Eighteenth-century Rome Research Articles

Priests and their Wigs in Eighteenth-Century Rome

Abstract The wig was the quintessential accessory of eighteenth-century European culture, but the wearing of wigs by clerics became a subject of heated controversy across Catholic societies. Critics of clerical wig-wearing pointed to its inherent vanity, to Paul's proscription against men covering their heads in Church in 1 Corinthians 11, and to its apparent denial of the tonsure's importance as the visible outward sign of clerical status. However, defenders pointed to arguments about the need to cover up imperfections in the priest's body and avoid scandal. Various bishops moved to restrict the use of wigs amongst their diocesan clergy. However, no bishop was more active in legislating than the bishops of Rome themselves. Popes from Clement IX (r. 1667–69) to Pius VI (r. 1775–99) all issued instructions about clerical wig-wearing and their legislation betrays shifting attitudes and approaches. The most zealous rules from the 1720s gradually gave way to more pragmatic ones which attest to the persistent desire of Roman clerics to engage in male status competition and to the growing difficulty that the Church's leadership had in persuading them of the intrinsic superiority of their clerical status.

The Art Market in Rome in the Eighteenth Century: A study in the social history of art

This anthology in ten chapters, based on an international conference held in 2012 at Palazzo Barberini in Rome, is a welcome addition to Brill’s series Studies in the History of Collecting and Art Markets. Paolo Coen, author of an earlier monographic study on the Roman art market of the eighteenth century – Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel diciottesimo secolo (2010) – brings together essays by well-known scholars working on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rome. The aim of the volume is to take stock of the current state of studies and to offer new approaches to a subject that, especially in the last two decades, has received much attention. The main ambitions of the publication are twofold: first to re-evaluate the history of collecting, patronage and the art market – a field of study that sits precariously between art history, history and the social and economic sciences – as being placed firmly within the social history of art. The methodological position is clearly outlined in Coen’s introduction to the volume and in Peter Burke’s opening essay. The former provides a very useful overview of the dynamics and historiography of the Roman ‘art system’ in the eighteenth century, emphasizing the need to adopt a humanistic rather than a purely economic approach to the study of art production and consumption. The latter, entitled ‘The social histories of art’, offers an incisive introduction to the field of studies and its developments in recent decades.

Review: Piranesi Unbound

Review: <i>Piranesi Unbound</i>

Pioneering sculptural workshop techniques: Filippo della Valle and Francesco Cerroti in eighteenth-century Rome

The recent blossoming of studies on central Italian sculpture of the first half of the eighteenth century has not yet focused on artistic technique. In this article, an attempt is made to introduce this subject by providing, through a series of examples, a first picture of the practice and skills of two fundamental figures of those years: the sculptor Filippo della Valle and the stonemason Francesco Cerroti. The article focuses on their technical knowledge of materials in order to highlight the production system of the sculptor’s workshop, which included the extensive use of measuring points and ruled copying frames, and the important skills of the stonemason, so as to shed new light on a type of specialization that is often little considered. This reconstruction, although very specific, raises an important issue: the semi-industrialization of sculptural practice, regarding both specific tools and the involvement of professional figures, has always been attributed to the context of Antonio Canova, but as this article shows, it has much deeper roots.

LANCISI E I 'LANCISIANI'. SAPERE MEDICO E DIVULGAZIONE NELLA ROMA DEL SETTECENTO

The kaleidoscopic figure of Giovanni Maria Lancisi (1654-1720), one of the most remarkable physicians, scientists and scholars in modern Italy, can be a lucky gateway into eighteenth-century Rome – a surprising place for its intellectual vivacity, sometimes unprejudiced and always open to the most innovative expectations. The Medical Library he founded, one of the oldest and most important in the world, is only the most concrete among the many contributions that Lancisi gave to the dissemination and growth of medical knowledge of his time. His studies in the field of hygiene and the fight against malaria, his efforts to eradicate fears and popular superstitions caused by the ‘sudden deaths’, the enhancement of new forms of teaching such as the use of anatomical theatres, the active participation to the life of scientific and literary academies of Europe, are all revealing features, which make Lancisi a figure of lasting and widespread interest three centuries after his death. A figure who, according to his first biographer, was so outstanding «in the knowledge of sciences, and in the competence to explain them» that he aroused «the applause, even among the commoners, and the young people».

Carlo Marchionni and the Art of Conversation

Carlo Marchionni, distinguished architect of eighteenth-century Rome, populated his renderings with monumental figures unparalleled in the European tradition of architectural draftsmanship, fundamentally altering the form and function of architectural drawing. The culture of civility, in particular the art of civil conversation, marks the corpus of Marchionni. Expressive figures underscore the central position artists, intellectuals, women, and craftsmen occupied in the production of social and cultural practices in Rome. Marchionni employs conversation to elicit audience participation and move viewers through fictive spaces. His figures eloquently articulate an analogy between conversation and drawing, each in its own way profoundly generative and creative.

Rome Fellowships: Materialising political economy: olive oil, patronage and science in eighteenth-century Rome

Rome Fellowships: Materialising political economy: olive oil, patronage and science in eighteenth-century Rome

Three Popes and the Fountain in Memory: Shaping the Trevi for Performances of Power

Why are images of the Trevi Fountain so potent and exploitable? Addressing this critically unexplored aspect, I draw on concepts from memory studies of shared and performative memory to reveal the shaping of the Fountain in eighteenth-century Rome as a powerful vehicle for prevailing ideologies, now masked by its many manifestations as a populist monument. First constructed as an ephemeral presence in elitist imagination to replace its medieval form, it slowly emerged as a showy edifice displaying potential for propaganda. I focus on the groups of fountain designers and their papal patrons who reconfigure water-associated myths in constructing the Fountain. It becomes a purveyor for their own and, unintentionally, future ideological discourses also assisted by its illusory design and gendered iconography. Sometimes the inventive practices of memory undermined official culture, and appropriating the Trevi uncovered ambiguities and new meanings generated during the production of self-serving papal pasts.

Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome, written by Maria Pia Donato, trans. Valentina Mazzei, 2014

Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome, written by Maria Pia Donato, trans. Valentina Mazzei, 2014

Piranesi’s Lost Words by Heather Hyde Minor, and: Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Rome by John A. Pinto

Reviewed by: Piranesi’s Lost Words by Heather Hyde Minor, and: Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Rome by John A. Pinto Basile Baudez Heather Hyde Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015). Pp. 248. $79.95. John A. Pinto, Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Rome. Vol. 24 of Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). Pp. 304. $65.00. In 2014, the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne organized the exhibition The Piranesi Effect, in which contemporary artists’ works were, to quote the museum’s website, “juxtaposed with a selection of prints by Giovanni Battista Piranesi to highlight the many ways in which the strategies and devices used by the eighteenth-century artist and architect are still very much a part of the way artists work today.” Three years after the University of Michigan’s 2012 publication of John Pinto’s Thomas Spencer Jerome lectures on Giambattista Piranesi and the architectural and antiquarian Roman eighteenth-century milieu (cosponsored by the American Academy in Rome), Heather Hyde Minor dedicates her own book on Piranesi to Pinto. Both publications offer a renewed appreciation of Piranesi’s decisive importance for the emergence of an autonomous sphere of graphic, textual, and mental representations of architecture and antiquity. They also exemplify the dynamism of Piranesi studies—both in the academy and in the museum—since John Wilton-Ely’s pioneering research of the 1970s. Pinto borrows his title from Piranesi: “Speaking ruins have filled my spirit with images that accurate drawings could never have succeeded in conveying” (Pinto, 1). By insisting on this aspect of the Venetian architect, Pinto seems to argue that Piranesi’s major contribution to our understanding of architecture relies on an emotive rather than an intellectual and scientific response. By unfolding the long story of the relationship between eighteenth-century Italian architects and Antiquity, however, Pinto succeeds in portraying Piranesi as a more complex and contradictory figure than most historians have been comfortable with accepting. Both Pinto and Minor question the image of Piranesi as an “antiquarian” in the scholarly sense that the term bore in the eighteenth century, and in light of the many publications devoted to Piranesi as an architect and a designer (notably in Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and Designer [1993]; and Lawrence, Wilton-Ely, Eisenman, Gonzalez-Palacios, and Graves, Piranesi as Designer [2007]). In his lectures, Pinto explores the dual relationship of eighteenth-century Roman architects with Antiquity: while one side looks to the past nostalgically, the other looks to the future for integrating historical fragments into a new architecture. Both “palimpsest and template” (275), this phenomenon is described by Pinto in his first two chapters as “the Perspective of Janus.” Piranesi is situated in a general history of changing taste, between the Roman baroque and Classical archaeology. In his third chapter, Pinto analyzes the Venetian’s structural approach to the rendering of antique monuments and convincingly links Piranesi’s “layered topography” (112) with contemporary anatomical representations. Here, a parallel might have been made closer to home with the development of the tracing paper method, employed by antiquarians at the same moment and itself close to the logic by which the anatomical books he discusses were produced. Piranesi developed [End Page 536] this layering method not only in his representations, but also in the field, digging on various Roman and Etruscan sites (notably with his son Francesco) as Pinto describes in his fourth lecture. The last chapter, “A Wider Prospect,” focuses on the books published between 1753 and 1764 on Palmyra and Baalbek by Wood and Dawkins, on Athens by Stuart and Revett, and on Split by Adam, a generation of architects-antiquarians strongly influenced by Piranesi that expanded the diversity of the classical repertoire available to eighteenth-century Europeans. Pinto writes that “striking originality, whether ancient or modern, and a willingness to break the rules are virtues for Piranesi” (65). If a regret can be expressed, it is that Pinto himself did not take the opportunity, perhaps through a more developed conclusion, to break some rules and present a more polemical argument based on...

Benedetto Pamphilj in Bologna (1690–3): Documents on his Patronage of Music

Between 1690 and 1693 Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj (1653–1730) held the office of Cardinal-Legate of Bologna. Although he is well known as a patron of music in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rome, his time in Bologna has received virtually no attention. This article provides an extensive overview of these years on the basis of a large body of previously unpublished documents. Three appendices provide transcriptions of 74 documents from the cardinal's financial administration, 44 excerpts from a Bolognese institutional diary and a chronology of events involving the cardinal.

Review: Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Rome, by John A. Pinto and Piranesi, Paestum &amp; Soane, by John Wilton-Ely

John A. Pinto Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Rome Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012, 352 pp., 192 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780472118212 John Wilton-Ely Piranesi, Paestum & Soane Munich: Prestel, 2013, 120 pp., 58 color illus. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9783791348063 A letter of 1774 from William Chambers to a former student living in Rome draws attention to that city’s seminal importance in architectural education. “Converse much with Artists of All Countrys particularly foreigners,” Chambers wrote. “Seek for those who have most reputation. … Amongst which forget not Piranesi, who you may See in my name, he is full of Matter, extravagant ’tis true, often Absurd, but from his overflowings You may gather much information. … Form if you can a style of Your own,” he urged, “in which endeavour to avoid the faults and blend the Perfections of all.”1 Thus Chambers advocated an eclectic design process for which the Rome of Giovanni Battista Piranesi furnished the crucible. Both books discussed in this review reinforce the wisdom of Chambers’s remarks and elucidate the role played by publications of new archaeological finds. Prestel’s handsome second edition of John Wilton-Ely’s Piranesi, Paestum & Soane of 2002 definitely improves upon the original softbound version published by Azimuth Editions. Larger format, more durable binding, and higher quality color reproductions enhance the contents, notably the illustrations featured in the central section: Piranesi’s seventeen magnificent drawings of the three antique Doric temples at Paestum (Greek Poseidonia) in southern Italy. In most other respects, the editions are identical except that noted Piranesi specialist Wilton-Ely updates notes 48–74 and the bibliography to reflect advances in scholarship. Puzzlingly, nowhere except in the acknowledgments does any mention of the Azimuth first edition occur. And the dust jacket blurb describes Soane as Piranesi’s “contemporary, friend, and colleague,” belying the scant evidence of any such close personal relationship presented inside the covers. This caveat and bibliographic questions aside, the second edition makes an insightful and visually appealing contribution to the literature. Wilton-Ely’s nine chapters start with one titled “Piranesi, Paestum & Soane,” in …

Displaying the Ideals of Antiquity: The Petrified Gaze by Johannes Siapkas and Lena Sjögren

390 PHOENIX make up the subject of the book, but also for understanding the importance of the myths displayed so prominently in so many ancient Roman homes and tombs. By approaching the interpretation of the reliefs on the sarcophagi through the eyes of the beholder, Zanker makes it impossible ever again to discuss these images solely as decoration or as a window to the afterlife. The new volume, from the series Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture and Representation, is beautifully produced and illustrated with photos, many in color, of the sarcophagi. Despite its expense, it is a necessary addition to every library collection of books on Roman art. The College of New Jersey Lee Ann Riccardi Displaying the Ideals of Antiquity: The Petrified Gaze. By Johannes Siapkas and Lena SjÈ ogren. New York and London: Routledge. 2014. Pp. xii, 242. Museum exhibits of ancient artefacts are one of the most common ways people, whether members of the public or specialists, encounter the physical remains of antiquity . However, current displays in museums are rarely considered when discussing the development of the discipline of classical art history and archaeology. This book breaks new ground by including museum exhibits as an important element in the historiography of ancient sculpture. The book is organized into four sections. Part I introduces the aims of the book: to examine how academic debates about ancient sculpture, first begun in eighteenthand nineteenth-century scholarship and reformulated in current research, are reflected in contemporary museum displays and the popular perception of ancient art. Part II, “Discursive Settings,” begins with a historiographical consideration of the early development of the closely intertwined disciplines of classical archaeology (Chapter One) and art history (Chapter Two). An excellent overview of several centuries of studies in ancient sculpture follows (Chapter Three), highlighting influential issues in scholarship ranging from Winkelmann’s1 foundational work in the eighteenth century to that of key twentyfirst -century scholars. Chapter Four concludes this section by focusing on the re-use and re-evaluation of these historic ideas in current scholarship through an examination of individual cases: the Parthenon sculptures, archaic korai, and the contextualization of Roman art. While the overview of sculptural studies is handled with assurance, combining key developments with sweeping fashions influenced by contemporary social, political, and scholarly issues, the treatment of current scholarship is less comprehensive. One important omission is the influence of the modern afterlife and collection history of ancient sculpture on the discipline.2 The omission is curious, since this approach closely relates to both the early development of the discipline and to the museum displays that form the focus of Part III. 1 J. J. Winkelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Dresden 1764). 2 For example, V. Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760 (Oxford 2009; included in the bibliography); I. Bignamini and C. Hornsby, Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome (New Haven 2010); and C. Bilsel, Antiquity on Display: Regimes of the Authentic in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum (Oxford 2012). BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 391 This final section, Part III, entitled “Museological Frictions,” examines current permanent displays of ancient sculpture in several international museums and considers how they reflect the debates explored in the published scholarship. After a brief introduction to museum concerns, there is an overview of the evolution of museums and of displays of antiquities (Chapter Five, “Genealogies”). This progresses from the earliest stages of private collections of curiosities to the public museums of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and includes discussion of the use of plaster casts. It is contextualized within the development of the disciplines of art history and classical archaeology already introduced in the opening chapters. The next three chapters use individual examples of museum display as illustrations of the three broad approaches to the study of ancient sculpture already identified. Chapter Six, “Masterpieces,” examines how the concerns of Meisterforschungen and Kopienkritik are carried into exhibits by giving key sculptures preferential treatment (through position, lighting, etc.) as expressions of artistic genius, while divorcing them from other narratives about ancient sculpture. The chapter concludes by considering the popularization of ancient sculpture, exemplified by the Venus de Milo and Nike of Samothrace, which have...

Speaking ruins: Piranesi, architects, and antiquity in eighteenth-century Rome

Speaking ruins: Piranesi, architects, and antiquity in eighteenth-century Rome

Susan Dixon. Review of "Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England" by Bruce Redford, "Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome" by Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, and "The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment" by Jason M. Kelly.

Susan Dixon. Review of "Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England" by Bruce Redford, "Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome" by Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, and "The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment" by Jason M. Kelly.

'Per accompagnare l'antico': the restoration of ancient sculpture in early eighteenth-century Rome

'Per accompagnare l'antico': the restoration of ancient sculpture in early eighteenth-century Rome

The myth of return: restoration as reception in eighteenth-century Rome

This article explores how themes and questions developed within the field of reception studies can be usefully applied to the study of the restoration of ancient sculpture. It focuses on a second-century AD statue which was restored at the very end of the eighteenth century by the Roman sculptor Giovanni Pierantoni and which is now in the collections of the Lady Lever gallery in Port Sunlight. This statue originally represented Antinous, but Pierantoni’s addition of a cup and jug turned the figure into Ganymede. Here I show how the restorer’s choices responded to contemporary trends in sculptural restoration, allegorical portraiture, and Catholic worshipper imagery; in particular, I argue that the myth of Zeus and Ganymede was newly configured to match a Christian model of interaction between mortal and divine.

Book reviews - Ilaria Bignamini & Clare Hornsby with Irma Della Giovampaola & Jonathan Yarker. Digging and dealing in eighteenth-century Rome. xxiv+622 pages, numerous colour illustrations. 2010. New Haven (CT) & London: Yale University Press; 978-0-300-16043-7; 2 volumes hardback £45.

Book reviews - Ilaria Bignamini & Clare Hornsby with Irma Della Giovampaola & Jonathan Yarker. Digging and dealing in eighteenth-century Rome. xxiv+622 pages, numerous colour illustrations. 2010. New Haven (CT) & London: Yale University Press; 978-0-300-16043-7; 2 volumes hardback £45.

Digging and dealing in eighteenth-century Rome

This long-awaited book offers the first overview of all British-led excavation sites in and around Rome in the golden age of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century. Based on work carried out by the late Ilaria Bignamini, it traces sculptures and other works of art that are currently in public collections around the world from their original find sites via the dealers and entrepreneurs to the private collectors in Britain. In the first of two extensively illustrated volumes, approximately fifty sites are analyzed in historical and topographical detail, supported by fifty newly written and researched biographies of the major names in the Anglo-Italian world of dealing and collecting. The second volume features hundreds of letters from dealers and excavators abroad to collectors in England, offering a rich source of information about all aspects of the art market at the time.

ERRATUM

Journal of Religious EthicsVolume 38, Issue 3 p. 598-599 Free Access ERRATUM This article corrects the following: WINCKELMANN AND CASANOVA IN ROME: A Case Study of Religion and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century Rome Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., Volume 38Issue 2Journal of Religious Ethics pages: 297-320 First Published online: May 18, 2010 First published: 18 August 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9795.2010.00451.xAboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat In 38(2) the following errors were published on pages 305, 306, 316, and 317. Page 305, Footnote 13: The 1958 Gallimard edition adds the phrase, chose habituelle dans cet etat de l'ame, “a common trouble in souls of this sort.” Page 306, Footnote 14: The 1958 Gallimard edition reads cette conduite, “this condition,” instead of cette fiction. Page 306, Footnote 15: The 1958 Gallimard edition reads ailleurs, “elsewhere” instead of en Angleterre. The French text to the above footnotes should have been in italics and should read as: Page 305, Footnote 13: The 1958 Gallimard edition adds the phrase, chose habituelle dans cet etat de l'ame, “a common trouble in souls of this sort.” Page 306, Footnote 14: The 1958 Gallimard edition reads cette conduite, “this condition,” instead of cette fiction. Page 306, Footnote 15: The 1958 Gallimard edition reads ailleurs, “elsewhere” instead of en Angleterre. Page 306, paragraph two, lines 8 to 9: Or one reads that Winckelmann was gay, and hence appreciated the homoer otic foundation of Classical culture at a significantly deeper level. The sentence should read: Or one reads that Winckelmann was gay, and hence appreciated the homoerotic foundation of Classical culture at a significantly deeper level. Page 316, paragraph one, last line: In this, he is very much like most of Winckelmann's absent and epistolary loves. The sentence should read: In this, he is very much like most of Winckelmann's absent epistolary loves. Page 317, last paragraph, lines 10 to 23: For Winckelmann, religion was in its very essence a matter of—and a meditation on—raw spiritual emotion and unquenchable, passionate desire. It is for this reason that I find his voice and his vision rich with potential for contemporary reflection on the complex relationship between religion and art. For Winckelmann, religion was in its very essence a matter of—and a meditation on—raw spiritual emotion and unquenchable, passionate desire. To put it in more traditional and Platonic terms, inflected now by Winckelmann's Aesthetics, religion is a novel sort of erotics: it is the desire of a finite being for infinity, nothing less. It is for this reason that I find his voice and his vision rich with potential for contemporary reflection on the complex relationship between religion and art. For Winckelmann, Classical Art was the new-old religion, and its curatorial display was a profound work of love. The sentence should read: For Winckelmann, religion was in its very essence a matter of—and a meditation on—raw spiritual emotion and unquenchable, passionate desire. To put it in more traditional and Platonic terms, inflected now by Winckelmann's Aesthetics, religion is a novel sort of erotics: it is the desire of a finite being for infinity, nothing less. It is for this reason that I find his voice and his vision rich with potential for contemporary reflection on the complex relationship between religion and art. For Winckelmann, Classical Art was the new-old religion, and its curatorial display was a profound work of love. We apologize for these errors. REFERENCE Ruprecht Jr, L. A. (2010) WINCKELMANN AND CASANOVA IN ROME: A Case Study of Religion and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century Rome. Journal of Religious Ethics 38, 297– 320. Wiley Online LibraryWeb of Science®Google Scholar Volume38, Issue3September 2010Pages 598-599 ReferencesRelatedInformation