Portraits & Social Standing in Rome.
The importance of the antique in eighteenth-century Roman portraits has been noticed; in portraits of people on the Grand Tour, references to classical statuary are plentiful; but it has been observed that this is hardly the case in portraits of the princes who lived in Rome.1 The topic of the study of Roman art history in relation to the social situation in the history of art is an interesting one. As Eliasson stresses, one of the classic books on the transition of painting , Francis Haskell’s Patrons and Painters virtually ignored the Rome of this century and concentrated on Venice. And despite a well-mannered disputation on the exclusion of eighteenth-century Rome from art history, Haskell refused to change the focus of his original book in a later edition.2 Since then the field of eighteenth-century Roman studies has evolved; one of its themes these days is on the construction of social identities in Rome, not only in relation to collecting and the classical tradition, suggested by the inclusion of antique statues within paintings by Pompeo Batoni; but also the concept of cosmopolitanism in Rome. This approach concentrates on the existence of different nationalities in Rome like Pecheux who painted Margherita Boccapudli (above) whose portraits secrete clues that may have been overlooked by those who focus on the sign of the antique,
1This was noted by the curator of the Batoni exhibition in Lucca, Isa Belli-Barsali who noted “The profusion of monuments and ancient statues was probably desired by the commissioners themselves, as not only a dutiful statement of the new excavation passion but also as a documentation or as a sentimental memory of an intellectual journey. However, these ancient objects never appear in the portraits of Roman princes. This last sentence led Sabrina Norlander Eliaason to pursue the question of other audiences in Roman portraits, Portraiture and social identity in eighteenth-century Rome (Manchester University Press, 2009), 1.
2Ibid.
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