Roman Holiday, 18th-Century Style - exhibition "The Spendor of 18th-Century Rome" co-organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Art in America, Dec, 2000 by Michael Duncan

With a sweeping array of objects backed by a wealth of historical research, a recent exhibition demonstrated that in the 18th century for artists and art lovers alike, all roads did lead to Rome.

Rome--where the remains of over 2,000 years of Western civilization vie for attention--may be considered the archetypal postmodern urban environment. The city's accrued architectural mix sets the standard for that of, say, London, New York or even simulacrum-infested Las Vegas. Rome's past seems present all at once, with tourist attractions like the Colosseum and St. Peter's folded into the fabric of contemporary life.

"The Splendor of 18th-Century Rome," the recent exhibition co-organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, surveyed the era in which the city's modern sense of historical self-consciousness was established. Eighteenth-century Rome's cosmopolitanism seems the result of a number of factors, including the relative stability of Vatican power--a stability that would end with Napoleon's siege in 1796. Extensive new archeological finds at Herculaneum (1738) and Pompeii (1748), the international lure of the city's art schools and master classes, and the opening of public libraries and museums (the Capitoline in 1747 and the Pio-Clementine around 1770) led to the organization and marketing of the Grand Tour, that cultural pilgrimage which put the final polish on a gentleman's education. The construction or completion of major new monuments such as the Spanish Steps (Francesco de Sanctis, 1728) and the Trevi Fountain (Nicola Salvi, 1762) and the refurbishing of many churches and palaces stimulated the new tourist industry. While the great artistic achievements of antiquity, the Renaissance and the Baroque were part of the past, a new conception of the purpose, appreciation and social function of art was just being formed.

Curated by Edgar Peters Bowron and Joseph J. Rishel, the Philadelphia/Houston exhibition made a case for Rome as the century's most important center for art production and esthetic thought, correcting past slights from art historians such as Rudolf Wittkower, Julius Held and Donald Posner. Bringing together around 400 paintings, sculptures, works on paper and decorative objects, the show presented the city as an international hub that attracted the Western world's most important talents.

The strongest works of the exhibition were those made during stints in the city by notable non-Roman artists such as David, Canova, Piranesi, Mengs, Fragonard, Houdon, Benjamin West, Hubert Robert, Angelika Kauffmann, John Flaxman, Henry Fuseli, Claude Vernet, Clodion and Gavin Hamilton. Roman-born artists faced stiff competition from these international art-stars, many of whom themselves became Grand Tour attractions, visited and courted by collectors. Artists based in Rome received most of Europe's important commissions, not just for portraits and landscapes, but also for tombs, history paintings, mythological subjects, monuments and memorials. The curators wisely avoided singling out and tracking individual careers, instead conveying through the exhibition's thematic organization the interwoven scholarly interests, esthetic affiliations and patronage circles that combined to make the city an artistic mecca.

The self-reflexive nature of 18th-century Roman culture was cleverly embodied at the outset of the exhibition by Vincenzo Coaci's bejeweled silver Inkstand in the Form of the Quirinal Monument (1792). The elaborate object, which celebrates Giovanni Antinori's redesign of the piazza outside the papal summer palace, features in miniature an Egyptian obelisk and Roman statues of the Dioscuri with rearing horses. This paragon of the mixed-era monument was accompanied by its handsome leather case. Shaped like a fortified medieval castle with domes and a lighthouse-like tower, the case conforms glovelike to the elements of the inkstand. The two subtly convey the fanciful and particularly Roman notion of architecture as forms built to house the past.

Eighteenth-century Rome seems to have felt a renewed responsibility to salute and disseminate its illustrious history, evident here in the elaborate maps, views and architectural renderings of the first sections of the show, "The City" and "The Making of Modern Rome." Preeminent among them were Giambattista Nolli's dazzlingly detailed plan of the city and Giuseppe Vasi's comprehensive panorama. Nearly 6 feet high and decorated to the max with stucco flourishes, Nicola Michetti's sculptural model (ca. 1715) for the Pallavicini Rospigliosi Chapel in S. Francesco a Ripa demonstrates the early 18th century's awareness of Baroque precedent by incorporating tributes to the architecture of Bernini and Andrea Pozzo.

Similarly self-reflexive in character is Piranesi's etching of St. John Lateran, created in the 1740s (and later included in the album "Vedute di Roma," which made the city's principal sites accessible to a wide European audience). The renowned printmaker here employs an oblique viewpoint that exaggerates the theatrical, false-front quality of the facade recently added by Alessandro Galilei to the Early Christian basilica. The era's enthusiasm for the antique is everywhere evident, perhaps most curiously in Charles-Louis Clerisseau's ink-and-gouache drawing, Ruin Room in the Convent of S. Trinita dei Monti, Rome (ca. 1766). The proto-Romantic design is for a monastic cell (which survives today) whose walls were to be painted in imitation of an ancient Roman ruin, complete with an illusionistic open roof and encroaching vines.