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Promising Monsters: Collecting History at the Ottocento Villa Torlonia on the Via Nomentana, Rome
Shumate, Michal Lynn
Shumate, Michal Lynn
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Abstract
This thesis investigates the early nineteenth century decorative program of the Villa Torlonia on the Via Nomentana in Rome, in particular the historicist rooms by painter and architect Giovanni Battista Caretti, as carried out during the 1830s under the patronage of Alessandro Torlonia. The neo-medieval Room of the Italian Poets and Artists is taken up as a case study in Rome's gothic revival, while the rooms as a whole are employed to contribute to the understanding of historicism at the time within the Roman decorative context. I propose that Caretti's depiction of gothic space as part of a collection of other historicist rooms is a Roman decorative phenomenon specific to the early nineteenth century, and of which the Villa Torlonia is an early and quintessential example. In order to address the singularity of this decorative approach, I demonstrate how its subsequent reception has been affected by the loss of its sister site, the Palazzo Torlonia in Piazza Venezia, which was demolished in 1902. To this end, considerable time will be spent on formal elements of the Room of the Poets – both those that remain to be viewed today and those that have been lost to time – in order to elaborate on what has been described in the literature as a pastiche. The time and place in which this property was decorated places it both at the intersection and on the margins of a number of far-reaching and overarching scholarly discussions and disciplines. This thesis brings together research from these various fields, from interior decoration to gothic revival to theories of collecting, in addition to the literature on the Villa Torlonia itself. The latter tends to be written through a museological or conservational lens, with the physical condition of the villa alongside historical and biographical details taking center stage; these publications have invaluable documentation, but there previously existed no art historical or visual analysis of the period rooms beyond general conservation and connoisseurship. Because the villa complex is still in the process of being restored and made available to the public, it is not surprising that a conceptual and synchronic account of the site is still outstanding. Part of the contribution of this thesis is to place the Palazzo Torlonia alongside the Villa Torlonia, and to consider the decorative program and space of the Casino Nobile in its entirety as well as within the context of the larger grounds and garden buildings. In thinking of these rooms as a collection of souvenirs, they are by extension a series of discrete compartments in a grand neoclassical cabinet. I argue throughout the paper for a consideration of the Room of the Poets and its counterparts as deliberate gestures rather than as a haphazard eclecticism with which they often find themselves labeled.
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Master of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Spring 2019.
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2019
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Villa Torlonia (Rome, Italy : Via Nomentana)
Citation
Shumate, Michal Lynn. "Promising Monsters: Collecting History at the Ottocento Villa Torlonia on the Via Nomentana, Rome". Master's Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2019.