Robert MacPherson had a lifelong interest in sculpture and sought to photograph every statue in every major collection in Rome. During the height of his career (1856-63), he produced several hundred photographs of sculptures in the Vatican, St. Peter’s cathedral, and many other churches and sites throughout Rome. Like his other sculptural studies, MacPherson’s photograph of Michelangelo’s Moses in the Roman church of San Pietro in Vincoli is very large and would have cost a small fortune to the mid-19th-century buyer. MacPherson’s preference for large formats, however, along with his dramatic compositions and profound interest in the possibilities of the photographic process, bespeaks his precocious pursuit of photography as a fine art, a medium capable of creative personal expression despite its seeming matter-of-factness.
This work is included in the exhibition Italy on Paper, on view until July 29.
Image:
Robert MacPherson (Scottish, 1811-1872)
Sculptural Study of Michelangelo’s Moses, Rome, ca. 1860
Albumen print
Gift of Marilyn W. Grounds, 1981.42.14
Located on the lawn outside the Allen Memorial Art Museum, this sculpture of a putto holding a dolphin is an early 20th-century replica of Andrea del Verrocchio’s late 15th-century bronze fountain in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. In 1931, Henry J. Haskell (OC 1896) gave the fountain to Oberlin College in memory of his wife Katharine Wright Haskell (OC 1898).
This sketch is on view in the exhibition Italy on Paper, on display in the Ripin Print Gallery through July 29.
Image:
(left) William Hoskins Brown (American, 1910-1976)
Verrocchio Fountain in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, ca. 1925
Pencil
Museum Purchase Fund, 1936.47
(right) Recent color photo of the Haskell Fountain
American writer Henry James compared the elegant building in the center, Palazzo Dario, to “a house of cards” and the French artist Claude Monet painted it. Palazzo Dario exemplifies another type of attraction, the residences of famous personas and the settings of important or curious events; even during Byron’s lifetime, the Venetian apartment he had occupied became a place of interest for the sightseer. The 15th-c. Palazzo Dario may owe its appeal for the artistic imagination to its distinctive semi-Italian, semi-Orientalizing façade, but its tourist popularity may also be rooted in its history of tragic deaths. One such event was the 1883 suicide of prominent English scholar Rawdon Lubbock Brown, who lived most of his life in Venice and had bought Palazzo Dario soon after he settled in the city in 1833 and spent his entire fortune on its renovations.
Italy on Paper continues through July 29.
Image:
Baron Adolph de Meyer (French, 1868-1949)
Views of Venice, early 20th century
Platinum print
Gift of Paul F. Walter (OC 1957), 2008.36.137
The first major stop on the Italian journey, Venice enjoyed a long-standing reputation for religious and political tolerance, a rich culture of diversion and display, remarkable architecture, and a certain Oriental flavor. Thus, the city was not only a favorite travel destination but also a preferred subject for artists. Painted views, or vedute, of recognizable Venetian scenery catered to upper-class patrons, while prints provided a more readily available form of reproducing the city’s vistas.
The exhibition, Italy on Paper, is on view in the Ripin Print Gallery through July 29.
Image:
Carlo Ponti (Italian, act. 1858-1875)
Canal Grande, vu de l’Academie de Beaux Arts, 1850-70
Albumen print
Gift of Marilyn W. Grounds, 1983.102.7
Italy’s lure as a travel destination was shaped by the Grand Tour. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Northern European aristocrats traveled to France and Italy to consolidate their knowledge of the classical past and hone their aesthetic taste. Painters headed to Italy to study its art and architecture and to capture its picturesque sights. The landscape with temple ruins quickly became a recurring theme in Western art. Poets and writers settled in Venice, Florence, or Rome, and authored Italian-inspired works.
With the advent of the railroad and the rise of the middle class in the nineteenth century, the Grand Tour gradually gave way to mass travel and tourism, and Italian cities were flooded by even more foreigners. Guidebooks and guided tours of Italy proliferated. Soon after the invention of photography in 1839, commercial photographic studios began to sell inexpensive prints to tourists in lieu of costly paintings, while illustrated travel narratives and photographic albums afforded vicarious sightseeing. Italy became widely accessible on paper.
Italy on Paper, on view now through July 29, takes the Grand Tour’s visual and literary legacy as its starting point and focuses on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century representations of Italy by leading European and American artists and photographers. With more than forty works on paper from the museum’s holdings and materials drawn from the Oberlin College Library, the exhibition explores the ways in which the three canonic Grand Tour stops—Venice, Rome, and Florence—were framed as travel destinations and tourist attractions. A selection of travel narratives, maps, guidebooks, and stereoscopic slides further contextualize and exemplify Italy’s appeal to the Western eye.
Image:
James McBey (American, 1883-1959)
Venice, Molo, 1925
Drypoint
Gift of M. Knoedler & Co., 1953.199
Join us tomorrow for our March Tuesday Tea. Melissa Duffes, AMAM Media and Publications coordinator, will be speaking. Coffee, tea, and cookies will be served afterwards!
