Torre dei Schiavi Monument and Metaphor Charles C. Eldredge When Benjamin West landed on Roman monuments, precisely Italy's ancient shores, he was fol- drawn if fancifully rearranged, simi- lowing the path of generations of larly enjoyed great vogue among Grand Tourists. Italy, especially the patrons of his day. Given this Rome, was, after all, the center of widespread enthusiasm for things European civilization and from an- Roman, it was little wonder that cient times had drawn visitors from Benjamin West, the New World's near and far. While but a single pil- first artist-ambassador to Europe, grim in the long line to Rome, West was determined "to visit the foun- was at the same time a pioneer for tainhead of the arts" and in 1760 generations of American artists headed to Rome.1 who would follow in his wake, West, who left Italy for London drawn by the city's special history in 1763, was followed by John Sin- and character. gleton Copley, who arrived in The distinctive nature of central Rome in 1774. The familiar land- Italian light and topography, which marks with which Pannini and col- had profoundly affected Claude leagues had preoccupied them- Lorrain and altered the subsequent selves reappeared tellingly in the course of landscape painting, was background of Copley's portrait of scarcely the sole attraction of the American Italophiles Mr. and which the area could boast. The an Mrs. Ralph Izard, painted in 1775. of the Old Masters was a major The couple posed amid their Old lure for the Grand Tourists of the World finery before a distant pros- eighteenth century, as were the pect of the Colosseum. That such sculpted artifacts and architectural trappings were significant both to remains of the ancients. These artists and sitters of many nationali- reminiscences of the classical ties is suggested by J. H. W. world were everywhere apparent Tischbein's renowned portrait along the Tiber and inescapably Goethe in the Roman Campagna molded perceptions and depictions (1787), with the Tomb of Caecilia of the Eternal City. Metella and other favorite sites in As archaeologists exhumed this the background, or Jean Ingres's storehouse of a storied past, artists equally acclaimed portrayal of his delineated the ruins, with exacti- colleague Frangois Granet (1807), tude or caprice. Giambattista posed before the Quirinal. Piranesi's famed views of the antiq- After the turn of the nineteenth uities of Rome excited the imagina- century, the pioneering travels of tions of connoisseurs throughout West and Copley were repeated by Europe and even in colonial Amer- increasing numbers of American Thomas Hotcbkiss, Torre di Schiavi (detail), ica, to which his engravings easily artists, for whom Italy became a fa- 1865. Oil on canvas 22 3/8 x 34 3/4 in. National Museum of American Art, Smith- and readily traveled. Giovanni vorite destination during their Eu- sonian Institution, Museum Purchase Pannini's compositions based upon ropean sojourns. Between 1796 15 Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1 Robert Burford, Explanation of the Pan- EXPLANATION OF TH£ MNOKAMA OF ROM I ANCIENT* MOUEKN orama of Rome Ancient & Modern, ca. 1840, Published in Burford, Description of a View of the City of Rome (New York: William Osborn, 1840) and 1815, John Vanderlyn spent all effect on the imaginations of but two years abroad, dividing his nineteenth-century Americans and, time between Paris and Rome. In from about 1825 to 1875, motivated Rome in 1807 he composed his ac- the travels and the productions of claimed Marius Amidst the Ruins of many writers and artists. It was Carthage, which reflected the art- James Russell Lowell who perhaps ist s mastery of antique history ren- best explained the American fasci- dered in tight, neoclassical style. nation. "Italy," he wrote, The American taste for figures and ruins, as well as for Italy in general, was classic ground and this not so reached its high point in the mid much by association with great nineteenth century, as seen for in- events as with great men [T]o stance in the work of the expatriate the American Italy gave cheaply William Page. In 1860 he painted a what gold cannot buy for him at romantic image of his wife before home, a past at once legendary> the Colosseum, an edifice that she, and authentic, and in which he has the quintessential Italophile, im- an equal claim with every other for- pressively dominates. While eigner. In England he is a poor re- Vanderlyn and Page and many lation ... in France his notions are others worked in Rome, the fascina- purely English... but Rome is the tion with the ancient capital extend- mother country of every boy who ed far beyond the city's bound- devoured Plutarch Italy gives aries. In his Paris studio in the us antiquity with good roads, early 1840s, the fashionable por- cheap living, and above all, a sense traitist George P. A. Healy painted of freedom from responsibility... Euphemia Van Rensselaer—with the sense of permanence, un- Roman ruins in the distance. changeableness and repose.3 Italomania was by then wide- spread, indeed so much so that The whole of Italy, from Etna to Ralph Waldo Emerson worried, the northern lakes, was rich in his- "My countrymen are... infatuated toric associations. But, for the mid- with the rococo toy of Europe. All nineteenth-centurv traveler, as for America seems on the point of em- his predecessors, it was to Rome barking."2 The "dream of Arcadia"— that attention was particularly di- as Thomas Cole entitled a key rected. Viewed from the Pincian or work of 1838—exercised a potent other Roman hilltops, or from the 3 Fall 1987 far reaches of the Campagna, the herbiage, clinging to its ruins as if dome of St. Peters and the city's to "mouth its distress" completes the fabled ruins inspired hushed rev- illusion. Crag rises over crag, green erence in nearly every visitor. and breezy summits mount into Worthington Whittredges recollec- the sky.5 tions of his first glimpse of the city was typical of most Americans: "To The overgrown arcades attracted as me, born in a log cabin and reared well the admiration of Rembrandt in towns of low flat-roofed houses Peale, who, like most of the artists, of pine and hemlock, the picture of regretted the program of cleaning Rome at last before my eyes was up the monuments that was begun quite enough to inspire me with in the early nineteenth century. In- feelings of reverence and humility. spired by recollections of a "beauti- I could not speak, or did not, and ful wilderness of ruins, vines and observed that the other passengers shrubbery," he suggested that [in the carriage] were similarly "some spots [be] left neglected and 4 affected." covered with plants and shrubs, as Understandably, artists sought to a sample of its former guise." capture the grand sight, on can- Peale's advice, however, went un- vases, daguerreotypes, or even in heeded, leaving later artists, like monumental panoramas, such as Elihu Vedder, to lament that "the that by the noted English specialist ruins were wonderfully beautiful of the genre Robert Burford, which before they were 'slicked up.'" was first exhibited in New York in "Slicked up" or not, the monu- 1840 and shown again in Philadel- ments cast their spell over visitors phia two years later—appropriately for most of the century. The "ro- at the Coliseum (fig. 1). Ameri- mance of ruins" was described as cans, of course, were not alone in "one of the most innocent and in- this fascination. Goethe's "discov- structive pleasures in which one ery" of Rome in the late eighteenth may indulge," and thousands century led to an equivalent migra- succumbed.6 tion of German artists, who min- The fascination with decay was gled in Rome with painters and more sentimental than morbid. Al- sculptors from the Scandinavian though most American artists did countries, France, Russia, and En- not wind up in Rome's Protestant gland, all drawn by the region's pe- Cemetery, many visitors would culiar appeal. have understood the poetic senti- Painters particularly delighted in ment of Shelley (who is interred in the scenic possibilities of decaying Rome): "It could make one in love monuments (fig. 2). For Thomas with death to think of being buried Cole, it was the Colosseum, "beauti- in so sweet a place."7 ful in its destruction," which, he If Rome inspired sweet thoughts said, "affected me most." "From the of mortality, the unsettled Cam- broad arena within," he recalled, pagna outside its ancient walls did not always do likewise. To many it rises around you, arch above early travelers, it was a bleak land arch, broken and desolate, and of "solitude, dust and tombs."8 The mantled in many parts with... wild and hilly Campagna was the plants and flowers, exquisite both domain of malaria and banditti, a for their color and fragrance. It dangerous "desert" whose traverse looks more like a work of nature was required to achieve the art- than of man, for the regularity of pilgrim's goal. Hippolyte Taine art is lost, in a great measure, in thought it like "an abandoned dilapidation, and the luxuriant cemetery... the sepulchre of 4 Smithsonian Studies in American Art Rome, and of all the nations she like those of Illinois."11 destroyed All antiquity, indis- Along with the tourists, painters criminately, lies buried here under extended their rambles through the monstrous city which devoured the historic landscape, searching them, and which died of its sur- for the perfect fragment of broken feit." Wrote another visitor in 1820, aqueduct, the artistic effect of sun- "Rome ..