State of Studies: Roman Eighteenth-Century Art

Abstract

ROMAN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES could be one of the very richest of fields for the scholarship of European culture: I hope I need not emphasize that it should be. Yet it lacks everything. Its historical text remains to be written. For the cultural history we still must use that great chronicler, Freiherr von Pastor, and even that old gossip, David Silvagni. While V. E. Giuntella's recent Settecento nel Roma is well intentioned and far more accurate and useful than Maurice Andrieux's Daily Life . . . , yet Giuntella is primitive and insufficient. De Felice, del Pane, Franco Venturi have helped to move us forward toward the socioeconomic history we need; yet we certainly aren't out of the woods of what might be called Risorgimento bias, and there is no text, full, accurate, or otherwise. There is no useful book on the eighteenth-century pieties, pomp, and theology of the resident church. There is no useful literary history, no history of science, nothing of consequence on the opera, theatre, music, the decorative arts, the splendid but suffering crafts. Why won't someone earn the gratitude of students of European architecture, design, iconography, and style simply by publishing all of the Chinea prints?1 Computer print-outs on Roman palazzi and piazze have begun to appear, but nothing on this most basic visual material. To my mind primary research in our field of an orderly and thorough sort has been done by only a single modern, and quite a while ago: Friedrich Noack. He covered the most obvious and basic