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RE P U B LICS A N D E MPIRE S
ITALIAN AND AMERICAN ART IN TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE, 1840–1970 E D I T E D BY M E L I S SA D A BA K I S A N D PAU L H . D . K A P L A N
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Republics and empires
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Republics and empires Italian and American art in transnational perspective, 1840–1970
Edited by Melissa Dabakis and Paul H. D. Kaplan
Manchester University Press
Copyright © Manchester University Press 2021 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL
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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 5261 5462 0 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: © 2021 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ugo Mulas © Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved. This publication has been made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Program of CAA.
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In memory of Dan Younger (1953–2016), who loved Rome as much as we do.
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Contents
List of plates ix List of figures xiii Notes on contributors xvii Acknowledgementsxxi Introduction1 Melissa Dabakis and Paul H. D. Kaplan Part I: Hybrid republicanisms 1 Past glories, present miseries: nationality, politics, and art in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home17 Leonardo Buonomo 2
‘Vivat Republica’: Washington, D.C. and Rome in early photographic archives35 Lindsay Harris
3
Thomas Nast and Giuseppe Garibaldi: the ‘Special Artist’ and the ‘Italian Washington’52 Melissa Dabakis
4 Monuments to tyranny: issues of race and power in nineteenth-century American responses to early modern Italian public sculpture69 Paul H. D. Kaplan 5
The picturesque political: Charles Caryl Coleman and Elihu Vedder in the circle of the Macchiaioli86 Adrienne Baxter Bell
6 William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni: a node in the web of transatlantic ‘traffic’ in the second half of the nineteenth century103 Marina Camboni
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Contents
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The Progress of America (1880) by Andrea Cefaly: Victoria Woodhull, Salvatore Morelli, and feminist social reform in Italy and America125 Maria Saveria Ruga
Part II: The courses of empire 8 Seeing America’s tangled threads in John Singer Sargent’s Street in Venice141 Jane Dini 9 Francesco Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù across empires154 Caitlin Meehye Beach 10 A transatlantic cultural landscape: America in Rome at the beginning of the twentieth century171 Daniele Fiorentino 11 New Deal murals and the myth of the Renaissance188 Sergio Cortesini 12 Eterna primavera: Catherine Viviano, Irene Brin, and Italian art’s conquest of Hollywood204 Raffaele Bedarida 13 Sculpture in the (ancient) city: Alexander Calder, David Smith, and Robert Smithson in Italy223 Marin R. Sullivan 14 Paul Thek and the muses of Italy: death, decay, and the Technological reliquaries, 1963–67240 Erika Doss Index255
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Plates
Plate 1. Guercino, Abraham casting out Hagar and Ishmael, 1657, oil on canvas, Brera, Milan. (Photo: Pinacoteca di Brera.) Plate 2. Fred Wilson, Speak of me as I am, 2003, American Pavilion, 2003 Biennale di Venezia. (Photo: Fred Wilson.) Plate 3. Elihu Vedder, Roman Campagna, ca. 1866, oil on canvas, private collection. (Photo: Borghi Fine Art.) Plate 4. Raffaello Sernesi, Roofs in sunlight, ca. 1860–61, oil on cardboard, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rome. (Photo: Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e per il Turismo.) Plate 5. Charles Caryl Coleman, Rooftops in Perugia, 1870, oil on canvas, private collection. (Photo: author.) Plate 6. Charles Caryl Coleman, Outside the walls, 1868, oil on paper on canvas, private collection. (Photo: Simon Parkes.) Plate 7. Elihu Vedder, The music party, 1871, oil on board laid down on panel, Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA. (Photo: Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts.) Plate 8. Charles Caryl Coleman, Mandolin player, 1879, oil on cradled panel, Graham Williford Foundation for American Art, Fairfield, TX. (Photo: Jean and Graham Devoe Williford Charitable Trust.) Plate 9. Silvestro Lega, Portrait of Garibaldi, 1861, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Comunale Silvestre Lega, Modigliana. (Photo: Comune di Modigliana.) Plate 10. Telemaco Signorini, L’alzaia, 1864, oil on canvas, private collection. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons.) Plate 11. Andrea Cefaly, The Progress of America, 1880, oil on canvas, Museo delle Arti in Catanzaro. (Photo: Museo MARCA, Provincia di Catanzaro.) Plate 12. John Gast, American progress, 1872, oil on canvas, Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, CA. (Photo: Autry Museum of the American West.) Plate 13. Domenico Tojetti, Progress of America, 1875, oil on canvas, The Kahn Collection, Oakland Museum of California, CA. (Photo: Oakland Museum of California.)
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Plates Plate 14. John Singer Sargent, Street in Venice, 1882, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Photo: Peter Barritt/Alamy Stock Photo.) Plate 15. Robert Frederick Blum, Venetian bead stringers, 1887–88, oil on canvas, private collection. (Photo: Margaret and Terry Stent.) Plate 16. Frank Duveneck, Venetian water carriers, Venice, 1884, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., bequest of Reverend F. Ward Denys, 1943.11.1. (Photo: Album/Alamy Stock Photo.) Plate 17. John Singer Sargent, Venetian bead stringers, 1880 or 1882, oil on canvas, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. (Photo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, www.albrightknox.org.) Plate 18. Cecilia Beaux, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and daughter Ethel, 1902, oil on canvas, private collection. (Photo: History and Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.) Plate 19. Maurice Prendergast, Pincian hill, Rome, 1898, watercolour over graphite pencil, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (Photo: Art Heritage/Alamy Stock Photo.) Plate 20. Henry Varnum Poor, Activities of justice, 1936, Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, Washington, D.C. Commissioned through the Section of Fine Arts, 1934–43. (Photo: Carol Highsmith. Courtesy of the US General Services Administration, Public Buildings Service, Fine Arts Collection.) Plate 21. Ethel Magafan, Andrew Jackson at the battle of New Orleans, 8 January 1814, 1943, mural, Office of Deeds, Washington, D.C. (Photo: Library of Congress/Carol Highsmith.) Plate 22. George Biddle, Society freed through justice, 1935, fresco, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C. (Photo: Library of Congress/Carol Highsmith.) Plate 23. Reginald Marsh, Sorting the mail, 1937, fresco, Ariel Rios Federal Building (formerly US Post Office building), Washington, D.C. (Photo: Library of Congress/Carol Highsmith.) Plate 24. George Harding, Post-dispatch rider, 1776, 1937, oil on canvas (mural), Ariel Rios Federal Building (formerly US Post Office building), Washington, D.C. (Photo: Library of Congress/Carol Highsmith.) Plate 25. Philip Guston, Reconstruction and well being of the family, 1942, oil on canvas on board (mural), Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building (formerly Social Security Building), Washington, D.C. (Photo: Olin Conservation, Inc. Courtesy of the US General Services Administration.) Plate 26. Frank Mechau, The danger of the post, 1937, oil on canvas (mural), Ariel Rios Federal Building (formerly US Post Office building), Washington, D.C. (Photo: Library of Congress/Carol Highsmith.) Plate 27. Afro (Basaldella), Lest we forget II, 1952–53, oil on canvas, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Emily Genaur Gash in memory of her husband, Frederick Gash. (Photo: Fondazione Archivio Afro.)
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Plates Plate 28. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, installation photo of Alberto Burri exhibition at the Stable Gallery, Harper’s Bazaar (September 1955): 199. (© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents. Photo: Center for Creative Photography.) Plate 29. Paul Thek, Untitled (Meat piece with flies), 1965, from the series Technological reliquaries, 1964–67, plexiglass, formica, wax, and chrome vitrine, the Judith Rothschild Foundation, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. (© Estate of Paul Thek. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.) Plate 30. Paul Thek, La corazza di Michelangelo, 1963, wax, paint, plaster form, Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg. (© Estate of Paul Thek. Photo: Deichtorhallen Hamburg/Sammlung Falckenberg.) Plate 31. Peter Hujar, Paul Thek studio shoot, Thek working on tomb effigy 8, 1967, pigmented ink print (printed 2010), Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA, Schneider/Erdman printer’s poof collection, partial gift, and partial purchase through the Margaret Fisher fund. (© Peter Hujar Archive. Photo: Harvard Art Museums.) Plate 32. Paul Thek, Untitled (diver), 1969, acrylic on newspaper, Collection Estate of Paul Thek. (© Estate of Paul Thek. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.)
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Figures
Figure 1.1. Arch of Peace, 1807, Milan. (Photo: Eduardo Nicolino/Alamy Stock Photo.) Figure 1.2. Antonio Canova, Napoleon as Mars the peace maker, 1802–6 (1811 copy), marble, Brera, Milan. (Photo: Theodore Liasi/Alamy Stock Photo.) Figure 1.3. Antonio Canova, Palamedes, 1805–8, marble, Villa Carlotta Museum, Tremezzo. (Photo: author.) Figure 2.1. John Plumbe, Jr, President’s House (White House), ca. 1846, daguerreotype, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. (Photo: Library of Congress.) Figure 2.2. John Plumbe, Jr, United States Capitol, Washington, D.C., ca. 1846, daguerreotype, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. (Photo: Library of Congress.) Figure 2.3. John Plumbe, Jr, General Post Office, ca. 1846, daguerreotype, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. (Photo: Library of Congress.) Figure 2.4. John Plumbe, Jr, United States Patent Office, ca. 1846, daguerreotype, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. (Photo: Library of Congress.) Figure 2.5. Stefano Lecchi, Casino dei Quattro Venti, 1849, calotype (salt paper print), Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome. (Photo: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.) Figure 2.6. Stefano Lecchi, Acquedotto dell’Acqua Paola, 1849, calotype (salt paper print), Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome. (Photo: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.) Figure 2.7. Edoardo Matania, Casino dei Quattro Venti, reproduced in Jessie White Mario, Garibaldi e i suoi tempi illustrato da Edoardo Matania, 1884. (Photo: author.) Figure 3.1. ‘Thos. Nast, Esq. Our special artist, now attached to Garibaldi’s staff, in Calabrian costume’, New-York Illustrated News 2:51 (8 November 1860): 52. (Photo: The Ohio State University Libraries.)
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Figures Figure 3.2. Winslow Homer, ‘General Guiseppe [sic] Garibaldi and two favorite volunteers. – From a late painting by Pagliano’, Harper’s Weekly 4:203 (17 November 1860): cover. (Photo: The Ohio State University Libraries.) Figure 3.3. ‘Reception of the first news from Garibaldi’s landing in Sicily. View in front of the Royal Exchange, at Genoa. From a sketch by our own artist, Th. Nast, Esq., now at Palermo’, New-York Illustrated News 2:36 (14 July 1860): 148. (Photo: The Ohio State University Libraries.) Figure 3.4. ‘The revolution in Sicily – Reception of Colonel Medici’s volunteers by Garibaldi and his staff, at Palermo. From a sketch taken on the spot, by our artist, Thomas Nast, Esq., now at Palermo’, New-York Illustrated News 2:38 (28 July 1860): 184. (Photo: The Ohio State University Libraries.) Figure 3.5. ‘Sketch of the battery which the Neapolitans took from the Garibaldini, and at this place, they burned the Garibaldians wounded and dead on Monday, October 1st. The Garibaldians took it again during the day, and have now. Thomas Nast, Oct. 6, 1860’, from the collection of Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, Morristown, NJ. (Photo: Macculloch Hall.) Figure 3.6. ‘Porte avancé devant Capoue, Thomas Nast, 1860’, from the collection of Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, Morristown, NJ. (Photo: Macculloch Hall.) Figure 4.1. Pietro Tacca, The Monument of the four moors (‘Quattro Mori’), 1626, bronze, Piazza Micheli, Livorno. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource.) Figure 4.2. Pietro Tacca, The Monument of the four moors (‘Quattro Mori’), detail of ‘Morgiano’, 1626. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource.) Figure 4.3. Baldassare Longhena, Juste Le Court, and Melchior Barthel, Monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro, 1669, marble and bronze, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Didier Descouens. CC BY-SA r.0 International.) Figure 4.4. Melchior Barthel, Monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro, 1669, detail of African. (Photo: author.) Figure 4.5. Harriet Hosmer, Freedman’s memorial to Abraham Lincoln, 1866, plaster, now lost. (Photo: author.) Figure 6.1. William Wetmore Story, Judith making her prayer upon slaying Holofernes (frontal view), 1863, marble, Farmleigh House, Dublin. (Photo: National Botanic Gardens of Ireland.) Figure 6.2. Donatello, Judith and Holofernes, ca. 1464?, bronze, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. (Photo: author.) Figure 6.3. William Wetmore Story, Judith making her prayer upon slaying Holofernes (side view), 1863, marble, Farmleigh House, Dublin. (Photo: National Botanic Gardens of Ireland.) Figure 6.4. Samuel Hollyer, Walt Whitman (frontispiece to Leaves of Grass), 1855, engraving (after a daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison). (Photo: author.)
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Figures Figure 6.5. Gustave Courbet, The meeting or ‘Bonjour Monsieur Courbet’, 1854, oil on canvas, Musée Fabre de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, Montpellier.118 Figure 7.1. Andrea Cefaly, Aurora, 1873, fresco, formerly Palazzo Serravalle, Catanzaro, in a photo just before its demolition in 1975. (Photo: Archivio Fotografico ‘Emilia Zinzi’, BAU, University of Calabria, AZF 1.1.48, 1.) 128 Figure 7.2. ‘The lady brokers driving the bulls and bears of Wall Street. Tennie C. holding the reins, Victoria the whip’, Evening 130 Telegram (18 February 1870). (Photo: author.) Figure 7.3. ‘Salvatore Morelli dressed as a woman’, Milan-Journal 118 (29 July–12 August 1877). (Photo: author.) 131 Figure 8.1. Jacob Riis, Bandit’s roost, 59½ Mulberry Street: scenes in the Lower East Side slums, 1888, from ‘Flashes from the slum’, The Sun, New York. (Photo: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.) 146 Figure 9.1. Francesco Pezzicar, L’Abolizione della schiavitù negli Stati Uniti (The abolition of slavery in the United States), 1873, cast in bronze in 1875 by K. K. Kunst-Erzgiesserei, Vienna, Museo Revoltella, Trieste. (Photo: Paul Kaplan.) 155 Figure 9.2. Thomas Ball, Emancipation memorial, 1876, bronze, Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C. (Photo: Library of Congress/Carol Highsmith.) 158 Figure 9.3. Edmonia Lewis, Forever free, 1867, marble, Howard University Art Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Photo: Gregory R. Staley.) 159 Figure 9.4. Circolo accademico italiano in Vienna, reading room, 1906–9, F10948, dono Francesco Pepeu, 3.10.1927, Fototeca dei Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte Trieste, Trieste. (Photo: Fototeca dei Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte.) 162 Figure 9.5. Circolo accademico italiano in Vienna, reading room, 1906–9, F10947, dono Francesco Pepeu, 3.10.1927, Fototeca dei Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte Trieste, Trieste. (Photo: Fototeca dei Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte.) 164 Figure 9.6. Pietro Magni, The nymph Aurisina, 1858, marble, Museo Revoltella, Trieste. (Photo: author.) 165 Figure 9.7. Pietro Magni, The cutting of the Suez Canal, 1863, marble, Museo Revoltella, Trieste. (Photo: author.) 165 Figure 10.1. Joseph Pennell, Building of the Victor Emmanuel monument, Rome, 1911, etching, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. (Photo: Library of Congress.) 177 Figure 12.1. Film still from Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich (director), 1955, featuring paintings by (from left to right) Afro Basaldella, Giorgio Morandi, and Franco Gentilini. (Courtesy of Adell Aldrich.) 205 Figure 12.2. Renzo Vespignani, Ruined building, 1946, ink on paper, Museum of Modern Art, New York. (© Museum of Modern Art/licensed by Scala/Art Resource.) 209
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Figures Figure 12.3. Richard Avedon, fashion photo with sculpture by Marino Marini, Harper’s Bazaar ( June 1952): 74. (Reproduced by permission of the Richard Avedon Foundation.) 212 Figure 12.4. Dennis Stock, Billy Wilder at home in Los Angeles, CA, 1960, with Marino Marini sculpture and Massimo Campigli painting. (© Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos.) 216 Figure 13.1. David Smith, Voltri series, installed in the Teatro Romano, Spoleto, June 1962. Photo by the artist. (© 2020 The Estate of David Smith/ Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photo: the artist.) 224 Figure 13.2. Alexander Calder, Teodelapio, 1962, steel, installed in the Piazza G. Polvani, outside Stazione FS, Spoleto. (© 2021 Calder Foundation, New York/ Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photo: Ugo Mulas © Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Archivio della Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna di Spoleto/Archivio Carandente, Biblioteca G. Carandente, Spoleto.) 225 Figure 13.3. Robert Smithson, Asphalt rundown, October 1969, Cava di Selce, near Rome. (© Holt-Smithson Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photo: Robert Smithson.) 226 Figure 13.4. Municipal bus ticket of Spoleto, 2010. (Photo: author.) 233 Figure 14.1. Peter Hujar, Paul Thek in catacombs 2, 1963–64, pigmented ink print, The Peter Hujar Archive. (© 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive. Courtesy of the Peter Hujar Archive Pace Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.) 241 Figure 14.2. Paul Thek, Hippopotamus poison, 1965, wax, stainless steel, and plexiglass, gift of Neil Jenney in honor of Ann Wilson, Museum of Modern Art, New York. (© Estate of Paul Thek. Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York. Digital image: © Museum of Modern Art/licensed by Scala/Art Resource.) 248 Figure 14.3. Paul Thek, The tomb (interior view), Stable Gallery, 1967, New York. (© Estate of Paul Thek. Photo: Alexander and Bonin, New York.) 249
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Contributors
Caitlin Meehye Beach (PhD Columbia University) is Assistant Professor of Art History at Fordham University, where her research and teaching focus on transatlantic histories of art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her writing has appeared in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, and in exhibition catalogues on American painting. Raffaele Bedarida (PhD CUNY Graduate Center) is an art historian and curator specialising in twentieth-century Italian art and politics. His research has focused on cultural diplomacy, migration, and cultural exchange between Italy and the United States. He is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Cooper Union, where he coordinates the History and Theory of Art programme. The author of two monographs, Bepi Romagnoni: Il Nuovo Racconto (2005) and Corrado Cagli: La pittura, l’esilio, l’America (2018; English edition upcoming), Bedarida is currently working on a new book, ‘Like a Giant Screen’: The Promotion of Contemporary Italian Art in the United States, 1935–1969. Adrienne Baxter Bell is Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. She is the author of George Inness and the Visionary Landscape (2003), which accompanied an exhibition she curated for the National Academy of Design and San Diego Museum of Art, and George Inness: Writings and Reflections on Art and Philosophy (2007). Her recent publications include an essay on the American art critic Anne Hampton Brewster in From Darkness to Light: Writers in Museums, 1798–1898 (2019) and several essays on the American artist Charles Caryl Coleman. She is currently working on a book and exhibition on Coleman, Elihu Vedder, and their American and Italian circle. Leonardo Buonomo teaches American literature at the University of Trieste. He has written widely on nineteenth-century American literature (in particular, the literary representation of Italy), Italian American literature, and American popular culture. His latest book is Immigration, Ethnicity, and Class in American Writing, 1830–1860: Reading the Stranger (2014). In 2019 he served as President of the Henry James Society. Marina Camboni has been Professor of American Literature and Director of the PhD Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Macerata, where she founded the Center for Italian American Studies. She has published extensively on
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Contributors
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Walt Whitman, including Utopia in the Present Tense: Walt Whitman and the Language of the New World (1992) and Walt Whitman e la lingua del mondo nuovo (2004), and on transatlantic Modernism (Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe-America, 1890–1839. Towards a Rewriting of Cultural History (2004)); and she co-edited Translating America: The Circulation of Narratives, Commodities, and Ideas across the Atlantic (2011). She has served as president of the Italian Association of North American Studies, and as co-founder of the Transatlantic Walt Whitman Association (TWWA) and of the Italian-American Studies Network. Sergio Cortesini is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Pisa. He has published essays on various aspects of political rhetoric, interactions, and critical discourses in Italian and American art in the 1930s. His most recent book is One Day We Must Meet: le sfide dell’arte e dell’architettura italiana in America 1933–1941 (2018), which treats the diplomatic challenges of the Italian fascist government in ‘exporting’ modern art and architecture to New Deal America. He has also worked on post-World War II Italian art, has written on Bice Lazzari, Emilio Vedova, Damien Hirst, Man Ray, and William Seabrook, and is preparing a new study of the mobilisation of artists in the burgeoning Italian movement of homosexual liberation (FUORI) in the early 1970s. Melissa Dabakis is Professor Emerita of Art History at Kenyon College, where she taught American and modern European art history. The author of two books, Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880– 1935 (1999) and A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth Century Rome (2014), she has also written many journal articles and essays on American and modern European painting and sculpture. Jane Dini is the Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Previously, she held positions as Associate Curator of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as Assistant Curator of American Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Among her publications are several essays on John Singer Sargent; she contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue Sargent and Italy (2008). She is the editor of the exhibition catalogue Dance: American Art 1830–1960 (2016), and she is currently preparing a book, Unifying the Arts: John Singer Sargent’s Murals in Boston. Erika Doss is a professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her wide-ranging interests in American art and visual culture are reflected in such publications as Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (1991, which received the Charles C. Eldredge Prize), Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities (1995), The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials (2008), Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010), and American Art of the 20th–21st Centuries (2017).
Contributors
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Daniele Fiorentino is Professor of US History and Chair of the Department of Political Sciences at the Università Roma Tre. He is also director of CISPEA (Italian Center for the Study of Euro-American History and Politics) and sits on the board of the Center of American Studies in Rome. He is the editor-in-chief of a book series on the United States and Italian unification in the nineteenth century. His most recent volume is Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia, 1848–1901 (2013). He has also written extensively on American Indian history and culture. Lindsay Harris is a scholar of modern and contemporary art and architecture, with an emphasis on the history of photography. Her research investigates the ways photographs both document and shape the course of modernity. Lindsay has organised exhibitions at the American Academy in Rome, the Museo Nazionale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna, Basilicata in Matera, and at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, and contributed to exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, and the Venice Biennale (2007). She was awarded a Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome, where she also served as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities. Paul H. D. Kaplan is Professor of Art History at Purchase College, SUNY. He is the author of Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture and the Arts in the Civil War Era (2020) and The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (1985). He served as Project Scholar for the artist Fred Wilson’s Speak of Me as I Am, an installation in the American Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale. He is a major contributor to several volumes of the new edition of The Image of the Black in Western Art (2010–12). Maria Saveria Ruga is Professor of the History of Modern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catanzaro (since 2015) and was Adjunct Professor of Art and Territory at the University of Calabria (2016–19). Her interests are particularly focused on artists’ memoirs, and on the building of a visual culture in Italy in the nineteenth century, mainly through the Risorgimento experience, emphasising relationships between Southern Italy, Rome, and Paris. On this subject she has written several essays and a book (Michele Cammarano’s Autobiography, 2018). She is preparing a monograph on the painter Andrea Cefaly (1827–1907), and his patriotic circle in Risorgimento Naples. Marin R. Sullivan (PhD, University of Michigan) is a Chicago-based art historian and curator. She is the Director of the Harry Bertoia Catalogue Raisonné, and is co-curator of Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life, organised by the Nasher Sculpture Center. She is also Curator of Modern and Contemporary Sculpture at Cheekwood Estate & Gardens in Nashville. Sullivan specialises in the histories of modern and contemporary sculpture, especially its interdisciplinary, intermedial dialogues with photography, design, and the built environment. She is the author of Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism (2017) and of many essays on contemporary art and photographic practice, and the co-editor of Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying the ‘Knot’ (2018).
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Acknowledgements
Our profound thanks go to the many people and institutions in both the United States and Italy with whom we worked to bring this complex project to fruition. This enterprise had its beginnings in 2013–14 when Melissa Dabakis held the Terra Foundation Senior Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and together with Paul Kaplan imagined the parameters of a cross-cultural, transnational pair of conferences that brought together for the first time a collaboration between SAAM and the American Academy in Rome (AAR). In Washington, D.C., the support of Karen Lemmey and Amelia Goerlitz was immediate and constant throughout the years. Their unlimited energy and stalwart belief in this idea served as its foundational core. Betsy Broun, Director of SAAM during the planning stages, and Stephanie Stebich, the current Director, both offered the resources of the museum to make possible the two-day conference in 2017. The staff at AAR embraced the project with enthusiasm. Lindsay Harris and Peter Benson Miller carefully shepherded this project through its Italian phase (2016). Kimberly Bowes, then Director of the Academy, opened up her institution to accommodate the needs of the conference participants; and Anne Coulson, Senior Programs Officer, masterfully administered the myriad of details necessary to the success of the event. The staff of the Centro Studi Americani in Rome, especially Giusy De Sio and Dr Gianni De Gennaro, President, were willing collaborators and offered their beautiful facility to host the opening events of the conference. Both Daniele Fiorentino and Marina Camboni, immediate enthusiasts of this international exchange, served as invaluable liaisons to the Centro Studi Americani and other Italian institutions. (Our thanks to Wendy Katz for introducing us to these wonderful Italian colleagues.) Sergio Cortesini worked with us in Washington and in Rome, helping us build the conceptual framework for our project proposal. Many institutions and foundations provided financial assistance and in-kind resources to this project. The Terra Foundation for American Art supported both international conferences with a major grant and provided a subvention for this volume; special thanks to Veerla Thieleman, Carrie Haslet, Julia Poppy, and Elizabeth Glassman, then President and Chief Executive Officer. The Embassy of the United States of America in Rome, the Embassy of Italy in Washington, D.C., Kenyon College, Purchase College, SUNY, the Università di Macerata, the Università di Pisa, the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, the Italian Association of North American Studies, and the Italian Cultural Institute Washington, D.C. lent support in a myriad of ways to these events.
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Acknowledgements We are very grateful to Manchester University Press and especially our editor Emma Brennan for their confidence in this project and valuable editorial assistance. We both thank Beth Sutherland for her unwavering personal support and patience over many years, and Daniel Kaplan for technical help. Finally, we of course owe the deepest debt to each of our authors for their long-term commitment to this project and their hard work at its every stage.
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Melissa Dabakis Paul H. D. Kaplan
Introduction
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Melissa Dabakis and Paul H. D. Kaplan
Italy and the United States have long enjoyed a fruitful cultural relationship, beginning with Benjamin West’s first trip to Italy in 1760, where he communed with the cosmopolitan neoclassical circle in Rome, and continuing to the more recent collaborations between Italian and American artists, critics, and gallerists in the postWorld War II era. Making apparent the influential web of cultural connections that has existed between the two countries, Republics and Empires: Italian and American Art in Transnational Perspective, 1840–1970 incorporates papers originally delivered at two international conferences held in Rome in October 2016 and Washington, D.C. in October 2017. Funded in part by the Terra Foundation for American Art, ‘Hybrid Republicanism: Italy and American Art, 1840–1918’ was organised at the American Academy in Rome, and ‘The Course of Empires: American–Italian Cultural Relations 1770–1980’ at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.1 These conferences, at their core, were fundamentally transnational and collaborative, encompassing thematically distinct but complementary programmes in two great capital cities. Rome and Washington, as centres of political power, national identity, and public art, served as apt venues to further pursue this scholarly discourse. This anthology, comprised of fifteen chapters by Italian and American scholars, highlights the work of both young and established specialists and presents an opportunity for a much needed dialogue between the parties on both sides of the Atlantic. Most but not all of the conference participants’ contributions are included in this volume; our thanks go to those who delivered excellent papers but were unable to contribute to this publication.2 Republics and Empires showcases transnational methodologies that both examine the significance of Italy for American art and visual culture and outline the impact of the United States on Italian art and popular culture from the antebellum period in the United States through the Cold War years. While American art history with a transatlantic focus has tended to privilege French, British, and German ties, these chapters highlight a more nuanced body of contemporary research on Italian– American exchange that moves beyond a discussion of ‘influence’ as a one-way directive towards a deeper understanding of cultural transactions that profoundly affected the artistic expression of both countries. Our collection relies on and grows out of a significant set of American and Italian scholarly initiatives, but what sets it apart? First, our contributors foreground
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Republics and empires political context, rather than treating it as a footnote to artistic production, and provide a wide array of transnational methodologies in their exemplary chapters. We have emphasised many lesser-known artists (such as photographers John Plumbe, Jr and Stefano Lecchi, painters Charles Caryl Coleman and Andrea Cefaly, and sculptors Francesco Pezzicar and Paul Thek). A few more renowned American expatriate artists, such as John Singer Sargent and Elihu Vedder, are also discussed, along with a group of famous figures (Thomas Nast, Alexander Calder, Robert Smithson, Marino Marini, and Giorgio Morandi, for example) whose Italian–American connections are not usually highlighted. We have been expansive in terms of time and space. The inclusion of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century topics is unusual in anthologies of this kind, but we believe new insights can be generated by this longer view. The considerable attention paid to Rome and Florence is complemented by extended discussions of artworks from Campania, Calabria, Umbria, Venice, and Trieste. We have also deliberately included a wide range of media, such as photography, film, and newspaper illustration; too much of earlier scholarship, we believe, has unduly privileged painting and large-scale sculpture. In all these ways, we have tried to bring new voices and perspectives to the discourse. The collection is intentionally balanced by contributions from Italian and American scholars, who are more than ever in dialogue with each other. We also hope this publication will prove useful in the classrooms of both the United States and Italy. *** Divided into two parts, the anthology’s thematic focus considers the ways in which several overlapping versions of republican ideology were manifested in the visual and literary cultures of the United States and Italy throughout the long nineteenth century (Part I), followed by an examination of the fascination with ‘empire’ that occurred in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian and American art (Part II). Part I concentrates on the shared notions of republicanism and tyranny that animated Italian and American politics. Although both countries were at different stages of the nation-building project in the nineteenth century, they ultimately adopted roughly similar but distinct principles of self-government in their representational democracies – that is, a presidential republic in the United States and a constitutional monarchy with a strong parliamentary system in Italy. It was only after World War II that Italy adopted a republican form of government. Rather imperfectly, both nations attempted to bind a community of diverse peoples together on the common values of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness.3 Taking into account the significant historical events that linked Italy and the United States in the long nineteenth century, the chapters in Part I address a variety of cross-cultural issues. In the early years of the American Republic, for example, Italian sculptors – many of them exiled republican patriots – travelled to the United States to help ornament the newly built Capitol in Washington, D.C., bringing with them a visual lexicon of political iconography that Americans adopted as their own. In the early nineteenth century, the United States continued to serve as a refuge for
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Introduction some of Italy’s most prominent exiled patriots. Often befriended and assisted by sympathetic Americans, such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, a leading literary figure and prominent antebellum Italophile, these political exiles carried the message of Italy’s struggle for independence from foreign rule and desire for national sovereignty to the United States. Sedgwick was deeply inspired by her friendship with these patriots and communicated her sympathy for the Italian cause to a broad readership in her travelogue Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, published in 1841, as Leonardo Buonomo explains. Departing from the traditional guidebook format by revealing a pronounced interest in Italian social and political issues, often articulated through a discussion of the fine arts, she made her readers aware of the effects of foreign occupation and despotism on contemporary Italy, and outlined Italy’s special relevance for American citizens whose republican aspirations were also born out of revolution. Just a few years later, in the 1840s, photography began to emerge as a visual medium which could convey ideological meaning. Lindsay Harris compares two photographic archives: the daguerreotypes of John Plumbe, Jr of select government buildings, such as the Capitol, in Washington, D.C., and the calotypes (salt paper prints) of Stefano Lecchi of the immediate aftermath of the 1849 Siege of Rome, both of which gave visual form to republican values. Such archives, Harris argues, when reproduced for a mass audience became a potent means of communicating a common national identity to a diverse citizenry in both Italy and the United States. At mid-century, Americans took careful note as the Italian peninsula became fully embroiled in a political movement for independence and unification, the Risorgimento. Through his visual journalism, Thomas Nast, the first American correspondent to cover such international events on foreign soil, introduced a popular audience in the United States to the patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi and the political events of 1860. Documenting this dramatic military campaign, Nast accompanied Garibaldi and his volunteers as they defeated the Bourbon regime in Sicily and the south of Italy. His ‘on-the-spot’ sketches, as Melissa Dabakis explains, were converted to wood engravings and published in the illustrated popular press in the United States, Great Britain, and France. Garibaldi was heralded as a contemporary hero, and the Italian cause gained international support. By 1861, the Italian peninsula had coalesced into a unified and sovereign nation – with Rome becoming its capital in 1871. At the same moment, the United States was torn apart by civil war, leading many Americans to question the failure of their own republican dreams. This uncanny course of events was not lost on American travellers, who, as Paul Kaplan explains, responded to two Italian public monuments featuring prominent African figures – the ‘Quattro Mori’ bronzes in Livorno (1626) and the Pesaro monument in Venice (1669) – in ways that reveal their own contemporary political anxieties about race, slavery, and abolition. In the public imagination of many progressive Northerners, Italy represented the promise of a new liberal nation, inspired in part by America’s own colonial past and revolutionary heritage. Although Italians eventually chose a constitutional monarchy as their governing structure, many Americans understood the newly formed Italian state in republican terms – as a nation comprised of free, autonomous, and
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Republics and empires self-governing citizens. Adrienne Baxter Bell investigates the landscape and genre paintings of Elihu Vedder and Charles Caryl Coleman, which were linked in both subject matter and style to the Florentine-based Macchiaioli and their support of revolutionary nation building in Italy during the Risorgimento era and later. Weaving together the sculpture of William Wetmore Story, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and the criticism of Enrico Nencioni (a Florentine poet and art critic), Marina Camboni uncovers a substantial, but until now under-recognised, transatlantic cultural dialogue addressing the parallel processes of political unification in Italy and national consolidation in the United States. Bringing critical attention to the work of Story and Whitman in Italy, Nencioni engaged in a dialogue with each about Mazzinian republican ideals and their cultural expression in post-Risorgimento Italy. In the 1860s and 1870s, both countries engaged in a significant period of social and cultural change, and Maria Saveria Ruga discusses this mutual interest in progressive reform by highlighting the struggle for women’s suffrage in Italy and the United States. In Andrea Cefaly’s The Progress of America of 1880, Ruga has recently identified the unmistakable presence of the American radical feminist Victoria Woodhull, who here embodies a crusading model of political equality for Italian social reformers. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, both war-wearied countries experienced a period of retrenchment, challenging the very ideals upon which these nations had been founded. In their quest to create a national identity and official culture, Italy and the United States looked to history for complementary reasons: to find inspiration for enlightened political practices; to locate models of artistic, political, and economic pre-eminence; and to seek ways to ward off imperial decadence and decline. Shifting attention from the shared goals of liberal nationalism to imperialistic ambition, the second section of the anthology examines the persistent focus on the cultural achievements of ancient Rome and the Renaissance by American and Italian artists in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These chapters demonstrate that imperial motives and republican ideology were not incompatible views in these two young nations, but rather helped shape the visual culture of both countries. In the United States, for example, there prevailed a relatively untroubled coexistence between Manifest Destiny, the institution of slavery, and an egalitarian impulse in society, as articulated by such movements as Young America. Taking their inspiration from the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy, founded in 1831, which urged the Italian peninsula towards independence, unity, and republicanism, Young Americans in the post-Jacksonian period cloaked themselves in a democratic mantle and followed closely the liberation movements abroad. At the same time, they promoted an unbridled nationalism and imperial expansionism at home in the hope of disseminating democracy across the North American continent. By supporting American military intervention into republican struggles abroad, Young Americans intended to spread democratic reform to countries like Italy, besieged by illiberal tyranny. In championing this movement, such important cultural figures as Walt Whitman and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, both discussed in this volume, saw themselves in the vanguard of a worldwide quest for liberty.4
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Introduction After the American Civil War, the emerging culture of capitalism openly embraced imperial power structures and strove to emulate not only the art and architecture of the Roman Empire but also the social forms and material traits of the Italian Renaissance. At the turn of the twentieth century, American Renaissance ideals positioned the United States as the new inheritor of Western high culture, and considered Washington, D.C. ‘the new Rome’, as witnessed by the mural decorations of Constantino Brumidi in the Capitol and by Elihu Vedder and others in the Library of Congress.5 Alongside this tendency towards imperial aspiration and emulation, certain American and Italian artists looked askance at the myth of past Italian glory. Instead, they often focused their attention on ancient Roman ruins, the devastation of Pompeii, or the signs of death and dying in catacombs, giving visual form to metaphors of the decline of empire. Part II of this volume addresses the various ways in which liberal tendencies gave way to imperial ambition, and how this transition was given visual and cultural form in both the United States and Italy. As the increasingly imperial aims of the Kingdom of Italy were manifested in the Mediterranean and North Africa, southern Italy (the Mezzogiorno), with its agrarian economy, was forsaken by the new government, which privileged development in the industrial north. Jane Dini traces the underbelly of imperial aspiration when she explores the contradictory impulses towards Italy that appeared in painting (especially those of John Singer Sargent) and other forms of cultural expression after a great wave of poor southern Italians immigrated to the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Addressing the waning of republican ideals in post-Risorgimento Italy, Caitlin Meehye Beach takes as her focus a remarkable sculpture by Francesco Pezzicar, L’Abolizione della schiavitù negli Stati Uniti (The Abolition of Slavery in the United States), modelled in 1873 and cast in bronze two years later. Displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the sculpture was later housed in the newly founded municipal museum in Trieste, at this point still part of the Austrian empire. Executed on an American theme by an Italian artist, the sculpture raises a host of transnational and ideological issues. Tracing the critical reception of this sculpted figure of a freed American slave, Beach explores the ways in which the work’s republican meanings expressed a brand of nationalism called irredentismo (irredentism), which called for the liberation of the border areas from Austrian rule and their incorporation into the newly formed Italian state. By the 1880s and 1890s, Pezzicar’s sculpture stood in a complicated relationship to modern Italian colonial expansion into the eastern horn of Africa and Eritrea. Situated within the intersecting vectors of both the Austrian and the Italian empires, the sculpture’s original republican meanings receded and were reformulated in the increasingly imperial moment of the late nineteenth century. Despite the cultural dominance of Paris as the modernist capital of the West, many American artists and architects continued to travel to Italy in the twentieth century. After its formation in 1897, the American Academy in Rome hosted an impressive number of visual artists, providing them with access to Rome’s rich artistic and cultural legacy. Daniele Fiorentino knits together broad geopolitical themes, including the deployment of arts and culture to reinforce national objectives on
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Republics and empires both sides of the Atlantic. He focuses on the particulars of American institutions in Rome, such as the American Academy and the Centro Studi Americani (Italian Center of American Studies), which opened in 1934, having been founded in 1918 as a library for American studies in Rome. During the interwar period, the social structures and aesthetic practices of the Renaissance reinvigorated American artists and critics working in Italy and came to inform American New Deal public art projects. Sergio Cortesini not only discusses the specific Renaissance artists and art works of importance to Americans, but also elucidates the ideological work that these images were doing by spelling out in great detail the ‘Americanising’ of Renaissance history. With the end of World War II and the defeat of Fascism, Italy lay in ruins. The reconstruction of the nation was funded in large part by Marshall Plan monies which kept the country safely within the United States’ ideological orbit. Ushering in an unprecedented period of economic growth in the 1950s, these international economic interventions transformed the war-torn country into a newly minted consumer society. With the miracolo economico italiano (Italian economic miracle), Italy, particularly Milan and Rome, developed into international fashion and design capitals at the same time that the tourism industry exploded. Such popular films as Roman Holiday (1953) and Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) solidified this optimistic vision of the new Italy, while Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) undermined the hopefulness of this new prosperity with the director’s darker vision of modern life in a capitalist society. In his chapter, Raffaele Bedarida elucidates the clear impact of Italian modernism (writ large) on American culture in the late 1950s and 1960s, specifically through the use of Italian modern art in Hollywood film. In the immediate postwar period, a dramatic increase in cross-cultural exchange – a creative coming and going – took place between the two nations, facilitated by museums, galleries, collectors, and cultural events, such as the Venice Biennale. Italian artists were regularly invited to exhibit in New York galleries and museums. Moreover, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) organised a landmark exhibition, Twentieth-Century Italian Art in 1949, curated by Alfred H. Barr, Jr and James T. Soby, the first show of its kind to take place in the United States.6 The curators’ interest in Italian art was twofold at the time: they were not only taken with the independence of Italian art from (what they considered) the oppressive influence of French modernism, but they were also entranced with the ‘new Italian Renaissance’ that was taking place after the long period of Fascist isolation.7 Italy’s cultural resurgence after the war attracted much attention from the American public. One of the more important international exhibitions in Italy was held in Spoleto in the summer of 1962: Sculture nella città (Sculptures in the city), organised by the Italian curator and art historian Giovanni Carandente. The exhibition highlighted the work of a large number of American, British, and Italian sculptors. In her chapter, Marin Sullivan focuses on the work of Alexander Calder and David Smith, whose monumental sculptures in the exhibition celebrated modernity and its grandeur by acknowledging, if only tacitly, the rebuilding of a new Italian industrial empire after the war. In contrast to this optimistic postwar vision, she also draws attention to the early site-specific work of Robert Smithson, who addressed
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Introduction modernity and progress much more ambiguously. With his choice of an Italian industrial quarry – rather than the famed marble quarries of yore – he produced a monumental ‘ruin in reverse’, suggesting the inevitable destruction and environmental decline caused by mighty technological empires. Not unlike Smithson, Paul Thek made explicit the importance of Italy and its history of both grandeur and decline for contemporary international artists. Erika Doss explores Thek’s Technological reliquaries, inspired, in part, by the desiccated bodies he saw in Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, which he interpreted as metaphors for Italy’s course of empire and its repeated cycle of rise and fall from the decline of an ancient Roman civilisation to Il Duce’s imperial re-enactment. We have organised the collection in roughly chronological order and by adhesion to the broad themes of republican and imperial ideology. But we wish to note here several other kinds of linkages between the chapters. Six authors (Dabakis, Camboni, Doss, Sullivan, Dini, and Bell) focus on American artists working in Italy, and two (Harris and Ruga) address the work of Italian artists. Issues of race are central to the chapters of Kaplan and Beach. Two writers (Buonomo and Kaplan) concentrate on art-writing on Italy by American critics, while Camboni’s chapter is centred on an Italian critic whose focus is American art and literature. Two contributors (Beach and Ruga) engage with the depiction of American political imagery in Italian art; Dabakis, conversely, dwells on the presence of Italian political icons in American culture. The chapters by Cortesini and Bedarida discuss the impact of Italian art in the United States, while Fiorentino’s study evaluates the importance of American cultural institutions in Italy. Finally, Ruga provides a necessary gender critique of the imagery discussed in this volume. We also invite our readers to consider alternative ways of juxtaposing the elements of our collection. *** Republics and Empires serves as a broad introduction to American–Italian cultural relations and provides a variety of historicised case studies, many of which address the ways in which gender, race, ethnicity, and class intersect with the powerful political and cultural dynamics of both nations. As editors, we have each developed our preoccupation with these themes in our own recent scholarly work, in one case through the detailed exploration of the important group of American women sculptors in nineteenth-century Rome, and in the other through an analysis of the surprising salience of people of colour in American artistic and literary responses to European culture during the same period.8 However, we and our contributors are hardly the first scholars to take an interest in the political, social, and cultural connections that underlie American and Italian art. Here, we will mention only a sample of a rather large bibliography in the hope of mapping the trajectory of scholarly concerns addressed over the years. Prompted no doubt by the renewed familiarity with Italy resulting from the United States’s role in the defeat of Fascism and early Cold War alliances, American authors began to address aspects of this cross-cultural topic in the 1950s.9 At first, in
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Republics and empires studies such as Van Wyck Brooks’s The Dream of Arcadia: American Artists and Writers in Italy (1958), there was a tendency to romanticise the American view of Italy, using the fiction of writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James as a thematic point of departure.10 The arcadian trope was still influential in the last comprehensive museum show on this topic in the United States, The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760–1914 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1992, with a catalogue edited by Theodore Stebbins, Jr.11 Several other important studies from the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as literary historian William Vance’s two-volume America’s Rome (1989), and art historian Irma Jaffe’s two-volume The Italian Presence in American Art (1989, 1992), drew new attention to this transnational equation. Vance’s magisterial tomes brought an encyclopedic scope and thematic approach to the study of artists and writers who worked in Rome in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Similarly, Jaffe’s two-volume anthology of essays by American and Italian scholars paid tribute to the ‘debt of insight and inspiration that the Western world owes to Italian culture’.12 The anthology Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy, edited by Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person, Jr (2002), remains concerned with the American (mostly literary) experience but through a sophisticated theoretical frame, addressing the complicated and intersecting issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Frederick Douglass, and others.13 In general, these sources are concerned with the ‘American experience’ of Italy, without taking into account the responses of Italian artists and critics to American art and culture. Since the early 1990s, in the United States and especially in Italy, there has been a growing interdisciplinary interest in exploring a more subtle view of this complicated cultural (and political) relationship. Sophisticated readings of historical context, like Daniele Fiorentino’s Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia 1848–1901, the nuanced studies of relevant travel writing, such as those by Leonardo Buonomo and Brigitte Bailey, and discussions by Sergio Cortesini of Fascist attitudes towards travelling exhibitions of modern art in the United States, have established a richer ground for analysis of the social dimension of visual imagery.14 Recent museum exhibitions and catalogues (both in the United States and in Italy) have brought new attention to aspects of our topic. Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle, curated by Elizabeth Ann McCauley and others for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2014), addresses the circle of luminaries and creative minds that inhabited the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, among them the poet Robert Browning, the painters Frank Duveneck, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeil Whistler, the novelist Henry James, and the scholar Bernard Berenson. This study is less concerned with the response of American artists to Venice than with the intricate cosmopolitan relationships that emerged from this setting in the 1880s and 1890s and which inspired a large body of creative work.15 Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings (2018), curated by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Tim Barringer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, uses transregional and global models of art-historical study to characterise the landscape painter Thomas Cole as
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Introduction a ‘troubled cosmopolitan figure’, who, marked by ‘restless transatlantic travel’, investigated a broad array of British, French, and Italian cultural traditions during his trips abroad.16 Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists (2012), curated by Francesca Bardazzi and Carlo Sisi at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, went well beyond Sargent to encompass a broad range of Italian and American painters and writers, such as Mary Cassatt, who travelled to Italy from Paris several times over her lifetime, the Macchiaioli painter Telemaco Signorini, the American poet Walt Whitman, and the Italian critic Enrico Nencioni (also studied by Marina Camboni, Chapter 6, this volume).17 These projects, marked by an interdisciplinarity that embeds the study of individual artists in complex, often transnational networks, have had an important effect on our approach here. The body of scholarly literature treating American–Italian cultural relations after World War II has also been expanding rapidly. Recent publications draw attention to the significance of the Italian sojourn to twentieth-century American artists – careful research has shown that there was a staggering number of such sojourns – while also re-incorporating postwar Italian artists within an international modernist narrative. The anthology Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying the Knot, edited by Sharon Hecker and Marin R. Sullivan, the first of its kind, presents a cross-section of postwar Italian art in a transatlantic perspective, and focuses on many Italian artists unfamiliar to most American viewers.18 Will Norman’s Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America reconstructs the New York art world in the postwar period not in canonical terms – that is, with the inevitable rise and cultural domination of Abstract Expressionism, for example – but as a tentative and unstable transnational cultural field into which exhibitions like MoMA’s Twentieth-Century Italian Art were inserted. Norman highlights, for example, the career of Saul Steinberg, a Romanian by birth who arrived in the United States in 1941 after spending eight years in Italy. As an architecture student in Milan, he began to create his characteristic drawings, which were then published on both sides of the Atlantic, galvanising his career within the vexed interstitial cultural spaces of illustration and fine art.19 Peter Benson Miller, one of the organisers of our conferences, has recently focused on the work of Philip Guston, an exponent of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Guston, awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome in 1948, returned to the Eternal City two more times in 1960 and 1970–71. With his Roma series, exhibited in Rome in 1971, Guston attempted to ‘reinvent a viable figurative painting’, a stylistic shift that earned him much criticism and derision in the New York art world at the time.20 Like many other postwar artists frustrated with the formal and ideological restraints of modernism, Guston sustained a transatlantic dialogue with classical Rome while simultaneously engaging with Italian and American art of the past and the present. It is important (perhaps essential) to acknowledge that many of these projects have been underwritten by the Terra Foundation for American Art, which has played a major role in expanding transnational scholarship. Through grants and partnerships, the Terra Foundation has made it a priority to bring works of
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Republics and empires American art, scholarly resources, and educational materials to audiences worldwide in order to foster global perspectives on the visual arts of the United States. Among their significant projects that addressed American–Italian cultural relations are the funding of exhibitions in Rome, Florence, and Washington, D.C.; the sponsorship of international conferences and symposia throughout the United States and Italy; the underwriting of transnational scholarly publications, including this one; and the recent inauguration of the year-long Terra Foundation Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome for senior scholars involved in cross-cultural Italian-American scholarship.21 In turn, we hope that Republics and Empires: Italian and American Art in Transnational Perspective, 1840–1970 will also make a lasting contribution to this growing field of cross-cultural study. Notes 1 The planning committees for both conferences were as follows: Melissa Dabakis, Paul Kaplan, Marina Camboni, Sergio Cortesini, Daniele Fiorentino, and Lindsay Harris (all contributors here); and Amelia Goerlitz, Fellowship and Academic Programs Manager, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Karen Lemmey, Curator of Sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum; and Peter Benson Miller, then Andrew Heiskell Arts Director, American Academy in Rome. 2 We are grateful for the participation of the following scholars: Peter Benson Miller, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Alice Pratt Brown, Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Adam M. Thomas, Curator of American Painting, Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University. We also wish to thank our conference keynote speakers: Don Doyle, McCausland Professor of History, University of South Carolina (Rome) and Ester Coen, Professor of Art History Emerita, Università dell’Aquila (Washington). 3 For discussion of nationalism in the nineteenth century, see B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (New York: Verso, 1991). 4 For more information on the Young America movement, see E. L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Y. Eyal, The Young American Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 5 For a thorough study of ‘American Renaissance’ artistic principles and practices, see R. G. Wilson, The American Renaissance, 1876–1971, exh. cat. (New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1979). 6 The MoMA exhibition was the focus of a recent conference organised by Silvia Bignami, Raffaele Bedarida, and Davide Colombo at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York in January 2019. The proceedings were later published in S. Bignami, R. Bedarida, and D. Colombo (eds), ‘The methodologies of exchange: MoMA’S “Twentieth-Century Italian Art” 1949’, Italian Modern Art 3 ( January 2020). 7 J. T. Soby and A. H. Barr, Jr, Twentieth-Century Italian Art, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949), p. 5. 8 M. Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014); P. H. D. Kaplan, Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020). 9 Cold War alliances between the United States and Italy have been the subject of recent publications, most notably A. Duran, Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) and J. Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Automania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 10 V. W. Brooks, The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760–1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958). See also Travelers in Arcadia: American Artists in Italy, 1830–1875, exh. cat. (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts and Toledo, OH: Toledo Museum of Art, 1951); O.
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Introduction Wittman, Jr, ‘The Italian experience (American artists and the Italian experience, 1830–1875)’, American Quarterly 4 (Spring 1952): 2–15; and O. Wittman, Jr, ‘Americans in Italy: mid-century attitudes a hundred years apart’, College Art Journal 17:3 (Spring 1958): 284–93. 11 T. Stebbins et al., The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760–1914, exh. cat. (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1992). See also P. Johnston and M. Dabakis, ‘Review of the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760–1914’, Art New England (December 1992–January 1993): 41. Two more recent, smaller exhibitions on this theme are P. A. Manoguerra, Classic Ground: Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting and the Italian Encounter, exh. cat. (Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, 2004) and W. L. Vance, M. K. McGuigan, and J. F. McGuigan, Jr, America’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City, 1800–1900, exh. cat. (Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum, 2009). 12 I. B. Jaffe (ed.), The Italian Presence in American Art, Vol. I 1760–1860 and Vol. II 1860–1920 (New York: Fordham University Press and Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia, 1989, 1992), Vol. I, p. vii; W. L. Vance, America’s Rome, Vol. I Classical Rome, Vol. II Catholic and Contemporary Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 13 R. K. Martin and L. S. Person, Jr (eds), Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in NineteenthCentury Italy (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2002). 14 L. Buonomo, Backward Glances: Exploring Italy, Reinterpreting America (1831–1866) (Teaneck, NJ and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 1996); D. Fiorentino, Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia 1848–1901 (Roma: Gangemi Editore, 2013); B. Bailey, American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–1862 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018); S. Cortesini, One Day We Must Meet: le sfide dell’arte e dell’archittettura italiana in America 1933–1941 (Monza: Johan & Levi, 2018). 15 E. A. McCauley et al., Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle, exh. cat. (Boston, MA: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004). 16 E. M. Kornhauser and T. Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), p. 9. This exhibition was co-sponsored by the National Gallery, London. 17 F. Bardazzi and C. Sisi, Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists, exh. cat. (Florence: Palazzo Strozzi, 2012). A more recent exhibition at the Museo del Novecento in Milan in 2017 and attendant catalogue explore the contacts that Italian artists had with the United States in the twentieth century, ranging from the Futurist Movement to Pop Art. F. Tedeschi, New York New York: Arte Italiana, la riscoperta dell’America (Milano: Electa/Mondadori, 2017). 18 This anthology takes as its primary reference point The Knot: Arte Povera at PS1, curated by Germano Celant in 1985, an important exhibition which helped introduce contemporary Italian art to American audiences. S. Hecker and M. R. Sullivan (eds), Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’ (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018). 19 W. Norman, Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 20 P. B. Miller, ‘Hoods on Vacation: Philip Guston’s Roma Series’, in Miller (ed.), Phillip Guston: Roma (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010), p. 27. Miller curated the exhibition Phillip Guston: Roma at the Museo Carlo Bilotti – Aranciera di Villa Borghese, Rome in 2010 and The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. in 2011. 21 Among the projects discussed here that have received Terra support are the exhibitions Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists and Phillip Guston: Roma; the international conferences ‘Hybrid Republicanism: Italy and American Art, 1840–1918’ at the American Academy in Rome and ‘The Course of Empires: American– Italian Cultural Relations, 1770–1980’ at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the publications A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome by M. Dabakis as well as the present volume. This anthology also benefited from support from CIMA in New York and the North American Italian Studies Association at the Università di Macerata. CIMA is dedicated to promoting new scholarship and advancing public appreciation of twentieth-century Italian art by hosting
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Republics and empires conferences, supporting research through its fellowship programme, and organising exhibitions of modern and contemporary Italian art in its New York location on 421 Broome Street. The North American Italian Studies Association sponsors conferences on a myriad of American-studies topics (which includes a commitment to the study of American visual culture) and regularly brings together American and Italian scholars in this forum.
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Selected bibliography Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn. New York: Verso, 1991. Bailey, B. American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–1862. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Bardazzi, F. and C. Sisi. Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists. Exh. cat. Florence: Palazzo Strozzi, 2012. Bignami, S., R. Bedarida, and D. Colombo (eds). ‘Methodologies of exchange: MoMA’S “TwentiethCentury Italian Art” 1949’, Italian Modern Art 3 ( January 2020). Brooks, V. W. The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760–1915. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958. Buonomo, L. Backward Glances: Exploring Italy, Reinterpreting America (1831–1866). Teaneck, NJ and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 1996. Cortesini, S. One Day We Must Meet: le sfide dell’arte e dell’archittetura italiana in America 1933–1941. Monza: Johan & Levi, 2018. Dabakis, M. A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Duran, A. Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Eyal, Y. The Young American Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Fiorentino, D. Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia 1848–1901. Roma: Gangemi Editore, 2013. Hecker, S. and M. R. Sullivan (eds). Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying the ‘Knot’. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018. Jaffe, I. B. (ed.). The Italian Presence in American Art Vol. I 1760–1860 and Vol. II 1860–1920. New York: Fordham University Press and Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia, 1989, 1992. Johnston, P. and M. Dabakis. ‘Review of the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760–1914’, Art New England (December 1992–January 1993): 41. Kaplan, P. H. D. Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. Kornhauser, E. M. and T. Barringer. Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings. Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018. Manoguerra, P. A. Classic Ground: Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting and the Italian Encounter. Exh cat. Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art, 2004. Mansoor, J. Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Automania. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Martin, R. K. and L. S. Person, Jr (eds). Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2002. McCauley, E. A. et al. Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle. Exh. cat. Boston, MA: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004. Miller, P. B. (ed.). Phillip Guston: Roma. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010. Norman, W. Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Soby, J. T. and A. H. Barr Jr. Twentieth-Century Italian Art. Exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949.
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Introduction Stebbins, Jr, T. et al. The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760–1914. Exh. cat. Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1992. Tedeschi, F. New York New York: Arte Italiana, la riscoperta dell’America. Milano: Electa/Mondadori, 2017. Travelers in Arcadia: American Artists in Italy, 1830–1875. Exh. cat. Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts and Toledo, OH: Toledo Museum of Art, 1951. Vance, W. L. America’s Rome, Vol. I Classical Rome, Vol. II Catholic and Contemporary Rome. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Vance, W. L., M. K. McGuigan, and J. F. McGuigan, Jr. America’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City, 1800– 1900. Exh. cat. Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum, 2009. Widmer, E. L. Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Wilson, R. G. The American Renaissance, 1876–1971. Exh. cat. New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1979. Wittman, Jr, O. ‘The Italian experience (American artists and the Italian experience, 1830–1875)’, American Quarterly 4 (Spring 1952): 2–15. _____. ‘Americans in Italy: mid-century attitudes a hundred years apart’, College Art Journal 17:3 (Spring 1958): 284–93.
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Part I: Hybrid republicanisms
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Past glories, present miseries: nationality, politics, and art in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home Leonardo Buonomo
Recalling her entrance into Italy, in her 1841 book Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, Catharine Maria Sedgwick evokes the rich historical associations connected with the Alpine mountain pass she and her companions had crossed: ‘this was, I believe, always the route by which the Frederics and their successors brought their German barbarians down upon the plains of Italy’.1 In short, Sedgwick and her travelling companions had literally followed the footsteps of the invaders of old. This is the first of several historical allusions by which Sedgwick, more or less explicitly, aligns herself and, by extension, all foreign visitors (but especially Anglo-American visitors) with barbarians, uncultivated intruders from vaguely defined northern lands, bent on getting as much as they can out of their Italian experience. In so doing, Sedgwick sets the tone for the entire Italian section of her travelogue, where she makes a consistent effort to challenge what she believed to be her Anglo-Saxon Protestant audience’s deeply ingrained superiority complex. For example, while describing her transactions with locals, she repeatedly tries to disprove popular generalisations and cautionary tales about the supposedly innate propensity of lowerclass Italians to take advantage of foreigners. When she does take notice of types of behaviour she finds offensive, Sedgwick tends to place them in their proper context, by relating them to relevant historical, political, social, and cultural circumstances. And while she refers to her own country, on more than one occasion, as a happy and fortunate land because of its prosperity and form of government – as opposed to impoverished, foreign-ruled Italy – she also points to other areas (the arts and, more generally, the cultivation of non-utilitarian pursuits) where the comparison between the two countries was not to America’s advantage. When Sedgwick offers her readers what they would have expected to find in a travelogue – namely descriptions of famous paintings, statues, and buildings – she frequently prefaces her comments with confessions of lack of expertise. As we shall see, this rhetorical strategy allows Sedgwick to present a non-technical and noncanonical reading of Italian art, one in which Italy’s artistic heritage could be perceived as providing insight into the country’s predicament. But if Sedgwick, by her
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Hybrid republicanisms own admission, was not particularly conversant with art history and architecture, she could bring to the Grand Tour genre her knowledge of the Italian language and Italian literature, which sets her apart from the majority of American and British authors, and which gave her unfiltered access into Italian society. That knowledge, combined with what she had absorbed through her interaction with Italian political exiles in the United States, informs the Italian section of Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home and renders it an important chapter in the history of American literary transatlanticism. In her time, Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867) was a leading figure in American letters. From her debut as a novelist, with A New-England Tale (1822), she showed her commitment to a distinctive and original national literature by emphasising local settings and character traits. Although she introduced herself to American readers in the apologetic fashion that was expected (if not demanded) of early-nineteenth-century women writers, Sedgwick made it clear that she was doing her part in the creation of a national literature. However ‘humble’ (as she put it), hers was an effort ‘to add something to the scanty stock of native American literature’2 and, as such, was part of the larger project of nation building in which the best American minds of the time were involved. By publishing her first American novels and short stories at a time when to do so was still a somewhat risky enterprise, Sedgwick earned recognition alongside Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant as ‘a founder of her nation’s literature’.3 Equally adept at mining her country’s past for literary materials or portraying the contemporary scene, Sedgwick moved skilfully and freely between fiction and non-fiction. Although in both her fiction (including her last novel, Married or Single?)4 and her private writings Sedgwick indicated that ‘marriage is usually preferable to a single state’,5 she herself chose not to marry and committed herself fully to her profession. Furthermore, she transgressed traditional gendered boundaries between literary topics, delving into the supposedly masculine domains of history, politics, and economics, as well as into areas such as sentiment, domesticity, and piety, widely believed to be the woman writer’s special province. Deeply invested in the question of American cultural independence and the creation of a distinctively national literature, Sedgwick was also remarkably cosmopolitan in her tastes and interests as testified, in particular, by her travelogue Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home. Based on her European travels of 1839–40, this book fits into the Anglo-American Grand Tour genre, with its route through well-known locations, its descriptions of historical and artistic landmarks, and its emphasis on the picturesque; but it also departs significantly from that tradition in its pronounced interest in contemporary social and political issues. Sedgwick’s concern about the here and now is particularly evident in the second volume of her book, devoted almost entirely to Italy. Instead of focusing mostly on the past, as many British and American authors of books about Italy invariably did, Sedgwick used her observations about the country’s history and glorious artistic heritage to throw into bold relief its present state of near-paralysis and despondency, which she saw as the direct result of political oppression. While duly taking her readers on a guidebook-sanctioned visit to
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Past glories, present miseries celebrated cities, landscapes, and monuments, she also tried to make them aware of the effects of foreign occupation and despotism on contemporary Italy and the special relevance of Italy’s situation for Americans. Sedgwick chose to convey her observations in epistolary form, structuring the book as a series of travel letters nominally addressed to her brother Charles back home. But these published letters differ significantly from her surviving private correspondence with Charles and other members of her family, both in size (they are considerably longer) and content (favouring as they do descriptive passages over personal references). They are much closer to passages found in Sedgwick’s travel journal. The published letters, then, constitute, in the words of Lucinda DamonBach, ‘a literary strategy calculated to create a sense of intimacy between author and audience’.6 Together with Charles, other relations, and friends of the family, all of Catharine’s readers are the ‘kindred at home’ whom, as the book’s title announces, she addresses from across the Atlantic. It seems to me that particularly in the Italian section of the book Sedgwick extends the meaning of ‘kindred’ even further so as to include, in general, her fellow Americans. She appeals to them as the citizens of a democracy born out of a revolution, and, as such, a people capable of relating to and sympathising with the Italians, then engaged in a struggle for independence and the achievement of nationhood. As a student of Italian language and culture, Sedgwick was certainly well equipped to read and interpret the Italian scene for her readers. In antebellum America, an acquaintance with the Italian idiom, accompanied by a fascination with things Italian, was not rare among cultivated upper- and middle-class women (as evidenced, for example, by the fairly astounding number of Italy-related stories, sketches, poems, and pictures published in the popular magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book).7 But Sedgwick’s interest in Italy went far beyond the narrow confines of what was regarded as a highly desirable accomplishment in a lady. In the 1830s Sedgwick and her family welcomed to the United States, befriended, and provided essential assistance to some of Italy’s most prominent patriots who, originally condemned to death by the occupying Austrian government, had had their sentences commuted to exile after being confined for years in the notorious Spielberg prison.8 Of the Italian exiles Sedgwick wrote the following: ‘several of them became intimate in my family, and closely bound to it by reverence and affection on our side … Confalonieri, Foresti, Albinola, and our Castillia became our dear friends’.9 While Sedgwick was not alone in her sympathy for the Italian cause, it is fairly safe to say that no other major American writer at the time became so actively involved, or developed such a close relationship, with the representatives of the Italian political diaspora. And only Margaret Fuller, after she took up residence in Italy as the correspondent for the New-York Tribune in the late 1840s, gained a keener awareness and a deeper understanding of Italy’s predicament in the Risorgimento era.10 The encounter with the Italian exiles had a powerful impact on Sedgwick’s opinions about national character, ethnicity, and religion. It forced her to question some of her beliefs which, although more progressive and liberal than most, were certainly not immune to the Anglo-Saxonism and anti-Catholicism to which so
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Hybrid republicanisms many of her contemporaries in the United States heartily subscribed. What she saw in men such as Gaetano De Castillia and Federico Confalonieri was a kind of moral purity, a clarity of opinion and conduct which matched her ideas of what an enlightened elite should possess (her father, a former US congressman and senator, and her brothers being her nearest point of reference). What she also recognised, however, was that those character traits, indeed the whole moral and intellectual make-up of the Italian exiles, was inextricably connected with their Catholic upbringing and faith. In a period when, especially in New England, anti-Catholic prejudice was rampant and occasionally led to violence (as in the 1834 burning of the Ursuline convent and school in Charlestown, Massachusetts),11 Sedgwick was confronted with living proof that intellectual lucidity, integrity, and a love of freedom were not incompatible with Catholicism. Remembering the Italian exiles in later years, she painted them as exemplars of virtue, as heroic and almost saint-like. De Castillia, whom she called ‘an elected brother to us all’, possessed, in her words, all the virtues that one can name, and in their most attractive forms. He was a Catholic – such a Catholic as Fénelon was, as St Paul was, ‘clothed in the whole armour of God’. But Castillia had more of St John than St Paul, and as appropriately might that apostle, who is to us the impersonation of all gospel love and gentleness, have been chained in a dungeon as Castillia.12
To Federico Confalonieri Sedgwick erected a verbal monument, celebrating him as ‘a man that no circumstances can subdue, but whose spirit, like angelic spirits, makes all circumstances subservient to his progress. I have never seen any man who has so realized to me my beau ideal, the dreams of my youth, and the sane portraits of my maturity.’13 Confalonieri and his fellow exiles were very much on Sedgwick’s mind during her Italian travels. While touring the north, she visited scenes from which her Italian friends had been displaced, and witnessed almost on a daily basis the pervasive, stifling presence of the Austrian military. It was only natural that she should think of the exiles as part of her ideal readership, as honourary members of the ‘kindred at home’ to whom she addressed her letters from abroad. But what makes Sedgwick’s travel book unique is that her very trajectory in Italy reflects, to some extent, her close relationship with the Italian exiles. While Sedgwick’s European trip was a family affair, in that she travelled with her older brother Robert, his wife and eldest daughter, and two other nieces, and the trip’s primary purpose was to cure Robert, who had recently suffered a stroke, Sedgwick was also on a mission of sorts for the Italian exiles. In addition to being among the imagined addressees of her travel letters, they were themselves the authors of letters Sedgwick carried with her.14 Those letters gained her admission into the homes – and won her the gratitude – of the exiles’ families and friends, of other former prisoners of Spielberg, most notably Silvio Pellico, and of other illustrious Italians, such as Alessandro Manzoni.15 Sedgwick was, then, simultaneously the exiles’ emissary and their representative. She carried news of them to their loved ones, and she evoked their presence and reputation in her travel book to sensitise her American readers to the cause of Italian
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Past glories, present miseries independence. For clearly it was of paramount importance to Sedgwick to convince her fellow Americans that the Italian people were worthy of self-rule. The Italian exiles she counted among her friends were the incarnation of that worthiness. This message, which runs like a common thread through the Italian section of Sedgwick’s book, stood in sharp contrast to that infantilisation and feminisation of Italy and its people which, as Brigitte Bailey and Paola Gemme have shown, figured prominently in American portrayals – both literary and visual.16 In the same vein, and with the same objective, Sedgwick examined the Italian past and contrasted it with the present. As we shall see, in her survey of Italian cities and landscapes, she singled out the era of the independent city states as the most glorious chapter in Italian history. It was a precedent which showed what the Italians had been capable of when they were masters of their own destiny. It was also the model of government and society that, in her view, contemporary Italians were striving to recreate on a national scale. Similarly, Sedgwick was drawn to those art works, buildings, and monuments that, in addition to being superior aesthetic achievements, told foundational stories about the country where they had been created. Thus, in her travel book celebrated masterpieces are made to testify in favour of the Italian people, to attest to their fitness to aspire to nationhood. For example, as she saw it, Florence’s inspiring republican past was inscribed on its walls, buildings, streets, and squares – in short, on its very architecture. The ‘best-preserved monument of the middle ages’, Florence, Sedgwick wrote, ‘derived the glory and power of its brilliant day from its industry and freedom; not the freedom of a few lawless nobles, but the freedom of its working classes’. The fact that over two hundred of the city’s towers, originally intended as fortresses for the nobility alone, were considerably reduced in height ‘by an ordinance of the people’, and later incorporated into other buildings, was in Sedgwick’s view a testament to the exercise of popular power.17 Equally significant was the knowledge that the celebrated Pitti Palace, the residence of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, bore the name not of an aristocrat but of a merchant (Luca Pitti), its original owner.18 Everywhere Sedgwick saw historical and (literally) monumental evidence of Florence’s rich heritage of industry and enterprise, which she pointed to as a force that could be revived and tapped into by modern-day Italians. It was this drive and creativity, this spirit of independence, that in Sedgwick’s opinion gave Florence a ‘claim on the sympathy of the citizens of a free and working country [the United States]’.19 This idiosyncratic and ideological reading of Italy sets Sedgwick’s views apart from those one encounters in most previous and contemporary American travelogues and looks forward to Margaret Fuller’s politically engaged dispatches for the New-York Tribune.20 Rather than a limitation, Sedgwick’s lack of expertise in art history – which she acknowledged candidly – gave her licence to assess the Italian scene by different standards from those traditionally prescribed and codified from a ‘perspective textually marked as masculine’ (to use Elizabeth Bohls’s phrase).21 Her deficient education in art, for which she was chastised by the critic of the North American Review,22 allowed her to distance herself from the type of acquisitive and imperialist gaze that countless Anglo-Saxon male travellers had directed at Southern Europe and, in
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Hybrid republicanisms particular, at Italy. While Sedgwick shared, like most American and British women travel writers of her time, the class status and accompanying privileges of her male counterparts, as a woman she was sensitive to the lot of those who, like the Italians (or, even more glaringly, African Americans in the United States), had had their liberty severely curtailed. This is not to suggest that Sedgwick’s portrayal of Italy and its people is entirely free from tropes and commonplaces that, by 1841, were firmly established. For example, she concludes her first letter from Italy with a list of actions and images that her readers would have immediately recognised as part of the foreign visitor’s typical Italian experience: ‘We have already been out to see an old Roman arch; our path has been crossed by a procession of priests; we have been beset by beggars; and we have come in to give our orders to a cameriero [sic]; in short, we are in Italy.’23 Evoking as it does antiquity, Catholicism, poverty, and interaction with social inferiors, this passage seems intended to present the Italian experience in a nutshell. It reduces it to a set of reassuringly familiar elements, popularised by earlier travel books. However, this and passages of a similar nature appear to be an occasional concession to the norm, almost as if Sedgwick had felt the need to pay her dues to tradition. Elsewhere, she repeatedly abandons the beaten track – for example, when she recounts, almost in the manner of a journalist, her visits to educational and charitable institutions, and even to an insane asylum. Describing this last, Sedgwick praises the enlightened treatment of the inmates, and uses it as a way to compare and contrast Italian and New England attitudes. So often painted as a country dominated by Catholic obscurantism, Italy emerges in this passage as more secular and liberal than the author’s native land: ‘The insane are under the care of a distinguished man of science … The “minister to the mind diseased”, in our Puritan land, takes his patients to church; the Italian professor conducts them to the theatre.’24 Like many of her predecessors, Sedgwick occasionally depicts Italian life as a spectacle, a giant pageant in which history and art, the dead and the living all contribute to the overall aesthetic effect for the benefit of foreign spectators.25 Like most Protestant visitors, Sedgwick responds with a mixture of puzzlement and discomfort at what she perceives as the theatrical, performative quality of Catholic ritual. At the same time, however, Sedgwick was aware of her cultural bias, and tried more than once to take it to task.26 Her description of the ceremonies in honour of St Charles in the Duomo of Milan is a case in point. Sedgwick remarks that she and her party could not escape the feeling that they had been ‘witnessing a sort of melodrama’. But if the ceremonies, in her eyes, were not truly Christian (being too showy and pagan-like), the same could be said, she had to admit, of her hasty censure. If she tried to place what she had seen in its proper context, she was bound to acknowledge that ‘Time and use have consecrated [those ceremonies] to the pious Catholic. To him, each observation of this to us empty and inexpressive show embodies some pious thought or holy memory.’27 Sedgwick also defies expectations when she abandons generalisations about the Italian people in favour of individual portraits. When she does so, she chooses as her subjects not only political exiles, their families and friends, or notable Italians,
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Past glories, present miseries but also members of the lower classes. The latter (servants, coachmen, etc.), it must be noted, were the people with whom authors of Italian travelogues interacted most frequently but who normally remained faceless and nameless in their accounts. By contrast, when Sedgwick recalls her departure from Venice, she not only paints a vivid picture of her gondolier (‘As we came away, he stood at the foot of the stone staircase, hat in hand, in his close-fitted, scarlet corded dress, his fine black hair waving off his bronzed temples; his sound white teeth shown off by a kindly smile’), but she quotes his affectionate good wishes and identifies him by his full name, Andrea Donaio.28 Here, Sedgwick adheres to the middle and upper-class Anglo-American convention of treating working-class Italians as aesthetic and even erotic objects, but with a twist, in that she assumes a stance – that of the appreciative perceiver of physical beauty – traditionally regarded as a male prerogative. Contrary to expectation, it is a male body which provides a spectacle for the feminine gaze. It is also worth noting that while Sedgwick’s emphasis on the gondolier’s physicality turns him into a familiar Italian stereotype, as popularised by countless literary and visual representations, her use of his first and last name (a very rare occurrence in travel literature, American and otherwise) restores his individuality. Later in the book Sedgwick interrupts her travel narrative to tell the story of a young woman who worked as a maid at the inn (near Perugia) where she and her family spent the night. At first, struck by the young woman’s appearance and demeanour, Sedgwick cannot resist the temptation to turn her into an aesthetic and literary construct: ‘I never saw motion so light and full of grace – it would make the fortune of an actress of pastoral-comedy.’29 Immediately afterwards, however, Sedgwick removes the young woman from the stage, as it were, and makes her real by sharing her name (Clotilde Poggione) and her brief biography with her readers. In entering into conversation with, and taking an interest in, Clotilde, Sedgwick crossed a social boundary that in the vast majority of Anglo-American travel accounts appears practically inviolable. At the very outset of her Italian tour, in Turin, Sedgwick notes that ‘on the very threshold of Italy, we instinctively turn from what is to what was’.30 And yet in the rest of the book she tries to fight that instinct or at least balance it with a pronounced focus on contemporary matters. Even when the language of aesthetics creeps into her speech, it is made for the most part subservient to political and ethical issues. This is especially noticeable in Sedgwick’s account of her encounter with Silvio Pellico, undoubtedly the best known of the former Italian prisoners of Spielberg thanks to the international renown of his book My Prisons (parts of which Sedgwick had translated into English). While introducing the encounter to her brother as ‘something … that will probably interest you more than all the pictures in Italy’, she cannot help turning Silvio Pellico himself into a picture: ‘He is of low stature and slightly made, a sort of etching of a man, with delicate and symmetrical features.’31 But then she fleshes him out, as it were, and for the benefit of her American readers compares him to one of their most influential and most highly respected intellectuals, the Unitarian theologian and author William Ellery Channing. Pellico, she states, has ‘enough body to gravitate and keep the spirit from its natural upward flight – a more
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Hybrid republicanisms shadowy Dr. Channing!’.32 Aware that to most Americans, Pellico was known primarily as the author of My Prisons, Sedgwick makes him one with his book, à la Whitman: ‘His looks, his manner, his voice, and every word he spoke, were in harmony with his book, certainly one of the most remarkable productions of our day.’33 Tellingly, then, the Italian section of Sedgwick’s book opens with the portrait of an exemplary Italian. And although she does mention some of the rumours that circulated at the time about Pellico, namely that he had finally succumbed to ‘political despotism and priestly craft’, Sedgwick dismisses those rumours quite emphatically with the statement that Pellico ‘is a saint that cannot fall from grace’.34 Like the exiles in the United States, of whom the Sedgwicks were able to give him news, Pellico embodied the virtues that in Sedgwick’s view the best part of the Italian elite possessed; she portrayed him as a human masterpiece and one perhaps more impressive and precious than those on canvas, walls, or in marble. The impression that Sedgwick’s homage to Pellico was intended as a public endorsement of the Italian cause acquires strength if one compares it with the corresponding entry in her travel journal. In the latter, the language is less effusive, less celebratory, and Pellico (‘a slight, delicate man’)35 comes across as more reserved and perhaps more visibly bowed down by the hardships he has suffered. Interestingly, while in the book we read that he ‘was gratified with our good tidings of his friends, and much interested with our account of his godchild, Maroncelli’s little Silvia’,36 in the journal Sedgwick notes that ‘he seemed grateful to hear from his friends but was not very eager to inquire after them’.37 In men such as Pellico, Confalonieri, Foresti, and the other patriots she knew, Sedgwick saw the possibility of a resurgence of that spirit of independence that, she believed, had had its heyday in the medieval Italian city states. Writing at a time when, as Reginald Horsman has shown, Anglo-Saxonism was on the rise in American public discourse,38 Sedgwick celebrated the days of the Italian city states as a sort of local equivalent to the Anglo-Saxons’ supposedly innate love of liberty. And she suggested that just as her own countrymen had proved to be the true heirs of the Anglo-Saxons in the modern world, so too could the Italians reclaim their own glorious heritage. Interestingly, given the ethnic and racial slant of the Anglo-Saxon myth, Sedgwick singled out northern Italians, and the Lombards in particular, as the people who more than any other had remained true to their roots and who continued to show a commendable intolerance of despotism. Northerners, in short, were the most American of the Italians. And Americans, because of their foundational ideals and form of government, were best qualified to appreciate and honour Milan’s past independence: we are in Milan, once the illustrious capital of Cisalpine Gaul, and still more illustrious as the metropolis of Lombardy and queen of the northern Italian republics in the glorious days of their successful struggles against the Frederics and the Henrys of Germany; and, as we think with our Democratic principles, yet more glorious for the resistance of the people to the nobles.39
According to Sedgwick, the ‘rising of the people … in the eleventh century upon the nobles’ was ‘evidence of the spirit of equal rights hardly surpassed in our
Past glories, present miseries
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Democratic age’.40 She detected traces of that original fervour when, attending a performance at La Scala, she noticed how Italian ladies refrained from receiving Austrian officers in their boxes, knowing that if they did they would be ostracised by their countrymen. Extending her observations to the entire population of Milan, Sedgwick saw in their attitude a ray of hope amid the oppressive gloom that enveloped Italy: Is there not hope of a people who, while their chains are clinking, dare thus openly to disdain their masters? … It is true, we see no rational prospect of freedom for Italy. Overshadowed as it is by Austrian despotism, and overpowered by the presence of her immense military force, and, what is still worse, broken into small and hostile states without one federative principle or feeling. But we cannot despair of a people who, like the Milanese, show that they have inherited the spirit of their fathers.41
With its appeal to enlightened, heroic founding fathers, the last sentence, it should be noted, echoes a previous passage in which Sedgwick not only emphasises the affinity between the Italian battle for independence and the American Revolution, but seems to give the Italians an edge over her own countrymen in terms of selflessness and valour. What is more, anticipating Margaret Fuller, she defines support for the Italian cause as a specific American duty: ‘We honor our fathers for the few years of difficulty through which they struggled; and can we refuse our homage to these men, who sacrificed everything, and forever, that man holds most dear, to the sacred cause of freedom and truth?’42 Later in the book, while visiting Padua, she once again alludes to a special connection, an affinity between Italy and her own country, and she does so by identifying the Italian tradition of municipal independence as specifically republican. Moreover, she associates that era of independence with the flourishing of agriculture and the arts in a relation of cause and effect: The Roman remains and memorials in Lombardy are comparatively few; and it is not to the days of Roman dominion that the mind recurs, but to the period of Italian independence. You perceive in these rich plains of Lombardy the source in nature of the individual life, vigor, and power of the free Italian cities, in these warm plains completely irrigated, and producing without measure corn, wine, and the mulberry-tree, those surest natural sources of wealth. And you perceive still, in the noble physiognomy of the people, the intellectual character that made Italy the seat of art, literature, commerce, and manufactures, while civilization had scarcely dawned on the rest of Europe … These were the days when Milan and Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, and Padua, and all the rest of their glorious company, were republics.43
In her campaign against despotism and for Italian independence, Sedgwick enlisted, so to speak, some of the art works she had the opportunity to observe closely in the course of her travels. Indeed, the extent to which certain monuments, pictures, and statues lent themselves to political commentary, or seemed to reveal distinctive traits of the Italian character, seems to have been one of Sedgwick’s main criteria for deeming them worthy of special attention. While several other travellers
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Hybrid republicanisms experienced Italy’s artistic heritage mostly as a reminder of an irretrievably lost greatness, Sedgwick looked for clues that might give her (and her readers) a better understanding of Italy’s present situation and some hope for the future. For instance, one of Italy’s great masters, Raphael, could be celebrated not only for his genius and exceptional skill, but also for preserving his artistic integrity and creative autonomy even in the context of papal patronage. Tellingly, after admiring his Sibyls in Rome, Sedgwick paid Raphael what she thought was the highest possible compliment by calling him ‘the Shakespeare of painters, and with almost as full a measure of inspiration’,44 thus using as a yardstick for excellence what many considered the very best of Anglo-Saxon culture. And she found herself riveted by The School of Athens (in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace), which, she pointed out, ‘was a subject of Raphael’s own selection’. What in her view made The School of Athens so compelling was that its creator ‘was unshackled by dictum of pope or cardinal, and freely followed out the suggestions of his inspired genius’.45 Here was an undisputed masterpiece which advertised the Italian capacity for independent thought, a capacity largely suffocated in the country Sedgwick toured but which she had reason to believe could re-emerge and finally make Italy one and free. Sedgwick certainly lost no opportunity to denounce the forces of oppression. For instance, after declining to offer any observations on the holdings of Palazzo Madama in Turin (which included works by Dolci, Reni, and Murillo), Sedgwick turned her full attention to the Arch of Peace in Milan (Figure 1.1). Originally projected by Napoleon, it had been completed by the Austrians after his defeat and death. In the process it had been appropriated and turned into a powerful piece of propaganda. To Sedgwick, the ways in which some of the original decorations had been tampered with to remove any allusion to Napoleon served as an example of how art, all too often, became ‘the passive slave of tyrants’.46 But what the Austrians had done to the Arch of Peace, rather than proclaiming their might, seemed to Sedgwick to betray their weakness and cowardice. And so too did their banishment of a bronze statue of Napoleon by Canova to a cellar of the Brera gallery (Figure 1.2). Although she found it ‘failing in resemblance’, Sedgwick thought the statue was so lifelike that she described it as ‘buried alive’ and capable even in its present condition of inspiring terror in the heart of the enemy.47
Figure 1.1. Arch of Peace, 1807, Milan
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Past glories, present miseries
Figure 1.2. Antonio Canova, Napoleon as Mars the peace maker, 1802–6 (1811 copy), marble, Brera, Milan
Sedgwick’s strong response to another piece she saw at the Brera, Guercino’s painting of Abraham casting out Hagar and Ishmael (Plate 1), is worth mentioning inasmuch as it seems to encapsulate her personal aesthetic principle: The coloring and composition is, as it should always be, made subservient to the moral effect – the outer reveals the inner man. In Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, the head of the chosen people, you see the patriot triumphing over the father and lover; Hagar, with her face steeped in tears, is the loving girl urging the claim of true and tender passion against what seems to her an incredible sentence; Sara is the very personification of “legal rights” and the poor little boy, burying his face in his mother’s gown, is the ruined favorite.48
To Sedgwick, technique was valuable inasmuch as it provided an effective conduit for the representation of, and probing into, the human condition and such existential binaries as good and evil, right and wrong and, in this case, duty and sentiment. Clearly what Sedgwick found particularly compelling was Guercino’s masterful rendition of a riveting family drama, one in which Abraham follows the dictates of leadership and politics at the expense of his humanity. The patriot gains victory, but he does so by defeating what Sedgwick regarded as his better self, the father and lover. And even though Sedgwick considerably toned down the language with which she had originally styled Sara in her journal (‘the rigid pharisaical wife’),49 her phrasing in the published version leaves no doubt as to where her
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Hybrid republicanisms sympathies lay between Sara and Hagar, between legal rights and ‘the claim of true and tender passion’. But more representative of Sedgwick’s attitude and her priority system is the way in which her visit to the studios of two notable living painters, Francesco Hayez and Pelagio Palagi, was completely overshadowed by her glimpse of Confalonieri’s house on her way there, a house that, with its inevitable associations, ‘produced too vivid an impression of our friend’s sufferings to allow any pleasant sensations immediately to succeed it’.50 Sedgwick later visited the Casati Stampa family mausoleum in the little town of Muggiò, near Monza, and took this opportunity to pay heartfelt homage to the memory of Confalonieri’s wife, Teresa Casati, a ‘victim to Austrian despotism, and martyr to conjugal affection’. In doing so, she also addressed anti-Catholic prejudice, which she correctly identified as a formidable obstacle to the full vindication of the Italian character in America. Appealing to her brother Charles and through him to all her American readers, she emphasised that Teresa Casati’s exemplary character ‘was formed in the bosom of the Catholic Church’.51 In similar accents she voiced her admiration for Canova’s statue of Palamedes, which she saw in the Villa Carlotta at Lake Como (Figure 1.3).52 She was struck by the story of how Canova had narrowly escaped being crushed by the accidental fall of the statue (during a flood in Rome) and how his patron, Count Sommariva, had
Figure 1.3. Antonio Canova, Palamedes, 1805–8, marble, Villa Carlotta Museum, Tremezzo
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Past glories, present miseries assured him that he cherished the damaged statue precisely because it would always remind him of Canova’s miraculous preservation. In sharing this anecdote with her readers, Sedgwick pursued a dual purpose. On the one hand she used it as a strong argument in her rebuttal of widespread negative stereotypes about the Italians and in her passionate defence of their right to self-rule. Describing Palamedes as ‘a monument of the integrity of the great artist, and the delicacy and generosity of his employer’, she exhorted her brother (the ideal reader, standing for all readers) to remember that ‘these are traits of Italian character, and that such incidental instances of virtue are proofs they are not quite the degraded people prejudice and ignorance represent them’.53 On the other hand, by praising Sommariva’s disinterested conduct, his idea of what constituted real value, Sedgwick placed before her compatriots an example in direct opposition to the unbridled market values that reigned in Jacksonian America. In this respect, Letters from Abroad is very much in tune with the troubled response to commercialism which, as Mary Kelley has pointed out,54 represents a key aspect of Sedgwick’s production (particularly, I would add, in her 1830 urban novel, Clarence).55 In stark contrast to Sommariva, American customers of American sculptors such as Thomas Crawford (whose Roman studio Sedgwick visited and described at length) treated their transactions with artists as they would any other exchange of commodities for money. Their intentions might be good, even ‘generous’, Sedgwick conceded, but by failing to provide artists with an adequate advance with which to cover the cost of materials, they placed them in a very difficult predicament: sometimes orders were given ‘with the mercantile idea of payment on delivery of the goods, which could not be executed for want of money to buy the block of marble’.56 It was precisely a desire to escape, at least temporarily, the mercantile mindset and its powerful hold on American life that drew so many Americans to Italy, a country they liked to believe was immune from, or at least as yet untouched by, the influence of modern market forces. Given the distinctly masculine connotation of those forces in antebellum American culture, Italy – conceived as an alternative dimension or a refuge – was particularly appealing to women. It comes as no surprise that when the Italian scene failed to live up to such expectations, the reaction of many nineteenth-century American travellers was one of disappointment. Sedgwick is no exception, as is particularly evident in her dismayed response to the Corso, the main thoroughfare in Rome. Tellingly, what made the Corso so unpleasant to her was that, with its many commercial activities, it reminded her too closely of America: ‘The Corso was full of gay equipages, filled with English people, and lined, for the most part, with mean shops, with mean, everyday commodities; such shops and such “goods” as you would see in the “Main-street” of Hudson, or in any other second-rate town.’57 Sedgwick wanted Italy to come as close as possible to the American republican ideal without becoming Americanised in its customs, tastes, and concerns. The same shops that in Hudson or any other small American town would likely have been regarded as a sign of vitality and industriousness, however mean and prosaic they might seem, looked incongruous in Rome. As James Buzard has argued, to visitors from Great Britain and the United States seeking refuge from
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Hybrid republicanisms utilitarianism and commercialism, ‘the ordinary making and trading occurring in Europe’s tourist capitals was … an unwelcome reminder of the methods and exigencies shaping social life in their own nations’.58 Interestingly, Sedgwick associated the commodification of the Corso with America (more specifically, with marketoriented, small-town America), and yet she simultaneously singled out the English as representative of the foreign takeover of Rome and, as such, responsible for the threat that tourism posed to the city’s cultural integrity. Earlier in the book Sedgwick had noted that ‘Americans are for the most part merged in the English on the Continent’,59 a phenomenon which – as testified by numerous nineteenth-century American travellers – was almost the norm in Italy (where Sedgwick was when she made this observation). It seems to me that in the passage about the Corso Sedgwick was following the example of the many Italians she had encountered by including her own countrymen under the label ‘English’ and implicitly in the larger category of foreign ‘invader’. In so doing, Sedgwick temporarily assumed, or at least sided with, the Italian point of view, according to which the English and the Americans were nearly indistinguishable as people of an indefinite North and the bearers of modernity, progress, and utilitarianism. If, recalling the moment when she had crossed the Alps, she had aligned herself and her travelling companions with the barbarians of old, here she clearly felt the need to distance herself from their modern counterparts. Perhaps more than any other European country, Italy in the nineteenth century made Americans feel simultaneously superior and inferior. While Sedgwick felt moved to thank heaven that her ‘lot was cast in a land where we can think, speak, and act as the spirit moveth us’,60 she also realised that she had never been so painfully aware of what was missing in her homeland: I cannot convey to you what I have enjoyed, and am enjoying, from painting, sculpture, and architecture; and when I involuntarily shudder at the idea of leaving all these magnificent and lovely forms, I doubt the wisdom of our New-World people coming here to acquire hankerings which cannot be appeased at home. I would advise no American to come to Italy who has not strong domestic affections and close domestic ties, or some absorbing and worthy pursuit at home. Without these strong bonds to his country he may feel, when he returns there, as one does who attempts to read a treatise on political economy after being lost in the interest of a captivating romance.61
Exposure to Italy’s art treasures was enriching, intoxicating, but also perilously addictive. Americans, she warned, could safely enjoy them only if personal attachments and responsibilities kept them firmly tied to the mast of their lives. Sedgwick knew from experience that American visitors to Italy could take comfort from and pride themselves in their more fortunate circumstances with regard to material prosperity, personal freedom, and form of government, but she hoped that such an assurance would make them more sympathetic to a people that aspired to the same goals. She believed that well-informed Americans, on becoming aware of the parallels between the revolutionary origins of their own nation and Italy’s struggle for independence, would connect the past to the present and relate what they
Past glories, present miseries perceived in Italy to their own history. Thus, rather than succumb to purely aesthetic and sensual impressions, they would gain a true insight into Italy’s predicament. Reading Italy and its treasures from the enlightened American perspective Sedgwick espoused in her book, they would understand with unprecedented clarity, and wholeheartedly support, Italy’s right to self-determination.
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Notes 1 C. M. Sedgwick, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841), vol. 2, p. 15. 2 C. M. Sedgwick, A New-England Tale: Or, Sketches of New-England Character and Manners (New York: E. Bliss & E. White, 1822), p. vii. 3 M. Kelley, ‘Negotiating a self: the autobiography and journals of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’, The New England Quarterly 66:3 (1993), 367. 4 C. M. Sedgwick, Married or Single? (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1857). 5 D. Gussman, ‘“Equal to either fortune”: Sedgwick’s Married or Single? and Feminism’, in L. Damon-Bach and V. Clements (eds), Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2003), p. 252. 6 L. Damon-Bach, ‘Catharine Maria Sedgwick Tours England: Private Letters, Public Account’, in B. L. Lueck, B. Bailey, and L. Damon-Bach (eds), Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012), p. 29. 7 On the fortune and role of Godey’s Lady’s Book in antebellum American culture, see I. Lehuu, ‘Sentimental Figures: Reading Godey’s Lady’s Book in Antebellum America’, in S. Samuels (ed.), The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 73–91. 8 For information on Italian political exiles, see in particular G. Stefani, I prigionieri dello Spielberg sulla via dell’esilio (Udine: Del Bianco, 1963) and A. Bistarelli, Gli esuli del Risorgimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011). 9 C. M. Sedgwick, Life and Letters of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1871), p. 223n. 10 On nineteenth-century American responses to Italy’s struggle for independence and nationhood, see H. R. Marraro, American Opinion on the Unification of Italy, 1846–1861 (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1932); R. M. Peterson, ‘Echoes of the Italian Risorgimento in contemporaneous American writers’, PMLA 47:1 (1932): 220–40; P. Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005); D. Berthold, American Risorgimento: Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2009); and D. Fiorentino, Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia 1848–1901 (Roma: Gangemi, 2013). 11 On anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century America, see R. A. Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1938); C. Beals, Brass-Knuckle Crusade: The Great Know-Nothing Conspiracy 1820–1860 (New York: Hastings House, 1960); and J. Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). 12 Sedgwick, Life and Letters of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, p. 223n. In a letter to Catharine, Charles expressed similar sentiments about Castillia: ‘I wonder how many men there are on earth like him; we have known no other – one such man in such a condition is to my mind a revelation of a future heaven, and his pure mind, his affections and his bitter trials could not exist in the same person, but for the ever living faith that the sufferings of his present life are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed.’ C. Sedgwick, Letters from Charles Sedgwick to His Family and Friends, C. M. Sedgwick and K. Sedgwick Minot (eds) (Boston, MA: privately printed, 1870), p. 129. 13 Sedgwick, Life and Letters of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, p. 258.
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Hybrid republicanisms 14 For example, in her journal Sedgwick included a letter from Federico Confalonieri to his brotherin-law, Count Gabrio Casati. In the letter, Confalonieri gratefully acknowledges the providential support that the Sedgwicks have provided to Italian exiles and describes them as ‘my true family in America’ (‘vera famiglia mia in America’). Federico Confalonieri in C. M. Sedgwick, Journal of a Trip to Europe, 1839–40, p. 180, Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/6u2w94 (accessed 17 August 2018). It should be noted that carrying letters written by political exiles was not without risk, as the following passage makes abundantly clear: ‘We have sent them [the letters], however, notwithstanding we hear that an American gentleman who brought a letter from one of our exile friends, was ordered by the police to leave Milan within twelve hours.’ Sedgwick, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, vol. 2, p. 32. 15 Sedgwick’s journal also includes the letter of introduction Federico Confalonieri addressed to Alessandro Manzoni in which Confalonieri describes Sedgwick as ‘the renowned American author who has exclusively consecrated her pen to the improvement of her country’s society, and especially its populace’. He goes on to recommend her to Manzoni’s favour by stating that, together with her brother Robert and her whole family, she had been ‘a second Providence to your compatriots who have been deported to America’. F. Confalonieri in Sedgwick, Journal of a Trip to Europe, p. 178 (‘la celebre autrice d’America che ha esclusivamente consacrato la sua penna al miglioramento sociale, ed in specie popolare, del suo paese … la seconda Provvidenza dei compatrioti tuoi deportati in America’). 16 B. Bailey, ‘Representing Italy: Fuller, History Painting, and the Popular Press’, in F. Fleishmann (ed.), Margaret Fuller’s Cultural Critique: Her Age and Legacy (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 229–48; B. Bailey, ‘Gender, nation, and the tourist gaze in the European “Year of Revolutions”: Kirkland’s Holidays Abroad’, American Literary History 14:1 (2002): 60–82; Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles, pp. 35–52. 17 Sedgwick, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, vol. 2, pp. 286–7. 18 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 287–8. 19 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 286. 20 M. Fuller, ‘These Sad but Glorious Days’: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, L. J. Reynolds and S. B. Smith (eds) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). 21 E. A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 3. 22 Review of Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home by C. M. Sedgwick, North American Review 53:113 (1841): 531. 23 Sedgwick, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, vol. 2, p. 19. 24 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 117. 25 Significantly enough, early in the Italian section of her journal, Sedgwick refers to Piazza Castello in Turin as ‘the first theatre of Italian life we have seen’. Sedgwick, Journal of a Trip to Europe, p. 167. 26 For example, after expressing her indignation at being asked to pay a small sum to see a painting in a church, Sedgwick critically re-examines her (and her companions’) self-righteousness: ‘We were not long in learning to smile at our own pharisaical Quixotism, and to discard it. … certainly it is just the possessor should derive an income from such a capital, and the sight of the picture is worth ten times the trifling sum it costs.’ Sedgwick, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, vol. 2, p. 93n. 27 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 46. 28 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 113. 29 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 278. 30 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 19. 31 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 23. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 24. 34 Ibid. 35 Sedgwick, Journal of a Trip to Europe, p. 171. 36 Sedgwick, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, vol. 2, p. 24.
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Past glories, present miseries 37 Sedgwick, Journal of a Trip to Europe, p. 171 (emphasis added). 38 R. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 39 Sedgwick, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, vol. 2, p. 31 (emphasis added). 40 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 31n. 41 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 41, 41n. 42 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 32n. 43 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 94. 44 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 168. 45 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 199. 46 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 33. 47 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 35. 48 Ibid. 49 Sedgwick, Journal of a Trip to Europe, p. 186. 50 Sedgwick, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, vol. 2, p. 57. 51 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 61. 52 It is also worth noting that during her visit to the Villa Carlotta, Sedgwick singled out for praise a statue of Mars and Venus (by Luigi Acquisti), which, she thought, gave form and substance to the very best in the Italian character: ‘in form, costume, and expression, such as you would expect to find the aborigines of this land – types of valor and love’. Sedgwick, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, vol. 2, p. 74. 53 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 75. 54 M. Kelley, ‘Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867)’, Legacy 6:2 (1989): 44. 55 C. M. Sedgwick, Clarence; Or, a Tale of Our Own Times (Philadelphia, PA: Carey & Lea, 1830). 56 Sedgwick, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, vol. 2, p. 158 (emphasis added). 57 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 148. 58 J. Buzard, ‘A continent of pictures: reflections on the “Europe” of nineteenth-century tourists’, PMLA 108:1 (1993): 32. 59 Sedgwick, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, vol. 2, p. 68n. 60 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 256. 61 Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 193–4.
Selected bibliography Bailey, B. ‘Representing Italy: Fuller, History Painting, and the Popular Press’. In F. Fleishmann (ed.), Margaret Fuller’s Cultural Critique: Her Age and Legacy. New York: Peter Lang, 2000, pp. 229–48. ___. ‘Gender, nation, and the tourist gaze in the European “Year of Revolutions”: Kirkland’s Holidays Abroad’, American Literary History 14:1 (2002): 60–82. Beals, C. Brass-Knuckle Crusade: The Great Know-Nothing Conspiracy 1820–1860. New York: Hastings House, 1960. Berthold, D. American Risorgimento: Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2009. Billington, R. A. The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860. Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1938. Bistarelli, A. Gli esuli del Risorgimento. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011. Bohls, E. A. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Buzard, J. ‘A continent of pictures: reflections on the “Europe” of nineteenth-century tourists’, PMLA 108:1 (1993): 30–44. Damon-Bach, L. L. ‘Catharine Maria Sedgwick Tours England: Private Letters, Public Account’. In B. L. Lueck, B. Bailey, and L. L. Damon-Bach (eds), Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012, pp. 21–48.
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Hybrid republicanisms Fiorentino, D. Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia 1848–1901. Roma: Gangemi, 2013. Franchot, J. Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994. Fuller, Margaret. ‘These Sad but Glorious Days’: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850. L. J. Reynolds and S. B. Smith (eds). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Gemme, P. Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Gussman, D. ‘“Equal to either fortune”: Sedgwick’s Married or Single? and Feminism’. In L. DamonBach and V. Clements (eds), Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2003, pp. 252–67. Horsman, R. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Kelley, M. ‘Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867)’, Legacy 6:2 (1989): 43–50. ___. ‘Negotiating a self: the autobiography and journals of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’, The New England Quarterly 66:3 (1993): 366–98. Lehuu, I. ‘Sentimental Figures: Reading Godey’s Lady’s Book in Antebellum America’. In S. Samuels (ed.), The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 73–91. Marraro, H. R. American Opinion on the Unification of Italy, 1846–1861. New York: University of Columbia Press, 1932. Peterson, R. M. ‘Echoes of the Italian Risorgimento in contemporaneous American writers’, PMLA 47:1 (1932): 220–40. ‘Review of Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home by C. M. Sedgwick’, North American Review 53:113 (1841): 529–32. Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. A New-England Tale: Or, Sketches of New-England Character and Manners. New York: E. Bliss & E. White, 1822. ___. Clarence; Or, a Tale of Our Own Times. Philadelphia, PA: Carey & Lea, 1830. ___. Journal of a Trip to Europe, 1839–40, Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/6u2w94 (accessed 17 August 2018). ___. Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home, 2 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841. ___. Married or Single? New York: Harper & Brothers, 1857. ___. Life and Letters of Catharine Maria Sedgwick. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1871. Sedgwick, Charles. Letters from Charles Sedgwick to His Family and Friends. C. M. Sedgwick and K. Sedgwick Minot (eds). Boston, MA: privately printed, 1870. Stefani, G. I prigionieri dello Spielberg sulla via dell’esilio. Udine: Del Bianco, 1963.
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‘Vivat Republica’: Washington, D.C. and Rome in early photographic archives Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document
Lindsay Harris
In recent years, scores of international libraries and museums have gone to great lengths to digitise their photographic archives. The new availability of these resources has encouraged theoretical debate on their content, history, and resonance as cultural symbols. It has also enabled researchers to access visual records of virtually every corner of the inhabited world from the comfort of their own living rooms. The earliest of these pictures show sites as they appeared in the 1840s, just a few years after the pioneering French photographer Louis Daguerre introduced the world’s first practical camera in 1839. Since photographic equipment of the day required a long exposure time, architecture was a frequent subject for early forays with the medium.1 The archival function of this imagery was often an unintended by-product. Taken at a time when the rise of nationalism was redefining the make-up of the modern world, early photographs often provide rare documentation of cities in the throes of transformation due to war, modernisation, or campaigns to fashion state capitals.2 Some depict buildings or cityscapes that today are hardly recognisable; others provide visual records of sites that would disappear in the course of modernity. In the surfaces of these images, we see the onset of photographers and intellectuals grappling with the challenge of how photographic archives could make visible the values for which their nations stood. In the 1840s, as photographers were beginning to understand the potential of their new medium to serve national interests, America and Italy were at different stages of nation building. While dissimilar in many regards, these nations’ unification efforts reveal the ideals – and iniquities – of a form of nationalism that gained new life in the long nineteenth century: republicanism.3 A concept that dates to ancient Greece, ‘republic’ in the broadest sense refers to a form of government in which a state is ruled by representatives of its citizens. In the eighteenth century, in response to growing resistance to absolutist regimes, the term came to signify a state that, in addition to being ruled by representatives of its citizens, bound a new community of diverse people based on ‘liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness’.4 Since then, as Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira has observed, republics have tended to pride themselves on a government with political legitimacy, citizens who participate in civil society, public space for debate and social accountability, and politicians and civil servants who uphold republican ideals.5 The United States, with its revolution against the British, beginning in 1776, has been acknowledged as the first modern republic. According to Benedict Anderson,
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Hybrid republicanisms the American model of nationhood as a political unity based on belief, rather than on ethnic ties or a mythological past, was the first state of its kind to emerge in the modern era.6 Don Doyle has corroborated Anderson’s view, noting that American nationalism ‘rested on political principles, not on any claim that Americans were a distinctive people’.7 Once control was seized from the British in the eastern United States, and, moving west over the next half century, from the Spanish, French, Mexicans, and Native Americans, the challenge by the 1840s would be to invent – and represent – a national identity for the heterogeneous mix of people that now called themselves Americans. During this period, Italians, in contrast, were just beginning their struggle to forge a unified nation, a process they referred to as the Risorgimento. The term suggests the resurgence of Italy’s glorious past in ancient Rome and the Renaissance.8 Yet it also borrows something of the American desire to define their new nation on the promise of the future, once Italy, like America, liberated itself from a host of foreign rulers. The Austrians occupied portions of the Italian peninsula in the north, while the Spanish Bourbons dominated the south, including Sicily. The Papal States controlled central Italy and, more importantly, Rome, the ideological lynchpin of Italian nationalism. Giuseppe Mazzini, a chief architect of Italian nationalism, spoke of establishing the ‘Third Rome’, a term that conveys the politician’s aspiration to ensure for the Eternal City a modern status equivalent to the Rome of the Caesars and the popes.9 Seizing the city from the Church to establish Rome as the new Italian capital would not be easy, as Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, the celebrated military commander, discovered in the summer of 1849. Yet it was essential if Italy wanted to begin to make visible what Doyle has termed ‘the nationalism of an imagined Italian community’.10 Two photographic archives from the 1840s convey the republican ideals that fuelled the struggles for nationalism in the United States and Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. The first is a series of four daguerreotypes taken in 1846 by American photographer John Plumbe, Jr of a selection of government buildings in Washington, D.C.11 The small corpus of images constitutes the only architectural photographs by Plumbe that are known to survive, with the exception of one additional daguerreotype of a monument commemorating the Battle of North Point, in Baltimore, and two further daguerreotypes of the US Capitol in private collections.12 Plumbe’s four views of government buildings in Washington, D.C. circulated publicly in the form of lithographs, which Plumbe printed himself and sold at his photographic galleries. The original daguerreotypes disappeared until 1972, when they turned up in a flea market in California. Soon thereafter, they entered the holdings of the Library of Congress, where today the rare and fragile objects are a pillar of its daguerreotype collection. The second series features forty-one calotypes, or salt paper prints, taken by Italian photographer Stefano Lecchi in the immediate aftermath of the Siege of Rome in the summer of 1849.13 Originally from Lombardy, Lecchi was active in France in the mid-1840s, where he experimented with early forms of photography, including daguerreotypes. He also contributed to the development of the calotype
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‘Vivat Republica’ process at which he eventually excelled. By 1846, Lecchi had returned to Italy, where he carried out one of the first photographic campaigns in Pompeii. He also became part of the ‘Roman school’ of calotypists, which included Giacomo Caneva and Frédéric Flachéron, a French pensionner in architecture at the Villa Medici. The some forty calotypes Lecchi took of the Siege of Rome came to be known through lithographs in albums published immediately after the battle, and through copy prints in the Museo del Risorgimento in Rome. In 1997, photography historian Marina Miraglia by chance unearthed a vintage set of Lecchi’s calotypes in the collection of Rome’s Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea. The series had originally belonged to Andrea Calandrelli, a republican who had fought in the Roman siege and who replaced Mazzini as triumvir in July 1849. The collection was digitised in 2011 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Italian unification and can be accessed on the library’s website; the calotypes, now recognised as a crown jewel of the library’s holdings, have been placed in a vault.14 The Plumbe and Lecchi archives differ in their medium, the number of photographs they contain, and the phase depicted within each nation’s political evolution. However, both collections constitute the earliest known photographic images to document a subject of national significance. Further, Plumbe’s daguerreotypes and Lecchi’s calotypes both circulated as lithographs, highlighting the technical limits of early photographic media, the importance of printmaking in early photographic history, and the value the public placed at the time on the newfound immediacy with which photography represented national events. Both collections suggest that within a decade of photography’s development, photographic archives became a potent means to represent a common, national identity to newly united citizens in the United States and Italy.15 They indicate, too, that in the mid-nineteenth century, political leaders in these countries espoused similar notions of what constituted a republic, including freedom from foreign rule, a heterogeneous population bound by shared beliefs, and a commitment to the humanitarian ideal of liberty for all citizens, even if universal rights were not yet a reality in either nation. There were also important differences, most notably the relative newness of the United States compared to Italy’s millennia-old past. The Plumbe pictures show government buildings of a rising America; the Lecchi photographs depict Renaissance and Baroque villas and ancient Roman walls that have been ruined by recent war. Yet by looking in parallel at the Plumbe and Lecchi photographs, two of the earliest visual manifestations of republican values in the United States and Italy respectively, we can grasp more fully the meaning of republicanism in the long nineteenth century and how advocates of this form of government sought to ensure their nations’ political success. John Plumbe, Jr was, as one writer described him, ‘a go-getter from the get-go’. His life and peripatetic career embodied many of the republican virtues that infuse his 1846 suite of architectural photographs of Washington, D.C., today the most celebrated images of his tumultuous career.16 Born in Wales, Plumbe immigrated to the United States as a teenager with his family in 1821. Over the next two decades, he tried to take advantage of the clean slate and potential for success through hard work that his new nation purported to promise. His training as a civil engineer fuelled an
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Hybrid republicanisms early fascination with the railroad, which he viewed as the engine of America’s national destiny. By 1832, at age twenty-three, he was building the first interstate railroad, a sixty-mile stretch between Virginia and North Carolina. Before he turned thirty, he was imploring Congress to endorse the construction of a railroad to connect the east coast of the United States to the Pacific. His plea garnered little more than ridicule at the time, and the strain of convincing people of the merit of his vision left Plumbe all but bankrupt in Boston by 1840. Determined to muster support for a transcontinental railroad, Plumbe quickly recognised the financial potential of another new technology that had already begun to revolutionise society: photography. Before long, Plumbe became one of the earliest Americans to learn how to make daguerreotypes, the first commercially successful form of photography, which recorded highly detailed, unique images on to a silver-coated copper plate. Within six years, he established a national reputation for himself as the owner of a chain of twenty-three photography galleries, a manufacturer and importer of photographic materials, a teacher of the first generation of American photographers, an innovator in colour photography, and a successful publisher of lithographs based on his daguerreotypes.17 In 1844, Plumbe opened the inaugural photography studio in the United States capital. Two years later, he made the four daguerreotypes that today constitute the earliest known photographic views of Washington, D.C. (Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4). When Plumbe took this suite of architectural views, he was best known for his photographic portraits of noted Americans, which included the first photograph of a sitting American president, James Polk. Yet, as The United States Journal observed on 29 January 1846, Plumbe’s Washington gallery also offered its customers lithographs of important government buildings, some of which in the District were still under construction. Plumbe’s gallery, wrote the journalist, was
Figure 2.1. John Plumbe, Jr, President’s House (White House), ca. 1846, daguerreotype, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
‘Vivat Republica’ an establishment whose superior merits are well deserving the notice of all who engaged in taking views of all the public buildings which are executed in a style of elegance, that far surpasses any we have ever seen … It is his intention to dispose copies of these beautiful pictures, either in sets or singly, thus affording to all an opportunity of securing perfect representation of the government buildings.18
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The Library of Congress archive illustrates the government buildings Plumbe considered the architectural core of the nation’s capital: the President’s House, the People’s House (the US Capitol), the General Post Office, and the US Patent Office. What did
Figure 2.2. John Plumbe, Jr, United States Capitol, Washington, D.C., ca. 1846, daguerreotype, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
Figure 2.3. John Plumbe, Jr, General Post Office, ca. 1846, daguerreotype, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
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Hybrid republicanisms
Figure 2.4. John Plumbe, Jr, United States Patent Office, ca. 1846, daguerreotype, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
these buildings convey to Plumbe and his contemporaries about the values of the American republic? How did Plumbe illustrate these values through photography? The President’s House, or the White House, was intended as a residence that would embody the republican values upon which the nation was founded. Designed by James Hoban, a young Irishman who had studied architecture in Dublin before coming to America after the War of Independence, its symbolic function was a literal part of the building’s foundation. When the cornerstone was laid in 1792, it was outfitted with a brass plate inscribed with the names of the nation’s president, the city’s three commissioners, the building’s master mason, and a closing command: ‘Vivat Republica’.19 Plumbe’s depiction of the building underscores its expression of the nation’s republican ideals (Figure 2.1). Shot at an oblique view, the photograph emphasises the geometry and harmonious proportions of the edifice. The many windows perforating its neoclassical façade, along with the soaring height of the semicircular portico, imbue the structure with space. The building’s openness conveys in architectural terms the value of transparency, a trait that connotes welcome to the people it was built to serve while flying in the face of corruption, a vice the founding fathers vilified. The candour that characterised early government buildings in Washington, D.C. is even more evident in Plumbe’s representation of the Capitol, which would be expanded in the coming decades (Figure 2.2). Known originally as the People’s House, the building is shown from a frontal perspective that brings into relief the symmetry of its design and the expanse of greenery surrounding it on all sides. The photograph depicts the east façade, which faces away from the Mall and is considered the formal entrance to the building. Replete with classicising details – the rustication on its base, the central colonnade, pediment, and dome, with a pair of smaller domes surmounting the house and senate wings – the building boasts an
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‘Vivat Republica’ ‘elegance’ of the kind cited in the newspaper’s account of Plumbe’s work, as well as a sense of balance. By highlighting in its frank composition the equilibrium of the building’s design – based on ancient as well as Italian Renaissance and Baroque prototypes – Plumbe’s photograph illuminates the principle of equality upon which the republic was based. At the same time, the evenness of the three horizontal strata of Plumbe’s image, in which the photographer allotted equal space to the gardens in the foreground, the Capitol in the centre, and an expanse of sky overhead, signals the importance of balance in the design for Washington, D.C. between urban and rural environments. In this regard, Plumbe’s representation of the city’s crowning architectural symbol underscores the persistence of country life in the nation’s capital, a characteristic the founding fathers held dear. ‘Agriculture,’ wrote Thomas Jefferson in a letter to George Washington in 1787, ‘is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness.’20 Green space also fills the foreground of Plumbe’s photograph of the General Post Office, where a trimmed lawn and a stand of young trees line a newly laid street (Figure 2.3). Plumbe’s composition underscores the relationship of the Post Office to the road and horse and carriage, key elements required for the postal system to provide communication. Post offices – often of a similar, neoclassical style – were frequently the first buildings constructed to mark the beginnings of new towns as the United States grew with westward expansion. The replication of representative buildings and the circulation of images of those structures across the country reinforced the values for which these buildings stood. Thus, we see in Plumbe’s photograph an indication of how America updated a process of expansion the Romans themselves had perfected centuries earlier as their own empire spread across the Mediterranean. The final photograph from Plumbe’s Library of Congress archive captures one of the leading principles of the early American republic, namely the belief that knowledge and innovation would distinguish the new country from its European predecessors. Shot from an upstairs window in what is probably one of the houses in the neighbourhood in the foreground, the photograph shows the US Patent Office designed by Robert Mills in 1836 (Figure 2.4). Unlike his views of other government buildings, which were surrounded by lawns or gardens, Plumbe here selects a vantage point that shows the patent office – a building intended to protect people’s innovations – rising above the houses where those very people reside. The building thus appears as a roof over people’s heads, so to speak, protecting American ingenuity through patent regulation. Shown – like the Post Office, Capitol, and White House – several years, if not decades, before its completion, the Patent Office in Plumbe’s photograph captures a moment of aspiration in American history when what existed was just an inkling of what the nation’s leaders hoped the country would one day become. With their focus on government buildings still coming into being, and their compositions that highlight principles, rather than the attributes of noted people or sites associated with the past, Plumbe’s photographs portray American nationalism as a set of shared ideas and aspirations for the future. What is more, his
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Hybrid republicanisms imagery depicts an American ideology not only for a powerful elite, but, above all, for the American people. Plumbe took his daguerreotypes of government buildings in the nation’s capital with the intent of reproducing them as lithographs. His images thus circulated as a series of prints that average citizens could afford. Plumbe’s pictures provided quotidian reminders in American schoolhouses and living rooms of the republican ideals of justice, equality, and freedom that bound the nation’s community. They also illustrated for Americans the classical – and therefore Italian – origins of the forms deployed in the nation’s earliest and most symbolic civic architecture. Plumbe’s elevation of the east façade of the Capitol, for example, presents the building as a modified successor to the Pantheon. The ancient and enigmatic Roman structure shares with the central section of the Capitol a portico with free-standing columns surmounted by a pediment – a design inherited from ancient Greek temples – attached to a domed rotunda. While the function and ideological significance of the Pantheon has long been a source of debate, scholars generally recognise the building as a site intended to signal the power of the gods and rulers of ancient Rome.21 As a model for the seat of the US Congress, the Pantheon bestowed a similar authority upon the leaders of the early American republic, a governing body not of divine sovereigns but of elected citizens. The ancient architectural protype thus helped validate America’s newly founded democracy. The portico and pediment, which recur in Mills’s design for the Patent Office, call to mind another architectural landmark of ancient Rome associated specifically with a republican system of government, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.22 Situated on the Capitoline hill, a highly visible location within the city, the temple, now largely destroyed and nestled within the Capitoline Museum, was originally dedicated to the most important Roman deity, Jupiter Optimus Maximus. It also included spaces to worship Juno and Minerva, who rounded out the so-called Capitoline Triad, a group of divine figures significant to the Roman state religion. Archaeological evidence suggests the temple was completed around 509 bce, purportedly the year in which the Romans overthrew the Etruscan monarchy to establish the Roman Republic. Starting around the second century bce, the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus emerged as a prototype for Roman temples across the empire, providing a symbolic connection through architecture between Rome and its colonies. The building thus offered lasting and far-reaching testament to the Romans’ independence from foreign rule and establishment of republican governance. Early American leaders were proud of having accomplished similar milestones, making the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, along with its numerous replicas around the Mediterranean, an attractive architectural trope to evoke in the nation’s foundational civic structures. If Plumbe’s daguerreotypes of Washington, D.C. helped Americans define their new nation according to common principles and historic architectural precedents, a series of calotypes of Rome taken by Italian photographer Stefano Lecchi in 1849 broadcast across Europe the struggle for national independence and unification that characterised the making of modern Italy (Figures 2.5 and 2.6). In June of that year,
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‘Vivat Republica’
Figure 2.5. Stefano Lecchi, Casino dei Quattro Venti, 1849, calotype (salt paper print), Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome
Figure 2.6. Stefano Lecchi, Acquedotto dell’Acqua Paola, 1849, calotype (salt paper print), Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea, Rome
Pope Pius IX, then in exile in Gaeta, ordered the French military to attempt to topple the Roman Republic, a short-lived constitutional government that had been instated by Mazzini and his colleagues six months earlier.23 By late July, the Siege of Rome, in the city’s western outskirts, had left over three thousand men dead, hundreds more wounded, and a handful of Renaissance and Baroque villas, rustic houses, and a Roman wall smouldering in heaps of rubble on the Janiculum Hill. Within a matter of days, Stefano Lecchi was on hand to survey the damage with his camera and horse-drawn cart in tow.24 Acknowledged as the first instance of war photography, a status once attributed to Roger Fenton’s photographs of the Crimean War, Lecchi’s Rome pictures are also, along with Plumbe’s Washington,
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Hybrid republicanisms D.C. daguerreotypes, among the earliest photographic illustrations of modern republican ideals. Their focus on Rome’s newest monuments, and their immediate dissemination through lithographs and wood engravings, make evident the determination of early Italian nationalists to establish – and encourage support for – a new constitutional government at whatever cost. At the same time, Lecchi’s images reveal the limitations of popular uprising in the struggle for Italian unification, as well as the potency of Italy’s history to serve as both a crucible and a catalyst in the course of modernity. Possibly as early as the end of July 1849, with battle wounds on the landscape still fresh, Lecchi set out to document the destruction on Rome’s Janiculum hill. Previously, this pinnacle above the right bank of the Tiber River had been best known for its great fountain, which was built in 1612 to mark the end of the Acqua Paola aqueduct after Pope Paul V restored the conduit and renamed it after himself. Further up the hill, the Porta di San Pancrazio marked the southwest entrance to the city, where aristocratic villas built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dotted the countryside. Little trace remains in Lecchi’s photographs of the idyllic atmosphere that had characterised the Janiculum only weeks earlier. The Villa Corsini, for example, also known as the Casino dei Quattro Venti, shown from a worm’s eye view at the base of a hill, looms over an expanse of ragged brush and parched earth in the foreground (Figure 2.5). The building’s façade, presented parallel to the picture plane, has been all but obliterated by the ‘war of … bombs and cannons’ that Mazzini described in his account of the attack on Rome that summer.25 In the centre of the image, beneath the blown-out windows and pock-marked walls, a man rests against a pile of rubble, his silhouette framed against the gaping hole that was once the building’s entrance. As Critelli has observed, figures like this one recur throughout Lecchi’s Janiculum series.26 It was customary in early photographs to pose figures in architectural or landscape views to provide a sense of scale. However, the figures in Lecchi’s images have a more significant, symbolic function. Starting in February 1849, when Garibaldi and his army of volunteers had established the Roman Republic, young men had secured the city’s new status and fought to preserve it. Less than six months later, thousands of them gave their lives for the Republican cause. The young men in Lecchi’s pictures are not shown in the throes of action. Photographic equipment of the period could not yet record scenes in motion. Instead, they are depicted in moments of reflection. Seated at the base of a villa in ruins, as in the view of the Casino dei Quattro Venti, or standing amid a war-ravaged landscape, the young men in Lecchi’s photographs mark the beginning of the next phase of history, in which experience gives way to commemoration of recent, tragic events. In this regard, Lecchi’s figures illustrate what landscape theorist John B. Jackson describes as the ‘necessity for ruins’. ‘Ruins,’ observes Jackson, ‘provide the incentive for restoration, and for a return to origins.’27 In Lecchi’s views, we see the onset of a physical process of restoration that would, over the next century and a half, develop into a residential neighbourhood embedded with historical memory of the failed battle to preserve the Roman republic, from streets named for Garibaldi and his
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‘Vivat Republica’ fallen comrades to the soaring, neoclassical arch designed by Andrea Busiri-Vici, one of the forerunners of historic preservation in Italy, to commemorate the Casino dei Quattro Venti, which was destroyed in battle. Lecchi’s calotypes, like Plumbe’s daguerreotypes, represent monuments in the making. The ruined villas, rustic houses, and walls his photographs depict did not remain rubble for long. Local aristocrats eventually rebuilt their estates; the city’s ancient perimeter was reinstated in due course. Yet Lecchi’s photographs preserve these structures in a state of perpetual destruction. The moment they were taken, the pictures became a reminder for viewers of the period – and for generations to come – of the people who gave their lives in the pursuit of Italian nationalism. Images destined to commemorate, Lecchi’s photographs transform the 1849 ruins of the Janiculum into Rome’s newest monuments: symbols of the beliefs upon which the modern Italian state would eventually be founded. Monuments, Jackson notes, are not erected to please the public ‘but to remind it of what it should believe and how it is to act’.28 ‘On a specific occasion a contract was entered into, a covenant was made’ between a country’s leaders and its citizens, he continues, ‘and the monument is to remind us of that contract’.29 Monuments also remind us of the continuity between past and present. Just as a monument ‘confers a kind of immortality’, Jackson concludes, ‘it determines our actions in years to come’.30 Plumbe and Lecchi’s photographs portray different stages in the process of making monuments that embody their nation’s principles. Plumbe’s views of government buildings in Washington, D.C. represent monuments designed to embody a national ideology in the course of being built. Lecchi’s photographs, on the other hand, depict monuments emerging through ruination. Nearly contemporary, these photographic series confirm Aloïs Riegl’s assertion from his landmark chapter of 1903, ‘Modern Cult of Monuments’, that perceptions of value, while different in scope, may coexist at the same historical moment.31 Plumbe’s depictions of monuments in the making illustrate an example of buildings exalted for their ‘newness’, one of Riegl’s key values. Michele Lamprakos has argued that in the nineteenth century, when Plumbe took his series of architectural photographs, ‘newness’ also signified construction according to an idealised style, in this case the classicism of ancient Rome, as noted earlier.32 While contemporary with Plumbe’s pictures, Lecchi’s photographs of recently destroyed structures on the Janiculum hill capture a moment of ruination in which ancient walls and Baroque villas alike are prized for their ‘age value’, or, to use Lamprakos’s phrasing, their ability to testify to an ‘endless cycle of life and decay’.33 Through Lecchi’s photographs, ruins of the Risorgimento become part of an ancient and ongoing process of physical remains testifying to the passage of time, and to the rise and fall of empires and nations. Ruins of modern Italy thus appear in Lecchi’s photographs as the latest in a process of deterioration and rebuilding that has defined Italian culture and, as a consequence, the Italian landscape, since antiquity. The temporal continuum embodied in monuments also underpins modern ideas of nationalism. Whether through destruction or neglect, the creation of ruins is a phenomenon closely identified with Italy, where, as Lecchi’s photographs
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Hybrid republicanisms suggest, the built remains of ancient civilisations are highly visible. According to Ernest Gellner, modern nations justify their existence in part on the mythology of a continuous past.34 By presenting the ruins of the Siege of Rome as the city’s newest group of monuments, Lecchi’s photographs make visible a continuity between past and present that provides a historic foundation for the pursuit of nationalism in Italy in the nineteenth century. The inclusion in Lecchi’s Rome series of ancient ruins on the Janiculum, which Garibaldi and his fighters used as barricades during the 1849 battles, helps to legitimise the Italian Republic as the modern heir to the Roman Empire. Via Aurelia Antica, a Roman consular road built in the third century bce, and the Acqua Paola aqueduct, originally built by Emperor Trajan in the first century ce, recede alongside an outer wall of Villa Pamphilij to a vanishing point just left of centre in Lecchi’s view of the area (Figure 2.6). In the foreground, a horse-drawn cart inserts a symbol of the nineteenth century into a scene, suggesting we read its traces of antiquity in contemporary terms. The Via Aurelia Antica and Acqua Paola aqueduct, while constructed nearly two millennia earlier, brim with modern significance in Lecchi’s view. ‘Garibaldi ordered a small group of his troops to occupy a house on a field in front of the second entrance to the Villa Pamphilij,’ recalled the artist Nino Costa, who fought in this very location on 30 April 1849. ‘It was impossible to defend … so we passed beneath the arches of the Acqua Paola and entered Villa Pamphilij and closed the gates … We were in an excellent position … We were protected by the arches of the aqueduct … and the road functioned as a moat, as the Villa Pamphilij was elevated above.’35 Viewed in a series of images depicting modern ruins from the Siege of Rome, Lecchi’s photograph of an ancient road and aqueduct becomes a document of the battle for Italian nationalism to which a newly united population could turn for inspiration. To nurture nationalist sentiment, photographs, like monuments, have to be seen. Monuments are often large-scale structures situated in the public realm and are thus highly visible. Photographs, in contrast, are relatively small objects that are frequently kept in albums or displayed in domestic settings, where they are viewed regularly but only by a handful of people.36 Already by the early 1840s, however, photographs, including daguerreotypes, were circulating widely among the public in both the United States and Italy through reproductions in print media.37 The publication of lithographs, wood engravings, and other types of prints in illustrated books, newspapers, and broadsides contributed to what Benedict Anderson has referred to as ‘print-capitalism’, which allowed modern nations to generate an abstract concept of a common identity among citizens who had never met each other.38 Plumbe, who excelled as a printmaker as well as a photographer, from the onset reproduced his daguerreotypes of government buildings in the United States capital as lithographs, which he sold at his twenty-three photography galleries located across the country. Plumbe thus ensured his images were accessible to a broad swathe of the American population. In so doing, he participated in what Don Doyle has described as ‘the popular reception of nationalism’. Disseminated among the
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‘Vivat Republica’ people, rather than limited to a ruling elite, Plumbe’s photographs ‘absorbed and complemented popular values instead of battling them for preeminence’.39 Lecchi’s documentation of the Siege of Rome achieved greater success as lithographs or wood engravings than it did as a photographic series. Before 1997, Lecchi’s views were known largely through other artists’ prints, none of which acknowledged the photographs from which they derived.40 As Miraglia has demonstrated, Lecchi’s photographs became the basis for popular prints by artists on both sides of the conflict almost immediately after they were taken.41 In 1849 alone, Pompilio de Cuppis published a selection of lithographs by Giuseppe Ferrini derived from Lecchi’s images, without crediting the photographer, in his Atlante generale dell’assedio di Roma avvenuto nel giugno 1849. Michele Danesi’s lithography company published four images ‘derived from daguerreotypes’, a misattribution of Lecchi’s calotypes, by the artists Badioli and Berzotti. The French printer Karl Werner also published a selection of engravings by Domenico Amici that depicts the Siege of Rome based in part on Lecchi’s pictures. Perhaps the most spectacular appropriation of Lecchi’s imagery appears in the Italian-based, American author Jessie White Mario’s illustrated biography of Garibaldi, published in 1884.42 As Isotta Poggi has shown, Mario accompanied her text with a series of wood engravings by Edoardo Matania, almost all of which are based upon Lecchi’s Siege of Rome photographs.43 As had been true of earlier lithographic reproductions of Lecchi’s pictures, though to a lesser extent, Matania’s engravings embellish the photographs with invented details to heighten the drama of the siege. His depiction of the Casino dei Quattro Venti, for example, presents the ruined villa as a ghostly backdrop for tangles of bayonets, fallen soldiers, and plumes of smoke in the foreground (Figure 2.7). ‘Once the enemy had taken this site, which [Garibaldi] had understood to be the strategic key to defense … the fall of Rome was close’, Mario wrote of this battle on 3 June 1849. Matania’s hyperbolic rendition of
Figure 2.7. Edoardo Matania, Casino dei Quattro Venti, reproduced in Jessie White Mario, Garibaldi e i suoi tempi illustrato da Edoardo Matania, 1884
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Hybrid republicanisms Lecchi’s photograph makes plain the tragic events that claimed the lives of the Republican heroes Francesco Daverio, Angelo Masina, Enrico Dandolo, and Goffredo Mameli, author of the Italian national anthem.44 Matania’s compulsion to insert people into Lecchi’s photographs to fill out the compositions raises a final question about who the American and Italian republics were intended to serve in the mid-nineteenth century. Like the majority of Lecchi’s Rome calotypes, Plumbe’s Washington, D.C. daguerreotypes show no indication of the city’s residents. In part this was due to the nature of early photography, which required long exposure times. People in architectural views fade into a blur or disappear altogether. Had contemporary street scenes registered on Plumbe’s silver-coated plates, however, they would have brought to light the true make-up of society in Washington, D.C., and in the United States, through 1863. Slavery defined Washington, D.C. as a Southern city.45 Its presence in the nation’s capital amplified the inhumanity and injustice of the institution, particularly among legislators from the North who were unaccustomed to its practical implications in daily life. Washington’s homes were run by slaves. Slave auctions were held in public squares, and the majority of the city’s public buildings had been built by slaves, including the Capitol and the White House. While Plumbe was busy photographing the People’s House, a building designed to symbolise the young republic’s ideals, slaves were being traded in its shadows. As Representative Horace Mann remarked in a speech to his colleagues, ‘By the order of Congress, the City of Washington is the Congo of America.’46 Rome in the mid-nineteenth century did not permit slavery, an institution which had been integral to the make-up of society in ancient Rome and Greece.47 However, as was true elsewhere in southern Italy, the countryside surrounding the city was home to a network of latifundia, large estates that were operated by agricultural and migrant workers whose harvest had to be given to an absentee landlord in exchange for the right to live on the land. Latifundia had also existed in antiquity.48 However, the practice around Rome in the mid-nineteenth century gained new public attention as efforts to forge a modern Italian state increasingly made the new nation’s leaders aware of the pervasive disenfranchisement at the doorstep of the future Italian capital. What was more, the Roman Campagna just beyond the Janiculum was home not only to latifundia but also to a rampant disease that by the end of the century would be identified as malaria.49 Living conditions not far from the sites that Lecchi had fixed as a touchstone of modern Italianità in the nascent national imagination were, as one writer would comment in 1910, ‘more primitive than in the darkest Africa’.50 What can we conclude about early ideals of ‘republicanism’ in the United States and Italy from two photographic archives of architectural subjects in the nations’ capital cities? Both Plumbe and Lecchi captured in their photographs a desire among their nations’ leaders to inherit a basic principle established by the Roman Republic in antiquity: the most effective state is one governed by representatives of the people. Different from their ancient predecessor, however, these modern republics were
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‘Vivat Republica’ predicated on a burgeoning commitment to the humanitarian belief that the promise of liberty and justice should apply to citizens across the social spectrum. The Plumbe and Lecchi photographic archives suggest that nationalism, as a lived experience, is not so much an idea as it is a process. After Plumbe took his Washington, D.C. series in the United States, another twenty years would pass before the Civil War would bring the abolition of slavery. Decades more would be required to achieve equal rights for all American citizens, including women. In Italy, the battles on the Janiculum hill in 1849 were just the beginning of a decades-long effort to unify the nation. It would take several more popular uprisings, an accord between the French and the king of Piedmont, Italy’s most powerful region, and the breach of Rome’s Porta Pia on 20 September 1870 to make the modern Italian state with Rome as capital a reality, at least in political terms.51 Fostering nationalist sentiment in the hearts and minds of Italians is a task that many consider to be still underway. Viewed in light of one another, the Plumbe and Lecchi photographs offer an important reminder about the fallibility of both photography and political ideology, which are ultimately as subjective as the people who put them to use. Notes 1 On the relationship between photography and architecture, see M. A. Pelizzari and P. Scrivano, Intersection of Photography and Architecture, special issue, Visual Resources, 27:2 (2011) and R. Pare, Photography and Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 2 Scholarship on nationalism is vast. For this essay I have considered in particular B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (New York: Verso, 1991); E. Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994) and Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); and E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 3 On the long nineteenth century, see Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780. 4 D. Doyle, Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002), p. 16. 5 L. C. Bresser-Pereira, ‘The Republican State’, in Democracy and Public Management Reform: Building the Republican State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), chapter 10. 6 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 7 Doyle, Divided Nations, p. 18. 8 Ibid., p. 27. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 29. 11 For an overview of the life and career of John Plumbe Jr, see H. Burchard, ‘Plumbe’s photographic depths’, Washington Post (19 December 1997), which was published on the occasion of the first retrospective of Plumbe’s photographs, National Vision, Local Enterprise: John Plumbe Jr. and the Advent of Photography in Washington, D.C., organised by C. and M. Krainik, Washington Historical Society (19 December 1997–14 February 1998). 12 On the Plumbe daguerreotypes at the Library of Congress, see www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/dag/plumbe.html (accessed 5 May 2019). 13 On Lecchi’s photography, see I. Poggi, ‘“And the bombs fell for many nights.” Stefano Lecchi’s Photographs of the 1849 Siege of Rome in the Cheney Album’, in C. Caraffa and T. Serena (eds), Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation (Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 203–19; M. P. Critelli, Fotografare la storia. Stefano Lecchi e La Repubblica Romana del 1849 (Roma: Palombi Editori, 2011) and Stefano Lecchi. Un fotografo e la Repubblica Romana del 1849 (Roma: Retablo, 2001);
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Hybrid republicanisms and M. Miraglia, ‘I luoghi dell’Epopea Garibaldina: reportage bellico e “veduta” nella fotografia dell’Ottocento’, in Garibaldi, arte e storia (Firenze: Scala, 1982), pp. 273–334. 14 Other collections of Lecchi’s calotypes have been identified at the Civica Raccolta delle stampe Bertarelli in Milan, which is part of the Dietmar Siegert collection, and at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. C. Bertolotti, ‘Le rovine della Repubblica. Reportage, vedute e religione dei sepolcri’, Italie et Mediterranee modernes e contemporaines 130:1 (2018): 97–104; Poggi, ‘“And the bombs fell for many nights”’. 15 On photographic archives and nationalism more broadly, see C. Caraffa and T. Serena, ‘Introduction: Photographs, Archives and the Discourse of Nation’, in Caraffa and Serena (eds), Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation, pp. 1–15. 16 Burchard, ‘Plumbe’s photographic depths’. 17 C. Krainik, ‘Plumbe, John, Jr.’, The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2009), http://uipress.lib.uiowa.edu (accessed 5 May 2019). 18 ‘John Plumbe Jr.’, The United States Journal (29 January 1846). 19 T. Lewis, Washington: A History of Our National City (New York: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 34–5. 20 Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Lewis, Washington, pp. 21–2. 21 On the history and historiography of the Pantheon, see T. A. Marder and M. W. Jones (eds), The Pantheon: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 22 E. Perry, ‘The Same, but Different: The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus through Time’, in B. D. Wescoat and R. G. Ousterhout (eds), Architecture of the Sacred: Space, Ritual, and Experience from Classical Greece to Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 175–200. 23 For an overview of this event, see Poggi, ‘“And the bombs fell for many nights”’, pp. 203–4; and D. Laven, ‘The Age of Restoration’, in J. A. Davis (ed.), Italy in the Nineteenth Century: 1796–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 65–73. 24 Poggi, ‘“And the bombs fell for many nights”’, p. 207. 25 Mazzini, quoted in ibid., p. 203. 26 Critelli, Fotografare la storia, p. 17. 27 J. B. Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 102. 28 Ibid., p. 92. 29 Ibid., p. 93. 30 Ibid. 31 A. Riegl, Moderne Denkmalkultus: sein Wesen und seine Enstehung (Wien: K. K. ZentralKommission für Kunst- und Historische Denkmale, 1903). Translation first published as A. Riegl, ‘The modern cult of monuments: its character and its origin’, translated by K. W. Forster and D. Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21–51. On the motivation for and significance of Riegl’s essay, see M. Lamprakos, ‘Riegl’s “Modern Cult of Monuments” and the problem of value’, Change over Time 4:2 (2014): 418–35. 32 Lamprakos, ‘Riegl’s “Modern Cult of Monuments”’, p. 420. 33 Ibid. 34 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. 35 N. Costa, Quel che vidi e quel che intesi, G. G. Costa (ed.) (Milano: Treves, 1927), p. 61. 36 On domestic uses of photography, and vernacular uses of the medium more broadly, see G. Batchen, ‘Vernacular Photographies’, in Each Wild Idea (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), pp. 56–81. 37 For a cogent study of this phenomenon and its political implications, see M. Leja, ‘Fortified images for the masses’, Art Journal 70:4 (Winter 2011): 60–83. 38 Anderson, quoted in Doyle, Divided Nations, p. 12. On the use of print reproductions to circulate political ideals, see Leja, ‘Fortified Images for the Masses’ and S. Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 39 Doyle, Divided Nations, p. 37. 40 Poggi, ‘“And the bombs fell for many nights”’, p. 212; L.Vitali, Il Risorgimento nella fotografia (Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1979).
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‘Vivat Republica’ 41 Miraglia, ‘I luoghi dell’epopea garibaldina’. 42 J. W. Mario, Garibaldi e i suoi tempi illustrato da Edoardo Matania (Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1905). 43 Poggi, ‘“And the bombs fell for many nights”’, pp. 211–18. 44 Ibid., p. 213. 45 Lewis, Washington, pp. 117–45. 46 Horace Mann, quoted in ibid., p. 136. 47 T. Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery (London: Croom Helm, 1981). 48 M. Petrusewicz, Latifundium: Moral Economy and Material Life in a European Periphery, translated by J. C. Green (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 49 On the history of malaria around Rome, see F. M. Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900– 1962 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 50 A. Cervesato, Latina Tellus. La Campagna Romana (Roma: Casa Editrice Mundus, 1910), p. 212. 51 Doyle, Divided Nations, pp. 27–34.
Selected bibliography Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn. New York: Verso, 1991. Batchen, G. ‘Vernacular Photographies.’ In Each Wild Idea. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997, pp. 56–81. Burchard, H. ‘Plumbe’s photographic depths’. Washington Post, 19 December 1997. Costa, Nino. Quel che vidi e quel che intesi. G. G. Costa (ed.). Milano: Treves, 1927. Critelli, M. P. Fotografare la storia. Stefano Lecchi e La Repubblica Romana del 1849. Roma: Palombi Editori, 2011. _____. Stefano Lecchi. Un fotografo e la Repubblica Romana del 1849. Roma: Retablo, 2001. Doyle, D. Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Gellner, E. Encounters with Nationalism. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994. _____. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Hobsbawm, E. J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Jackson, J. B. The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. Krainik, C. ‘Plumbe, John, Jr.’. The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2009. Leja, M. ‘Fortified images for the masses’. Art Journal 70:4 (2011): 60–83. Lewis, T. Washington: A History of Our National City. New York: Basic Books, 2015. Mario, Jessie White. Garibaldi e i suoi tempi illustrato da Edoardo Matania. Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1905. Miraglia, M. ‘I luoghi dell’epopea garibaldina: reportage bellico e “veduta” nella fotografia dell’Ottocento’. In Garibaldi, Arte e Storia, vol. I (Arte). Firenze: Centro Di, 1982, pp. 274–334. Pare, R. Photography and Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Pelizzari, M. A. and P. Scrivano. Intersection of Photography and Architecture, special issue, Visual Resources 27: 2 (2011). Poggi, I. ‘“And the bombs fell for many nights.” Stefano Lecchi’s Photographs of the 1849 Siege of Rome in the Cheney Album’. In C. Caraffa and T. Serena (eds), Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation. Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 203–19. Vitali, L. Il Risorgimento nella fotografia. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1979.
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Thomas Nast and Giuseppe Garibaldi: the ‘Special Artist’ and the ‘Italian Washington’ Melissa Dabakis
On 3 November 1860, the New York Illustrated News published an image of their ‘Special Artist’ Thomas Nast in a red shirt, baggy trousers, and cocked hat (Figure 3.1). Posing as one of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s devoted soldiers, known as I Mille (The Thousand), Nast joined the general’s forces in Palermo, Sicily on 21 June 1860. Travelling with the troops, comprised of Italians as well as an international corps of volunteers (many of whom were writers, poets, and artists), he made his way across the Straits of Messina to Calabria, and north to Naples.1 In this studio portrait, engraved from a photograph taken in Naples on 27 September 1860, his twentieth birthday, Nast appears as a dashing freedom fighter, brandishing the accoutrements of war, such as the large knife and canteen tucked closely by his side.2 Among Nast’s most powerful weapons was his sketchbook, which he shelters in his lap. He presents himself as an experienced international war correspondent, recording the stunning events of the Italian Southern campaign, during which Garibaldi and his troops invaded the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (comprised of the island of Sicily and the southern territory of Italy, including Naples) and liberated these provinces from Spanish Bourbon rule. On 21 October 1860, popular plebiscites overwhelmingly supported unification with the Italian nation state under the new constitutional monarchy of King Victor Emmanuel II.3 Nast was among the first American correspondents to cover international wartime events, witnessing battles and insurrections as well as the more humble actions of daily military life, which he recorded with care and precision. He experienced firsthand the bravery of the Italian troops and international volunteers, the skill of Garibaldi’s leadership, and, above all, the brutality of war. From these sketches, which he made ‘on the spot’ in Italy, he later produced detailed drawings that he sent to illustrated weeklies in New York, London, and Paris. These images not only championed the Italian cause but also helped create the historical legacy of General Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose powerful and dashing presence came to embody the shared ideals of both republicanism and liberty in the United States and the new Italian nation. Nast’s images of Garibaldi’s Southern campaign gave visual form to a transnational web of political ideologies that crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean in the mid-nineteenth century. Struggles for national liberation at this moment were often understood as part
Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Figure 3.1. ‘Thos. Nast, Esq. Our special artist, now attached to Garibaldi’s staff, in Calabrian costume’, New-York Illustrated News 2:51 (8 November 1860): 52
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Hybrid republicanisms of a universal fight for freedom.4 Indeed, Garibaldi and his volunteers were certainly seen in this light, as they formed part of the larger nationalist movement of Italy, the Risorgimento, which sought to free the peninsula from external political control and to unify its territories into an independent nation state. Up until 1860, Italy was ruled by foreign powers: Austria governed Florence, Milan and the surrounding territories; and the Spanish Bourbons controlled Naples, Sicily, and other southern Italian provinces. Venice and the Veneto would become free of Austrian control in 1866; Rome and the Papal States would join the new nation in 1870. At mid-century, when the Italian peninsula was in the process of uniting into a sovereign country, by contrast the United States was splitting apart, leading many Americans to question the failure of their own republican dreams. Nast’s images of Garibaldi’s Southern campaign kept alive for many Americans the ideals for which their own revolution had been fought. ‘If there is one nation more than another that is bound to sympathize with [the Italian cause],’ wrote the New York Herald in November 1859, ‘it is this [nation] for we have had to fight the same fight, under the same difficulties, for political independence.’5 In this novel public sphere constituted by newspapers and magazines, Italy came to represent the promise of a new liberal nation, an active agent in its own self-governance, inspired, at least in part, by America’s own colonial past and revolutionary heritage.6 The attention of the foreign press to Italian events made Garibaldi an international celebrity. Certainly well publicised in his native country, his mythic persona became synonymous with the Italian nationalist cause in Europe, Great Britain, and the United States through all manner of foreign publications. As early as 1848, with Margaret Fuller’s coverage of the Roman Republic for the New-York Tribune, Americans had adopted Garibaldi as a hero of their own. After handing over command of the Italian Southern campaign to King Victor Emmanuel II in 1860, the American press often referred to him as ‘the Washington of Italy’, a leader, like Cincinnatus (and Washington himself), who refused absolute political power and quietly returned to peacetime life. Considered the ‘new Washington’ in Italy, Garibaldi was a heroic figure who represented and promoted the political ideals of liberalism and h roughout republicanism that the Italian nationalist cause hoped to embody.7 T 1860, Garibaldi’s handsome presence regularly adorned the front pages of the American popular illustrated press. His portrait appeared on the cover of Harper’s Weekly on 17 November 1860 (Figure 3.2), for example, just one week after President-elect Abraham Lincoln was featured.8 This juxtaposition of magazine covers not only celebrated the election of the President but also intimated the new leader’s intense interest in Garibaldi, whom he would invite in the summer of 1861 to serve as a major general in the Union Army. Although deeply supportive of the Northern cause, Garibaldi ultimately declined this military command.9 This dignified portrait of Garibaldi brought into concert the political efforts of the two countries.10 Engraved by the American artist Winslow Homer, the portrait was based on a widely reproduced photograph of an oil painting by Eleuterio Pagliano of the same year.11 On the Harper’s Weekly cover, the general was presented with a clean-cut image, his hair and beard nicely coiffed; he wore the Piedmontese
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Thomas Nast and Giuseppe Garibaldi
Figure 3.2. Winslow Homer, ‘General Guiseppe [sic] Garibaldi and two favorite volunteers. – From a late painting by Pagliano’, Harper’s Weekly 4:203 (17 November 1860): cover
military uniform, carefully buttoned and braided, signifying his role as general in the war for Italian independence fought against Austria in 1859. The flutter of the Italian flag and the presence of two key lieutenants at his side insured the portrait’s association with the Italian national cause. Despite these details, he could easily have been mistaken for an American general in dress uniform, thus signifying a doubling of the concerns consuming Italy and the United States at the time. The magazine underlined this dualistic reading of the image by explaining: ‘We present our readers with the latest and most authentic Portrait in existence of General Garibaldi, the Washington of Italy.’12 The new pictorial presses, such as Harper’s Weekly, came to play a large role in the construction of the Garibaldi myth and, by extension, the popularity of the Italian cause in the United States.13 With their rapid communication of current events, these publications were ‘the first mass delivery system for visual art’, as David Tatham has outlined. After 1857, with the transatlantic cable in place, knowledge of events in far-off locations became commonplace, as reports from abroad could be sent and received quickly. In the matter of a week, the literate public would read about foreign wars, European royalty, international elections, and all manner of information previously unavailable in the United States.14 In their expanding awareness of international events, Americans grew more cosmopolitan and less provincial in their understanding of the world, and thus cognisant of the impact of the Italian revolution on American political discourse.
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Hybrid republicanisms With their extensive international coverage, the pictorial presses provided for a new type of journalist, the ‘artist-reporter’, or ‘special artist’, a moniker which Nast proudly assumed when working on assignments in the United States and abroad. During his career, he worked for several different pictorial presses, including the New-York Illustrated News and its German edition, The Illustrated London News, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, and eventually Harper’s Weekly. Only the NewYork Illustrated News and The Illustrated London News sent artist-reporters to Italy to cover the revolutionary events in person, thus delivering a new visual component to the international news. When employed as a staff artist at Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine from 1856 to 1859, Nast was able to develop a distinct artistic identity in this relatively new publishing industry. As a young correspondent, he assumed many different professional responsibilities, as no clear division separated the artist, illustrator, engraver, and journalist. Not only did he provide illustrations of news events that he himself witnessed, but he also transferred the sketches of other artists on to wood engraving blocks. (The original artist’s renderings were redrawn in the studio to fit the proportions of the magazine page.) During the complex printing process, several engravers would work on different wood blocks at once, in many cases adding details or altering scenes as they saw fit. A master engraver was charged with the final step of assembling all the blocks into a stylistically coherent and unified visual image ready for press. For international special artists/reporters, as Nast would shortly become, the date of publication of such images was less timely. Unlike the written text, which was transmitted quickly via international cables, illustrations from abroad still had to travel by sea to the publication offices in New York. Thus, there was a lag in international reporting between the written description of an event and the appearance of the visual image that illustrated it.15 Nast began his career as an artist/correspondent at Leslie’s at the age of 15, cutting his teeth on a type of reporting that could be crude, gritty, and zealous in its advocacy. From the very start, he covered important national stories, such as the ‘Swill Milk’ scandal, a pictorial campaign depicting dying cows and the unsanitary conditions of milk production, which, in 1861, provoked the reform of state laws regulating dairy production in New York. To some, the pictorial reporter became a new type of hero of the people, challenging powerful political entities and exposing societal wrongs in a crusading manner. Nast learned the skills of a muckraker at Leslie’s, and soon realised that visual images – indeed, his own sketches made on the spot – could make a political difference in the world.16 After leaving Leslie’s in 1859, Nast went to work for the fledgling New-York Illustrated News, where he fully embraced his role as special artist/reporter. He travelled to North Elba, New York to cover the funeral of John Brown on 8 December 1859, and was later responsible for a pictorial campaign which illustrated the vice and misery of New York tenements. Shortly thereafter, he was sent out on important international assignments. On 15 February 1860, he sailed for London to cover the boxing match between England’s John Heenan and the American Tom Sayers. During this period, the New-York Illustrated News struggled financially, unable to pay Nast
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Thomas Nast and Giuseppe Garibaldi promptly for his drawings of the match. As a result, Nast cultivated a relationship with The Illustrated London News, which had a large international circulation throughout the English-speaking world (including the United States) dating back to 1842. Both illustrated presses enlisted Nast to cover Garibaldi’s campaign in Italy.17 The London weekly had been well known for its coverage of the revolutionary events in Italy in 1848 and 1849, focusing much attention on Garibaldi’s key role in the short-lived Roman Republic. The Italian general was a hero to Nast, who had grown up in a vibrant German-American community in New York City, where he was schooled in the liberal, but ultimately failed, revolutions that had erupted in France, Italy, Hungary, and Germany in 1848 and 1849. Nast’s father was an outspoken activist in his hometown of Landau, where his son Thomas was born in 1840. When his family life became endangered by the political climate, they immigrated to New York City in 1846, where the elder Nast continued to follow European politics closely.18 As in Italy, the German revolution sought national unity and democratic self-rule, but was quashed by powerful imperial forces. When Garibaldi visited New York City between 1850 and 1851, he was lauded as a republican hero by many German ’48ers. Yet in his modest and unassuming manner Garibaldi managed to keep the spotlight on the Italian national cause, rather than on himself, during his brief stay in the United States.19 In 1851, Nast studied with the painter Theodore Kaufmann, holding a six-month apprenticeship with this German ’48er and political activist, who encouraged the young artist to imbue his art with the political ideals of his time. Through Kaufmann, a committed abolitionist, Nast was introduced at a young age to many progressive values, such as the meaning of citizenship, the importance of voting, and the necessity of civil rights for all, a set of beliefs that would eventually propel him into covering the revolutionary events in Italy.20 A decade later, he certainly understood that to travel with Garibaldi in 1860 was an opportunity like no other, in which he would ‘witness the essence of European liberalism in action’, as historian Fiona Deans Halloran has explained.21 Nast eagerly arrived in Genoa on 31 May 1860, to report on the Italian Southern campaign. Garibaldi and his troops had departed for Sicily about a month earlier, on 5 May, arriving at Marsala on 14 May. For two weeks, they fought their way across the island, finally reaching Palermo on 27 May. Within days of his arrival in the capital, the general had taken control of the city and had won the support of the Sicilian people. On 30 May, the Bourbon government, under the rule of Francesco II, requested a truce; their final surrender took place on 6 June. But luck had also played a large role in Garibaldi’s success in Sicily. With the death of Ferdinando II and the accession of the meek twenty-three-year-old Francesco II to the throne in 1859, Bourbon rule was in crisis. Essentially, by the time that Garibaldi had arrived in Sicily, the government had already been substantially weakened. With the total collapse of the state in the spring of 1860, the general adroitly filled this political vacuum by assuming the role of dictator of Sicily.22 In Palermo, Garibaldi and his soldiers became quite the rage. Everyone was wearing red shirts, red skirts, red feathers, and red ribbons in support of the new
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Figure 3.3. ‘Reception of the first news from Garibaldi’s landing in Sicily. View in front of the Royal Exchange, at Genoa. From a sketch by our own artist, Th. Nast, Esq., now at Palermo’, New-York Illustrated News 2:36 (14 July 1860): 148
regime.23 In fact, it was here in Palermo that Nast secured the red shirt, trousers, and Garibaldino cap that he wore in the photograph taken on his birthday in Naples.24 The French author Alexandre Dumas the elder, who brought needed supplies to Garibaldi’s forces on his yacht, the Emma, remarked that ‘red has become a fashionable colour’. Despite the destruction of much of the city during the brutal siege, Dumas recorded the Garibaldi mania taking place in the Sicilian capital: ‘All the streets and public places of Palermo give one the impression of being in a vast field of poppies.’25 Having won the hearts and minds of the Palermitani, Garibaldi took up residence in the Palazzo Reale, the historic home of the Bourbon dynasty and symbolic centre of political power on the island.26 Nast was in Genoa when the city first received news of the spectacular events in Sicily, and he hoped to deliver ‘very vivid and life-like pictures of the whole [Italian] affair’ to his readers at home.27 Indeed, Nast’s images were vibrant and captivating: highly detailed in their renderings of facial features, unique dress, and local architectural sites. One of the earliest images that he produced, ‘Reception of the first news from Garibaldi’s landing in Sicily’, was published in New York on 14 July (Figure 3.3). It shows a street scene in Genoa with a mostly male population (one woman stands with her back to us); they read broadsides and discuss the current news, which, at times, was confusing and somewhat unreliable. Men from all classes, including civilians and soldiers, clergy and laity, assemble before the Royal Exchange. A newsboy stands at the centre of the image – a symbol of the new liberalism and freedom of
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Thomas Nast and Giuseppe Garibaldi the press enjoyed by the Genoese population; his posture is echoed by the adult male behind him, reinforcing the importance of the press to a free people. In general, the American pictorial presses were proud supporters of the Italian cause. For example, the New-York Illustrated News opined the following week: ‘Sicily shall be free! God and Garibaldi for Sicily!’28 In secret, Nast set sail for Sicily on 9 June, writing to his future wife, Sarah [Sallie] Edwards, ‘You must not say a word about me going to Sicily.’ He confided to her his fears and his hopes, even preparing her for the worst outcome of war: ‘If I should not come back, may God Bless my dear Sallie.’ At the same time, he made clear his ambitions as a war correspondent: ‘My name is now in public and I will do justice to it (that is to say if I can.)’29 He travelled to Sicily with the second military expedition of 2,500 well-armed men under the command of Colonel Giacomo Medici; they reached the island safely on 14 June. The following day, he marched to Palermo with a contingent of troops led by Captain John W. Peard, an Englishman who had fought with Garibaldi in Rome.30 It was a gruelling overland trek. Upon their arrival in Palermo on 19 June, he first witnessed the horrors of war, as whole districts of the city were in complete ruination.31 He wrote home to Sallie: ‘I am in Sicily, but am very safe. … [having] gone through a great deal of danger.’ Recognising the seriousness of his mission – and his ambition – he also wrote that ‘I have come here to make a name.’32 In Palermo, the volunteers were greeted with celebration and music, welcomed into the city ‘under a rain of flowers’, as one Garibaldino exclaimed.33 Nast produced several sketches of this event. The final published image, ‘The revolution in Sicily – Reception of Colonel Medici’s volunteers by Garibaldi and his staff, at Palermo – From a sketch taken on the spot, by our artist, Thomas Nast, Esq., now at Palermo’, appeared in the New-York Illustrated News on 28 July 1860 (Figure 3.4). Surrounded by his officers, Garibaldi rides on to the scene from the far right, doffing his hat at the crowd of volunteers, all of whom hold their swords and rifles in the air to hail their commander. Even the little boys wave their arms in support. Garibaldi is erect upon his statuesque horse in total command of the scene, his authoritative posture bearing witness to his new political power in Sicily. In the crowd in the lower right-hand corner of the image, a woman, her back to the viewer, and a tonsured monk appear. Dressed in a simple hooded cloak redolent of Giotto, the woman bows down on her knees before Garibaldi’s horse with hands raised in adoration, reminiscent of the respect paid to Christ upon his entry into Jerusalem.34 Next to her stands the monk, a reference to the radicalised clergy who fought with Garibaldi and encouraged the Palermitani to revolt against despotic Bourbon rule. Garibaldi presented himself in Sicily as a popular saviour and liberator, an image that Nast was eager to share with his British and American audiences. However, the image elided the marked increase in violence and popular disorder that was also mounting on the island.35 Nonetheless, a cult of Garibaldi was born in Sicily, creating a type of civil religion that focused upon Italian unification. Throughout Palermo, for example, festivals encouraged a sense of national identity, fostered an emotional attachment to the new regime, and Italianised the public spaces, previously subordinated to Bourbon royal
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Figure 3.4. ‘The revolution in Sicily – Reception of Colonel Medici’s volunteers by Garibaldi and his staff, at Palermo. From a sketch taken on the spot, by our artist, Thomas Nast, Esq., now at Palermo’, New-York Illustrated News 2:38 (28 July 1860): 184
power. To be sure, social problems were brewing, especially in the countryside, but in Palermo and other urban centres, most of the ‘common people’, one British observer noted, ‘worship[ped] Garibaldi as a mythical hero’, a type of secular divinity made real through media images distributed throughout the world.36 Garibaldi was acutely aware of the importance of publicity for his military campaign and for the broader Italian cause. The invasion of Sicily had not been officially sanctioned by King Victor Emmanuel II nor approved by Prime Minister Cavour. However, from the very start, in an attempt to legitimise his expedition in the eyes of monarchists, Garibaldi had dedicated his mission to the king. In fact, the official slogan of the Thousand was ‘Italia e Vittorio Emanuele’, identifying Italian nationalism with the monarch. He knew that the world was watching and waiting to see the outcome of this conflict. In fact, in early June, The New York Times took a rather ambivalent position on the Italian question, unsure whether Garibaldi should be considered ‘a hero or a brigand’. To help burnish his reputation, Garibaldi, using his personal charm and charisma, invited European and American reporters to join his campaign shortly after arriving in Palermo. The press had become an integral component of modern warfare.37 In the summer of 1860, Palermo and Naples became the centre of global press attention. Writing on 8 June 1860, the Times (London) reported that the Italian campaign was ‘being fought out under the eyes of newspaper correspondents, tourists, artists, and English and American sympathisers, as well as … more official spectators’.
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Thomas Nast and Giuseppe Garibaldi Both The New York Times and the New York Herald had correspondents in Sicily for brief periods of time. Henry Adams, writing for the Boston Courier, spent three days in Palermo from 7 June to 10 June. The Illustrated London News had two artist/reporters embedded with Garibaldi: Nast and the renowned illustrator Frank Vizitelly.38 Nast, representing both the London and New York pictorial weeklies, served as an important cog in this publicity machine. In late August, Garibaldi crossed the Straits of Messina with his troops and landed in Calabria.39 Nast accompanied the general as he travelled north to Naples. Writing from Monteleone on 28 August, he complained, ‘I have not time to write, General Garibaldi makes me work hard to keep up with him, he travels all day and half the night, so I have not time to do my things.’40 Indeed, Garibaldi’s entire entourage of international reporters struggled to keep up with his charging forces. On 7 September, the general arrived in Naples by train and was met with thousands of waving supporters, shouting ‘Viva Garibaldi! Viva Vittorio Emmanuele! Viva Italia!’41 Nast arrived the following day, describing the scene as one that ‘I shall never forget’.42 Garibaldi knew his optics well, and invited Nast to accompany him to the Shrine of the Virgin in Piedigrotta, just outside the city. Co-opting an age-old royal ritual, he personally attended the festival, established in 1774 by Carlo III to commemorate the expulsion of the Austrians by the Spaniards. As Garibaldi approached the shrine, the National Guard ceremoniously lined the streets under arms.43 One eyewitness reported that ‘Garibaldi is a saint for the common people … It is God who has sent him to save the country.’44 In September and October 1860, Nast covered the Battle of the Volturno, a series of fierce military clashes that took place between Garibaldi’s volunteers and royal troops northwest of Naples. They were among the most ferocious of the Southern campaign. On 1 October, Nast was positioned in the little village of Sant’Angelo near Capua, the Bourbon military centre of operations, where he witnessed a battle that raged for ten hours. King Francesco II and his forces vastly outnumbered the volunteers, 50,000 to 20,000.45 Nast climbed a hill in the nearby village of Santa Maria whence he gained a panoramic view of the fighting. He made several sketches on the spot, but when the battle ceased, his work really began. He returned to Naples each evening and spent hours producing follow-up detailed drawings that he would send to New York and London.46 The battery along the road from Capua to Sant’Angelo was where one of the most gruesome incidents of the war took place, an event that Nast recorded from eye-witness accounts. Verbal reports described a terrible scene: ‘Near one of the batteries which had been taken and retaken several times during the course of the day the Neapolitans, when in possession of it, piled up the [Garibaldian] dead and wounded; and if a poor fellow had strength to crawl out he was pushed back by the Neapolitan bayonets.’47 Nast produced a quickly executed drawing, dated 6 October 1860 (Figure 3.5). The final engraving published in the New-York Illustrated News on 17 November 1860 rendered the drawing with great fidelity. In the image, Neapolitan troops stand before a mass of dead and dying Garibaldians, smoke rising from the pile of flesh. To the left, one soldier holds a torch aloft, after having set the
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Figure 3.5. ‘Sketch of the battery which the Neapolitans took from the Garibaldini, and at this place, they burned the Garibaldians wounded and dead on Monday, October 1st. The Garibaldians took it again during the day, and have now. Thomas Nast, Oct. 6, 1860’, from the collection of Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, Morristown, NJ
bodies on fire; another bayonets a wounded Garibaldino, who attempts to escape his miserable demise. To the right, several more soldiers patrol the pile of bodies, one pointing a revolver at a wounded soldier attempting to crawl from the funeral pyre. The scene is ghastly, yet carefully rendered: the royal military is depicted with precision, from its uniforms to its weapons; two Garibaldini appear in excruciating detail as they meet their fate at the tips of the Neapolitan bayonets.48 No other image from Italy depicts the horrors of war as powerfully as this one, capturing the ‘desperate valor’ of those fighting for the nationalist cause.49 Although Nast did not witness this particular scene first-hand, such memories of war atrocities would haunt his imagination and inform his future career as an artist-reporter of the American Civil War. Nast documented another dramatic moment of the war on 19 October 1860. In the drawing, ‘Porte avancé devant Capoue’, he captures Garibaldi seated with his telescope at rest and gazing relentlessly towards Capua, the domes of the city visible in the distance, where his forces had suffered massive losses in recent days (Figure 3.6). At this moment, the general is attentive to the presence of the newly arrived British Legion, otherwise called ‘Garibaldi’s Excursionists’.50 Draped in a long cape which augments his girth, he dominates the scene. His two lead generals stand behind him; his soldiers surround him. In performing his last military act of the Southern campaign, Garibaldi is endowed with great dignity, enthroned Zeus-like upon
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Thomas Nast and Giuseppe Garibaldi
Figure 3.6. ‘Porte avancé devant Capoue, Thomas Nast, 1860’, from the collection of Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, Morristown, NJ
this mountain top with his troops mustering below. A man of action, he commands the scene with purposefulness. Nast identifies with precision the geographical terrain, the individual actors, and the military landmarks, presenting the most accurate record of the event possible. The engraved image appeared not only in the New-York Illustrated News51 and its German-language edition, but also in The Illustrated London News and Le Monde Illustré. Such depictions of Garibaldi, with their widespread circulation throughout Europe and the United States, would help embed his heroic persona within the public memory of many Western democracies, in particular in the divided house of the American republic, where he emblematised the dramatic struggle for unity occurring in both the United States and Italy. Garibaldi ended his military mission in the south of Italy on 26 October, when King Victor Emmanuel met him at Teano in northern Campania and took command of the troops. The transfer of power went smoothly, despite fears that Garibaldi’s popularity would eclipse the King’s leadership. Adding to his mystique as Cincinnatus, or the Washington of Italy, Garibaldi departed Naples on 9 November without ceremony, relinquishing his military power for a seemingly quiet agrarian life on the island of Caprera, near Sardinia. In reality, this international freedom fighter kept in close contact with events on the mainland, as a cadre of writers and journalists covered his every move on the island. Even in retirement, the ‘press-led Garibaldi mania’, as the historian Lucy Riall has called it, continued.52 On 3 November, Nast watched as the Bourbon troops surrendered to the King, writing that the Neapolitans sent a flag of truce and surrendered ‘to us’.53 After
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Hybrid republicanisms covering Garibaldi’s last days in Naples, where the general bade goodbye to his friends and followers and distributed medals to his soldiers, both fallen and alive, Nast wrote to Sallie on 12 November, ‘I am sick of Naples, nothing pleases me, nothing seems right, everything seems to make me miserable. As soon as the King makes his state entrance to Naples, I leave for Rome, a change of this kind may do me good.’54 The artist departed Naples on 30 November, after covering King Victor Emmanuel’s military exploits in Capua and his triumphal entry into Naples. He eventually returned to the United States on 1 February 1861, after travelling to Germany and England.55 Not surprisingly, the young reporter was exhausted from his wartime ordeal. Although not a combatant, he was embedded with the troops and witnessed the horrors of war first-hand. It must be remembered that direct war coverage such as Nast experienced was a new phenomenon, first reported in The Illustrated London News during the Crimean War in the mid 1850s.56 Nast, as a young man of twenty, was perhaps the first American artist/correspondent to witness battle first-hand. As a cub reporter for the New-York Illustrated News, Nast had covered momentous historical events in the United States and Italy, including the burial of John Brown as well as Garibaldi’s Southern campaign.57 Well prepared for his next important assignment, he accompanied President-elect Abraham Lincoln to Washington, D.C. to document his first inaugural.58 Within a few months, he would be reporting on the American Civil War for the New-York Illustrated News, The Illustrated London News, and Harper’s Weekly.59 By 1862, he was working solely for Harper’s, where he was the only artist with war-correspondence experience, though he did little battle-front work himself, making only occasional trips to the war zone.60 He knew what battle looked like, how soldiers fought in the field – in short, what death and dying entailed. Working from the safe confines of his studio in New York, he often invented battle scenes, rather than sketching them directly as he had done in Italy. Nonetheless, due to his recent war-time experience, he created enduring imagery of America’s internecine strife with passion and commitment.61 Throughout his long and notable career as a special artist/correspondent and political cartoonist, Nast never forgot his days in Italy. He created a moving memorial to Garibaldi for Harper’s Weekly shortly after the Italian’s death in 1882,62 and painted a large-scale portrait of the general in 1900 from sketches that he had made in Italy nearly a half century earlier.63 With both images, Nast continued his quest to immortalise the iconic figure of Garibaldi, a romantic hero who haunted the American imagination throughout the long nineteenth century. Notes 1 L. Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 241. I Mille, or The Thousand, were just a fraction of the soldiers who fought with Garibaldi in the South; the estimate of those joining the campaign is up to 21,000. 2 Thomas Nast to Sarah Edwards, Naples, 8 October 1860, HM27746, Thomas Nast Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (hereafter TNP). 3 L. Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy: Liberal Policy and Local Power, 1859–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 2; Riall, Garibaldi, p. 221. Nast made sketches of the election, as well as other scenes related to the Southern campaign. Thomas Nast’s Italian Sketchbook, Macculloch
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Thomas Nast and Giuseppe Garibaldi Hall Historical Museum, Morristown, NJ. For further discussion of American involvement in the Italian Risorgimento, see D. Fiorentino and M. Sanfilippo (eds), Gli Stati Uniti e l’unità d’Italia (Roma: Gangemi Editore, 2004). 4 M. Schwagman, ‘In love with Garibaldi: romancing the Italian Risorgimento’, European Review of History 12:2 ( July 2005): 384. 5 Quoted in H. Marraro, American Opinion on the Unification of Italy, 1846–1861 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 287. 6 J. Fagg, M. Pethers, and R. Vandome, ‘Introduction: networks and the nineteenth-century periodical’, American Periodical 23: 2 (2013): 97. 7 Riall, Garibaldi, pp. 95, 221, 276; D. Fiorentino, Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia 1848– 1901 (Roma: Gangemi Editore, 2013), p. 158. 8 ‘Honorable Abraham Lincoln, Born in Kentucky, February 12, 1809’, Harper’s Weekly (10 November 1860). Engraved by Winslow Homer, this image was based on the Cooper Union portrait photograph by Mathew Brady of 1860. D. Tathan, Winslow Homer and the Pictorial Press (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), p. 96. 9 D. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 17–25. 10 For a detailed discussion of the political concerns shared by both countries, see Doyle, The Cause of All Nations and Fiorentino, Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia 1848–1901. 11 Pagliano had fought alongside Garibaldi in Rome in 1849 and in Lombardy a decade later. Tathan, Winslow Homer and the Pictorial Press, p. 97. 12 ‘Guiseppe [sic] Garibaldi’, Harper’s Weekly 4:203 (17 November 1860): 722. 13 For an exhaustive visual study of the Garibaldi myth in Italian culture, see F. Mazzocca and A. Villari, Garibaldi il mito: da Lega a Guttuso (Genova: Palazzo Ducale, 2007). 14 Tatham, Winslow Homer and the Pictorial Press, pp. 20–3, quote p. 18; J. Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), p. 49. 15 Tatham, Winslow Homer and the Pictorial Press, pp. 13–5, 23; F. D. Halloran, Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), pp. 24–6; J. Eger, ‘Thomas Nast and the New York Illustrated News, part III, Thomas Nast in Italy with Garibaldi’, Journal of the Thomas Nast Society 12:1 (1998): 66. 16 Brown, Beyond the Lines, p. 27; Halloran, Thomas Nast, p. 25; A. B. Paine, Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures (New York: Macmillan Company, 1904), pp. 17–24. 17 Paine, Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures, p. 34; Halloran, Thomas Nast, pp. 48–50; Tatham, Homer and the Pictorial Press, p. 40. 18 Paine, Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures, p. 5; Halloran, Thomas Nast, p. 50. 19 Riall, Garibaldi, pp. 2, 106, 110. 20 A. Boime, ‘Thomas Nast and French art’, American Art Journal 4:1 (Spring 1972): 43–5. Nast also attended the National Academy of Design, where he received a rigorous academic training. 21 Halloran, Thomas Nast, p. 50. 22 G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Thousand (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910), p. 323; Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy, p. 71; Riall, Garibaldi, pp. 211–12. 23 Riall, Garibaldi, p. 291. For red shirts, see p. 184. 24 Paine, Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures, p. 51. 25 A. Dumas, On Board the Emma: Adventures with Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand’ in Sicily, translated and introduced by R. S. Garnett (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1929), p. 309. 26 Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Thousand, p. 326. Garibaldi lived in the Torre Pisano, which housed a famous observatory and allowed spectacular views of the city. 27 ‘Original sketches of scenes in Sicily during the present war’, New-York Illustrated News 2:34 (30 June 1860): 115. 28 ‘Garibaldi’s volunteers parting with their friends at Genoa’, New-York Illustrated News 2:87 (21 July 1860): 171. 29 Thomas Nast to Sarah Edwards, Genoa, 2 June 1860, HM 27734, TNP.
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Hybrid republicanisms 30 Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Thousand, p. 325. Nast spent most of his time in Italy with the English volunteers, covering with special attention their battles throughout the campaign. Thomas Nast to William Luson Thomas, Cagliari, Sardinia, 13 June 1860, HM27738, TNP. 31 Paine, Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures, p. 51. The French photographer Gustave Le Gray took photographs of the devastation in Palermo. E. P. Janis, The Photography of Gustave Le Gray (Chicago, IL: Art Institute of Chicago and University of Chicago Press, 1987). 32 Thomas Nast to Sarah Edwards, Palermo, 22 June 1860, HM 27739, TNP. 33 G. C. Abba, The Diary of One of Garibaldi’s Thousand. Translated and introduced by E. R. Vincent (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 92. 34 Italian artists also used sacred models when depicting Garibaldi and scenes from the Risorgimento, as, for example, Antonio Licata, L’Entrata di Garibaldi a Napoli, 1860, Museo Nazionale di San Martino, Napoli. See Mazzocca and Villari, Garibaldi il mito, pp. 174–5. 35 Disturbances in the countryside increased largely in reaction to the inadequacy of land reforms that pitted the landed gentry against the needs of the peasantry. Riall, Garibaldi, p. 281; Riall, Sicily and Unification, pp. 75, 87, 93. 36 Riall, Garibaldi, pp. 229–37; quote from Riall, Sicily and Unification, p. 87. 37 Riall, Garibaldi, pp. 239, 253–4, quote p. 248; Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy, p. 79. 38 Quoted in Riall, Garibaldi, p. 253. See also Fiorentino, Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia 1848– 1901, pp. 151, 158; Marraro, American Opinion on the Unification of Italy, p. 282; Henry Adams, ‘Henry Adams and Garibaldi, 1860’, American Historical Review 25:2 ( January 1920): 241; and Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: The Modern Library, 1931), pp. 94–5. 39 Riall, Garibaldi, p. 144. 40 Thomas Nast to William Luson Thomas, Naples, 8 September 1860, HM 27742, TNP. W. L. Thomas (1830–1900) was an English engraver who worked for The Illustrated London News. A social reformer, he collaborated with Nast when reproducing his images from Italy. 41 Paine, Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures, pp. 59–60. 42 Thomas Nast to William Luson Thomas, Naples, 8 September 1860, HM 27743, TNP. 43 New-York Illustrated News 2:51 (27 October 1860): 397. Nast documented the scene on pp. 392– 3: ‘The Italian Revolution – Garibaldi at the Shrine of the Virgin of Piedegrotta, at Naples. From a Sketch by Thos. Nast, Esq.’. 44 Quoted in Riall, Garibaldi, pp. 230–1. 45 ‘The battle of Volturno’, New-York Illustrated News 2:53 (17 November 1860): 45; Abba, The Diary of One of Garibaldi’s Thousand, p. 144; G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy, June–November, 1860 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), pp. 197–8. 46 Paine, Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures, pp. 61–2; Brown, Beyond the Lines, p. 54. 47 ‘The battle of Volturno’, p. 45. See also ‘Incidents of the Battle of Volturno. Burning of the Dead and Wounded. From a Sketch by Th. Nast, Our Special Artist, Now Attached to Garibaldi’s Staff ’, p. 20. 48 Known for its more sensational imagery, the New-York Illustrated News published grisly views of the war carnage on a regular basis. The Illustrated London News, on the other hand, printed a different version of Nast’s drawing. The British publication attracted a respectable, middle-class audience, whose taste was more genteel. ‘Battery where the Neapolitans burnt the wounded Garibaldians’, which appeared on 20 October 1860, was coupled with the engraving ‘Fight in the field near Sant’Angelo’. Both lacked the immediacy and emotional charge of the illustrations published in New York. Distracting the viewer’s attention by a myriad of ancillary figures populating the scene, the British image does not focus on the horror of the wounded soldiers in the pyre. Only one Garibaldino, who appears dead, is carried towards the inferno. Both representations present a much more decorous version of war. 49 ‘The revolution in Italy’, New-York Illustrated News 2:54 (24 November 1860): 44. 50 Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy, p. 260; Riall, Garibaldi, pp. 297, 301. 51 ‘The Italian revolution: Garibaldi at the advanced posts before the fortress of Capua’, New-York Illustrated News 2:54 (24 November 1860): 20. 52 Riall, Garibaldi, p. 224, quote p. 251. 53 Thomas Nast to William Luson Thomas, Naples, 3 November 1860, HM27749, TNP.
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Thomas Nast and Giuseppe Garibaldi 54 Thomas Nast to Sarah Edwards, Naples, 12 November 1860, HM27747, TNP; Paine, Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures, p. 63. 55 Nast embarked from Liverpool to New York on 19 January 1861. Halloran, Thomas Nast, p. 306, n. 43. 56 J. E. Brown, ‘Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper: The Pictorial Press and the Representation of America, 1855–1889’, PhD diss., Columbia University, New York, 1993, p. 26. The Crimean War was fought between 1853 and 1856. For a discussion of an earlier set of war photographs by Stefano Lecchi documenting the Siege of Rome in 1849, see Chapter 2, this volume. 57 Nast’s drawings of the execution and burial of John Brown were published in the New-York Illustrated News on 10 and 24 December 1859. 58 ‘We have much pleasure in acquainting our friends and patrons, and the public generally, that we have made arrangements with our well-known and popular artist, Mr. Nast, for his attendance on the Presidential journey to the Capital … [He will] gratify the public curiosity with faithful pictorial representations of every note-worthy event in this most remarkable epoch in our country and history.’ New-York Illustrated News 3:68 (23 February 1861): 242. 59 Paine, Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures, pp. 81–2; P. Hills, ‘Cultural Racism: Resistance and Accommodation in the Civil War Art of Eastman Johnson and Thomas Nast’, in P. Johnston (ed.), Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006): 107. Nast’s images of the American Civil War were published in The Illustrated London News between 23 March and 22 June 1861. See also D. Hill, unpublished manuscript on Thomas Nast, Billie Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. 60 Brown, Beyond the Lines, p. 53. 61 Paine, Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures, pp. 81–9. 62 Thomas Nast, ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi: died at Caprera, June 2, 1882’, Harper’s Weekly 17 ( June 1882): 300. 63 Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. My thanks to Roberto C. Ferrari, Curator of Art Properties for generously allowing me to view, study, and photograph this work.
Selected bibliography Abba, Giuseppe Cesare. The Diary of One of Garibaldi’s Thousand. Translated by E. R. Vincent. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Brown, J. Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America. Berkeley, CA: University of Californian Press, 2002. Doyle, D. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 2015. Dumas, Alexandre. On Board the Emma: Adventures with Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand’ in Sicily. Translated and introduced by R. S. Garnett. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1929 Eger, J. ‘Thomas Nast and the New York Illustrated News, part III, Thomas Nast in Italy with Garibaldi’. Journal of the Thomas Nast Society 12:1 (1998): 66–111. Fiorentino, D. Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia 1848–1901. Roma: Gangemi Editore, 2013. Fiorentino D. and M. Sanfilippo (eds). Gli Stati Uniti e l’unità d’Italia. Roma: Gangemi Editore, 2004. Halloran, F. D. Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Marraro, H. American Opinion on the Unification of Italy, 1846–1861. New York: Columbia University Press, 1932. Mazzocca, A. and A. Villari. Garibaldi il mito: da Lega a Guttuso. Genova: Palazzo Ducale, 2007. New-York Illustrated News. Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. Paine, A. B. Thomas Nast, His Period and His Pictures. New York: Macmillan Company, 1904.
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Riall, L. Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. _____. Sicily and the Unification of Italy: Liberal Policy and Local Power, 1859–1866. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Tatham, D. Winslow Homer and the Pictorial Press. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Thomas Nast Collection at Macculloch Hall Historical Museum, Morristown, NJ. Thomas Nast Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. Trevelyan, G. M. Garibaldi and the Thousand. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910.
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4
Monuments to tyranny: issues of race and power in nineteenth-century American responses to early modern Italian public sculpture Paul H. D. Kaplan
A great many of the most highly charged works of mid-nineteenth century American sculpture were produced in Italy, and thanks to recent scholarship we are increasingly cognisant of the impact of the Italian environment upon their form and content.1 That environment has sometimes been divided into two rather separate halves: the art of the past on the one hand, and the social and political conditions of the contemporary moment on the other. Nineteenth-century American travellers often stressed that separation, admiring the masterworks of antiquity or the Renaissance while bemoaning the present poverty and corruption of society and institutions on the Italian peninsula. This chapter will emphasise how several monuments from the early modern era – in particular the ‘Quattro Mori’ bronzes in Livorno (1626) (Figures 4.1 and 4.2) and the Black African telamones (figural supports) of the Pesaro monument in Venice (1669) (Figures 4.3 and 4.4) – were read by American writers and artists in the light of contemporary political anxieties around race, slavery, and abolition. The most fraught and thus most revealing era for these interactions runs from the 1840s into Reconstruction, but a few telling responses from well after 1876 will also be considered. Before turning to the impact of these works in Livorno and Venice, two other American encounters with Old World (but not Italian) triumphalist public sculpture should be examined, due to their association with issues of race. The colonial period in North America seems to have witnessed the erection of only a handful of such monuments, and the unfortunate fate of the largest of these, a massive 1770 equestrian portrait of King George III by the English sculptor Joseph Wilson, may have precipitated a long-standing sensitivity to this sort of artwork once the American republic was formed.2 Wilson, who had trained for seven years in Florence and Rome, had been commissioned by the New York colonial legislature to produce this cast work in lead covered in gold leaf for installation on Bowling Green, in lower Manhattan, but the sculpture remained in place for only six years. On 9 July 1776 – the day of the Declaration of Independence’s first reading in New York City – the monument was pulled down and broken up by a revolutionary mob. The approving
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Figure 4.1. Pietro Tacca, The Monument of the four moors (‘Quattro Mori’), 1626, bronze, Piazza Micheli, Livorno
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Monuments to tyranny
Figure 4.2. Pietro Tacca, The Monument of the four moors (‘Quattro Mori’), detail of ‘Morgiano’, 1626
Pennsylvania Gazette judged this desecration the ‘just desert of an ungrateful tyrant!’.3 Though we do not know the individual identities of those who destroyed the statue, people of colour (like Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre in 1770) had a place among the urban rebellious masses, and a tinted pro-British engraving of the statue’s destruction (by Franz Xavier Habermann) depicts African Americans among those manning the ropes which toppled the monument.4 A very different association with people of colour was prompted by another triumphalist project dedicated to a British leader. When Herman Melville first landed in England as a young merchant seaman in 1839, he was deeply affected by an elaborate bronze and marble memorial to Admiral Horatio Nelson which graced one of the squares of the thriving port city of Liverpool. Designed by Matthew Cotes Wyatt and executed by Richard Westmacott, it had been installed in 1813.5 Four despairing, manacled, nude male captives are seated around the base of the work, and are juxtaposed with reliefs of four of Nelson’s naval victories, including
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Figure 4.3. Baldassare Longhena, Juste Le Court, and Melchior Barthel, Monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro, 1669, marble and bronze, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice
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Monuments to tyranny
Figure 4.4. Melchior Barthel, Monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro, 1669, detail of African
that of the Nile. One of the chief promoters of the monument was William Roscoe (1753–1831), perhaps the most influential cultural leader in Liverpool. Though Roscoe flourished in a port city that had until recently made vast sums in the slave trade and its material products, he was an unusually bold proponent of the abolition of African slavery and its international commerce. However, the captives on the monument, though of dark bronze, show no sign of non-European features, and are largely indebted to Michelangelo in their physiques. Nevertheless, the young Melville, at least as he recorded his reaction in his semi-autobiographical novel Redburn of 1849, could not avoid thinking of American slavery: These woe-begone figures of captives are emblematic of Nelson’s principal victories; but I never could look at their swarthy limbs and manacles, without being involuntarily reminded of four African slaves in the market-place. And my thoughts would revert to Virginia and Carolina; and also to the historical fact, that the African slave-trade once constituted the principal commerce of Liverpool; and that the prosperity of the town was once supposed to have been indissolubly linked to its prosecution. And I remembered that my father had often spoken to gentlemen visiting our house in New York, of the unhappiness that the discussion of the abolition of this trade had occasioned in Liverpool; that the struggle between sordid interest and humanity had made sad havoc at the fire-sides of the merchants; estranged sons from sires; and even separated husband from wife. And my thoughts reverted to my father’s friend, the good and great Roscoe, the intrepid enemy of the trade; who in every way exerted his fine talents toward its suppression; writing a poem (‘the Wrongs of Africa’), several pamphlets; and in his place in Parliament, he delivered a speech against it, which, as coming from a member from Liverpool, was supposed to have turned many votes, and no small share in the triumph of sound policy and humanity that ensued.6
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Hybrid republicanisms It is especially striking that no other early published description or critique of the monument linked the captives to the reality of contemporary slavery. While the bodies of the Liverpool captives themselves evoke Michelangelo, their positioning and their chains, at the feet of a great naval commander, are above all reminiscent of a much earlier monument in another European maritime city inextricably linked to slavery: Livorno. Livorno (or Leghorn, as the British called it) had essentially been founded in the late sixteenth century by the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany as a free port and as a naval base. From the first there was something paradoxical about Livorno’s identity: as a free port it welcomed traders of many nationalities and beliefs, including Jews and Muslims, but its naval force was directed primarily at the suppression of piracy by Muslim North Africans (the so-called Barbary pirates). These captured pirates and other North Africans were enslaved in significant numbers in the city. Livorno’s greatest public sculpture and best-known artistic monument, usually known as the ‘Quattro Mori’ (‘Four Moors’), emphasised the martial rather than the commercial aspect of the city’s profile, even as it presided over the very docks where trading vessels abounded.7 The monument began as a statue (by Giovanni Bandini) of Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici in the 1590s, but during the first decade of the 1600s the ambitious Tuscan sculptor Pietro Tacca (who had been trained by Giambologna) was charged with executing a group of four bronze figures around its base (Figure 4.1).8 The point of Tacca’s four chained and despairing figures was to emphasise Ferdinando’s suppression of ‘infidel’ piracy, and more generally to assert the dominance of a Christian ruler over Muslims. That dominance was embodied not only by the bronze statues but more directly by the presence of many captive Muslim galley slaves in Livorno itself, where they stayed in a kind of prison-hostel (with a mosque!) when not at sea. Two recent essays, by Mark Rosen and Steven Ostrow, have richly explored this part of the work’s content, including Tacca’s use of at least two men who were galley slaves (Ali and Morgiano) as models.9 The enslaved population of Livorno at the beginning of the seventeenth century was substantial, at 8 per cent of the total. Many ethnicities were represented in this enslaved population, but Africans constituted about 30 per cent, of which roughly half were of sub-Saharan ancestry. There is a strong likelihood that the model Morgiano’s facial features are those of the one bronze figure (Figure 4.2) who is unmistakably a Black African in physiognomic type – tightly curled hair, full lips, and broad nose. The other three instead exhibit traits of North Africans and Ottoman Turks, as they were then understood by Europeans, with more projecting noses, moustaches, and topknots. The term mori (or Moors) is a complicated one, sometimes denoting North African Muslims or even all Muslims, but also signifying peoples of sub-Saharan African descent and of any religion. Tacca’s four figures of clearly varying ethnicity sum up the ambiguity of this word.10 Livorno remained the principal Tuscan port, and Tacca’s figures were by far the best-known works of art in a city not otherwise distinguished by cultural attractions. There was an important English community there – they had their own
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cemetery by the mid-seventeenth century – and there is no doubt that the base of the 1813 Liverpool Nelson monument took inspiration from Tacca’s work.11 But fourteen years earlier, the ‘Quattro Mori’ had had a brush with severe revision if not destruction. In March 1799 the Grand Duchy of Tuscany fell under French control, and in April the commander in Livorno, General Sextius Miollis, proposed – in a revolutionary spirit – to pull down the statue of Ferdinando and to free the slaves from their chains: A single monument exists in Livorno and it is a monument to tyranny which insults humanity: four unfortunate men a hundred times braver than the ferocious Ferdinand who, chained, crowd around his pedestal, having provided for three hundred years the most revolting view as soon as one arrives in the port. Accents of pain, indignation, hatred and contempt must agitate every sensitive soul who approaches it. Let us avenge the injury to humanity. Let us then, citizens, order that the statue of Liberty be substituted for this monster [Ferdinand], and let Liberty with one hand break with a mason’s square the chains of these four slaves while her other hand wields a pike to smash the head of the overthrown, prostrate Ferdinand.12
This remarkable proposal is well known to scholars, who have pointed out that it is modelled on the 1790 statement of the revolutionary Alexandre de Lameth (a relative of a close friend of Miollis), which argued that French monuments celebrating slavery should be destroyed; indeed, a few years later in Paris one such work was demolished and another disassembled.13 But what has never been mentioned is that Miollis’s character – and consequently his reaction to Tacca’s ‘Moors’ – must also have been significantly shaped by his extensive experience fighting alongside the rebellious American colonists in 1780–81. He would have noted the presence of Black troops among the American forces north of New York City, and during his participation in the Yorktown campaign in Tidewater Virginia he would have been much exposed to slavery.14 Lafayette, the leader of the French forces, explicitly rejected the enslavement of African Americans as a result of this experience, and it is likely that Miollis’s fury at the ‘Quattro Mori’ was reinforced by his American interlude.15 The alterations demanded by Miollis, however, mostly failed to take place, and the full monument was quickly restored after the departure of French troops a few months later. Livorno continued to be the most important hub of shipping on the west coast of central Italy. It is a piquant coincidence that Tacca’s chained figures observed, so to speak, the passage through the city of two of the most celebrated works of American sculpture produced in Italy: Hiram Powers’s Greek slave (in 1845) and Thomas Crawford’s Freedom (in 1858). Powers frequently visited Livorno, and in 1849 he travelled to the American consulate there to apply for a patent on replicas of the Greek slave – asserting further ownership of an already captive subject.16 He could hardly have failed to study Tacca’s work, with its prominent chains, and despite the many differences (medium, gender, pose, and affect) between his creation and Tacca’s, we may suspect it had a conceptual impact on him. For even those visitors to Livorno who approved of the duke’s mastery over his captives tended to admire the
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Hybrid republicanisms pathos of the slave figures. As for Crawford’s Freedom (intended for the dome of the US Capitol), it had already been the subject of a heated transatlantic dispute, in which Crawford’s plan to include a liberty cap – the ancient marker of a manumitted slave – was rejected by Jefferson Davis as an impermissible reference to slavery. In a further turn, when this work was finally cast, in 1862, an enslaved craftsman famously played a vital role.17 To return to Tacca’s creations: some echo of Miollis’s outrage about them can be found in the Scots cleric Thomas Henry White’s 1845 A Pilgrim’s Reliquary, where the work is characterised both as ‘magnificent’ and ‘the most pitiless production of Sculpture’. The pompously haughty ruler is mocked, but White expresses pity for the ‘four naked fellow-creatures, chained and writhing in the most abject postures of Captivity’. ‘It is enough that people triumph, it is enough that people suffer, but let the triumph and the suffering be at least transitory here.’18 Josephine Eppes, the Philadelphia-raised wife of a Virginia slaveholder, expressed a similar sympathy with the pain of the figures, in a private, unpublished reaction to them in 1851: ‘four slaves chained at the corners of the pedestal, writhing with their hands fettered behind them, and faces expressing so much despair and mental suffering as inimitable’.19 Likewise, Julia S. Hawkes of Springfield, Massachusetts, in a wonderfully strange 1844 textbook for teachers of French that is entirely composed of discourses on Italy, lamented that ‘the expression of so much anguish will haunt my imagination for many days to come’.20 But most mid-century Americans, and especially those from the South, were less disturbed by the public commemoration of slavery, even though in the antebellum US public monuments were generally purged of any reference to African Americans and their enslavement. (Karen Lemmey has documented the mostly unsuccessful attempts of the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown to challenge this taboo.21) In 1861 the future Confederate Governor of Louisiana Henry Watkins Allen called the monument ‘well thought of ’ and ‘astonishing’, though he made the interesting claim that all four of the chained figures were ‘black Turks’.22 Douglas French Forrest, an officer in the Confederate navy stranded in Europe in 1864, referred to the Moors as a ‘fine specimen in bronze’.23 Frederick De Bourg Richards, a Philadelphia painter and photographer whose 1857 travel book is marked by racist and anti-Semitic asides, found the statues ‘very fine’, and much superior to the statue of the duke above.24 As late as 1909 Henry James, in his Italian Hours, repeated Henry Watkins Allen’s mistake: ‘Four colossal negroes in very bad bronze are chained to the base of the monument.’25 It should be noted that for James the ‘badness’ of the work implied no critique of bondage per se. If anything, James still supported the antebellum notion that there was inherently something in poor taste about representing people of African descent on such a public, monumental scale. A lack of decorum perceived as intrinsic to the Baroque and to Blackness are linked here. James’s aesthetic revulsion at the representation of Blackness on a large scale is reminiscent of American reactions to the Pesaro tomb (Figure 4.3) in the Venetian church of the Frari. Doge Giovanni Pesaro (1589–1659), like many of Venice’s elected chief executives during this period of political decline, was a relatively ineffectual
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Monuments to tyranny leader, who ruled for only sixteen months, but he was associated with the struggle with the more powerful Ottoman Empire over the island of Crete. Though the Venetians suffered final defeat in this war in the very year (1669) that Pesaro’s tomb was completed, the monument’s four enormous Black telamones (Figure 4.4) evidently allude to the ‘otherness’ of the Ottomans, and images of Ottoman subjects as dark-skinned are not infrequent in Venetian art. This dominant feature of the monument no doubt owes something to Tacca’s ‘Quattro Mori’, but the triumphalist rhetoric of the earlier work has now become truly bombastic. These black and white marble figures were very skillfully carved by Melchior Barthel, who collaborated on the tomb with Juste Le Court and the architect Baldassare Longhena.26 By the early nineteenth century the dominant neoclassical style in sculpture had rendered late Baroque monuments of this type deeply unfashionable, and it is not surprising to see the author of what was then the most influential English guidebook to Venice, Sir Francis Palgrave, disparaging the Pesaro tomb. In the 1842 first edition of John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy Palgrave called the tomb ‘a curious specimen of the odd taste of the 17th-century’, and remarked on the ‘colossal Moors or Negroes of black marble’.27 By 1856, in the sixth edition, its taste was defined as ‘bad’ rather than merely ‘odd’.28 But among not only British but also continental travel writers of this period, Palgrave is practically the only person to mention the monument and its African figures. More than a dozen American writers, however, were drawn to comment (in books, diaries, and letters) on the tomb and especially the black-marble telamones.29 The most violent and revealing reaction is found in one of the most widely read mid-century American volumes about Italy, George Stillman Hillard’s Six Months in Italy, first published in 1853 and frequently reissued thereafter. Hillard singled out the Pesaro tomb, describing it as ‘a caricature in marble’ and affirming that ‘in grotesqueness and bad taste this monument has no rival in all Europe’. Above all, he was disturbed by the Africans: ‘The most prominent objects are four enormous negroes, or Moors, of black marble, but dressed in jackets and trowsers of white marble, and, oddest of all, the artist has represented them with their knees and elbows protruding through rents in their garments.’30 Like Henry James in Livorno (and unlike Melville in Liverpool), Hillard does not express any sympathy for these oppressed figures; rather, one gets the sense that he is angry at the artist for transgressing the limits of a decorum that ought to have prevented their representation. Hillard (1808–79) was not only a successful travel writer but also a well-connected attorney and member of the Massachusetts elite. During his early career he was particularly close to an accomplished young Brahman who was likewise fascinated by Europe and European culture: Charles Sumner (1811–74). The two were law partners, and in the first years of the 1840s they shared an enthusiasm for a movement that came to dominate Sumner’s personal and political life: abolitionism. But Hillard, like many in his social milieu, distanced himself from abolitionism as it came to be perceived as a threat to the Union and certain economic interests. By the late 1840s he had become a ‘Cotton Whig’, supporting pro-Southern positions like the Fugitive Slave Law and the Compromise of 1850. Hillard even
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Hybrid republicanisms worked against Sumner’s successful anti-slavery candidacy for the Senate in 1851. Hillard’s wife, Susan, however, harboured fugitive slaves in the attic of their own dwelling. It is not clear whether Hillard was even aware of this; if he was, he would have been in quite a quandary, as he was officially bound to try to seize such fugitives. These conflicts may go some way towards explaining his vociferous disgust at the Pesaro tomb, which he characterised as ‘the monstrous architecture of a feverish dream’, with ‘matter enough in it for a whole stud of nightmares’.31 Hillard simply did not want the European cultural tradition to raise these kinds of uncomfortable issues. A year after the publication of Hillard’s popular volume, the New York legislator Erastus C. Benedict passed through Venice, and in his travel memoir of 1860 (A Run through Europe) the Pesaro tomb again figured rather prominently. But as Benedict was a Republican, rather than a Cotton Whig, his reading of the tomb has a different cast: A most striking, singular and stupendous monument is that erected to the Doge Giovanni Pesaro. One would think it was as much a monument in honor of negro slavery as of the Doge, although I am not informed that he had any connection with slavery. The tomb is supported by brawny and gigantic negroes, sculptured in black marble, dressed in white marble, ragged and rent, through the tatters of which their black knees and elbows stick out, and their ebony skins are exposed.32
Benedict’s response directly addresses that which Hillard had to repress – slavery – and the monument is not condemned in aesthetic terms, though one may sense some irony in the word ‘honor.’ Benedict also shows a degree of self-awareness that he may be projecting a contemporary meaning on a then two-century-old work. However, while the Pesaro tomb was not principally directed towards affirming the enslavement of Blacks, it is worth noting that another, earlier Pesaro commission located right next to the tomb in the Frari – Titian’s Pesaro Altarpiece of 1519–26 – also includes a captive Black African man, one of two Ottoman prisoners presented to the Virgin as a kind of booty.33 For the Pesaro family, subjugated Africans were a recurring visual theme, and Benedict’s hunch was not far off. In the late 1860s, both William Dean Howells and Mark Twain – the two most distinguished American travel writers of this era – noticed the Pesaro tomb and its African figures, but they were more bemused than offended or impressed by it. Twain (or perhaps his editor) did, however, commission an illustration of the monument for Twain’s Innocents Abroad (1869), albeit one which ludicrously transforms the struggling, bareheaded Africans of the tomb into rather relaxed, turbaned men of colour who more closely resemble the decorative and exoticising statues of African servants (now often referred to as ‘blackamoors’) that were familiar ornaments to many upper-class domestic interiors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.34 (This illustration, by the way, is the only example I have found of a nineteenthcentury American visual rendering of the tomb.) Howells and Twain, as it happens, had much else to say about Black Africans in the context of Venetian art and society, but they were not especially provoked by the Pesaro Tomb.35 Twain was actually
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Monuments to tyranny introduced to Venetian painting, in 1867, by a local guide who was the son of formerly enslaved African Americans, but Twain does not reference him in his quick description of the tomb.36 Nor do we know the response of the African American sculptor Eugène Warburg, who in 1857 visited the church of the Frari with the white American painter Sanford Robinson Gifford. Warburg, born into bondage in New Orleans in 1826, had been manumitted by his German Jewish immigrant father, and his trip to Venice was part of the six years he spent in Europe in the 1850s, beginning in Paris and ending with his death in Rome in 1859. The Frari is the only Venetian building we know for certain that Warburg visited, and given his own earlier work with black and white marble pavers in the cathedral of St Louis in New Orleans, he must have been particularly eager to see the Pesaro Tomb.37 Indeed, even in the 1850s quite a number of African Americans had the opportunity to visit Venice. For example, David Dorr, who passed through the city while on an extended European tour with the man who owned him, Cornelius Fellows of New Orleans, mentions the lagoon city in his remarkable travel memoir, A Colored Man Round the World of 1858, but again he does not refer to the Pesaro tomb.38 Betsey Lamarr, the enslaved mixed-race maidservant of Octavia Walton Le Vert, was in Venice in 1853. Lamarr’s socially prominent mistress – who hosted an intellectually ambitious salon in Mobile, Alabama – wrote extensively of Venice in her widely read 1857 book, Souvenirs of Travel. Le Vert, more conflicted about slavery than most of her southern contemporaries, was especially attuned to the Black presence – historical and contemporary – in Venice, commenting on ‘blackamoor’ statues in her hotel and noting what she called a black-marble bust of Othello with ‘perfect negro features’ and ‘crispy hair’ among portraits of military commanders in the Ducal Palace. (I have not been able to identify such a work.) She also recounts how her maid Betsey objected to being categorised as a moretta (female Moor) by a Venetian customs officer; Lamarr asked Le Vert to insist to the officer that ‘she had nothing but pure American blood in her veins, and that she was a slave from the South.’ We do not, unfortunately, hear anything about Lamarr’s response to the Pesaro tomb, but Le Vert devoted considerable attention to it: ‘The monument of Doge Pesaro is very singular. It has many columns of great height, resting on the shoulders of immense statues, representing negroes, or Moors, of black marble. The figures are dressed in white, and thick lips and woolly heads. Through several rents in their garments the black skin creeps out.’ But, like Hillard, she could not approve of the work, concluding that ‘there surely was never a greater expenditure with a worse result’.39 Her negative reaction is especially interesting in light of her praise of the portrait of Othello. Two further citations of the Pesaro tomb in American travel memoirs from after the Civil War confirm the tendency to perceive the monument in terms of contemporary racial attitudes, through their (perhaps deliberate and ironic) misinterpretations of the cushions used by the telamones to buffer the weight of the entablature they support. Mary Sherwood, writing in 1869, refers to ‘the negroes [as] bearing cotton bales on their woolly heads; over these, in stately repose, lies the marble effigy of the doge who, I suppose, “made money in cotton”’.40 George Raum, some
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Hybrid republicanisms decades later, instead opts for another commodity, characterising the tomb as ‘consisting of four gigantic Nubians in black marble, bearing on their heads sacks of India coffee’.41 Brutal labour rather than explicit enslavement becomes the focus in these telling comments. As we have seen, the troubling nature of the enslaved Black captives on the Livorno and Venice monuments elicited a range of American literary responses, from affirmations of white racial superiority to horror, depending to a great degree on the political orientation of the observer. While Americans of the period did notice depictions of Black Africans in other European and especially Italian works of art, the Livorno and Venice monuments are unique in having attracted such intense and sometimes passionate scrutiny, due to their scale, conspicuous locations, and unmistakable references to bondage. (In their own day, the two monuments clearly endorsed the enslavement of Africans, but they were never critiqued through the lens of ethical debates among Europeans about African slavery, which were to develop far more strongly in the following centuries.) I want to conclude with a brief discussion of two visual rather than textual responses to the Livorno and Venice monuments from the realm of public art, one from the 1860s and one much more recent. Neither of these responses is sympathetic to the explicit racial hierarchies of the originals. The earlier case is that of Harriet Hosmer’s project for an elaborate memorial to Abraham Lincoln, generally known as the Freedman’s Memorial. Hosmer, the most important of the considerable group of American women sculptors in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century, had in fact shown little sympathy for abolition in the antebellum era, but the Civil War seems to have altered her views, and from late 1865 to 1868 it was her proposal for the Freedman’s Memorial that dominated the project. Due to shortfalls in funding and a shift in the political views of the white men controlling the commission, her design eventually was discarded in favour of a smaller and racially more retrogressive work, completed in 1876 by Thomas Ball (Figure 9.2). Two slightly different versions of Hosmer’s design are, however, preserved in photographs of a lost plaster model of 1866 (Figure 4.5) and in a drawing of 1868. In both versions, Lincoln occupies a central, raised position, recumbent in the model and standing in the drawing. In the plaster model four African American men are placed on lower, attached columnar pedestals, while angels occupy four other still lower pedestals at the periphery. (In the later drawing, the men have moved to the outlying pedestals.42) It has not been observed that the arrangement on Hosmer’s plaster model (and to some degree also in her drawing) calls to mind the structure of the ‘Quattro Mori’ in Livorno, with its dominant character looming over four adjoining and racially distinct figures. Hosmer was surely extremely well acquainted with the Livorno monument, because she spent many of her summers at a coastal resort (Antignano) only a few miles south of Livorno.43 (Rome was famously reputed to be dangerously unhealthful during the summer months, due to the prevalence of malaria, so foreigners with the means to do so generally left the city.) In Hosmer’s designs, two of the African American figures are slaves, one labouring and one at auction, recalling the slaves in the Livorno work in status if not in posture. Hosmer’s other two figures, however, articulate the path to and results of
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Monuments to tyranny
Figure 4.5. Harriet Hosmer, Freedman’s memorial to Abraham Lincoln, 1866, plaster, now lost
Emancipation: one is a ‘contraband guide’ (a fugitive from slavery assisting Union troops) and the other is a uniformed soldier, fighting for the freedom of his people. Hosmer must have felt some satisfaction in using the Livorno monument’s composition for such a different end, but she does not appear to have mentioned Tacca’s monument, perhaps for fear that its pro-slavery associations would raise the hackles of those controlling the project. The more recent work is part of the complex installation, titled Speak of me as I am, by the African American artist Fred Wilson at the American Pavilion of the 2003 Biennale di Venezia.44 Wilson (b. 1954) is best known for his practice of creatively and provocatively juxtaposing artworks and other material objects of the past in museum settings; his most salient themes involve the history of slavery and colonialism. Wilson’s installation used a variety of media and strategies to deconstruct the history of Black Africans in Venetian art and society, deploying video (manipulated performances of Othello, as both play and opera), photo-reproduction, and glass sculptures of his own design, among which was an elaborate Murano-style glass chandelier executed entirely in black glass. American racial history was also very much within the scope of the installation. It was most powerfully evoked by the element seen first by visitors, as they approached the pavilion from a distance (Plate 2). The structure (designed by the Beaux-Arts architects Williams Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich in 1930) is a somewhat grim little neo-Georgian/Palladian villa in brick, with white stone columns supporting a classical pediment over its main entrance. Wilson hung large banners reproducing (at close to actual scale) two of the four African telamones of the Pesaro tomb between the columns to each side of the central doorway; the pediment above displays, rather than a doge, the words ‘Stati Uniti d’America’ (United States of America, in Italian), chiselled into its surface in the mode of an ancient architectural inscription. (Wilson did not have to add this, as it was part of the building’s original appearance.) A ‘monument to Negro slavery’ indeed, as Erastus Benedict had affirmed of the Pesaro tomb nearly a
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Hybrid republicanisms century and a half earlier, and one which ingeniously joined its Italian origins to its meanings for an American audience. Wilson’s work reaffirms the continuing and often disturbing relevance of early modern Italian art to the unfinished task of coming to terms with American slavery.
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Notes 1 M. Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). 2 A. S. Marks, ‘The statue of King George III in New York and the iconology of regicide’, American Art Journal 13 (Summer 1981): 61–82; W. Bellion, Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2019). 3 17 July 1776, 1, quoted in Marks, ‘The statue of King George’, 65. 4 La Destruction de la statue royale à Nouvelle Yorck, published in Augsburg, 1776, 208 x 400 mm; Washington, D.C., Library of Congress. It should be noted that the print is hardly a trustworthy record of the event, as the statue itself omits the horse on which the King was perched. Though intended as a racialising insult to the rebels, the dark-skinned figures in the print nevertheless give new meaning to the ‘Sons of Liberty’ who destroyed the statue. The American John Lloyd Stephens (Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia and Poland, 2 vols (New York: Harper, 1838), vol. 2, pp. 33–4) was charmed to find a copy of the print displayed in a hotel bar in Kiev, and he describes the ring-leader as a ‘long negro’. An American mid-nineteenth-century painting of this scene also depicts an African American figure: W. Walcutt, Pulling Down the Statue of George III at Bowling Green, 1857, Lafayette College, Easton, PA. K. Y. Lemmey, ‘Henry Kirk Brown and the Development of American Public Sculpture in New York City, 1846–1876’, PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center, New York, 2005, Introduction, figure 3. 5 A. Yarrington, ‘Public Sculpture and Civic Pride 1800–1830’, in P. Curtis (ed.), Patronage and Practice: Sculpture on Merseyside (Liverpool: Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1989), pp. 22–31, esp. 22–6; T. Cavanaugh, Public Sculpture in Liverpool (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), pp. 51–5. 6 H. Melville, Redburn (Evanston and Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1969), pp. 155–6. My deep thanks to John Neff for alerting me to this passage. 7 L. Frattarelli Fischer, ‘Introduzione’, in A. Addobbati and Marcella Aglietti (eds), La città delle nazioni: Livorno e i limiti del cosmopolitismo (1566–1834) (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2016), pp. 27–36. 8 A. Brook, Pietro Tacca a Livorno: il monumento a Ferdinando I de’ Medici (Livorno: Comune di Livorno (O. Debatte), 2008); J. Mack-Andrick, Pietro Tacca, Hofbildhauer der Medici (1577– 1640): politisches Funktion und Ikonographie des frühabsolutischen Herrscherdenkmals unter den Grossherzögen Ferdinando I., Cosimo II. und Ferdinando II. (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2005), pp. 131–3. 9 M. Rosen, ‘Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori and the conditions of slavery in early Seicento Tuscany’, Art Bulletin 97:1 (2015): 34–57; S. F. Ostrow, ‘Pietra Tacca and his Quattro Mori: the beauty and identity of the slaves’, Artibus et Historiae 71 (2015): 145–80. See also E. McGrath, ‘Caryatids, Page Boys, and African Fetters. Themes of Slavery in European art’, in E. McGrath and J. M. Massing (eds), The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem (London and Turin: Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno Editore, 2012), pp. 3–38; and Jean-Michel Massing’s treatment of the monument in D. Bindman and H. L. Gates, Jr (eds), The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 3, part 2 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 191–5. 10 See P. H. D. Kaplan, ‘Black Turks: Venetian Artists and Perceptions of Ottoman Ethnicity’, in J. Harper (ed.), The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750: Visual Imagery before Orientalism (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 41–66. 11 As noted by Cavanaugh, Public Sculpture in Liverpool, p. 52, and Yarrington, ‘Public Sculpture and Civic Pride 1800–1830’, 26.
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Monuments to tyranny 12 ‘Miollis aux citoyens officiers municipaux de Livourne. Un seul monument existe dans Livourne et c’est un monument de tyrannie qui insulte l’humanité: quatre infortunés cent fois plus brave que le féroce Ferdinand qui les foule enchaînés à son piédestal, offrent depuis trois cent ans la vue la plus révoltant dès qu’on se present au port. Les accents de la douleur, de l’indignation, de la haine, du mépris doivent nécessairement agiter toute âme sensible qui s’en approche. Vengeons l’injure faite à l’humanité. Veuillez bien, citoyens, ordonner que la statue de la liberté soit substituée à celle de ce monstre, que, d’un main elle brise avec l’équerre, les chaînes de ces quatre esclaves, et que, de l’autre, elle écrase avec la pique la tête de Ferdinand étendu par terre. Salut et fraternité, Miollis.’ Quoted in H. Aureas, Un général de Napoléon: Miollis (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1961), pp. 71–2; see also McGrath, ‘Caryatids, Page Boys, and African Fetters’, pp. 12–13. 13 McGrath, ‘Caryatids, Page Boys, and African Fetters’, pp. 12–13; Aureas, Un général de Napoléon, p. 71. Desjardins’ monument to Louis XIV (with chained figures of European regions) was destroyed in 1792. H. Ziegler, ‘“On ne parlait que de ces quatre esclaves.” Zu den Debatten der Franzözischen Historiographie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert um das Standbild Ludwigs XIV. auf der Pariser Place des Victoires’, Francia. Forschungen zur westeuropaischen Geschichte 31.2 (2004): 159–89. On Pierre de Francqueville’s Parisian monument to Henri IV, see Massing in Bindman and Gates, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 3, part 2, pp. 194–5, figure 124. 14 Aureas, Un général de Napoléon, pp. 25–6. 15 L. Auricchio, The Marquis; Lafayette Reconsidered (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), pp. 116–20. 16 R. P. Wunder, Hiram Powers: Vermont Sculptor, 1803–1873, 2 vols (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1989–91), vol. 1, p. 160, vol. 2, p. 161. 17 R. L. Gale, Thomas Crawford, American Sculptor (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), p. 190 (on Livorno). On the problems with Davis, and the contribution of enslaved artisans and workers, see V. G. Fryd, Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 183–4, 188–200; and P. H. D. Kaplan, Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture and the Arts in the Civil War Era (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), pp. 130–1. 18 T. H. White, A Pilgrim’s Reliquary (London: William Pickering, 1845), pp. 146–7. 19 Quoted in D. Kilbride, ‘Slavery, Nation, and Ideology: Virginians on the Grand Tour in the 1850s’, in P. Wallenstein and B. Wyatt-Brown (eds), Virginia’s Civil War (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005), pp. 61–71, esp. p. 67. 20 J. S. Hawkes, Conversations on Italy (Philadelphia, PA: Grigg and Elliot, 1844), pp. 214–15. 21 Lemmey, ‘Henry Kirk Brown’, pp. 88–90, 122, 196–9, 227, 244–50, 255–6, 261–2, 266–7. For further examples, see Fryd, Art and Empire, pp. 200–8 and K. Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 22 H. W. Allen, The Travels of a Sugar Planter, or Six Months in Europe (New York: John F. Trow, 1861), p. 185. Allen also gave incorrect information about the sculptor and the date of the work. 23 D. F. Forrest, Odyssey in Gray: A Diary of Confederate Service, 1863–1865, W. N. Still, Jr (ed.) (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1979), p. 216. 24 F. D. Richards, Random Sketches, or, What I Saw in Europe: from the Portfolio of an Artist (Philadelphia, PA: G. Collings, 1857), p. 65. 25 H. James, Italian Hours (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1909), pp. 431–2. 26 D. Bindman and H. L. Gates, Jr (eds), The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 3, part 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 183–7; Andrew Hopkins, Baldassare Longhena and Venetian Baroque Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 150–7. 27 F. Palgrave, John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy, 1st edn (London: John Murray, 1842), p. 353. 28 F. Palgrave, John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy, 6th edn (London: John Murray, 1856), p. 342. 29 In addition to those cited below, see also W. M. Gould, Zephyrs from Italy and Sicily (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1852), p. 279; Old Sights with New Eyes. By a Yankee, introduced by R. Baird
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Hybrid republicanisms (New York: M.W. Dodd, 1854), p. 270; A. Woolsey, Too Young to Travel Abroad, introduced by L. H. Tallman (Portsmouth, NH: Peter E. Randall, 1995), p. 142 (written 1856–57); C. H. Jones, Recollections of Venice (Reading, PA: B. F. Owen, 1862), p. 39; J. Henry Coghill, Abroad. Journal of a Tour through Great Britain and on the Continent (New York: Sheldon and Co., 1868), p. 207; C. Guild, Over the Ocean; or, Sights and Scenes in Foreign Lands (Boston, MA: Lee and Shepard, 1884), p. 507; and the journal of A. Singleton Van Buren, 1854–55 (Columbia, SC: South Caroliniana Library), p. 86 (29 October 1854). 30 G. S. Hillard, Six Months in Italy, 2 vols, 4th edn (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1854), vol. 1, p. 56. 31 Hillard, Six Months in Italy, vol. 1, pp. 56–7. On Hillard’s life and politics, see A.-M. Taylor, Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American Enlightenment, 1811–1851 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), pp. 80, 232–3, 278, 299–300, 312. 32 C. Benedict, A Run through Europe (New York: D. Appleton, 1860), p. 296; on Benedict’s career as a politician and educator, see G. F. Betts, ‘Memorial Notice’, The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries 6:1 ( January 1881): 78–80. 33 See my discussion in Bindman and Gates (eds), The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 116–17, figure 48. 34 M. Twain, Innocents Abroad (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1869), pp. 235–6; for more on this, see Kaplan, Contraband Guides, p. 20, figure 10. On ‘blackamoor’ statues, see A. Amkpa (ed.), ReSignifications: European Blackamoors, Africana Readings (Rome: Postcart, 2016). 35 On references to people of colour in Howells’s Venetian Life (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866) and others of his essays and books, see Kaplan, Contraband Guides, pp. 12–14, 17–19, 21, 23–4, 26–7, 29, 175, 216, 222–3. In Venetian Life (p. 169), Howells spins a story of a Venetian tomcat on the prowl, who ‘has been all over the great mausoleum of the Doge Pesaro, and he knows whether the griffins descend from their perches at the midnight hour to bite the naked knees of the ragged black caryatides’. 36 Twain, Innocents Abroad, pp. 240–2; Kaplan, Contraband Guides, pp. 208–10, 216–18, 223. 37 See P. H. D. Kaplan, ‘“A Mulatto Sculptor from New Orleans”: Eugène Warburg in Europe, 1853– 1859’, in A. Childs and S. Libby (eds), Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 69–103; Kaplan, Contraband Guides, chapter 2. Gifford noted in a letter of 17 July 1857 that he and Warburg were set to go to the Frari. Sanford Robinson Gifford Papers, Letters, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., vol. II, no. 36, p. 173 of typescript transcription. 38 D. Dorr, A Colored Man Round the World ([Cleveland?]: printed for the author, 1858); on pp. 147–9, Dorr does take notice of a dark-skinned medieval sculpture of the African St Zeno in S. Zeno Maggiore in Verona. There is also a modern edition of Dorr’s book: A Colored Man Round the World, M. J. Schueller (ed.) (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 39 B. Lamarr, Souvenirs of Travel, 2 vols (Mobile, AL: S. H. Goetzel and Company, 1857), vol. 1, pp. 224, 233, 235. See also F. G. Satterfield, Madame Le Vert. A Biography of Octavia Walton Le Vert (Edisto Island, SC: Edisto Press, 1987), pp. 102–3, 106, 128, 148–9, 283 – a useful though not always reliable source. 40 M. E. Wilson Sherwood, Here and There and Everywhere: Reminiscences (Chicago, IL and New York: H. S. Stone, 1898), p. 41. Note the late publication date, but the account was written in 1869. 41 G. E. Raum, A Tour around the World (New York: William S. Gottsberger, 1895), p. 198. 42 Photographs of the plaster model are in the Watertown Free Public Library, Watertown, MA. See Dabakis, Sisterhood of Sculptors, pp. 175–8; Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, pp. 90–100, 234, n. 18; K. Culkin, Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), pp. 101–9; and Kaplan, Contraband Guides, pp. 198, 221–2. On Ball’s sculpture, see Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, pp. 114–22. On Hosmer’s earlier views about slavery, see Culkin, Harriet Hosmer, p. 18. 43 Harriet Hosmer, Harriet Hosmer Letters and Memories, C. Carr (ed.) (New York: Moffett, Yard & Co., 1912), pp. 179 (letter of 27 August 1861), 221 (letter of October 1866). Today, Antignano is the southernmost neighbourhood of the city of Livorno.
Monuments to tyranny 44 Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am (Cambridge, MA: MIT, List Visual Arts Center, 2003); D. Globus (ed.), Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader (London: Ridinghouse, 2011), pp. 169–219, 447–63. I served as ‘Project Scholar’ to this installation, providing information about the history of people of colour in Venetian art and society.
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Selected bibliography Amkpa, A. (ed.) ReSignifications: European Blackamoors, Africana Readings. Rome: Postcart, 2016. Aureas, H. Un général de Napoléon: Miollis. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1961. Bindman, D. and H. L. Gates, Jr (eds). The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 3, parts 1 and 2. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010–11. Brook, A. Pietro Tacca a Livorno: il monumento a Ferdinando I de’ Medici. Livorno: Comune di Livorno (O. Debatte), 2008. Culkin, K. Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. Dabakis, M. A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Dorr, David. A Colored Man Round the World. M. J. Schueller (ed.). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Fryd, V. G. Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Hillard, George Stillman. Six Months in Italy, 2 vols. 4th edn. Boston, MA: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1854. Hopkins, A. Baldassare Longhena and Venetian Baroque Architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. James, Henry. Italian Hours. Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1909. Kaplan, P. H. D. Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture and the Arts in the Civil War Era. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. Mack-Andrick, J. Pietro Tacca, Hofbildhauer der Medici (1577–1640): politisches Funktion und Ikonographie des frühabsolutischen Herrscherdenkmals unter den Grossherzögen Ferdinando I., Cosimo II. und Ferdinando II. Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2005. Marks, A. S. ‘The statue of King George III in New York and the iconology of regicide’. American Art Journal 13 (Summer 1981): 61–82. McGrath, E. ‘Caryatids, Page Boys, and African Fetters. Themes of Slavery in European Art’. In E. McGrath and J. M. Massing (eds), The Slave in European Art: From Renaissance Trophy to Abolitionist Emblem. London and Turin: Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno Editore, 2012, pp. 3–38. Ostrow, S. F. ‘Pietra Tacca and his Quattro Mori: The beauty and identity of the slaves’. Artibus et Historiae 71 (2015): 145–80. Rosen, M. ‘Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori and the conditions of slavery in early Seicento Tuscany’. Art Bulletin 97:1 (2015): 34–57. Savage, K. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Wilson, F. Fred Wilson: Speak of Me as I Am. Cambridge, MA: MIT, List Visual Arts Center, 2003. Yarrington, A. ‘Public Sculpture and Civic Pride 1800–1830’. In Penelope Curtis (ed.), Patronage and Practice: Sculpture on Merseyside. Liverpool: Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1989, pp. 22–31. Ziegler, H. ‘“On ne parlait que de ces quatre esclaves.” Zu den Debatten der Franzözischen Historiographie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert um das Standbild Ludwigs XIV. auf der Pariser Place des Victoires’. Francia. Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte 31:2 (2004): 159–89.
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The picturesque political: Charles Caryl Coleman and Elihu Vedder in the circle of the Macchiaioli Adrienne Baxter Bell
‘What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What can I discover? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.’1 And so, after a short prologue, begins chapter 26 of The Innocents Abroad (1869), Mark Twain’s ‘Pleasure Excursion’ to Europe and the Holy Land. Twain knew that openings constituted expensive literary real estate and he wasted no time in capitalising on the power of nihilism to attract an audience. Later melding his disillusionment with American populism, he derided Italy for pouring its wealth into a ‘vast array of wonderful church edifices’, only to leave half of its citizens ‘starving’. He needled American puritanical impulses when claiming that ‘All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jewelled frippery in one of [Italy’s] hundred cathedrals.’2 For Twain in the late 1860s, Rome had become a city ripe for ridicule; just as he hoped, The Innocents Abroad became a bestseller, bringing the author considerable domestic and international fame. Many mid-nineteenth-century American artists arrived in Italy with similarly opportunistic goals. Planning to stay for a few months or perhaps a year, they sought out the celebrated motifs – the Colosseum, the ruins of the Roman aqueducts, Lake Nemi, et al. – that they could transform from sketches into marketable, Grand Manner oil paintings at home. The lives of these artists – provisional figures in Italy, profiting from her landmarks and generally isolated from her citizens – have been deeply inscribed into the historiography of American art. Less well known, however, are the stories of the American artist-émigrés who remained in Italy, spurned the exalted ruins of the Roman empire, and shifted their attention to the enduring domestic customs and ancient landscapes of the working classes. Twain may have sneered at the Italian peasant’s conical hat, black coat, and ‘ridiculous’ boots that ‘can stand no wear’; the artist-émigrés recognised them as new and exciting subjects for sketches and paintings. The Roman Campagna, in Twain’s merrily myopic view, was ‘really small compared to the United States of America’; to the American artist-émigrés, it inspired entirely new compositional formats, it spurred their exploration of artistic techniques that had been censured at home, and it sparked empathy for the ongoing revolutionary struggle in Italy for independence and unification.3
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The picturesque political Two of the American artist-émigrés, Charles Caryl Coleman (1840–1928) and his close friend Elihu Vedder (1836–1923), warrant pairing for their symbiotic artistic visions and close interactions with the Macchiaioli.4 The cultural and political conversations in which these American and Italian artists engaged have been somewhat overlooked in the vast corpus on nineteenth-century art. Illuminating these conversations advances the ongoing process of challenging the prevailing view of the American artist in Italy as interloper. It draws attention to the warp and weft that bound transnational relationships, and it maps other overlooked artistic relationships that deserve attention. Ultimately, it helps to advance a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the complex tapestry of nineteenth-century Italo-American art history. The stories of Coleman, Vedder, and their Italian counterparts have escaped attention for a number of reasons. First, the art of the Macchiaioli is difficult to categorise. Not all works of art feature the demonstrative macchia (variously defined as ‘spot’, ‘stain’, ‘mark’, and ‘sketch’) that gave the group its name.5 In fact, several members of the group – such as Giuseppe Abbati, Vito D’Ancona, and Telemaco Signorini – eschewed expressive brushwork and painted with precision. Others – Abbati, Vincenzo Cabianca, and Silvestro Lega, for example – painted in both styles. Moreover, the Macchiaioli pictured an unusually wide range of themes, including landscapes, portraits, and self-portraits, as well as allegorical, historical, and genre scenes. Their intentions could be perplexing. For example, in some of his representations of soldiers and encampments, Giovanni Fattori seemed far less interested in historical documentation than in paint’s ability to represent light’s ability to visually construct form. In addition, the Macchiaioli lacked socio-economic unity; some were wealthy with links to the aristocracy (D’Ancona, Lega) while others hailed from the middle class (Fattori, Adriano Cecioni). Finally, the artists struggled with their collective identity. As Norma Broude observed, they ‘did not apply the name “Macchiaioli” to themselves, and … they consistently denied and attempted to counteract its derogatory implications, from Signorini in the early 1860s, who insisted that these artists were not radical and had really invented nothing new, to Cecioni in the 1880s, who staunchly proclaimed that the macchia was not a sketch’.6 Time is another concern: the formative period of the Macchiaioli – 1849–60 – largely predates the period of many American émigrés’ Italian residency – that is, the 1860s to the 1920s. With these hermeneutic asymmetries in mind, we must identify points of clarity. First, several Macchiaioli participated in the heady political events that constituted the Risorgimento. They fought in the Wars of Independence (1849–70) to overthrow the hegemonic presence of Austria and France, and to unite the independent regions of Italy into a single nation state with Rome as its capital. In so doing, they contributed to nothing less than the birth of modern Italy. At the same time, led by Abbati, Fattori, Lega, and Giovanni (Nino) Costa, they invented a highly attenuated physical structure for landscape painting – in some cases, with the length nine times the height – that extended their identity as progressive revolutionaries into the art world. Second, Coleman and Vedder lived primarily in Florence and Rome during the late 1850s and 1860s. Vedder was in Florence in September 1859, when the statesman
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Hybrid republicanisms Bettino Ricasoli opened a competition for the representation of ancient and modern patriotic scenes, which several of the Macchiaioli entered and won; he was there in May 1860, when the Italian nationalist and general Giuseppe Garibaldi and his thousand volunteer soldiers (I Mille) advanced the cause of Italian unification by conquering the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, thereby helping to establish, in March 1861, the Kingdom of Italy. Coleman, who arrived in Florence in December 1860, remained in Italy when Vittorio Emanuele II was proclaimed the country’s first king in Turin in March 1861, when Garibaldi was defeated at Aspromonte in August 1862, when Florence became the temporary seat of government in 1865, and when the patriots marched into Rome to unseat the temporal power of the papacy in August 1870. In short, both American artists witnessed the struggle for and achievement of Italian unification. Third, Coleman and Vedder were more than compatriots. Letters between them and within their circle of family members and friends attest to a kinship that lasted a lifetime: from their first meeting in 1856 to their deaths in the 1920s. Together, they faced the struggles and advantages of living apart from New York, Paris, and London, the presumptive capitals of nineteenth-century Western art. As in many great artistic dyads, they challenged and inspired one another. Moreover, we can often use their art to place them simultaneously in the same city, exploring – in different, though complementary ways – the same or kindred subjects. For a time in the 1860s, they anchored their lives and pictorial programmes to the company, imagery, and techniques of the Macchiaioli. Unfortunately, their alienation from the artistic conventions employed by most transient American artists in Italy not only stymied their careers but may also have contributed to their marginal places within art history.7 Early in life, Vedder was exposed to the pleasures and trials of living outside of one’s native land. Born on Varick Street in New York, he was then shuffled between Cuba, where his father worked as a dentist, and his grandfather’s farm in Brooklyn, New York. As a result, he grew accustomed to living a bifurcated existence: at home in two worlds, never entirely comfortable in either one. Arriving in Florence in 1857, he took evening classes at the Accademia Galli, a free art school, where he painted from the nude and copied costumes of the Trecento and Renaissance. These practices prepared him for further study with Raffaello Bonaiuti (active in Florence from 1850 to 1872), who became an influential figure in his life.8 At the time, Bonaiuti’s income came primarily from his copies of Fra Angelico paintings; exposure to these artworks brought Vedder to the Macchiaioli, who saw themselves as descendants of the Early Renaissance Tuscan masters. Moreover, Bonaiuti had been commissioned to make drawings of ancient statues in the Vatican; when he later explained his work to Vedder, the American artist confessed that he ‘felt quite unworthy of the privilege’.9 While Bonaiuti encouraged Vedder to pursue disegno, the expected course of study for an American artist abroad, he also exposed him to colorito. Years later, Vedder recalled that when he asked Bonaiuti how he was going to colour a composition that he had just ‘drawn in to his satisfaction on the canvas’, Bonaiuti answered, ‘Nella maniera di Tiziano!’10 Working in the style of the
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The picturesque political patriarch of the pittura di macchia would later inspire Vedder to read essays on Venetian painting, including those by Marco Boschini (1602–81), the Italian writer known for his pioneering accounts of Titian’s painting practices.11 One of Vedder’s early landscapes reveals his provisional exploration of the macchia. It would be easy to overlook the rather humble Roman Campagna (ca. 1866) (Plate 3) in that it features an unremarkable section of a high stone wall in the countryside. Moreover, the imbalance created by the large cluster of vegetation at the top of the wall and the column fragment on the ground at the lower right betrays a stubborn pictorial irresolution. And yet the interest in Roman Campagna resides precisely in Vedder’s choice of subject and painterly technique. In its absence of a famous ancient Roman ruin, Roman Campagna is a distinctly un-American work, ill suited to the landmark-driven American art market. Indeed, the stone wall aggressively denies the gaze that for years reflexively perused ruin-flecked rolling hills and golden sunsets in paintings of the Roman Campagna. As if to deprive our appetite for spectacles, Vedder even leaves the rounded niche in the wall emphatically vacant; driven by his imagination, Vedder invites the viewer’s imagination to fill it. That imagination is called to service again when contemplating the boldly streaked and daubed brushwork of Roman Campagna. By using it, Vedder distanced himself from Hudson River School painters – who often took great pains to demarcate each ripple in each stream, each leaf on each tree, each feather on each bird – and aligned himself with the Macchiaioli. These Italian artists fuelled their resolve in part by contesting the authority of the Florentine Academy, which they viewed as artistic oppression linked to bourgeois taste and such establishment figures as Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto. As Broude reminds us, the Macchiaioli felt that the Academy represented ‘moribund attitudes and “foreign” cultural standards’, notably the dominance in Italy of the Austrians.12 Vedder knew that the Academy had celebrated such neoclassical works as Pietro Benvenuti’s Hercules fighting the centaurs (1817–29; Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence). Trained in the Academy, Benvenuti admired the German Hellenist Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the German neoclassical painter Anton Raphael Mengs. Vedder would have connected these types of highly polished, historical scenes to the works of the Pre-Raphaelites, which he critiqued as ‘needlessly hard and crude’. For him, their ‘inessential details’ and ‘exaggeration of colour’ bound them to convention.13 As Vedder put it quite economically, ‘the finishing of a picture [is] … the death of the sketch’.14 Emancipation from the Florentine Academy arrived through the macchia, with which American and Italian artists found a vehicle to convey their intimate relationship to the motif. Vedder knew from Bonaiuti and their study of the Venetian Renaissance that the macchia was, in fact, a fairly traditional means of engaging viewers. David Rosand explained that Titian’s colorito involved a building up of paint that invites ‘the viewer … not to stand back and squint until a focused illusion is obtained, but rather to approach, to respond to the tactile appeal of articulated stroke and surface’.15 In this same way, the macchia compresses physical distance between painting and viewer, and by implication temporal distance between artist and viewer. It encourages the viewer to rehearse the actions of the artist’s brush and,
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Hybrid republicanisms at times, the artist’s fingers, to envision him expertly dispatching colour on the textured surfaces of his paintings. The macchia can also leave the painting’s setting and forms unclear, thereby creating an open-ended dialogue with the viewer, who has the ongoing challenge and pleasure of interrogating the artist’s intentions; here is the conversation sparked, as suggested above, by Vedder’s Roman Campagna. In La Quinta Promotrice (1869), the aesthetician Vittorio Imbriani, who officially linked the macchia to psychological provocation, explained that the artist using it recognises his initial feeling of a scene and then produces in his work a ‘harmony of tone – that is, of shadow and light – aimed at capturing a specific feeling in the mind of the painter, and at making the imagination the focus of his artistic productivity’.16 For Imbriani, the macchia transcends paint application; it conjures a mood, often in an anonymous setting freed from habitual emotional reactions. It might even be identified as a way of thinking, or a way of entering the world. Seen together, technique, tenour, and content construct the aesthetic – the inextricable combination of instrumentation and philosophy – that in part fuelled the work of the Macchiaioli and the American artists they inspired. It would be reasonable to argue that in painting Roman Campagna Vedder was equally inspired by contemporary French painting. To be sure, he could have seen Barbizon landscapes in Paris in 1856 and again in 1860, when he went on sketching trips in France with Coleman and William Morris Hunt, a disciple of the Barbizon School. Indeed, several of the Macchiaioli studied with Barbizon painters and, like them, recorded their reactions en plein air.17 But whereas Barbizon painters often used expressive brushwork to capture multiple fleeting effects of light and colour in nature, the Macchiaioli, even more strongly influenced by photography, often consolidated those effects into a single, poignant moment. They were guided more actively than their French contemporaries by the dictates of design, composition, and finish. Raffaello Sernesi’s Roofs in sunlight (ca. 1860–61) (Plate 4) reflects this distinction. Anticipating Paul Cézanne in the mid-1880s, Sernesi distilled architecture through the alembic of light until it re-emerged as intricately conjoined masses of luminescent pastel rectangles, trapezoids, and parallelograms. Even the conformation in Roofs in sunlight of the lower-left edge of the puff of smoke to the jagged outline of the roofs below it forecasts the uncanny conformation of pine and mountain in the Frenchman’s Mont Sainte-Victoire with large pine (ca. 1887; Courtauld Institute of Art). Ostensibly generating the illusion of a three-dimensional setting, Sernesi nearly sacrifices ontological identities to the expressive potential of form and chroma. Several of Coleman’s paintings from the late 1860s and early 1870s suggest that he recognised the radicality of Sernesi’s work. Coleman had been trained in his hometown of Buffalo, New York, and later in Paris, where he studied in the atelier of Thomas Couture.18 In Florence in 1860, he probably joined Vedder in taking night classes at the Accademia Galli.19 He remained there for two years, leaving only for brief trips to Gibraltar in July 1860 and Paris in November 1860.20 Given his friendship with Vedder, and given Vedder’s friendships with the Macchiaioli, it is highly likely that Coleman joined their sketching trips, an act to which he refers in a rare
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The picturesque political letter from this period.21 Coleman may even have attended the First Italian National Exhibition (Esposizione Italiana) in Florence in 1861, organised by the Macchiaioli to nourish the market for art when the authority of the aristocracy and the Catholic church, long-standing patrons, was being challenged. Coleman’s exposure to Macchiaioli work would come to fruition in Rooftops in Perugia (1870) (Plate 5), which resembles Sernesi’s Roofs in sunlight in subject matter, technique, and tenour. Upending the ‘predella’ format favoured by the Macchiaioli, Coleman eliminated nearly all detail to feature segments of buildings as interlocking, irregular geometric forms. He built on Sernesi’s work by showing depth in space primarily through subtle tonal and chromatic adjustments, rather than the progressive diminution of form as determined by linear perspective. Indeed, he seems even less concerned about the laws of perspective than his Italian counterpart. His macchia appears unapologetically on a building at the far right, where it testifies to the irrelevance of academic ‘finish’ and simultaneously to the capacity of brushwork to bring order to the chaos of visual sensations in nature, another driving force in the work of Cézanne. Coleman never sold Rooftops in Perugia; perhaps it was ill suited to an American art market still strongly advocating fidelity to nature. Today, it represents Coleman’s contestation of academic aesthetics championed on both sides of the Atlantic, his solidarity with the Macchiaioli, and his prescient exploration of ideas that, in part, would come to define early modernism. Common ground in the works of Coleman, Vedder, and the Macchiaioli stemmed from the artists’ close friendships. While most artists socialised with fellow citizens in the 1850s, Vedder went to the Caffè Michelangiolo in the Via Larga (today the Via Cavour), the informal meeting house for the Macchiaioli in the 1850s and 1860s.22 Indeed, from his earliest days abroad, Vedder aligned himself with Italian artists. He shared his first apartment, located near Fiesole, with Francesco Saverio Altamura, a friend of the Macchiaioli.23 He described other Italian artists in his circle as ‘my friend Gortigiani’, ‘[Gaetano] Bianchi and his wife … [he] who so faithfully restored frescoes by Giotto in Santa Croce’, and his ‘stout friend Banty’, who was almost certainly the Macchiaiolo Cristiano Banti. He socialised with Cabianca, who years later candidly confessed to him, ‘How I envy you your friends!’24 Coleman and Vedder knew that the Macchiaioli put themselves quite literally in the avant-garde by joining the army and fighting for the Risorgimento. Serving under Garibaldi, Serafino De Tivoli and Lega battled the Austrians in Lombardy in 1848, during the First War of Italian Independence. Odoardo Borrani, Cecioni, Sernesi, and Signorini participated in the narrow French-Sardinian victory over the Austrians at Magenta in June 1859. After the patriots clustered around Garibaldi, who began his quest to liberate Sicily and Naples from the Austrians in 1860, many more of the Macchiaioli, including Borrani, Abbati, and Sernesi, joined Garibaldi’s ‘red shirts’. As part of the expedition of I Mille in southern Italy, Abbati lost his right eye at the Battle of Capua. Injured in the leg, Sernesi was taken prisoner by the Austrians in 1866 and died later that year from gangrene. Driven by the idea that ‘a painter’s highest function and responsibility was to paint history’, Fattori sketched and painted military sites in 1859, including Magenta.25 In short, the Macchiaioli were
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Hybrid republicanisms artist-revolutionaries, fighting simultaneously and on multiple fronts for new painting practices, for liberation from the Academy and foreign rule, and for Italy’s unification. Natives of many different regions of Italy, they cultivated their solidarity at the Caffè Michelangiolo, which served as ‘a microcosm of that broader process of social and political fusion that would soon begin to bind the country together as a whole’.26 That Coleman and Vedder could not participate in the Risorgimento was not a sign of their political apathy. Both strongly supported the Union in the Civil War. In the spring of 1862, Coleman returned to America to enlist in Buffalo’s Company K, 100th Regiment, New York State Volunteers, as a private. He joined his regiment at Yorktown, Virginia, and rose quickly through the ranks.27 On 8 September 1862, he was appointed Second Lieutenant; on 13 January 1863, he mustered in as First Lieutenant of Company I.28 While stationed on Folly Island, South Carolina, in May 1863, Coleman was accidentally wounded in the mouth and jaw by a brother officer, and then honorably discharged.29 After recuperating and reconnecting briefly with his New York studio, he returned to Italy in 1866, where he would live and work for the rest of his life. Previously wounded and unable to carry a gun, Vedder maintained ‘out-and-out Union sentiments’ and attempted to enlist. ‘My name was down,’ he later wrote, ‘and I stood my chance with the others in the draft.’ He poignantly added, ‘during it all I never wavered in my hope of our ultimate success or in my hatred of slavery, or in my loyalty to the Nation. I had the honour and privilege of voting for Lincoln, and paid my tribute of honest tears when that much-loved man was slain.’ A supporter of the Risorgimento, he identified as a ‘fierce republican’ and a ‘rank republican’, even proudly underscoring his solidarity with the patriots by noting that he ‘was considered one of them’.30 As it politically united the disparate regions of the peninsula, the Risorgimento needed to define the very concept of a unified ‘Italy’. Adrian Lyttelton has suggested that if, in fact, ‘there is a sense in which the national past of “Italy” can be said to have been truly “invented”, it consists in the translations of events and personages from a local to a peninsular context’. Lyttelton actually prefers the concept of the ‘construction’ of tradition, as the materials used to form ‘Italy’ ‘were not new, only the uses to which they were put’.31 While in the eyes of some historians this process was never successful, one idea that reconciled most Italians was their rejection of ancient Roman values, which had been linked to French imperialist ideology and its domination over Italy, as well as the support that French troops gave to the papacy at a time when the patriots were seeking to diminish its authority. For this reason, Lyttelton explains, ‘in its origins the Risorgimento was predominantly anti-Roman or, at least, designed to combat the fixation on Rome’s imperial glory’.32 Unlike most of the transient American artists in Italy, Coleman and Vedder largely avoided motifs affiliated with ancient Rome. In addition to Roman Campagna, Vedder painted Italian landscape with sheep and Florentine well (ca. 1858–60; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Study of rocks, bed of torrente Mugnone, near Florence (ca. 1858–60; Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University). Coleman began his
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The picturesque political career in Europe with similarly humble sketches of the Bordighera countryside and its residents (1866; private collections). These works correspond to a shift in the Macchiaioli treatment of the landscape ‘from the scenic to the participatory, from the privileged to the democratic view’, which more closely reflected the ‘communality of the Risorgimento ideal’.33 Linked to the ideals of the patriotic landed proprietors and country gentlemen, Macchiaioli landscapes often feature olive groves, farmhouses, and, in Joshua Taylor’s felicitous phrase, ‘the age-old quiet of the Tuscan countryside’.34 In search of motifs that could ‘construct’ the pictorial vocabulary of a common Italian heritage, the Macchiaioli often painted Etruscan sites; in this regard, Costa took the lead. Vedder referred to him, quite simply, as ‘the Etruscan’; in the winter of 1883–84, Costa sanctioned the moniker by establishing The Etruscan School of Art with the British artists George Howard, William Blake Richmond, Edith Corbet, and Matthew Ridley Corbet. According to Vedder, his friendship with Costa developed in the late 1850s in Florence, to which Costa had returned after fighting the French in Rome; they ‘became and remained friends from that day on’.35 Ten years older than Vedder, Costa was the emblematic artist-patriot. An idealistic republican already at the age of twenty-one, he joined Mazzini’s La Giovine Italia (Young Italy) in 1847 and, as part of the Roman volunteers, fought the Austrians in the Veneto in May 1848. The following year, Garibaldi put him on his staff. In 1859, Costa joined the Sardinian army to fight in the Second Italian War of Independence. In 1870, he helped to breach the Aurelian Walls – famously, on 20 September – and to place Rome under a state of siege, an event that led to the surrender of the papal forces of Pius IX. Years earlier (by 1859), he had become the leader (though never an official member) of the Macchiaioli. Costa took Vedder on sketching trips to cities rich with Etruscan history, such as Cerveteri, Tarquinia, and Volterra, three of the ‘twelve cities’ of the Etruscan League. In Volterra (1860; Smithsonian American Art Museum), Cliffs of Volterra (1860; Butler Institute of American Art), The lost mind (1864–65; Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Prayer for death in the desert (ca. 1867; Brooklyn Museum), Vedder unmistakably featured the sandstone ridges of the Volterran hills, evocative of the many surrounding Etruscan necropolises. These are not the ‘paintings of modern life’ that historians have often privileged, the brightly coloured scenes of crowded Parisian cafés and verdant bourgeois gardens. Their modernism resides, instead, in their capacity to catalyse or – as William James put it in a different context – to ‘unclamp’ the imagination and thereby to evoke the historical roots and inhabitants of the ancient terrains depicted.36 American and Italian artists nurtured their friendships at the Caffè Michelangiolo and at work. For a time, Coleman, Vedder, and Costa maintained studios in the same Roman building. Via Margutta 33 would become known for its international array of artists, including the Italians Anatolio Scifoni and Giuseppe De Sanctis, and the little-known English landscape and animal painter Charles Coleman, who came to Rome in 1831, married the Italian model Fortunata Segatori, and died there in 1874.37 Costa was the first to establish his studio in Via Margutta 33, working there from 1852 until his health failed in 1902.38 Vedder rented one of the studios in 1866.39
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Hybrid republicanisms Late in 1869, Charles Caryl Coleman moved into Studio #18, ‘directly over that of Costa’.40 Costa’s biographer Olivia Rossetti Agresti, who knew the artist, noted that while he was often hounded by the papal police, ‘he even managed, when he wished, to talk politics and organise conspiracies in the studio in Via Margutta’. She added that it was ‘in his studio in the Via Margutta that a group of patriots met in the summer of 1853 to see by what means they could best forward a united action between the Roman revolutionists and the Liberal Government at Turin’.41 While Vedder and Coleman were not yet in Rome, they could have witnessed and even participated in kindred conversations during the 1860s. Moreover, as Costa maintained considerable power in the Italian art world, his proximity, both physical and philosophical, to his American friends may have spurred his desire to publicise their work. He was a member of the Roman city council and arranged art exhibitions at the Casino del Pincio, a building in the public gardens of the Pincian hill. As a curator, he was determined not only to undermine the authority of the Academy by showing studies from nature but also to demonstrate his progressivism by including works by artists of many different nationalities. When preparing for an exhibition in the winter of 1872–73, Costa ‘collected the few works which showed sincerity and thought, amongst others some by Scipione Vanutelli, a Roman painter for whom Costa had a sincere admiration; by Raggio, a Genoese … by the American artist, Elihu Vedder, who still resides in Rome; by another American, Coleman’.42 Costa’s support for Coleman and Vedder would endure. In 1886, while living in Tuscany, he co-founded In arte libertas (Freedom through art), an organisation intended, again, to challenge the Florentine Academy and to welcome foreign voices to the art world. For its first exhibition, held in Rome, Costa included one of his own paintings, Bridge at Ariccia; in subsequent exhibitions sponsored by In arte libertas during the 1880s, he included Vedder’s work and, in 1891–92, eight paintings by Coleman.43 The practice of representing ancient Etruscan sites to create a common visual vocabulary for Italian unification belonged to the widespread drive towards romanticism in nineteenth-century European and American painting. Such romanticism took many forms, including a reaction against ancient Rome and neoclassicism, and in favour of local traditions. Lyttelton situated this shift within a broad cultural context, noting that while ‘the critical public for national propagandists [during the Risorgimento] was that of the educated middle classes … democrats recognised the need to reach out to the masses’.44 Reaching out to ‘the masses’ may have involved depicting them in art. During the late 1860s and 1870s, Coleman frequently sketched and painted the ciociari and pifferari – residents of the Roman Campagna, who wore traditional Italian folk costumes. In these efforts, he was surely inspired by Costa and the Macchiaioli, who, as Dario Durbé noted, sought to ‘rediscover and redefine their own cultural identity’.45 Coleman’s Italian shepherd (ca. 1866; private collection) closely resembles Costa’s Shepherd in the Roman countryside (1860; Gallery of Modern Art, Milan). Both are fairly diminutive works painted on supports suitable for plein air sketching.46 The titular subjects wear the same clothing and stand in the same pose in nearly the same setting. Perhaps equally influential for Coleman was Fattori’s work, such as Women of the Ciociaria (ca. 1872; Galleria d’Arte Moderna,
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The picturesque political Palazzo Pitti) and Ciociaro (ca. 1872; present location unknown), which were studies for Horse market in the Piazza Montanara in Rome (1872 or 1873; unlocated). Coleman used several sketches of ciociari (now in private collections) to compose paintings, including Outside the walls (1868) (Plate 6). Evoking the high wall and isocephalic alignment of figures in Masaccio’s Raising of the son of Theophilus and St Peter enthroned (1425–27; Brancacci Chapel, Florence), Coleman featured two small clusters of ciociari, with their strapped shoes (ciocie), long capes, and knee-high pants. The women (ciociare) wear their traditional white blouses and long skirts, and cover their heads with rectangular cloths adorned with embroidery. Three children allude to generational continuity within their community while two priests, visually aligned with the ciociari and wearing plain mozzette over cassocks, idealistically embody the democratisation of the clergy. While Outside the walls may resemble any one of dozens of nineteenth-century romantic images of peasants, it takes on a more political identity when compared to photographs, probably taken in the 1870s, of Italian models dressed in traditional clothing.47 Affiliated with the Via Margutta, where they were sure to find artists in need of their services, the models are shown in one photograph playing Il gioco della morra on Via Flaminia, one of the oldest games in Italian history on one of the oldest roads in Rome.48 Although Via Flaminia was primarily constructed around 220 bce, during the reign of (and named for) the Roman consul Gaius Flaminius, sections may belong to an earlier road leading to the Etruscan city of Veii.49 As this road also connected Rome to Cisalpine Gaul in the north and to Rimini on the Adriatic coast, it ‘hastened the spread of Roman speech and manners both among the Umbrian cities, uniting them all more closely to Rome’.50 Moreover, as the Via Flaminia begins at the Porta del Popolo (formerly the Porta Flaminia), it lies ‘outside of ’ Rome’s ancient Aurelian Walls. If Coleman used these models for his painting, as it seems he did, and if the painting’s title alludes to their location on or near Via Flaminia, then despite its seemingly innocuous setting, Outside the walls conjures that sense of ‘national history’, rooted in the Etruscan past, that the patriots felt would promote their cause. Admittedly, it is not known if the models were, in fact, ciociari; still, by posing for photographs, they became savvy purveyors of self-representation, players in a performance of ‘peasanthood’. Their images helped to construct a visual lexicon of esteemed, patrimonial Italian traditions. Coleman joined this effort – at once picturesque and political – by representing them and by producing what he hoped would be marketable images. Indeed, Outside the walls was one of the few works he painted and sold on commission.51 While Lyttelton asserts that ‘conscious attempts to produce a national history for the masses became important only after unification had been achieved’,52 some works of art suggest that models and artists collaborated in this endeavour on the eve – and in the service – of unification. Another romantic strategy in which Coleman, Vedder, and the Macchiaioli participated was the quattrocento revival, which linked the Macchiaioli to the earlier Nazarenes and concurrent Pre-Raphaelites. Roberta Olson has shown that when nineteenth-century Italian artists ‘adopted overtly Italianate subjects and styles, it
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Hybrid republicanisms was frequently as an intentional regional and/or nationalistic statement’; in this way, they could avoid censorship and convey their contemporary political values to a receptive audience.53 Reflecting this agenda, Cabianca’s Florentine storytellers of the fourteenth century (1860; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Palazzo Pitti) presents a lush, shaded garden with five figures dressed in medieval costumes. The music of the lute player has inspired an amorous couple at the left, a gesticulating man in red at the centre (perhaps a poet or philosopher), and, at the right, a younger figure who stares intently at the musician. The lute player gazes into space, lost in the mellifluous sounds of his instrument. According to Olson, Cabianca was influenced here by Luigi Mussini’s The Sienese Decameron (1858; private collection) and Francesco Podesti’s The storytellers of the Decameron (ca. 1851; Museo Civico, Treviso).54 Having used the vernacular to write the Decameron (1348–53), Boccaccio became a hero to patriots. This context suggests that Cabianca capitalised on Boccaccio’s historical/ patriotic status to fortify the cause of the Risorgimento. The music party (1871) (Plate 7) is one of several works that Vedder painted either in direct tribute to Florentine storytellers of the fourteenth century or, more broadly, to Cabianca’s oeuvre. The walled garden and medieval ensemble return, though now with three costumed figures surrounding two musicians, all reified through meticulous brushwork and saturated colours in the style of Cabianca. Cabianca’s literary inspiration had long preoccupied Vedder; in describing his mindset around 1859, he noted, ‘I was more under the influence of the merry spirit of Boccaccio than that of the stern Ghibelline, and it was through his eyes that I saw most of the things in that Florentine Garden.’55 Vedder and Coleman could have seen Cabianca’s second iteration of the theme, Florentine story-tellers (Villa Salviati, episode from Boccaccio) (1860; present location unknown), at the Florentine Promotrice di belle arti in 1860.56 For much of the late 1860s and 1870s, Coleman joined in the romantic/patriotic quattrocento revival as well. One of dozens of drawings, paintings, and works on paper in this style is his Mandolin player (1879) (Plate 8). The titular subject closely resembles the musician in Cabianca’s painting; both figures perch on a shallow platform, cross their legs, and rest a large stringed instrument in their lap. Both wear flat-topped, conical hats and pointed shoes. Coleman’s musician wears bright red tights and a richly detailed blue-and-yellow jacket with slashed sleeves. A wine bottle and glass at the left counterbalance, at the right, the flower-filled maiolica albarello, or medicinal jar (mid-sixteenth century). The orange-and-blue ogival-patterned wall covering was a feature of Coleman’s Roman studio and appears in several of his paintings. The backgrounds of kindred works often include medieval tapestries showing hunting teams and their tents; the cassone here seems to show courtiers around a king and queen. Irrespective of his literary origin, the historical figure of the medieval musician, previously unheralded, took a starring role in the work of Cabianca, Vedder, and Coleman. His appearance was hardly coincidental. In 1820, the historian Ermes Visconti had stated that, in Italy, ‘classicism is dead and finished like the Venetian republic’; Lyttelton added that, by the mid-nineteenth century, heroic figures from
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The picturesque political ancient institutions affiliated with classical conventions were ‘nearly obsolete’. Instead, for writers and artists, ‘secondary figures – attendants, soldiers, crowds – and accessories – costumes, furniture, weapons – were essential for the creation of the atmosphere of the epoch without which the true significance of events that took place in history could not be understood’.57 While Coleman actively participated in the neoclassical revival during the 1880s and later, he and Vedder, surely inspired by Cabianca, supported precisely this literary and artistic turn towards ‘secondary figures’ – members of the working classes – and their ‘accessories’ in their quattrocentesque paintings. As Coleman foregrounds the titular subject of Mandolin player, he also aggressively directs our gaze to the musician’s brightly coloured costume, the resplendent cassone, the elegant wine bottle and glass, and the profiled figure on the albarello – that is, to ‘accessories’ ostensibly produced by skilled medieval Italian craftsmen. In short, as Coleman produced marketable paintings, he pictured the ‘secondary figures’ – the unsung heroes – who helped to establish Italy’s cultural history.58 Durbé has noted that after the transfer of the capital of Italy from Florence to Rome (in 1871), a ‘certain ennui settled over the work of the Macchiaioli’. The goal of unity having been achieved, some of the artist-patriots fell into a state of ‘spiritual malaise and disenchantment’. Costa seems to have become particularly embittered. As an elderly man, he felt that ‘the Italian people had not really suffered enough in order to be able to appreciate the true value of the blood that had been spilled’ and that the ‘ideals and goals of the Risorgimento were (and continued to be) essentially alien to the Italian people’.59 In Caricaturisti e caricaturati al Caffè ‘Michelangiolo’ (1848–1866) (1893), Signorini identified 1862, an even earlier date, for the death of the macchia.60 In the years following unification, Vedder partly embraced the ideals of the neoclassical revival. He drew and painted mythological scenes (Perseus and Medusa, The Pleiades), figures from the Bible (Lazarus, Samson and Delilah), and allegorical imagery (The soul in bondage, Fortune). He also continued to paint what might be termed aggressively anonymous scenes of the Italian countryside, in which he occasionally included peasants or religious figures. In this regard, his aesthetic changed little before and after unification; his lyrical paintings from both periods present fragments of rustic houses, old mills, windswept hills, and other features of rural Italy. By representing these otherwise overlooked facets of Italian life and culture even after unification, Vedder continued to foster the progressive political agenda of the Macchiaioli. After moving to Capri in the mid-1880s, Coleman, again working with models, joined the neoclassical revival by imaging Capri’s original ancient Greek residents, most often women lounging in pergola-filled gardens or carrying jugs of olive oil or wine from boats or ships on to the seashore. He also became the chief pictorial advocate for Capri’s local labourers: women making or carrying olive oil or wine, or harvesting the wheat fields of Anacapri. In these two bodies of work, he employed the ancient Roman trope of the ‘landscape of allusion’, the landscape ‘richly strewn with mementos of the past’.61 Well-known examples include Hadrian’s Villa, with its
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Hybrid republicanisms recreation of the Temple of Serapis in Canopus, and the landscapes of Nicolas Poussin inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The strategically constructed spaces of Coleman’s paintings not only alluded to historical continuity between Capri’s ancient Greek past and its present, they also conjured larger metaphysical narratives, such as the cycle of life, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. At the same time, Coleman may have been thinking about the patriotic ideals that he and Vedder shared with the Macchiaioli, and their practice of representing local Italian traditions in distinctly rural Italian settings. From yet another perspective – partly nostalgic, partly dispirited – Coleman’s paintings of local Capri workers reflect his distress over the increasing urbanisation, industrialisation, and modernisation that permeated late-nineteenth-century Italy, as well as the ensuing expatriation between 1876 and the beginning of World War I of millions of residents of southern Italy (the mezzogiorno), who failed to benefit from these so-called socio-economic improvements. Coleman was hardly alone in grappling with these multifaceted forces; as Jane Dini shows in Chapter 8, this volume, John Singer Sargent’s Street in Venice (1882) (Plate 14), which features working-class Venetian women, emanates ambivalence and paradox. Dini argues that while Sargent responds in his painting to the enthusiasm for the picturesque that washed across European art circles in the late nineteenth century, he also took care to represent women from an antiquated and pre-industrial economy, women who would not pose a threat to an American audience rife with critical disdain for the surge of immigrants from Italy into America. Ultimately, at the end of the century, the tensions between art and society, the idealised past and the uncertain future, the picturesque and the political made it almost impossible to present conventionally patriotic images of Italy. In November 1868, at the height of Coleman’s and Vedder’s alliance with the Macchiaioli, Frederic Church penned these words to his friend Martin Johnson Heade: ‘There is no use writing about Rome. The subject is as thread bare as the priests here.’62 Church had arrived in Rome only fifteen days earlier; his swipe at the Eternal City was somewhat surprising, given his well-known cultural inquisitiveness and penchant for grandeur. He seems to have been playing Twain, minus the wily sarcasm. While Church and his magnificent paintings would come to figure centrally in the historiography of American art, some of his antipathy seems to have overshadowed research into the American artist-émigrés. A shift in the heuristic spotlight illuminates their challenges and achievements. The Italian-born macchia – a potential career-ender at home – offered them agency and solidarity with the Italian artists who adopted it, in more ways than one, as a nom de guerre. Subject mattered as well. Reified through the brushstrokes of Coleman, Vedder, and the Macchiaioli, rural settings, often with Etruscan roots, and working-class Italians, be they ciociari, models playing ciociari, or quattrocento musicians, emerged to claim their patriotic identities. While the American artists would soon explore decorative, mythological, and neoclassical themes that were at odds with the aesthetics of the Macchiaioli, they never wavered in their devotion to the land and people of Italy. In reflecting on their early years as émigrés, a time of fierce political and aesthetic
The picturesque political battles on two continents, they could recall how they and their Italian companions together surmounted academic expectations, and how they shared a lexicon of painting and patriotism that offered them all a measure of freedom.
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Acknowledgements. I am grateful to Melissa Dabakis, Paul Kaplan, and Daniele Fiorentino for inviting me to present my work at the ‘Hybrid Republicanism’ conference in Rome in October 2016, out of which this essay grew. Additional thanks to Melissa and Paul for their thoughtful and detailed comments on an earlier draft of this essay, and to Jane Dini for sharing a draft of her chapter on Sargent in this volume with me.
Notes 1 M. Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress (1869; reprint New York: Penguin, 1969), pp. 196–7. 2 Ibid., pp. 190–1. 3 Ibid., pp. 198–9. 4 Coleman created more than 395 oil paintings, drawings, pastels, and watercolours during his sixty-two years in Italy, few of which have been published. He is the subject of a forthcoming critical analysis and catalogue by the author. For other artists in the Coleman–Vedder–Macchiaioli circle, see R. Soria, G. Borghini, and E. di Majo, Viaggiatori appassionati: Elihu Vedder e altri paesaggisti Americani dell’Ottocento in Italia (San Gimignano: Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Raffaele De Grada, 2002). 5 On the meanings of macchia, see D. Durbé, ‘Painters of Italian Life’, in E. Tonelli and K. Hart (eds), The Macchiaioli: Painters of Italian Life, 1850–1900 (Los Angeles, CA: The Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, 1986), pp. 21–3. See also N. Broude, The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 4. 6 N. Broude, ‘The Macchiaioli: art or history?’ Art Journal 46:2 (Summer 1987): 141. 7 The American press of the 1850s and early 1860s largely denounced the type of expressive brushwork favoured by the Macchiaioli. For example, a critic castigated George Inness for one of his loosely painted landscapes, calling it ‘a most lamentable display’. He implored Inness to ‘pray leave off such freaks, and paint as we know you can paint. Thus to trifle with yourself and the public is more than foolish: it is criminal.’ See ‘Editor’s Table. Exhibition of the National Academy of Design’, The Knickerbocker 45:5 (May 1855): 533. Vedder’s position in American art history is more secure than Coleman’s. It was considerably bolstered by Regina Soria’s landmark Vedder biography, Elihu Vedder: American Visionary Artist in Rome (1836–1923) (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970). However, rather than appropriately interpreting the epithet ‘visionary’ as ‘imaginative’, some scholars suggested that Vedder was handicapped by mental illness, which led to further exclusion from the canon. For a more ecumenical view of his work, see S. Yount, ‘Elihu Vedder’s Rubáiyát: art and enterprise’, American Art 29:2 (Summer 2015): 112–18. 8 Bonaiuti’s last name is alternatively spelled Buonaiuti and Buonajuti. 9 E. Vedder, The Digressions of ‘V’: Written for His Own Fun and That of His Friends (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), p. 152. Vedder doesn’t specify which statues Bonaiuti copied, though he notes, somewhat peculiarly, that they studied ‘the Elgin marbles’, probably thinking of the three Parthenon fragments in the Vatican. 10 Ibid. 11 Soria, Elihu Vedder, p. 104. 12 Broude, The Macchiaioli, p. 3. 13 Vedder, The Digressions of ‘V’, pp. 161–2. 14 Ibid., p. 140. 15 D. Rosand, ‘Titian and the eloquence of the brush’, Artibus et Historiae 2:3 (1981): 93. 16 Quoted in Durbé, ‘Painters of Italian Life’, p. 22.
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Hybrid republicanisms 17 On this topic, see N. Broude, ‘The Macchiaioli: effect and expression in nineteenth-century Florentine painting’, The Art Bulletin 52:1 (March 1970): 11–21. 18 M. E. Landgren, American Pupils of Thomas Couture (Baltimore, MA: University of Maryland Art Gallery, 1970), pp. 26–7. 19 R. Soria, Visions of Italy: Charles Caryl Coleman, Elihu Vedder (New York: Borghi & Co., 1988), p. 52. 20 Kate Field puts Coleman in Florence in 1861. See L. Whiting, Kate Field: A Memoir (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1900), pp. 124–5. For the trip to Gibraltar, see ‘Art items’, NewYork Daily Tribune (28 July 1860): 6. For the trip to Paris, see ‘Art items’, New-York Daily Tribune (7 November 1860): 7:4. 21 On 11 December 1860, Coleman in Florence wrote to George Henry Yewell in Paris: ‘I am very pleasantly situated at no. 1176 Borgo S. S. Apostoli. I am delighted with Florence[,] its galleries and the surrounding country. Since my arrival I have painted from original pictures & made several sketches from nature.’ Yewell papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter AAA), roll 2428, frame 120. 22 Vedder, The Digressions of ‘V’, p. 151. 23 Ibid., p. 165. Fiesole is significant not only for its Etruscan roots but also as the setting of Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Both identities, I argue here, linked Vedder and Coleman to the Macchiaioli. 24 Ibid., pp. 154–5. Vedder is probably referring to the portraitist Michele Gordigiani (1835–1909), a friend of the Macchiaioli. 25 Broude, The Macchiaioli, p. 203. 26 Ibid. p. 3. 27 G. Kobbé, ‘Charles Caryl Coleman’, Truth (March 1900): 54. 28 Annual Report of the Adjutant-General of the State of New York For the Year 1902: Registers of the One Hundredth, One Hundred and First, One Hundred and Second, One Hundred and Third, One Hundred and Fourth, One Hundred and Fifth, and One Hundred and Sixth Regiments of Infantry, serial no. 33, vol. 4 (Albany, NY: The Argus Company, Printers, 1903), p. 53. See also the National Park Service’s ‘Search for Soldier’, www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-soldiers.htm (accessed 6 October 2019), and ‘They owned the town. Survivors of the 100th Regiment entertained at Akron’, Buffalo Courier (7 September 1890): 5. 29 Vedder, The Digressions of ‘V’, p. 233. 30 The quotations by Vedder in this paragraph come from ibid., pp. 190, 233, 232, 142, and 150 respectively. Soria has written that ‘On the whole one cannot say that political events, which so much affected the lives of the Italian artists with whom Vedder associated, had any particular effect on Vedder himself … If chasing the Grand Duke from Florence had been an exciting event in which he had participated because of the enthusiasm of his Macchiaioli friends, Garibaldi’s unsuccessful attempt to seize Rome in 1867 was, as Vedder wrote to his father, an interruption to his work.’ R. Soria, ‘Introduction’, in Perceptions and Evocations: The Art of Elihu Vedder (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979), p. 9. Soria focuses on Vedder’s comment from The Digressions of ‘V’ (p. 149) that he ‘seemed to take so little interest in the great events going on about me at that time’. But let us also recall that, in the same memoir, he noted that ‘It is strange how little one sees of what is going on when one is in the midst of it’ (p. 234). 31 A. Lyttelton, ‘Creating a National Past: History, Myth and Image in the Risorgimento’, in A. R. Ascoli and K. von Henneberg (eds), Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (New York and Oxford: Berg, 2001), p. 28. 32 Ibid., p. 44. 33 A. Boime, ‘The Macchiaioli and the Risorgimento’, in E. Tonelli and K. Hart (eds), The Macchiaioli: Painters of Italian Life, 1850–1900 (Los Angeles, CA: The Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, 1986), p. 35. 34 J. C. Taylor, ‘Perceptions and Digressions’, in R. Soria, Perceptions and Evocations: The Art of Elihu Vedder (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979), p. 40.
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The picturesque political 35 Vedder, The Digressions of ‘V’, p. 373. Vedder would ratify his link to Costa by joining the Golden Club, founded by Costa in Rome in 1875 to promote the direct study of nature. 36 W. James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899; reprint Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 127. 37 ‘Roman Gossip: Our Italian Letter’, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (21 March 1877): 1. See also G. J. Hoogewerff, Via Margutta, centro di vita artistica (Roma: Instituto di Studi Romani, 1953). The English Coleman was also a close friend of Giovanni Costa; Costa admired his sweeping treatments of the Roman countryside and his interest in Italian workers, such as buffalo herders, shepherds, and charcoal burners. For the sincerity of his treatment of these subjects, Costa referred to him as ‘the Father of the Campagna Romana School’. For more on Costa’s friendship with him and with the English artist George Hemming Mason, see O. R. Agresti, Giovanni Costa: His Life, Work, & Times (London: Gay and Bird, 1903), pp. 55–61. 38 Agresti, Giovanni Costa, p. 51. 39 Soria, ‘Introduction’, p. 16. 40 A. Brewster, ‘Letter from Rome’, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (27 April 1870): 2; see also ‘Americans in Rome. Loitering in the studios’, Richmond Dispatch (21 June 1885): 6. 41 Agresti, Giovanni Costa, pp. 52, 79. So close were Costa’s ties to the English, Agresti noted, that when the papal government later sought to seize Costa’s property, the English consul was enlisted to ‘seal up the door of the studio at No. 33 Via Margutta with England’s seal, and to appropriate pro tem. the property’ (p. 161). 42 Agresti, Giovanni Costa, p. 196. 43 Soria, Vedder, p. 249; Soria, Visions of Italy, p. 58. 44 Lyttelton, ‘Creating a National Past’, p. 28. 45 Durbé, ‘Painters of Italian Life’, p. 23. 46 Costa painted with oils on 33 x 27 cm paper; Coleman painted with oils on 17.15 x 12.7 cm artist’s board. 47 Coleman seems to have used Filomena (‘Nena’) di Anticoli and Maria Curti as models for two women in the painting. He may have used the model Rampino and his son for the shepherd and little boy. See A. Jandolo, Studi e Modelli di Via Margutta (1870–1950) (Milano: Casa Editrice Ceschina, 1953), captions for plates 37 and 39. For the use of models in the Italian works of other American artists, see M. McGuigan, ‘“This Market of Physiognomy”: American Artists and Rome’s Art Academies, Life Schools, and Models, 1825–1870’, in W. L. Vance, M. K. McGuigan, and J. F. McGuigan, Jr., America’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City, 1800–1900 (Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum 2009), pp. 39–71. 48 The game morra (from the Latin mico, to flash) involves two players rapidly and simultaneously revealing different numbers of fingers. The player who most frequently calls out the total correct number of fingers revealed wins the game. Played by the ancient Romans (as micatio), morra continues to be played in various incarnations throughout the Mediterranean. 49 T. Ashby and R. A. L. Fell, ‘The Via Flaminia’, Journal of Roman Studies 11 (1921): 134. 50 Ibid.: 127. 51 An inscription on the reverse of the painting in Coleman’s hand reads ‘painted for Mr. Scheafe/ Care [of] Hollinger & Co. Paris’. 52 Lyttelton, ‘Creating a National Past’, p. 28. 53 R. J. M. Olson, Ottocento: Romanticism and Revolution in 19th-Century Italian Painting (Florence: Centro Di and New York: The American Federation of Arts, 1992), p. 13. 54 Ibid., p. 171. 55 Vedder, The Digressions of ‘V’, p. 149. 56 For the exhibition of the painting in Florence, see Broude, The Macchiaioli, p. 289, n. 29. 57 Lyttelton, ‘Creating a National Past’, p. 33 (emphasis in the original). 58 Coleman, Vedder, and Italian artists in their circle also personally participated in the quattrocento revival. See the photographs of ‘Florentine Artists in Costume’ and of Vedder himself in costume in The Digressions of ‘V’ (pp. 151, 335). Moreover, a recently discovered cache of photographs included one of Coleman in a quattrocento costume; the photograph is now in a private collection. On the discovery of the photographs, see my article ‘Charles Caryl Coleman Rediscovered’:
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Hybrid republicanisms www.aaa.si.edu/blog/2019/08/charles-caryl-coleman-rediscovered. Indeed, this penchant for performance endured. In 1892, a group of Via Margutta artists, which included Cesare Biseo, Augusto Alberici, and Aurelio Tiratelli, organised a ‘corteo quattrocentesco’, complete with banners and plumed hats. See Jandolo, Studi e Modelli di Via Margutta, plate 32. The medieval festival continues today in Corciano, near Perugia. 59 The quotations by Durbé in this paragraph come from Durbé, ‘Painters of Italian Life’, pp. 18, 19, and 19 respectively. 60 Broude, The Macchiaioli, p. 47. For Broude, by contrast, the ‘effects’ of the macchia ‘continued to be felt in their art long after 1862’ (p. 47). 61 For the ‘landscape of allusion’ as it pertains to ancient Roman architecture, see J. Pinto, ‘Hadrian’s Villa and the landscape of allusion’, SiteLINES: A Journal of Place 4:2 (Spring 2009): 7–9. 62 Church to Heade, 16 November 1868, Martin Johnson Heade papers, AAA, box 1, folder 1.
Selected bibliography Bell, A. B. ‘Charles Caryl Coleman: Transnational American artist’, American Arts Quarterly (Winter 2015): 31–40. Broude, N. The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. _____. ‘The Macchiaioli: effect and expression in nineteenth-century Florentine painting’, The Art Bulletin 52:1 (March 1970): 11–21. Costa, Giovanni. Quel che vidi e quel che intesi, a cura di G. Guerazzi Costa. Milano: Fratelli Treves Editori, 1927; Milano: Longanesi & C., 1983. Dini, F. and S. Frezzotti. Nino Costa e il paesaggio dell’anima. Da Corot ai macchiaioli. Milano: Skira, 2009. Durbé, D. Fattori e la Scuola di Castiglioncello (I Macchiaioli). Roma e Milano: De Luca Edizioni d’Arte and Leonardo Editore, 1989. Lyttelton, A. ‘Creating a National Past: History, Myth and Image in the Risorgimento’. In R. Ascoli and K. von Henneberg, Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento. New York and Oxford: Berg, 2001, pp. 27–74. Maffioli, M. I Macchiaioli e la fotographia. Firenze: Alinari, 2008. Mazzocca, F. I Macchiaioli. Firenze: Giunti Editore, 2019. Olson, R. J. M. Ottocento: Romanticism and Revolution in 19th-Century Italian Painting. Florence: Centro Di and New York: American Federation of Arts, 1992. Panconi, T. Antologia dei Macchiaioli. La trasformazione sociale e artistica nella Toscana di metà Ottocento. Massa e Cozzile: MediArte, 1999. Signorini, Telemaco. Caricaturisti e Caricaturati al Caffe ‘Michelangiolo’. Firenze: LeMonnier, 1952; Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2012. Soria, R. Elihu Vedder: American Visionary Artist in Rome (1836–1923). Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970. Soria, R., G. Borghini, and E. di Majo. Viaggiatori appassionati: Elihu Vedder e altri paesaggisti Americani dell’Ottocento in Italia. San Gimignano: Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Raffaele De Grada, 2002. Tonelli, E. and K. Hart (eds). The Macchiaioli: Painters of Italian Life 1850–1900. Los Angeles, CA: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1986. Vedder, Elihu. The Digressions of ‘V’: Written for His Own Fun and That of His Friends. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910.
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6
William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni: a node in the web of transatlantic ‘traffic’ in the second half of the nineteenth century Marina Camboni
Henry James wrote in his biography of William Wetmore Story that ‘a prosperous traffic’ joined at the time, as it does now, the two sides of the Atlantic.1 This ‘traffic’ yields its riches only if critical attention focuses on human exchanges as much as on the hybridising processes that entangle the two Atlantic coasts. Here I shall concentrate on the single entangling node in the transatlantic web formed by William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni in the second half of the nineteenth century, with Nencioni as connecting thread. William Wetmore Story (1819–95), a representative of the New England elite, a lawyer turned sculptor, was born the same year as his compatriot Walt Whitman (1819–92), the working-class, self-taught poet rooted in New York. The two men could not have been more different. While Story was cosmopolitan and well travelled, Whitman never left North America even though, like his alter ego Walt in ‘Song of myself ’, he espoused a cosmic consciousness. Story and Whitman also followed distinct ideal and artistic paths with opposite temporal trajectories: one heading back to a nostalgic past, the other aiming towards an unborn future. Story looked to the time-laden city of Rome as the place where he could ‘loafe and invite’ his ‘soul’, while Whitman chose to ‘lean and loafe’ at his ease, ‘observing a spear of summer grass’ in the American landscape.2 To these two American artists the Florentine critic and poet Enrico Nencioni (1837–96) devoted remarkable critical attention. He befriended Story and made his work known in Italy. Exceptionally, he devoted six long critical essays to Whitman, which included the first Italian translations of his poems. Nencioni engaged with each in a dialogue that nourished the Mazzinian ideal of a modern realist art to be developed in post-Risorgimento Italy. While Nencioni’s role in introducing Whitman to the Italian public has been amply acknowledged, the transnational historical context has been insufficiently explored. Nencioni’s relationship with Story and what he did to promote Story’s work have also been largely ignored.3 By contrast, the one literary work that has set the scene for generations regarding Story’s art and Italian experience is Henry James’s biography, William Wetmore
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Hybrid republicanisms Story and His Friends. James represents the sculptor’s epoch as one swathed in a nostalgic aura seeming to sanctify the earlier generations of American artists who came in pilgrimage to Rome and Italy only to become ‘consenting victims’ of a bewitching land.4 While this nostalgic aura served as a rhetorical ruse to establish a hazy distance between his own historical and artistic time and Story’s, it also blunted James’s critique of Story’s achievement. In fact, the book itself was a written monument sanctioning the cultural death and burial not only of Story and his work but also of classical Rome, with its American neoclassical admirers, among them a group of American women sculptors, as Melissa Dabakis has discussed in A Sisterhood of Sculptors.5 James’s critique also cast a shadow over the work of Enrico Nencioni. James had met and conversed with Nencioni and probably knew of his long-lasting relationship with Story.6 Despite quoting a lengthy autobiographical letter from Story to Nencioni, James mentions the latter only once in his biography, after first introducing him as an ‘Italian acquaintance’ of Story’s. Later critics have continued to refer to Nencioni only as ‘an acquaintance’.7 Here I will address this imbalance by reading Nencioni’s relationship with Story and Whitman from a semiotic critical perspective and within the parallel processes of political unification in Italy and national consolidation in the United States. The relational nodes constituted by Story and Nencioni, and Nencioni and Whitman, moreover, are seen as part of a larger network that contributed to the shaping of an asynchronous, complex transnational and transatlantic cultural sphere.8 My chapter comprises three parts. The first, devoted to the relationship between Nencioni and Story, also examines Story’s symbolic representations of the American Civil War. The second focuses on Nencioni’s reading of Whitman as the poet of the Civil War and Nencioni’s association of Whitman with Giuseppe Mazzini and Gustave Courbet. The third centres on Whitman’s poem ‘Resurgemus’ and his self-image as a revolutionary in the manner of the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi and Courbet. *** A well-connected traveller who moved in the upper spheres of culture and politics, William Wetmore Story aspired to become not simply a sculptor, but a humanist and the modern incarnation of the Renaissance man.9 He visited Italy twice (1847– 49 and 1851–54) before finally settling in Rome in 1856, in a spacious apartment on the second floor of the Palazzo Barberini. He lived in Rome until the end of his life, producing his best work, taking advantage of the skills of native carvers and the abundance of marble, rejoicing in the company and example of American and international sculptors, and ultimately reinforced ‘the formation of his taste’ by this garden of the arts.10 Story and his family landed in Genoa in late 1847, on the eve of 1848, the year of the ‘Springtime of the Peoples’, when all over Europe political revolutions were undermining the post-Napoleonic order imposed by the Holy Alliance from 1815
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William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni onwards.11 On their way to Rome, the Storys first visited Florence, where they were to return the following summer and winter, and where they met Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A close friendship developed between them, and a long-lasting admiration for Robert Browning’s poetry bloomed in Story, who later sculpted busts of the couple.12 The Storys spent most of 1848 in Rome, where their Transcendentalist friend Margaret Fuller, now a correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune, introduced them to the circle of Anglo-American expatriates in the city and to her patriot ‘friend’ Giovanni Ossoli.13 In February 1849 the Storys were plunged into the political experiment of the Repubblica Romana, the first secular and democratic republic on European soil, headed by Giuseppe Mazzini. When the French soldiers of Louis Napoleon attacked the Republic to restore Pope Pius IX, Giuseppe Garibaldi’s guards strenuously defended it. Story watched the construction of barricades at the Porta San Giovanni and drew a number of sketches. He did not limit himself to observing the war unfold, however; before leaving Rome in May, he and his wife contributed funds to the hospital for wounded soldiers run by the Princess Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso. In July 1849 the Republic fell and, with the help of the French, the Pope returned to restore a harsher order than before.14 After 1856 the Storys, already permanent residents in Rome, started to spend their summers in country villas. And it was in one of the villas near Siena that, in 1859, Story discovered ‘a kindred spirit’ in the much younger Enrico Nencioni, who was then working as a private tutor to Count Augusto Gori Pannilini’s son. Story’s own daughter, Marchesa Edith Marion Peruzzi de’ Medici, provides the best summary of those summers: In the late fifties the Villa Belvedere Marciano, near Siena, became for five years our summer home. From the terrace garden, looking across a valley of olives and vines, we could see the grim square Villa Alberti where the Brownings lived; then Villa Borghese, for a time occupied by Tommaseo – the patriot whose inscription to Mrs. Browning on Casa Guidi makes him dear to all Anglo-Saxons … and Villa Bargagli in a grove of trees, where the Crawfords came for a month or so. Our nearest neighbours were Count Gori Pannilini and his family. My father soon discovered in the person of the tutor of young Giulio Gori that rare kindred spirit Enrico Nencioni. At that time Nencioni’s scant knowledge of English made it impossible to foresee that in the years to come he would become a great critic of English poetry; but my father soon felt that he had such a fine mind and such an intuition for the beautiful that he took great pleasure in initiating him into the study of English poetry and would read with him for hours in the evening.15
Enrico Nencioni, born in Florence in 1837 into a genteel but impoverished family, had a classical education at the Piarists Schools of the Scolopi Fathers in Florence, where the painter Telemaco Signorini also studied. He became Signorini’s lifelong friend. Although unable to attend university, Nencioni pursued his education by subscribing to the international lending library of the Gabinetto Vieusseux. Reading modern and contemporary literature, he kept up to date with the most recent international literary production. And it was by cultivating his transnational interests and by promoting a non-nationalist stance that he built his reputation as a critic and
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Hybrid republicanisms attracted the interest of both a select literary readership and a larger public, especially women.16 Although Nencioni predominantly engaged with foreign tongues and literatures, it was the languages of the visual arts to which he felt most attracted. In the late 1850s, in association with Telemaco Signorini, he worked on a programme to forge a relationship between the written and the visual arts and create an aesthetic language that could span both. Signorini was the theorist and the most international of the Macchiaioli painters, who rebelled against academic and neoclassical art while supporting Mazzinian republicanism and Italian unification.17 It would become a hallmark of Nencioni’s criticism to examine this important linkage between visual and verbal codes. From 1859 to 1870 Nencioni worked for the Gori Pannilini family, to whom he also introduced Signorini. These were formative years for the romantic Mazzinian. Tutoring left him time to devote to his poetry, cultivate his literary taste, learn foreign languages, share in the Count’s wide cultural and scientific pursuits, and socialise with the family’s neighbours. Indeed, this strong relationship with the Gori Pannilini family would leave a lasting mark on his professional career. Frequent meetings in one salon or another, and reciprocal visits between the families, favoured friendships. Through the Gori Pannilini, Nencioni met William Wetmore Story, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Robert Browning as well as their close friend Walter Savage Landor. Nencioni’s record of a heated debate in 1859 between Landor and an Italian professor about Garibaldi offers an insight into the kind of cultural and political discourse that took place in those salons. Importantly, 1859 was the crucial year of the Second Italian War of Independence. If Nencioni felt personally involved in the events, Story found himself again immersed in the heat of ideological and political conflict in Italy. The old Landor, Nencioni writes, ‘spoke with youthful ardour of Garibaldi’, but the professor ‘tried to object and advance his reservations’, leading Landor to get angry and raise his voice.18 Nencioni certainly understood the opposite political agendas at play in this heated debate. While Landor had taken the sides of the two revolutionary republican Giuseppes, Mazzini and Garibaldi, the professor had aligned himself with the moderate programme of Italy’s unification under the King of Piedmont and Sardinia. This professor, probably a friend and ally of Count Augusto Gori Pannilini, was devoted to the Italian cause but averse to the revolutionary spirit of the republicans.19 The count’s moderate liberalism most probably influenced Nencioni and somewhat tempered the Mazzinian patriotism he shared with Signorini. Nencioni’s critical essays betray both attitudes, but also show his determination to promote a democratic art and to shape a more Europeanised, cosmopolitan, and modern Italian culture. After a long separation, Story and Nencioni renewed their relationship in the early 1880s, the high point of Nencioni’s career; their friendship continued until Story’s death. Nencioni had spent a forlorn period tutoring in Naples (1875–80) before moving to Rome in the years 1880–83. There, he worked at the national periodical of culture Fanfulla della Domenica, contributed to the leading literary magazines of the time, and participated in the thriving artistic circles of the Italian capital.
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William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni Appointed professor at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero for women, he returned to Florence, where from 1884 he taught, lectured, and played an active part in the Anglo-Florentine salons of Violet Paget (Vernon Lee) and Linda and Pasquale Villari. At this time not only did he consolidate his earlier friendships with Story and Signorini, but he also met Henry James.20 The letters Story and Nencioni exchanged, the critical essays in which Nencioni reviewed Story’s work, and the poems Story dedicated to the Italian critic testify to their professional and personal connection. Notwithstanding their differences in age, language, and upbringing, the two were deeply romantic in their outlook, as Story points out in an 1881 letter to Nencioni, where he comments on Nencioni’s reading of Don Quixote, to which he thoroughly subscribes: I was delighted with the Don. You have rightly [?] interpreted that spiritual and romantic nature for which the world of Sancho Panza, wedded to common sense (so called) and to what a few are pleased to call facts as distinguished from ideas has only a vulgar contempt – Ideal and poetic natures are always … [in opposition?] to the common herd, who have scarcely any principles beyond expedience.
In another undated letter, Story attached two sonnets dedicated to Nencioni, which confirm his inveterate romantic idealism and neoclassical imagination. Here is one: Where are those forms august that mid the press The busy noise and praises of to-day Stand so serene above the world’s affray With sure youthful strength and loveliness? They are the mighty makers, whom no stress Of time can shame – no fashion sweep away Whom art begot on nature in the play Of healthy passion, scorning base excess Riding perchance in mist & half-obscure When up the horizon of their age they came Brighter with years they shine in steadier light – Great constellations that will aye endure Though myriad meteors with a stroke of flame Across them flash to Mind a moment’s sight.21
Nencioni and Story were patriotic but not revolutionary. Although Nencioni may have felt that his work as a critic was aligned with Mazzini’s ideas and served as his political contribution to the construction of a European Italy, both writer and artist lacked the enthusiasm and active participation that was to make Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, and Margaret Fuller heroes of the Risorgimento. And yet Story accurately recorded the oppression of the people under the French occupation of Rome, the despotism of Pope Pius IX, and the church’s control over the Romans in his successful Roba di Roma. In the book, completed in 1862, he sided with the Italians fighting for independence. Using classical references in an
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apparently folkloric narrative, he also painted a Corot-like picture of the city and its inhabitants to prove to the American and British visitor – who deemed the people incapable of fighting for freedom – that the Romans of his day were the contemporary incarnation of ancient Rome and equally worthy of respect and admiration. Enrico Nencioni’s first review of Roba di Roma appeared in an early issue of L’Italia Nuova, a newspaper launched in Florence in the aftermath of the climactic event of the Italian Risorgimento, the capture of Rome in September 1870. At the beginning Nencioni emphasises the material and symbolic relevance of the book for the city and for the whole unified nation: Rome! – Sacred and fateful name … The Italians … composed a poem to her in our times, written with the action of Garibaldi’s sword and with the blood of thousands of martyrs, and in the irresistible impetus to unite with her, the true and natural head, fused themselves into one family. One of the latest books on Rome, though not the least, is that by Mr. W. Story, renowned American sculptor and poet and long-time resident of Rome. While like his predecessors he depicts the ideal and poetic character of the great city, he does not fail to note what Rome lacks materially as a modern city (and there is much) … [in the book] the voice of this sculptor of Cleopatra and Saul, this poet of Nemesi and Ghino di Tacco, comes across clearly.22
If in this first review Nencioni underscores the connection of Story’s Roba di Roma both to Italian unification and to his work as sculptor, in the second, published in 1881 in the Fanfulla della Domenica, he calls Story ‘meritorious’ of Italy.23 In it, he also details the artistic value of Story’s sculpture Cleopatra and its success in the London International Exhibition of 1862, provides a long biography he had obtained from the artist himself, and contributes a review of Story’s Roba di Roma, as well as poetry and critical writings. Nencioni reviewed the book for the third time in the 1888 essay ‘Roma e gli scrittori inglesi’, devoted to a number of English and American writers who had dedicated their attention to the city, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne among them. Celebrating Rome as capital of the newly formed Italian state, Nencioni highlights the city’s post-unification modernisation and polemicises against those foreign writers who believe the city should be a museum. These writers, he explains, are not worth taking into consideration. However, he does include Story, mentions his Graffiti d’Italia, and recommends reading Roba di Roma, ‘a book à la Stendhal’, because it is written by a true artist. Though some of the chapters represent a picturesque Rome which has almost disappeared, Nencioni sees other parts of the book providing a rich repertory of images of the living city. 24 While Story was writing Roba di Roma, he was also involved in the Civil War drama of the United States where, in February 1861, seven seceding southern states had formed a new Confederacy. By the end of the year the Confederates seemed to be winning their armed battle for independence on American soil, and gaining diplomatic and popular recognition across the Atlantic. In December 1861 Story sent three letters to the British paper The Daily News – later published in book form as The American Question (1862) – entering the public arena on the side of the northern
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William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni Unionists. In the letters he protested that the stated neutrality of Great Britain towards the two belligerents belied its actual support of the southern states, and reminded the British government that ‘Such was not the course of England … when the Italian states drove out their oppressors to the cry of freedom’. 25 Like the Italians in Europe, he argued, the Unionists were fighting a civilising war for human freedom, and waging a political war that with the abolition of slavery would complete the 1776 Revolution, finally wiping the stain of slavery from the Constitution. Fighting for a united republic, he contended, was in the best interests of the nation. As a single democratic republic, the United States would not only differentiate itself further from a Europe divided into many belligerent states but would carry much more weight on the world political and economic stage. Drawing a parallel between the Italian struggle for unity and the northern defence of the Union, Story indirectly pointed out that the American Civil War was a transatlantic affair. Europeans were divided, with the conservatives anticipating the failure of the American democratic republic, and the revolutionaries looking to the country as a beacon of liberty for which they were fighting. Many governments in Europe also knew that the split into two distinct political entities would interrupt the expansion of the United States to their advantage. An 1864 note of Walt Whitman’s sums up America’s concern: ‘There is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the United States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember’d by it.’26 To win over British and European opinion on the good motives of the Unionists, Story put in place a coherent rhetorical strategy. He built two symbolically powerful sets of isotopies and arranged them on opposite sides in which the Unionist, American, and universal moral spaces overlapped. While the Unionists are aligned with the good and God, the South shares its side with evil and Satan. Here is the lexical list taken from the text: GOD/GOOD The Northern States – union – democracy – revolution – construction – liberty – constitution – law – freedom as birthright – faithfulness/loyalty (to the constitution) – obedience – peace
DEVIL/WRONG The Southern States – confederation – oligarchy – rebellion – destruction – slavery – secession – illegality – master–slave – treason – disruption – violence
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To give universal moral authority to this opposition, Story wrapped it in classical and biblical imagery, which projected a heroic and mythical aura on to the American Civil War. Where the North is the Temple/Pillar of democracy, the South is its ruin. If the South is the malignant Giant Geryon, the North must be Hercules fighting it. And if ‘slavery … is the hissing head of Southern rebellion’ then the South must be Lucifer, the rebellious angel in the form of a serpent, necessarily to be punished by God/the obeying Angel.27 GOD/GOOD The Northern States – Temple/Pillar – Hercules – God/obeying Angel
DEVIL/WRONG The Southern States – Ruin – Giant Geryon – Devil/Serpent/Lucifer
Story’s articulated symbolism represents the Civil War as the eternal battle between Heaven and Hell, dear to the Anglo-Puritan literary tradition and shared by many other Northern intellectuals and artists. Walt Whitman, for one, was in complete accord with Story when he denounced the secessionist attack on Fort Sumter and the United States flag, showing that battles are fought on the physical land as much as in the cognitive spaces of cultural symbols. Just like Story, he identified ‘secession slavery’ with ‘the arch-enemy’, and the secessionists as people in whose faces ‘the devil snickers’.28 Turning our attention to the transatlantic dimension of the Civil War, I would like to concentrate on Story’s statue Judith making her prayer upon slaying Holofernes rather than on the Libyan Sybil, usually associated with the war (Figure 6.1).29 Story wrote of Judith and the Sybil in a letter he sent in August 1861 to his friend Charles Eliot Norton where he specified that he had conceived the Sybil in racialised terms ‘with slavery on the horizon’. The horizon of slavery, however, included the ‘colourless’ white majority as much as the ‘coloured’ slave minority. And it is as signifiers of the White–Black, North–South dynamic of social, cultural, and geopolitical relations that we should regard both the Sybil and Judith. If the black eyes of the Libyan Sybil look out ‘into futurity’ only to see ‘the terrible fate of her race’, the blank eyes of the white Judith look up, skyward, to ask God to save her own race from an analogous terrible fate. The Sybil and Judith convey different facets of Story’s political sensibility and of the role racial discrimination and power relations played in the Civil War.30 In this, Story seems to share Whitman’s opinion that ‘the horror of slavery was not in what it did for the nigger but what it produced of the whites’.31 While slavery remained ‘on the horizon’, as Story writes, both the sculptor and the poet wanted as much to preserve a hegemonic white majority as to avoid the disintegration of their nation through a bloody fratricidal war, if not through peaceful means. Story began his Judith in 1858–59 and had it carved in marble in 1863. Through it, he hoped not only to communicate the cultural symbolism of civic courage and female sexual purity present in the myth of the biblical heroine, but to offer a perspective capable of speaking to the North American unionist, Anglo-Puritan
Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Figure 6.1. William Wetmore Story, Judith making her prayer upon slaying Holofernes (frontal view), 1863, marble, Farmleigh House, Dublin
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Hybrid republicanisms audience. He did so, however, through a dialectical relationship with the Italian culture in which he was immersed. The Judith myth, indeed, played a role not only in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, but also in Risorgimento artistic culture, where Judith-like characters were made to represent the integrity of the nation’s body and its revolt against foreign domination.32 In his letter to Norton, Story pointed out the political symbolism of his Judith, whose ‘great patriotic act’ (emphasis added) against ‘Holofernes the tyrant, the oppressor of her country’, seems more in tune with the Italian struggle for political independence than with the American Civil War.33 Story’s Judith entertains a constructive dialogue with past and present Italian artistic culture, and his novella Fiammetta bears proof of it. The novella’s protagonist is the Italian painter Marco Stenoni, who, at the beginning of the story, works on ‘a large canvas, representing Judith after the slaying of Holofernes’ in his studio in Rome. Dissatisfied with his work, he asks the opinion of his painter friend, who tells him frankly that ‘as a subject’ Judith ‘is heroic, stern, powerful’ and does not suit the painter’s ‘peculiar genius’, which, like Story’s, does not lie ‘in the direction of the cruel, the violent, the stern; but rather in the poetic, the ideal’. Besides, he continues, since ‘galleries everywhere are peopled with Judiths – all black-haired, all with a great sword’, his picture should show ‘real power and originality of conception’.34 At that point, Stenoni leaves his studio and the city to spend the summer in his countryside home. At the end of the story, he resumes his work and finishes the painting. The completed painting, like the completed statue, embodies Story’s personal originality as an American artist. His description of the statue in his letter to Norton guides us towards it: Judith [is represented] at the moment she makes her prayer before killing Holofernes. The right hand is thrown up to heaven, the left holds, a little behind her, her sword … All other representations make Judith a criminal, an assassin, and it is only before the act that she is poetically and artistically grand. The deed done she is a woman who has killed a man – and with Holofernes’ head repulsive. The painters represent her thus, for sake of colour and contrast, but this conception of her is low. The only other time is when she holds the head up to the people, a grand subject for a grand painting.35
Story’s Judith differs from the most familiar Renaissance and Baroque versions, where she holds Holofernes’s head.36 It also stands apart from Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes (1464?) in Florence, the first sculptural representation of the act of decapitation itself (Figure 6.2). Yet it is Donatello’s statue commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici which might have inspired him, at least for its political symbolism. The original inscription on the sculpture’s base emphasised Judith’s role as tyrant-slayer and stood for the independence and freedom cherished by the Medici. When the Medici were exiled in 1495, and the newly reinstated Republic appropriated the statue, the original inscription was replaced by a new one that emphasised the ‘republican endorsement of Judith’s divine role’ and the symbolism of Judith as chosen by God.37 Faithful to his idea that sculpture is a tragic art and has to do ‘with character, not anecdote’, Story chose to represent neither the act nor its outcome.38 With her upheld face and her right arm flung high, as if she were holding liberty’s flame, Judith
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William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni signals to her tribe God’s covenanted protection as well as her determination to kill Holofernes (Figure 6.3). A virginal, goddess-like young woman, dressed in a neoclassical tunic, Judith hides her sword. Nonetheless, she is ready to act. Her determination could well represent the attitude of the white northern American opponents of slavery, forced by the evil Confederates into a bloody war they did not want. In contrast to the Florentine Judith, who brandishes her sword, Story’s figure is a reluctant heroine who tells us that her violence is neither innate nor lasting but temporarily forced on her by the violence of the other. As with the Unionists in Story’s The American Question, God is on her side. Personifying a moral, patriotic America, she is the true ancestor of the white Puritan colonisers who identified with God’s chosen people. Nothing differs more from Story’s idealising representation of the Civil War than the Drum Taps poems of Walt Whitman, who also recorded in prose the war’s various phases. His description of the Union soldiers entering Washington, D.C. in a procession after the defeat at Bull Run in 1861 expresses a sentiment of participatory identification that recalls Telemaco Signorini’s paintings of the Risorgimento battles of 1859. Here, too, soldiers ‘come along … marching in silence … Sidewalks of Pennsylvania Avenue … crowded, jammed with citizens’. For Whitman, as for Signorini, the hero is the common soldier, whom he honours in ‘Death of a hero’.39
Figure 6.2. Donatello, Judith and Holofernes, ca. 1464?, bronze, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence
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Figure 6.3. William Wetmore Story, Judith making her prayer upon slaying Holofernes (side view), 1863, marble, Farmleigh House, Dublin
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William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni As a supporter of Italian independence and unity during the Risorgimento, Nencioni was perfectly in tune with Story’s and Whitman’s Unionist and nationalist credo and their emphasis on the need to eliminate slavery not only because it was a stain on the democratic republic but also because it was a remnant of an outdated feudal system, as Whitman pointed out in the lecture he delivered to commemorate Lincoln’s death.40 However, Nencioni felt closer to Whitman’s modern, cosmopolitan, and humanitarian ethos than to Story’s legal, neoclassically Puritan representations of the war and the Union. Nencioni chose to present – and partially translate – the poems from Drum Taps in the last and longest essay he devoted to Whitman, ‘Il poeta della guerra americana’, published in 1891. Whitman, ‘the poet of the American war’, is also for Nencioni, as for Emerson, ‘a (real) man’ and the pioneer of a new society. As for the American Civil War, ‘unique in human history’, it is ‘a titanic battle’ fought in an immense setting, and the high price paid in human lives is worth the abolition of slavery and ‘the indivisibility of the Republic’.41 As does Story in The American Question, Nencioni’s essay provides a representation of the ‘antagonism between North and South’. Initially a pagan titanic war, it soon becomes a ‘sainted, fecund, useful’ war, the perfect antithesis to Napoleon’s ‘very unjust, very bloody, and useless’ wars. Like Whitman, Nencioni considers the Northern volunteers as great as the volunteers of the French Republic of 1792, while Abraham Lincoln, ‘the first hero of the epoch’, shares his martyrdom with the many soldiers who fought in the war.42 Nencioni translates ‘First, O Songs for a Prelude’, ‘The Wound-Dresser’, and ‘War Dreams’ to point out how Whitman realistically portrays all facets of war and its tragedy, and how he sides with the common people, helping soldiers in his role as nurse in war camps and hospitals. He also detects a touch of Rembrandt in ‘A March in the Ranks Hard-pressed’. Like Story, Nencioni believes that the North’s greatness lies in its resistance ‘to the hardest trials remaining pure and heroic’.43 Concluding his essay, Nencioni first translates section 14 of ‘By Blue Ontario’s Shore’, then turns to ‘The Wound-Dresser’ to produce a portrait of the war poet as a modern-day Pietà, holding in his/her lap not one son but the million wounded, dead, or dying soldiers. Because they obeyed God’s will in dying for democracy, they are all saviours, and not uniquely of the American Union but of humanity. With a final turn, in his closing paragraph Nencioni addresses Italian artists. Instead of admiring contemporary European decadent literature, he argues, Italian poets should read Whitman, a man who can produce images and poems of global, humanitarian scope. In an earlier essay, titled ‘Whitman and Mazzini’ (1884), Nencioni had posited a parallel humanitarian stance between the two. He showed how the poems of the American poet, with their emphasis ‘on movement, action, the tremendous audacity of the masses’, who long for nature and yet passionately choose the city and its crowds, could be considered the concrete materialisation of the ideas of the Italian founder of Young Italy and Young Europe.44 Mazzini, Nencioni writes, invited artists to turn away from neoclassical representations, which, he believed, were only repetitive imitations, and represent the people and the events of their epoch.
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Hybrid republicanisms In associating Whitman and Mazzini, Nencioni was pointing in the right direction. But he stopped short of disentangling the transatlantic traffic of political and cultural ideas connecting the two. I will try to clarify a few of these connections: Mazzini had represented history as life issuing from ‘the social principle … sprung from the people, the monarch of the future’, and imagined present-day monarchies and aristocracies as ‘dead forms’.45 In his Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, in 1855, Whitman, the Young American, introduced the figure of America as the new protagonist on the world stage, who looked upon the past as skin to be shed, for ‘life … has passed into the new life of the new forms’. He showed ‘the corpse’ of past forms and institutions being ‘slowly borne’ out of the house.46 Among the twelve poems published in Leaves of Grass in 1855 was ‘Resurgemus’, inspired by the European Revolutions of 1848–49. Whitman had first published it in June 1850 in the New-York Daily Tribune, the same paper that had published Margaret Fuller’s dispatches from Rome. As Larry J. Reynolds has argued, ‘the revolutions of 1848–49 had shaped or were shaping [Whitman’s] conception of himself as an artist’.47 In a lecture given at the Brooklyn Art Union in 1851, the poet not only listed ‘Kossuth in captivity and Mazzini in exile’ among the ‘great rebels and innovators’ of the time but referred to recent events in Italy, finding in them a revolutionary spirit and aspirations to liberty and freedom from bondage: ‘In Naples, in Rome, in Venice, that ardour for liberty which is a constituent part of all well developed artists and without which a man cannot be such, has had a struggle – a hot and baffled one.’ Kossuth and Mazzini, he continued, ‘are heroic beauty’, ‘the best beloved of art’, and they are living poetry, that which the painter, the sculptor, can only express in description.48 Concluding his speech, Whitman quoted eighteen lines from ‘Resurgemus’, further linking his own emergent poetic voice to European revolutions. In the poem he points to the sufferings of the European revolutionaries who fought and died for liberty and independence, but he also celebrates ‘the revolutionary energy’ which unshackles people from bondage and rises up from the death fields of war. The very title of the poem, with its lexical affinity to the Italian ‘Risorgimento’, bears evidence that Italy was in his mind. Nencioni shared the humanitarian ideals of Whitman with his friends the Macchiaioli, geographically based in Florence but artistically connected to contemporary realist art in Europe, all in one way or another indebted to Mazzini’s revolutionary republicanism, and to Gustave Courbet’s radical realism in painting. In 1879 Nencioni sent to Signorini his first article on Whitman, and in his accompanying letter suggested that the painter, who had a good command of English, should read the Leaves, where he could find inspiration, as Whitman was ‘the American Courbet’.49 Nencioni was right. Whitman renewed poetry and literature in as radical a way as Gustave Courbet did painting. To host the paintings refused by the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1855, the same year as Leaves of Grass, Courbet had erected a circus tent called The Pavilion of Realism (Pavillon du réalisme) where he displayed his works. In his Realist Manifesto, also issued in 1855, he wrote that he wanted to be a man, not only a painter, and represent in his paintings ‘the reasoned and
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William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni independent consciousness’ of his own individuality.50 Years later, Whitman himself used similar words, referring to his 1855 Leaves as the manifesto in which he wanted to ‘faithfully express … my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality … and to exploit that Personality’.51 Whitman’s and Courbet’s revolutionary spirit took the symbolic form of a shirt uniting ideological and representational realities. In their respective portraits of the artist as contemporary revolutionary, it is the shirt they are wearing that symbolises both their political class choice and their adoption of realism in art. In the engraved portrait enclosed in the first edition of Leaves of Grass (Figure 6.4) Whitman sports with ease a common shirt comparable to that of his contemporary Courbet – also born in 1819 – in his 1854 painting The meeting or ‘Bonjour Monsieur Courbet’ (Figure 6.5). If the shirt explicitly points to the common man and present-day reality, it implicitly brings to mind the most heroic shirt of the time, Garibaldi’s red shirt, as in Silvestro Lega’s Portrait of Garibaldi, of 1861 (Plate 9). A Mazzinian who had fought for the Roman Republic and a unified Italy, as well as the ‘defender of Uruguayan freedom’, Garibaldi was the hero of the two worlds par excellence.52 To these images of Whitman and Courbet one could apply the words Victor Hugo used to define Garibaldi: ‘What is Garibaldi? He is a man, nothing more. But a man in the full sublime sense of the word. A man of freedom, a man of humanity.’53 Like Whitman, Nencioni affiliated himself with this universal humanitarianism and put his literary criticism at its service. Signorini moved on and embraced class consciousness together with Proudhon’s socialist philosophy and art theory. There is no proof that Signorini ever read Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. However, one of his paintings, L’alzaia (1864), offers a representation of the male worker that seems in tune with Whitman’s post-Civil War ‘average’ American man (Plate 10). L’alzaia was first exhibited in the same year the International Working Men’s Association was created in London with no less a programme than to regenerate mankind. In Signorini’s painting, five boatmen pull a boat (the Alzaia, outside the frame) against the current of the river. Heavily bent under the weight of arduous work and manifest poverty, they move slowly from right to left. All except one hide their face and turn their back to the viewer as if to signify an apparent humility, though they may be really hiding pent-up anger ready to explode and to revolt against those who exploit them. Their strong bodies stand for muscular virility. Both anger and virility are visible in the boatman at the centre of the painting, who glares out from the picture. These workers occupy the foreground of the painting, and with their very material bodies express Signorini’s positivism as well as his Risorgimento paganism and ‘love of materiality’.54 Set against a marginalised, pale aristocracy represented by the diminished servant and the little girl on the left, the five men seem to prefigure the historical movement forward in which the working classes will conquer the central stage. Just as Signorini moved beyond Mazzini, embracing socialism, and beyond the Macchia towards a more ideologically marked style, so, in the post-Civil War years,
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Figure 6.4. Samuel Hollyer, Walt Whitman (frontispiece to Leaves of Grass), 1855, engraving (after a daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison)
Figure 6.5. Gustave Courbet, The meeting or ‘Bonjour Monsieur Courbet’, 1854, oil on canvas, Musée Fabre de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, Montpellier
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William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni Whitman moved beyond his representation of the easy-going, good-natured, young city worker he had shown in his 1855 Leaves as an instance of the common man. Shedding the role of the artist of the present, he embraced that of the mythmaker and prophet, envisioning himself as the singer of a new American identity, rooted in the titanic west. Western ‘muscular democratic virilities’,55 modelled after President Lincoln, would now be the prototype of ‘the vast [human] averages, and the generic American masses’.56 Late in life – in Boston in 1881 – he also discovered not Courbet’s but JeanFrançois Millet’s pictures, in which he perceived human oppression and latent rebellion, represented as ‘Nature’s force, titanic … waiting terribly to break forth, revengeful’.57 Whitman’s representation of the western man and his interpretation of the workers’ pent-up anger in Millet’s paintings could well apply to Signorini’s boatmen in L’alzaia. If we were to rephrase Whitman’s ‘muscular democratic virilit[y]’ as ‘class-conscious muscular virility’, we would have a fitting description of Signorini’s exploited workers and the emblematic boatman at the centre of L’alzaia. Finally, if we were to substitute Whitman’s ‘Nature’s force, titanic’ with ‘class struggle, titanic’ we would better be able to perceive similarities and differences in the American and European representations of the political and social dynamics of the time. Notes 1 H. James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (New York: Grove Press, 1903), vol. I, p. 9 (hereafter WWS). 2 ‘Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son’: thus in ‘Song of Myself ’ the poetic persona defines himself, while at the beginning of the poem his artistic pursuit is represented as detachment from more materialistic, time-bound activities: ‘I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.’ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891–2), pp. 48, 29 (hereafter LoG 1891–2). 3 See R. Asselineau, ‘Whitman in Italy’, in G. W. Allen and E. Folsom (eds), Walt Whitman and the World (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1995), pp. 268–74; and S. Pantazzi, ‘Enrico Nencioni, William Wetmore Story and Vernon Lee’, English Miscellany 10 (1959): 249–60. 4 Henry James, WWS, vol. II, p. 4. 5 M. Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Scuptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). 6 Nencioni writes to Carlo Placci: ‘James has come to see me. He spent one hour with me … He marvelled at finding me so well informed on English and American literature, and most of all at what I told him about Hawthorne and Henry James’s Portraits of Places. We are old friends already.’ (‘James è venuto a trovarmi. È stato qui un’ora . . . È restato meravigliato di trovarmi ben informato di English and American literature. Sopratutto di quello che gli ho detto di Hawthorne e di Portraits of places di Henry James. Siamo già vecchi amici.’) Quoted in M. Strowel, ‘Carlo Placci between Italy and Britain. His friends, his essays, and the role of Enrico Nencioni’, Modern Language Review 89:1 ( January 1994): 85. Unless otherwise specified, all translations are mine. 7 James reproduces the biography Story had sent to Nencioni for his 1881 review of Roba di Roma. (WWS, vol. I, pp. 29 ff., 35). In ‘A Critical Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story (1819–1895), American Sculptor and Man of Letters’, PhD diss., Boston University, MA, 1985, J. M. Seidler also refers to Nencioni as ‘an acquaintance’ (p. 21). But see Nencioni’s unpublished
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Hybrid republicanisms papers and letters at the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence, listed in M. M. Angeli, Le carte di Enrico Nencioni (Firenze: Manent, 1999). 8 On James, Story, and Italian politics, see T. Petrovich Njegosh, ‘Henry James e la Repubblica Romana del 1849: William Wetmore Story and His Friends’, in S. Antonelli, D. Fiorentino, and G. Monsagrati (eds), Gli americani e la Repubblica Romana del 1849 (Roma: Gangemi Editore, 2000), pp. 189–210; and G. Monsagrati, ‘Un mondo che cambia: gli Americani e l’Italia di fine Ottocento’, in D. Fiorentino (ed.), Gli Stati Uniti e l’Italia alla fine del XIX secolo (Roma: Gangemi Editore, 2010), pp. 75–100. For a theory of a transatlantic cultural sphere, see M. Camboni, ‘Networking Women: A Research Project and a Relational Model of the Cultural Sphere’, in M. Camboni (ed.), Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe–America, 1890–1939. Towards a Rewriting of Cultural History (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), pp. 1–26. 9 W. W. Story, Conversations in a Studio (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890), vol. I, p. 140. 10 Thomas Crawford to Robert Launitz, in Seidler, ‘A Critical Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story’, p. 157. On Story and Rome see the numerous references in W. Vance, America’s Rome, 2 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 11 See L. J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 12 Story’s marble bust of Robert (1867) is in the Keats and Shelley House, Rome. A version of Elizabeth’s bust (1864) is in Casa Guidi in Florence. 13 See M. Fuller, ‘These Sad but Glorious Days’: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, Larry J. Reynolds and Susan B. Smith (eds) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); James, WWS, vol. I, ‘The Siege of Rome’; and Antonelli, Fiorentino, and Monsagrati, Gli americani e la Repubblica romana. 14 James, WWS, vol. I, p. 134; Seidler, ‘A Critical Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story’, p. 223. 15 Edith Marion Peruzzi de’ Medici, ‘Walter Savage Landor’, The Living Age 285 (April–May–June 1915), p. 554. 16 E. Nencioni, Pagine scelte di Enrico Nencioni, Bruno Cicognani (ed.) (Milano: Laboratori Maestretti Editore, 1940), p. 5. See also I. Nardi, Un critico vittoriano: Enrico Nencioni (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1985). 17 T. Signorini, Caricaturisti e caricaturati al Caffè ‘Michelangiolo’ (1848–1866) (Florence: Civelli Editore, 1897), p. 127. 18 ‘Parlava con giovanile entusiasmo’, E. Nencioni, Saggi critici di letteratura inglese (Firenze: Società Tipografica Fiorentina, 1910), p. 365 (hereafter Saggi). See also James, WWS, vol. II, pp. 14–29. 19 Augusto Gori Pannilini was elected senator in the first Italian Parliament, in 1861. 20 See S. Balloni, ‘Telemaco Signorini e Enrico Nencioni, Vernon Lee e John Singer Sargent: letteratura e pittura americana nella Firenze dei Macchiaioli’, in S. Cenni, S. Geoffroy, and E. Bizzotto (eds), Violet del Palmerino: Aspetti della cultura cosmopolita nel salotto di Vernon Lee: 1889–1935. (Firenze: Consiglio Regionale della Toscana, 2014), pp. 175–86; and M. Strowel, ‘Carlo Placci between Italy and Britain’. 21 Story’s sonnets and his letter to Nencioni of 27 June 1881 are in the Nencioni Papers, Biblioteca Marucelliana. Square brackets signal words difficult to decipher. 22 ‘Roma! Nome sacro e fatale … Gl’Italiani … scrissero in questi ultimi tempi su di lei un poema in azione colla spada di Garibaldi e col sangue di migliaia di martiri; – e nell’impeto irresistibile di unirsi a lei, vero e natural lor capo, si fusero in una sola famiglia. Uno degli ultimi di tempo ma non di merito, è il libro scritto su Roma dal sig. W. Story, insigne scultore e poeta americano da molti anni domiciliato in Roma. Il quale mentre dipinge, come i suoi predecessori, il carattere ideale e poetico della gran villa, non lascia però inosservato quel che materialmente le manca (ed è molto) come città moderna … e vi si sente l’uomo che scolpì Cleopatra e il Saul, e il poeta di Nemesi e di Ghino di Tacco.’ Enrico Nencioni, ‘Roba di Roma’, Part 1, L’Italia Nuova 1:17 (1870): 1. On the book, see A. Mariani, ‘William Wetmore Story’s Roba di Roma. The sculptor’s prose as painting’, RSA Journal 3:4–5 (1984–85): 123–31.
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William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni 23 ‘Benemerito d’Italia’, Enrico Nencioni, ‘Roba di Roma: William Story’, Fanfulla della Domenica 3:13 (March 1881): 1. 24 Nencioni, ‘un libro alla Stendhal, più lo stile di un vero artista’. Saggi, p. 195. The 8th edition of the book was published in 1887. 25 W. W. Story, The American Question (London: George Manwaring, 1867), p. 8 (hereafter AQ). For a transatlantic perspective on the Civil War, see D. H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International Story of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015); and D. Fiorentino, Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia 1848–1901 (Roma: Gangemi Editore, 2013), chapters 4–5. 26 W. Whitman, ‘Attitude of Foreign Governments during the War’, in Complete Prose Works (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892), p. 64 (hereafter CPW). 27 Story, AQ, p. 25. 28 W. Whitman, ‘National Uprising and Volunteering’ and ‘Battle of Bull Run, July, 1861’, in CPW, pp. 22, 23. 29 The ‘thoroughly African’ Libyan Sybil was modelled in 1860 and first carved in 1861. Story considered the Sybil his ‘best work’. James, WWS, vol. II, p. 71. The 1861 version of the Sybil is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 700, New York. Another copy, carved in 1868, is owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. 30 All quotations are from Story’s letter to Norton, in James, WWS, vol. II, p. 71. Together with Cleopatra, the Sybil was first exhibited at the 1862 London International Exposition in representation of the Roman Government (Story, undated letter to Enrico Nencioni, New York Public Library, Berg Collection, A. L. S 41). Both statues have attracted critical attention in relation to race and gender issues, and to slavery. See M. Malamud, African Americans and the Classics: Antiquity, Abolition, and Activism (London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2016). 31 Whitman’s words as reported by Horace Traubel in With Walt Whitman in Camden, 1906–96. The Walt Whitman Archive, E. Folsom and K. M. Price (eds), Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and University of Nebraska–Lincoln, NE, vol. 8, 1996, p. 439, https://whitmanarchive.org (accessed 20 June 2020). For a recent assessment of Whitman’s racism, particularly after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, see E. Folsom, ‘“A yet more terrible and more deeply complicated problem”: Walt Whitman, race, Reconstruction, and American democracy’, American Literary History 30: 3 (Fall 2018): 532. For a synthesis of Whitman’s racial stance, see G. Hutchinson and D. Drews, ‘Racial Attitudes’, in J. R. LeMaster and D. D. Kummings (eds), Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). 32 A. M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento: parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Torino: Einaudi, 2000), pp. 83–4, 148; P. Bernardini, ‘Judith in the Italian Unification Process, 1800–1900’, in K. R. Brine, E. Ciletti, and H. Lähnemann (eds), The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies across the Disciplines (Cambridge: Open Books Publishers, 2010), pp. 397–410. One Judith-like character is Dolabella in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Attila (1846), libretto by Temistocle Solera. 33 James, WWS, vol. II, p. 70. Judith was exhibited, alongside Story’s Saul, When the Evil Spirit was Upon Him, in the Central Hall of the 1865 International Art Exhibition in Dublin with a price tag of £1,000. Purchased by Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, the Judith rested in his residence until it was donated to the state. It was later taken to the National Botanic Gardens for outdoor display. It languished there until 2002, when it was moved to Farmleigh House, where the left hand holding the sword was partially mutilated. Reviews of the exhibition and critical evaluation of the statue as well as more recent information were generously provided by Professor Paula Murphy (University College Dublin), who also provided photographs of the statue by Dr Matthew Jebb, Director of the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin. Two of these pictures are reproduced here. I thank Dr Karen Lemmey, Curator of Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, for contacting Professor Murphy on my behalf, and forwarding the photographs. 34 W. W. Story, Fiammetta (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), pp. 19–22. 35 James, WWS, vol. II, p. 70 (emphasis added). 36 Story had seen many versions of Judith, including Cristofano Allori’s Judith with the head of Holofernes in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. See Seidler, ‘A Critical Reappraisal’, p. 442.
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Hybrid republicanisms 37 See S. B. McHam, ‘Donatello’s Judith, and the emblem of God’s chosen people’, in Brine, Ciletti, and Lähnemann, The Sword of Judith, pp. 307–24. 38 W. W. Story, quoted in Seidler, ‘A Critical Reappraisal’, p. 285. 39 Whitman, CPW, pp. 23, 52–3. T. Signorini joined Garibaldi in 1859. He later based a number of oil paintings on war scenes such as his Soldati francesi feriti a Solferino salutano l’artiglieria toscana a Montechiaro (1860). 40 See his ‘Death of Abraham Lincoln’, CPW, pp. 306–15. 41 ‘[U]n uomo’, ‘unica nella storia’, ‘quella lotta titanica’, ‘l’abolizione della schiavitù e la indivisibiltà della Repubblica’ (emphasis added). Nencioni, Saggi, p. 205. The adjective ‘titanic’ as a qualifier of the Civil War circulated widely, nourishing the European imaginary. ‘Titanic American strife’ Karl Marx wrote in an 1864 letter to Abraham Lincoln in which he congratulated ‘the American people’ for his re-election. Writing as the representative of the recently created International Working Men’s Association, he concluded his letter with the following words: ‘The workingmen of Europe … consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.’ Karl Marx, ‘Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America’, The Bee-Hive Newspaper 169 (7 November 1865), Marx & Engels Internet Archive, 2000. www.marxists.org/archive/marx (accessed 7 June 2020). 42 ‘[L]’antagonismo tra Nord e Sud’, ‘feconda, utile e santa’, ‘tanto ingiuste, tanto sanguinose, e tanto inutili’, ‘il primo fra i molti eroi della grande epoca’. Nencioni, Saggi, pp. 205, 207. 43 ‘Alle più dure prove restando puro ed eroico’. Nencioni, Saggi, p. 218. Nencioni used the titles Whitman’s poems were given by W. M. Rossetti in Poems by Walt Whitman. The son of an Italian exile, Rossetti gave prominence in his edition to Whitman’s revolutionary and war poems. 44 ‘Carattere della nuova poesia sarà il movimento, l’azione, la tremenda audacia delle masse’. Enrico Nencioni, ‘Mazzini e Whitman’, Fanfulla della Domenica 16 (20 April 1884), p. 1. The essay was included in the introduction to Nencioni’s edition of Scritti letterari di Giuseppe Mazzini. 45 Giuseppe Mazzini, Essays. Selected from the Writings, Literary, Political and Religious. William Clarke (ed.) (London: Walter Scott, 1887), p. 9 (emphasis in the original). 46 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, NY: 1855), p. III. 47 Reynolds, European Revolutions, p. 143. On Whitman’s association with Young America, see B. Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 30. 48 Walt Whitman, ‘Arts and artists. Remarks of Walt Whitman, before the Brooklyn Art Union, on the evening of March 31, 1851’, Brooklyn Daily Advertiser (3 April 1851), in D. A. Noverr and J. Stacy (eds), Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism (Iowa City, IA: Iowa University Press, 2014), p. 157 (emphasis in the original); Reynolds, European Revolutions, pp. 144, 143. 49 Letter of 1879. Signorini Papers, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. See S. Balloni, ‘Walt Whitman, Telemaco Signorini, and American Literature in Florence’, in F. Baldazzi and C. Sisi (eds), The Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists (Venice: Marsilio, 2011), pp. 80–7. 50 Gustave Courbet, quoted in A. Boime, ‘Leaves of Grass and Real Allegory: A Case Study of International Rebellion’, in G. M. Sill and R. K. Tarbell (eds), Walt Whitman and the Visual Arts (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 63. Signorini himself tells us that ‘the Macchia was born [in Paris] in 1855’ (‘la Macchia è nata a Parigi’), when three of its founders, after visiting both exhibitions, and with the help of photography, decided that they wanted to revolutionise Italian academic and neoclassic art, and started to use chiaroscuro and produce ‘a violent macchia’ (‘una macchia violenta’). Telemaco Signorini, ‘Cose d’arte’, Il Rinnovamento (12–13 June 1874), in Zibaldone, ed. by S. Balloni (Livorno: Sillabe, 2008), p. 54. 51 Whitman, LoG, 1891–2, pp. 426–7. 52 L. Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 41. 53 ‘Garibaldi. Qu’est-ce que Garibaldi? C’est un homme. Rien de plus. Mais un homme dans toute l’acception sublime du mot. Un homme de la liberté; un homme de l’humanité.’ Victor Hugo, Actes et paroles (Les 4 volumes): Nouvelle édition augmentée (Arvensa éditions), www. books.google.it/books?id (accessed 14 February 2019).
William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni
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54 Signorini, ‘Cose d’arte’, p. 54. 55 Walt Whitman, quoted by R. M. Bucke, Walt Whitman (Philadelphia, David McKay, 1883), p. 66. 56 Bucke, Walt Whitman, p. 67. In his ‘Death of Abraham Lincoln’ Whitman writes that Lincoln’s life, as all heroic lives, condenses a nationality. To him the United States owe ‘the parturition and delivery of our at last really free Republic; born again, henceforth its career of genuine homogeneous Union, compact, consistent with itself ’. CPW, p. 314. 57 Walt Whitman, quoted by S. Baxter, ‘Walt Whitman in Boston’, New England Magazine 6 (August 1892): 714–21. In Joel Myerson (ed.), Whitman in His Own Time (Iowa City, IA: Iowa University Press, 2000), p. 82 (emphasis added).
Selected bibliography Angeli, M. M. (ed.), Le carte di Enrico Nencioni. Biblioteca Marucelliana. Firenze: Manent, 1999. Asselineau, R. ‘Whitman in Italy’. In G. W. Allen and E. Folsom (eds), Walt Whitman and the World. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1995, pp. 268–74. Balloni, S. ‘Walt Whitman, Telemaco Signorini, and American literature in Florence’. In F. Baldazzi and C. Sisi (eds), The Americans in Florence: Sargent and the American Impressionists. Venice: Marsilio, 2011, pp. 80–7. _____. ‘Telemaco Signorini e Enrico Nencioni, Vernon Lee e John Singer Sargent: letteratura e pittura americana nella Firenze dei Macchiaioli’. In S. Cenni, S. Geoffroy, and E. Bizzotto (eds), Violet del Palmerino: Aspetti della cultura cosmopolita nel salotto di Vernon Lee: 1889–1935. Firenze: Consiglio Regionale della Toscana, 2014, pp. 175–86. Bernardini, P. ‘Judith in the Italian Unification Process, 1800–1900’. In K. R. Brine, E. Ciletti, and H. Lähnemann (eds), The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies across the Disciplines. Cambridge: Open Books Publishers, 2010, pp. 397–410. Boime, A. ‘Leaves of Grass and Real Allegory: A Case Study of International Rebellion’. In M. Sill and R. K. Tarbell (eds), Walt Whitman and the Visual Arts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992, pp. 53–84. Bucke, R. M. Walt Whitman. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1883. Erkkila, B. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. James, Henry. William Wetmore Story and His Friends. From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections, 2 vols. New York: Grove Press, 1903. Mariani, A. ‘William Wetmore Story’s Roba di Roma. The sculptor’s prose as painting’. RSA Journal 3:4–5 (1984–85): 123–31. Mazzini, Giuseppe. Scritti letterari di Giuseppe Mazzini. Edited and introduced by Enrico Nencioni. Roma: Commissione Editrice, 1884. Nardi, I. Un critico vittoriano: Enrico Nencioni. Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1985. Nencioni, Enrico. ‘Roba di Roma’, Part 1, L’Italia Nuova 1:17 (1870): 1. _____. ‘Roba di Roma: William Story’, Fanfulla della Domenica 3:13 (March 1881): 1–2. _____. ‘Mazzini e Whitman’, Fanfulla della Domenica 16 (20 April 1884): 1–2. _____. Saggi critici di letteratura inglese. Preface by G. Carducci. Firenze: Società Tipografica Fiorentina, 1910. _____. Pagine Scelte di Enrico Nencioni. Edited by G. Cicognani. Milano: Laboratori Maestretti Editore, 1940. Pantazzi, S. ‘Enrico Nencioni, William Wetmore Story and Vernon Lee’. English Miscellany 10 (1959): 249–60. Petrovich Njegosh, T. ‘Henry James e la Repubblica Romana del 1849: William Wetmore Story and his Friends’. In S. Antonelli, D. Fiorentino, and G. Monsagrati (eds), Gli americani e la Repubblica Romana del 1849. Roma: Gangemi Editore, 2000, pp. 189–210. Reynolds, L. J. European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
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Hybrid republicanisms Seidler, J. M. ‘A Critical Reappraisal of the Career of William Wetmore Story (1819–1895), American Sculptor and Man of Letters’. PhD diss., Boston University, MA, 1985. Signorini, Telemaco. Caricaturisti e caricaturati al Caffè ‘Michelangiolo’ (1848–1866). Firenze: Civelli Editore, 1897. _____. ‘Cose d’arte’, Il Rinnovamento, 12–13 June 1874. In S. Balloni (ed.), Zibaldone, anastatic reprint. Livorno: Sillabe, 2008, pp. 54–5. Story, William Wetmore. Roba di Roma. London: Chapman and Hall, 1863. _____. The American Question. London: George Manwaring, 1867. _____. Fiammetta. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1886. _____. Conversations in a Studio, 2 vols. Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1890. Strowel, M. ‘Carlo Placci between Italy and Britain. His friends, his essays, and the role of Enrico Nencioni’. Modern Language Review 89:1 ( January 1994): 71–87. Tarbell, R. K. ‘Whitman and the Visual Arts’. In D. S. Reynolds (ed.), A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman. New York, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 153–204. Traubel, H. With Walt Whitman in Camden, 1906–1996, vol. 1, 1906; vol. 8, 1996. In E. Folsom and K. M. Price (eds), The Walt Whitman Archive. Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, NE. Whitman, Walt. ‘Resurgemus’. New York Daily Tribune (21 June 1850): 3. _____. ‘Arts and Artists. Remarks of Walt Whitman, before the Brooklyn Art Union, on the evening of March 31, 1851’, Brooklyn Daily Advertizer (3 April 1851). In D. A. Noverr and J. Stacy (eds), Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism. Iowa City, IA: Iowa University Press, 2014, pp. 153–9. _____. Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn, New York, 1855. _____. Poems by Walt Whitman. Edited by William M. Rossetti. London: John Camden Hotten, 1868. _____. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891–92. _____. Complete Prose Works. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892.
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7
The Progress of America (1880) by Andrea Cefaly: Victoria Woodhull, Salvatore Morelli, and feminist social reform in Italy and America Maria Saveria Ruga
Among the works of the painter Andrea Cefaly (1827–1907), there is a curious oil on canvas titled The Progress of America (1880), which is located in the Museo delle Arti in Catanzaro (MARCA) together with about forty other works by this painter, including those documenting his Risorgimento experience (Plate 11).1 The painter was a soldier in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s army and a participant in patriotic circles in pre-unification Naples. The Progress of America is signed and dated 1880 on the base of a small column under which is written ‘Civil Progress’. This work was realised during Cefaly’s stay in Naples, in a year that coincided with his intense activity as a painter and as a member of Parliament in the Left Party (1875–80). It presents iconographic elements unusual in Italian art, referencing a moment of radical social reform in both Italy and America in the late nineteenth century, with a particular focus on women’s issues. Some brief biographic details are useful to understand more about Cefaly’s political stance when he painted this canvas. Andrea Cefaly was the leading figure of Calabrian art in the late nineteenth century and one of the most interesting figures in Southern Italy for his strong social and civic engagement. He was born in 1827 in the small town of Cortale, near Catanzaro. The artist’s family, and especially his father, Domenico Cefaly – a bourgeois landowner – held liberal views.2 His grandfather had supported the revolution of 1798; his brother Raimondo and sister Vittoria, a nun, were all patriots involved in the unification of Italy. Cefaly studied at the Royal College of Catanzaro, where the patriot Luigi Settembrini (1813–76) taught.3 In 1839, Settembrini was arrested in Catanzaro by the Bourbon police because of his patriotic proselytising; in 1842, Cefaly was expelled from the College for having opposed the ‘injustices of a vice rector’.4 He then moved to Naples, where he trained at the Royal Institute of Fine Arts under the academic painter Filippo Marsigli (1790–1863). Later, he studied in the private school of Giuseppe Bonolis (1800–51),5 who was influenced by the civic and patriotic ideals of Francesco De Sanctis (1817–83), writer, literary critic, politician, and one of the most important Italian intellectuals of the Risorgimento.6 Cefaly’s training was interrupted in 1848 when he took part in the
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Hybrid republicanisms revolutionary movement. With the failure of this uprising, he was forced to flee Naples to escape the Bourbon police. After his return, in 1855, he studied with the painter Giuseppe Mancinelli (1813–75), professor at the Neapolitan Academy. Cefaly was also close to Filippo Palizzi (1818–99), leader of the new Neapolitan School, who taught his pupils to study from nature, rather than pursue a rigid academic training.7 In these years, Cefaly’s residence served as a meeting point for young patriotic artists and musicians.8 In 1860, Cefaly joined Garibaldi’s campaign and fought as a captain in Calabria and Naples.9 After unification in 1861, he decided to stay in Calabria and engage in local politics. In 1875, he returned to Naples after his election to Parliament. Cefaly is best known for his Risorgimento paintings and as the founder of one of the first free art schools in Southern Italy dedicated to painting popular subjects from life. In 1877, the Neapolitan artistic scene was dominated by the National Exhibition of Fine Arts, a popular event that took place in several cities in Italy and was attended by artists from all Italian regional schools. Cefaly was elected president of the Painting Section of the Artistic Congress.10 The following year, he participated in the Paris International Exhibition, showing Francesca da Rimini or Paolo e Francesca (1877–78), a subject drawn from Dante and emblematic of the new Italian national language.11 In 1884, after the death of five of his seven children – who were torn from family affections by disease, probably tuberculosis – Cefaly returned to Calabria, where he retreated from contemporary politics.12 At the end of his career, he became disillusioned by the national failure to achieve the ideals of the Risorgimento. His radical ideas gave way to a humanitarian socialism, suggested by his reading of Tolstoy.13 He died in Cortale in 1907. Cefaly created The Progress of America while living in Calabria and participating in national politics. The painting references American values through the presence of the flag, which he associated with the phrase ‘Civil Progress’. Instantly recognisable is the portrait of George Washington, held up by two women, celebrating the values of progress. Embodying the notion of political freedom, Washington was revered during the Italian Risorgimento and his name was associated with Garibaldi, who was often called ‘the Washington of Italy’.14 At the centre of the painting, in a carriage, is a woman leading the procession. Both the woman dressed in white and the carriage driver wear the phrygian cap, considered a revolutionary emblem at the time. In addition, the woman is holding a little boy by the hand while raising her right arm, as if to welcome the advent of a new world, as one contemporary observer remembered.15 Another little boy, standing before the chariot wheel wearing a blue cap, helps spread flowers to celebrate the new course of history. Both boys represent the future of progressive manhood. The little girl in the foreground to the right holds a book under her arm and admires the woman in the carriage, probably affirming the right of female education.16 The allegory of ‘progress’ is symbolised by the racing horse-drawn chariot. We do not know where this event is taking place; the background appears to be an allegorical setting. Cefaly often invented new iconography by combining heterogeneous elements. At first glance, it seems that he was celebrating the contrast between the old world (the prostrate monk in the bottom right corner holding an ‘Inquisition’ inscription,
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The Progress of America (1880) by Andrea Cefaly the Moorish architecture, the Arabian costumes17) and the new, with its elements of progress (including contemporary clothing, the hot-air balloon, train, telegraph, and factory smokestack in the background). In the distance we can recognise the Gulf of Naples. The prostrate monk embodies Cefaly’s aversion towards the temporal power of the Church, an attitude towards Catholicism typical of Italian patriots.18 In the bottom left corner a snake and a rat, or more probably a toad – sometimes associated with the snake as a demonic symbol – attempt to disrupt the race for Freedom. There are no direct prototypes for the painting; the allegory seems almost an iconographic pastiche. For example, the locomotive and the balloon were depicted in two earlier paintings by Cefaly that addressed the nascent Southern Question, the economic and social problems that characterised the historical development of Southern Italy after unification.19 In the painting The best way to travel in Calabria (1866), he highlights the poor road conditions in the South.20 In another painting, The commerce of Calabria (1867), the clouds in the sky form a locomotive, alluding to the railway which was still unrealised in the South, while in the lower right corner a robber is threatening a traveller – a reference to the problematic question of briganti.21 Denouncing the failure of post-national politics, both of these paintings served as an explicit and controversial political critique. Exhibited respectively at the fourth and fifth expositions of the Società Promotrice di Belle Arti di Napoli, they were aimed at the Minister of Transportation, who had betrayed the promise of railway construction in the South of Italy.22 In The Progress of America, the artist appeared to utilise various visual prototypes of ‘American progress’. While working on the painting, Cefaly was also involved with a fresco decoration for the private mansion of the jurist Antonio Serravalle in Catanzaro, the Allegory of progress, or The civilisation that illuminates the world, 1873–74, which was lost with the demolition of the building, in 1975. With only a small detail remaining, known as the Aurora (Figure 7.1), the image reveals iconographic affinities with some American prototypes of Manifest Destiny, such as the presence of the chariot and of an angelic woman floating in the air in white robes in John Gast’s painting American progress, of 1872 (Plate 12). In a letter dated 29 March 1874, Cefaly wrote to Serravalle, his patron, asking for a lithograph and a book to help him realise his preparatory cartoon. He wrote ‘the lithograph you promised to me … will serve me to make costumes. It will also be useful to reread the latest events of the American war, to be able to conceive the composition of the picture, and then I’ll have to make the cartoon.’23 We don’t know what book he requested, but certanly he knew the History of the War of Independence of the United States of America, by Carlo Botta, published in 1809, which had an extraordinary circulation at the time.24 And Cefaly was most probably asking for one of the best-known allegories of Manifest Destiny, Gast’s American progress, which had been reproduced widely as a colour lithograph in the 1870s by George A. Crofutt, a publisher of fashionable western travel guides.25 Gast presents the railway and the telegraph as symbols of the advancement of civilisation. The angelic woman floating in the air in white robes, with the star of empire in her hair, carries telegraph wires. Progress is moving forward from the settled east to the frontier west.26 In The
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Figure 7.1. Andrea Cefaly, Aurora, 1873, fresco, formerly Palazzo Serravalle, Catanzaro, in a photo just before its demolition in 1975
Progress of America, though, Cefaly clothes his protagonist in contemporary garb, which suggests his desire to confront pressing social issues of the day. Certainly, Gast’s American progress was also known to Domenico Tojetti (1807– 92), who produced another version of the Progress of America ca. 1875 (Plate 13).27 In this painting, progress is a female figure who is also driving a chariot; in the left corner Indians and a bison flee into darkness in advance of civilisation; on the right there are female figures representing the arts; in the lower right corner there is a train. Tojetti’s work dates from about 1875, one year after Cefaly’s letter to his patron. We do not know if Cefaly was aware of this painting, though they share many similarities, most notably the iconographic attribute of the phrygian cap worn by the female figures who drive both chariots.28 After the American Civil War, Tojetti contributed to the Italian artistic presence in the United States, which had been dominated by the painters and sculptors who helped adorn the US Capitol. In this context, Tojetti’s work may reference the American patriotic values found in the allegorical fresco on the dome of the Capitol, The apotheosis of George Washington (1865), by Costantino Brumidi.29 It is no coincidence that the Washington portrait appears beside the allegorical figure of Liberty, who wears the phrygian cap. Both Tojetti and Brumidi took part in the revival of the Roman school of fresco painting, revitalised by Pope Pius IX’s support of the arts. Moving to the ‘New World’, they created new images of American national identity, which connected Italian history painting, especially in its Roman declination, to the modern mythography of American democracy.30 Based on the evidence offered in the first biography of Cefaly, written in 1896 by Giuseppe Barone when the artist was still alive, the painting was commissioned by an American committee which supported the candidacy of ‘Vittoria Vandalle for the U.S. presidency’.31 Clearly, the Italianate name indicates Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927), the first woman to run for president of the United States, in 1872. In The Progress of America, the woman in the white dress on the chariot is Woodhull, as the
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The Progress of America (1880) by Andrea Cefaly partial words on the flag seem to read: ‘Vitt … ’ (‘Vittoria’, Italian for ‘victory’, probably an allusion to both the affirmation of American civil values and Woodhull’s name). She was not only famous in her day in the United States, but was also known to Italian feminists.32 Moreover, Tennessee Claflin (1844–1923), the noted suffragist activist and writer (and Victoria Woodhull’s younger sister), would travel to Naples in 1910 to ‘see something of Italian women and study the country from which so many thousands are now on their way to America’.33 It is possible that Cefaly began work on this painting in 1872, initially as an homage to Woodhull’s candidacy for president. We do not know which specific American committee commissioned the painting. But these patrons most probably had ties to Naples or Calabria.34 We do know that Cefaly had Italo-American contacts, such as Luigi Carnovale, a professor of Italian studies in Chicago.35 In 1872, Woodhull was in Washington, D.C. to lobby on behalf of women’s suffrage, receiving much coverage in the American press.36 In the previous year, she had already established herself as a public figure and was the first woman to speak before the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives about women’s suffrage. Together with Claflin, she operated a brokerage firm on Wall Street, as recalled by a satirical cartoon that represents two women on a ‘chariot, drawn by two bullocks and two bears, with the heads of the largest financiers of the time’– among them, Cornelius Vanderbilt (seen in the face of the bull on the left), who helped finance Woodhull, Claflin & Co., the first woman-owned Wall Street company (Figure 7.2).37 Woodhull also addressed feminist issues in the magazine she founded with her sister, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. Because of her radical ideas, the cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840–1902) went so far as to depict her as ‘Mrs. Satan’ in Harper’s Weekly, referring to her public statement: ‘Yes, I am a free lover! I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law can frame any right to interfere.’38 In Cefaly’s painting, it is interesting to note the predominance of women, who are dressed in different historical and cultural costumes – from the contemporary Western dress of the women at the centre of the image to the Middle Eastern garb on the models behind the American flag, and the Calabrian folk costumes on the figures in the centre foreground of the painting – as if he wanted to reference the entire female population in different religious and political contexts. Despite this dominant female presence, there is at least one other important male figure located just behind the Washington portrait, whom the Neapolitan political magazine Il Piccolo in 1880 identified as Salvatore Morelli (1827–80).39 Morelli was a Neapolitan patriot and author of the book Woman and Science (1861).40 A radical supporter of female emancipation, he declared that ‘the woman is the highest form of the genius of a Nation’.41 Cefaly certainly knew Morelli, as both were members of Parliament in the Left Party. In agreement with Morelli on this important political battle, Cefaly addressed the issue of gender through painting, superimposing the relevance of the Italian parliamentary debate on to a celebration of the candidacy of the American feminist Victoria Woodhull. According to a passage reported in the periodical La
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Figure 7.2. ‘The lady brokers driving the bulls and bears of Wall Street. Tennie C. holding the reins, Victoria the whip’, Evening Telegram (18 February 1870)
donna: periodico morale e istruttivo in 1880, a New York Association for Female Suffrage had even sent a portrait of Victoria Woodhull to Salvatore Morelli as a gift.42 Cefaly completed the painting in 1880, the year that Morelli died. At that time, he probably decided to recast the subject as an allegory of the defence of universal women’s rights, connecting the American and Italian suffrage debates through the figures of Woodhull and Morelli. In fact, Cefaly wanted to send The Progress of America to the National Exhibition of Turin in 1880, but instead he sent it to the Melbourne International Exhibition.43 Two years earlier, he had participated in the International Exhibition in Paris, at which time the First International Conference on Women’s Rights was organised.44 Italy was represented at this first conference by Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920), the main contributor to the feminist newspaper La donna.45 In 1865, she had written Women and the Project for the New Italian Civil Code, about social relationships on the occasion of the revision of the Italian Civil Code. In 1869, she translated into Italian the work of John Stuart Mill, author of The Subjection of Women.46 Mozzoni and Morelli worked closely in the battle for women’s rights. In 1867, he became a Member of Parliament and demanded the recognition of civil and political rights for women, and equality between the sexes. Inspired by Mill’s 1866 proposal before the British Parliament to extend the right to vote to women, Morelli hoped that Italy would be the first country to enact such reforms. This proposed legislation received praise from Garibaldi and Mazzini, who were both supporters
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The Progress of America (1880) by Andrea Cefaly
Figure 7.3. ‘Salvatore Morelli dressed as a woman’, Milan-Journal 118 (29 July– 12 August 1877)
of women’s suffrage.47 Morelli also had a support network that included British and American committees, which documented contacts between activists for women’s rights in Italy and America.48 In 1874, Morelli put forward seven bills of his own with the aim of introducing women’s and children’s rights, promoting the equality of spouses in marriage and divorce, and the ability of women to choose their own surname. He was also the only Member of Parliament to support Mozzoni’s petition, in 1877, for a woman’s right to vote. Between 1878 and 1880, he made four more interventions in favour of divorce.49 In 1877, a satirical cartoon was published in the Italian-French newspaper Milan-Journal in which Morelli was dressed as a woman, sitting on a parlour chair (Figure 7.3).50 He is holding open his book with one hand, and with the other he manipulates women puppets. In the lower corner, he lies on a bed while a woman performs a bloodletting, a medical procedure, which ridiculed both his political position and feminist ideals. Immediately after Morelli’s death, in 1880, a group of American women wrote a letter to the Italian newspaper Bergamo Nuova, in which they lauded him as a staunch defender of women’s rights.51 Nonetheless, in the new Italy that emerged after 1861, women gained few civil liberties. Despite the support that radical women gave the patriotic cause, and the vociferous support of Garibaldi and Mazzini for women’s participation in public life, Italian women won only the right to education and to inheritance.52 Cefaly’s painting The Progress of America has been interpreted as a general salute to the American values of civil progress. However, I have read the picture instead as an allegory of women’s rights, by identifying the figures of Victoria Woodhull and Salvatore Morelli, two important protagonists of the battle for those rights in their respective countries. Interestingly, in nineteenth-century Italian art there is no other evidence that links Victoria Woodhull to Salvatore Morelli, a political thinker almost completely forgotten in Italy today.53
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Hybrid republicanisms Morelli had anticipated the radical ideas of Woodhull and other American feminists of the 1860s, later pursuing this social agenda in concert with Anna Maria Mozzoni. At the same time, we have no direct sources linking Cefaly’s painting to the popularity of Victoria Woodhull in Europe. Because the work remained so long in his private studio, contemporary critical discussion is lacking, and this has hampered a true understanding of its deeper meaning. Was the path to political progress and women’s empowerment still too problematic to deal with? A further important scholarly question concerns the presence of American women sculptors in Rome, who themselves were strong feminists. Were they aware of the ideological battles fought by Mozzoni and Morelli in Italy? The Progress of America is a unique case study in its focus on gender, and an interesting and unexpected point of contact between Italy and the United States regarding the debate on women’s suffrage. The painting not only underlines Andrea Cefaly’s republican sympathies in the post-unification period, but also attests to the reception of the myth of American progress in late-nineteenth-century Italian art – as seen in the writings of Tocqueville54 and the murals of Leutze, the cromolithograph of Gast and the paintings of Tojetti, and in the context of the patriots of Southern Italy. It also reveals a shared American and Italian iconography regarding notions of political progress intersecting with debates about the civil rights of women. The painting demonstrates a close symbiosis between the progress of society and the condition of women, while documenting the active participation of Southern Italy’s visual and political culture in the new nation and in the discourses of transnational radicalism.55 Notes 1 This paper analyses a specific case study that I have examined in my PhD dissertation (University of Pisa, 2014), which focuses on Andrea Cefaly (1827–1907); see M. S. Ruga, La ‘fucina’ di Andrea Cefaly: un crocevia di artisti tra Napoli, Firenze e Parigi (Lugano: Nerbini International, 2020). 2 His mother, Carolina Pigonati, of French origin, educated Cefaly in music and classical studies. Domenico Cefaly was described by Arthur John Strutt in his A Pedestrian Tour in Calabria & Sicily (London: Newby, 1842), a travel journal written during a journey in the South of Italy in 1838 with his friend the poet William Jackson, the French collector Etienne Evariste Fouret (1807–1863), and the writer Francis Wey (1812–1882), then a friend of Gustave Courbet. During this tour, Strutt was a distinguished guest of Domenico Cefaly, who had saved him from an assault by a group of bandits (briganti). At that time, Andrea Cefaly was a child, already interested in drawing. He was able to observe the Sketches of Beauties, an album in which Strutt drew beautiful folk costumes of the South. Such costumes would later appear in the paintings of Cefaly. 3 L. Settembrini, Ricordanze della mia vita, posthumous publication edited by F. de Sanctis (Napoli: Antonio Morano Editore, 1879). The volume is one of the founding books of the cultural Risorgimento (see M. S. Ruga, ‘“Merita la mia vita d’esser narrata?” L’incipit nel racconto autobiografico degli artisti italiani del secondo Ottocento’, Lettere italiane LXVI:3 (2014): 374–92. 4 V. Vivaldi, Calabresi illustri: F. Fiorentino, F. Tocco, V. Gallo-Arcuri, D. Milelli, P. Furgiuele, A. Cefaly, A. Fazzari (Catanzaro: Tipo-editrice Bruzia, 1927), p. 211. 5 About the artist and his educational programmes, see G. Bonolis, D’un nuovo ordinamento intorno alla Scuola di Belle Arti: discorso (Napoli: Sta. Tip. F. Azzolino, 1849), Trattato dell’arte pittorica (Napoli: Tip. di Federico Vitale, 1851); and L. Martorelli, Artisti teramani dell’Ottocento: Bonolis, Della Monica, Pagliaccetti, Celommi (Francavilla al Mare: Fondazione F.P. Michetti, 1986).
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The Progress of America (1880) by Andrea Cefaly 6 See A. Mariani, De Sanctis, Francesco, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 39 (2011), ad vocem and bibliography; and D. M. Smith, ‘Francesco De Sanctis: The Politics of a Literary Critic’, in J. A. Davis and P. Ginsborg (eds), Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento: Essays in Honour of Denis Mack Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 251–70. 7 L. Arbace (ed.), Filippo Palizzi. La natura e le arti (Lanciano: Casa editrice Rocco Carabba, 2018). 8 A significant passage on the painter Andrea Cefaly and this patriotic cenacolo in pre-unity Naples is in Michele Cammarano’s complete autobiography, a primary source that gives us a detailed portrait of a historical and artistic moment, from his childhood to the 1870s. In his autobiography, the painter describes the memory of the 1848 barricades, the battles with Garibaldi, the Neapolitan artistic environment of Domenico Morelli and Filippo Palizzi, and his memory of meetings with Gustave Courbet and Alexandre Dumas. Michele Cammarano, Racconto della sua vita, e senza bugie, edited by M. S. Ruga (Lugano: Nerbini International, 2018). On the parts dedicated to Cefaly, see M. S. Ruga, ‘Il manoscritto ritrovato: Michele Cammarano e la «fucina» di Andrea Cefaly’, Ricerche di storia dell’arte 113 (2014): 87–93. 9 He depicted the memorable battle that marked the defeat of the Bourbons in his painting The Battle of Volturno, 1861 (Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples, currently located in Reggio Calabria, Pinacoteca Civica), in which he painted his self-portrait under the Italian flag in the lower left corner. The painting was presented at the first National Exhibition in Florence (1861) and then bought by King Vittorio Emanuele. At the centre of this composition Garibaldi is in his red uniform on a chariot. The memory of those days is also found in other paintings and sketches that depict a camp of garibaldini, such as Bivacco dei garibaldini (1860, oil on canvas, MARCA). 10 Relazione ed atti del III Congresso artistico e dell’Esposizione nazionale di belle Arti di Napoli 1877 (Napoli, 1880), 27. 11 Oil on canvas, 108 x 158 cm, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples, currently located in Catanzaro, MARCA. The painting was bought by the King in 1880 for the Royal Collection in Capodimonte (inv. 239 P. S., ACS, Ministero della Real casa, Divisione III, b. 409, f. 158, Capodimonte. Verbale di cessione dalla Real Casa al Demanio … dei mobili ed oggetto d’arte di Sua Maestà il Re, 6 maggio 1926, p. 25). 12 The following year, his 13-year-old daughter, Carolina, also died; only his son Raimondo survived. 13 G. Pepe-Maturi, Andrea Cefaly (Napoli: Tipografia Editrice Ferdinando Bideri, 1921), pp. 25–6. 14 L. Cattanei and L. Dosio (eds), Edizione nazionale delle opere di Giuseppe Cesare Abba, vol. 3, Scritti garibaldini (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1983), p. 448; see G. Faustini, ‘L’Unità d’Italia: gli Stati Uniti e un garibaldino americano’, Italica 89:2 (Summer 2012): 202–18. Some Neapolitans also embraced Washington’s family kinship with Joachim Murat, Admiral of France under the reign of Napoleon and King of Naples from 1808 to 1815. 15 F. Lo Sardo, ‘Simonetti – Mormile – Cefaly’, Il Piccolo: giornale politico della sera XIII:76 (16 March 1880): 3; XIII:77 (17 March 1880): 3. 16 This figure seems to recall a portrait of the painter’s daughter Carolina, who appears in other studies by Cefaly (Compulsory school and Family on the terrace, both at Catanzaro, MARCA) made during his years in Portici, and was therefore added to the painting around 1879–80. 17 Cefaly appears quite interested in the Muslim/Islamic character of the architecture, as well as the dress of several figures in the painting. He addressed a similar subject in another large and unfinished sketch, titled Assault of Arabs (1862–67, charcoal and pastel on canvas, 148.5 x 79 cm, Catanzaro, MARCA), referring to the history of Saracen raids on the southern coasts of Sicily. In The Progress of America, women in Arab costumes are relegated to the shadows of an arcade, moving slowly towards the light. It is interesting to note that 1872, the year in which Cefaly conceived the painting, is also the date of the completion of Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia (1854–72), 3 vols (Catania: Editrice Dafni, 1986), the monumental work of the patriot, historian, and politician Michele Amari. 18 Cefaly declared his political position towards the Church in other works, such as the sculpture Allegory of Italy (Piazza Italia, Cortale), located in a square in front of a church: a woman who
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26 27
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30 31 32
personifies Italy, distinguished by the iconographic attribute of the turreted crown (‘Italia turrita’), turns her back on the religious building to symbolise the anticlericalism of the Risorgimento. P. Villari, ‘Di chi è la colpa? O sia la pace o la guerra’, Il Politecnico. Memorie IV, vol. II fasc. III, September (1866), and Le lettere meridionali ed altri scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia (Firenze: Successori Le Monnier, 1878). Oil on canvas, 92 x 74 cm, Museo Civico di Castelnuovo, Naples. Oil on canvas, 119 x 99 cm, Banca d’Italia, Catanzaro. In a missing pendant to The commerce of Calabria, titled Aerostat, means of salvation in Calabria, the detail of the balloon – painted for the first time in 1862 by Cefaly in the sign for his free art school – appeared as a polemical attack on the poor state of transportation in Calabria. On these paintings, see the catalogue in Ruga, La ‘fucina’ di Andrea Cefaly. ‘la litografia promessa … che mi servirà bene pe’ costumi. Mi gioverà pure il rileggere gli ultimi fatti della guerra d’America e poter concepire la composizione del Quadro, e poi dovrò fare il Cartone.’ (BCCz, sezione manoscritti, Carteggio Cefaly-Serravalle, lettera di A. Cefaly, Cortale, 29 marzo 1874). C. Botta, Storia della guerra d’indipendenza degli Stati Uniti d’America (Parigi: D. Colas, 1809). For Botta, the American Revolutionary War was a good model for all revolutions. Oil on canvas, Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles, CA. American progress, chromolithograph, 1873, after John Gast’s American progress, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. See O. R. Pinelli, Arte di frontiera. Pittura e identità nazionale nell’Ottocento nord-americano (Roma: Carocci, 1996), pp. 110–1, 184 n. 38. This subject was inaugurated by the German painter Emanuel Leutze (1816–1868) in the large mural painting Westward the course of empire takes its way (westward ho!) (US Capitol, Washington, 1862), which depicts a caravan of pioneers proceeding towards the Promised Land (the west coast of the United States); see J. Wierich, Grand Themes. Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, and American History Painting (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). A. Stephanson, Destino manifesto. L’espansionismo americano e l’Impero del Bene (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2004). Oil on canvas, Oakland Museum, Kahn Collection, Oakland, CA. During the reign of Pius IX, Tojetti was an academic painter at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, the main artistic institution of the city. Later, he was invited to establish an Academy of Fine Arts in Guatemala, after which he moved to Mexico, finally settling in San Francisco in 1872. See Pinelli, Arte di frontiera, pp. 110–11, 184–5 n. 41; M. S. Ruga, ‘Opera d’arte destinata a figurare in terra straniera: notizie di esportazioni nella pubblicistica romana tra 1846 e 1870’, in G. Capitelli, S. Grandesso, and C. Mazzarelli (eds), Roma fuori di Roma. L’esportazione dell’arte moderna da Pio VI all’Unità (1775– 1870) (Roma: Campisano, 2012), pp. 69–86, 74–5, 84 n. 49; G. Capitelli and S. Cracolici, ‘Apostar por Roma: arte en México en el siglo de la Indipendenzia’, in Roma en México, México en Roma (Roma: Campisano, 2018), pp. 19–56, 35, 50, 55 n. 61; and P. Coen, Il recupero del Rinascimento. Arte, politica e mercato nei primi decenni di Roma Capitale (1870–1911) (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2020), p. 321. The immediacy and synthesis of images are representative of the ideals we attribute to new nations, according to a declaration in the ‘New York American Art-Union’ in 1845: ‘the images are more powerful than speeches, as evidenced by “the central role assumed by visual culture” in the context of a patriotic society’, quoted in Pinelli, Arte di frontiera, p. 18. See V. G. Fryd, ‘The Italian Presence in the United States Capitol’, in I. B. Jaffe (ed.), The Italian Presence in American Art (1760–1860) (New York: Fordham University Press and Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia, 1989), pp. 132–69; and B. A. Wolanin, ‘Constantino Brumidi’s Frescoes in the United States Capitol’, in Jaffe (ed.), The Italian Presence, pp. 150–64. Wolanin, ‘Constantino Brumidi’s Frescoes in the United States Capitol’, p. 157. G. Barone, ‘Andrea Cefaly’, La Vita Italiana II 5:6 (1 February 1896): 530. K. Havelin, Victoria Woodhull: Fearless Feminist (Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2006), p. 8. See V. Woodhull, ‘The progress of the revolution’, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly (28 December 1872): 9–10. Victoria Woodhull was known in Italian feminist circles, as suggested by articles published in the periodical La donna: periodico morale e istruttivo (16 (1879): 246; and
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34 35
36
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39 40
41 42 43 44 45 46
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and 22 (1880): 350–2). By contrast, Victoria Woodhull’s candidacy was viewed with suspicion and branded as ridiculous (‘la più ridicola commedia di Miss Victoria Woodhull in pretenzione di contendere col suo muliebre partito, la presidenza degli Stati Uniti al generale Grant’) in other Italian contexts, where the complete emancipation of women was not accepted. See G. di Menza, Le condizioni sociali dei nostri tempi. Memoria letta all’Accademia di Scienze e lettere di Palermo (Palermo: Officio tipografico di Michele Amenta, 1872), p. 16. J. Guglielmo, Living the Revolution. Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 105. This book focuses on women’s cultures of resistance in Southern Italy and radicalism in New York City. In cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago, and Cleveland, there were labour movements organised by Italian immigrant women. Ibid., p. 3. L. Carnovale (1879–1934), known in America as ‘Ercole Colombo’, was a writer and professor of Italian Studies at the Berlitz School in Chicago; he was also a supporter of universal peace. See his Il supremo ideale raggiunto (Chicago, IL: Mayham & Dallas, 1926). Contact with Cefaly is documented by Carnovale, who recalled a visit to the painter’s studio. Carnovale, Il supremo ideale raggiunto, p. 153. Some of Cefaly’s works were purchased by Americans and brought to the United States, such as the painting Humanity confronting the nations (unknown location, before 1870) (Barone, ‘Andrea Cefaly’: 530), as well as several landscapes which are not further characterised (Maturi, Andrea Cefaly, pp. 27–8). No work by Cefaly is known in the United States today. Woodhull was certainly aware of the installation of Vinnie Ream’s Lincoln statue in the US Capitol in 1871; Ream’s career embodied the battle for equal treatment with men. See M. Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). ‘Some doubtful financiers are crushed under the wheels of the chariot, whilst others, embodied as ducks, with crutches under their wings, are trying to fly away’, Evening Telegram (18 February 1870), reprinted in M. F. Darwin, One Moral Standard for All: Extracts from the Lives of Victoria Claflin Woodhull Now Mrs. John Biddulph Martin and Tennessee Claflin, Now Lady Cook (New York: Caulon Press, 1919), pp. 10–11. V. Woodhull, ‘And the truth shall make you free’: a speech on the principles of social freedom, delivered in Steinway Hall, Nov. 20, 1871 (New York: Woodhull, Claflin & Co., 1871). Nast was one of the American correspondents who covered Italian unification, working for The Illustrated London News and the New-York Illustrated News, and helped to fuel the myth of Garibaldi in the early 1860s. On Nast, see M. Dabakis, Chapter 3, this volume. Lo Sardo, ‘Simonetti – Mormile – Cefaly’. S. Morelli, La donna e la scienza considerate come soli mezzi atti a risolvere il problema dell’avvenire (Napoli: Stab. tip. Delle belle arti, 1861); S. Morelli, La donna e la scienza o La soluzione del problema sociale, con un cenno critico e biografico del professore Virgilio Estival (Napoli: Società tipografica editrice, 1869). On the woman question in Italy, see P. Wilson (ed.), Gender, Family and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy, 1860–1945 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). G. C. Odorisio (ed.), Salvatore Morelli (1824–1880): emancipazionismo e democrazia nell’Ottocento europeo (Napoli: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1992); E. Sarogni, L’Italia e la donna: la vita di Salvatore Morelli (Torino: D. Piazza, 2007). La donna: periodico morale e istruttivo 22 (1880): 351. Melbourne International Exhibition (1880). Official Record (Melbourne, 1882), p. 511 (mentioned as The car of progress). J. Adams, Women and the Vote. A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 301. Ibid., p. 30. On Mozzoni, see also S. Soldani, Mozzoni, Marianna (Anna Maria), in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 77 (2012), ad vocem and bibliography. A. M. Mozzoni, La donna in faccia al progetto del nuovo codice civile italiano (Milano: Tip. sociale, 1865); the previous year, she published La donna e i suoi rapporti sociali (1864). On Anna Maria Mozzoni, see S. Murari, L’idea più avanzata del secolo: Anna Maria Mozzoni e il femminismo italiano (Roma: Arcane, 2008). Morelli suspected that women’s rights might only be achieved in a republican state. In Italy, the right to vote for women was introduced only after the Second World War, in 1945. Morelli’s ideas
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Hybrid republicanisms had a certain echo abroad, especially in France, where he was nicknamed ‘Salvator Mulierum’. He also received a letter from Victor Hugo, dated 17 August 1867, who wrote: ‘you have a noble thought and I concur wholeheartedly with your efforts’ (V. Estival, Cenno critico-biografico, in Morelli, La donna e la scienza o La soluzione del problema sociale, p. xc). See L. Rossi, Garibaldi. Democracy and Civil Rights (Rome: Gangemi, 2008). 48 Morelli was proud to register, during a parliamentary question, the circulation of his ideas through his biography by Virgilio Estival (Atti parlamentari Camera dei Deputati, Sessione 1874– 75, vol. 4, 1° tornata del 14 giugno 1875, 4239, 4252–6); in support of his efforts, he received statements from Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Victor Hugo, and John Stuart Mill. The fame of his political ideas was known beyond national borders. 49 Svolgimento di una proposta di legge intorno al divorzio (1878), in S. Morelli, Politica e questione femminile, edited by G. C. Odorisio (Roma: L’Ed, 1990), 74–84. See M. Seymour, Debating Divorce in Italy: Marriage and the Making of Modern Italians, 1860–1974 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); V. Bosna, Salvatore Morelli in difesa delle donne nell’Italia risorgimentale (Roma: Arcane, 2012); and M. G. Colombari, Salvatore Morelli, il deputato delle donne (Torino: Robin, 2017). 50 Milan-Journal 118 (29 July 1877–12 August 1877); Sarogni, L’Italia e la donna, pp. 146–8. 51 The information is reported in Sarogni, L’Italia e la donna, p. 9; two others articles recall the importance of his civil battle: Bergamo nuova (25–26 October and 26–27 October 1880). 52 Adams, Women and the Vote, p. 301. See L. Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 372; and S. Soldani, ‘Il Risorgimento delle donne’, in A. M. Banti and P. Ginsborg (eds), Storia d’Italia. Annali, 22, Il Risorgimento (Torino: Einaudi, 2007), pp. 183–224. 53 Bosna, Salvatore Morelli; Colombari, Salvatore Morelli. 54 A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1835–40). 55 The long fascination with America as a symbol of democracy also appeared in two other allegorical paintings by the Neapolitan painter Tommaso De Vivo (1790–1884), representing ‘New Italy’ and ‘New America’. F. Mazzocca, ‘Nati dal popolo: la pittura “eretica” dei romantici e dei macchiaioli’, in F. Mazzocca (ed.), Romantici e Macchiaioli: Giuseppe Mazzini e la grande pittura europea (Milano: Skira, 2005), pp. 34–5. De Vivo – best known for his historical and commemorative paintings – was a patriot involved in the revolutionary movement of 1848. He moved to Rome to work under Vincenzo Camuccini, where he painted The trumpets of Italy (then called Allegory of Italy or Italy and its genii), a celebration of the ‘New Italy’ created after the conquest of Rome (1870). As an ideal pendant to this work, De Vivo also painted America and its genii (1870, private collection), a mixture of classical and allegorical elements in which Abraham Lincoln is admired as a symbol of freedom after the abolition of slavery.
Selected bibliography Adams, J. Women and the Vote. A World History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Barone, G. ‘Andrea Cefaly’. La Vita Italiana II 5:6 (1 February 1896): 527–33. Botta, C. Storia della guerra d’indipendenza degli Stati Uniti d’America. Paris: D. Colas, 1809. Cammarano, M. Racconto della sua vita, e senza bugie. Edited by Maria Saveria Ruga. Lugano: Nerbini International, 2018. Carnovale, L. Il supremo ideale raggiunto. Chicago, IL: Mayham & Dallas, 1926. Coen, P. Il recupero del Rinascimento. Arte, politica e mercato nei primi decenni di Roma Capitale (1870– 1911). Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2020. Dabakis, M. A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Fryd, V. G. ‘The Italian Presence in the United States Capitol’. In I. B. Jaffe (ed.), The Italian Presence in American Art (1760–1860), Vol. I. New York: Fordham University Press and Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia, 1989, pp. 132–69. Guglielmo, J. Living the Revolution. Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880– 1945. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
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The Progress of America (1880) by Andrea Cefaly Havelin, K. Victoria Woodhull: Fearless Feminist. Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2006. Heyman, J. P. and M.-S. Delamaire (eds). New Eyes on America: The Genius of Richard Caton Woodville. Baltimore, MD: Walters Art Museum, 2013. Lo Sardo, F. ‘Simonetti – Mormile – Cefaly’, in Il Piccolo: giornale politico della sera XIII:76 (16 March 1880): 3; XIII:77 (17 March 1880): 3. Mazzocca, F. ‘Nati dal popolo: la pittura “eretica” dei romantici e dei macchiaioli’. In F. Mazzocca (ed.), Romantici e Macchiaioli: Giuseppe Mazzini e la grande pittura europea. Milano: Skira, 2005, 17–39. Mill, J. S. The Subjection of Women. London: Longmans, 1869. _____. La servitù delle donne. Translated by Anna Maria Mozzoni. Milano: F. Legros, 1870. Morelli, Salvatore. Politica e questione femminile. Edited by Ginevra Conti Odorisio. Roma: L’Ed, 1990. Odorisio, G. C. (ed.). Salvatore Morelli (1824–1880): emancipazionismo e democrazia nell’Ottocento europeo. Napoli: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1992. Pepe-Maturi, G. Andrea Cefaly. Napoli: Tipografia Editrice Ferdinando Bideri, 1921. Rossi P. O. Arte di frontiera. Pittura e identità nazionale nell’Ottocento nord-americano. Roma: Carocci, 1996. Ruga, M. S., ‘Il manoscritto ritrovato: Michele Cammarano e la “fucina” di Andrea Cefaly’. Ricerche di storia dell’arte 113 (2014): 87–93. _____. ‘“Merita la mia vita d’esser narrata?” L’incipit nel racconto autobiografico degli artisti italiani del secondo Ottocento’. Lettere italiane LXVI:3 (2014): 374–92. _____. La ‘fucina’ di Andrea Cefaly: un crocevia di artisti tra Napoli, Firenze e Parigi. Lugano: Nerbini International, 2020. Sarogni, E. L’Italia e la donna: la vita di Salvatore Morelli, 3rd edn. Torino: D. Piazza, 2007. Settembrini, Luigi. Ricordanze della mia vita. Edited by Francesco de Sanctis. Napoli: Antonio Morano Editore, 1879. Stephanson, A. Destino manifesto. L’espansionismo americano e l’Impero del Bene. Milano: Feltrinelli, 2004. Strutt, A. J. A Pedestrian Tour in Calabria & Sicily. London: Newby, 1842. Tocqueville, A. de. Democracy in America. London: Saunders and Otley, 1835–40. Wierich, J. Grand Themes. Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, and American History Painting. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. Wolanin, B. A. ‘Constantino Brumidi’s frescoes in the United States Capitol’. In I. B. Jaffe (ed.), The Italian Presence in American Art (1760–1860), Vol. I. New York: Fordham University Press and Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia, 1989, pp. 150–64. Woodhull, V. ‘The progress of the revolution’. Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly (28 December 1872): 9–10.
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Part II: The courses of empire
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8
Seeing America’s tangled threads in John Singer Sargent’s Street in Venice Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document
Jane Dini
In 1882, John Singer Sargent painted Street in Venice, an image of a working-class Venetian woman walking down a narrow street, a calle, passing a seated couple and two men in conversation (Plate 14).1 At first glance, the composition of Street in Venice is deceptively simple. The young woman, placed left of centre, strides towards the viewer. Her hands are clasped in front of her to keep her long black shawl from falling open. As she walks, the shawl’s fringe dances about her heavy white skirt. The movement of her dress, the rustle of one material against another, is in marked contrast to the stillness of her upper body and the serenity of her face, which is only partially lit from the viewer’s right. In the middle ground, one man leans against a wall and looks out towards the woman while another stands in a languid contrapposto, turning his head to face his companion as he gestures with his right hand. In the background, two figures sit outside a shop or dwelling. As in similar scenes in the photographs of Tomaso Filippi and the etchings of James McNeil Whistler, the female, seated with her knees forming a stable platform, is engaged in some kind of piece work, most likely stringing beads.2 Over the course of the painting’s exhibition history, art critics have interpreted the figures in Street in Venice as representations of three commonly held nineteenth-century stereotypes of Italian people: Italian beauty, depicted as the striding Venetian woman; the couple behind her, who represent manual labour; and the two conversing men dressed in dark coats, alluding to the swarthy and possibly dangerous Italian. While serving as agents of the picturesque, at the same time, and in the same painting, Sargent’s figures also make evident concerns regarding the immigration of Italians to the United States. The elevation of Italian beauty on the one hand and the prejudice levelled against Italian immigrants on the other comprised a conflicting discourse that motivated American journalism, social reform, and immigration policy in the late nineteenth century.3 In 1888, when Sargent exhibited Street in Venice at New York’s National Academy of Design, The Art Amateur described the image in somewhat neutral terms: ‘a slim young girl comes down a narrow, gray street, with two dark men in front of a doorway behind her’.4 Four years later, in 1892, when the painting was again exhibited at the National Academy, now as part of the New York Columbian Celebration of the Four Hundredth Anniversary of the Discovery of America, the same publication wrote, ‘Of Mr. J. S. Sargent there was only the single, small example, “Venice”,
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The courses of empire a girl in a black-mantilla and two brigandish individuals muffled for warmth and picturesqueness in dingy neckerchiefs and big, black cloaks – these three in a mean, green-sheltered alley with no water and very little sky; not the Venice of our dreams, but an excellent picture.’5 The men in the street were carelessly referred to as brigands, or brigante, robbers who travelled in gangs, and their conversation in a narrow street was cast in ominous terms. Proclaiming the work as an ‘excellent picture’, this reviewer heightened the drama by judging the street scene as somewhat sinister. What caused this change in the reception of the painting? Sargent paints a scene that is embedded in a great deal of ambivalence: the viewer is both attracted to and frightened by the imagery. Even in the late twentieth century, scholars have differed on the emotional temper of the scene. In 1986, Linda Ayres wrote: ‘Street in Venice depicts two bearded men in an alley as they pause to watch a young woman who clutches her shawl tightly around her as if to ward off glances.’6 Here, the men’s gazes cause the Venetian woman discomfort and concern. In 1998, in contrast, Robert Torchia interpreted the scene very differently: ‘her eyes half closed, [she] is self-absorbed and aloof, unaware that she is being watched’.7 From this description, we get a sense that the men’s glances are ignored, and do not penetrate the young woman’s cool reserve. In both descriptions, nonetheless, her perceived isolation serves to amplify the woman as object of desire. In the twentyfirst century, the sexualised descriptions of Sargent’s Venetian working women continue: Sargent had a reputation for being shy and awkward with peers and tongue-tied with women, but it appears that he had no issues when dealing with his [Venetian] models, who were from a different social class. Perhaps professional distance allowed him to be comfortable with beautiful and overtly sexual creatures.8
The sexualised bodies of working-class women have appeared frequently in latenineteenth- and twentieth-century American art. For example, American artists such as Robert Frederick Blum, Charles Ulrich, and Frank Duveneck banked on the popular appeal of Venetian subjects in the United States. Their representations of young, attractive, working-class women were well-established types. But Sargent’s scenes were not as illustrative. His Venetian figures, their interactions and their motives, were more elusive. This was precisely Trevor Fairbrother’s insight regarding the nature of the artist’s Venetian works: ‘Their fascination lies in our not being sure whether the people being depicted know each other and whether their encounters are innocent or not.’9 It is this ambiguity that left Street in Venice open to critical interpretations that helped constitute the fluctuating perceptions of Italians in American society. At the end of the nineteenth century, as Italian immigration was on the rise, there was a vogue for American genre paintings depicting scenes of working-class Italians. For the first time, both representations of Italians and Italian immigrants themselves were present in large numbers in the United States. This historical coexistence offers an opportunity to explore how American audiences negotiated the conflict between a well-established romanticised ideal of Italy and the newly
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John Singer Sargent’s Street in Venice perceived social threat of Italian immigration. What were the cultural paradoxes that this aestheticising project provoked and sought to contain? When exhibited in the United States (particularly New York City – a centre for Italian immigration), these depictions of picturesque labour complicated debates on women’s entry into the workforce. Late-nineteenth-century images of Venetian working women could sustain the myth of the Italian beauty in the American imagination, all the while appearing to contribute to the economic sustainability of their communities. In the fine arts, these depictions could exacerbate or ameliorate political tensions surrounding the fraught labour conditions in American society at the time.10 While working within the high art tradition, Sargent’s painting appeared to complicate the conventions of the picturesque, adding a taint of danger to a charming genre scene. In Street in Venice, the Italian woman’s passage down a narrow calle walks a fine line between two worlds: Venice’s glorified past and its aestheticised present. Sargent’s public criticised him on both accounts: his Italians were neither ‘Titian’s beauties’, as the Gazette des Beaux Arts lamented, nor were the scenes ‘brilliant and gay’, as in Blum’s Venetian bead stringers (1887–88) (Plate 15). Blum demonstrates his vibrant use of colour in the gaily patterned dresses of his working women, whose expressions of delight and concentration are as easily discernable as the intricacies of their work.11 Sargent’s subdued palette and self-contained figures, by contrast, are much less demonstrative but offer a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the hardships of Venetian working-class life. Even in Paris, Linda Ayres suggests, Sargent’s audience read his Italian subjects as lacking the appropriate veil of romantic sentiment. Thus he never developed a Venetian subject for the fashionable French Salon.12 While every new wave of immigration has aroused fear and bigotry, Italian immigration operated in a unique way. From 1880 to 1914, the United States witnessed two seemingly contradictory but intertwined Italian stories. In the previous decades, Charles Eliot Norton and James Jackson Jarves had lauded Italian civilisation at Harvard and Yale respectively. By the late nineteenth century, in New York the grandest versions of the Italophile sensibility included the Morgan Library, and in Boston the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. At the same time, the greatest numbers of working-class Italians were immigrating to the United States, and popular images of working-class Italian women, either situated in pastoral settings or placed in front of backdrops of urban decay, were proliferating. Thus Italian immigrants were at times redeemed in the popular press for having a cultural legacy that was far superior to that of other ‘immigrant stock’. Presumably Italians, no matter how poor or uneducated, maintained an inherent link to their homeland’s past glories. This biologically determined ideology is expressed in The Italian in America (1905), a publication promoting the Young People’s Missionary Movement: Does a stigma recall that this stock was the fountainhead of the Renaissance that dispelled the gloom of the Middle Ages? … How strange is this flaunt of prejudice in
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the faces of Dante and Tasso and Petrarch – of Raphael and Michael Angelo and Canova – of Verdi and Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti – of Ristori and Duse and Salvini and Rossi – of Alfieri and Giacometti – of Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi!13
Despite the fact that Italians were regularly stereotyped as dangerous, they were rarely divorced from their artistic heritage, and were perpetually linked to a rich fine-arts tradition. Sargent’s Street in Venice was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1888; at precisely the same moment Italian immigrants were frequently featured in popular literature and the American press. Such notable authors as Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, William Dean Howells, and Brander Matthews turned New York Italian neighbourhoods into sites of local colour, distinct from the rest of the city. The art critic Van Rensselaer extolled Italians as one of the beautiful aspects of the city because they were able to maintain their native picturesqueness in ‘the new world’: I have seen Mulberry Bend on an October day when it was just as full of Italians, lounging, eating, working, gossiping out of doors, with faces as beautifully brown and ruddy, teeth as white, smiles as quick, speech as voluble, jewelry as profuse, and garments as party-colored, as though they were at home in their Naples; and the New York sun gilded them as radiantly as though it had been the sun of Naples.14
Similarly, William Dean Howells, who had served as American consul in Venice under President Lincoln, published accounts of his travels through Italy that were enormously popular for their dramatic details of Italian life. In his novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), the Bostonians Mr and Mrs March (thinly disguised as Howells and his wife) move to New York and set about looking for an apartment in an Italian-American neighbourhood. Howells writes: The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely aesthetic view of the facts as they glimpsed them in this street of tenement-houses; when they would have contented themselves with saying that it was as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence, and with wondering why nobody came to paint it; they would have thought they were sufficiently serious about it in blaming the artists for their failure to appreciate it, and going abroad for the picturesque when they had it here under their noses.15
Coupled with the author’s criticism of the city’s growing social inequities, Howells illustrates the Marches’ dawning awareness of the irony of the picturesque subject in American painting. Mr and Mrs March see Italians in America as artists might have envisioned them in Italy. For this audience, the reverse was also true. In Street in Venice, Sargent composed a portrait of urban lower-class Venetians, who, though depicted in far-away Italy, were immediately recognisable to middle-class viewers, reminding them of the tensions in their own city streets.16 In the early 1890s, Brander Matthews, the first professor of dramatic literature at Columbia University, wrote ‘snapshot’ satirical sketches of city life titled ‘Vignettes of Manhattan’, first published in installments in Harper’s, in which he revelled in stereotypes of Italian immigrants. His vignette ‘In search for local color’ features Rupert de Ruyter (a stand-in for Matthews), who, in an effort to shake his writer’s
John Singer Sargent’s Street in Venice
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block is guided by a social reformer John Suydam through New York’s largest Italian-American neighbourhood. De Ruyter exclaims: ‘I haven’t found anything so Italian as this for years’, he said to his guide, as they picked their way through a tangle of babies sprawling out of a doorway. ‘Did you see that young mother we passed just now?’ ‘The one nursing the infant?’ Suydam returned. ‘Yes’, De Ruyter went on. ‘She had an oval face and the olive complexion the Greeks left behind them in Sicily. She was not pretty, if you like, but she had the calm beauty of a race of sculptors.’ ‘If I didn’t know’, the novelist remarked, ‘that the Italians had developed their mercantile faculty at the expense of all their artistic impulses, I should wonder how it was that scions of the race of Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci and Raffael of Urbino could now be willing to live in a house as hideous as that!’17
Although the novelist was taken with the beauty of the young Italian women on the streets, the social worker asserted that Italians, living in abject poverty, were responsible for the city’s increased crime. The story concludes with a visit to the apartment of Pietro Barretti, ‘Italian Pete’, whose excellent skills in laying mosaics and cooking macaroni do not disguise, according to the astute observation of the novelist, an ‘eye like a glass stiletto’. Sure enough, as they leave the neighbourhood their suspicions are confirmed: Suydam and de Ruyter run into a police officer on his way to arrest Barretti for murdering his wife in a jealous rage.18 In his fictionalised character studies, often overlooked by historians, Matthews helped shape perceptions of the Italian immigrant at a critical time in the American imagination. Matthews dedicated his short stories ‘Vignettes of Manhattan’ to his close friend Theodore Roosevelt, writing: ‘It is because of this common regard for our strange and many-sided city that I am giving myself the pleasure of proffering to you this little volume of vignettes.’ Years later, as President of the United States, Roosevelt’s immigration restrictions were informed by popular stereotypes, many of which he had developed as a young politician in the 1890s.19 In 1891, while serving as United States Civil Service Commissioner in Washington, D.C., he wrote to his daughter about the recent lynching of eleven Italian-Americans in New Orleans: ‘Monday we dined at the Camerons; various dago diplomats were present, all much wrought up by the lynching of the Italians in New Orleans. Personally I think it rather a good thing, and said so.’20 The power of Matthews’s dramatic storytelling helped audiences confirm and articulate stereotypes also found in fine art. In essence, Sargent’s Street in Venice, when exhibited in New York, was another source that helped codify the way in which contemporary viewers ‘saw’ immigrant urban life in New York. Ultimately, both depictions, Sargent’s painting and Matthews’s tale of the city, serve to underscore a paradoxical perception of Italian culture evident in nineteenth-century American critical debate: specifically that Italians, while heirs to a rich artistic past, live in squalor and inhabit crime-infested streets. The picturesque narrow alley that Howells and Matthews describe and Sargent paints was also a pictorial device that connoted both social reform and racial
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Figure 8.1. Jacob Riis, Bandit’s roost, 59½ Mulberry Street, scenes in the Lower East Side slums, 1888, from ‘Flashes from the slum’, The Sun, New York
discrimination. Perhaps the most famous and controversial image of this type was Jacob Riis’s photograph Bandit’s roost, 59 ½ Mulberry Street: scenes in the Lower East Side slums, illustrating the 1888 publication ‘Flashes from the slum’ in New York’s The Sun (Figure 8.1).21 Ultimately, Bandits’ roost was used as one of three photographs that illustrated ‘The Bend’, in Riis’s 1890 publication, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. The Bend was the nickname of a slum in the heart of Mulberry Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where a large population of Italian immigrants had settled.21 The title makes it virtually impossible to view the photograph without negative preconceptions. The image depicts a narrow alley populated by men and women who pose to approximate their daily activities. To achieve the exposure, Riis ignited his flash powder, which required his subjects to remain still and somewhat stilted. The resulting scene looks more staged than commonplace. Clearly, from the drying laundry to (as Riis describes) the tobacco shop, fish-stand, and ash barrels, the alley housed both a domestic and mercantile way of life. Furthermore, Riis’s descriptions of the neighbourhood articulated prevailing prejudices about Italians when he wrote that ‘destitution and disorder which, set in the frame-work of Mediterranean exuberance, are the delight of the artist’. But he also cautioned that these communities harbour ‘danger and reproach’.22
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John Singer Sargent’s Street in Venice Bandit’s roost and Street in Venice share interesting formal qualities. The paving stones, irregular and uneven, create a sightline from the foreground to the rear of the alleyway. Although the alleys each have numerous windows and doors, there is no discernable exit. The window shutters in Sargent’s painting are placed at relatively the same height in the composition as the laundry hanging on the line in Riis’s photograph. Also similar are the two men at the right of each composition whose presence, identity, and intent drive the narrative and underscore the drama. The narrow settings of both photograph and painting induce a kind of claustrophobia, which alarmed the American middle and upper classes because they associated it with the increased growth of immigrant populations in their urban areas. Ultimately, depictions in both fine-art oil painting and social reform photography worked side by side to codify the way in which New Yorkers understood immigrant urban life. It is doubtful that the photographer knew the painter. However, they did share a common public audience. For example, Theodore Roosevelt, as a sponsor and a patron, was connected to both Riis and Sargent. Although Sargent had royalty and robber barons among his clientele, it was largely the new wealth of the upper-middle class that paid for his portraits. Many of these individuals also worked with Riis, and were inspired to found settlement houses or run for public office.23 Riis looked most favourably on Italian women, particularly as picturesque subjects in his images. Conceived in very traditional terms as ‘faithful wives and devoted mothers’, they were a welcome sight – a source of aesthetic enjoyment for the viewer, who did not have to travel to Venice in order to delight in their colourful dress and habit. ‘Their vivid and picturesque costumes lend a tinge of color to the otherwise dull monotony of the slums they inhabit,’ Riis explained.24 Similarly, in 1887, popular art critic Charlotte Adams credited the increased population of Italians with the heightened colour on New York streets. The influx of Italians during the past ten years has adorned our streets with those beautiful fruit stalls which make up half the charm of the Italian towns, lighting up as they do the gray, somber walls of mediaeval palaces and municipal halls … Walk through Sixth Avenue and through the side streets below Twenty-third Street, and see how much the city gains in appearance from the splendid masses of color, in the way of Italian fruit stalls, placed at the angles of the houses.25
But this old-fashioned character also reinforced the idea that Italians were unable to modernise, assimilate, and take on the habits, customs, and values of the ‘superior’ Anglo-Saxons. In contrast to his romanticisation of Italian women and children, Riis reinforced the popular perception that Italian men were habitually lazy. He wrote: Down the street comes a file of women carrying enormous bundles of fire-wood on their heads, loads of decaying vegetables from the market wagons in their aprons, and each a baby at the breast supported by a sort of sling that prevents it from tumbling down. The women do all the carrying, all the work one sees going on in ‘the Bend’.26
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The courses of empire Frank Duveneck’s Venetian water carriers, Venice (1884) typifies this norm (Plate 16). In the image, two women water carriers cross a bridge while fishermen idle on its balustrade. A small girl, straining with the weight of her own bucket, walks alongside the women; two young boys, one of whose dirty feet are cleverly juxtaposed with the majestic view of Palladio’s San Giorgio, are, by contrast, idle, signalling the depression of the historic fishing trade. As this industry suffered, tourism took its place. As a result, a new demand arose for the old tasks of lace making and bead stringing. Such transformations in a local economy were rarely gender-neutral, often forcing women into the worst-paying and lowest-status occupations.27 As seen in Sargent’s Street in Venice, the seated woman in the doorway of the alley is reinforcing the notion that men idle and women work. In Venetian bead stringers (1880 or 1882), Sargent illustrated this traditional craft through the labour of three women in a dimly lit palazzo (perhaps the one he used as a studio) (Plate 17). The seated woman balances a sessola on her lap, an oblong wooden scoop that contains her beads and threads. Her co-worker, seated next to her, appears to hold the typical paper case that contained long, steel needles made especially for stringing. In her work, the impiraressa would adroitly manipulate multiple needles between her fingers. Once the needles were strung with beads, they took on the appearance of a fan, and were aptly known as a palmeta. After the fan was completely full of beads, the bead stringer made an agada, a ‘needleful’; two agada make a marin, which consisted of forty threads of beads. It appears that the woman standing in Sargent’s Venetian bead stringers holds one such palmeta strung with iridescent violet and sky-blue beads.28 Working women in Venice are depicted in close proximity to the places where they dwell. Their domestic obligations, such as childcare and cooking, it is inferred, can be maintained as they work stringing beads brought home from the factories on the island of Murano. Women working, therefore, were not separate or apart from their families or communities. The glorification of working at home, a type of idealised cottage industry, was also a popular subject in reform and tourist photography from the same period, such as Tomaso Filippi’s Street scene (bead stringers) (ca. 1890), in which Venetian women string beads in front of doorways in alleyways.29 From his shop in St Mark’s Square, Filippi’s professional photos were purchased by tourists for their Grand Tour albums. In a period of growing industrialisation in the United States, such images presented Venice as a pre-industrial society, a site located outside of history and time. For tourists the deterioration of the once great Republic was the city’s most attractive feature. Novelist Henry James characterised the economic challenges of ‘the children of the lagoon’: ‘Not their misery, doubtless, but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases the sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight of a beautiful race that lives by the aid of its imagination.’30 In the late nineteenth century, Venice had taken the place of Rome for American painters and writers seeking views of an ahistorical romanticised Italy.31 With the unification of the peninsula, Italy had become a sovereign nation state with Rome as its capital in 1871. The Eternal City had lost its charm, many American
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John Singer Sargent’s Street in Venice artists and writers believed, with the building of railway stations, new apartment buildings, and major roadways. In Venice, on the other hand, working women in dim palazzos symbolised a renewal of the past and consistency with it. As nostalgic representations rather than documentary ‘realities’, these imagined female labourers in Sargent’s paintings existed in an antiquated and pre-industrial economy where their production could not possibly threaten American economic development. The idealisation of an antiquated feminine labour force not only portrayed the Italian as safely existing within this pre-industrial past, but also served as a response to the ‘real’ threat of foreign labour in the modern industrial United States. The suitability of women working for a wage was hotly debated in late-nineteenth-century America and Italy. In 1880, Harper’s published ‘Working-women in New York’, focusing on local solutions to ease the plight of the working mother, but home, according to the article, was still ‘the most desirable place to be’.32 The report also describes the establishment of daycare: ‘Crèches, or dry-nurseries, have been opened in some parts of the city, where a working-woman can leave her children while she is at work, reclaiming them in the evening.’33 Representations of Italian female labourers acted against or tried to ameliorate two constraints: the problem of the Italian working mother and the problem of working women of all ethnicities, causing these images to lie under a double burden. Such notions of immigrant behaviour allowed Sargent’s painting of antiquated Venice to serve as a visual guide to New York immigrant life, but with a ‘high art’ veneer.34 In times of great strife, the public’s perception of Italian-American behaviour and customs became amplified. During the 1920s, when Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were on trial for murdering two men during the Slater and Morrill armed robbery, all Italians were suspect of criminal activity. By that point, a woman walking down the street holding a shawl tightly around her was not seen as picturesque. A daughter recalls the story of her immigrant mother: During the winter, it was the worst time. You could hardly go out. My mother used to wear those heavy, warm shawls. They turned out to be protection from more than just cold. My mother would huddle into the shawl when she went out, and then the snowballs would start flying. Sometimes they hit her so hard, she was afraid to walk. And those who threw them shouted, ‘guinea, guinea’, and followed her down the street … My mother would pretend she had a knife in her pocket sometime[s], just to scare them off. They were scared, too, especially because they expected Italians to carry knives those days.35
Sargent cannot be directly linked to how the public came to terms with Sacco and Vanzetti, but he can be placed in a long line of image makers who helped shape how audiences saw Italian character, behaviour, and beauty in the United States.36 These historical representations offer a timely warning of the destructive consequences of dehumanising people according to their gender and national origin. Ultimately, the historical paradoxes uncovered in Street in Venice give us reason to question our own omissions and exclusions.
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Notes 1 The female model in Street in Venice was prominently featured in several scenes early in Sargent’s career, between the years 1880 and 1883. She was often depicted working as an impiraressa, holding colourful glass canes, stringing cut-glass beads into long strands, and relaxing with men in wine shops similar to those depicted in Street in Venice. See R. Ormond, ‘Modern Life Subjects’, in B. Robertson (ed.), Sargent in Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 50–79. 2 See J. M. Whistler, Second Venice set: Bead stringers, 1880, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, and T. Filippi, Street scene (bead stringers), ca. 1890, IRE (Istitutzioni di Ricovero e di Educazione), Venice. 3 T. Stebbins’s exhibition and catalogue The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience 1760–1914 (New York: Abrams, 1992) is testimony to the American artist’s significant presence in Italy and serves as a well-documented overview. M. Lovell’s exhibition catalogue Venice: The American View, 1860–1920 (San Francisco, CA: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1984) and her subsequent publication A Visitable Past: Views of Venice by American Artists, 1860–1915 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1989) are notable studies for isolating the American interest in Venice both temporally – a sixty-year period – and contextually, by treating Venice as a distinctive city within Italy. What Lovell discovered was a city quite out of step with the rest of the world, a place where artists flocked not for a glimpse of the future but for a glimpse of the past. L. Ayres, ‘Sargent in Venice’, in P. Hills (ed.), John Singer Sargent (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1986), pp. 48–73 and T. Fairbrother, ‘Sargent’s genre paintings and the issues of suppression and privacy’, Studies in the History of Art 37 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990), pp. 29–49 have shaped the literature and articulated the leading arguments, which include the claim that Sargent did not share his contemporaries’ sensibilities or stylistic concerns. M. C. Volk in John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1992) and M. Simpson in Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997) have suggested the limitations of the Parisian audience for Sargent’s genre subjects. 4 ‘The National Academy of Design’, The Art Amateur 18 (May 1888): 132. 5 ‘An Exhibition of American Paintings’, The Art Amateur 27 (November 1892): 138. For more on how this New York celebration ultimately established Columbus Day, see D. M. Carletta, ‘The triumph of American spectacle: New York City’s 1892 Columbian Celebration’, Material Culture 40:1 (2008): 19–40. 6 Ayres, ‘Sargent in Venice’, p. 62. 7 R. W. Torchia, American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, part 2, with D. Chotner and E. Miles (Washington, D.C. and New York: National Gallery of Art and Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 102. 8 W. Adelson, ‘Sargent’s Life: Routes to Venice’, in Sargent’s Venice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 49. 9 Fairbrother, ‘Sargent’s genre paintings and the issues of suppression and privacy’: 29–49. 10 See L. Nochlin, ‘The Image of the Working Woman’, in Representing Women (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2019), pp. 80–105. 11 A. Baignères, ‘Première Exposition de la Société Internationale de Peintres et Sculpteurs’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 27 (February 1883): 189–90. Although Sargent’s work was admired at the National Academy, Robert Blum’s Venetian bead stringers (1887–88) in the same exhibition was praised for being ‘brilliant and gay in effect without being gaudy, a fault it might easily have if the subject were painted by a less cultivated colorist than Mr. Blum. The picture abounds in good morceaux.’ ‘Fine arts: the Academy exhibition’, Nation 46 (19 April 1888): 331. 12 Ayres, ‘Sargent in Venice’, p. 62. Baignères, ‘Première Exposition de la Société Internationale de Peintres et Sculpteurs’: 189–90, quoted in Simpson, Uncanny Spectacle, p. 106. 13 E. Lord, J. Trenor, and S. Barrows, The Italian in America (New York: Young People’s Missionary Movement, 1905), pp. 232–3. 14 M. G. Van Rensselaer, ‘Picturesque New York’, The Century 45 (December 1892): 172.
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John Singer Sargent’s Street in Venice 15 W. D. Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 53. 16 In 1888, Street in Venice was exhibited at the St Botolph Club, Boston, MA; see Greta, ‘The Art Season in Boston’, The Art Amateur 19 ( June 1888): 5. 17 B. Matthews, ‘Vignettes of Manhattan’, Harper’s Monthly 89 ( June 1894): 36. 18 Ibid. 19 H. Krabbendam, ‘“In the interests of all of us …”: Theodore Roosevelt and the launch of immigration restriction as an executive concern’, European Journal of American Studies 10:2 (2015), document 21. 20 Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Ann Roosevelt, 21 March 1891, Harvard College Library. For a more detailed account of this event, see D. Fiorentino, Chapter 10, this volume. 21 J. A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890), edited by Sam Bass Warner, Jr (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). 22 Ibid., p. 48. 23 Perhaps the best example of a Sargent sitter and a Riis supporter was Edith Minturn Stokes (1867–1937). See D. S. Gardner, ‘Practical philanthropy: the Phelps Stokes fund and housing’, Prospects 15 (1990): 359–411. 24 Riis, How the Other Half Lives, p. 54. 25 Charlotte Adams, ‘Color in New York streets’, The Art Review 2 (September 1887): 17. 26 Riis, How the Other Half Lives, p. 59. 27 See C. Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). On Venice in particular, Irene Ninni wrote a rare historical account of the Venetian bead stringer, titled L’impiraressa, detailing the particulars of her vocation and her ‘meager wage’: ‘The impiraresse earn a mere pittance considering the physical strain of sitting in a room dawn to the late hours of the night with a wooden scoop on their knees for just one lira a day.’ I. Ninni, ‘L’impiraressa: The Venetian Bead Stringer (1893)’, translated by L. Segatti, Beads: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers 3 (1991): 73–82. 28 L. Hapke, ‘The American working girl and the New York tenement tale of the 1890’s’, Journal of American Culture 15 (Spring 1992): 44; see also E. Lipton, ‘The laundress in late nineteenthcentury French culture’, Art History 3 (September 1980): 303; H. Campbell, ‘Certain forms of woman’s work for woman’, The Century 38 ( June 1889): 217–29; and M. G. Van Rensselaer, ‘American painters in pastel’, The Century 29 (December 1884): 204. 29 In particular, Tomaso Filippi, Street scene (bead stringers), ca. 1890, IRE (Istituzioni di Ricovero e di Educazione), Venice; more generally, see the etchings of Otto Bacher (1856–1909) in the Venetian Series (1880), Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA. See also James Jackson Jarves, ‘Ancient and modern Venetian glass of Murano’, Harper’s Monthly 64 ( January 1882): 177–90. 30 Henry James, ‘Venice’, The Century 25 (November 1882): 4. 31 See M. Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014); see also L. Buonomo, Backward Glances: Exploring Italy, Reinterpreting America (1831–1866) (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), p. 60. Buonomo has explained that Venice in the first half of the nineteenth century was a place American travellers passed through on their way to Rome or Florence. See also G. Bologna, ‘“Looking across the Grand Canal”: pittori americani a Venezia e la fotografia (1880–1910)’, L’Uomo nero X, 10 (December 2013): 37–49. 32 ‘Working women in New York’, Harper’s 61 ( June 1880): 25. ‘The shirt-makers can do their work at home, and thus have an opportunity to keep an eye on their children, and prepare their husbands’ meals at the same time.’ 33 Ibid.: 29. 34 See A. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 35 V. R. Winsey, ‘The Italian Immigrant Women who Arrived in the United States before World War I’, in F. Cordasco (ed.), Studies in Italian American Social History (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), p. 207. Reprinted in D. Hoobler and T. Hoobler, The Italian American Family Album (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 60.
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Selected bibliography Banta, M. American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Buonomo, L. Backward Glances: Exploring Italy, Reinterpreting America (1831–1866). Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Dabakis, M. A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Ewen, E. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side 1890–1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985. Fairbrother, T. ‘Sargent’s genre paintings and the issues of suppression and privacy’. Studies in the History of Art 37 (1990): 29–49. Glazer, N. and D. P. Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963. Greenwald, M. W. ‘Historians and the working-class women in America’. International Labor and WorkingClass History (Spring 1979): 23–32. Guglielmo, J. Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880– 1945. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Guglielmo, J. and S. Salerno. Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003. Hills, P. et al. John Singer Sargent. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1986. Hoobler, D. and T. Hoobler. The Italian American Family Album. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Howells, William Dean. Italian Journeys. Boston, MA: James R. Osgood, 1877. _____. Venetian Life. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1892. Jaffe, I. B. (ed.), The Italian Presence in American Art 1760–1860. New York: Fordham University Press, 1989. _____. The Italian Presence in American Art 1860–1920. New York: Fordham University Press, 1992. Jarves, James Jackson. Italian Rambles: Studies of Life and Manners in New and Old Italy. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883. Kessler-Harris, A. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Kessner, T. The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City 1880–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Lears, J. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Lovell, M. Venice: The American View, 1860–1920. San Francisco, CA: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1984. _____. A Visitable Past: Views of Venice by American Artists, 1860–1915. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1989. Mangione, J. and B. Morreale. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Matthews, Brander. Vignettes of Manhattan. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894. Norton, Charles Eliot. Notes of Travel and Study in Italy. Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1859. Ormond, R. and E. Kilmurray. John Singer Sargent: Complete Paintings, vol. 4, Figures and Landscapes, 1874–1882. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957. Robertson, B. (ed.) Sargent in Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
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John Singer Sargent’s Street in Venice Simon, R. J. and S. H. Alexander. The Ambivalent Welcome: Print Media, Public Opinion and Immigration. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993. Simpson, M. et al. Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Sollors, W. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. _____. The Invention of Ethnicity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Stebbins, T. E. The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience 1760–1914. New York: Abrams, 1992. Stange, M. Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Volk, M. C. et al. John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1992.
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Francesco Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù across empires Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document
Caitlin Meehye Beach
In early 1877, townspeople in the Austrian imperial port of Trieste (present-day Italy) began a public subscription campaign to secure funds for the city’s purchase of a sculpture deemed, as one newspaper proclaimed, ‘the first work of a Trieste sculptor to merit the praise of the world’.1 The work in question was a bronze sculpture by the artist Francesco Pezzicar (1831–90) titled L’Abolizione della schiavitù negli Stati Uniti (The abolition of slavery in the United States) (Figure 9.1). Modelled by Pezzicar in 1873 and cast in bronze two years later, the monumental work commemorated the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation during the American Civil War, which proclaimed freedom for people enslaved in areas of the country under rebellion. It depicts an African American man with arms outstretched, one wrist bearing a broken shackle and holding overhead a fragment of bronze inscribed with excerpts from President Abraham Lincoln’s famed decree. The sculpture had been most recently displayed to considerable acclaim and commentary in the United States at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and returned to Trieste at the fair’s close. Upon its return, what locals termed ‘a patriotic project’ began to secure the celebrated work’s public display and entry into the newly founded municipal museum, the Civico Museo Revoltella, where it stands today.2 This chapter takes the ‘patriotic project’ of the city of Trieste as a starting point to critically consider the place of Pezzicar’s sculptural homage to the abolition of American slavery and representation of a former bondsperson at a time of shifting national and imperial allegiances in Italy and Austria. L’Abolizione della schiavitù remains primarily known by scholars today for its exhibition at the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876, where it stood on prominent view in the Austrian section of fine-arts displays in the fair’s Memorial Hall.3 Before and after this world’s fair, the sculpture was also the subject of attention and enthusiasm in the artist’s home city of Trieste, which lay just outside of the borders of the Italian nation until the early twentieth century. The reception and circulation of L’Abolizione della schiavitù in and around late-nineteenth-century Trieste has much to tell us about the ways in which sculpture entered into entangled dialogues on American slavery, Italian liberation, and Austrian imperialism. Although Pezzicar was hardly the only artist to address the abolition of American slavery during the late nineteenth century, the manner in which he did so was markedly unusual in its day. He departed from most other contemporary
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Francesco Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù
Figure 9.1. Francesco Pezzicar, L’Abolizione della schiavitù negli Stati Uniti (The abolition of slavery in the United States), 1873, cast in bronze in 1875 by K. K. Kunst-Erzgiesserei, Vienna, Museo Revoltella, Trieste
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The courses of empire commemorations of abolition by American and European artists by presenting a striking representation of a former bondsperson as a powerful instigator – rather than recipient – of his own liberation. Published commentaries, prints, and photographs reveal how viewers in both Philadelphia and Trieste found L’Abolizione della schiavitù compelling and made sense of Emancipation in relationship to their own political realities. Rather than situating the work in an American context, they appropriated and assimilated the sculpture into a constructed mythos of Italian sovereignty that stretched from Roman antiquity to the Risorgimento. Yet these narratives of liberal freedom attached to Pezzicar’s sculpture coincided with – and were arguably unsettled by – new patterns of global commerce and imperial exploitation that unfolded in and around the Mediterranean during the late nineteenth century. In parsing the ways in which a sculpture about Emancipation intersected histories of empire on the Italian peninsula while refracting the course of its imperialist realities elsewhere, this chapter ultimately seeks to interrogate how it might reveal and obscure the construction of the liberal categories of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’ at the crossroads of abolition and empire. Before turning to the sculpture’s reception in Trieste, it is first useful to address how, why, and on what terms Pezzicar responded to the histories of Emancipation and abolition in the United States. In the midst of the American Civil War in January 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed into effect the Emancipation Proclamation, a military document that decreed freedom for African Americans enslaved in areas of the country under control of the Southern Confederacy.4 While this did not abolish slavery outright, its message was consequential for many enslaved people. In one particular instance, following its preliminary announcement, in September 1862, enslaved men in Virginia arrested for planning an insurrection among their fellow bondspeople were said to have been found with ‘copies of late newspapers, which published Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation’.5 The proclamation also crystallised the idea among Northern politicians, policymakers, soldiers, and the broader publics that the Civil War would be waged specifically to end slavery, and this aim was formally realised at its close with the passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, in 1865.6 Scholars of the Black radical tradition have discussed the ways in which Emancipation as a juridical operation set into motion by a constitutional amendment did not immediately translate into a larger condition of ‘freedom’ for Black Americans in the United States after 1865 but rather confronted the maintenance of existing racist power structures in society.7 This reality complicates the ways liberal narratives of history have routinely framed ‘slavery’ and ‘freedom’ in oppositional terms, positing Emancipation as a temporal turning point in this dialectic.8 A representation such as Pezzicar’s – so publicly seen, exhibited, and commented upon in its day as ‘a statue emblematical of emancipation’ and ‘a tribute to liberty’ – demands that we call into question the work of the visual in the manufacture of these narratives and the realities of unfreedom they overshadowed.9 Pezzicar was one of the many artists of the late nineteenth century who created a work of art in commemoration of Emancipation. What specifically prompted the sculptor to do so remains unclear. The Duino-born Pezzicar studied at the Academy
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Francesco Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù of Fine Arts in Venice from 1857 to 1863.10 He won the school’s Alunnato di Roma in 1863, a premium that afforded pupils the opportunity for three years of study in Rome.11 After departing Rome, in 1866, he spent the majority of his career in Trieste and never travelled to the United States. But it is reasonable to suggest that working and living in these cosmopolitan centres on the Italian peninsula informed his choice to pursue a work about the abolition of American slavery. As major ports on the Mediterranean, both Venice and Trieste had long been home to significant populations of people of African descent. In Venice in particular, references to the enslavement of Black Africans took visual and visible form, with the racist motif of the so-called ‘blackamoor’ figure appearing in sculpture and the decorative arts from the early modern era onwards.12 Indeed, the open and unbound figure of Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù seems a sculptural inverse of the crouching forms of the enslaved men that Baldassare Longhena, Juste Le Court, and Melchior Barthel modelled for a funerary monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro in the Frari (1665–69) (Figures 4.3 and 4.4), a space with which the artist would have certainly been acquainted from his studies in Venice.13 Moreover, during his tenure in Rome, Pezzicar would have been a member of an international community of sculptors that by the mid-1860s encompassed the Americans Edmonia Lewis and Harriet Hosmer, both of whom undertook works about Emancipation over the course of the decade. As a contemporary account by Alexander Wheelock Thayer, the American consul to Trieste and a close associate of the artist, relayed, the sculpture ‘owe[d] its origins to the enthusiasm aroused in Mr. Pezzicar’s mind by the news of Mr. Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in 1863 – events which he then determined to commemorate in a suitable work’.14 Pezzicar may have also been familiar with the work of his contemporaries in Rome as they responded in sculpture to cataclysmic events such as the end of the American Civil War, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the abolition of slavery.15 Hosmer, for example, started work on her Freedman’s memorial to Abraham Lincoln in the autumn of 1865 (Figure 4.5). Following her arrival in the city in late 1865, Lewis began to conceive of The freedwoman on first hearing of her liberty in early 1866.16 Most certain, however, is that Pezzicar’s study in Venice and Rome directed him to a professional career decisively oriented towards broader geopolitical spheres. Following his studies in Venice and Rome, he settled in Trieste in the late 1860s, where he worked as a delegate for an international exposition held in the city in 1871 and as an exhibition commissioner for the Vienna world’s fair of 1873.17 Pezzicar began work on L’Abolizione della schiavitù during these same years, completing a plaster model of the sculpture in Trieste and collaborating with casters Joseph Röhlich and Franz Xaver Pönninger at the imperial foundry in Vienna to produce a version in bronze expressly ‘intended for the exhibition in Philadelphia’, as Viennese newspapers reported.18 The cast was completed in 1875 and travelled to the United States the following year as part of Austria’s entry to the Centennial Exhibition. Austria’s choice to send Pezzicar’s sculpture to Philadelphia may be understood in light of international interest in exhibiting works of art thematising ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ at a fair celebrating the centenary of the signing of the American
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Figure 9.2. Thomas Ball, Emancipation memorial, 1876, bronze, Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C.
Declaration of Independence. France, most notably, sent fragments of FrédéricAuguste Bartholdi’s yet to be completed Statue of Liberty to the Centennial; the statue’s colossal torch-bearing hand stood as a popular attraction in Fairmount Park.19 Yet unlike Bartholdi’s giant arm – and its broad-based overture to liberty – Pezzicar’s sculpture directly addressed the specific history of Emancipation and African American freedom from slavery. L’Abolizione della schiavitù differed from other nineteenth-century sculptures representing Emancipation. For example, Thomas Ball’s Emancipation memorial (Figure 9.2) was dedicated in Lincoln Park in southeast Washington, D.C. the same year that L’Abolizione della schiavitù was unveiled at the Philadelphia Centennial. Ball’s sculpture depicted an African American man with shackled wrists and kneeling before Abraham Lincoln. As the art historian Kirk Savage has noted, Ball’s monument recalled the visual logic of earlier sculptural images such as Josiah Wedgwood’s widely reproduced anti-slavery medallion, whose representation of a single kneeling Black man in chains gazing upward with clasped hands suggested that liberation from enslavement occurred only at the behest of white people.20 It thus aligned with a racist and false narrative of abolition that conceived of former bondspersons as indebted subjects rather than active agents in Emancipation.21 By contrast, the stance of Pezzicar’s sculpted figure connotes solidity and strength. Lincoln’s presence appears in word rather than in body, with the sheaf of bronze inscribed with excerpted lines from the Proclamation reading, ‘I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves … are, and henceforward shall be free. … Upon this act … I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God … A. Lincoln, January 1st, 1863.’ More significant yet, the figure’s outstretched arms and broken chains suggest that he has secured his own liberation. The sculpture has more in common with Lewis’s Forever free, produced in Rome in 1867, whose standing male figure gazes upwards while raising a left arm with a broken shackle (Figure 9.3). Pezzicar modelled a corporeally capacious statue that engaged space in a dynamic way. The figure appears to stride forward, his movement accentuated by a flowing cloth knotted at the waist and a broken fragment of chain at the statue’s base.
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Francesco Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù
Figure 9.3. Edmonia Lewis, Forever free, 1867, marble, Howard University Art Gallery, Washington, D.C.
The large scale of the work further lends the figure a commanding presence.22 The statue measures seven feet, eight inches high, and approaches a colossal scale when placed atop an additional pedestal, as it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.23 If the shackled figure in Ball’s composition kneels beneath Lincoln with the arc of his back ensconced beneath the president’s extended arm, it is the viewer of L’Abolizione della schiavitù who must duck beneath and conform their body to the space occupied by the statue, thus initiating a phenomenologically active and deferential engagement with this powerful figure. Such a bold composition was unprecedented in nineteenth-century sculpture.24 The figure represented by L’Abolizione della schiavitù is over life size, dynamic, and powerful: as one period critic noted, ‘The attitude is impressive and full of vital force.’25 Pezzicar’s representation of a forceful, free Black subject drew attention not only in Philadelphia but also in Trieste. The art historian Massimo De Grassi has discussed how people in Trieste assiduously followed the sculpture’s progress from its conception, to its exhibition abroad at the Centennial, and, finally, to its display, public subscription campaign, and acquisition by the city upon its return to Europe.26 What sparked this local interest in L’Abolizione della schiavitù? Given the sculpture’s reference to American abolition in its title as well as the English-language excerpts
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The courses of empire of the Emancipation Proclamation transcribed upon its surface, in what ways did this historic specificity translate – or fail to translate – in a European context? Most importantly, how did the work’s popularity relate to broader discourses on nationalism, liberation, and empire at the shifting borders of the Italian state during the late nineteenth century? As Hugh Honour has hypothesised, Pezzicar’s initial choice to depict a freed American slave in sculpture may have had particular ideological import within the nationalist politics of the Italian Risorgimento.27 References to the abolition of slavery in the American context gained considerable traction and visibility on the Italian peninsula in the 1850s and 1860s. Many Italian nationalists and their American sympathisers were quick to draw comparisons, albeit problematic ones, between the ongoing struggles for liberation from Austrian and papal control on the Italian peninsula and the efforts to end slavery in the United States.28 The Italian Republican politician Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), who himself had advocated for the end of slavery in the United States, wrote in 1859, ‘We are fighting the same sacred battle for freedom and emancipation of the oppressed.’29 Statements like Mazzini’s, which posited an uneven and distorted rhetorical equation between the lived experience of African Americans subjugated to enslavement and that of Italian people under Austrian rule, were commonplace in a Risorgimento discourse largely dominated by white Italians. As the literary historian Paola Gemme has succinctly noted of this appropriation, ‘To discuss the possibility of freedom in Italy was to discuss the possibility of freedom for American slaves.’30 In this transatlantic context, a sculpture like Pezzicar’s would take on multiple intersecting layers of signification. If L’Abolizione della schiavitù commemorated the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, that commemoration would resonate with anti-Austrian discourses of national self-determination on the Italian peninsula, and in Trieste in particular. Trieste was not part of the initial phase of Italian unification. During the Risorgimento, Italian states formally united as the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 following a series of nationalist campaigns in the preceding decades. In 1871, Rome became the legal capital of the new nation state after being annexed to Italy a year prior.31 Trieste, which lay one hundred miles east of Venice, near present-day Slovenia, remained outside of this geographic scope of nation formation until it was annexed to Italy after the First World War. Since 1719, Trieste had been a key port of free trade within the Austrian Empire because of its strategic status as a centre of commerce on the Adriatic coast. It became a stronghold of the Habsburg monarchy during the early modern era and, like many other European ports, benefited from both colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade for its wealth and development.32 During the second half of the nineteenth century, as several historians have pointed out, the city harboured a committed contingent of patriots organised under a specific brand of nationalism called irredentismo, or irredentism, who called for the liberation of Italian-speaking border regions on the peninsula from Austrian rule and their subsequent incorporation into the newly formed Italy.33 The enthusiasm for Pezzicar’s sculpture in late-nineteenth-century Trieste may be read within the context of irredentism. Among the most vocal promoters of
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Francesco Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù L’Abolizione della schiavitù was the journal Libertà e Lavoro. Established in 1867 under the slogan ‘liberazione, emancipazione, associazione’, Libertà e Lavoro drew inspiration from the revolutionary ideals of Italian unification leaders Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82) and provided commentaries on social problems, arts, culture, and irredentist politics.34 As De Grassi has noted, the journal’s editor Giuseppe Caprin devoted a great deal of attention to Pezzicar’s sculpture throughout the 1870s, featuring in one instance a full-page lithograph of the bronze, included as an insert that subscribers might detach and hang in their own homes.35 On another occasion, the journal published a lengthy ode in praise of the sculpture by the poet Cesare Rossi. The poem situated the sculpture within the ‘American dawn of freedom’ as well as a longer history of struggles for liberation that stretched back to ‘the days of antiquity’, evoking parallels to the figure of the ancient enslaved gladiator ‘Spartacus the brave’, who was said to have ‘shook the servile chain’.36 Libertà e Lavoro’s allusion to Spartacus, who led an insurrection of his fellow enslaved Thracians against the Roman republic in the first century bce, is meaningful. As several scholars have observed, Pezzicar’s larger-than-life, dynamic figure has much in common with the Italian sculptor Vincenzo Vela’s seven and a half feet high Spartacus, of 1847, whose muscular body also advances forward with a purposeful stride.37 Executed by an artist who was himself an active participant in northern Italian revolts against Austrian rule in 1848, Spartacus was widely recognised and disseminated as a symbol of the Risorgimento throughout the Italian peninsula, with multiple bronze reductions reproduced after the marble original.38 Significantly, period viewers understood Pezzicar’s sculpture in relationship to Spartacus. One reporter for the Triestine periodical L’Alba remarked that Pezzicar’s sculpture reiterated ‘the concept of Vela’s Spartacus, but [was] not an imitation’.39 There is little doubt that Pezzicar had created his sculpture with Vela’s work in mind. It is well within the realm of possibility that a new generation of irredentists in Trieste were inclined to embrace L’Abolizione della schiavitù as an emblem of the city’s struggle for freedom from Austrian imperial rule and its incorporation into the new borders of Italy. A more pointed insertion of L’Abolizione della schiativù into discourses of Italian liberation occurred in the Austrian imperial capital itself. Consider the case of the Circolo accademico italiano in Vienna, a cultural society established in 1879 by artists, intellectuals, and university students from Trieste who lived in the empire’s capital city and looked to promote the Italian language and culture there.40 The Circolo accademico existed ‘to keep alive the flame of italianità’, as one contemporary journalist put it, and to this end kept a lively schedule of literary salons, concerts, theatrical productions, and parties, documented in a series of photographs archived at the Civico Museo di Storia ed Arte in Trieste.41 Pezzicar’s sculpture appeared on display in the society’s main reading room, where it was temporarily moved from its original home at the Museo Revoltella, installed in front of a large Italian tricolour hung on the wall (Figure 9.4). The figure is framed symmetrically and theatrically by the flag’s draping curves, with outstretched arms spanning its middle panel and the rippling bronze sheaf of the Emancipation Proclamation echoing the folds of the newspapers that lie on the table below. In this room – where it was surrounded by printed maps of the
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The courses of empire
Figure 9.4. Circolo accademico italiano in Vienna, reading room, 1906–9, F10948, dono Francesco Pepeu, 3.10.1927, Fototeca dei Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte Trieste, Trieste
peninsula, portrait engravings of heroes from the Risorgimento, and photographs of monuments – the bronze statue of L’Abolizione della schiavitù appears as another mechanical image produced and circulated in the name of Italian nationalism. If a periodical like Libertà e Lavoro made sense of Pezzicar’s sculpted figure of a freed American slave within a broader discourse of Italy’s liberation from Austria, the Circolo accademico italiano completely co-opted the work in this service. A fundamental premise governing the production and circulation of Pezzicar’s sculpture figured Black freedom as a cipher and symbol: a single, anonymous figure who stands in for and personifies a monolithic concept of slavery’s abolition.42 We should also note that the work’s title broadly gestured to ‘the abolition of slavery in the United States, 1863’ rather than to any one individual – and subsequently the work’s significance was construed in relationship to different ideologies and geographies. In Trieste, a city caught between the transregional reach of the Austrian empire and the local ideas of Italian irredentism, Pezzicar’s sculpture was readily uncoupled from a particularised history of American slavery and Emancipation and instead stood as a symbol of liberty and liberation more generally.
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Francesco Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù Liberty and liberation – but to what ends? In her study of the interconnected relationships between enslavement, empire, and European liberalism, Lisa Lowe has asked us to be attentive to what she calls the ‘ruses of liberty’ across the long nineteenth century.43 By tracking the ways in which the ends of slavery in the Atlantic world coincided with new forms of imperial power, she argues that liberalism’s abstract promises of abolition and emancipation have often obscured their embeddedness within colonial conditions of settlement, enslaved and coerced labour, and imperial trade.44 Lowe’s argument is especially generative within the context of this volume’s consideration of the intertwined geographies of art and imperialism in Italian and American contexts, as it prompts our critical reflection on the historical processes – and courses of empire – that visual affirmations of freedom obfuscate, exclude, or disavow. In late-nineteenth-century Italy, I would argue, Pezzicar’s sculptural overture to the abolition of slavery in the United States stood in a vexed, dialogic relationship to imperial projects on and beyond the Italian peninsula. Crucially, the interest in liberating Trieste from Austrian rule and incorporating the port into the newly formed Italy unfolded amid a broader landscape of shifting and contested borders of empire, colony, and the nation state. Another photograph of the reading room at the Circolo accademico italiano in which L’Abolizione della schiavitù stood shows a wall adjacent to the statue adorned with a pair of large maps (Figure 9.5). A closer view reveals that these maps were created for military and civil use by the Lombard geographer Arcangelo Ghisleri (1855–1938), a prolific cartographer who sought to standardise the study of geography across the newly formed Italian state in the late nineteenth century.45 The two maps – part of Ghisleri’s larger atlas project titled Gran Carta Storica Murale del Risorgimento Italiano – collectively document the shifting borders of Italy past and present. The map on the left side of the room depicts a pre-unification Italy from 1815 to 1859, while its counterpart to the right presents L’Italia odierna (Italy today). Notably, the latter includes in its corner an insert labelled possedimenti e prottetorati d’Italia, showing the eastern horn of Africa, and Eritrea in particular, proclaimed by the Kingdom of Italy as an overseas colony in 1890.46 This military invasion, which took place over the course of the 1880s and 1890s, had begun several decades earlier, following the opening of the Suez Canal, the man-made waterway in northern Egypt that facilitated European shipping routes and colonial invasions in eastern Africa by connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea by way of the Nile river. (Incidentally, Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty had initially been envisioned for installation at the entryway of the Suez Canal.47) The presence of both Ghisleri’s maps and Pezzicar’s sculpture at the Circolo accademico italiano reveals a great deal about Trieste’s place at the crossroads of the Austrian and Italian empires in the late nineteenth century. Trieste, one of the largest ports of free trade in the eastern Mediterranean at the time, stood as a critical node in the rapidly growing network of commerce and colonial expansion from Italy to northeastern Africa, as shown in the L’Italia odierna map.48 Significantly, it was Alexander Wheelock Thayer, the American consul to Trieste, who recounted the making of Pezzicar’s sculpture to American audiences and who was among the first to call for the city’s increased influence and dominance in this Afro-Mediterranean
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Figure 9.5. Circolo accademico italiano in Vienna, reading room, 1906–9, F10947, dono Francesco Pepeu, 3.10.1927, Fototeca dei Civici Musei di Storia ed Arte Trieste, Trieste
network in the mid-nineteenth century. Writing in an 1869 report on ‘The commercial future of Trieste’, he noted, ‘American cotton could arrive from New Orleans, Mobile, or Savannah via Trieste to the Sava River, in not much more time and probably at a cost not much higher than it arrives to the mills of Lancashire via Liverpool. In the meantime, the production of Egypt and the Levant is, so to speak, in the immediate vicinity.’49 In the years immediately following the American Civil War, Thayer envisioned a direct lineage between the plantation economies of the southern United States and new forms of imperial commerce, extraction, and unfree labour across the globe. When the city of Trieste acquired Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù for the Museo Revoltella after their public fundraising campaign drew to a close in the 1870s, the statue joined a collection of paintings and sculptures that had previously belonged to Baron Pasquale Revoltella (1795–1869), a wealthy financier and shipping magnate in Trieste who had served as vice president of the Suez Canal company during the 1850s and 1860s.50 Among the prized pieces of this existing collection were two marble groups by the Milanese sculptor Pietro Magni (1817–77), each of which marked Trieste’s place in a modern Mediterranean network of trade and commerce. The first, The nymph Aurisina (Figure 9.6), carved by Magni in 1858 and
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Francesco Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù
Figure 9.6. Pietro Magni, The nymph Aurisina, 1858, marble, Museo Revoltella, Trieste
Figure 9.7. Pietro Magni, The cutting of the Suez Canal, 1863, marble, Museo Revoltella, Trieste
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The courses of empire incorporated into a working fountain, commemorated the recent completion of a major aqueduct that descended to the city from the rocky plateau in the nearby village of Aurisina. Described by an original accompanying pamphlet as ‘a fine expression of a mercantile city standing on the shores of the sea’, the sculpture presented a nude nymph rising from a seashell, a symbol of the Adriatic Sea.51 The man-made aqueduct appears here as a mythological, feminine allegory, with a winged cherub and a crowned matron who usher her forth into being while water flows beneath and pools into the upturned seashell. The second marble group similarly conflated the man-made with the mythological. In 1863, Magni completed The cutting of the Suez Canal (Figure 9.7), which Revoltella himself had commissioned as a self-congratulatory commemoration of his own involvement with and financing of the canal’s completion.52 In much the same manner as he did with The nymph Aurisina, Magni conceived of The cutting of the Suez Canal as a complex tableau of multiple figures, each occupying a specific role in the scene. A personification of Europe stands at left and unites with outstretched arms the seated and reclining figures of the Mediterranean and the Red seas, each of whom wield tridents. The figures of winged Mercury and Navigation preside over this group as if to offer guidance. The neoclassical and the mythological function as technologies of imperial persuasion, transforming the artifice of a canal wrought deep into the earth in the service of European colonisation and commerce into an allegory of divinely ordained right. As Ghisleri’s maps at the Circolo accademico italiano worked to subsume the project of modern Italian colonial expansion to the African continent under a cartographic rationale, Magni’s sculpture recast this violence as a classicising allegory in blindingly white marble. Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù entered into this imperial discourse when it arrived at the Museo Revoltella in the 1870s. Like Magni’s marble meditations on commerce and expansion, L’Abolizione della schiavitù ultimately traded in a series of reversals and disavowals connected to the conflicting courses of empire and freedom. Initially cast and sent for exhibition under the stamp of the Austrian imperial crown, the work’s address to the abolition of American slavery later came to be symbolic of Italy’s shifting and contested borders. Yet at the same time that these national borders shifted eastward to Trieste, they also extended southward to eastern Africa to connect both regions with a global network of trade and commerce. If questions of American abolition and Italian empire seem on the one hand historically and geopolitically distinct, the co-presence of Pezzicar’s and Magni’s sculptures asks us to consider the connections between these histories, and the places and people they made visible and invisible in their entanglement. Notes 1 ‘La prima opera di uno scultore triestino che meritò le lode del mondo intero.’ ‘La statua di Pezzicar’, L’Adria (15 May 1877): 1. All translations are my own unless indicated. I thank Elizabeth Hutchinson, Kellie Jones, Karen Lemmey, Maurizio Lorber, Melissa Dabakis, and Paul Kaplan for their invaluable feedback and suggestions in developing this article.
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Francesco Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù 2 ‘l’amor patria e la generosità de’ cittadini’, ‘La statua di Pezzicar’, 1. For a brief history of Revoltella’s patronage and the founding of the museum, see B. Coslovich (ed.), Museo Revoltella: Il Palazzo baronale (Trieste: Museo Revoltella, 2016). 3 The exhibition of Pezzicar’s sculpture at the Centennial has been discussed by many scholars. See, for example, R. J. Powell, ‘Resurrection and respiration: sculptures by Edmonia Lewis and Francesco Pezzicar’ (lecture, American Academy in Rome, Rome, 7 November 2017, and lecture, Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery, Washington, D.C., 7 May 2019); K. Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monuments in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 87; S. Gold, The Unfinished Exhibition: Visualizing Myth, Memory and the Shadow of the Civil War in Centennial America (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 120–3; J. Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded Age America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), p. 130; and D. Bindman and H. L. Gates, Jr (eds), The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, part 1: Slaves and Liberators (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 122. 4 Lincoln first issued the Emancipation Proclamation in late September 1862, at a moment when the Union Army held a military advantage over Confederate forces. The document was preliminary and provisional, stating that enslaved people in Southern states would be declared free if those states did not rejoin the Union by the end of the year. Since no states rejoined the Union, the proclamation went into effect on 1 January 1863. For further context, see M. Vorenberg, The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010) and J. H. Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1963). 5 ‘Terror in Virginia’, The New York Times, 21 October 1862, 1. This insurrection and other reactions to the preliminary proclamation are detailed in L. Masur, Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 117–38 and Franklin, ‘The Hundred Days’, The Emancipation Proclamation, pp. 58–93. 6 Masur, Lincoln’s Hundred Days, pp. 117–38. The thirteenth amendment was passed in January 1865 and ratified by the requisite number of states (27) by December of that year. 7 Rinaldo Walcott identifies ‘the long emancipation’ as both a colonial construction and a durational condition, noting ‘since 1834 (the British colonies), 1865 (United States), and so on (Portugal, Spain, etc.), the various and multiple colonial emancipations that have followed have put in place juridical conditions of “white civil society” that have continually preempted “black freedom”’. R. Walcott, The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). On what Saidiya Hartman terms the ‘burdened individuality of freedom’ and what Lisa Lowe terms ‘the ruses of liberty’, see S. Hartman, ‘The Subject of Freedom’, in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 115–206 and L. Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 101–34. 8 My thinking here is informed by critiques of this narrative engaged by Lowe, ‘The Ruses of Liberty’, in The Intimacies of Four Continents, pp. 101–34; S. Smallwood, ‘Commodified freedom: interrogating the limits of anti-slavery ideology in the early republic’, Journal of the Early Republic 24:2 (Summer 2004): 289–98; and Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, pp. 115–206. See also Smallwood, ‘Reading the archive of liberalism with Lisa Lowe: reflections on the Intimacies of Four Continents’, Cultural Dynamics 29:1–2 (2017): 83–93. 9 J. C. Ridpath, A Popular History of the United States of America, from the Aboriginal Times to the Present Day (Philadelphia: Jones Brothers & Co., 1877), p. 625; A. W. Thayer, ‘Pezzicar’s bronze statue – “The emancipated slave”’, Boston Daily Advertiser (4 August 1876): 2. 10 ‘Matricola generale degli Alunni iscritti. Anno scolastico 1857–1858’, 1857 novembre 5–1858 aprile 28, Serie 4, Registro 6; ‘Matricola generale degli Alunni iscritti. Anno scolastico 1858–1859’, 1858 novembre 5–1859 maggio 17, Serie 4, Registro 7; ‘Matricola generale degli Alunni iscritti. Anno scolastico 1859–1860’, 1859 novembre 8–1860 maggio 23, Serie 4, Registro 8; Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, 1806-XX.
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The courses of empire 11 ‘Anno scolastico 1862–1863. Posizione del concorso all’alunnato di Roma per la scultura [relativo ai concorrenti Antonio Dal Zotto e Francesco Pezzikar, 1862–1865]’, box 166, classificazione 1.4.1.10, Archivio Storico, Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, 1806-XX. 12 On the African diaspora and histories of enslavement in Venice, see K. Lowe, ‘Visible lives: Black gondoliers and other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly 66:2 (Summer 2013): 412–52 and P. H. D. Kaplan, ‘Local color: The Black African Presence in Venetian Art and History’, in F. Wilson, K. Goncharov, R. Tomii, and K. Friello (eds), Fred Wilson: Speak of Me As I Am (Cambridge, MA: List Center for the Visual Arts/MIT, 2003), pp. 8–19. 13 See also P. H. D. Kaplan, Chapter 4, this volume. 14 Prior to his diplomatic mission in Trieste, Thayer was connected to anti-slavery circles in Boston and was a close associate of the abolitionist Charles Sumner. A detailed discussion of Pezzicar’s statue, which has not been cited previously by scholars, appears in Thayer, ‘Pezzicar’s bronze statue’, 4. For an extended analysis of this commentary, see C. M. Beach, Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, forthcoming). 15 For thorough discussions of American sculptors in nineteenth-century Rome, see M. Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014) and C. Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). On sculptural commemorations of Emancipation specifically, see Dabakis, ‘Antislavery Sermons in Stone’, in A Sisterhood of Sculptors, pp. 149–80. 16 Hosmer’s and Lewis’s works are no longer extant. For an early report on the progress of Lewis’s Freedwoman, see ‘Photographs’, The Freedmen’s Record (1 April 1866): 69. 17 Atti della esposizione agricola, industriale, e di belle arti tenuta in Trieste (Trieste: Tipografia Appolonia & Caprin, 1872), p. 9; ‘Weltaustellung 1873 in Wien. Mitglieder der k. Austellungscommission’, Allgemeine illustrirte Weltausstellungs-Zeitung 1:6 (20 March 1872); ‘Austellungscomission in Küstenland’, Wiener Zeitung (16 February 1872): 3. 18 The Wiener Salonblatt reported the statue – ‘die für die Ausstellung in Philadelphia bestimmt ist’ – was ‘ein besonderes Interesse’ (of particular interest) to Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I during his visit to the imperial foundry. ‘Der Kaißer in der Kunstergießerei’, Wiener Salonblatt (19 February 1876): 6. See also ‘Osterreiches Museum’, Neue Freie Presse Wien (28 November 1875): 6. 19 The marker of ‘liberty’, as Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby has discussed, paradoxically overlapped European colonial ambitions in Africa. D. G. Grigsby, ‘Liberty’s surface’, Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal. Transcontinental Ambition in France and United States during the Long Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope Press, 2012), pp. 70–94. See also Y. Khan, Enlightening the World: The Creation of the Statue of Liberty (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010) and F.-A. Bartholdi, The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, Described by the Sculptor Bartholdi (New York: The North American Review, 1885). 20 Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, p. 87. 21 Ibid. 22 The sculpture is so large and spatially diffuse that its casting appears to have been completed in several pieces, as evinced by the seam marks that run through several areas. 23 Installation view from Rassegna di Pittura e Scultura dell’800 a Trieste, 1922, Biblioteca d’arte Sergio Molesi, Museo Revoltella, Trieste. 24 I thank Thayer Tolles for first suggesting this observation to me. 25 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Register of the Centennial (Philadelphia, PA: Frank Leslie, 1876), p. 167. 26 M. De Grassi, ‘Francesco Pezzicar e L’abolizione della schiavitù’, Arte in Friuli, Arte a Trieste 31 (2012): 261–96. 27 Bindman and Gates, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, p. 258. 28 Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors, pp. 119–120. P. Gemme, ‘Domesticating foreign struggles: American narratives of Italian revolutions and the debate on slavery in the antebellum era’, Prospects 27 (October 2002): 77–101. 29 ‘Mazzini on American slavery’, Liberator (22 April 1859): 2. 30 Gemme notes Frederick Douglass’s response to comparisons between American slavery and Austrian colonisation in Italy, published in his newspaper The North Star: ‘Do not these
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Francesco Pezzicar’s L’Abolizione della schiavitù pretended friends of liberty and admirers of Roman intrepidity know that … there are about four millions of persons in this country subject to an amount of injury and oppression infinitely more terrible than that which the Romans are endeavouring to shake off ’. P. Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012), pp. 119–20. 31 For further information, see L. Riall, Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to NationState (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 32 An extensive discussion of the position of Mediterranean ports within the Atlantic world appears in I. Danewid, ‘White innocence in the Black Mediterranean: hospitality and the erasure of history’, Third World Quarterly 38:7 (2017): 1674–89. As Kay Dian Kriz and Geoff Quilley have argued, ‘the circuits of Atlantic exchange also involve, more or less indirectly, Baltic and Mediterranean states as well as the Levant’. K. D. Kriz and G. Quilley (eds), An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 7. 33 Comprehensive discussions of irredentismo in Trieste appear in D. K. Reill, Nationalists who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012) and Katia Pizzi, A City in Search of an Author: The Literary Identity of Trieste (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), pp. 101–16. 34 S. M. Orel, I Giornali Triestini dal 1863 al 1902 (Trieste: LINT, 1976), p. 115. 35 ‘L’Abolizione della schiavitù. Statua in bronzo di F. Pezzicar’, Libertà e Lavoro 10:10 (21 May 1876). The lithograph was produced by the firm of Bartolommeo Linassi, which was known for local views of the city and also for illustrations of works of art. Cesare Rossi, ‘Il moro Statua di Francesco Pezzicar’, Libertà e Lavoro 7:20 (1 December 1873): 158–9. A reproduction of this image also appears in De Grassi, ‘Francesco Pezzicar e L’abolizione della schiavitù’, 267. 36 ‘Scolpita, veggo non solo l’americana aurora di libertà, ma insiem di giorni antichi’ and ‘Spartaco il prode, alla pallida Roma, in faccia ei squassa la servil catena’. Rossi, ‘Il moro Statua di Francesco Pezzicar’, 158–9. 37 M. Gardonio, ‘Scultori italiani a Parigi tra Esposizioni Universali, mercato e strategie’, Saggi e Memorie di Storia dell’Arte 33 (2009): 333–404; De Grassi, ‘Francesco Pezzicar e l’Abolizione della Schiavitù’, 273. 38 On Vela, see G. Zanchetti, ‘Libertà di linguaggio e valori liberali nella scultura di Vincenzo Vela’, in Vincenzo Vela. La scultura per esprimere il valore delle libertà (Ligornetto: Museo Vincenzo Vela, 2012), pp. 13–24; G. Zanchetti, ‘Non fuit majus Italiae discrimen quam a Spartaco’, in G. A. M. Zeni (ed.), Spartaco. La scultura in rivolta, Ligornetto, Museo Vela, 5 giugno–2 ottobre 2005 (Ligornetto: Museo Vincenzo Vela, 2005), pp. 10–16; and G. A. M. Zeni (ed.), Museo Vela: The Collections (Lugano: Cornèr, 2002). 39 ‘È il concetto dello Spartaco di Vela, ma non è una imitazione, tanto diversamente è svolto dal bravo scultore.’ L’Alba: Giornale Politico Bimensile 5:22 (24 June 1876), 4. 40 Statuti del Circolo accademico italiano in Vienna (Trieste and Vienna: Circolo accademico italiano in Vienna, 1882); Rapporto annuale del Circolo accademico italiano di Vienna (Capodistria [Koper]: Tipografia Cobolo & Priora Editrice, 1890); ‘Il Circolo accademico Italiano in Vienna’, L’Illustrazione Italiana 33 (1906): 334. 41 ‘di mantener viva la fiamma dell’italianità’. Carlo de Slop, ‘Da Vienna [25 novembre 1889]’, Il Teatro Illustrato. Anno IX – 1889 (Milano: Edoardo Sonzogno, 1889), pp. 184–5. 42 My thinking here is informed by what the literary scholar Maurice O. Wallace has written regarding the framing of representations of Black masculinity by and within white imaginaries in nineteenth-century public spheres. He argues that visual and textual representations in such contexts are conditioned by a racialising and ‘spectragraphic gaze’, by which Black bodies appear at once spectacular yet spectral, hypervisible yet obscured. To see symbolically in the Black masculine form, Wallace argues, is to see selectively, if at all. M. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Duke University Press, NC: 2002), pp. 29–32. 43 Lowe, ‘The Ruses of Liberty’, pp 101–33. 44 Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, p. 16.
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The courses of empire 45 S. Berardi, L’Italia Risorgimentale di Arcangelo Ghisleri (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2010); F. Ferretti, ‘Inventing Italy: geography, Risorgimento and national imagination: the international circulation of geographical knowledge in the nineteenth century’, Geographical Journal 180:4 (December 2014): 402–13. 46 The text in the map’s insert translates as ‘Possessions and protectorates of Italy’. 47 Grigsby, ‘Liberty’s surface’, Colossal, pp. 70–94. 48 The history of Trieste’s relationship with American commerce stretched back to the late eighteenth century, when officials from the port made special arrangements to trade with British American colonies around the time of the Revolutionary War. M. Stock, Trieste e l’America nascente (Trieste: Fachin, 1985); O. de Incontrera, Trieste e l’America (1782–1830) (Trieste: Edizioni dello Zibaldone, 1961). 49 ‘Il cotone d’America arriverebbe via Trieste alla Sava, da Nuova Orleans, Mobile o Savannah, in tempo non molto più lungo, e probabilamente con spesa non molto maggiore che non giunga ai filatoi di Lancashire via Liverpool, mentre il prodotto di Egitto e del Levante è, per così dire, in vicinanza immediata.’ I thank Clare Kobasa for her help with this translation. Alexander Wheelock Thayer, L’avvenire commerciale di Trieste. Rapporto a John Jay, 1869 (Trieste: Peternelli & Morterra, 1872), p. 23. 50 M. M. Dan (ed.), Pasquale Revoltella (1795–1869): Sogno e consapevolezza del cosmopolitismo triestino (Trieste: Comune di Trieste, Assessorato alla cultura, Museo Revoltella, 1996) and B. Coslovich (ed.), Museo Revoltella: The Modern Art Gallery, translated by L. Comoy (Trieste: Museo Revoltella, 2010), pp. 7–9. 51 The original text of the pamphlet appears in Coslovich, Museo Revoltella, p. 27. On the aqueduct, see also S. Formiggini, P. Knadler, P. Revoltella, and J. B. Scrinzi (eds), Three Days at Trieste (Trieste: Austrian Lloyd’s Press, 1858), pp. 97–9. 52 Dan, ‘Pasquale Revoltella e l’arte: dalla collezione al museo’, in Pasquale Revoltella, pp. 71–107.
Selected bibliography Archivio Storico, Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice. Bindman, D. and H. L. Gates, Jr (eds), The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, part 1: Slaves and Liberators. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. Dabakis, M. A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Dan, M. M. (ed.), Pasquale Revoltella (1795–1869): Sogno e consapevolezza del cosmopolitismo Triestino. Trieste: Comune di Trieste, Assessorato alla cultura, Museo Revoltella, 1996. De Grassi, M. ‘Francesco Pezzicar e L’abolizione della schiavitù’. Arte in Friuli, Arte a Trieste 31 (2012): 261–96. Gemme, P. Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011. ‘La statua di Pezzicar’. L’Adria (15 May 1877), 1. Lowe, L. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Rossi, Cesare. ‘Il moro Statua di Francesco Pezzicar’. Libertà e Lavoro 7:20 (1 December 1873): 158–9. Savage, K. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Smallwood, S. ‘Commodified freedom: interrogating the limits of anti-slavery ideology in the early republic’. Journal of the Early Republic 24:2 (Summer 2004): 289–98. Thayer, Alexander Wheelock. L’avvenire commerciale di Trieste. Rapporto a John Jay, 1869. Trieste: Peternelli & Morterra, 1872. _____. ‘Pezzicar’s bronze statue – “The emancipated slave”’. Boston Daily Advertiser (4 August 1876). Walcott, R. The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Wallace, M. Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
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A transatlantic cultural landscape: America in Rome at the beginning of the twentieth century Daniele Fiorentino
By 1911, diplomatic relations between the United States and Italy seemed solidly planted. In that year, the United States proceeded to sign arbitration treaties with Great Britain and France as part of a broader foreign-policy strategy of peaceful diplomatic relations and promotion of commerce.1 The two young nation states, in the process of establishing their standing in what was then called the concert of nations, had signed an arbitration treaty in 1908 (which was renewed in 1914).2 However, as the United States promoted peaceful exchanges among ‘developed’ nations, it repeatedly intervened in the Caribbean according to Theodore Roosevelt’s new reading of the Monroe Doctrine. Italy, on its part, declared war on Turkey, claiming territories on the north African coast across the Mediterranean, namely Libya.3 Both countries were reasserting their national identity and position in world affairs through an aggressive imperial foreign policy that supposedly matched their transatlantic diplomatic strategies. This was carried out also through cultural relations and the promotion of world fairs and international exhibitions, such as the expositions staged in Rome and Turin in 1911. As in the case of the famous 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, these international events offered both countries the opportunity to showcase their achievements to the world. In 1911, in fact, Italy celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and for this reason the government decided to organise world exhibitions in two of the three capitals of the country, Turin and Rome:4 in the former an exposition of business and industry, in the latter the arts. Actually, Rome hosted a series of exhibitions that celebrated both national identity and patriotism and the new international position of the young kingdom. To foreigners, Italy still represented the cradle of past glories, classical art, and ancient beauty, but at the same time had started projecting an image of growing dynamism and modernity. The International Exposition of Fine Arts in the capital city was another occasion for the United States to show the world the achievements made by Americans in the arts. The last of such chances on European soil had been offered to American artists and architects at the Paris Exposition of 1900. The ten years separating the two events are labelled most appropriately the Roosevelt Era. In fact, what President Roosevelt did for the affirmation of American national identity and the country’s position among nations was unprecedented.
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The courses of empire With his aggressive foreign policy and gripping cultural statements, he managed to launch the United States into the firmament of great powers, while at the same time promoting a new image of the country as the hotbed of new trends – in technology and politics, of course, but also in the cultural realm. To American literati, artists, and politicians, Italian classical and Renaissance culture remained an inspirational reference, while the recently unified nation represented an interesting potential partner in world affairs. Italy, for its part, wanted to project an image of revived cultural and spiritual initiative beyond the stereotypical portrait of an old and exotic country, a typical destination on the Grand Tour. At the turn of the century, the interaction between the United States and Italy took on new features, which contributed to the sense that the two nations were stating their new positions in the world and promoting their renewed identities. This chapter intends to highlight the intense transnational cultural exchange between Italy and the United States between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. This exchange was part of a larger transatlantic connection that prepared the ground for the central role of the United States in international affairs while opening the road to transformation and growth in Italy. Among these connections were the formation of the American Academy in Rome in 1897, and the founding of the Library for American Studies, which opened in the Italian capital in 1918. This potential would fully spread its wings only after World War II and the end of the disruptive interval of Fascism. As it is often the case in history, economic and political relations were central, but they could not have flourished without that most important soft power, as it is called nowadays, represented by the arts, literature, and history.5 At the time, both countries were able to use their cultural potential as part of their changing political status on the international stage. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, several Italian intellectuals began exploring the social realm in search of new ways to enable the country to adjust to the modern industrial world, and writers and artists reconnoitred new means of expression. By 1909, the Italian artistic and intellectual scene had seen the emergence of a vanguard movement seemingly transcending all previous experiments: Futurism.6 Americans were at the same time investigating new forms of expression, travelling constantly between the United States and Europe, especially Paris and Rome. Slowly, critics and other artists in Europe acknowledged that there was indeed an American school with its own peculiar traits. Thus, the American Commissioner General at the International Exposition of Fine Arts in Rome in 1911, Harrison S. Morris, in an interesting synthesis of the zeitgeist, declared: ‘All roads still lead to Rome; but the artist of today will succeed not thither unless his offspring are saturated with the American soil, and stamped with the impress of his nationality.’7 His statement echoed the words pronounced by the American ambassador in Rome, George Von Lengerke Meyer, at the opening of the American Academy in Villa Mirafiori in 1904: ‘No truly great country has yet existed without an art of its own, and it is equally true that all national arts only have their origin in some previous one.’8 In fact, the major goal of Congress in allotting money for the Rome Exposition was to assert the new achievements of American art, proving that the nation had
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A transatlantic cultural landscape weaned itself from cumbersome European influence. While many American artists and writers still looked to Europe for inspiration and models, others had found their own style and identity, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, was markedly nationalist. A few years later, they were asserting a new American national spirit, as was the American government in its international projection, inspired by the new, Rooseveltian mixture of civic and racial nationalism.9 While affirming the need to strengthen the national ideal through the ideological project of Americanisation of recently arrived immigrants to the country, the president promoted international expansion based on the racial character of the Anglo-Saxon type. It was not by chance that the American Committee for the Roman event included, among traditional landscapes and bucolic scenes, Cecilia Beaux’s Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and daughter Ethel, of 1902 (Plate 18). Such a choice was testimony to the president’s new course and his central role in American society and culture. The Rome Exposition itself was a statement of national identity for both countries and an attempt at defining the nation, an imagined community of purpose that fifty years after Italian unification and the American Civil War was still in need of confirmation.10 In the same promotional note in Scribner’s Magazine, Morris added: The display at Rome was ordered by Congress at the people’s expense. It is to represent and advance the people. It is the test of the people’s cultivation in achievement and in the recognition of ideals to date. It is fitting, it is essential, that every movement in American painting and sculpture shall have fair representation, and so far as it has been possible within physical and economical limits they have. But if the artists have flocked to the patriotic standards, there is another side of forming a great American collection which remains to touch upon. As the kindling interest in American art has crackled into a considerable flame there has been much judicious buying by individuals and institutions. Indeed, no home exhibition nowadays is without eager patrons who quickly carry off the best work in painting and sculpture.11
Artistic expression was a way of circulating the cultural as well as the political values of a new American society. As Sarah Moore has written in her essay on the Rome Exposition: ‘As with any other world’s fairs from the turn of the twentieth century, it was within the context of the fine arts displays at the Rome Exposition that the collision of national and international imperatives and boundaries were most evident and widely discussed.’12 The transnational community that had developed in the nineteenth century was now evolving along new lines in the redefinition of the nation state. The United States and Italy, then minor political and military powers, contributed a great deal to keeping the two sides of the Atlantic connected. But there was a major issue at stake that at times caused friction and dissent: immigration. The two countries had been on the brink of breaking diplomatic relations in 1891, when eleven Italian nationals, some of them already holding naturalisation papers, were lynched in New Orleans in the major mass lynching in US history. They had been accused of the assassination of the New Orleans Chief of Police, David Hennessy. Brought to trial, they had been acquitted for lack of evidence. But the widespread stereotype of the Italians as
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The courses of empire ‘Mafiosi’, as low-class, dangerous individuals, often labelled by American Protestants as ‘almost negro papists’, moved the mob to consider the foreign immigrants as dangerous types, alien to nativist American culture.13 The Italian government decided to recall the Minister plenipotentiary, Baron Xavier Fava, after receiving a laconic reply to its request for explanations and for an enquiry on the part of the federal government: the matter fell within the competence of the state of Louisiana and had no federal relevance. It took two years and a major diplomatic effort to re-establish a friendly relationship.14 The traditional amity between the two countries called for positive mutual attitudes. After all, it was a time of constant travelling back and forth across the ocean, of Italians migrating to the United States and of growing numbers of Americans visiting Italy on the Grand Tour, many of whom even settled in the major cities of the peninsula or in beautiful patrician dwellings in the Italian countryside. By 1893, and after drawn-out negotiations, the two countries not only decided to send their representatives back to their respective capitals, but they also promoted them to the rank of ambassadors. This was, after all, the policy adopted by the US government as the country projected itself in the international arena. Moreover, in a wise diplomatic move, Washington appointed two politicians in a row to serve in Rome, Wayne McVeagh and William Draper, thus interrupting the common practice of sending artists or intellectuals to represent the United States in what after all was still considered the cradle of Western civilisation. The two nation states faced common problems that made the completion of the process of nation building more difficult: the dilemma of immigration and the Southern Question. In both countries, the regions in the south lagged behind in the process of nationalisation; their economies shattered, they resisted full integration in the nation state, politically dominated by the north, at least in the first years of unification and Reconstruction. Moreover, the central governments had to face persistent demands for reform from the growing middle class and industrial labour, the latter most often conveying its resentment through the organisation of syndicates and socialist movements when not through populism and anarchism.15 The answer of the dominant elites was to promote new forms of political control that could somehow keep at bay, at least for a time, the growing uneasiness of the masses. Progressivism was one of the most significant responses enacted in the United States by an expanding, successful middle class afraid of losing its only recently acquired privileges.16 In that fateful year of 1893, during the Chicago World’s Fair, a group of American architects, led by the eclectic and cosmopolitan Charles McKim, started thinking about the possibility of launching an American academy for architecture and the arts in Rome. The model for such an institution, as aptly underlined by Peter Benson Miller, was the prestigious French Academy, on the Pincian hill. In 1894, the American architect was already in the Italian capital, examining the prospects for establishing the academy. He began creating important local connections in order to inspect the real-estate options available in Rome and find the most appropriate spot for the new endeavour. By 1897, the project was accomplished with the
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A transatlantic cultural landscape establishment of the American Academy in the Casino dell’Aurora in the prestigious Villa Ludovisi. 17 The American attitude towards the new Italy slowly began combining a traditional approach to the country’s monumental past with an attraction to what seemed a lively and dynamic new reality still in the process of nation building. Two years later, a young graduate from Harvard, after travelling in Italy, decided to make Rome his home. His purpose was very different from McKim’s but was the product of that same transnational milieu that developed between the two sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the century and that, although finding its natural seat in Paris, did not neglect the importance of Rome. Harry Nelson Gay, trained in history and politics, began accumulating books and manuscripts on the Italian Risorgimento, the Italian struggle for independence and unification, expanding his collection year by year in collaboration with the most prominent historian of Italy in the United States, the Harvard professor William Roscoe Thayer.18 Thayer and Gay established a partnership that concentrated mainly on the more recent aspects of Italian history, along the lines developed by those American intellectuals and artists who, throughout the nineteenth century, had followed, often supported, and even in some cases directly participated in the Risorgimento. Their attention was also concentrated on Italy in its present state. In a way, their correspondence and the future creation of the Library for American Studies (1918), and later of the Centro Italiano di Studi Americani (Italian Center of American Studies, 1936), were the necessary complement to the establishment of the American Academy. Although their stories differ in many ways, the two institutions represent two aspects of a shifting American interest in Italy.19 On the one hand the fascination with classical studies and the legacy of the Roman past persisted, although coupled with an appreciation for the Risorgimento; on the other there was a growing curiosity about the transformation and development of a country many American writers had previously labelled as backward and decrepit in their diaries and accounts. At the same time, interest in the United States grew among the Italian learned and entrepreneurial classes and led to the constitution of the Unione Italo-Americana (Italian American Union) in the same year of the creation of the Library for American Studies. In the first years of their activity, the Library and the Associazione Italo-Americana (as the Unione Italo-Americana was renamed after its incorporation in 1919) proceeded on parallel tracks, occupying the same premises and often collaborating, while maintaining independent agendas and administrations.20 For Gay, Italians needed to project their culture abroad, promoting not only their classical patrimony, but also the richness of a country that had much to offer in the way of political and legal culture.21 He was not alone in his interest in the Risorgimento. Increasingly, the American approach to Italy focused also on the political realm and the promise of a consolidation and expansion of the nation state. Attracting the attention of other Americans to the transformations taking place on the peninsula became one of Gay’s major endeavours. Very soon, he began supporting more radical positions regarding the consolidation of Italian unification and the amalgamation of the nation. He increasingly identified with that part of the Italian
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The courses of empire middle class close to the old aristocracy but with a more cosmopolitan vocation that promoted modernisation on the foundations of the new patriotic spirit born in the Risorgimento. The new upper-middle class made up of entrepreneurs, professionals, and financiers gave a boost not only to the economy but also to a change in the mindset of the elites, enabling a slow emancipation from the pervasive influence of the Catholic Church on Italian society. A new liberal bourgeois culture emerged as the driving force of the country.22 Yet, despite this transnational approach, many representatives of the upper class also supported the reclamation of lands where Italian was spoken and that were still under the control of the Habsburg empire in the northeast. The growing nationalist sentiment in the country, which soon became pervasive among the masses, was to precipitate a chauvinistic sense of blood and country that towards the end of the nineteenth century enabled the rise of irredentism. This culminated in the war-mongering attitudes of the interventisti, the supporters of the Italian involvement in World War I, and their later claims on the northeast lands, in the disputed territory of Slovenia.23 By the beginning of the 1900s, the image of Italy and Rome also started changing in the work of American painters and writers. Throughout the nineteenth century, the characterisations of Italy by many American writers travelling in the country were not always flattering. While enthralled by the beauty of the countryside and the vestiges of the grandeur of the past, many writers lamented the poverty and backwardness of the cities and of the rural environment. From Herman Melville to Mark Twain, authors indulged in depictions of the overall material and social misery. Some, like Henry James, held tight to the mythology of the Roman past and regretted the many changes Italian society and culture were undergoing.24 However, two travellers of the early twentieth century offered a fresh look at Italy. In 1903, Maud Howe Elliott, raised in an abolitionist and suffragist milieu, published Roma Beata, a book that while offering the traditional perspective on the eternal city also provided glimpses into the daily life of its inhabitants. She found both past and present had a new aspect, as she immediately recorded in the incipit of her work: ‘Rome, which we reached Thursday, is very much changed since I last saw it; imagine the Fountain of Trevi, all the principal streets, even many of the smaller ones, gleaming with electric lights!’25 Electricity was in those days the very symbol of modernisation – quite a transformation for a city long confined only to the past. In 1908, William Dean Howells’s Roman Holidays and Others contributed a different view of the city in which one could see the passing of time and the changes occurring in the Western world: There is the antique Rome, the medieval Rome, the modern Rome; but that is only the beginning. There is the Rome of the State and the Rome of the Church, which divide between them the Rome of politics and the Rome of fashion; but here is a field so vast that we may not enter it without danger of being promptly lost.26
The city was in the process of undergoing major changes despite its ancient tradition, but the author, and his friends, in the end did privilege progress: ‘In spite of our abhorrence of the destruction and construction which have made modern Rome so
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A transatlantic cultural landscape
Figure 10.1. Joseph Pennell, Building of the Victor Emmanuel monument, Rome, 1911, etching, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
wholesome and delightful,’ continued Howells, ‘most of us had our habitations in the new quarters.’27 A similar approach gradually surfaced among painters who began alternating between traditional landscapes of ruins and depictions of the animated, restless, and bustling life in the city. Joseph Pennell’s drawing Building of the Victor Emmanuel monument, Rome, 1911 (Figure 10.1) and Maurice Prendergast’s painting Pincian hill, Rome, 1898 (Plate 19) are testimony to the transformation the city was undergoing. Pennell had been associated with industrial and city life since he was very young and began drawing for The Century magazine. When he was twenty-one, The Century commissioned him to prepare ten etchings to accompany a series of articles on Tuscany by William Dean Howells. This commission took him on a trip to Italy, which turned into a revelation and kept him in Europe for a long time.28 He had a special penchant for construction work and the transformation of the urban landscape, as evidenced by the 1904 series of etchings of New York he produced during his longest visit back to the United States after twenty years of travelling overseas.29 Modernisation was well underway in Rome by the beginning of the twentieth century, and the colossal Victor Emmanuel monument, portrayed by Pennell during construction, typified the dramatic transformation of a historic quarter which included the Monti district and the Capitoline hill. Many Americans, however, continued to prefer the decrepit city of their youth. As Mary King Waddington underlined in the late nineteenth century, ‘I preferred “Roma com’era” [“Rome as it was”]’, not ‘the new buildings and the boulevards and the bustle and the quantities of people
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The courses of empire [which] had spoiled the dear, dead, old Rome of our days … I like progress in my own country, but certainly not here.’30 Pennell’s etching highlighted, for example, the overwhelming volumes of the Vittorio Emanuele monument, as it dominated the classic buildings of the ancient Roman quartieri. To be sure, some Americans living in the eternal city often showed mixed feelings about the significant changes then underway. Moreover, a new middle class was emerging as the protagonists of economic and social life, a cultivated elite whom Prendergast depicted in different cities, from New York to Paris and Rome. Here, he particularly chose a site dear to American visitors: the Pincian hill, a legacy of the French occupation of the early nineteenth century (Plate 19). Designed by the neoclassical architect Giuseppe Valadier, the Pincio had become a symbol of a new Roman bourgeoisie as well as of a growing community of tourists and expatriates who conspicuously promenaded in its gardens and avenues.31 In other paintings by Prendergast, Rome was still linked to its recent past, and to the presence of the Catholic church. The Pincian hill from this point of view represents a portrayal of a city in the process of changing, the locus of a ‘perpetual war between the old and the new’.32 As in Pennell’s imagery, Howells’s Roman Holidays offers a synthesis of what made Italy appealing to Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century: the traditional admiration for antiquities, coupled with the surprise and respect raised by the process of modernisation in action as the legacy of the Risorgimento, which suggested that Italy might regain its ancient pride and position. For Howells, there was no doubt that things had changed. While the old fascination with the aristocracy and classical culture remained a feature of the American approach, some visitors were disquieted by the change that was taking place, especially the gentrification of a country still considered exotic by many. However, this was not Howell’s perspective. Unlike other American travellers of the time, he used words of commendation for the ‘new Rome’. He actually titled a sub-chapter ‘A praise of new Rome’, which begins as follows: Rome and I had both grown older since I had seen her last, but she seemed not to show so much as I the forty-three years that had passed. Naturally a city that was already twenty-seven centuries of age (and no one knows how much more) would not betray the lapse of time since 1864 as a man must who was then only twenty-seven years of age. In fact, I should say that Rome looked, if anything, younger at our second meeting, in 1908, or at any rate, newer: and I am so warm a friend of youth (in others) that I was not sorry to find Rome young, or merely new, in so many good things.33
He also appreciated the clearing of the ghetto and the new Tiber embankments. For Howells, Rome remained the capital of the world since it was the capital of Western civilisation.34 As Peter D’Agostino correctly underlines: ‘Americans constructed an Episcopal Church, St. Paul within the Walls, on via Nazionale, another blight on papal Rome.’35 The church was built mostly thanks to American donations after Rome was seized from the Pope in 1870 and made the capital of the young kingdom. It stands out as a
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A transatlantic cultural landscape strong statement in the middle of one of the main central boulevards of the city. Urban and architectural renovation was also needed in order to transcend the long temporal kingdom of the popes, but this did not always mean improvement, especially from an aesthetic point of view. A heated debate between ‘purists’, who expected the ancient capital to remain true to its old urban shape and look, and modernisers went beyond the chambers of City Hall, and often involved foreign residents. Starting in 1907, the liberal administration of Mayor Ernesto Nathan, an Italian-British Jew and a liberal progressive, designed the first modern urban plan for the city. This included the development of the Janiculum hill, opposite the Pincian hill, with the construction of fashionable villas and middle-class family homes.36 It was there that American investors and architects eventually decided to establish the new headquarters of the American Academy, and to expand the presence of the American community in Rome. What the Pincian hill had embodied for Americans in the nineteenth century, the Janiculum came to embody in the twentieth: the destination for leisurely strolls, often the favourite district of tourists and residents. Such was the Rome of the early twentieth century, and if the Americans passing through continued to have an inclination for classical and Renaissance studies and for the cult of the past, those living in the city appreciated, albeit with some qualms, the making of a new Rome, as underlined by William Vance in his seminal two-volume work America’s Rome.37 In particular, the construction of the Episcopal Church on via Nazionale (1873–80) and the establishment of the American Academy in its different locations, and finally on the Janiculum, marked a change in the presence of Americans as liberal, modern participants in the life of a thriving city. ‘Both projects,’ writes Vance, ‘were extensively underwritten by J.P. Morgan, who found in Rome the city most congenial to his taste.’38 It is clear that while more upper-class Americans moved to the city, buying ancient and prestigious houses and mixing with the local aristocracy,39 there was a growing number of American middle-class visitors, especially professors and young scholars, who used public transportation, lived in small pensioni, and enjoyed the daily life of common Italians.40 This would become a regular feature of the average American visiting Rome in the second half of the twentieth century. One American who seemed to understand fully the significance of the changes taking place in Italian society and culture was Francis Marion Crawford, son of sculptor Thomas Crawford and Louisa Cutler Ward, whose sister was the poet Julia Ward Howe. Born in Tuscany, Crawford was profoundly enmeshed in both American and Italian culture. He published many novels set in Italy, depicting all sorts of Italian types, but he was able to capture better than anybody else the new class of Americans who were becoming part of the elite but remained at the same time on its margins. He also highlighted the damages done by real-estate speculators, many of them nouveaux riches, who were ransacking the beauty of Rome.41 They belonged to a new class of investors and entrepreneurs whom Crawford labelled as proud nationalists. He was ambivalent about this emerging elite, which he considered dangerous for the preservation of the Italian classical tradition but at the same time deemed
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The courses of empire capable of contributing to giving Italy a new shape. Once again the dichotomy between old and new, tradition and innovation, was central to the American approach to the transformation of Rome and the whole country.42 The American community in the city soon grew to an unprecedented level, expanding its needs and expectations. In the matter of a few years, between 1897 and 1911, many things changed. Even as Italian immigration to the United States reached its peak in 1907, a growing number of Americans – not only literati and artists, but entrepreneurs, professionals, diplomats, and businessmen – moved to Italy, and mainly to Rome, Florence, and Venice. By the beginning of the new century, the Anglo-Saxon community could support three periodicals that provided travel and commercial information in English along with articles on Italy and its cultural and social life.43 They also often featured the announcements or accounts of parties and events organised by the prominent figures of ‘Anglosaxondom’ in which the presence of the Roman aristocracy or professional elite became customary. These periodicals also informed American residents about the accomplishments of their compatriots in both Italy and the United States, and about the scintillating life of Americans who were able to befriend, and often enter into, the Italian aristocracy. Several young American heiresses married into families of counts, marquises, and barons, thus transforming their literary salons into milieus of aristocratic Italian society. The consolidation of the American Academy and the opening of the Library for American Studies in Rome were part and parcel of this new reality. By 1902, Gay’s personal library had reached 6,000 volumes and forced him to move to larger quarters within six years: from one apartment to another behind the Trevi Fountain, and finally to a prestigious residence in the Palazzo Orsini, near the ghetto, in the very heart of the city. At the same time, he took regular orders from Thayer, who needed material to write his monumental biography of the Italian mastermind of unification, Prime Minister Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour.44 Gay’s volumes increased to about 10,000 by 1918. Only a small portion of them came to constitute the backbone of the Library for American Studies, created in the same year with Gay as its director.45 He sent most of the books on Italy to Harvard between 1930 and 1932, shortly before his death, to create the Risorgimento collection in Widener Library, the largest of its kind in the United States. However, he kept a small section for himself, which was later bequeathed to the Library for American Studies. The entire Americana collection became instead the pillar of that library, since Gay was convinced that the people of both countries needed to learn more about each other. Although relations had gone back to normal by the end of the century, after the crisis of the early 1890s, the initiatives of President Roosevelt contributed to strengthening relations between the two countries. In fact, he decided to effect a major change in the American diplomatic legation. During his almost eight years in power, Theodore Rex, as his biographer Edmund Morris renamed him, sent three of the most prominent and appreciated American diplomats to Rome.46 All of them came from the upper crust of the professional and entrepreneurial ranks of the East Coast: George Von Lengerke Meyer, Henry White, and Lloyd Griscom. In those years, they anticipated a future policy of the United States which the historian Emily
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A transatlantic cultural landscape Rosenberg has called ‘The Promotional State’.47 All three became confidants of King Victor Emmanuel III and played a major role in two of the key diplomatic events of the decade: the talks to put an end to the Russian–Japanese war of 1905 (Meyer and Griscom) and the Treaty of Portsmouth, which earned Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize; and the Conference of Algeciras on the colonisation of Morocco and the neighbouring North African territories (White).48 At the same time, they supported the enterprise of Americans investing in Italy or promoting trade between the two nations. Von Lengerke Meyer opened the way; his aristocratic allure allowed him to become part of the elite of the country and befriend some of the key figures of the Italian government, including the King, with whom he went hunting and horse riding in the countryside. Julian Russell Story, son of William Wetmore Story, the artist who had lived in Rome during the Risorgimento and who was among the first Americans to notice the transformation of the city at the end of the century, had portrayed Meyer in a painting dated 1894. By then, Meyer had settled in the prominent community of Hamilton, in Essex County near Boston, had become the president of the prestigious Myopia Hunt Club, and had joined the local Republican Ward Committee. Story’s romantic portrayal of the businessman endeavoured to summarise a success story which would become even more successful with Meyer’s political appointments in Rome, St Petersburg, and then as Postmaster General and Secretary of the Navy under Presidents Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. His German patrician origins, his Harvard background, and his elitist approach facilitated his interaction with the European aristocracy.49 Roosevelt wanted the United States to play a new role at the international level, and Italy seemed to represent a strategic outpost in European affairs. As Meyer aptly put it: ‘Rome is rather a “listening-post” in the European world than a station for difficult work in diplomacy.’50 In fact, he became an habitué of the Roman aristocratic milieu, especially for his horse-riding dexterity and for being ‘one of the pioneers of motoring in central Italy’.51 The Italian capital was ideal for developing an American web on the continent. Meyer travelled intensely during his term, visiting several European capitals. The relationship with Italy was further enhanced when President Roosevelt made two momentous decisions that contributed to tightening the friendship between the two countries. In December 1908, he promptly reacted to the disaster of the Messina earthquake and tsunami, which took the lives of over 100,000 people, including the American Consul general and his wife. He ordered the flagship of the White Fleet, then cruising the world in a typical Rooseveltian show of American might, along with two cruisers then anchored in Egypt, to hasten to Sicily and provide relief to the survivors. A few days later, on 4 January 1909, he sent a message to Congress, ‘recommending an appropriation for the relief of the sufferers by earthquake in Italy and its islands’. In that message, he offered a synthesis of the American perception of Italy: The ordinary machinery for supplying the wants of civilized communities is paralyzed, and an exceptional emergency exists which demands that the obligations of humanity shall regard no limit of National lines.
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The immense debt of civilization to Italy; the warm and steadfast friendship between that country and our own; the affection for their native land felt by great numbers of good American citizens who are immigrants from Italy; the abundance which God has blessed us in our safety; all these should prompt us to immediate and effective relief.52
As the American government increasingly acknowledged Italy, not only as a source of immigration or a land of ancient vestiges but as a political peer, Italy came to recognise the value of American culture and the importance of its presence in the capital. In 1904, Gay had registered this change in a letter to Thayer. Speaking of the visit by Andrew D. White, prominent scholar at Cornell and former ambassador to St Petersburg, he underlined how this represented for Italians ‘a chance of knowing what a really cultured, intellectual American is’. He then closed the letter with an interesting comment on cultural relations between the two countries: ‘All this pleasures me much, for it seems that each intellectual Italo-American friendship is a new bond in the intimate intellectual relationship between the two countries, which is as yet so slight, but which I hope may grow with geometrical progression. Viva nostro cavaliere americani! [sic]’. 53 The Italian government and some of the major firms and banks reciprocated, the reception of these American initiatives being so positive as to draw thousands of Italian readers to the American Library in the early twenties, and favour the constitution of the Associazione Italo-Americana.54 The latter was chaired by Senator Francesco Ruffini, a respected professor of canonic law, who became a staunch opponent of Fascism a few years later. Gay had in the meantime established agreements with Italian academic institutions, namely the prestigious University of Rome, and government agencies, especially in the Ministry of Education, in order to increase the circulation of the library’s books across the country.55 By the early 1920s, some Italian graduate students began producing final dissertations concerning the United States. The diplomats Meyer and White, in particular, also played an important role in fostering the American cultural presence in Rome by supporting the establishment of the American Academy. Meyer and McKim already had a strong personal bond having married two sisters: Marian Alice Appleton (Meyer) and Julia Appleton (McKim, who died at a young age), both grandchildren of William Appleton, a Whig congressman from Massachusetts. Meyer made the appropriate contacts to acquire the Villa Mirafiori and secure a loan of $125,000 for its purchase from the industrial manager Henry Walters, founder of Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum.56 The Villa Mirafiori was the headquarters of the Academy between 1904 and 1914, before the Villa Aurelia and the construction of the new building realised by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White across the street on the Janiculum hill. In 1906, Ambassador White was already working on the new project, corresponding with Clara Jessup Heyland, owner of the Villa Aurelia, who invited him to reach out to J. Pierpont Morgan to explore the potential of the area around her property. She lamented the budgetary limitations imposed by Congress on the Academy, which could ‘restrict the development of a great idea’, and the choice of the name, which should have been ‘The Academy of America’.57
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A transatlantic cultural landscape Woodrow Wilson’s election as president somehow threw these developments into reverse, as he appointed to the ambassadorial post in Rome a writer from the South: Thomas Nelson Page. Although not well versed in transatlantic exchanges, the new ambassador was bound to watch over the inauguration of the new building of the Academy on the Janiculum, in 1914, and the opening, four years later, of the Library for American Studies in Rome, in the Palazzo Salviati, on the central Corso Umberto (now Via del Corso). In a very short time, the American cultural presence in Rome, more or less as we know it today, had been institutionalised. The two organisations were located in two of the most prestigious areas of the city, and the Academy was on the historic hill where Garibaldi and his troops had offered a last stand during the Roman Republic of 1849.58 Actually, the Villa Aurelia, bequeathed by Clara Heyland to the Academy in 1910, had been the Italian general’s observatory and headquarters in the defence of Rome against the French. With the outbreak of World War I, the transatlantic relationship as well as the American presence in Europe changed once more, progressively acquiring its present nature. To some extent, the time of the traditional Grand Tour was over; a new political and cultural relationship replaced it and lasted until the early 1930s, before relations worsened after the Italian Fascist aggression against Ethiopia, and worsened further with the introduction of racial laws in Italy in the autumn of 1938. However, as World War I dragged on in the European trenches, it became clear that American intervention would move from the Caribbean and the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. Wilson carried further what Roosevelt had initiated, although with different goals. He helped to make the Atlantic Ocean the locus of international and transnational relations for the next seventy years. Wilson thus violated the major unwritten rule of the Republic: entanglements with none (especially with European powers). World War I changed that rule for good. It also changed the attitude of many American writers and artists towards Italy and its people. A few months after signing another protocol on arbitration with the United States, the Italian government entered the war, switching alliances and moving into the ‘entente’ with England and France. It was May 1915. By the end of the year, many Americans had left Rome, although several continued to support the country at war. They sent funds to the American Red Cross, on whose board sat several American women married to Italian noblemen and still in the country. Gay was appointed director of the American Red Cross Relief Fund,59 and he was one of two Americans among the most vocal interventisti, the Italian pro-war agitators, the other being Ambassador Page. Actually, both of them even supported irredentismo, the idea that Italy was to expand its influence on all territories that spoke the language. Italians hailed Wilson’s decision to enter the war, as did many other Europeans who considered the American pronouncement inevitable. 1917–18 seemed to represent the opportunity to finally strengthen a partnership that had grown over time. The US Army started training the troops that would soon go over to Europe, a process that took almost a year, but by the end of 1917 some special units reached the continent ahead of others. Among them were aviators sent to Foggia, in Apulia, for training under the command of Major Fiorello La Guardia.60
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In the summer of 1918, as the war drew towards its close, Gay with the support of Page and of two American Red Cross officials created the first administrative structure of the Library for American Studies. The library initiative also gained the support of the American businessman of German origin, Otto H. Kahn, who once back in the United States had his new villa built after the model of Bramante’s Palazzo della Cancelleria in central Rome. Gay could thus write with pride to his friend Roscoe Thayer that the library was meeting with success: This Library is booming – sixteen readers yesterday. We expect to complete arrangements this next week, by which students and professors in all the universities of the kingdom can borrow books free of expense, and without expense of transportation to us, through the library of the university of Rome.61
By the time of the Versailles conference, Ambassador Page’s position had become so pro-Italian as to force him to resign in disagreement with the decisions taken by President Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing. Gay in turn sympathised with the emerging Fascist regime, seeing in it a drive for renewal and further transformation. He deluded himself that with such a thrust, political and cultural relations could not but improve. After all, this was the spirit that had driven him in the creation of the new library. Upon its opening, he anticipated in a way the public cultural diplomacy of the second half of the twentieth century, writing: ‘This is a large enterprise and its results should be far reaching. We have need [for] a similar campaign in the United States. Without much fuller knowledge of one another, Italy and the United States cannot hope to enjoy close international relations.’62 Once again, Italy represented a good testing ground for the growth of transatlantic cultural relations. Although Wilson had not adopted Roosevelt’s strategy, he followed in his footsteps, creating a major shift in American transatlantic policy. This included the presence of the United States in Europe. The articles of incorporation of the Library for American Studies, issued in July 1918, evidenced the importance the United States was beginning to give to its presence overseas. Wilson’s new strategy entailed the expansion of American values, which he considered universal. The new library was to promote the knowledge of American culture, which could become an arm of the new diplomatic approach: The undersigned, Americans now in Italy, convinced that Italy and the United States are at the present moment greatly interested in one another, that for their good and the good of the world it is the duty of each country to make it easy for this interest to increase, and that an important step on the part of Americans toward the performance of this duty is to provide a method by which precise and accurate knowledge of the United States can be readily obtained in Italy, have decided to form an association to establish in Rome a library of the best books on America.63
Although in the two following decades, American neutrality and Italian Fascism contributed to the weakening of this rapport, which in turn led to a tragic confrontation during World War II, the foundations of the new transatlantic relationship had already been laid down successfully from both a diplomatic and cultural point of view.
A transatlantic cultural landscape
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Notes 1 J. P. Campbell, ‘Taft, Roosevelt, and the arbitration treaties of 1911’, Journal of American History 53:2 (1966): 279. 2 ‘Arbitration Convention between the United States and Italy, signed March 28, 1908’, United States Department of State Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States with the annual message of the president transmitted to Congress, December 7, 1909. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909, pp. 385–6 (hereafter FRUS). http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS. FRUS1909 (accessed 2 February 2019); ‘Arbitration Agreement between the United States and Italy, Extending the Duration of the Convention of March 25, 1908’ (FRUS). http://digital.library.wisc. edu/1711.dl/FRUS.FRUS1914 (accessed 2 February 2019); D. Fiorentino, ‘Ambasciatori e aristocratici: Stati Uniti e Italia durante la presidenza di Theodore Roosevelt’, in D. Fiorentino and M. Sanfilippo (eds), Stati Uniti e Italia nel nuovo scenario internazionale, 1898–1918 (Roma: Gangemi, 2012). 3 The best reference on the Italian–Turkish War is N. Labanca, La guerra italiana per la Libia 1911–1931 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012). 4 The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in March 1861 with Turin as its capital. The capital city was then transferred for a few years to Florence, and finally in 1870 to Rome, after the Italian army conquered the city from the Pope. 5 The term ‘soft power’ was coined by Joseph Nye in 1990 in Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books). The author later elaborated upon the concept in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 6 C. Salaris, Futurismo (Milano: Editrice Bibliografica, 2016). 7 H. S. Morris, ‘The field of art – The Roman Art Exposition of 1911’, Scribner’s Magazine 49:5 (1911): 512. 8 ‘American artists in a Roman villa’, Sunday Herald, Boston, MA (17 April 1904): 7–8. George Von Lengerke Meyer’s Scrapbooks, vol. 41 (8–29 June 1905). George von Lengerke Meyer papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA. 9 G. Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 47–9. 10 See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), esp. pp. 39–45. 11 Morris, ‘The field of art’, 512. 12 S. J. Moore, ‘Defining Nationalism in the Valle Giulia’, in Chris Huemer (ed.), Spellbound by Rome: Anglo-American Community in Rome: 1890–1914 on the Foundation of the Keats–Shelley House (Rome: Palombi, 2005), p. 121. 13 On the New Orleans lynching, see P. Salvetti, Corda e sapone: storie di linciaggi degli italiani negli Stati Uniti (Roma: Donzelli, 2003); and Fiorentino, ‘Ambasciatori e aristocratici’, pp. 23–46. 14 Salvetti, Corda e sapone, pp. 44–6. 15 The most in-depth studies on the subject are D. Doyle, Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002) and D. Fiorentino, Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia, 1848–1901 (Roma: Gangemi, 2013). 16 For an updated appraisal and definition of American Progressivism, see T. J. J. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). 17 P. B. Miller, ‘Building an Idea’, in M. Talamona and P. B. Miller (eds), Building an Idea: McKim, Mead & White and the American Academy in Rome, 1914–2014 (Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2014), pp. 11, 15. 18 Harry Nelson Gay, 128 Letters, 1899–1922. I. bMS Am 1081 (634). William Roscoe Thayer Papers (MS 1081–1081.3), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (hereafter Gay Letters in Thayer). 19 Gay, 128 Letters, 1899–1922. I. bMS Am 1081 (634), Gay Letters in Thayer. See also M. A. Musmanno, ‘The Library for American Studies in Italy’, Rivista d’Italia e d’America 13–14 (1925): 3–7. 20 Opuscolo Unione Italo Americana. Archivio Storico del Centro Studi Americani (CSA), Serie AIA, B.9, quoted in Centro Studi Americani, Storia. https://centrostudiamericani.org/storia/ (accessed 27 April 2017).
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Letter from Harry Nelson Gay to Roscoe Thayer, 16 March 1904, Gay Letters in Thayer, Folder 5. A. M. Banti, Storia della borghesia italiana (Roma: Donzelli, 1996), pp. 271–2, 283–5. For a further discussion of irredentism, see Chapter 9, this volume. W. L. Vance, America’s Rome, vol. II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 213–5, 241–2; T. Petrovich Njegosh, ‘L’Italia di Henry James: lezioni d’ombra’, in Fiorentino and Sanfilippo (eds), Stati Uniti e Italia nel nuovo scenario internazionale, 1898–1918, pp. 85–98. 25 M. H. Elliott, Roma Beata, Letters from the Eternal City (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1903), p. 1. Elliott had made her previous visit in 1894. 26 W. D. Howells, Roman Holidays and Others (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1908), p. 102. 27 Ibid., p. 103. 28 M. S. Young. ‘The remarkable Joseph Pennell’, American Art Journal 2:1 (1970): 83. 29 M. J. Schmitz, ‘Joseph Pennell and the Anglo-American construction of New York’, Tate Papers 27 (2017), www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/27/joseph-pennell (accessed 14 July 2019). 30 M. King Waddington, Italian Letters of a Diplomat’s Wife, January–May, 1880, February–April 1904 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), pp. 96–7. 31 Prendergast took an even greater interest in Venice. Along with other artists, he had come to identify the city as a new modern art centre thanks to its successful Biennale, the art exhibition that since the end of the nineteenth century has been a major event for the Italian art scene. 32 N. M. Mathews, ‘Prendergast in Italy’, in N. M. Mathews and E. Kennedy (eds), Prendergast in Italy (London and New York: Merrell; Williamstown, MA: in association with Williams College Museum of Art; Chicago, IL: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2009), p. 70. 33 Howells, Roman Holidays, p. 79. 34 Ibid., p. 86. 35 P. D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 81. 36 On Nathan and his mayoralty, see especially N. Ciani, Da Mazzini al Campidoglio. Vita di Ernesto Nathan (Roma: Ediesse, 2007). 37 Vance, America’s Rome, vol. II, esp. pp. 252–4. 38 Ibid., esp. pp. 267–8. 39 L. Harris, ‘“An Ever-Widening Circle”: Rome and its Artistic Community circa 1914’, in Talamona and Miller (eds), Building an Idea: McKim, Mead & White, p. 132. 40 Vance, America’s Rome, vol. II, p. 306. 41 L. Buonomo, ‘Raccontare la capitale: Roma negli scritti di Francis Marion Crawford e Constance Fenimore Woolson’, in D. Fiorentino and M. Sanfilippo (eds), Le relazioni tra Stati Uniti e Italia nel periodo di Roma capitale (Roma: Gangemi, 2008), pp. 131–46. 42 Vance, America’s Rome, vol. II, p. 233. 43 The periodicals were The Roman Times, The Roman World and The Roman Post. The first was founded in 1895; the other two followed within ten years. 44 Gay to Thayer, Letters of 26 July, 22 August, 26 August 1911, Folder 10, Gay Letters in Thayer. W. R. Thayer, The Life and Times of Cavour (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911). 45 Gay to Thayer, Letters Folder 3, Gay Letters in Thayer. 46 E. Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Random House, 2001). 47 E. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890– 1945 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982). 48 Fiorentino, ‘Ambasciatori e aristocratici’, pp. 36–9. 49 M. A. De Wolfe Howe, George Von Lengerke Meyer: His Life and Public Services (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1919), p. 38, https://archive.org/details/georgevonlengerk00howeiala/ page/n6, pp. 15–16 (accessed 21 October 2019). 50 Howe, George Von Lengerke Meyer, p. 38. 51 C. Huemer, ‘To Be Remembered and to Please’, in Huemer (ed.), Spellbound by Rome, pp. 7–24. 52 ‘Message from the President of the United States, recommending an appropriation for the relief of the sufferers by earthquake in Italy and its islands’. 60th Congress, 2nd session, Senate, Document no. 617, Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1909, p. 3.
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61 62 63
Gay to Thayer, 4 May 1904, Folder 6, Gay Letters in Thayer. Musmanno, ‘The Library for American Studies in Italy’: 5. Ibid.: 4. Henry Walters to Charles F. McKim, 22 August 1904; Charles F. McKim to George V. L. Meyer, 11 November 1904. Italy Correspondence, box 2, 1904–Mar. 1905, Folders 7–8. George von Lengerke Meyer Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. Clara Heyland to Henry White, 16 June 1906, box 18, Folder April–June 1906, Henry White Papers, 1812–1931, ID No.: MSS45328, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division. S. Antonelli, D. Fiorentino, and G. Monsagrati (eds), Gli americani e la Repubblica romana del 1849 (Roma: Gangemi, 2000). The American Academy, for its part, leased the Villa Aurelia to the American Red Cross when it expanded its Rome branch. D. Fiorentino, ‘La comunità americana a Roma durante la guerra in 1917. L’inizio del secolo americano’, in L. Benadusi, D. Rossini, and A. Villari (eds), Politica, propaganda e cultura in Italia tra guerra e dopoguerre (Roma: Viella, 2018), pp. 57–76; A. Brodsky, The Great Mayor: Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of the City of New York (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), pp. 90–4. Gay to Thayer, no date (probably 18 July 1918), Folder 6, Gay Letters in Thayer. Ibid. Articles of Incorporation 25 July 1918, Folder 13, Gay Letters in Thayer.
Selected bibliography Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Campbell, J. P. ‘Taft, Roosevelt, and the arbitration treaties of 1911’. Journal of American History 53:2 (1966): 279–98. De Wolfe Howe, M. A. George Von Lengerke Meyer; His Life and Public Services. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1919. Doyle, D. Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Elliott, M. H. Roma Beata, Letters from the Eternal City. Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1903. Fiorentino, D. ‘Ambasciatori e aristocratici: Stati Uniti e Italia durante la presidenza di Theodore Roosevelt’. In D. Fiorentino and M. Sanfilippo (eds), Stati Uniti e Italia nel nuovo scenario internazionale, 1898–1918. Roma: Gangemi, 2012, pp. 23–46. _____. Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia, 1848–1901. Roma: Gangemi, 2013. Gerstle, G. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Howells, W. D. Roman Holidays and Others. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1908. Huemer, C. (ed.) Spellbound by Rome: Anglo-American Community in Rome: 1890–1914 on the Foundation of the Keats–Shelley House. Rome: Palombi, 2005. Mathews, N. M. and E. Kennedy (eds) Prendergast in Italy. London and New York: Merrell; Williamstown, MA: in association with Williams College Museum of Art; Chicago, IL: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2009. Morris, H. S. ‘The field of art – The Roman Art Exposition of 1911’. Scribner’s Magazine 49:5 (1911): 509–12. Nye, J. Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. New York: Basic Books, 1990. Salvetti, P. Corda e sapone: storie di linciaggi degli italiani negli Stati Uniti. Roma: Donzelli, 2003. Talamona M. and P. B. Miller (eds) Building an Idea: McKim, Mead & White and the American Academy in Rome, 1914–2014. Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2014. Vance, W. L. America’s Rome, 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Young, M. S. ‘The remarkable Joseph Pennell’. American Art Journal 2:1 (1970): 81–91.
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New Deal murals and the myth of the Renaissance Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document
Sergio Cortesini
The art projects of the New Deal have been investigated in the last forty years from a variety of perspectives: for their efforts in restoring the American Dream and a sense of hope during the Depression; for the democratisation of the art experience and the creation of a middlebrow culture; as well as for the promotion of hegemonic thinking about gender, race, and class. Comparatively less attention has been reserved for the myth of the Italian Renaissance within the discourse of the programme of artistic decorations of federal buildings administrated by the Section of Painting and Sculpture, a division that operated within the US Treasury Department between October 1934 and July 1943. My aim is to investigate the critical appropriation of the Italian cultural past as a ‘usable past’ – to exploit Van Wyck Brooks’s noted expression – in the service of a burgeoning American modern art, paradoxically one that claimed to be democratic, unique, and drawn from the heartland of the country. *** Unlike the short-lived Public Works of Art Project (PWAP, essentially a relief effort for unemployed artists), the Federal Art Project (a wider programme for needy artists paying a weekly salary, financed by the Works Progress Administration, and covering any media), and the Treasury Relief Art Project (a smaller programme administered by the Department of Treasury according to the same relief rules as the WPA), the Section of Painting and Sculpture (hereafter ‘the Section’) committed itself to commissioning decorations of the highest quality for new federal buildings, for which about one per cent of the cost of the construction was customarily set aside. From 1935 to 1943, approximately 1,400 post offices and courthouses throughout the country, as well as in Washington, D.C. (including the buildings of the Departments of Justice, Interior, Post Office, as well as that of the Social Security Administration), received paintings and sculptures by artists mostly allotted through 190 open and anonymous competitions, juried by local experts and supervised by Washington administrators. The Section disseminated fine public art to far-flung communities where no museum or artworks existed. At the same time, it exploited the persuasive power of images to celebrate national or local history and productivity, and family and gender cooperation, in order to overcome the dire
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New Deal murals and the myth of the Renaissance reality of the day, and stir faith in a rosier future.1 To keep up with the populist rhetoric of cultural democracy and a promised social utopia, Section administrators favoured a middle-of-the-road figurative style – shunning the extremes of modernist distortions and neoclassicism – and urged the use of local histories or regional themes of the American scene. Artists were encouraged to consult with local people as they designed their works, the taxpayers serving as implicit patrons. Administrators in Washington scrutinised the winning preliminary studies. Artists had to accommodate the demands of audience and administrators, and the finished works were often the result of triangulated negotiations. Yet, ironical as it may seem for a programme so targeted at reinforcing American values, revamping the founding principles of the Republic, and stimulating a national, participatory movement of modern art through the catalyst of the New Deal, the magnificent image of the Italian Renaissance can be read as a watermark between the lines of the Section’s discursive rhetoric and painterly practice. The Section was originated, directed, or informally inspired by a coterie of artists and critics with similar backgrounds: painter and lawyer Edward Bruce, who was appointed its chief; former editor of The Arts magazine Forbes Watson, who served as advisor; and former gallery director and educator Edward Rowan, who was hired as superintendent, with painter Olin Dows as his assistant. Painter George Biddle did not receive executive responsibilities, but helped inspire the programme while being one of its first participants. With the exception of Rowan (born in Chicago), they were well-connected northeasterners, Ivy Leaguers, personal acquaintances of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and had prior experience with Italy from their travels as art students.2 Moreover, Bruce and Biddle had taken up residence for some years next to painter Maurice Sterne, in Anticoli Corrado, a small village about sixty kilometres from Rome. The three men were internationally travelled, as Sterne had lived in several cities in Europe, and in Bali; and Bruce had been a lawyer and businessman in New York, China, and the Philippines, before devoting himself to professional painting at the age of forty-four and joining Sterne in Italy. The poor yet picturesque Anticoli Corrado was their chosen place of residence, whence they journeyed to Rome and Florence to visit American expatriates, such as art critic and collector Leo Stein and the eminent art historian Bernard Berenson.3 I would argue that their direct observation of Italian artworks seen in situ, on the walls of churches, in town squares, and still integrated in the social fabric, as artefacts used in Catholic liturgy, or cherished by popular worship or civic pride – and not uprooted like gallery pictures – was seminal in instilling the awareness of art (especially murals in public buildings) as a factor of communal identity and social cohesion that later became the driving goal of the Section. Before his Italian sojourn, Biddle had painted on canvas, or made lithographs; it was in Italy in 1932 that he became acquainted with the fresco technique and made his ‘first crude efforts’, which he continued to develop in the United States in 1935, together with painter Reginald Marsh, under the guidance of the expert Olle Nordmark.4 As Bruce once said to Sterne in 1939 – in a correspondence announcing two large mural jobs for the War Department and the Social Security buildings in
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The courses of empire Washington – ‘I have it in the back of my mind that we may somehow find an opportunity to do the series of murals for “bread” that we discussed so many times in Anticoli.’5 If the letter suggests that in Bruce’s opinion the Section had not as yet attained its full economic potential, it also reveals that certain New Deal art programmes originated – if only as a discursive hypothesis – in Italy, possibly even before the stock-market crash. In any case, the dire unemployment and the collapse of private patronage at the nadir of the Depression confirmed the validity of their conjectures. Not by chance, their fellow Anticolano, Biddle, writing a letter to Roosevelt on 9 May 1933, six months after his return from Italy, is credited with the idea of the PWAP, the first ‘bread’ programme for artists that Roosevelt called Bruce to head.6 The discourse articulated by Bruce and others for the PWAP, and reiterated for the Section, was an attack on what they called the ‘star system’ of artists whose commercial values were pumped up by art dealers, who fed the ambitions of parvenu collectors (the fluctuations of the art market mirroring the individualist spirit of capitalism and the financial speculations of the 1920s). They criticised the esotericism of vanguard aesthetics, and called for a redefinition of the artist as a citizen integrated into the social fabric. They sought cooperation between artists and the patron-state, and called for socially meaningful art that revealed ‘a fuller and richer life’ and ‘new frontiers’ of spiritual wealth that countered the abating materialism. The New Frontiers theme was crafted by Bruce at his hearings, in April 1935, before the House Committee on Patents, which was considering a resolution to establish a US Department of Science, Art and Literature. Bruce argued that after the closing of the American frontier and the onslaught of the Great Depression in 1929, further social progress was more likely to be advanced by spiritual or cultural means. Therefore, the government had the moral obligation of taking over the patronage of the arts from the diminished private sector.7 While these arguments were not totally new, they were made to resonate with the social role of art in Italian medieval communes in a grand historical parallel. In the first official Bulletin of the Section, in March 1935, Admiral Christian Joy Peoples (the director of procurement in the Treasury Department) affirmed that the Section would commit itself to the best works on the basis of artistic excellence. Availing itself of artists and non-professionals of proven ‘faith in the development of … art and the spiritual life’, this New Deal programme would replicate the spirit of Florentine patrons and artists, who had acted according to the strictest artistic standards, so much so that ‘no artists dared to do a mediocre painting or piece of sculpture’. Analogously, ‘the Section … hopes that in employing the vital talents of this country, faith in the country and a renewed sense of its glorious possibilities will be awakened’.8 As early as May 1934, in a philippic tellingly titled ‘The Artist Becomes a Citizen’, Forbes Watson railed against the ‘madness’ of the pre-Depression art market and the eradication of artists from their communities, while praising the PWAP for reforming the productive base and ‘changing the artist into an active citizen … raising [him] once more to the “dignity of the artisan” and finally bringing a whole new audience into direct co-operation with him’.9 Along the same lines, Bruce explained in the American Magazine of Art that before 1520 virtually no painting was made
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New Deal murals and the myth of the Renaissance without a commission, and, countering the whims of the art market, he envisioned scores of average artists-turned-craftsmen among their fellow folks, rather than ‘vague genius[es]’. The notion of the average artist parallels the sociological ideal of the ‘average man’ cherished by New Dealers, and Bruce was certain that ‘Masterpieces and great geniuses are not produced from isolated efforts; if the history of art is any criterion … [a] large body of work and a large number of artists are necessary to produce the Leonardos, the Piero della Francescas, the Michelangelos.’10 Great American artists, the message implied, would come out of a communal practice, just as the Italian masters were born of an art experience integrated within the body politic. These arguments against the speculative market and for the social reintegration of artists were nurtured by the fantasy of a return to the historic guild system. ‘The trouble [with the disappointing quality of some works]’ – Maurice Sterne argued in a letter to Bruce in 1937 – is … the maladjustment of the artist to life. Formerly – that is centuries ago – the artist … belonged to the master-craftsman guilds who received commissions and executed them to the best of their ability. This relationship between the artist and his public gradually disappeared which gave rise to the greatest evil of the past 2 centuries – the easel pictures … I am convinced that the only constructive solution lies in the direction of commission and not in relief work.11
Bruce replied, ‘Do continue to think of this matter and perhaps it will be possible to bring back the old ideal of the master craftsmanship [sic]. A friend of mine is making an exhaustive study of how the business was conducted in the old days of the Renaissance and when I get this report I will send you a copy of it.’12 (This report has not yet been located.) In 1935, artist and educator Lewis Rubenstein published in The American Scholar a plea for the revival of buon fresco and for the artists-turned-craftsmen as social interpreters, which was reprinted in the Bulletin as a recommended reading for the recipients of mural commissions.13 Rubenstein – who had travelled extensively in Italy and studied Renaissance frescos in 1931 and in 1932 – extolled the Italian masters for the ‘architectural’ quality of their murals (solidly modelled forms, balanced compositions, accuracy of scale) and for their social point of view. He argued that had American social realists mastered the technical difficulties of buon fresco and studied the achievements of Giotto, Masaccio, Piero, Mantegna, and Signorelli in that medium, they would have raised their own work from mere political illustration to pictures in which the dynamics of form and colour strengthened the referential content and thus the social message. Moreover, fresco making (which requires cooperation between architect, plasterer, and painter) epitomised a synthesis of conflicting interests and professional divisions, so much so that the artist, Rubenstein contended, should not sign the mural, acknowledging it as a collective effort rather than an individual creation. Such a traditional medium could thus become a conduit that spoke to the masses, while having ‘a real part in the solution of the urgent problems of reorganisation and revaluation of life’.14
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The courses of empire Similarly, Watson, in his 1936 book which documented the first murals commissioned by the Treasury, remarked that ‘Back of all great mural painting is a [social] belief. The painter shares this belief with the audience … The Government has afforded the artists an incredible opportunity to express in terms of art our faith.’ He argued that the social message informing American murals equalled the religious belief that had motivated thirteenth-century Italian frescos. The artists, consequently, would develop a new logic demanding ‘the use of symbols … simpler and broader in appeal’.15 Indeed, many American artists became fascinated with the fresco technique, and insisted upon using this medium, rather than canvas attached to the wall (for example, Henry Varnum Poor and Biddle at the Department of Justice, or Reginald Marsh and Ward Lockwood at the Post Office Department buildings), while others chose egg tempera as an alternate homage to the Italian primitives (Ethel Magafan, for instance, appreciated the durability and matte surface of their paintings which did not produce a glare from reflected light).16 Some of the artists commissioned by the Section were directly inspired by Renaissance frescos seen via journeys in Italy. However, even without (or before) those on-site trips, the Italian Renaissance – and classical art by and large – was a canon in art schools and colleges, where students educated themselves through photographic reproductions, book illustrations, and plaster casts, as well as visits to museums. Even vanguard-minded artists, as they engaged in ambitious endeavours, held the Renaissance painters as benchmarks. Man Ray, for instance, painted his large equestrian scene MCMXIV (1914), which elusively referred to World War I, ‘on a specially prepared canvas to make it look like a fresco … I had been reading about Paolo Uccello; the reproductions of his battle scenes had impressed me with their power.’17 The diagrammatic components of the Renaissance works became sources of formalist study for leading exponents of New Deal muralism, such as Lorser Feiterson (who visited Italy), Thomas Hart Benton, and Reginald Marsh. For the latter, the lack of a journey to Italy did not hinder his reverence for the old masters in Anatomy for Artists (1945), a book replete with free drawings after Michelangelo, Leonardo, and others, works which he had studied in the collections of Cooper Union and in photographs.18 The visual intelligibility of Early Renaissance frescos was taken as a paragon, as Section murals were invested with the mission of educating the masses. A debate about an effective style ensued. In an open letter in the Bulletin addressed to both artists and the jury announcing the mural competition for the Social Security building in 1940, Henry Varnum Poor extolled Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca for what he deemed their ‘sense of pictorial necessity, a visual freshness and reality, which speaks more clearly than any other thing’. The ‘purely intellectual content’ of any great mural is ‘almost nil’, Poor continued; the Italian masters’ true contribution stemmed from a ‘visual sensibility’, not purely ‘ideas’, and consisted of the atmosphere around the figures as well as their clear grouping and gestures.19 Poor’s recommendations echo the standard critical notions about quattrocento artists who were appreciated for the clarity and the ‘dignity’ of their human figures, and relates to Berenson’s distinguishing of ‘art’ from ‘illustration’ (the first being the command
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New Deal murals and the myth of the Renaissance over the ‘tactile values, movement and space-composition’ intrinsic to painting, and the latter the extrinsic values of feelings and ideas belonging to the world). Berenson reckoned that the painter’s true greatness was in stimulating the beholder’s ‘tactile imagination’ and suggesting the materiality of the objects depicted. Above all, he praised Giotto and Masaccio for these qualities.20 Indeed, Poor’s admiration for Masaccio was well known. Watson, in slide lectures delivered across the country, showed Poor’s collection of twelve panels frescoed around the doorways of the Attorney General’s corridor at the Department of Justice building (1936), including the set where the artist depicted the entrance of a detainee to jail and his return to the embrace of the family after he had served his time, and – above the lintel – a factory scene representing the redeeming function of inmate work assignments (Plate 20). Watson eulogised them for their ‘strong masculine quality’, adding that ‘like his predecessor of centuries ago … Poor indulges in no graces in order to charm his audience’.21 Watson also congratulated Ethel Magafan for her dispassionate rendering of Andrew Jackson at the battle of New Orleans, 8 January 1814 in a mural for the Office of Deeds building in Washington, D.C., comparing it to the ‘static quality’ of Piero’s battles (Plate 21). She was encouraged not to include any action and preserve the dignity of the personages when translating her preliminary study into the final painting.22 Magafan animated an easily readable, frieze-like composition (necessitated by the rectangular format typical of Section murals) with two dramatic foci. The viewer is positioned behind the American ramparts, where Jackson, astride his white steed, oversees the coordinated and unhurried movements of artillerymen, frontiersmen, and slaves while the British troops appear through the mist across the prairie in the background. For several American painters the quattrocento embodied a deeply held cultural myth. ‘Dreamt last night that I was Piero della Francesca’ – Biddle wrote in his diary in January 1935. ‘He is constantly with me.’ And while working on his fresco at the Department of Justice, Society freed through justice (1935), he confessed, ‘Piero della Francesca is still my idol and my goal’ (Plate 22). ‘I devoured his work. I used to think the Resurrection of Christ at San Sepolcro the most beautiful painting in the world.’23 If we are to believe Vera Segal Sterne, Maurice Sterne’s wife, ‘the air [in Anticoli] was light, the sky a soft blue, like the skies in the Piero della Francescas that Maurice had taught me to love’.24 The painter Frank Mechau claimed that upon visiting Italy in 1932, The Italian primitives … meant more to me than anything in paint since 1400. I dismissed forever mottled and hatched complementary colors and began to paint with broad areas of simple primary colors … Before returning to America … we travelled – first to Florence and Arezzo, where I absorbed the frescoes of my beloved Piero della Francesca, who represents the most supreme use of plastic elements in history for me. After Arezzo and Piero della Francesca come certain Giottos at Padua, and the color of the Ravenna mosaics.25
This love for Italian masters, however, only rarely gave way to blatant imitation, and the range of sources of inspiration encompassed the Renaissance in its wider
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The courses of empire chronological scope, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. While he was working on Sorting the mail for the Post Office department building, Reginald Marsh declared to Rowan that ‘Fresco has made me want to do large figures and put more event in them’ (Plate 23). Driven by a sense of realistic engagement, he studied the scene from life at the Rail Mail Service under Penn Station in New York with its ‘complicated systems of shutes, belts, [and] conveyors’. He eventually created a composition replete with torsions of muscular bodies in contrapposto poses, foreshortened from below, proving himself to be a devotee of Michelangelo.26 George Harding, in his oil on canvas (but imitating the texture of fresco) Post-dispatch rider, 1776, paid homage to Piero della Francesca in the general colour scheme, placement of the bodies in perspective, and in the visual quotation of the gesture of a rider who raises his arm to halt his galloping horse as he arrives at General George Washington’s headquarters (Plate 24). Piero also influenced Philip Guston’s triptych Reconstruction and well being of the family (1942) for the Social Security building (Plate 25). The central panel shows an open-air family meal, the father stretching out his arms in a protective embrace of his wife and four children. The left panel, featuring a man digging a trench in an outcrop of eroded earth and a woodsman collecting logs, pays tribute to soil conservation, while the right panel, with a miner working at a pneumatic drill and an African American holding a shovel, symbolises mining and industrial work. In the impassive expressions and somewhat frozen actions, the facial physiognomies, and the tonal modelling, Guston clad his American scene in the stylistic mantle of his Italian idol. Ward Lockwood frescoed a scene representing the Consolidation of the West, in 1937, also at the Post Office department building, and inserted a Michelangelesque pioneer woman holding a naked child, as a Madonna of the Plains, an obvious superimposition of American history on to traditional Renaissance iconography. However, for the most part, American painters’ admiration of Italian masters appeared in murals that seemed ‘modern in idiom’ to contemporary viewers. Despite Biddle’s identification with Piero, we would not find much of the Tuscan painter’s style in the American’s illustration of the positive effects of justice in his three-sided fresco wrapping the staircase of the Department of Justice building, contrasting the sweatshop and tenement of yesterday with the ordered family life of today (Plate 22). Biddle’s visual strategy, including the brilliantly hued but flattened portraits of New Dealers, who appear to overlap each other on a raised plane, interior scenes as if viewed through a removed façade, and the triptych-like partitioning of the subject matter all reveal a broader and unspecific interest in the Italian primitives. Likewise, in The danger of the post (also for the Post Office department), Mechau distilled his combined love for Piero, Giotto, and probably Paolo Uccello and the Mannerists, transforming a violent scene into a colourful and undulating composition (Plate 26). In his acceptance speech for the Friedsam medal, in April 1938, awarded for his merits in the advancement of American art, Bruce once more made clear the Italian–American analogy. Reaffirming the uplifting mission of art, Bruce attested that artists should consider a Treasury Section commission as an honour, rather than a
New Deal murals and the myth of the Renaissance
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financial benefit, as their moral satisfaction would be greater than their material earnings, not unlike Piero della Francesca, when he created a masterpiece for his hometown. If anyone has any doubt on this point, let him make a pilgrimage to … Borgo San Sepolcro in Tuscany. It is a little town no bigger than some of the places where our artists are working. In that town … a great artist … painted a picture that has glorified it and has made it a mecca for every lover of supreme artistic creation … Piero’s financial reward was insignificant, but like the true artist he glorified that little chapel. And so it is [a] source today of intense satisfaction to realise that our artists are giving of their best.27
In another version of the speech that he delivered at a Cabinet meeting with President Roosevelt in attendance, Bruce declared that he would often point out the frescos in Borgo San Sepolcro to artists who had received mural commissions: In that village there is a little town hall no bigger than the average country post office … Piero della Francesca … painted there the greatest picture in the world, The Resurrection of Christ. Whenever I am in Italy I make a pilgrimage to Borgo to see that picture, and I find my soul refreshed from seeing it … I hope the day may come when we, too, may develop a Piero della Francesca.28
Bruce envisioned that post offices with their own American Pieros might one day be visited as artistic shrines, as are many Tuscan town halls. In a similar vein, for Watson ‘the mural shows us … that it is possible to have not only a Rome with its Vatican, but also an Assisi. So in America … the walls of more and more public buildings outside of the great centers will be found adorned with paintings which to be seen must be visited.’ In Watson’s imagination, such architectural masterpieces adorned with great artworks would also arise in small American towns, carrying ‘their expression of a great faith beyond the limits of metropolitan centers. What has been done, can be done again.’29 In 1936, Edward Rowan unsuccessfully applied for a grant to travel to Italy. Thanking Bruce, Peoples, and Louis Simon (the supervising architect of the Treasury Department) for their letters of recommendations, he stated that ‘it would have been wonderful … and I think I could have brought back something of value to the Section after seeing the Pieros, the Signorellis and the Campo Santo at Pisa – but that’s all for another time’.30 Rowan, who had joined the Section after holding previous positions as director of the Little Gallery in Cedar Rapids and the Stone City Art Colony in Iowa, is usually credited as an advocate of Midwestern artists to whom he offered prestigious commissions, among them the regionalist triumvirate of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry. Yet Italian travel was not seen as antithetical to the regionalist creed; paradoxically, it was understood as merely functional, a different facet of the commonplace practice of field trips across America undertaken by both artists and administrators. Rowan and Bruce agreed on the importance of travel to American sites where they could inspect newly installed murals, talk with local artists, give public lectures, and stimulate interest in New Deal programmes. ‘I am in agreement with you
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The courses of empire that Olin should make an extensive trip throughout the country in the interest of the project and of the Section,’ Rowan wrote about the same time as he was planning his travel to Italy. ‘I especially want to do Taos, Santa Fe and California, and let the artists out there realize that we are definitely interested in what they are doing. I will meet the artists, art associations and other groups. It seems to me that it would be a grand piece of propaganda for the ideals of the New Deal.’31 In a similar fashion, travelling to small-town Italy with its historical regional geography mirrored, in a way, the goals of contemporary American scene ideology. The journey throughout the United States might have been aimed at propaganda and networking, while the Italian sojourn concentrated on bringing back ‘something of value’ from historical precursors, but both benefited regionalist interlocutors and fellow artists/citizens. If Borgo could stand for small-town America, and its chapel for the lobby of any post office, this analogy implied a deeper cultural fantasy. As we have seen, Rowan and Bruce focussed upon Pisa, Orvieto (where Signorelli worked), Arezzo, and Borgo (where Piero painted), while Watson mentioned Assisi, rather than the achievements of the High Renaissance and Baroque in Rome or Venice. They also advocated for the artist-artisan/citizen. In so doing, they invested the historical past with a cultural significance that transcended facticity and philological accuracy. *** The Italian past made available for America’s sake was indeed selective; it singled out the cradle of the Early Renaissance in central Italy and its social order comprised of republican communities with proto-capitalist economies. Rowan travelled extensively through the north and centre of Italy in the summer of 1929, visiting cities that do not typically fall into the touristic path, such as Cremona, Pavia, Ravenna, and Verona, where he admired the remains of murals on the façades surrounding the Piazza delle Erbe. His diary carefully recorded his visits to museums, monuments, and churches, indicating his profound knowledge of medieval and early modern art. However, Rowan gave his highest praise to Florence as ‘La Bella, fair flower of Tuscany, probably the most interesting spot in the world’, and the art of the smaller towns in Tuscany, including Siena and Arezzo, paying comparatively less attention to the Eternal City. He ignored the South of the country, due both to the privileging of the Tuscan Renaissance in the writings of Berenson and others and to an ethnic bias. In fact, Rowan extolled the beauty of the ‘light-complexioned with refined featured’ northern Lombards, while describing their southern fellow citizens – those that constituted the majority of Italians in America – as the ‘cheaper sort – the dark skinned, evil tempered Sicilians’.32 Bernard Berenson opened the first volume of his Italian Painters of the Renaissance, published between 1894 and 1907, with the claim that art of the Renaissance was less a historical style than the embodiment of a spiritual attitude that had expanded out from scholarly circles through ‘popular utterance’. The Renaissance, he claimed, may be considered as an age in European history, but it ‘is even more
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New Deal murals and the myth of the Renaissance important typically than historically’. ‘It stands for youth … for intellectual curiosity and energy grasping at the whole of life as material which it hopes to mould to any shape … We ourselves … are instinctively in sympathy with the Renaissance … That spirit seems like the small rough model after which ours is being fashioned.’33 Even though in his three later volumes Berenson developed his formalist theory of visual pleasure, related to the tactile and compositional values of pictures and their life-enhancing effects on the viewers, his remark about the ‘typical’ spirit of the Renaissance furnished a paradigm that was both sociological and transhistorically usable, contributing to the cultural fantasy of the westward path of classical civilisation converging in the Section’s blending of Americanism and neo-Renaissance dreams. Bruce and his staff were not alone in believing in the idea of a westward transfer of artistic leadership from the Italian past to contemporary America. The Renaissance was widely considered a pinnacle of world art, and it was commonly held that it declined after the Italian city states lost their independence to foreign powers during the sixteenth century. William Henry Goodyear, in his popular Renaissance and Modern Art, first published in 1894, explained that Italian art of the early sixteenth century remained unsurpassed, and that ‘the Renaissance drew its last breath on the shores of the New World, with the painters of the American Revolutionary time … The art of … Washington Allston, [ John Singleton] Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and Rembrandt Peale, is thus an interesting continuation and survival of the “Old Masters”.’34 Thomas Craven’s lavish A Treasury of Art Masterpieces (1939) opens with a commentary on twenty-nine Italian artists from Giotto to Tiepolo, concluding with fifteen Americans from Copley to Grant Wood. Faithful to his regionalist creed and relational approach, Craven situated Giotto at the root of Western art, as the artist who had reconnected with common human experience. He praised Italian painting as a composite of ‘intensely local schools, each … conditioned by local psychologies … [and] an essentially local occupation … in specific settings’. He then concluded: ‘Today the hope of painting lies in America’, whose artists ‘are a part of the society in which they live; their paintings reflect the color and character of that society’.35 In his Men of Art (1940), Craven again drew a historical trajectory starting with Giotto and ‘driving a straight course’ to ‘the new mural art of North America’.36 But I believe that Bruce had the intuition of a more structural – or typical, in Berenson’s lexicon – analogy between the communal society of the Early Renaissance and New Deal America: that is, the nexus between social capital (the attitude of mutual trust and cooperation), cultural capital, and economic capital. The discourse of the New Deal art administrators, with their emphasis on community identities and communal cooperation, the agency of the artist-citizen, democratic criteria of selection, and praise of medieval guilds, tended to recast the new movement of American art in the tradition of civic humanism. Bruce was aware that the fifteenth century was less a democratic and increasingly an oligarchic age than the previous century of communal democracy. He knew that some of the great works of art were commissioned as self-aggrandisement of individual Signori rather
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The courses of empire than expressions of the experience of the common people. This did not prevent him from casting the New Deal in the paradigm of the Renaissance, seen more as a socio-cultural typology than a unique historical phenomenon, which the Section appropriated and reformulated as their own. It provided personae that could be adopted at will. Bruce once compared Roosevelt to as great a patron of the arts as Pope Julius II, and Bruce himself was described as a Renaissance man due to the variety of his skills and career choices.37 In December 1939, Sterne recommended Albert M. Bender, collector and donor to the San Francisco Museum of Art, for a Friedsam Medal. Praising him as a man who embodied the spirit of the Renaissance, Sterne wrote ‘the only difference between [Bender] and Lorenzo il Magnifico [is] in degree, not in kind’.38 One of the lectures that Watson often gave across the country started as follows: ‘When Uncle Sam began to rehearse the part of a modern de Medici he chose such a prosaic sounding name [PWAP] … that people have yet not fully realized the romance of the magnificently optimistic character which he created.’39 These are just a few examples of the prestige and versatility of the Renaissance myth, regardless of the paradoxical evocation of lords and popes in this pervasively democratic rhetoric. It also suggests a pragmatic mobilisation of history by intellectuals and administrators, who, in rehearsing a part in the art-historical drama, seemed to follow Van Wyck Brooks’s encouragement towards a proactive use of history: ‘The past is an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes; it opens of itself at the touch of desire.’40 In Jacob Burckhardt’s classic The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860, translated into English in 1929), the period is essentially characterised as a fertile nexus of civic humanism, democracy, and economic prosperity. Burckhardt stressed the progressive, innovative, and ‘modern’ qualities of the early modern civic world. However, the discursive rhetoric of the Section continued the trend of Progressive-era intellectuals – but also that of the American Renaissance and City Beautiful movements – who sought to mobilise the historical past as a repository of spiritual resources that they could draw on while defining America’s still insecure contribution to Western Civilisation, and offering to fellow citizens a guide to the future. Most of this ‘usable past’ was found in European history and was tailored to the ideological needs of the United States. The civic world of late medieval Italian republics resonated with its self-image. At the turn of the twentieth century, the first generation of American academic scholars of European history gave to the Italian Renaissance the greatest share of their attention in erecting grand historical schemes. It became almost obligatory for these American writers to affirm that American institutions were built on ancient and Italian Renaissance foundations, to the point that ‘it is hard to tell’ – according to historian Edward Muir – ‘whether America or Italy is gaining luster from the association’.41 This suggests that the intellectual purpose of American historiography was to locate a subset of America’s own history in Italy’s past, and the ideological agenda of those scholars often resulted in an Americanisation of historical facts. Ferdinand Schevill, the outstanding historian of medieval and Renaissance Italy during the first decades of the twentieth century, interpreted medieval merchants as capitalists and medieval statutes as constitutions. In his work from the late
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New Deal murals and the myth of the Renaissance 1930s, he persisted with this formulation, organising his widely read history of medieval and Renaissance Florence as a succession of beleaguered democracies.42 The heuristic attitude and the resulting interpretation that oversimplified and Americanised the socio-political realities of the Italian Renaissance became embedded in the concepts undergirding courses in Western Civilisation, initially established in colleges between the world wars and almost universally underpinning the humanities curriculum in the 1950s and 1960s. In the teleological scheme of Western Civilisation, understood as the progression of humanistic heritage from ancient Greece and Rome to the gestation of American civilisation, the Italian Renaissance and the experience of the Italian city republics held a pivotal position. Historian Frederic Lane, for instance, wrote in his 1966 History of Venice: My thesis here is that republicanism, not capitalism, is the most distinctive and significant aspect of these Italian city states; that republicanism gave to the civilization of Italy from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries its distinctive quality … The attempt to revive the culture of the ancient city states strengthened in turn the republican ideal and contributed mightily to its triumph later in modern nations and primarily in our own.43
The fascination with Renaissance art among muralists as well as regionalist painters (such as Grant Wood’s interest in Piero) complicates the simplistic understanding that the art of the American scene was solely based on Americana.44 It also suggests a larger variety of ‘usable pasts’ made available in New Deal initiatives which fostered middlebrow culture, alongside – and not antithetical to – the rediscovery of America’s own past and pre-industrial material culture in the FAP-sponsored Index of American Design. As for Mexican muralism as a coeval inspiration, American artists and New Deal administrators certainly looked to it for inspiration as civically minded and socially integrated works of art, but the Mexican school was not immune from suspicion on the part of conservative critics and officials. Biddle himself evoked the Mexicans in his seminal letter to Roosevelt that triggered the PWAP, but later his own sketches for the fresco in the Department of Justice had to overcome the criticism of the Commission of Fine Arts (an advisory body supervising public art in the federal capital), which objected to them for being ‘“very French and rather Mexican”, or vice versa’.45 Bruce in turn requested that Biddle produce a resumé that would dissociate the artist from Rivera and leftist radicalism, ‘showing how completely free from Mexican influence your work is’.46 Bruce’s caution echoes occasional voices in the press concerned that the national art movement might be tinged by what a journalist called ‘this unfortunate Mexicanitis’,47 a ‘disease’ associated with what seemed akin to Rivera’s or Siqueiros’s crude and expressive styles and political radicalism. Conversely, if Mexican, or even French (that is, cubistic), elements were considered too un-American to receive governmental sanction, the Italianate influences were welcomed as echoes from an age of social harmony. If we consider the developments of American art after the closure of the Section in 1943, we may conclude that the efforts made by Bruce and his collaborators
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The courses of empire proved futile. The return to the ‘star system’ and individualist expressions in Action Painting and Pop Art, or the denial of Albertian spatial composition in Abstract Expressionism’s all-over painting, or in Minimalist ‘one thing after the other’ – all disavow the Section’s ambition to leave a mark on American art. ‘The whole project has impregnated the country in such a way that it will never be the same sweet gal’, Rowan once said to Bruce over-optimistically.48 The idea of collaborative work with a return to the cohesive spirit of pre-capitalist guilds has been a recurring fantasy in modern art theory, resulting from the search for a new social role for the artist after the advent of industrialisation and mechanised production that marginalised artisanship. However, the Section’s fantasy of a return to the past was not just nostalgic and retrograde. Indeed, the inspiring romanticism of the Section’s texts on pre-capitalist art-in-society was informed by new methods of cultural pedagogy and social engineering that were pursued with a scientific determination that was unknown to the Italian Renaissance. Attracted to the art production of a bygone society, but acting with modern bureaucratic determinacy, the Section ignored the fact that historic murals are multimedia works embedded in chapels and palaces that were rarely the result of a preordained figurative plan. They are palimpsests, layered in time and reflecting the evolving uses of a given structure, reworked and re-signified over the decades. This organic and diachronic dimension of art is what post-World War II American artists appreciated about Italy. Its complexity was more multifarious and allegorical (in Benjaminian terms)49 than the self-assuring fantasy nurtured by the Section of transplanting a golden age retrieved from the Italian past on to the contemporary American scene as a ‘panacea … against all the rotten unrest that is tormenting the world today’, as Bruce once said to Roosevelt.50 After the war, American artists looked to Italy for different reasons, shifting their interest to entropy, ruins, graffiti, the multilayered encrustations of history (think of Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Smithson), catacombs, the ethnologic diversity of the peninsula (Paul Thek, Meyer Vaisman), while rejecting American mass culture and the standardisation of suburbia. When Smithson visited Rome in 1961, and stared at the brilliant remains of the Last judgment by Piero Cavallini (ca. 1290), frescoed in the church of Santa Cecilia, ‘which has its roots in the pre-Renaissance’, he said that ‘the broken icons of Byzantium inspired me more than all the insipid equine figures of the Florentine’. With this statement he was rejecting the equestrian frescos of Uccello and Castagno in Florence’s cathedral that had enamoured and motivated a previous generation.51 His dismissal of the painted monuments of the Florentine Duomo, often taken as paradigms of humanist Renaissance art – both as emblems of Burckhardt’s vision of the civic essence of the Renaissance, and Berenson’s ‘tactile values’ – would have made painful reading for the leaders of the Section.
Acknowledgements. The research for this essay was funded by a grant from the University of Pisa (PRA 2017–18: La mutevole ambivalenza epistemologica delle immagini. Invenzione, espressione, comunicazione).
New Deal murals and the myth of the Renaissance
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Notes 1 For an overview of the Treasury art programmes, see O. Dows, ‘The New Deal’s Treasury Art Programs: a memoir’, Arts in Society 2:4 (1963[?]): 50–88, http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgibin/Arts/Arts-idx?type=article&did=Arts.ArtsSocv02i4.ODows&id=Arts.ArtsSocv02i4&isize=M&q1=Dows (accessed 1 August 2020). 2 For short profiles of the Section’s executives, see S. A. Musher, Democratic Art: New Deal Influence on American Culture (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 73–80. 3 Sterne first visited Anticoli in 1908 and lived there intermittently for several years (more consistently between 1923 and 1933), alternating winters in Rome. He returned to the United States shortly before November 1933. For the many travels of Sterne, see C. L. Mayerson, Shadow and Light. The Life, Friends and Opinions of Maurice Sterne (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965). Bruce came to Anticoli in 1923; according to his correspondence with Biddle, by 1928 Bruce had moved to Villa L’Orcio in Settignano on the outskirts of Florence, and by January 1930 he was in New York (see Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. (hereafter AAA), Edward Bruce Papers (hereafter EBP), reel D-82, Correspondence, 1920–43). Biddle lived in Anticoli from Summer 1931 to November 1932. 4 AAA, George Biddle Papers, reel 3621, frame 148, George Biddle, diary entry of 10 July 1935. 5 National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter NARA), Record Group (hereafter RG) 121, entry 124, box 13, folder ‘Sterne Maurice/3’, Edward Bruce to Maurice Sterne, 6 March 1939. 6 The often quoted letter of Biddle to FDR was originally reproduced in George Biddle, An American Artist’s Story (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co, 1939), p. 268. Further evidence of the bond between Biddle, Bruce, and Sterne in relation to Anticoli and the genesis of mural patronage is suggested by a letter that Sterne wrote to Bruce, 12 November 1933: ‘here we are back in the American mess … aside from the natural wish to see you and have one of our chats, there is something I want to consult you about – a scheme which George Biddle and a few others have made (?) way for the decoration of public buildings in Washington at plumber’s wages in which they have included me. Do you remember those lovely thanksgiving parties we used to have in Italy?’. NARA, RG 121, entry 124, box 13, folder ‘Sterne, Maurice/1’. For further insights on Biddle and the Section in relation to Italian murals (contemporary and Renaissance), see S. Cortesini, ‘Depicting National Identities in New Deal America and Fascist Italy: Government Sponsored Murals’, in H.-J. Czech and N. Doll (eds), Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen 1930–1945 (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2007), pp. 36–47. 7 Hearings before the Committee on Patents, House of Representatives, Seventy-Fourth Congress, First Section, April 15, 16, 23–25, May, 14, 21, 1935 (Washington, D.C.: United States Printing Office, 1935), pp. 21–8, 54–67 (see pp. 22–3 for ‘richer and fuller life’), https://babel.hathitrust.org/ cgi/pt?id=mdp. 39015022754843;view=1up;seq=1 (accessed 1 August 2020). 8 C. J. Peoples, ‘Foreword’, Bulletin Section of Painting and Sculpture 1 (March 1935): 5. 9 F. Watson, ‘The artist becomes a citizen’, The Forum 91:5 (May 1934): 279; Watson reiterated his creed in ‘New forces in American art’, Kenyon Review 1:2 (Spring 1939): 119–34. 10 E. Bruce, ‘Implications of the Public Works of Art Project’, American Magazine of Art 27:3 (March 1934): 15. 11 NARA, RG 121, entry 124, box 13, folder ‘Sterne, Maurice/1’, Maurice Sterne to Edward Bruce, 18 January 1937. 12 NARA, RG 121, entry 124, box 13, folder ‘Sterne, Maurice/1’, Edward Bruce to Maurice Sterne, 22 January 1937. 13 L. Rubenstein, ‘Fresco painting today’, American Scholar 4:4 (Autumn 1935): 418–27, reprinted in Bulletin Section of Painting and Sculpture 10 ( June–August 1936): 10–12. See also Musher, Democratic Art, p. 67. 14 Rubenstein, ‘Fresco painting today’, 427. 15 F. Watson, ‘A Perspective of American Murals’, in Art in Federal Buildings. An Illustrated Record of the Treasury Department New Program in Painting and Sculpture (Washington, D.C.: Art in Federal Buildings Inc., 1936), pp. 4, 3.
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The courses of empire 16 AAA, reel 3949, frames 763–72, p. 5, Ethel Magafan interviewed by Joseph Trovato, 5 November 1964. 17 M. Ray, Self Portrait (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1963), p. 49. 18 R. Marsh, Anatomy for Artists (New York: American Artists Group, 1945). 19 The letter, originally published on the Bulletin of the Section no. 21, March 1940, was reprinted in Dows, ‘The New Deal’s Treasury Art Programs’: 80–1. 20 For Berenson’s distinction between ‘art’ and ‘illustration’, and the notion of ‘space-composition’, see Bernard Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (London: Oxford University Press – Humphrey Milford, 1938), pp. 134–8, 186, 198; see also p. 72 for his comment on Masaccio. 21 AAA, Forbes Watson Papers, box 5, folder ‘Treasury Dpt File, Lists of Lecture Slides (2–3)’, Forbes Watson, text for slide no. 14. 22 NARA, RG 121, entry 133, box 127, folder ‘Recorder of Deeds Bldg. – Ethel Magafan’, Edward Rowan to Ethel Magafan, 15 April 1943. 23 Quotes respectively from AAA, George Biddle Papers, reel 3621, frame 147 (1 January 1935); frame 155 (28 December 1935); frame 270 (3 May 1948). 24 Mayerson, Shadow and Light, p. 176. 25 Frank Mechau, quoted by C. M. Bach, Frank Mechau, Artist of Colorado (Aspen, CO: Aspen Center for the Visual Arts, 1981), p. 14. 26 NARA, RG 121, entry 133, box 124, folder ‘PO Dpt Bldg – Reginald Marsh’, Reginald Marsh to Olin Dows, 6 August 1935 (received). 27 AAA, EBP, reel D-82, frames 249–52, Edward Bruce, acceptance speech for the Friedsam Medal, 8 April 1938, p. 250. 28 AAA, EBP, reel D-91 frames 1038–45, Edward Bruce, ‘Cabinet Meeting Talk’, undated (1937), p. 6. This passage is also quoted by P. Boswell, Jr, Modern American Painting (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1940), pp. 84–5. 29 Watson, ‘A Perspective of American Murals’, pp. 23–2. 30 NARA, RG 121, entry 124, box 10, folder ‘Rowan, Edward – Apr–Dec 1936’, Edward Rowan to Bruce, undated (but August 1936). 31 NARA, RG 121, entry 124, box 10, folder ‘Rowan, Edward 1935’, Edward Rowan to Edward Bruce, 9 December 1935. 32 AAA, Edward Rowan Papers, reel D-142, frames 1199–1282, Edward Rowan, diary, Summer 1929 (see p. 45 for Florence, p. 32 for ‘two types of Italians’). 33 Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, p. v. 34 W. H. Goodyear, Renaissance and Modern Art (New York: McMillan, 1908), p. 39. 35 T. Craven, A Treasury of Art Masterpieces, from the Renaissance to the Present Day (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1933), pp. 13, 12, 15. 36 T. Craven, Men of Art (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940), p. xv. 37 Bruce, ‘Cabinet Meeting Talk’, p. 1. 38 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, CT, Maurice Sterne Papers, box 1, folder ‘Bruce Edward’, Maurice Sterne to Edward Bruce, 5 December 1939. 39 AAA, Forbes Watson Papers, box 5, folder ‘Treasury Dpt File, Typescript, An American Experiment, Undated’, Forbes Watson, ‘Our Uncle the Collector’, undated (about October 1935). 40 V. W. Brooks, ‘On creating a usable past’, The Dial 64:764 (11 April 1918): 339. 41 E. Muir, ‘The Italian Renaissance in America’, American Historical Review 100:4 (1995): 1100. 42 F. Schevill, History of Florence from the Founding of the City through the Renaissance (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1936). 43 F. C. Lane, ‘At the roots of republicanism’, American Historical Review 71 ( January 1966): 403, reprinted in Muir, ‘The Italian Renaissance in America’, 1106. 44 L. Cheles, ‘The Italian Renaissance in American Gothic: Grant Wood and Piero della Francesca’, American Art 30:1 (March 2016): 106–24. 45 AAA, EBP, reel D-82, frame 906–912, George Biddle to Bruce, undated (but December 1935). 46 AAA, EBP, reel D-82, frame 927–928, Edward Bruce to George Biddle, 3 December 1935, also quoted by Musher, Democratic Art, p. 84.
New Deal murals and the myth of the Renaissance
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47 M. Breuning. ‘Howard Cook’s works with Mexican motifs at Weyhe Gallery’, New York Post (2 February 1934). 48 NARA, RG 121, entry 124, box 10, folder ‘Rowan, Edward – Feb-Mar 1936’, Edward Rowan to Edward Bruce, 27 March 1936. 49 My usage of Walter Benjamin’s notion of allegory conforms to Craig Owens’s essay ‘The Allegorical impulse: toward a theory of postmodernism’, October 12 (Spring 1980): 67–86; 13 (Summer 1980): 58–80. 50 Bruce, ‘Cabinet Meeting Talk’, p. 6. 51 A. Nagel, Medieval Modern. Art out of Time (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012), p. 132.
Selected bibliography Art in Federal Buildings. An Illustrated Record of the Treasury Department New Program in Painting and Sculpture (Washington, D.C.: Art in Federal Buildings Inc., 1936). Berenson, B. The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press – Humphrey Milford, 1938). Bruce, E. ‘Implications of the Public Works of Art Project’. American Magazine of Art 27:3 (March 1934): 113–15. Cortesini, S. ‘Depicting National Identities in New Deal America and Fascist Italy: Government Sponsored Murals’. In H.-J. Czech and N. Doll (eds), Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen 1930–1945 (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2007), pp. 36–47. Dows, O. ‘The New Deal’s Treasury Art Programs: a memoir’. Arts in Society 2:4 (1963?): 50–88. Mayerson, C. L. Shadow and Light. The Life, Friends and Opinions of Maurice Sterne (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965). Muir, E. ‘The Italian Renaissance in America’. American Historical Review 100:4 (1995): 1095–118. Musher, S. A. Democratic Art: New Deal Influence on American Culture. (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Rubenstein, L. ‘Fresco painting today’. American Scholar 4:4 (Autumn 1935): 418–27. Watson, F. ‘The artist becomes a citizen’. The Forum 91:5 (May 1934): 277–9.
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Eterna primavera: Catherine Viviano, Irene Brin, and Italian art’s conquest of Hollywood Raffaele Bedarida
In a key scene from Robert Aldrich’s 1955 American science-fiction drama Kiss Me Deadly, right before the grand finale, the private detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) breaks into a commercial art gallery, the fictional Mist’s Gallery of Modern Art in Los Angeles. He is looking for information about a complicated case involving multiple murders and an enigmatic box, the contents of which are said to be precious and dangerous. Hammer wants to interrogate the gallery owner, William Mist, whose apartment is located above the exhibition. It’s night and Hammer walks furtively through the dimly lit galleries. His gaze (hence ours) focuses on the art on display, slowly moving through a room filled with works by Marino Marini, Afro Basaldella, Giorgio Morandi, Franco Gentilini, and Massimo Campigli (Figure 12.1). Hammer is so absorbed by the act of looking that he bumps into a coffee table, and the noise alerts the art dealer, Mr Mist, who frantically swallows a mouthful of sleeping pills to avoid the detective’s interrogation. The plot of Kiss Me Deadly had nothing to do with contemporary Italian art, so why did Aldrich choose an exhibit of Italian modernism for his movie? How was modern Italian art perceived by the American public at the time? Did the Italians play an active role in this story? Aldrich’s movie was part of a larger phenomenon involving the emerging interest in and market for contemporary Italian art in the United States, a cultural trend that helped change the perception of Italy in the 1950s. During the first decade after World War II, known as the Reconstruction period, Italy appeared to the world as an impoverished and devastated country. But starting in the mid-1950s, as the national economy expanded and a large portion of the country transformed into a consumer society, a new façade emerged – the so-called ‘new Italy’ – which signalled a modern glamour and international sophistication. Contemporary art, I will argue, played a crucial role in shaping and changing Italy’s international image beyond the art world. During the first half of the 1950s, the fortunes of contemporary Italian artists improved significantly in the United States. In 1949, MoMA curators Alfred H. Barr, Jr and James Thrall Soby organised the first postwar show dedicated to twentieth-century Italian art. They regarded Italian modernism as unjustly overshadowed by contemporary French art on the one hand and Italian antiquity on the other.1
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Figure 12.1. Film still from Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich (director), 1955, featuring paintings by (from left to right) Afro Basaldella, Giorgio Morandi, and Franco Gentilini.
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The courses of empire Following in the museum’s footsteps, gallerists Catherine Viviano and Irene Brin helped launch Italian modernism in the United States. Both women exhibited the work of contemporary Italian artists in their New York galleries, and at times travelled these shows throughout the country. By the mid-1950s, the Hollywood movie Kiss Me Deadly indicated that the prestige and visibility of Italian modernist art was high and on the increase due to a constellation of exhibitions held in commercial and non-commercial spaces in major cities, on college campuses, and in art centres across the country. In addition, the work of Italian artists like Afro, Campigli, Marini, and Morandi reached a wide American public through more popular venues, such as Hollywood movies, fashion magazines, interior design stores, and television shows. In fact, Aldrich shot his famous gallery scene in Irene Brin’s (and her husband’s) exhibition Eterna Primavera, which was conveniently on view at the Frank Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills in 1954. All this stood for a new, transformed image of Italy. Barr and Soby had initiated this process. The 1949 exhibition that they curated at MoMA, Twentieth-Century Italian Art, had a twofold effect. First, it rehabilitated Italian modernism by emphasising the pre-Fascist moment: the show identified Amedeo Modigliani as well as the artists of early Futurism and Arte Metafisica as major contributors to modern European art before Mussolini took power in 1922. Second, the show promoted the concept of a new artistic Renaissance in Italy after the fall of Mussolini by featuring a diversity of stylistic tendencies, which revived various modernist traditions: the expressionist painting of the Scuola Romana, the neo-cubist abstraction of Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, the magic realism of the so-called ‘Fantasts’, and the modernist sculpture of Marini and Giacomo Manzù. Although most of the artists promoted in the show had, in fact, worked and thrived under Mussolini, MoMA’s anti-Fascist narrative was well received and widely embraced on both sides of the Atlantic.2 Twentieth-Century Italian Art succeeded in fostering both an interest in and a market for contemporary Italian art in the United States. Immediately after the show, Curt Valentin, the owner of the Buchholz Gallery in New York and an authority on the European sculpture market, started a long-lasting collaboration with Marini.3 As early as May 1950, Life magazine celebrated his commercial success with a piece titled ‘Marino Marini: sculptor from Italy becomes a US best seller’.4 Even more significant for her systematic effort to promote Italian art was the activity of the Italian-American art dealer Catherine Viviano.5 A former assistant of Pierre Matisse, Viviano opened her own gallery on 57th Street in 1950, not far from MoMA, dedicated to the promotion of contemporary art from her country of origin. Writing to the Italian artists with whom she wished to collaborate, she promised ‘to do for Italian art what Pierre Matisse has done for Modern French art here in America’, and indeed the gallery became a showcase of postwar Italian art for two decades.6 Most of the artists initially invited by Viviano had participated in the 1949 MoMA show. In particular, Corrado Cagli helped her establish an artistic network. A queer Jewish artist, Cagli left Fascist Italy in 1939, migrated to the United States,
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Italian art’s conquest of Hollywood and fought the war in Europe with the US Army. In the immediate postwar years, as he travelled between New York and Rome, Cagli played an important role as a cultural liaison, introducing Viviano to a milieu of artists who had been involved in the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti movement: Renato Guttuso and the two Basaldella brothers, Afro and Mirko in Rome (the latter was married to Cagli’s sister, Serena), Ennio Morlotti in Milan, and Armando Pizzinato in Venice.7 Viviano had first-hand access to the postwar Italian art scene by travelling regularly to Italy (almost every summer) and by having various Italian magazines and catalogues sent to her gallery in New York. She presented herself as the legitimate heir to the most important galleries exhibiting Italian modernism in New York before the war. With help from Cagli and his friend Elsie Rieti, Viviano took over Julien Levy’s exhibition space. Mostly famous for having exhibited surrealism in the United States, Levy was one of the few gallerists to exhibit Italian modernism on a regular basis: he gave solo shows to Campigli (1931, 1936, and 1939), Giorgio de Chirico (1936 and 1937), Leonor Fini (1936 and 1939), as well as Cagli (1940).8 Mimì Pecci-Blunt, to whom Viviano owed a great debt, was another important Italian gallerist. In fact, most of the artists initially invited by Viviano to join her stable – Afro, Cagli, Guttuso, Mirko, Morandi, and Fausto Pirandello – had exhibited before the war at Pecci-Blunt’s Comet Gallery, the New York branch of her Galleria della Cometa in Rome. By exclusively showing Italian artists in her New York space, Pecci-Blunt had attempted to make an ‘Italian School’ accepted as an alternative to the École de Paris, facilitating the 1950s cultural exchange between Italy and the United States.9 Partly compromised by Fascist cultural diplomacy and partly redeemed by the censorship of the same regime, the Comet gallery could not be acknowledged explicitly in the years immediately following the fall of Mussolini, but it could provide a source of inspiration to Viviano.10 Pecci-Blunt defined a field of operation and a vocabulary for a kind of modernism which could be marketed as specifically Italian. While at the same time internationally recognised, it was rooted in a national tradition that was not excessively chauvinistic. Another major influence on Viviano was the Italian art historian and critic Lionello Venturi, who as an anti-Fascist activist had spent the war years in the United States. Returning to Italy in 1945, he was widely regarded as the most authoritative figure in Italian art criticism and the most vocal supporter of Italy’s cultural exchange with the United States. His collaboration with Viviano was crucial to the gallery’s direction and programming: he would regularly recommend artists, discuss curatorial choices for individual shows, and contribute critical essays for her catalogues and other publications. From day one, even before the gallery opened, Venturi was an important interlocutor for Viviano, encouraging her to support a type of painting that he called ‘astratto-concreto’, for which he functioned as a theorist, spokesperson, and promoter. These artists, he believed, drew inspiration from prewar European avant-gardes in order to overcome the ideologically charged binary of abstraction and figuration, which had come to dominate postwar discourse. He introduced Viviano to one of his top protégés, Renato Birolli, and encouraged her to exhibit the entire group of ‘gli otto’, a formation of eight artists embodying his ‘astratto-concreto’ ideas.11
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The courses of empire Although Viviano availed herself of the network, advice, and know-how of her Italian colleagues, she actively protected her professional autonomy, eschewing the factionalism of the Italian contemporary art scene. From her experience with the Matisse Gallery, she knew the United States art market and adopted the role of cultural translator. For example, she strenuously defended her decision to inaugurate the gallery with the show Five Italian Painters, dedicated to the work of Afro, Cagli, Guttuso, Morlotti, and Pizzinato, rather than having the eight-artist formation as packaged by Venturi.12 And soon after the gallery’s inauguration, she replaced Cagli with Afro as her consultant and the main cultural bridge between the gallery and the contemporary art scene in Italy. Afro became one of the stars of the Viviano Gallery too: not only was he the most frequently exhibited artist, with an average of a solo show every other year from the opening of her gallery in 1950 to its closure in 1968, but he was also the one who, largely thanks to Viviano’s guidance, managed to engage most fully with the American art system, receiving major success among US critics, museums, and the market alike. 13 In addition to the art market, the 1949 MoMA show set the tone for the US critical reception of Italian art in the 1950s. In line with the Cold War rhetoric of the Marshall Plan years, the exhibit promoted the idea of a new Renaissance in Italian art, following the fall of Fascism in 1945 and the defeat of Communism in the political elections of 1948. As Italy transitioned in American mainstream media from Fascist enemy to an ally and a protégé country under NATO auspices, Twentieth-Century Italian Art helped redeem the country and its inhabitants by showing an image of national destruction and human suffering. The implicit message was that the Italian people were the victims of Fascism and the war. This idea was visualised on the catalogue cover by a mutilated and almost dead tree trunk sprouting the leaves of a new life as designed by Italian-American graphic designer George Giusti. Images of destruction could be seen in the MoMA galleries as well in the works by the show’s youngest artist, Renzo Vespignani. Like Vespignani’s Ruined building, they depicted a ruined and impoverished country, which was slowly re-emerging from the destruction of war (Figure 12.2). The redemptive visual rhetoric of Italy in rubble was ubiquitous, well beyond MoMA. It reached the American general public both through mass media and the film industry, from the reportage of Life magazine to neorealist movies, which had become more and more successful in the United States. This image of ruination, in addition to depicting the actual conditions of destruction and trauma in Italy in the aftermath of World War II, had a convenient effect: that of erasing the past – especially the most problematic final years of Fascism.14 A second rhetorical trope pervaded the austere years of the Reconstruction in Italy. A dignified poverty and humility defined the semantic sphere of absolution, embodied by the figure of Saint Francis of Assisi, whose popularity peaked in the early 1950s and reconciled the two main political/ideological forces of postwar Italy, Marxism and Catholicism.15 In the United States, this language translated into an emphasis on the purported work ethic of the Italians: the recurrent image here was of the impoverished yet ingenious Italian people working hard to reconstruct the
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Italian art’s conquest of Hollywood
Figure 12.2. Renzo Vespignani, Ruined building, 1946, ink on paper, Museum of Modern Art, New York
country (with the help of the Marshall Plan and the containment of Communism). Exhibitions such as Handicraft as Fine Art in Italy (1948) and, especially, Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today (1950) promoted exactly this kind of message.16 Opening at the Brooklyn Museum in 1951, Italy at Work travelled for more than three years to major museums in the United States and Canada. Commercially successful and widely covered by the American press during its tour, the exhibition has often been heralded as the impetus behind America’s awareness of Italian design and its international success in the late 1950s and 1960s.17 By exhibiting the traditional carretto siciliano (a hand-painted handcart) and the latest model of a Lambretta (a motor scooter) side by side, Italy at Work pointed to the Italians’ collective effort to reconnect tradition and modernity across the Fascist ‘parenthesis’ with the help of the Marshall Plan. The reception of contemporary Italian art in the United States during the early 1950s was deeply affected by this interpretive framework. Most predictably, Soby would describe Vespignani’s images of Rome’s impoverished outskirts as a ‘delicate yet piercing commentary on post-war Italy, with its heritage of destruction and melancholy’ (Figure 12.2).18 But a similar tone would apply to most of contemporary
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The courses of empire Italian art, whatever its stylistic affiliation or subject matter. When Marini debuted at Valentin’s gallery, for example, a Time magazine critic wrote: ‘Marini’s sculpture celebrates humility, awkwardness and sorrow – plus dogged endurance’.19 Non-representational paintings too would be seen as unequivocal responses to the trauma of war. For instance, when Viviano exhibited Afro’s Lest we forget II, critic Emily Genauer (who purchased the painting from Viviano) wrote that the ‘twisted barbedwire kind of line that loops through the composition suggests memories of war or its aftermath’ (Plate 27).20 In other words, she chose to overlook the deliberate ambiguity of Afro’s abstracted image in favour of an unequivocal traumatic and war-related interpretation. Alberto Burri’s Sacchi, a series of abstract paintings made out of burlap sacks and other types of fabrics, which the artist sewed and stitched together, received a similar reception. The first monograph on the artist, penned in 1955 by James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, underscored such themes as poverty and the wounds of war with a redemptive tone: ‘Burri transmutes rubbish into a metaphor for human, bleeding flesh. He vitalizes the dead materials in which he works, makes them live and bleed; then sews up the wounds.’21 Simultaneously, however, a different image of Italy emerged – one which would dominate the second half of the 1950s. The 1955 show The New Decade: 22 Painters and Sculptors, organised by Andrew Ritchie at MoMA, signalled the shift of tone at an institutional level. The exhibition presented artists such as Afro and Burri through a new, optimistic, and forward-looking lens: ‘A new decade of hope’, as Ritchie called it.22 If the first postwar decade looked backwards and dealt with the memory of the recent past (if only to erase it), Ritchie’s show now placed a new emphasis on the present and the possibilities it opened for the future. In addition, The New Decade replaced the old emphasis on Italian cultural nationalism with an internationalist message by presenting the Italians in the larger context of Western-European art. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, another show opened simultaneously bearing an almost identical title: The New Decade: 35 American Painters and Sculptors. The exhibits, with a special emphasis on the European Art Informel and the American Abstract Expressionist movements respectively, toured together to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Art, encouraging visitors to compare the latest trends on the two continents. The MoMA exhibition, in fact, embraced this more optimistic message and marketing strategy, which private dealers had patiently been constructing through the years. Viviano had been working meticulously to establish a reputation for herself and her artists in American institutions through collaborations with influential museum curators and directors, among them Ritchie and Sweeney. But, above all, it was the owners of the Galleria dell’Obelisco in Rome, Irene Brin and her husband Gaspero Del Corso, who most successfully created this new image for Italy and Italian art. Brin and Del Corso did not limit themselves to traditional methods, such as opening exhibition spaces in the United States, like the Obelisk Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Sagittarius in New York.23 Their most innovative strategy wed art and fashion, benefiting from Brin’s role as a fashion critic and journalist. Starting in
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Italian art’s conquest of Hollywood 1952, she was the Roman editor of the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar and played an important and widely acknowledged role as a creator and promoter of the ‘Made in Italy’ fashion brand abroad.24 The function of contemporary art in her promotional operation, however, deserves closer historical attention. There is no doubt that Brin and Del Corso both encouraged and benefited from the redemptive tone described above (after all, it was they who published Sweeney’s monograph and compared a Burri to a St Francis relic). However, through the juxtaposition of art and fashion, Brin introduced a new tone of glamour and desirability for these same artworks, associating Italian fashion with the status of high culture and prestige traditionally assigned to the fine arts. The first initiative of this kind was the exhibition titled Twenty Imaginary Views of the American Scene by Twenty Young Italian Artists, which L’Obelisco organised in collaboration with Helena Rubinstein, an art collector and a cosmetics and fashion tycoon. Brin and Del Corso convinced Rubinstein to commission twenty Italian artists represented by L’Obelisco to each paint a view of America. After its initial showing in Rome, the collection toured the United States, receiving media attention, especially in the fashion world, thanks to the celebrity status of Rubinstein.25 As reported in Vogue, the paintings in the show were imaginary visions, as most of the artists had never travelled to the United States.26 Rather than imagining the United States as a real country, the artists depicted an America which was filtered through popular culture, such as movies, advertisements, illustrated magazines, and music. Some artists, significantly, mixed their fictional America with Italian elements: they ended up representing something in between an Americanised Italy and an Italianised America. Franco Gentilini depicted a dreamlike Brooklyn Bridge, which he knew from American advertisements, as he declared. But his depiction of New York architecture closely resembled the Italian cathedrals Gentilini was best known for. Nino Caffè painted Baseball, a quintessentially American sport. The game, however, involved not only the usual players in white uniforms but also ‘an energetic group of priests’, all dressed in black cassocks. Bruno Caruso painted an Ice cream vendor in Brooklyn wearing a harlequin costume. Even Afro and Burri, who had previously visited the United States, did not refer to their personal experience in the country. Afro, who had travelled to New York in 1950 on the occasion of his show at the Viviano Gallery, depicted Chicago, a city that he knew only from gangster movies, and described this abstract painting as a ‘mass of violent, plunging verticals’. And Alberto Burri, who had started his career as a painter when he was a prisoner of war in Hereford, Texas, titled one of his burlap paintings Jazz, the American music that conquered Europe in the early 1950s.27 The show introduced two important strategies that would become dominant during Italy’s economic boom: it gave contemporary Italian art a glamorous character through its association with fashion, and it envisioned an imaginary cultural space influenced by both Italian and American elements, so that Roman Catholic clergy and baseball games, commedia dell’arte and jazz, mafia and skyscrapers would mix and melt in one big pot.28 Brin used her position at Harper’s Bazaar to promote the artists of her gallery and their activities, not only through articles dedicated to them, such as ‘Roman
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The courses of empire painters of the Galleria l’Obelisco’, featuring photographs of Del Corso with artists Burri and Caruso, but also, more importantly, through fashion photography. This was not unique or new, as can be seen in similar cases with Jackson Pollock (Vogue, 1951) and Franz Kline (Harper’s Bazaar, 1954).29 Thanks to Brin, however, the Italians appeared more often and in greater numbers. Whereas Abstract Expressionist paintings functioned merely as backdrops for these fashion shoots, the works by the Italian artists of L’Obelisco were acknowledged by the models, and their art was incorporated into the narrative frame. For example, in Richard Avedon’s photographs in Harper’s, the erotically charged Horse sculptures by Marini point their head towards the curves of thin models, whose gestures engage with the sculpture either by seducing or rejecting them ( June 1952) (Figure 12.3). In another shot, a Marini Horse and rider is placed in a lush country landscape and the model joins the sculpture for a ride (May 1953).30 An especially significant case was that of Burri, whose sacchi, exhibited at the Stable Gallery in New York, functioned as a photographic backdrop for models in an autumn clothing line for a September 1955 issue of Harper’s (Plate 28). The
Figure 12.3. Richard Avedon, fashion photo with sculpture by Marino Marini, Harper’s Bazaar ( June 1952): 74
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Italian art’s conquest of Hollywood difference between this interpretation of Burri’s work and the one given by art critics in the same period is striking. For the latter, Burri’s work had evoked war trauma and Franciscan poverty, as in the Sweeney monograph, but the fashion photographs exuded a sophisticated elegance, highlighting the earth tones of both the clothes and the paintings as appropriate colours for the upcoming season. On the one hand Sweeney emphasised the tension between repulsion and erotic seduction in Burri’s tactility: burlap canvases evoked the rough surface of Franciscan clothes rubbing against one’s body or farmers’ sacks holding the earth’s produce; the work’s cuts, stitches, and holes suggested wounds, scars, and orifices.31 On the other hand, through Brin’s new marketing strategy in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, a gloved model caressed the surface of Burri’s work, anaesthetising its rough tactile quality and neutralising any unpleasant feeling. By doing so, the tactile effect of the work was negated twice. First, the haptic sense in a painting (a combination of represented and actual textures) is traditionally activated in the beholder by the impossibility of actually touching the painted image, but Harper’s photo reverses this sensation by showing someone in the act of physically touching the painting’s surface. Second, the photograph frustrates that represented sensory experience by covering the touching hand with a glove. In the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, Burri’s seams and stitches no longer evoked war wounds, but they pointed more directly towards the sartorial skills behind the advertised clothes. A fashion magazine and an artist’s monograph operate in different contexts and have different objectives, and Brin understood that very well in her rebranding of Italian art in the 1950s. Harper’s Bazaar was a significant platform for the creation of a modern and sophisticated taste in the 1950s, in the fashion world and beyond. Some of the most influential art critics of the time contributed important articles to the magazine: Barr wrote on Frederick Kiesler as a sculptor (rather than his better-known activity as an architect); Clement Greenberg discussed Pollock’s figurative turn in real time; and Sweeney reported on young artists active in Paris before they achieved notoriety in the United States. In the same pages, some of the most celebrated photographers, such as Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Avedon, blurred the boundaries between fashion, photojournalism, and fine art. Moreover, it was in Harper’s Bazaar, during the same years, that Andy Warhol started his career as a commercial artist. Brin was perfectly aware of the podium she was using and the radicality of this strategy.32 In that context, she consciously worked to construct a sophisticated and international identity for Italy, within which art was an important ingredient but not the only one. Brin and Del Corso promoted cultural dialogue through an extensive artistic exchange, and consistently invited American artists to exhibit at L’Obelisco. They were especially proud of having hosted the first solo shows in Italy of Saul Steinberg (1951), Robert Rauschenberg (1953), Carlyle Brown (1954), and Arshile Gorky (1957). They also encouraged the Italian artists in their stable to collaborate with American galleries and cooperate directly with American art critics and institutions. In particular, L’Obelisco was the first Italian gallery to partner with the New Yorkbased American Federation of Arts (AFA), which played a significant role in gaining recognition for contemporary Italian artists throughout the United States.
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The courses of empire During the 1950s, the AFA frequently worked as a mediator between the Italian organisers of exhibitions and AFA members, including American museums, universities, and other cultural institutions interested in hosting them. The organisers would put the exhibit together and ship it to the United States at their expense; the AFA would then travel the show to its various venues, taking care of the logistics, such as insuring the artworks and mediating eventual sales.33 The AFA programme circulated their shows not only to important museums in major cities, but also to universities, small exhibition spaces, and private galleries throughout the United States and Canada, a characteristic that attracted Brin and Del Corso, who desired to reach a broader public than regular museum-goers and art collectors. Initiated in 1952 by Viviano with the show Five Contemporary Italians, the collaboration with the AFA was brought to a new level by Brin and Del Corso. Their shows Eterna Primavera: Young Italian Painters (1954) and Major Works, Minor Scale (1955–57) aimed at penetrating new art markets and initiating new collectors into contemporary Italian art.34 The goal was to reach a glamourous, wealthy public beyond the art centres on the east coast. They were especially interested in the Hollywood crowd, who had money and could influence the entire nation. Eterna Primavera opened in Cincinnati, toured the United States, and reached the Frank Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills in November 1954, at which point Robert Aldrich shot the gallery scene in Kiss Me Deadly. Begun in the mid-1950s, Brin’s marketing strategy aimed at Hollywood yielded remarkable results within a few years. Both Brin and Del Corso masterfully orchestrated the way contemporary Italian art entered the public conversation and the cultural role it played, presenting Italian artists as signifying a higher degree of cultural sophistication to Hollywood collectors. Modern Italian art was less expensive and recognisable than the French modern masters, but served finer palates. By 1958, the Pasadena Art Museum could organise a major survey of Italian modernism titled The New Italian Renaissance, which largely consisted of loans from Hollywood collections. Actor and producer Kirk Douglas loaned a painting by Campigli, two by Sironi, and a sculpture by Marini; actor Vincent Price gave a painting by Afro; agent Henry C. Rogers lent an Afro; actor Rex Evans gave a Filippo De Pisis, a Campigli, and a drawing by Gino Severini; producer Harry Lenart loaned a sculpture by Marini, two paintings by Morandi, and one by Campigli; author Max Benoff lent two paintings by Edmondo Bacci, one by Capogrossi, one by Crippa, and one by Dova; screenwriter Michael Blankfort gave a sculpture by Emilio Greco, director Norman Panama a sculpture by Marini, producer Harold Hecht a painting by Amedeo Modigliani, and actor Sam Jaffe a painting by Morandi. The effects of Brin’s professional endeavours were felt across the country. In 1957, television producer Herbert Mayer founded the World House Galleries in Manhattan, a 6,900-square-feet space designed by Frederick Kiesler that showed Italian art which was described by the New Yorker as of ‘museum proportion’.35 Even Viviano marvelled at the unexpected degree of prestige and visibility that contemporary Italian art had gained. She wrote to Afro delightedly:
Italian art’s conquest of Hollywood
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Now, your name is always mentioned among the most prominent contemporary painters, and last week one of your paintings was shown on one of the most popular TV programs, that of Ed Murrow [on CBS], who interviewed Vincent Price in his home. Vincent showed your painting and said: ‘This is a painting made by the great contemporary Italian artist, Afro.’ And so tens of millions of people saw your paintings and heard these words!36
Hollywood’s growing interest in everything Italian was happening concurrently, as collaborations between Hollywood and Cinecittà increased exponentially during the 1950s. (The arc from initial euphoria to critique and decadence was documented in film by William Wyler in Roman Holiday (1953) and by Federico Fellini in La Dolce Vita (1960).) Given this context, Italian art had a specific function within Kiss Me Deadly. In the movie, the protagonist, Mr Hammer, is a simple-minded guy who fails as a private detective because he is not able to see beyond his own materialistic motivations – money and sex.37 He, therefore, cannot accept that people would risk their lives chasing after a box without knowing its contents. Similarly, it appears that every time Hammer encounters high culture, it ends up badly. Film critic Christopher Sharrett described Hammer as an ‘American postliterate consumer’.38 The Italian paintings that Hammer sees in the gallery – significantly owned by someone called Mist – stand for something incomprehensible to him. Unlike the paintings in his apartment, which he considers as ‘merely’ decorative, these artworks signify in an elusive way: they are as opaque as the uncooperative dealer himself. Unlike the posters of Henri Matisse and other famous modernists that are also in the gallery but fail to attract Hammer’s curiosity, the Italian pieces hold his attention, but elude his middlebrow taste. More significant was the case of Billy Wilder. An important collector of modern European art, he also collected the Italian artists promoted by the Obelisco: Marini, Campigli, Caruso, Morandi, and Greco, whose works he utilised as signifiers of status within his movies. In Figure 12.4, a photograph of Billy Wilder at home in Los Angeles, taken in 1960 by photographer Dennis Stock, there are recognisable artworks such as Marini’s sculpture Piccolo cavaliere (1948), seen in the movie Sabrina, and Campigli’s painting Mondariso (1958), from The Apartment. In Sabrina (1954), the contrast between Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn), who is the daughter of the chauffeur of the Larrabees, a wealthy family in Long Island, New York, and the Larrabees’ first-born, Linus (Humphrey Bogart), is emphasised – among other things – by the family’s art collection, and especially by the Italian moderns. The Italian works appear both in passing, as when Linus shaves in front of a landscape painting by Carlo Carrà, and in important scenes such as the conversation between Sabrina and Linus, in which the impossibility of their love, across an insurmountable class divide, is materialised by a Marini sculpture. Wilder’s camera repeatedly frames Sabrina’s body in such a way that the pointed head of Marini’s horse in the background looks like a weapon aimed at Sabrina’s thin long neck in the foreground. The image emphasises Sabrina’s social as well as sexual vulnerability. In The Apartment (1960), Wilder utilised again artworks by Italian artists as signifiers of class and power disparity. The protagonist, ‘Bud’ Baxter ( Jack Lemmon),
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Figure 12.4. Dennis Stock, Billy Wilder at home in Los Angeles, CA, 1960, with Marino Marini sculpture and Massimo Campigli painting
is a white-collar employee of a Manhattan corporation, who lends his apartment to his bosses for their extra-marital affairs. Baxter’s apartment is a claustrophobic, dark environment decorated with cheap posters reproducing works by Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso. The CEO’s office, in contrast, is a spacious interior with stunning views of New York’s skyline, featuring original pieces by Italian artists, such as Arnaldo Pomodoro, Bruno Caruso, and Campigli. As in Aldrich’s movie, the contrast is not only between cheap reproductions and the original artworks, but also between easily recognisable artists in the employee’s house (middlebrow taste) and the lesser-known Italian names in the boss’s office (highbrow taste), signifying a higher degree of sophistication. By the late 1950s, Italy was experiencing such a transformative economic boom that mass media called it a miracle, miracolo economico. The international image of the country and its cultural production was radically different from the image of poverty and destruction that dominated in the immediate postwar moment. In
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Italian art’s conquest of Hollywood addition to the interpretive shift, the role of contemporary art in the construction of an international image for Italy had become more and more important and now had a trendsetting position. In 1958, Brin wrote about this shift when she was invited to contribute an essay to a special issue on Italy for the American magazine Atlantic Monthly. She wrote: ‘[Italy owed] much of its initial popularity in the postwar years to fashion. Today the position is somewhat reversed, and Italian fashion undoubtedly owes part of its popularity to the enthusiasm abroad for grissini bread-sticks and Parmesan cheese, Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani, the sculpture of Marini and Manzù.’39 Brin’s passage was significant for two main reasons: first, she stressed the prominent role played by contemporary art in reshaping the image of the ‘new Italy’ (although her text was dedicated to fashion); second, by juxtaposing the sculpture of Marini and Manzù with gourmet food and cinema stars, Brin advertised how the image of Italy had changed since the immediate postwar period, when she and her husband began their activity as art dealers. She described that period: ‘We had been defeated and we were poor, penitent, and without justification.’40 Merely a decade prior felt, in her words, like a different era. In 1955, the Italian government awarded her the honourary title of Cavaliere Ufficiale dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana for her contribution to the ‘international affirmation of Italian fashion’;41 and in 1958, her writings appeared in the Atlantic Monthly special issue on Italy alongside texts by the Italian prime minister, Amintore Fanfani, and other major members of the Italian intelligentsia.42 Brin was officially recognised and celebrated as a cultural ambassador of a ‘new Italy’. Through the examples of Catherine Viviano and Irene Brin, we have seen how contemporary Italian art significantly changed the perception of Italy in the United States. In the ten years after the fall of Fascism, Italy was transformed from an enemy to an ally. Aided in part by Marshall Plan money, a destroyed, backward country became a thriving, consumer society. Through the postwar MoMA shows and, especially, the initiatives of Catherine Viviano, contemporary Italian art facilitated the rehabilitation of post-Fascist Italy at a highbrow cultural level. The activities of Irene Brin and Gaspero Del Corso, in addition to other art institutions and collectors, reached a wider American public through their marketing and mass-media strategies, setting the tone for Italy’s new image during the economic boom of the late 1950s. Instead of the redemptive, penitent rhetoric of the immediate postwar period, Italy’s transformation into a consumer society helped fabricate a glamourous and international ‘made in Italy’ cultural product. Although by the early 1960s, US collectors and art institutions started to lose interest in Italian modernism as they became more and more focused on the domestic art scene, the promotional effort left a long-lasting mark. If major museums in the United States still have Italian modernism in their collections, it is largely due to the acquisitions of the 1950s, which continue to shape the perception of modern Italy in this country.43 Acknowledgements. For their feedback on previous versions of this essay, my thanks to the audiences at the Center for Italian Modern Art, New York; the Department of Italian Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson; and the conference ‘The Course of Empire’, Smithsonian American Art
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The courses of empire Museum, Washington, D.C. A shorter version of this essay was previously published in Italian in the exhibition catalogue New York New York. Arte Italiana. La Riscoperta dell’America, F. Tedeschi (ed.) (Milan: Electa/Mondadori, 2017), pp. 117–26. In particular, I want to thank Emily Braun, Heather Ewing, Franco Baldasso, and Francesco Tedeschi for their invaluable comments on previous versions of this text, as well as Melissa Dabakis and Paul Kaplan for their insightful suggestions. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
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Notes 1 A. H. Barr, Jr and J. T. Soby, Twentieth-Century Italian Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949), p. 5. 2 R. Bedarida, ‘Operation Renaissance: Italian art at MoMA, 1940–1949’, Oxford Art Journal 35:2 ( June 2012): 147–69. See also D. Colombo, ‘1949: Twentieth-Century Italian Art al MoMA di New York’, in F. Tedeschi (ed.), New York New York. Arte Italiana. La Riscoperta dell’America (Milano: Electa/Mondadori. 2017), pp. 102–9. A multifaceted discussion of the consequences of the exhibition was conducted on the occasion of the conference, ‘Methodologies of Exchange: MoMA’s Twentieth-Century Italian Art’, which I co-chaired with Silvia Bignami and Davide Colombo. The symposium was held at the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) in New York on 12 February 2019. CIMA’s journal, Italian Modern Art, dedicated a monographic issue to the topic, edited by the conference co-chairs: see S. Bignami, R. Bedarida, and D. Colombo (eds), ‘Methodologies of exchange: MoMA’s “Twentieth-Century Italian Art” (1949)’, Italian Modern Art 3 ( January 2020). 3 On the Valentin–Marini collaboration see T. Meucci, ‘Marino Marini e Curt Valentin: la fortuna dello scultore in America’, Quaderni di Scultura Contemporanea 8 (October 2008): 6–21. 4 ‘Marino Marini: sculptor from Italy becomes a US best seller’, Life (22 May 1950): 99. Between 1953 and 1954, Valentin had working relationships with other Italian artists, whose work he acquired and exhibited: Bruno Cassinari, Giacomo Manzù, and Giorgio Morandi. None of them, however, exhibited with Valentin with the same consistency and success as Marini. On the commercial success of Marini in the United States, see A. Gamble, ‘Buying Marini: The American Market for Italian Art after World War II’, in S. Hecker and M. Sullivan (eds), Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’ (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 155–72. 5 Scans of her 1901 immigration papers are available at www.ellisisland.org (accessed 10 July 2013). See also ‘Catherine Viviano, 92, art dealer and expert’, The New York Times (9 January 1992): L D 23. 6 Original: ‘per lungo tempo ho avuto in mente l’intenzione di stabilire una galleria con l’intento di fare per l’arte italiana ciò che ha fatto Pierre Matisse per l’arte francese moderna qui in America’. This was the text of a standard letter that Viviano sent to Afro Basaldella, Corrado Cagli, Renato Guttuso, Mirko Basaldella, Giorgio Morandi, and Fausto Pirandello in February–March 1950. Catherine Viviano Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. 7 Although the Basaldella brothers were not official members of the movement, they were part of the same milieu and repeatedly exhibited as affiliates of the group. See A. Duran, Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 25, 99. On Cagli’s role as a cultural bridge in the postwar moment, see R. Bedarida, Corrado Cagli: la pittura, l’esilio, l’America (Roma: Donzelli, 2018). 8 All shows except Cagli’s are listed and documented in I. Schaffner and L. Jacobs (eds), Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). I have documented the Cagli exhibition in Corrado Cagli, pp. 100–1. 9 Not all of the artists contacted by Viviano in fact exhibited with her. For example, Morandi declined her invitation. Mirko, a sculptor, did not exhibit at the inaugural show, but had a solo show at the gallery later on in 1950. Contacted as early as in 1949, Pirandello exhibited at the Viviano Gallery only in 1955. 10 Within the cultural landscape of Fascist Italy in the late 1930s, the Cometa supported a progressive, internationalist exhibition programme and facilitated collaborations across disciplines, by inviting
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Italian art’s conquest of Hollywood
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poets, architects, musicians, and visual artists to converse and cooperate while promoting a version of Italian humanist culture that appealed to the Italian Minister of Education, Giuseppe Bottai, but repelled conservatives such as Roberto Farinacci, a pro-Nazi journalist and member of the Italian Parliament. By promoting in painting a kind of soft expressionism that she called ‘tonalism’ and a type of magic realism that she called ‘metafisica-inspired’, Pecci-Blunt intentionally avoided terms borrowed from non-Italian art movements yet alluded to her artists’ openness to major international avant-gardes. For a historical overview of the Cometa, see L. Chiavazzi (ed.), Una Collezionista e Mecenate Romana: Anna Laetitia Pecci-Blunt (Roma: Edizioni Carte Segrete, 1992). The entire collection of catalogues published by the Cometa is available in reprint in G. Appella (ed.), Galleria della Cometa: I Cataloghi dal 1935 al 1938 (Roma: Edizioni della Cometa, 1989). On the American activity of the Comet, see S. Cortesini, One Day We Must Meet: Le sfide dell’arte e dell’architettura italiane in America (1933–1941) (Monza: Joan & Levi, 2018), pp. 133–64. See the correspondence between Venturi and Viviano, in the Catherine Viviano Gallery Records, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. When some of her Italian advisers, led by Morlotti, insisted that she had to include the entire formation of eight painters as described in a recent and influential book, Gino Ghiringhelli’s Pittura moderna italiana (1949), Viviano did not object to the critical judgment of Morlotti or Ghiringhelli. More pragmatically, she explained that those names, which bore so much weight in the Italian context, were unfamiliar and hard to absorb for the American public and market. Therefore, she concluded, in an approximate yet eloquent Italian, ‘I do believe that five painters can be exhibited most effectively. Eight would be too many.’ Viviano to Morlotti, 1 November 1949, Catherine Viviano Gallery Records, Folder ‘Ennio Morlotti’. See G. Ghiringhelli, Pittura moderna italiana (Torino: Orengo Turati Editori, 1949). The letters between Afro and Viviano, the originals of which are in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, are also available in a book. B. Drudi (ed.), Afro, Da Roma a New York, 1950–1968 (Siena: Gli Ori, 2008). About Afro’s career in the United States, see G. Belli (ed.), Afro, the American Period (Milan: Electa, 2012). See R. Ben-Ghiat, ‘Liberation: Italian Cinema and the Fascist Past, 1945–50’, in R. J. B. Bosworth and P. Dogliani (eds), Italian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 83–101. See Emily Braun (ed.), Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim, 2015). See E. Dellapiana, ‘Italy creates. Giò Ponti, America and the shaping of the Italian design image’, Res Mobilis 7:8 (2018): 19–48. Curated by Italian critic and historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Handicraft as Fine Art in Italy was held at the House of Italian Handicraft located at 217 East 49th Street, New York. The catalogue was edited by Ragghianti and designed by Bruno Munari. Handicraft as Fine Art in Italy (Florence: CADMA, 1948). The exhibition presented works by thirty-seven artists, craftsmen, and designers, with a selection that was much more forward-looking than the one that MoMA would make one year later. M. R. Rogers (ed.), Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1950). The New York Times (among many others) followed the project assiduously: M. R. Rogers, ‘Italian art works: coming show to feature crafts from abroad’, The New York Times (24 September 1950); ‘New Italian art arrives for tour: 2,500 contemporary works to be on exhibition in our museums for 3 years’, The New York Times (27 November 1950); ‘Art work of Italy to go on exhibition: display opening Wednesday at the Brooklyn Museum comprises 2,500 objects’, The New York Times (27 November 1950). See P. Sparke, ‘The straw donkey: tourist kitsch or proto-design? Craft in Italy, 1945–1960’, Journal of Design History 11:1 (1998): 59–69; and G. Bosoni (ed.), Il Modo Italiano: Italian Design and Avant-Garde in the 20th Century (Milan: Skira, 2006), pp. 69–80. Barr and Soby, Twentieth-Century Italian Art, p. 31. Time (27 February 1950). E. Genauer, ‘Art and artists: European show in New York’, New York Herald Tribune Book Review (4 October 1954). Art historian Davide Colombo found evidence in Viviano’s gallery records that the journalist bought the painting for $300 in 1955. D. Colombo, in Belli, Afro, the American Period, p. 159.
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The courses of empire 21 J. J. Sweeney, Burri (Roma: L’Obelisco, 1955), p. 5. As documented by Megan Fontanella, Sweeney based his work on earlier American critics who had written on Burri in the first half of the 1950s. M. Fontanella, ‘Begun behind Barbed Wire’, in Braun (ed.), Alberto Burri, pp. 92–111. 22 Museum of Modern Art, Press Release N. 45, 11 May 1955, ‘Recent European painting and sculpture on view at museum’, MoMA Archives, New York, 85 (5), folder 1. In addition to Afro and Burri, the Italian section of the show included Giuseppe Capogrossi, Mirko Basaldella, and Luciano Minguzzi. Mirko, Afro and Minguzzi were all represented by Viviano. Capogrossi had proposed his work to Viviano in 1950 with no success. Burri was promoted in the United States by the Stable Gallery in New York as well as by the Galleria dell’Obelisco in Rome (see below). 23 See I. Schiaffini, ‘La Galleria L’Obelisco e il mercato americano dal dopoguerra alla fine degli Anni Cinquanta’, in V. C. Caratozzolo, I. Schiaffini, and C. Zambianchi (eds), Irene Brin, Gaspero Del Corso e la Galleria L’Obelisco (Roma: Drago Publishing, 2018), pp. 133–4. 24 See V. C. Caratozzolo, Irene Brin: Lo stile italiano nella moda (Venice: Marsilio, 2006). 25 The show was featured in Vogue and in Look magazine. ‘Imaginary views of America by Italian painters’, Vogue (15 October 1953): 68–9, 116; ‘Paintings of America commissioned by Helena Rubinstein of young Italian artists who had never been to the USA’, Look (20 October 1953): 98–101. 26 Although Afro and Burri had claimed this to the press, they both had been to America in 1950 (see below). 27 ‘Imaginary views of America by Italian painters’, pp. 68–9, 116. 28 On this, see R. Bedarida, ‘New Decade, New Italy: Afro and the Image of Italy in the United States between Reconstruction and Economic Miracle’, in Belli, Afro, the American Period, pp. 42–53. 29 T. J. Clark, ‘Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction’, in S. Guilbaut (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 172–242. 30 Elsewhere, a large screen decorated with paintings by Salvatore Fiume was used by the models to change their clothes (November 1955); or models playfully emulated the poses of Luciano Minguzzi’s sculptures exhibited in the Viviano Gallery (March 1957). 31 Art historian Emily Braun has compared the power of Burri’s tactilism to the sensual realism of Caravaggio’s Incredulity of St. Thomas – an artist and a subject that experienced a wave of popularity in the early 1950s. Braun, Alberto Burri, pp. 52–7. 32 Brin expressed this awareness in her autobiographical text Irene Brin, L’Italia Esplode. Diario dell’anno 1952, C. Palma (ed.) (Roma: Viella, 2014). 33 See, for example, American Federation of Arts Papers, Exhibition Files: 55–57, Major Work in Minor Scale, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. 34 Eterna Primavera: Young Italian Painters, Contemporary Arts Center of the Cincinnati Art Museum in Cincinnati, OH, 16 October–5 November 1954. The show included Afro, Burri, Caffè, Campigli, Caruso, Clerici, Gentilini, Morandi, Mušič, Pagliacci, Antero Piletti, Pirandello, Russo, and Vespignani. The catalogue was prefaced by Robert H. Luck, Eterna Primavera: Young Italian Painters (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1954). The other supporter of the collaboration was Paul Hyde Bonner, the former American ambassador to Rome and early supporter of the 1949 MoMA show. He was friends with Thomas Messer, director of the AFA and suggested that the latter visit l’Obelisco during his trip to Rome in the autumn of 1954. See Thomas Messer to Paul Hyde Bonner, 23 September 1954. Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., Exhibition Files, 55–7. Major Works, Minor Scale was originally held at l’Obelisco in Rome with a different title: 5 Pittori–5 Scultori. It included three works per artist. The five painters were Nino Caffè, Bruno Caruso, Giordano Falzoni, Antonio Mušič, and Renzo Vespignani; and the sculptors were Pericle Fazzini, Emilio Greco, Giacomo Manzù, Marcello Mascherini, and Luciano Minguzzi. Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., Exhibition Files, 55–7, ‘Documentation’. 35 R. M. Coates, ‘The new Italy’, The New Yorker (23 March 1957): 109. The centrality of Italian art within the World House was made clear right away in the gallery’s first year. As art historian Mary Ann Calo has pointed out, the opening show, The Struggle for New Form (22 January–23 February 1957), showcased early twentieth-century European and American modernism and gave special
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Italian art’s conquest of Hollywood prominence to Futurism within the international context. The second show was a large survey, Italy, The New Vision (1–23 March), which included works by forty contemporary Italian artists. For more information on the World House Galleries, see M. A. Calo, Modernism at the Fringes: Herbert Meyer and the World House Galleries (Hamilton, NY: Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, 2011). 36 Viviano to Afro, 23 October 1958, Archivio Afro, Rome, reproduced in Afro, Catalogo Ragionato. Dai Documenti dell’Archivio Afro (Roma: Dataars, 1997), p. 401. Original: ‘Il tuo nome è ora menzionato sempre coi primissimi pittori contemporanei, e la settimana scorsa un tuo quadro è stato mostrato in uno dei più popolari programmi di television, quello di Ed Murrow che intervistava nella sua abitazione Vincent Price. Vincent ha mostrato il tuo quadro e ha detto “Questo è un quadro fatto dal grande pittore italiano contemporaneo Afro.” Cosi decine di milioni di persone hanno visto il tuo quadro e hanno sentito queste parole!’ 37 Aldrich’s Hammer parodied the American author Mickey Spillane’s fictional character with the same name. 38 Sharrett continued: ‘He breaks phonograph records and knocks over a table after breaking into Mist’s Gallery of Modern Art … He can memorize a poem (it is a clue in the case) but he understands it not at all.’ ‘Kiss Me Deadly reviewed by Christopher Sharrett’, Cineaste, 36:4 (2011), www.cineaste.com/fall2011/kiss-me-deadly-web-exclusive (accessed 10 January 2019). 39 I. Brin, ‘Italian Fashion. The Art and Business of Elegance’, Perspective of Italy, Atlantic Monthly Supplement (New York: Intercultural Publications, 1958), p. 65. 40 Ibid. 41 Caratozzolo, Irene Brin, p. 43. 42 Authors included Giovanni Gronchi, Amintore Fanfani, Guido Piovene, Alberto Moravia, Guido Calogero, Amedeo Maiuri, Elio Vittorini, Lionello Venturi, Bruno Zevi, Vasco Pratolini, Umberto Zanotto Bianco, Fabio Tombari, Corrado Alvaro, Giovanni Grazzini, Irene Brin, Luigi Barzini, Jr., Massimo Mila, Natalia Ginzburg, Aldo Palazzeschi, P. L. Tumiati, Guido Carli, Ruggero Orlando, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Salvatore Quasimodo, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Umberto Saba, and Eugenio Montale. 43 In some cases, the Italian works were sold back to Italian galleries or collectors during the 1960s, but some important collections kept a significant group of Italian works for decades and even up to the present. The paintings seen in the movie Kiss Me Deadly provide a significant sample: Campigli’s painting Gioco del diablo (n. 54–011) was sold in 1955 by L’Obelisco to Chicago collector Nathan Cummings, but by the mid-1960s it was back in Italy, in the collection of Maurizio d’Opaglio in Novara and then bought by the Galleria Marescalchi of Bologna; Morandi’s painting, Natura morta (n. 909 in the Catalogo Generale, 2016) was sold by the Milanese Galleria del Milione to the World House Galleries of New York, but by 1968 it was back in Turin at the Galleria La Bussola and then the collection of R. Morone in the same city. Billy Wilder, on the contrary, kept his Italian works in the collection well after they fell out of fashion and even exhibited them. The 1966 show, A Selection of Paintings, Drawings, Collages and Sculptures from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Billy Wilder, held at The Art Gallery of the University of California, Santa Barbara, included works, among many others, by the Italians Morandi, Giacomo Manzù, Marini, and Arnaldo Pomodoro. In line with the taste of the time, art critic Henry J. Seldis chose to ignore this component of the collection when he wrote in the exhibition catalogue: ‘The director’s chameleonic nature is reflected in many aspects of his art collection. Works by Klee, Kirchner and Jawlensky mirror his Central European youth; Vuillard Picasso, de Stael, Dubuffet and Soulage his life-long admiration for things French; Shahn, Rivers, Cornell and Johnson the genuineness of his Americanisation; Balthus, Schiele, Pascin his sophistication in matters sexual; and Steinberg, Bombois and Vivin his natural alignment with humor.’ In fact, it would not be until 1989 that Wilder sold Marini’s Piccolo cavaliere, seen in the movie Sabrina, his Cardinale by Manzù, and the Piccola bagnante discobola by Emilio Greco (Christie’s New York, 13 November 1989). Campigli’s painting Mondariso (n. 58–001) was still in the collection in 2000, two years before the director’s death. Significant groups of Italian modernist works originally acquired in the 1950s are still part of public collections in the United States. On the donations by Midwestern collectors to museums such as the Kemper Art Museum and the Saint Louis Art Museum, see S. Hecker, ‘“Friendly Competition”: A Network of Collecting Postwar Italian Art in the American Midwest’,
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The courses of empire in Bedarida, Bignami, and Colombo, Methodologies of Exchange, www.italianmodernart.org/journal/articles/friendly-competition-a-network-of-collecting-postwar-italian-art-in-the-americanmidwest/ (accessed 8 January 2020). On the collection of the World House Galleries to Colgate University, see Calo, Modernism at the Fringes. On the 1950s acquisitions for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, see T. Bashkoff (ed.), Art of Another Kind (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2012). For a more general framework, see R. Bedarida, ‘Export/Import: The Promotion of Contemporary Italian Art in the United States, 1935–1969’, PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center, New York, 2016.
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Selected bibliography Barr, A. H., Jr and J. T. Soby. Twentieth-Century Italian Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949. Bedarida, R. ‘Operation Renaissance: Italian art at MoMA, 1940–1949’. Oxford Art Journal 35:2 (2012): 147–69. Belli, G. (ed.) Afro, the American Period. Milan: Electa, 2012. Bosoni, G. (ed.) Il Modo Italiano: Italian Design and Avant-Garde in the 20th Century. Milan: Skira, 2006. Braun, E. (ed.) Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2015. Caratozzolo, V. C., I. Schiaffini, and C. Zambianchi (eds) Irene Brin, Gaspero Del Corso e la Galleria L’Obelisco. Roma: Drago Publishing, 2018. Cortesini, S. One Day We Must Meet: Le sfide dell’arte e dell’architettura italiane in America (1933–1941). Monza: Joan & Levi, 2018. Dellapiana, E. ‘Italy creates. Giò Ponti, America and the shaping of the Italian design image’. Res Mobilis 7:8 (2018): 19–48. Dogliani, P. (ed.) Italian Fascism: History, Memory and Representation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Drudi, B. (ed.) Afro, Da Roma a New York, 1950–1968. Siena: Gli Ori, 2008. Duran, A. Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Ghiringhelli, G. Pittura moderna italiana. Torino: Orengo Turati Editori, 1949. Guilbaut, S. (ed.) Reconstructing Modernism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Hecker, S. and M. Sullivan (eds) Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. Luck, R. H. (ed.) Eterna Primavera: Young Italian Painters. Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1954. Mann Borghese, E. (ed.) Perspective of Italy, Atlantic Monthly Supplement. New York: Intercultural Publications, 1958. Palma, C. (ed.) Irene Brin, L’Italia Esplode. Diario dell’anno 1952. Roma: Viella, 2014. Ragghianti, C. L. (ed.) Handicraft as Fine Art in Italy. Florence: CADMA, 1948. Rogers, M. R. (ed.) Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today. Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1950. Sweeney, J. J. Burri. Roma: L’Obelisco, 1955. Tedeschi, F. (ed.) New York New York. Arte Italiana. La Riscoperta dell’America. Milano: Electa/ Mondadori. 2017.
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Sculpture in the (ancient) city: Alexander Calder, David Smith, and Robert Smithson in Italy Marin R. Sullivan
During the summer of 1962, the Italian curator and art historian Giovanni Carandente organised Sculture nella città (Sculptures in the city), an exhibition of international contemporary sculpture installed throughout the ancient hillside town of Spoleto, about a hundred kilometres northeast of Rome. The exhibition was groundbreaking, with Carandente choosing to show the work not in a pastoral countryside or urban park, but embedded in the layered, lived fabric of a city. Carandente’s desire to highlight the contemporary, and to show how sculpture was materially connected to and altered by everyday life, evoked a tradition of displaying sculpture in Italy that stretched all the way back to antiquity, but also consciously juxtaposed the modern, mostly abstract, sculpture chosen for the exhibition with the surrounding architecture. He utilised sculpture’s inherent responsiveness to the space it occupies, but did so squarely within the particular context of the 1960s – a moment in Italy marked by rapid economic growth and socio-political upheaval. Sculture nella città made explicit the connections between the emergent postwar industry at the root of these changes and the concurrent embrace of new materials, growing scale, and unconventional display strategies of contemporary sculptors. No work perhaps better encapsulates the aims of Sculture nella città than David Smith’s epic Voltri, a series of twenty-seven sculptures the artist created in just thirty days that Carandente masterfully displayed together as a group in Spoleto’s ancient Teatro Romano (Figure 13.1). Smith was one of ten sculptors asked by Carandente to come to Italy and create work in mills owned by Italsider, the national steel concern, and the resulting work emerged physically and conceptually from the materials Smith encountered at the Voltri Centre. In just one month, he created roughly a fourth of all the work shown in Sculture nella città. Smith’s output was covered in the national and international press in an almost exasperated tone as a maniacal artistic explosion. One critic referred to it as ‘a creative bender of an awesome magnitude’.1 Today, the achievement of Smith’s Voltri has largely eclipsed the importance and impact of the exhibition, which often serves as little more than a contextual backdrop or footnote within Anglo-American art history. Smith was not the only notable American artist to create monumental work for the exhibition or produce vanguard sculpture in Italy during the 1960s, and this
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Figure 13.1. David Smith, Voltri series, installed in the Teatro Romano, Spoleto, June 1962
chapter seeks instead to examine his remarkable sculptural output within that context. For Carandente’s exhibition, Alexander Calder realised Teodelapio, his first large-scale public stabile sculpture, still in situ next to the Spoleto train station (Figure 13.2). Seven years after Sculture nella città, Robert Smithson realised Asphalt rundown (Figure 13.3), his first large-scale outdoor sculpture or earthwork, in a disused quarry in the outskirts of Rome. Facilitated by the Italian gallerist Fabio Sargentini and involving several tons of hot, oozing asphalt dumped down a hillside, Smithson’s Italian intervention may appear diametrically different from Smith and Calder’s steel abstractions. Assessed together, however, these projects suggest an acute engagement by American sculptors with the lasting legacy and contemporary implications of what could be called an Italian artistic monumentality. Monumentality and the related term ‘monument’ had and still have long, complicated histories – as is evidenced by recent debates in both Italy and the United States around Fascist and Confederate artworks in the public sphere. The projects realised in Italy during the 1960s by Calder, Smith, and Smithson should not be considered monuments in the traditional sense, as something akin to a statue,
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Sculpture in the (ancient) city
Figure 13.2. Alexander Calder, Teodelapio, 1962, steel, installed in the Piazza G. Polvani, outside Stazione FS, Spoleto
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Figure 13.3. Robert Smithson, Asphalt rundown, October 1969, Cava di Selce, near Rome
sculpture, or other structure used to commemorate a person or historically significant event. They do not memorialise, nor do they serve as symbolic representations, materialising some collective consciousness. I also do not intend to discuss them within the context of the anti- or counter-monument, or, to quote art historian Rosalind Krauss, as ‘ontological absences’. In her seminal essay ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’, Krauss declared ‘the logic of sculpture is inseparable from the logic of the monument’, but argued that in the modernist epoch, sculpture became the monument’s negative condition, rendered nomadic, ripped from its pedestal, and untethered in its existence as ‘not-landscape’ and ‘not-architecture’ – an idea that resonates with architectural historian Lewis Mumford’s assertion in the late 1930s that ‘if it is a monument, it cannot be modern, and if its modern, it cannot be a monument’.2 While Smithson’s intervention could certainly be discussed in such contrarian terms, I am more interested here in the condition of these sculptures as monumental, or, in short, in their expressed monumentality. The mid-twentieth century marked a sort of crisis point in the need for monumentality, especially in the wake of the deployment of monuments by Fascist regimes. As architectural historian Sigfried Giedion argued in 1944, Monumentality derives from the eternal need of the people to own symbols which reveal their inner life, their actions and their social conceptions … Every period has the impulse to create symbols in the form of monuments, which, according to the Latin meaning are ‘things that remind’, things to be transmitted to later generations. This demand for monumentality cannot, in the long run, be suppressed. It tries to find an outlet at all costs.3
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Sculpture in the (ancient) city What is striking in Giedion’s sentiment is the evocation of temporality, of the passage and continued presence of the past bound to matter. This paradox of the timeless and the ephemeral would, of course, serve as the cornerstone of Smithson’s practice. In his essay ‘Entropy and the new monuments’, published just over twenty years after Giedion’s, Smithson declared that time was now reduced to ‘fractions of seconds’, not the ‘long space of centuries’, with ‘both past and future … placed into an objective present’. For Smithson, this compression of the passage of time, or, as he described it, the ‘coming and going of things’, was at the heart of his fascination with Rome.4 It would be too tidy a correlation to claim that American artist goes to Italy, sees large, monumental sculpture, and in turn creates large, monumental sculpture. The fact, however, that Calder, Smith, and Smithson each embraced a new sense of scale while working in a built environment famous since antiquity for its monumentality – both in regards to size and grandness – is neither insignificant nor coincidental. All three artists conjured powerful allusions to Italy and Italian history, and asserted that their Italian encounters proved formative in their careers. They each engaged with the Italian urban landscape to their work’s utmost advantage, and relied on Italian intermediaries to realise their projects. The resulting works – the Voltri, Teodelapio, and Asphalt rundown – are distinct sculptural projects created with vastly different intents and approaches, but collectively they present a monumentality shaped by an Italian imaginary, not just the grandeur of the past, but also the layered, complex physical manifestations found in the postwar present. *** Italy, and in particular the Italy of ancient Rome, has proved a perpetual source of inspiration for American sculptors, a physical and conceptual touchstone for a certain kind of epic grandeur and classical lineage – though such influence is less commonly associated with the art of the postwar period. Though Sculture nella città was a one-time event, it provided a significant opportunity for Italo-American artistic exchange. The exhibition was staged in conjunction with the fifth annual Festival dei Due Mondi (Festival of Two Worlds), the performing arts festival held in Spoleto during the summer. The organisers wanted to incorporate the visual arts and asked Giovanni Carandente to curate and organise a complementary art exhibition. Carandente was a professor, curator, and, up until his death in 2009, one of the most important art historians in Italy. His desire to put together a major outdoor sculpture exhibition was sparked by his involvement with Scultura italiana moderna (Modern Italian sculpture), an exhibition held in the public gardens of Messina, Sicily in 1957.5 From the very beginning, Carandente intended to make the exhibition grand in scale and scope. Sculture nella città was the first large, international modern sculpture exhibition to take place outdoors in an urban environment, and he envisioned sculptures placed within the city, in its streets and piazzas.6 Spoleto, a small Umbrian city known for its layered Etruscan, ancient Roman, and medieval history, provided a
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The courses of empire dynamic backdrop for the display of modern sculpture. Carandente understood that in order to generate interest in the exhibition he would have to assemble the most notable sculptors of the day. He paired contemporary Italian sculptors with noted international figures like Calder, Smith, Henry Moore, and Pablo Picasso, who instantly raised the profile of the exhibition. On a purely logistical level, the exhibition was a tremendous undertaking. Works came from all over the world, lent directly by artists and collectors or through museums and galleries, including the Marlborough and Betty Parsons Galleries in New York and Galerie Maeght in Paris.7 Along with the organising committee of the Festival, works were chosen with the help of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which was responsible for the selection of most of the American entries. Ultimately, fifty-three sculptors participated, contributing a combined one hundred and two works.8 Carandente imbued the exhibition with progressive elements that spoke to new trends in modern sculpture and made the exhibition truly novel. For him, the past was in the ‘outdoor museum of Italy’s Classical, Gothic, and Renaissance’ structures, but the future was ‘in the steel mills, in industry’. He wanted this exhibition to be a ‘modernist explosion … with an international band of sculptors serving as shock troops’.9 He needed additional financial support to accomplish these goals, and with Italsider, the newly formed Italian steel conglomerate, he found the means to make these practical and conceptual aspirations a reality. The Italian government was the majority owner of Italsider, which was formed in 1961 from the merger between the Ilva and Cornigliano blast furnaces and steel mills.10 It effectively commissioned ten sculptors, six Italian, three American, and one British, to create one or two works for Sculture nella città. Calder, Eugenio Carmi, Lynn Chadwick, Ettore Colla, Pietro Consagra, Nino Franchina, Carlo Lorenzetti, Beverly Pepper, Arnaldo Pomodoro, and Smith did not just send pieces, but came and created sculpture specifically for the exhibition at the company’s facilities spread across the northern half of Italy.11 The company paid for the transportation costs of the work and the sculptors, as well as all of the room and board expenses of each artist, often at four-star hotels and restaurants.12 In addition to covering these expenses, Italsider opened the doors to its factories and provided all the materials and support labour. They also, in a move rarely seen in corporate commissions, allowed the artists to maintain full ownership over their work after the exhibition concluded.13 Italsider had some input into which artists were selected, but Carandente made the final decisions. As the correspondence between the organisers and other historical records show, many of the artists decided to participate based on the involvement of others. Setting off this domino-like chain of events was Beverly Pepper. Carandente first approached Pepper at an exhibition of her wood sculptures in September 1961, at the Galleria Pogliani in Rome. She recalls that he asked if she knew how to weld: ‘I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. I asked why.’14 Carandente told her that he was organising a sculpture exhibition in Spoleto and that he had the resources to invite about ten artists to come and work in collaboration with Italsider at their steel centres. As she stated, ‘When he told me that the exhibition would be seven
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Sculpture in the (ancient) city months later, I decided that I would be able to learn welding by then, so I said yes.’ She returned to her home in Monte Mario and immediately apprenticed herself to a blacksmith who made wrought-iron gates.15 At the time, Carandente told Pepper that Calder and Smith would also be participating, but since Smith did not accept until late in the spring of 1962, this ‘selling point’ was merely suggestive of Carandente’s intentions and ambitions for the exhibition. Pepper, in fact, helped Carandente secure both Moore’s and Smith’s participation. She sent her own letter to Smith, writing that Carandente was determined to have him participate and that ‘though he’d be delighted to get any sculpture from you, he would like, in addition, for you to see your way clear to working at one of the Italsider factories’.16 Carandente and Giancarlo Menotti, the founder and organiser of the Festival dei Due Mondi, felt that Smith’s participation, because of his reputation and previous sustained engagement with steel sculpture, was critical to the success of the exhibition. After many entreaties from both Carandente and Menotti, Smith arrived in Italy on 19 May 1962.17 By the opening of the exhibition in June, all of Carandente’s ‘ten’ had completed their work at the Italsider factories, cognisant and appreciative of such a rare opportunity. As Smith recalled of the group, ‘It brought out the best in all of us. Calder did his greatest work there; so did Chadwick and Consagra and Pomodoro and Franchina – the whole Italian group.’18 Within the extensive literature on Smith, some scholars have taken the context of place, specifically the Voltri’s creation in Italy, as an invitation to attribute classical and archaic sources for each of the sculptures and to tie his work more closely to the country’s artistic patrimony.19 Similar connections or references also have been discussed in regards to his previous work, but while Smith was aware of and interested in classical Greek and Roman sculpture, the most palpable influence and strongest connection to Italy was not its ancient history but its more recent industrialisation. If the ‘language’ of the Voltri works was foreign to Smith’s previous work, it was not Latin or Greek but vernacular, present-day Italian. Smith took the specifics of his site, of the local environment in which he found himself, and developed new forms while continuing to explore his trademark tensions between figuration and abstraction, intention and chance, found and created objects. The experience of working as Italsider’s ‘guest’ palpably manifested itself in the work he produced. As Smith wrote to Carandente, ‘This was the most productive period in my life. I am grateful to Italsider for the freedom of their mills and factories, for their interests in my work with unlimited material and their generosity. The fact that all works are called “Voltri” is my affectionate regard for Italsider’s Centre at Voltri.’ 20 Smith’s engagement with the specifics of place and material, with iron and steel, functions as the grounding impetus of the project. For Smith, the allure of these materials was their relatively new application in sculptural practice. Industrial steel and iron did not possess the art-historical baggage of bronze or stone, but possessed the associations, according to the sculptor, of ‘this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality’.21 These references and concepts permeate the Voltri works and help to explain why elements like wheels are present.
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The courses of empire A rare element in sculpture, especially in modern sculpture, Smith’s wheels were found elements from the Voltri mills. The wheels further and forever connect Smith’s sculptures to that place, but they also literally and figuratively function as signifiers of movement. As is typical in Smith’s work, though, the metaphor is complicated by the work’s construction. Like the carts they once were, these works are caught between movement and stasis; their functional wheels convey the possibility of rolling while the steel wedges welded to the front of each work hinder this mobility, using the force of gravity to anchor the piece to the ground. All three of the wagon-like works are capable of moving but only with the aid of human force lifting the front portion of the work. On one of these, Voltri VI (Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas), Smith etched into the steel ‘Andiamo a Spoleto’ (‘Let’s go to Spoleto!’). The only inscription on any of the Voltri works, this phrase is not only suggestive of the journey each of these works took from Voltri to Spoleto, almost three hundred miles away, but also of the homelessness of modern sculpture, endlessly moving around from one installation to the next. In addition to the conditions of their creation and material properties, the Voltri are forever linked to Italy due to Caradente’s curatorial solution to the problem of having so many unexpected sculptures to display. He installed almost all of the pieces in Spoleto’s ancient Teatro Romano. The twenty sculptures took over the entirety of the space – far enough away from one another to both blanket every area and maintain a certain level of individual autonomy, but close enough to create strands and angles of connectivity. Their combined presences in such an unusual and architecturally specific space completely transformed the site, and were concurrently transformed by the space’s unique characteristics and attributes. Smith’s sculptures were monumental enough in scale to compete with such a historically dense place, both negating and embracing it. As Carandente stated, ‘A classical amphitheater [sic] is, after all, abstract space, a metaphysical void, the very opposite of the canonical conception of “architecture”.’22 A Roman theatre is, by its typology, a site of transformation, a place of instability and action, an arena for the passage of time. While not necessarily an intention of their creator, the specifics of the site, and the fact that the works were positioned in this space like humans – like actors and viewers participating in some great performance – certainly brought a new, dramatic element to the works. Because of their arrangement, a person viewing the works had no choice but to share in this performance, to become a fellow audience member on the steps of the ancient theatre. This was not a contemplative mode of viewing like that created while standing in a white-walled gallery in a climate-controlled museum, but one susceptible to, and changed by, the time of day, the weather, the elevation, and spectatorial distance. Looking towards the west side of the theatre, the works were framed by hundreds of years of architectural layering visible in the foundations and walls of surrounding structures. Looking towards the east, especially at the top of the theatre, the sculptures were set against the expanse of the Umbrian countryside, lusciously green in the summer months. Looking down towards the stage, one was confronted with the historical function of the space.
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Sculpture in the (ancient) city By all accounts, Smith was tremendously happy with the unusual siting of his work, frequently commenting on the curator’s ‘brilliant idea of the Forum’. He was effusive in his insistence that his work had never been treated better. 23 Smith’s Italian work was a remarkable achievement on its own terms, as individual pieces pushed his sculptural practice in new ways and to a grander scale, but it was their installation that sealed their connection to place, space, and each other. Today, the Voltri sculptures are spread across the world in private and public collections, but Carandente’s installation forever concretised them into a ‘homogenous’, ‘organic’, and ‘indivisible’ group.24 In another of Smith’s many letters to Carandente, he wrote, ‘I am so grateful to you [and] Italsider for my Italian period, it was the greatest and most prolific of my life’, and declared in the postscript, ‘For the rest of my life I shall be part Italian, and although I am stupid, I shall try to learn the language.’25 While the monumentality of the Voltri came from the scale of their creation and their subsequent placement as a group in the theatre, Calder’s Teodelapio was perhaps the most memorable and monumental single work of Sculture nella città – and is certainly its most lasting symbol (Figure 13.2). Calder’s sculpture stands over fifty-eight feet tall and forty-five feet across, and was the first of numerous monumental stabiles that would transform Calder into one of the most ubiquitous public sculptors of the late postwar period. It is now almost impossible to go to a major city and not see a large-scale painted steel Calder sculpture in front of some building, placed in a plaza, or tucked into a park. As site specificity became an increasingly valued element in public art, Calder’s work was often criticised for the seemingly detached neutrality of both its creation and placement – studio created, enlarged by fabricators in a steelworks, with the artist intimately involved at each step, and indifferently plopped down in an urban setting. The same critique could be levelled at Teodelapio, but like many of his public commissions, the circumstances of the work are more complex and connected to site and the legacy of monumentality than they might first appear. In Carandente’s initial contact with the artist, he sought a ‘Calder mobile to use as a sort of triumphal arch at the entrance to the city to symbolise the whole exhibition’.26 While the form and location of the final work would change multiple times between Carandente’s first letter in March and the installation of the sculpture in July 1962, the allusion to gateway monuments would remain constant. By the end of April, Calder decided to change the form of the work, sending Carandente a sketch and description of a stabile that would ‘stand on the ground and arch the roadway’. Carandente had estimated that whatever work was installed on the site, posts would need to be 10 m high so that vehicles could still traverse the space, but Calder pushed back, writing, ‘I doubt if you will have any vehicle that high – 5 m ought to be enough – and anything taller can go around.’27 Carandente was so pleased with what he described as a ‘modern town gate for Spoleto’ that he decided in early May to place the work in a more visible if logistically similar location.28 Throughout the entire process, the curator sent Calder numerous photographs and descriptions of the site, and in turn the artist designed the sculpture with the location and context of the exhibition in mind. Calder was not present in Italy during its fabrication at the Italsider di Savona Centre just west
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The courses of empire of Genoa. He was the only artist of the ten selected by Carandente to create pieces for the exhibition who did not physically fabricate the resulting work(s) himself. The correspondence between the two men suggests that Calder had wanted and tried to travel to Italy during the process but due to scheduling conflicts simply sent a maquette and instructions to the workers at Savona, declaring that they would know better anyway.29 Following the scaling of Calder’s model by a factor of twenty-seven, the pieces of the then untitled sculpture were sent to Spoleto, where numerous problems ensued during installation. Due to its resulting monumental size, the work had to be moved to a third site, in the Piazza Giovanni Polvani, adjacent to the town’s main train station, where technicians used two massive cranes to weld the pieces together on site.30 Carandente was quick to convey to Calder that the sculpture would still ‘fulfil its original function and form a modern gateway to the town’. Assembling the 11 mm-thick sheets of steel usually used for the hulls of ships proved difficult and ultimately unsafe, causing the work to be structurally unsound and unable to withstand Spoleto’s notoriously high winds. Carandente and the American curator James Johnson Sweeney dispatched a telegram, which read, ‘Come quick, danger.’ After unsuccessfully trying to get Carandente on the phone, Calder travelled from the United States to Italy, sending in advance a return telegram that read, ‘Love Danger. Coming Quick.’31 Calder decided to add steel reinforcements to the piece, and after attaching some cardboard versions to the small model, worked with the technicians to stabilise the structure. Once he arrived in Spoleto, Calder watched as the metalworkers reinforced the work with additional steel plates, which would not be painted black until later in the year. Calder also named the work on a whim after seeing a print of a seventh-century Umbrian duke wearing a crown hanging in his hotel during his stay. The reference to a historical figure who perhaps would have once been the subject of an equestrian monument was not only visible in the tipped form of the sculpture, but also in Calder’s subsequent and repeated personification of the work. The artist wrote of being delighted at seeing ‘his’ size and expanse from the train, and pursued an opportunity to receive the gift of an apartment from the city of Spoleto so that he could ‘come and visit Teodelapio’.32 Beyond its significance as Calder’s first monumental outdoor project, Teodelapio remains a key example of how sculpture can be affected by the characteristics and needs of its site. The work almost immediately became the symbol of Spoleto, both the figurative and literal gateway to the city, as it welcomed visitors to Sculture nella città during the summer of 1962 and every year since. As one reporter noted, ‘As soon as you exit the station in Spoleto, you find yourself in front of the first surprise: a colossal iron sculpture by Calder, about fifteen meters high, dominating the square.’33 Teodelapio made a powerful first impression and provided an effective introduction to the conceptual framework of the exhibition: largely abstract, massive in scale, made of industrial materials, and fully incorporated into the folds of the urban space. Carandente wrote to the artist, ‘Your participation [in the exhibition] can be summarised as follows: idea, mobile, intention, stabile, result, eternal.
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Sculpture in the (ancient) city
Figure 13.4. Municipal bus ticket of Spoleto, 2010
Magnifico!’ before concluding, ‘seriously, I do not see how we are ever going to take it down again – so it looks like it will have to stay here’.34 And stay in Spoleto it did. Following the conclusion of the exhibition, Calder gifted the work to the city, where it has remained ever since, its outline still appearing on the city’s municipal bus tickets (Figure 13.4). Calder’s international reputation contributed to the heightened status of the work, but its size, placement, and relationship to the surrounding locale were equally if not more responsible for its widespread popularity and acclaim. Enacted on the morning of 15 October 1969, seven years after Sculture nella città, Robert Smithson’s Asphalt rundown (Figure 13.3) seemingly bears little resemblance in form or intent to the Voltri and Teodelapio. In contrast to Smith and Calder’s solid steel, Smithson made his work with several tons of fluid asphalt. The site of Asphalt rundown was a disused area of the Cava di Selce, a rock quarry approximately eighteen kilometres southeast of Rome, near the Roma Ciampino airport, very different from the populated, historically rich streets of Spoleto. And its creation within the emergence of an international climate of ‘art as process’ in the late 1960s seems wholly disconnected from the autonomous, permanent objects that had dominated the modernism of the early 1960s. Like those of his two predecessors, however,
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The courses of empire Smithson’s encounter with Italy would impact his career, leave a mark on the Italian landscape, and form an additional link in the history of American artists’ construction of an Italian imaginary. Asphalt rundown was a straightforward, singular act, but done on a scale Smithson had yet to realise in his work. The piece became the first of several massive outdoor sculptures or earthworks he made prior to his unexpected death in a helicopter crash in 1973. As would be the case with those subsequent large-scale works, Smithson relied on external assistance in order to realise Asphalt rundown. The opportunity to work in Italy came at the invitation of Italian gallerist Fabio Sargentini, who had encouraged Smithson to exhibit at his Galleria L’Attico in Rome. Much like Carandente, Sargentini had a very clear vision of how national and international vanguard art could showcase both the legacy of Italy’s past and its vibrant present and future. Sargentini, along with other gallerists, like Gian Enzo Sperone, were already accustomed to the innovative three-dimensional work being made by their own stables of artists, like Giovanni Anselmo, Jannis Kounellis, and Michelangelo Pistoletto. They helped create an environment – a network across Italy in the late 1960s – that proved a particularly welcoming place for international artists seeking opportunities to experiment with new approaches to sculpture.35 The chance to create a piece in this open, experimental environment proved especially significant in the case of Smithson, just as the Cava di Selce proved a particularly rich physical and historical location in which to enact Asphalt rundown. The selection of this site, however, owes more to Smithson’s involvement with Sargentini than it does to any specific artistic conceptualisation or conscious choice. Sargentini met Smithson while on his first trip to New York, in April 1969, through the art dealers John Weber and Annina Nosei, and he subsequently invited Smithson to show at his massive new gallery space in a former parking garage in Rome.36 Smithson realised Asphalt rundown at the end of an intense year of travel and exhibitions in which he visited Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, shortly before and after his exhibition at L’Attico. Smithson flew to Rome, directly from Prospect ‘69, the art fair in Düsseldorf, and was back in New York within a week of Asphalt rundown’s realisation. Smithson wrote in advance of his arrival, asking Sargentini to scout for a suitable, accessible quarry location.37 Sargentini was responsible not only for choosing the specific site, but also for procuring all of the necessary raw materials, machinery, and human resources. He functioned, then, as more than a passive commissioning patron, becoming instead a crucial, participatory force in the creation of the work.38 Asphalt rundown was very much a product of the exhibition strategies and collaborative patronage models that emerged during the late 1960s. It was a precocious act that represented a complete break from the traditional means by which art was created and displayed; moreover, it was a definite break from the traditional understanding of monumental, large-scale sculpture. While its realisation in an outdoor setting was still a fairly radical move at the time, the work remained beholden to, and entrenched in, both the greater enframing space of its institutional context, provided by Sargentini’s gallery, and the embedded specifics of its Italian site, with its
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Sculpture in the (ancient) city long cultural history stretching back to antiquity.39 The circumstances of Asphalt rundown’s realisation were, in part, due to good timing or happenstance. However, Smithson’s completion of his largest work to date in Italy, in an industrial quarry near Rome, almost seemed preordained. The Rome of antiquity, along with its ensuing ruins, had long gripped Smithson’s artistic consciousness. Writing in 1967 of his tour of the ‘ruins in reverse’, or monuments, of Passaic, Smithson wondered whether the industrial New Jersey town had replaced Rome as the ‘Eternal City’. The pumping derricks, the abandoned construction sites and buildings, and even the displaced neoclassical statues he encountered on his suburban American journey have a clear affinity with the disused quarry on the outskirts of Rome, all of them filled or marked by the presence of ‘out of date things’ and a ‘discredited idea of time’.40 Unlike the pipes of Passaic, however, the Cava di Selce referenced an accumulation of the past, a ‘historical background of debris’ that locations in the United States could never match. As Smithson stated, ‘You might say that my early preoccupations with the early civilisations of the West was a kind of fascination with the coming and going of things … And I think this is what fascinated me in my early interest in Rome, just this kind of collection, this junk heap of history.’41 Smithson asked Sargentini to find a very un-monumental site, away from the centre of Rome. While Asphalt rundown can be understood as its own ‘ruin in reverse’, its sense of time is far more complicated and more acutely connected to the industrial monumentality of Calder and Smith’s ship hull steel. Smithson was certainly open to and welcoming of the idea of his work disappearing, of entropy and ephemerality, but he discussed Asphalt rundown with a distinct air of monumental permanence. He described how the work was rooted to the contours of the land, that due to the density of the asphalt the work was not ephemeral, and that, while subject to weathering, it would be ‘permanently there’ or at least ‘should last for quite some time’.42 Like Smith’s Voltri group installation, Asphalt rundown did not stand the test of time, its material having eroded completely away over the past five decades. What Smithson referred to, however, as ‘the sense of something being very definitively in time’ while simultaneously possessing a ‘moment that gives you a sense of timelessness’ was the conceptual foundation of Asphalt rundown.43 The temporal paradox of Smithson’s intervention – the way its monumentality intertwines past and present – is also visible in Smith’s and Calder’s Italian works. The three sculptural projects created by Calder, Smith, and Smithson were not site-specific, at least as that term is deployed to designate a socially engaged artwork or intervention, irremovable from its location. Each was very much a late modern manifestation of largely self-referential, autonomous sculpture. All three were heavily dependent on the structures of the art world and each artist made them within the context of a specific site, but they contained within their creation the ability to function elsewhere. Today, Calder’s large-scale works, while site-connected, have proven flexible at being shown in any urban public plaza, and Smith’s Voltri series have been dispersed to many gallery interiors. Smithson would go on to enact two
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The courses of empire subsequent ‘dumps’, or large-scale works that involved flowing matter – Cement pour in Chicago and Glue pour in Vancouver, both created in late 1969 – in similar industrial landscapes. The nature of the Italian sites – their locations in Italy and affiliations to local cultural institutions – did, however, directly shape how and why the Voltri, Teodelapio, and Asphalt rundown came into being. The particular contexts of Spoleto and Rome in the 1960s, and the involvement of art-world figures like Carandente and Sargentini, provided each artist with the opportunity to work in a scale and size they had not yet been able to realise. To look at the photographs taken of these works installed in their original locations, embedded into the fabric of the Italian landscape, is not just archival due diligence, but a requirement to truly understand the profound connection of sculpture to site. All three projects resisted the classical notion of the monument while simultaneously engaging the layered histories embedded in the fabric of Italy that stretched back to antiquity. The Voltri, Teodelapio, and Asphalt rundown did not replicate the fragmented blocks of marble or borrow the form of bronze statues, but instead suggested a new monumentality for the postwar transatlantic world – one that reflected the poetics, power, and possibilities of industrial materials – and in the process they became objects that continue to transmit meaning and presence to later generations. Notes 1 J. Jacobs, ‘David Smith sculpts for Spoleto’, Art News Annual 29 (1964): 49. 2 R. E. Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’, October 8 (Spring 1979): 33; L. Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), p. 438. 3 S. Giedion, ‘The Need for a New Monumentality’, in P. Zucker (ed.), New Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), pp. 552–3. 4 R. Smithson, ‘Entropy and the New Monuments (1966)’, in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p. 11. 5 M. Adelmann, ‘Sculpture in the streets’, The Studio 164:835 (1962): 164–5. 6 For more on Carandente’s curatorial strategy with Sculture nella città and the importance of photography, see M. R. Sullivan, ‘Activating sculpture: the curatorial program of Sculture nella città’, Journal of Curatorial Studies 2:3 (2013): 356–82. 7 Adelmann, ‘Sculpture in the streets’: 165. 8 G. Carandente, Sculture nella città, Spoleto (Spoleto: NE Editrice, 2007). In the existing body of literature on the exhibition, there are many discrepancies regarding the number of works and the participants. The catalogue for the exhibition, as is typical, was published before the opening and did not provide an accurate sampling of the works on display, and this generated many conflicting reports in the popular press. I take the list of participants and works published in the 2007 commemorative catalogue by Carandente and the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna di Spoleto to be the most accurate. It lists as the participants: Kenneth Armitage, Hans Arp, Kengiro Azuma, André Bloc, Alexander Calder*, Eugenio Carmi, Lynn Chadwick, Eduardo Chillida, Ettore Colla, Pietro Consagra, Costas Coulentianos, Harold B. Cousins*, Wessel Couzijn, Dusan Dzamonja, Kosso Eloul, Herbert Ferber*, Lucio Fontana, Nino Franchina, Franco Garelli, Quinto Ghermandi, Emile Gilioli, Shamaï Haber, Otto Herbert Hajek, Rudolf Hoflehner, Robert Jacobsen, Berto Lardera, Henri Laurens, Leoncillo, Jacques Lipchitz*, Seymour Lipton*, Carlo Lorenzetti, Giacomo Manzù, Marino Marini, Etienne Martin, Umberto Mastroianni, Luciano Minguzzi, Mirko, Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alicia Penalba, Beverly Pepper*, Augusto Perez, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Germaine Richier, James Rosati, Jason Seley*, Pablo Serrano, David Smith*,
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Sculpture in the (ancient) city Francesco Somaini, Drago Trsar, Alberto Viani, Fritz Wotruba, and Ossip Zadkine. Artists possessing US nationality are marked with *. 9 R. E. Krauss, Beverly Pepper: Sculpture in Place (Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Gallery, 1986), p. 42. 10 F. Valentini, ‘Calder. Fotografie di Ugo Mulas. 1962–1971’, MA thesis, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia, 2008–09. 11 Carmi, Chadwick, and Franchina worked at Italsider di Cornigliano in Genoa. Calder, Consagra, and Lorenzetti created their works at Italsider di Savona, west of Genoa. Pomodoro worked at Italsider di Lovere, northwest of Bergamo. Colla worked at Italsider di Bagnoli, south of Padua. Smith was at Voltri, also just west of Genoa, and Pepper was at Italsider di Piombino, south of Livorno, just east of the island of Elba. See Carandente, Sculture nella città, pp. 145–57. 12 Giovanni Carandente Papers, Biblioteca Carandente, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Spoleto (hereafter Carandente Papers), memorandum by unknown author, 1962. 13 This was part of the ‘selling point’ presented to Smith as he was deciding whether to participate. Carandente Papers, letter from Beverly Pepper to David Smith, 1962. 14 Krauss, Beverly Pepper, p. 42. 15 Beverly Pepper a Forte Belvedere: Trent’anni di scultura (Milano: Electa, 1989), p. 23. 16 Carandente Papers, letter from Beverly Pepper to David Smith, undated, ca. 1962. 17 Jacobs, ‘David Smith sculpts for Spoleto’: 45. 18 Ibid.: 46. 19 Carandente suggested this in his earliest texts, stating that Smith’s work was imaginatively reflective of Scythian, Roman, and Etruscan ‘memories’. See G. Carandente, ‘Sculptures in the city’, Siderexport [foreign supplement of Rivista Italsider] 4 (December 1962): 35; and Giovani Carandente, ‘Sculture nella città’, Spoletium 8:1–2 (December 1962). 20 Carandente, ‘Sculptures in the city’, 35. 21 David Smith, quoted in G. Carandente, ‘The American Odysseus of sculpture’, in David Smith in Italy (Milan: PradaMilanoarte, 1995), p. 23. 22 Ibid., p. 22. 23 Carandente Papers, letter from David Smith to Giovanni Carandente, 23 June 1962. 24 Carandente, ‘The American Odysseus of sculpture’, p. 22. 25 Carandente Papers, letter from David Smith to Giovanni Carandente, 28 September 1962. 26 Giovanni Carandente Papers, 1962–63, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (hereafter AAA), letter from Giovanni Carandente to Alexander Calder, undated, ca. March 1962. 27 AAA, letter from Alexander Calder to Giovanni Carandente, 20 April 1962. 28 AAA, letter from Giovanni Carandente to Alexander Calder, 1 May 1962. 29 AAA, Giovanni Carandente letters, 1962–63. 30 For a detailed account of the making and installation of Teodelapio, see G. Carandente, Teodelapio: Alexander Calder (Milan: Charta, 1996). 31 Carandente Papers, telegram from Alexander Calder to James Johnson Sweeney in Spoleto, 24 July 1962. 32 AAA, ‘Teodelapio’, statement by Alexander Calder, undated, ca. 1962. 33 G. di Genova, ‘Integrazione o invasion?’, Nuova generazione (5 August 1962). 34 AAA, letter from Giovanni Carandente to Alexander Calder, 16 July 1962. 35 For a more detailed history of Sargentini and his involvement with the L’Attico gallery, see F. Sargentini, Album: 9/68–2/71 (Roma: L’Attico, 1971); G. Politi and F. Sargentini, Fabio Sargentini (Milano: G. Politi, 1990); and L. M. Barbero and F. Pola (eds), L’Attico di Fabio Sargentini 1966–1978, Rome, Macro, 26 October 2010–6 February 2011 (Milano: Electa, 2010). 36 The artist, Smithson’s widow, Nancy Holt, and Sargentini himself confirmed Weber’s role in facilitating introductions to artists like Smithson and Sol LeWitt during Sargentini’s trip to New York in April. Fabio Sargentini, in discussion with the author, May 2010; Nancy Holt, email message to the author, 28 February 2011. Married at the time to the Roman art dealer Annina Nosei, Weber worked for the Dwan Gallery from 1968 through its closure in 1971. He then went on to open his own eponymous space, where he continued to represent the Estate of Robert Smithson. For a more detailed history of Weber’s role in the late 1960s art scene and his involvement with
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Robert Smithson, see the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Oral History interview with John Weber, 21 March–4 April 2006. There is no record of this correspondence in Smithson’s papers, but both Sargentini and Holt confirm this chain of events. Fabio Sargentini, in discussion with the author, Rome, May 2010; Nancy Holt, email message to the author, 28 February 2011. For a more thorough history of Asphalt rundown and the involvement of both Sargentini and the L’Attico in-house photographer Claudio Abate, see M. R. Sullivan, Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism (London: Routledge, 2017). A. Kaprow and R. Smithson, ‘What Is a Museum? (1967)’, in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p. 47. R. Smithson, ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967)’, in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p. 74. Smithson, quoted in ‘Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American Art/ Smithsonian Institution (1972)’, and ‘Entropy Made Visible (1973)’, in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 293, 304. Smithson, quoted in ‘Four Conversations between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson’, in J. Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), p. 225. Smithson, quoted in ibid., p. 216.
Selected bibliography Adelmann, M. ‘Sculpture in the streets’. The Studio 164:835 (1962): 164–9. L’Attico 1957–87: Trent’anni di pittura, scultura, musica, danza, performance, video. Milano: Mondadori, 1987. Beverly Pepper a Forte Belvedere: Trent’anni di scultura. Milano: Electa, 1989. Carandente, G. ‘Sculptures in the city’. Siderexport [foreign supplement of Rivista Italsider] 4 (December 1962): 31–9. _____. ‘Sculture nella città’. Spoletium, 8:1–2 (December 1962): 19–27. _____. Una città piena di sculture: Spoleto 1962. Perugia: Electa Editori Umbri, 1992. _____. ‘The American Odysseus of Sculpture’. In David Smith in Italy. Milan: PradaMilanoarte, 1995, pp. 17–28. _____. Teodelapio: Alexander Calder. Milan: Charta, 1996. _____. Sculture nella città, Spoleto. Spoleto: NE Editrice, 2007. Giovanni Carandente Papers, Biblioteca Carandente, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Spoleto. Giovanni Carandente letters, 1962–63, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Carmean Jr, E. A. ‘David Smith: The Voltri Sculpture’. In E.A. Carmean Jr (ed.), American Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artist. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1978, pp. 214–42. Di Genova, G. ‘Integrazione o invasione?’ Nuova generazione (5 August 1962). Giedion, S. ‘The Need for a New Monumentality’. In P. Zucker (ed.), New Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium. New York: Philosophical Library, 1944, pp. 549–69. Jacobs, J. ‘David Smith sculpts for Spoleto’. Art News Annual 29 (1964): 42–9, 156–8. Krauss, R. ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’. October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44. _____. Beverly Pepper: Sculpture in Place. Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Gallery, 1986. Leeb Hadzi, M. ‘Report from Rome: sculpture at Spoleto’. Art in America 50:4 (1962): 116–18. McCoy, G. (ed.) David Smith. New York: Praeger, 1973. Politi, G. and F. Sargentini. Fabio Sargentini. Milano: G.Politi, 1990. Sargentini, F. Album: 9/68 – 2/71. Roma: L’Attico, 1971. ‘Sculture nelle strade e nelle piazze di Spoleto’. L’Avanti! (19 April 1962). Smithson, R. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Edited by J. Flam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. Sullivan, M. R. ‘Activating sculpture: the curatorial program of Sculture nella città’. Journal of Curatorial Studies 2:3 (2013): 356–82.
Sculpture in the (ancient) city
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_____. Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism. London: Routledge, 2017. Sylvester, D. ‘The Spoleto experiment’. The Sunday Times 7282 (9 December 1962): 12–17. ‘A town full of sculpture’. Time (24 August 1962): 50. Valentini, F. ‘Calder. Fotografie di Ugo Mulas. 1962–1971’, MA thesis, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia, 2008–9.
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Paul Thek and the muses of Italy: death, decay, and the Technological reliquaries, 1963–67 Erika Doss
American artist Paul Thek (1933–88) lived in Italy intermittently during the 1960s and 1970s, maintaining studios in Rome’s Trastevere neighbourhood and on Ponza, the largest of the six Pontine Islands that form an archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea. In 1963, Thek and photographer Peter Hujar visited Palermo’s Capuchin Catacombs, an arid network of burial chambers underneath a monastery where thousands of desiccated bodies are displayed in motley states of decay – fully dressed, propped against walls, stacked on shelves, or lying in coffins (Figure 14.1). Thek, born Catholic and deeply engaged throughout his life in issues of faith and religious ritual, was deeply moved by his experience inside this Italian crypt. He later described his physical and emotional reactions in an interview with art critic Gene Swenson: [The] initial effect is so stunning you fall back for a moment and then it’s exhilarating. There are 8,000 corpses – not skeletons, corpses – decorating the walls, and the corridors are filled with windowed coffins. I opened one and picked up what I thought was a piece of paper; it was a piece of dried thigh. I felt strangely relieved and free. It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers. We accept our thing-ness intellectually, but the emotional acceptance of it can be a joy.1
Hujar, who was Thek’s lover and partner throughout much of the 1960s, shot several photographs of Thek inside the catacombs, pointedly contrasting his handsome, willowy body with the crypt’s corpse-filled coffins. Doing so, he captured a moment when Thek first began to reckon with the raw – not romantic – themes of death and decay that would inform his first major body of art, the Technological reliquaries, a series of sculptures that he worked on from 1963 to 1967. Italy deeply inspired Thek’s manufacture of the Technological reliquaries, as did the experimental directions of modern Italian artists. Less interested in romantic stereotypes of Italy as cultural muse, Thek was drawn to the affective, materialist, disruptive, and process-driven practices of Italy’s postwar avant-garde, many of whom shared his interests in corporeality and decay.2 By extension, Italy’s course of empire, its repeated cycle of rise and fall from the Age of the Caesars to the regime of Il Duce, functioned as a metaphor for Thek’s own repeated attention in the Technological reliquaries to the decline and destruction of the body over the course of human life.
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Paul Thek and the muses of Italy
Figure 14.1. Peter Hujar, Paul Thek in catacombs 2, 1963–64, pigmented ink print
In her introduction to Portraits in Life and Death (1976), which features Hujar’s black-and-white photographs of Palermo’s shrivelled mummies juxtaposed with warm and soulful pictures of art-world friends and companions including William Burroughs, John Waters, David Wojnarowicz, Divine, and Thek, Susan Sontag wrote: We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures; but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera shows, inexorably . . . Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death. I am moved by the purity and delicacy of his intentions.3
Sontag’s reflections on Hujar’s photographic memento mori were written when she was in hospital, the night before her first exploratory surgery for breast cancer in
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The courses of empire 1975.4 Her critical attention to the factual, physical terms of mortality was compatible with both Hujar’s photographs and Thek’s sculptures. First introduced in New York in 1959, Sontag and Thek were close friends for almost thirty years, often meeting in Europe and the United States, exchanging letters, going to the movies, and arguing about books, exhibitions, ideas, and even marriage – apparently, each rejected proposals from the other. Both were drawn to philosopher Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death (1959), which Sontag exuberantly praised for its liberating advocacy of Eros and the ‘resurrection of the flesh’ in a prohibitively puritanical and pleasure-numbing post-World War II America. ‘[W]e need an erotics of art’, she famously concluded in her 1964 essay ‘Against Interpretation’. Thek – who painted that phrase on one of his last canvases in 1987 – was Sontag’s modern art muse, constantly experimenting with avant-garde forms and processes that sought and embodied the corporeal and affective terms she imagined in print.5 Although Sontag never published anything on Thek’s art, she dedicated two books to him – Against Interpretation (1966) and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989).6 The Capuchin Catacombs profoundly altered Thek’s ideas about art. Established in the sixteenth century, the catacombs were originally intended as burial chambers for friars, and as spaces where the living could pray for and with the deceased. They soon became the preferred cemetery for Sicilian elites, who were interred there until the 1920s. Bodies were mummified in the dry, musty chambers, enclosed in glass coffins or stone niches, and stuffed with straw as their innards putrefied. Located on the edge of Palermo, the catacombs first became a popular tourist attraction in the nineteenth century. Drawn to their macabre materiality and preservation of the dead, inspired by the metaphors of corporeality captured in Hujar’s photographs and in Italian Renaissance sculpture, and informed by his Catholic upbringing, Thek began making hyper-realistic sculptures of raw meat and faux body parts. Displayed inside pristine glass or Plexiglas boxes carefully edged in metal trim, his ‘meat sculptures’ consisted of glistening gobbets of bloody flesh or amputated human limbs encased in classical Roman armour (Plate 29). Each was meticulously rendered from beeswax and resin and painted in acrylics, with some pieces pierced by metal pins or wires and perforated by plastic tubes and others studded with beads, hair, mirrors, and plastic insects (flies and butterflies). Thek’s first venture in this aesthetic direction, the meat-themed sculpture La corazza di Michelangelo, was made during the summer of 1963 in Sicily, where he had been invited to stay at the villa of Topazia Alliata, an Italian painter, writer, and art dealer (Plate 30). Purchasing a plaster replica of a Roman Republican cuirass, or breastplate (corazza translates as ‘armour’), at a souvenir shop, Thek covered it in lumps of painted wax simulating bloody, fatty flesh and resembling chunks of raw hamburger. His piece references Michelangelo’s Portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici (1526–34), a marble sculpture made for the Florentine tomb of the Captain General of the Papal armed forces (who died in 1516). Michelangelo sheathed his stone figure in an anatomical cuirass, a style of armour typically worn by emperors and generals which mimicked an idealised male torso (complete with realistic nipples and a navel), and
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Paul Thek and the muses of Italy often featured mythological or theatrical scenes. Thek, who listed Michelangelo as one of his ‘favorite artists’, destabilised the Renaissance artist’s rendering of a flawless torso to underscore the intrinsic vulnerability of human flesh.7 In his 1966 interview with Swenson, Thek explained that he did not want to ‘shock’ viewers with the horror of corporeal seepage but to ‘goad’ them ‘into seeing more than they do’, and in particular, to see and feel the ‘kind of freedom’ that he felt was inherent in an ‘erratic, slimy – uncontrollable’ materiality. As he put it, ‘Everything is beautiful and everything is ugly simultaneously.’8 In a 1965 letter to Sontag, Thek likened his assembly of his meat sculptures to a ‘death-schedule’, and described their concentrated production as a means to regain the feelings and sensations he had experienced while living in Italy: ‘There are moments here with that perfection like walking in lemon groves in Sicily. A flying quality. The big clarity thing. But mostly the quiet & the rhythm . . . My death-schedule is designed to bring them home.’9 Thek called his meat pieces Technological reliquaries, referencing their aesthetic dialogue between science, industry, religion, and faith.10 Thek himself was called ‘Meat Man’, his art deemed both ‘fascinating’ and ‘abhorrent’ by critics. John Canaday observed in a 1967 review, ‘Mr. Thek is a marvelous technician and a worthy member of the Grand Guignol Club.’11 At a moment when Minimalism and other ‘cool’ styles dominated modern American art, Thek’s ‘uncanny refleshing’ of the object was disconcerting.12 His preservation and display of oozing body parts inside boxes constructed from the same industrial materials used by Don Judd and Robert Morris was, Mike Kelley later wrote, a ‘perverted version of Minimalism’.13 Thek’s art was visceral, intimate, and affective, shaped by his Catholic upbringing, his bisexuality, his steadfast distaste for the banal commercialism of New York’s art world, and his encounters in the 1960s with Italian muses ranging from Capuchin catacombs and Roman ruins to Renaissance sculpture and Arte Povera. As he related in an interview with Richard Flood in 1981: I was amused with the idea of meat under Plexiglas because I thought it made fun of the scene – where the name of the game seemed to be ‘how cool can you be’ and ‘how refined’. Nobody ever mentioned anything that seemed real . . . I’d go to a gallery and there would be a lot of fancy people looking at a lot of stuff that didn’t say anything about anything to anyone . . . I thought there was a lack and that it was my job to say so.14
Thek’s take on the ‘lack’ in modern American art, specifically Minimalism, was its frosty superficiality, inert display of form, and seeming emotional reserve. He believed his ‘job’ was to restore feeling to art, to recreate the sort of revelatory aura and corporeal release that he had experienced in Palermo in 1963. In the 1950s, Thek studied at the Art Students League, Pratt, and Cooper Union. Early friends included Hujar, Sontag, avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson, and artists Eva Hesse and Ann Wilson. His early work, while living in New York and Florida, included fashion illustration, textile design, and abstract painting. Settling in Rome in October 1962, Thek encountered an established community of expatriate American artists, and Italian gallerists interested in showing their art. He met
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The courses of empire abstract painter Cy Twombly, for example, shortly after he arrived. Twombly had first visited Italy in 1952 after receiving a travel fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and spent several months in Rome and Florence with Robert Rauschenberg.15 In 1957, Twombly moved permanently to Italy, living in an apartment in Rome and a villa in Gaeta, a coastal town about sixty miles north of Naples and thirty-eight miles from Ponza. Twombly’s friendship with Thek, and his blue-chip status at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in New York, most likely helped Thek get a solo show there in the autumn of 1964, where he first exhibited his meat sculptures. Italy was a muse and a magnet for many post-World War II American artists. Between 1949 and 1956, ‘121 of all the painters and sculptors who received a Fulbright went to Italy, whereas 83 went to France.’16 Peter Hujar was on a Fulbright Fellowship when he photographed the Capuchin Catacombs in 1963. Thek was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy in 1967 and returned to Rome, spending his first summer on Ponza in 1968, and most of the next decade in Europe, moving between Ponza, Rome, Amsterdam, Essen, and Paris. In 1958, Otto Wittman, Jr, director of the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art, observed that ‘almost exactly a century after the first great wave of American artists went to Italy, that country has become again a strong magnet for young American artists’. He explained that modern American artists were especially drawn to Italy’s ‘humanistic background’ as an ‘inspiration for personal development’.17 This transatlantic cultural ‘phenomenon’ of postwar American artists working in Italy prompted several 1950s’ museum exhibitions. In 1951, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Toledo Museum of Art jointly organised a show of contemporary paintings by American artists who had recently lived and worked in Italy. In 1955, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, New York organised a similar show titled Italy Rediscovered: An Exhibition of Work by American Painters in Italy since World War II. In 1956, the Duveen–Graham Gallery exhibited art made by American Fulbright fellows in Europe (and especially Italy) between 1949–56, and the Downtown Gallery organised Americans in Europe, the majority of whom (thirteen out of twentythree artists) were producing paintings or sculptures in Rome or Florence.18 Italy’s allure for contemporary artists was repeatedly covered in postwar American magazines. ‘In the world of art, all roads today lead to the Eternal City’, New York Times staffer Robert Hawkins wrote in 1955. ‘This is the new Mecca . . . for the artistic cognoscenti, where the practicing cultists come to worship.’ Likewise, Life reported in 1952: ‘At the end of World War II artists from all over the United States began to head to Italy where, for the past six years, they have swarmed the hillsides and made Rome the rival of Paris as art headquarters.’19 Each magazine compared the current migration with the ‘swarm’ of American artists who spent time in Rome, Florence, and Venice in the nineteenth century, including sculptor Hiram Powers and painter Sanford Gifford. Italy was a particular magnet for postwar American artists because of its low costs for art studios, art supplies, and food and drink, its ‘congenial people’, good weather (especially in Rome), and ‘great art and monuments’. Life, always keen to promote modern American interests, concluded its article by remarking that American artists were ‘hopeful that what they produce in Italy
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Paul Thek and the muses of Italy will bring rewards in the United States. As one artist put it, ‘“Italy is our studio but America is our market.”’20 Italy was more than low-cost living for Paul Thek: it was a cathartic landscape where he first began to assess the ‘procreative power of decay’, a liminal state marked by feelings of both repugnance for and attraction to troubling or dangerous things – like chunks of bloody flesh or severed body parts.21 Italy, at least in places like the Capuchin catacombs, prompted Thek to think differently about the ‘thing-ness’ of decay and rot. Rather than feeling threatened by these liminal states because of their intimation of bodily harm and pain, he worked with and through them to reach new thresholds of enlightenment in the Technological reliquaries.22 The physical realities of death and decay were not cynically avoided or denied: they became the focus of an intense, demanding, and highly ritualised four-year art project. Although he never used the word, Thek was an early adopter of abjection – and major influence on a later generation of abject (or body-focused) artists including Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, and Kiki Smith. Italy introduced Thek to the abject bodies, and body parts, that are the corporeal heart of his Technological reliquaries. In addition to Palermo’s Capuchin catacombs, Thek encountered countless tombs, shrines, relics, and reliquaries that serve as the focal points of Christian worship and pilgrimage. Rome is especially resplendent with what the Catholic church claims as some of the holiest of Christian relics: the heads of St Peter and St Paul, the Holy Umbilical Cord, the left foot of Mary Magdalene, multiple pieces of the True Cross, the skull of St John the Baptist, the finger of ‘doubting’ St Thomas, the ‘incorruptible’ corpse of St Cecilia, the heart and arm of St Camillus de Lellus, and the arm of St Francis Xavier. Raised Roman Catholic in Brooklyn, Thek was certainly familiar with Catholicism’s veneration of holy bodies and body parts. Much of Thek’s art was informed by the metaphors, rituals, and ‘thing-ness’ of his faith tradition. In the catalogue for his solo show Processions (1977), curator Suzanne Delehanty observed that Thek remembered ‘the church of his childhood as a special place’ of ‘mysterious darkness, the flicker of candlelight, the scent of beeswax and incense’.23 Italy reinvigorated these sensory states of faith and reverence, which he then re-envisioned in the Technological reliquaries. As Ann Wilson recalled in 1995: Today’s Rome is an urban landscape filled with the fragments of history. For Catholics, this fragmentary visual ambience is resonant with meaning both religious and secular, and for Paul Thek and Peter Hujar, who were both Catholics, the Italian and Roman references resonated from their understanding of the religious liturgy and its relevance to daily life. The catacombs, for example, represented a real fragment of the very basis of the church with their implications of martyrdom and transcendence.24
After facing, and touching, the corporeality of death in the Capuchin catacombs, Thek began making reliquaries that similarly venerated human remains and evoked Catholic doctrine while also negotiating an erotics of art. Importantly, Thek was not a Catholic artist: he did not make art to proselytise but to problematise issues
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The courses of empire pertaining to self, sexuality, and art-world identity. Asked by critic Gene Swenson to describe his Technological reliquaries, Thek replied: ‘They’re agnostic. They lead nowhere, except perhaps to a kind of freedom.’25 During his time in Italy, Thek re-evaluated his religious beliefs, especially Catholicism’s doctrinal emphasis on the human body as a vessel of divine spirit and an agent of suffering and martyrdom. For Catholic faithful, this is literally embodied in the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Transubstantiation of the Host into the body and blood of Christ, and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The ‘Catholic perspective’ on the body, critic Eleanor Heartney observes, ‘pushes certain artists towards the corporeal and the transgressive’.26 This is certainly true of Thek, whose meat-themed sculptures were predicated on his ‘revitalization’ of sensory states beyond the ‘cool’ formalism of Minimalism to a more emotionally engaged materiality that accommodated the body on nuanced and non-normative terms, including the terms of sexual difference censured in the Catholic Church.27 Living in Rome in the early 1960s, Thek found work as an extra for Cinecittà Studios, postwar Europe’s largest film and television studio.28 Dubbed ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’, Cinecittà was a leading post-production facility for movies like Ben Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), Cleopatra (1963), and other films that traced the rise and fall of empire. Thek’s experiences inspired a body of oil paintings based on mass-media images, figurative canvases shaped like TV sets that engaged, he told Hujar, ‘the mechanical-eye questioning of reality’. Hoping to extend his stay in Italy, Thek applied for a Fulbright, explaining that he wanted to paint ‘the new images of our time, particularly those of television and the cinema’, and that Rome’s ‘great film center’ was the ideal setting to do so.29 Although his application was unsuccessful, Thek’s Television analyzation paintings were shown in Rome in 1963 at Galleria 88, run by American art dealer Charles Moses. They were also shown at Topazia Alliata’s Galleria Trastevere in Rome. Like her friend Peggy Guggenheim, who began publicly displaying her modern art collection in Venice in 1951, Alliata was drawn to innovative art from around the world and was ‘particularly fond of experimental work’. Representing Italian avant-garde artists including Piero Manzoni, Carla Accardi, Pino Pascali, and Jannis Kounellis, Alliata also showed the work of diverse global moderns from Thek to Moroccan painter Mohamed Melehi.30 In 1962, her gallery featured Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, a rotating light sculpture whose stroboscopic effects were intended to induce visions. Gysin, a writer, painter, and sound artist who had exhibited with the Surrealists in the mid-1930s and collaborated with William Burroughs in the 1950s on ‘cut-ups’ made from randomly rearranged texts, described the Dreamachine as ‘A Chapel of Extreme Experience’.31 Thek met Gysin and Burroughs in Rome and developed similarly experimental practices with large-scale installations that he made in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands from 1967 to 1976. His interests in mechanics, ephemerality, and collaboration were also strongly shaped by Arte Povera practitioners whose work he saw at Alliata’s gallery. Their ‘radical questioning of and play with high-art pretensions and quasi-heroics’, writes art historian Alex Potts, and their ‘take-it-or-leave-it engagement with everyday things and substances’ influenced
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Paul Thek and the muses of Italy Thek’s interrogation of the meaning, purpose, and permanence of modern art in his meat sculptures and his installations.32 The liberating possibilities of affective ‘thing-ness’ which Thek experienced in the Capuchin catacombs became his primary focus with the Technological reliquaries. Selling La corazza to Alliata (who kept it in her private collection in Rome for fifty years), Thek returned to the United States and, living with Hujar in New York, began following the assembly-line ‘death-schedule’ that resulted in approximately forty-four meat sculptures. Meat-themed art was actually prevalent at the time. In 1964, for example, performance-art pioneer Carolee Schneemann staged Meat joy, an ‘erotic rite’ in which eight scantily clad dancers writhed on a floor strewn with raw chicken, fish, sausages, and wet paint.33 Schneemann met Thek in 1964 and spent time in his studio on East Third Street, where they discussed their shared interests in ‘taboo physicality’. As she later recalled, ‘We both had a lonely, isolated sense of what I called visceral plasticity. We wanted sensuousness in materials. Things that others considered to be obscene were sacred to us; we talked of the “religiosity” of our sources.’34 Also in 1964, Happenings artist Robert Delford Brown presented The meat show, a three-day ‘environment’ consisting of beef, lamb, and pork carcasses and buckets of blood arranged in a huge cooler at the Washington Meat Market on West 13th Street. Brown organised The meat show in conjunction with the ‘Grand Opening Service of the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic’, of which he was the founder and leader.35 Some likened these sorts of performances to the carnage of the Vietnam War. Thek’s meat sculptures, which juxtaposed metal, plastic, and wire mesh with flesh and blood inside boxes resembling both incubators and coffins, more explicitly linked that carnage to military technologies, including the matériel and metrics of combat operations. By extension, Thek’s meat sculptures protested what some saw as Pop Art’s uncritical ‘acceptance of mass production’ and Minimalism’s ‘idealization of technology’.36 Thek met Andy Warhol in 1964, and posed twice for his Screen Tests (short, silent, black-and-white films). After seeing an exhibition of Warhol’s simulated boxes of various mass consumable products at the Stable Gallery (where he would have his first major solo show in October 1964), Thek told him they needed ‘a piece of meat inside’.37 Warhol gave him one of his Brillo Box sculptures, which Thek then repurposed: removing a side, adding a glass panel, and inserting a slab of oozing flesh perforated by plastic tubing. He thereby refashioned and revised Pop Art’s ‘unruffled mass production’ with his own ‘death-schedule’ assembly of a more emotionally engaged memento mori.38 Thek’s Meat piece with Warhol Brillo Box was exhibited in the 1965 group show Beyond Realism at the Pace Gallery. A year later, Pace featured Thek’s Technological reliquaries in a solo exhibition. In addition to critiquing, as he remarked, ‘the “Modern Art” materials that were all the rage at the time, Formica and glass and plastic’, as well as their mechanical and anonymous fabrication into durable art-market consumables, Thek’s meat sculptures were often humorous. His 1965 piece Hippopotamus poison (Figure 14.2), for example, which features a hunk of rotting meat and a portion of roughly textured ‘skin’ etched with words (all in caps) warning of imminent human annihilation, spoofed Sylvia Kraus, a New Yorker who distributed leaflets (often in front of Saks
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The courses of empire
Figure 14.2. Paul Thek, Hippopotamus poison, 1965, wax, stainless steel, and plexiglass, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Fifth Avenue) detailing Communist plots to liquidate ‘loyal Americans with TASTELESS POISONS’.39 Kraus was, Thek later remarked, ‘always very nicely dressed in a kind of Schrafft’s middle-aged-matron way’. He appropriated one of her paranoid broadsides and substituted the word ‘tasteless’ with the word ‘hippopotamus’, he told curator Richard Flood in 1981, to ‘blow the logic of that particular understanding and, at the same time, enlarge it beyond the anecdotal’.40 The culminating work in the Technological reliquaries was The tomb, which featured a life-sized effigy of Thek dressed in a pink suit and laid to rest on a floor surrounded by pink goblets, a funerary bowl, personal letters, and jewellery inside a spacious one-story pink ziggurat, hazy with burning incense (Figure 14.3). Given its origins in Palermo’s arid ossuary, The tomb might be seen as Thek’s self-portrait as a desiccated Capuchin monk. Sculpting his uncanny likeness to reveal severed fingers on his right hand (his working hand) and a blackened tongue flopping out of his partially closed mouth, Thek presented his dead self ‘as a mute and impotent agent of social change’. Describing The tomb a decade later, Suzanne Delehanty remarked, ‘The machine age had made human feelings and the handcrafted object obsolete; technology had imprisoned humanity in monuments of its own invention.’41 First shown at Stable Gallery in 1967, and then re-installed in various European museums over the next decade, Thek’s funerary monument to himself, the first of his many large-scale and immersive environments, was a 1960s sensation. Dubbed ‘Death of Hippie’ by critics, some visitors left flowers and other offerings at the
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Paul Thek and the muses of Italy
Figure 14.3. Paul Thek, The tomb (interior view), Stable Gallery, 1967, New York
installation.42 Hujar photographed Thek working on and lying next to his dead self, echoing the photos he took of him four years earlier inside the Capuchin catacombs (Plate 31). He also documented the books and pictures in Thek’s studio that contextualised the making and meaning of the Technological reliquaries, including ‘photographs of grotesquely deformed twins; Michelangelo’s David; Christ on the cross; diseased cells, organs and body parts’, various pictures of freaks and disasters in the Daily News, and examples of religious ephemera.43 The contemplative, if provocative, emotional engagement that Thek proposed in his Technological reliquaries was only minimally absorbed, or understood, in the art world of the 1960s. Despite his representation in several prestigious New York galleries, Thek’s deliberately affective critique of the ‘cool’ art styles that dominated the era was distrusted. Disgusted with an increasingly rapacious New York art market and his limited opportunities as an artist nicknamed ‘Meat Man’, Thek returned to Rome in late 1967, and was soon forgotten in American art. In Italy, he turned to other creative outlets. In 1967, he spent time in Turin with Le Stelle di Mario Schifano (The Stars of Mario Schifano), an Italian rock band patronised by Italian painter and filmmaker Schifano (similar to the relationship between Warhol and the rock group The Velvet Underground). In 1968, he moved to Ponza and spent time swimming and exploring underground sea caves. Abandoning his ‘death-schedule’ assembly of meticulously crafted abject objects, Thek explored ‘other more congenial modes of expression: the esthetic of accident, mysticism, the replacing, as he put it, “of technological education with spiritual education”’.44
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The courses of empire Famed for its multicoloured volcanic cliffs, turquoise waters, Etruscan grottoes, and archaeological ruins, Ponza was an ideal setting for Thek’s new, or redirected, interests. Some identify Ponza as Aeaea, the mythological island in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus and his crew stopped to rest during their long and arduous journey from Troy to Ithaca, and were bewitched and held captive by the powerful goddess-sorceress Circe. Ponza was, and still is, a prison island: the Roman emperor Tiberius exiled his adopted grandson Nero to Ponza in ce 29; the Flavian emperor Domitian banished Christians there later in the first century; Bedouins and Libyans resistant to Italian colonisation in North Africa were forcibly deported to Ponza from 1911 until the early 1930s; the Ethiopian prince Haile Selassie was held prisoner on Ponza from 1936 to 1943; hundreds of anti-Fascist political dissidents were imprisoned on the island from 1926 to 1943; and Mussolini was imprisoned on Ponza in July 1943. Today, Ponza is one of many migrant detention centres in Italy’s carceral archipelago, as well as a popular tourist resort.45 Whether or not Thek was fully aware of Ponza’s carceral history, he made the island the locus of his exile from the United States. Thek was not, of course, a prisoner on Ponza but he used his refuge there to reassess and reorder his aesthetic priorities. Between organising huge, collaborative, immersive, and often audacious installations for museums in Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Lucerne, and for Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, Thek spent his time alone on Ponza. He drew and painted the island, the sea, and the interior of the small shack he rented, and kept extensive notebooks documenting his thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. 96 sacraments (1975), for example, listed ways to ‘Praise the Lord’, including ‘to wake up’, ‘to breathe’, ‘to go to work’, ‘to think of love’, ‘to write a poem’, and ‘to forget The Way’.46 He had very little money and mostly painted on newspaper, including pages from the International Herald Tribune. Untitled (diver), 1969, a sketchily painted image of a naked man boldly plunging into a turquoise sea (Plate 32), was inspired by a Greek wall painting in the Tomb of the Diver, a fifth century bce necropolis near Paestum (south of Salerno) that was rediscovered in 1968.47 The tomb’s depiction of a young man diving into the sea from atop a tall structure is generally interpreted as a symbolic plunge into the afterlife, a theme that certainly segued with Thek’s long-standing interests in the corporeal and the metaphysical. Focusing on bodies in motion, organic life, and spiritual rediscovery, Thek’s Ponza seascapes and personal notebooks seemingly deviated from the themes of death and decay that obsessively informed the Technological reliquaries. But Thek’s new creative directions remained aligned with his consistent resistance to hierarchy, or what he perceived as corrupt alliances. Disrupting art-world conventions of commodification and permanence, and refusing to become a professionalised, market-driven artist with a single ‘signature’ style or brand, Thek lived in Italy to pursue an uncompromised artistic practice of uncontained and uncontrolled difference. Italy gave him the space, and time, to think about creative process in a manner that presaged the installation practices of many future American artists. In 2017, poet and artist Susan Howe drew on Thek’s work, and in particular the newspaper paintings he made in Ponza, in her collection Debths, whose title (taken from
Paul Thek and the muses of Italy James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) puns on the inspirations and achievements we owe to others and how deeply we owe them.48 Thek’s debt to the muses of Italy is similarly illuminating. Acknowledgements. Thanks to Elissa Auther, Felicia Caponigri, Melissa Dabakis, Stephanie Malia Hom, and Alex Taylor for their advice and suggestions with this essay.
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Notes 1 Paul Thek, quoted in G. R. Swenson, ‘Beneath the skin, interview with Paul Thek’, Art News 65:2 (April 1966): 35. 2 See, for example, S. Hecker and M. R. Sullivan, ‘Introduction’, in S. Hecker and M. R. Sullivan (eds), Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’ (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018), pp. 1–20. 3 S. Sontag, ‘Introduction’, in P. Hujar, Portraits in Life and Death (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976). 4 K. Roiphe, ‘Remembering Susan Sontag’s final days’, Literary Hub (28 March 2016), https:// lithub.com/remembering-susan-sontags-final-days/. Sontag died of cancer in 2004. 5 S. Sontag, ‘Of Freud and the new resurrection of the flesh’, The Supplement, Columbia Daily Spectator 2:6 (28 April 1961): 3–4; R. Storr, ‘This time around’, Frieze 136 ( January–February 2011): 121–2. Storr described Thek as Sontag’s ‘male muse’. For an excellent overview of Thek’s career and critical response to his work, see K. Winnekes, ‘Life is Like a Bowl of Cherries: Biography and Catalogue of the Collection’, in K. Winnekes (ed.), Paul Thek: Shrine (Cologne: Kolumba, 2012), pp. 411–88. 6 S. Sontag, Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1976); S. Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1989). Their relationship was rocky, but in 1986, when Thek was sick and poverty stricken, Sontag wrote a letter of recommendation supporting Thek’s application for a Pollock–Krasner Foundation artist’s grant (which he received). And in August 1988, when Thek was dying of AIDS in Lenox Hill Hospital, Sontag stayed at his bedside and arranged for last rites. For letters, see M. Brehm, ‘Dear Baby-Dear SisterDear Susan, Excerpts from Paul Thek’s Letters to Susan Sontag’, in H. Falckenberg and P. Weibel (eds), Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist (Karlsruhe: ZKM/Center for Art and Media, 2008), pp. 296–311; on their relationship in the 1980s see M. Brehm, ‘Chronology Paul Thek’, in Fackenberg and Weibel, Paul Thek, p. 602 and P. Schjeldahl, ‘Out-there man: Paul Thek rediscovered’, The New Yorker (1 November 2010), www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/01/out-there-man. 7 H. Cotter, ‘Thek’s social reliquaries’, Art in America 78:6 ( June 1990): 137. 8 Thek, quoted in Swenson, ‘Beneath the skin’: 35, 66. 9 Paul Thek to Susan Sontag, 22 June 1965, in Brehm, ‘Dear Baby’, p. 297. 10 The term Technological reliquaries was first used by Suzanne Delehanty in the catalogue Paul Thek: Processions (Philadelphia, PA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1977), and referred to works Thek made between 1965–67; see M. Brehm, ‘“Keep trying to get IN not OUT”: Paul Thek in the Context of American Art, 1964–1970’, in Fackenberg and Weibel, Paul Thek, pp. 80, 83. 11 J. Canaday, ‘Art’, The New York Times (30 September 1967): 29. Operating in Paris’s Pigalle district from 1897 to 1962, the Théâtre de Grand Guignol (‘the big puppet show’) specialised in brutally naturalistic and bloody horror plays. 12 D. Johnson, ‘Modern death: Jack Smith, Fred Herko, and Paul Thek’, Criticism 56:2 (Spring 2014): 216. 13 M. Kelley, ‘Paul Thek: death and transfiguration’, Art Press 183 (September 1993): 21. 14 R. Flood, ‘Paul Thek: real misunderstanding’, Artforum 20:2 (October 1981): 49. 15 K. Varnedoe, Cy Twombly (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), p. 16. 16 C. Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), p. 69.
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The courses of empire 17 O. Wittmann, Jr., ‘Americans in Italy: mid-century attitudes a hundred years apart’, College Art Journal 17:3 (Spring 1958): 287, 293. 18 Wittman explained that the Detroit–Toledo show supplemented Travelers in Arcadia: American Artists in Italy, 1830–1875, also jointly organised by both museums in 1951; see Wittman, ‘Artists in Italy’, 286–7. Americans in Europe at the Downtown Gallery was held 5–29 September 1956; for more, see Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., Downtown Gallery Records, 1824– 1974, Series 7.1 Printed Matter Produced by Downtown Gallery, 1926–1968, Reel 5640 (Box 105), Frames 1029–1120: Exhibition Catalogs, Checklists, Invitations, and Announcements (2 of 3), 1950s, and specifically for this exhibit, frames 1060–75. 19 R. F. Hawkins, ‘On the Left Bank – of Rome’, The New York Times Sunday Magazine (5 June 1955); ‘Americans in Italy’, Life (15 September 1952): 88. 20 ‘Americans in Italy’: 88. 21 G. Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on the General Economy (1993), as noted in C. DeSilvery, ‘Observed decay: telling stories with mutable things’, Journal of Material Culture 11:3 (2006): 320. 22 Thek told Swenson that his sculptures were somewhat ‘sado-masochistic’ but that he found that label ‘limiting’. See Swenson, ‘Beneath the skin’: 67. 23 S. Delehanty, ‘Paul Thek: Seeking the Way’, in Paul Thek, p. 56. 24 A. Wilson, ‘Voices from the Era’, in P. Thek et al., Paul Thek: The Wonderful World that Almost Was (Rotterdam: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, 1995), p. 58. 25 ‘Introduction’, in Winnekes, Paul Thek, p. 10; Swenson, ‘Beneath the skin’: 35. 26 E. Heartney, ‘Postmodern heretics’, Art in America 85:2 (February 1997): 33; see also E. Doss, ‘Robert Gober’s “Virgin” Installation: Issues of Spirituality in Contemporary American Art’, in D. Morgan and S. M. Promey (eds), The Visual Culture of American Religions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 129–45. 27 Thek, quoted in Swenson, ‘Beneath the skin’: 35. 28 O. L. Shultz, ‘Paul Thek: Untimely Bodies, 1963–1988’, PhD diss., Stanford University, CA, 2018, p. 43. 29 Thek shared a draft of his Fulbright application with Hujar in a 22 October 1963 letter; see Winnekes, ‘Life is Like a Bowl of Cherries’, pp. 420–1. 30 ‘Princess Topazia Alliata – obituary’, Telegraph (17 February 2016), www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ obituaries/12161560/Princess-Topazia-Alliata-obituary.html (accessed 2 April 2021); C. S. Blum, Rewriting the Journey in Contemporary Italian Literature: Figures of Subjectivity in Progress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), p. 172. 31 L. Hoptman, Brion Gysin: Dream Machine (London: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2010), pp. 17–20. 32 A. Potts, ‘Autonomy in post-war art, quasi-heroic and casual’, Oxford Art Journal 27:1 (2004): 53. 33 C. Schneemann, ‘The obscene body/politic’, Art Journal 50:4 (Winter 1991): 29. 34 C. Schneemann, quoted in ‘Body of influence: six views on Paul Thek’, Artforum 49:5 ( January 2011): 163. 35 C. Tomkins, ‘Art or not, it’s food for thought’, Life (20 November 1964): 144. 36 Delehanty, Paul Thek, p. 3. 37 Thek, quoted in Brehm, ‘“Keep Trying to Get IN not OUT”’, p. 85. 38 Cotter, ‘Thek’s social reliquaries’: 137. 39 Kraus also sent letters to multiple US newspapers warning about Communist plots; see V. Chambers, ‘Alarmist exploits gullibilities in anti-communist campaign’, Conn Census (Connecticut College student newspaper) (9 May 1963). Examples of Kraus’s broadsides, including ‘Warning! Halt the Communists Insidious Massacre of Loyal Americans and God Worshippers by Blending Food, Beverages, Tobacco with Poisons Which Simulate Heart Attack, Cancer, Stroke, Etc.’ (4 July 1964), can be found in Cornell University Libraries, Department of Manuscript and University Archives, John Rivoire, Collector, Broadsides, #2039. 40 Thek, quoted in Flood, ‘Paul Thek’, 49. 41 Delehanty, Paul Thek, p. 8. 42 The tomb was called ‘Death of Hippie’ during its installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969, about two years after the Diggers organised the ‘Death of Hippie’ march in San Francisco.
Paul Thek and the muses of Italy
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43 M. Israel, ‘Finding Thek’s Tomb’, Art in America 98:10 (November 2010): 126. 44 Cotter, ‘Thek’s social reliquaries’, 140. Cotter quotes from Thek’s 1975 notebook 96 Sacraments, numbers 53–5: ‘To replace some technological education with some spiritual education.’ See 96 Sacraments in Thek et al., Paul Thek, pp. 137–43. 45 S. M. Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019). 46 Ibid. Some eighty notebooks were found among Thek’s possessions after his death. 47 The title of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibit Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective (21 October 2010–9 January 2011) was inspired by the paintings Thek made at Ponza ca. 1969–70. 48 S. Howe, Debths (New York: New Directions, 2017).
Selected bibliography ‘Americans in Italy’. Life (15 September 1952): 88–97. Blum, C. S. Rewriting the Journey in Contemporary Italian Literature: Figures of Subjectivity in Progress. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.’ Brehm, M. and R. Ohrt. Paul Thek: Tales the Tortoise Taught Us. Berlin: Walther König, 2009. Cotter, H. ‘Thek’s social reliquaries’. Art in America 78:6 ( June 1990): 137–43. Delehanty, S. Paul Thek: Processions. Philadelphia, PA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1977. DeSilvery, C. ‘Observed decay: telling stories with mutable things.’ Journal of Material Culture 11:3 (2006): 318–38. Doss, E. ‘Robert Gober’s “Virgin” Installation: Issues of Spirituality in Contemporary American Art’. In D. Morgan and S. M. Promey (eds), The Visual Culture of American Religions. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001, pp. 129–45, 322–4. Dossin, C. The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. Falckenberg, H. and P. Weibel (eds). Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist. Karlsruhe: ZKM/Center for Art and Media, 2008. Flood, R. ‘Paul Thek: real misunderstanding’. Artforum 20:2 (October 1981): 48–53. Hawkins, R. F. ‘On the Left Bank – of Rome’. The New York Times Sunday Magazine (5 June 1955). Heartney, E. ‘Postmodern Heretics’. Art in America 85:2 (February 1997): 33–9. Hecker, S. and M. R. Sullivan. Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018. Hom, S. M. Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. Hoptman, L. Brion Gysin: Dream Machine. London: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2010. Howe, S. Debths. New York: New Directions, 2017. Israel, M. ‘Finding Thek’s tomb’. Art in America 98:10 (November 2010): 118–27. Johnson, D. ‘Modern death: Jack Smith, Fred Herko, and Paul Thek’. Criticism 56:2 (Spring 2014): 211–34. Kelley, M. ‘Paul Thek: death and transfiguration’. Art Press 183 (September 1993): 21–4. Kelley, M., G. Indiana, C. Schneemann, J. Miller, N. Jenney, and C. Kraus, ‘Body of influence: six views on Paul Thek’. Artforum 49:5 ( January 2011): 160–7, 242. Potts, A. ‘Autonomy in post-war art, quasi-heroic and casual’. Oxford Art Journal 27:1 (2004): 45–59. Roiphe, K. ‘Remembering Susan Sontag’s final days’. Literary Hub (28 March 2016). https://lithub. com/remembering-susan-sontags-final-days/ (accessed 2 April 2021). Schjeldahl, P. ‘Out-there man: Paul Thek rediscovered’. The New Yorker (1 November, 2010). www. newyorker.com/magazine/2010/11/01/out-there-man (accessed 2 April 2021). Schneemann, C. ‘The obscene body/politic’. Art Journal 50:4 (Winter 1991): 28–35. Shultz, O. L. ‘Paul Thek: Untimely Bodies, 1963–1988’. PhD diss., Stanford University, CA, 2018.
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The courses of empire Sontag, S. ‘Of Freud and the new resurrection of the flesh’. The Supplement, Columbia Daily Spectator 2:6 (28 April 1961): 3–4. _____. ‘Introduction’. In P. Hujar, Portraits in Life and Death. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976. Storr, R. ‘This time around’. Frieze 136 ( January–February 2011): 121–2. Swenson, G. R. ‘Beneath the skin, interview with Paul Thek’. Art News 65:2 (April 1966): 34–5, 66–7. Thek, P. et al. Paul Thek: The Wonderful World that Almost Was. Rotterdam: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, 1995. _____. Paul Thek: Shrine. Cologne: Kolumba, 2012. Tomkins, C. ‘Art or not, it’s food for thought’. Life (20 November 1964): 143–4. Varnedoe, K. Cy Twombly. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994. Winnekes, K. ‘Life is Like a Bowl of Cherries: Biography and Catalogue of the Collection’. In Thek, Paul Thek, 411–88. Wittmann, Jr, O. ‘Americans in Italy: mid-century attitudes a hundred years apart’. College Art Journal 17:3 (Spring 1958): 284–93.
Plate 1. Guercino, Abraham casting out Hagar and Ishmael, 1657, oil on canvas, Brera, Milan
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Plate 2. Fred Wilson, Speak of me as I am, 2003, American Pavilion, 2003 Biennale di Venezia
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Plate 3. Elihu Vedder, Roman Campagna, ca. 1866, oil on canvas, private collection
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Plate 5. Charles Caryl Coleman, Rooftops in Perugia, 1870, oil on canvas, private collection
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Plate 6. Charles Caryl Coleman, Outside the walls, 1868, oil on paper on canvas, private collection
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Plate 7. Elihu Vedder, The music party, 1871, oil on board laid down on panel, Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA
Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Plate 8. Charles Caryl Coleman, Mandolin player, 1879, oil on cradled panel, Graham Williford Foundation for American Art, Fairfield, TX
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Plate 9. Silvestro Lega, Portrait of Garibaldi, 1861, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Comunale Silvestre Lega, Modigliana
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Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Plate 11. Andrea Cefaly, The Progress of America, 1880, oil on canvas, Museo delle Arti in Catanzaro
Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Plate 12. John Gast, American progress, 1872, oil on canvas, Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, CA
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Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Plate 14. John Singer Sargent, Street in Venice, 1882, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Plate 16. Frank Duveneck, Venetian water carriers, Venice, 1884, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
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Plate 17. John Singer Sargent, Venetian bead stringers, 1880 or 1882, oil on canvas, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
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Plate 21. Ethel Magafan, Andrew Jackson at the battle of New Orleans, 8 January 1814, 1943, mural, Office of Deeds, Washington, D.C.
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Plate 23. Reginald Marsh, Sorting the mail, 1937, fresco, Ariel Rios Federal Building (formerly US Post Office building), Washington, D.C.
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Plate 24. George Harding, Post-dispatch rider, 1776, 1937, oil on canvas (mural), Ariel Rios Federal Building (formerly US Post Office building), Washington, D.C.
Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Plate 25. Philip Guston, Reconstruction and well being of the family, 1942, oil on canvas on board (mural), Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building (formerly Social Security Building), Washington, D.C.
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Plate 32. Paul Thek, Untitled (diver), 1969, acrylic on newspaper, Collection Estate of Paul Thek
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Index
Note: ‘n.’ after a page number indicates a note on that page. Page numbers in italics refer to black and white illustrations in the main body of the text; color plates are indicated by pl. 1, etc. Abbati, Giuseppe 87, 91 abolitionism 57, 69, 73, 77–8, 80, 92, 109, 113, 115, 136n.55, 154–64, 166, 168n.14, 175 Abraham (Old Testament) 27 Abstract Expressionism 9, 200, 210, 212 Accardi, Carla 246 Acquisti, Luigi Mars and Venus 33n.52 Adams, Charlotte 147 Adams, Henry 61 Adriatic Sea 166 Aeaea 250 Africa 48, 74 horn of 5, 163 North 5, 74, 171, 181, 250 African Americans 5, 22, 71, 75, 79–81, 110, 154, 158 Africans and African Americans, depictions of 69, 71, 74, 76–80, 154–61, 193–4 Afro see Basaldella, Afro Agresti, Olivia Rossetti 94 L’Alba 161 Alberici, Augusto 102n.58 Alberti, Leon Battista 200 Albinola, Giovanni 19 Aldrich, Chester Holmes 81 Aldrich, Robert Kiss Me Deadly 204, 205, 206, 214–16, 221n.43 Alfieri, Vittorio 144 Algerciras, Conference of 181 Ali 74 Allen, Henry Watkins 76 Alliata, Topazia 242, 246–7 Allori, Cristofano Judith with the head of Holofernes 121n.36 Allston, Washington 197 Altamura, Francesco Saverio 91 Amari, Michele Storia dei Musulmani in Sicilia 133n.17 American Academy in Rome see Rome, American Academy in American Art-Union 134n.28 American Federation of the Arts 213–14 American Magazine of Art 190
American Red Cross 183–4 American Scholar, The 191 Amici, Domenico 47 Amsterdam 244, 250 Anacapri 97 Anderson, Benedict 35–6, 46 Andrea del Sarto 89 Angelico, Fra 88 Anglo-Puritan literary tradition 110 Anglo-Saxonism 19, 21, 24, 26, 147, 173, 180 Anselmo, Giovanni 234 anti-Catholicism, American 19–20, 22, 28 anti-clericalism, Italian 127, 133–4n.18, 178 anti-Fascism 206–7, 250 Anticoli Corrado 189–90, 193, 201n.3, 201n.6 Antignano 80 Appleton, Julia (McKim) 182 Appleton, Mary Alice (Meyer) 182 Appleton, William 182 Apulia 183 Arabs and Arabia 127, 133n.17 Arezzo 193, 196 Art Amateur, The 141–2 Art Informel 210 Arte Metafisica 206 Arte Povera 243, 246 Artistic Congress, Painting Section of 126 Arts, The 189 Aspromonte 88 Assisi 195–6, 208 Association for Female Suffrage 130 Atlantic Monthly 217 Attucks, Crispus 71 Aurisina 166 Austrian empire 5, 154, 157 as occupiers of Italy 20, 25–6, 28, 36, 54–5, 61, 87, 89, 91, 93, 160–3, 168–9n.30 Avedon, Richard 212–13, 212 Ayres, Linda 142–3 Bacci, Edmondo 214 Bacher, Otto 151n.29 Badioli and Berzotti, lithographers 47
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Index Bagnoli (PD) 237n.11 Bailey, Bridget 7, 21 Bali 189 Ball, Thomas Freedman’s Memorial (Emancipation Memorial) 80, 158–9, 158 Baltimore 36 Walters Art Museum 182 Bandini, Giovanni 74 Banty, Cristiano 91 Barbizon School 90 Bardazzi, Francesca 9 Barone, Giuseppe 128 Baroque 37, 41, 43, 45, 76–7, 112 Barr, Alfred H., Jr 6, 204, 206, 213 Barringer, Tim 8 Barthel, Melchior 77, 157 Bartholdi, Frédéric-Auguste Statue of Liberty 158, 163 Basaldella, Afro 204–8, 210–11, 214–15, 220n.34 Chicago 211 Lest we forget II 210, pl. 28 Basaldella, Mirko 207, 218n.9, 220n.22 Baxter, Bud 215 Beaux, Cecilia Mrs Roosevelt and daughter Ethel 173, pl. 18 Bedarida, Raffaele 10n.6 Bedouins 250 Bellini, Vincenzo 144 Ben Hur 246 Bender, Albert M. 198 Benedict, Erastus C. A Run through Europe 78, 81–2 Benjamin, Walter 200 Benoff, Max 214 Benton, Thomas Hart 192, 195 Benvenuti, Pietro Hercules fighting the centaurs 89 Berenson, Bernard 8, 189, 192–3, 196–7, 200 Italian Painters of the Renaissance 196 Bergamo 237n.8 Bergamo Nuova 131 Berzotti, Cesare see Badioli and Berzotti, lithographers Beverly Hills, CA Frank Perls Gallery 206, 214 Bianchi, Gaetano 91 Biddle, George 189–90, 192–4, 199, 201n.3, 201n.6 Society freed through justice 193–4, pl. 22 Biennale di Venezia see Venice, Biennale Bignami, Silvia 10n.6 Birolli, Renato 207 Biseo, Cesare 101n.58 Blankfort, Michael 214 Blum, Robert Frederick 142 Venetian bead stringers 143, 150n.11, pl. 15
Boccaccio Decameron 96, 100n.23 Bohls, Elizabeth 21 Bologna Galleria Marescalchi 221n.43 Bonaiuti, Raffaello 88–9 Bonner, Paul Hyde 220n.34 Bonolis, Giuseppe 125 Bordighera 92 Borgo San Sepolcro 193, 195–6 Borrani, Odoardo 91 Boschini, Marco 89 Boston 38, 119, 135n.34 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 8, 143 Museum of Fine Arts 8 Boston Courier 61 Boston Massacre 71 Botta, Carlo History of the War of Independence of the United States of America 127 Bottai, Giuseppe 219n.10 Bourbon regime in southern Italy 3, 52, 54, 57–9, 61, 63, 125–6 Brady, Mathew 65n.8 Bramante, Donato 184 Brassaï 213 Braun, Emily 220n.31 Brescia 25 Bresser-Perreira, Luiz Carlos 35 brigandage 127, 132n.2, 142 Brin, Irene 206, 210–14, 217 British Legion 62 Brooklyn, NY 88, 245 Art Union 116 Brooks, Van Wyck 8, 188, 198 Broude, Norma 87, 89 Brown, Carlyle 213 Brown, Henry Kirke 76 Brown, John 56 Brown, Norman O. Life against Death 242 Brown, Robert Delford The meat show 247 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 104–7 Browning, Robert 8, 104–7 Bruce, Edward 189–91, 194–200, 201n.3, 201n.6 Brumidi, Constantino 5 The apotheosis of George Washington 128 Bryant, William Cullen 18 Buffalo, NY 90, 92 Bull Run, Battle of 113 Buonomo, Leonardo 8 Burckhardt, Jacob The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy 198 Burri, Alberto 211–13, 220n.22, 220n.34 Jazz 211 Sacchi 210, 212, pl. 28
Index
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Burroughs, William 241, 246 Busiri-Vici, Andrea 45 Buzard, James 29 Byzantine art 200 Cabianca, Vincenzo 87, 91 Florentine story-tellers (Villa Salviati, episode from Boccaccio) 96 Florentine storytellers of the fourteenth century 96 Caffè, Nino 220n.34 Baseball 211 Cagli, Corrado 206–8 Cagli, Serena 207 Calabria 2, 52, 61, 125–6, 129 Calandrelli, Andrea 37 Calder, Alexander 2, 6, 224, 227–9, 235 Teodelapio 224, 225, 227, 231–3, 236 California 196 Calo, Mary Ann 220n.35 Cambridge, MA Harvard University 143, 175, 181 Widener Library 180 Camillus de Lellus, St 245 Cammarano, Michele 133n.8 Campagna, Roman 48, 86, 89, 94, 101n.37 Campania 2, 63 Campigli, Massimo 204, 206–7, 214–16, 220n.34 Gioco del diablo 221n.43 Mondariso 215, 221n.43 Camuccini, Vincenzo 136n.55 Canada 209, 214 Canaday, John 243 Caneva, Giacomo 37 Canopus, Temple of Serapis in 97 Canova, Antonio 144 Napoleon as Mars the peace-maker 26, 27 Palamedes 28–9, 28 Capogrossi, Giuseppe 214, 220n.22 Caprera 63 Capri 97–8 Caprin, Giuseppe 161 Capua 61–2, 64, 91 see also Volturno, Battle of Carandente, Giovanni 6, 223–4, 227–32, 234, 236, 237n.19 Caravaggio Incredulity of St Thomas 220n.31 Caribbean Sea 171, 183 Carlo III, King 61 Carmi, Eugenio 227 Carnovale, Luigi 129 Carrà, Carlo 215 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 213 Caruso, Bruno 212, 215–16, 220n.34 Ice cream vendor in Brooklyn 211 Casati, Count Gabrio 32n.14
Casati-Stampa mausoleum in Muggiò 28 Casati, Teresa 28 Cassatt, Mary 9 Cassinari, Bruno 218n.4 Castagno, Andrea del 200 Castillia, Gaetano De see De Castillia, Gaetano catacombs 5, 200 see also Palermo, Capuchin catacombs Catanzaro 125 Museo delle Arti in Catanzaro (MARCA) 125 Palazzo Seravalle 127 Royal College 125 Catholicism 20, 22, 28, 91, 189, 208, 211 Paul Thek’s engagement with 240, 242–3, 245–6 Cava di Selce 233–5 Cavallini, Pietro Last judgment 200 Cavour, Camillo 60, 144, 180 Cecilia, St 245 Cecioni, Adriano 87, 91 Cedar City, IA Little Gallery 195 Cefaly, Andrea 2, 125–32, 132n.2, 133n.8, 135n.35 Aerostat, means of salvation in Calabria 134n.22 Allegory of Italy 133–4n.18 Allegory of progress 127, 128 Assault of Arabs 133n.17 Aurora 127, 128 The battle of Volturno 133n.9 The best way to travel in Calabria 127 Bivacco dei garibaldini 133n.9 The commerce of Calabria 127 Compulsory school 133n.16 Family on the terrace 133n.16 Francesca da Rimini 126 Humanity confronting the nations 135n.35 Paolo e Francesca 126 Progress of America 4, 125–32, pl. 11 Cefaly, Carolina 133n.12, 133n.16 Cefaly, Domenico 125, 132n.2 Cefaly, Raimondo 125 Cefaly, Vittoria 125 Celant, Germano 11n.18 Century, The 177 Cerveteri 93 Cézanne, Paul 90–1 Mont Sainte-Victoire with large pine 90 Chadwick, Lynn 227, 229 Chagall, Marc 216 Channing, William Ellery 23–4 Charlestown, MA, Ursuline convent and school in 20 Chicago 129, 135n.34, 189, 221n.43, 236 Berlitz School 135n.35 World’s Fair 171, 174 China 189
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Index Church, Frederick 98 CIMA see New York, Center for Italian Modern Art Cincinnati 214 Cincinnatus 54, 63 Cinecittà 215, 246 Circe 250 City Beautiful movement 198 civic humanism 197–8, 200 Civil War, American 3, 5, 49, 62, 64, 79, 92, 104, 108–10, 112–13, 115, 127–8, 154, 156–7, 164, 173 Claflin, Tennessee 129 Cleopatra 246 Clerici, Fabrizio 220n.34 Cleveland 135n.34 Cold War 7, 10n.9, 208 Cole, Thomas 8 Coleman, Charles 93, 101n.37 Coleman, Charles Caryl 2, 4, 87–8, 90–8, 99n.4 Italian shepherd 94 Mandolin player 96–7, pl. 8 Outside the walls 95, pl. 6 Rooftops in Perugia 91, pl. 5 Colla, Ettore 228 Colombo, Davide 10n.6, 219n.20 Colombo, Ercole see Carnovale, Luigi colonialism, Italian 5, 81, 160, 163, 166 Commission of Fine Art 199 communes, Italian medieval 190 Communism 208–9, 248, 252n.39 Como, Lake 28 Compromise of 1850 77 Confalonieri, Federico 19–20, 24, 28, 32n.14–15 Confederacy 108–10, 113, 156, 167n.4, 224 British support for 109 Congress, United States 42, 172–3, 181–2 House Committee on Patents 190 Consagra, Pietro 228–9 Constitution, American 109 constitutional monarchy, Italy as 2–3, 52 Cooper, James Fenimore 18 Copley, John Singleton 197 Corbet, Edith 93 Corbet, Matthew Ridley 93 Corciano 102n.58 Cornigliano blast furnace 228, 237n.8 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille 108 Cortale 125–6 Cortesini, Sergio 8 Costa, Giovanni (Nino) 46, 87, 93–4, 97, 100n.35, 101n.37 Bridge at Ariccia 94 Shepherd in the Roman countryside 94 Courbet, Gustave 104, 116–19, 132n.2, 133n.8
The meeting, or ‘Bonjour Monsieur Courbet’ 117, 118 Realist Manifesto 116 Couture, Thomas 90 Craven, Thomas Men of Art 197 A Treasury of Art Masterpieces 197 Crawford, Francis Marion 179 Crawford, Thomas 29, 105, 179 Freedom 75–6 Cremona 196 Crete 77 Crimean War 43, 64 Crippa, Roberto 214 Critelli, Maria Pia 44 Crofutt, George A. 127 Cuba 88 Cubism, French 199 Cummings, Nathan 221n.43 Curry, John Steuart 195 Curti, Maria 101n.47 D’Agostino, Peter 178 D’Ancona, Vito 87 D’Opaglio, Maurizio 221n.43 Dabakis, Melissa A Sisterhood of Sculptors 11n.21, 104 Daguerre, Louis 35 Dahl-Wolfe, Louise installation photo of Burri exhibition pl. 28 Daily News, The (London) 108 Damon-Bach, Lucinda 19 Dandolo, Enrico 48 Danese, Michele 47 Dante 126, 144 Daverio, Francesco 48 Davis, Jefferson 76 De Castillia, Gaetano 19–20, 31n.12 de Chirico, Giorgio 207 De Cuppis, Pompilio 47 De Grassi, Massimo 159, 161 De Pisis, Filippo 214 De Sanctis, Francesco 125 De Sanctis, Giuseppe 93 De Tivoli, Serafino 91 De Vivo, Tommaso America and its genii 136n.55 New America 136n.55 New Italy 136n.55 The trumpets of Italy 136n.55 decay 45, 98, 143, 147, 240, 245, 250 Declaration of Independence 69, 158 Del Corso, Gaspero 210–14, 217 Delano, William Adams 81 Delehanty, Suzanne 245, 248, 251n.10 Depression, Great 188, 190 design, Italian 209
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Index Desjardins, Martin 83n.13 Detroit Institute of Arts 244 Travelers in Arcadia: American Artists in Italy 252n.18 Di Anticoli, Filomena (‘Nena’) 101n.47 Diggers 252n.42 Divine 241 Domitian, Emperor 250 Don Quixote 107 Donaia, Andrea 23 Donatello Judith and Holofernes 112, 113 Donizetti, Gaetano 144 La donna: periodico morale ed istruttivo 129–30 Dorr, David A Colored Man Round the World 79 Douglas, Kirk 214 Douglass, Frederick 8, 168–9n.30 Dova, Gianni 214 Dows, Olin 189, 196 Doyle, Don 36, 46 Draper, William 174 Dublin 40 Farmleigh House 121n.33 International Art Exhibition 121n.33 National Botanic Gardens 121n.33 Il Duce see Mussolini, Benito Duino 156 Dumas, Alexandre, the elder 58, 133n.8 Durbé, Dario 94, 97 Duse, Eleonora 144 Düsseldorf Prospect ’69 234 Duveneck, Frank 8, 142 Venetian water-carriers 147, pl. 16 École de Paris 207 Edwards, Sarah (Sallie) 59, 64 Egypt 164, 181 Suez Canal 163–4 Elgin marbles 99n.9 Elliot, Maud Howe Roma Beata 176 Emancipation Proclamation 154, 156–8, 160–2, 167n.4 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 115 English in Italy 30 Eppes, Josephine 76 Eritrea 5, 163 Essen 244 Estival, Virgilio 136n.48 Eterna Primavera see New York, Catherine Viviano Gallery Ethiopia 183, 250 Etruria, ancient 93–5, 98, 227 Etruscan School of Art 93 Europe, personification of 166
Evans, Rex 214 Evening Telegram 130 exiles, Italian political 18–20, 22–4, 32n.14, 207 Fairbrother, Trevor 142 Falzoni, Giordano 220n.34 Fanfani, Amintore 217 Fanfulla della Domenica 106, 108 Fantasts 206 FAP see Federal Art Project Farinacci, Roberto 219n.10 Fascism 6–7, 172, 182–4, 206–9, 217, 218n.10, 224, 226 see also anti-Fascism fashion, art and 6, 206, 210–14, 217 Fattori, Giovanni 87, 91 Ciociaro 95 Horse market in the Piazza Montanaro in Rome 95 Women of Ciociaria 94 Fava, Baron Xavier 174 Fazzini, Pericle 220n.34 Federal Art Project 188, 199 Feiterson, Lorser 192 Fellini, Federico La Dolce Vita 6, 215 feminism 4, 18, 126, 128–32 Fénelon, François 20 Fenton, Roger 43 Ferdinando II, King 57 Ferrini, Giuseppe 47 Fiesole 91 Filippi, Tomaso 141 Street scene 148 Fini, Leonor 207 Fiorentino, Daniele 8 First International Conference on Women’s Rights 130 First National Italian Exposition 91, 133n.9 Fiume, Salvatore 220n.30 Flachéron, Frédéric 37 Flaminius, Gaius 95 Flood, Richard 243, 248 Florence 2, 10, 21, 54, 69, 87–8, 93, 104, 116, 133n.9, 144, 180, 189, 193, 196, 242, 244 Accademia di Belle Arti 89, 94 Accademia Galli 88, 90 Caffè Michelangiolo 91–3 Casa Guidi 105 Duomo 200 Istituto Superiore di Magistero 107 as Italian capital 97, 185n.4 Gabinetto Vieusseux 105 Nencioni, Enrico, in 107 Palazzo Pitti 21 Palazzo Strozzi 9
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Index Piarist Schools of the Scolopi Fathers 105 Promotrice di belle arti 96 Santa Croce 91 Florida 243 Foggia 183 Folly Island, SC 92 Foresti, Eleutario Felice 19, 24 Forrest, Douglas French 76 Fouret, Etienne Evariste 132n.2 Francesco II, King 57, 61 Franchina, Nino 228–9 Francis of Assisi, St 208, 211 Francis Xavier, St 245 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine 56 Franz Josef I, Emperor 168n.18 French intervention in Italy 92–3, 105, 107, 183 fresco 189, 191–2, 194, 199 Friedsam Medal 194, 198 Fronte Nuovo delle Arti 206–7 Fugitive Slave Law 77–8 Fulbright program 244, 246 Fuller, Margaret 19, 21, 25, 54, 105, 107, 116 Futurism 11n.17, 172, 206, 221n.35 Gaeta 43, 244 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 3, 36, 44, 46–7, 52–5, 57–9, 61–4, 88, 91, 100n.3, 104–6, 108, 117, 122n.39, 125–6, 130–1, 135n.38, 136n.48, 144, 161, 183 portraits of 54, 59, 62–4, 117, 133n.9 Gast, John American progress 127–8, 132, pl. 12 Gay, Harry Nelson 175, 180, 182–4 Gazette des Beaux-Arts 143 Gellner, Ernest 46 Gemme, Paola 21, 160 Genauer, Emily 210 Genoa 57–9, 104, 232, 237n.8 Royal Exchange 58 Torre Pisano 65n.26 Gentilini, Franco 204–5, 220n.34 Brooklyn Bridge 211 George III, King 69 Geryon 110 Ghiringelli, Gino Pittura moderna italiana 219n.12 Ghisleri, Arcangelo Gran Carta Storica Murale del Risorgimento Italiano 163, 166 Giacometti, Paolo 144 Giambologna 74 Gibraltar 90 Giedion, Sigfried 226–7 Gifford, Sanford Robinson 79, 244 Giotto 59, 91, 191–4, 197 La Giovine Italia see Young Italy Giusti, George 208
Gober, Robert 245 Godey’s Lady’s Book 19 Goodyear, William Henry Renaissance and Modern Art 197 Gordigiani, Michele 91, 100n.24 Gori Pannilini, Count Augusto 105–6 Gori Pannilini, Giulio 105–6 Gorky, Arshile 213 Gortigiani see Gordigiani, Michele Grand Tour 18, 148, 172, 174, 183 Greco, Emilio 214–15, 220n.34 Piccolo bagnante discobola 221n.43 Greece, ancient 35, 42, 48, 97–8, 145, 199, 229, 250 Greenberg, Clement 213 Griscom, Lloyd 180–1 Guatemala Academy of Fine Arts 134n.27 Guercino Abraham casting out Hagar and Ishmael 27, pl. 1 Guggenheim, Peggy 246 Guinness, Sir Benjamin Lee 121n.33 Guston, Philip 9, 11n.20 Reconstruction and well being of the family 194, pl. 25 Guttoso, Renato 207–8 Gysin, Brion Dreamachine 246 Haberman, Franz Xavier 71, 82n.4 Habsburgs 160, 176 Hadrian’s Villa 97 Hagar 27–8 Haile Selassie, Emperor 250 Halloran, Fiona Deans 57 Hamilton, MA 181 Myopia Hunt Club 181 Hamilton, NY Colgate University 222n.43 Hammer, Mike 204, 215 Harding, George Post-dispatch rider, 1776 194, pl. 24 Harper’s Bazaar 211–13 Harper’s Weekly 54–6, 64, 129, 144, 149 Hawkes, Julia S. 76 Hawkins, Robert 244 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 8, 108, 119n.6 Hayez, Francesco 28 Heade, Martin Johnson 98 Heartney, Eleanor 246 Hecht, Harold 214 Hecker, Sharon 9 Heenan, John 56 Hennessy, David 173 Hepburn, Audrey 215 Hercules 110 Hereford, TX 211 Hesse, Eva 243
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Index Heyland, Clara Jessup 182–3 Hillard, George Stillman 77–9 Six Months in Italy 77 Hillard, Susan 78 Hoban, James 40 Hollyer, Samuel Walt Whitman 118 Hollywood 6, 206, 214–15 collectors 214–16 Holofernes 112–13 Holt, Nancy 237n.36 Holy Alliance 104 Homer Odyssey 250 Homer, Winslow 54 ‘General Guiseppe [sic] Garibaldi and two favorite volunteers’ 54 Honour, Hugh 160 Horsman, Reginald 24 Hosmer, Harriet 80–1, 157 Freedman’s Memorial designs 80–1, 81, 157 Howard, George 93 Howe, Julia Ward 179 Howe, Susan Debths 250 Howells, William Dean 144, 177 A Hazard of New Fortunes 144–5 Roman Holidays and Others 176–8 Venetian Life 78, 84n.35 Hudson, NY 29 Hudson River School 89 Hugo, Victor 136n.47, 136n.48 Hujar, Peter 240–7, 249 Paul Thek in catacombs 2 241, 241 Paul Thek studio shoot, Thek working on tomb effigy 8 249, pl. 31 Hunt, William Morris 90 Illustrated London News 55, 57, 61, 63–4, 66n.40, 66n.48, 136n.38 Ilva blast furnace 228 Imbriani, Vittorio La Quinta Promotrice 90 immigration and immigrants 5, 98, 135n.34, 141–5, 147, 149, 173–4, 180, 250 In arte libertas 94 Index of Industrial Design 199 Inness, George 99n.7 Inquisition 126 International Herald Tribune 250 irredentismo 5, 160–2, 176, 183 Irving, Washington 18 L’Italia Nuova 108 Italian-Americans 5, 98, 129, 135n.34, 141–5, 147, 206, 208 Italian Civil Code 130 Italian in America, The 143
Italsider 223, 228, 231–2, 237n.8 Italy, kingdom of 5, 88, 160, 163, 185n.4 Ithaca 250 Jackson, Andrew 193 Jackson, John B. 44–5 Jackson, William 132n.2 Jaffe, Irma 8 Jaffe, Sam 214 James, Henry 8, 107–8, 119n.6, 148, 176 Italian Hours 76–7 William Wetmore Story and His Friends 103–4 James, William 93 Jarves, James Jackson 143 Jefferson, Thomas 41 Jews 27, 74, 79, 179, 206 John the Baptist, St 245 Joyce, James Finnegans Wake 251 Judd, Donald 243 Judith as artistic and literary subject 110–13 Julius II, Pope 198 Juno 42 Jupiter Optimus Maximus 42 Kahn, Otto H. 184 Kassel Documenta 5 250 Kaufmann, Theodore 57 Kelley, Mary 29 Kelley, Mike 243, 245 Kiesler, Frederick 213–14 Kline, Franz 212 Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin 8 Kounellis, Jannis 234, 246 Kossuth, Louis 116 Kraus, Sylvia 247–8, 252n.39 Krauss, Rosalind ‘Sculpture in the expanded field’ 226 ‘The lady brokers driving the bulls and bears of Wall Street’ 129, 130 La Guardia, Fiorello 183 Lafayette, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de 75 Lamarr, Betsey 79 Lambretta 209 Lameth, Alexandre de 75 Lamprakos, Michele 45 Lancashire 174 Landau 57 Landor, Walter Savage 106 Lane, Frederic History of Venice 199 Lansing, Robert 184 Larabee, Linus 215 latifundia 48 Le Court, Juste 77, 157
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Index Le Gray, Gustave 66n.31 Le Vert, Octavia Walton Souvenirs of Travel 79 Lecchi, Stefano 2–3, 36–7, 42–9 Acquedotto dell’Acqua Paola 43 Casino dei Quattro Venti 43 Lee, Vernon 107 Left Party 125, 129 Lega, Silvestro 87, 91 Portrait of Garibaldi 117, pl. 9 Leghorn see Livorno Lemmey, Karen 76 Lemon, Jack 215 Lenart, Harry 214 Leonardo da Vinci 145, 191 Leutze, Emanuel 132 Westward the course of empire takes its way 134n.25 Levant 164 Levy, Julien 207 Lewis, Edmonia 157 Forever free 158, 159 The freedwoman on first hearing of her liberty 157 LeWitt, Sol 237n.36 Libertà e Lavoro 161–2 Libya 171, 250 Licata, Antonio L’Entrata di Garibaldi a Napoli 66n.34 Life magazine 206, 208, 244 Linassi, Bartolomeo 169n.35 Lincoln, Abraham 54, 64, 80–1, 92, 115, 119, 122n.41, 123n.56, 135n.36, 136n.55, 144, 154, 156–9 Liverpool 71, 73–5, 77, 164 Livorno 3, 74–7, 80–1, 237n.8 see also Tacca, Pietro, Quattro mori Lockwood, Ward 192 Consolidation of the West 194 Lombardy 24–5, 36, 91, 196 London 52, 56, 61 International Exhibition of 1862 108, 121n.30 International Working Men’s Association 117, 122n.41 National Gallery 11n.16 Longhena, Baldassare 77, 157 Loren, Sophia 217 Lorenzetti, Carlo 228 Los Angeles 204, 215 County Museum of Art 210 Getty Research Institute 50n.14 Louisiana 174 Lovere 237n.8 Lowe, Lisa 163 Lucerne 250 Lucifer 110 Lyttleton, Adrian 92, 94–6
McCauley, Elizabeth Ann 8 Macchiaioli, 4, 9, 87–99, 106, 116 Macerata see North American Italian Studies Association McKim, Charles 174–5, 182 McKim, Meade and White 182 McVeigh, Wayne 174 ‘Made in Italy’ 211, 217 Mafia 174, 211 Magafan, Ethel 192–3 Andrew Jackson at the battle of New Orleans 193, pl. 21 Magenta, Battle of 91 Magnani, Anna 217 Magni, Pietro The cutting of the Suez Canal 165, 166 The nymph Aurisina 164, 165, 166 Mameli, Goffredo 48 Mancinelli, Giuseppe 126 Manhattan see New York City Manifest Destiny 4, 127 Mann, Horace 48 Mannerism 194 Mantegna, Andrea 191 Manzoni, Alessandro 20, 32n.15 Manzoni, Piero 246 Manzù, Giacomo 206, 217, 218n.4, 220n.34, 221n.43 Cardinale 221n.43 Marini, Marino 2, 204, 206, 210, 214–15, 217, 218n.4, 221n.43 Horse and rider 212 Horse sculptures 212, 212 Piccolo cavaliere 215, 221n.43 Mario, Jessie White 47 Maroncelli, Silvia 24 Marsala 57 Marsh, Reginald 189, 192, 194 Anatomy for Artists 192 Sorting the mail 194, pl. 23 Marshall Plan 6, 208–9, 217 Marsigli, Filippo 125 Martin, Robert K. 8 Marx, Karl 122n.41 Marxism 208 Mary Magdalen, St 245 Masaccio 191–3 Raising of the son of Theophilus and St Peter enthroned 95 Mascherini, Marcello 220n.34 Masina, Angelo 48 Mason, George Hemming 101n.37 Massachusetts 77, 182 Matania, Edoardo 47 Casino dei Quattro Venti 47–8, 47 Matisse, Henri 215 Matisse, Pierre 206
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Index Matthews, Brander 144 ‘Vignettes of Manhattan’ 144–5 Mayer, Herbert 214 Mazzini, Giuseppe 4, 36–7, 43–4, 93, 103–7, 115–17, 130–1, 136n.48, 144, 160–1 Mechau, Frank 193 Danger of the post 194, pl. 26 Medici, Cosimo de’ 112 Medici, Edith Marion Peruzzi de’ 105 Medici family 74 Medici, Giacomo 59 Medici, Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ 74–5 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 198 Mediterranean Sea 5, 156–7, 163, 166, 171 Meeks, Ralph 204 Melbourne National Exhibition 130 Melehi, Mohamed 246 Melville, Herman 71, 176 Redburn 73, 77 Mengs, Anton Raphael 89 Menotti, Giancarlo 229 Mercury 166 Messer, Thomas 220n.34 Messina 52, 61, 181 Scultura italiana moderna Mexican muralism 199 Mexico 134n.27 Meyer, George Von Lengerke 172, 180–1 Mezzogiorno 5, 98, 127, 196 see also Southern Question Michelangelo 73–4, 89, 144–5, 191, 193–4, 243 David 249 Portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici 242 Milan 6, 9, 24–5, 32n.14, 54, 207 Arch of Peace 26, 26 Brera 26–7 Civica Raccolta delle Stampe Bertarelli 50n.14 Duomo 22 Galleria del Milione 221n.43 Museo del Novecento 11n.17 La Scala 25 Milan-Journal 131 Mill, John Stuart 136n.48 The Subjection of Women 130 Miller, Peter Benson 9, 174 Millet, Jean-François 119 Mills, Robert 41–2 Minerva 42 Minguzzi, Luciano 220n.22, 220n.30, 220n.34 Minimalism 200, 243, 246–7 Ministry of Education, Italian 182 Minneapolis Museum of Art 210 Miollis, Sextius 75–6 miracolo economico italiano 6, 216
Miraglia, Marina 37, 47 Mist, William 204, 215 Mist’s Gallery of Modern Art 204 Mobile, AL 79, 164 Modernism 91, 93 French 6, 206 Italian 6, 204, 206–7, 214–15, 217, 221n.43 Modigliani, Amadeo 206, 214 MoMA see New York, Museum of Modern Art Monde Illustré, Le 63 Mondrian, Piet 216 Monroe Doctrine 171 Monteleone 61 monuments and monumentality 3, 6–7, 36, 45–6, 69–82, 154, 157–8, 162, 177–8, 223–4, 226–7, 231–2, 234–6, 248 Moore, Henry 227 Moore, Sarah 173 moors 74, 77 see also Tacca, Pietro, Quattro mori Morandi, Giorgio 2, 204–7, 214–15, 218n.4, 218n.9, 220n.34, 221n.43 Natura morta 221n.43 Morelli, Domenico 133n.8 Morelli, Salvatore 129–32 Women and Science 129 Morgan, J. Pierpont 179, 182 Morgiano 74 Morlotti, Ennio 207–8 Morocco 181 Morone, R. 221n.43 Morris, Edmond 180 Morris, Harrison S. 172–3 Morris, Robert 243 Moses, Charles 246 Mozzoni, Anna Maria 130–2 Women and the Project for the New Italian Civil Code 130 Muir, Edward 198 Mumford, Lewis 226 Murano 148 Murat, Joachim 133n.14 Murrow, Edward R. 215 Mušič, Zoran 220n.34 Muslims 74, 133n.17 Mussini, Luigi The Sienese Decameron 96 Mussolini, Benito 7, 206–7, 240, 250 Naples 52, 54, 58, 60–1, 63–4, 91, 106, 116, 125–6, 129, 144, 244 Academy 126 Capodimonte, Royal Collection in 133n.11 Gulf of 127 Piedigrotta, shrine of the Virgin at 61 Royal Institute of Fine Art 125 Società promotrice di belle arti 127
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Index Napoleon 26, 115, 133n.14 Napoleon, Louis 105 Nast, Thomas 2–3, 52, 56–64, 136n.38 ‘The Italian revolution’ 66n.43 ‘Mrs Satan’ 129 ‘Porte avancé devant Capoue’ 62–3, 63 ‘Reception of the first news from Garibaldi’s landing in Sicily’ 58, 59 ‘The revolution in Sicily’ 59, 60 ‘Sketch of the battery’ 61–2, 62 ‘Thos. Nast, Esq. Our special artist, now attached to Garibaldi’s staff, in Calabrian costume’ 52, 53 Nathan, Ernesto 179 National Exhibition of Fine Arts (Italy) 126 NATO 208 Navigation, allegory of 166 Nazarenes 95 Neapolitan School 126 Nelson, Horatio 71, 73 Nemi, Lake 86 Nencioni, Enrico 4, 9, 103–8, 115–17 ‘Il poeta della guerra americana’ 115 reviews of Story’s Roba di Roma 108 ‘Whitman and Mazzini’ 115 Neorealist cinema 208 Nero, Emperor 250 New Deal 6, 188–92, 194–9 New England 20, 22, 103 New Haven, CT Yale University 143 New Jersey 235 New Orleans 79, 164 Cathedral of St. Louis 79 lynching of Italian-Americans in 145, 173 New York City 9, 52, 56–7, 61, 64, 75, 92, 103, 135n.34, 143, 177–8, 206–7, 213, 216, 234, 242–3, 249 Art Students League 243 Betty Parsons Gallery 227 Bowling Green 69 Brooklyn Museum Italy at Work 209 Buchholz Gallery 206 Catherine Viviano Gallery 206–8 Eterna Primavera 206, 214 Five Contemporary Italians 214 Five Italian Painters 208 Major Works, Minor Scale 214 Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) 11–12n.21 Columbia University 144 Comet Gallery 207 Cooper Union 192, 243 Downtown Gallery Americans in Europe 244 Duveen–Graham Gallery 244
Dwan Gallery 237n.36 East Third Street 247 House of Italian Handicraft Handicraft as Fine Art in Italy 209, 219n.16 Italian neighborhoods in 144–5 Lenox Hill Hospital 251n.6 Lower East Side 146 Marlborough Gallery 227 Matisse Gallery 208 Metropolitan Museum of Art 8 Morgan Library 143 Mulberry Bend 144, 147 Mulberry Street 146 Museum of Modern Art 6, 217, 219n.16 International Council 228 The New Decade: 22 Painters and Sculptors 210 Twentieth Century Italian Art 6, 9, 10n.6, 204, 206, 208, 220n.34 National Academy of Design 141, 144 Pace Gallery 247 Beyond Realism 247 Pennsylvania Station 194 Pratt Institute 243 PS1 The Knot: Arte Povera at PS1 11n.18 Sagittarius 210 Saks Fifth Avenue 247 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 210, 222n.43 Stable Gallery 212, 220n.22, 244, 247–8 Varick Street 88 Wall Street 129 Washington Meat Market 247 Whitney Museum of American Art 210, 252n.42 The New Decade: 35 American Painters and Sculptors 210 World House Galleries 214, 221–2n.43 Italy, the New Vision 221n.35 The Struggle for New Form 220–1n.35 New York colonial legislature 69 New York Columbian Celebration 141 New York Daily News 249 New-York Daily Tribune see New-York Tribune New York Herald 54, 61 New-York Illustrated News 52, 55–7, 59, 61, 63–4, 66n.48, 134n.38 New York Times 60–1, 244 New-York Tribune 19, 21, 54, 105, 116 New Yorker magazine 214 Nile river 73, 163 Ninni, Irene L’impiraressa 151n.27 Nobel Peace Prize 181 Nordmark, Olle 189 Norman, Will 9
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North American Italian Studies Association 11–12n.21 North American Review 21 North Elba, NY 56 North Point, Battle of 36 The North Star 168–9n.30 Norton, Charles Eliot 110, 112, 143 Nosei, Annina 234, 237n.36 Novara 221n.43 Olson, Roberta 95–6 Orvieto 196 Ossoli, Giovanni 105 Ostrow, Steven 74 Othello 79 see also Shakespeare Ottoman Empire 77 Ottoman Turks 74, 76–8 Ovid Metamorphoses 98 Padua 5, 193, 237n.8 Paestum Tomb of the Diver 250 Page, Thomas Nelson 183–4 Paget, Violet see Lee, Vernon Pagliacci, Aldo 220n.34 Pagliano, Eleuterio 54 Palagi, Pelagio 28 Palermo 52, 57–61 Capuchin catacombs 7, 240–5, 247–9 Palazzo Reale 58 Palgrave, Sir Francis John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy 77 Palizzi, Filippo 126, 133n.8 Palladio, Andrea 148 Panama, Norman 214 Panza, Sancho 107 Papacy 26, 36, 88, 92–4, 101n.41, 105, 160, 178, 185n.4, 242 see also Pius IX, Pope Papal States 36, 54 Paris 5, 9, 52, 79, 90, 143, 172, 175, 178, 207, 213, 244 Exposition (1900) 171 Exposition Universelle (1855) 116 Galerie Maeght 227 Grand Guignol, Le Théâtre de 243, 251n.11 International Exhibition (1877) 126, 130 Pavillon du réalisme 116 Parliament, British 130 Parliament, Italian 125–6, 129–31, 219n.10 Pasadena Art Museum The New Italian Renaissance 214 Pascali, Pino 246 Passaic, NJ 235
Paul, St 245 Paul V, Pope 44 Pavia 196 Peale, Rembrandt 197 Peard, John W. 59 peasantry, Italian 66n.35, 86, 94–5, 97 Pecci-Blunt, Mimì 207, 219n.10 Pellico, Silvio 20, 23–4 My Prisons 23–4 Pennell, Joseph 177 Building of the Victor Emmanuel monument 177–8, 177 Pennsylvania Gazette, 71 Peoples, Admiral Christian Joy 190, 195 Pepper, Beverly 228–9 Person, Leland S. 8 Perugia 23 Pesaro, Giovanni 76–7, 157 Pesaro family 78 Peter, St 245 Petrarch 144 Pezzicar, Francesco 2, 154–64, 166 L’Abolizione della schiavitù negli Stati Uniti 5, 154–64, 155, 166 Philadelphia 76 Centennial Exhibition 5, 154, 156–9 Fairmount Park 158 Philippines, The 189 phrygian cap 126, 128 Picasso, Pablo 216, 227 Piccolo, Il 129 Piedmont and Sardinia, Kingdom of 49, 54, 91, 93, 106 Piero della Francesca 191–5, 199 Resurrection 193, 195 Pigonati, Carolina 132n.2 Piletti, Antero 220n.34 Piombino 237n.8 piracy, Mediterranean 74 Pirandello, Fausto 207, 218n.9, 220n.34 Pisa 196 Campo Santo 195 Pistoletto, Michelangelo 234 Pitti, Luca 21 Pius IX, Pope 43, 93, 105, 107, 128, 133n.27 Pizzinato, Armando 207–8 Placci, Carlo 119n.6 Plumbe, John, Jr 2–3, 36–42, 43–6, 48–9 General Post Office 39, 41, 39 President’s House (White House) 38–41, 38 United States Capitol, Washington, D.C. 36, 39–41, 39 United States Patent Office 39, 40, 41 Podesti, Francesco The storytellers of the Decameron 96 Poggi, Isotta 47 Poggione, Clotilde 23
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Index Polk, James 38 Pollock, Jackson 212–13 Pollock–Krasner Foundation 251n.6 Pomodoro, Arnaldo 216, 221n.43, 228–9 Pompeii 5, 37 Pönninger, Franz Xaver 157 Ponza, island of 240, 244, 249–50 Poor, Henry Varnum 192–3 Activities of justice 192–3, pl. 20 Pop Art 11n.17, 200, 247 Portici 133n.16 Portsmouth, Treaty of 181 Potts, Alex 246 Poussin, Nicholas 97 Powers, Hiram 244 Greek Slave 75 Pre-Raphaelites 89, 95 Prendergast, Maurice 186n.31 Pincian hill, Rome 177–8, pl. 19 Price, Vincent 214–15 Progressivism 174, 198 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 117 Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) 188, 190, 199 Puritans 113, 115 quattrocento see Renaissance, Early quattrocento revival 95–7, 101–2n.58, 193 Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico 219n.16 Raggio, Giuseppe 94 Raphael 26, 89, 144–5 School of Athens 26 Sibyls 26 Raum, George 79 Rauschenberg, Robert 200, 213, 244 Ravenna 193, 196 Ray, Man 192 MCMIX 192 Ream, Vinnie Lincoln 135n.36 Reconstruction 69, 121n.31, 174 Reconstruction, Italian 6, 204, 208 Red Sea 163, 166 Regionalism 195–6, 199 Rembrandt 115 Renaissance 4–6, 88, 112, 143, 171, 197, 200, 242–3 admired by New Deal artists and administrators 188–9, 191–8 American 5, 198 Early 192–3, 196–7 High 196 New Italian 6, 206, 208, 214 Tuscan 196 Venetian 89 republicanism, ideals of 35–7, 40, 42, 44, 48–9, 189, 199 see also Risorgimento
Revoltella, Baron Pasquale 164, 166 Revolution, American 25, 54, 75, 109, 134n.24, 170n.48, 197 revolutions of 1848 57, 104, 116, 125–6 Reynolds, Larry J. 116 Riall, Lucy 63 Ricasoli, Bettino 88 Richards, Frederick De Bourg 76 Richmond, VA Museum of Fine Arts 244 Richmond, William Blake 93 Riegl, Aloïs 45 Rieti, Elsie 207 Riis, Jacob 147 Bandit’s roost 146–7, 146 ‘The Bend’ 146 ‘Flashes from the slum’ 146 How the Other Half Lives 146 Rimini 95 Risorgimento 3–5, 19–26, 30–1, 36, 103, 107–8, 112, 115–17, 125–6, 156, 160–2, 175–6, 178, 180–1 First Italian War of Independence 42–8, 57, 87, 91, 93, 161 Macchiaioli engagement with 4, 87–8, 91–2, 94–5, 97, 106, 117 Second Italian War of Independence 49, 52–5, 57–64, 87–8, 91, 93, 106, 113 Southern campaign 52, 54, 57–64, 64n.3, 88, 91 Thomas Nast’s participation in 52–64 see also Rome, conquest of; Roman Republic (1849) Ristori, Adelaide 144 Ritchie, Andrew 210 Rivera, Diego 199 Rogers, Henry C. 214 Röhlich, Joseph 157 Roman Empire 5, 46, 86, 92 Roman Holiday 6 Roman Republic (1849) 43–4, 46, 54, 57, 105, 117, 183 Rome 2, 6, 8–10, 54, 59, 64, 69, 79–80, 87–8, 98, 103–4, 116, 156, 172, 176, 189, 196, 224, 235–6 Accademia di San Luca 134n.27 Acqua Paola aqueduct 43–4, 46 American Academy in 1, 5, 9–10, 171, 174–5, 179–80, 182–3 American women sculptors in 80, 104, 131, 157–8 ancient 4, 7, 37, 42, 48, 108, 156, 161, 199, 227, 235 Associazione Italo-Americana see Rome, Unione Italo-Americana Aurelian walls 93, 95 Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea 37
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Index Capitoline hill 42, 177 Capitoline Museum 42 Casino dei Quattro Venti 43–5, 48 Casino dell’Aurora 174 Casino del Pincio 94 Centro Studi Americani 6, 175 Ciampino airport 233 Colosseum 86 conquest of in 1870 93, 108, 136n.55, 178 Corso 29–30, 183 Fontana di Trevi 176, 180 French Academy see Rome, Villa Medici French occupation of 107 Galleria 88 246 Galleria L’Attico 234 Galleria della Cometa 207, 218–19n.10 Galleria dell’Obelisco 210–13, 215, 220n.22, 220n.34, 221n.43 Twenty Imaginary Views of the American Scene 211 Galleria Pogliani 228 Galleria Trastevere 246 Golden Club 100n.35 international exhibitions of 1911 171 International Exposition of Fine Arts 171–3 as Italian capital 3, 87, 97, 108, 148, 160, 178, 185n.4 Janiculum hill 43–8, 179, 182–3 Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Temple of 42 Library for American Studies 172, 175, 180, 182–4 modernization of 176–80 Monte Mario 229 Monti district 177 Museo Carlo Bilotti Philip Guston: Roma 11n.20 Museo del Risorgimento 37 Nencioni, Enrico, in 106–7 Palazzo Barberini 104 Palazzo della Cancelleria 184 Palazzo Orsini 180 Palazzo Salviati 183 Pantheon 42 Pincian hill 94, 174, 178–9 Porta Pia 49 Porta del Popolo 95 Porta San Giovanni 105 Porta San Pancrazio 44 postwar art in 207 St Paul within the Walls 178–9 Santa Cecilia 200 Siege of 3, 36–7, 43–8 Story, William Wetmore in and on 104–5, 107–8, 112 Thek, Paul, in 243, 245–6, 249 Third 36 Tiber river 44
Trastevere 240 Twain, Mark, on 86 Unione Italo-Americana 175, 182 University of 182 Vatican 26, 88, 99n.9, 195 Via Aurelia Antiqua 46 Via Flaminia 95 Via Margutta 93–5, 101n.58 Via Nazionale 178 Victor Emmanuel monument 177–8 Villa Aurelia 182–3 Villa Corsini see Rome, Casino dei Quattro Venti Villa Ludovisi 174 Villa Medici (Académie de France) 37, 174 Villa Mirafiori 172, 182 Villa Pamphilij 46 West, Benjamin, in 1 Roosevelt, Edith 173 Roosevelt, Ethel 173 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 189, 195, 198–200, 201n.6 Roosevelt, Theodore 145, 147, 171, 173, 180–1, 183–4, 190 Rosand, David 89 Roscoe, William 73 Rosen, Mark 74 Rosenberg, Emily 180–1 Rossetti, William Michael 122n.43 Rossi, Cesare 161 Rossi, Ernesto 144 Rossini, Gioachino 144 Rowan, Edward 189, 194–6, 200 Rubinstein, Helena 211 Rubinstein, Lewis 191 Ruffini, Francesco 182 ruins 5–7, 37, 43–7, 86, 89, 177, 200, 209, 235, 243, 250 Russo, Mario 220n.34 Russo-Japanese War 181 Sacco, Nicola 149 St Louis, MO Art Museum 221n.43 Kemper Art Museum 221n.43 St Petersburg 181–2 Salerno 250 Salvini, Tommaso 144 San Francisco 134n.27, 252n.42 Museum of Art 198, 210 Santa Barbara, CA Art Gallery of the University of California A Selection of Paintings, Drawings, Collages and Sculptures 221n.43 Santa Fe 196 Santa Maria (Capua) 61 Sant’Angelo (Capua) 61
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Index Sara (Old Testament) 27–8 Sardinia 63 see also Piedmont and Sardinia, Kingdom of Sargent, John Singer 2, 5, 8, 9, 141–5, 147–9 Street in Venice 98, 141–5, 147–9, pl. 14 Venetian bead-stringers 148, pl. 17 Sargentini, Fabio 224, 234–6, 237n.36 Sava river 164 Savage, Kirk 158 Savannah, GA 164 Savona Centre 231, 237n.8 Sayers, Tom 56 Schevill, Ferdinand 198–9 Schifano, Mario 249 Schneemann, Carolee Meat joy 247 Science, Art and Literature, proposed United States Department of 190 Scifoni, Anatolio 93 Scribner’s Magazine 173 Scuola Romana 206 Section of Painting and Sculpture 188, 190, 192–200 Bulletin 190–2 Sedgwick, Catherine Maria 3–4, 17–34 Clarence 29 Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home 3, 17–18, 20, 29 Married or Single? 18 New-England Tale, A 18 Sedgwick, Charles 19, 31n.12 Sedgwick, Robert, 20 Segatori, Fortunata 93 Seldis, Henry J. 221n.43 Seravalle, Antonio 127 Sernesi, Raffaello 91 Roofs in sunlight 90, pl. 4 Settembrini, Luigi 125 Settignano Villa L’Orcio 201n.3 Severini, Gino 214 Shakespeare 26 Othello 81 Sharrett, Christopher 215 Sherwood, Mary 79 Sicily 36, 52, 54, 57–60, 91, 133n.17, 145, 181, 196, 242–3 Siena 105, 196 Signorelli, Luca 191, 195–6 Signorini, Telemaco 9, 87, 91, 105–6, 113, 117, 122n.50 L’alzaia 117, 119, pl. 10 Caricaturisti e caricaturati al caffé ‘Michelangiolo’ (1848–1866) 97 Soldati francesi feriti a Solferino 122n.39 Simon, Louis 195
Siqueros, David 199 Sironi, Mario 214 Sisi, Carlo 9 Slater and Morrill robbery 149 slavery and slave trade 4–5, 48–9, 69, 73–5, 78–81, 109–10, 113, 115, 121n.30, 136n.55, 154, 156, 158, 160, 162–3, 166, 168–9n.30, 193 Slovenia 160, 176 Smith, David 6, 223–4, 235 Voltri 223, 224, 227, 229–31, 233, 235–6 Voltri VI 230 Smith, Kiki 245 Smithson, Robert 2, 6–7, 200, 224, 226 Asphalt rundown 224, 226, 227, 233–6 Cement pour 236 ‘Entropy and the new monuments’ 227 Glue pour 236 Soby, James T. 6, 204, 206, 209 socialism 117, 126, 174 Sommariva, Giovanni Battista 28–9 Sontag, Susan 241–3, 251n.6 Against Interpretation 242 AIDS and Its Metaphors 242 Portraits in Life and Death 241 Soria, Regina 100n.30 Southern Question 127, 174 see also Mezzogiorno Spartacus 161 Spartacus (film) 246 Sperone, Gian Enzo 234 Spielberg prison 19–20, 23 Spillane, Mickey 221n.37 Spoleto 223, 236 Festival dei Due Mondi 227–9 Piazza Giovanni Polvani 232 Sculture nella città 6, 223–4, 227–33 additional participants 236n.8 Teatro Romano 223, 230 train station 224, 232 Springfield, MA 76 Stebbins, Theodore, Jr 8 Stein, Leo 189 Steinberg, Saul 9, 213 Stelle di Mario Schifano, Le 249 Stendhal 108 Stephens, John Lloyd 82n.4 Sterne, Maurice 189, 191, 193, 201n.3, 201n.6 Sterne, Vera Segal 193 Stock, Dennis 215 Billy Wilder at home in Los Angeles, CA 215, 216 Stockholm 250 Stokes, Edith Minturn 151n.23 Stone City Art Colony 195 Story, Julian Russell 181 Portrait of George Van Lengerke Meyer 181 Story, William Wetmore, 4, 103–15, 181 The American Question 108, 113, 115
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Index busts of the Brownings 105 Cleopatra 108, 121n.30 Fiammetta 112 Stenoni, Marco 112 ‘Ghino di Tacco’ 108 Graffiti d’Italia 108 Judith making her prayer upon slaying Holofernes 110–13, 111, 114 Libyan Sibyl 110, 121n.29, 121n.30 ‘Nemesi’ 108 Roba di Roma 107–9 Saul 108, 121n.33 sonnets 107 Strutt, Arthur John 132n.2 A Pedestrian Tour in Calabria and Sicily 132n.2 Sketches of Beauties 132n.2 Stuart, Gilbert 197 Sullivan, Marin R. 9 Sumner, Charles 77–8, 168n.14 Sumter, Fort 110 Sun, The 146 Surrealism 207, 246 Sweeney, James Johnson 210–11, 213, 232 Swenson, Gene 240, 243, 246 ‘Swill Milk’ scandal 56 Tacca, Pietro Quattro mori 3, 69, 70, 71, 74–7, 80 Taft, William Howard 181 Taos 196 Tarquinia 93 Tasso, Torquato 144 Tatham, David 55 Taylor, Joshua 92 Teano 63 Terra Foundation for American Art 1, 9–10 Thayer, Alexander Wheelock 157, 163–4, 168n.14 Thayer, William Roscoe 175, 180, 182, 184 Thek, Paul 2, 7, 200, 240–51, 251n.6 96 sacraments 250 La corazza di Michelangelo 242, 247, pl. 30 Hippopotamus poison 247–8, 248 Meat piece with Warhol Brillo Box 247 Processions 245 Technological reliquaries 7, 240, 243, 245–50, 251n.6 Television analyzation 246 The tomb (‘Death of Hippie’) 248–9, 249, 252n.42 Untitled (diver) 250, pl. 32 Untitled (Meat piece with flies) 242, pl. 29 Thirteenth Amendment 156 Thomas, St 245 Thomas, William Luson 66n.40 Three Coins in the Fountain 6 Tiberius, Emperor 250 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 197
Time magazine 210 Tiratelli, Aurelio 102n.58 Titian 88–9, 143 Pesaro Altarpiece 78 Tocqueville, Alexis de 132 Tojetti, Domenico 128, 132, 134n.27 Progress of America 128, pl. 13 Toledo, OH Museum of Art 244 Travelers in Arcadia: American Artists in Italy 252n.18 Tolstoy, Leo 126 Tommaseo, Nicolò 105 Torchia, Robert 142 Trajan 46 Transcendentalists 105 Treasury Department, United States 188, 190, 192, 194–5 Relief Art Project 188 see also Section of Painting and Sculpture Trecento 88 Trieste 2, 5, 154–7, 159–66 Civico Museo Revoltella 154, 161, 164, 166 Civico Museo di Storia ed Arte 161 International Exposition 157 Trivulzio di Belgioioso, Princess Cristina 105 Troy 250 Turin 23, 88, 94, 171, 185n.4, 249 Galleria La Bussola 221n.43 National Exhibition 130 Palazzo Madama 26 Piazza Castello 32n.25 Turkey 171 Turks see Ottoman Turks Tuscany 94, 179, 195–6 Grand Duchy of 21, 74–5 Twain, Mark 98, 176 Innocents Abroad 78–9, 86 Two Sicilies, Kingdom of 52, 88 see also Bourbon regime in southern Italy Twombly, Cy 200, 244 Tyrrhenian Sea 240 Uccello, Paolo 192, 194, 200 Ulrich, Charles 142 Umbria 2, 227, 230 unification, Italian see Risorgimento Union Army 54, 92, 113, 115, 167n.4 United States Journal, The 38 Uruguay 117 Utica, NY Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Italy Rediscovered 244 Vaisman, Meyer 200 Valadier, Giuseppe 178 Valentin, Curt 206, 210, 218n.4
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Index Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold 144 Vance, William America’s Rome 8, 179 Vancouver 236 Vandalle, Vittoria see Woodhull, Victoria Vanderbilt, Cornelius 129 Vanutelli, Scipione 94 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo 149 Vedder, Elihu 2, 4–5, 87–98, 99n.7 Cliffs of Volterra 93 Digressions of ‘V’ 100n.30 Fortune 97 Italian landscape with sheep and Florentine well 92 Lazarus 97 The lost mind 93 The music party 96, pl. 7 Perseus and Medusa 97 The Pleiades 97 Prayer for death in the desert 93 Roman Campagna 89–90, 92, pl. 3 Samson and Delilah 97 The soul in bondage 97 Study of rocks, bed of torrente Mugnone, near Florence 92 Volterra 93 Veii 95 Vela, Vincenzo Spartacus 161 Velvet Underground, The 249 Veneto 54, 93 Venice 2, 8, 54, 116, 141–5, 147–9, 157, 160, 180, 196, 207, 244 Academy of Fine Arts 156–7 Biennale 6, 81, 186n.31 American Pavilion 81 Ducal Palace 79 Frari, church of the 76, 78–9 Palazzo Barbaro 8 Peggy Guggenheim Collection 246 Pesaro monument (tomb) 3, 69, 72, 73, 76–82, 84n.35, 157 guidebooks to 77–80 San Giorgio Maggiore 148 St Mark’s Square 148 see also Murano Venturi, Lionello 207–8 Verdi, Giuseppe 144 Verona 25 Piazza delle Erbe 196 San Zeno Maggiore 84n.38 Versailles Conference 184 Vespignani, Renzo 220n.34 Ruined building 208–9, 209 Vicenza 25 Victor Emmanuel II, King 52, 54, 60–1, 63–4, 88, 106, 133n.9 see also Rome, Victor Emmanuel monument
Victor Emmanuel III, King 181 Vienna Circolo academico italiano 161–3, 166, 162, 164 World’s Fair 157 Vietnam War 247 Villa Alberti 105 Villa Bargagli 105 Villa Belvedere Marciano 105 Villa Borghese (Siena) 105 Villa Carlotta 28 Villari, Linda and Pasquale 107 Virginia 38, 73, 75–6, 92, 156 Visconti, Ermes 96 Vittorio Emanuele II see Victor Emmanuel II, King Viviano, Catherine 206–8, 210–11, 214, 217, 218n.9, 219n.12, 219n.20, 220n.22, 220n.30 Vizitelly, Frank 61 Vogue 211–12 Volterra 93 Voltri Centre 223, 229–30, 237n.11 see also Smith, David Volturno, Battle of 61–3, 133n.9 Waddington, Mary King 177 Wallace, Maurice O. 169n.42 Walters, Henry 182 Warburg, Eugène 79 Ward, Eleanor 244 Ward, Louisa Cutler 179 Warhol, Andy 213, 247, 249 Brillo Box sculptures 247 Screen Tests 247 Washington, D.C. 1, 10, 113, 129 Capitol, United States 2–3, 5, 48, 76, 128, 134n.25, 135n.36 House of Representatives, United States 129 Views by John Plumbe, Jr 36, 39–42, 39, 48 Department of Interior building 188 Department of Justice building 188, 193–4, 199 General Post Office, 39, 39, 41 Library of Congress 5, 36, 39 Lincoln Park 158 New Deal projects in 188–90, 192–4, 199 as new Rome 5 Obelisk Gallery 210 Office of Deeds building 193 Patent Office building 39, 40, 41–2, Pennsylvania Avenue 113 Phillips Collection Philip Guston: Roma 11n.20 Plumbe, John, Jr, in 36, 38, 45 Post Office Department building 188, 192, 194 Smithsonian American Art Museum 1
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Index Social Security Administration building 188–9, 192, 194 Treasury Department building 192 War Department building 189 White House 40, 48 View by John Plumbe, Jr 39–41, 39 Washington, George 41, 54–5, 63, 126, 128–9, 133n.14, 194 Waters, John 241 Watson, Forbes 189–90, 192–3, 195–6, 198 Weber, John 234, 237n.36 Wedgwood, Josiah 158 Werner, Karl 47 West, Benjamin 1 Western Civilization, concepts of and courses in 198–9, 235 Westmacott, Richard Nelson monument 71, 75 Wey, Francis 132n.2 Whistler, James McNeil 8, 141 White, Andrew D. 182 White, Henry 180–1 White, Thomas Henry A Pilgrim’s Reliquary 76 Whitman, Walt, 4, 9, 103–4, 109–11, 113, 115–19 ‘Death of a hero’ 113 ‘Death of Abraham Lincoln’ 123n.56 Drum Taps 113, 115 Leaves of Grass 116–17, 119 and race 121n.31 ‘Resurgemus’ 104, 116 ‘Song of myself ’ 103 Wilder, Billy 215–16, 221n.43 Apartment, The 215 Sabrina 215, 221n.43
Wilson, Ann 243, 245 Wilson, Fred Speak of me as I am 81–2, pl. 2 Wilson, Joseph 69 Wilson, Robert 243 Wilson, Woodrow 183–4 Winkelmann, Johann Joachim 89 Wittman, Otto, Jr 244, 252n.18 Wojnarowicz, David 241 women’s suffrage 4, 49, 129–31, 175 Wood, Grant 195, 197, 199 Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly 129 Woodhull, Claflin & Co. 129 Woodhull, Victoria 4, 128–32, 134–5n.32 working class, Italian 23, 86, 97–8, 101n.37, 117, 119, 142 women 141–3, 145, 147–9 Works Progress Administration see Federal Art Project World War I 98, 160, 176, 183 World War II 6, 135n.47, 171, 184, 200, 204, 207–8, 242, 244 Wyatt, Matthew Cotes Nelson monument 71, 75 Wyler, William Roman Holiday 215 Yewell, George Henry 100n.21 Yorktown Campaign 75 Yorktown, VA 92 Young America 4, 116 Young Europe 115 Young Italy 4, 93, 115 Young People’s Missionary Movement 143
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