TEFAF Online

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, private academies – born as an alternative to institutional places of artistic education – were firmly entrenched in Rome’s artistic milieu, but tended to be obscure due to the privacy which marked them out. They included the Accademia de’ Pensieri, founded in 1793 by Felice Giani at his home in Palazzo Corea.

More than an academy in the traditional sense of the term, Giani’s initiative afforded an opportunity for young artists to meet and try their hand at the same theme in free compositions which were then commented on and discussed by all the participants in the challenge.

Among the coterie of talented individuals attending these meetings was Vincenzo Camuccini who was seeking to develop his inventiveness in order to imbue his compositions with greater flair and expressive strength. Evidence of what these exclusively graphic works would have been like are Giani’s The Infant Moses casting the Pharaoh’s Crown to the Ground, and Camuccini’s Hecuba Discovers the Corpse of Polydorus’ Son, characterized by a fervid imagination and a certain amount of formal idiosyncrasies which broke down the studied equilibrium of more orthodox Neoclassicism and opened the way to forays into the territory of “the sublime”.

The fruitful experience of Giani’s academy found a natural carry-over in Bologna with the Accademia della Pace, where the young Pelagio Palagi learned the ropes. In the get-togethers which took place there, there was a careful analysis of the correspondence between figurative invention and the literary text which had inspired it. The subjects were selected from Dante’s Inferno, and above all from the episode of Count Ugolino, on which Palagi meditated in many of his compositions. The unpublished work presented here – of which only a transparency kept in the Palagi collection at the Archiginnasio of Bologna and an 1822 print by Gallo Gallina were hitherto known – is certainly the most complete testimony of the creative process inspired by Dante’s story, to the extent that this year it was the subject of precise reflections during the exhibition Dante. The Vision of Art, held at the San Domenico Museums in Forlì as part of the seventh centenary celebrations of the death of the great poet.