Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Wednesday, June 6, 2018 in Conferences, Events, HART, Lectures, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC.

Christopher Johns, Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of History of Art, will present a paper entitled “John SIngleton Copley in Rome: The Challenge of the Old Masters Accepted,” at an international conference, “American Latium: American Artists and Travellers in and around Rome in the Age of the Grand Tour,” on June 6-7 at the Centro Studi Americani, Palazzo Mattei di Giove, in Rome. The conference forms part of an ongoing research project directed by Johns, Tommaso Manfredi (Università Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria) and Karin Wolfe (British School at Rome); conference proceedings will be published in 2019.

The Boston-born painter John Singleton Copley began his Grand Tour in London and Paris before arriving in Rome in October 1774, eager to see the antiquities and Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces housed in Rome’s myriad museums, private galleries and churches. Impressed with Raphael, Copley decided to paint the Ascension of Christ during the winter of 1774-1775, “both as a tribute to Raphael and as a modern challenge to the authority of what was arguably the most famous painting in the world during the eighteenth century,” said Johns.

Why did Copley choose such a subject as his initial challenge to the European tradition he so admired and envied? Why did Copley decide not to produce a large-scale version to demonstrate his mastery of the High Renaissance idiom? In his paper Johns will examine the sources of Copley’s Ascension in the context of artistic challenge so frequently encountered among artists in Italy during the age of the Grand Tour.

Johns described the American Latium conference as addressing the pioneering origins of the artistic relations between America, Rome, and its environs from the eighteenth century up until 1870, in order to define the extraordinary impact of the arts of Rome, from antiquity through to the modern world, that in large part resulted in the birth of a national American aesthetic.

The conference program features four thematically distinct sessions: The American Grand Tour in Europe: Origins and Dynamics (chaired by Johns); American Rome and Latium: Image, Sites and Itineraries; Americans and the Artistic Culture of Rome: From Old Masters to New (Copley paper presented by Johns); and Rome in America: Transpositions of Ideas, Art and Artists.

Interdisciplinary in nature, this conference will introduce new research and new research approaches to the study of cultural travel and cultural exchange, including exploring the reverse side of this story of exchange, foregrounding the experiences and the contributions of the first Italians who traveled to America in search of work opportunities and cultural acclaim.

While in Rome for the conference, Johns will attend the formal presentation of the volume, The Holy Name: Art of the Gesù: Bernini and His Age, in a formal ceremony held in the Church of the Gesù. Johns co-edited the book with Linda Wolk-Simon, director and chief curator of the Fairfield University Art Museum, who described it as “the most important and substantial study in any language devoted to the Gesù.” Richly illustrated with 246 color images, The Holy Name is comprised of thirteen essays by an international team of specialists in Italian Baroque sacred art and religious culture. Johns contributed an essay entitled “The Fortunes of the Society of Jesus: Ecclesia Triumphans to Dominus Ac Redemptor.”

*John Singleton Copley. The Ascension, 1775, oil on canvas, 81.28 x 73.02 cm (32 x 28 3/4 inches). Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA.