Dreams of Arcadia & Victorian Fantasies: Italy..
Dreams of Arcadia and Victorian Fantasies: Italy in the American Imagination
Dr. Mary Ann Calo
From the earliest days of its existence as an independent nation, Americans interested in art and culture made pilgrimages to Italy. What did they expect to find? How have these American “Italy seekers” reconciled fantasies of an “eternal Italy,” a timeless place suspended in the cultural past, with the conditions they encountered in modern Italy?
At the core of this course is the meaning of Italy to American artists, writers, cultural tourists, and art collectors across time. It will include discussion of how travel to Italy informed the development of American landscape painting and sculpture in the 19th century, and how admiration for Italian art shaped the first American art collectors and the museums they founded. The experience of Italy will be presented as an ongoing dialog about taste, nostalgia, and the perception of difference that has influenced how Americans understand themselves as citizens of an independent democratic nation.
The course will be organized around three places especially relevant to evolving notions of Italy in the American imagination: Rome, Florence, and Venice.
- OPTIONAL READINGS -
PRIMARY SOURCES
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1860)
Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad (1869)
Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1902)
Henry James, Italian Hours (1909)
Mary McCarthy, The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed, (1959 and 1961; 1972)
SECONDARY SOURCES (some will be out of print but should be available in libraries)
Francesca Bardazzi and Carlo Sisi, editors, Americans in Florence (2012)
Leonardo Buonomo, Backward Glances: Exploring Italy, Reinterpreting America 1831-1866 (1996)
John Coffey, Twilight of Arcadia: American Landscape Painters in Rome, 1830-1880 (1987)
Melissa Dabakis, A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (2014)
Eric Denker, Whistler and His Circle in Venice (2003)
Irma Jaffe, editor, The Italian Presence in American Art, 1760-1860 (1989)
Leo Olschki, editor, The Poetics of Place: Florence Imagined (2001)
John Pemble, Venice Rediscovered (1996)
Alice Powers, editor, Italy in Mind (1997)
Bruce Robertson, editor, Sargent and Italy (2003)
Theodore Stebbins, Jr. et al, The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760-1914 (1992)
William Vance et al, America’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City, 1800-1900 (2009)
Bruno Wanrooij, editor, Otherness: Anglo-American Women in 19th and 20th Century Florence (2001)
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LECTURE 1 "Rome"
Sculptors seeking to create monuments to America’s military and political heroes relocated to Rome where they found artistic models and skilled artisans. The experience of the Italian landscape, punctuated with historical “ruins,” had a profound impact on American painters trying to capture the u...
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LECTURE 2 "Florence"
Florence became a destination somewhat later and attracted a very different kind of visitor, one strongly focused on the merits and aesthetic qualities of Italian Renaissance art and how they might elevate artistic taste in the United States. The city offered not only an extraordinary opportunity...
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LECTURE 3 "Venice"
Finally, Venice ascends at the end of the 19th century and appealed strongly to individuals with more modern sensibilities. The lure of Venice was often rooted in the perception of it as a city of decadence, mystery, and extreme aestheticism, made most evident in the works of American artist Jame...
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Questions Lecture 3
