the papal throne.

In our day, we arrive by plane or speed into the city by train or bus or hired car for an arduous week of sight-seeing. Eighteenth-century tourists to Italy arrived by ship or made the bone-rattling trip by chaise or carriage over cruel roads and, if they were fortunate, were carried across the Alps in a sedan chair.

It may sound a bit harsh, but with sufficient wealth, no tourist wanted for life's necessities. In 1704, the prominent architect Lord Burlington, traveling from England, reached the city with a party of 15 retainers to see to all his needs; the entourage included a doctor, an artist, a groom, a cook, a tutor and a bookkeeper.

Like Lord Burlington, most of the Grand Tourists were British. They usually stayed for months, meeting the stellar literary figures in residence, making their way through elegant art-filled palazzi (which were not yet public museums, as many are today), examining breathtaking collections of ancient sculpture and stalking the spectacular treasures of the Vatican. Artists who came to study would often stay a few years and sometimes forever. In Rome, "I live like a gentleman," the British sculptor John Deare wrote his family, to explain why he was not coming home.

For young painters and sculptors in quest of guidance and inspiration, the city was a rich source of learning as well as an education in worldly matters. In one way, old Rome was not unlike modern Manhattan; every other resident seemed to be from some other place-from other Italian towns and cities (Antonio Canova of Venice), from England (Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gavin Hamilton), France (Jacques-Louis David, Claude- Joseph Vernet, Jean-Honore Fragonard), Switzerland (Angelika Kauffmann, Henry Fuseli), or Germany (Wilhelm Tischbein, Anton Raphael Mengs). Even Colonial America sent off the young Benjamin West for an education in painting, which he would go on to perfect during a lifelong residence in England.

There were more than enough institutions of learning to accommodate an aspiring young artist, including a school specializing in the nude, a boon to artists who hoped to concentrate on images of the human figure. Arriving from Germany in 1779, Tisch-bein counted ten private teaching academies in the city. The same year, the talented young Canova, who would become one of the stellar sculptors of the age, checked out the city's official academy and found himself struggling for air in a studio crammed with more than 150 students, a setting so stifling that he was finally compelled to flee.

With peace and wealth, the popes and the city's monied classes dedicated themselves to sprucing up or creating major monuments. Old family palaces were renewed and embellished; the unabashedly melodramatic Trevi Fountain was given life and liquid; the Spanish Steps were built, and the square bordering them became the neighborhood where British residents and tourists liked to hang out.

To be sure, beauty did not invade every corner of Rome. Samuel Powel, a Philadelphian who would one day be his city's mayor, toured the sumptuously decorated Barberini Palace and complained that the place was dirty and nasty. He was not alone; there were tourist laments about the unclean look of much of the city. In those days, city travel depended on horses, which are not famous for their sanitary habits. On the other hand, Rome was spared the contemporary curse of incessantly snarling motorcycles and gasoline fumes.

Today, a trip abroad without a camera is almost unimaginable. For the 18th-century traveler of means, a souvenir of a visit was a costlier substitute-perhaps a portrait in a glamorized urban or country setting, preferably set down on canvas by a "name" artist. In nearly 50 years of labor in Rome, for example, Pompeo Batoni, a native of the Tuscan town of Lucca, became one of Europe's most celebrated portrait painters, turning out some 200 likenesses of British subjects. Often his art might include an image of a cute pet dog. Batoni's commercial labors for tourists paid the rent but did not gild his local reputation, which was enhanced by his paintings of more "serious" subjects such as history and mythology.

In one respect, tourists then were hardly different from modern visitors. They ran through Italy "knick-knackically," in one traveler's mocking phrase, and they carried home, as British author Horace Walpole noted in an account of his souvenir collection, "medals, lamps, idols, prints." Walpole confessed to an even grander want: "I would buy the Coliseum if I could."

If one's baggage did not include a portrait, it might carry a brilliantly faked replica of antiquity. Yesterday, as today, the remains of Rome's great ancient civilizations held visitors in thrall. The big-league producer of these souvenir items was Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, who was kept busy and made rich by an affluent and enthusiastic international clientele.

Cavaceppi's studio was staffed with skilled helpers energetically turning out copies of important classical pieces and restoring, not always accurately, genuine antiques that had lately been unearthed. Archaeological excavations and newly dug foundations regularly yielded large and small memorabilia of antiquity, as indeed they continue to do in our day.

Still another obligatory purchase was a fine print of a view of Rome or its outskirts as seen or even imagined by the prolific Giovanni Battista Piranesi, a transplant from Venice. Piranesi was an architect who, failing to find sustaining building projects, took up etching. Over a 40-year period, he produced some of the most potent, vividly detailed and occasionally fantasized images of the modern and ancient city.

In a way, Philadelphia's show is the climax of decades of insider talk. It is also a kind of homage to a scholar who was an early, sometimes isolated partisan of the period: Anthony Morris Clark, a big bear of a man with a matching personality, who amassed a trove of 18th-century works during decades of art-hunting.

Although Clark's last curatorial position was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the executor of his estate decided that what remained of the collection after the paintings had been sold-378 old master drawings, 204 period prints and assorted other objects-should go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The museum exhibited them in 1980, but that hardly approached full coverage of the subject. Rishel, a former colleague of Clark's, says those who strongly supported Clark's position found themselves "wandering around saying we really should carry through on what he never did-a full show of his subject."

Toward that end, the Philadelphia curators, together with an international team of scholars, have assembled more than 424 works by more than 160 artists, from museums and private collections that span our continent and much of Europe, along with some opulent pieces of furniture and decorative objects whose designers are unknown. In addition to Rishel, the Philadelphia organizers of the exhibition include Ann Percy, curator of drawings, and Dean Walker, senior curator of European decorative arts and sculpture.

One of the ironies of this show is that it is punctuated with the works of artists who were once household names and are now almost totally unfamiliar. For example, the museum walls offer four elegant drawings by Carlo Maratti. In a catalogue essay, Edgar Peters Bowron, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, tells us that at the start of the century Maratti was "the most influential artist in Rome-indeed...in all of Europe...." Among other important roles, he was first painter to a French king and to seven popes. Today, outside of Italy, you'll rarely find a major Maratti painting in a public collection.

It may also be difficult to discover a dedicated museumgoer who longs for the sight of works from the hand of Giuseppe Cades, a man who in his day, Bowron tells us, "turned heads with his seemingly effortless ability to paint and draw . . . in every style from Baroque to Romanticism. . . ." But Cades' handsome oils and drawings may, at least, be seen in some major institutions, and eight are in the show.

An entire gallery has been dedicated to Piranesi's prints, drawings and books-more than 50 of them. He is, after all, the man who showed all Europe the splendors of old and new Rome. If you lacked the means or the time to travel to Italy, you might invest your dreams in one of Piranesi's affordable architectural images. If you were visiting the city, you probably found your way to his engraving shop on the Corso. Some of his images, especially a famous prison series, are chillingly eerie; but a fair number are romantic fantasies or, at least, joyous exaggerations.

Probably the most spectacular detours from real life are the invented views of Giovanni Panini. On commission from a French count who was on a diplomatic mission to Rome, he produced four canvases about art and the city; they are large, show-offy and fun. The exhibition has two of them: the vast interior of a picture gallery crammed with paintings of modern Rome and a second work showing a big space thick with images of old Rome. Each interior is a soaring space hung from floor to ceiling with paintings, dotted with important sculptures and populated by small parties of connoisseurs as well as artists turning out copies. Another Panini, this one taken from life, is of the interior of that great domed monument of old Rome, the Pantheon.

The busy hand of Pompeo Batoni provides 22 paintings and drawings ranging over many of the subjects-antiquity, mythology, Christianity- that engaged artists of that day. Of course there are also portraits, including the requisite British subject-Lady Mary Fox, for instance, gowned in blue, gazing winningly at the viewer, and cradling...yes, an adorable dog.

The show has four pieces by Angelika Kauffmann, a rare figure in her time and for many decades to come. A Swiss, she had learned the fundamentals of art from her father, a church mural painter, then studied in Rome and spent a number of years in London as a popular portrait artist. After a brief, bad marriage, she met and married the Italian painter Antonio Zucchi and returned to Rome for much of the rest of her life. A sharp intellect clearly went with the gifts of hand and eye. She was a friend of Goethe during his two Roman stays and an intimate of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the great German scholar who became curator of the Vatican's collection of antiquities and transformed the study of archaeology into a scholarly discipline.

One of the four Kauffmann pieces on view is an invincibly flattering self-portrait of a pretty young woman making a major life decision. Kauffmann was apparently gifted in two directions: the painting shows her saying a fond farewell to a disappointed muse of music (score in hand) and turning toward the figure offering her an artist's palette.

The show has five pieces by Antonio Canova, who settled in Rome in 1780, when he was in his mid-20's, just in time to help send the long- favored Baroque style into oblivion. Like many of his fellow sculptors, Canova was inspired by the antique Greek and Roman pieces he encountered and became the leading exponent of the neoclassical style.

One of the museum's major triumphs is a rare loan from St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum-a grand, neoclassical yet sentimental piece called Cupid and Psyche, which Canova chipped out of marble for the Empress Josephine in the days of her husband's reign. With lifted pinky, young Psyche is delicately placing a butterfly, the symbol of the soul, in Cupid's hand.

In Rome of those days, when the reigning pope needed an artist to restore an antiquity, the man to summon was Bartolomeo Cavaceppi. One of the most striking pieces to come out of his studio is a marble figure labeled Myron's Diskobolos Restored as Diomedes with the Palladion. Diomedes was a Greek hero who stole the idol of the gods from Troy, but any contemporary museumgoer will recognize the torso of the figure as a copy of Myron's great, oft-imitated work, known also as the Discus Thrower.

The Diomedes is a brilliant example of a custom of the time: completing a fragment with other fragments, old and new. It was the Rome-dwelling British painter Gavin Hamilton who found the torso and gave Cavaceppi the idea for making it whole. This was done by placing on the body an ancient head that, to an expert's eye, is plainly from another period. To complete the piece, many additions of new materials were also provided, including the right leg from the knee down and the left leg from the middle of the shin down.

One of the strangest pieces to come out of the Cavaceppi atelier in multiples was Boy on a Dolphin. It shows us a plump toddler tragically impaled by a dolphin's fin. At least six versions of the sculpture in several sizes were sold to English, Irish, French and Russian clients. Cavaceppi claimed that two centuries earlier it had been designed by the great Renaissance painter Raphael and executed by the sculptor Lorenzetto.

The exhibition, which begins with some beguiling period maps showing the city as it looked two and a half centuries ago, ends with an appropriate celebration. We don't think of Rome as a carnival town, but periodically this seat of faith and intellect exploded for the sake of shared pleasure. There were street entertainments, carnivals and fireworks. Horses were raced down the crowded Corso, then as now a main thoroughfare. Grand palace salons were jammed with fancy dress balls. As Goethe described it in a long diary passage, at carnival time "the most serious-minded Roman...throws dignity and prudence to the winds."

No, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is not scattering prudence in any direction, but in homage to those festivals, the entrance to the show is festooned with banners and the final gallery offers some art that shows Rome having a wonderful time.

Frequent contributor Helen Dudar writes on the arts from her home in New York City.

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