Thesis (Ph. D.)--Princeton University, 1910.

Thesis (D.Phil.)--University of Oxford, 2008. / Supervisor: Dr Janet DeLaine. Bibliography: leaves 246-259.

Thesis (doctoral)--Wesfälischen Wilhelmsuniversität zu Münster, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references.

The Sack of Rome of 1527 was the greatest disruption to the history of sixteenth-century Italian art. Sufficient attention has been paid to its ramifications in terms of the diaspora of artists from Rome that disseminated "Mannerism" throughout Europe and monumental papal projects executed in its wake, including Michelangelo's Last Judgment (1534-41), Perino del Vaga's decoration of the Sala Paolina in Castel Sant'Angelo (1545-47), and the propagation of a more disciplined use of classicism in architecture and literature by the papacy of Pope Paul III. Focus on these consequences, of a grand scale, emphasizes the impact of the event for papal history but has obscured to some extent a set of works that was directly and immediately affected by the Sack of Rome: paintings by artists who were dispersed from Rome, produced in cities of exile. These paintings by displaced artists are the subject of my dissertation. Repercussions of the Sack disrupted the practice of painters who were forced to flee the ruined city, including Polidoro da Caravaggio, Perino del Vaga, Giovanni da Udine, Giovanni Antonio Lappoli, Vincenzo Tamagni, Parmigianino, Rosso Fiorentino, and Sebastiano del Piombo. The first post-Sack paintings of three of these artists, executed for private patrons (rather than under papal or imperial direction as in the cases of Giovanni da Udine and Perino), signal the disruption of the Sack through both marked stylistic innovation and iconographic manipulation: Parmigianino's St. Roch with a Donor in Bologna, Rosso's Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross in Sansepolcro, and Sebastiano del Piombo's Nativity of the Virgin in Rome. In these altarpieces, each artist exhibits a distinct change in his creative production and disturbs the iconography of a well-established sacred subject by inserting an aberrant and conspicuous reference to Rome. Together, these examples suggest that, while the artists do not illustrate the event of the Sack itself in their works, they mark their paintings as products of a specifically post-Sack context, in which the identity of the three painters as refugees from Rome was an essential component. This study raises the problem of the roles of historical trauma and of biography in art historical investigation. Chapter One examines contemporary writings about artists and the Sack and explores the extent to which an artist's association with the event was both a deeply personal issue as well as a public aspect of identity. The cases of Polidoro, Lappoli, and Tamagni are presented here as complementary cases to the chapter studies of Parmigianino, Rosso, and Sebastiano. Chapter Two investigates Parmigianino's production of the St. Roch altarpiece in Bologna, where his new monumentality and dramatic effect combine with an incongruous inclusion of antique costume to assert his artistic lineage to and recent departure from Rome. Chapter Three studies Rosso in Sansepolcro and the ways in which his Lamentation signals his distance from Rome - both physical and artistic - through appropriation of local culture and through his inversion of the figure of the Roman soldier. Chapter Four follows Sebastiano back to Rome after exile where he resumed the project for the Nativity that had been interrupted by the Sack. His emulation of the art of his former rival, Raphael, introduces an aberrant classical component that acknowledges at once the nostalgia for pre-Sack Rome inherent in his commission and the transformation, initiated as a result of the Sack, of the legendary site of the Nativity itself, at Loreto.

Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689)--one of the most celebrated, if controversial, converts of all times--settled in the papal city after her abdication in 1654. Her palace--the Palazzo Riario (today Corsini)--became one of Rome's leading cultural institutions: a site where learned, artistic, and elite culture converged. This study examines Christina's practice of collecting, and argues that her ambition was to create a center for learning and the arts in the Palazzo Riario modeled on the ancient Musaeum of Alexandria. While Christina's importance as a patron of art and learning has long been recognized, this dissertation offers the first comprehensive discussion of Christina's practice of collecting, and the architecture and ambience of her Roman palace. Based on both published and unpublished architectural drawings, inventories, household accounts, and contemporary travel descriptions, this dissertation establishes the contents and the display of Christina's collection, and the architectural plan of the Palazzo Riario. This study examines the intersection between objects and their display, issues of etiquette and decorum, and the social use of architecture in seventeenth-century Rome. It aims to contribute to the history of collecting and early museums, and to the broader field of seventeenth-century culture.

“Inscribing Community” examines Greek inscriptions from Rome, between the first and fourth centuries CE, in order to understand the spaces and presentation of multicultural communities within the topography of the city. Literary sources, from Martial to Aelius Aristides, cite Rome’s multiculturalism as a defining feature of the city. These literary sources, however, separate Rome’s diverse population from the city’s built environment. For all the presentation of the city as a culturally diverse capital, did its multicultural population contribute to the topography of the city? Understanding the relationship between the city’s multicultural population and landscape comes as a challenge given the difficulties of tracing identity within material culture and the flawed preservation of Rome’s archaeological record. For this dissertation, I turn to Greek inscriptions – as both social historical texts and archaeological objects – in order to examine the organization and spaces of multicultural communities in Rome. Greek inscriptions, despite the cultural popularity of the language, remained a rarity in the landscape of Rome, accounting for less than 5% of the existing epigraphic record of the city. Within the center of Rome, inscribed Greek represented a cultural practice of the eastern half of the empire, where Greek functioned as the administrative language. When the Greek epigraphic record is mapped onto the topography of Rome, three distinct clusters of inscriptions can be seen in the areas of the Sacra Via, the Baths of Trajan, and the southern Transtiberim region. The contents of the inscriptions within these areas not only demonstrate the existence of communities organized by people from the different parts of eastern Mediterranean but also reveal their physical impression on the city. The three sites mark the only known structures and spaces devoted to multicultural communities in the urban topography of Rome. The Greek inscriptions of these three sites, when examined together, reveal the tension between motivation and perception in imperial Rome. Individuals and communities created inscriptions in Greek as an expression of their identities and native cultures. Yet, the display of inscriptions made the texts perceptible objects within the landscape of Rome, which anyone in the city might interpret in their own way. At each of the sites, imperial power mediated this tension, affecting their presentation and articulation of identity. Whether displayed in the center of the city or its periphery, Greek inscriptions in Rome represent eastern cultural identity that can also serve as a message of imperial dominance.

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Modern religious architecture is studied and understood inadequately, partly because modernity has been considered antithetical to religious practice and belief, and partly because studies of modern religious architecture have typically sidelined its distinctively religious aspects. Furthermore, would-be interpreters have lacked an adequate interpretive framework for the modern and religious identities that together characterize modern religious architecture. Thus, the problem is rooted both in history and theory: the solution requires 1) an interdisciplinary approach to the historical context of modernity that can properly situate such buildings in architectural and religious terms, and 2) a hermeneutic that is sufficiently rich to address the religious content, yet fluid and modest enough to be fruitful even from outside such theology-laden contexts. As identity is largely a matter of mainstream practice, the historical setting for this research is a significant but non-experimental context: post-WWII Rome. This period is marked by both a multifaceted identity crisis with distinctive political, architectural and theological aspects, and the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) that marked a shift in Catholicism’s attitude towards modernity. The chief interpretive concept offering sufficient richness and fluidity to address modern religious architecture is mediation, relevant to both religious identity (especially on beauty and sacrament) and the identity of modern architecture (especially on ornament). The main interlocutors here are Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88), Karsten Harries (1937-), Oleg Grabar (1929-), and Jacques Maritain (1882-1973). The hermeneutic framework is forged and tested through formal and phenomenological analyses of four post-WWII Catholic churches in Rome that are exemplary of four modes of mediation: 1) San Giovanni Bosco (1952-59), by Gaetano Rapisardi: critique; 2) San Gregorio VII (1959-61), by Paniconi and Pediconi: updating; 3) San Policarpo (1960-67), by Giuseppe Nicolosi: retrieval; 4) Sancta Maria Mater Ecclesiae (1965-70), Luigi Moretti’s unbuilt “Chiesa del Concilio”: invention. These analyses also reveal four distinct forms of ornament — material, tectonic, geometric, and spatial — that are discernible largely through a reconsideration of ornament as defined primarily through its mediating function. The conclusion evaluates the fecundity of the hermeneutic and suggests possibilities for further research. / text

In early 1505, at twenty-nine years of age, Michelangelo began work on a massive tomb for Pope Julius II. The formal, temporal, and constructional intertwinings of this project are plumbed to create the foundation of this text. Finding its only full manifestation in the narratives of Vasari and Condivi, this tomb was the site of Michelangelo's first engagement with the making of architecture. The execution of this project would go on to intermittently occupy nearly half of Michelangelo's lifetime, making it a pivotal and paradigmatic work in the understanding of his opera. Explored as an embodied architectural treatise, the tomb reveals Michelangelo's dynamic process of creative making. Problematic issues in the prevailing Twentieth Century analyses and reconstructions of the tomb are called into question and alternative approaches to establish a deeper understanding of the project are proposed. Conjectures on the relevance of history, the hegemony and limits of analysis, the physical manifestation of ideas, what it means to "finish" a project, and what constitutes a "work," are projected from the foundations of the tomb onto the making of architecture today.

This study traces the genesis and development of the History of Constantine tapestries designed by Pietro da Cortona and woven on the looms established by Francesco Barberini shortly after his return from France in December 1625. The circumstances surrounding the creation of the series provide a foundation and a framework for exploring its meaning and purpose. Though inspired by an earlier Constantine suite of tapestries designed by Rubens, the "Cortona" panels should be read as an independent entity, the significance of which can only be fully appreciated within the context of the gran salone of the Palazzo Barberini, which I propose was their intended destination. This conclusion is supported by the many links between the tapestries and Barberini ideology, papal politics, the palace and the ceiling fresco in the Salone. Like the Divine Providence fresco, the "Cortona" series is a summa of the virtues and religious, political, intellectual and social initiatives of the family. The series emerges finally as a promotionally Italian endeavour, a showcase of Italian art and culture.