The Academy kicked off the annual Trustees Week in Rome with a series of highly anticipated events from 28 May until 31 May, beginning with the 8th edition of the McKim Medal Gala. Each year the Academy Trustees gather in Rome for committee meetings, attend the Fellows’ Open Studios, Reading, and Concert., and spend time learning about Fellows’ projects and Rome on a series of curated walks and talks.
Among the many highlights were the seventeen walks and talks offered throughout the week by current Fellows, Academy Advisors, and AAR staff. Serving as group leaders on the excursions were Albert Paul Albano, Aaron S. Allen, Margaret Marshall Andrews, Jennifer Davis, Jackie Murray, Camille S. Mathieu, Elizabeth C. Robinson, Carly Jane Steinborn, Heidi Wendt (2012 Fellows); Jeffrey Blanchard, FAAR’79, Patrizia Cavazzini, Gianni Ponti, Lila Yawn, FAAR’98 (Advisors of the American Academy in Rome); Corey Brennan, FAAR’88, and Karl Kirchwey, FAAR’95 (AAR Mellon Professor and Heiskell Arts Director, respectively); and J. Michael Schwarting, FAAR’70.
On the first morning, despite the pouring rain, a group of intrepid AAR members and Trustees trekked up the Aventine hill for the walk “The Glories of the Aventine.” Led by Lila Yawn and Jeffrey Blanchard, the walk explored the hill’s most grandiose sites, including the atmospheric Clivio di Rocca Savella, the complex of Santa Sabina, and the Priory of the Knights of Malta, whose church constitutes the only architectural project by Piranesi ever carried out.
Contemporaneously across the city at the Foro Italico, Corey Brennan with Paolo Pedinelli (Coni Spa) led a fascinating tour of works by architect Luigi Moretti, widely considered the most important Italian architect of the twentieth century. The walk titled “The Architect Luigi Moretti at Foro Italico” shared insights most recently gained from a full-day April 2012 AAR workshop on Moretti’s impact on the Foro in the years 1933-1941, an event that drew many of the acknowledged experts in twentieth-century Italian architectural history. Brennan and Pedinelli focused on Moretti’s most highly regarded contributions to the site, including the private palaestra he designed for Mussolini and the monumental Piazzale dell’Impero.
That afternoon J. Michael Schwarting led a group through the centro storico to the Vatican on his tour of “Renaissance Palazzi and Piazze on the Processo through Campo Marzio to San Pietro,” while Fellow Elizabeth Robinson took a group to the excavations of the Imperial Fora to discuss the archaeological discoveries of the last ten years. Her walk, “The Imperial Fora: Discoveries of the Last Ten Years,” looked carefully at the buildings and the function of each forum, as well as reconstructions of what the fora may have looked like at the time of their creation.
On the morning of Tuesday 29 May, a group of some 25 people joined Karl Kirchwey for “A Poets’ Roman Baedeker (Season Two).” The group benefited from the presence of William B. Hart Poet-in-Residence Robert Hass, who participated in some of the readings. The intent of this walk was to present certain poems in the presence of those monuments, sculptures, or works of art that had inspired them. The group began by contemplating Joachim Du Bellay’s sonnet # 27 from Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558), which considers Rome as a kind of palimpsest, constantly erasing and remaking itself out of its own ruins, and how this might stand as a paradigm for poets and others making art in Rome. Next was Joseph Brodsky’s, RAAR’81, poem about nearby Porta San Pancrazio. The group then descended in vans to Trastevere, where two poems by Karl Kirchwey separated by eighteen years were both set in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, amid its Cavallini mosaics and its mons claudianus granite columns. From here, the group walked to the statue of Roman dialect poet G.G. Belli near the Tiber and considered, first, a sonnet of Belli about the joys of making graffitti (read in Romanesco by Karl Kirchwey and by Robert Hass in a modern English translation), and then a late sonnet by American poet James Wright about the statue of Belli defaced by graffitti in 1979.
A visit to Santa Prassede allowed for a reading of Robert Browning’s famous dramatic monologue “The Bishop Orders His Tomb, St. Praxed’s Church” (the poem interestingly quite unconnected to the actual physical setting of the church). Next was the Column of Trajan and Anthony Hecht’s, FAAR’52, RAAR’69, elegant and sober juxtaposition of Trajan’s “scarred veterans” on the column frieze with the heedless young couple speeding around it on a Vespa. The view of the Roman Forum from the Tabularium allowed the group to contemplate poems about the Forum by Anglo-Catholic poet Elizabeth Jennings and by Rosanna Warren, RAAR’01. The last stop on this walk was the Villa Sciarra, where the group listened to Richard Wilbur’s beautiful poem “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra,” though the fountain, dry for a long period and most recently blessed once more with flowing water, was on this morning again inexplicably dry! The waters of poetry, at least, had flowed with relative abundance for the time those enamored of this art had spent together.
Also that morning Corey Brennan led a group on a whirlwind tour that highlighted Christian “Churches of the Forum,” both lost and extant. In the former category are structures such as the oratory of SS. Sergio e Bacco, which was built against the Arch of Septimius Severus; S. Adriano, dismantled in its setting in the Senate House in the years 1935-1937; and the old S. Maria Liberatrice, dynamited in 1900 to expose the site of S. Maria Antiqua. The main focus was on visiting the interiors of SS. Luca e Martina (a Baroque masterpiece by Pietro da Cortona), S. Lorenzo in Miranda (spectacularly built into the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, and difficult to visit), SS. Cosmas and Damian (including the seldom-seen original lower level); and S. Francesca Romana (the first purpose-built church in the forum).
In the afternoon Patrizia Cavazzini took a group to the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in the San Michele complex in Trastevere to view the recent “Restoration of Caravaggio’s masterpiece the Resurrection of Lazarus.” Prof. Cavazzini discussed the work’s history and the restorers of the painting spoke about the latest discoveries that had come to light during their intervention. After the visit, Prof. Cavazzini also led an impromptu walk to see two churches near Piazza Navona: San Luigi dei Francesi, to view Caravaggio’s cycle of Saint Matthew, and Sant’Agostino, which contains his Madonna dei Pellegrini.
Another afternoon walk, led by Camille S. Mathieu, visited the French Academy. Mathieu’s tour, “The Villa Medici and the French Academy in the early 19th century,” examined the unique environment—both physical and intellectual—that the residents of the French Academy experienced. The visit focused on the Villa Medici as a symbol of French power during the years of Napoleon’s domination of Italy, and the role played by its pensionnaires in the social and artistic fabric of the newly Napoleonic city.
The Wednesday 30 May walks and talks included a visit to the Vatican, an exhibit of the Vatican Archives at the Capitoline Museums, Medieval Roman sites, and a group of churches and a palace by Borromini.
The day began with the walk “A Visit to the Sistine Chapel, Raphael Rooms and the Vatican Restoration.” Fellow Albert Paul Albano led a private visit to the Sistine Chapel where he discussed its fabrication, the historic campaigns for its preservation, and their consequences. This was followed by the Vatican painting and conservation/restoration laboratory, renowned for its state-of-the-art facility. During the walk the group was able to view and discuss some of the projects currently undergoing conservation/restoration, including an early seventeenth-century “Christ and the Adulterous Women” ascribed to Domenico Fetti (1588-1623); a slightly later “Massacre of the Holy Innocents” in the style of Poussin; the “Presentation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to God the Father” of Plautilla Bricci (1616-1690, a painter and architect who also with her brother designed the Villa del Vascello near the AAR); “The Miracle of the Paralytic,” by Francesco Mancini (1679-1758); and animal portraits by Peter Wenzel (1745-1829). In addition, the group visited and discussed the Vatican’s unique collection of modern and contemporary art with work represented by Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Francis Bacon, and many other great masters of the twentieth century.
Also that morning Fellow Jackie Murray took a group on her walk, “‘Lux in Arcana’: Treasures of the Archivio Segreto Vaticano on Exhibit at the Capitoline Museums,” to see the major exhibition of documents from the Vatican Archive. On view were such gems as the written excommunication of Martin Luther (1522), a menacing letter from the British House of Lords to Clement VII over the issue of annulling Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon (1530), a signed defense by Galileo during the trial (1633) that led to his condemnation, and a letter written by Marie-Bernarde Soubirous (of Lourdes) to Pius IX in 1876.
On Wednesday afternoon Corey Brennan provided a few glimpses of major works in Rome by the innovative architect Francesco Borromini (1599-1667) on his tour “Borromini’s Palazzo di Propaganda Fide and S. Carlino alle Quattro Fontane.” Brennan’s group started with the spectacular but long inaccessible Palazzo di Propaganda Fide (at the eastern edge of the Piazza di Spagna), which saw itself recast in late 2010 as a stylish new Museo Missionario. The museum highlights the activities of the Congregazione per l’Evangelizzazione dei Popoli (founded 1622) over its almost four centuries of existence. And the building itself marks one of the greatest of Borromini’s achievements: he designed the façade, two chapels (including the justly famed Capella dei Re Magi), and many of the interior details of the Palazzo. This walk proceeded to examine Borromini’s contributions to two nearby works: S. Andrea delle Fratte, and the Palazzo Barberini. It all concluded with an appreciation of Borromini’s masterpiece S. Carlino, set against his rival Gianlorenzo Bernini’s S. Andrea al Quirinale, which stands a few hundred meters distant.
Fellows Jennifer Davis and Carly Jane Steinborn teamed up for the tour “Rome and the Birth of the Medieval.” They took a group to major sites such as the Arch of Constantine and the Lateran triclinium to explore the vexed question of the birth of the Middle Ages as we see it in buildings, images, and inscriptions of Rome. Among the questions raised were how to conceptualize the dividing lines between the ancient and medieval, a heated topic of debate for scholars, who differ over how to analyze the changes from Constantine, the first Christian emperor to Charlemagne, who revived the empire in the 800s.
Thursday 31 May saw four walks and talks, beginning with three that morning: one of “The Rione Ludovisi” by Corey Brennan; “Ostia and the Marble Trade by Gianni Ponti;” and “The Subura,” a walk in the area of modern day Monti by Fellow Margaret Marshall Andrews.
Corey Brennan’s group headed to the area of the Via Veneto to visit the last two vestiges of what was once the Boncompagni Ludovisi family’s 90-acre Villa Ludovisi (established 1622 and dismantled 1885): the Palazzo Grande (now encased in the late nineteenth-century Palazzo Margherita, which since 1946 has housed the U.S. Embassy on the Via Veneto) and the Villa Aurora (which remains the family residence of the head of the Boncompagni Ludovisi). U.S. Embassy Curator Dott.ssa Valeria Brunori introduced the group to the Embassy’s complicated architectural history and the many sculptures from the famed Ludovisi collection that the Embassy still retains, including Giambologna’s spectacular Cesarini Venus. And HSH Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi guided the Academy group through her home the Villa Aurora, and discussed the Villa’s unique oil-on-plaster ceiling by Caravaggio (rediscovered in 1968), as well as important work by Guercino (the major “Aurora” and “Fama” ceiling frescoes, on which art historian and AAR Trustee David Stone, FAAR’98, shared his insights), Bril, Viola, Tassi, Valesio, and Domenichino. Taken together, the site visits allowed the group to re-imagine at least a bit of what was for two and a half centuries the largest and most magnificent private residence within the walls of Rome.
The focus of the Ostia trip was to understand the city’s role as an import terminal for Roman marbles. Gianni Ponti demonstrated this by taking the group through stocks of unused columns, unfinished architectural elements in export form, examples of opus sectile (marble pieces cut and polished to be set into a design), repairs on damaged architectural material, as well as many different types of white and polychrome marbles, which helped explain why this material had such an important role as a cultural symbol and marker of refined taste in the Roman world.
Fellow Margaret Andrew’s walk “The Subura,” took a group through the heart of modern Monti. Among the important sites visited was the top of the Esquiline to the Cispian Hill, site of the temple of Juno Lucina, goddess of childbirth, as well as the fifth-century church of S. Maria Maggiore, the first major basilica within the walls of Rome, and the ninth-century church of S. Prassede, with its magnificent mosaic decorative program.
That afternoon saw Fellow Aaron S. Allen’s visit, “Nineteenth-century Roman Opera Houses” at Teatro Argentina, Teatro dell’Opera, and Teatro della Valle, where many of the opera premieres by Rossini, Verdi, Beethoven, and Puccini took place.
The 2012 Rome annual Board of Trustees meeting took place on Friday 1 June. Friday also saw a visit led by Fellow Heidi Wendt to discover the “Foreign Cults of Trastevere,” a fascinating walk oriented around sites that witnessed Trastevere’s twin legacies of commercialism and exotic influences.
The Trustees trip concluded on Saturday 2 June with a final excursion led by Corey Brennan and Adele Chatfield-Taylor to Capalbio, where they enjoyed a visit to artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s Giardino dei Tarocchi, an exploration of one of Italy’s best-preserved medieval town centers, and a garden lunch at the home of longtime Academy friends, the Count Antonello and Countess Giuppi Pietromarchi.