Paul Delaroche's Italian noviciate

Abstract

In a collection of papers on the theme of the image of history, a contribution dealing with the representation of Italy is particularly appropriate. For Italy was commonly held to be the ‘land of art’, where the great Italian art of the past had been produced as the result of a kind of organic process of generation, operating at a level deeper than that of changing historical circumstances.1 Unlike art housed in museums, it retained its original aura. The idea of Italy as a privileged site of artistic inspiration and regeneration was also premised on the belief that the landscape and its people remained virtually unchanged in their appearance, and continued to provide models for the artists of the past, as they had done for their predecessors. Belief in the viability and visibility of Italy's special identity informs several descriptive tropes found in travel narratives, which vary between impromptu revelation and the resolute pursuit of the authentic. This visualized elision of past and present can be seen at work in many early nineteenth-century images of Italy. A picture such as Léopold Robert's Woman of Procida (1822 Winterthur, Oskar Reinhardt Foundation) illustrates this process in perhaps its simplest form, whereby a contemporary Italian woman is depicted as a reincarnation of a Raphael Madonna. In doing so the image collapses the distinction between artistic past and immediately observable present, that is, between the social world in which and of which artists were observers, and the ideal, one might almost say immaculate, two-dimensional legacy from previous centuries. In like manner, Schnetz's Roman peasants fleeing from a deluge (1831 Rouen, Musée des beaux-arts) seem to have walked off the walls of Raphael's Stanze — although the representational process that they enshrine is rather to have walked into the painting. Needless to say, the particular mechanisms whereby such images enact this kind of elision cannot be reduced to a mere substitution for the present by the past, but their generic inscription of the premise that Italian nature was broadly speaking coextensive with the country's art bespeaks a powerful belief on the part of artists in the special conditions offered by the totality of the Italian environment.