Nicole Dacos’s most recent contribution to the study of artistic exchange in the Renaissance examines how artists throughout Europe responded to Rome’s gravitational pull. In five chapters and two case studies arranged in chronological order, Dacos compares the experiences of Netherlandish, Spanish, Portuguese, and, to a lesser degree, French, German, and Eastern European painters who visited Rome in the sixteenth century. The book traces what the author identifies as an overarching progression from a universalizing quest for a “common language” rooted in classical antiquity, which compelled artists to travel to Rome in increasing numbers after 1500, to a growing “national consciousness” (218) that took hold toward 1600 and radically altered artists’ engagement with both ancient and modern Roman art.
While artists had long traveled to the Eternal City, often as pilgrims or at the charge of a patron, by the 1520s a sojourn in Rome became almost indispensable for ambitious painters eager to learn from the visual riches of the city that Jan van Scorel would purportedly call the “true school of painting” (70). The Sack of Rome of 1527 actually opened the way for foreign artists, many from regions torn by sectarian conflict, to come to Rome “to see and to learn,” often working under Italian masters on large fresco cycles decorating important spaces, such as the Sala dei Cento Giorni (12–15).
In the first decades of the century, recently unearthed antiquities and the art of Raphael and his workshop were the chief attractions. For Dacos, the outcome of this early encounter with classical and Renaissance art is predicated on social and epistemological differences. Italian artistic theory and practice differed from those of other European cultures, and acclimating to new modes of production and thought proved challenging for non-Italian artists. To explain the process of assimilating an Italian approach to art, Dacos uses a range of metaphors, including the notion of a greffe (graft), in which the Roman experience fundamentally changes an artist’s practice even while his native identity remains, still detectable in his accent.
Stranieri, Dacos argues, might succeed in emulating their Italian peers, often working under Italian masters on large fresco cycles. But their art would always be hybrid. That basic premise justifies an extensive attempt to recover the work of non-Italian artists in projects ranging from the Vatican Loggia (ca. 1518) to Caprarola (ca. 1570). Sorting out artists’ hands in such collaborative projects is a notoriously problematic enterprise. Excellent photographs help the reader to share in Dacos’s connoisseurial process, if not necessarily her conclusions. A case study between chapters 1 and 2 considers drawings by Alonso Berruguete, adding new attributions to the oeuvre of this neglected Castilian sculptor and painter who, according to Vasari, copied Laocoön and gained privileged access to Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina cartoon.
Whereas the presence of Iberian artists in Italy becomes more sporadic at this point, painters from the Low Countries arrive in increasing numbers. In chapter 2, Dacos juxtaposes well-known and documented visits by artists such as Michiel Coxcie, Maarten van Heemskerck, and Lambert Sustris with more-exploratory insights into possible trips by Pieter Aertsen and Lambert Suavius. For further elaboration, particularly in the case of peripatetic figures like Léonard Thiry, the reader is referred to the author’s numerous previous publications.
Chapter 3, addressing art in the wake of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, examines works by Spanish and French artists, including Roviale Spagnuolo, Jean Cousin, and Antoine Caron, who responded so differently to Italian art, and highlights the truly international figure of Giulio Clovio, the Croatian miniaturist who became a magnet for other foreigners in Rome. This leads to another case study, centered on the productive internationalism of the workshop at Palazzo Capodiferro-Spada (1550–52).
Chapter 4 picks up with a generation of artists bracketed between the Brill brothers and El Greco, who often looked to Venetian as well as Roman models and offered eclectic responses to an Italian artistic climate that increasingly valued its own diversity. It is only in the final quarter of the century, explored in chapter 5, that Dacos, following Federico Zeri, identifies a new coherence motivated chiefly by concerns of the Counter-Reformation. Frequently anachronistic in character, late sixteenth-century art reflects, for the author, a return to nature (Elsheimer) and earlier Christian conventions (Rubens), and, simultaneously, a renewed sensitivity to modern Rome’s preeminent artistic and spiritual authority.
By way of conclusion, the epilogue sketches a growing resistance to Rome’s cultural absolutism at the start of the seventeenth century. Here Dacos evokes some of the ways that artists’ local contexts shaped their development. This discussion might have been further enriched with recent scholarship countering prevailing narratives of artists from Gossaert to El Greco that have centered on their Italian experiences. Yet the detailed historiographic appendix, which reviews the critical fortune of the term Romanist and its multiple associations, underscores just how pioneering the author’s research into this overlooked period of change has been. Voyage à Rome, lavishly produced and thoroughly documented, will remain an essential point of reference for future investigations into the ways contact with Rome shaped the visual arts in Europe and beyond.
