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

An exhibition wall text stated that the use of the term "Neoclassicism" to describe Roman art in the last decades of the 18th century doesn't make much sense since the city "is one place where `Classicism' never disappeared." Regardless of terminology, much of the late 18th-century art on display featured the formal streamlining and precise staging of narrative events that are typically associated with the movement. Included in the exhibition were such textbook examples as David's Oath of the Horatii (1786), Friedrich Doell's marble relief of Minerva Handing Pegasus Over to Bellerophon (1774-75) and several handsome works by Antonio Canova.

Born outside Venice, Canova quickly achieved fame as a young sculptor in Rome and remained there for most of his life. His Cupid and Psyche (ca. 1800-02), seen here in the State Hermitage Museum's standing version, exemplifies the Neo-Classical ideal. Executed in smooth, gleaming marble, the lovers examine a butterfly, conveying through this delicate action a kind of airy, Platonic affection devoid of naturalism or any hint of carnal relations.

The restoration of Classical antiquities provided a new and thriving profession for many 18th-century sculptors. On display was a torso fragment of an ancient version of the Diskobolos that underwent a fascinatingly awkward restoration around 1772. Bartolomeo Cavaceppi is believed to be the sculptor who transformed the fragment into Diomedes with the Palladion, a full-scale figure from the Iliad crouching in the act of stealing a small statue of Athena. The oddly posed amalgam resulted from the suppositions of artist/archeologist Gavin Hamilton, who unearthed the fragment in Ostia. He was found to be wildly incorrect in 1783, when a complete ancient copy of the Diskobolos was excavated at the Villa Massimi. Cavaceppi's misbegotten sculpture now seems a poignant relic, emblematic of the fallibility of historical conjecture.

Archeology's potential to inspire imaginative flights of fancy found early confirmation in Piranesi's etching series called the "Carceri" (Prisons), 1749-50. These works are set in a fantastic hulking complex of multi-tiered halls, creepy cul-de-sacs and machines of torture. The skillful rendering of architectural space and sophisticated control of perspective evident in Piranesi's etchings of Roman monuments and buildings are here dedicated to purely theatrical effects. The Gothic Arch, for example, presents a labyrinth of staircases and vaulted passageways that presages the illusions of M.C. Escher.

The exhibition persuasively demonstrated how Rome's academic Classicism, bolstered by archeology and buoyed by patronage, was the link between the Baroque and later Neo-Classicism and early Romanticism, thereby establishing the city's essential role in 18th-century culture. The purely esthetic superiority of Rome's art over that of Paris, Venice or London remains open to question--and beside the point. Eighteenth-century Rome inspired not just the Grand Tour but modern art history as first defined by Winckelmann. This historicizing impulse persists as a vital part of contemporary consciousness, evident in both the insular nature of modernism and the referential nature of postmodernism. Letting ideas and consummate connoisseurship guide their selections, the curators assembled an impressive group of objects that not only traced stylistic developments but also accounted for the deepening self-awareness of the Western world's most culturally resonant city.