Torre dei Schiavi Monument and Metaphor Charles C. Eldredge Thomas Hotcbkiss, Torre di Schiavi (detail), 1865. Oil on canvas 22 3/8 x 34 3/4 in. National Museum of American Art, Smith- sonian Institution, Museum Purchase When Benjamin West landed on Italy's ancient shores, he was fol- lowing the path of generations of Grand Tourists. Italy, especially Rome, was, after all, the center of European civilization and from an- cient times had drawn visitors from near and far. While but a single pil- grim in the long line to Rome, West was at the same time a pioneer for generations of American artists who would follow in his wake, drawn by the city's special history and character. The distinctive nature of central Italian light and topography, which had profoundly affected Claude Lorrain and altered the subsequent course of landscape painting, was scarcely the sole attraction of which the area could boast. The an of the Old Masters was a major lure for the Grand Tourists of the eighteenth century, as were the sculpted artifacts and architectural remains of the ancients. These reminiscences of the classical world were everywhere apparent along the Tiber and inescapably molded perceptions and depictions of the Eternal City. As archaeologists exhumed this storehouse of a storied past, artists delineated the ruins, with exacti- tude or caprice. Giambattista Piranesi's famed views of the antiq- uities of Rome excited the imagina- tions of connoisseurs throughout Europe and even in colonial Amer- ica, to which his engravings easily and readily traveled. Giovanni Pannini's compositions based upon Roman monuments, precisely drawn if fancifully rearranged, simi- larly enjoyed great vogue among the patrons of his day. Given this widespread enthusiasm for things Roman, it was little wonder that Benjamin West, the New World's first artist-ambassador to Europe, was determined "to visit the foun- tainhead of the arts" and in 1760 headed to Rome.1 West, who left Italy for London in 1763, was followed by John Sin- gleton Copley, who arrived in Rome in 1774. The familiar land- marks with which Pannini and col- leagues had preoccupied them- selves reappeared tellingly in the background of Copley's portrait of the American Italophiles Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard, painted in 1775. The couple posed amid their Old World finery before a distant pros- pect of the Colosseum. That such trappings were significant both to artists and sitters of many nationali- ties is suggested by J. H. W. Tischbein's renowned portrait Goethe in the Roman Campagna (1787), with the Tomb of Caecilia Metella and other favorite sites in the background, or Jean Ingres's equally acclaimed portrayal of his colleague Frangois Granet (1807), posed before the Quirinal. After the turn of the nineteenth century, the pioneering travels of West and Copley were repeated by increasing numbers of American artists, for whom Italy became a fa- vorite destination during their Eu- ropean sojourns. Between 1796 15 Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1 Robert Burford, Explanation of the Pan- orama of Rome Ancient & Modern, ca. 1840, Published in Burford, Description of a View of the City of Rome (New York: William Osborn, 1840) and 1815, John Vanderlyn spent all but two years abroad, dividing his time between Paris and Rome. In Rome in 1807 he composed his ac- claimed Marius Amidst the Ruins of Carthage, which reflected the art- ist s mastery of antique history ren- dered in tight, neoclassical style. The American taste for figures and ruins, as well as for Italy in general, reached its high point in the mid nineteenth century, as seen for in- stance in the work of the expatriate William Page. In 1860 he painted a romantic image of his wife before the Colosseum, an edifice that she, the quintessential Italophile, im- pressively dominates. While Vanderlyn and Page and many others worked in Rome, the fascina- tion with the ancient capital extend- ed far beyond the city's bound- aries. In his Paris studio in the early 1840s, the fashionable por- traitist George P. A. Healy painted Euphemia Van Rensselaer—with Roman ruins in the distance. Italomania was by then wide- spread, indeed so much so that Ralph Waldo Emerson worried, "My countrymen a r e . . . infatuated with the rococo toy of Europe. All America seems on the point of em- barking."2 The "dream of Arcadia"— as Thomas Cole entitled a key work of 1838—exercised a potent effect on the imaginations of nineteenth-century Americans and, from about 1825 to 1875, motivated the travels and the productions of many writers and artists. It was James Russell Lowell who perhaps best explained the American fasci- nation. "Italy," he wrote, was classic ground and this not so much by association with great events as with great men [T]o the American Italy gave cheaply what gold cannot buy for him at home, a past at once legendary> and authentic, and in which he has an equal claim with every other for- eigner. In England he is a poor re- lation ... in France his notions are purely English... but Rome is the mother country of every boy who devoured Plutarch Italy gives us antiquity with good roads, cheap living, and above all, a sense of freedom from responsibility... the sense of permanence, un- changeableness and repose.3 The whole of Italy, from Etna to the northern lakes, was rich in his- toric associations. But, for the mid- nineteenth-centurv traveler, as for his predecessors, it was to Rome that attention was particularly di- rected. Viewed from the Pincian or other Roman hilltops, or from the EXPLANATION OF TH£ MNOKAMA OF ROM I ANCIENT* MOUEKN 3 Fall 1987 far reaches of the Campagna, the dome of St. Peters and the city's fabled ruins inspired hushed rev- erence in nearly every visitor. Worthington Whittredges recollec- tions of his first glimpse of the city was typical of most Americans: "To me, born in a log cabin and reared in towns of low flat-roofed houses of pine and hemlock, the picture of Rome at last before my eyes was quite enough to inspire me with feelings of reverence and humility. I could not speak, or did not, and observed that the other passengers [in the carriage] were similarly affected."4 Understandably, artists sought to capture the grand sight, on can- vases, daguerreotypes, or even in monumental panoramas, such as that by the noted English specialist of the genre Robert Burford, which was first exhibited in New York in 1840 and shown again in Philadel- phia two years later—appropriately at the Coliseum (fig. 1). Ameri- cans, of course, were not alone in this fascination. Goethe's "discov- ery" of Rome in the late eighteenth century led to an equivalent migra- tion of German artists, who min- gled in Rome with painters and sculptors from the Scandinavian countries, France, Russia, and En- gland, all drawn by the region's pe- culiar appeal. Painters particularly delighted in the scenic possibilities of decaying monuments (fig. 2). For Thomas Cole, it was the Colosseum, "beauti- ful in its destruction," which, he said, "affected me most." "From the broad arena within," he recalled, it rises around you, arch above arch, broken and desolate, and mantled in many parts with... plants and flowers, exquisite both for their color and fragrance. It looks more like a work of nature than of man, for the regularity of art is lost, in a great measure, in dilapidation, and the luxuriant herbiage, clinging to its ruins as if to "mouth its distress" completes the illusion. Crag rises over crag, green and breezy summits mount into the sky.5 The overgrown arcades attracted as well the admiration of Rembrandt Peale, who, like most of the artists, regretted the program of cleaning up the monuments that was begun in the early nineteenth century. In- spired by recollections of a "beauti- ful wilderness of ruins, vines and shrubbery," he suggested that "some spots [be] left neglected and covered with plants and shrubs, as a sample of its former guise." Peale's advice, however, went un- heeded, leaving later artists, like Elihu Vedder, to lament that "the ruins were wonderfully beautiful before they were 'slicked up.'" "Slicked up" or not, the monu- ments cast their spell over visitors for most of the century. The "ro- mance of ruins" was described as "one of the most innocent and in- structive pleasures in which one may indulge," and thousands succumbed.6 The fascination with decay was more sentimental than morbid. Al- though most American artists did not wind up in Rome's Protestant Cemetery, many visitors would have understood the poetic senti- ment of Shelley (who is interred in Rome): "It could make one in love with death to think of being buried in so sweet a place."7 If Rome inspired sweet thoughts of mortality, the unsettled Cam- pagna outside its ancient walls did not always do likewise. To many early travelers, it was a bleak land of "solitude, dust and tombs."8 The wild and hilly Campagna was the domain of malaria and banditti, a dangerous "desert" whose traverse was required to achieve the art- pilgrim's goal. Hippolyte Taine thought it like "an abandoned cemetery... the sepulchre of 4 Smithsonian Studies in American Art Rome, and of all the nations she destroyed All antiquity, indis- criminately, lies buried here under the monstrous city which devoured them, and which died of its sur- feit." Wrote another visitor in 1820, "Rome . . . stood alone in the wil- derness, as in the world, sur- rounded by a desert of her own creation . . . pestilent with disease and death [L]ike a devouring grave, it annually engulphs [sic] all of human kind that toil upon its surface."9 During the nineteenth century, as highway safety improved and as methods to deal with the threats of malaria developed, travelers pushed farther beyond the limits of the city. The Campagna had to be crossed to reach the pictur- esque towns of Tivoli, Albano, and their neighbors in the Sabine Hills, which drew increasing numbers of travelers. As familiarity grew and se- curity improved, the reactions of travelers to the Campagnas wastes changed. Instead of the "fearsome loneliness" experienced by an ear- lier traveler, William Wetmore Story, one of Rome s greatest propa- gandists, found the Campagna air "filled with a tender sentiment of sadness which makes the beauty of the world about you touching."10 To his many readers Bayard Taylor recommended the view from the Campagna. While "there was noth- ing particularly beautiful or sub- lime in the landscape," he noted, "few other scenes on earth com- bine in one glance such a myriad of mighty associations, or bewilder the mind with such a crowd of con- fused emotions." In time, the re- gion came to seem almost homey. Charles Dickens, visiting in the early 1860s, noted that one Cam- pagna view, "where it was most level, reminded me of an American prairie." Indeed one American tour- ist, familiar with the Midwest, wrote that the Campagnas "wheat- fields, extending far and wide, are like those of Illinois."11 Along with the tourists, painters extended their rambles through the historic landscape, searching for the perfect fragment of broken aqueduct, the artistic effect of sun- set across verdant land, the colorful herdsman tending his flock amid the ruins. Van Wyck Brooks created a memorable word picture of these artists, who, "with Claude on the brain," haunted the Campagna, painting all day until twilight, willing to run the risks of the chill and the night mist, hoping to catch a little of the wonder of the sunset; and then hurrying in to pass the gates before these were closed in the eve- ning, man]elling over the purple clouds behind,the purpler Alban Hills and the mellow golden glow in the sky at the west.12 Ruined aqueducts, the "camels of the Campagna" that had brought precious water to ancient Rome from the distant hills, provided a favorite motif for nineteenth- century painters, as did the pictur- esque ruins along the old Appian Way. Another favored destination, to the east of the city along the Via Praenestina, was the remains of the villa of the Gordian emperors (fig. 3), who reigned from A.D. 237 to 244. The site, which was known as the Torre dei Schiavi, lay about two and one-half miles beyond the Porta Maggiore, crowning a rise in the landscape above the flow of the Acqua Bollicante. It was praised in guidebooks as "one of the most pic- turesque and interesting points in the Campagna."13 The complex was constructed amid and over the remains of ear- lier Antonine cisterns and build- ings. The new imperial country house was remarkable for its size; the ruins stretched along nearly a mile of the roadway. Begun by Gordian pere, a cultivated man of letters, the villa was subsequently 18 Fall 1987 3 Veduta delle Religuie della Villa dei Gordiani. Engraving in Luigi Canina, Gli edifizj antichi dei contorni di Roma, vol 6 (Rome, 1856), plate 106 4 Terme e Ninfeo della Villa dei Gordiani (elevations, sections, and plans). Engrav- ing in Luigi Canina, Gli edifizj antichi dei contorni di Roma, vol 6 (Rome, 1856), plate 107 occupied by Gordian III, who shared his father's passion for books, amassing a library of sixty thousand volumes. But the epicu- rean son also collected in other ar- eas, boasting twenty-two concu- bines, by each of whom he sired three or.four children—perhaps ac- counting for the size of the subur- ban spread. Three main elements composed the villa: sumptuous baths; the "heroon" or mausoleum, a circular building oriented toward the high- way in the best Vitruvian fashion; and a large colonnaded structure incorporating three basilicas. Of these, only ruins remained in the nineteenth century, although the form of the mausoleum was still readily apparent, as was a corner of an octagonal bath. Contemporary descriptions by the Roman chronicler Julius Capitolinus suggest the elaborate scale and decoration of this majes- tic home. The Gordian villa, he wrote, "was remarkable for the magnificence of a portico with four ranges of columns, fifty of which were of Carystian, fifty of Claudian, fifty of Synnadan [or Phrygian], and fifty of Nubian marble." Remnants of these colorful, imported stones were recovered in archaeological excavations which began in earnest in the early nineteenth century. "There were also three basilicas of corresponding size, particularly some thermae, more magnificent than any others in the world, ex- cept those in Rome" (fig. 4).14 The circular mausoleum was likened by a number of nineteenth- century travel writers to the Pan- theon, but its modest scale—fifty- six feet interior diameter—and method of construction are more analogous to the Temple of Romu- lus on the Appian Way. The brick- work of the Gordian villa and the engineering of the vaults were char- acteristically late Roman; the pio- neering archaeologist Antonio Nibby even claimed that the Gordian mausoleum was "the most ancient of this type of construction" and served as the model for the more familiar landmark near the Circus of Romulus on the Via Ap- pia. Four large round windows, of which two remain intact, permitted light into the upper story; there, a series of niches, alternating square 19 Smithsonian Studies in American Art and round, presumably contained sculpture. Augustus Hare noted that the splendid statue of Livia in the Torlonia Museum was found at the site and that works of that type originally embellished the entire complex.15 A subterranean room similarly contained straight and arched niches and was supported at its center by a large round pillar. Adjacent to the circular structure were the vast basilican building and the baths, of which little remains. Long after the dissipated Gordian III was murdered by his troops, his Campagna homesite was put to very different purposes. Remains of frescoes, which in the nineteenth century were still evi- dent in the mausoleums vault, sug- gest that the structure served as a medieval church. A frieze of saints and other Christian subjects was painted beneath the oculi in what was probably the church o f San An- drea, razed in A.D. 984.16 The ruins served military as well as religious purposes. The octagonal room re- maining from the ornate baths was transformed into a watchtower in the late Roman Empire by building walls over the apselike vault, strengthening it at the center with a thick Saracenic column, and top- ping it with a newly constructed tower. To Karl Baedeker, writing in 1867, this curious pastiche "im- parled] a grotesque aspect to the place"—and doubtless enhanced its allure.17 Eventually the Gordian villa site came to be known as the Torre dei Schiavi, a designation originally oc- casioned by the curious, broken watchtower but later applied to the distinctive mausoleum and ulti- mately to the entire region. The ori- gins of the name are uncertain. In the nineteenth century it was often referred to by English-speaking visi- tors as the "Tower of Slaves," al- though at least one travel guide specifically cautioned against such a literal translation with its allusion to Roman slavery. Instead, Bruno Schrader traced the name to the wealthy Schiavi family of the fif- teenth century, one of whose mem- bers, Vincenzo dello Schiavo, was prominent in Rome as late as 1562.18 The ruins along the Via Praenestina lay largely ignored for centuries following the construc- tion o f the watchtower and the raz- ing of San Andrea. Few travelers and fewer artists were drawn to the site until, in the seventeenth cen- tury, Piranesi turned to the ruins for inspiration. Among his cele- brated views of the Roman antiqui- ties are several plates featuring the ruined villa and its environs (fig. 5).19 He drew the stucco orna- ments of foliation and animals in the octagonal bath, which he mis- took for a tomb, and in his engrav- ings of the mausoleum he made the common misidentification of the site as a temple. In the following century, tour- ism outside the walls of Rome re- mained scarce. Francois Joullain was among the apparent few who made the pilgrimage to the Torre, perhaps attracted to it by Piranesi's prints, which remained popular among R o m e s visitors and cogno- scenti. Joullains small panel is char- acteristic of the views of Roman monuments popular with collec- tors of the period (fig. 6). He has anticipated the later "slickening up" o f the ruins by transforming the broken and irregular form of the mausoleum into a tidy sheep- fold. The rustic, mangerlike setting, the multiple lamb references, the gesturing, Magus-like figure at the left, and the mother and child with father, combine in an unexpected suggestion of a Nativity on the Campagna. The villa of a degener- ate emperor would surely be an un- likely setting for such an extraordi- nary event—if that indeed was what the artist intended—and 20 Fall 1987 Veduta degli Avanzi di Fabbrica magnifica sepolcrale... vicina a Torre de1 Schiavi... Published in Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le antichita romane (Rome: Stamperia di Angelo Rotilj\ 1756), plate 60 FranqoisJoullain, Torre dei Schiavi, n.d. Oil on wood, 9 7/16 x 12 3/4 in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bruns- wick, Maine, Bequest of The Hon. James Bowdoin III Joullain s rare choice of the Torre setting suggests that in his time there was little understanding of the site's historical importance. That appreciation did not come until the early years of the nine- teenth century, when the ruins at- tracted the attention of archaeolo- gists. The recovery of precious decorative materials and of such treasures as the Torlonia Livia lent new interest to the Torre dei Schiavi, and excavations were con- ducted nearly continuously from the 1830s to the 1870s. The site simultaneously attracted attention for a very different reason—it was there that Rome's large community of German artists assembled for their annual Walpurgisnacht festivals, events which grew in popularity through the middle decades of the century (fig. 7). The German revels quickly became a popular attraction for Ro- man visitors of many nationalities, 21 Smithsonian Studies in American Art 7 Ippolito Caffi, The Artists' Party7 near Tor de' Schiavi, 1839. Oil on canvas, 32 1/4 x 58 11/16 in. Museo di Roma whose carriages followed the art- ists' procession across the Cam- pagna to the Torre dei Schiavi. Many of the era's travel accounts took note of the colorful event. "I do not think a foreign colony ever or- ganized abroad a national festival with spirit and originality to com- pare with this," wrote Francis Wey; "the enormity of the farce in it rep- resents the old German gaiety, while the picturesque display of the spec- tacle could only have been imag- ined by artists."20 The artists' fol- lies inevitably attracted other paint- ers from Rome's international com- munity, such as Henri Regnault, who made illustrations of the Wal- purgisnacht festivities, and Walter Crane, who later recounted one such May Day spectacle: The central feature of the one I re- member was a gorgeous domed Moorish divan on wheels, with an Emperor of Morocco and his harem sitting inside; behind and be- fore went a great company of art- ists of all nationalities in all sorts of costumes—some as seventeenth- century Spanish cavaliers on horse- back, some as burlesque field mar- shals with enormous cocked hats, jackboots, and sabres riding on donkeys. The caterer of the picnic (a well-known artists colorman) was attired as a sort of white liz- ard, with a tall conical hat, and a long robe on which were painted lobsters, salads and other sugges- tions of luncheon.21 The crowd of artists and follow- ers assembled at the Torre dei Schiavi and from there proceeded across the Campagna for several miles to the grotto of Cervara (fig. 8). "At the moment of departure," wrote Wey, on a car festooned with garlands and drawn by four great oxen whose ample horns have been gilded, appears the President in the midst of his court of chamberlains, of madmen, and poets; he passes his countrymen in review, makes them a solemn and grotesque dis- course, and distributes to the wor- thiest the knightly order of the Baiocco; then the procession pro- ceeds on its way, escorted by its fourgon of wines, its cooking bat- tery, and its cup bearers, towards the grottos, chosen for a monster festival on account of their fresh- ness and their darkness, which is favorable to the effects of illumination. Upon arriving at the caves of Cervara, the artists entered: "At the bottom of the grotto a high priest calls up the Sibyl who, appearing in the midst of Bengal fires, recites 22 Fall 1987 8 Henri Regnault, German Masquerading; The March Past. Wood engraving, in Fran- cis Wey, Rome (New York: D. Appleton, 1875) in comic verses the exploits of the school, and prophesies the desti- nies of its artists for the following year. A Homeric supper prepared and served by our friends on stone tables in the heart of the cavern, which is lighted by torches and fes- tooned by garlands, precedes the return."22 The annual outing, how- ever frivolous, was also decorous, and George Hillard was able to re- assure his American readers that al- though "the day is spent in the wildest and most exuberant frolic, [it] rarely or never, however, degen- erate^] into vulgar license or coarse excess, but preserves] the flavor of wit and the spice of genu- ine enthusiasm."23 The May Day rites at the Torre dei Schiavi provided an important occasion for artists of various na- tionalities to celebrate together on common ground. Equally impor- tant, the festivities introduced many in the Roman community for the first time to the Gordian ruins and their beautiful views across the Campagna. It was, after all, the scenic splendor of this rise in the countryside that had lured the em- perors in the first place, and that beauty remained undiminished af- ter fifteen hundred years. Hillard recommended the site to his read- ers, for though these ruins are not much in themselves, they are so happily placed that they form a favorite sub- ject for artists. [T]he chief charm of the spot consists in the unrivalled beauty of the distant view which it commands; revealing, as it does, all the characteristic features of the Campagna. On the extreme left, towers the solitary bulk of Soracte, a hermit mountain which seems to have wandered away from its kin- dred heights, and to live in remote and unsocial seclusion. On the right dividing it from the Sabine chain is the narrow lateral valley of the Tiber; and further on the ho- rizon is walled up by the imposing range of the Sabine Hills, whose peaks, bold, pointed and irregular, have the true grandeur, and claim affinity with the great central chain of the Appenines.24 With the rise of the landscapist's art in the United States, such natu- ral splendors predictably attracted increasing numbers of American painters to the Torre dei Schiavi from the 1840s onward. Almost un- failingly these artists included in their views not only the distant ^y-viouii^ 10 Smithsonian Studies in American Art 24 Fall 1987 11 Edward Lear, The Tor di Schiavi on the Via Labicana, 1842. Oil on canvas, 9 1/4 X 17 1/2 in. Present whereabouts unknown 9 (opposite) Attributed to John Gadsby Chap- man, Excavations in the Campagna, 1837. Oil on canvas, 30 5/8 x 55 5/8 in. Paul Moro, Inc., New York 10 (opposite) Thomas Cole, Torre dei Schiavi, Campagna di Roma, 1842. Oil on wood, 14 3/4 x 24 in. Private Collection Campagna prospect but also the ru- ined circular mausoleum, a power- fully evocative object within the Campagnas expanse. The excavations at the Torre fig- ured in several views of the site. In an expansive canvas attributed to John Gadsby Chapman, workers busily retrieve fragments of statu- ary, urns, and even a human skull from the columbaria (fig. 9). Such recoveries from "the glory that was Rome" inevitably fired the imagina- tions of visitors from the New World and made a special magnet of the Torre and the entire Campagna. Chapman, a longtime resident of Rome, was so taken with the archaeological activity at the Torre dei Schiavi that he visited the site frequently and his enthusi- asm inspired his son, John Linton Chapman, to paint the ruin as well. In 1842 Thomas Cole discov- ered the Torre. His depiction of it (fig. 10) shows a less busy, more contemplative scene than Chapmans. Cole's view of the mau- soleum from its unfractured "back" side is unusual, presenting a less ruinous structure. The fabled golden sun of central Italy rises be- hind the tower and over the Sabine Hills, accentuating the unbroken oculus and suffusing the landscape with its glow. In both point of view and mood, Cole differs strikingly from the Chapmans and from Edward Lear, who also painted the Torre in the same year (fig. 11). The urbane Englishman depicted the more familiar broken facade, past which peasants amble toward the city in the distance, suggesting the monument's placement in com- munity and in a historical contin- uum, linking the ancient past to the colorful present. Despite the crowds of peasants, archaeologists, and painters that often attended the site, Cole populates his view with but a lone goatherd, seem- ingly lost in timeless contemplation of the romantic scene. Cole's lonely herdsman became a favorite motif for a number of Torre painters at mid century. He reappeared in 1849 in two draw- ings by Jasper Francis Cropsey (fig. 12), perhaps studies for an unlo- 25 Smithsonian Studies in American Art 12 Jasper Francis Cropsey, Torre dei Schiavi: The Roman Campagna, 1849. Pencil, broum wash and Chinese white on brown paper, 41/8x5 11/16 in. The Metropoli- tan Museum of Art, Charles and Anita Blatt Fund 13 (opposite) Sanford Robinson Gifford, Torre di Schiavi, Campagna di Roma, ca. 1864. Oil on canvas, 8 1/2 x 15 3/4 in. Henry Melville Fuller 14 (opposite) George Yewell, Torre dei Schiavi, 1860s. Oil on board, 51/2x8 3/4 in. University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, Gift of Oscar Coast cated painting of the scene that the artist exhibited in Buffalo in 1861,25 as well as in views by San- ford Gifford (fig. 13), Thomas Hotchkiss, George Yewell (fig. 14 ), and David Maitland Armstrong. The herdsman's thatched hut is neigh- bor to the monument in John Rollin Tiltons version of the Torre (fig. 15). During the middle de- cades of the century, many other Americans painted at the ruins, among them John F. Kensett, Christopher Cranch, William S. Haseltine, Elihu Vedder, Eugene Benson, Conrad Wise Chapman, and Thomas Hicks. The frequent appearance of these views at mid century indi- cates the monument s sudden popularity among American artists and their audiences—surprising in light of its relative neglect over most of the preceding millennium. One reviewer, for instance, singled out Tiltons painting of the ruins for special praise: "Among the smaller pictures in o i l . . . we are inclined to value most the Torre dei Schiavi, on the Campagna, which is distinctly drawn, and has infused into it an impressive sense of solemnity and lonely memo- ries."26 The Torre painters often admired each others efforts. For in- stance, his friends particularly val- ued Vedders small landscape com- positions for their "realism taken directly from nature and studied profoundly, [such a s ] . . . the Roman Campagna with Tor de Schiavi [s/c]." And Vedder reciprocated the praise, inscribing his painting of the scene (fig. 16) with the leg- 26 Fall 1987 15 John Rollin Tilton, Torre di Schiavi, n.d. Oil on canvas, 11 x 23 in. Present where- abouts unknown 16 Elihu Vedder, Ruins, Torre di Schiavi, ca. 1868. Oil on panel, 15 1/2 x 5 1/4 in. Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, N. K, Gift of Robert Palmiter end: "A good subject—Hotchkiss used to go out there frequently... [and] made some good things at the Torre dei Schiavi."2"7 That a number of painters repeated the scene of "solemnity and lonely memories11 implies a special mean- ing for the subject, as well as a ready market for the Torre views. Hotchkiss's two canvases, painted in 1864 and 1865 (fig. 17), are among the most ambitious and accomplished of the group. In each he opted for a horizontal format, well suited to the expansive sweep of the Campagna landscape and used by nearly all the artists. (The broad vista compelled Haseltine, unique among his colleagues, to paint the view from, rather than of, the mausoleum, looking westward toward Rome and St. Peter s distant dome [fig. 18].) Hotchkiss s fre- quent visits and familiarity with the site yielded the most faithful re- cordings of archaeological detail. He carefully drew the interior niches, the curious notched bands on the buildings exterior, the frag- ments of ornately carved archi- traves and capitals, and the boy- and-dolphin motif of the mosaic pavement, which was also de- scribed by Nibby. (His eye for his- torical detail brought Hotchkiss financial as well as aesthetic re- wards, for as Vedder recorded, " 'twas here he found a niche in this Columbarium which had not been discovered a beautiful glass vase and sold it for a good sum of money which came in well in those days."28) A human skull and bones near the columbaria at the lower left serve as the works me- mento mori; in the second canvas this mood is completed by a herds- man, lost in reverie on this scene of ruined Roman glory. Vedder's view of the ruins (see fig. 16) differed markedly from all others. In lieu of the usual horizon- tal format, Vedder's small oil is em- phatically tall and narrow. Like other Campagna sketches he painted during the 1860s, his view employs the eccentric format of the Macchiaioli artists with whom he was in close association. The painting, which Vedder left unfin- ished, is more spontaneous, more sketchlike, than most of the Ameri- can productions. The elongated canvas eliminates most of the roll- ing landscape and distant hills and focuses closely upon the verdant ground and the broken mauso- leum, whose brickwork is warmed by the suns slanting rays. The circu- lar building occupies exclusive at- tention in the upper half of the composition and is set off below by a corner of newly excavated columbarium and broken pottery. These two focal points—the frac- tured building echoed in the pot shards—are visually and psycho- logically locked in perfect balance. Absent the herdsman in reverie, without the distant Campagna pros- pects bathed in warm Italian light, even lacking the archaeological de- tail that gave resonance to other in- terpretations, Vedder's small Torre view nevertheless provides one of the most telling and poignant evo- cations of past Roman glory. So popular was the Torre dei Schiavi that figure painters as well as landscapists turned to the monu- ment. In 1867-68 Conrad Wise Chapman painted a suite of The Four Seasons, a traditional allegori- cal subject that the American treated in the colorful costume of Italian peasants much favored by foreign artists in Italy. These models, bedecked in their regional finery, were the subject of many fig- ure studies, their ubiquity suggest- ing that for foreigners the peasant had come to symbolize the historic land. In Chapman's depiction of the harvest season, a gleaner in tra- ditional peasant dress of the cen- tral region stands before the Torre dei Schiavi (fig. 19). The symbolic authority of the peasant figure is 28 Fall 1987 17 Thomas Hotchkiss, Torre di Schiavi, 1865. Oil on cant os, 22 3 8 x 34 3/4 in. Na- tional Museum of American Art, Smithso- nian Institution, Museum Purchase augmented by its pairing with the Torre, which had become an equally potent symbol of Italy for Chapman and his compatriots. In the same year, Thomas Hicks composed his Italian Mother and Child (fig. 20). The association of allusive figures with Roman ruins had by then become a common- place in many artists' works. Daniel Huntington's Italy (fig. 21), for in- stance, posed the symbol of nation- hood between a Tuscan bell tower, which evoked the Catholic piety of modern Italians, and ancient ruins which harkened back to the glory that was Rome. Beyond the parapet in Hicks's painting, the remains of the Torre dei Schiavi are clearly evident—suggesting that the woman is no ordinary Italian mother but, indeed, Mother Italy. More than their scenic character is required to explain the phe- nomenal popularity of these par- ticular ruins at mid century. If the Torre dei Schiavi could appropri- ately accompany Mater Italia, if it could embody the fabled grandeur of legendary Rome, might it not have played other roles and prompted other reveries as well? Despite Bruno Schrader's warn- ing that the Torre dei Schiavi desig- nation had nothing to do with slav- ery, most commentators persisted in the notion that the monument was somehow—in a way never clearly specified—linked with such Roman practices and to slave insur- rections during the late Empire. The discovery of several colum- baria adjacent to the Torre, purport- edly containing inscriptions of "liberti," further fueled that roman- tic association.29 Such associations would, of course, have been highly topical in the mid nineteenth century when American artists' pilgrimages to Rome and the Campagna were at their peak. This tourism coincided with the cresting of abolitionist sen- timent in the United States and Brit- 29 Smithsonian Studies in American Art 18 William Stanley Haseltine, Torre degli Schiavi, Campagna Romana, 1856. Oil on canvas, 13 3/4 x 19 1/2 in. North Caro- lina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Gift of Helen Haseltine in memory ofW. R. Valentiner <19 20 Conrad Wise Chapman, The Four Seasons (Harvest), 1867-68. Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 1/4 in. Present whereabouts unknown Thomas Hicks, Italian Mother and Child, 1868. Oil on canvas, 363/4 x 29 1/2 in. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Gift of John W. Bailey 21 (opposite) Daniel Huntington, Italy, 1843. Oil on canvas, 38 5/8 x 29 1/8 in. Na- tional Museum of American Art, Smithson- ian Institution. Museum Purchase ain and with America's seemingly inevitable slide toward civil war. It seems scarcely accidental that the "Tower of Slaves" enjoyed such fa- vor among American painters and that depictions of the once obscure ruin became most frequent in the troubled decade of the 1860s. Although Americans in Italy were safely removed from the ca- lamities of the Civil War at home, they were scarcely unaware or unaf- fected by the tragic events, and many of the artists believed strongly in the Union cause. Their liberal sympathies had extended to European struggles as well— including the Greeks' war of inde- pendence, the revolutionaries of 1848, and those involved in the movement for Italian unification. In that matrix of political and social issues, the huge popularity of an image such as Hiram Powers s Greek Slave becomes understand- able, adding another dimension to its aesthetic appeal. In 1848 in Flor- ence, where the expatriate Powers had carved his slave, he conceived the allegorical figure of America (fig. 22), a heroic symbol of Liberty and a prototype for Bartholdfs fa- mous statue in New York Harbor. Journalists on occasion resorted to ancient precedent to describe the bloody struggle between the Union forces and the Confederacy. In 1861, for instance, the American Fall 1987 Smithsonian Studies in American Art 22 Hiram Powers, America, 1848-50. Plaster, 89 3/16 x 35 3/16 x 16 7/8 in. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian In- stitution, Museum purchase in memory of Ralph Cross Johnson "CAESAR IMPERATOR!" THE AMERICAN GLADIATORS. 23 "Caesar Imperator!" or, The American Glad- iators, 1861. Engraving in Punch, or the London Charivari, 18 May 1861, p. 203 war was depicted by Punch car- toonists in Roman terms, as "Caesar Imperator f or, The Ameri- can Gladiators (fig. 23), reflecting the conjunction of two of the peri- od's major preoccupations, previ- ously distinct—Italomania and na- tional preservation. Given this predilection for alle- gory and historicism in Europe and America, the sudden popularity of the "Tower of Slaves" owes as much to metaphor as to monu- ment. American painters and pa- trons, untroubled by the lack of cor- roborating facts, readily tied the Torre dei Schiavi to legendary slave battles of an earlier empire. For them the monument on the Campagna became an architectural surrogate for Liberty, symbolic of their optimistic faith in the Ameri- can cause. Notes 1 John Gait, The Life, Studies, and Works of Benjamin West (London: Cadell and Davies, 1820), p. 84. 2 Quoted in Otto Wittmann, "The Italian Experience (American Artists in Italy 1830-1875 )," American Quarterly, Spring 1952, p. 5. 3 Quoted in Otto Wittmann, "The Attrac- tion of Italy for American Painters," An- tiques 85, no. 5 (May 1964): 553. 4 Worthington Whittredge, "Autobiogra- phy," Brooklyn Museum Journal, 1942, p. 350. 5 Quoted in Wittmann, "The Italian Expe- rience," p. 12. 6 Peale, Notes on Italy (Philadelphia: 1831), p. 105; Vedder quoted in Marga- ret R. Scherer, Mangels of Ancient Rome (New York: Phaidon, 1955), fig. 154; "ro- mance of ruins" quotation from Etienne- Jean Delecluze, Two Lovers in Rome, Being Extracts from the Journal and Letters of Etienne-Jean Delecluze, ed. Louis Desternes and trans. Gerard Hopkins (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), p. 92. 7 Quoted in Wendy M. Watson, Images of Italy: Photography in the Nineteenth Century (South Hadlev, Mass.: Mount Holvoke College Museum of An, 1980), p. 48. 8 Abbe Dupaty, Travels through Italy... in the Year 1785 (London, 1788), p. 153. 9 Taine, Italy: Florence and Venice, trans. J. Durand (New York: Ley, Oldt & Holt, 1869), pp. 1 - 2 ; 1820 quote in Charlotte A. Eaton, Rome in the Nineteenth Cen- tury, vol. 1 (1820; reprint London: Henry G. Bohn, I860), p. 13. 10 "Fearsome loneliness" in ibid., p. 64; Story, Roha di Roma (London: Chap- man & Hall, 1875), p. 3 1 1 . 1 1 Taylor, Views Afoot (New York: Putnam, 1859), p. 405; Dickens, Pictures from Italy, and American Notes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1862), p. 143; quota- tion by American tourist in Henry P. Leland, Americans in Rome (New York: Charles T. Evans, 1863), p. 198. 1 2 Brooks, The Dream of Arcadia-. Ameri- can Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760- 1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), p. 90. 1 3 George Stillman Hillard, Six Months in Italy ( Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1856), p. 315. 14 Quoted in Robert Burn, Rome and the Campagna: An Historical and Topo- graphical Description (Cambridge and London: 1871), p. 418. 1 5 N ibby, Analisi Storico—Topografico— Antiquaria della Carta deDintorno di Roma, vol. 3 (Rome, 1857), p. 7 1 1 ; Hare, Walks in Rome (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1923), p. 427. 16 The identification of San Andrea was first proposed by Nibby, p. 712. See also Bruno Schrader, Die Romische Campagna (Leipzig: E. A. Seeman, 1910), p. 62. 1 7 Baedeker, Italy: Handbook for Travel- lers. Part 2: Central Italy and Rome (London: Williams & Norgate, 1867), p. 3 1 2 . 18 Schrader, p. 62. 32 Fall 1987 19 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le antichita romane (Rome: Stamperia di Angelo Rotilja, 1756), e.g., vol. 2, plates 29, 59, 60. 20 Wey, Rome (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1875), p. 269. 21 Crane, An Artist's Reminiscences (New York: Macmillan, 1907), p. 137. 22 Wey, p. 269. 23 Hillard, p. 316. 24 Ibid., p. 315. 25 The Cropsey painting and a number of other works referred to here are in- cluded in the National Museum of American Art's Index to American Art Exhibition Catalogues from the Begin- ning through the 1876 Centennial Year, compiled by the Smithsonian In- stitution's National Museum of Ameri- can Art (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986). 26 "Mr. Tilton's Pictures," Atlantic Monthly 47, no. 280 (February 1881): 291. 27 Quotation on realism from American Academy of Arts and Letters, Exhibition of the Works of Elihu Vedder (New York, 1937), p. 20; Vedder quoted in Gwendolyn Owens and John Peters- Campbell, Golden Day, Silver Night: Per- ceptions of Nature in American Art, 1850-1910 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of An, 1983), p. 102. 28 Ibid. 29 For Schrader's warning, see n. 16; late editions of Murray's Handbook refer to such a discovery in the spring of 1874; others were possibly found earlier. Nei- ther the accuracy nor the significance of the inscriptions can be determined. See A Handbook of Rome and the Campagna (London: John Murray, 1899), p. 398. 20 Smithsonian Studies in American Art