“Italy, for America, functioned as the perfect other,” literary critic Leonardo Buonomo has explained. In the nineteenth century, it was not considered a place of historical and material consequence, ...but a “gigantic picture, or a stage where a performance was continually held for the sake of a foreign audience.”¹ In the timeless Campagna (the open landscape outside the ancient city walls), for example, dotted with Roman aqueducts and other picturesque ruins, American visitors imagined the pleasures and beauties of a distant arcadian past in which antique fauns and quaint contadini (peasants) idly rambled. In the city of Rome, however, these
Reimagining Italy MELISSA DABAKIS
A Sisterhood of Sculptors,
05/2020
Book Chapter
Martin Johnson Heade’s Roman Newsboys (1848; fig. 48), candidly chronicles Roman politics at midcentury. In one of his few genre paintings, Heade brings to light recently realized freedoms available ...to the Roman people under the shortlived Republic.¹ He depicts two street urchins who openly distribute copies of the satirical publication Il Don Pirlone: Giornale di caricature politiche (a newspaper of political satire, or “the Punch of Rome,” as the American journalist Margaret Fuller described it).² In this image, Heade illustrates the tenets of the two political parties associated with the Risorgimento, the movement to liberate the Italian peninsula from foreign
Introduction MELISSA DABAKIS
A Sisterhood of Sculptors,
05/2020
Book Chapter
On a brilliant sunny day in the historical center of Rome, the fictional heroine Corinne is crowned poet laureate on the steps of the ancient Capitoline. The most famous woman in Rome, Corinne is ...lauded as a poetess, writer, improviser, and intellectual in Madame de Staël’s (Germaine Necker’s) popular novel Corinne, or Italy of 1807. Clad in a white tunic with an exotic turban wound round her head, the great beauty improvises verses while playing the lyre: “Italy, empire of the Sun; Italy, mistress of the world; cradle of literature; I salute you,” her performance begins. While paying homage to
Postscript MELISSA DABAKIS
A Sisterhood of Sculptors,
05/2020
Book Chapter
As interest in the equal rights struggle waned and the ideology of separate spheres became more pronounced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, women’s access to the public sphere of ...monument making changed dramatically. In fact, Vinnie Ream’s career offered a stunning parallel to the fate of the women’s rights movement, which fractured after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870. Ream domesticated her public image by transforming herself into a salonnière and hosting weekly receptions on Wednesday evenings from nine to midnight in her Washington home. At times, up to twenty or thirty people crowded into
The artist’s studio was the popular face of female professionalism in Rome, a space in which women artists actively fashioned their identities. With its public character, the studio served as a site ...of both production and display where artists showcased themselves as well as their work. With its attendant mercantile interests, it witnessed commerce and financial negotiations and was a morally perilous zone that held the potential of tarnishing a woman artist’s reputation.¹ Considered curiosities for the public lives they led, Harriet Hosmer and Louisa Lander attracted much attention in Rome. Visitors to the city obtained their addresses and calling
