American Latium. American Artists in and around Rome in the Age of the Grand Tour

This volume brings together the proceedings presented at the international conference American Latium: American Artists and Travelers in and around Rome in the Age of the Grand Tour sponsored by the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, and hosted by the Centro Studi Americani in Rome on the 7-8 June 2018, convened by Christopher Johns, Tommaso Manfredi and Karin Wolfe. The premise of the conference was to examine the concept of cultural exchange between America and Rome and its surrounding territory not as a bilateral transfer of culture, but rather as an entangled and reciprocal history of cultural transmission, including the importance of London with its powerful art academies as an intermediate destination for Americans making their way to the continent. Travel to Rome engaged American artists, collectors, scientists, writers and diplomats in dialogue with a network of European artists, intellectuals and statesmen. The remarkable degree of cosmopolitanism found in Rome signalled its importance not simply as a cultural destination, but as a place of experiment and creativity for travelers of differing nationalities who gathered there – a place where ancient history and tradition was cross-pollinated with the experience of the modern. Divided into three parts, The American Grand Tour: From Old Masters to the New World, American Latium: Sites and Itineraries in and around Rome; Americans and the Artistic Culture of Rome: Toward an American Art, the book addresses the pioneering origins of the artistic relations between America, Rome and its environs from the eighteenth century up until 1870. Interdisciplinary in nature, these proceedings present new, and at times unexpected, research on the experience of reciprocal cultural exchange.