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

A generous selection of works by Pompeo Batoni, one of the most successful painters in 18th-century Rome, established his command of both secular and church subjects. The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche (1756), commissioned by Frederick the Great of Prussia, is a prettified yet elegant mythological scene, seeming midway on the road from the Rococo to Neo-Classicism; Cardinal Prospero Colonna di Sciarra (ca. 1750) is a straightforward, finely rendered work of ecclesiastical portraiture.

Batoni's renown centered on his portraits, generally of British gentlemen on the Grand Tour. These works incorporate antiquities and views of Rome to lend their subjects a kind of Classical aura. Dressed in what was known as a "Van Dyck" costume-- and thus invoking the Flemish master's Baroque portraits--Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham, Baronet (1758-59) stands before a view of the Temple of the Sibyl in Tivoli. Beside him rests a bust based on a Roman adaptation of a fourth-century B.C. bronze of Minerva. The artist's sensitive drawings of antique sculpture, also included in the exhibition, demonstrate a deep appreciation of classicism and are among his most exquisite works.

Appropriately, given its pumped-up faddishness, the Grand Tour inspired satire as well. A group of ink drawings by Pier Leone Ghezzi parody the pretentious airs and grotesqueries of the tourist set. His Caricature of Dr. James Hay as Bear-leader (ca. 1725) literalizes the colloquial name for a tour guide as a dour expert leads his dim-looking charge--a stylishly dressed bear--by the cuff. Other drawings depict slack-jawed, dilettantish British and French tourists attempting to absorb the Classical atmosphere.

The archeological discoveries of the time insistently cropped up throughout the exhibition. A patterned geometric mosaic excavated from a floor in Hadrian's Villa was reused in 1742 by the designer Francesco Giardoni as the top of a handsome console table. A fantastic gilded bronze bibelot featuring three sirens astride an elephant once stood on a mosaic plinth with three tiny yet accurate models of the Greek temples at Paestum. The ensemble was created for the Queen of Naples, and the sirens hold two cameo portraits of members of the Neapolitan royal family. Fittingly, the show paid homage to the German archeologist Johann Winckelmann, the first historian of ancient art, by including a bright-eyed portrait of him (ca. 1768) by Anton Mengs.

Two exhibition sections, "City of Art" and "School of Art," homed in on Rome's importance as a center for the study of both Classicism and art-making. The many art academies stressed drawing after the antique and from life, resulting in an extraordinary consistency of style. Adding a kind of flighty poetry to the times was the literary institution known as the Accademia dell'Arcadia, an influential organization of writers, thinkers and artists dedicated to promoting Classical ideals. In their discussions, the Arcadians argued the sometimes conflicting visions of Classicism and Roman Catholicism, appeasing both through complex allegorical interpretations.