An Artistic Utopia?
A major player responsible for boosting Rome to the status of cultural capital of Europe was the sculptor Antonio Canova. In lauding Rome, Canova was contesting Napoleon’s claim that Paris was the main city of culture, but Canova also believed in Rome as an “Artists’ Utopia” where creative personalities were free to discuss aesthetic, philosophical, and even political matters in an idyllic setting. Some of this was undoubtedly true: the English sculptor John Gibson said that he not only listened to “conversations between Canova (above) and Thorvaldsen [a Danish sculptor] but between artists of talent of all nations.”1 Paintings like the German artist Catel’s image of an ensemble of artists (including Thorvaldsen) in the Spanish Wine Tavern convey the convivial atmosphere in which such lively debates took place, yet if one delves deeper beneath the surface sheen of cosmopolitanism, the “practice of national prejudice”2 is revealed. What we have then is a more competitive arena than an international clearing house of artistic ideas, which may also be a theme in Catel’s picture. National rivalry is reflected in the attitude of the pugnacious Irish painter James Barry who wrote a whole dissertation contesting the view that an artistic nation like Italy could not be like Britain. Another cultural flashpoint was Jacques Louis David’s classically realized Oath of the Horatii lionized out of all proportion by the French, but unreservedly condemned by the Italians; it also provided the German artist- and Goethe’s friend- Tischbein with an opportunity to take an independent stance and use his pen to reveal some of the petty chauvinisms lying beneath the surface of “harmonious” relations.3Tischbein’s balanced assessment of the state of painting in Rome should be contrasted with German claims to artistic fraternity and cultural superiority, or to use Crask’s contemporary gloss on it,- “a Germanic take-over bid” in 18th century Rome.4
1Quoted in Matthew Crask, Art in Europe 1700-1830, 1997, Oxford History of Art, 141.
2Ibid,
3 Petra Lamers in Grand Tour exh cat, no. 31.
4Crask, Art in Europe , 142
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