As the American Academy prepares for its Giorno del Ringraziamento (=Thanksgiving) festivities, there’s something to be said for taking stock—if only of events of the days leading up to the holiday.

Those events included two shop talks by current Fellows (filmmaker Abigail Child, typographer Russell Maret), a commemoration of the life of Roman historian Lily Ross Taylor (FAAR’18) by Mellon Professor Corey Brennan, a moonlit “walk and talk” for members of the Academy community along the Tiber (with contributions by Fellows Robert Hammond and Kiel Moe), a fireside chat by Rachel Donadio (Rome Bureau Chief for The New York Times),  a marathon of contemporary music at the Villa Aurelia under the auspices of the Nuova Consonanza artistic circle (with performances by Fellows Lisa Bielawa and Don Byron), and a visit by the newly appointed US Ambassador to the Italian Republic and San Marino, David H. Thorne. All that was over eight—not atypical—days in all. A few glimpses of that week can be found below…

Monday 23 November, at the AAR’s McKim, Mead & White building: reception for US Ambassador to Italy David H. Thorne. From left: Rose Thorne, Ambassador Thorne, AAR President Adele Chatfield-Taylor (FAAR’84), Christoph Riedweg (Director, Istituto Svizzero di Roma).

Saturday 21 November, at the AAR’s Villa Aurelia: the 46th Festival of Nuova Consonanza. Performing ‘Multipla’ by 2009 AAR McKim Medalist Ennio Moricone (from left), vocalists Sandra Del Maro, Patrizia Rotonda, Monica Demuru.

Saturday 21 November, Nuova Consonanza festival: Gianni Trovalusci (left) and David Ryan rehearse for “Lucrezio—frammenti per audio e video”.

Friday 20 November, McKim, Mead & White building: fireside chat in the Academy salone with journalist Rachel Donadio, Rome Bureau Chief for The New York Times. Donadio discussed current developments in Italian politics and also the Vatican.

Thursday 19 November, Isola Tiberina: AAR group at the installation “Frontier” by American multimedia artist Doug Aitken.

Thursday 19 November, Isola Tiberina: current Fellow Kiel Moe presents to AAR group on the Ponte Fabricio—Rome’s oldest functioning bridge, built 62 BC.

Wednesday 18 November, AAR Lecture Room: AAR Mellon Professor Corey Brennan lectured on “Lily Ross Taylor’s Rome”, on the 40th anniversary of the historian’s death. Above: excerpt from Taylor’s April 1924 posting on news from Italy for Current History magazine. She posted 21 such reports—not noted in any bibliography— in the period 1923-1925.

Wednesday 18 November: contemporaneous with Lily Ross Taylor’s first term as Professor-in-Charge at the Academy (1934-1935) is this clip from December 1934 on the ‘Accademia Americana di Belle Arti a Roma’ (Giornale Luce B0593). Credit: Archivio Storico Istituto Luce.

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James Ackerman at the Villa Lante (Rome), October 2009

It can be confidently stated that the leading historian of Renaissance architecture and Italian Renaissance architectural theory is James Sloss Ackerman (FAAR’52, RAAR’65, ‘70, ‘75, ‘80), Trustee of the American Academy in Rome 1967-1984, and now Trustee Emeritus. As it happens, James Ackerman and his wife, artist and professor Jill Slosburg-Ackerman, are spending five weeks at the AAR this fall. During that time, he has delivered a lecture on “Michelangelo, Palladio and Public Magnificence” to a capacity audience in the Academy lecture room, and has participated in a wide range of less formal walks and talks in Rome. Plus, on 8 November, he celebrated his 90th birthday at the Academy.

James Ackerman was educated at Yale; his graduate work was at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, completing his degrees (MA 1947, PhD 1952) following World War II service in the US Army in Italy. From 1949 through 1952, he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Ackerman taught at Berkeley and from 1960 at Harvard as Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Fine Arts until his retirement in 1990. In an in-depth interview, AAR Arts and Humanities Intern Diana Mellon asks James Ackerman about his formative experiences in Italy, his fellowship years at the AAR, his perceptions of changes at the American Academy over the decades, and of larger developments in the field of architectural history. And following the interview is appended Ackerman’s own current “must see” list for Rome and Venice.

DM: Can you speak about your first encounters with Italy and your time here during the war? Where was architecture in your mind at that time, and how did your interest in it develop?

JSA: Well the first time I was 12 years old, so it was a very different kind of trip on that account. Just looking at things the way 12-year-olds do, without any particular focus or preparation for seeing anything. I remember practically nothing except the view out the hotel window onto the baths of Diocletian.

The next time was about ten years later, when I came to Italy as a soldier. I had prepared for enlistment by studying Russian in an army-supported program at Columbia University—very high pressure, eight hours a day. I was in that program for about three months and making tremendous progress. Then I was called up. So, first of all, when I was actually introduced to the specialty—it was cryptonalysis and cryptography—they weren’t interested in Russian at all, just wanted to know whether I’d rather do German or Japanese and I chose German, because it’s the major language of art history, and lost all the Russian right away.

We went first to England, then to Algeria, and then were transferred to Italy. We were initially in a major collecting point in Caserta, outside of Naples, and then in the course of the fall and winter 1944-45 we were posted in the Apennines because, being engaged in intercepting the communications of the Germans—and Italians of course, their allies—we had to be in heights. So I didn’t have much contact with Italian culture. A little bit with what life on a farm in the Apennines was like, that sort of thing.

In the spring of 1945 the Germans began to retreat. My company was entirely mobile, that is to say, all the operations, all the radio-receiving stuff and the kitchen and everything else was on the backs of two-ton trucks, so when the Germans started to retreat, we just moved forward on wheels and passed the infantry very quickly—and so we were among the first units to move north of Bologna (was where the front had been), and we continued north, crossing the Po river in a couple days. All along the way we were welcomed as liberators, although we barely knew how to carry a gun, much less to shoot it.

In that stretch of time my major achievement was getting permission, along with the fellow with whom I shared a pup tent, to go to the next town when the courier jeep went out to get instructions. So we buzzed along for a short time and arrived at a town that had a kind of a causeway leading across a body of water into its center. It turned out to be Mantua. We were dropped in the main square and the courier went on to some other place. The two of us were left standing in the middle of this vast space and there was nobody around. People gradually hesitantly emerged from the arcades around the edges; they didn’t know who we were. They had been given horrific information about the nature of the enemy, namely that they ate babies and stuff like that. So we turned out to be the liberators of Mantua. Instead of going sightseeing we were put at the edge of a victory column that wound its way through the city.

Then we moved on. From there we went way up to Lake Como and later settled in a town outside of Milan. I volunteered to work with the Monuments and Fine Arts Commission just established there because it was something to do—I was tired of playing cards, waiting to be returned to the States. So for not a very long time I was in Milan and the commission sent me daily to the Certosa of Pavia, a monastery not very far from Milan, where they’d stored archival materials for safety which they wanted to bring back to the city. All the hefting of the volumes was handled by Italians hired to do the moving, and I was only there to supervise. I walked around the monastery every day. I’d had a year of graduate work before I got into the army, so I was already committed to being an art historian, but I didn’t know what field it would be after only a year. But the experience of looking intensely at a building complex like that I found very engaging.

When I came back to the States, they rushed us back very early because they wanted to retrain us for the service in the Pacific with Japanese communications—a typically ridiculous order given that it would have taken us five to six years to learn enough Japanese to do the job. While I was on home-leave a couple of weeks in August of 1945, the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Japanese surrendered shortly after. When I got back to Fort Dix in New Jersey, we were told that they didn’t know what to do with us, and we were demobilized. So I got right back to the fall semester of NYU graduate school and from there on I was a budding historian of architecture. This wasn’t due entire to the Certosa; I’d had a little encouragement jn my first year because I had had a course with Richard Krautheimer, who was a great architectural historian who worked on early Christian churches, in Rome, actually. The course was in Renaissance architecture, so I just merged into this specialty. Four years later I was married, had a child and won a Rome prize. This was the second year after the academy was closed from the beginning of the war until 1947. I came in 1949, so there had been actually only one year of operations before, and it was quite small at that time. There were very few funded fellowships compared to those now secured. Thank you, [AAR President] Adele [Chatfield-Taylor].

So there were maybe four visual artists: Concetta Scaravaglione, Norman Rubington, Mitchell Siporin. I was the only art historian. One couple was here doing art history but I don’t recall that they were regular Fellows, and then perhaps one in music, Alexei Haieff?. The total could have been under 12. The situation was quite different: the director, Laurance Roberts really set the Academy in a completely different direction from pre-war times; it had previously been a white, Protestant men’s club, basically—you can tell from the portraits that are in the [AAR] café. They all look as if they’re about to go out to play polo. It was just a privileged bunch of gentlemen.

Also the Academy had an entirely different orientation than before the war, when the Fellows in the arts were required to collaborate in a single program throughout the year and come up with a sort of a Beaux-Arts project completely worked out with sculpture and building and landscape architecture at the end of the year. Beginning with the postwar period, there were no requirements—the artists were expected to have something to show in the exhibition at the end of the year but that was about it. I was very fortunate because I got a Fulbright during my first year so I had a two-year academy appointment and I took the Fulbright in between the two (the people at the Academy kindly kept me on during the Fulbright year). I even had a second child in Rome. Rome was in disastrous form at this point. You could see it in the Italian realist movies of the postwar period. The poverty and the disorganization and all. (Continues.)

At St. Peter’s, October 2009

DM: How has the Academy’s relationship to the city changed since then?

JSA: It has sufficiently, I would say. At the time when I was a Fellow, there was only one fellow who could even speak Italian and there were no Italians coming here to be part of the group or even to visit. I myself, because I had a family and was full time engaged with that, didn’t make much of a contact with the city and its opportunities. We art historIans, worked at the Biblioteca Hertziana more than we did here (and I was working on the history of the Vatican—subsequently published by the Vatican Press), so that I used the library there as well, sometimes looking out the window to check parts of the building. This brought us into contact with a different community but it wasn’t primarily Italian. That’s always been a problem—this physical isolation from the city and then the cultural division. Also, Italy at that time was a lot more conservative socially, and on occasions when I would invite an Italian colleague to come here, he’d show up without his wife because one didn’t participate socially that way except with old friends. And also, actually, the Italians on the whole, like a lot of Western Europeans, were very much involved with old family and social relations of their childhood, so they had very little impetus to really make interchange with us. I did however form a lifetime bond with a Venetian art historian, Michelangelo Muraro, but that was not common.

DM: When you first came to the Academy, what was the position of the study of architectural history, and how has it changed over the decades?

JSA: Well, architectural history in Italy had been strangled by fascism. There was very little of interest going on in the field. It was quite amazing how little progress they’d made. Fascism also isolated the Italian intellectual and scholar from other cultures so that they didn’t learn languages. At that time more than ever if you couldn’t read German you couldn’t even be a proper art historian, particularly in Rome with the Hertziana, where they had a really highly sophisticated tool for research, and the Germans were outstanding in the field.

When I got launched on Palladio—this was not during my fellowship but during a later time I spent here—there was only one book on the subject. It was by a Neapolitan, Roberto Pane…his approach to architecture was more or less art appreciation and it was based primarily in what you could grasp by looking at things rather than combining that with also investigation into the documentary material and social, economic and political underpinnings. The chronology of Palladio was completely vague, apart from one amateur scholar in Vicenza by the name of Giangiorgio Zorzi, who had started to bring out archival material. But as far as real understanding of what any particular architecture was like, it just didn’t exist, in my field anyway. Baroque was equally uninvestigated. (Continues.)

James Ackerman at St. Peter’s, discussing the facade with current Fellow Richard Wittman (left)

DM: You mentioned that observing buildings is important but so is looking at other kinds of archival material and developing your own ideas. In which of these areas do you think the Academy helped you, a historian at the beginning of his career?

JSA: Well, I would say—and I’m not particularly thinking of the work I was doing but rather of my orientation as a historian—being in a community with artists was very helpful because art historians are very often out of touch with the art of their contemporaries. It was important for me to be able to look at things with artists. I had one association here with Siporin and it was really good because we’d go places and look at things together. His responses were stimulating because they were very different from what we had had in the classroom. They, I think, widened my perspective. That was a good kind of offshoot of the life here.

DM: I’ve heard a lot about a well-loved photograph of you in the oculus of the Pantheon. Can you tell me the story behind it?

JSA: It could be a figment of the imagination! (Professor-in-Charge) Frank Brown…was a famous Yale archeologist and classicist who had been here for many years, during my entire fellowship and years later, and he took us up onto the roof of the Pantheon where we looked down from the oculus into the space. It was a terrifying experience. You know how you get vertigo from heights, right? I kind of inched up on my stomach and just got my eyebrows and eyes over the edge. The only way there could have been a photograph would have been the back of my head as I lay there. I never saw it. [We'll find it—Ed.]

DM: You’ve been at the Academy every decade since you were a fellow in the 1940s up until the 1980s, and then again now. Why have you kept in such close contact with the Academy, and how has your relationship evolved?

JSA: The reason is that [Rome] was the focus of much of my early work and the first thing I did as a Fellow, and combined with my dissertation, was the work on the Vatican palace and the Cortile del Belvedere. The next thing I got into was the architecture of Michelangelo and that has very much of a Roman focus. And then on a subsequent visit to the Academy I had the manuscript of my Palladio book in rough form and spent most of the time here refining the writing, and this was an operation that was by no means common at that time. People wanted to get things out and whatever way the ideas spilled forth, they spilled forth. Because I was working on a project at Penguin Books to produce a series of paperbacks called “The Architect in Society,” I thought it was really important to write something which would have lasting value on account of its writing. While I’m not exactly embarrassed by what I wrote prior to that, this was really a focused effort to produce polished English (with the help of reading Edmund Wilson and George Orwell). And it paid off—the book has lasted without the text having been changed very much. (Continues.)

At the AAR’s Villa Aurelia (October 2009). From left, James Ackerman, Jill Slosburg-Ackerman, AAR Associate Director for External Affairs Bill Franklin, current Resident Stephen Greenblatt, AAR Director Carmela Vircillo Franklin (FAAR’85, RAAR’02)

DM: Where does your field, architectural history, stand now?

JSA: It has been, like other fields in the humanities, greatly impacted by the kind of cultural wars of the ’70s and ’80s. That impact is most felt in architectural theory and understood in the architecture schools, where I felt that theory had gone into a kind of private realm of its own. There was a certain amount of that reflected in the practice of architectural history, but the field has broadened a great deal, and people are working on very different things than they did when I started. You don’t see the same preoccupation with what-happened-when, but much more in interpretive directions. I think this has been a healthy current.

On the other hand, in any field in the humanities there’s always a rather small number of people who have creative ideas, while the rest of the scholars have no ideas at all and just write what Michael Baxandall called chronicles—this happened, that happened, and then that happened. I would say the majority of people who are publishing in architectural history are doing chronicles. In the archival sense, fine, it doesn’t do any harm and it creates a kind of solid foundation of knowledge here and there, but it’s not inspiring or illuminating to read. You pick up the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and it’s very rarely that you want to read something there which impacts the entire field of architectural history and history in general.

I’ve always felt that I’m not committed to just architecture. I believe in the imagination going wherever you get the stimulus. In Italy there was a really important turnaround in the development of the school of architectural history in Venice, started by (Bruno) Zevi and really brought to great heights by (Manfredo) Tafuri, and that’s turned out really splendid people. Not only Italians, but quite a number of Americans have benefited from being there. It works very well to teach architectural history in the architecture schools in Italy.

In the States, it began to develop not very long ago. At Harvard there was always one architectural historian in the architecture school, and then there became a little coterie of architectural historians and people could get a PhD within the architecture school, although the degree can’t be authorized in a professional school but must be in arts and science. But that worked. And my first job, at Berkeley, after leaving here, was half architecture and half history of art; I started the architecture history program when I got there in 1952. I like teaching architecture students along with humanities students because they have a visual training that others don’t and also some of them can do very important work that people in history of art departments can’t do—in terms of technical investigation. I have one student from Harvard who’s done amazing work on proportion in Brunelleschi that has to do with geometrical analysis of the kind that I don’t know any professional art historian would be able to do. (Continues.)

At the Porta San Spirito (Rome) with AAR Fellows, past and present, October 2009. Credit: Diana Mellon

DM: One last question. On this visit to the academy, what strikes you as different in the experience of a Fellow here?

JSA: Well first of all, a lot of us are visitors. That constitutes quite a—…nobody visited in the past. It wasn’t even considered proper. If there were people it was only for a short time. I could see how the present situation, with maybe between a third and a half of the people here are people who are paying guests, that Fellows might feel that there are a lot of outsiders coming in and they might have a negative attitude towards it. But this is a particularly happy year because people are extremely congenial with one another and I’ve seen no signs of resentment against the visitors, who are mostly older and can serve as resources, in a way, for younger fellows at the Academy. And also it’s very different to have Italian artists and scholars attached to the Academy. It gives one stimulus to interaction and to learn the language.

Postscript: James Ackerman’s what-to-see-in Rome (and Venice) list

[Note: the accompanying links below were chosen by the SOF Weblog, solely to provide precise locations and addresses—Ed.]

“TO SEE IN ROME: Get to the following on the bus from the American Academy? Go to the ATAC Roma website, click on the British Flag, then “calculate route”, fill first blank with “Via G. Carini”, and blank below with street or place of destination. You get a map of the bus line(s) and the bus numbers.

“St. Ignazio (the perspective ceiling; the Baroque piazza); the Doria-Pamphili painting gallery nearby off the Corso. Both are near Piazza Venezia. Villa Borghese Museum (reserve on the web or by telephone; tickets have to be picked up a half hour before you can get in). Presently in addition to the great collection, a Caravaggio show partly marred by a stupid effort to compare him to Francis Bacon. Cortona ceiling in the Barberini Palace.

“Castel S. Angelo, in Vatican area. Vatican: the lines can be horrendously long, like 2 hours. Maybe get there there ½-1 hour before opening. Or wait ‘til cold weather. Inside of St. Peter: Michelangelo Pietà, Bernini Tabernacle and papal tomb, and sunburst in the apse.

“Villa Giulia, papal villa with great Etruscan museum. Great Roman museum by RR station (Termini), across from Baths of Diocletian in Palazzo Massimo. Don‘t miss painting top floor. Aside from the painting, I prefer the museum at Palazzo Altemps, beyond the river end of Piazza Navona. It’s a great Ludovisi collection from the 18th century in a Renaissance Palace, much more congenial in its spaces, great works and labels that show how much of them is restoration. Many rooms have sixteenth-century frescoes; be sure to see the “Ludovisi Throne.” Crypta Balbi museum on Via Botteghe Oscure (connecting Largo Argentina with Piazza Venezia). If the Farnese Palace is open, Caracci rooms at rear. Piazza Navona and nearby S. Luigi de’ Francesi chapel of Caravaggio (now closed for restoration). Michelangelo Moses in S. Pietro in Vincoli off Via Nazionale.

“Capitoline Hill—the museum of ancient sculpture and painting galleries in the Palazzo dei Conservatori there. (Currently there is an) exhibition of Michelangelo architecture in Rome. Forum Romanum: maybe it’s enough to survey it from behind the Capitoline hill, though you should go to the Imperial palaces on the Palatine hill for which you use the same ticket as for the Forum.

“Starting at Quirinal Palace in the square with the two giant horse trainers, see current show in the Scuderie museum across from the Palace of the President with great Roman painting. Continue past the side of the palace on Via del Quirinale, look into Baroque churches of Bernini (S. Andrea) and Borromini (S. Carlo), then continue along the same street, now named XX Settembre about 3 blocks to church of Sta. Maria della Vittoria on the first large square to see chapel with Bernini’s Ecstasy of Sta. Teresa.

“The best medieval mosaics: Sta. Prassede, a block west of the piazza before S. Maria Maggiore, especially the small chapel on the side-entrance side where they keep the supposed column on which Christ was flogged. Also apse mosaics: Church of SS Cosma & Damiano alongside Forum; S. Maria Maggiore very early along nave, later in apse. Best Cosmati pavement in striking old Christian church Sta. Maria in Cosmedin, by Bocca della Verità stop of bus 44. Also see Sta. Maria in Trastevere.

“S.Clemente, the church with three levels, near Colosseum. Fortified church, Quattro Coronati, is nearby to the right along street from S. Clemente going away from Colosseum. Ara Pacis on Tiber not far from Piazza del Popolo, in new (inappropriate) enclosure by Richard Meier.

“Baths of Caracalla: pass through the Porta S. Sebastiano onto the Via Appia, go straight at the Y to have a look at the Fosse Ardeatine, the monument built to commemorate where the 320 hostages were shot during WW2 by German soldiers in response to the bombing of 32 SS officers by partisans.

“Outside walls to the east, Church of Sta. Costanza (there’s also a catacomb under the church next door, but not one of the best).

“Out of town: Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa and Medici Gardens (in town). Ostia, best surviving town after Pompeii. Next to the airport, a characteristic Roman town. Accessible by subway; half-a-day. Cerveteri or better Tarquinia, Etruscan tombs with wall paintings. With car, Bagnaia, Villa Gamberaia-Lante, Caprarola Villa.

“TO SEE IN VENICE (2/3 days). Buy ferry passes for as many days as you will be there.

“The Accademia. Exhibition in Palazzo Fortuny, remarkable collection of contemporary art, some past. Exhibit of John Wesley in Prada galleries on Isola S. Giorgio, across canal from San Marco piazza. Take ferry #2, one stop. Scuola di San Rocco: Tintoretto. Frari church opposite: Titian Paintings. Scuola De’ Schiavoni: Carpaccio paintings; see upper floor as well. S. Zaccaria: Bellini altarpiece, Chapel in rear left, a charge to enter.

“If time allows, a boat to Torcello. Allow 40 minutes. Stop in Murano on the way back if you want to buy any glass, cheaper than in Venice.”

James Ackerman and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman at the opening of current Fellow Terry Adkins’ Meteor Stream exhibition (16 October 2009).

From the cover of Richard Barnes’ new book (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009)

The work of New York-based photographer Richard Barnes, FAAR’06, is the subject of three exhibitions and a new monograph.

The University of Michigan Art Museum in Ann Arbor has just opened a Barnes solo show titled (Un)natural History: The Museum Unveiled. And an exhibition titled Past Perfect/Future Tense features all new work and is located at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan where Richard Barnes is the 2009 Sidman Fellow for the Arts. Included in this show is a full scale cast of a primitive whale species hung from the ceiling of the gallery.

A third solo exhibition and installation, Animal Logic, opened on at the Cranbrook Academy Art Museum in association with the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Read the artdaily review here.

Animal Logic is also the name of Barnes’ just-released monograph. The book is published by Princeton Architectural Press and focuses on work done over the past 10 years, including images made during his fellowship at the Academy—such as  starlings performing breathtaking aerial displays above Rome, primarily shot in EUR.

Murmur 1 Nov. 15, 2005. From www.richardbarnes.net

On Tuesday 20 October 2009 the American Academy in Rome celebrated the publication of Symbols of Wealth and Power: Architectural Terracotta Decoration in Etruria and Central Italy, 640-510 B.C. by Nancy A. Winter. It is the latest installment, the 9th, in the Supplements to the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, published by the University of Michigan Press, and the most significant contribution to Etruscan architectural history in the last 70 years.

Nancy Winter presented on her new monumental book—some 728 pages—with Ingrid E.M. Edlund-Berry (FAAR’84) of the University of Texas at Austin as commentator. The audience included many of the leading ancient terracotta experts in the world, gathered in Rome for the conference Deliciae Fictiles IV at the Dutch Academy, as well as members of the AAR community. 

Nancy Winter resides in Rome, and has made a massive and authoritative contribution to the study of roof systems and roof decorations in Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquity. For her scholarly contributions she has received many awards and grants, most recently a NEH Fellowship, and election as a foreign member to the Istituto di Studi Etruschi ed Italici. For many years—almost thirty in all—Winter served as Librarian of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Symbols of Wealth and Power is her fourth authored or edited book, with a fifth soon to follow.

In the AAR Norton-Van Buren Seminar Room, (from left) former AAR Mellon Professor Archer Martin, Nancy Winter, Ingrid Edlund-Berry FAAR’84

After the presentations by Winter and Edlund-Berry, the entire audience visited the new archaeological study collection of the American Academy, where Elizabeth Gray Kogen, AAR Vice President for Development, formally announced its new name: The Norton-Van Buren Seminar Room. Nancy Winter immediately captivated the capacity crowd by explaining some highlights from the AAR’s rich collection of architectural terracottas.

Elizabeth Gray Kogen formally announces the naming of the AAR’s Norton-Van Buren Seminar Room

Brass plate from a previous incarnation of the AAR archaeological study collection

Then on Friday 23 October the Academy hosted the second and final day of a conference organized by the Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia of the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, to celebrate the 75th birthday of Professor Antonio Martina, who held the Chair of Greek Literature at the University until his retirement in 2006.

Noted Greek literature scholar, Professor Antonio Martina

The conference focused on the relationship between local and panhellenic myths in Greek epic, and included speakers from Italy and the United States: Richard Janko (Michigan), Giovanni Cerri (Università Roma Tre), Paola Bernadini (Università di Urbino “Carlo Bo”), Ettore Cingano (Università di Venezia “Ca’ Foscari”), Massimo Giuseppetti (Università Roma Tre), Benjamin Acosta-Hughes (The Ohio State University), and Giulio Massimilla (Università di Napoli).

At the Martina conference, Paola Bernadini (Urbino) and Mario De Nonno (Roma Tre)

Anne Coulson, AAR Senior Programs Associate, served as chief coordinator for both the Nancy A. Winter and Antonio Martina events for the Academy’s Programs Department.

At the Martina conference: coffee break in the AAR Cryptoporticus

Terry Adkins, Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, is the current Jesse Howard, Jr./Jacob H. Lazarus-Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome. On Friday 16 October 2009 his show Meteor Stream: Recital in Four Dominions opened in the Gallery of the American Academy, to a large and responsive audience from the AAR and the Roman public. Read a synopsis and interview with Adkins (in Italian, by Giovanna Sarno) here.

Meteor Stream is the latest incarnation of Terry Adkins’ ongoing cycle of site-inspired recitals on the abolitionist John Brown that began in 1999 at the John Brown House and sheep farm in Akron, Ohio. Commemorating the 150th anniversary of his Harper’s Ferry, Virginia campaign, the opening of Meteor Stream coincided with the inception of Brown’s 16 October 1859 raid on a U.S. armory to his execution by hanging on that December 2nd at Charlestown.

Terry Adkins at the 16 October opening of Meteor Stream

In Meteor Stream Adkins dutifully explores biblical aspects of John Brown as a shepherd, soldier, martyr, and prophet through a muscular communion of sound, text, video, sculpture, drawing, and ritual actions. He has also responded to new research for Meteor Stream that reveals incredibly far-reaching ties, binding the legend of this enigmatic American figure to parallel histories of Rome, the Janiculum Hill and the American Academy in Rome. The 16 October opening featured performances on reed instruments by Adkins, sometimes accompanying readings from various Brown-related texts by current AAR Fellow and poet Peter Campion. Chief coordinator of the show is Lexi Eberspacher of the AAR Programs Department.

Peter Campion and Terry Adkins

Terry Adkins is an artist, musician, and activist who upholds the legacies of transformative figures from the past by reinserting them to their rightful place in the contemporary landscape of world history. His recitals are multimedia events that rely on the collision of imaginative intuition with the potential disclosure of unfolding biography and reclaimed materials.

Adkins has exhibited and performed widely since 1982, and his work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others.

The AAR Gallery will be open to view Meteor Stream from 17 October to 2 December 2009 by appointment. Please call 06/5846459. The Gallery may see further performances by Terry Adkins and Peter Campion before the 2 December closing. Please note that all visitors to the American Academy in Rome are required to show a form of ID at the entrance.

James S. Ackerman FAAR’52, RAAR’65,’70,’75,’80, and Jill Slosburg-Ackerman

AAR Arts Intern Giovanna Sarno and AAR Director Carmela Vircillo Franklin FAAR’85, RAAR’02

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Credit: Annie Schlechter

An audience of more than one hundred packed the American Academy in Rome on Saturday morning 10 October 2009 for the launch of the English translation of Oretta Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta (2009). The book is a carefully researched compendium of historical and geographical information on this staple of the Italian diet, and is the latest installment in the California Studies in Food and Culture series of the University of California Press.

Rachel Donadio in the 14 October 2009 New York Times profiled Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia, terming it “a social history disguised as a food book”.  The New York Times article also highlighted the warm reception Oretta Zanini De Vita has received at the Academy. “’I think of her as a kind of Julia Child,’ said Mona Talbott, the executive chef at the American Academy in Rome and coordinator of its Rome Sustainable Food Project, founded by Alice Waters. ‘Julia Child demystified French food. Oretta demystifies pasta.’” You can read eyewitness accounts of the 10 October AAR event by current Fellow Matthew Bronski here (“Week Five”) and by Fellow Traveler (and food expert) Amy Campion here.
From left: Christopher Boswell, Maureen B. Fant, Oretta Zanini De Vita, Sheila Levine. Credit: Annie Schlechter

At the 10 October book launch, the American Academy welcomed the general public, the AAR’s resident community, and many members of the Friends of the Academy in Italy.

The morning program gave an opportunity for the author, the translator (Rome-based writer and editor Maureen B. Fant), the publisher (Sheila Levine), and a distinguished chef (Christopher Boswell, Sous Chef of the Rome Sustainable Food Project) to talk about the book.

R. William Franklin, Associate Director for External Affairs at the Academy welcomed the guests and then introduced and moderated the panel, which was punctuated by lively discussion from the audience.

Oretta Zanini DeVita in the RSFP/AAR kitchen. Credit: Annie Schlechter

Oretta Zanini De Vita in the program focussed on her methodology in compiling this reference work—one part oral history, one part archival research, one part detective work in finding lost recipe books—and her hope that the volume will be a living link to the great Italian tradition of food that is rapidly disappearing.

And after the launch, there was a lunch to remember. More than a hundred members of the AAR community and Friends of the Academy in Italy gathered in the Academy dining room for a special pasta lunch made up of recipes of Zanini De Vita, including as dessert a memorable chocolate pasta.

Credit: Annie Schlechter

Maureen B. Fant and Sheila Levine. Credit: Annie Schlechter

Oretta Zanini De Vita with the staff of the Rome Sustainable Food Project. Credit: Annie Schlechter

Portrait bust of Lily Ross Taylor in the AAR Library

This 18 November marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Lily Ross Taylor (1886-1969) FAAR’18, who is widely and justifiably regarded as one of the foremost Romanists that North America has produced. During her career at Vassar and (especially) Bryn Mawr, Taylor produced six books—each of unusual importance—some seventy articles and almost sixty reviews.  Taylor also was the first woman to hold a Rome Prize in the united American Academy in Rome, and served as Professor-in-Charge at the AAR during two pivotal eras (1934-1935, and 1951-1955).

In one of her essays that appeared in Memoirs of the American Academy of Rome, Taylor surveyed the vexed problem of the location of the ancient municipality of ancient Trebula Suffenas, before definitively placing its location in the territory of modern Ciciliano, 13 km east of Tivoli in Lazio. Here Taylor also traced the whole story of the town’s Plautii Silvani, a powerful family that formed part of the circle of the emperor Augustus and his wife Livia. This past weekend a cultural association from the town of Ciciliano “Committee Article 9” paid tribute to Lily Ross Taylor and her 1954 article “Trebula Suffenas and the Plautii Silvani” by naming a piazza and adjoining garden in her honor, complete with a memorial stele.

The not-for-profit Cultural Association “Committee Article 9″—founded just two years ago—aims to protect and enhance the historical, artistic and environmental  territory of Ciciliano, on the basis of the principles laid down in Article 9 of the Italian Constitution.

Crowd gathering before the ceremony

The event that the Association organized with the co-sponsorship of the American Academy in Rome and the Comune of Ciciliano was held Saturday 10 October 2009, near the archaeological site of Trebula Suffenas, now part of the Villa Manni. On the podium were a number of regional authorities, including Zaccaria Mari (Soprintendenza ai Beni Archeologici del Lazio), on. Fabio Rampelli (Camera dei Deputati), and Patrizia Vincenti (Assessore alla Cultura del Comune di Ciciliano), as well as Francesco Poggi (President of the Association), Mario Ceccarelli (from the Association), Franco Sciarretta (author of numerous learned publications on Trebula Suffenas) and AAR Mellon Professor Corey Brennan. All in attendance received a rare glimpse of the Villa Manni in a guided tour that followed the morning ceremony.

Franco Sciarretta explains the history of ancient Trebula Suffenas

Association president Francesco Poggi and Corey Brennan unveil the tribute stele

Members of the Corpo Forestale dello Stato at the ceremony

Attendees explore the Villa Manni, which now covers the forum and ancient baths of Trebula Suffenas

Some examples of the extraordinarily rich spolia at the Villa Manni

In describing the scope of her work, it would be hard to outdo a two-sentence summation Lily Ross Taylor herself offered in a 1959 lecture.  “I have spent my life teaching Latin literature and producing studies on Roman religion and Roman politics, some of them of a regrettably technical nature (it’s harder to write a general book than a technical book).  I want to know how the Romans thought and felt, what they learned at school, what they read and talked about in their leisure hours, what their sense of values was, the nature of their legal system and of their government of an empire, what the impact of Greek civilization on theirs was and how they handed down the treasure stores of Greece to future ages, how this polytheistic people, always hospitable to foreign gods, became monotheists, and how Rome became the center of a great religion which inherited the claim of universality that had once belonged to Roman rule.”

Three leading lights at Bryn Mawr in the mid-50s: from left, Berthe Marti FAAR’45, RAAR’51; TRS Broughton RAAR’60, ‘61; Lily Ross Taylor FAAR’18. Credit: Broughton family

On the evening of 18 November 2009 (6.30 PM) the American Academy will present “Lily Ross Taylor’s Rome”, an illustrated presentation by Corey Brennan. Here the aim is to contextualize aspects of Taylor’s life and work by focusing on five of her sustained experiences in Italy: as a young student in 1909 and 1910, a Red Cross worker during the First World War, an Academy Fellow of 1919-1920, and professor in charge at the American Academy in 1934-1935 and then 1951-1955. The event, held at the Academy’s Lecture Room at Via Angelo Masina, 5, is open to the public.

The magnificent Galleria Cortona of the Brazilian Embassy in Rome’s Piazza Navona was the setting Thursday 8 October for a presentation and panel discussion of the recent book of Stephanie Leone FAAR’00, The Palazzo Pamphili in Piazza Navona:  Constructing Identity in Early Modern Rome (Harvey Miller/ Brepols, 2008).

Stephanie Leone, a 2001 Ph.D. in Art History from Rutgers University, is associate professor in the Fine Arts department of Boston College. Aurimar Jacobino de Barros Nunes, Primo Segretario at the Embassy of Brazil in Rome, organized the event in collaboration with Anne Coulson from the Programs Department of the American Academy in Rome.

Stephanie Leone FAAR’00 with Ministro Tarcísio Costa (Brazilian Embassy to Italy)

Leone’s book is in many ways the first full-length treatment of the Piazza’s remarkable transformation from a medieval field to a magnificent Baroque urban space. As Leone shows in her clear and well-written volume, it was the ambitions of a single family, the Pamphilj, that brought about this stunning change.

Pope Innocent X (1644-55) sought to aggrandize his family’s identity through an ambitious building program, including the monumental Palazzo Pamphilj (now housing the Brazilian Embassy), the church of S. Agnese in Agone, the Collegio Innocenziano, and Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers and Fountain of the Moor.

Panelists at the book presentation, from left: Patrizia Cavazzini, Corey Brennan, Tarcísio Costa, Stephanie Leone, Francesca Cappelletti

What is particularly original about Leone’s book is that she argues in favor of a collaborative process of execution of the Palazzo, in two distinct phases (1634-38, 1645-50), involving three architects (Francesco Peperelli, Girolamo Rainaldi, Francesco Borromini), two patrons (Innocent X and his sister-in-law Olimpia Maidalchini), and an architectural revisor (Virgilio Spada).

Leone presents the history of the palace as inextricably linked to the social milieu of the early modern papal court, to the development of Piazza Navona—and to that of the city itself.

Reception following the presentation in the Galleria Cortona

The SOF Weblog had a brief chat with Stephanie Leone at the Palazzo Pamphilj book presentation.

In a few words, what have you been doing since your two years as a pre-doctoral Fellow at the AAR?
“Since I left Rome in 2001, I have been a faculty member of the Fine Arts Department at Boston College where I teach various classes on  Renaissance and Baroque art and architectural history. In 2007 I received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor.”

You were in Rome this past summer, were you not?
“Yes, this past summer I initiated a summer course for BC students in Rome, which I will be teaching every other year.”

What’s next?
“My current research project builds upon my research on the Palazzo Pamphilj. It focuses on the Pamphilj’s art collection and, in particular, the collecting activities of the understudied Benedetto Cardinal Pamphilj [1653-1730], who was a major patron of the visual arts, music, and literature in Rome in the period that fostered the Grand Tour.”

How major a patron was this Pamphilj?
“Well, for instance, he assembled a collection of 1,400 paintings during his lifetime and was George Frideric Handel’s first patron in Rome.”

Studying the Pamphilj as a family sounds like a massive project…
“My research stems from a collaborative project on Pamphilj patronage, which began as the theme of an exhibition for the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College. Although the exhibition project currently is on hold, I’m organizing a conference to be held at Boston College next year, which will allow the project participants and me to disseminate our research. After the conference, we we’ll publish a collection of essays. If you are in the Boston area and interested in attending, please send me your contact information.”

Get ready for a great party: the American Academy in Rome Cabaret, the evening of Wednesday 2 December 2009, in New York City.

Performers include Laurie Anderson, RAAR’06, Derek Bermel, FAAR’02, Molissa Fenley, FAAR’08…and more. The venue is hard to beat: the Angel Orensanz Foundation at 172 Norfolk Street, in New York’s Lower East Side.  It’s an ex-synagogue turned downtown event space.

The AAR Cabaret is a new event, that aims to be annual. It’s curated by Laurie Anderson, and designed by Fellows for Fellows, to benefit the Rome Prize fellowship.

Think of the Cabaret as a reunion of your “class” of Fellows, Residents, Affiliated Fellows, Visiting Artists and Scholars—a celebration of your time in Rome.  Anyone who has spent time at the Academy who can be there December 2nd will want to be there.

The Cabaret will also serve as a vivid introduction to the Academy. So please invite friends and colleagues who one day might be Fellows, Residents and Visitors to join the party.

Tickets are $150 per person prior to the event, $300 at the door.

If you would like to support the fellowship and want to make the event a great success by purchasing tickets or becoming a sponsor, please contact Jennifer Dudley at j.dudley@aarome.org or call her at (212) 751-7200, ext 12.

Mark your calendars and spread the word.

Tod Papageorge. Credit: Deborah Flomenhaft

Tod Papageorge is the Walker Evans Professor of Photography and Director of Graduate Studies in Photography at the Yale School of Art. The Features section of the Academy website has posted eight compelling photographs from his work this summer in Rome (“In the Street, June 15-July 27″). Recently AAR Mellon Professor Corey Brennan caught up with Papageorge to ask him about his six weeks at the Academy this summer as the Photographer in Residence, and about some aspects of his approach to photography in general.

You are well-known as a black-and-white photographer of people in public spaces. For your Rome photographs, you are using a digital camera (a Leica M8.2) for the first time, and shooting in color. How much of a departure are your Rome images from your work to date?

It was all a big change, of course, and coincided with my arrival in Rome: I’d bought the Leica just a couple of weeks before, and spent some harried days up until my flight learning a few things about digital photography, and pinning down and applying a series of technical modifications to the camera. So the experience of making these pictures was as bright-penny new as the city itself seemed to me.

My early years as a struggling photographer made me wary of color: the cost of a few rolls of Kodachrome and the special processing it required discouraged me from using it. Later, when I might have been able to afford it, I’d become a black-and-white photographer, which, for me anyway, alludes to a way of thinking as much as it does to how certain photographs look. Once in Rome, though, I quickly decided that, because I had the camera for it, the best way to photograph the city was to take as much advantage of the remarkable color and light abounding there as I could.

Perhaps the color-lessons I imagined myself learning as I visited and revisited the Caravaggios in central Rome were an actual help. In any event, the greatest surprises I experienced while working with this camera had nothing to do with the putative problems of thinking in color, and everything to do with a new working process. And those surprises were all positive.

What were they? Well, the most obvious were that I could now check my framing and exposure on the fly, as I made pictures, and, even more fundamentally useful, review every photograph I’d made during the day back at the Academy the same night—a feedback loop of a kind I’d never known before. And this is to say nothing of all of the worry that the process eliminated, those depressing varieties of anxiety that I’d always gone through when traveling with film: Will the X-rays ruin it? Is there a refrigerator in this room? When will I get it back to my darkroom and be able to develop it? And be able to make contact sheets of it?

Now, no more of that; none of it.

The Leica that you used is of the “rangefinder” type. Precisely what makes this a real advantage for street photography?

“Rangefinder” refers to a focusing system where the photographer manually adjusts a lens to bring a split image in the viewfinder into alignment. Its advantage is that it’s straightforward and quick to use, particularly with wide-angle lenses. This, along with a window-like viewing system (where the photographer can see things moving into and out of the edges of the visual field), and, in the case of the Leica, an especially quiet shutter and superior lenses, comprise a classic method of making photographs–one that’s particularly effective in the street.

Had you worked in Rome before?

Yes, a couple of times, but not as extensively as I did on this visit, and with not nearly as much success.

How did you organize your day photographing in Rome? How much of a challenge was it working with Rome’s bright midday light?

It was more difficult to organize than it might seem, what with the harsh midday light that you mention and, of course, the heat. I never developed a consistent program for dealing with it, other than tending to visit the Pantheon after I discovered weeks on into my stay that, at that time of day and year, the sun pours its light straight down through the oculus. (Talk about a great lens!)

The majority of my pictures, though, were made after 4:00 pm. The light began to settle down into a kind of generalized glow just about then, and the heat became more bearable.

During the months of June and July the composition of the city changes—Romans start to peel away for vacation, and even the number of tourists start to thin. Did this ebb and flow have an impact your work at all?

Yes. I was happy enough to leave Rome when I did—on July 27—because it was clear to me that the gradual emptying-out of the city had reached a point where there would be exponentially less for me to photograph going on into August. Needless to say, I’d love to come back in a different season to add on to what I’ve done and, I’d hope, complete a body of work that I feel I got a tremendous start on during my time at the Academy.

Even the dozen or so of your Rome photographs that I’ve seen represent a very weighty portfolio. Is there something about the specific spaces you chose in the city that lend themselves so well to the photographic aesthetic?

Romans tend to be dramatic—and unselfconscious about it—and are often picture-handsome. Throw in the color palette of the architecture, and armies of tourists, and layers of archeological/historical/religio-enriched environments, and you have a space fully fit, perhaps uniquely fit, for a daily series of lightning photographic-poetic raids.

That said, I tended, after a couple of weeks, to follow my own footsteps and revisit places where I could fairly count on running across a certain amount of that drama and visual complexity. Even in the small group of pictures shown here you can see that I favored the Trevi fountain, with all of its crush and madness, and also the Largo Carlo Goldoni, a small piazza at the base of the Via Condotti, where the sunlight became astonishing at about six o’clock, and the turnout of shopping Romans provided an attendant, rampant spectacle.

Your Rome street images are full of detail, often with multiple competing centers of interest. Do you allow anything in your images to be irrelevant?

The picture is the picture, so nothing in it is irrelevant—and, therefore, everything in it should bear some greater or lesser responsibility for it being picture-perfect. Not simple-perfect, though; and not predictably perfect (as in, “I’ve seen this before”); but perfect in that all it describes joins in the cohering visual/reading experience a viewer of it should (ideally) have.

You mention “reading” a photograph and, earlier, used the word “poetic” to describe your work. How do you relate these words to photography in general?

I’ve always felt that photography is closer to poetry than to the other visual arts. What other artistic medium owns anything like the mixed relationship that these two have to common, lived reality? A photographer must employ what Zen calls the “ten thousand facts” of the physical world to build his pictures from, just as a poet can only use the ten thousand words of her language (what W. H. Auden called the “glory and the shame” of poetry) to construct her poems. The first operates through denotation, the second through connotation. But the problem for both is to transmute the dross—the contingent stuff of things or words—into the webs of meaning and resonance that are achieved photographs and poems. Neither medium is like music, but both are more like each other than like painting.

It was once written of photographer Garry Winogrand, “There are no adjectives in photographs, only nouns” (Leo Rubinfien). I would love to hear your comment on this.

I may have just answered this, if I understand what Leo Rubinfien was meaning to say, which I guess is that photography is a medium of surfaces, those ten thousand facts—or denotative nouns—again. My cavil with this is that, as I also said, any photograph is everything that’s in it, including the visual weaving that binds it—and all of its “multiple competing centers,” if it’s complex enough to have them—together. And I can easily imagine applying any number of adjectives to describe the beauty or intricacy or rhyming of that weaving in a particular photograph, as I can imagine Garry Winogrand (who, I guess you know, was a very close friend of mine) also applying them.

The photographs in your recent (2007) book, Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park, very powerfully evoke the New York of the 70s and 80s. And the images in your (2008) collection, American Sports, 1970, or How We Spent the War in Vietnam, deeply illuminate a pivotal era. Is it too early to identify any particular attributes of Rome in 2009?

Thank you for your kind words about my books. As for my work in Rome, let me finish the project, and I’ll let you know what I think then.

Tod Papageorge