In the long, influential history of art in Rome, the Nineteenth-Century is rarely included. In fact, apart from contributions to Neoclassicism and academic traditions, the century is usually excluded as the unrepresentative moment when the Eternal City apparently had nothing to offer. But was there really nothing going on in Rome in the 1800s? Or, was the art produced here so heterogenous, so distant from conventional art-historical narratives of Modernist development that it has been overlooked? Perhaps the lack of any overarching trajectory—Modernist or otherwise—the absence of a recognizable story that can link one movement to another has rendered the material uninteresting to art historians? Maybe it even appears unhistorical?
What might an art history without a story look like? How do the demands of narrative condition what gets defined as relevant, as historical? This course poses these questions as it surveys the surprisingly large and rich body of art produced in the Caput Mundi in the Nineteenth Century. Expatriate artists as well as Italians still filled the city, creating not only works of art, but highly visible art communities, must-see studio itineraries that no well-informed visitor missed, and major commissions for national monuments here and abroad. From the Napoleonic occupation to the Unification of Italy that made Rome the new capital, Rome drew artists and inspired avant-garde artistic movements as well as modern interpretations of tradition.
The course thus studies the heterogenous art production in the city, seeking to avoid the narratives that conventionally underlay the evaluation of Nineteenth-century art. Since much of the material that the course covers was influential in its time, the course asks why it has been forgotten. Period discourses will help address this question, as will careful attention to the paradigms that underlay modern interpretations—for instance antagonistic scenarios such as avant-garde vs tradition; or developmental paradigms such as the linear nature of stylistic change; or, relationships such as that of the avant-garde to political revolution—none of which fit very well with the art scene in Rome in the Nineteenth Century. In the subjects taken up by the course, there are frequently instructive instances where modern assumptions about style and about modernity will be brought out by the differences between period reception and modern understanding, as well as by apparent paradoxes today that embodied coherence then. And, throughout the century, references to the past remain, giving repeated opportunities to analyze the role of the past in the construction of modernity.