The annual October study days organized by The Marignoli di Montecorona Foundation, in collaboration with the Fondazione Federico Zeri, return this vear and will be devoted to Neoclassical sculpture. The conference will offer an overview of sculpture across the entire Italian peninsula, from the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century through the Napoleonic era. The journey will begin in Rome, crucible and capital of Neoclassicism, and the destination for study and discussion for artists, scholars and collectors from across Ital and beyond, from Johann Joachim Winckelmann to Antonio Canova, Jacques-Louis David and John Flaxman. Following an initial focus on the papal capital, the conference will turn to the other principal centers of artistic interest across an Italy that remained decidedly polycentric even in this field. Within broader, apparently monolithic tendencies, such the imitation of antiquity or the unchallenged authority of Canova, we will bring to light local interpretations that privileged alternative aspects such as the heroic, the elegiac, the graceful, or the horrific – all of which lay hidden beneath the broader Neoclassical label. “Not just Canova”, therefore, but also centuries-old artistic traditions that were firmly rooted in the most vibrant centers of late-Eighteenth-Century Italy and with which the new language had to come to terms, often in the face of resistance from a Baroque tradition that endured into the early Nineteenth Century. As we have learned from seminal studies such as Gérard Hubert’s La sculpture dans l’Italie napoléonienne (1964), the modernizing drive of Napoleon grafted itself onto this panorama, bringing about a standardization that was unable to completely erase the specific local identities of an Italian culture that was still very much polyphonic. It did, however, lay the foundations for new ideas that would germinate into Purist and Romantic tendencies under the Restoration.
As in past editions, curators Andrea Bacchi, Duccio K. Marignoli and Francesco Zagnoni have included younger scholars alongside established experts, in order to offer a broad cross-section of the most recent developments in historical and artistic research on Neoclassical sculpture in Italy.
Useful contacts:
Marignoli di Montecorona Foundation
Michele Drascek (Curator of projects): micheledrascek@marignolifoundation.org
Livia Nocchi (Scientific Director): livianocchi@marignolifoundation.org
Palazzo Collicola
Piazza Collicola 1, 06049 Spoleto (Pg), Italy; info@palazzocollicola.it; 0743-46434
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