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Forschungsbericht
Es läßt sich festhalten, daß die Genueser
Grottenanlagen keineswegs allein privaten
Charakter innehatten, sondern als wichtige
Statussymbole innerhalb der Genueser
Oligarchie sowie für die auswärtige Klientel
der Handels- und Bankkaufleute eingesetzt
wurden. Sie dienten als Schauplatz für Bankette
und Theateraufführungen, der Ostentation von
Reichtum und „Modernität“ (Rubens). In der
Entwicklung besonders effektvoller
Raumgliederungen, ungewöhnlicher Bautypen
– etwa der Kombination von Grotte und
Voliere – , komplexer Wasserspiele und
Automatentheater bestätigt sich die schon von
Lomazzo herausgestellte Rolle Genuas auf
diesem Gebiet. Die Arbeit wird von Prof. Georg Satzinger (Bonn) betreut.
„Europeans of the Future“: The Artistic Community of Bellosguardo and its
Contribution to Modernism.
Cassandra Sciortino, Kress Foundation
During the nineteenth century the city of Florence attracted leading artists and writers
from all over Europe and North America. The inspiration which they drew from the
city, as well as the community of like-minded people they encountered there, affected
their work in a variety of ways; taken together, it testifies to the continued and multifaceted
vitality of Italy as a source of creative stimulation even in modern times. This phenomenon
demands a more comprehensive scholarly treatment than it has yet received; the
dissertation project addresses some of the deeper issues involved by examining the
activities of a particular group of artists, primarily English and German, who lived, or
stayed for extended periods, at Bellosguardo, a hilltop community just outside the city,
from the 1870’s to the years just before the First World War.
The first members of the English group were J.R.S. Stanhope, Evelyn De Morgan, the
ceramicist and novelist William De Morgan, and the historian and aesthetic critic, Violet
Paget, who wrote under the name Vernon Lee. This circle drew other members of the
English artistic and literary world: painters such as Marie Spartali Stillman, Edward
Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, historians such as Bernard Berenson, and writers such as
Walter Pater and Henry James. The English and Americans closely associated with the
German artists and writers who gathered at the home and studio of sculptor, Adolf
von Hildebrand: art theorist, Konrad Fiedler, painters, Hans von Marées, Franz von
Lenbach, and the Swiss born Arnold Böcklin, who lived in nearby Fiesole, among
others. The English, Americans, and Germans were, in turn, only one part of a lively
international network of artists, writers, musicians, connoisseurs, collectors, patrons,
critics, and historians that came to be centred at Bellosguardo.
This community shared the belief that the art and values of the early Italian Renaissance
embodied principles of urgent relevance to creative activity in the modern world. Their
return to the past was thus a critical strategy, a critique of modern art that was linked in
their minds with a comprehensive critique of modern culture. In a range of different
ways, the artists and writers sought to respond to the conditions of modern life and to
the difficult issues - morality, gender, vision, expression, empathy, and the unconscious,
for example - raised by the social changes that accompanied industrialization, urbanization,
and secularization. The radically progressive self-image entertained by these artists is
indicated by their contemporary, Isolde Kurz, a German writer also living in Florence,
54
Grotte, ca. 1560.
Genua, Villa
Pallavicino delle
Peschiere.