Dipingere in copia. Da Roma all'Europa, 1750-1870

Copies were a crucial issue in the definition of art history as a discipline and as a constant in the theoretical debate about the painter's education in Europe. Artists’ biographies, art histories and treatises, pictorial letters and art dictionaries enable us to retrace the multiple roles, meanings and functions entrusted to the pictorial copy. The theories, however, were echoed by the practices, especially those that developed against the backdrop of Rome, the cosmopolitan capital of artistic education between the mid-18th century and the end of the temporal power of the Church. Travel journals, memorials, artists’ notebooks and letters, applications for a license to make copies in museums, palaces and churches: the many stories that emerge from this substantial documentation reflect the continuity and fractures in the “school of Rome” between the Enlightenment and the second Restoration. But the pictorial copy also constituted a substantial part of Rome outside Rome, in London, St. Petersburg and Paris: from the project for the Northumberland Gallery in London to the eagerly awaited and finally unsuccessful plan for a Musée des copies in Paris promoted by Charles Blanc. From the mid-18th century until the 19th, there was a continuous succession of ideas and projects, most of which evolved in Rome, where intermediaries, academies and artists debated and competed and where, from the utopia of universal and shared knowledge, the ambition gradually emerged to establish the various national schools of art.

Published in cooperation with the USI, Academy of Architecture, Institute of History and Theory of Art and Architecture.