Call for Articles | Collecting Italian Art North of the Alps
From RIHA Journal:
RIHA Journal Special Issue: Collecting Italian Art North of the Alps 1600–1800
Submissions due by 1 December 2013
The Italian schools occupied central positions in early modern art collections, a tradition that continued through the 19th and 20th centuries. The primacy of Italian art became a cornerstone for museum practice as well as a founding principle for the nascent art history discipline. This issue takes a closer look at the beginning of this tradition in the 17th and 18th century. Since the 1960s (and before), scholars have taken an interest in the Grand Tours of princes, aristocrats and connoisseurs. More recent research has added to the picture by discussing the collecting activities of artists, architects, diplomats, dealers and scholars, and of women collectors and travellers. Further advances in the last few years have included investigations of the Italian art market(s), early modes of display, legal and illegal ways of export and curatorial strategies in the early princely collections and private museums. Although pictures and sculptures have been most in focus, scholars are also bringing these questions with a new interest to collections of the applied arts, prints and drawings (including architectural and decorative drawings).
The issue could include (but does not have to be restricted to) studies of individual collectors and collectors, primary and secondary art markets, the history and theory of display, the export and physical transportation of art, auctions, bequests, the supply of and demand for particular schools, changing attitudes to individual artists, the rise of the interest in the “primitivi,” looting, copying, and the political and nation-building dimensions of collecting.
Suitable submissions will be sent to two expert peer reviewers for blind review. Articles should be no longer than 50,000 characters (including spaces) or 8,000 word, both measures including footnotes and captions. Up to 10 illustrations will be accepted. Contributions in English, French, Italian or German are welcome. Please follow the RIHA Journal Style Guide. Please send your contributions, including a 250-word abstract, to the editors at linda.hinners@nationalmuseum.se by 1 December 2013.
Kind regards,
Martin Olin, Assistant Director, Swedish Institute in Rome. Guest Editor of “Collecting Italian Art North of the Alps”
Magdalena Gram, RIHA Journal Local Editor
Linda Hinners, Assistant Local Editor, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
Conference | Torino Britannica: Political and Cultural Crossroads
From the Seminar on Collecting and Display:
Torino Britannica: Political and Cultural Crossroads on the Grand Tour in the Early Modern Age
The British School at Rome and the Centro Studi Reggia di Veneria Reale in Turin, 19-21 June 2013
Traditional views of the cultural and political phenomenon broadly known as the ‘Grand Tour’ focus on a stereotype of the eighteenth-century British aristocratic traveller resolute on acquiring both cultural artefacts and diplomatic and political know-how from the antique European states, especially those in Italy. More detailed analysis of specific features of the Grand Tour allows for a more insightful assessment of this important historic development during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. This conference will introduce and explore a significant aspect of the Grand Tour long neglected by scholars but which formed an integral part of the education and cultural formation of many British travellers: their sojourn at Turin, capital of the Savoy-Piedmont Polity. The conference will also address another overlooked, yet critical feature of this international movement – the Italian side of and contribution to the Grand Tour experience – a phenomenon which may be called a ‘reverse’ Grand Tour; namely, the movement of artists, writers and other protagonists travelling from Turin to Britain and enriching the cultural exchanges between the two.
Visitors to Turin were confronted with an entirely different experience from that of the other classic Grand Tour sites, including Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice. While these obligatory stopovers were famous for viewing (and purchasing) antiquities, for studying the great repositories of cultural treasures, and for participating in society, a sojourn at Turin, by contrast, became regarded as exceptional, offering the visitor an altogether more pragmatic learning experience. The Savoyard capital boasted important modern royal urban and architectural enhancements, public features that placed Turin in the vanguard of European capitals. Due to the tight controls the Savoy dynasty exercised – by way of a highly efficient bureaucracy – over all cultural, military, religious, ceremonial and social activities throughout its realm, but particularly in Turin, the city was also admired as a model of public functionality and even rationality not seen elsewhere in Italy. The biggest draw for British visitors, however, was undoubtedly the Turin Royal Academy (l’Accademia Reale), which offered an up-to-date and prestigious education in military and diplomatic culture to a wide range of young Europeans who frequented it for extended periods, permitting a cosmopolitan exchange among future statesmen.
As a military power and a flourishing princely court of strategic diplomatic stature, Turin was fully integrated into European affairs, including its important diplomatic and cultural relations with Britain, which peaked in the century following the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1678. Foreigners began to flock there, and the manner in which these European elites shared a common culture formed by their mutual experience of the Academy is one of the questions the conference will address. A model example of an elite military school, the Academy taught not only martial arts and equitation but also mathematics, geography, history, languages (Italian and French), continental social skills and gentlemanly virtues necessary for diplomacy and salon conversations of fashionable society. Fundamentally different from the other Italian Grand Tour sites, which were visited primarily for their historical art treasures, antiquities, musical and theatrical offerings, or even landscape and climate, Turin offered a course of study for the modern man. Torino Britannica will explore these differences while illuminating the significance of the Torinese experience of the Grand Tour in the larger historical narrative of this important British political and cultural phenomenon. In line with the most recent scholarship on the Grand Tour, its intention is to highlight the need to recover these less celebrated and previously underappreciated pathways along which cultural and artistic trends were spread across Europe in the early modern period.
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W E D N E S D A Y , 1 9 J U N E
Rome, British School at Rome
9.15 Opening Remarks, Christopher Smith (British School at Rome) and Andrea Merlotti (Centro Studi, Reggia di Venaria Reale)
Session 1 — Britain in Turin: Politics at the Savoy Court / Britannia a Torino: politica alla corte dei Savoia
Chair: Paola Bianchi (Università della Valle d’Aosta)
9.30 Edward Chaney (Southampton Solent University), Torino Britannica and the Cultural Memory of Egypt: Stuarts, Savoys and the Divine Right of Kings
10.00 Toby Osborne (Durham University), England and Savoy: The Culture of Dynastic Affinity
10.30 Andrea Pennini (Università di Torino), Un’altra via possibile? Progetti matrimoniali fra Stuart e Savoia nel Seicento
11.00 Break
11.30 Edward Corp (Université de Toulouse), The Court of Turin and the English Succession, 1712-1720
12:00 Christopher Storrs (University of Dundee), British Diplomats at the Savoy Court and International Politics
12.30 Paolo Cozzo (Università di Torino), “La metropolitaine des catoliques”. La cappella dell’ambasciata di Savoia nella Londra di Giorgio II.
13.00 Lunch
Session 2 — Turin: Gateway to the British Grand Tour / Torino: porta del Grand Tour britannico
Chair: Karin Wolfe (British School at Rome)
14.30 Paola Bianchi (Università della Valle d’Aosta), Cosmopolitismo e pragmatismo confessionale: gentiluomini britannici in Accademia Reale
15.00 Andrew Moore (Attingham Trust and Paul Mellon Senior Fellow, 2011-13), Thomas Coke: Playhouse, Rope Dancing and the Venaria Real
15.30 Andrea Merlotti (Centro Studi Reggia di Venaria Reale), Salotti, conversazioni, logge. I viaggiatori inglesi nella sociabilità aristocratica torinese del Settecento
16.00 Discussion
16.30 Break
17.00 Exhibition: James Hakewill’s Grand Tour Drawings in the British School at Rome Library
18.00 Keynote address: Cesare De Seta (Università degli studi di Napoli Federico II), Viaggi, viaggiatori e pittori a Torino tra Sei e Settecento
19.30 Reception
20.00 Dinner
T H U R S D A Y , 2 0 J U N E
Rome, British School at Rome
Session 3 — The British in Turin: Art and Diplomacy / Britannici a Torino: arte e diplomazia
Chair: Joanna Kostylo (British School at Rome)
10.00 Karin Wolfe (British School at Rome), John Molesworth: British Envoy and Cultural Intermediary in Turin
10.30 James Rothwell (National Trust), Silver from London and Turin: The Collection of the 2nd Earl of Bristol, Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of Savoy 1755-58
11.00 Break
11.30 Jonny Yarker (British School at Rome), Domenico Duprà: A Turinese Painter and the British
12.00 Christopher Johns (Vanderbilt University), Chinoiserie in Piedmont: An International Language of Diplomacy and Modernity
12.30 Discussion
13.00 Lunch
14.30 Departure from the British School at Rome for Turin
F R I D A Y , 2 1 J U N E
Turin, Reggia di Venaria, Aula magna del Centro restauro
Session 4 — Britain and Turin: Architectural Crossroads on the Grand Tour / Britannia e Torino: percorsi architettonici del Grand Tour
Chair: Costanza Roggero (Politecnico di Torino)
10.00 Tommaso Manfredi (Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria), Architetti e Re nell’Europa del Grand Tour: da Wren a Juvarra
10.30 Cristina Ruggero (Bibliotheca Hertziana, Roma), L’album juvarriano per Lord Burlington a Chatsworth
11.00 Giuseppe Dardanello (Università di Torino), Esperienze dell’Inghilterra nella cultura architettonica e figurativa nel Piemonte del Settecento
11.30 Edoardo Piccoli (Politecnico di Torino), Englishmen in Turin, 1747-1748
12.00 Paolo Cornaglia (Politecnico di Torino), Il giardino inglese in Piemonte a fine Settecento: declinazioni pittoresche, anglo-cinesi e paesaggistiche
12.30 Discussion
13.00 Lunch
Session 5 — Turin in Britain: Cultural Exchange in the Age of the Grand Tour / Torino in Britannia: scambi culturali nell’età del Grand Tour
Chair: Andrea Merlotti (Centro Studi della Reggia di Venaria)
15.00 Alastair Laing (National Trust), A Plurality of Pluras: Members of the Plura Family and Their Work for the British
15.30 Olga Zoller (Independent Scholar), Crossing Professional and National Limits: the Pioneering Role of the Versatile Architect-Engineer Giovanni Battista Borra (1713-1770)
16.00 Cristina Bracchi (Archivio delle Donne in Piemonte), Baretti inglese: la didattica e la critica
16.30 Francesca Fedi (Università di Parma), Alfieri in Inghilterra
17.00 Annarita Colturato (Università di Torino), Con talento e intraprendenza: musicisti piemontesi a Londra nel secondo Settecento
17.30 Discussion
18.00 Concerto: Benvenuto Robbio di San Raffaele (1735-1794), Sonate 1, 2, 3 e 5 dalle Sei Sonate a Violino o Cembalo Solo — Silvia Colli, violino; Gioele Gusberti, violoncello; Mario Tonda, clavicembalo
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