Roma - Autunno 2016

Italy has served as a key destination for American artists since the founding of the republic. American painters, sculptors, and illustrators were enchanted with its mythic arcadian past, fascinated with its classical legacy, and impassioned by its political movement toward independence and unification, the Risorgimento. This conference will consider the shared notions of republicanism and tyranny that animated American and Italian politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Italians eventually chose a constitutional monarchy as their governing structure, Americans understood the Italian state in republican terms—as a nation comprised of free, autonomous, and self-governing citizens. The scope of the conference will take into account significant historical events that linked Italy and the United States, such as the Italian wars of independence, the American Civil War, the founding of the Italian nation with Rome as its capital, the rise and decline of progressive reforms in Italy and the United States in the late nineteenth century, and both nations’ participation in World War I. The conference organizers seek papers that are concerned with, but not limited to, the following issues: How did Italian and American artists articulate a language of republicanism that suited both their country’s political needs? In what way was neoclassicism infused with both republican and imperial ideologies, at times simultaneously? How were images of Garibaldi and Washington deployed to further the political ends of Italy and the United States? How did American artistic responses to Italy, and conversely, Italian responses to the United States, shift after Italian unification?