The Art Bulletin | 2019
So What about Italy These Days?
Abstract
Historically and art historically, Italian Renaissance and Baroque art have been our discipline’s foundational fields. From Heinrich Wölfflin to Bernard Berenson to Erwin Panofsky and beyond, one can’t begin to enumerate the many fine scholars in that field. What, then, could be the benefit of an “Italian issue” of The Art Bulletin now? And in what sense could it be more than a return to the preferred stomping grounds of such distinguished predecessors? The articles in this issue approach Italian art through various historical, cultural, and ideological moments, diverse methodological perspectives, temporal angles, and media. Though they arrived randomly as unsolicited submissions, they turned out to be oddly synchronized in their stubborn avoidance of set art historical conventions, boundaries of periodizations and specialties, and traditional aesthetic and material expressive means. Sarah McPhee’s meticulous iconological exploration of Giovanni Battista Falda’s famous 1676 map of Rome includes allusions to the (unlikely) pairing in the age of the Baroque of authoritarian papacy with the emblems of ancient Roman republicanism. Viewed through the eyes of the art critic Roberto Longhi in 1913, as Laura Moure Cecchini argues, that same Baroque culture became the platform that gave birth to the Futurist avant-garde as part of a discursive attempt to construct an unbroken national heritage that buttressed Italian geopolitical aspirations on the eve of World War I. Focusing on Giorgio de Chirico’s series of allegedly “claustrophobic” interiors created in Ferrara during World War I, Ara Merjian views them instead as the willfully cloistered sites that launched liberating remote explorations, a transcendent metaphysical experiment founded on the physical. The two final articles in this issue are situated on the eve of World War II and of Fascist cultural politics shaped by notions of “romanità” and “italianità.” These provided a platform, Andrée Hayum maintains, for the colossal “export,” under Mussolini’s auspices—part Fascist preening, part Fascist propaganda—of hundreds of Renaissance masterpieces to London’s 1930 Royal Academy of Arts exhibition. Romanità ideals also prompted, according to Michael Tymkiw, the creation of Luigi Moretti’s floor mosaics, inspired by ancient Roman pavements, that decorated the Piazzale dell’Impero, in the Foro Mussolini, a public means of imperialist indoctrination. Italian art? Yes. Ancient, Renaissance, Baroque, modern? Yes. But otherly.