Archetypes and Responsive Smiles: Classical Statues and American Artists in Rome

Abstract

As scholars of cultural intersections know, in the 18 th and 19 th centuries Rome was interpreted and described as "the city of statues." The same physical space that in the 2nd century A.D. was occupied by almost two million people, in the 1850s hosted no more than 180.000 inhabitants (Corridore 564-574; Martinelli; Bartoccini; Vidotto). Soon after their arrival, travelers noticed the sense of void that haunted the vast empty areas, separating the enormous monuments that dwarfed passers-by, intimidating foreigners, and establishing ambiguous dialogues with the natives. As they walked through the streets of the city, visiting museums, churches, and noble palaces, the grand tourists were met by an army of statues, that they interpreted, in turn, as silent witnesses of local history, fascinating icons of eternal beauty, symbols of ancient fables, pale ghosts from the past, or disquieting muses. These obsessive presences concealed in every corner, "freaks in marble," archetypes of truths that only in Rome could be revealed, after a number of days became discreet interlocutors in implicit conversations involving crucial moral themes. Anglo-American tourists were no exception, including Louisa May Alcott, as we discover reading through the Roman pages of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag: Shawl Straps (1873), although the text is deliberately conceived and written in an irreverent, occasionally sarcastic mood. As the three protagonists of the book enter the Eternal City in the infamous winter of the great flood (1870-1871), they expect to find fountains, splendid palaces and, even more, statues. 1 In the spring of 1871, during a garden party near Albano, in the Castelli Romani, the three ladies are delighted by the food, the dances, the charades, but, above all, by "stories and statues"-an expression that I have no hesitation in interpreting as "stories of statues," since, as we shall see, Roman statues regularly had and told stories Archetypes and Responsive Smiles: Classical Statues and American Artists in Rome