Enfilade

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