Republics and empires: Italian and American art in transnational perspective, 1840–1970

By Manchester University Press

Republics and empires provides transnational perspectives on the significance of Italy to American art and visual culture and the impact of the United States on Italian art and popular culture. Covering the period from the Risorgimento to the Cold War, it reveals the complexity of the visual discourses that bound two relatively new nations together. It also gives substantial attention to literary and critical texts that addressed the evolving cultural relationship between Italy and the United States. While American art history has tended to privilege French, British and German ties, these chapters highlight a rich body of contemporary research by Italian and American scholars 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 nations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526154613

Book preview

Introduction

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 post-World 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 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.

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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 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 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

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 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 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.

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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 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 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 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

1The 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.

2We 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).

3For 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).

4For 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).

5For 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).

6The 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).

7J. T. Soby and A. H. Barr, Jr, Twentieth-Century Italian Art , exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949), p. 5.

8M. 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).

9Cold 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. 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 Nineteenth-Century 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 Museodel 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 Furturist 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 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.

Selected bibliography

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Dabakis, M. A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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_____. ‘Americans in Italy: mid-century attitudes a hundred years apart’, College Art Journal 17:3 (Spring 1958): 284–93.

Part I: Hybrid republicanisms

1

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