Stefania Ventra's volume attempts to answer the question that the author addresses as the main focus of her research: was there a dominant academic culture in Rome, from the 1670s onward, based on the canon inspired by the cult of the antique and its modern declination expressed by Carlo Maratti and Giovan Pietro Bellori? By examining the archival material of the Accademia di San Luca in detail—already studied but always in a fragmented way—Ventra overturns an established critical statement by demonstrating how the academic institution, at this crucial moment after the end of Barberini's pontificate, promoted a broad and inclusive figurative culture, the result of the sum of all those artistic tendencies that still made Rome the capital of the arts in Europe.

Nicolaus Pevsner, in his pioneering study Academies of Art (1940), pointed out how the academies promoted education based on a universally accepted style and how, following the foundation of the Académie de France in Rome, in 1666, San Luca become a sort of reflection of the French academic system. In 1976, Carl Goldstein confirmed that the Roman academy had encouraged the creation of “a supra-individual style that all young artists were expected to adopt” (C. Goldstein, “Art History without Names: A Case Study of the Roman Academy,” Art Quarterly 1 [1977–78]: 14). In this sense, according to Zygmunt Waźbiński, it was Giovan Pietro Bellori, with his famous speech “The Idea,” read to the academicians of San Luca in 1664, during the principate of his friend Maratti, who sanctioned the definitive embrace between academic ideology and classicist doctrine, based on the perfection of the ancient example and the painting of Raphael and Annibale Carracci (Z. Waźbiński, “Annibale Carracci e l'Accademia di San Luca: A proposito di un monumento eretto in Pantheon nel 1674,” in Les Carrache et les décors profane [1988]: 587–615).

This interpretative framework, built on the symbiosis between the presence of the Maratti-Bellori duo in the academy and San Luca's unconditional adherence to the classicist credo, has been punctually and convincingly demolished by Ventra's research, which shows how the panorama of trends in the second half of the seventeenth century was highly heterogeneous. A systematic examination of the presences at the academic sessions immediately reveals that Bellori and Maratti were absent from the meetings for long periods of time: the former, scarcely present during the principate of his friend Maratti (1664–65), was secretary of the institution for a few years from 1666 onward and finally left the academy in 1679, while Maratti spent twenty years (1678–99) away from the life of the institution. It is significant that the most active artists at the Accademia di San Luca at this turn of the century were the pupils and collaborators of the two great masters of the Roman Baroque: Pietro da Cortona and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. One just has to think of Giovanni Battista Gaulli, Ciro Ferri, or Giacinto Brandi, or the sculptors Ercole Ferrata, Antonio Raggi, and Paolo Naldini.

They indeed represented the Roman academy, which reacted to the election of Charles le Brun as prince in 1676. Since Le Brun was busy in Paris, he was replaced by Charles Errard, director of the Académie de France in Rome. It was above all Giuseppe Ghezzi, secretary of San Luca from 1674, who consolidated the institution, promoting “a project of cultural affirmation based on the variety with which the Roman Academy, unlike the French one, succeeded in expressing itself and where the lack of an established canon became a strong element of originality” (116–17). It is no coincidence that in 1696, on the occasion of the institute's centenary celebrations—in the exact year that Giovan Pietro Bellori died—two works by Bernini were assigned to young artists in training: Saint Theresa for the third painting class, and Saint Daniel of the Chigi chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo for sculptors. A clear demonstration, as Ventra emphasizes, of the desire to support contemporary Roman artistic production as a new reference model.