SESSION: Eighteenth-Century Italian Art and Artists in Global Contexts
Sponsored by the Italian Art Society
This session considers the work of eighteenth-century Italian artists and artists living in Italy, in the context of newly available trans-cultural influences and sources of visual and material culture. As curiosity about the wider world exploded, the eighteenth-century witnessed global movements of materials, techniques and makers to a larger extent than ever before. Tourists and artists travelled to Italy and visited academies, monuments, museums and private collections, while Italian artists travelled outside Italian borders to test new art markets and gain patrons. Characterized by voyages of exploration, new technologies, scientific discoveries, political upheaval and nascent industrialization, the cross-cultural encounters taking place between individuals at that time, along with the mobility of commodities and ideas, prompted artists to experiment with new subject matter and visual languages within and outside of the Italian peninsula.
Moving beyond isolated narratives, this session broadens scholarly perspectives by focusing on Italian encounters—real or imagined—with other populations throughout the world to study how those exchanges were expressed through visual and material cultures, including painting, sculpture, print, design, architecture and decorative arts.
Session Convenors:
Arlene Leis, Independent Scholar
Miriam Al Jamil, Independent Scholar
Speakers:
Hardeep Singh Dhindsa, Birmingham Museums Trust
Nero Asiaticus’: Navigating Anglo-Indian Politics through the Grand Tour of Sir Robert Clive
During a 2022 visit to Palazzo Barberini, Rome, I encountered an overlooked portrait of Sir Robert Clive, the first Governor-General of Bengal, painted by Anton von Maron in Rome in 1766. What was the leading figure of British colonial power doing in Italy, and why did he commission a portrait in the guise of a classical connoisseur? Few sources mention Clive’s Grand Tour, and even fewer acknowledge this painting. Yet the portrait – depicting Clive seated on a leopard skin, directing a (presumably) Indian servant who is polishing his shoes on an exotic rug – offers a striking visualisation of colonial hierarchies refracted through Italian neoclassical aesthetics. As the museum caption identifies, there is ‘a general taste of the exotic…but also a setting totally oriental; von Maron’s composition blends classical restraint with orientalist display, embedding the visual language of empire within the conventions of Grand Tour portraiture.
This paper utilises this portrait to reveal the intertwined networks of imperial and artistic mobility that linked Rome, London, and Bengal. Reading this image against the political and economic backdrop of the East India Company’s expansion, I show how colonial wealth financed and reshaped the culture of the Grand Tour, and how Italian artists engaged with the visual rhetoric of empire. Situating Clive’s portrait within these global circuits of exchange, this study reconsiders eighteenth-century Italy as a site of imperial exchange, where the cultivation of taste was inextricably bound to the circulation of colonial wealth.
Elisa Cazzato, University of Naples Federico II
Ephemeral Itineraries: Theatre Decorators and the Mobility of Artistic Practices in Eighteenth-Century Europe
This paper is a methodological reflection on the study of eighteenth-century scenography as a legitimate and fertile field within art history. In the eighteenth century, stage design was an experimental arena where visual and material cultures intersected, embodying
the dialogue between artistic invention, craftsmanship, and spectacle. Often confined to the margins of art history and theatre studies, stage decorators were key agents in the transnational circulation of visual knowledge, materials, and techniques across Europe.
Drawing on the ongoing research project EPHEMER-ART: Tracing Artists and Practices of Ephemeral Art from Italy to Europe (1700-1880), the paper investigates how ephemeral decoration functioned as a site of artistic exchange between Italian centres and European contexts. It explores how stage decorators moved across borders, circulating ideas, fashions, and technical expertise, adapting their skills and visual languages to new social and artistic environments.
By analysing ephemeral production as both a material and conceptual form of artistic transfer, the paper argues for the inclusion of stage decoration in global art-historical narratives, revealing how cross-cultural encounters shaped the visual language of eighteenth-century spectacle. It also reflects on the methodological challenges of studying an ephemeral art form such as scenography, whose surviving evidence is fragmentary and dispersed. By combining an art-historical reading of documents with archival analysis, the paper seeks to recover the creative agency of these artists and the material conditions of their work. In doing so, it highlights the potential of this approach to expand our understanding of eighteenth-century artistic mobility and exchange.
Agnieszka Anna Ficek, Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Dallas
The Global Lives of Porcelain: Maria Amalia of Saxony and the Circulation of Artistic Knowledge between Naples, Dresden and China
This paper situates Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony’s salottino di porcellana (1757-1759) at Portici within the eighteenth century’s transcultural circuits of artistic exchange and material innovation. Created by the Royal Porcelain Manufactory at Capodimonte, the salottino—a porcelain-lined boudoir overlooking the Bay of Naples—represents one of the period’s most ambitious experiments in soft-paste porcelain. Moving beyond readings of porcelain as fragile ornament, this study argues that the salottino functioned as a site of artistic and political agency through which Maria Amalia articulated a new model of queenship.
By tracing the queen’s engagement with Saxon porcelain traditions, Neapolitan craftsmanship, and global chinoiserie, the paper examines how transnational flows of materials, techniques, and imagery shaped both the physical construction and symbolic language of the salottino. The project’s chinoiserie décor—inflected by Naples’s unique intercultural connection to China through the Collegio dei Cinesi—exemplifies how Italian artists and patrons negotiated global fantasies of the East within local frameworks of royal identity. Integrating archival documentation and feminist art-historical approaches, the paper demonstrates that Maria Amalia was not a passive recipient of Porcelain’s exotic allure but an active producer who transformed a material coded as feminine and delicate into a durable language of power and modernity.
Through the salottino di porcellana, porcelain became an architectural skin that embodied the convergence of gender, technology, and empire. This paper thus repositions the Portici interior as both a product and a critique of global exchange—where fragility and strength, imitation and invention, converge to redefine the boundaries of Italian art in a connected eighteenth-century world.
Maja Jackson, Independent Scholar
Art, Science, and Spectacle: Pietro Longhi’s Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Venice
This paper examines Pietro Longhi’s depictions of so-called “exotic” animals—most notably The Rhinoceros (1751, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice)—in the context of eighteenth-century Venice’s engagement with global networks of material and visual culture.
Foreign species occupy a notable place in Longhi’s oeuvre, frequently shown alongside the Venetian nobles who commissioned these works. Rather than interpreting these paintings simply as depictions of public spectacles, this paper argues that they reflect
patrons’ intellectual interests in natural history, collecting, taxonomy, and physiognomy—concerns that resonated throughout the Enlightenment world.
The Rhinoceros is discussed in relation to the extensive print culture that publicised the animal’s European tour, revealing how both painted and printed representations shaped contemporary ways of seeing and understanding the natural world. The paper situates
Longhi’s animal paintings within wider debates on the relationship between human and non-human species and the revival of physiognomic theories advanced by Charles Le Brun and Johann Caspar Lavater. By blending portraiture, caricature, and genre
painting, Longhi explored questions of resemblance, likeness, and identity at a moment when the boundaries between art and science, and between human and animal, were being renegotiated.
Finally, the paper considers the role such images played in the lives of their owners. Beyond offering amusement or recording intellectual pursuits, Longhi’s paintings fostered reflection on self-representation and social distinction, enabling Venetian patricians to display erudition, curiosity, and participation in a global culture of Enlightenment inquiry.