In Light of Rome: Early Photography in the Capital of the Art World, 1842–1871 9780271094304

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgmements
Part 1 “ The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky” Early Photography in Rome , 1839–1871
Introduction: The Discovery
1. The Daguerreotype
2. The Calotype
3. The Roman School of Photography
4. The 1850s
5. The 1860s
Part 2 A Few Questions About Photography in Nineteenth-Century Rome
Introduction
Plates
Appendix 1 Richard W. Thomas, “Photography in Rome,” 1852
Appendix 2 Note on the Photographers, Photographic Establishments, and Their Assistants in the Various Districts of Rome, ca. 1866
Artist Biographies
Chronology of Roman History, 1831 to 1878
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 1

In Light

of Rome

7/7/22 2:11 PM

McGuigan, InLight_text.indd 2

7/13/22 4:21 PM



In Light

of Rome

Early Photography in the Capital of the Art World, 1842–1871

John F. McGuigan Jr. and Frank H. Goodyear III Foreword by Maria Francesca Bonetti The Pennsylvania State University Press | University Park, Pennsylvania

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 3

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Library of Congress Cataloging-​i n-​P ublication Data Names: McGuigan, John F., Jr. (John Fuller), author. | Goodyear, Frank H., III, 1967– author. Title: In light of Rome : early photography in the capital of the art world, 1842–1871 / John F. McGuigan Jr. and Frank H. Goodyear III ; foreword by Maria Francesca Bonetti. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines Rome’s contribution to the technical and artistic development of photography up to 1871, focusing on experimental painter-​photographers and the adoption of the medium as an equal branch of art”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022019139 | ISBN 9780271094885 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Photography—Italy—Rome— History—19th century. | Photography, Artistic—19th century. Classification: LCC TR80.R66 M39 2022 | DDC 770.9456/32—dc23/eng/20220617 LC record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2022019139 Copyright © 2022 Bowdoin College Museum of Art All rights reserved Printed in China Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. Frontispiece: Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (French, 1804–1892) Two Details of the Arch of Septimius Severus, 1842, full-plate daguerreotype, 9 ½ × 7 ¼ in. (24.2 × 18.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 4

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Contents

Foreword [vii] Maria Francesca Bonetti Acknowledgments [xi]

Part 1 “The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”: Early Photography in Rome, 1839–1871  [1] John F. McGuigan Jr. Introduction: The Discovery  [3] 1. The Daguerreotype  [7] 2. The Calotype  [21] 3. The Roman School of Photography  [29] 4. The 1850s  [39] 5. The 1860s  [51]

Part 2 A Few Questions About Photography in Nineteenth-Century Rome  [71] Frank H. Goodyear III Plates [91] Appendix 1: Richard W. Thomas, “Photography in Rome,” 1852  [203] Appendix 2: Note on the Photographers, Photographic Establishments, and Their Assistants in the Various Districts of Rome, ca. 1866  [206] Artist Biographies  [208] Chronology of Roman History, 1831 to 1878  [227] Notes [229] Bibliography [237] Index [250]

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 5

7/7/22 2:11 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 6

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Foreword

“The effulgent light of a southern sky”: there could not be a more appropriate title for this new, keen, and fascinating history of photography in Rome, from the invention of the daguerreotype to the wider dissemination of images obtained with collodion plates. Those crucial decades saw the provincial and picturesque capital of the Papal States—still at the center of international culture and art—transformed into a new urban reality, under pressure from the first clumsy attempts at modernization imposed by the bureaucracy and the administration of the new Italian government. This book was written, perhaps, with the same ineffable impression in mind of a monumental, warm, and shining Rome that surprised and captured the spirit of foreign travelers and artists visiting the “universal and eternal” city—and also with a bit of nostalgia at not being able to appreciate, firsthand, those romantic aspects and customs that painters and the first generations of photographers loved and fixed in their images. A scholar, connoisseur, and art collector, John McGuigan began to acquire photographs of Rome about fifteen years ago, in order to better understand and study the experiences and fabric of relationships among foreign artists, especially Americans, who settled or sojourned there in the nineteenth century. From the observation of a fact—the constant and unavoidable presence, since 1839, of a new device for the reproduction and representation of reality—and from the need to know the reasons behind the different approaches

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 7

to photography in this time and place were born the urgency and curiosity for a new object of study, which soon transformed itself into a new personal collecting interest. This was confirmation, for me, of what I had already brought into focus a few years ago, when, on the occasion of the publication of another collection of photographs of Rome from 1840 to 1870, I had identified that implicit vocation, generally underlying all Roman photographic production of the nineteenth century, to stimulate and nourish, since its origins, collecting desires and passions. It is evident, in fact—and John McGuigan’s study gives further testimony of this—of a tendency typical of photographic collecting that, not only in Italy but also internationally, has often intertwined a particular, if not exclusive, connection with the image of Rome. Consequently, documentary and iconographic interest in one of the most emblematic places of the collective imagination that founded and marked Western culture increasingly has been confused with and superimposed on, in an almost symbiotic form, the same historical-photographic interests. The singular art of collecting—since it is a true “creative” work when a collection, such as the one made up by John and Mary McGuigan, becomes an object capable of communicating and transmitting, in and of itself, a set of data, knowledge, and cultural values—and the meticulous work of research and documentary restitution presented to us in this book belong to that type of

7/7/22 2:11 PM

contribution which, starting from the first essays on the history of the origins of Roman photography by Silvio Negro (since his article I primi fotografi romani, which appeared in l’Urbe in 1942), have led connoisseurs and collectors, Italian and foreign, attracted by the timeless charm of the nineteenth-century city, to associate their private passion with a more open and generous strategy for dissemination, with important publications and exhibitions of their “treasures,” in order to increase knowledge, accessibility, and love from an ever-growing audience. Among the most significant precedents: Silvio Negro, Valerio Cianfarani, Ceccarius (Giuseppe Ceccarelli), Piero Becchetti, and, more recently, Filippo Maggia, Marco Antonetto, and Andrea Sciolari; as well as Dietmar Siegert, Peter Herzog, Bruce Lundberg, and Jean-Philippe Garric, to name only some of the collections dedicated entirely to, or with specific sections on, the history of photography in Rome, and some of which have fortunately merged with important public institutions. However, the present study offered by John McGuigan demonstrates the characteristics of a completely autonomous contribution which, while making use of the studies and historiographic reconstructions that preceded it, as any serious and rigorous historical narration must, adds the value of a personal critical gaze, refined through practice and daily attendance to the series of original works and documents at his disposal. This has allowed him to write his history of early photography in Rome between the years 1839 and 1871 from a particular point of view: that of a scholar who, by way of his specific knowledge of foreign artists active in Italy in the nineteenth century, and his targeted research of photographic materials that belonged to travelers and artists of that era, has been able to conduct investigation into areas that were still little known until now. Further, McGuigan deserves credit for the recovery of a series of objects that, due to the usual dispersion pattern of images

originally produced and acquired in Rome (destined for an international clientele and private collecting; essentially linked to travel and personal memories rather than professional or academic artistic production), had lost their link with their context of origin and, therefore, their full historical and documentary significance. I am referring above all to the important presence in the McGuigan Collection, that is the basis of this new and intricate history of photography, of a series of images and a large number of photographic albums belonging to personalities whom McGuigan has here identified fully for the first time, uncovering details of their nationality, status, cultural and artistic activities and interests, friendships, circumstances, and dates of activity in Rome. Through comparisons, connections, and interactions with other sources and with images present in other archives and collections, these discoveries cast new light on still-unidentified authors and images, as well as on the important networks of relationships that characterized Roman photographic activity and guided the choices of the various buyers and users of the time—in particular, the artists of the academies, archaeologists, amateurs, and enthusiasts of the fine arts. As a historian, and not as a collector, I have had the good fortune and the honor of repeatedly engaging in discourse with John McGuigan over the last two years—albeit only by correspondence, given the unfortunate limits imposed on us by global pandemic that has overlapped precisely with the period in which this book was written. For me, this correspondence was a “return” to the question and themes that, more than any others, have marked my historical-photographic studies. As in other cases (I am thinking in particular of Piero Becchetti), I feel the duty to express my debt of gratitude for what has been transmitted to me in terms of competence, information, reflections, insights, and critical analysis.

viii  Foreword

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 8

7/7/22 2:11 PM

I listened carefully to the author’s questions; I searched with him for answers; and I looked with admiration at his experience and the richness of his precious collection. Finally, I read and greatly appreciated his dense historiographic synthesis, appreciative of his extraordinary ability to address a non-specialist public and to present with clarity facts and arguments that are not at all simple (for example, the physico-chemical description of inventions and technical procedures, their evolution, and their different expressive qualities). But above all, I would like to underline the value of this wide-ranging historical restitution, bound to

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 9

be of international interest, albeit with a focus on a limited territory, based on rigor and the search for objectivity in the reading of sources and materials. The text is completely free from exaggeration and bias, even when the author is justifiably proud of identifications and discoveries, and despite the choices and predilections for photographers and images that always, inevitably, characterize a collection in a subjective way. Maria Francesca Bonetti Rome, November 2021

7/7/22 2:11 PM

J. & C. Walker, folding map of Rome from John Murray’s A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs (London, 1869). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 10

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Acknowledgments

Researching and writing about the earliest years of photography in Rome has been a great pleasure. It has been especially rewarding to be able to work collaboratively on this book and its accompanying exhibition. Our conversations together and with many others have been enriching and have led to many exciting discoveries. While the project was led by the two of us, we understand and appreciate greatly the contributions from many quarters. To begin, we want to acknowledge financial support from the Stevens L. Frost Endowment Fund. We also wish to thank the outstanding professionals at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. To Suzanne Bergeron, Leslie Bird, Sean Burrus, Elizabeth Carpenter, Michelle Henning, Jim Higginbotham, Jo Hluska, Laura Latman, Sabrina Lin, Liza Nelson, Jose Ribas, Amanda Skinner, Laura Sprague, Adam Talbot, and Anne Witty, your efforts on behalf of this project and the Museum are much appreciated. We are also grateful to the team at the Penn State University Press, and especially executive editor Eleanor Goodman, for their support of this book. Each of us also has our thanks to convey. Frank wishes to express gratitude to Katherine McKee, Bowdoin Class of 2022, who interned at the Museum during the spring semester of 2021. As an Italian and Cinema Studies double major, Katherine was invaluable in creating this book’s chronology and in developing the website that will accompany the exhibition. Her internship was supported

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 11

by the Katharine J. Watson Fund at the Museum. Frank is also appreciative of a writer’s residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, where he completed his essay for this book. He extends his thanks to the entire staff of the foundation and its trustees for this gift of time and the ideal setting to think and write. And to Anne Collins Goodyear, co-director of the Museum, he offers heartfelt thanks for wise advice and good cheer. John wishes to express his gratitude, first of all, to Mary K. McGuigan. This project could never have happened without her partnership, knowledge, insight, and thoughtful editing. Special thanks also go to those whose constant aid and wisdom have guided this endeavor. Foremost among them is Maria Francesca Bonetti, for shepherding him through the vast body of Italian scholarship, sharing her unfailing eye and critical judgment, and for her enduring patience, and to Alistair Crawford for his decades of friendship, insight, and humor. John is grateful as well to Helena Pérez Gallardo, JeanPhilippe Garric, Stefano Grandesso, Ken Jacobson, Michael Kolster, Filippo Maggia, Mark Osterman, Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Nicholas Stanley-Price, Andrea Sciolari, Carlo Virgilio, and Scott Wilcox. Lastly, he wants to thank those who have shared their expertise in helping to form the McGuigan Collection: Robert Hershkowitz, Charles Isaacs, Serge Kakou, Hans P. Kraus Jr., Vincenzo Mirisola, Alex Novak, Serge Plantereux, Adnan Sezer, Bruno Tartarin, Chester Urban, and Paul Worman.

7/7/22 2:11 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 12

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Part 1

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky” Early Photography in Rome, 1839–1871

John F. McGuigan Jr.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 1

7/7/22 2:11 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 2

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Introduction The Discovery

There is in the future a possible development of this new art into one of the great elements of civilization, the handmaid of science and all the arts; there is no limit to its applications or to the usefulness. —William James Stillman

The origins of photography can be traced to two significant discoveries, the first of which involved a natural optical phenomenon, identified as early as the fourth century bce, in which light passing through a tiny hole into a dark room or chamber casts a reverse image on the opposite wall of whatever appears outside the opening. By the sixteenth century, this principle gained agency through its practical application in the camera obscura (Latin for “dark chamber”), which consists of a small box with a lens or hole through which an image can be projected onto the opposite wall and then traced. The second discovery occurred around 1717, when the German scientist Johann Heinrich Schulze proved that silver halides, or salts of silver (bromides, iodides, and chlorides), were sensitive to light and would permanently darken upon exposure. With the foundational knowledge of these two concepts, it was only a matter of time before some would-be alchemists found a way to combine them

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 3

to permanently affix a projected image from nature onto a durable surface. One of these alchemists, the English polymath William Henry Fox Talbot, had struggled to draw views with the assistance of a camera obscura during visits to Italy in 1823 and 1824 and eventually despaired of it. Then, in September 1824, his elder compatriot John Herschel (1792–1871) introduced him to the more practical camera lucida (“bright chamber”), patented by William Hyde Wollaston in 1806. Lightweight, portable, and with fewer visual distortions and a wider field of vision than its cousin, a camera lucida consists of a glass prism attached to a telescoping pole mounted above a piece of paper. The viewer sees the subject reflected through the prism and the paper simultaneously, and with a little training, the hand can trace the superimposed image onto the paper. To demonstrate its function, Herschel might have shown examples from his portfolio of drawings from his own recent trip to Italy.1 One of these works, the panoramic cityscape Rome from the Pincian Terrace Beyond the Villa Medici (fig. 1), reproduces a remarkable level of detail across a cogently constructed composition with a delineated foreground, middle ground, and background. Herschel’s notation of “Eye 13·0” and vertical and horizontal markings memorialize his use of the optical device whose verisimilitude would be

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 1 John Herschel, Rome from the Pincian Terrace Beyond the Villa Medici, August 8, 1824. Pencil on paper, 77/8 × 121/4 in. (20.1 × 30.9 cm). McGuigan Collection.

4  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 4

7/7/22 2:11 PM

surpassed only by photography. Herschel not only possessed one of the greatest scientific minds of his era and was deeply learned in optics and chemistry, but he also was adept with and devoted to the camera lucida. This consequential meeting between the two English inventors stimulated the younger man’s pioneering optical research and, as the photography historian Larry J. Schaaf commented, “established a friendship and a scientific collaboration crucial to Talbot’s later success.”2 Talbot periodically grappled with the camera lucida over the next nine years until October 1833, when he was again in Italy, this time on his honeymoon in the picturesque village of Bellagio on Lake Como. There he finally admitted that—even with a mechanical aid—he was a deplorable draftsman. But he did not allow his shortcomings to defeat him; rather, he was inspired to devise new solutions to record visual phenomena with accuracy and ease. He pondered, “how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!” Engrossed by this thought, he remembered, “I was then a wanderer in classic Italy, and, of course, unable to commence an inquiry of so much difficulty: but, lest the thought should again escape me between that time and my return to England, I made a careful note of it in writing, and also of such experiments as I thought would be most likely to realize it, if it were possible.”3 Back home at Lacock Abbey in the county of Wiltshire, Talbot initiated his studies and named his earliest efforts “photogenic drawings” (Greek for “produced by light”). He began by soaking paper in salt water, then brushing one side with silver nitrate, to make salted paper. He took these sheets, placed botanical specimens and textile fragments on them, encased them between glass plates, and put them in the sun. While neither salt nor silver nitrate is photosensitive on its own, when combined they form silver chloride, with the result that

the background darkened while the areas on which the objects had been laid appeared lighter. He stabilized these images in a salt bath (either potassium iodide or sodium chloride) but was unable to permanently fix them.4 Talbot graduated to placing his salted papers into several purpose-built camera obscuras (hereafter referred to as cameras) to photograph architecture and still lifes at Lacock Abbey. As all his photogenic drawings were negatives, he simply made negatives of his negatives in order to make positives. Although these early attempts were rudimentary and impermanent, Talbot nevertheless had discovered the means of producing photographs on paper. Aware of the implications for natural science, he sent thirty-six examples of his work to his friend and fellow botanist, Antonio Bertoloni, in Bologna, Italy, in 1839–40. These works, preserved today in the Album di Disegni Fotogenici at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were some of the very first photographs to reach the Italian peninsula and were discussed widely in the press. Talbot eventually presented his findings to the Royal Society on January 31, 1839, in order to claim credit for the invention of photography. But he was too late, as that honor had gone three weeks earlier to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, a French painter, stage designer, and inventor of the diorama theater, a precursor to modern cinema. The complicated history of Daguerre’s eponymous invention actually begins with his compatriot Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who experimented with paper treated with light-sensitive chemicals in conjunction with a camera obscura as early as 1816. Around 1827, Niépce invented heliography (Greek for “sun writing”), using pewter plates coated with bitumen, resulting in the very first photographs. He improved upon this by switching to copper plates coated with burnished silver, then treating them with iodine vapor to fix them. In order to refine and market his invention, he entered into partnership with the impresario Daguerre in 1829.

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  5

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 5

7/7/22 2:11 PM

It was only after Niépce’s premature death in 1833 that Daguerre perfected their process by designing a better camera, employing a more sophisticated lens, and developing the plates with fumes of mercury, which made them more durable and appreciably sharper in appearance. Daguerre revealed his invention to the world in Paris on January 7, 1839, and demonstrated it before a joint

session of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux-Arts that August. The French government granted Daguerre a lifetime pension for sharing his discovery,5 prompting the renowned French chemist Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac to declare, “It is the beginning of a new art in an old civilization; it will constitute a new era and secure for us a title to glory.”6

6  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 6

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Chapter 1

The Daguerreotype

At the time of photography’s discovery, Rome was the capital of the Papal States, the sovereign domain of the Catholic Church that included the territories of Lazio, the Marches, Romagna, Umbria, and parts of Emilia. Although it counted only about 160,000 inhabitants, the city was also a cosmopolitan capital of art that hosted an international array of painters, sculptors, and architects; antiquarians and archaeologists; and connoisseurs and amateurs of art. Even at midcentury, it remained one of the world’s epicenters for the transmission of art, its authority as the leading European entrepôt of cultural exchange perhaps challenged only by an emerging rival in Paris. The palimpsest of art and history on display throughout Rome certainly formed part of its enduring allure, but the city was also a vibrant and influential commercial market for contemporary art, with a sophisticated network of studios, workshops, and academies for its production; dealers, promoters, and exhibition spaces for its consumption; and packers, shippers, and agents for its global exportation.1 Within Rome’s small urban footprint, most of this activity took place around the Spanish Steps, an area traditionally associated with foreigners and the intelligentsia in the rione, or district, of Campo Marzio. While the conservative pontificate of Gregory XVI Cappellari (1831–46) generally opposed the popular democratic reforms and movements that were gripping the European continent and

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 7

denounced many technological advancements, fearing the erosion of the pope’s temporal power, residents and foreigners in this rione tended to enjoy greater liberality as long as they did not meddle in Vatican affairs. Many histories of early photography in Rome2 commence with the announcement of its invention in the local art journal L’Album on March 23, 1839, which only provided a brief description.3 However, the fundamentals of photography had been long understood among the city’s learned artistic and scientific societies—including the Collegio Romano, the Jesuit seminary established in 1551—whose members closely followed developments abroad.4 For instance, the French architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc,5 who was in the circle of the French Academy in Rome and a close friend of its director from 1835 to 1840, the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, received the following intelligence in a letter from his father, dated September 28, 1836: “Here’s something new: Daguerre has managed to fix chemically on a flat white substance, which is not paper, the reflection of the camera obscura. . . . This is a view of Montmartre taken from the top of the Diorama; the telegraph and its tower are about eight lines high; with a weak magnifying glass one can clearly see the hooks and the pillars . . . and other minute details invisible to the best simple sight of the drawing itself, and which no hand or tool would be

7/7/22 2:11 PM

able to render.” He then quipped that his son and all the pensionnaires (academic students receiving a stipend from the French government) soon would be out of business: “Now if the fact is true, as I am not allowed to doubt it, and if this means comes within the reach of everyone, get rid of yourselves, poor artists, put your eyes out while a Savoyard with his magic lantern will drive you a hundred feet underground!!! There is reason to get mad and doubt providence, because after all that is not fair.”6 Viollet-le-Duc took several weeks to consider the news, and judging from his reply, it must have sparked a spirited debate among the denizens of the French Academy in Rome, established through royal decree by Louis XIV in 1666. He declared that he was not, in fact, afraid, and that “until I have seen with my own eyes (this news is so surprising) I will not believe it.” Even if it were true, he wrote, he expected that its effect on the fine arts would be minimal: “Did we not say, when the camera obscura appeared: Ah! all the designs of our fathers are just crude and imperfect imitations of nature, compared to what we can do today. . . . Draw without knowing how to draw! Paradox, sublime paradox! . . . As a result, do those who do not know how to draw draw better?” In conclusion, he naively asserted that the hand of the artist would always be preferred over the coldness of a mere tool, proclaiming, “No, no, we still do not like mechanics and their soporific results enough for M. Daguerre to break into our beautiful France, still too full of dreams and poetry for her to listen to the musings of a seeker of the philosopher’s stone which has already bothered him for a long time.”7 The illustrated guide to Daguerre’s process of photography, published in Paris in September 1839, was reprinted in the original French by Antoine Beuf in Genoa that same year and disseminated throughout Italy.8 Its reception in Rome was swift and positive: Filippo Mercurj gave readers of the journal Il Tiberino their first practical description of daguerreotypy on December 7, 1839,9 and the

next month Alessandro Monaldi issued the first Italian translation of Daguerre’s manual, with six copper-plate illustrations.10 Early in 1840, the newspaper Diario di Roma predicted that the new art form would assume a prominent position in the life of the city, writing, “This new birth of human intelligence, which aroused universal admiration, deserves to be propagated in Rome, as a mother and guardian of the arts and sciences.”11 The native-born Lorenzo Suscipj is the first person in Rome identified in the historical record as a manufacturer of cameras based upon Daguerreian principles and a photographer. On February 8, 1840, the Diario di Roma commented on “the optician machinist Mr. Suscipj, who with true zeal and sincere love of the arts undertook the construction of the new instrument with prosperous success, in order to make it common among us,”12 and on February 17 Il Tiberino wrote that he had daguerreotype views of Rome displayed for sale in his shop at 182 via del Corso: “[They] have nothing to envy to those of Daguerre exhibited in Paris. These tests on metal plates are sold at fixed prices and at the same time commissions are taken to carry out every view of the capital.”13 The earliest dated daguerreotype by Suscipj, and possibly the earliest dated extant photograph of Rome, is his View of the Bridge and Castel Sant’Angelo (Science Museum, London) from 1840. An inscription on the back notes the temporary scaffolding that had been erected on the fortress for the annual Easter fireworks display, known as the girandola, that occurred on Monday, April 20, of that year. Antique monuments, Renaissance and baroque façades, and cityscapes constituted the original subject matter for daguerreotypists in Rome, because the procedure required a strong source of natural light and a long exposure time in order to secure an image. The process was not inexpensive, which is why Suscipj worked largely on commission at this time. These classic exterior views already had an established international audience from the world

8  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 8

7/7/22 2:11 PM

of paintings, drawings, and reproductive prints, and many of the first photographers, like Suscipj, catered to their erudite interests and sensibilities. The repetition of these topoi from Roman culture—themes that gain agency through repetition—underscores their evocative value as places of myth, memory, and history. There is, therefore, an iconographic continuity between photography and the traditional fine arts in the privileging of certain views. Suscipj’s Panorama of Rome from the Campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin (fig. 2), for instance, updates a favorite composition of the Dutch painter Caspar van Wittel, known as Vanvitelli (fig. 3), who is usually credited with inventing the Italian veduta (view) genre by introducing to Roman landscapes a Northern predilection for topographical accuracy. The technical capacity of the photographic apparatus and its elevated vantage point allow Suscipj’s prospect to assert empirical authority over the traditional veduta as a representation of objective modern-day reality. However, in its inability to portray signs of human activity or the transitory effect of clouds, it fails to match the veduta as a picturesque souvenir of Rome. In 1842, the Diario di Roma noted Suscipj’s groundbreaking work photographing sculpture in the studios of Rome,14 one of the earliest recorded instances of the emerging collaboration between the two art forms that, according to the photography historian Patrizia Di Bello, would become essential: “Without reproductions, sculptures would have been condemned to low exhibition values given their limited transportability, at a time when blockbuster traveling exhibitions were a crucial source of income and notoriety for artists and art entrepreneurs.”15 Although no examples by Suscipj have been identified, these early accounts demonstrate a reciprocity between technological advancements—as better lenses allowed for long exposures in low-light interior conditions—and the evolving market for photography at midcentury.

(The chiaroscuro and reflective varnishes of paintings had yet to be overcome by the daguerreotype.) The Suscipj firm enjoyed success under both the Holy See and the House of Savoy until 1901, and its founder’s entrepreneurship as a photographer, fabricator of optical devices, and shop owner speaks to the remarkably differentiated and sophisticated market for the creation and provision of material culture that existed in Rome. On April 6, 1840, the painter and writer Cesare Masini published one of his scherzi, or satirical poems, in Il Tiberino, with some of his thoughts on the daguerreotype: The magical invention, That I am talking about, Will mark the century Nineteen. The art of engraving Almost forgotten By the more artistic Lithography; And the Daguerreotype, Which produces for you Immobile objects Thanks to light.16 Although the poem was prophetic of future advances in the field, etchers, engravers, and lithographers as yet had nothing to fear, as each daguerreotype was a unique creation that only could be duplicated by rephotographing or engraving it—a serious drawback to its widespread adoption. The esteemed academic painter Paul Delaroche, who had served on the French committee charged with studying the invention, recommended its use by engravers, proclaiming that “M. Daguerre’s wonderful discovery is an immense service rendered to art.”17 Not only could the brethren of the burin prosper by making multiples of daguerreotypes; he

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  9

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 9

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 2 Lorenzo Suscipj, Panorama of Rome from the Campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, 1840. Full plate daguerreotype, 81/2 × 61/2 in (21.6 × 16.6 cm). National Science and Media Museum / Science and Society Picture Library, London, 1890-56-R53. Photo: Science Media Group. Figure 3 | opposite Caspar van Wittel, View of the Tiber, Rome, 1685. Oil on canvas. Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie, object # Gemäldegalerie, 9129. Photo: KHM-Museumsverband.

10  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 10

7/7/22 2:11 PM

argued that they could also benefit from the unprecedented level of accuracy in the resulting works. Similarly, he anticipated that painters would find them indispensable as replacements for open-air sketching and preparatory drawings in their studio practice. For now, however, they remained luxury items that already had a secondary market: one auction in April 1840 at 42 via del Corso listed for sale violins by Stradivarius, a four-seat carriage with a seven-year-old horse, and a daguerreotype of an “extremely extraordinary size.”18 Among the first to consummate the marriage between daguerreotypy and etching was the French optician Noël-Marie-Paymal Lerebours (1807–1873), who commissioned and acquired photographs from a team of traveler-photographers for his serial publication Excursions daguerriennes: Vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe (Daguerrean Excursions: The Most Remarkable Views and Monuments of the Globe; 1840–44). He almost certainly based his project on

the well-known lithographic compilation Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (Picturesque and Romantic Journeys in Ancient France; 1820–78), the prototype for many ensuing enterprises (including the Mission héliographique in 1851).19 He reportedly collected almost 1,200 daguerreotypes, 111 of which were reproduced as aquatints, including 13 of Rome. On June 1, 1840, Il Tiberino announced that Lerebours had on exhibition in his Parisian shop “wonderful views of Rome, including the Basilica of St. Peter, the house of Virgil, and the Porto di Ripetta,”20 indicating that the Italian portion of his project was well underway. The daguerreotypes typically were damaged or destroyed as a result of tracing the metal surface for transfer to the engraver’s plate; however, two photographs of the Castel Sant’Angelo and St. Peter’s Basilica from the embankments of the Tiber River (fig. 4 and Robinson Library, Newcastle University) survive that may have served as the basis for an engraving (fig. 5) in Excursions daguerriennes.21

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  11

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 11

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 4 Photographer unidentified, Castel Sant’Angelo and St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome, ca. 1839. Full plate daguerreotype, 61/8 × 81/8 in. (15.5 × 20.5 cm). George Eastman Museum, 1976.0168.0153. Photo courtesy of the George Eastman Museum. Figure 5 | opposite Noël-Marie-Paymal Lerebours, The Basilica of Saint Peter and Castel Sant’Angelo from the Tiber, ca. 1840. Etching after a daguerreotype, 101/4 × 141/4 in. (25.9 × 36 cm). McGuigan Collection.

12  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 12

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Photography still could capture neither clouds nor movement because of the lengthy exposure time required, so it fell to the engravers employed by Lerebours to animate the skies and populate the final prints with suitable character types. Lerebours acknowledged as much when he wrote, “The engraved views will be enlivened by figures. When the pictures taken on the site have none, they will be supplemented by a few groups taken from sketches drawn from nature in the same localities.”22 Although some critics condemned this artifice, the insertion of people fulfilled a market demand for scenes of romanità, the innate Roman spirit traceable to antiquity, as manifested in the

physiognomies, costumes, and folkways of the local inhabitants. This quasi-ethnographic interest was inspired by Romantic literature and widely disseminated in print culture, particularly the engraved oeuvre of the native Trasteverino, Bartolomeo Pinelli, from the first quarter of the nineteenth century. His influential depictions suggest a continuity between modern Romans and their illustrious ancestors and contributed significantly to forging a global imaginary not just of Rome but of Italy as a whole.23 The English philologist Alexander John Ellis caught daguerreotype fever soon after he arrived in Rome in 1840 and conceived the idea for a monthly

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  13

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 13

7/7/22 2:11 PM

publication with aquatints after photographs titled Italy Daguerreotyped, similar to Lerebours’s Excursions daguerriennes. During his stay in Italy, Ellis collected 158 full-plate daguerreotypes, 103 of which showed Rome, most of them taken during a period of intense activity in June 1841. He initially purchased daguerreotypes from Suscipj and then commissioned him, as well as the little-known Achille Morelli and probably others, to photograph specific locales in the city. Although the project never came to fruition, its impetus apparently stemmed from Ellis’s deep-seated distrust of traditional print media. As he explained: “Since the daguerreotype is a faithful reproduction of reality, no engraving will ever have the same precision, since the mania to embellish, innate in every artist, has introduced so much compensation in the engravings of the views of Rome, has so exaggerated its ruins and its architectonic details, or has so enlarged the spaces in which they are found that a foreigner who arrives in Rome with the expectation aroused by these prints, will infallibly remain disappointed.”24 Indeed, engravers often made alterations for a variety of practical, aesthetic, personal, or rhetorical reasons, from the Flemish priest Lievin Cruyl in the seventeenth century, to the Frenchman Jean Barbault in the eighteenth century, to the Italian Luigi Rossini in the nineteenth century. The trend for exaggerating the scale and perspective of architecture can be credited to the eighteenth-century Venetian Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) and his profound and highly original quest to aggrandize the legacy of ancient Rome. The compositional freedom and narrative possibilities enjoyed by printmakers were largely unobtainable by photographers; however, the perceived objectivity of their vision—even though they did choose their vantage point and framed and cropped their images to create or enhance desired effects—ushered in a new era of verisimilitude in mass-produced images. Among the photographs collected by Ellis are two ambitious multiplate panoramas of the Roman

skyline: one by Suscipj, from the convent of San Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum Hill, consists of eight plates; the other by Morelli, from the campanile on the Capitoline Hill, has thirteen plates and is, according to the eminent photography historian Piero Becchetti, the earliest known circular photographic panorama of the city.25 Ellis himself took twenty photographs, becoming one of the first foreign amateurs working in the capital.26 He recorded valuable information on the backs of his plates, such as the time of day, weather, and exposure time. The latter was anywhere from ten to twenty minutes27 due to the size of his aperture, which, Becchetti speculated, may have been only f/14 or f/16 and required him to remove and replace the lens cap to achieve the desired result.28 Three works in the Ellis Collection are the earliest known photographs of figures in a landscape in Rome.29 Numerous histories of early photography repeat the fallacy that an elusive Spanish painter named José Ramos Zapetti purportedly invented photography in Rome two years before Daguerre in Paris.30 Their source is a 1902 article titled “El inventor de la fotografía?” (“The Inventor of Photography?”) by the Spanish journalist Francisco Alcántara, who made numerous errors, including the date and the man’s name. In the piece, he recounted a reminiscence of the painter Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz that when he was a student in Rome on a pension from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, “Zapetti” revealed to him a photograph that he took, “a figure and part of the studio reproduced in bright copper foil.”31 News of this possible revision to the canon spread rapidly and even reached the pages of the monthly Bullettino of the Società Fotografica Italiana in 1904, which naturally relished the idea that the Eternal City was the true birthplace of the medium.32 Left unmentioned was the fact that Madrazo did not arrive in Rome until October 25, 1839,33 well after Daguerre’s process had been published. Subsequent research conducted by José Antonio Hernández

14  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 14

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Latas has revealed that the mysterious painter was, in fact, José Zanetti, an Italian-Spanish native of Lleida in Catalonia, whose photographic activity I have ascertained did not begin until 1840.34 Madrazo remembered his compatriot, who had studied art at Rome’s Accademia di San Luca in 1817, as an eccentric, “a bit of a poet and a bit of a musician and a bit of a mechanic.”35 He lived in the church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli (known today as Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore), located at 101 piazza Navona, in an “immense and ramshackle room that served him as studio, laboratory, everything, because he did everything (even a flying machine).”36 Zanetti could always be found there experimenting with chemicals from a “cupboard full of bottles and flasks with liquids, which gave the environment of the poor room a certain smell of a pharmacy.” He showed Madrazo “two or three views of the houses and monuments that he had in front of his windows” that had a purplish color,37 in addition to the one of a model in his studio. Notably, this last work indicates that Zanetti was the earliest known painter-photographer in Rome. Madrazo realized the import of Zanetti’s experiments and hoped that they would “redound to the benefit of all, and especially the artists, his companions, who could economize with the model and mannequin.”38 In light of this significant new information, there is hope that some of the daguerreotypes from Zanetti’s rooms, which could include views of Bernini’s Fountain of the Moor, the Palazzo Pamphilj, and the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, may be identified and finally cement his legacy. In April 1842, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, an artist as well as amateur archaeologist and architectural historian, arrived in Rome on a tour he was conducting to document photographically the architecture of the Mediterranean region for publication—similar to the Voyages pittoresques and Excursions daguerriennes. Neither Girault’s equipment nor his technical notes are known to survive, but we can deduce that he

brought with him from Paris the latest advances in the field, such as Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault and Hippolyte Fizeau’s method for sensitizing plates with bromine, which drastically reduced exposure times from twenty or thirty minutes to just under one minute, as well as Fizeau’s technique for hardening plates after an image was fixed with a solution of gold chloride, which greatly enhanced contrasts. He probably had several small cameras, a bespoke large-format camera capable of producing photographs of an unprecedented size (approximately 9 1/2 × 7 1/2 inches), and the newest Chevalier lenses as well as special plate holders, masks, and a convertible lens for taking multiple images of different dimensions (such as half- or quarter-size) and orientations (vertical or horizontal) on the same plate (see frontispiece).39 The director of the French Academy in Rome at the time, the painter Jean-Victor Schnetz, noted that during a three-month period Girault took more than three hundred photographs, but he was largely unimpressed: “Mr. Girault de Prangey daguerreotypes everything he can here, everything happening here, monuments, streets, pifferari, and even cardinals. He even has the ambition to point his instrument in front of the nose of the Holy Father. He claims to do wonders with his perfected instrument; to the naked eye, the improvements he boasts are almost nil: I still see in his images the same flaws and the same qualities as before.”40 As for Girault’s claims of technical improvements, one need only consider the scope and clarity he attained in The Tiber Island with the Bridge of Cestius and Basilica of St. Bartholomew (plate 1) and his unprecedentedly long formats, range of sizes, and close-ups—apparently the first of their kind,41 such as The Arch of Janus (plates 2 and 3)—to conclude that he was an innovator. And yet it is precisely Girault’s keen eye for observing quotidian vignettes—some of which are the earliest recorded photographs of popular Roman subjects, such as his Maremmana Cattle in the Forum (Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs) and his

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  15

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 15

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Pifferari (plate 4)—that appeals to today’s viewer. As the first painter-photographer in Rome with a known oeuvre, Girault and his work speak to a pivotal shift in that era toward art that “increasingly valued the mundane, the fragmentary, the seemingly uncomposed,” as Peter Galassi observed in his influential study Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, and “found in the contingent qualities of perception a standard of artistic, and moral, authenticity.”42 The scientific community at the Collegio Romano ardently embraced the daguerreotype’s technological possibilities. Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, the local poet known for his sonnets in the native Romanesco dialect—the literary counterpoint to Pinelli’s prints—described a luncheon held on May 20, 1841, at the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, attended by “the most distinguished in Rome by virtue and doctrine,” including “about thirty of the brightest professors of the University,” at which Professor Antonio Chimenti “took with the daguerreotype the view of the beautiful cloister with images of most of the guests.”43 The next year, Chimenti published his influential Elementi di chimica, one of the first treatises to include daguerreotypy.44 Other clerics who experimented with photography include Monsignor Giuseppe Berardi and the priest Filippo Bottoni,45 but the most distinguished was Vittorio della Rovere, who taught chemistry and physics. “This clergyman took his photographs in the court of the Jesuit College in Rome,” the playwright and poet Filippo Zamboni recalled. “Padre della Rovere, of whom the Jesuits were very proud because he descended from the Duke of Urbino, was considered the best daguerreotypist in Rome. He also pursued the matter with true passion, spared no expense in procuring the most excellent apparatus that could be acquired at the time, and seriously occupied himself with the relevant chemical studies.”46 In 1843, Della Rovere collaborated with Father Francesco de Vico, the director of the college’s astronomical

observatory, to daguerreotype the moon, and at Tivoli on October 2, 1845, he obtained the first papal sitting with a photographer, employing a double camera to make two portraits of Gregory XVI simultaneously.47 A perennial student, Della Rovere published three important papers on photography between 1846 and 1851.48 By 1842, new lenses and accelerating agents (such as bromine and chlorine) introduced on the international market made photography faster, more affordable, and more accessible. Its greatest commercial application was portraiture, and with its patrician families, religious communities, diplomatic missions, and affluent travelers, papal Rome possessed an ample clientele for established and itinerant photographers to capitalize on the mania for daguerreotypy. Suscipj, for example, accepted portraiture commissions at his well-known establishment, as the Diario di Roma reported in 1842: Lorenzo Suscipj, Optician and Machinist in via del Corso 182, in addition to having provided his shop with what is most sought after in these professions, notes that he takes Portraits with the Daguerreotype machine in the space of 15 to 25 seconds of a minute. Such Portraits succeed perfectly, and are fixed beautifully using the latest discovery of Mr. Fizeau, having built a special covered room for this purpose, so that those who long to have their Portrait are not harassed by the sun. The price is set at three scudi, not including the frame. Anyone wishing to have their Portrait done in their own home, or requiring groups of several people, the price will be determined.49 The Roman scudo was roughly equal to the American dollar, meaning that Suscipj’s fee was rather hefty, considering that a young artist could live comfortably in the city on just four scudi a month.50 Several visiting daguerreotypists are known from their advertisements in local Roman journals or from signatures or labels on their work,

16  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 16

7/7/22 2:11 PM

as documented by Maria Francesca Bonetti and Monica Maffioli in their exhaustive 2003 exhibition catalogue L’Italia d’argento (The Italy of Silver). This is the case with Iller in the mid-1840s, Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg around 1844–45, possibly Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros sometime between 1844 and 1850,51 C. Meissner in 1847, Antonio Gambina Fici in 1848, and Raffaele Sgarzi and Giuseppe Lissone De Giorgis in 1852.52 Undoubtedly, countless others remain unidentified who, like so many portraitists and miniaturists before them, migrated freely between major European capitals following the seasonal and festal calendar and remaining only as long as the market sustained them. The amateur American painter Emma Cameron described an encounter with an unnamed photographer on a trip from Rome to Naples in 1847: We were quite delighted to find that the Frenchman could help us to pass away a portion of the time by taking views in daguerreotype. I saw him prepare the plates and afterwards he took two impressions of our party gathered around the vettura. With the carriage, the young Hungarian, and my dress, he was successful, but the rest were not so good. He is an artist, and has come to Italy to take the most celebrated views. He has done those of Rome and intends taking those of Naples. The whole apparatus, china, glass, liquids, &c., &c., &c., are carried with him, and to me it is a perfect wonder that they are not destroyed.53 Photographers formed part of the everyday social fabric in papal Rome and were an integral part of the economy, directly employing chemists, opticians (glassmakers), framemakers, and retouchers (frequently artists), and indirectly benefiting numerous peripheral industries, workshops, and retail stores, such as dressmakers, tailors, haberdashers, and milliners. Francesco Frezzolini, the owner of the Tassinari pharmacy located at 92 piazza di Pietra (between

the Pantheon and the via del Corso), was an important purveyor of photographic chemicals, carrying “a deposit of these substances, such as bromine, iodine, etc.,” and preparing them “according to the most recent methods, such as iodide chloride, bromine iodide, according to the methods of Valicourt, Fizeau, Thierry.”54 The increased access to supplies was vital in transforming Rome from a secondary to a primary actor in the material production and consumption of the daguerreotype. A prominent center for the exchange and reception of photography was the storefront of Tommaso Cuccioni at 18 via dei Condotti. Cuccioni had sold engravings, maps, and stationery since the 1830s and now commissioned a stable of emerging daguerreotypists, such as the Venetian veduta painter Giacomo Caneva, to supply him with stock. We are fortunate that Becchetti uncovered Cuccioni’s account books, which record several lucrative transactions: “17 October 1849, to Caneva for 4 daguerreotypes sold, 2.40 scudi”; “25 October 1849, to Caneva for 4 daguerreotypes, scudi 2.40”; “16 May 1850 in Caneva for 20 daguerreotypes and the residue of four others, 12.34 scudi.”55 In just a few years, photography would become so commonplace that Caneva later remarked, “In fact, we believe there is no village or home, however civilized it may be, that does not possess proof of the daguerreotype.”56 Itinerant portraitists sometimes dubiously claimed a superior or secret process to gain publicity. One spurious practitioner, known only as C. Fischer, passed through Rome in early 1844, boasting of having invented color photography through the action of light.57 Paolo Mazio, publisher of the Roman journal Il Saggiatore (named after Galileo’s 1683 volume on scientific methodology), felt compelled to verify this audacious boast after he had negligently reprinted similar unproven assertions by the German duo of Ernst Schönefeldt and Heinrich Gensbauer before they left for Naples. Mazio commented, “We actually rejoice whenever we are notified of some discovery or improvement of discovery, . . . but we

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  17

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 17

7/7/22 2:11 PM

want that scientific proof precedes the analysis, and that every shadow of trickery is removed from the experiments: credulity, I always speak of scientific theory, harms much more than doubt or incredulity.” He quickly detected Fischer’s deceit when he viewed one example in raking light, which “gave rise to the firm belief that the glorified coloring is produced with the brush, not with the light.” Ultimately, Fischer admitted that he retouched his works when, “by the irrefutable observations of the bystanders, he confessed to having given the yellow gold to the earrings and other neck and chest ornaments.”58 Fischer’s Roman work is unknown, but a hand-colored daguerreotype done in Spain illustrates his subterfuge (fig. 6). The best documented itinerant portraitist in Rome at midcentury was Philibert Perraud. In 1845–46,59 the Frenchman was renowned for his speed, accuracy, and professionalism, as an evocative firsthand account in the Diario di Roma of February 24, 1846, reported: First we saw a beautiful and large room, where very large examples were on display of portraits, groups, views, drawings, statues, all obtained with the aforementioned medium. We then passed to a contiguous internal loggia, still spacious, adorned with flowers and graceful backdrops, which serve as a beautiful field for portraits. . . . Whether there is sun or not for Mr. Perraud it is the same thing, he worked from the beginning of the day until sunset. . . . The chemist prepared the optical chamber, made my friend sit in front of it and begged him for a moment not to move, and he had not, so to speak, taken action, when Perraud warned us that the image was ready. Then he left us, and while we were thinking about this marvelous and so useful discovery, in less time than it takes to sip a cup of coffee or eat gelato, Perraud returning told us that he had passed the portrait through the mercury chamber, had washed it with hyposulphite, and to make it indelible, had fixed it with gold chloride. In truth, our astonishment

increased as we confirmed for ourselves what we had read about him in the newspapers of Milan and Turin in which cities he had made over 8,000 portraits. Modestly he added that the kindness and encouragement he had received in Rome was no less, because he already had well over 5,000 portraits executed. Nor could this surprise us, because the talented chemist spared nothing to deserve the help of the Romans. In fact, in addition to living in an elegant apartment, rooms and people have also been provided to keep the children, so that they do not have to disturb anyone by taking them with them who would not want to be portrayed with them.60 Perraud’s enduring fame rests with his impressive group portraits of artists of different nations residing in Rome, including the French, German, English, Scandinavian, and American cohorts, all likely posed in the courtyard of his studio at 50 via dei Pontefici. They all apparently date from late April to early May 1845 and usually depict around a dozen individuals. One exceptionally well-preserved and complex example, A Group of French Artists in Rome (plate 5), shows twenty-four pensionnaires at the academy and is inscribed in French on the back, “photograph of all the artists who were in Rome at the time.”61 Perraud’s group portraits memorialize the artistic camaraderie and the sophisticated structures of sociability that were a defining characteristic of the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city. Perraud’s biographer, Eugène Constant, credited him with advancing “the daguerreotype so much that it became indispensable to all genre painters, portrait painters, and landscape painters.”62 As one of the foremost painter-photographers in Rome in the late 1840s and early 1850s, Constant was certainly qualified to make that judgment. Of the tens of thousands of daguerreotypes of people created in Rome during the 1840s and early 1850s, depictions of artists’ models, intended as visual aids for painters and sculptors alike, were

18  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 18

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 6 C. Fischer, Portrait of an Unidentified Woman with Two Parts in Her Hair, 1845. Quarter-plate daguerreotype, 31/4 × 41/4 in (8.3 × 10.8 cm). Library of Congress, DAG no. 1437 [P&P].

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 19

7/7/22 2:11 PM

apparently quite rare. Recall that in the early 1840s Girault had photographed a group of models (see plate 4) and Zanetti a model in his studio, but these were both for personal use, and it seems that such images were seldom available for sale. This may be due in part to resistance from the artists themselves, many of whom esteemed the daguerreotype’s empirical accuracy and didactic potential but did not recognize any innate aesthetic merit. Most artists in Rome continued to hire models to pose for them and patronized the city’s well-defined network of evening “life schools”—such as Gigi’s academy on the via Margutta, the celebrated street of artists’ studios—where they could draw and sculpt in clay from both nude and costumed figures for a small fee alongside their peers.63 New research conducted for this project has recovered the identity of one of the more interesting characters from this era: Edgar Adolphe, previously known in scholarship only as Adolphe, or Adolfo di Parigi.64 He announced his arrival in Rome in October 1846 in the pages of the Diario di Roma: “new discovery made by Mr. Adolfo, artist from Paris, for instant Portraits of the Daguerreotype, likeness guaranteed, unalterable for centuries, made on a silver plate, in the room in the shade, whether the weather is good or bad, and also in color if desired, by a means and method of his own invention.”65 Working from second-floor rooms at 18 via dei Pontefici (between the via del Corso and the mausoleum of Augustus), Adolphe charged one scudo per portrait. Frustratingly, for an artist whose Italian oeuvre spanned the peninsula and Sicily and exceeded well over ten thousand pieces by 1848,66 only a few signed portraits are known today.67 Adolphe and Suscipj are the only two practitioners known to have dealt in photographs of professional models at this early date, with the former frequently advertising, “He sells portraits of models to artists and amateurs.”68 An exquisite example of this genre, A Roman Model in Profile

with Bare Shoulders and Gold Earring (plate 6), may be by Adolphe. The seated female is captured in profile to accentuate her Roman aquiline nose, sinuous plunging neckline, and baroque dangling earring, which, on closer examination, is slightly out of focus, blurred by her gentle breathing. She cradles her chin with her left hand, while with her right she clutches some drapery to her bust, a conventional pose that kept sitters still with greater naturalism while also making them appear pensive and remote.69 Truly elevated to an art form, this remarkable early depiction of a model would have been a risqué image in papal Rome. There has been an oral tradition, handed down by previous owners, attributing it to Suscipj, because it originated in the same historical collection as another work, Roman Model (private collection),70 that bears his label; however, a stylistic comparison between it and other works by Suscipj makes this unlikely.71 The allure of the daguerreotype’s jewel-like surface and its magnificent level of detail were unequaled by any other chemical process, but because each one was unique, not easily duplicated, and fairly expensive, the daguerreotype remained a luxury good beyond the reach of most artists, and its full potential went unrealized. Augusto Castellani, the famed Roman antiquarian jeweler and amateur photographer who was intimately familiar with the capital’s guilds, confraternities, and professional organizations, summarized the situation in 1849: “Everyone understood that this beautiful discovery had to advance further to become of interest to the arts: the difficulty of finding good silver plates, their high price, the manufacturing they required, the complicated preparation and space needed to simply create an image, not to mention the huge expense and money lost, in the end all this kept it from that class of hard-working people who form the creative craftsmen: therefore it existed not as an art but as an almost amusing and private one practiced only by the bourgeoisie.”72

20  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 20

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Chapter 2

The Calotype

The death of Gregory XVI on June 1, 1846, after a fifteen-year reign, and the subsequent election on June 16 of fifty-four-year-old Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti as Pope Pius IX created a momentous shift in Roman religious and political affairs. A stern critic of his predecessor, Pius IX granted general amnesty to political prisoners; implemented popular modernizing reforms, such as a regional railroad and street lighting; and promised to align his policies with more progressive European governments. Although the daguerreotype was not yet a decade old at the outset of his pontificate,1 it was already confronted with a potent successor in the calotype (Greek for “beautiful image”), sometimes erroneously referred to as a daguerreotype on paper. The calotype heralded a revolution in the manufacture of photographs: it could yield multiple positive paper prints from one paper negative; the apparatus was relatively affordable and portable; and the paper and chemicals involved were convenient to acquire and use. Calotypes transformed the commerce in and circulation of photographs, as they were inexpensive and easy to handle, and they could be sent through the mail and pasted in albums like prints and drawings. Talbot, who had given his method of photogenic drawing freely to the world after being upstaged by Daguerre, endeavored to create a superior procedure to that of the Frenchman. His invention of

the calotype, also known as the Talbotype, was patented on February 8, 1841, with some significant improvements in 1843. He began his experiments by switching from silver chloride to the more photosensitive silver iodide, his rival’s preferred compound, and employed a new accelerating agent of gallo-nitrate of silver, which was a mixture of silver nitrate, acetic acid, and gallic acid. He next used Herschel’s discovery that bathing the exposed paper negatives in a solution of sodium hyposulphite (hypo), known today as thiosulphate, washed away the unexposed silver iodide, rendering the residual silver inert and no longer susceptible to fading. He then waxed his negatives to make the paper grain less visible and more translucent, which permitted more light to pass through, contributing to a higher resolution.2 Finally, he printed his positives on relatively inexpensive paper treated with silver chloride, initially to offset the high cost of the negative paper, but ultimately because he liked how the rough surface resembled the nubs of a painter’s canvas. This aesthetic decision by Talbot became a defining characteristic of the salted paper print, as the positive became known, which would be embraced by painter–photographers for its pictorial effects. Acceptance of the calotype by the photographic community was slow, hindered by Talbot’s proprietary marketing and litigiousness. Eventually,

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  21

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 21

7/7/22 2:11 PM

however, his methods were adapted and improved by an array of international pioneers, such as the Frenchmen Hippolyte Bayard and Alexandre Edmond Becquerel, the Germans Carl Enzmann and Karl Emil Schafhäutl, and the Englishman Robert Hunt. The Tassinari pharmacy in Rome advertised on January 13, 1846, that in addition to supplies for daguerreotypy, it also maintained a stock of “all the substances and preparations for photographic papers, according to the methods of Talbot, Enzmann, Flunt [sic], Schaefhacult [sic], Becquerel, Bayard, Ruisè, etc. etc.”3 As this notice appeared at the beginning of the year, we may infer that calotypy already was known and practiced in Rome in 1845, earlier than generally suspected.4 One of the few people personally trained by Talbot in his new technique—and surely the most successful, probably because he was an accomplished painter—was the Welshman Calvert Richard Jones.5 He and Talbot formed a profit-sharing partnership in which Talbot supplied the chemicals and prepared paper for Jones’s proposed tour of the Mediterranean region, during which he would take photographs to be printed and sold in England. Jones embarked in November 1845, but by the time he arrived in Rome on May 4, 1846, he was running low on supplies and complained to Talbot, “I only wish that I had paper, chemicals, and leisure among the splendid subjects which surround us.”6 On another occasion he noted, “I am extremely annoyed at having used all of a small bottle of Gallic acid which I brought from England, and cannot procure a grain in Italy.”7 (This begs the question of whether the Tassinari pharmacy actually did carry all the necessary supplies or was simply out of stock.) Jones remained in Rome only for a fortnight, but his efforts were well received in the capital, as he enthusiastically wrote to Talbot: “The artists and others here to whom I have shewn your invention are amazingly delighted with it.”8 He also advised Talbot that “S[ig.] Suscipj a highly respectable optician in the Corso at Rome would prove an effective

Agent in the cause,”9 meaning the commercial distribution of calotypes. Despite the brevity of his stay, Jones likely sought out the society of his Welsh colleagues, the painter of Roman scenery Penry Williams and the neoclassical sculptor John Gibson, at the Caffè Greco on the via dei Condotti, the heart of the Roman art world since its establishment in 1760. The longtime expatriate American painter James Edward Freeman conjured the bohemian appeal of its international milieu for armchair travelers in an 1841 article titled “Gleanings in Italy”: Gathered into knots or cliques of different nations, and as different in their dress and manners as in their tongues, they sit—elf locks, long beards, caps from Raffaelic to Brigandish, velvet coats of all shapes, from the loose palletot to the close buttoned, blouses blue, red, and white, and no color. Sketch books, portfolios, and portable paint boxes, sketching stools and umbrellas, lay about in every corner; for it is from the campagna and the academy or to them that they journey. The soft Italian jars with the guttural German, and the glib tongued Frenchman forms a nasal treble to the rattling English. The smoke of pipes, various in caprice for shape, and the fumes of bad cigars fill the rooms with an atmosphere the rays of a good sized lamp find difficulty to struggle through. Scarcely a great artist for the last century who has studied at Rome but has frequented this scene.—Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thorwaldsen, Canova, etc. etc.10 The café was a meeting point for artists and patrons as well, with one English correspondent recommending, “Here you may make appointments, and travellers will save some of that valuable time which is costing them many scudi per day at fashionable hotels.”11 As we shall see, this historic haunt also played a significant role in shaping the medium of photography in Rome.

22  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 22

7/7/22 2:11 PM

After a slow start, Jones informed Talbot on May 11 that “the weather has not been very propitious, [but] I have managed to do some beautiful and very interesting views.” One masterful example of Jones’s work from this period is The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina (plate 7), which depicts the half-buried pronaos of the second-century monument in the Forum with the baroque façade of the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda erected inside it. While the viewer initially notices the two women, who would have posed patiently for anywhere between six and twenty minutes (based upon Jones’s notes of his general exposure times), closer observation reveals makeshift scaffolding on the left side of the temple. This temporary rigging may have been constructed by one of the architectural pensionnaires at the French Academy in Rome, such as Jacques-Martin Tétaz, Alexis Paccard, or Philippe Auguste Titeux (all three are pictured in plate 5), to measure and sketch the entablature as part of their ongoing studies. The systematic analysis and documentation of ancient Roman buildings and ruins was a mainstay of the academic curriculum, one in which photography would come to play a significant role. Jones alerted Talbot that he had encountered another calotypist in Rome, writing, “There is a man here who does Talbotype portraits, which are pretty good, but all touched [retouched], he is a Frenchman, and tells me that he does the large Camera specimens in 15 seconds but of course makes a secret of his acceleration. I only wish that you would manage the same time, as the additional period which I now leave it in the Camera is very inconvenient.”12 This competitor almost certainly was the noted physician Jacques-Michel Guillot, who began his experiments in 1844 and soon discovered that he could eliminate Talbot’s initial steps and sensitize paper simply by soaking it in a solution of potassium iodide, rather than brushing the solution on. The paper could be prepared in advance and made camera-ready with only

the application of a solution of silver nitrate and acetic acid to create the iodide of silver. As Jones remarked, Guillot’s “secret” process dramatically decreased the exposure time by increasing the paper’s light sensitivity.13 Guillot had arrived in Rome in late 1845 with his wife of ten years, Amélie Saguez (1810–1864), an accomplished painter who exhibited her work at the Salon under the name Guillot-Saguez. When the couple returned to France two years later, Guillot published his improved calotype process as Méthode théorique et pratique de photographie sur papier under the name Dr. Guillot-Saguez. Recently discovered photographs clearly bear Saguez’s signature, “A. Guillot-Saguez,” including one inscribed “Rome, 1845” and others that show evidence of retouching in watercolor (fig. 7), the practice that Jones criticized. These autograph prints indicate that Saguez—not her husband or Jones—may deserve the distinction of being the first recorded calotypist in the city. The photography historian Sylvie Aubenas has speculated that the couple most likely worked together, wedding their expertise in art and science, and therefore should share the credit.14 Further evidence for this marital-professional partnership exists in three photographs for which “MM. Guillot-Saguez” (indicating Monsieur and Madame) received a bronze medal at the Exposition of Products of French Industry in 1849.15 In January 1847, Louis-Désiré Blanquart-Evrard presented his groundbreaking advances to the calotype, similar to those of Guillot-Saguez, to the Académie des Sciences in Paris and published them that same month. His work promised no less than the democratization of art through the proliferation of paper photography, as the transcript of the proceedings records: “For as it can produce likely souvenirs of the travels of the man of the world, or faithful images of objects pleasing to him, it will obtain exact technical drawings of anatomy or natural history for the savant; historians, archeologists, and even artists will have picturesque views,

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  23

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 23

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 7 Amélie Guillot-Saguez, Rome, 1847. Salted paper print. Photo © 2016 Christie’s Images Limited.

studies of ensembles and details of the great monuments of antiquity and the Middle Ages, whose rare images are seen by so few.”16 The realistic appearance of the photographic image, combined with the relatively easy exchange of the paper medium, held enormous implications for the transmission of thousands of years of Roman cultural history, as well as the contemporaneous affairs of the Papal States, to an international audience. The period from 1847 to 1849 witnessed a burgeoning number of paper photographers in Rome, including some daguerreotypists who adopted the nascent medium. Edgar Adolphe, for example, announced in the

Roman Advertiser in 1848, “M. Adolfo is shortly to return to Paris in order to present his new invention for daguerreotypes on paper.”17 Probably the most influential calotypist working with the Blanquart-Evrard method18 in Rome was Frédéric Flachéron, a painter and sculptor who owned one of the city’s preeminent artists’ supply stores, Flachéron-Hayard, located at 43 piazza di Spagna, which he had taken over from his fatherin-law. The Frenchman’s photographic activity spanned the years 1847 to 1853,19 and his earliest paper negatives, taken from 1847 to 1848, are easily distinguished by their small format, measuring

24  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 24

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 8 Frédéric Flachéron, The Forum Looking Toward the Capitoline Hill, ca. 1847–48. Salted paper print from a paper negative, 67/8 × 85/16 in. (17.1 × 21 cm). McGuigan Collection.

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  25

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 25

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 9 Giacomo Caneva, The Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum, ca. 1847–48. Salted paper print, 8 × 101/8 in. (20.3 × 26.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

26  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 26

7/7/22 2:11 PM

approximately 8 1/2 × 6 1/2 inches (the size of a fullplate daguerreotype), while his salted paper prints are known for their warm honey coloration. He was a friend of Ingres, and his oeuvre reflects a close affiliation with the French Academy in Rome, with his subject matter often mirroring academicians’ deeply considered interest in studying classical models in situ. Flachéron’s The Forum Looking Toward the Capitoline Hill (fig. 8) underlines a mutual concern for documenting the current appearance of historic sites amid scenes of everyday life, with Maremmana bulls and haycarts resting alongside the ghostly sentinels of Rome’s former glory: the Temple of Saturn, the Arch of Septimius Severus, and the Column of Phocas. On the left we can see that the Temple of Castor and Pollux is covered in makeshift scaffolding, which may have been installed by one of the academy’s architects. The painter-photographer Caneva shared Flachéron’s affinity for ancient monuments and ruins and commenced his trials with the Blanquart-Evrard calotype method at roughly the same time. This is evidenced by his earliest known effort in the medium, The Temple of Vesta (Museo di Roma, Palazzo Braschi, Rome), which is signed, dated, and inscribed “Roma 1847 G. Caneva,”20 as well as his masterful The Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum (fig. 9),21 which shows these iconic ruins amid the built environment of the modern city. Caneva maintained strong ties with the community of Spanish artists in Rome on an academic pension from Madrid, and he even posed with them for a group portrait on a rooftop (plate 8). Although his face is in deep shadow, he is recognizable from other photographs as the man standing fifth from the right, wearing a type of top hat. The paper mount is inscribed “Roma 1849 (Avril),” and all the sitters are identified, including the painter Bernardino Montañés, who once owned it.22 Originally attributed to Caneva, the photograph almost certainly was taken by Pedro Téllez de Girón—a recently rediscovered Spanish calotypist who will

be discussed in the next chapter—who does not appear in it. The photography historian José Antonio Hernández Latas, who discovered this image with Becchetti, marveled, “It is a truly exceptional historical document, the oldest known photographic testimony of the presence of Spanish artists in Italy.”23 As revolutions convulsed Europe in 1848, the Italian nationalist movement known as the Risorgimento sought to unite the Italian peninsula under one government and flag, with Rome—the caput mundi, or head of the world—as its capital. Pius IX’s failures to follow through on promised reforms led to the assassination of his despised prime minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi, on November 15. Chaos ensued; insurrectionists stormed the papal residence at Palazzo del Quirinale; and Pius IX escaped to the neighboring Kingdom of Naples. The Roman Republic, led by the liberal Giuseppe Mazzini, was declared on February 9, 1849, but the exiled pope appealed to Catholic Europe to reestablish his temporal power. To their astonishment, the republicans soon were threatened on three fronts as Neapolitan troops under Spanish control advanced on Rome from the south, Austrians assaulted Ancona on the Adriatic coast, and the French army landed at Civitavecchia to the west on April 25. Most artists fled the city in concern for their safety, especially those whose nations backed the restoration of the pope, such as the French and Spanish. Despite some early victories by Giuseppe Garibaldi, the commander of Mazzini’s army, and his troops against the Neapolitans, twenty thousand French troops laid siege to the city, and many patriots lost their lives before the city gates were breached and Rome was reclaimed on behalf of the pope on July 3, 1849. Most ardent supporters who either had participated in the new government or had fought against the French faced reprisals or execution, including the Rome-born calotypist Ludovico Tuminello, who uprooted his promising career for a long exile in

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  27

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 27

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 10 Stefano Lecchi, Casino Valentini, Rome, 1849. Salted paper print. Getty Research Institute, 2002.R.45*, Image 18.

Turin in the Kingdom of Sardinia. Some republicans, however, managed to maintain a neutral presence, such as the Lombard painter Stefano Lecchi, whose forty-one salted paper prints of the campaign were the first to document the fighting of

the Risorgimento. They are considered by Marina Miraglia, one of the leading authorities on Italian photography who discovered them, to be important predecessors of reportage, as the first photographs to show a theater of war (fig. 10).24

28  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 28

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Chapter 3

The Roman School of Photography

With the pope’s reentry into Rome in April 1850, the provisional French authorities relinquished control of the city, although a protective French garrison remained behind to ensure his temporal power. The rione of Campo Marzio slowly regained its former cultural and intellectual tenor as artists opened their studios and tourists returned. The calotypists resumed their daily activities, punctuated by lively gatherings at the Caffè Greco, located just a short walk away from the Villa Medici, where the French Academy maintained a sizable physical footprint and had resumed its considerable role in the intellectual life of the city. The famed coffeehouse even lent its name to the group that is sometimes called the Circle of the Caffè Greco but is more appropriately referred to as the Roman School of Photography. It was not so much a formal school as a collegial forum for discussion about how to alter Blanquart-Evrard’s methodology to accommodate the exigencies of Rome’s Mediterranean climate, which entailed some chemical modifications and slightly moistening the paper before inserting it into the camera, a technique that would come to be known as the “wet method.” The London chemist and amateur photographer Richard Wheeler Thomas learned the techniques of the Roman School during a four-month stay in the city in 1850, and his firsthand account in London’s Art-Journal two years later provides us

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 29

with a direct glimpse into their operations (see appendix 1).1 He had arrived thoroughly trained in Talbot’s dry method for preparing negatives and embarked “with much expectation of success” on a series of solo photographic expeditions. Despite local advice that he would not prevail, he persisted for more than a month but met only failure. “Every modification which my ingenuity could suggest, I tried, but without success,” he remembered, as “the effulgent light of a southern sky [was] so intense, as entirely to preclude the possibility of obtaining a negative strongly impressed in the pores of the paper.” Ultimately, he “tore up some fifty negatives, and commenced di nuovo,” heeding the sound counsel offered him at the Caffè Greco among “those who are always accessible to the photographic artist, and who readily communicate their experience and practice, with a view, reciprocally, to gain instruction.” As he probably was not fluent in Italian or French, Thomas elevated an amiable anglophone, Arthur Robinson (1820–1868),2 as his primary cicerone among the group: Foremost, I must place Mr. Robinson, well known to all artists and amateurs of every denomination in Rome. I cannot speak too highly of his courteous bearing towards a stranger who introduces himself as a follower of his favorite pursuit. I am quite sure that any

7/7/22 2:11 PM

English gentleman would meet with as much assistance as I myself did. . . . I would recommend any one visiting Rome, with the intention of following this absorbing pursuit, to repair at once to the Caffè Greco, where, with a little attention, he will soon recognise his own vernacular in the conversation of those in the central compartment, and, by singling out a bearded habitué, the chances are, that he at once pounces upon the right man, or at any rate, finds himself in close quarters with the English photographer, whose acquaintance is an introduction to the party.3 A little-known and studied artist, calotypist, and architect whose work is extremely rare,4 Robinson has remained a shadowy figure in photographic history until now. Much can be learned about him from his sole chronicler, the American painter Freeman,5 who recalled in his 1877 memoirs that he first met “Robby,” as he was familiarly known, “a remarkably handsome young man, of quiet, well-bred, and unobtrusive manners,” in the early 1840s. “There was a mystery surrounding him; no one knew from what source he derived his means of support, nor was anything known of his family. That he was a gentleman, everyone felt who knew him; but his history, whatever it was, he kept to himself.” Yet, despite the genial and outgoing personality described by Thomas above, Freeman explained that Robinson was actually an introvert and was “known only to a few companions among the artists.” Despite Robinson’s best efforts to keep a low profile, he now can be rightfully situated as an integral member of the Roman School of Photography, as Freeman continued: There were few branches of popular intelligence in which he was not informed. In the physical sciences he was very well instructed, and it was to Robby his companions referred when a question arose among them where such knowledge

was required. His complete unselfishness was a remarkable trait in his character; he was ready to assist any of the artists where his superior acquirements could serve them, and with as much zeal as if the result were to benefit himself alone. When the first essays in photography were made in Rome by two of his compatriots, he aided them with his experience in chemistry, and one of them has since made a fortune by being the first in the field here. But Robinson could never be induced to profit by the service he had rendered him. There was not a man, woman, child, or dog, who knew the gentle Robby, that did not like him.6 In addition to Robinson, Thomas listed four principal members of the “photographic clique” at the Caffè Greco, namely “the Prince Giron des Anglonnes,” Caneva, Constant, and Flachéron, and he observed that “on the whole their method of manipulation is attended with more success than is generally met with in this country.”7 The “Prince Giron des Anglonnes” had been a mystery for some time, with some eminent scholars speculating that the “Frenchman” was a complete fiction, made up as a joke.8 Fortunately, thanks to the scholarship of Helena Pérez Gallardo,9 we now know that he was a Spaniard by the name of Pedro Téllez de Girón, Prince of Anglona, probably the photographer of the remarkable early group portrait of Spanish artists in Rome. The exciting confirmation of Girón’s identity adds yet another layer to the international colony of artists and intellectuals in Rome at midcentury. Thomas, Girón, and Caneva soon embarked on a ten-day excursion to Tivoli, where the Englishman finally mastered the new wet method under their tutelage “and ever afterwards pursued it, uniformly with success; . . . My own negatives will bear me out in the statement that this method far excels any other for hot climates.”10 Although none of Thomas’s prints are known today, those of another

30  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 30

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Englishman, James Robertson, who undertook a similar expedition to Tivoli, may offer insight. His The Temple of Vesta, Tivoli (plate 9)11 shares the same format and many of the tonal effects of the Roman School from this time and is indicative of the aesthetic interests and technical sophistication of the period. Caneva specialized in photographs for use by artists, with one French guidebook later explaining that he worked almost exclusively to “supply the residents of the Academy.”12 Four costume studies illustrate the range of poses, props, costumes, and types of models, as well as the dramatic lighting and shallow backdrop, typical of such work (plates 10–13). Miraglia recognized Caneva primarily as a pure landscapist for his sweeping views of the Roman Campagna—the surrounding countryside whose vast undulating expanses were littered with ancient monuments, aqueducts, and tombs—and his precocious studies of trees, plants, rocks, water, and sky (plates 17 and 18) that find their formal parallel in concurrent paintings and drawings. His pictures, enhanced by the expressive qualities of salted paper, masterfully invoke the descriptive and analytical lessons of plein-air sketches while not forfeiting, as Miraglia noted, their artistic sentiment.13 Although Caneva remained committed to the calotype for its pictorial qualities, he experimented with all of the latest techniques and, finding no reliable Italian-language manual, he issued his own, Della Fotografia Trattato Pratico (Practical Treatise on Photography), in 1855 to educate others. The penultimate figure mentioned by Thomas was the French genre painter Constant, who was active in Rome between 1848 and 1855. Constant was among the first in the city to employ a revolutionary method devised by Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor (a second cousin of Nicéphore Niépce) for making negatives on glass—not on paper—and coating them with a binder of albumen (egg whites, essentially) to attain a degree of detail matched

only by the daguerreotype. Constant, along with Flachéron and Caneva, lent some of his Roman works to the Exhibition of Recent Specimens of Photography at the House of the Society of Arts in London in December 1852, the first dedicated presentation of the medium, where they were touted as “splendid specimens in every respect.”14 Constant was one of the notable few who sold his prints, many bearing his blind stamp, through dealers such as Eduard Mauche, who maintained an establishment at 174 via del Corso (plate 19).15 The final person on Thomas’s list, Flachéron, was undoubtedly the true leader of the group, more so than Robinson, and certainly the most famous. In 1848, he was gifted a new camera with an improved lens by Chevalier that could accommodate large plates, measuring approximately 10 × 13 1/2 inches (an improvement over the previous version, which had merely adapted the daguerreotype format). With it, he could produce a negative roughly the same size as an average engraving that actually gave printmakers cause for concern and helped elevate him and, by extension, the Roman School of Photography to the next level. He earned a medal at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London’s Crystal Palace with seven views of Rome. The English photographer Robert Hunt, greatly impressed by what Flachéron’s work portended, commented that it had excited tremendous interest and that “the process by which these [photographs] were obtained in the Eternal City was eagerly sought for by photographic amateurs.”16 The London Daily News appreciated his “admirable architectural specimens,” especially those of the Forum, Colosseum, and the Column of Trajan, “which would a century ago have saved a vast deal of toil to the masterly hand of Piranesi.”17 Critics and the public esteemed Flachéron’s pleasing atmospheric effects, which evinced a slightly grainy, or sfumato, appearance due to his personal preference for—like Talbot and Caneva— inexpensive salted paper. His Arch of Titus,

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  31

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 31

7/7/22 2:11 PM

the organizers of the London exhibition noted, “deserves special mention for the perfectly artistic expression of the whole, combined with a singularly accurate representation of the superficial texture of the material.”18 Another print from this period, The Forum with the Column of Phocas, the Arch of Septimius Severus, and the Church of Saints Luke and Martina (plate 20), is perhaps one of Flachéron’s most finely toned, brilliantly conveying the sense of materiality so prized by the English jury in rendering the various buildings. It is a masterful display of planar perspective, with the overlapping façades receding into the distance and the verticality of the lone column playing against the horizontality of the retaining wall that pleasingly bisects the composition. The hem of a large cloth hanging on a row of drying laundry, white under the sun, was retouched by Flachéron, the painter, to bring it into high relief against the stone wall. Flachéron’s superior technical abilities ranked him among the best calotypists in the world and attracted the attention of the influential British photographer and writer Thomas Sutton, who declared, “The finest Paper Negatives that I have seen are those by M. Flachéron, of Rome.”19 Sutton, with true nationalistic pride, informed his readers that Flachéron’s secret was his use of exceptional English paper manufactured by J. Whatman at Turkey Mill, near Maidstone in Kent, which was free from iron spots and “considered to be faultless; in fact the only paper on which he could obtain a result.”20 Flachéron ascribed his superior productions to Chevalier, to whom he expressed his particular gratitude: “I am pleased to tell you again that I am always very satisfied. Besides, the success of my prints (views of Rome) is proof of this; because I ship them all over the world, not to mention those that are sold at my place, in Rome, to artists and amateurs.”21 Among the pensionnaires of the French Academy in Rome, the only one who can be considered part of the Roman School of Photography appears

to be the Parisian architect Alfred Nicolas Normand,22 whose practice was only rediscovered in the 1970s.23 Late in his tenure at the Villa Medici, he broadened his repertoire to include calotypy, as he divulged to his parents on April 24, 1851: “Some time ago I started making daguerreotypes on paper. I made some views of Rome which were quite successful. This attempt should bring me luck.”24 Several of Normand’s 130 known works depict his favorite monuments in the Forum, but the majority are intimate views of the façades and grounds of the Villa Medici, such as his large, casually posed photograph Three French Academicians in the Gardens of the Villa Medici (plate 21), taken in front of the colossal antique statue of the Dea Roma, or goddess of Rome. Two of the men bear a striking resemblance to Normand himself and the figure painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a fellow pensionnaire. I am pleased to introduce here for the first time the name of a forgotten calotypist of the Roman School of Photography, Pierre-Antoine de Bermond de Vaulx, whose oeuvre constitutes one of the largest such discoveries in several decades. The scion of a noble Provençal family, de Bermond intermittently practiced photography in Rome between 1851 and 1858, if not earlier, as evinced by a Roman Album (McGuigan Collection) assembled around 1855 (with several later additions).25 Visual comparisons confirm that de Bermond worked alongside both Caneva and Flachéron in Rome and Tivoli, perhaps initially as a pupil and then as a peer and companion, capturing nearly identical scenes at virtually the same time. For example, de Bermond’s photograph of The Ripetta Port (Porto di Ripetta), ca. 1852–53 (fig. 11) and Caneva’s salted paper print of Porto di Ripetta (Collection of Andrea Sciolari, Rome)26 show the same offloaded wine barrels in an identical position, which only could have occurred at a specific moment and could never be duplicated. De Bermond’s work demonstrates great originality, exceptional technique, and a fanciful eye,

32  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 32

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 11 Pierre Antoine de Bermond de Vaulx, The Ripetta Port (Porto di Ripetta), ca. 1852–53. Salted paper print, 75/16 × 95/16 in. (18.5 × 23.7 cm). McGuigan Collection.

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  33

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 33

7/7/22 2:11 PM

which should finally earn him equal stature among the pioneering ranks of Roman photographers. One chef d’oeuvre, A Palm Tree Near the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli (plate 23), ca. 1850–52, elegantly illustrates this point, with the titular tree rising majestically above other greenery and the confines of its masonry enclosure to find its counterpoint in the campanile of the Palazzo Senatorio in the far right distance, to which the viewer’s gaze is conducted by the receding plane of the stuccoed wall. This palm tree and the Tower of the Borgias frequently served as a framing device for the Capitoline Hill in early photographic views, such as Caneva’s View from the Door of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome (ca. 1850).27 In contrast, in de Bermond’s boldly innovative composition, it is resplendent in its isolation and may be emblematic of the Frenchman’s deeply conservative faith, as the palm is a symbol of righteousness. One even could speculate that, as palm trees are not native to Rome, Bermond empathized with a fellow transplant that also thrived in the Eternal City. The Parisian chemist Alphonse Davanne entered the orbit of the Villa Medici and, by extension, the Caffè Greco, in early 1853 during a tour of Italy. His The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina in the Forum (plate 24), with its warm honey coloration, accords with the work of Flachéron and Caneva, who both favored the same tonality. Davanne’s professional background accounts for his concern for the long-term durability of photographic prints, which were susceptible to fading as a result of poor technique or environmental conditions such as heat or moisture, and he worked tirelessly with publishers to standardize and disseminate proper procedures. A central figure in the early refinement and promotion of photography, Davanne wrote: “Like steam, like electricity, [photography] does indeed, although in a more modest proportion, share in the progress in all applications of human knowledge.”28 Working in Paris, the French painter-photographer Gustave Le Gray attained sublime effects

of coloring and atmosphere with his waxed paper process, one of the final improvements to calotypy before it was usurped by collodion. By coating his paper negatives with wax before applying the light-sensitive layer, Le Gray discovered that he could prevent the image from permeating into the paper fibers, thereby sharpening clarity and eliminating the awkward need to keep the paper wet. As this dry method could be prepared days in advance and developed days afterward, it was ideally suited for the traveling photographer working in the field. As Lerebours marveled in the pages of the French photographic journal La Lumière: Today one leaves Paris with a camera, a tripod, twenty-five or thirty sheets of prepared paper in a cardboard box, nothing more! . . . Prepare your paper one or two days before the trip and develop the images as you wish, as soon as you get back or even the next day. . . . There is almost no end to what can be done with paper; general views, monuments, excavated stone ruins, landscapes, copies of great paintings, all these subjects become admirable images. Remember that for paper a large format is necessary to produce striking contrasts in a broad, vigorous and rich effect.29 Beyond its convenience, the greatest advantage of the system, as Eugenia Parry Janis explained, was that “waxed paper negatives seemed to promote a more harmonious blending of highlights, middle tones and deep shadows, warmer clarity in the details, which some had found rather harsh with Blanquart’s process, and better all-over finish.”30 Before Le Gray announced his methodology in 1851, three of his acolytes, Eugène Piot, Émile Pécarrère, and Firmin Eugène Le Dien, introduced it to the tight-knit circle at the Caffè Greco during their migrations south starting in 1850, although it does not appear to have been widely adopted. All of the trio were affluent bourgeois amateurs who fell

34  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 34

7/7/22 2:11 PM

under the spell of their charismatic teacher, who, as a former student of Delaroche, instructed them not only in photography but also in pictorial principles such as orientation, framing, and horizon lines. Yet, as Aubenas has noted, Le Gray’s genius was not for fieldwork; rather, it was “in the printing of the positive proofs, to which Le Gray devoted loving care, that the full force of his originality [was] apparent.”31 Piot was a publisher and archaeologist who took up photography to document his obsession with ancient architecture. His work culminated in an ambitious but short-lived publication titled L’Italie monumentale (1851–53), one of the rare commercial endeavors undertaken by a dilettante, intended to prove that photography could rival traditional printmaking as a means of illustrating travel books. The Colosseum (plate 25) admirably demonstrates the didactic nature of his enterprise in a broad view of the interior and rent arcade of the amphitheater, with the first-century fountain known as the Meta Sudans standing guard in the foreground. In 1852 Piot sent his print titled Rome from the French Academy to the Exhibition of Recent Specimens of Photography at London’s Society of Arts alongside subjects by Caneva, Constant, and Flachéron, as well as Pécarrère, the second of Le Gray’s devoteees.32 Pécarrère was a lawyer who arrived in Rome at the end of 1850 with the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, his close friend. His only located Roman view, The Temple of Castor and Pollux (Tempio dei Dioscuri), Also Known as the Temple of Jupiter Stator (plate 26), signed “Pec / Rome 50,” possesses the familiar warm honey coloration favored by the Roman School and is likely the print identified in the London exhibition as The Temple of Jupiter at Rome. The prestigious Art-Journal praised its skilled use of waxed paper, marveling that “the results obtained speak greatly in favour of it in practised hands.”33 The most brilliant, yet enigmatic, of Le Gray’s students was Firmin Eugène Le Dien, the son of a

landowner from northern France who served as a magistrate after law school. In company with the painters Léon Gérard and Alexandre de Vonne, Le Dien entered Rome on September 9, 1852, and remained until late April 1853. He ventured throughout the city and the Castelli Romani, producing some of the most poetically beautiful and self-assured artistic views of the era, such as Poussin’s Walk at Acqua Acetosa (plate 27), a site beloved by French artists for its association with the great seventeenth-century master who drew inspiration for his arcadian landscapes from his walks in the Roman Campagna. Le Dien’s composition, rigorously composed and bathed in atmospheric light, pays homage to his illustrious countryman, the seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin, as well as perhaps to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, who painted an oil sketch of the promenade from a similar position in 1826–28.34 Surprisingly, he never exhibited or pursued photography again after this fruitful trip. Upon his return to Paris, he partnered with Le Gray to print his negatives and perhaps distribute them, producing a series of more than two hundred numbered salted paper prints, including the three illustrated here, Poussin’s Walk at Acqua Acetosa, Landscape Study Near Tivoli, and The Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli from the Piazza del Campidoglio (plates 27, 28, and 29). In the early twentieth century, Le Dien reemerged from obscurity when a few of his photographs with the blind stamp “le dien et gustave le gray” were sold at auction; however, his identity remained a mystery until the scholars Sylvie Aubenas, André Jammes, and Maria Antonella Pelizzari began to recognize and catalogue his works based partially upon his unique style of numbering.35 During the French occupation of Rome from 1849 to 1870, many officers found intellectual and cultural retreat from their martial duties within the resident francophone community, and several of them took up photography, perhaps within the sphere of the French Academy’s influence.

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  35

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 35

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Captain Constant Louvel and Lieutenant-Colonel Louis-Henri-Eugène Copmartin, who served concurrently, frequently submitted their drawings of military life for publication in Parisian periodicals, and their eye for detail translated easily into attractive albumen prints. Louvel, of the Seventh Artillery Regiment, fought in the Siege of Rome and was intermittently active in photography between 1855 and 1862, during his postings in Rome. His waxed paper negative Vegetation on the Pincian Hill (plate 31) shares formal similarities with another nature study of succulent plants by an anonymous French photographer (plate 32), possibly an artist or a member of the military. This example from around 1855 is inscribed “Rome / au Pincio” in the lower left corner. Copmartin’s Via Ripetta After the Flood of the Tiber, 1861 (plate 33) offers a rare view of the baroque staircase of the Porto di Ripetta and the adjacent street inundated with water during one of the city’s frequent floods. Angelo Luswergh and his son Giacomo, Roman machinists and opticians, owned and operated a family factory that had catered to the papal government for generations, manufacturing “precision instruments, military buttons, lead pipes, lightning rods etc.” Angelo was also the commander of the papal firefighters.36 They developed a keen interest in photography, beginning with the daguerreotype in the 1840s, but it was only after Giacomo returned from the Great Exhibition of 1851 full of enthusiasm for the calotype that he and his father established a successful enterprise selling their works through Piale’s English and American Library at 1 piazza di Spagna.37 On January 10, 1855, the Luswerghs published a catalogue of their photographs for sale, the first of its kind in Rome, which featured 131 views of Rome as well as reproductions of art, especially statues from the Vatican Museums.38 Because photography remained a secondary pursuit for the Luswerghs, their work is extremely rare. While reflecting the traditional framing of the veduta tradition, they could often humanize their

work, as they did by adding a young soldier seated below the imposing bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the piazza del Campidoglio (plate 34). The first Americans known to have learned the Roman method of photography are Leavitt Hunt, brother of the famous architect Richard Morris Hunt and the painter William Morris Hunt, and the sculptor Nathan Flint Baker, both scions of wealthy families, whose collaborative salted paper prints are preserved at the Library of Congress and the Cincinnati Art Museum. The two men had lived in Rome at separate times in the 1840s, and Baker had also maintained a studio there. They returned together in October 1851 to prepare for an upcoming Mediterranean tour, with the intent of utilizing calotypy to document it.39 Baker wrote admiringly of the work of the Roman School: “Those [photographs] which I have seen in Rome are beautiful and exceed any engraving which I have ever seen.”40 Their extant Roman oeuvre is technically uneven and may reflect independent efforts prior to entering the circle of the Caffè Greco, while their later Mediterranean works indicate that they had thoroughly assimilated the Roman method. One mysterious Englishman, known only as T. Carr, produced a series of photographs titled Roman Views between 1852 and 1853, accompanied by descriptive printed labels that suggest he intended to market them; however, their rarity today indicates otherwise. His work is unique and suggests a close association with the Roman School of Photography, and while his compositions resemble those of Caneva, his methodology of salted paper prints from albumen glass negatives aligns him more with Constant. The strong horizontal lines juxtaposing the rich vegetation of the garden against crumbling walls in The Cloister of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls (plate 36), for example, is reminiscent of Caneva’s framing of a scene, while the tonal range and strong inky contrasts recall Constant’s elegant style.

36  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 36

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 12 Jane Martha St. John, The Fountain di Trevi, Rome, 1856–59. Albumen silver print from a paper negative, 615/16 × 911/16 in. (17.7 × 24.6 cm). The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 84.XA.760.14.69. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  37

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 37

7/7/22 2:11 PM

The Englishwoman Jane Martha St. John (1801– 1882) probably learned to calotype not from Talbot, her distant cousin, but from the Welsh photographer John Dillwyn Llewelyn, a close family friend. At the age of fifty-three, St. John embarked on a Continental tour with her husband and reached Rome in the spring of 1856. Like most amateurs, she created her photographs for private consumption among a small circle of family and friends, as records of places she visited, and they are therefore extremely rare in the art market.41 Many of

her works are beautifully composed and manifest a familiarity with the traditional veduta genre, while others demonstrate spontaneity and personal style. Some have the feel of a modern snapshot, impromptu reactions free from rigid formality. In her The Fountain di Trevi, Rome (fig. 12), with its axis slightly off center, the viewer feels the excitement of encountering this iconic baroque fountain for the first time alongside this pioneering female photographer.

38  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 38

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Chapter 4

The 1850s

The implementation of a practical wet collodion process by the British sculptor Frederick Scott Archer in 1851 transformed the field of photography and dominated it for the next thirty years.1 Utilizing a glass plate support, a solution of dissolved collodion (Greek for “gluey”) is poured evenly over the surface, immersed in a bath of silver nitrate, put into a sealed plateholder, and placed in the camera. After it is exposed for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, a developing agent is poured over it to reveal the image, followed by water to stop it at the perfect moment, and a fixing agent. From these large glass-plate negatives, an unlimited number of albumenized prints could be made until the plate broke or the collodion surface was damaged. With a precision similar to the daguerreotype and the promise of large-scale reproducibility, the collodion-on-glass process finally realized the full potential of Talbot’s positive/negative invention and was widely adopted. Although simple in principle, the wet collodion could be vexatious in practice—it was prone to streaking, blotching, and attracting dust before it dried. The painter-photographer William James Stillman, US consul to Rome from 1861 to 1865, commented on its difficulty: “The wet-plate with its ponderous and treacherous silver bath, always out of order at the critical moment, and always a mysterious thing in its ways of going wrong, and

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 39

exhausting the patience of the photographer.” But it was, he concluded, “the best thing we had on the whole.”2 A small oval photograph titled The Cloister of St. Paul Outside the Walls with Drying Glass Negatives (plate 38) by Giovanni Battista Altadonna shows two developed glass negatives propped up against the ancient columns of the covered walkway to dry in the sun, a charming image that also suggests the precariousness of early fieldwork. While Caneva was adept at the use of collodion, he rarely deviated from his beloved paper negatives, whereas James Anderson and Robert Macpherson, two British veduta painters working independently of each other, specialized in collodion-on-glass negatives, becoming the consummate masters of this line of photography in Rome at midcentury. They incorporated technical proficiency, which they both learned from Arthur Robinson, with years of artistic training, leading Sutton to declare in his influential periodical Photographic Notes, “I do not hesitate to say that the works of Anderson and Macpherson of Rome have never yet been equaled by Collodion.”3 Further, their innovative business models speak to the professionalization of the field in Rome, marked by increased production, expanded modes of circulation, and growing markets for the reception of photographic imagery. Their iconic albumen prints (as their positives are called) became synonymous with Rome itself and

7/7/22 2:11 PM

by Dunbar from 1846 (Museo di Roma) to demonstrate an artistic parallel between the practices of the two assumed identities.8

continue to influence our perception of the city today. Before any discussion of Anderson can begin, I must correct the misinformation about his life and career that has permeated almost every level of scholarship for the last eighty years and clarify the record. These biographical errors distort our understanding of his life and hinder our appreciation of his singular accomplishments as a painter-photographer and entrepreneur. Much of what has been written about his early life was based upon Anderson family lore that their forefather Isaac Atkinson fled England in 1837, possibly having committed a murder; studied painting in Paris under the nom d’arte of William Nugent Dunbar; and moved to Rome in 1838 under this same assumed name. Then, the tradition continues, in 1845 he devised the persona of James Anderson, the photographer, while maintaining the alias of Dunbar, the painter, until his death in 1877. There is one insurmountable flaw in this narrative, one that I am apparently the first to address: William Nugent Dunbar was a very real Scottish painter who outlived Anderson in Rome by five years.4 This elaborate fabrication about Dunbar/Anderson leading a dual life in Rome for more than thirty years first found credence in Seconda Roma (1943), the groundbreaking text by the Italian journalist and historian of Roman photography Silvio Negro.5 Forty years later, Becchetti embellished Negro’s story by overlaying facts about the real-life Dunbar, such as his exhibition records and studio addresses, in an effort to account for Anderson’s undocumented early years in Rome.6 Then in 1986,

A series of irrefutable sources, such as lawsuits and depositions from the late 1870s and 1880s between Anderson’s heirs and their English relatives, as well as the media coverage surrounding them, have revealed the truth of the matter. Isaac Atkinson, the eldest son of an affluent landholder in Blencarn, England, absconded with a considerable sum of family money and fled directly to Rome in 1838 under the alias of James Anderson in order to conceal his identity.9 Anderson’s apparent absence from the historical record during his first fourteen years of residence in Rome evidently led both his descendants and scholars recklessly to fill the void with the conclusion that he initially had lived and worked under the pseudonym of Dunbar. However, according to the principle of Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation is often best, as indicated by a notice in the Giornale del Regno delle Due Sicilie which states that a “Giacomo [James] Anderson,” a possidente (landed gentleman), had arrived in Naples for a visit from Rome on July 9, 1842.10 If this is indeed our black sheep, it would seem to indicate that his early obscurity owes to the fact that he lived a life of leisure and artistic pursuit with no visible means of income and, therefore, attracted little attention until he adopted photography, not dissimilar to Arthur Robinson’s circumstances. While city guides affirm that Anderson maintained a painting studio at 113 via Tomacelli until 1858,11 more reliable family records indicate that he

the pioneering photography historian and collector Helmut Gernsheim unfortunately validated this ongoing fallacy by extrapolating that an 1838 Roman tailor’s bill with Dunbar’s name on it in the Anderson family archive confirmed his arrival in the city by that date, under that name.7 Finally, Dorothea Ritter, in her otherwise excellent 2005 monograph on Anderson, illustrated two drawings

added photography to his artistic repertoire around 1851.12 This date has been corroborated by Andrea Sciolari through both technical and visual analysis of two of Anderson’s earliest known works, originally from the collection of the Spanish painter Montañés, which he can precisely date to 1851.13 This places Anderson in the waning days of the Roman School of Photography, with which he has

40  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 40

7/7/22 2:11 PM

frequently been mischaracterized as an integral—if not a founding—member by most scholars. Their assumption was based on a ledger of customers that purportedly was begun at the Caffè Greco in 1845, which lists, “Anderson James, Fotografo, Fuori Porta del Popolo no. 18.”14 However, even a cursory examination of the names and addresses in the register makes it clear that it was, in fact, begun in the late 1850s, and that Anderson’s signature occurs among others from the 1860s.15 Thus, while Anderson was likely loosely affiliated with these pioneer photographers—having received some technical training in chemistry from Robinson, his earliest work displays an affinity with the painterly interests and techniques of Constant—he truly belongs at the head of the new wet collodion movement in Rome. Described as the facile princeps of Roman photography in John Murray’s updated Handbook of Rome and Its Environs of 1867 (first published 1843),16 Anderson’s mature classicizing style, evident in works such as St. Peter’s Basilica and the Spina di Borgo from Castel Sant’Angelo (plate 41) and The Claudian Aqueduct and Via Appia (plate 42), involved arranging his compositions to ensure the maximum legibility of minute detail while rigorously maintaining spatial relationships and a breadth of vision in the landscape. The mellow coloration of his albumen prints imbues a timeless, halcyon air that complements and reinforces the symbolic framework of the architecture, as in The Spanish Steps and Trinità dei Monti (plate 43). Anderson’s pictorial sensibility found its ideal outlet in Archer’s collodion process. His commercial success was due in part to the noted German publisher and print- and bookseller Joseph Spithöver, who held the exclusive rights to sell Anderson’s prints at his well-known establishment in the piazza di Spagna (they bear his blind stamp on the mounts). Spithöver’s operation could “forward photographs at a moderate charge to England and the United States, through his correspondents

in London and New York, by which all trouble at the frontier custom-houses will be avoided,”17 making him a significant transnational intermediary between practice and patronage in the rapidly increasing commodification of paper photography. An 1859 Spithöver catalogue listing 561 of Anderson’s works reveals that standard-format prints typically sold for between two to five pauls (with ten pauls to the scudo), while his panoramas sold for two to three scudi. The perennial appeal of Anderson’s photographs and his impressive business acumen established a family dynasty that lasted until 1960. Macpherson, a former medical student at the University of Edinburgh, arrived in Rome around 1840, where he studied art and painted vedute. Like Anderson, he appears to have taken up photography, aided by Robinson, around 1851, initially experimenting with Niépce de Saint-Victor’s glass albumen process before embracing the wet collodion method, at which he excelled.18 By 1854, a correspondent for the London Morning Post commented on the Scotsman’s superior skills: “The shop windows of Rome are crowded with examples of this wonderful modern invention, produced by the above-named gentleman, and Messrs. Robinson and Anderson. Photography is admirably suited for architecture and sculpture; the atmosphere, too, of Rome materially assists the process. I have seen a whole collection of Mr. Macpherson’s photographs and I think I may say we have nothing like them in England. The art is evidently progressing, and we may expect every day to hear of new wonders, which Mr. Macpherson, I understand, is working out.”19 The 1856 edition of Murray’s Handbook of Rome and Its Environs proclaimed Macpherson the finest photographer in Rome and noted that he charged an average of one scudo per print, placing his works at the higher end of the market.20 They advised travelers that prints could be purchased either at Macpherson’s home, located at 4 via de’ Strozzi, or at Flachéron-Hayard’s shop.21 While

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  41

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 41

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Flachéron evidently no longer practiced photography, it is fascinating to consider that, by carrying Macpherson’s works, he conferred upon him his imprimatur. Around 1856, Macpherson (and Anderson) switched from the wet collodion process to a new dry method invented by the French chemist Dr. J. M. Taupenot. The collodion-albumen process, Gernsheim explained, “preserved the sensitivity of the collodion plate by coating it with a film of iodized albumen and then dipping it once more in the nitrate of silver bath, thus obtaining two sensitive layers. After this the plate was dried, and could be kept for several weeks. The only drawback was the length of the exposure which was about 6 times longer than for wet collodion (depending on the length of time the plate had to be kept).”22 Macpherson exploited this long exposure time to his advantage to attain luxuriant dark tones, deep shadows, and emphatic chiaroscuro that characterize his painterly style of photography and are prized by collectors and museums today in pieces such as The Arch of Titus from the Temple of Venus and Rome (plate 44). He himself found “from long experience” that the dry procedure was “best adapted for subjects requiring long exposure,” which depended entirely upon circumstances: “For a distant landscape, in a good light, five minutes was enough; for near objects, ten or twenty minutes.”23 Harper’s Hand-Book for Travellers in Europe and the East described Macpherson for American audiences as the “most conscientious artist in Rome . . . who has brought the art to the highest state of perfection (being also a painter).”24 Macpherson could not have said it better himself, as he always differentiated his cultivated aesthetic from the ordinary merchandise offered at the larger commercial establishments. In the introduction to his 1863 Vatican Sculptures book, he emphasized, “I remain a photographer to this day, without any feeling that by so doing I have abandoned art, or have in any way forfeited my claim to the title of

artist.”25 To reinforce his autonomy and to minimize the risk of his oeuvre being pirated, in the late 1850s he became the sole distributor of his work, advertising that “Mr. Macpherson finds it necessary to state that all his photographs are stamped with his name on the mounting-board. . . . [T]hey are not exposed nor to be had at any of the shops, and are only sold at his studio N. 12 Vicolo d’Alibert, Via [del] Babuino, near the Piazza di Spagna.”26 Although several other English photographers made significant contributions to early photography in the Eternal City—such as Robert Eaton (plate 47) and Francis Frith, both of whom marketed their series to a worldwide audience—Anderson and Macpherson stand out for elevating photography in this era to an equal branch of the arts. Becchetti concluded that, thanks to them and a few of their Italian colleagues, “the photographic view of the collodion quickly replaced engravings and lithographs as souvenirs.” This sea change in public taste and buying patterns displaced many professionals in the traditional print trade, and while some found employment in photographic studios, others faced financial ruin. In 1858 one group of concerned engravers petitioned Monsignor Camillo Amici, the minister of commerce, arts, and industry, to protect their historical craft, but he replied frankly, “Unfortunately, these are the consequences of all inventions and discoveries. What would you have me do? Stop the discoveries?”27 Pietro Dovizielli, a native Roman, operated a successful multigenerational family business, similar to Flachéron’s, that sold artists’ supplies and reproductions of artworks. Located at 135–40 via del Babuino,28 steps away from the via Margutta and the piazza di Spagna, it was a fertile site of cross-cultural exchange among artists, connoisseurs, and collectors. Dovizielli probably had experimented with daguerreotypy and calotypy before switching in 1851 to the wet collodion process, examples of which he sold at his shop. He attracted international recognition for his works

42  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 42

7/7/22 2:11 PM

at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855. As one French commentator remarked, “How not to admire . . . the photographs in warm and luminous tones exhibited by Mr. Dovizielli, of Rome. You can tell that the dazzling sun of Italia supported the artist’s talent; but the latter, in order to convey these sites, these monuments with so much clarity and vigor, has he not made rare use of all the resources of his art?”29 Another writer shared the sentiment but expressed “regret at the still high price of these photographs: 6 francs per print.”30 In 1855, 6 French francs equaled approximately 9 dollars or scudi, which, adjusted for inflation, would equal around 450 dollars today, making them rather expensive indeed. Murray’s Handbook of Rome and Its Environs from the late 1860s through the mid-1870s argued similarly, acknowledging that Dovizielli’s work had “great merit,” but at “high prices.”31 Many of Dovizielli’s photographs are numbered in the negative, while others bear his blind stamp on the mount, but the majority usually are attributed on the basis of his individual style—key aspects of which are his glass plate size and his preference for framing views on the diagonal to emphasize, with a theatrical flair, the three-dimensional volume of buildings and the deep recession of space. His Interior of the Colosseum (plate 50) and The Ponte and Castel Sant’Angelo (plate 51) highlight the sophistication of his gaze by demonstrating the different ways that he was able to convey architectural volume—the vastness of the concave arena in the former and the massiveness of the convex façade of the mausoleum—through the subtle gradations of light and shadow across the forms. As discussed in chapter 2, Tommaso Cuccioni had been a reputable engraver and purveyor of prints and photography since the 1830s, first at 88 via della Croce and then at 18 via dei Condotti. Around 1852, he learned the wet collodion method and quickly gained a high reputation among his

peers. His works are often distinguished by his original approach to familiar subject matter, such as Palazzo Caffarelli with the Tarpeian Rock and the Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli (plate 52) or The Fountain of the Moor in Piazza Navona (plate 53), choosing uncommon points of view that ally him with the painter-photographers of his acquaintance. Cuccioni’s The Inauguration of the Column of the Immaculate Conception in Piazza Mignanelli on December 8, 1857 (plate 54) and The Piazza del Popolo with the Temporary Carnival Racetrack from the Pincian Hill (plate 55) assimilate the proto-reportorial function of documentary photography with the tradition of paintings and prints that commemorated festive events of the Roman calendar, such as Pinelli’s etchings of the ottobrate, or wine harvest, and the Frenchman Théodore Gericault’s painting The Race of the Riderless Horses, part of the annual Carnival celebrations. Murray’s Handbook of Rome and Its Environs for 1858 named Cuccioni, alongside Anderson and Macpherson, as one of the city’s principal photographers and noted that his work was competitively priced “from 5 pauls to 1 scudo.”32 It also praised his monumental city views comprising two or three prints, the biggest of which measured 24 × 40 inches overall, noting, “the large ones of the Coliseum, the Roman Forum, St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s, the Castle of St. Angelo, the Fontana di Trevi, &c., are chefs-d’oeuvres, unique for their size and execution.”33 The Irish author, critic, painter, and sculptor Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald commented on their imposing presence in his travel memoir Roman Candles (1861), remarking that from his apartments above the via dei Condotti, “I look down to the right, and take in the shining sweep of street, the jewelling bazaars, and gaudy scarf shops, and cigar-and-salt temples, and Cuccioni’s monster photographs hung out.”34 At the International Exhibition of 1862 held in London, both Cuccioni and Dovizielli received medals for “general

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  43

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 43

7/7/22 2:11 PM

photographic excellence,”35 thus securing their reputations in the Atlantic world. The German Emil Braun studied archaeology and art history in Munich and Berlin before settling permanently in Rome in 1833, where he became the secretary of the German Archaeological Institute. Braun was a colorful author and amateur artist, and his Panorama of Rome: Taken from the Casino of the Villa Ludovisi was engraved by Carl Sprosse and issued in 1851, while his book Ruins and Museums of Rome was published in 1854. According to Konrad Schauenburg, “He devoted a large part of his time and energy to industrial undertakings such as electroplating, the manufacture of artificial marble, and photography.” Little is known of his photographic activity outside of one inventively composed work, Dolce Far Niente: Self-Portrait (?) as a Contadino (plate 56), that bears his blind stamp “Emil Braun / Roma.” Upon learning of Braun’s premature death from malaria, the German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius reflected, “Braun was a sophist, but possessed of traits of genuine liberality and magnanimity.”36 The Swiss Henri Béguin (who frequently Italianized his first name as Enrico) was a daguerreotypist in northern Italy before arriving in Rome around 1855, where he stayed for five years. It has been proposed that he was loosely affiliated with the Roman School of Photography, based upon his affinity, with Caneva, for depicting models and animals, probably as aides-mémoire for painters. One such example is his salted paper print A Team of Yoked Buffalo (fig. 13), in which the somnolent state of the beasts of burden, lying sheltered from the sun, rendered them still enough to not appear blurry. I believe Béguin’s true talent manifested itself in a series of wet collodion studio portraits of average people seen on the streets of Rome—not professional models. For instance, his Mendicant Monk from Life (plate 57) is inscribed in English on the mount: “Constantly seen in the streets of Rome / any remains of dinners &c &c thankfully received & placed in the

Basket / and taken to his Monastry [sic]. From Life 1858–9.” This humble servant of God, whom most passersby probably avoided, gains here a poignant grace and stature in much the same way the figures in The Wife and Child of the Artist’s Studio Assistant (plate 58) do, with their intense gazes piercing through the lens as if to remind the viewer that they were real people who led dignified lives and were not mere studio props. In The Pencil of Nature (1844–46), Talbot commented, “Statues, busts, and other specimens of sculpture are generally well represented by the Photographic Art; and also very rapidly, in consequence of their whiteness.”37 In Rome, Caneva was granted permission to photograph the sculpture in the Vatican museums in the late 1840s, and in the 1850s and 1860s it became the norm among Altobelli, Anderson, Béguin, Cuccioni, Dovizielli, Fratelli D’Alessandri, Macpherson, Michele Mang, and Enrico Verzaschi to also gain access to the Capitoline Museums, private palazzi, and contemporary studios to satisfy an international market hungry for images of Rome’s rich sculptural holdings, both ancient and modern. Installation views of sculpture in situ in these luxurious rooms speak to the history of taste, and Macpherson and Anderson distinguished themselves as masters for their technical excellence, artistry, and singular commitment to advancing the genre of photographing sculpture. While Macpherson offered only eight photographs of antique sculpture for sale in his 1858 catalogue, including his iconic The Apollo Belvedere (plate 60), his ambition was to document all the celebrated collections in Rome. In 1868, he issued Vatican Sculptures, with 128 images, followed in 1871 by Sculptures of the Capitol, with a staggering 287 examples. Macpherson credited the collodion-albumen process for the sharp contrasts that he obtained by long exposures, explaining, “in some of the sculpture galleries, where the light was deficient, two hours were often required; and in

44  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 44

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 13 Enrico Béguin, A Team of Yoked Buffalo, ca. 1855. Salted paper print, 511/16 × 73/4 in. (14.3 × 19.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  45

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 45

7/7/22 2:11 PM

one or two cases, even an exposure of two days was necessary to produce a good negative.”38 Early in his career, Macpherson tried his hand at photographing contemporary statues in the studios of his peers, such as the American Thomas Crawford and the Welshman Gibson, but these are relatively rare and may have been done as a personal favor. Anderson’s Laocoön and His Sons (plate 61) is a tour de force of midcentury photography of sculpture, a synthesis of didacticism and aestheticism. Anderson seems to have cornered the market for photographing contemporary sculpture and offered a large selection of reproductions of work by a host of artists: the Britons Holme Cardwell, Alfred Gatley, Gibson, Lawrence Macdonald, and Benjamin Edward Spence; the Americans Harriet Hosmer, Joseph Mozier, William Henry Rinehart, and Randolph Rogers; the Italian Giovanni Battista Lombardi; the Swiss Heinrich Maximilian Imhof; and the Germans Wilhelm Theodor Achtermann and Joseph von Kopf. This international array of sculptors working in the cosmopolitan crossroads of modern-day Rome deployed photography as a distribution tool for their work, dispatching exquisitely toned albumen prints of their latest works to a network of influential cultural commentators and proactively generating positive publicity outside the confines of the Papal States. Anderson’s albumen print of Hosmer’s plaster Zenobia in Chains (plate 63) conveys the sad dignity of the third-century queen of Palmyra at the beginning of her exile, as she is marched in a triumphal procession through the streets of Rome, having dared to challenge Emperor Aurelian’s reign.39 Hosmer was an especially astute early adaptor of photography as attendant to her sculptural practice. In September 1858 she sent a photograph of her four-foot-tall bozzetto, or clay model, of Zenobia in Chains to the renowned art historian and writer Anna Brownell Jameson (whose niece Gerardine Bate was married to Macpherson) and asked for her feedback.40 A year later, Hosmer wrote to

inform Jameson that she had greatly improved the statue “by adopting your suggestions and profiting by your criticisms” and enclosed two photographs of the larger-than-life-size original plaster of Zenobia in Chains taken from two different angles, concluding, “I shall leave them to speak for themselves.” She also boasted that the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) had recently visited her studio and asked for a photograph of Zenobia in Chains to show to his mother, Queen Victoria, back in England.41 After vicious rumors spread that Gibson, not Hosmer, had actually sculpted Zenobia in Chains— just one instance of the misogyny directed at female sculptors in the nineteenth century—Hosmer commissioned a photographic portrait d’apparat (ceremonial portrait) posed in front of her Fountain of the Siren at her studio on the via Margutta, where her surroundings help designate her occupation and confer status (plate 64). The American author and diplomat Nathaniel Hawthorne described Hosmer much as she appears in the photograph in his journal entry for March 15, 1859: “She herself looked prettily, with her jaunty little velvet cap, on the side of her head, whence came frizzling out her short brown curls; her face full of pleasant life and quick expression.”42 Gazing directly at the camera lens, arms folded, she stands confidently at the center of twenty-three of her male studio assistants, leaving absolutely no doubt as to who was in charge. The iconographic similarities between the Hosmer portrait and the Fratelli D’Alessandri of Pope Pius IX (plate 65) and his retinue are apparent, as is their shared propagandistic intent.

Coda: Strategies for the Dissemination of Roman Photography to an International Audience; Portability, Storage, and Presentation While it is not within the author’s purview to explore fully the range of strategies employed for

46  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 46

7/7/22 2:11 PM

disseminating, storing, and presenting early photographic views of Rome outside of the Papal States, a word or two must be included as to changing systems among professional photographers, dilettantes, commercial middlemen, and private collectors. As a cosmopolitan center of artists and artisans, Rome was at the forefront of devising and manufacturing ever-new ways to export objects to global audiences. The introduction of the carte de visite, the stereograph, and the cabinet card was instrumental to evolving practices of circulating, viewing, and handling photographs. Their small formats, portability, low cost, and collectibility were the leading factors in their market appeal. Albums and scrapbooks—oftentimes bespoke presentation pieces commemorative of a Roman holiday or military stint—were designed specifically to house a range of photographic sizes and types. Editions of novels, histories, travelogues, and memoirs were issued with blank pages interspersed for the consumer to tip in photographs to complement the text. Rome’s photographic community acted quickly to include these lucrative adjuncts to their commercial offerings. The carte de visite (French for “calling card”) was generated by a special camera with four lenses and a moving plate holder patented by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in 1854. (The cabinet card, introduced in 1860, was basically a larger iteration of the carte de visite.) Eight portraits, approximately 3 1/2 × 2 1/4 inches each, could be printed from one sitting and mounted onto stiff cardboard. These intimately sized albumen prints effectively rendered the daguerreotype portrait obsolete by their precision, convenience, low cost, and portability. They could be passed around easily and assembled in specially sleeved albums. Murray’s Handbook of Rome and Its Environs for 1862 estimated their cost at between five French francs (just over one dollar) for a single example and one franc (twenty cents) each for orders of one hundred or more, indicating that their business model

worked on volume.43 The carte de visite was ubiquitous in the third quarter of the nineteenth century and played a critical role in the self-fashioning of middle-class norms as well as celebrity culture. Collecting cartes de visite on a trip to Rome and having your own portrait taken there functioned to affirm networks of sociability and cultural status.44 Murray’s Handbook of Rome and Its Environs recommended two specialists in the carte-de-visite format: Antonio D’Alessandri at 65 via del Babuino, third floor, and Luswergh at 8 via dei Canestrari, near the Teatro Valle,45 to which we may add Suscipj as a third. D’Alessandri, a priest from L’Aquila, took up photography after visiting the Luswerghs’ studio in 1852, and by 1856 he partnered with his brother Paolo to open Fratelli D’Alessandri, a family operation that survived at different addresses until the end of the 1940s. While they were respected for their landscapes of Rome and its environs, their business model was built on portraiture, especially cartes de visite. Antonio became an official pontifical portraitist known for his large-format albumen prints, such as Pope Pius IX and Members of His Papal Court (see plate 65), featuring eleven advisors (Monsignors Ricci, Tella, Francesco Saverio de Mérode, Eduardo Borromeo, Santo Padre, George Talbot, Pacca, Negretto, Cardinal Gustav Adolf Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, and Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli) around the seated pope.46 The stereograph, based on an 1830s design by the Englishman Charles Wheatstone, essentially simulated binocular vision by setting two images of the same scene, each approximately 2 3/4 × 3 inches, side-by-side on a single mount. Looking through a handheld or tabletop stereoscope (a device with binocular lenses) makes them appear to converge visually into one three-dimensional image. The market demand for paper and glass-plate stereographs was insatiable, and when accompanied by texts, whether issued with the stereographs themselves or from guidebooks, their domestic function was roughly the equivalent of today’s family movie

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  47

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 47

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 14 Attributed to Lorenzo Suscipj, Tableau in the Studio, ca. 1855. Stereograph, 213/16 × 59/16 in (7.2 × 14.3 cm). McGuigan Collection.

48  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 48

7/7/22 2:11 PM

or game night. In June 1855 news outlets reported that Vittorio della Rovere had been granted a sixyear patent in the Papal States for a stereoscopic camera (a camera with two lenses), but he soon transferred those rights to the optician Giuliano Ansiglioni.47 The stereograph quickly gained huge popularity at the hands of Anderson, Ansiglioni, Luswergh, and Suscipj, who became known for their beautifully chosen and composed subjects that could, as Becchetti observed, “compare with views of the same type performed by the best professionals residing in Rome.”48 The stereograph attributed to Suscipj, Tableau in the Studio, richly evocative of religious devotional paintings and memento mori, vies for consideration as an autonomous work of art in the grand manner style of painting (fig. 14). With the advent of paper photography, especially after the introduction of the carte de visite, albums became the storage device of choice among collectors. As in many other areas of artistic manufacture, Rome was well known for its bibliopegy—the art of bookbinding—specializing in vellum covers, gilt tooling, marbled paper, and calligraphic flourishes. As Murray’s Handbook of Rome and Its Environs for 1858 noted, “Rome is celebrated for its white vellum bookbinding, the vellum being manufactured chiefly at Sulmona, in the kingdom of Naples; a 12mo. volume costs 3 to 4 pauls, and larger sizes in proportion. Volpari, No. 69, Via Condotti; Moschetti, 75, Via della Croce; and Bencini, 172, Via Ripetta, are good bookbinders.”49 Albums enfranchised artists, the clergy, members of the military, travelers, and other people of diverse backgrounds to express their individualism and creativity through this transnational collecting phenomenon. In curating a series of photographs—from their selection, sequencing, and written text to their presentation, including hand-coloring, cropping, and collage—these collectors ascribed a larger cultural significance to their

personal experiences, and the volumes that survive intact are windows into the past. Interleaving photographs into books about Italy became a popular pastime in the 1850s after the German publisher Bernhard Tauchnitz and others began issuing small, lightweight paperback editions bound in paper wraps that were ideal for travel, such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Hans Christian Andersen’s The Improvisatore (1835), and George Eliot’s Romola (1863). This Victorian leisure practice constituted another mode of viewing photography and an avenue for consumers to interact creatively with photography—collecting, arranging, embellishing— while expanding traditional notions of authorship and ownership. Bowdoin College alumnus Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) coincided with the mania for tipping images into these books, as described by the Rome-based Anglo-American Times in 1868: This work by our New-England Hawthorne is in great demand by the way not only with the Americans, but amongst the English, for the facilities it affords as a book illustration. At Spithöver’s they keep all the photographs of the localities, pictures and statuary, therein described, and the prepared paper on which to paste them, so that it has become a favourite amusement with the ladies here to buy them, place them properly, and have the volumes rebound in vellum or otherwise according to taste. The Tauchnitz would be the best edition to select for such a purpose were it not for the numerous misprints. If it could be obtained here, that published by J. J. Field and Co., of Boston, would be the finest in every respect. Have you ever read the story? If not you should do so. It is even more entertaining taken in connection with Rome and Roman life than Bulwer’s Last Days of Pompeii.50

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  49

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 49

7/7/22 2:11 PM

The romance became required reading for Americans visiting the Eternal City, as the Anglo-American author Henry James wrote: “It is part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome, and is read by every English-speaking traveller who arrives there, who has been there, or who expects to go.”51 The book centers on artist life in Rome, and the character of Hilda was inspired by Hosmer, whose genius

Hawthorne acknowledged by citing her and Zenobia in Chains in the preface.52 The resemblance of the character of Donatello to the Faun of Praxiteles, which gave the book its name, naturally made photographs of that antique sculpture highly collectible, such as this one by Michele Mang (plate 66), and cabinet card–size images of it were commonly inserted into copies of the novel.

50  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 50

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Chapter 5

The 1860s

The 1860s witnessed the consolidation and commercialization of the field of photography due to the widespread acceptance of the collodion as the preferred process. With no disruptive technologies interrupting the collodion’s rise to dominance, the decade was an era of subtle refinements, streamlining, and professionalization. By 1868, William Pembroke Fetridge, author of Harper’s Hand-Book for Travellers in Europe and the East, declared: “Photography has been brought to a high state of perfection in Rome, and in no city is the art made to render more valuable service. The classical scholar, the artist, and the gentleman of taste in fine arts, who may be unable to visit Rome, are by this means furnished with opportunities to see her monuments and ruins reproduced in all their grandeur.”1 The city’s designation as the capital of a newly united Italy in 1861 made images of Rome more in demand than ever before. Throughout the peninsula, photographs of Rome’s cultural patrimony helped construct a notion of italianità, national identity, that was indispensable over the coming years as the country sought to make Roma capitale not just a promise but a reality.2 According to an adage traditionally ascribed to Massimo D’Azeglio, “Fatta l’Italia, bisogna fare gli italiani”: “We have made Italy, now we must make Italians.”3 The decade also heralded a changing of the guard, as some of the painter-photographers of the

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 51

Roman School of Photography who worked in calotypes faded into the background, paving the way for an emerging generation to make their mark. Foreign photographers flocked to the Eternal City, participants in a continuum of artistic pilgrimages that speak to Rome’s ongoing cultural significance as a repository of the classical tradition and a springboard for individual creativity. According to Miraglia: It is therefore no coincidence that, as had happened or was happening at the same time for all young artists of the most varied nationalities, even for photographers of the first generation—whether they were from Lombardy-Venetia, Germans, English, French, or from other origins—the trip to Rome constituted a fundamental and unavoidable stage, not only because the iconography of Rome, caput mundi, absolutely could not be missing in the repertoires of photographers who aspired to a certain international esteem, but above all because photography looked at the city as a place where they could find “in a greater degree than anywhere else, all those influences which expand the blossoms, and ripen the fruit of genius” and that found their nourishment in the cultural and symbolic values implicit in the universality of the classical world and of the Christian one.4

7/7/22 2:11 PM

With new practitioners entering the field and the proliferation of large international photographic houses, the quest for original subject matter and unique points of view took on new import. Grand Tour scenery expanded to encompass ever more remote corners of the city, surrounding hill towns, and forest interiors; the customs and costumes of the inhabitants also took on additional urgency. After Cuccioni’s death in 1864, his widow, Isabella Bonafede Cuccioni, assumed the helm of the establishment and hired a fellow Roman, Giuseppe Ninci, who possibly had been her husband’s assistant, as the house photographer. Two years later, he broke away and founded Stabilimento Fotografico di G. Ninci at 2 via di San Giuseppe a Capo le Case, where the resemblance of his work to Cuccioni’s— including his equally monumental city views—has led some to speculate that he may have been their primary photographer for much longer.5 A set of two elephant folio albums in the McGuigan Collection, titled Monumenti di Roma in Fotografia, bears the name and address of Ninci’s firm and showcases 122 of his photographs, including some of his finest works, such as Excavations of the Emporio Tiberino (plate 67) and Market Day in the Piazza Navona with the Church of Sant’Agnese in Agone (plate 68). We can confidently date the albums to 1868–71 partially based upon a photocollage titled The First Vatican Council, June 29, 1868 (fig. 15) by Gioacchino Altobelli in the second volume. Inscribed “composed from life,” it incorporates hundreds of individual photographs of the participants at the ecumenical assembly that were cut and combined onto a precise drawing of the south transept interior of St. Peter’s Basilica and then photographed. The albums’ bespoke white leather bindings by L. Olivieri6 of Rome have the papal coat of arms hand-tooled and colored on them, suggesting that they probably were a presentation gift from Pius IX to a high-ranking cardinal at the convocation of the council that would declare the dogma of papal infallibility before adjourning in October 1870.7

Altobelli’s photocollage is but one example of his ambitious approach to the medium—a self-conscious reference to Ingres’s The Sistine Chapel (1814), which was itself a manifesto of the authority of “modern historical-genre painting”8—making him one of the more innovative and visually pleasing of the painter-photographers in this era. Hailing from the town of Terni in Umbria, he was a pupil of the influential painter Tommaso Minardi in the early 1830s before establishing his own painting studio at 48 via Margutta in the mid-1850s.9 After several lean years, he opened a photographic studio called Altobelli & Molins on the top floor of 46 via della Fontanella di Borghese with Pompeo Molins, a friend from his student days. Interestingly, Francesco Saverio Bonfigli’s 1860 Guide to the Studios in Rome only refers to Altobelli—not his partner—as an “artist–photographer,”10 suggesting perhaps a separation of duties. While their financial success derived from their trade in cartes de visite, their high artistic reputation resulted from their large-format wet collodion photographs (either 8 × 10 3/4 in. or 10 3/4 × 15 in.). These seemingly extemporaneous scenes depict a cross-section of society interacting amid the built environment of Rome, as in their The Arch of the Goldsmiths (The Little Arch of Septimius Severus) and the Church of San Giorgio in Velabro (plate 69) and The Fountain of the Triton Covered in Ice, Piazza Barberini, with Figures (plate 70). For unknown reasons, Altobelli & Molins dissolved in 1865, and the two men probably divided their negatives, as Molins continued to issue reprints with his own label over his long career. Meanwhile, Altobelli established his own firm, Altobelli & Co., at 16 via di Ripetta, advising that while he was available for portrait sittings and other commissions, he was devoting a portion of his professional time to experimentation: “He has begun to operate all the branches of photography, with the best means known today and especially in the practice of Portraits, which he personally deals with, both for the artistic and photographic side,

52  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 52

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 15 Gioacchino Altobelli, The First Vatican Council, June 29, 1868, ca. 1868–71. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 101/2 × 171/8 in. (26.7 × 43.5 cm). McGuigan Collection.

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  53

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 53

7/7/22 2:11 PM

with the notice, however, he will generally work every day, except Friday and Saturday, in which he must exclusively deal with other branches of the photographic art.”11 Surely his most significant contribution was his procedure for the combination printing of two equally sized negatives—one of clouds in the sky and the other of a landscape—for which he received a patent in the Papal States in 1866. His application described the process: First of all, the monument is executed to the desired size, with ordinary photographic practices. Having done this, the photographer observes the effect of the light that illuminates that monument, and on the days when the sky presents pictorial clouds, he looks for pleasing arrangements, which if he finds illuminated as the monument requires, reproduces them with photography, making a matrix of the same size as that of the monument. To then join the two matrices, the Artist first prints the monument with white sky, and then transfers the printed sheet onto the matrix destined to make the skies, diligently making certain that the already printed part is exactly covered, and does not receive any impression of light, except that portion of white paper which is reserved for the background. And so that a perfect and complete view is obtained in every part, as can easily be seen from the enclosed specimen, and to achieve this, beyond the mechanical art of Photography, one also needs the artistic part, without which one cannot have the effect you want.12 Altobelli could deploy his invention with great subtlety, as in his The Piazza of Santa Maria Maggiore with a Photographer (plate 71), which may include a self-portrait next to his tripod with an encased glass negative leaning against it, or with sublime effect, as in The Roman Forum from the Capitoline Hill with Moonlight Effect (plate 72), one of his famous “moonlight” views. Altobelli’s

concern for capturing such synoptic realism in his photographic compositions belongs to a larger nineteenth-century phenomenon of interest in cloud and sky studies by painters—from John Constable in England and François-Marius Granet in France and Italy to Frederic Edwin Church in America. Enrico Verzaschi, unlike most photographers of the time, came from neither an artistic nor a scientific background. As a young man, he joined the orchestra of the prestigious Accademici Filarmonici Romani (Roman Philharmonic Academy), founded in 1821 and officially recognized by the papal government in 1824. The Philharmonic was noted for performing obscure or previously censored scores, and in 1857 Verzaschi played the double bass in Saverio Mercandante’s opera The Bravo, loosely based on James Fenimore Cooper’s eponymous novel (1831), a tale set in Venice about political corruption and the oppression of the masses. In 1860, Pius IX disbanded the musical company for being too liberal,13 and finding himself suddenly unemployed, Verzaschi opened a photographic studio, eventually establishing Enrico Verzaschi & Co. in the mid-1860s at 135–36 via del Corso.14 He solidified his reputation at the Italian Industrial Exhibition in Milan in 1871, where one reviewer remarked, “Mr. Enrico Verzaschi of Rome exhibits a large assortment of views of the capital and ancient pieces of art, which in addition to the beauty of the proofs, stand out for their size (20 by 40 centimeters [8 × 16 inches]), as well as their nice tonality; they are a good value.”15 Following acclaim two years later at the Vienna Universal Exposition, he published a general catalogue with thousands of subjects that could be ordered in various formats, from cartes de visite, cabinet cards, and stereographs to his preferred print size of 8 1/4 by 10 3/4 inches.16 Verzaschi’s oeuvre, which is easily distinguishable by either his personal numbering system or his blind stamp, constitutes an encyclopedic visual record of Rome, including many of the new excavations occurring in the Forum and on the Palatine

54  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 54

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 16 Enrico Verzaschi, Pius IX and Victor Emmanuel II Arm in Arm, ca. 1873. Cabinet card, 53/8 × 37/8 in (13.7 × 9.9 cm). McGuigan Collection.

Hill. One unusual example, A Flooded Interior Chamber of the Colosseum (plate 77), is almost surreal in the way he used the mirror reflection of the deluged chamber to create a labyrinthine fantasy. Two of his street scenes, The Palazzo Doria Pamphili and the Corso from the South (plate 78) and Via dei Due Macelli Looking Toward Via del Babuino and Piazza del Popolo (plate 79) are magnificent specimens for the technique of deep focus and one-point perspective. We can garner from Verzaschi’s association with the Roman Philharmonic Academy that he was politically progressive, so it should come as

no surprise that he issued at least one photograph of a satirical cartoon about the pope that reached an international audience. The British statesman and author William Ewart Gladstone even commented on Pius IX and Victor Emmanuel II Arm in Arm (fig. 16) in one of his famous speeches: “The wrath of the aged Pontiff had in fact been stirred in a special way by some abbominevoli immagini [abominable images], some execrable pictures, which were for him most profane. . . . Such is the unheard-of audacity of Italian Liberalism, and such its hatred and persecution of the pope, that a certain Verzaschi, living in the Corso No. 135, had

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  55

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 55

7/7/22 2:11 PM

for several days exhibited to public view a picture, in which the Pope and the King of Italy were—we tremble as we write—embracing one another!”17 Vincenzo Carlo Domenico Baldassarre Simelli stands out as a painter-photographer for his brilliant body of photographs intended for use by artists as well as his wide sphere of influence, both of which require further research. He moved from Umbria to Rome as a teenager in the late 1820s and by 1838 was regarded as a “well-known Perspective Painter”18 whose avant-garde aquatints, which were primarily collected by other artists, foreshadowed his later photographic genius.19 He belonged to the Insigne Artistica Congregazione de’ Virtuosi al Pantheon, known today as the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Letters of the Virtuosi al Pantheon, whose purpose was “to promote the Arts to the greater luster and splendor of the Catholic Religion.”20 Through this membership, he associated with some of the leaders of the Roman art scene, including the painters Natale Carta, Tommaso Minardi, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Francesco Podesti, and Jean-Victor Schnetz, and the sculptors John Hogan, Rinaldo Rinaldi, and Adamo Tadolini. It is unclear exactly when Simelli turned to photography, but in 1857 he was commissioned by the Reverend Fabbrica di S. Pietro to photograph the buttresses of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica to document existing damage ahead of proposed restorations.21 Bonfigli’s Guide to the Studios in Rome for 1860 listed him as an “Artist–photographer” at 509 via del Corso, where “he takes portraits for visiting cards, and has a large collection of photographs representing pictures, landscapes, drawings, classical architecture, etc.”22 Although his cartes de visite are, as yet, unidentified, his artists’ studies—landscapes, nature studies, architectural ornaments, and models—are highly esteemed, as are his cloud studies, such as Cloud Study with Trinità dei Monti (plate 80), which are often mistaken for nocturnes. Peter Galassi observes that his penchant for choosing out-of-the-way corners

and close-up views, as in his Study of an Agave Plant (plate 81), is indicative of a modern sensibility that challenged conventional expectations of picturesqueness and ushered in new modalities for the perception of landscape as something that is fragmentary and fleeting. The snippet of a much larger view is a motif also found in contemporaneous oil sketches that show only partial views of things seen in isolation—“bits,” as J. M. W. Turner famously termed them—that then could be pieced together into larger finished compositions. As Galassi wrote, “These pictures, then, are doubly ‘bits’—for their nominal subjects and for their frankly narrow pictorial scope. This sense of the picture as a detail, carved from a greater, more complex whole, is a characteristic, original feature of nineteenth-century art.”23 Simelli’s fascination with early Christian archaeology led to a fruitful collaboration with John Henry Parker, an English amateur archaeologist and publisher who cofounded the British and American Archaeological Society of Rome and was director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Parker spent every winter between 1864 and 1877 in Rome, where he methodically studied antiquity alongside close friends such as William Long of Balliol College in Oxford, who often joined him on excursions to the catacombs, the aqueducts, or some of the lesser-known attractions, such as The Cloister of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (plate 83), in which Long is depicted. Parker commissioned photographs not only from Simelli but his circle as well, including Francesco Adriano de Bonis, Giovanni Battista Colamedici, Filippo Lais (plate 84), Francesco Sidoli (plate 85), Filippo Spina (plate 86), and the Canadian Charles Smeaton. He first published these photographs, accompanied by his own text, in November 1867 as A Catalogue of a Series of Photographs Illustrative of the Archaeology of Rome, followed by Part II, representing images taken during the winter of 1867–68, and Part III, from the winter of 1868–69—all of which totaled more than 1,500

56  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 56

7/7/22 2:11 PM

images. From 1874 to 1883, Parker released The Archaeology of Rome in thirteen volumes illustrated with more than 3,391 photographs.24 As part of their arrangement, Parker allowed Simelli to keep the glass negatives and sell individual photographs through his studio until 1869, after which they were transferred, until 1872, to P. Brocard at 27 via Felice, and then to Phelps and Co. on the via del Babuino. Around 1880, they were acquired by Pompeo Molins and kept at his studio on the via dei Condotti in the Negroni Caffarelli Palace, where they were tragically destroyed by fire in 1893.25 Simelli cultivated a similar relationship with the French archaeologist Xavier Barbier de Montault, who in 1864 published Antiquités Chrétiennes de Rome du Ve au XVIe siècle décrites par le Chanoine Barbier de Montault et photographiées par C. B. Simelli, illustrated by 60 photographs, which was available for purchase at Spithöver’s establishment.26 This was followed by Exposition réligieuse de Rome 1870. Antiquités chrétiennes photographiées by M. Ch. Simelli in 1870 with 26, and Photographs of Christian Antiquities at Rome and the Neighborhood in 1872, published by the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, which contained 189 of his works.27 Simelli’s unique contributions to the history of photography were generously acknowledged by Barbier de Montault, who commended him as follows: “M. Simelli, in exhibiting such a complete and interesting collection, drew special attention to objects which until then had only been known to archaeologists. Thanks to him, photography became an indispensable aid to ecclesiology and teaches everyone to know and love the Eternal City better, where art speaks so loudly and so eloquently.”28 Simelli, like Anderson, Luswergh, Macpherson, and Verzaschi, issued several catalogues to advertise his vast stock of photographs for sale. The information contained therein, in conjunction with his habit of either labeling or numbering his negatives, has enabled scholars to attribute many of his

works. Confusingly, however, a few of these offerings have been identified as by other photographers, such as de Bonis,29 so it is unclear whether Simelli purchased their negatives or acted as an intermediary or publisher on their behalf. Throughout his career, Simelli often collaborated with his contemporaries, but a recently uncovered mention in the 1865 edition of Luigi Piale’s popular guidebook, Rome Seen in a Week, confirms a brief partnership with Filippo Belli at via del Corso 117.30 A Roman by birth, Belli began as a painter and seems to have taken up photography in the early 1860s, pursuing it successfully for at least the next quarter of a century. His previously known series were of washerwomen or rural laborers performing everyday duties (plates 87 and 88), interiors of the Corsini Palace (fig. 17), and the Vatican loggias. In addition, I now can assign a significant body of views of Rome and its environs, especially around Tivoli, based upon several distinguishing features. First is the uniform size of his glass plates, 7 7⁄8 × 10 1/4 inches (20 × 26 cm). Second, there are unique marks in his negatives made by special clamps used to secure the plate inside the plate holder at three corners; these precise marks31 are clearly visible on all of his known negatives (most of which are preserved in the Fondo Cugnoni, Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, Rome) as well as on untrimmed albumen prints (plates 89 and 90)—and they do not appear in any negatives or untrimmed prints by Caneva, de Bonis, or Simelli. Third, an identification number, ranging from the low hundreds to the four thousands, is written in the same hand in either pencil or crayon on the backs. By establishing these three physical attributes as a sort of virtual signature, I believe that I have greatly expanded the scope of Belli’s oeuvre by several thousand works. In the third edition of Walks in Rome (1872), Augustus Hare’s definitive vade mecum for English-speaking travelers that went through sixteen editions before the Rome-born author’s

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  57

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 57

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 17 Filippo Belli, A Console Table in the Private Apartments of the Palazzo Corsini, 1876. Untrimmed albumen print from a glass negative, 89/16 × 1013/16 in (21.7 × 27.5 cm), glass plate 77/8 × 101/4 in (20 × 26 cm). McGuigan Collection.

58  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 58

7/7/22 2:11 PM

death in 1903, one photographer was singled out: “For Artistic Bits, very much to be recommended, De Bonis, 28 Via S. Isidore.”32 Francesco Adriano de Bonis nevertheless remained largely unknown in twentieth-century scholarship until Bonetti brought him back from obscurity.33 A native Tuscan, de Bonis studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and was learned in chemistry, mathematics, geometry, and perspective. Based on a technical, stylistic, and comparative analysis of some of his first salted paper prints, Sciolari has proven that de Bonis first worked in Rome circa 1850 to 1852.34 The earliest date that I have been able to ascertain for his permanent presence there, however, is 1863, when he was listed in Augustin Joseph du Pays’s popular French guidebook as “photographies.—De Bonis, via Felice, 123.”35 De Bonis’s compositions are distinguished by their tight framing, in contrast to the traditional veduta and panorama formats or even the artists’ studies by Simelli and Belli, and they tend to depict intimate scenes and details around Rome, some with a palpable sense of sfumato atmosphere. Rooftops, Rome (plate 91), which both I and Bonetti believe to be one of his earliest works, is reminiscent of Romantic paintings made from open windows, the vogue for which the art historian Hugh Honour attributed to an increasingly subjective take on landscape: “Providing an ‘accidental’ framework, the artificial opening in the wall helped the painter to abolish the artfully natural structure of the traditional landscape and to depict a segment of the natural continuum literally from his own point of view.”36 I can confirm for the first time that a photograph, which I attribute to de Bonis, The Arch of Titus with the Colosseum (plate 92),37 served as the background for one of the most iconic pictures of the American Grand Tour experience, The Arch of Titus (fig. 18), painted by George Peter Alexander Healy. It depicts the beloved American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, another Bowdoin

College alumnus, and his daughter Edith bathed in late afternoon light as they walk underneath the arch toward a trio of American painters in the right foreground—the bearded Jervis McEntee and clean-shaven Healy looking over the shoulder of the seated Frederic Edwin Church, with his sketchbook and pencil in hand. The photograph and painting match in every respect, including their perspective and the fall of shadows that indicate a specific point of view, time of day, and time of year. Healy had portrayed the father and daughter before and planned to paint a new portrait of the duo in Rome in 1868. Longfellow admired a sketch of the Arch of Titus in Healy’s studio, so the story goes, and so the artist decided to use it in the portrait; however, the evidence of de Bonis’s nearly identical photograph reveals Healy’s original source and begs the question of whether Longfellow really saw a sketch or the photograph. Further, the Longfellows also were painted from a photograph, taken in Healy’s Roman studio in 1868, which was squared off for transfer to the canvas.38 The employment of photographs by painters as aides-mémoire has been discussed, but this situation is especially fascinating for the way in which it underlines how the medium opened up new compositional possibilities and collaborations. As more of his albumen prints are discovered (there are more than two hundred examples in the McGuigan Collection), de Bonis is finally earning accolades as one of the most original painter-photographers ever to have worked in Rome, with a style so recognizable that, to coin a phrase, it can only be considered “de Bonisian.” His early photographs, which he printed himself, typically bear either his blind stamp, “DB,” on the image or his wet stamp, “A. de B,” on the verso of the print or mount (in some cases both). He generally avoided the conventional views established by print culture and instead focused on the essence of his subject—its soul, if you will—such as those published here for the first time (plates 93–95). The influential French critic Francis Wey found de Bonis’s

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  59

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 59

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 18 George Peter Alexander Healy, The Arch of Titus, 1871. Oil on canvas, 188 × 124 1/2 in. (477.5 × 316.2 cm). Collection of The Newark Museum of Art, 1926 26.1260.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 60

7/7/22 2:11 PM

photographs so compelling that he reproduced many of them as wood engravings to illustrate his monumental 1872 travel book, Rome: Descriptions et souvenirs, disseminating the photographer’s particular aesthetic style to an international audience. In 1879, de Bonis published a pamphlet titled I vandali a Roma (The Vandals of Rome), “a sort of manifesto of his photographic work,” as Bonetti described it, although it must be noted that he does not discuss photography per se. De Bonis conducts the reader on a tour of six locations in the city—much as Virgil guided Dante through the nine circles of Hell in The Inferno—that had been stripped of their romantic qualities or outright destroyed since the arrival of the modern-day invaders, the House of Savoy, in a “preconceived plan to take away Rome’s original character.”39 De Bonis demonstrates himself a committed advocate of “Pictorial Beauty,” which he defines as follows: “It is a grateful and pleasant sensation that produces in us the sight of a harmonious whole of extremely varied parts, and sometimes even very irregular, and in themselves not beautiful.” In describing the Jewish Ghetto and the Portico of Octavia, his prose is as remarkably evocative as his photography (plate 96), as he casually dismisses stereotypes about the unsanitary conditions there in favor of its picturesqueness. “Go to the nearby ghetto,” he urges: Can you imagine something dirtier and messier than this?—Nevertheless, along the streets Rua and Fiumara and elsewhere, you will come across some places where a harmony of apparently discordant water fonts, passages, stairs, doors, windows, etc. form views so graceful that, if you are an artist, you will want to sketch a record of it. But if you want something really wonderful, turn around, there at the ancient portico of Octavia. Look at its face—first, it is so mutilated and wedged in between buildings so different in shape and time, it will present you with a painting that you could never tire of admiring!—Then

turn to the left of the same portico, where the old fish market is, and observe those arches; those roofs supported by large beams; those marble ruins reduced to use as benches; those bizarre doors, sometimes made up of fragments of classical lintels; that narrow street, made up of wretched and filthy houses; in a word, that variety of objects so different in every respect, and tell me if you have ever seen anything more pictorial, more enchanting than this?40 De Bonis next instructed his readers, “Let’s turn our thoughts to the once captivating banks of the Tiber,” previously a favorite subject of his, but now shrouded “with so much sorrow” because “we have seen it so spoiled”: Certainly, it cannot be said that the factories of the ghetto, nor those that continue to it towards Ponte Rotto, a few exceptions made, are beautiful, as most of those on the opposite shore were not beautiful. Nonetheless, that combination of irregular and paltry huts, of substructures, of embankments, of ancient ruins, of domes, of bell towers, of towers, of temples, etc. They produced such varied and attractive views, before which you were moved and exclaimed:—“oh! What an enchantment!” Certainly, few visitors to Rome today who stand on the embankments of the Tiber near the Ponte Sisto ever would imagine that factories and mills once congested the river, and that their unique pictorialness was once a favorite subject not only of de Bonis but also of Simelli, as illustrated by the latter’s Wheat Mills on the Tiber from Isola Tiberina with the Ponte Sisto (fig. 19). In the 1860s, three other painter-photographers can be loosely affiliated with Simelli’s circle: the Frenchman Edmond Lebel, the Dane Peter Thyge Boyesen, and the Italian Federico Faruffini. Their work is extremely rare and shares a visual

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  61

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 61

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 19 Carlo Baldassarre Simelli, Wheat Mills on the Tiber from Isola Tiberina with the Ponte Sisto, ca. 1871. Albumen silver print from a glass negative, 75/8 × 103/8 in. (19.3 × 26.2 cm). McGuigan Collection.

62  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 62

7/7/22 2:11 PM

sensibility marked by a personal intimacy with their subjects that is alluring in its timeless appeal. Lebel first arrived in Rome in 1860 with Jules Lefèbvre and Léon Bonnat, with whom he studied painting under Léon Cogniet in Paris. He was heavily influenced by both de Bonis and Simelli, whose work he collected, and adopted a similar style in his own studio practice, as seen in Young Female Model in Costume in Lebel’s Studio (plate 97), which also evokes the work of Béguin in that her straightforward glance invites the viewer’s sympathetic engagement and evokes the sentiment of childhood. During his second stay in Rome, from 1870 to 1872, Lebel made some exceptional views of contadini (country people) in Cassino, also known as San Germano, eighty-five miles south of Rome in southern Lazio (plates 98 and 99). Like Normand before him, Lebel remained largely unknown until his family donated a set of his photographs to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris in 2006. Boyesen, who went by the name Pietro in Rome, arrived around 1855 and was later described by the Danish author Vilhelm Bergsøe as one “who made a living by taking nature photographs for the artists, and photographing the countrymen who frequently visited his studio with its friendly garden and the many strange plants that he used in his photographs.”41 His Study of a Courtyard with a Marble Bust is one of his rare still lifes, shot in a rustic corner overgrown with morning glories that set off a marble bust of an Italian maiden sitting atop a modeling stand outside a sculptor’s studio (plate 100). Faruffini, a struggling painter and engraver from Lombardy, specialized in picturesque costume studies and genre scenes that he sold to tourists and artists. In a letter to the artist Pio Joris, Faruffini bragged: “The day before yesterday at the Caffè Greco, [Attilio] Simonetti told someone you know well that I frame photographs as a painter and that the artist therefore only has little to do; this means that I am too good of a photographer.”42 Perhaps more than any other painter-photographer in Rome in this

period, Faruffini anticipated fin-de-siècle pictorialism in his expressive approach to the new medium.43 Adolphe Braun has acquired a reputation as one of the most influential French photographers of the nineteenth century for the large-format panoramic views he produced, such as The Baths of Caracalla (plate 101). To achieve these marvels, Braun took advantage of the new pantoscopic camera invented by the American John Johnson and the Englishman John Harrison in conjunction with the carbon print process developed by the English chemist and physicist Joseph Wilson Swan, which substituted a layer of gelatin infused with lampblack for metallic silver as the light-sensitive component, thus allowing for a greater tonal range. Many guidebooks, including Baedeker’s Italien: Handbuch für Reisende, referred readers to the photography dealer E. Aubert’s shop at 22 via dei Condotti, the “depôt of Braun’s photographs.”44 Charles Soulier partnered with Claude-Marie Ferrier and his son in Paris between 1859 and 1864 to form the company Ferrier père et fils, Ch. Soulier at 99 boulevard Sébastopol (later number 113), where they specialized in glass stereoscopic views that included a large inventory of Italian subjects. After Soulier left the firm in the mid-1860s, he created a series of exquisite albumen prints with a double matrix system that allowed him to clearly delineate both the landscape and the sky, as seen in Panorama with the Tiber from the Aventine Hill (plate 102). These technical and picturesque masterpieces were issued under his own label, “Ch. Soulier, Photographer of the Emperor,” and published at his Paris address, 141 boulevard Sébastopol. Edmond Behles moved to Rome permanently in the late 1850s, and there he adopted the Italianized name of Edmondo and kept a studio at 28 via Mario dei Fiori and a shop at 196 via del Corso. Beginning in 1857, he partnered with his compatriot Giorgio Sommer, based in Naples, to form Sommer & Behles, which seems to have disbanded around 1867, after which he operated under his own name.

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  63

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 63

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Behles remained active as a photographer until at least 1879, when he last appeared in Baedeker’s Italy: Handbook for Travellers, which advised that his works could be purchased at his studio or at the bookseller Loescher & Co. at 307 via del Corso. Confusingly, the photographic mounts of Sommer & Behles often appear with the blind stamp of one or the other man, or sometimes both, which makes it difficult to establish their exact date or authorship. One example of this by Behles dates from the mid-1860s, The Piazza Colonna with the Column of Marcus Aurelius (plate 103), in which the imposing second-century monument shares the stage in the early morning light with the kiosks and fruit stands that will soon cater to the bustling hordes in the square. The composition shares an affinity with the work of Anderson and perhaps even was intended to compete directly with the acknowledged titan. Three American painter-photographers are known to have worked in Rome during the 1860s: John Linton Chapman, Arthur Dexter, and William James Stillman—although there were surely others. Chapman moved to Italy with his family at eleven years of age, and he and his younger brother, Conrad Wise Chapman, studied painting under their father, John Gadsby Chapman (plate 104), who specialized in landscapes and genre scenes of Italy for an American clientele. During the family’s nearly thirty-year residence in Rome, they rented their apartments at 135 via del Babuino from Dovizielli and were close friends with Robert Macpherson and his family; it seems likely that Chapman learned photography from one or both men. Apparently a hobbyist, as no work without a family provenance is known, Chapman maintained a dedicated photography studio adjacent to his painting room from the late 1850s to 1877, when he returned to America. In addition to his expansive city and Campagna views (plate 105), which are indebted to the veduta tradition in their oval or panoramic compositions, Chapman methodically photographed all of the paintings that he, his brother, and his

father produced. Conrad, who ran away in 1861 to fight in the American Civil War, often admonished his brother for his lackadaisical handling of toxic chemicals and encouraged him to give up photography altogether. In one instance he wrote: I wish I could be with you, look over your negatives, and positives, and last but not least stop up your “[cyanide] of Potassium,” which I am willing to bet is right under your nose. I wish to gracious you would give up the use of this infernal concoction, or photography altogether, one of the two, for I assure you ever since I bid you goodbye at Civita Vecchia, this thing has been uppermost in my mind. I think you stand double the chance of being settled by that damned stuff than I do by Yankee bullets.45 Although photography did pose the risk of chemical poisoning, the profession of painting could be just as dangerous, and John Gadsby Chapman suffered his entire career from what was referred to as the “painter’s disease.”46 Arthur Dexter, the heir to a wealthy Boston family, moved to Rome in the mid-1860s to live a life devoted to leisure and art.47 Dexter was “mio amico [my friend] Arturo,” the dedicatee of the American sculptor William Wetmore Story’s volume of poetry, Graffiti d’Italia, and remembered by Henry James as among “the small, select company of the bachelors of Boston, a group so almost romantic in their rarity that their ‘note’ would suggest, their title verily adorn, a light modern opera.”48 Dexter’s body of work, all of it preserved at the Boston Athenaeum, is that of a dilettante, but he was often capable of very beautiful, intimate portraits of his friends, as well as exquisite landscapes, many taken on the grounds of the Villa Negroni near his apartments—a site not often selected by other photographers. William James Stillman, from Schenectady, New York, studied with the preeminent Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church before

64  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 64

7/7/22 2:11 PM

becoming a Pre-Raphaelite and a close friend of the English art critic John Ruskin in the 1850s. Today, he is best remembered for his 1870 album of twenty-five large prints, The Acropolis of Athens, which alone earns him a high rank in the canon. He learned the rudiments of photography in Boston in 1857, but he mastered it in Rome around 1861 while serving as US consul to the Papal States, having “purchased a wet collodion apparatus from a discouraged Englishman whose patience had given out”; it was regarded at the time as “the highest achievement of mechanical invention in that direction.”49 This was Kinnear’s camera, the design of which incorporated a tapered bellows, rather than the standard fixed one, which made the camera collapsible and, ultimately, more portable for fieldwork. Although I am not aware of any of Stillman’s photographs from the early 1860s, later views of Rome from the 1880s are preserved at his alma mater, Union College, in his hometown.50 Stillman penned a little-known roman à clef set in Rome during the early to mid-1860s, John Manson: A Studio Story,51 serialized in The Photographic Times and American Photographer, in which he chronicled the title character’s struggle to choose between careers. At one point, Manson’s best friend, a Russian painter named Pashkoff, asks him (a thinly disguised version of Stillman), “Why not take up photography? you are so clever with your fingers, and have so much taste and patience. You know MacPherson and Anderson were both painters before they took up the camera, and they are making money by it—a much better income than any of the painters of our set. You could learn it in a month, and we’ll manage the outfit amongst us. . . . After all, it’s nature that you love, and not art, and the camera will give you one side of nature as your pencil never will.”52 We are fortunate to have a unique record of most of the photographers active in the city around 1866, courtesy of a rare census taken by the papal police titled Note on the Photographers, Photographic

Establishments, and Their Assistants in the Various Districts of Rome and published in its entirety here for the first time (appendix 2).53 Although a few names are conspicuously absent—such as Macpherson, who was likely out of town—the census lists forty-four studios in eight rioni, with the greatest concentration in Campo Marzio. Although most of these establishments were patronized only by artists and tourists, as many of Rome’s 180,000 inhabitants lived at the poverty level, these photographers did contribute substantially to the local economy. As Becchetti noted, they employed “photography dealers, plate and chemical product sellers, stationers who provided the supports for the photographs and the albums to contain them, the sellers of frames, the refiners who recycled the waste products of the workshops, the retouchers, often recruited by the most fashionable studios even among the most qualified artists, the lithographers, who prepared the marks to be affixed on the reverse of the photographs, and finally, as can be seen from the accounting books of Isabella Cuccioni, the tinmen who manufactured the tin tubes to ship the photographs without damage in Italy and abroad.”54

Coda: Roman Photography, the Risorgimento, and Unification Through a series of battles and plebiscites, Victor Emmanuel II of the House of Savoy was crowned king of Italy on March 17, 1861. That same month, the Italian parliament declared Rome the capital of the new nation, but before the seat of government could be moved from Turin, there was the issue of Pope Piux IX, whose temporal power was reinforced by the French garrison that continued to occupy the city. In 1864, Italy and France agreed to protect the autonomy of the Papal States in exchange for France’s promise to withdraw its troops at the end of two years, during which time the papal army would be trained to replace them. Garibaldi had made several attempts to settle the

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  65

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 65

7/7/22 2:11 PM

“Roman Question,” as it was known, by marching on Rome, and when the French vacated in 1866, he raised another army and announced his intention to capture the city. When his plans became known, the French returned to prepare for an invasion. To propagandize their state of readiness to an international audience, pontifical authorities granted Fratelli D’Alessandri and Gioacchino Altobelli access to photograph papal military drills and camp life under the command of General Hermann Kanzler at the training grounds at Rocca di Papa, one of the hill towns of the Castelli Romani sixteen miles southeast of Rome (plates 106 and 107). In anticipation of Garibaldi’s arrival, papal troops and French Zouaves destroyed a number of key bridges leading into the city, regardless of their importance or ancient pedigrees—such as the Ponte Salario (plate 108)—creating, in essence, present-day ruins. On November 3, 1867, Garibaldi was summarily defeated by papal and French troops equipped with state-of-the-art Chassepot rifles at Mentana, fourteen miles northeast of the city. Two powerful scenes photographed by Antonio D’Alessandri evoke the horrors of war: After the Battle of Mentana, November 3, 1867, with the Bodies of the Dead Scattered Among Haystacks (plate 109) and View of Mentana After the Battle of November 3, 1867, with the Corpses of Soldiers Lying Along the Road (plate 110). Some historians have suggested that these compositions are reenactments, with soldiers posing as dead figures for the photographer. While this seems plausible in the first image, where the bodies seem staged, I think it less likely in the second, where they appear to lie naturally where they fell, and where D’Alessandri’s cape and top hat hastily cast aside in the left foreground suggest that he quickly scampered up the hillside to compose his shot before the scene was cleared. With the onset of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the French withdrew their troops from Rome, although, in principle, they continued to act as the pope’s protector. However, after the French were

soundly defeated at the Battle of Sedan on September 2 and Napoleon III lost his throne, Rome was left vulnerable and undefended. At this point, Victor Emmanuel II offered Pius IX generous terms to relinquish control of the city, but the pope indignantly refused. On September 19, Italian troops laid siege at the Porta Pia in the Aurelian Wall, where they met little resistance before the pope surrendered and they breached the gate on September 20 (fig. 20). They entered Rome on the via Porta Pia, later rechristened via Venti Settembre in honor of the day when the final piece of Italian unification was achieved. On July 2, 1871, the House of Savoy designated Rome as the new capital of the Kingdom of Italy, taking the papal Quirinal Palace as its official residence while the pope retreated behind the walls of the Leonine City—where he and his successors described themselves as prisoners in the Vatican until the Lateran Treaty of 1929. Thus was set in motion a plan that rapidly transformed the appearance of the city, as developers expanded the urban footprint beyond the ancient walls of the city center—constructing thoroughfares, administrative buildings, and housing blocks where there had once been sleepy side streets, medieval neighborhoods, suburban country villas with their historic gardens and collections, and the disabitato, or unpopulated, semirural areas—to fashion a metropolis befitting a modern European state. The embankments of the Tiber severed the city from its historic waterfront, with its boat traffic and traditional trades, and brought with it the unceremonious demolition of the riverside Renaissance palazzi that Macpherson had lovingly portrayed (see plate 46), the baroque Porto di Ripetta that Caneva had captured in its prime (see plates 15 and 33, and fig. 11), and the Ponte Cestio, an ancient bridge that Mario de Maria (1852–1924) eulogized as a snow-dusted cadaver in a photograph dated February 1, 1888 (fig. 21). Sadly, many of these treasures could have easily been saved, yet the city planners proceeded with reckless disregard, undeterred by protests.

66  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 66

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 20 Fratelli d’Alessandri (Antonio d’Alessandri), The Porta Pia with Figures and Italian Soldiers Studying the Damage from the Attack of September 20, 1870, 1870. Albumen print from a glass negative, 61/2 × 81/2 in. (16.5 × 21.5 cm). McGuigan Collection.

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  67

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 67

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 21 Mario de Maria (Marius Pictor), The Ponte Cestio Under Snow During Its Demolition and Reconstruction, February 1, 1888. Albumen print from a glass negative, 47/8 × 67/8 in. (12.2 × 17.4 cm). McGuigan Collection.

68  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 68

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Painter-photographers were in the vanguard of recording Rome’s fleeting past for future generations, and de Bonis went even further in his Vandals of Rome, in which decried the “vandalic mania of destruction” that was obliterating Rome’s architectural palimpsest: I am not far enough into history to know the causes for which, among so many barbarians who invaded Europe in the distant past, the Vandals par excellence acquired the reputation of destroyers of how great and beautiful it was; I only know that when one wants to express the devastation of a masterpiece, a building, a city, the saying is commonplace, it is vandalism. So, leaving aside the etymology of the word, and according to the simple fact that, in the vernacular, Vandal means stupid destroyer, and vandalism the resulting stupid destruction, let’s see if the work of the Vandals manifests itself in the great changes to which, unfortunately, Rome is subject.55 De Bonis was not alone in his elegiac lament for the Rome of the Italians. It was not just the physical aspects of the city that were under assault but also the social fabric of traditional Roman artist life as it had been practiced for centuries, as bohemian outposts were gentrified by an influx of bureaucrats, politicians, and diplomats; rail travel collapsed time and distance; and the religious calendar gave way to secular practicalities. Rome’s pictorial qualities so cherished by early photographers were fast disappearing, as a correspondent the New-York Daily Tribune noted in 1873: “Twenty years ago this place was far more fruitful, artistically speaking, than now, when the peasants have lost their picturesque costumes and wear as much of Manchester cheap goods as they can get. The absence of the religious shows, the gorgeousness of the Cardinals, etc., has also damaged the trade so to speak. Instead of picturesque effects and glimpses at every street corner there are to be seen modern attempts on all sides,

however poor and feeble they may be, and thus, being in the transition state, it may be said that the city is neither picturesque nor metropolitan.”56 Dynastic photographic houses such as Fratelli Alinari, Anderson, Gustave Eugène Chauffourier, Fratelli D’Alessandri, and Cesare Vasari, as well as smaller firms established by Behles, Giacomo Brogi, Mang, Molins, Roberto Rive, Romualdo Moscioni, Tuminello (who had returned from exile), and Verzaschi, adapted to marketplace realities and became more commercialized, while many painter-photographers struggled financially or abandoned their craft altogether. While Rome continued to attract new generations of painter-photographers over the following decades—such as the Italians Pietro Barucci, Vincenzo Galdi, Mario de Maria (Marius Pictor), and Ettore Roesler Franz; the German Wilhelm von Plüschow; and the Frenchman Felix Thiollier (all well-represented in the McGuigan Collection but beyond the scope of this survey)— its historic status as the center of the international art world was ceded to Paris. The rione of Campo Marzio could no longer claim to be the exclusive domain of artists and the erudite, as poignantly chronicled by the American expatriate painter Elihu Vedder, who wrote to his wife in 1872: Poor old Macpherson makes me feel very sorry. He has been turned out of his home by the rent being raised three times what it used to be and is now outside of the [Porta del] Popolo in a house which would be perfectly charming were it anywhere else. I will tell you how everything has crowded on him when you come—it would take too much room here. There is no doubt that the foreign residents will have to make a break from the Piazza di Spagna—all except the richest ones—for other parts of the city, and I don’t believe they will ever live in such a small quarter as heretofore.57

“The Effulgent Light of a Southern Sky”  69

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 69

7/7/22 2:11 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 70

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Part 2

A Few Questions About Photography in Nineteenth-Century Rome

Frank H. Goodyear III

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 71

7/7/22 2:11 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 72

7/7/22 2:11 PM

“It demands a capability of no ordinary calibre to give these columns and arches the merit of looking something more than historical and antiquarian mementoes. It has been left to photography to picture Rome in such detail as it is not the province of painting to attempt . . . in the light and shade of these ruins there is a sentiment which, with the stern truth of photography, affects the mind more deeply than a qualified essay in painting.” With such enthusiasm, an anonymous critic for an 1862 British art journal praised the Roman photographs by Scottish artist Robert Macpherson. For this writer, painters working then in Rome—and also in Venice—were failing to see the cities in their midst. Too often they pictured the same sites, and too often they lacked an original aesthetic vision. To represent a place such as Rome and its “mouldering grandeur,” one had to avoid “any descent to prettiness.” In Macpherson’s photographs, by contrast, the city had been reanimated. As the critic explained about his view of The Arch of Constantine, North Façade (fig. 22), “on examining it you are struck with surprise at seeing so much that you have never seen before: you never suspected it had been so highly finished and you never dreamt of its perfection of decay.”1 For many, including this critic, photography corrected existing misconceptions and permitted one to see the city with new eyes. In doing so, it transported the viewer before

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 73

the subject itself and reawakened one to the past and present glories of Rome as an artistic capital. Photography arrived in Rome, as it did in cities and towns throughout the Western world, in the work of a small handful of practitioners, many from beyond the city itself. These individuals— including, in the earliest years, daguerreotypists Lorenzo Suscipj, Achille Morelli, Alexander Ellis, and Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey—were fascinated by this new visual technology and its capacity to render faithfully the subjects before their lens. As John McGuigan describes in this volume, within several years, this small band of innovators had grown into an army. Photography expanded exponentially throughout Europe and the Americas in the immediate decades after its introduction in 1839. In Rome, a global crossroads and a city that had trafficked in images for more than two thousand years, the middle of the nineteenth century saw photography become the primary visual medium through which the city was represented and understood, especially by foreigners. Although painters and printmakers continued to picture Rome and its inhabitants, photography was the leading source for images of the Eternal City. These views mediated ideas about the place and helped usher in a new period of tourism. Like other new developments in transportation, communication, and engineering,

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 22 Robert Macpherson, The Arch of Constantine, North Façade, ca. 1851–57. Albumen print from a glass negative, 113/8 × 163/16 in. (28.9 × 40.9 cm). McGuigan Collection.

74  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 74

7/7/22 2:11 PM

photography was instrumental in helping to make Rome modern. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to characterize photography’s impact as revolutionary—at least in terms of the aesthetic depiction of the city. Although its emergence coincided with an important period of political, social, and technological change throughout the Italian peninsula, photographers working in Rome tended to align themselves with tradition. Whether they were from beyond Rome or native to the city, these individuals gravitated toward similar subjects—mostly well-known landmarks from the city’s classical past. Only occasionally during the nineteenth century did photographers use their camera to experiment with how to picture the urban landscape or to discover new themes. As a result, their views shaped people’s perceptions about the sites to see and foregrounded the historic grandeur of this ancient city but did little to challenge the status quo—either artistically or politically. Not unlike their contemporary compatriots in painting and printmaking, they favored an image of Rome that had been fixed centuries before. This conservatism can be attributed in part to photography’s newness and the cumbersome nature of the equipment and materials they employed during the early years of the medium. It also reflects the demands of a marketplace that favored conventional views of the city and photographers’ desire to be accepted within established artistic circles. Rather than striking out in new directions, depicting familiar landmarks within accepted modes of expression became the favored approach of these individuals. What photography’s introduction did accelerate, however, was a subtle yet profound shift in one’s relationship to the city—its history, inhabitants, and built environment. Travelers who made the pilgrimage to Rome to bear witness to its artistic treasures and architectural landmarks were among the primary consumers of these photographic views. They were not the sole audience, for many

artists based in Rome also collected photographs; later, elite families and the Papacy collected as well. Yet it was the visitor from beyond Rome who sustained these practitioners. Travelers tended to collect sets of images, often curating their own selection and assembling them in distinct albums. Different reasons underlie the motivation for purchasing such views, though for many the acquisition of a volume of photographic images served primarily as a type of souvenir—a reminder of time spent in Rome, a means to share the city vicariously with family and friends, and a status object that suggested one’s own cultural literacy and social standing. Photography’s wondrous ability to represent the seen world precisely—combined with its novelty and its affordability relative to other visual mediums—help explain its rapid popularization. Although these images, in fact, dispensed only an illusion of reality, replacing one filtered view with another, they provided viewers with a ready vehicle to experience Rome. Earlier representations of the city in oil and ink could function similarly, yet photography soon outpaced its visual rivals in its capacity to engage a wide audience and to promulgate the fantasy that one was physically there. In paintings and prints of the period, Rome was often a backdrop for conveying narratives about other peoples’ lives. In early photographs of the city, such narratives were rarely present, thus providing the viewer with a blank stage on which to enact or reenact their own experiences. Whether one had traveled to Rome or not, photographic views allowed for such imaginings. Photography’s entrance into Rome in 1839–40 coincided with a turn in visual and literary representations of the city—begun in the previous century—that increasingly foregrounded the subjective experience of the individual in the present moment. In the popular prints of Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the poetry and prose of the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,

A Few Questions About Photography  75

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 75

7/7/22 2:11 PM

the English poet Lord Byron, and the French author Madame de Staël—to name only a few influential voices—Rome became a site to embark on a type of imaginary adventure into the past. Although academic study of Rome’s many-layered history remained in vogue in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, visitors came to see and measure the city on their own terms. Photography was well suited to the spirit of Romanticism, the term critics used to characterize this new movement in art and literature. Not unlike a Piranesi etching or a Byron poem, a well-crafted photograph carried one to places and objects long recognizable in the Western world. By permitting individuals an eyewitness view into the past, photography had the effect of transforming its subjects into easily digestible icons of culture. Alongside other developments in transportation and hospitality that were impacting travel on the Italian peninsula, photography helped precipitate a new age of consumerism in Rome—a hallmark of the modern tourism phenomenon. Rome was a vital and early center of activity for photography. Previous scholarship has focused especially on the histories of individual photographers who practiced there and the representation of specific sites throughout the city.2 McGuigan’s research further extends an understanding of the lives and photographic achievements of this diverse group of practitioners. Benefiting from these foundational studies, this essay seeks to address a set of questions about the aesthetic ambition, historical context, and cultural significance of these views. What occurred in Rome was not unique, for early photographic endeavors had a profound influence in other places throughout Italy and beyond.3 Yet, during the tumultuous period in the city’s history that resulted in the birth of a unified Italian nation, photography helped shape a new understanding about the city. This essay poses a series of pertinent questions that require attention when considering these works. Although these are not the only inquiries that such work precipitates, the ones I have

chosen allow an opportunity to probe further into the origins and influence of these views.

1. How do these early photographs compare with other views of Rome from this and earlier periods? How does this work relate to the prints of Piranesi and the veduta tradition? To see Rome for the first time through the new medium of photography was a revelatory experience. Though one may well have known the city from time spent there, observing it in a series of photographs provoked a sense of surprise along with familiarity. With its ability to place the viewer directly before a chosen subject and to stop time, photography gave many the impression that they were witness to an unmediated encounter. Gazing at a photograph rich with detail, viewers could imagine themselves there, striding through wide plazas, gazing into open doorways, and encountering historic landmarks. Similar to recorded voices or music on a phonograph—an invention introduced in 1877 that reshaped the experience of sound—photography transformed how one saw and understood the seen world. While these images were indeed new to the world, artists had created careful renderings of Rome and its environs for almost two centuries prior to photography’s introduction. Many did so cognizant of the thriving market for such views. With the emergence of the Grand Tour in the early eighteenth century, painters, printmakers, and sketch artists supplied attractive likenesses of Rome’s famed buildings and panoramic vistas to a class of travelers who understood the trip as a pilgrimage to the city then widely seen as the cradle of Western civilization and the Christian church. While the tradition of such urban landscapes— known as vedute, or views—originated in Flanders, it reached its apogee in Italy. For many artists, topographical accuracy was a primary characteristic of

76  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 76

7/7/22 2:11 PM

such paintings, prints, and drawings. As the genre evolved in the early nineteenth century, some pursued a more individualized style, creating cityscapes that included certain personal marks of the artist, yet the goal was always a faithful rendering of the landscape and the built environment. Photography emerged as the vogue for views of the city was in its full maturity. A comparison of early photographs of Rome’s cityscape to the landscape imagery created by other artists reveals the important influence that this seasoned genre had for photographers. Familiar with these views, photographers sought out the same sites and often the same perspectives as their artistic brethren. Like painters and printmakers, they sometimes incorporated staffage, or strategically placed figures, before their chosen subjects in order to provide a sense of scale and lend the view a human element. In some instances, they also tried to imitate the dramatic lighting that was common to veduta painting and prints, though they struggled—at least initially—to produce similar night scenes or cloud-filled skyscapes because of early photography’s technical limitations. Juxtaposing the work of these new photographers with the prints of Piranesi makes the affinity between photography and printmaking especially evident. While many artists created views of Rome, Piranesi was the unparalleled leader in this field during the eighteenth century—in part because of his authority as an artist, an architect, and an archaeologist, but also because of the large quantity of views he created.4 Born in Venice, Piranesi settled in Rome in 1740 at age twenty, and over the next thirty-eight years created more than one thousand etchings associated with Rome and its environs. His views remained important and in wide circulation by the time of photography’s introduction, more than sixty years after his death. Comparing a salt print of the Pantheon by Angelo Luswergh and his son Giacomo (fig. 23) with Piranesi’s view of the same site created a

century earlier (fig. 24) suggests the influence he had on them and other photographers of the period whose work centered on historic architecture. In the choice of subject matter, composition, perspective, and elevation, the Luswerghs created an image that shared great similarities with Piranesi’s earlier print. Whether they borrowed knowingly or not cannot be confirmed, though no early photographer in Rome could escape Piranesi’s legacy. In fact, many were guided in their work by his example and aspired to create sets of images that might rival the demand by consumers. A close inspection of both views reveals broad similarities along with notable differences. These discrepancies are, in part, the result of decisions by the respective artists. While Piranesi was a trained architect who was known to employ a camera obscura and take measurements of the buildings he depicted, he was also an early Romantic whose etchings reveal many artistic interventions. In his print of the Pantheon, he manipulated the building’s scale, heightening its columns and central dome; added or accentuated decorative elements and inscriptions on the building; and populated the foreground scene with several dozen individuals, all engaged in one activity or another. To focus attention exclusively on this famed building, he also deleted altogether the early eighteenth-century fountain and Egyptian obelisk located in the plaza directly outside the building’s entrance; to enhance its monumentality, he reduced the size of the adjacent buildings. To capture the building in its entirety, the Luswerghs could not remove this fountain or the three kiosks that appear in the foreground. They also had to contend with early morning lighting challenges that left the right side of the Pantheon and much of the entrance portico entirely in shadow. Athough photography was known for its capacity to render subjects accurately, photographic images of this period were not able to describe every element as legibly as a printmaker

A Few Questions About Photography  77

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 77

7/7/22 2:11 PM

Figure 23 Angelo Luswergh and Giacomo Luswergh, The Pantheon, ca. 1852–54. Salted paper print, 87/8 × 121/8 in. (22.7 × 31.7 cm). McGuigan Collection. Figure 24 | opposite Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View of the Pantheon of Agrippa, ca. 1755. Etching on paper, 183/4 × 273/4 in. (47.63 × 70.33 cm). Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Accession Number 1954.1.5.

78  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 78

7/7/22 2:11 PM

who was intent on reproducing a certain detail. As such, many of the inscriptions that appear in Piranesi’s print are more difficult to read or largely missing in the Luswerghs’ photograph. Their goal was similar to Piranesi’s—to create an image that celebrated this ancient building—though important differences in the two mediums led to notable differences in the resulting images. Photography did not immediately challenge painting, printmaking, and drawing, for many of the earliest photographic images were small in size, limited in quantity, and—like the Luswerghs’ photograph of the Pantheon—possessed qualities that made them different from, and in the estimation of some inferior to, works in other more established

artistic mediums. Yet within a decade of its introduction, the photographic image had become the leading visual technology for representing Rome and its inhabitants. Many factors account for this trend. As improvements in cameras and other equipment advanced, the size and reproducibility of photographs grew and costs declined, enabling the medium to solidify its hold on public audiences. Photography would never entirely replace other views of the city, though it did precipitate a sea change in the marketplace for images of Rome. Photographic vision—selectively framed, monochromatic, and incontestable—became the dominant way of seeing the Eternal City and the larger world.

A Few Questions About Photography  79

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 79

7/7/22 2:11 PM

2. What relationship did this mix of photographers in Rome have with contemporary artists and writers of the city? What was the aesthetic ambition of these early photographers? In Europe and beyond, the relationship between the first generation of photographers and the wider community of visual artists differed from place to place. In some cities, including such artistic centers as London and New York, photographers had little standing in or access to the social and professional circles that painters and sculptors maintained. Many dismissed photographers as lacking in fine art training and unengaged with the same concerns as artists in other mediums. They were perceived either as commercial image-makers, meeting a demand among middle-class audiences for portraits and other saleable images, or as technologists engaged in scientific pursuits. When photographers exhibited their work, they did so with other photographers. Although exceptions existed, painters, sculptors, and draftsmen generally tended not to cross paths regularly with them. In Rome, this separation was less pronounced. While photographers did not exhibit alongside artists working in other mediums, they were more integrated into the wider artistic and literary community. Distinctions existed, yet there was greater fluidity and exchange. This relative openness was due in part to the large number of individuals in Rome who pursued work as artists and/or photographers. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American writer who moved to Rome with his wife Sophia Peabody in 1858, remarked on this critical mass in his novel The Marble Faun: “One of the chief causes that make Rome the favorite residence of artists . . . is, doubtless, that they there find themselves in force, and are numerous enough to create a congenial atmosphere. In every other clime, they are isolated strangers; in this Land of Art, they are free citizens.”5 Although not a photographer himself, Hawthorne had for more than a decade

been interested in photography, and he collected photographic views of Rome’s ancient ruins during the year and a half he lived there. As a writer who sought to portray accurately the places where his writings were set, it is notable that he encouraged a special edition of The Marble Faun—issued in 1860 by the German publisher Christian Tauchnitz— that included blank pages on which readers could insert photographs of historic sites, artworks, and monuments described in his novel. Hawthorne was one of the first fiction writers to bring out a book that could be illustrated with photographs. This type of collaborative exchange was uniquely facilitated by Rome’s creative circles. Significantly, many of the early photographers working in Rome had either been painters, sculptors, or draftsmen in the past or continued to pursue such work alongside their photographic practice. Given the centrality of the visual arts there, the city fostered an atmosphere in which work in a new medium, such as photography, might coexist—even thrive—amid work in more traditional mediums. Leading photographers in Rome, such as Gioacchino Altobelli, James Anderson, Giacomo Caneva, Frédéric Flachéron, Calvert Jones, Robert Macpherson, Pompeo Molins, and Carlo Simelli, all had experience as painters. They settled in Rome to pursue artistic work, and while there they found the inspiration to learn photography. For many, photography became their main creative outlet. Although each of these artists followed their own path to photography, the example of Frédéric Flachéron offers a typical example. Raised in a family of artists in Lyon, France, Flachéron studied painting, sculpture, and engraving in Paris as a young man. He moved to Rome in 1839 after being awarded second place in the engravings category of the French Academy’s Prix de Rome, which funded an extended stay in the Eternal City. Immersing himself in the circle of French artists who were then in Rome—many of whom were associated with the French Academy in Rome—Flachéron

80  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 80

7/7/22 2:11 PM

discovered photography and began making calotype views in 1848. The Forum with the Column of Phocas, the Arch of Septimius Severus, and the Church of Saints Luke and Martina (plate 20) is characteristic of the widely popular photographic practice that emphasized depictions of Rome’s famed architecture. In this salt print, he brings together in a single view four distinct landmarks, or at least some part of those landmarks. This dynamic grouping suggests the relationship of each to the other, though it also conveys the visual excitement that awaited visitors in every corner of the city. Although Rome was rarely deserted, no people are visible in the view; the only indication of a human presence is a line of clothes drying in the sun. The photograph invites viewers to imagine themselves there. Flachéron was not unique in crafting street views that included an assortment of Roman monuments; many other photographers as well as artists working in other mediums created similar compositions during this and earlier periods. His salt print reflects an active dialogue that existed between image-makers in Rome. Flachéron exhibited his photographs on several occasions, though ultimately he turned away from photography in 1853 to focus his efforts on running Flachéron-Hayard, an artists’ supply store located on the piazza di Spagna and founded by his father-in-law. His example demonstrates a tendency among many in Rome who pursued photography in the first decades after its introduction: they saw it as one of several visual mediums worth employing in their artistic engagement with the city. Various arts-oriented businesses and organizations also contributed to this easy intermixing. Flachéron-Hayard was one such place where artists and photographers met not only to acquire supplies but also to learn from one another. This same neighborhood was also home to various cafes, including most famously the Caffè Greco, a bar opened in 1760 on Via dei Condotti where generations of artists and writers—both native

and foreign-born—congregated. Most famous for attracting such cultural luminaries as the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the English poet Lord Byron, and the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, the Caffè Greco became a place where many early photographers also found respite. In an 1852 essay about photography in Rome, the British author Richard W. Thomas recommended the bar to “any one visiting Rome, with the intention of following this absorbing pursuit . . . [there] he will soon recognize his own vernacular in the conversation of those in the central compartment.”6 The presence in Rome of the French, Spanish, and British academies also fostered productive interactions between artists and photographers. Established by these nations for the benefit of their fellow citizens who pursued careers in the arts, the academies provided—in varying degrees—formal artistic instruction in different mediums. While photography was not taught in the nineteenth century, artists who worked with photography were involved in the activities, professional and social, that happened there. After the medium’s introduction, photography was regularly used to create group portraits of the visiting artists who resided in Rome. A salt print created in 1849 depicting a group of artists at the Spanish Academy indicates the presence of photography at that institution (plate 8). In this image, Italian photographer Giacomo Caneva stands amid this group of painters and sculptors. Trained as a painter, though primarily working at the time as a photographer, Caneva felt welcome in wider artistic circles. As in the past and in other cities, rivalries shaped the contemporary art marketplace in Rome. During this period, photography affected the image economy, especially among printmakers and sketch artists. It added a competing product and led many artists to rethink the conventional strategies for picturing the city and its inhabitants. Notable artistic innovations, such as colored images and new subjects, were introduced as photography’s

A Few Questions About Photography  81

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 81

7/7/22 2:11 PM

influence grew. Yet this competition neither held back the flourishing of a broad photographic community nor cut off interactions between artists and photographers. No mere outsiders, photographers learned much from the other image-makers of the city and in turn contributed significantly to Rome’s reputation as an artistic capital.

3. How was the ancient past understood by photographers of this period and by those who purchased their photographs? While most photographers were cognizant of the work being done in other artistic mediums, they did not necessarily create photographs that followed in lockstep with those traditions. For example, photographers in Rome were not especially drawn to religious themes, which were among the primary subject matter of artists associated with the Nazarenes, the Pre-Raphaelites, and others in nineteenth-century Rome. Photographers did create portraits of the pope and other Vatican officials and did document St. Peter’s and other churches, but they generally did not invest these images with any overt religiosity. In the city that was the capital of the Catholic Church, this relatively mute response was notable. Nor did photographers capture— except on rare occasions—the festive pageantry associated with the city. In part, they passed over such parades and popular entertainments because early camera equipment did not lend itself to capturing the movement of large crowds or nighttime scenes. Instead, photographers were more apt to produce work that aligned with the interests of the city’s increasingly secular visitors. What most attracted these visitors was Rome’s classical past. Unlike other cosmopolitan European cities such as Paris, London, and Milan, Rome permitted one to travel across more than two millennia. Through a tour of the city’s art and architecture, visitors could

commune with the perceived origins and historical development of Western civilization. Doing so was not an exercise merely for the casual dilettante, but rather an opportunity for profound reflection about one’s own moment—and one’s own place in the world—relative to a past that many understood as a glorious ideal. Seeing what remained of the classical world and how subsequent generations built on top of that legacy, both literally and figuratively, put the present into a wider perspective. For centuries before photography’s introduction, visitors marveled at Rome’s ancient ruins. In the eighteenth century, the rise of archaeology as a scientific practice and art history as an academic discipline heightened interest in the past and fostered a neoclassical rebirth that influenced art, literature, fashion, travel, and more. Arriving in Rome in 1755, the German historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann began studies that transformed understanding of the cultural achievements of the ancients and canonized select artworks and buildings. His 1764 book The History of Art in Antiquity became a classic of European literature. Begun during the same period, the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum—two ancient cities outside Naples—prompted international interest and popularized travel to the southern half of the Italian peninsula. There one could see the freshly unearthed remains of a once-flourishing world, frozen in place since the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 ce. Excavations there and at other sites continued into the nineteenth century and, in many cases, are still active today.7 Although numerous ancient sites in Rome appealed to foreign travelers, none was as revered as the Colosseum, the large oval amphitheater built in the first century ce that was being excavated after centuries of neglect. No visit was complete without time spent there. Travel writers inevitably remarked on the site, and poets created new work inspired by it. American author Mark Twain visited Rome for only four days in 1867 and described the

82  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 82

7/7/22 2:12 PM

ancient structure’s significance: “More vividly than all the written histories, the Coliseum tells the story of Rome’s grandeur and Rome’s decay. It is the worthiest type of both that exists.”8 For Twain, like many writers of the period, the Colosseum was as notable for what it revealed about the passage of time as for what it suggested about those who built it. Artists gravitated to the site with equal enthusiasm. Together, they transformed the site into the preeminent icon of Rome’s past glory and present-day romance. When photographers represented the Colosseum—and nearly every early photographer did—they were obliged to reckon with this history. Many envisioned the Colosseum as other artists had in the past, accentuating the massive scale of the structure and observing the crumbling stonework and abundant vegetation evident on its interior and exterior. Although photographers owed much to their predecessors, they also created images that were distinctively their own. Not only could photography picture elements of the building in greater detail and with greater accuracy, but it could also create the types of aesthetic dreamscapes that resonated with contemporary travelers. An interior view of the Colosseum by Gioacchino Altobelli, a former landscape painter who experimented with ways to make clouds visible in his photographs, conveys well this pictorial mode (fig. 25). Altobelli foregrounds two well-dressed tourists and five others amid the interior of this ancient building—site of former gladiatorial contests, animal hunts, and other grand public entertainments before the fall of Rome. Although clouds appear in the sky, a strong afternoon light casts shadows on the ground while fully illuminating the structure that rises behind them. In this view, the figures become actors on a stage, with the Colosseum’s decaying interior serving as a dramatic backdrop. Such images by Altobelli and others permitted viewers to envision certain popular narratives set at the Colosseum and to imagine themselves there.

Painters and printmakers sought to achieve similar qualities in the pictures they created, though photography’s ability to present a subject in a transparent, supposedly unmediated manner helped make it the visual medium increasingly most favored by travelers. Throughout the nineteenth century and later, Rome’s buildings were the most common subject for photographers. These immobile edifices were relatively easy to capture, and photographers demonstrated much creativity in picturing them from different perspectives and in different lights. For many, they were portals that provided stories about ancient history as well as lessons for the present. Given the widely shared belief in the cyclical nature of history, the past was understood as a harbinger of the future, and travelers endowed such structures with significance beyond their formal beauty. Early photographers in Rome were quick to supply views that might faithfully represent that history and cater to this specific clientele. Human activity in the present and modern buildings and technology were seen as less important than the grandeur of the past—a perspective that helps explain the relative paucity of views that document the people of Rome or address the social and political issues of the day. For travelers, much of Italy seemed fallen, after the perceived decline over many centuries from the heights of classical splendor. Holding on to that ancient past fueled this new photographic tradition.

4. To what degree did these photographs uphold the idea of Rome as a global crossroads, or did they render invisible that diversity? When the American abolitionist and social reformer Frederick Douglass visited Rome for the first time in 1887 with his wife Helen Pitts, he was impressed—like so many before him—by the city’s “ancient greatness.” Recalling the thick walls of

A Few Questions About Photography  83

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 83

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Figure 25 Gioacchino Altobelli, Interior of the Colosseum with Figures, ca. 1865. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 101/2 × 15 in. (26.6 × 38.1 cm). McGuigan Collection.

84  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 84

7/7/22 2:12 PM

the Pantheon in his autobiography, he remarked that “it tells of the thoroughness of the Romans in everything they thought it worth their while to undertake or to be or to do.”9 For Douglass and others, Rome’s built environment was the foundation on which the city’s reputation rested, and he was excited to see its many famous sites. As one who had devoted his life’s work to the cause of racial equality in the United States, Douglass also came to Rome eager to observe the workings of a diverse, multicultural metropolis. He understood that Rome had been, for centuries, a crossroads within the Mediterranean world and that its “greatness” as a civilization was in part rooted in its racial and ethnic complexity. Rejecting assumptions about the whiteness of ancient Rome and its supposed racial purity—ideas that were current then in America and elsewhere—Douglass believed that Rome’s example might provide lessons for the United States as it grappled with the legacy of slavery in the years after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Throughout the written account of his visit, he called out signs of intermixing cultures and the influence of African and Middle Eastern societies.10 Douglass was attuned to this history and deliberately looked for it. Yet most visitors to Rome were less interested in the dynamic population in their midst. They celebrated the city’s ancient ruins and artistic masterworks but found its people, by comparison, especially its current population, not as worthy of attention. Early photographers in Rome were also less interested in the present moment and only infrequently included individuals in their compositions. When people do appear—often as staffage in larger cityscapes or in traditional folk costume—they seem almost like apparitions from some distant past. Hawthorne noted during his Roman sojourn in 1858–59 the belief held by many travelers that the current citizenry was relatively inconsequential compared to those from the ancient past. In The Marble Faun, his novel set in modern Rome about the tribulations of three artists

and an Italian count who resembles Praxiteles’s famed sculpture of a faun, the narrator remarks: “The very ghosts of that massive and stately epoch have so much density, that the actual people of today seem the thinner of the two, and stand more ghostlike by the arches and columns, letting the rich sculpture be discerned through their ill-compacted substance.”11 Some travelers, including Hawthorne, sought to learn more about and engage with contemporary Rome, though most favored the ancient past. While many photographers presented their catalogue of images as a comprehensive survey of the city, they privileged certain sections and subjects over others. Not surprisingly, those areas with the greatest concentration of landmark structures took center stage in their photographic record. Of the thirteen rioni, or districts, in Rome, only three were frequented regularly by early photographers. Romans lived throughout the city, but the many photographers who were intent on picturing the built environment only occasionally pictured them or their homes. Their priorities centered not on the city’s residents but rather on the cause of historic preservation. By creating views of ancient structures, they believed they were making a record of such sites for posterity. While some photographers maintained an active business in portraiture, Rome was best known for its buildings. Nevertheless, many historic places and populations went largely undocumented. The Roman Ghetto in Rione Sant’Angelo was one such neighborhood. Although centrally located along the banks of the Tiber River, this poor, predominantly Jewish enclave was home to more than 3,500 inhabitants by the middle of the nineteenth century. A notable Jewish population had lived in Rome for more than 2,500 years, though since a decree of the Papacy in 1555, it had been required to exist confined within this quarter.12 While the ghetto had long been a part of Rome’s history, artists and photographers rarely ventured inside. The Arch

A Few Questions About Photography  85

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 85

7/7/22 2:12 PM

of Octavius—an ancient monument constructed around 28 bce—served as one of the few entries into the ghetto and was one of the only sites in this section of the city that early photographers ever represented. Francesco Adriano de Bonis’s photograph from the late 1850s is typical of such views (plate 96). No people appear in this image, nor are there any obvious signs of the fish market that had long existed there. Only the ancient arch itself is pictured, having deteriorated significantly over the centuries and surrounded by more recently constructed buildings. The photograph is a testament of the monument’s survival and a record of its current state. What is missing, however, are the people who lived there. Also mostly invisible in the nineteenth-century photographic record is another even larger segment of Rome’s population: members of the clergy. Until the political unification of Italy was completed in 1870, the Catholic Church wielded both religious and secular authority over the city. Travel writers regularly noted the ubiquity of the clergy throughout the city. Yet, apart from formal portraits of Vatican leaders, they appear infrequently or only in the margins of photographic images. This relative absence was not new to photography but reflects a historic pattern in Rome’s visual culture that downplayed the importance of those who served the Papacy. It may also indicate the success that many clergy had in avoiding the photographer’s gaze. Beyond the figures who occasionally appear in an image to provide a sense of scale, the only individuals who regularly captured photographers’ attention were the traditionally costumed country dwellers who frequented the city during market days. Giacomo Caneva’s photograph of a young shepherdess exemplifies this tradition (plate 13). This young contadina—who wears a patterned country dress and lovingly holds a kid goat in her lap—is pictured close up, with few details in the foreground or background to provide any wider

context. In Caneva’s image, she epitomizes the simple rustic elegance that many travelers associated with young Italian women; she is not so much an individual but rather a type. Painters and printmakers had long made similar portraits for a ready market of consumers transfixed by the myth of Rome’s arcadian past. While certain photographers pictured individuals in different costumes to indicate the variety of Italy’s cultural heritage, few tried to represent more systematically—as they had in surveying the city’s ancient buildings—the broad and diverse population that constituted nineteenth-century Rome.13 Because of this singular focus, the demographic complexity of contemporary Rome is largely missing in the photographic record of this period. As much went unpictured, existing assumptions held by foreign visitors about the relative ethnic homogeneity of Romans and Italians remained largely intact. Rather than marking Rome’s diverse cosmopolitanism—that quality that Douglass sought—these image-makers tended to further, often quite unconsciously, age-old attitudes about the city and its population.

5. Were the photographs meant to support and/ or have the effect of supporting the campaign for Italy’s unification? How did photographers respond to the dramatic political and social changes in their midst? As historians have chronicled thoroughly, the three decades after photography’s introduction in 1839 were a tumultuous period in Rome and throughout the Italian peninsula. This era was marked by various military conflicts and changes in political leadership, determining the form of government that would govern the city and, beginning in 1861, the newly unified nation. Led by Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, secular forces attempted to establish a Roman republic in 1849

86  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 86

7/7/22 2:12 PM

but were defeated. After fourteen centuries in control, the Vatican—then under the leadership of Pope Pius IX—maintained its authority, though doing so required an alliance with French president Napoleon III (emperor after 1852) and the presence of a French garrison. The Risorgimento—as the decades-long nationalist movement came to be called—continued despite this defeat and gave rise to various republican uprisings with the goal of unseating the Papacy’s civic authority; uniting the different, long-independent Italian provinces; and establishing Rome as the nation’s capital. Although a new Kingdom of Italy, under the leadership of King Victor Emmanuel II, was founded in 1861, it would be another decade before hostilities between the French and papal armies and Italian nationalist forces ceased. Not until 1870 did French troops finally abandon their occupation of Rome, an event that was followed shortly thereafter by a successful invasion of the city and eventually the city’s ascendancy as the nation’s capital.14 It was amid this backdrop that photography came of age in Rome. There are no easy answers to the question of artists’ and photographers’ attitudes toward these conflicts and political developments. On the one hand, these individuals were pursuing their own artistic practice, and many did not see their work as directly related. While each may have had their own perspective on current events, much of the photographic work being produced in Rome was largely separate from such present-day affairs. Yet, at the same time, these photographers were working in a city that was under the vigilant control of the Papacy, and its government ministries were not reticent in enforcing obedience to the status quo. Though a few early photographers in Rome may have harbored resentment toward the city’s occupation by the French military, most were Catholic and allied with the pope. For those photographers from England, Germany, and the United States who were not Catholic, they understood that their continued presence in Rome depended on

the approval of the Vatican. While each was fully integrated into Rome’s artistic community, these foreign-born image-makers, as well as those nativeborn, recognized that there was no latitude for public deviation from the established order. The Vatican was long familiar with the power of images to shape ideas and convey power. The Papacy did not directly commission photographers to create images that would support its political and religious agenda, though it did permit access to select places and people. For example, when General Garibaldi and his Italian volunteers sought to capture Rome in 1867, Gioacchino Altobelli was allowed to embed himself with papal troops and French Zouaves as they positioned themselves to defend the city. Formerly, Altobelli’s photographic work had focused on depicting the familiar landmarks of Rome. On this occasion, he was allowed to travel outside the city to witness firsthand the Papacy’s response to Garibaldi’s hostile advance. His photograph of the Ponte Salario after its destruction by the papal army demonstrated the efforts to halt this invasion (plate 108). This and other images by Altobelli conveyed the strength and resolve of the Vatican, an impression the Papacy was eager to convey. French military officers and tourists alike collected these photographs. Certain images were also reproduced as engravings in contemporaneous issues of the French newspaper L’Illustration: Journal Universel. Although such images might be interpreted differently after their dissemination, they indicated photography’s potential to respond to the events of the day and the Papacy’s interest in controlling the narrative. Also on the front lines in 1867 were the Fratelli D’Alessandri, the brothers Antonio and Paolo Francesco D’Alessandri. Antonio was a Catholic priest who was granted a special dispensation to work as a photographer, and he was joined in this enterprise by his younger brother Paolo Francesco. Favored by Vatican officials, they were the first to create formal portraits of Pope Pius IX and his

A Few Questions About Photography  87

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 87

7/7/22 2:12 PM

court. When hostilities broke out on the outskirts of Rome, they set out to create a photographic series that would document these events. They joined the papal army at Rocca di Papa, where they created a succession of views of the military encampment. Their photograph depicting soldiers, tents, wagons, and armaments positioned on a hillside emphasizes the strength and orderliness of the armies set out to defend Rome (plate 106). As during military conflicts witnessed by photographers elsewhere, including the Crimean War and the American Civil War, the medium was not then suited to picture actual conflict; technical limitations made such images unattainable until the twentieth century. Instead, the two brothers used their cameras to create portraits of soldiers and images that foreground the sites where armies had deployed during this military engagement. This and other views heroized the papal army and built support for the Vatican’s campaign to quell nationalist sentiments. Later, the Fratelli D’Alessandri ventured north to Mentana, where the concluding battle of the insurrection was fought. Again, although their photographs could not capture fighting, they did depict scenes that captured present-day realities—a marked difference from their earlier photographic projects. Artists and photographers aligned their work to conform with the Papacy’s expectations. During this period, image-makers in Rome could not create or distribute images of Garibaldi or other pro-republic leaders. When the Fratelli D’Alessandri photographed the successful invasion of Rome under General Raffaele Cadorna three years later, their images provoked a hostile reaction from Vatican authorities, who then revoked all rights previously accorded them. Views such as the artillery-battered wall at the Porta Pia entrance to the city made visible the place where nationalist forces entered Rome on their path to victory and undercut the Vatican’s narrative about its authority (fig. 20). On October 2, 1870, less than two weeks after the assault at Porta

Pia, a popular referendum confirmed the ascension of nationalist leaders, and although the Pope refused to renounce his temporal power, the government of King Victor Emmanuel II became the ruling authority in Rome. With the unification of Italy complete and the Papacy diminished, artists and photographers had much greater license to create images that reflected a wider range of perspectives. Ultimately, Antonio D’Alessandri would leave the priesthood and devote his energies primarily to his photographic business. Other photographers also switched allegiances, and in the aftermath of this transfer of power, images of Garibaldi and other nationalist leaders soared in popularity. While early photographers in Rome were attentive primarily to their own artistic practice, they could not easily dismiss or erase the tumultuousness of this period. In response to these events, some used their cameras to venture into the realm of reportage, to explore the documentation of other types of sites, and to counter assumed ideas about the city. This focus on present-day realities and on new modes of representation helped usher in a new chapter in the history of photography in Rome and a new era in the city’s history. The questions explored in this essay represent only a few of those that might be asked about the photographers and photographic images created in Rome during the three decades after the medium’s introduction. Previous scholarship has explored some of these questions; others have not yet been addressed. Photographic portraiture, views of the natural landscape, copies of historic artworks, and studies created for those working in other artistic mediums are all genres that are not considered in any detail here but represent an important part of photography’s history in nineteenth-century Rome. The public display of photography and the use of photographic images in illustrated newspapers, books, and albums also deserve greater attention, as does the relationship between photographers of

88  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 88

7/7/22 2:12 PM

different nationalities, technical experiments with creating night-like and other visual effects, and the contributions of women. Many of the images reproduced in this volume belonged to broader series of views, and those specific photographic projects also merit further study. Indeed, there is much room for future scholarship to widen and enrich the field in the years ahead. What this essay and this book do hope to illuminate is photography’s extraordinary vitality in nineteenth-century Rome. The city had long been one of the cultural capitals of the Western world. It nurtured native-born talent and attracted writers and artists from well beyond the Italian peninsula. At midcentury, photographers also factored significantly into this mix. Working in a new visual medium, these individuals created images that reshaped Rome’s visual economy and changed how people understood and interacted with this place. It is a coincidence of history that the first photographs of Rome were created in the same decade as the publication of the first modern guidebook to Rome (John Murray’s Handbook for Travelers in Central Italy, 1843) and the first endeavors to bring rail service to the city (the Rome and Frascati Railroad, begun 1848). These and other developments aided in the transformation of Rome from a relatively small papal enclave with a largely agricultural and crafts economy to a modern capital city bustling with tourists and new industries. Whereas, during the previous century, a visitor on the Grand Tour came to Rome to stay for months or even years, the new class of travelers sped through the city often in a matter of days. Together with up-to-date guidebooks and maps, photographs helped educate and direct the tourist to those sites deemed worthy of admiration. Although the reasons for traveling to Rome remained somewhat similar, the visitor’s experience a century later was altogether different.15 Photographers were not the first to picture the city, and their images reflected the influence of

past image-makers. For many, the essence of the Eternal City was in its classical past, and photographers created images that privileged that tradition. Given their attachment to the world as it was, these earliest photographers might be regarded as conservative in their artistic and political outlook. And yet, through their embrace of this new visual technology and their participation in Rome’s rapidly evolving economy, they can also be regarded as a part of the vanguard that was moving the city toward a new future. Their images laid the foundation for new modes of photography in Italy and contributed to the evolution of new artistic styles within the wider cultural community. In the years after 1870, Rome’s growth and transformation only accelerated. Prompted by the city’s designation as the national capital and a series of devastating floods, government officials commenced an intensive period of urban renewal, widening avenues, building tall embankments on the Tiber, clearing densely populated neighborhoods, and constructing or renovating many buildings and bridges. Even the ancient Colosseum—that “still exhaustless mine of Contemplation,” as Byron famously described it16—was modernized, as the decision was made to remove the centuries-old vegetation that grew on it. In addition to these physical changes, city leaders ushered in a slate of liberal reforms, including granting equal rights to Jews and instituting a system of public education. These changes were much commented upon by Romans and foreign travelers alike. American sculptor and art critic William Wetmore Story first visited Rome in 1848 and spent much of his lifetime in Italy. Writing in 1887, he reflected upon Rome’s development over the past four decades: “The character of Rome has very much changed from what it was. It is no longer the peaceful and tranquil place where the pilgrim might wander and muse over the past, far from the busy traffic of the world, and its worry and its interests. . . .

A Few Questions About Photography  89

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 89

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Life is astir in its crowded streets. It is awaking from its long dream.”17 Cities are always changing, and it is inevitable that older generations look back with nostalgia to earlier moments. Yet the social and political transformations experienced in Rome during the latter half of the nineteenth century were profound. As the former papal regime faded and a new national government arose, Rome emerged as an increasingly secular and modern

city. While it was still the center of the Catholic Church and a pilgrimage destination for a global faithful, new audiences came and bore witness to its past while also engaging with its present. Photography was instrumental in defining the city’s new civic image, in carrying forward an understanding of its artistic and architectural legacy, and in shaping its future.

90  In Light of Rome

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 90

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plates

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 91

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 1 Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, The Tiber Island with the Bridge of Cestius and Basilica of St. Bartholomew, 1842. Quarter-plate daguerreotype, 43/4 × 35/8 in. (11.9 × 9.2 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 92

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 2 Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, The Arch of Janus with Tripod, 1842. Quarter-plate daguerreotype, 39/16 × 45/8 in. (9 × 11.7 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 93

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 3 Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, Detail of the Arch of Janus, 1842. Quarter-plate daguerreotype, 45/8 × 39/16 in. (11.7 × 9 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 94

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 4 Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, Pifferari, 1842. Quarter-plate daguerreotype, 39/16 × 45/8 in. (9 × 11.7 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 95

7/7/22 2:12 PM

PlatE 5 Philibert Perraud, A Group of French Artists in Rome, 1845. Quarter-plate daguerreotype, 31/8 × 41/4 in. (7.8 × 10.6 cm) (oval). McGuigan Collection. PlatE 6 | oPPositE Photographer unidentified, A Roman Model in Profile with Bare Shoulders and Gold Earring, ca. 1846. Sixth-plate daguerreotype, 215/16 × 23/8 in. (7.5 × 6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 96

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 97

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 7 The Reverend Calvert Richard Jones, The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, 1846. Salted paper print, 61/2 × 81/4 in. (16.5 × 21.0 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 98

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 8 Attributed to Pedro Téllez Girón, A Group of Spanish Artists with Giacomo Caneva, 1849. Salted paper print, 711/16 × 93/4 in. (19.5 × 24.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 99

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 9 James Robertson, The Temple of Vesta, Tivoli, ca. 1848. Salted paper print, 81/4 × 615/16 in. (20.9 × 17.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 100

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 10 Giacomo Caneva, Standing Female Model in Costume with Tambour Facing Left, ca. 1855. Salted paper print, 10 × 65/8 in. (25.3 × 16.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 101

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 11 Giacomo Caneva, Costume Study of Six Models Posed as a Family, ca. 1855. Albumen print from a glass negative, 55/8 × 61/2 in. (13.8 × 16.5 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 12 | opposite Giacomo Caneva, Bust Length Portrait of a Young Woman in Costume Clutching Her Necklace, ca. 1855. Salted paper print from a glass negative, 55/8 × 41/4 in. (14.3 × 10.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 102

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 103

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 104

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 13 | opposite Giacomo Caneva, Genre Scene of a Young Shepherdess with Kid Goat, ca. 1855. Salted paper print, 511/16 × 51/8 in. (14.5 × 13 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 14 Giacomo Caneva, View Over the Piazza del Popolo Toward the Vatican, ca. 1855. Salted paper print, 10 × 131/4 in. (25.4 × 33.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 105

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 15 Giacomo Caneva, The Ripetta Port (Porto di Ripetta), ca. 1850. Salted paper print, 83/16 × 1015/16 in. (20.8 × 27.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 106

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 16 Giacomo Caneva, Self-Portrait (?) with the Ruins of the Temple of the Sun (Serapis) in the Villa Colonna, 1850. Salted paper print, 63/8 × 95/8 in. (16.3 × 24.4 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 107

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 17 Attributed to Giacomo Caneva, A Forest in the Campagna, ca. 1853. Salted paper print, 95/16 × 127/8 in. (23.7 × 32.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 108

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 18 Giacomo Caneva, Study of a Stream with Plants, ca. 1855. Salted paper print, 711/16 × 1115/16 in. (19.6 × 30.3 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 109

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 19 Eugène Constant, The Arch of Titus, ca. 1850. Salted paper print from a glass negative, 65/16 × 89/16 in. (16.1 × 21.7 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 20 | opposite Frédéric Flachéron, The Forum with the Column of Phocas, the Arch of Septimius Severus, and the Church of Saints Luke and Martina, 1849. Salted paper print, 131/4 × 97/8 in. (33.5 × 25.1 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 110

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 111

7/7/22 2:12 PM

PlatE 21 Alfred Nicolas Normand, Three French Academicians in the Gardens of the Villa Medici, 1851. Salted paper print, 71/8 × 83/8 in. (18.1× 21.4 cm) (trimmed). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 112

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 22 Photographer unidentified, Panorama from Piazza Trinità dei Monti, ca. 1850. Salted paper print, 73/8 × 911/16 in. (18.7 × 24.7 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 113

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 114

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 23 | opposite Pierre Antoine de Bermond de Vaulx, A Palm Tree Near the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, ca. 1850–1852. Salted paper print, 101/16 × 71/2 in. (25.6 × 19 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 24 Alphonse Davanne, The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina in the Forum, 1853. Salted paper print, 61/8 × 811/16 in. (15.4 × 22.2 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 115

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 25 Eugène Piot, The Colosseum, ca. 1850. Salted paper print from a waxed paper negative, 101/8 × 141/16 in. (25.7 × 35.7 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 26 | opposite Pierre-Emile-Joseph Pécarrère, The Temple of Castor and Pollux (Tempio dei Dioscuri), Also Known as the Temple of Jupiter Stator, 1850. Salted paper print from a waxed paper negative, 81/4 × 63/16 in. (20.9 × 15.7 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 116

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 117

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 27 Firmin-Eugène Le Dien (printed by Gustave Le Gray), Poussin’s Walk at Acqua Acetosa, ca. 1853. Salted paper print from a waxed paper negative, 95/8 × 13 in. (24.4 × 33 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 118

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 28 Firmin-Eugène Le Dien (printed by Gustave Le Gray), Landscape Study Near Tivoli, ca. 1853. Salted paper print from a waxed paper negative, 95/16 × 131/8 in. (23.6 × 33.4 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 119

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 29 Firmin-Eugène Le Dien (printed by Gustave Le Gray), The Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli from Piazza del Campidoglio, ca. 1853. Salted paper print from a waxed paper negative, 127/8 × 91/16 in. (32.8 × 23 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 120

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 30 Constant Louvel, The Fountain of Trevi, ca. 1855. Waxed paper negative, 123/4 × 91/8 in. (32.2 × 23 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 121

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 31 Constant Louvel, Vegetation on the Pincian Hill, ca. 1855. Waxed paper negative, 7 × 95/16 in. (17.9 × 23.7 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 122

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 32 Unidentified French photographer, Vegetation on the Pincian Hill, ca. 1855. Albumen print from a waxed paper negative, 51/2 × 71/8 in. (14 × 18.2 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 123

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 124

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 33 | opposite Louis-Henri-Eugène Copmartin, Via Ripetta After the Flood of the Tiber, 1861, 1861. Albumen print from a glass negative, 51/2 × 41/4 in. (14 × 10.8 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 34 Angelo Luswergh and Giacomo Luswergh, Piazza del Campidoglio with the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, ca. 1852–54. Salted paper print, 913/16 × 121/8 in. (25.1 × 30.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 125

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 35 Angelo Luswergh and Giacomo Luswergh, The Temple of Saturn and the Roman Forum from via Campidoglio, ca. 1854. Salted paper print, 81/4 × 101/8 in. (21 × 25.7 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 126

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 36 T. Carr, The Cloister of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, ca. 1852–53. Salted paper print from a glass negative, 67/8 × 815/16 in. (17.5 × 22.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 127

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 128

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 37 | opposite T. Carr, The Forum and Funeral Column of Trajan, ca. 1852–53. Salted paper print from a glass negative, 87/8 × 7 in. (22.6 × 17.9 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 38 Giovanni Battista Altadonna, The Cloister of St. Paul Outside the Walls with Drying Glass Negatives, ca. 1850s. Albumen print from a glass negative, 39/16 × 47/8 in. (9 × 12.5 cm) (oval). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 129

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 39 Giovanni Battista Altadonna, Via Appia, ca. 1850s. Albumen print from a glass negative, 39/16 × 47/8 in. (9 × 12.5 cm) (oval). McGuigan Collection. Plate 40 | opposite James Anderson, The Arch of the Goldsmiths (The Little Arch of Septimius Severus), ca. 1852. Albumen print from a glass negative, 145/8 × 113/8 in. (36.4 × 28.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 130

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 131

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 132

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 41 | opposite James Anderson, St. Peter’s Basilica and the Spina di Borgo from Castel Sant’Angelo, ca. 1856. Albumen print from a glass negative, 117/16 × 143/16 in. (29 × 37.3 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 42 James Anderson, The Claudian Aqueduct and Via Appia, ca. 1853. Albumen print from a glass negative, 73/4 × 161/8 in. (19.7 × 40.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 133

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 43 James Anderson, The Spanish Steps and Trinità dei Monti, ca. 1854. Albumen print from a glass negative, 910/16 × 7 in. (24.8 × 17.7 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 134

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 44 Robert Macpherson, The Arch of Titus from the Temple of Venus and Rome, ca. 1858. Albumen print from a glass negative, 153/8 × 117/8 in. (38.5 × 30.2 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 135

7/7/22 2:12 PM

PlatE 46 Robert Macpherson, Palazzo Altoviti on the Tiber, ca. 1851–57. Albumen print from a glass negative, 10 × 143/4 in. (25.3 × 37.5 cm). McGuigan Collection.

PlatE 45 Robert Macpherson, View of the Acqueduct—Acqua Claudia, ca. 1858. Albumen print from a glass negative, 811/16 × 153/8 in. (22 × 39 cm) (oval). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 136

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 46 Robert Macpherson, Palazzo Altoviti on the Tiber, ca. 1851–57. Albumen print from a glass negative, 10 × 143/4 in. (25.3 × 37.5 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 137

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 47 Robert Eaton, The Forum with the Temple of Saturn and the Temple of Vespasian, ca. 1855. Albumen print from a glass negative, 65/8 × 8 in. (16.8 × 20.4 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 138

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 48 Pietro Dovizielli, The Temple of Vesta, ca. 1850s. Salted paper print from a glass negative, 117/8 × 16 in. (30.1 × 40.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 139

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 49 Pietro Dovizielli, View of the Tiber with the Cloaca Maxima, the Temple of Vesta, the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and the Piazza di Bocca della Verità from the Ponte Rotto, ca. 1854. Salted paper print from a glass negative, 111/4 × 155/8 in. (28.5 × 39.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 140

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 50 Pietro Dovizielli, Interior of the Colosseum, ca. 1853. Salted paper print from a glass negative, 12 × 153/8 in. (30.5 × 39 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 141

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 51 Pietro Dovizielli, The Ponte and Castel Sant’Angelo, ca. 1850s. Salted paper print from a glass negative, 1111/16 × 16 in. (30 × 40.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 142

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 52 Tommaso Cuccioni, Palazzo Caffarelli with the Tarpeian Rock and the Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, ca. 1855. Albumen print from a glass negative, 93/16 × 1213/16 in. (23.2 × 32.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 143

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 53 Tommaso Cuccioni, The Fountain of the Moor in Piazza Navona, ca. 1860. Albumen print from a glass negative, 9 × 125/8 in. (22.9 × 31.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 144

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 54 Tommaso Cuccioni, The Inauguration of the Column of the Immaculate Conception in Piazza Mignanelli on December 8, 1857, 1857. Albumen print from a glass negative, 71/8 × 101/4 in. (18.2 × 26 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 145

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 55 Tommaso Cuccioni, The Piazza del Popolo with the Temporary Carnival Racetrack from the Pincian Hill, ca. 1855–60. Albumen print from a glass negative, 83/4 × 123/8 in. (22.3 × 31.2 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 56 | opposite Emil Braun, Dolce Far Niente: Self-Portrait (?) as a Contadino, ca. 1854. Salted paper print from a glass negative, 10 × 713/16 in. (25.5 × 19.9 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 146

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 147

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 57 Enrico Béguin, Mendicant Monk from Life, 1858–59. Albumen print from a glass negative, 8 × 43/4 in. (20.3 × 12.3 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 58 | opposite Enrico Béguin, The Wife and Child of the Artist’s Studio Assistant, 1859. Albumen print from a glass negative, 75/8 × 51/2 in. (19.3 × 14 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 148

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 149

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 59 Robert Macpherson, Statue of the Nile and Its Tributaries, in the Vatican Museums, ca. 1851–58. Albumen print from a glass negative, 1013/16 × 135/8 in. (27.5 × 34.5 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 60 | opposite Robert Macpherson, The Apollo Belvedere, ca. 1853. Albumen print from a glass negative, 149/16 × 95/16 in. (37 × 23.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 150

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 151

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 152

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 61 | opposite James Anderson, Laocoön and His Sons, ca. 1858. Albumen print from a glass negative, 153/4 × 121/8 in. (40 × 30.8 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 62 Tommaso Cuccioni, Statue of Moses by Michelangelo in San Pietro in Vincoli, ca. 1855. Albumen print from a glass negative, 91/16 × 123/8 in. (23 × 31.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 153

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 154

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 63 | opposite James Anderson, Harriet Hosmer’s “Zenobia in Chains,” ca. 1857. Albumen print from a glass negative, 14 × 83/8 in. (35.5 × 21.3 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 64 Photographer unidentified, The American Sculptor Harriet Hosmer with Her Studio Assistants, Via Margutta, 1861. Albumen print from a glass negative, 81/8 × 101/8 in. (20.5 × 25.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 155

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 65 Fratelli d’Alessandri (Antonio d’Alessandri and Paolo Francesco d’Alessandri), Pope Pius IX and Members of His Papal Court, 1868. Albumen print from a glass negative, 75/16 × 91/4 in. (18.6 × 23.3 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 66 | opposite Michele Mang, The Faun of Praxiteles, ca. 1870s. Albumen print from a glass negative, 913/16 × 715/16 in. (24.9 × 20.2 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 156

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 157

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 67 Giuseppe Ninci, Excavations of the Emporio Tiberino, ca. 1868–69. Albumen print from a glass negative, 1011/16 × 1413/16 in. (27 × 37.7 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 68 | opposite Giuseppe Ninci, Market Day in the Piazza Navona with the Church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, ca. 1860s. Albumen print from a glass negative, 1411/16 × 1011/16 in. (37.7 × 27 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 158

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 159

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 69 Altobelli & Molins (Gioacchino Altobelli and Pompeo Molins), The Arch of the Goldsmiths (The Little Arch of Septimius Severus) and the Church of San Giorgio in Velabro, ca. 1860–65. Albumen print from a glass negative, 73/4 × 105/16 in. (19.7 × 26.1 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 160

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 70 Altobelli & Molins (Gioacchino Altobelli and Pompeo Molins), The Fountain of the Triton Covered in Ice, Piazza Barberini, with Figures, ca. 1860–65. Albumen print from a glass negative, 73/8 × 10 in. (18.8 × 25.4 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 161

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 71 Gioacchino Altobelli, The Piazza of Santa Maria Maggiore with a Photographer, ca. 1866. Albumen print from a glass negative, 105/8 × 1413/16 in. (27 × 37.5 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 162

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 72 Gioacchino Altobelli, The Roman Forum from the Capitoline Hill with Moonlight Effect, ca. 1866. Albumen print from a glass negative, 10 9/16 × 147/8 in. (26.9 × 37.7 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 163

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 73 Gioacchino Altobelli, Piazza and Fountain of the Tartarughe, ca. 1866. Albumen print from a glass negative, 109/16 × 1413/16 in. (26.9 × 37.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 164

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 74 Gioacchino Altobelli, View of the Protestant Cemetery and the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, ca. 1866. Albumen print from a glass negative, 105/8 × 47/8 in. (27 × 37.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 165

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 75 Gioacchino Altobelli, Fishermen on the Tiber with the Ponte and Castel Sant’Angelo, and St. Peter’s Basilica, ca. 1866. Albumen print from a glass negative, 107/8 × 145/8 in. (27.5 × 37.3 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 166

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 76 Gioacchino Altobelli, Easter Mass in the Piazza of St. Peter’s Basilica, ca. 1866. Albumen print from a glass negative, 75/8 × 101/8 in. (19.3 × 25.7 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 167

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 77 Enrico Verzaschi, A Flooded Interior Chamber of the Colosseum, ca. 1860s. Albumen print from a glass negative, 107/16 × 71/8 in. (26.6 × 19.5 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 168

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 78 Enrico Verzaschi, The Palazzo Doria Pamphili and the Corso from the South, ca. 1860s. Albumen print from a glass negative, 81/2 × 6 in. (21.7 × 15.4 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 169

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 170

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 79 | opposite Enrico Verzaschi, Via dei Due Macelli Looking Toward Via del Babuino and Piazza del Popolo, ca. 1860s. Albumen print from a glass negative, 89/16 × 6 in. (21.8 × 15.3 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 80 Carlo Baldassarre Simelli, Cloud Study with Trinità dei Monti, ca. 1860s. Untrimmed albumen print from a glass negative, 715/16 × 101/4 in. (20.3 × 26.1 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 171

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 81 Carlo Baldassarre Simelli, Study of an Agave Plant, ca. 1860s. Albumen print from a glass negative, 8 × 101/2 in. (20.4 × 26.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 172

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 82 Attributed to Carlo Baldassarre Simelli, The Arch of Septimius Severus and the Church of San Luca and Santa Martina, ca. 1865. Untrimmed albumen print from a glass negative, 91/16 × 113/16 in. (23 × 28.5 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 173

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 174

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 83 | opposite Carlo Baldassarre Simelli, The Cloister of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, ca. 1864–66. Albumen print from a glass negative, 93/16 × 613/16 in. (23.4 × 17.3 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 84 Filippo Lais, Via Appia, the Second Columbarium of Vigna Codini, West and North Sides, ca. 1868–69. Albumen print from a glass negative, 67/8 × 87/8 in. (17.5 × 22.7 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 175

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 85 Attributed to Francesco Sidoli, Statue of St. Peter by Giuseppe De Fabris (1840), Outside St. Peter’s Basilica, ca. 1860s. Albumen print from a glass negative, 93/16 × 611/16 in. (23.3 × 17 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 176

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 86 Filippo Spina, Interior of the Palace of Caligula on the Palatine Hill, ca. 1860s. Albumen print from a glass negative, 107/16 × 77/8 in. (26.5 × 20.3 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 177

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 87 Filippo Belli, Washerwomen at Albano Laziale, ca. 1871. Albumen print from a glass negative, 71/4 × 10 in. (18.5 × 25.4 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 88 | opposite Filippo Belli, Genre Scene with Two Women at a Well, ca. 1870s. Albumen print from a glass negative, 101/8 × 75/16 in. (25.6 × 18.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 178

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 179

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 89 Attributed to Filippo Belli, Study of an Olive Tree, Villa d’Este, Tivoli, ca. 1870s. Untrimmed albumen print from a glass negative, 113/16 × 815/16 in. (28.4 × 22.8 cm), glass plate 77/8 × 101/4 in. (20 × 26 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 180

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 90 Attributed to Filippo Belli, Right Cordonata of the Fountain of the Dragons, Villa d’Este, Tivoli, ca. 1870s. Untrimmed albumen print from a glass negative, 101/4 × 89/16 in (27.4 × 21.8 cm), glass plate 77/8 × 101/4 in. (20 × 26 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 181

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 91 Attributed to Francesco Adriano de Bonis, Rooftops, Rome, ca. 1851–60. Albumen print from a waxed paper negative, 87/16 × 71/8 in. (21.5 × 18.2 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 182

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 92 Attributed to Francesco Adriano de Bonis, The Arch of Titus with the Colosseum, ca. 1860s. Albumen print from a glass negative, 91/2 × 75/8 in. (24.1 × 19.4 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 183

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 93 Francesco Adriano de Bonis, An Ancient Candelabra in the Basilica of Saints Nereus and Achilleus, ca. 1860. Albumen print from a glass negative, 93/8 × 7 in. (23.9 × 17.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 184

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 94 Francesco Adriano de Bonis, The Entrance of the Villa Malta, ca. 1855–60. Albumen print from a glass negative, 97/8 × 71/2 in. (25 × 19.1 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 185

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 95 Francesco Adriano de Bonis, The Altar Inside the Colosseum, ca. 1855–60. Albumen print from a glass negative, 97/8 × 71/2 in. (25.2 × 19.1 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 186

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 96 Francesco Adriano de Bonis, The Portico of Octavia, ca. 1855–60. Albumen print from a glass negative, 93/8 × 71/8 in. (23.9 × 18 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 187

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 188

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 97 | opposite Edmond Lebel, Young Female Model in Costume in Lebel’s Studio, ca. 1863. Albumen print from a glass negative, 73/4 × 51/8 in. (19.8 × 13 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 98 Edmond Lebel, Contadini Grilling Chestnuts at Cassino (San Germano), ca. 1871. Albumen print from a glass negative, 53/8 × 93/8 in. (13.8 × 23.9 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 189

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 99 Edmond Lebel, Cassino (San Germano), Still Life with Baskets of Fruit, ca. 1871. Albumen print from a glass negative, 55/16 × 71/2 in. (13.6 × 19 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 100 | opposite Pietro Thyge Boyesen, Study of a Courtyard with a Marble Bust, ca. 1870. Albumen print from a glass negative, 81/4 × 63/4 in. (20.9 × 17.1 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 190

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 191

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 101 Adolphe Braun, The Baths of Caracalla, ca. 1866. Carbon print from a glass negative, 9 × 1815/16 in. (22.9 × 48 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 102 | opposite Charles Soulier, Panorama with the Tiber from the Aventine Hill, ca. 1867. Albumen print from a glass negative, 75/8 × 97/8 in. (19.3 × 25.1 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 192

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 193

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 194

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 103 | opposite Edmond Behles, The Piazza Colonna with the Column of Marcus Aurelius, ca. 1865. Albumen print from a glass negative, 161/4 × 147/8 in. (41 × 37.8 cm). McGuigan Collection. Plate 104 John Linton Chapman, John Gadsby Chapman in His Studio on the Via del Babuino, ca. 1860. Albumen print from a glass negative, 4 × 515/16 in. (10.2 × 15.2 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 195

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 105 John Linton Chapman, The Acqua Acetosa, May 4, 1869, 1869. Albumen print from a glass negative, 65/8 × 815/16 in. (17 × 22.8 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 196

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 106 Fratelli d’Alessandri (Antonio d’Alessandri and Paolo Francesco d’Alessandri), Papal Army Encampment at Rocca di Papa, 1867. Albumen print from a glass negative, 71/8 × 93/8 in. (18.1 × 23.9 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 197

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 107 Gioacchino Altobelli, The Officers of the First and Third Battalions of the Pontifical Army at Rocca di Papa, 1868. Albumen print from a glass negative, 61/8 × 83/8 in. (15.5 × 21.2 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 198

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 108 Gioacchino Altobelli, Ponte Salario Blown up by Papal Troops and French Zouaves in 1867, 1867. Albumen print from a glass negative, 103/4 × 147/8 in. (27.3 × 37.7 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 199

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 109 Fratelli d’Alessandri (Antonio d’Alessandri and Paolo Francesco d’Alessandri), After the Battle of Mentana, November 3, 1867, with the Bodies of the Dead Scattered Among Haystacks, 1867. Albumen print from a glass negative, 103/16 × 143/4 in. (25.8 × 37.5 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 200

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Plate 110 Fratelli d’Alessandri (Antonio d’Alessandri and Paolo Francesco d’Alessandri), View of Mentana After the Battle of November 3, 1867, with the Corpses of Soldiers Lying Along the Road, 1867. Albumen print from a glass negative, 103/16 × 1413/16 in. (25.9 × 37.6 cm). McGuigan Collection.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 201

7/7/22 2:12 PM

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 202

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Appendix 1 Richard W. Thomas, “Photography in Rome,” 1852

Richard W. Thomas, “Photography in Rome,” The Art-Journal 14 (May 1852): 159–60; reprinted as “Photography in Rome,” The Photographic Art-Journal (June 1852): 377–80. Transcribed, annotated, and lightly corrected by John F. McGuigan Jr. It occurs to me that some few facts respecting the state of Photography in Rome may not be without interest to those of your readers who take a delight in this beautiful branch of Art; and as many of my photographic acquaintances have frequently expressed a wish that I would publish the method I adopted for making negatives during a four months’ residence in the Eternal City, I have thought it best to forward a familiar letter on the subject for insertion in your journal—should you deem the communication of sufficient importance. In the first place a word about Roman photographers. I need hardly say that their places of rendezvous are the [Trattoria] Lépre and Caffè Greco. It will be as well to mention the names of those who are always accessible to the photographic artist, and who readily communicate their experience and practice, with a view, reciprocally, to gain instruction. Foremost, I must place Mr. Robinson, well known to all artists and amateurs of every denomination in Rome. I cannot speak too highly of his courteous bearing towards a stranger who introduces himself as a follower of his favorite pursuit. I am quite sure that any English gentleman would meet with as much assistance as I myself did. Then there is the Prince Giron des Anglonnes, Signor Caneva, M. Constant, and M. Flacheron (this formed in 1850 the photographic clique), and on the whole their method of manipulation is attended with more success than is generally met with in this country. I would recommend any one visiting Rome, with the intention of following this absorbing pursuit, to repair at once to the Caffè Greco, where, with a little attention, he will soon recognise his own vernacular in the conversation of those in the central compartment, and, by

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 203

singling out a bearded habitué, the chances are, that he at once pounces upon the right man, or at any rate, finds himself in close quarters with the English photographer, whose acquaintance is an introduction to the party. I will now proceed to the point, and, imprimis, must state that when I left England I could make a good negative on paper by the usual method introduced by Mr. Fox Talbot, and, consequently, with much expectation of success, prepared a large quantity of iodized paper of the average strength as stock. It is almost needless to say with what anxiety I looked forward to the arrival of my apparatus, which had been sent from England by sea; and will not take up your space by describing the many distressing failures I encountered, day after day, with the same batch of paper as that used in England. Every modification which my ingenuity could suggest, I tried, but without success. I bought and prepared fresh English paper, and excited it with the most homœopathic doses of silver, but still the amount of sensibility was so great, the state of the atmosphere so rare, and the effulgent light of a southern sky so intense, as entirely to preclude the possibility of obtaining a negative strongly impressed in the pores of the paper. The time required to produce a picture on paper iodized in the ordinary way, being so short as to admit of its surface only being acted upon, and this faint kind of negative will not give a good positive. I persevered, however, for a whole month, although repeatedly assured by Robinson and the Prince that they never could do anything by what they termed the dry method. This I found to be the case; and as my productions were far inferior to theirs, I tore up some fifty negatives, and commenced di nuovo. Whilst at Tivoli, in company with the Prince and Signor Caneva, with whom I worked for ten days, I learnt the following method, and ever afterwards pursued it, uniformly with success; and although the process is not new, it requires to be carefully explained. My own negatives will bear me out in the statement that this method far excels any other for hot climates.

7/7/22 2:12 PM

1st. Select old and thin English paper,—I prefer Whatman’s: cut it in such a manner that a sheet shall be the sixteenth part of an inch smaller than the glass of the paper-holder on every side, and leave two ends, at diagonal corners, to the sheet, by which to handle it. 2nd. Prepare the following solution:— Saturated solution of iodide of potassium, 2 1/2 fluid drachms; pure iodine, 9 grains; dissolve. Then add—distilled water, 11 1/2 ounces; iodide of potassium, 4 drachms; bromide of potassium, 10 grains; and mix. Now filter this solution into a shallow porcelain vessel, somewhat larger than the sheet of paper to be prepared. Take a piece by the two diagonal ends, and gently place the end of the marked side nearest to you, upon the surface of the bath; then carefully incline the surface of the sheet to the liquid, and allow it to rest two minutes; if French paper, one minute, or until the back of the paper (not wetted) becomes tinted uniformly by the action of the dark-colored solution. Raise it up by means of the two ends occasionally, in order to chase away any air-bubbles, which would be indicated by white spots on the back, showing that the solution in those places has not been absorbed. Hold the paper by one of the ends for a minute or so, in order that the superfluous moisture may run off; then hang up to dry, by pinning the one end to a string run across a room, and let the excess drop off at the diagonal corner. When dry, the paper is ready for use, and quite tinted with iodine on both sides. It will keep any length of time, and is much improved by age. 3rdly. I will presume that four sheets are to be excited for the camera, and that the operator has two double paper-holders, made without a wooden partition, the interior capacity of which is sufficiently large to admit of three glasses, all moveable. The third, as will be seen, is to prevent the two pieces of excited paper coming in contact with each other. Prepare the following solution:— Take of nitrate of silver, 2 1/2 drachms; acetic acid, 4 1/2 drachms; distilled water, 3 1/4 ounces; mix and dissolve. Now take four of the glasses of the paper­holders, perfectly clean, and place each upon a piece of common blotting paper, to absorb any little excess of liquid. Pour about 1 1/2 drachms, or rather more, of the solution just prepared, into a small glass funnel, into which a filter of white bibulous paper has been placed, and let the solution filter, drop by drop, upon glass No. 1, until about 1 1/2 drachms have been filtered in detached drops, regularly placed upon its surface; then, with a slip of paper,

cause the liquid to be diffused over the whole surface of the glass. Take a piece of prepared paper, and place its marked side downwards upon the glass just prepared, beginning at the end nearest you, and thus chasing out the air. Draw it up once or twice by its two diagonal corners; allow it to rest, and prepare glass No. 2, in a similar manner. Now look at glass No. 1, and it will be perceived that the violet tint of the paper has become mottled with patches of white, which gradually spread, and in a few seconds the paper resumes its original whiteness, which is an indication that it is ready for the camera. It will be found to adhere firmly to the glass. Do not remove it; but hold up the glass to allow the excess of fluid to run off at one corner. It must not be touched with blotting-paper, but replaced flat upon the table. Serve Nos. 2, 3, and 4 in like manner. Take four pieces of common white paper, not too much sized, free from iron spots, and cut a trifle smaller than the prepared sheets; soak them in distilled water; draw out one piece; hold it up by the fingers to drain off superfluous moisture, and place it gently upon the back of the prepared paper, glass No. 1. With another piece of glass kept for the purpose, having the edge rounded, and large enough to act uniformly upon the paper, scrape off gently the excess of liquid, beginning at the top of the sheet, and removing, with the rounded edge of the scraper, the liquid to one of the corners. Repeat this operation twice. Both the excited and superimposed paper are thus fixed to the glass. Proceed in a similar manner with glass No. 2. When the two first glasses are thus prepared, take the clean glass No. 5, and place upon glass No. 1. Press gently; the moist paper will cause it to adhere. Take up the two glasses thus affixed, and place them upon glass No. 2, in such a manner that the supernumerary glass No. 5 shall be in the centre. The whole will now form a compact body, and (having polished the surfaces and wiped the edges) may at once be put into the paperholder. It will be seen that each piece of excited paper is backed by a piece of paper moistened with distilled water, and having a third glass intervening to prevent the papers touching each other. To prepare the four sheets— with a little practice—it will take half an hour. 4thly. With a Ross’s, Chevalier’s, or Lerebours’s single lens—three inch diameter, and half-an-inch diaphragm— the object to be copied, well lighted by the sun, the paper will require from four to six minutes’ exposure. 5thly. Take out the three glasses, which will still firmly adhere; separate them gently, and remove the pieces of moistened paper, which must not be used again.

204  Appendix 1

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 204

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Now lift up the prepared paper by one corner, to the extent of half the glass, and pour into the centre about one drachm of a saturated solution of gallic acid, which will immediately diffuse itself. Raise, also, the other corner, to facilitate its extension; and serve the others in like manner. The image takes, generally, from ten to twenty minutes to develop. Hold the glass up to a candle, to watch its intensity. When sufficiently developed, remove the negative from the glass. Wash in two or three waters for a few hours; dry with blotting­paper, and immerse each, separately, for ten minutes, in a bath of the following solution:— Bromide of potassium, 10 grains; water, 1 ounce. Then wash in water, and dry. The iodide may be removed by means of hyposulphite of soda, in the usual way, twelve months afterwards, or when convenient. If the process has been carefully conducted, four beautiful negatives must be the result. I was ten days working

incessantly at Pompeii, and scarcely ever knew what a failure was. Although the process of exciting the paper may appear somewhat tedious, it must be borne in mind that the operation of iodizing, as usually followed in this country, is entirely dispensed with. I may add that the first solution requires to be charged with a little more iodine after preparing a dozen sheets, as the starch and size of the papers absorb it very greedily. Two or three sheets of French paper, which, I believe, is sized almost entirely with starch, are sometimes sufficient to decolorise the solution—forming an iodide of starch. —Richard W. Thomas, Chemist 10, Pall Mall

Appendix 1  205

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 205

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Appendix 2 Note on the Photographers, Photographic Establishments, and Their Assistants in the Various Districts of Rome, ca. 1866

Nota dei Fotografi e Stabilimenti Fotografici esistenti nei diversi Rioni di Roma, Archivio di Stato, Roma, Archivio della S. Congregazione del Buon Governo, busta n. 44, Carte di Polizia 1816–1870, ca. 1866. Transcribed by John F. McGuigan Jr.

Name (last, first)

Location

Observation Rione Colonna

1. Passinati Gaetano

via di Pietra No. 87

2. Barchiesi Vincenzo

S. Maria in Via No. 50

3. Tartaglini Filippo

via della Vite No. 109

4. Lais Stefano

via Campo Marzo [No.] 50

5. Ferretti Raffaele

vico del Pozzo No. 46 Rione Campo Marzo

6. Patrignani Luigi

via del Leoncino No. 16

7. Rappaini Giovanni

via Tomacelli No. 140

8. Felici Giuseppe

via di Ripetta No. 192

9. Simonetti Giulio

via di Ripetta No. 197

10. Sartori Stanislao

via di Ripetta No. 70

11. Altobelli Gioacchino

Ripa del Fiume No. 16

12. Sanglau Achille

Piazza del Popolo 3

13. D’Alessandri Fratelli

via del Corso No. 12

14. Bettini Carlo Napole [Carlo

via del Corso 509

pianoterra

15. Anderson Giacomo

fuori Porta del Popolo

vecchi Orti

16. Venuti Raffaele

via dei Pontefici No. 64

lavora privatamente pianoterreno

a pianoterra

Napoleone Bettini]

17. Lais Filippo

via dei Pontefici N. 49

18. Verzaschi Enrico

vico Soderini No. 16

19. Danesi Michele

via Bocca di Leone 85

20. Ferrando Salvatore

via Bocca di Leone 11

21. Fabbri Augusto

via Condotti No. 18, 19

22. Sidoli Francesco

Piazza di Spagna 32

23. Luswergh Tommaso

Piazza Mignanelli 22

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 206

terreno terreno

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Name (last, first)

Location

Observation

24. Quagliotti Augusto

via Frattina No. 148

terreno

25. Simelli Gio. Ba

via del Corso No. 509

26. Fermanelli Bonaventura

via della Croce No. 67

27. Barberi Tito

via della Croce No. 34

28. Betti Giulio

via del Corso No. 117

29. Suscipj Lorenzo

via Condotti 48

30. Behles e Sommer

Mario di Fiori 28

31. Molins Pompeo

Fontanella di Borghese 46

32. Mang Michele

Piazza di Spagna No. 9

33. Chalet Cesere

via Margutta No. 28

34. Mariannecci Antonio

via Margutta No. 49

terreno

Rione Trevi e Pigna 35. Sbrascia Filippo

S. Nicola da Tolentino No. 3

36. Maldura Ettore

[via delle] Tre Cannelle No. 103 Rione Ponte

37. Fagioli Vitt ved Mengarelli [Vittoria a

a

Banchi Nuovi No. 49

Fagioli, vedova Mengarelli] 38. Belli Filippo

Banchi Vecchi No. 41 Rione Monti

39. Pugnaloni Giovanni

Sa Lucia in Selci No. 63

40. Ravenna Pietro

Tribuna di Campitelli No. 12

41. Pugnaloni Samuele

Borgo S. Ang No. 79 [Borgo S. Angelo]

Rione Borgo o

Rione Trastevere 42. Rossi Giuseppe

S. Francesco a Ripa No. 136

43. Felici Giuseppe

[via della] Lungaretta No. 36

44. Pugnaloni Ferdinando

[via della] Lungara No. 163 al 166

Appendix 2  207

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 207

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Artist Biographies John F. McGuigan Jr.

Edgar Adolphe (French, ca. 1808–1890)

Giovanni Battista Altadonna (Italian, 1824–1890)

Previously known to photography historians only as Adolphe or Adolfo of Paris, Edgar Adolphe began as a miniaturist and silhouettist and once claimed to have been appointed an official painter to Louis Philippe I. From 1832, he was an itinerant portraitist in England and Wales, returning to Paris in late 1844, where he learned daguerreotypy. From February 1845, he traveled extensively through Italy as a photographer, documented first in Turin and then, by October 1846, in Rome, where he opened a studio at 18 via dei Pontefici, located between the via del Corso and the mausoleum of Augustus. After working in several other cities, he returned to Rome in 1848 with a new address at 422 via del Corso. That August, he advertised in the Florentine journal L’Alba that his Italian oeuvre exceeded well over ten thousand works executed in every major city of the peninsula and Sicily. By the mid-1850s, he had settled permanently in Dublin, Ireland, where he operated a photographic portrait studio called the Golden Palette.

This little-known painter studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice and ran a successful photographic portrait studio in Trento, in the northern region of Trentino-Alto Adige, from 1859 until the mid-1870s. He appears to have been active in Rome between 1853 and 1856, based upon his technique and datable elements within his photographs. Altadonna’s landscapes are typically found in two formats, 3 9/16 × 5 inches, such as The Cloister of St. Paul Outside the Walls with Drying Glass Negatives (plate 38), and 7 3/8 × 9 13/16 inches, such as the large-format version of the same composition in the Marco Antonetto Collection (Italy). Other examples of these two sizes corresponding to the same subjects can be found in the McGuigan Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

References

References Piero Becchetti, “Altadonna, Giovanni Battista,” in La fotografia a Roma, 268. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Altadonna, Giovanni Battista,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 198, cat. 129, 227.

[Advertisements.] Huntingdon, Bedford & Peterborough Gazette, January 11, 1834, 3. “Advertisements.” The Roman Advertiser, no. 69 (February 12, 1848): 123. “Avvisi.” L’Alba: Giornale Politico–Letterario, no. 289 (August 5, 1848): 1156. Piero Becchetti, “Adolphe,” in La fotografia a Roma, 267. Becchetti and Pietrangeli, Roma in Dagherrotipia, 42. Bologna and Jacobson, “Itinerant Daguerreotypist,” 85. Bonetti and Maffioli, L’Italia d’argento, 51, 163–64, 167, 197, 199, 240, 243, 254, 262. Pigot & Co.’s Directory of Sussex (London: Pigot, 1839), 664. David Simkin, “Portraiture in Sussex Before Photography. 3. Profilists and Silhouette Artists,” Sussex PhotoHistory, accessed September 23, 2021, https://‌w ww‌.photohistory‌-sussex‌.co‌.uk‌/Profilists &SilhouetteArtists‌.htm. “Supplement,” Diario di Roma, no. 79 (October 3, 1846): 1.

Gioacchino Altobelli (Italian, 1814–after 1878) One of the greatest photographers of his generation, Altobelli was born in the Umbrian city of Terni, sixty-five miles northeast of Rome. He studied under the important purist painter Tommaso Minardi from 1833 to 1841 and was referred to as a painter with a studio at 48 via Margutta in the 1855 Almanacco Romano. He was recorded by F. S. Bonfigli in 1860 as a “historical and portrait painter” at the same address but also as a partner with Pompeo Molins in the photographic firm Altobelli & Molins at 45 via della Fontanella di Borghese (their work also could be purchased at Monaldini’s Library, 79 piazza di Spagna). Although their production consisted mostly of carte-de-visite portraits, they became known for their large-format landscapes of Rome populated

208  Artist Biographies

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 208

7/7/22 2:12 PM

with figures, for which they earned recognition at the Italian Exposition in Florence in 1861. Due to the high rank of Molins’s father-in-law in the papal administration, they were designated Official Photographers of the Imperial Academy of France and of the Works of Art for the Roman Railways. After their partnership dissolved in 1865, Altobelli & Co. was established in 1866 at 16a via Passeggiata di Ripetta (also called 16 Ripa del Fiume) in rooms rented from the Roman photographer Michele Petagna, whose own enterprise, named Stabilimento Fotografico, Altobelli agreed to manage concurrently after Petagna moved to Florence. That same year Altobelli developed a double matrix process that allowed him to introduce clouds into his photographs, an invention that greatly enhanced his fame. Around 1869, Enrico Verzaschi purchased the Stabilimento Fotografico, with Altobelli continuing as director until 1875.

his vocation became photography, and Spithöver issued a catalogue of his works. Bonfigli listed his address in 1860 as 246 via di Ripetta, and by 1865 Piale noted that he had moved to 19 Fuori di Porta del Popolo. Numerous exhibitions in Britain helped secure his international reputation, beginning in 1855 with the Glasgow Photographic Association, where he showed eleven works, and the Photographic Society of London, with four; in 1856 at the Photographic Society of Scotland in Edinburgh, with three works; in 1857, in Art Treasures of the United Kingdom at the Photographic Gallery of Manchester, with one image; and in 1862 with a collection of landscapes and sculpture at the International Exhibition in London. Anderson’s business acumen earned him great wealth and established a family dynasty that passed to his eldest son, Domenico, and survived until 1960.

References

References

Piero Becchetti, “Altobelli, Gioacchino,” in La fotografia a

Almanacco Romano (1855), 287; Almanacco Romano (1858),

Roma, 268–71; Becchetti, “Altobelli, Gioacchino,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 138–39. “Belle Arti: Pittori, Scultori, Incisori, Mosaicisti,” Almanacco Romano (Rome: Tipografia Chiassi, 1855), 286. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Altobelli, Gioacchino,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 227–28; Bonetti, “Gioacchino Altobelli,” in Dewitz, Siegert, and Schuller-Procopovici, Italien: Sehen und Sterben, 261. Bonfigli, Guide to the Studios in Rome, 20, 107. Carlotta Sylos Calò, “Altobelli, Gioacchino,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 197. Marina Miraglia, “Gioacchino Altobelli,” in Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 578–79. Piale, Rome Seen in a Week, 11–12.

266. Piero Becchetti, “Anderson, James,” in La fotografia a Roma, 272–73; Becchetti, “Una dinastia di fotografi romani.” Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Anderson, James,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 228; Bonetti, “James Anderson,” in Dewitz, Siegert, and Schuller-Procopovici, Italien: Sehen und Sterben, 262–63. Bonfigli, Guide to the Studios in Rome, 107. “Foreign States, Rome, Class 14,” International Exhibition 1862: Official Catalogue of the Industrial Department (London: Truscott, Son, & Simmons, 1862), 373. Gernsheim, “James Anderson 1813–77.” Giusi Lombardi, “Anderson, James (Giacomo),” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 197. Anita Margiotta, “James Anderson,” in Cartier-Bresson et al.,

James Anderson (English, 1813–1877) Considered one of the most significant painter-photographers of the nineteenth century, Isaac Atkinson was born in Blencarn, England, and arrived in Rome in 1838 under the assumed name of James Anderson, studying art and living off of money he had stolen from his family. Records indicate that he became a professional photographer by 1851 to supplement his income, selling his albumen prints first from his studio and then exclusively through the German bookseller Joseph Spithöver in the piazza di Spagna. Between 1855 and 1858, the Almanacco Romano recorded that he maintained a painting studio at 113 via Tomacelli, but around 1859

Roma 1850, 176. Marina Miraglia, “Anderson James,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 139; Miraglia, “James Anderson,” in Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 574–75. Negro, Seconda Roma (1943), 470–71. Piale, Rome Seen in a Week, 11, 12. Dorothea Ritter, “Auf den Spuren James Andersons und der Maler-Fotografen in Rom,” in Ritter, Rom 1846–1870, 11–25.

Henri (Enrico) Béguin (Swiss, dates unknown) Born in Geneva, the little-known Béguin learned daguerreotypy in Paris before embarking for Italy in

Artist Biographies  209

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 209

7/7/22 2:12 PM

1850 as an itinerant photographer in Verona, Ferrara, and Bologna. Active in Rome between 1855 and 1860, he Italianized his name to Enrico and is known for the charming landscapes, animal studies, and informal costume studies done in these years with glass negatives. References Piero Becchetti, “Beguin, E.,” in La fotografia a Roma, 276. Bologna and Jacobson, “Itinerant Daguerreotypist,” 88–91. Bonetti and Maffioli, L’Italia d’argento, 113, 197, 219, 223, 240, 243. Carlotta Sylos Calò, “Béguin, Henri (Enrico),” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 197. Marina Miraglia, “Henri Béguin,” in Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 580.

Edmond (Edmondo) Behles (German, 1841–1921) Behles moved to Rome permanently in the late 1850s, where he operated a studio at 28 via Mario dei Fiori and a shop at 196 via del Corso. Beginning in 1857, he partnered with his compatriot Giorgio Sommer in Naples to form Sommer & Behles, which seems to have disbanded around 1867, after which he continued under his own name. Behles remained active as a photographer until at least 1879, when he last appeared in Baedeker’s handbook, which noted that his works could be purchased at his studio or at the bookseller Loescher & Co. at 307 via del Corso. References Baedeker, Italy (1879), 111. Piero Becchetti, “Behles, Edmondo,” in La fotografia a Roma, 276–77.

dell’Arco della Ciambella, and 37 via dei Cestari. In 1874, it is documented that he was one of the photographers who supplied work for Isabella Bonafede Cuccioni’s firm at 43–44 piazza di Spagna. Belli appears to have been an integral member of Simelli’s circle, and the latter printed many of his negatives, which has led to some confusion. In the early twentieth century, the photographer Valeriano Cugnoni acquired thousands of negatives by Belli and Simelli (Fondo Cugnoni, Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, Rome), which were later erroneously attributed to his relative, the architect Ignazio Cugnoni, who was never a photographer. Sebastiano Porretta even published a monograph attributing all the works to Cugnoni in 1976, contributing to Belli’s obscurity. His diverse oeuvre, which consists of Roman landscapes, views populated with washerwomen or country people performing everyday duties, and images of pastoral life and landscapes made in nearby towns, is larger and more significant than previously thought and deserving of reappraisal. References Piero Becchetti, “Belli, Filippo,” in La fotografia a Roma, 277, 291. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Belli, Filippo,” in Bonfait, Le Peuple de Rome, 274; Bonetti, “Belli, Filippo,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 229–30; Bonetti, “Filippo Belli,” in Dewitz, Siegert, and Schuller-Procopovici, Italien: Sehen und Sterben, 263. Cestelli Guidi, “Beni patrimoniali e beni simbolici.” Dewitz, Siegert, and Schuller-Procopovici, Italien: Sehen und sterben, 218–29, 263. Piale, Rome Seen in a Week, 12. Porretta, Ignazio Cugnoni fotografo.

Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Behles, Edmondo,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 229. Marina Miraglia, “Behles Edmondo,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 143. Piale, Rome Seen in a Week, 12.

Filippo Belli (Italian, 1836–1927) Trained as a painter, the Roman-born Belli began his photography career in 1858 when he opened a studio at 41 via dei Banchi Vecchi. In 1865, Piale listed him in a brief partnership with Carlo Baldassarre Simelli at 117 via del Corso. Around 1873, he formed the Stabilimento Litografico Fotografico (Photographic Lithographic Establishment) with G. Cleman, which operated until 1885 at various addresses, including 313 via del Corso, 16 via

Peter (Pietro) Thyge Boyesen (Danish, 1819–1882) Born in Copenhagen, Boyesen studied in Munich for ten years beginning in 1855 before permanently moving to Rome and establishing himself as a photographer at 44 via della Purificazione. His compatriot, the author Vilhelm Bergsøe, observed that he “made a living by taking nature photographs for the artists, and photographing the countrymen who frequently visited his studio with its friendly garden and the many strange plants for the use of his photographs.” He was evidently industrious; the Danish writer Frederik Gotschalk Knudtzon noted that Boyesen “was rarely seen because he is always busy.” To supplement his income, he also worked as a clerk at the Prussian embassy.

210  Artist Biographies

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 210

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Helsted et al., Rome in Early Photographs, 41, cats. 10, 77, and 80.

and photography.” Little is known of his photographic activity outside of the one example in the McGuigan Collection, likely a self-portrait, ca. 1854 (plate 56), that bears his blind stamp “Emil Braun / Roma.” Tragically, he died two years later from malaria.

Knudtzon, Ungdomsdage, 173.

References

References Piero Becchetti, “Boyesen, Pietro Thyge,” in La fotografia a Roma, 283. Bergsøe, Henrik Ibsen Paa Ischia, 300–301.

Braun, Dr. Emil Braun’s Panorama von Rome; Braun, Die

Adolphe Braun (French, 1812–1877) Born in Besançon, Braun earned a reputation as one of the most significant French photographers of the nineteenth century. He used the camera as an aid in his floral design business but soon made photography his vocation after winning acclaim for his floral still lifes at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855. In 1857, he founded the successful firm of Braun et Cie and initially became known for his large-format panoramic views produced with the pantoscopic camera (invented by the American John Johnson and the Englishman John Harrison) in conjunction with the carbon print process developed by the English chemist and physicist Joseph Wilson Swan. Braun’s Roman activity can be dated from between ca. 1866 to 1868 and from 1869 to 1870; both Murray’s and Baedeker’s handbooks noted that his works could be purchased in Rome at the photography dealer E. Aubert’s shop at 22 via dei Condotti, the “depôt of Braun’s photographs.” During the 1870s, he focused exclusively on reproductions of old master drawings and sculpture. References Baedeker, Italien: Handbuch für Reisende (1874), 83. Piero Becchetti, “Braun, Adolphe,” in La fotografia a Roma, 284. Gernsheim, Rise of Photography, 183. Marina Miraglia, “Adolphe Braun,” in Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 581; Miraglia, “Braun Adolphe,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 146–47. Murray, Handbook of Rome (1871), xxiii. Pohlmann, Mellenthin, and Kunze, Adolphe Braun, 139–55.

Emil Braun (German, 1809–1856) Hailing from Gotha in central Germany, Emil Braun studied archaeology and art history in Munich and Berlin before settling permanently in Rome in 1833, where he became the secretary of the German Archaeological Institute. A colorful author and amateur artist, Braun, according to Konrad Schauenburg, “devoted a large part of his time and energy to industrial undertakings such as electroplating, the manufacture of artificial marble

Ruinen und Museen Roms. Gregorovius, Roman Journals, 32. Konrad Schauenburg, “August Emil Braun,” Deutsche Biographie, accessed September 23, 2021, https://‌w ww‌.deutsche‌ -biographie‌.de‌/pnd116415738‌.html‌# ndbcontent.

Giacomo Caneva (Italian, 1813–1865) Perhaps the most significant photographer of his generation, Caneva, a native of Padua, trained as a perspective painter at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice before moving to Rome in 1838 to direct the expansions and improvements at the Villa Torlonia carried out by the architect Giuseppe Jappelli. It had been assumed by Becchetti that he took up photography in 1845 because his name appears in a ledger kept in the archive at the Caffè Greco thought to date from that year; however, as I established in chapter 4, the ledger actually dates to the 1850s. While it is therefore difficult to assess when he became a photographer, his earliest known calotype, The Temple of Vesta, is signed, dated, and inscribed “Roma 1847 G. Caneva” (Museo di Roma, Palazzo Braschi, Rome), and his initial forays in daguerreotypy are datable to 1849 based upon payments recorded in an account book from the archive of Tommaso Cuccioni. Along with Frédéric Flachéron, Caneva is considered the driving force behind the Roman School of Photography. He gained international recognition in London for his salted paper prints at the earliest photographic exhibition ever held, at the Society of Arts in 1852. In 1855, he published Della Fotografia Trattato Pratico (Practical Treatise on Photography), in which he described for the first time in Italian all the known photographic processes. In the early 1850s, he kept a studio at 68 via del Babuino (although at some point he also operated at 446 via del Corso, as indicated in the abovementioned Caffè Greco ledger) before adding a second location in the early 1860s at 100 via Sistina. Caneva primarily sold his work to his fellow artists, and after his death his negatives were acquired by Ludovico Tuminello and Carlo Baldassarre Simelli (and after him, by Gustave Eugenio

Artist Biographies  211

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 211

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Chauffourier) and were in continual circulation over the next several decades. References Almanacco Romano (1855), 287. Piero Becchetti, “Caneva, Giacomo,” in La fotografia a Roma, 286; Becchetti, Giacomo Caneva. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Caneva, Giacomo,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 198; Bonetti, “Caneva, Giacomo,” in Bonfait, Le Peuple de Rome, 270–72; Bonetti, “Caneva, Giacomo,” in Cartier-Bresson et al., Éloge du négatif, 220; Bonetti, “Caneva, Giacomo,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 231–32; Bonetti, “Giacomo Caneva,” in Dewitz, Siegert, and Schuller-Procopovici, Italien: Sehen und Sterben, 265–66. Caneva, Della fotografia. Anita Margiotta, “Giacomo Caneva,” in Cartier-Bresson et al., Roma 1850, 176–77. Marina Miraglia, “Caneva Giacomo,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 147–48; Miraglia, “Giacomo Caneva,” in Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 574, 580. R. Thomas, “Photography in Rome,” 159–60.

T. Carr (British, dates unknown) It seems likely that the mysterious T. Carr, evidently a British subject, already was a practitioner of photography before he embarked on an Italian tour sometime between 1852 and 1853, in part because several of his earliest prints bear the watermark of “Towgood 1852,” for the English firm of Edward Towgood & Sons, paper manufacturers in Sawston, Cambridgeshire; whereas presumably later examples, such as plate 36, have the watermark of French manufacturer De Canson Frères, whose products were readily available in Rome. Many of his photographic mounts (the paper supports onto which the photos were glued, probably after he returned home) bear the watermark “J. Whatman/Turkey Mill/1853.” Additionally, there are a number of datable features in his work, such as the appearance of the Roman Forum, which is devoid of its alley of trees (uprooted in 1849 and replanted in 1855), as well as the finished state of the Papal Observatory, erected in 1852, on top of the medieval tower of the Palazzo Senatorio on the Capitoline Hill. Most of his Italian oeuvre, comprising more than 100 salted paper prints from albumen-on-glass negatives, is accompanied by printed labels that describe in original prose the locations in and around Florence, Naples, Pisa, Rome, Siena, and Volterra that were grouped into three distinct series: Roman Views, Tuscan Views, and

Neapolitan Views. Eight of these images were exhibited at the International Exhibition of 1862 in London. T. Carr originally was known from 6 prints in the “Calotype Albums” of Prince Albert (The Royal Collection Trust) and 55 at the McGill University Library, Montreal, Canada, before a sequentially numbered group of 106 images appeared at auction in 2010, 52 of which are now in the McGuigan Collection. Several recent publications have erroneously suggested that T. Carr was part of the “Circle of Robert Henry Cheney,” arguing that Cheney’s mother was Harriet Carr and that, ergo, there was a connection. The original source for this information was Maria Francesca Bonetti, who was asked by Serge Plantureux to research Carr and, finding nothing, merely speculated on a possible connection which was then published by Plantureux in the catalogue for his photography auction at Binoche et Giquello in Paris on November 18, 2010, and in In Rome’s Light (2015). As the author has subsequently confirmed with both Bonetti and Plantureux, as well as through genealogical sources, there is no proof of any relationship. References Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Carr, T.,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 232. International Exhibition of 1862: Catalogue of Photographs, 14. “T. Carr,” Royal Collection Trust, accessed September 24, 2021, https://‌w ww‌.rct‌.uk‌/collection‌/2906139‌/the‌-coliseum ‌-rome.

John Linton Chapman (American, 1839–1905) Born in Washington, DC, Chapman moved to Rome as a young boy in October 1850 with his family, headed by the Virginia-born painter and engraver John Gadsby Chapman, who had studied in Italy from 1828 to 1831. In December 1852, they rented apartments from the photographer and art supplier Pietro Dovizielli at 135 via del Babuino, where Chapman continued to live for the next twenty-six years. Chapman apprenticed under his father and specialized in pastoral vedute of the Roman Campagna and the ancient via Appia for a clientele of mostly American and British tourists. His earliest datable photograph suggests that he took up the practice around 1859, perhaps under the influence of Dovizielli or Robert Macpherson, who was a close family friend. His photographic oeuvre consists of around one hundred landscape views of Rome and its vicinity, some including family and

212  Artist Biographies

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 212

7/7/22 2:12 PM

friends, such as the visiting poet and editor of the New York Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant, taken at Ostia in 1867. He also recorded hundreds of works painted by himself, his father, and his younger brother Conrad Wise Chapman. There is no evidence that Chapman ever commercially distributed his work; he seems to have practiced as a prolific amateur, and he apparently abandoned photography when he returned to the United States in 1878. References

Alistair Crawford, “Constant, Eugène,” in Hannavy, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, 334. Explication des Ouvrages de Peinture, Sculpture, Architecture, Gravure et Lithographie des Artists Vivants, Exposés au Musée Royal (Paris: Vinchon, 1842), 48. Giusi Lombardi, “Constant, Eugène,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 198. Marina Miraglia, “Eugène Constant,” in Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 574.

Chapman Family Correspondence, UCSD.

Rapport sur la première exposition publique, 54.

Chapman Family Papers, McGuigan Collection.

R. Thomas, “Photography in Rome,” 159–60.

John F. McGuigan, “American Open-Air Landscape Painting”; McGuigan, “Old Photo and New Light”; McGuigan, “Who They Were.” Mary K. McGuigan, “‘This Market of Physiognomy.’” McGuigan and McGuigan, John Gadsby Chapman.

Eugène Constant (French, dates unknown) Little is known about Constant’s early life outside of two paintings he exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1842, where he was listed as residing at both Venice and Paris. He was the first in Rome, where he appears to have been active between 1848 and 1855, to utilize Niépce de Saint-Victor’s albumen glass negative process. In 1850, Richard Wheeler Thomas listed Constant as one of the founding members of the Roman School of Photography. He exhibited six Roman views at the Society of Arts in London in 1852, alongside Frédéric Flachéron and Giacomo Caneva. The cataloguer of the French Photographic Society in Paris in 1855 noted that his albumen photographs “can be cited among the remarkable products obtained by this process. His views of Rome, which date back to 1848, are from the most skilful hand.” In 1855, Constant wrote the biographical entry for his friend Philibert Perraud in Le Biographe moderne. Bonfigli noted in 1860 that Constant’s photographs could be purchased at Mauche and Company, a stationery store at 174 via del Corso. References Piero Becchetti, “Constant, Eugène,” in La fotografia a Roma, 292–93. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Constant, Eugène,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 232–33. Bonfigli, Guide to the Studios in Rome, 108. Marie-Eve Bouillon, “Constant, Eugène,” in Cartier-Bresson et al., Roma 1850, 177. Catalogue of an Exhibition of Recent Specimens, 13, 16. Constant, “M. Perraud,” n.p.

Louis-Henri-Eugène Copmartin (French, 1819–1880) Born in Courbevoie, just outside Paris, Copmartin began his distinguished military career in 1838 and fought in the Crimean War from 1853 to 1855, during which he was twice wounded. He arrived in Rome in 1859 as part of the occupying forces and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel of the Fifty-First Regiment on August 2, 1861. His photographic work, represented by twenty examples in the McGuigan Collection, shares a close affinity with the same compositions and artistic sensibilities of the Roman School of Photography. In December 1862 he was transferred to North America as part of the Second French Intervention in Mexico, and several of his drawings of the campaign were reproduced in the Parisian L’Illustration: Journal Universel, just as Constant Louvel’s had been before him. References Colonel Du Pin, “Mexique (1862–1867),” May 9, 2013, Second Empire Forum, https://‌18edelignesecondempire‌.clicforum ‌.fr‌/t921‌-Mexique‌-1862‌–1867‌.htm. “Expédition du Mexique,” L’Illustration: Journal Universel 41, no. 1057 (May 30, 1863): 340, 341, 344.

Tommaso Cuccioni (Italian, 1790–1864) Cuccioni’s commercial activity as an engraver and print dealer began around 1830 at 88 via della Croce, and his establishment was among the first to sell photographs, as early as 1849; his account books record commissions for daguerreotypes and calotypes by Giacomo Caneva and others. Murray’s 1853 handbook listed a new location at 18–19 via Condotti, noting, “Photography has been of late years very successfully applied in delineating the monuments of ancient and modern Rome; and such views may be procured at Cuccioni’s, and at all

Artist Biographies  213

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 213

7/7/22 2:12 PM

the print-shops, at prices varying from 5 to 10 pauls.” About this same time, Cuccioni took up the collodion process and established himself as one of the principal photographers of the city. He exhibited his albumen prints throughout Europe, winning a medal “For general photographic excellence” at the International Exhibition of 1862 in London, along with Pietro Dovizielli. The Gladwell Gallery at 21 Gracechurch Street, London, advertised that they were the “sole Depôt in England” of his works. After his death, management of the firm passed to his wife, Isabella Bonafede Cuccioni, who hired Guiseppe Ninci as her house photographer until Augusto Fabbri replaced him around 1866. Subsequently, the widow purchased negatives from other photographers or their estates, including Filippo Belli and Robert Macpherson, and continued to operate the business until at least 1886, when Baedeker last recorded it at 43 piazza di Spagna.

relocated to 10–14 via del Corso, then to 61–62 via dei Condotti in the 1890s, where the firm remained in operation through several generations, until the late 1940s. They were popular among local and visiting patricians and, because he was a man of the cloth, Antonio enjoyed privileged access to Pius IX and his court. They are also known for a series of costume studies for artists, landscapes, and especially Antonio’s reportage scenes of the battlefields at Mentana and Monterotondo in 1867.

References

Murray, Handbook of Rome (1858), xix.

References Piero Becchetti, “D’Alessandri, Antonio,” in La fotografia a Roma, 294–95. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “D’Alessandri, Fratelli,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 233–34; Bonetti, “Fratelli D’Alessandri,” in Dewitz, Siegert, and Schuller-Procopovici, Italien: Sehen und Sterben, 267–68. Marina Miraglia, “D’Alessandri, Antonio,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 151.

[Advertisements], Athenaeum, no. 1821 (September 20, 1862): 354. Baedeker, Italy: Handbook for Travellers (1886), 109, 111. Piero Becchetti, “Cuccioni, Tommaso,” in La fotografia a Roma, 293–94; Becchetti, “Cuccioni Tommaso,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 150–51. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Cuccioni, Tommaso,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 233; Bonetti, “Tommaso Cuccioni,” in Dewitz, Siegert, and Schuller-Procopovici, Italien: Sehen und Sterben, 267. Carlotta Sylos Calò, “Cuccioni, Tommaso,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 198–99.

Louis-Alphonse Davanne (French, 1824–1912) The Parisian chemist Davanne adopted the profession of photography in 1852 and over the next fifty years became a pioneering figure for his numerous publications on the refinement of various processes, invention of equipment, and new methods to ensure the long-term durability of positives and negatives. A series of salted paper prints executed in Rome in 1853 displays an affinity with the work of the Roman School of Photography, with which he likely worked closely.

“Class XIV: Photography and Photographic Apparatus,” 206.

References

Marina Miraglia, “Tommaso Cuccioni,” in Susinno et al., Mae-

Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Davanne, Louis-Alphonse,” in Mina,

stà di Roma, 574.

In Rome’s Light, 234.

Murray, Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy (1853), 9.

Florence Le Corre, “Alphonse Davanne,” in Cartier-Bresson et

Fratelli D’Alessandri

Johan Swinnen, “Davanne, Louis-Alphonse,” in Hannavy, Ency-

al., Éloge du négatif, 221.

Antonio D’Alessandri (Italian, 1818–1893) and Paolo Francesco D’Alessandri (Italian, 1824–1889) Antonio and Paolo D’Alessandri were brothers from L’Aquila, seventy-three miles east of Rome. Antonio, a priest, became interested in photography in 1852, through visits to the Luswergh family workshop at the Collegio Romano, and opened for business in 1856 with his brother Francesco at 65 via del Babuino. Two years later, Murray’s handbook described it as one of the most successful portrait studios in the city. In 1865, they

clopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, 386–87.

Pierre-Antoine de Bermond de Vaulx (French, 1821–1900) The eldest son of Louise Combalot and Jean-Antoine de Bermond de Vaulx, a prominent landowner, Pierre de Bermond was raised at the Château de Périvoye, his family’s ancestral home, in Noyers-sur-Jabron in the Alpes-deHaute-Provence region of southeastern France. As a boy, de Bermond studied in Lyon at the private Catholic school

214  Artist Biographies

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 214

7/7/22 2:12 PM

founded in 1833 by Monsignor Étienne Dauphin in the former Château d’Oullins, where his fellow pupils included the writer Eugène Beluze, the painter Paul Borel, and the architect Pierre Bossan. According to research conducted by the photography historian Vincent Rouby, de Bermond later served on the faculty at the University of Montpellier before establishing a medical practice in Koblenz, Germany, in 1855 (though I have not been able to corroborate this information). During the 1850s, he frequently visited the Eternal City and, on June 3, 1857, he became a Knight of the Order of Malta, an ancient Catholic lay organization founded in 1099 ce and based in Rome since 1834, whose motto reads “Defense of the faith and assistance to the poor.” By the late 1860s, de Bermond, a staunch monarchist, retired to his family estate and served as both mayor and general counsel of his village. Credit for the rediscovery of de Bermond as an amateur calotypist belongs to the photography expert and consultant Serge Kakou, who acquired an unattributed Roman Album of his salted paper prints at auction in Marseilles in 1986, comprising fifty views of the city that span the entire decade of the 1850s and nine German landscapes (McGuigan Collection). Several years later, another group of photographs appeared on the art market with examples common to the Roman Album, as well as views of Provence and Vietnam. Kakou recognized the latter from the French journal L’Illustration of 1864 as engravings after photographs by de Bermond’s younger brother, Octave, who had been stationed in Indochina during his naval career. The French landscapes were then attributed to de Bermond’s father, Jean-Antoine, by the photography historian Gilbert Beaugé, but the author of the Roman photographs remained unknown until 1993, when Kakou located Octave’s great-grandson, Bruno de Bermond de Vaulx, who provided the following critical piece of information: “Among the de Bermonds you cite, one is missing in my opinion, it was my great uncle who also frequently practiced photography: this is Pierre-Antoine de Bermond (1821–1900).” After years of nurturing this relationship, Kakou was finally invited to the Château de Périvoye, where he was able to match the original paper negatives of Pierre de Bermond held in the family archive with most of the prints in the album, thereby confirming his activity as a calotypist. Unfortunately, following Bruno de Bermond’s passing in 2001, Kakou’s repeated requests to visit the château and further study the archive went unanswered by his heirs.

Over the last several decades, perhaps longer, de Bermond’s photographs have slowly filtered onto the art market through multiple sources, and many are to be found in prominent public and private collections either unattributed or misattributed to his father, brother, or more frequently to Caneva, whom he clearly worked alongside, positioning their tripods just a few feet from each other. Through the present volume, which is the first publication to identify him as an active participant in the Roman School of Photography, and the ongoing cooperation and enthusiasm of my colleagues Maria Francesca Bonetti and the Roman architect and photography collector Andrea Sciolari, it is to be hoped that Pierre de Bermond’s significant contributions and unique place in the early history of photography in Rome can be restored. References Sylvie Aubenas, Marc Durand, and Paul-Louis Roubert, “Bermond de Vaux, Jean Antoine de (1798–1871),” in Aubenas and Roubert, Primitifs de la photographie, 263. Beaugé, La photographie en Provence, 158. Beluze, Vie de Monseigneur Dauphin, 5, 150–52, 421–22. Bruno de Bermond de Vaulx to Serge Kakou, letter, August 4, 1993. Serge Kakou to John F. McGuigan Jr., emails, May 9, 2019; May 13, 2019; May 28, 2021; November 11, 2021; and January 19, 2022. Lamathière, “Bermond de Vaulx,” 328. Vincent Rouby to Serge Kakou, email, April 28, 2014.

Francesco Adriano de Bonis (Italian, 1820–1884) The Tuscan-born de Bonis attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and studied chemistry and mathematics. By 1849, he listed his profession as architect, but he also found employment translating French treatises on architecture, chemistry, and economics into Italian. It is not known when he learned photography, but some of his works possibly date his presence in Rome to the early to mid-1850s. The first recorded address that I have found, from du Pays’s French guidebook, placed him at 123 via Felice in 1863. Bonetti discovered that de Bonis moved to 38 via Sant’Isidoro in 1865; in 1872–73, he lived in the convent of the Spanish Discalced Augustinians at 11 via Felice; and lastly, from 1881, at 51 via dei Modelli, where he listed his profession as draftsman. Between 1872 and 1882, Augustus Hare lauded him in editions of his popular English-language guidebook, Walks in Rome:

Artist Biographies  215

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 215

7/7/22 2:12 PM

In Rome’s Light, 234–35; Bonetti, “Francesco Adriano De

Colour-Warehouse, Pencils, Canvasses, and all other accessories for the Art of Painting; he likewise sells Water-colours, modern Pictures; Photographs; etc. No. 138, via del Babuino.” A central figure in the Roman art world, Dovizielli appears to have taken up photography in 1851 and sold his albumen prints exclusively through his own establishment. Esteemed as one of the finest photographers in Rome, he attracted international attention with his works at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855, for which he was awarded a bronze medal, and at the Italian Exposition in Florence that same year. By 1859, he issued a broadside of his inventory of works for sale, Catalogue des Travaux Exécutés Photographie dans L’Établissement de P. Dovizielli, with 144 numbered prints of landscapes in and around Rome, fifty reproductions of paintings in various collections around the city, and forty-seven photographs of statues in the Vatican Museums. He exhibited at the London Photographic Society’s Eighth Exhibition in 1861 and at the International Exhibition in London in 1862 (receiving a bronze medal along with Tommaso Cuccioni), where the British architect and art historian Matthew Digby Wyatt paid him high praise: “In photography the names of Ponte of Venice, Alinari of Florence, and Dovizielli of Rome, are well known in this country as connected with very perfect reproductions of the most striking architectural monuments of those cities. It may be enough to say that they ably sustain their reputation amidst rivals whose excellence brings them within a few paces of the foremost in the race.” Later that same year, the London Morning Post reported that Dovizielli had been commissioned by Napoleon III to document the current archaeological excavations on the Palatine Hill. His photographs could be purchased at his store as late as 1881, and after his death, his sons Cesare and Pompeo continued to manage the business.

Bonis Personal Research File,” shared with the author

References

March 20, 2020.

Piero Becchetti, “Dovizielli, Pietro,” in La fotografia a Roma,

“For Artistic Bits, very much to be recommended, de Bonis, 28 via S. Isidore.” De Bonis maintained a special relationship with the French Academy in Rome, as witnessed by his large number of views of the structures and gardens of the Villa Medici, and his photographs were eagerly acquired by its pensionnaires, including Ernest Barthélemy Michel, winner of the Prix de Rome in 1860, who owned thirty-eight prints now in the McGuigan Collection. De Bonis contributed at least twenty photographs to the English archaeologist John Henry Parker’s ambitious 1868 volume The Archaeology of Rome, and subsequently many of his other works were engraved as illustrations for the pioneering art and photography critic Francis Wey’s Rome: Descriptions et souvenirs of 1872. De Bonis originally issued his own photographs, which are identifiable either by his blind stamp “DB” or his ink stamp “AdB” on the print or mount, or sometimes both. At some point, likely in the 1870s, Carlo Baldassarre Simelli began to print and distribute de Bonis’s works, a few of which he numbered and issued under his own name. In 1879, embittered by the destruction of so many picturesque elements of Rome as a result of post-unification public works projects, de Bonis published a booklet denouncing their loss, entitled I vandali a Roma (The Vandals of Rome). References Piero Becchetti, “De Bonis,” in La fotografia a Roma, 297. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “A. De Bonis,” in Dewitz, Siegert, and Schuller-Procopovici, Italien: Sehen und Sterben, 268; Bonetti, “A. De Bonis, an ‘Outsider’ Photographer,” in Lundberg and Pinto, Steps Off the Beaten Path, 25–32; Bonetti, “De Bonis, A.,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 199; Bonetti, “De Bonis, Francesco Adriano,” in Mina,

Cavazzi, Margiotta, and Tozzi, Englishman in Rome.

301–2.

De Bonis, I vandali a Roma.

Bleser, Rome et ses Monuments, 527.

Du Pays, Itinéraire Descriptif (1863), 536–37.

Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Dovizielli, Pietro,” in Bonetti, Roma

Hare, Walks in Rome (1872), 1:29; Hare, Walks in Rome (1882), 2. Parker, Supplement to a Catalogue, 13, 16, and 18.

1840–1870, 199; Bonetti, “Dovizielli, Pietro,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 236. Bonfigli, Guide to the Studios in Rome, n.p.

Pietro Dovizielli (Italian, 1804–1885) The Roman Dovizielli operated a multigenerational family business at 136–38 via del Babuino, which was advertised by Bonfigli in 1860 as “Dovizielli’s

[Dovizielli], Catalogue des Travaux Exécutés Photographie dans L’Établissement de P. Dovizielli. “États Pontificaux,” 386. Marina Miraglia, “Pietro Dovizielli,” in Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 577–78.

216  Artist Biographies

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 216

7/7/22 2:12 PM

“Roman Affairs. From Our Own Correspondent,” London Morning Post, November 14, 1862. Wyatt, “On the Present Aspect,” 145.

Robert Eaton (Welsh, 1817–1872) A wealthy Quaker merchant and banker, Robert Eaton was born in Swansea, Glamorganshire, Wales, and the correct years of his life are published here for the first time. He appears to have taken up photography as an amateur in Rome around 1855, where he likely associated with the Roman School of Photography. His negatives were not printed until several years later by Francis Frith and Co. in Reigate, Surrey (est. 1859), and McLean, Melhuish, Napper and Co. at 26 Haymarket, London (active 1859–61). Five of Eaton’s Roman views were lent to the Exhibition of the Architectural Photographic Association in 1861, and “a fine series of photographs of ancient remains in Rome” were exhibited at the Cambrian Archaeological Association at Swansea Castle that same year. He died on December 30, 1872, in Bath, England. References Archæologia Cambrensis. The Journal of the Cambrian Archaeological Association, vol. 8, 3rd ser. (London: J. Russell Smith, 1861), 368.

at 21 via Ripa di Fiume in the 1845 Manuale artistico ed archeologico, Flachéron adopted photography around 1847 and sold his prints directly to an international clientele at his store. Along with Giacomo Caneva and Pedro Téllez Girón, he is considered a founding member of the Roman School of Photography. In 1851, he exhibited seven views of Rome at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London’s Crystal Palace and was awarded a medal. In 1852, he showed another five works at the first-ever photography exhibition held at London’s Society of Arts. Flachéron appears to have abandoned photography after 1855, and he and his family returned to Paris in 1866. References Becchetti, “Flachéron, Frédéric (Jean-François-Charles-André),” in La fotografia a Roma, 307–8. Catalogue of an Exhibition of Recent Specimens, 14–15. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Flachéron, Frédéric (Jean-FrançoisCharles-André),” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 236–37. Marie-Eve Bouillon, “Jean François Charles André Flachéron,” in Cartier-Bresson et al., Roma 1850, 178–79. Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851, 3:1220, no. 836. Giusi Lombardi, “Flachéron, Frédéric (Jean-François-CharlesAndré),” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 199. Manuale artistico ed archeologico ossia raccolte di notizie ed

Piero Becchetti, “Eaton, Robert,” in La fotografia a Roma, 302.

indirizzi riguardanti i stabilimenti, i professori d’ogni

Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Eaton, Robert,” in Bonetti, Roma

genere, artisti e negozianti residenti in Roma (Rome:

1840–1870, 199. Marina Miraglia, “Eaton Robert,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 154. “Robert Eaton,” cemetery records, Bath Record Office, England, accessed September 26, 2021, https://‌w ww.batharchives

Monaldi, 1845), 52. Marina Miraglia, “Flacheron Frédéric,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 156; Miraglia, “Frédéric Flachéron (Jean-François-Charles),” in Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 573–74.

‌.co‌.uk‌/cemeteries‌/claverton‌/robert‌-eaton. Society of Friends’ Registers: Notes and Certificates of Births, Marriages and Burials, Class: RG 6, Piece 236, General Register Office National Archives, Kew.

Frédéric Flachéron (French, 1813–1883) A painter and sculptor originally from Lyon, Flachéron studied under David D’Angers and Jean-Jacques Barre before winning second place in the Prix de Rome for engraving on medals and pietra dura in 1839. He soon after joined his brother Isidore, a pupil of Ingres, in Rome, and in 1842 he married Caroline Hayard and formed a partnership with her father, Charles, in an artists’ supply store known as Hayard-Flachéron located at 43 piazza di Spagna. Listed as a “Landscape painter”

Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (French, 1804–1892) Born into a wealthy family in Langres, Haute-Marne, Girault came into an inheritance in 1825 and thereafter devoted himself to the arts, becoming an accomplished painter and draftsman who exhibited at the Salon. He studied in Paris under the landscape painters FrançoisEdme Ricois and Jules Coignet and, after making his first pilgrimage to Rome in 1831, toured through North Africa, Spain, and Sicily. During these travels, he became intrigued by the influence of ancient Greek and Roman precedents on Islamic architecture and published a series of lithographs based on his sketches, entitled Monuments arabes et moresques (1836–39). Girault’s earliest known

Artist Biographies  217

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 217

7/7/22 2:12 PM

photographs were taken on the grounds of his villa at Courcelles-Val-d’Esnoms in 1841–42, presumably as practice ahead of his second Mediterranean tour. He arrived in Rome in April 1842, where he entered the orbit of the French Academy, and over the ensuing three months he created more than three hundred daguerreotypes of buildings, ruins, architectural ornaments, people, and animals. The quantity of plates that he produced in such a short period and the scope of his interests are truly remarkable for the era. Departing around July 20, Girault moved on to Malta, Athens, Cairo, Alexandria, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Beirut before returning to France in 1845, where he published Monuments arabes d’Egypte, de Syrie et d’Asie-Mineure, dessinés et mesurés 1842 à 1845 with lithographs after his daguerreotypes.

responsible for sending pensioned students to Rome, he was in the Eternal City alongside his friends, the painters Luis de Madrazo and Bernardino Montañés, both of whom collected his photographs. Girón evidently learned the calotype in Rome around 1849 and, by 1850, Richard Wheeler Thomas remarked that the Prince Giron des Anglonnes—a Frenchified version of his name—was a principal member of the Roman School of Photography, alongside Giacomo Caneva, Eugène Constant, Frédéric Flachéron, and Arthur Robinson, who met regularly at the famous Caffè Greco.

References

Hernández Latas and Becchetti, Recuerdo de Roma, 88–89.

Becchetti, “Girault de Prangey, Joseph-Philibert,” in La fotogra-

Pérez Gallardo, Fotografía y arquitectura, 101; Pérez Gallardo,

fia a Roma, 312. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Girault de Prangey, Joseph Philibert,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 237.

References Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Giron des Anglonnes, prince (Pedro de Alcántara Téllez-Girón y Fernández de Santillán, prince of Anglona),” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 237–38.

“Le prince Girón de Anglona”; Pérez Gallardo, “El príncipe Girón de Anglona.” R. Thomas, “Photography in Rome.”

Gernsheim with Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre, 107–8. Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, Monuments arabes et moresques de Cordoue, Séville et Grenade, dessinés et mesurés en 1832 et 1833 (Paris: Veith et Hauser, 1836–39); Girault de Prangey, Monuments arabes d’Egypte, de Syrie et d’Asie-Mineure, dessinés et mesurés 1842 à 1845 (Paris: J.-P. Girault de Prangey, 1846). Mauron, Miroirs d’argent. Pinson et al., Monumental Journey. Lindsey S. Stewart, “In Perfect Order: Antiquity in the Daguerreotypes of Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey,” in Lyons et al., Antiquity and Photography, 66–91.

Pedro Téllez-Girón (Pedro de Alcántara Téllez-Girón y Fernández de Santillán, Prince of Anglona) (Spanish, 1812–1900) A native of Cadiz, Girón was the son of Pedro de Alcántara Téllez-Girón y Alfonso-Pimentel, 2nd Prince of Anglona, who was the director of the Prado Museum in Madrid from 1820 to 1823. Girón learned daguerreotypy in Paris in 1839 shortly after it was announced, and, while visiting his father in Cuba in 1840–41 (who was then captain general of Cuba), he is credited with taking the first photographs of the island nation. From 1849 to 1851, when his father was director of Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the institution

Calvert Richard Jones (Welsh, 1802–1877) Born into a wealthy family in Swansea, Jones earned a degree in mathematics at the University of Oxford and became a talented amateur painter, likely having studied with the English watercolorist Samuel Prout. He developed a precocious interest in photography and is credited with taking the first daguerreotype of his native Wales in 1841. After Jones learned calotypy in 1845 directly from its inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot, he embarked upon a speculative photographic tour of the Mediterranean region and arrived in Rome on May 4, 1846, where he spent two weeks and created around two dozen works. He often is credited as the first calotypist in the city, but that distinction belongs to two French photographers of his acquaintance, Amélie Guillot-Saguez and her husband, Dr. Jacques-Michel Guillot, who preceded him by about seven months. Jones’s journey was documented through his correspondence with Talbot, to whom he wrote at the conclusion, “I have nearly 100 large, and about 20 small negatives, all highly interesting, done in Malta, Sicily, Naples (a series at Pompeii) Rome and Venice, most of them are wonderfully perfect and beautiful.” After the death of his father in 1847, he inherited a fortune and seems not to have pursued photography seriously after this date.

218  Artist Biographies

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 218

7/7/22 2:12 PM

References Piero Becchetti, “Jones, Rev. Calvert Richard,” in La fotografia

Parker, Catalogue of Fifteen Hundred Photographs (1869), 5–6, 10, 12–24, 28–29, 31–37.

a Roma, 313–14. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Calvert Richard Jones,” in Dewitz, Siegert, and Schuller-Procopovici, Italien: Sehen und Sterben, 269; Bonetti, “Jones, Reverend Calvert Richard,” in Cartier-Bresson et al., Éloge du négatif, 226. Buckman, Photographic Work. Calvert Richard Jones to William Henry Fox Talbot, Swansea, June 6, 1846, Fox Talbot Collection, LA46–076. Lassam and Gray, Romantic Era, 12, 15–17, 25–50. Marina Miraglia, “Calvert Richard Jones,” in Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 570–71. Schaaf and Devlin, “Reverend Calvert R. Jones.”

Filippo Lais (Italian, ca. 1819–1901) Lais, whose years have not been published until now, was a professor of music and singing, listed in 1855 at 90 via dei Cesarini, and a lifelong member of Rome’s prestigious Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, one of the oldest musical institutions in the world, founded in 1585. At the end of the 1850s, he opened a studio, Fotografia Artistica Romana, at 49 via dei Pontefici, much like his brother Stefano Lais who maintained one from about 1860 to 1870 at 57 via di Campo Marzio. Around 1867, he contributed several photographs to John Henry Parker’s important Catalogue of Fifteen Hundred Photographs Illustrative of the Archaeology of Rome (1869), likely on the recommendation of Carlo Baldassare Simelli. From 1874 to 1876 he formed a partnership with F. De Marchis in 9 piazza di Spagna, then under his own name from 1878 to 1881 at 6 via Laurina, then from 1882 to 1891 at 30 via Brunetti, and finally in 1892, the last year he is recorded in business, at 14 via del Colosseo. He died in Rome at the age of eighty-one.

Edmond Lebel (French, 1834–1908) A star pupil of his father’s—François-Désiré Lebel, a photographer and professor of drawing—Lebel was born in Amiens in northern France. In 1855, he entered the atelier of the history painter Léon Cogniet in Paris, followed soon thereafter by his father, who became partners with the photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, inventor of the carte de visite and owner of the largest photographic studio in the city. Lebel often worked in the Disdéri studio, where he learned the most advanced techniques. He arrived in Rome in early 1861 with fellow artists Jules Lefèbvre and Léon Bonnat, both of whom also had studied under Cogniet in Paris, and rented a studio until 1863 at 32 via Vittoria, between piazza San Silvestro and via del Corso. At this stage of his career, photography became a vital adjunct to his painting, and he knew and collected the works of Gioacchino Altobelli, Peter Boyesen, Giacomo Caneva, Francesco Adriano de Bonis, and Carlo Baldassarre Simelli, all of whom influenced his style. Upon his return to Paris, his paintings of Italian subjects became so popular that the publisher Goupil agreed to finance a second trip to Rome in 1869. Lebel waited for the surrender of papal troops on September 20, 1870, and arrived soon afterward, remaining until 1872. His photographic work during these years is noteworthy for his views of country life in Cassino, also known as San Germano, eighty-five miles south of Rome in southern Lazio. References Lebel, Lebel, and Comandini, Edmond Lebel. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Lebel, François Désiré,” in Bonfait, Le Peuple de Rome, 236.

References Almanacco Romano (1855), 280. Becchetti, “Lais, Filippo,” in La fotografia a Roma, 314. Breve Guida di Roma, 301–3. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Lais, Filippo,” in Bonfait, Le Peuple de Rome, 237. Alberto Cametti, “Necrologie,” Gazzetta Musicale di Milano 6, no. 7 (February 14, 1901): 111. Cavazzi, Margiotta, and Tozzi, Englishman in Rome. Marina Miraglia, “Filippo e Stefano Lais,” in Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 580.

Firmin-Eugène Le Dien (French, 1817–1865) The son of a wealthy landowner from Huppy in northern France, after graduating from law school Le Dien served as a magistrate before learning the waxed paper process from Gustave Le Gray in 1851. In company with the painters Léon Gérard and Alexandre de Vonne, Le Dien arrived in Rome on September 9, 1852, and remained until late April 1853. He ventured throughout the city and the neighboring Castelli Romani capturing some of

Artist Biographies  219

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 219

7/7/22 2:12 PM

the most beautiful and artistic views of the era, proving himself to be one Le Gray’s finest pupils. Upon his return to Paris, he collaborated with Le Gray to print his negatives, and perhaps distribute them, in a series of more than two hundred numbered works. Surprisingly, he never exhibited or pursued photography after this fruitful trip. References Sylvie Aubenas, “On Photographic Collaboration: Firmin Eugène Le Dien and Gustave Le Gray,” in Baldwin, Gustave Le Gray, 297–313. Sylvie Aubenas, Marc Durand, and Paul-Louis Roubert, “Le Dien, Firmin-Eugène,” in Aubenas and Roubert, Primitifs de la photographie, 287–88.

Constant Louvel (French, 1828–1917) A career officer in the French army hailing from Avranches in Normandy, Louvel was a captain in the Seventh Artillery Regiment that fought in the Siege of Rome and took possession of the city on July 3, 1849. His earliest known photograph of Rome dates from that same year, and he was intermittently active in the city between 1855 and 1862. His positives and negatives of Rome, which number well over one hundred, share a close affinity with the Roman School of Photography, indicating that he likely was active with the group. His regiment often was called upon for other campaigns, such as the Crimean War (his drawings of which were engraved by the Parisian journal L’Illustration, as it would later with Louis-Henri-Eugène Copmartin) and the Second French Intervention in Mexico. Previously only known as Capitaine Louvel, the photography historian Helena Pérez Gallardo discovered his identity and that he was later active in the Société d’archéologie d’Avranches, suggesting that he also may have been an amateur archaeologist. References Sylvie Aubenas, Marc Durand, and Paul-Louis Roubert, “Lou-

Helena Pérez Gallardo to the author, February 13, 2021. Leclere Maison de Ventes, Photographie 21 May 2011 (Marseille: Leclere, 2011) (auction catalogue).

Angelo Luswergh (Italian, 1793–1858), Giacomo Luswergh (Italian, 1819–1891), and Tommaso Luswergh (Italian, 1823–1907) Angelo Luswergh and his son Giacomo, from a family of Roman machinists and opticians, owned and operated a factory that had supplied the papal government for generations. They developed a keen interest in photography, beginning with the daguerreotype in the 1840s, and added it to their practice at the Collegio Romano at 50 via del Teatro Valle. After Giacomo visited the Great Exhibition of 1851, he returned home full of enthusiasm for the calotype, whereupon he and his father opened a photographic studio and sold their works through Piale’s English and American Library at 1 piazza di Spagna. On January 10, 1855, the Luswerghs published a sale catalogue of their photographs, the first of its kind in Rome, which featured 131 views of Rome as well as reproductions of art, including statues from the Vatican Museums. After Angelo’s death, Giacomo assumed control of the family’s factory and turned over the photographic establishment to his brother Tommaso; it was then called Fratelli Luswergh and was located at 8 via dei Canestrari, just a few blocks away. References Piero Becchetti, “Luswergh, Angelo,” in La fotografia a Roma, 318–19. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Giacomo Luswergh,” in Bonetti and Maffioli, L’Italia d’argento, 246–47. Bonfigli, Guide to the Studios in Rome, 108. Giusi Lombardi, “Luswergh, Angelo and Giacomo,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 199–200. [Luswergh], Catalogo dei lavori. Marina Miraglia, “Luswergh, Angelo, Giacomo, Tommaso,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 162.

vel, Capitaine,” in Aubenas and Roubert, Primitifs de la

Murray, Handbook of Rome (1858), xviii–xix.

photographie, 290.

Pietrangeli, “Il calamaio di Pio VIII.”

Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Louvel, Capitaine (monogrammist C. L.),” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 240. “Bureau de la Société pour 1888,” Mémoires de la Société d’Archéologie, Littérature, Sciences et Arts d’Avranches & de Mortain 9 (October 1888): 351. “Expédition de la Baltique,” L’Illustration: Journal Universel 24, no. 599 (August 19, 1854): 125.

Robert Macpherson (Scottish, 1814–1872) Considered one of the greatest photographers of the nineteenth century, Macpherson was born in Dalkeith, Scotland, and attended medical school at the University of Edinburgh from 1831 to 1835, although he did not

220  Artist Biographies

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 220

7/7/22 2:12 PM

earn a degree. He next studied art at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, where he exhibited from 1835 to 1839. Macpherson expatriated to Rome around 1840 and opened a studio at 38 via Gregoriana as a veduta painter. In 1849 he married Gerardine Bate, the niece of the prominent Anglo-Irish writer and art historian Anna Brownell Jameson, and around 1851 he adopted photography, although he continued to paint at 54 via Gregoriana until the mid-1850s. As his success and fame as a photographer grew, he was assisted in his practice by his wife and issued catalogues of available subjects in the years 1857, 1858, 1859, 1862, 1863, and 1871. He often exhibited in Britain: in 1855 at the British Association of Glasgow (7 works) and the Photographic Institution of London (18); in 1856 (19) and 1858 (4) at the Photographic Society of Scotland in Edinburgh; in 1859 at Aberdeen’s British Association and the Photographic Society of London (1 each); in an 1858 retrospective of 120 works at the Architectural Photographic Association of London, the apogee of his career; and then again at the same venue in 1861, with another 32 works. In the mid-1850s, his works could be purchased either from his studio at 4 via dei Strozzi or at Hayard-Flachéron’s shop at 43 piazza di Spagna. Around 1857, he moved to 192 via di Ripetta, where Murray’s 1858 handbook advised that he acted as his sole distributor and, around 1859, he moved to 12 vicolo di Aliberti. In 1871, Macpherson took over the studio of the photographer Stefano Lais (brother of Filippo Lais) at 57 via di Campo Marzio, but, shortly before his death from malaria in 1872, he was forced by high rents to move to via Flaminia outside the Porta del Popolo and the city walls. References Almanacco Romano (1855), 288. Piero Becchetti, “Macpherson, Robert,” in La fotografia a Roma, 319–20. Becchetti and Pietrangeli, English Photographer in Rome. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Macpherson, Robert,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 240; Bonetti, “Robert Macpherson,” in Dewitz, Siegert, and Schuller-Procopovici, Italien: Sehen und Sterben, 271–72. Carlotta Sylos Calò, “Macpherson, Robert,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 200. Alistair Crawford, “Robert Macpherson,” unpublished manuscript (1997); Crawford, “Robert Macpherson, 1814–1872: The Final Proof”; Crawford, “Robert Macpherson, 1814–1872: The Foremost Photographer of Rome.” Le Grice, Walks Through the Studii, 280.

Marina Miraglia, “Mac Pherson Robert,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 162–63. Murray, Handbook of Rome (1856), xv; Murray, Handbook of Rome (1858), xix.

Michele Mang (German, dates unknown) Little is known about Mang until the appearance in 1865 of his photographic studio, Mang and Co., at 9 piazza di Spagna, known for portraiture, cartes de visite, and landscapes in and around Rome. Additionally, Mang took photographs of works by contemporary artists in Rome, such as the American Elihu Vedder, whose correspondence reveals that he frequently sent photographs of drawings and paintings in progress to prospective clients in America and England. Around 1870, Mang relocated to 113 via Felice (today via Sistina), where he was until about 1887. He remained active until at least 1895. References Piero Becchetti, “Mang Michele,” in La fotografia a Roma, 321. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Mang, Michele,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 241. Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d’Italia, no. 270 (November 16, 1895): 1264. Piale, Rome Seen in a Week, 12. Elihu Vedder Papers.

Pompeo Molins (Italian, 1827–ca. 1900) The Roman-born Molins studied under the influential painter Tommaso Minardi, through whom he likely met Gioacchino Altobelli, a former pupil. In 1860 the two formed the photographic partnership of Altobelli & Molins, with a studio at 46 via Fontanella Borghese— perhaps through the auspices of Molins’s father-in-law, who worked in the same building as a papal shipping agent—and were designated Official Photographers of the Imperial Academy of France and of the Works of Art for the Roman Railways. For the next five years they operated a successful portrait studio and became known for their engaging, large-format cityscapes populated with ordinary people. Molins appears to have run the business side, while Altobelli handled the creative part, but further research is required to prove this hypothesis. After 1865, Altobelli & Molins ceased operation, and the two principals evidently divided their negatives. Molins continued at the same location and built a new catalogue of work, although he occasionally purchased negatives by

Artist Biographies  221

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 221

7/7/22 2:12 PM

other photographers as well, such as Robert Macpherson and Filippo Belli. Around 1880, he relocated to Palazzo Negroni Caffarelli in via dei Condotti, after which time he acquired the archive of glass negatives assembled by John Henry Parker, which Baedeker’s 1883 handbook recommended as of great interest to archaeologists. In 1893, the palazzo was destroyed by fire, consuming everything Molins owned, including his stock, and he and his wife Adele suffered severe burns. After his recovery, he opened a studio at 39 via d’Aracoeli. Baedeker, Italy: Handbook for Travellers (1883), 110.

Roman Forum, making detailed drawings and watercolors of the monuments and taking measurements. He incorporated photography as an aid to his studies in early 1851, inspired by the photographic mission of Maxime Du Camp and Gustave Flaubert to the Middle East, Greece, and Egypt in 1849–51. Evidently active within the Roman School of Photography, Normand and his contributions went unrecognized until his grandson Alfred Cayla discovered approximately 130 of his positives and negatives in the 1970s. He returned to Paris in 1852, where he distinguished himself as an architect during the Second Empire.

Piero Becchetti, “Molins, Pompeo,” in La fotografia a Roma,

References

References

324–25; Becchetti, “Molins Pompeo,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 165–66. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Molins, Pompeo,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 241. Carlotta Sylos Calò, “Molins, Pompeo,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 200. Marina Miraglia, “Pompeo Molins,” in Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 578.

Piero Becchetti, “Normand, Alfred-Nicholas,” in La fotografia a Roma, 329. Marie-Eve Bouillon, “Alfred-Nicolas Normand,” in Cartier-Bresson et al., Roma 1850, 179. Jammes, Cayla, and Néagu, Alfred-Nicolas Normand. André Jammes and Eugenia Parry Janis, “Normand, Alfred-Nicolas,” in Jammes and Janis, Art of French Calotype, 228–29. Marina Miraglia, “Normand Alfred Nicholas,” in Bollati et al.,

Giuseppe Ninci (Italian, 1823–1890) Ninci likely began as an assistant or house photographer for the print dealer and photographer Tommaso Cuccioni, and, following his death in 1864, his widow Isabella Bonafede Cuccioni paid him 10 percent of receipts from the sale of his photographs. Around 1866, he established G. Ninci & Co. in direct competition with his former employer, first at 2 via di S. Giuseppe a Capo le Case, and by 1867 at 28 piazza di Spagna, where he remained until 1881; then at 4 via di S. Antonio until 1888, and from then until his death at 12 via Flavia. References Piero Becchetti, “Ninci, Giuseppe,” in La fotografia a Roma, 329. Giusi Lombardi, “Ninci, Giuseppe,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 200–201. Murray, Handbook of Rome (1867), xxi.

Alfred Nicolas Normand (French, 1822–1909) Normand entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1842 and won the coveted Prix de Rome for architecture in 1846. He arrived as a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome in early 1847 and focused his studies on the

Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 169. Néagu, Alfred Normand.

Pierre-Émile-Joseph Pécarrère (French, 1816–1904) A wealthy Parisian lawyer, Pécarrère studied under Gustave Le Gray and was a founding member of the Société Héliographique in 1851. His oeuvre became lost through 150 years of confusion beginning in 1852, when forty-nine architectural views he exhibited at the Society of Arts in London, signed “Pec” or “Em. Pec” on the negatives, were misattributed to “E. Pecquerel.” Fortunately, Anne de Mondenard, in her fundamental 2002 history of the Mission Héliographique, firmly reestablished his identity. Pécarrère traveled to Rome at the end of 1850 with his close friend, the painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, and became involved with the Roman School of Photography, and yet only one of his three known Roman views has been located: The Temple of Castor and Pollux (Tempio dei Dioscuri), Also Known as the Temple of Jupiter Stator, which is signed “Pec / Rome 50” (plate 26). References Sylvie Aubenas, Marc Durand, and Paul-Louis Roubert, “Pécarrèrè, Pierre Émile Joseph,” in Aubenas and Roubert, Primitifs de la photographie, 299.

222  Artist Biographies

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 222

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Catalogue of an Exhibition of Recent Specimens, 13–14. De Mondenard, La mission héliographique, 208. Vincent Rouby, “Pécarrère, Pierre Émile Joseph,” in de Mondenard, Pagneux, and Rouby, Modernisme ou modernité, 388–89.

Philibert Perraud (French, b. 1815) Born in Maçon, France, Perraud worked as a chef, notably in the kitchen of the governor of Genoa, at the time a part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. In 1840, he learned daguerreotypy in Paris and traveled thereafter as an itinerant photographer between Genoa, Turin, Milan, and Bologna. Perraud arrived in Rome in 1845, where some modern sources claim he befriended Frédéric Flachéron, who supposedly introduced him into the city’s artistic circles. He opened a studio at 50 via dei Pontefici and within a year was reported to have made more than five thousand portraits—an astonishing number by any metric. Today he is remembered especially for his group portraits of artists of various nationalities at Rome. References Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Perraud, Philibert,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 242; Bonetti, “Philibert Perraud,” in Bonetti and Maffioli, L’Italia d’argento, 248–49. Bologna and Jacobson, “Itinerant Daguerreotypist,” 79–81. Constant, “M. Perraud,” n.p. M., “Dagherrotipia,” Diario di Roma, no. 16 (February 24, 1846): 1. Marina Miraglia, “Giovanni Perraud,” in Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 570; Miraglia, “Perraud,” in Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 172. Dominique Planchon-de Font Réaulx, “Cat. 205. Attribué à Philibert Perraud,” in Bajac and Planchon-de Font Réaulx, Le daguerréotype français, 287, cat. 205.

Jean Baptiste Eugène Piot (French, 1812–1890) After growing up in Burgundy, Piot inherited a fortune upon the death of his father in 1832 and moved to Paris to study law. By 1838, he abandoned his career in favor of traveling, collecting, and studying art and archaeology. In 1839–40 he learned daguerreotypy, which he used to document a six-month trip to Spain with the author Théophile Gautier. In 1849, he studied with Gustave Le Gray and arrived in Rome later that year, where he likely was one of the first to introduce his mentor’s new waxed paper process to the Roman School of Photography.

His Italian sojourn resulted in the serial publication L’Italie monumentale (1851–53), with the intention of demonstrating that photography could rival traditional printmaking as a means of illustrating travel books. In 1853, he planned to issue another series, entitled Rome et ses environs, but he could not secure financing. He exhibited views of Florence and Pisa at the Society of Arts in London in 1852, alongside Giacomo Caneva, Eugène Constant, Frédéric Flachéron, and Pierre-ÉmileJoseph Pécarrère, and at the Universal Exposition of 1855 in Paris, where he received a first-class medal. References Sylvie Aubenas, Marc Durand, and Paul-Louis Roubert, “Piot, Jean-Baptiste Eugène,” in Aubenas and Roubert, Primitifs de la photographie, 300. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Eugène Piot,” in Dewitz, Siegert, and Schuller-Procopovici, Italien: Sehen und Sterben, 273. Catalogue of an Exhibition of Recent Specimens, 16. Vincent Rouby, “Piot, Jean Baptiste Eugène,” in de Mondenard, Pagneux, and Rouby, Modernisme ou modernité, 389.

James Robertson (English, 1813–1888) From Middlesex in southeastern England, Robertson trained as a medal engraver in London before he moved in 1841 to Constantinople (now Istanbul), Turkey, to assume the position of chief engraver of the Imperial Mint, a position he held until 1881. It has not been determined when he took up photography, but there is evidence in a collection of his work discovered by the photography historian Becchetti that he began as early as 1848; one of the works bears the inscription “St. Peter’s, the Vatican & St. Angelo, Rome. By Robertson, Photographer. 1848.” In 1854 he opened a studio in Pera, the European section of Constantinople, and in 1855 he partnered with his brother-in-law, the British-Italian photographer Felice Beato. Thereafter they gained fame for views of Egypt and the Holy Land, as well as for scenes of the Crimean War. Upon his retirement from the mint, Robertson joined Beato in Japan, where he later died. References Becchetti, “‘La natura stessa è fatta,’” 10–11, 31–33. Carlotta Sylos Calò, “Robertson, James,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 201. Heinz K. Henisch and Bridget A. Henisch, “Robertson, James,” in Hannavy, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, 2:1201–2.

Artist Biographies  223

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 223

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Francesco Sidoli (Italian, 1817–1896) Born in Bardi in the region of Emilia-Romagna, Sidoli moved to Piacenza, where he worked as a watchmaker until he established a photography studio around 1857. In the spring of 1866, he moved to Rome, where he opened another location and successfully applied for a number of patents for improvements in making portraiture. As his business prospered, he found a more suitable space, as noted by the Osservatore Romano in November 1868: “The photography establishment of Francesco Sidoli of Piazza di Spagna n. 32 fifth floor, was moved to via del Babuino n. 76 first floor, and this for the greater convenience of those gentlemen and ladies who will want to honor him with their commissions . . . assuring Sidoli of the most perfect similarity, exactness, highest precision in the work, and at very reasonable prices.” Sidoli also was a landscapist and formed part of the inner circle of Carlo Baldassarre Simelli, who likely recommended him to John Henry Parker, after which he contributed numerous photographs to the English archaeologist’s ambitious 1868 volume, The Archaeology of Rome. Sidoli was last recorded in the Roman directory Guida Monaci in 1876, as noted by Becchetti, after which he returned to Piacenza. He won medals at the Exposition in Piacenza in 1869 and 1874 and exhibited at the Exposition in Torino in 1884. References “Avviso,” Osservatore Romano, November 17, 1868. Piero Becchetti, “Sidoli, Francesco,” in La fotografia a Roma, 346–47. Caccialanza, Francesco Sidoli. Cavazzi, Margiotta, and Tozzi, Englishman in Rome. Parker, Catalogue of Fifteen Hundred Photographs (1869), 29, 30, 31, 37, 41, and 42.

Carlo Baldassarre Simelli (Italian, 1811–1885) One of the most important painter-photographers of his generation, Simelli was born in Stroncone, Umbria, just across the border from Lazio, and he moved to Rome as a teenager with his family. By 1838, the Roman journal Il Tiberino described him as a “well-known Perspective Painter,” with a studio at 9 via S. Isidoro, and from 1843 at 57 via dei Pontefici. He was a member of the Artistica Congregazione dei Virtuosi al Pantheon, one of the leading arts organizations in the city. In addition to his accomplishments as a painter, in the 1840s Simelli taught mathematics and published practical treatises

on geometry to supplement his income. During the revolutions of 1848 and the short-lived Roman Republic of 1849, he enlisted as a captain and is reported to have fought with Giuseppe Garibaldi. It is unclear exactly when Simelli turned to photography, but in 1857 he was commissioned by the Fabbrica di S. Pietro to photograph the buttresses of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica to document damage ahead of proposed restorations. In 1860, Bonfigli listed him as an “Artist-photographer” at 509 via del Corso, where “he takes portraits for visiting cards, and has a large collection of photographs representing pictures, landscapes, drawings, classical architecture, etc.” In 1865, Piale’s popular guidebook documented a brief partnership with Filippo Belli, in which they were listed as “Photographers and portraits for visiting Cards.—117 via del Corso.” In 1870, Simelli sold his establishment to Gustave Eugène Chauffourier and moved to Frascati for several years to focus on landscape photography, but he returned in 1872 to open a new studio at 6 via di S. Sebastiano, then from 1873 to 1877 at 11 via Bocca di Leone, and finally at 18 via Modena around 1878. In the late 1870s he published several catalogues, including one entitled Roma Fotografia Artistica ed Archeologica, which listed hundreds of works available at his studio or at the Libreria Centrale at 146 via del Corso, Massimiliano Hefner’s store at 133 via Frattina, and Lorenzo Casali’s shop at 119 via Sistina. Simelli maintained a lifelong devotion to archaeology, especially early Christian antiquities, which resulted in several fruitful collaborations, first in 1864 with the French archaeologist Xavier Barbier de Montault, who published Antiquities Chrétiennes de Rome du Ve au XVIe siècle, with 60 of his photographs, for sale at the book- and printseller Spithöver, followed in 1872 by de Montault’s Photographs of Christian Antiquities at Rome and the Neighborhood, published by the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, with 189 of his works. From 1867, Simelli was instrumental in helping the English archeologist John Henry Parker amass his archive and acted as his principal photographer. Through his influence, Parker employed many other members of Simelli’s circle, including Giovanni Battista Colamedici, Francesco Adriano de Bonis, Filippo Lais, Francesco Sidoli, Filippo Spina, and the Canadian Charles Smeaton. References Baedeker, Italy: Handbook for Travellers (1872), 86–87.

224  Artist Biographies

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 224

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Xavier Barbier de Montault, “L’Archéologie à l’Exposition Religieuse”; Barbier de Montault, Exposition réligieuse de Rome 1870; Barbier de Montault, Photographs of Christian Antiquities at Rome. Piero Becchetti, “Simelli, Carlo Baldassarre,” in La fotografia a Roma, 347. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Simelli, Carlo Baldassarre (Giovanni Battista),” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 244. Bonfigli, Guide to the Studios in Rome, 108. Caccialanza, Carlo Baldassarre Simelli. Carlotta Sylos Calò, “Simelli, Carlo Baldassarre,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 201.

both the landscape and the sky. These works were issued under his own label, “Ch. Soulier, Photographer of the Emperor,” and published at his Paris address, 141 boulevard Sébastopol, where he was recorded as late as 1879. References Adressbuch für Photographie und Verwandte Fächer (Vienna: Photographischen Correspondenz, 1879), 118. Piero Becchetti, “Ferrier, Claude Marie e Soulier, Charles,” in La fotografia a Roma, 307. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Soulier, Charles,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 202. John B. Cameron, “Leon, Moyse & Lévy, Issac; Ferrier,

Cavazzi, Margiotta, and Tozzi, Englishman in Rome.

Cluade-Marie; and Charles Soulier,” in Hannavy, Encyclo-

Marina Miraglia, “Simelli and Landscape,” in Lundberg and

pedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, 2:850–51.

Pinto, Steps Off the Beaten Path, 19–21. “Notizia,” Il Tiberino 4, no. 52 (September 28, 1838): 208. Parker, Archaeology of Rome (1867), 2, 4–10, 12–20, 23–28, 31–43, 45–47, 49; Parker, Archaeology of Rome (1868), 6, 7, 9, 13–16, 18–20; Parker, Catalogue of Fifteen Hundred Photographs (1869), 1, 10, 13, 24, 36; Parker, Historical Photographs (1879), part 1: 4–25, 28, 32–42, 44–48, 50–51, 54–59, 61–63, 66–67, 81, 106–11, 113–21; part 2: 1, 2, 19, 35; part 3: 32–39. Piale, Rome Seen in a Week, 12. Le Rivelazioni Impunitarie di Costanza Vaccari-Diotallevi nella Causa Venanzi-Fausti ed Altri Documenti Relativi Pubblicati con Considerazioni e Note dal Comitato Nazionale Romano (Rome: Tipografia Nazionale, October 1863). C. B. Simelli, “Istruzione. Lezioni di Geometria pratica adattate alla capacità dei giovannetti,” L’Artigianello 2, no. 12 (March 21, 1846): 93–96; Simelli, Roma fotografia artistica ed archeologica. Tiberia, La Congregazione dei Virtuosi.

Filippo Spina (Italian, dates unknown) Active in Rome in the 1860s at 34 via della Croce, Spina probably was recruited by Carlo Baldassarre Simelli to form part of the stable of photographers who contributed to John Henry Parker’s impressive catalogue of works devoted to the archaeology of Rome, where his albumen prints first appeared in 1869. Some of his archaeological views were later printed by Enrico Verzaschi, which suggests either a collaboration or a transfer of negatives. Inspired by his efforts with Parker, in the early 1870s Spina published a book of sixteen photographs entitled Gli Scavi al Palazzo dei Cesari sul Palatino in Roma Pianta e Vedute Fotografiche, with didactic text and an illustrated map of the most recent excavations on the Palatine Hill. From 1880 to 1885, he relocated his studio, known as Fotografia Tiberina, to 136 via Tordinona, and from 1886 to 1890 to 30 via del Monte della Farina. References Piero Becchetti, “Spina, Filippo,” in La fotografia a Roma, 348.

Charles Soulier (French, dates unknown) Soulier is first recorded in 1854 in a photographic partnership with Athanase Clouzard at 14 rue Saint-André des Arts and later at 28 rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris. Between 1859 and 1864, he joined Claude-Marie Ferrier and his son to form the company “Ferrier père et fils, Ch. Soulier” at 99 boulevard Sébastopol, and then at number 113, which specialized in glass stereographs that included Italian views. In the mid-1860s, Soulier worked in Rome and created a series of large-format albumen prints done in the style of Gioacchino Altobelli’s double matrix system, which allowed him to delineate clearly

Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Spina, Filippo,” in Roma 1840–1870, 202. Cavazzi, Margiotta, and Tozzi, Englishman in Rome, 20. Parker, Catalogue of Fifteen Hundred Photographs (1869) (only one example has been identified to date, no. 1237).

Lorenzo Suscipj (Italian, 1802–1855) A foundational figure in the Roman photography world and probably the first daguerreotypist in the city, Suscipj produced documented work as early as February 8, 1840. An optician and mechanic, he maintained an establishment at 182 via del Corso, where he sold and

Artist Biographies  225

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 225

7/7/22 2:12 PM

took commissions for photographs and manufactured photographic equipment to order. In 1840–41, he supplied twenty-three daguerreotypes of landscapes to the English photographer John Alexander Ellis for his unrealized project, Italy Daguerreotyped (National Science and Media Museum, Bradford, England). In 1842, he expanded his business to include portraiture and the occasional costume study for use by artists. After his untimely death, the company was managed by his widow, Virginia De Andreis, and their sons, who relocated to 48 via dei Condotti in 1866. With the invention of glass negatives and the carte de visite, the Suscipj family firm thrived as a leading supplier of portraits, stereographs, and cabinet cards well into the twentieth century. References Piero Becchetti, “Suscipj, Lorenzo,” in La fotografia a Roma, 349–50. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Lorenzo Suscipj,” in Bonetti and Maffioli, L’Italia d’argento, 244, 247–48; Bonetti, “Suscipj, Lorenzo,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 245. Marina Miraglia, “Lorenzo Suscipj,” in Susinno et al., Maestà

advertised in L’Universo Illustrato as Enrico Verzaschi & Co. at 135a–136 via del Corso, next to the Hôtel de Rome, where he maintained a “Large Repository of Photographs of All Sizes, Ancient and Modern Paintings, and Journalistic Agency,” which he operated until at least 1879. Around 1869, he also took over the “Stabilimento Fotografico” at 16/a via Passeggiata di Ripetta from Gioacchino Altobelli, who continued as its director until 1875. Some negatives by Altobelli and Filippo Spina were reprinted with Verzaschi’s own numbering system, which has led to subsequent confusion as to authorship. Verzaschi exhibited at the Italian Industrial Exposition in Milan in 1871 and was awarded a medal at the Vienna Universal Exposition of 1873. That same year, he published Catalogo Generale delle Riproduzioni Fotografiche Pubblicate per cura del Premiato Stabilimento Fotografico di Enrico Verzaschi Roma, with thousands of landscapes, views of sculpture, and reproductions of famous paintings, as well as cartes de visite, cabinet cards, and stereographs, all of which were available for order by catalogue number.

di Roma, 568–69; Miraglia, “Suscipj Lorenzo,” in Bollati

References

et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 180–81.

[Advertisement], L’Universo Illustrato. Giornale per Tutti 1, no. 21 (February 21, 1867): 336.

Enrico Verzaschi (Italian, dates unknown) Little is known of the early life of this important photographer, whether a native of Rome or a transplant, but his last name is typically associated with the valley of the Verzasca river just north of Lago Maggiore in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino. Verzaschi is first recorded in Rome in 1857 as a double bassist in the prestigious Accademici Filarmonici Romani. After the organization was temporarily disbanded as too liberal by Pius IX in 1860, he turned to photography and shortly afterward opened a studio at 16 vicolo dei Soderini, where he was listed in 1866. The following February, he

Piero Becchetti, “Verzaschi, Enrico,” in La fotografia a Roma, 356. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Verzaschi, Enrico,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 246. “Il Bravo” Melodramma in Tre Atti, 5. Giusi Lombardi, “Verzaschi, Enrico,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 202. Nota dei Fotografi e Stabilimenti Fotografici esistenti nei diversi Rioni di Roma (see appendix 2). [Verzaschi], Catalogo Generale delle Riproduzioni Fotografiche.

226  Artist Biographies

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 226

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Chronology of Roman History, 1831 to 1878 Katherine McKee

1831 Giuseppe Mazzini founds the nationalist party Young Italy, which strives for a united independent Italian republic. Pope Gregory XVI (r. 1831–46) becomes Pope following the death of Pope Pius VIII (r. 1829–30). 1840 The Moderate party under Cesare Balbo seeks a united Italy as a constitutional monarchy under the rule of the King of Sicily. Others, including Vincenzo Gioberti, believe the pope should be the head of a future Italian nation. Rome’s population is approximately 160,000. 1844 Pope Gregory XVI establishes the Museo Profano Lateranense to exhibit ancient Roman art. 1846 Pope Pius IX (r. 1846–78) becomes pope. His ascension suggests at first that reform and progress toward a united Italy will occur. Regarded initially as a liberal, he appoints a secular cabinet and decries press censorship. 1847 New statues of the Apostles Peter and Paul are erected in front of St. Peter’s Basilica. 1848 Revolutions occur throughout Europe. Stemming from an outgrowth of industrialization and various reform movements, these conflicts reflect a desire by the middle classes to achieve political power through a liberal system of government. Revolutions begin against Austrian rule in Sicily, Naples, Florence, Milan, and Venice, yet the pope declines to join these nationalists who seek a unified confederation of Italian states (the Risorgimento). Tensions between factions rise in Rome as some propose universal suffrage. The pope and his secretary of state, Cardinal Antonelli, condemn these reforms. In France, Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) is elected president of the Second Republic following the revolution there. He becomes king of the Second Empire in 1852. 1849 On February 9, the Roman Republic replaces the Papal government, with Giuseppe Mazzini

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 227

1850

1854

1856 1857 1858

in charge and Giuseppe Garibaldi as head of the army. The pope appeals to King Ferdinand of Naples and Austrian and French leaders for support. The French army invades Italy. Mazzini heads the Republic’s triumvirate and works for the unification of Italy. Garibaldi leads the Republic’s forces against the French invasion. The pope refuses to support Italian forces who seek to push out the Hapsburg armies in the north. He favors the church above national unity and is forced to flee to Gaeta for more than a year until tensions lessen. During this time, Mazzini’s Democrats win the majority and declare the pope’s sovereignty to have ended. Louis Napoleon seeks to support the pope and to weaken Austrian control in Italy. His troops force the Republican army to capitulate in July. The French are victorious, and the pope returns to authority in April. For the next twenty years, a French garrison is almost continually present in Rome to reinforce the Pope’s secular power. Pius’s liberal tendencies now gone, Cardinal Giacometti Antonelli serves as secretary of state and adopts stern reactionary measures for the rest of the pope’s reign. All democratic tendencies are checked. Rome’s population is approximately 171,000. The pope enlarges the Lateran Museum with a collection of ancient and medieval Christian art. Gas lighting is installed in select sections of the city. The Rome and Frascati railway line, the first railroad in the Papal States, begins service. The pope establishes the Galleria dei Santi e Beati in the Vatican. Italian patriot Felice Orsini attempts to assassinate Napoleon III and fails, though surprisingly

7/7/22 2:12 PM

1859

1860

1861

1863 1864

1866

Napoleon III moves toward supporting the Italian people rather than the pope. France joins the Italians in battle against the Austrians in the North. Napoleon concludes a peace, though he does not consult the Italians. The nationalist movement reemerges and votes for Italian unification under King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia. Napoleon accepts this decision in exchange for the cession of Nice and Savoy to France. Garibaldi shifts focus to the south and wins support there. In September, troops from Piedmont defeat the papal army, and Emmanuel II and Garibaldi join forces near Naples, avoiding a new partition of Italy. Emmanuel II gains control of all the Italian peninsula, except for the Veneto and Rome. Rome’s population is approximately 179,000. In March, the Italian parliament convenes in Turin and Emmanuel is proclaimed king of Italy. The Risorgimento is not complete, however, as the authority of Rome remains undetermined. The first concern of the new Italian state is to break the temporal power of the Papacy. Although the pope still holds authority in Rome, the city is declared the capital of the new kingdom. The pope refuses to concede. A steel drawbridge is erected across the Tiber River. The Papacy passes the Syllabus of Errors, insisting that science and government should be subordinated to the authority of the church. A colossal sculpture of Hercules is unearthed near the Campo dei Fiori. The first horse-drawn omnibuses appear in Rome.

1867 Garibaldi marches on Rome in an attempt to make Rome the capital of Italy, yet he is defeated by French and Papal forces. 1869–70 The First Vatican Council, the twentieth ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, meets in Rome for the first time in three centuries to consider and to rule on questions of Christian doctrine. Under threat from wider social movements, the Council condemns rationalism, secularism, liberalism, naturalism, modernism, materialism, and pantheism. 1870 Rome’s population is approximately 226,000. In July, France declares war on Prussia, and French troops withdraw from Rome. Emmanuel moves his troops into the city, and the pope cedes authority. On September 20, Italian forces under General Raffaele Cadorna succeed in taking the city. Unification is now complete. A referendum in October confirms the transition. Devastating floods occur on the banks of the Tiber. 1871 Emmanuel establishes his government in Rome, and the pope retreats to the Vatican. On July 1, Rome becomes the capital of Italy. The pope is offered sovereignty within the Vatican, though he refuses to renounce temporal power. Relations are not resolved until 1929. A period of new building and reform commences. The slums are cleared; Jewish people are granted equal rights; and a public educational system is organized. 1876 The construction of tall embankments along the Tiber begins. 1878 In January, Emmanuel dies. He is succeeded by Umberto I, who rules as king of Italy until his assassination in 1900. In February, Pope Pius IX dies after the longest reign in the history of the Papacy. He is succeeded by Pope Leo XIII.

228  Chronology of Roman History, 1831 to 1878

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 228

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Notes

Part 1

La fotografia a Roma, 9–10; this was reprinted from the Messaggere Torinese on February 23, 1839).

Introduction 1. Schaaf, Tracings of Light, 21.



4. For an analysis of this, see Prandi, “‘Roman Process.’”

2. Schaaf, Photographic Art, 12.



5. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) was joined in Rome



3. Talbot, “Introductory Remarks,” in The Pencil of Nature,

by his wife, Elisabeth Tempier, where they became

n.p.

intimately involved with the French Academy and its

4. At this stage, Talbot had progressed no further than

director, Ingres, who painted Elisabeth’s portrait. All

his closest predecessor, Thomas Wedgwood, of pottery family fame, who had engaged in similar experiments in

translations, unless otherwise noted, are by the author.

the 1790s. A chemist friend of Wedgwood’s, Humphrey

September 28, 1836, in Viollet-le-Duc, Lettres d’Italie; see

Davy, reported his discovery in “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass.” The paper soon was



also Barker, “An appraisal of Viollet-le-Duc,” 3–13.

7. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc,

translated into French, the lingua franca of the period, and

Siena, October 14, 1836, in Viollet-le-Duc, Lettres d’Italie,

disseminated throughout international scientific circles.

166–67. These quotes first appeared in André Jammes,

5. It was not, in fact, shared with the whole world, as

“Alfred-Nicolas Normand et l’Art du ‘Calotype,” in

Daguerre patented his process in England, where a license

Jammes, Cayla, and Néagu, Alfred-Nicolas Normand

cost £900, approximately $125,000 in today’s money, thus



6. Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc to Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, Paris,

Architecte, 3.

putting it out of reach of most commercial establish-

8. Daguerre, Description pratique.

ments. All currency conversions were made using period



sources such as guidebooks, and all prices were adjusted

10. Daguerre, Descrizione pratica.

for inflation and calculated, unless otherwise noted, at

11. Diario di Roma, February 8, 1840.

https://‌w ww‌.officialdata‌.org.

12. “Appendice,” Diario di Roma, February 8, 1840.

6. Gernsheim and Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre, 94.

9. Mercurj, “Sul dagherrotipo.”

13. Il Tiberino, February 17, 1840. 14. “Avvisi,” Diario di Roma, June 21, 1842.

Chapter 1

1. For Rome as an international center of art in the nine-

16. Il Tiberino, April 6, 1840.

Roma”; Capitelli and Grandesso, “Roma fuori di Roma”;

17. As quoted and translated by Newhall, “Eighteen Thirty-

Roma; Braga and True, Roma e gli artisti stranieri.



see also Hamber, “A Higher Branch of the Art,” 187–207.

teenth century, see especially Susinno, “La pittura a Capitelli, Grandesso, and Mazzarelli, Roma fuori di

15. Di Bello, “Photography and Sculpture,” 25. For the subject,

2. For the early history of photography in Rome, see

Nine,” 23. 18. “Avvisi,” Diario di Roma, April 25, 1840. 19. Taylor, Cailleux, and Nodier, Voyages pittoresques; for an

Palazzoli, “La notizia dell’invenzione”; Becchetti and

excellent discussion of this, see Maria Francesca Bonetti,

Pietrangeli, Roma in Dagherrotipia; Bonetti and Maffioli,

“D’après le Daguerréotype . . . L’immagine dell’Italia tra

L’Italia d’argento.

incisione e fotografia,” in Bonetti and Maffioli, L’Italia

3. “Invenzioni e scoperte: Il dagherrotipo o la Camera Ottica di Daguerre,” L’Album: Giornale letterario e di belle arti 6, no. 3 (March 23, 1839): 22–23 (article cited in Becchetti,

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 229

d’argento, 31–40. 20. Il Tiberino, June 1, 1840; as cited by Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 12.

7/7/22 2:12 PM

21. For more on this discovery, see Bonetti, “Looking at Reality.”

38. Alcántara, “El inventor de la fotografía?” 39. Stewart, “In Perfect Order,” 71; Stephen C. Pinson, “Splen-

22. As quoted and translated by Bonetti, ibid., 43.

dor in the Dust,” in Pinson et al., Monumental Journey,

23. See Grandesso, “L’antico e i soggetti di genere,” and

16–18.

Olson, Ottocento, 20. 24. As quoted in Becchetti and Pietrangeli, Roma in Dagherrotipia, 34; transcribed by Becchetti from Ellis’s original

40. Jean-Victor Schnetz to Desiré-Raoul Rochette, April 20, 1842, quoted in Fossier, Les directeurs de la villa Médicis . . . (1840–1846), 110.

notes in The Ellis Collection, National Science and Media

41. Gernsheim and Gernsheim, L. J. M. Daguerre, 107.

Museum, Bradford, England.

42. Galassi, Before Photography, 28.

25. Becchetti and Pietrangeli, Roma in Dagherrotipia, 40. 26. For a complete inventory of the Ellis Collection, see “Altri

43. Giuseppe Gioachino Belli to Ciro Belli, Rome, May 24, 1841, quoted in Belli, Le lettere, 155–56.

dagherrotipi italiani,” in Bonetti and Maffioli, Italia d’ar-

44. Diario di Roma, November 15, 1842.

gento, 263–65; Becchetti and Bonetti, “La dagherrotipia a

45. For Bottoni, see Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 39–40;

Roma,” in Bonetti and Maffioli, Italia d’argento, 238–43. 27. Ruffles, “Ellis, Alexander John.”

for Berardi, see Becchetti and Pietrangeli, Roma in Dagherrotipia, 43–44.

28. Becchetti and Pietrangeli, Roma in Dagherrotipia, 40–41.

46. “Anfänge der Daguerreotypie in Italien.”

29. These works at the Science Museum, London, are Ellis’s

47. Becchetti and Pietrangeli, Roma in Dagherrotipia, 42.

Arch of Septimius Severus, which features a dapper man

48. For a list of these, see Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma,

in a top hat, who we know stood patiently against the rail

298.

for twelve minutes, and directly quotes Luigi Rossini’s

49. “Avvisi,” Diario di Roma, June 21, 1842.

1820 Veduta dell’Arco di Settimio in a conscious effort to

50. Freeman, Gatherings from an Artist’s Portfolio, 29.

show the scale of the triumphal arch and man standing

51. Four daguerreotypes attributed to Baron Gros—The Foun-

near it; Morelli’s The Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore,

tain of Trevi, Ruins of a Roman Church, An Italian Port,

with a seated man on a wall to the right who wears a

and St. Mark’s Campanile, Venice—were auctioned in

tam o’shanter, which drew its inspiration from Piranesi’s

Geneva at Rauch bookshop in 1961; see Rauch, La photog-

Veduta della Facciata di dietro della Basilica di S. Maria Maggiore; and the anonymous Arch of Drusus with its four soldiers standing alert at parade rest, which similarly parallels Rossini’s 1819 Arco di Druso. 30. Examples of this can be found in the work of eminent photography historians such as the Spaniards Ermengol Alsina I Munné, Alejandro Castellote, Lee Fontanella, Miguel Huertas Juncosa, Gerardo Kurtz, José Antonio

raphie, 16, no. 26. 52. For numerous examples, see Bonetti and Maffioli, L’Italia d’argento; Bologna and Jacobson, “Itinerant Daguerreotypist”; and Micalizzi, “Antonio e Vito Gambina Fici.” 53. Cameron, entry for May 1847, “Notes on Travels in Italy,” 2:25. 54. “Chimica,” Diario di Roma, January 13, 1846; Edmond de Valicourt and J. Thierry both published their methods.

Hernández Latas, Juan Naranjo, Bernardo Riego, Alfredo

55. Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 286.

Romero Santamaría, Juan Miguel Sánchez Vigil, and

56. Caneva, Della fotografia, n.p.

Marie-Loup Sougez; the German Wilhelm Knapp; the

57. F. C., “Perfezionamenti del Dagherrotipo,” Poliorama

Italian Piero Becchetti; the French René d’Héliécourt and

Pittoresco, no. 25 (January 27, 1844): 202–3; “Aviso Impor-

Sylvain Morand; the Swiss C. J. Bucher; and the Australian

tante,” El Nuevo Avisador, no. 521 (March 21, 1844): 1.

Geoffrey Batchen, to name just a few. 31. Alcántara, “El inventor de la fotografía?” 32. “Notizie varie: Roma e l’invenzione della fotgrafia.” 33. Gónzalez López, Federico de Madrazo y Küntz, 2:7. 34. La Redacción, “D. Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz,” 4; Hernández Latas, “José Zanetti.”

58. Mazio, “Varietà artistiche,” cited in Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 13–14. 59. “Belle Arti: Ritratti col Dagherrotipo,” Diario di Roma, April 8, 1845. 60. M., “Dagherrotipia,” Diario di Roma, February 24, 1846. 61. The twenty whom I have identified are the architects

35. Alcántara, “El inventor de la fotografía?”

Théodore Ballu, Prosper Desbuisson, Jacques-Martin

36. Hernández Latas, “Mystery of ‘Ramos Zapetti.’”

Tétaz, and Philippe Auguste Titeux; the composers Victor

37. La Redacción, “D. Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz,” 4;

Massé and Alexis-André Roger; the engravers Jean Ernest

Hernández Latas, “José Zanetti.”

Aubert, Louis-Désiré-Joseph Delemer, and Louis Merley;

230  Notes to Pages 11–18

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 230

7/7/22 2:12 PM

the painters Félix-Joseph Barrias, Victor-François-Éloi

misread Newhall’s catalogue, as there is no mention of

Biennourry, Pierre Nicolas Brisset, Eugène-Jean Damery,

this work under Prevost; rather, it appears in the next

Félix-Hippolyte Lanoüe, and Auguste Lebouys; and the

column under Talbot’s entry, which means that, in all

sculptors Pierre Jules Cavelier, Georges Diebolt, Charles

likelihood, the photograph was actually by Calvert Jones

Joseph Godde, Eugène-Louis Lequesne, and René-Am-

and was misdated from 1846 to 1843 by Newhall. Though

broise Maréchal; with the remaining four the architect

I came to this finding independently, Bonetti graciously

Alexis Paccard, the composers Louis-Aimé Maillart and

pointed out that she previously had reached this con-

Alphonse Charles Renaud de Vilbac, and the engraver

clusion in 2017; please also see Bonetti, “Photography

Jean-Marie Saint-Eve. 62. Constant, “M. Perraud.”

Exhibition in Rome,” 58 and 64n41.

63. For a discussion of this, see M. McGuigan, “‘This Market

on the Italian peninsula, see Bonetti, “Talbot and the

of Physiognomy.’” 64. For example, see Becchetti and Pietrangeli, Roma in

5. For an excellent discussion of the origins of the calotype Introduction of the Calotype,” 24–35.



Dagherrotipia, 267; Bonetti and Maffioli, L’Italia d’ar-

6. Jones to Talbot, Rome, May 11, 1846, Fox Talbot Collection, LA46–58.

gento, 51, 163–64, cat. 3, 167, 197, 199, 240, 243, 254, and

7. Ibid.

262.

8. Ibid.

65. “Supplement,” Diario di Roma, October 3, 1846. 66. “Avvisi,” L’Alba: Giornale Politico–Letterario, no. 289 (August 5, 1848): 1156. 67. For examples, see Bonetti and Maffioli, L’Italia d’argento, 51, 164, cat. 3; Bologna and Jacobson, “Itinerant Daguerreotypist,” 97. 68. “Avis Intéressant,” Gazzetta Piemontese, no. 67 (March 22, 1845): 4. 69. For a discussion of this, see Hauptman, “Ingres and Photographic Vision.” 70. Serge Kakou to the author, September 29, 2020; Kakou



9. Jones to Talbot, Swansea, Wales, August 12, 1846, Fox Talbot Collection, LA46–88.

10. Freeman, “Gleanings in Italy,” Northern Light 1, no. 9 (December 1841): 134. 11. From a correspondent, “British Artists in Rome: Painters,” London Morning Post, December 15, 1854. 12. Jones to Talbot, May 11, 1846. 13. Guillot-Saguez, “Scientific Notices.” 14. Sylvie Aubenas, Marc Durand, and Paul-Louis Roubert, “Guillot-Saguez, Amélie Esther,” in Aubenas and Roubert, Primitifs de la photographie, 281–82. Aubenas discovered

first encountered the pair twenty-six years ago in Nice,

a photograph from a paper negative in the family’s archive

France, before they were separated. For the Suscipj, see

by Amélie Guillot-Saguez that depicts her husband and

Maria Francesca Bonetti, “The Âge d’Or of Photography in

son, Henri Léon, captioned “1er photographe [sic]. Rome

Rome,” in Mina, In Rome’s Light, 42, fig. 3.

1845,” which places her activity there well before that of

71. For other examples of Suscipj’s portraits, see Bonetti and Maffioli, L’Italia d’argento, 142, 247–48, cat. 166.

Jones, who is often credited as the first calotypist. 15. Rapport du Jury, 539–40.

72. Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 14.

16. As translated in Jammes and Janis, Art of French Calo-

Chapter 2

17. “Advertisements,” Roman Advertiser, no. 69 (February 12,

type, 32, 113n66.

1. See Miraglia, “Età del collodio,” and Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Talbot and the Introduction of the Calotype in Italy,” in Cartier-Bresson et al., Éloge du négatif, 25.

2. Arnold, William Henry Fox Talbot, 130. 3. “Chimica,” Diario di Roma, no. 4 (January 13, 1846): 3; the identity and contribution of Mr. Ruisè, the last mentioned by Frezzolini, have yet to be established. 4. In Seconda Roma (1943), 391, Negro claimed that the first

1848): 123. 18. Flachéron’s pupil, the Englishman Thomas Sutton, confirmed that his negatives were “produced by Blanquart Evrard’s process” rather than that of Guillot-Saguez, as some have speculated. See Sutton, “Sir William Newton’s Letter.” 19. Marie-Eve Bouillon, “Jean François Charles André Flachéron,” in Cartier-Bresson et al., Roma 1850, 178–79.

calotype taken in Rome was a view of the Colosseum

20. For this image, see ibid., 69.

dated 1843 by Victor Prevost, and cited Newhall’s Photog-

21. This salted paper print is one of four signed by Caneva

raphy, 1839–1937, 101, cat. 114, which was later repeated

that was tipped into an album of engravings by Dome-

by Becchetti in La fotografia a Roma, 16. However, Negro

nico Amici dated between 1835 and 1847; McGuigan

Notes to Pages 18–27  231

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 231

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Collection, P2015.10. Compared with another Caneva of

Spanish Academy from 1848 to 1852; for the latter, see

the same subject, ca. 1850 (Becchetti, Giacomo Caneva,

Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Robinson, Albert,” in Mina, In

53), the example illustrated here appears to be earlier. 22. They are Andrés Rodríguez, sculptor; José Fernández,

Rome’s Light, 164, cat. 6, and 243.

sculptor/photographer; José Pagniucci Zumel, sculptor; Bernardino Montañés, painter; Carlos Múgica y Pérez,

5. For more on Freeman, see McGuigan and McGuigan, James Edward Freeman.

6. Freeman, Gatherings from an Artist’s Portfolio, 292. The

painter; Francisco Jareño y Alarcón, architect; Benito

“two of his compatriots” to whom Robinson gave instruc-

Soriano Murillo, painter; Manuel Arbós y Ayerbe, painter;

tion in the chemistry required to practice photography

Adrian Fernando Shakery, diplomat (secretary of the Lega-

were almost certainly Macpherson and Anderson, as Free-

tion for El Salvador); Jerónimo de la Gándara, architect;

man later reveals that the former, his closest friend, died

Luis de Madrazo, painter; Giacomo Caneva, painter/pho-

poor, while it is an established fact that the latter created

tographer; and Francisco Sainz Pinto, painter.

multigenerational wealth.

23. Hernández Latas, Bernardino Montañés, 60; see also Hernández Latas and Becchetti, Recuerdo de Roma,



7. R. Thomas, “Photography in Rome,” 159.



8. Sylvie Aubenas, “Autour de Frédéric Flachéron: Les calo-

88–89 [as by Caneva]; Hernández Latas et al., Álbum de

typistes français en Italie,” in Cartier-Bresson et al., Éloge

Pompeya, 3 [as by Caneva]; Pérez Gallardo, Fotografía y

du négatif, 57–61.

arquitectura, 101 [as attributed to Caneva]. 24. Critelli, Stefano Lecchi; Miraglia, “Die Helden Zeigen,” 19–20; Paoli, “Stefano Lecchi.”



9. Pérez Gallardo, “El príncipe Girón de Anglona.”

10. R. Thomas, “Photography in Rome,” 159. 11. This salted paper print was discovered by Becchetti and entered his collection together with its pendant, which

Chapter 3

was inscribed on the mount: “St. Peter’s, the Vatican &



1. R. Thomas, “Photography in Rome.”

St. Angelo, Rome. By Robertson, Photographer. 1848.”



2. Arthur Robinson was born in London on January 9,

There is no other evidence to suggest when or how long

1820, the son of Mary Frances and Stratford Robinson, a

Robertson was in Italy, but he would have had many

prominent attorney. When Arthur’s father died in 1833,

opportunities to visit as he traveled between England and

he left his family a large inheritance with a very generous

Turkey, where he was chief engraver of the Imperial Mint

income. In the 1841 English census, Arthur was listed

in Istanbul from 1841 to 1881; see Becchetti, “‘La natura

as an architect, after which time he traveled to study in

stessa è fatta,’” 10–11, 31–33; Carlotta Sylos Calò, “Robert-

Greece before arriving in Rome around 1843. After his

son, James,” in Bonetti, Roma 1840–1870, 201.

death on November 15, 1868, he left his older brother Fran-

12. Du Pays, Itinéraire de l’Italie et de la Sicile (1863), 536–37.

cis an estate worth almost seven thousand pounds, or the

13. Miraglia, “La fotografia fra indice, icona e simbolo,” 281.

equivalent of over one million dollars today. Becchetti (in

14. “Exhibition of Photographic Pictures at the Society of

La fotografia a Roma, 339) first identified Arthur Robin-

Arts.”

son, whom he assumed was an artist, from his signature

15. Bonfigli, Guide to the Studios in Rome, 108.

in the Caffè Greco ledger; Crawford (“Robert Macpherson

16. Hunt, Manual of Photography, 215–17.

1814–1872: The Foremost Photographer of Rome,” 387) was

17. “Contents of the Glass Palace.”

the first to correctly identify his years and profession but

18. Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851,

accidentally named him Albert instead of Arthur.

279.



3. R. Thomas, “Photography in Rome,” 159.

19. Sutton, “Sir William Newton’s Letter.”



4. One watercolor is known by Arthur Robinson, View of

20. Sutton, “On Photographic Paper.”

the Casino Called the “Casale Cenci-Giustiniani” in the Borghese Gardens, Rome, Italy (New-York Historical Society, 1956.78.10), from the collection of the American painter Thomas Pritchard Rossiter, who studied in

21. Flachéron to Chevalier, Paris, July 28, 1851, in Chevalier, Guide du photographe, 3:40. 22. Jammes and Janis, Art of French Calotype, 228–29, recorded two pensioned sculptors at the French Academy

Rome from 1842 to 1846. One salted paper print has been

in Rome who adopted daguerreotypy in 1840: Auguste-

variously attributed as either a portrait or a self-portrait

Louis M ­ arie Ottin and Jean-Baptiste Farochon. They

by Robinson on the basis of an inscription on that mount

allegedly received their supplies in Florence from their

that reads: “Mr. Robinson / 15,” from the collection of the

compatriot, the art critic François Sabatier, and sold their

Spanish painter Bernardino Montañés, a pensioner at the

work to English tourists through a merchant named

232  Notes to Pages 27–32

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 232

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Diamanti; however, I have not found the original source

so, to my knowledge, no living scholar has had the oppor-

for this citation nor any other information to support it. 23. Néagu, Alfred Normand; Jammes, Cayla, and Néagu, Alfred-Nicolas Normand Architecte.

tunity to study it. 39. Saunders, “American Pupils.” 40. Nathan Baker to Mary E. Baker, Naples, November 12,

24. Néagu, Alfred Normand, n.p.

1851, Mixter Family Papers, box 1, folder 3, Cincinnati

25. On the pasted–down endpapers of the album appears

Historical Society, Cincinnati Museum Center, Ohio; as

the label: “aux deux créoles / 62, rue du Faubg St. Honoré / au coin de la rue d’Aguesseau / delarue &

quoted by Hanlon, “Pilgrims on Paper,” 321. 41. See Taylor, “Jane Martha St. John.”

hivert / papetiers.” This represents the stationery firm established by Charles-Ambroise Delarue and Jean-Bap-

Chapter 4

tiste-Ambroise Hivert, 62 Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré,



1. Archer, “Chemical Manufacturers.”

Paris, who entered into partnership on September 13,



2. Stillman, “John Manson,” Photographic Times and Amer-

Journal des Tribunaux 16, no. 231 (September 25, 1852):



3. Sutton, “On Photographic Paper,” 11.

946; “Sociétés commerciales et Industrielles,” Le Droit:



4. William Nugent Dunbar was born in Scotland in 1809

1852 and dissolved it on August 15, 1855. See Le Droit:

ican Photographer 18, no. 368 (October 5, 1888): 473.

Journal des Tribunaux 19, no. 67 (March 21, 1855): 276.

to Major Robert Skerret Nugent-Dunbar of Machermore

Photographs that are dateable from 1855 to 1858 were

(1769–1846) and Catherine Lister (1776–ca. 1861), daughter

pasted down by Bermond on the reverse sides of mounts

of Nathaniel Lister, MP, of Armitage Park, and his family

throughout the album, ideally to demonstrate his

lived at Machermore Castle in Newton Stewart, Dum-

technical and aesthetic advancement through visual

fries and Galloway. The American painter James Edward

comparison.

Freeman remembered first meeting Dunbar at the British Academy in Rome in 1837; see Freeman, Gatherings from

26. This example can be viewed at fondoromano‌.com or another at Helsted et al., Rome in Early Photographs,

an Artist’s Portfolio in Rome, 287. For an obituary of Dun-

cat.143, reprinted by Tuminello after Caneva’s negative.

bar, see [Obituaries], United Service Magazine 159 (1882): 125.

27. See Dewitz, Siegert, and Schuller-Procopovici, Italien: Sehen und Sterben, 178, for the print in the collection



of the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany (Inv.-Nr. FH

6. Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 272–73.

01565).



7. Gernsheim, “James Anderson 1813–77,” 17.



8. Dorothea Ritter, “Auf den Spuren James Andersons und



9. The true identity of James Anderson would never have

28. Florence Le Corre, “Alphonse Davanne,” in Cartier-Bresson et al., Éloge du négatif, 221. 29. Lerebours, “Plaque, Papier, ou Verre?,” as cited and trans-

5. See Negro, Seconda Roma (1966), 470–71.

der Maler-Fotografen in Rom,” in Rom 1846–1870, 18.

lated by Eugenia Parry Janis in Jammes and Janis, Art of

been known had he not initiated a series of events that

French Calotype, 68.

became widely reported in the British press under the title

30. Jammes and Janis, Art of French Calotype, 33.

“A Romantic Case,” and which were covered as “Ander-

31. Baldwin, Gustave Le Gray, 225.

son v. Anderson” in the British Journal of Photography

32. Catalogue of an Exhibition of Recent Specimens, 16.

27, no. 1044 (May 7, 1880), 226. Atkinson/Anderson knew

33. “Photographic Exhibition at the Society of Arts,” 55;

that under British law he was entitled to primogeniture

Pécarrère’s name was misspelled Pecquerel in the cata-

as eldest son, and that, as a British subject living over-

logue, which led to some later confusion.

seas, he had forty years after the death of his father to file

34. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Poussin’s Walk, Roman

a claim. His father, John Atkinson, died on October 29,

Campagna, oil on paper on canvas, n.d., Musée du Louvre,

1839, approximately one year after Isaac ran away, so it

RF 1941 6.

can be no coincidence that Anderson arrived in Cum-

35. See Sylvie Aubenas, “On Photographic Collaboration:

berland, England, with his eldest son, Domenico, in the

Firmin Eugène Le Dien and Gustave Le Gray,” in Baldwin,

summer 1876. Leaving Domenico alone at a local hotel,

Gustave Le Gray, 297–313.

Anderson sought out his siblings, who informed him that

36. Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 318.

they had presumed him dead and that two of his broth-

37. Bonfigli, Guide to the Studios in Rome, 108.

ers had divided the estate. Keeping Domenico ignorant,

38. [Luswergh], Catalogo dei lavori. Becchetti owned the only

Anderson returned to Rome to prepare legal proceedings

known copy of this catalogue but apparently misplaced it,

in anticipation of a return to England the following year.

Notes to Pages 32–40  233

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 233

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Before any of this could happen, however, Anderson died,

laudatory press. When Macpherson refused Pentland’s

and only afterward did Domenico discover that he and

renewed overtures, his rank in the guide diminished until

his three brothers were entitled to a substantial inheri-

he was eventually excluded altogether. This unsavory

tance. Domenico hired a solicitor in London, who began

practice should call into question the veracity of Pentland’s

an investigation and court proceeding that revealed

opinions; or at the very least, we should take his assertions

Anderson’s true identity and eventually resulted in a

as well as his omissions with a grain of salt. For both sides

generous settlement from the Atkinson family—minus,

of this argument, see “Handbook for Italy,” Athenaeum,

of course, the money that Isaac/James had stolen in 1838.

no. 2066 (June 1, 1867): 728–29.

The numerous depositions and facts revealed throughout

22. Gernsheim and Gernsheim, History of Photography, 258.

the lengthy legal proceedings confirm that Anderson went

23. “Photographic Society of Scotland,” 184.

straight from Cumberland, England, to Rome (not Paris),

24. Fetridge, Harper’s Hand-Book for Travellers, 388.

where he resided continuously until his death.

25. Macpherson, Vatican Sculptures, 1.

10. “Arrivi e Partenze,” Giornale del Regno delle Due Sicilie, no. 147 (July 12, 1842): 588. 11. Almanacco Romano (1855), 287; Almanacco Romano

26. Macpherson, Macpherson’s Photographs Rome (1871), 4. 27. Quoted in Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 26. 28. Bonfigli, Guide to the Studios in Rome, 145.

(1856), 314; Almanacco Romano (1857), 259; Almanacco

29. Ber., “Exposition Universelle,” 343–44.

Romano (1858), 266.

30. De Montluisant, Notice sur les Produits, 79.

12. Domenico Anderson, James Anderson’s son, added a hand-

31. Murray, Handbook of Rome (1869), xxiii; Murray, Hand-

written entry in a cash book that was kept for the sale of

book of Rome (1873), xxiii; Murray, Handbook of Rome

his father’s photographs from 1854, in which he indicated

(1875), 28.

that his father’s photographs were for sale with the book-

32. Murray, Handbook of Rome (1858), xix.

seller Josef Spithöver as early as 1851; see Ritter, “Auf den

33. Ibid.

Spuren James Andersons,” 19.

34. Fitzgerald, Roman Candles, 12.

13. Andrea Sciolari, “Datazioni e notazioni tecniche,” in Fanelli and Scolari, James Anderson fotografo, 27–38. 14. This journal was discovered by Becchetti in the Archives

35. “Class XIV: Photography and Photographic Apparatus,” 206. 36. Gregorovius, Roman Journals, 32.

of the Caffè Greco, but it was lost soon after, so few schol-

37. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, v.

ars have ever had access to it. Becchetti claimed that the

38. “Photographic Society of Scotland,” 184.

signatures of Anderson and Dunbar were identical, and

39. The first example in marble, dated 1859, is now at the

this assumption has been perpetuated in good faith; see Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 272–73. The McGuigan

Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California.

Collection possesses a photocopy of the original led-

40. Hosmer, Harriet Hosmer, 149–51.

ger from the Alistair Crawford Archive, wherein it is

41. Erskine, Anna Jameson, 243–45.

abundantly clear that the two signatures were written by

42. Hawthorne, French and Italian Notebooks, 508–9.

different hands.

43. Murray, Handbook of Rome (1862), xx–xxi.

15. Piale, Rome Seen in a Week, 12.

44. For the collecting and display of cartes de visite, see

16. Murray, Handbook of Rome (1867), xxi.

Siegel, Galleries of Friendship and Fame; Siegel, Di Bello,

17. Ibid.

and Weiss, Playing with Pictures.

18. Crawford, “Robert Macpherson,” unpublished manuscript (1997), n.p. 19. “British Artists in Rome. Painters,” London Morning Post, December 15, 1854.

45. Murray, Handbook of Rome (1858), xix. 46. An example of this albumen print in the Wellcome Collection records the names on the mount; see “Pope Pius IX and members of the Papal court. Photograph,

20. Murray, Handbook of Rome (1858), xix.

1868,” Wellcome Collection, accessed August 27, 2021,

21. Murray, Handbook of Rome (1856), xv. Murray’s Handbook

https://‌wellcomecollection‌.org‌/works‌/p67hzz4k.

of Rome is often cited for its critical judgments, yet based upon Macpherson’s experiences, it appears that the guide-

47. Giornale di Roma, no. 128 (June 6, 1855): 530; cited by Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 273–74.

book’s Roman agent, Joseph Barclay Pentland, extorted

48. Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 350.

him, and perhaps other photographers, in exchange for

49. Murray, Handbook of Rome (1858), xviii.

234  Notes to Pages 40–49

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 234

7/7/22 2:12 PM

50. “American Art in Rome,” Anglo-American Times, February 29, 1868.

25. Two hundred glass negatives, purportedly once from the Parker Collection, are housed at the American Academy

51. James, Hawthorne, 160.

in Rome, which were ideally culled and replaced with new

52. Hawthorne, Marble Faun, x.

examples by Molins long before the fire; however, their provenance is still being debated and studied by scholars

Chapter 5

who have yet to form a consensus. For an excellent history

1. Fetridge, Harper’s Hand-Book for Travellers, 388.

of the photographic archive formed by John Henry Parker,



see Bonetti, “I cataloghi Parker”; Garric, “La raccolta

2. Costa, “Les objets et les lieux de l’art”; Pizzo, “La nascita della fotografia”; Manodori Sagredo, Le icone fotografiche, 30.

Parker.” 26. Barbier de Montault, Antiquités Chrétiennes de Rome.



3. As quoted by Valentini, “Fare gli italiani,” 55.

27. Barbier de Montault, Exposition réligieuse de Rome 1870.



4. Miraglia, “La fotografia,” 565; Miraglia quotes Hillard, Six

28. Barbier de Montault, “L’Archéologie a l’Exposition réli-

Months in Italy, 2:253. 5. Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 329.



6. “Bookbinders . . . the best are Olivieri, Piazza di Spagna,

on the Via Flaminia (McGuigan Collection) is numbered

at the corner of the Via Frattina, especially for ornamental

lower left in black in the negative by Simelli, “773,” and

bindings,” in Murray, Handbook of Rome (1871), xxii.

corresponds numerically with other works published in

7. I am grateful to Helena Pérez Gallardo for confirming the significance of the papal seals on these two albums.



gieuse,” 209. 29. As one example, de Bonis’s The Fountain of Pope Julius III

8. Philip Conisbee, “Rome, 1806–1820,” in Tinterow and Conisbee, Portraits by Ingres, 107, 109, fig. 100.

his series of the Via Flaminia; see Simelli, Roma fotografia artistica ed archeologica, 21, cats. 768 and 769. 30. Piale, Rome Seen in a Week, 12. 31. The black impressions left by the clamps on the glass

9. Almanacco Romano (1855), 286.

negatives, where light was unable to pass, measure 3/16

10. Bonfigli, Guide to the Studios in Rome, 107.

× 5/8 in., 3/16 × 3/4 in., and 1/8 × 1/2 in. (0.5 × 1.7 cm, 0.6 × 2

11. As quoted by Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 268–69.

cm, and 0.3 × 1.4 cm).

12. Ministry of Commerce, 1866–68, State Archives, Rome, as quoted in ibid., 268–71. 13. Quattrocchi, Storia dell’Accademia filarmonica romana, 48–49. 14. [Advertisement], L’Universo Illustrato: Giornale per Tutti 1, no. 21 (February 21, 1867): 396.

32. Hare, Walks in Rome (1872), 1:29. 33. See especially Maria Francesca Bonetti, “A. De Bonis, an ‘Outsider’ Photographer,” in Lundberg and Pinto, Steps Off the Beaten Path, 25–32. 34. Sciolari, Una inedita fotografia, and for a more in-depth analysis, see Fanelli and Sciolari, Adriano De Bonis.

15. Cantù, Album dell’Esposizione Industriale Italiana, 210.

35. Du Pays, Itinéraire de l’Italie et de la Sicile (1863), 536–37.

16. [Verzaschi], Catalogo Generale delle Riproduzioni

36. Honour, Romanticism, 107–8; for the subject of views

Fotografiche. 17. Gladstone, “Speeches of Pope Piux IX,” 291.

from open windows, see also Rewald, Rooms with a View. 37. This photograph, preserved in an album assembled by

18. “Notizia,” Il Tiberino 4, no. 52 (September 28, 1838): 208.

Sophia Lydia Wright in March 1873 from images collected

19. Examples of these works are in the collection of the Getty

in Rome over several years, is one of the only landscapes

Research Institute and can be viewed on the HathiTrust Digital Library at https://‌catalog‌.hathitrust‌.org‌/Record‌ /102153505.

not stamped by de Bonis, yet it shares the same qualities common to the master’s work as the others. 38. Eleanor Jones Harvey, “George Peter Alexander Healy,”

20. Notizie per l’Anno 1847, 405–7.

in Stebbins et al., Lure of Italy, 244–46, fig. 1. Harvey

21. Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 347.

adroitly suggested the influence of photography on this

22. Bonfigli, Guide to the Studios in Rome, 108.

composition.

23. Galassi, Before Photography, 26.

39. De Bonis, I vandali a Roma, 50.

24. The definitive edition in which these all appeared

40. Ibid., 34–35.

together was Parker’s Historical Photographs (1879). See

41. Bergsøe, Henrik Ibsen Paa Ischia, 300.

also Parker, Catalogue of a Series of Photographs; Parker,

42. Vitali, “Federico Faruffini fotografo.”

Supplement; Parker, Catalogue of Fifteen Hundred Photo-

43. Maria Francesca Bonetti, “Federico Faruffini,” in Bonfait,

graphs; and Parker, Archaeology of Rome (1869).

Le Peuple de Rome, 275–77.

Notes to Pages 50–64  235

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 235

7/7/22 2:12 PM

44. Baedeker, Italien, 83 (original emphasis).



2. About previous histories of photography in nine-

45. Conrad Wise Chapman to John Linton Chapman, London,

teenth-century Rome, see Helsted et al., Rome in Early

February 5, 1865, Chapman Family Correspondence,

Photographs; Lyons et al., Antiquity and Photography;

UCSD.

Lundberg and Pinto, Steps Off the Beaten Path; McCauley,

46. Brannt, “Diseases and Accidents to Which Painters and Varnishers Are Particularly Liable,” in Painter, Varnisher,

“Fawning over Marbles.”

and Gilders Companion, 191–207.

centers, see Jammes and Janis, Art of the French Calotype;

47. See “Arthur Dexter Nineteenth-Century Photographic

Taylor, Impressed by Light; Jones et al., In the Forest of

Albums,” Boston Athenaeum Digital Collections, accessed September 17, 2021, https://‌cdm‌.bostonathe

3. About photography’s early development in other European

Fontainebleau.

naeum‌.org‌/digital‌/collection‌/p16057coll12.

4. About Piranesi and his significance, see Pinto, Speaking Ruins.

48. James, William Wetmore Story, 1:363.

5. Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 1:148.

49. “W. J. Stillman,” Photographic Times and American Pho-



6. R. Thomas, “Photography in Rome,” 159.



7. About the collecting and study of antiquities in eigh-

tographer 17, no. 312 (September 9, 1887): 452. 50. See “William James Stillman Albums,” Union Digital Works, Schaffer Library, Union College, Schenectady, New

teenth-century Rome, see Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and Dealing.

York, accessed September 21, 2021, https://‌d igitalworks‌

8. Twain, Innocents Abroad, 277.

.union‌.edu‌/stillman.

9. Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 695.

51. “John Manson: A Studio Story” was serialized in Photographic Times and American Photographer in fifty-six

10. About Frederick Douglass’s visit to Rome, see Milder, “Road to Africa.”

installments between September 9, 1887, and November 9,

11. Hawthorne, Marble Faun, 1:177.

1888.

12. About the history of Rome’s Jewish ghetto, see Schwartz,

52. Stillman, “John Manson,” Photographic Times and American Photographer 18, no. 366 (September 21, 1888): 451. 53. Nota dei Fotografi e Stabilimenti Fotografici. Digital copy of original document courtesy of Maria Francesca Bonetti; see appendix 2. 54. Becchetti, La fotografia a Roma, 24. 55. De Bonis, I vandali a Roma, 5–8. 56. “Artist Life in Rome,” New-York Daily Tribune, April 12, 1873. 57. Elihu Vedder to Carrie Vedder, Rome, August 18, 1872,

Ghetto. 13. About photography’s role in the spatial segregation of Rome, see Forgacs, Italy’s Margins. 14. About Roman history in the age of Pope Pius IX, see Coppa, Pope Pius IX; Mack Smith, Italy and the Monarchy. 15. About the history of Roman maps and their impact on the development of tourism in Rome, see Maier, Eternal City. 16. Byron, Works of Lord Byron, 2:424. 17. Story, Roba di Roma, 1:v–vi.

Elihu Vedder Papers.

Part 2

1. “Photographs of Rome,” 227; quoted in part in Helsted et al., Rome in Early Photographs, 346; Pinto, City of the Soul, 27.

236  Notes to Pages 64–90

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 236

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Bibliography

Photographers’ Catalogues Anderson, James. Catalogue des photographies de Rome de

[Verzaschi]. Catalogo Generale delle Riproduzioni Fotografiche Pubblicate per cura del Premiato Stabilimento

James Anderson: Mars 1859. Rome: Joseph Spithöver,

Fotografioc di Enrico Verzaschi Roma. Rome: Tipogra-

1859.

fia Romana di C. Bartoli, 1873.

Barbier de Montault, Xavier. Antiquités Chrétiennes de Rome du Ve au XVIe siècle décrites par le Chanoine Barbier de Montault et photographiées par C. B. Simelli.

Guidebooks

Rome: n.p., 1864.

Almanacco Romano. Rome: Tipografia Chiassi, 1855.

———. Exposition réligieuse de Rome 1870. Antiquités chréti-

Almanacco Romano. Rome: Tipografia Legale, 1857.

et décrites par M.gr X. Barbier de Montault Camérier

Almanacco Romano. Rome: Tipografia Sinimberghi, 1858.

d’honneur de Sa Sainteté. Rome: Simelli, 1870.

Baedeker, Karl. Italien: Handbuch für Reisende. Zweiter Theil:

———. Photographs of Christian Antiquities at Rome and the Neighborhood by C. B. Simelli. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1872. [Dovizielli, Pietro]. Catalogue des Travaux Exécutés Photographie dans L’Établissement de P. Dovizielli. Rome: P. Dovizielli, ca. 1859. [Luswergh]. Catalogo dei lavori eseguiti in Fotografia col metodo perfezionato nello Stabilimento di Angelo Luswergh e Giacomo Figlio. Roma. Via del Teatro Valle, nel Fabbricato della Università Romana N. 50. Rome, 1855. Macpherson, Robert. Macpherson’s Photographs of Celebrated Pictures Mostly Taken from the Best Engravings. Rome: n.p., 1865. ———. Macpherson’s Photographs Rome. 1858. Rome: n.p., 1858. ———. Macpherson’s Photographs Rome. August 1863. Rome: n.p., 1863. ———. Macpherson’s Photographs Rome. Rome, December 1871. Rome: n.p., 1871. ———. Macpherson’s Vatican Sculptures. 1st March, 1868. Rome: n.p., 1868. ———. Sculptures of the Capitol. 287 in all. Rome, December 1871. Rome: n.p., 1871. ———. Vatican Sculptures. London: Chapman & Hall, 1863. Simelli, C. B. Roma fotografia artistica ed archeologica. Parte 2a. Ornato ed architettura. Rome: Capaccini and Ripamonti, ca. 1878.

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 237

Almanacco Romano. Rome: Tipografia Legale, 1856.

ennes photographiées by M. Ch. Simelli. Cataloguées

Mittel-Italien und Rome. 4th rev. ed. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1874. ———. Italy: Handbook for Travellers. First Part: Northern Italy. 6th rev. ed. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1882. ———. Italy: Handbook for Travellers. Second Part: Central Italy and Rome. 3rd rev. ed. Coblenz: Karl Baedeker, 1872. ———. Italy: Handbook for Travellers. Second Part: Central Italy and Rome. 4th rev. ed. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1875. ———. Italy: Handbook for Travellers. Second Part: Central Italy and Rome. 6th ed. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1879. ———. Italy: Handbook for Travellers. Second Part: Central Italy and Rome. 8th rev. ed. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1883. ———. Italy: Handbook for Travellers. Second Part: Central Italy and Rome. 9th rev. ed. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1886. ———. Italy: Handbook for Travellers. Second Part: Central Italy and Rome. 10th rev. ed. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1890. Bleser, Edouart-Philippe-Jacques. Rome et ses Monuments: Guide du Voyageur Catholique dans la Capitale du Monde Chrétien. Louvain: Chez C.-J. Fonteyn, Père, 1870. Bonfigli, F. S. Guide to the Studios in Rome. Rome: Tipografia Legale, 1860.

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Breve Guida di Roma. Rome: Salviucci, 1875. du Pays, A. J. Itinéraire Descriptif, Historique et Artistique de l’Italie et de la Sicile. Collection des Guides-Joanne. Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette, 1855. ———. Itinéraire Descriptif, Historique et Artistique de l’Italie et de la Sicile. Collection des Guides-Joanne. 2nd ed. Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette, 1859. ———. Itinéraire Descriptif, Historique et Artistique de l’Italie et de la Sicile. Collection des Guides-Joanne. 3rd ed.

———. A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs. 7th ed. London: John Murray, 1867. ———. A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs. 8th ed. London: John Murray, 1867. ———. A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs. 9th ed. London: John Murray, 1869. ———. A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs. 10th ed. London: John Murray, 1871. Piale, L. Rome Seen in a Week. 5th ed. Rome: Piale, 1865.

Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette, 1863. ———. Itinéraire Descriptif, Historique et Artistique de l’Italie et de la Sicile: Tome premier Italie du Nord. Collec-

Archival Sources

tion des Guides- Joanne. 4th ed. Paris: Librairie de L.

Cameron, Emma S. “Notes on Travels in Italy, 1846–1848.”

Hachette, 1865. ———. Itinéraire Descriptif, Historique et Artistique de l’Italie et de la Sicile. Collection des Guides-Joanne. 5th ed. Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette, 1869. ———. Itinéraire Descriptif, Historique et Artistique de l’Italie et de la Sicile. II. Italie du Centre. Collection des Guides-Joanne. 7th ed. Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette, 1877. Fetridge, M. Pembroke. Harper’s Hand-Book for Travellers in Europe and the East. 7th ed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868. Hare, Augustus J. C. Walks in Rome. 1st ed. 2 vols. London: Strahan, 1871.

James and Emma Cameron Papers, F. W. Olin Library Special Collections, Mills College. Crawford, Alistair. “Robert Macpherson.” Unpublished manuscript, 1997. Alistair Crawford Archive, McGuigan Collection. Chapman Family Correspondence. Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Chapman Family Papers, 1801–1904. McGuigan Collection, Harpswell, Maine. Fox Talbot Collection. British Library, London. Nota dei Fotografi e Stabilimenti Fotografici esistenti nei diversi Rioni di Roma. Archives of S. Congregazione

———. Walks in Rome. 3rd ed. 2 vols. London: Strahan, 1872.

del Buon Governo, State Archives, Rome, folder 44,

———. Walks in Rome. 5th ed. 2 vols. London: Daldy, Isbister,

Carte di Polizia 1816–1870, ca. 1866.

1875. ———. Walks in Rome. 8th American ed. New York: George

Elihu Vedder Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Routledge & Sons, 1882. Le Grice, Count Hawks. Walks Through the Studii of the Sculptors at Rome. 2 vols. Rome: Crispino Puccinelli,

Other Published Sources

1841.

Affri, Dimitri, and Paola Callegari, eds. Studi d’artista: Fotogra-

Loescher, Herman. Rome and Its Neighborhood Visited in Eight Days. Rome: Herman Loescher, 1873. Murray, John. A Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy. Part II: Rome and Its Environs. 3rd ed. London: John Murray, 1853. ———. A Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy. Part II: Rome and Its Environs. 4th ed. London: John Murray, 1856. ———. A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs; Forming Part II of the Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy. 5th ed. London: John Murray, 1858. ———. A Handbook of Rome and Its Environs; Forming Part

fie d’atelier tra ’800 e ’900. Perugia: EFFE, Fabrizio Fabbri, 2009. Exhibition catalogue. Alcántara, Francisco. “El inventor de la fotografía?” Madrid Científico 9, no. 398 (1902): 312–13. Amerio, Andrea. Grand Tour: A Photographic Journey Through Goethe’s Italy / Grand Tour. Mit Goethe durch das alte Italien. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2013. “Anfänge der Daguerreotypie in Italien.” Photographische Korrespondenz 48, no. 615 (1911): 638. Angeli, Diego. Le Cronache del “Caffe Greco.” Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1930. Antonetto, Marco. La Fotografica vedutistica a Roma: Dal

II of the Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy. 6th

“Circolo del Caffè Greco” alla fotografia commerciale

ed. London: John Murray, 1862.

1847–1890. Rome: Paolo Antonacci, 2008. Exhibition catalogue.

238  Bibliography

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 238

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Archer, Frederick Scott. “Chemical Manufacturers and Agricultural Chemistry: The Use of Collodion in Photography.” Chemist: A Monthly Journal of Chemical Philosophy n.s. 2, no. 19 (March 1851): 257–58. Arnold, H. J. P. William Henry Fox Talbot: Pioneer of Photography and Man of Science. London: Hutchinson Benham, 1977. Asmus, Gesine, ed. and trans. Rom in frühen Photographien 1846–1878 aus römischen und dänischen Sammlungen. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1988. Aubenas, Sylvie, with Denis Canguilhem and Quentin Bajac. Le photographe photographié: L’autoportrait en France 1850–1914. Foreword by Danielle Molinari. Preface by Quentin Bajac and Denis Canguilhem. Paris: Musées de la Ville de Paris, 2004. Aubenas, Sylvie, et al. L’art du nu au XIXe siècle: Le photographe et son modèle. Paris: Hazan, 1997. Exhibition catalogue. Aubenas, Sylvie, and Thomas Galifot, eds. Girault de Prangey photographe (1804–1892). Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2020. Exhibition catalogue. Aubenas, Sylvie, and Paul-Louis Roubert, eds. With contributions by Marc Durand, Michel Frizot, and Nicolas Le Guern. Primitifs de la photographie: Le calotype en France 1843–1860. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. Exhibition catalogue. Bajac, Quentin, and Dominique Planchon-de Font Réaulx. Le daguerréotype français: Un object photographique. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2003. Exhibition catalogue.

Architectural History: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 41 (1998): 192–207. Beaugé, Gilbert. La photographie en Provence, 1839-1895: Culture photographique et société au XIXe siècle. Marseille: Editions Jeanne Laffitte, 1995. Becchetti, Nino, and Piero Becchetti. Ripa Grande: Porto di Roma. Rome: Quasar, 1989. Becchetti, Piero. “Una dinastia di fotografi romani: Gli Anderson.” Archivio Fotografi Toscano 2 (1986): 56–67. ———. La fotografia a Roma dalle origini al 1915. Rome: Colombo, 1983. ———. Fotografi e fotografia in Italia 1839–1880. Rome: Quasar, 1978. ———. Giacomo Caneva e la Scuola Fotografica Romana (1847/1855). Florence: Fratelli Alinari, 1989. Exhibition catalogue. ———. Immagini della Campagna Romana 1853–1915. Rome: Quasar, 1983. ———. “‘La natura stessa è fatta di sé medesima pittrice’: Quindici anni di vedute romane.” In Maggia and Roganti, eds., Modena per la Fotografia, 10–38. ———. Roma cento anni fa nelle fotografie del tempo. Rome: Palazzo Braschi, 1970. ———. Roma nelle fotografie dei Fratelli D’Alessandri 1858– 1930. Introduction by Oreste Ferrari. Rome: Colombo, 1996. ———. Roma nelle fotografie della Fondazione Marco Besso 1850–1920. Rome: Colombo, 1993. Becchetti, Piero, and Bruno Bizzi. Roma in tre dimensioni: La fotografia stereoscopica. Rome: Colombo, 2004.

Baldwin, Gordon, ed. With contributions by Sylvie Aubenas,

Becchetti, Piero, and Anne Cartier-Bresson. Pittori fotografi a

Anne Cartier-Bresson, Joachim Bonnemaison, Bar-

Roma 1845–1870: Immagini dalla raccolta fotogra-

thélémy Jobert, Chaude Schopp, Mercedes Volait,

fica comunale. Rome: Multigrafica, 1987. Exhibition

and Henri Zerner. Gustave Le Gray 1820–1884. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002. Barbarò, Falzone del, and Claudia Tempesta, eds. Marius Pictor Fotografo: L’Album fotografico di Mario De Maria, 1882–1887. Milan: I Fotolibri / Longanesi, 1979.

catalogue. Becchetti, Piero, and Carlo Pietrangeli. An English Photographer in Rome: Robert Macpherson. Rome: Quasar, 1988. ———. Roma in Dagherrotipia. Rome: Quasar, 1979.

———. Regione Lazio: Gli Alinari Fotografi; Strumenti di

Belli, Giuseppe Gioachino. Le lettere. Edited by Giacinto Spag-

Lavoro. Florence: Fratelli Alinari, 1989.

noletti. Milan: Cino del Duca Editore, 1961.

Barbier de Montault, Xavier. “L’Archéologie à l’Exposition réligieuse de Rome en 1870: Deuxième Article.” Revue de l’art chrétien 17, series 2, book 1 (1874): 202–16. Barker, Michael. “An Appraisal of Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) and His Influence.” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850–the Present, no. 16 (1992): 3–13.

Beluze, Eugène. Vie de Monseigneur Dauphin, prélat de la maison de leurs Saintetés Pie IX et Léon XIII: 1806–1882. Paris: Jules Gervais, 1886. Ber., E. “Exposition Universelle . . . Coup d’oeil sur l’Exposition des États Pontificaux.” Revue des Deux Monds 25 (October 1, 1855): 343–44.

Barnes, Martin, and Christopher Whitehead. “The ‘Sugges-

Bergsøe, Vilhelm. Henrik Ibsen Paa Ischia og “Fra Piazza del

tiveness’ of Roman Architecture: Henry Cole and

Popolo”: Erindringer fra Aarene 1863–69. Copenha-

Pietro Dovizielli’s Photographic Survey of 1859.”

gen: Gyldendalske Boghandel Nordisk Forlag, 1907.

Bibliography  239

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 239

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Bernoni, Carlo, and Bruno Bizzi, eds. Roma, paesaggi, figure negli acquerelli inediti di Ettore Roesler Franz. Rome: Colombo, 1986. ———, eds. Roma, paesaggi, figure nelle fotografie inedite di Ettore Roesler Franz. 2nd ed. With an essay by Manlio Barberito. Rome: Colombo, 1997. Bernoni, Carlo, and Giulio Bollati, eds. L’immagine fotografica 1845–1945. 2 vols. Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1979. Bernoni, Carlo, and Renato Mammuccari. Roma scomparsa nelle fotografie di Ettore Roesler Franz. Rome: Newton Compton, 2001. Bignamini, Ilaria, and Clare Hornsby. Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Bollati, Giulio, et al. Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento. Preface by Helmut Gernsheim. Milan: Edizioni Alinari, 1979. Bologna, Gabriella, and Ken Jacobson. “The Itinerant Daguerreotypist: A Case Study in Pre-Unified Northern Italy.” Daguerreian Annual (2012): 71–107. Bonetti, Maria Francesca. “I cataloghi Parker (1867–1879) e l’esemplare dell’INHA (post 1879): La struttura di un ampio reportage su Roma.” In Un patrimonio da ordinare: I cataloghi a stampa dei fotografi, edited by Pierangelo Cavanna and Francesca Mambelli, 109–31. Bologna: Fondazione Federico Zeri, 2019. ———. “Costumi della campagna romana: La fotografia di ‘genere’ e i suoi modelli.” In I “suoni” della Campagna romana: Per una ricostruzione del paesaggio sonoro di un territorio del Lazio, edited by Roberta Tucci, 203–9. Soveria Mannelli (Calabria): Rubbettino, 2003. ———. “Looking at Reality: Daguerreian Pictures; From Silver to Paper.” Daguerreotype Journal 1, no. 0 (June 2014): 40–43. ———. “The Photography Exhibition in Rome from 1840 to 1915: Collectors, Scholars and Connoisseurs around 1953.” In Rivista di Studi di Fotografia. Journal of Studies in Photography 3, no. 6 (2017): 50–70. https:// ‌doi‌.org‌/10‌.14601‌/RSF‌-22522. Bonetti, Maria Francesca, with Chiara Dall’Olio and Alberto Prandi. Roma 1840–1870: La fotografia, il collezionista e lo storico; Orsola and Filippo Maggia Collection. Rome: Peliti, 2008. Bonetti, Maria Francesca, and Monica Maffioli, eds. L’Italia d’argento: 1839/1859 storia del dagherrotipo in Italia. Florence: Fratelli Alinari, 2003. Bonfait, Olivier, et al. Maestà di Roma: da Napoleone all’Unità d’Italia: D’Ingres à Degas, les Artistes français à

Rome. Rome: Académie de France à Rome, 2003. Exhibition catalogue. ———, ed. Le Peuple de Rome: Representation et imaginaire de Napoleon a l’Unité italienne. Paris: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2013. Exhibition catalogue. Bonnaffé, Edmond. Eugène Piot. Paris: Étienne Charavay, 1890. Bordini, Silvia. “Aspetti del rapporto pittura-fotografia nel secondo Ottocento.” In La Pittura in Italia: L’Ottocento, edited by Enrico Castelnuovo, 2:581–601. Milan: Electa, 1990. Bouqueret, Christian, and François Livi. Le voyage en Italie: Les photographes français en Italie 1840–1920. Lyon: La manufacture, 1989. Braga, Ariane Varela, and Thomas-Leo True, eds. Roma e gli artisti stranieri: Integrazione, reti e identità (XVI–XX s.). Rome: Artemide, 2018. Brannt, William T. The Painter, Varnisher, and Gilders Companion. New York: William Jackson, 1836. Braun, Emil. Dr. Emil Braun’s Panorama von Rome: Aufgenommen vom Casino der Villa Ludovisi und in Kupfer gestochen von Carl Sprosse. Leipzig: Georg Wigand, 1851. ———. Die Ruinen und Museen Roms. Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1854. Braun, Marta, and Hope Kingsley, eds. Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840–1860 from the Wilson Centre for Photography. London: Mack, 2015. “Il Bravo” Melodramma in Tre Atti. Rome: Accademici Filarmonici Romani, 1857. Brizzi, Bruno. Roma cento anni fa nelle fotografie della raccolta Parker. 2nd rev. ed. Rome: Quasar, 1977. ———. Roma fine secolo nelle fotografie di Ettore Roesler Franz. Rome: Quasar, 1978. Brunel, George, ed. Correspondance des directeurs di l’Académie de France a Rome, n.s. Vol. 1, Répertoires. Paris: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1979. Buckman, Rollin. The Photographic Work of Calvert Richard Jones. Introduction by John Ward. London: Science Museum, 1990. Buerger, Janet E. French Daguerreotypes. Foreword by Walter Clark. Technical appendix by Alice Swan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Byron, George Gordon. The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 2. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. London: John Murray, 1899. Caccialanza, Roberto. Carlo Baldassarre Simelli: La campagna romana e Narni; Immagini inedite dalla collezione Ruggero Pini. Cremona: Roberto Caccialanza, 2020.

240  Bibliography

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 240

7/7/22 2:12 PM

———. Francesco Sidoli: Fotografo a Piacenza e a Roma

Corsini.” Rivista Di Studi Di Fotografia. Journal of

(1817–1896). Tricase, Italy: Youcanprint Self-Publish-

Studies in Photography 2, no. 3 (2016): 28–49. https://

ing, 2018.

‌doi‌.org‌/10‌.14601‌/RSF‌-18542.

———. Stefano Lecchi, Pupil of Daguerre: The Latest Revelations; Élève de Daguerre: Les derniers révélations; Allievo di Daguerre: Le ultime rivelazioni. Cremona: Roberto Caccialanza, 2020. Callegari, Paola, Sandra Costa, and Marco Pizzo, eds. I Collezioni d’arte e fotografia artistica nell’Italia del Risorgimento: Collections d’art et photographie artistique dans l’Italie du Risorgimento. Rome: Gangemi, 2010. Exhibition catalogue. Caneva, Giacomo. Della fotografia: Trattato pratico di Gia-

Chevalier, Charles. Guide du photographe. Paris: C. Chevalier, 1854. “Class XIV: Photography and Photographic Apparatus.” International Exhibition. 1862: Medals and Honourable Mentions Awarded by the International Juries. 2nd ed. London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1862. Constant, Eugène. “M. Perraud: Artiste Photographe.” In Le Biographe moderne: Pantheon universel des Sciences, des Arts, du Commerce et de l’Industrie par

como Caneva pittore pittoresco. Introduction by Italo

une Société d’historiens, de litterateurs et d’artistes,

Zannier. Rome: Tipografia Tiberina, 1855; Florence:

edited by F. Langlois Duhamel, n.p. Paris: Sous les

Fratelli Alinari, 1985.

arcades de l’Odéon, et au Bureau du Biographe Mod-

Cantù, Ignazio, comp. Album dell’Esposizione Industriale Italiana. Milan: Enrico Politti, 1871. Capitelli, Giovanni, and Stefano Grandesso. “Roma fuori di Roma.” In Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 589–600. Capitelli, Giovanna, Stefano Grandesso, and Carla Mazzarelli. Roma fuori di Roma: L’esportazione dell’arte

erne, ca. 1855. “Contents of the Glass Palace: Photography.” London Daily News, June 4, 1851. Coppa, Frank. Pope Pius IX: Crusader in a Secular Age. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Costa, Sandra. “Les objets et les lieux de l’art: La photographie

moderna da Pio VI all’Unità 1775–1870. Rome:

historique comme source pour l’étude des collec-

Campisano, 2013.

tions.” In Callegari, Costa, and Pizzo, Collezioni

Cartier-Bresson, Anne, and Monica Maffioli, eds. Una storia della fotografia italiana nelle collezioni Alinari 1841–1941. Florence: Alinari, 2006. Cartier-Bresson, Anne, et al. Éloge du négatif: Les débuts de la photographie sur papier en Italie (1846–1862). Paris: Petit Palais, 2010. Exhibition catalogue. ———. Roma 1850: Il Circolo dei Pittori Fotografi del Caffè Greco. Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2003. Cartier-Bresson, Anne, Monica Maffioli, and Béatrice Riottot El-Habib. Vu d’Italie 1841–1941: La photographie italienne dans les collections du Musée Alinari. Florence: Fratelli Alinari, 2004. A Catalogue of an Exhibition of Recent Specimens of Photog-

d’arte e fotografia artistica nell’Italia del Risorgimento, 17–31. Costantini, Paolo. “Dall’immagie elusiva all’immagine critica: La raccolta Ellis e la costruzione dell’immagine fotografica di Venezia.” Fotologia 3 (1985): 12–29. Costantini, Paolo, Silvio Fuso, Sandro Mescola, and Italo Zannier, eds. L’insistenza dello sguardo: Fotografie italiane 1839–1989. Florence: Fratelli Alinari, 1989. Exhibition catalogue. Costantini, Paolo, and Italo Zannier, eds. I dagherrotipi della collezione Ruskin. Florence: Alinari–Arsenale, 1986. Crawford, Alistair. “Robert Macpherson, 1814–1872: The Final Proof.” In Jubilee—30 Years of the European Society

raphy Exhibited at the House of the Society of Arts,

for the History of Photography: Congress of Photogra-

18 John Street, Adelphi, in December, 1852. London:

phy in Vienna, edited by Anna Auer and Uwe Schögl,

Society of Arts, 1852.

32–47. Vienna: Fotohof, 2008.

Cavazzi, Lucia, and Maria Elisa Tittoni, eds. Luigi Rossini incisore: Vedute di Roma 1817–1850. Rome: Multigrafica, 1982. Cavazzi, Lucia, Anita Margiotta, and Simonetta Tozzi. An Englishman in Rome, 1864–1877: The Parker Collection in the Municipal Photographic Archives. Rome: Artemide, 1990. Cestelli Guidi, Benedetta. “Beni patrimoniali e beni simbolici: l’album fotografico della Principessa Luisa Scotto

———. “Robert Macpherson, 1814–1872: The Foremost Photographer of Rome.” Papers of the British School at Rome 67 (1999): 353–403. Critelli, Maria Pia, ed. With contributions by Marina Miraglia and Silvia Paoli. Stefano Lecchi: Un fotografo e la Repubblica romana del 1849. Rome, Retablo, 2001. Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé. Description pratique du procédé nommé le Daguerréotype ecc. Genoa: Antoine Beuf, 1839.

Bibliography  241

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 241

7/7/22 2:12 PM

———. Descrizione pratica del nuovo istromento chiamato Il Daguerrotipo coll’aiuto del quale si riproducono spontaneamente le immagini della natura ricevute nella camera oscura, non già con i colori ma bensì con una estrema finezza di gradazioni di tinte: Nuova scoperta del Sig. Daguerre, pittore, inventore del

edited by Patrizia Di Bello and Gabriel Koureas, 19–34. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010. Douglass, Frederick. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Boston: De Wolfe & Fiske, 1892. Drouot-Montaigne. Promenade Méditerranénne: Collection photographique de la Duchesse de Berry; Les années

diorama, ufficiale della Legione d’Onore, membro di

1850. May 30, 2007. Auction catalogue.

varie accademie, ecc. ecc. Prima traduzione italiana.

Eder, Joseph Maria. History of Photography. Translated by

Rome: Alessandro Monaldi, 1840. Dall’Olio, Chiara, ed. Robert Rive: Photographies d’Italie. Milan: Skira, 2016. Exhibition catalogue. D’Ambrosio, Paul S., ed. With contributions by William L. Vance, Mary K. McGuigan, and John F. McGuigan Jr.

Edward Epstean. New York: Columbia University Press, 1945. Einaudi, Karin Bull-Simonsen, ed. Fotografia archeologica 1865–1914. Rome: De Luca, 1978. Elliott, David B. A Pre-Raphaelite Marriage: The Lives and

America’s Rome: Artists in the Eternal City, 1800–

Works of Marie Spartali Stillman and William James

1900. Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum,

Stillman. Woodbridge, England: Antique Collectors

2009. Exhibition catalogue.

Club, 2006.

D’Autilia, Gabriele. Storia della fotografia in Italia dal 1839 a oggi. Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 2012. Darrah, William C. Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography. Gettysburg, PA: W. C. Darrah, 1981. Davy, Humphrey. “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the

Erskine, Mrs. [Beatrice] Steuart. Anna Jameson: Letters and Friendships (1812–1860). London: T. Fisher, Unwin, 1915. “États Pontificaux.” Exposition des produits de l’Industrie de Toutes les Nations 1855: Catalogue officiel. Paris: E. Panis Éditeur, 1855.

Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver, with Observa-

“Exhibition of Photographic Pictures at the Society of Arts.”

tions by Humphrey Davy. Invented by T. Wedgwood,

Athenaeum, no. 1314 (January 1, 1853): 23.

Esq.” Journal of the Royal Institution 1 (1802): 170. de Bonis, Francesco Adriano. I vandali a Roma. Rome: Forense, 1879. de Mondenard, Anne. La mission héliographique: Cinq photographes parcourent la France en 1851. Paris: Centre des monuments nationaux, 2002. de Mondenard, Anne, Marc Pagneux, and Vincent Rouby. Modernisme ou modernité: Les photographes du cercle de Gustave Le Gray. Arles: Actes Sud, 2012. de Montluisant, Charles. Notice sur les Produits des États Pon-

Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851: Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into Which the Exhibition Was Divided. London: William Clowes, 1852. Fanelli, Giovanni. L’Italia virata all’oro: Attraverso le fotografie di Giorgio Sommer. Florence: Pagliai Polistampa, 2007. Fanelli, Giovanni, with Barbara Mazza. Roberto Rive. Florence: Polistampa, 2010. Fanelli, Giovanni, Adriana Sartori, and Susanna Zatti. Fed-

tificaux a l’Exposition Universelle. Paris: Imprimerie

erico Faruffini pittore. Milan: Skira, 1999. Exhibition

Bailly, Divry, 1855.

catalogue.

Denison, Cara D., Myra Nan Rosenfeld, and Stephanie Wiles,

Fanelli, Giovanni, and Andrea Sciolari. Adriano De Bonis.

with Elizabeth Kieven and John Wilton-Ely. Exploring

Un’altra Roma, grandiose e paesana, 3rd edition (Janu-

Rome: Piranesi and His Contemporaries. New York:

ary 2022). http://‌w ww‌.historyphotography‌.org‌/doc‌

Pierpont Morgan Library, 1993.

/DE‌%20BONIS‌_def‌%20GENNAIO‌_ 2022‌_ LOW‌.pdf.

Desmas, Anne-Lise, ed. Académie de France à Rome aux XIX et XX siècles: Entre tradition, modernité et création.

———. James Anderson fotografo. September 2021. http://‌w ww‌ .historyphotography‌.org‌/doc‌/ANDERSON‌_06‌_10‌.pdf.

Rome: Académie de France à Rome, 2002.

Finocchi, Anna. Federico Faruffini: Un pittore tra Romanti-

Dewitz, Bodo von, Dietmar Siegert, and Karin Schuller-Proco-

cismo e Realismo. Milan: Silvana, 1989.

povici. Italien: Sehen und Sterben; Photographien der Zeit des Risorgimento (1845–1870). Heidelberg: Braus, 1994. Di Bello, Patrizia. “Photography and Sculpture: A Light Touch.” In Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present,

Fitzgerald, Percy Hetherington. Roman Candles. London: Chapman and Hall, 1861. [Flachéron, Frédéric]. Photographies anciennes: Succession Comte Frédéric Flachéron. Paris: Vendôme, 1987. March 22, 1987. Auction catalogue.

242  Bibliography

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 242

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Font-Réaulx, Dominique. Painting and Photography, 1839– 1914. Paris: Flammarion, 2012. Forgacs, David. Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and National Formation Since 1861 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Fossier, François, ed. Correspondance des directeurs de l’Académie de France à Rome: Jean-Auguste-Domi-

———. L. J. M. Daguerre (1787–1851): The World’s First Photographer and Inventor of the Daguerreotype. Cleveland: The World, 1956. Gernsheim, Helmut, with Daniela Palazzoli. The Origins of Photography. 3rd rev. ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1982. Gilardi, Ando. Storia sociale della fotografia: Con dizionario

nique Ingres 1835–1841. Rome: Éditions de Boccard,

degli antichi termini, miti e personaggi dell’immag-

2016.

ine ottica più un inventario di tutti i trattati riviste,

———. Les directeurs de la villa Médicis au XIXe siècle: Correspondance de Jean Alaux (1847–1852). Paris: L’Harmattan, 2018. ———. Les directeurs de la villa Médicis au XIXe siècle: Correspondance des deuxième et troisième directorats de Jean-Victor Schnetz (1853–1866) et directorat de Joseph- Nicolas Robert-Fleury (1866–1867). Paris: L’Harmattan, 2018. ———. Les directeurs de la villa Médicis au XIXe siècle:

manuali, almanacchi e circoli dei fotografi dell’Ottocento. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976. Gladstone, William Ewart. “Speeches of Pope Piux IX.” Quarterly Review 138, no. 275 (January 1875): 291. Gónzalez López, Carlos. Federico de Madrazo y Küntz. 2 vols. Barcelona: Editorial Subirana, 1981. González y Montse Martí, Carlos. Pintores españoles en Roma (1850–1900). 2nd ed. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1996. Grandesso, Stefano. “L’antico e i soggetti di genere nella

Correspondance du premier directorat de Jean-Victor

scultura classicista a Roma: Pinelli, Thorvaldsen,

Schnetz (1840–1846). Paris: L’Harmattan, 2018.

Schadow e i pensionnaires francesi.” In Studi neo-

Freeman, James Edward. Gatherings from an Artist’s Portfolio. New York: D. Appleton, 1877. ———. Gatherings from an Artist’s Portfolio in Rome. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883. ———. “Gleanings in Italy.” Northern Light 1, no. 9 (December 1841): 134. Fusco, Maria Antonella, and Nicoletta Ossanna Cavadini, eds. Luigi Rossini (1790–1857) Engraver: The Secret Journey. Milan: Silvana, 2014. Exhibition catalogue. Galassi, Peter. Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981. Exhibition catalogue. Garric, Jean Philippe. “La raccolta Parker dell’INHA nella gestione di Pompeo Molins (post 1879) e la produzione fotografica romana.” In Un patrimonio da ordinare: I cataloghi a stampa dei fotografi, edited by Pierangelo

classici, edited by Stefano Grandesso and Fernando Mazzocca, 81–90. Pisa: Fabrizio Serra, 2017. Grandesso, Stefano, and Francesco Leone, eds. Dall’ideale classico al Novecento: Scritti per Fernando Mazzocca. Milan: Silvana, 2018. Grandesso, Stefano, and Fernando Mazzocca. Dodicesima Settimana di Studi Canoviani, Bassano del Grappa and Possagno, 2012. Pisa: Fabrizio Serra, 2017. Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851: Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue. London: W. Clowes, 1851. Gregorovius, Ferdinand. The Roman Journals of Ferdinand Gregorovius, 1852–1874. Edited by Friedrich Althaus. Translated by Mrs. Gustavus W. Hamilton. London: George Bell, 1907. Grunchec, Philippe. Le Grand Prix de Peinture: Les Concours

Cavanna and Francesca Mambelli, 133–51. Bologna:

des Prix de Rome de 1797 à 1863. Preface by Jacques

Fondazione Federico Zeri, 2019.

Thuillier. Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des

Gernsheim, Helmut. The History of Photography. Vol. 2, Rise of Photography, 1850–1880: The Age of Collodion. 3rd ed. rev. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988. ———. “James Anderson 1813–77.” Fotologia 6 (December 1986): 17–23. Gernsheim, Helmut, with Alison Gernsheim. The History of Photography from the Earliest Use of the Camera Obscura in the Eleventh Century up to 1914. London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1955.

Beaux-Arts, 1983. ———. The Grand Prix de Rome: Paintings from the Ecole Beaux-Arts, 1797–1863. Washington, DC: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1984. Exhibition catalogue. Guadagnini, Walter, ed. With contributions by Quentin Bajac, Elizabeth Siegel, and Francesco Zanot. Photography: The Origins, 1839–1890. Milan: Skira, 2010. Guillot-Saguez, Dr. “Scientific Notices: Notice of a Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Photography.” London

Bibliography  243

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 243

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Journal of Arts, Sciences, and Manufacturers 31, no. 192 (1847): 368–70. Hamber, Anthony J. “A Higher Branch of the Art”: Photographing the Fine Arts in England, 1839–1880. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1996. ———. Photography and the 1851 Great Exhibition. Foreword by Tristram Hunt. Newcastle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2018. Hamill, Sarah, and Megan R. Luke, eds. Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017. Hammond, John H., and Jill Austin. The Camera Lucida in Art and Science. Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1987. Hanlon, David R. “Pilgrims on Paper: The Calotype Journey of Leavitt Hunt and Nathan Flint Baker.” History of Photography 31, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 319–29. Hannavy, John, ed. Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography. 2 vols. New York: Routledge, 2008. Hauptman, William. “Ingres and Photographic Vision.” History

Photography, 11–38. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2017. Hernández Latas, José Antonio, and Piero Becchetti. Recuerdo de Roma (1848–1867): Fotografie della collezione Bernardino Montañés. Zaragoza: Diputación de Zaragoza, 1998. Hernández Latas, José Antonio, C. Guiral Pelegrín, and A. Mostalac Carrillo. Álbum de Pompeya de Bernardino Montañés 1849. Zaragoza: Institución “Fernando el Católico,” 1999. Hershkowitz, Robert. The British Photographer Abroad: The First Thirty Years. London: Robert Hershkowitz, 1980. Hibbert, Christopher. Rome: The Biography of a City. London: Penguin, 1987. Hillard, George Stillman. Six Months in Italy. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1853. Holliday, Peter J. The Fascination with the Past: John Henry Parker’s Photographs of Rome. San Bernardino: Uni-

of Photography, an International Quarterly 1, no. 2

versity Art Gallery, California State University, 1991.

(April 1977): 117–28.

Exhibition catalogue.

Haworth-Booth, Mark, ed. The Golden Age of British Photography, 1839–1900. Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1984. Exhibition catalogue. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The French and Italian Notebooks. Edited by Thomas Woodson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980. ———. The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni. 2 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860. Hellman, Karen, ed. With contributions by Sylvie Aubenas, Sarah Freeman, Anne de Mondenard, Karlyn Ovido, and Paul-Louis Roubert. Real Ideal: Photography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016. Helsted, Dyveke, et al. Rome in Early Photographs: The Age of Pius IX; Photographs 1848–1878 from Roman

Honour, Hugh. Romanticism. New York: Westview, 1979. Hosmer, Harriet. Harriet Hosmer: Letters and Memories. Edited by Cornelia Carr. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1912. Hunt, Robert. A Manual of Photography. London: Richard Griffin, 1854. International Exhibition. 1862: Medals and Honourable Mentions Awarded by the International Juries. 2nd ed. London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1862. International Exhibition of 1862: Catalogue of Photographs Exhibited in Class XIV. London: W. Trounce, 1862. Jacobson, Ken, and Jenny Jacobson. Carrying Off the Palaces: John Ruskin’s Lost Daguerreotypes. London: Bernard Quaritch, 2015. Jacobson, Ken, and Jenny Jacobson, with Anthony Hamber.

and Danish Collections. Copenhagen: Thorvaldsen

Étude d’après nature: 19th Century Photographs

Museum, 1977. Exhibition catalogue.

in Relation to Art; Artists’ Studies, Works of Art,

Hernández Latas, José Antonio. Bernardino Montañés (1825– 1893): Arte y erudición en la edad de la inocencia. Colección “Mariano De Pano y Ruata” 21. Caja de Ahorros de la Immaculada de Aragón Publicación, no. 93. Zaragoza: Caja de Ahorros de la Immaculada de Aragón, 2002, 59–78. ———. “José Zanetti, el pionero español de la fotografía.” Heraldo de Aragón, June 13, 2019. ———. “The Mystery of ‘Ramos Zapetti.’ New documental

Portraits of Artists, Mixed Media. Petches Bridge, England: Ken & Jenny Jacobson, 1996. James, Henry. Hawthorne. Edited by John Morley. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1879. ———. William Wetmore Story and His Friends. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904. Jammes, André, Alfred Cayla, and Philippe Néagu, with Georges Brunel and Roméo Martinez. Alfred-Nicolas Normand, architecte: Photographies de 1851–1852.

and graphic contributions about Spanish supposed

Paris: Expositions de la Caisse Nationale, 1980. Exhi-

inventor of photography.” In Conference on Research

bition catalogue.

in History of Photography, 1839–1939: A Century of

244  Bibliography

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 244

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Jammes, André, and Eugenia Parry Janis. The Art of French Calotype, with a Critical Dictionary of Photographers, 1845–1870. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Jammes, Marie-Thérèse, and André Jammes. Niépce to Atget: The First Century of Photography from the Collection of André Jammes. Introduction by David Travis. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1977. Exhibition catalogue. Janis, Eugenia Parry. The Photography of Gustave Le Gray. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1987. Jones, Kimberly A., et al. In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Exhibition catalogue. Keller, Judith, and Kenneth A. Breisch. A Victorian View of Ancient Rome: The Parker Collection of Historical Photographs in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. Foreword by Margaret Cool Root. Ann Arbor: Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan, 1980. Exhibition catalogue. Knudtzon, Frederik Gotschalk. Ungdomsdage. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1927. Kühn, Christine, with Annettta Alexandridis. Italienische Fotografien aus der Sammlung John Henry Parker 1806–1884. Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2000. Exhibition catalogue. Lamathière, Théophile. “Bermond de Vaulx (Lodoix-Thérèse-

Lundberg, W. Bruce, and John A. Pinto, eds. Steps off the Beaten Path: 19th-Century Photographs of Rome and Its Environs. Milan: Charta, 2007. Lyons, Claire L., et al. Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005. Macioti, Maria Immacolata. Il pane e le rose: Donne del Lazio nelle Collezioni Alinari. Florence: Fratelli Alinari, 2004. Mack Smith, Denis. Italy and the Monarchy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Maggia, Filippo, ed. Souvenir del Grand Tour: Immagini dell’Italia di metà Ottocento. Modena: Raccolte Fotografiche Modenesi Giuseppe Panini, 2005. Maggia, Filippo, and Gabriella Roganti, eds. Modena per la fotografia italiana: L’idea di paesaggio nella fotografia dal 1850 ad oggi. Milan: Silvana: 2003. Exhibition catalogue. Magni, Luigi, and Waldimiro Settimelli. Roma e il Lazio negli Archivi Alinari. Florence: Fratelli Alinari, 1989. Maier, Jessica. The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Manodori Sagredo, Alberto. Le icone fotografiche del grand voyage tra fine Ottocento e primo Novecento. Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2012. Marbot, Bernard, with Christine Bonnefon, eds. Une invention de XIXe siècle: Expression et technique: La photographie collections de la Société Française de

Octave vicomte de).” In Panthéon de la Légion

Photographie. Introduction by J. J. Trillat. Paris: Bib-

d’honneur, 328. Paris: n.p., ca. 1911.

liothèque Nationale, 1976.

Lapauze, Henry. Histoire de l’Académie de France a Rome. 2 vols. Paris: Librairie Plon. Plon-Nourrit, 1924. Lassam, Robert E., and Michael Gray. The Romantic Era: La Calotipia in Italia 1845–1860: Reverendo Calvert

Margiotta, Anita, ed. L’incanto della fotografia: Le collezioni Silvio Negro e Valerio Cianfarani al Museo di Roma. Rome: Artemide, 2016. Margiotta, Anita, and Federica Pirani, eds. Mediteranneo:

Richard Jones, Reverendo George Wilson Bridges, Wil-

Fotografie di viaggio dal 1850 al 1910. Rome:

liam Robert Baker. Florence: Alinari, 1988. Exhibition

Gangemi, 2004. Exhibition catalogue.

catalogue. Lebel, Jean-Edmond, Aurélie Lebel, and Giacomo Visco Comandini. Edmond Lebel: Le concours de Rome; Quinze ans d’essais photographique en extérieur et en ateleier (1857–1872), commentés par son petit-fils Jean-Edmond Lebel. Paris: Carnets de Rhinocéros jr, 2006. Lerebours, Noël-Marie-Paymal. “Plaque, Papier, ou Verre?” La Lumière 2 (May 1, 1852). Léri, Jean-Marc, et al. Rome au XIXe Siècle: Photographies inédites 1852–1890. Rome: Fratelli Palombi, 1999. Liva, Walter. Fotografia e Risorgimento in Italia: Tesori dei

Martinez, Romeo, Sandro Mescola, and Christian Roger. I caloptipi della Società francese di fotografia 1840– 1860. Venice: Marsilio, 1981. Exhibition catalogue. Mauron, Christophe, ed. Miroirs d’argent: Daguerréotypes de Girault de Prangey. Ville de Bulle, Switzerland: Musée Gruérien, 2008. Mazio, Paolo. “Varietà artistiche: De’ disegni dagherriani del Fisher.” Il Saggiatore: Giornale Romano di Storia, Letteratura, Belle Arti, Filologia, e Varietà 1, no. 6 (March 16, 1844): 202. McCauley, Elizabeth Anne. “Fawning over Marbles: Robert and

grandi musei italiani. Preface by Domenico Fisichella.

Gerardine Macpherson’s Vatican Sculptures and the

Prato (Udine), Italy: Lithostampa, 2011.

Role of Photographs in the Reception of the Antique.”

Bibliography  245

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 245

7/7/22 2:12 PM

In Art and the Early Photographic Album, edited by Stephen Bann, 91–122. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2011. McGuigan, John F., Jr. “American Open-Air Landscape Painting in Rome 1825–1885.” In D’Ambrosio, America’s Rome, 73–119. ———. “An Old Photo and New Light on John Gibson’s Tomb.” Friends of the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome Newsletter 26 (Spring 2014): 2. ———. “Who They Were . . . Mary Elizabeth Chapman.” Friends of the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome Newsletter 23 (Summer 2013): 4. McGuigan, John F., Jr., and Mary K. McGuigan. James Edward Freeman (1808–1884): An American Painter in Italy. Utica: Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, 2009. Exhibition catalogue. ———. John Gadsby Chapman: America’s First Artist-Etcher;

Milan-Ligornetto: 5 Continents-Museo Vincenzo Vela, 2016. Miraglia, Marina, et al. La Fotografia a Roma nel Secolo XIX: La veduta, il ritratto, l’archeologia. Preface by Lucia Cavazzi. Rome: Artemide, 1989. ———. Giorgio Sommer in Italien: Fotografien 1857–1888. Heidelberg: Braus, 1992. Miraglia, Marina. “L’età del collodio.” In Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 41–48. ———. “La fotografia.” In Susinno et al., Maestà di Roma, 565–81. ———. “La fotografia fra indice, icona e simbolo.” In L’Ottocento in Italia: Le arti sorelle; Il Realismo 1849–1870, edited by Carlo Sisi, 271–84. Milan: Electa, 2007. ———. “Die Helden Zeigen, Wie Sie Wirklich Sind: Die Photographie und das Risorgimento.” In Italien: Sehen und Sterben; Photographien der Zeit des Risorgimento

With a Catalogue of his Italian Etchings. Harpswell,

(1845–1870), by Bodo von Dewitz, Dietmar Siegert,

ME: Arcady Editions, 2015.

and Karin Schuller-Procopovici, 18–24. Heidelberg:

McGuigan, John F., Jr., and Nicholas Stanley-Price. “Four albumen photographs of the Cemetery by the Scottish

Braus, 1994. Miraglia, Marina, and Ulrich Pohlmann, eds. Un viaggio fra

photographer Robert Macpherson, 1864.” Friends of

mito e realtà: Giorgio Sommer fotografo in Italia

the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome Newsletter 43

1857–1891. Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992. Exhibition

(Summer 2018): 3–4.

catalogue.

McGuigan, Mary K. “‘This Market of Physiognomy’: American Artists and Rome’s Art Academies, Life Schools, and Models, 1825–1870.” In D’Ambrosio, ed., America’s Rome, 39–71. McGuigan, Mary K., and John F. McGuigan Jr. “An Inhabited Solitude. The Protestant Cemetery as Landscape.” In

Néagu, Philippe. Alfred Normand: Photographies d’Italie, de Grèce et de Constantinople; Calotypes 1851–52. Bergamo: Grafica Gutenberg, 1978. Negro, Silvio. “Caneva ‘pittore veneziano’ precursore della fotografia a Roma.” Strenna dei Romanisti 5 (1944): 153–57.

At the Foot of the Pyramid: 300 Years of the Cem-

———. Mostra della fotografia a Roma dal 1840 al 1911. Edited

etery for Foreigners in Rome, 15–22. Rome: Casa di

by Amici dei Musei di Roma. Rome: Ente provinciale

Goethe, 2016. Mercalli, Marica, Bruno Contardi, and Alberto Manodori, eds. Castel Sant’Angelo: La memoria fotografica 1850– 1904. Rome: De Luca, 1993. Mercurj, Filippo. “Sul dagherrotipo.” Il Tiberino 6, no. 5 (December 7, 1839): 17–18. Micalizzi, Carmelo. “Antonio e Vito Gambina Fici dagherrotipisti itineranti.” Messenion d’Oro, n.s., no. 17 (July/ September 2008): 33–44. Milder, Robert. “Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass’s Rome.” In Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in

per il turismo, 1953. ———. Nuovo album Romano: Fotografie di un secolo. Rome: Neri Pozza, 1981. ———. Seconda Roma (1850–1870). Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1943. ———. Seconda Roma (1850–1870). Rev. ed. Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1966. Newhall, Beaumont. “Eighteen Thirty-Nine: The Birth of Photography.” In Photography: Discovery and Invention, 19–23. Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1990. ———. Photography, 1839–1937. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1937.

Nineteenth-Century Italy, edited by Robert K. Martin

Notizie per l’Anno 1847. Rome: Stamperia Cracas, 1847.

and Leland S. Person, 226–45. Iowa City: University of

“Notizie varie: Roma e l’invenzione della fotografia.” Bullettino

Iowa Press, 2002. Mina, Gianna A., ed. In Rome’s Light: Photographs from

mensile, Società Fotografica Italiana 16, no. 3 (1904): 95.

1840 to 1870 from the Marco Antonetto Collection.

246  Bibliography

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 246

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Ochsner, Bjørn. Fotografer i og fra Danmark indtil år 1900. Rev. ed. 2 vols. Copenhagen: Det Konigelige Bibliotek, 1969. Olson, Roberta J. M. Ottocento: Romanticism and Revolution in 19th-Century Italian Painting. New York and Florence: American Federation of Arts and Centro Di, 1992. Palazzoli, Daniela. “La notizia dell’invenzione dello ‘specchio dotato di memoria’ arriva in Italia.” In Bollati et al., Fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento, 9–16. Paoli, Silvia. “Stefano Lecchi.” In Cartier-Bresson et al., Éloge du négatif, 227. Parker, John Henry. The Archaeology of Rome. 13 vols. Oxford: James Parker, 1874–1883. ———. A Catalogue of a Series of Photographs Illustrative of the Archaeology of Rome. Oxford: James Parker, 1867. ———. A Catalogue of Fifteen Hundred Photographs Illustrative of the Archaeology of Rome Prepared Under the

Pietrangeli, Carlo. “Il calamaio di Pio VIII.” Strenna dei Romanisti 45. April 18, 1984: 396–403. Pinson, Stephen C., et al. Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019. Exhibition catalogue. Pinto, John A. City of the Soul: Rome and the Romantics. New York: Morgan Library and Museum, 2016. Exhibition catalogue. ———. Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Rome. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Pizzo, Marco, ed. Fotografie del Risorgimento Italiano. Rome: Gangemi, 2004. ———. “La nascita della fotografia d’arte e le foto di paesaggio.” In Callegari, Costa, and Pizzo, eds., Collezioni d’arte e fotografia artistica nell’Italia del Risorgimento, 33–41. Pohlmann, Ulrich, et al. Voir l’Italie et mourir: Photographie et

Direction of John Henry Parker. Part III Taken in the

peinture dans l’Italie du XIXe siècle. Preface by Guy

Winter of 1868–69. Oxford: Privately printed, 1869.

Cogeval. Paris: Skira-Flammarion, 2009. Exhibition

———. Historical Photographs. A Catalog of Three Thousand Three Hundred Photographs of Antiquities in Rome and Italy. London: Edward Stanford, 1879. ———. Mosaic Pictures in Rome and Ravenna, with Diagrams. Oxford: James Parker, 1866. ———. Supplement to a Catalogue of Fifteen Hundred Photographs Illustrative of the Archaeology of Rome Prepared Under the Direction of John Henry Parker in the winter of 1867–68. Oxford: Privately printed, 1868. Pelizzari, Maria Antonella. Photography and Italy. Edited by Mark Haworth-Booth and Peter Hamilton. London: Reaktion, 2011. Pérez Gallardo, Helena. Fotografía y arquitectura en el siglo XIX: Historia y representación monumental. Madrid: Grandes Temas Cátedra, 2015. ———. “Le prince Girón de Anglona. Un amateur espagnol à l’école romaine de la photographie.” In Etudes photographiques 32 (Spring 2015): 2–11. http://‌journals‌ .openedition‌.org‌/etudesphotographiques‌/3505. ———. “El príncipe Girón de Anglona y XIII duque de Osuna: Apuntes sobre un pionero fotógrafo y desconocido coleccionista.” Valori Tattili, no. 9 (January–June 2017): 177– 85. “Photographic Exhibition at the Society of Arts.” Art-Journal n.s., 5 (February 1, 1853): 55. “Photographic Society of Scotland.” Photographic Journal 8, no. 128 (December 15, 1862): 184. “Photographs of Rome.” Art Journal (November 1862): 227.

catalogue. Pohlmann, Ulrich, Paul Mellenthin, and Franziska Kunze. Adolphe Braun: une entreprise photographique européenne au 19è siècle. Munich: Schirmer / Mosel, 2017. Porretta, Sebastiano. Ignazio Cugnoni fotografo. Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Prandi, Alberto. “‘The Roman Process’: Con un repertorio della letteratura fotografica 1849–1863 relativa all’esperienza romana.” In Bonetti, Dall’Olio, and Prandi, Roma 1840–1870, 17–25. Quattrocchi, Arrigo. Storia dell’Accademia filarmonica romana. Rome: Presidenza del consiglio dei ministri dipartimento per informazione e l’editoria, 1991. Quintavalle, Arturo Carlo. Gli Alinari. Florence: Alinari, 2003. Rapport du Jury Central sur les Produits de l’Agriculture et de l’Industrie Exposés en 1849, Book 3. Paris: Imprimerie National, 1850. Rapport sur la première exposition publique dans les salons de la Société. Paris: Société française de photographie, 1855. Rauch, Nicolas. La photographie des origines au début du XXe siècle. Genève: Rauch, 1961. Auction catalogue. La Redacción. “D. Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz.” La Ilustracion Artistica 9, no. 444 (July 1, 1890): 4. Rewald, Sabine. Rooms with a View: The Open Window in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011. Exhibition catalogue.

Bibliography  247

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 247

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Ritter, Dorothea. Rom 1846–1870: James Anderson und die Maler-Fotografien, Sammlung Siegert. Foreword by Herbert W. Rott. Heidelberg: Braus, 2005. Romano, Serena, ed. L’immagine di Roma 1848–1895: La città, l’archeologia, il medioevo nei calotipi del fondo Tuminello; Catalogo della collezione di Piero Becchetti. Naples: Electa, 1994. Ruffles, Tom. “Ellis, Alexander John (1814–1890).” In Hannavy, ed., Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, 1:480–83. Saunders, Beth. “American Pupils of the Roman School of Photography: Nathan Flint Baker, Leavitt Hunt and

Siegel, Elizabeth, Patrizia Di Bello, and Marta Rachel Weiss. Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2009. Siegert, Dietmar. Rom vor Hundert Jahren: Photographien 1846–1890. Ebersberg: Achteinhalb Lothar Just, 1985. Sotheby’s. La Photographie IV: Collection Marie-Thérese et André Jammes. Paris: Sotheby’s, November 15, 2008. Auction catalogue. Sougez, Marie-Loup, and Helena Pérez Gallardo. Diccionario de historia de la la fotografía. Madrid: Cuadernos Arte Cátedra, 2003. Stanley-Price, Nicholas, Mary K. McGuigan, and John F.

Richard Morris Hunt.” Rivista di Studi di Fotografia

McGuigan Jr, with Pier Andrea De Rosa, Claudia

5, no. 9 (2019): 8–29.

Nordhoff, and Oddbjørn Sørmoen. At the Foot of the

Schaaf, Larry J. The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. ———. Sir John Herschel: Camera Lucida Drawings. New York: Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs, 2014. Exhibition catalogue. ———. “Talbot and Photogravure.” Sun Pictures 12. New York: Hans P. Kraus Jr., 2003. Exhibition catalogue. ———. “Talbot’s World: A Gallery of Natural Magic.” Sun

Pyramid: 300 Years of the Cemetery for Foreigners in Rome. Rome: Casa di Goethe, 2016. Exhibition catalogue. Stebbins, Theodore E., Jr., et al. The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience, 1760–1914. New York: Harry N. Abrams and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1992. Exhibition catalogue. Stewart, Lindsey S. “In Perfect Order: Antiquity in the

Pictures 21. New York: Hans P. Kraus Jr., 2003. Exhibi-

Daguerreotypes of Joseph-Philibert Girault de

tion catalogue.

Prangey.” In Claire Lyons et al., Antiquity and Pho-

———. Tracings of Light: Sir John Herschel and the Camera Lucida; Drawings from the Graham Nash Collection. Introductions by Graham Nash and Graham Howe. San Francisco: Friends of Photography, 1990. Schaaf, Larry J., with Sean Devlin. “The Reverend Calvert R. Jones.” Sun Pictures 5. New York: Hans P. Kraus, 1990. Exhibition catalogue. Schulte-Arndt, Monika, and Dietmar Siegert, eds. With contributions by Dorothea Ritter and Andrea Domesle. Im Land der Sehnsucht: Mit Bleistift und Kamera durch

tography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites, 66–91. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005. Stillman, William J. “John Manson: A Studio Story.” Serialized in Photographic Times and American Photographer, September 9, 1887–November 9, 1888. ———. The Union of Italy, 1815–1895. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898. Story, William Wetmore. Roba di Roma. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1893. Susinno, Stefano. L’Ottocento a Roma: Artisti, cantieri, atelier

Italien 1820 bis 1880. Frankfurt am Main: Fichter,

tra età napoleonica e Restaurazione. Milan: Silvana,

1998.

2009.

Schwartz, Daniel B. Ghetto: The History of a Word. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Sciolari, Andrea. Una inedita fotografia degli esordi di Adriano De Bonis (September 2014). http://‌w ww‌.historypho tography‌.org‌/doc‌/Andrea ‌_ Sciolari‌.pdf. Seguin, Jean-Pierre, and Weston J. Naef. Regards sur la photographie en France au XIXe siècle: 180 chefs-d’oeuvre du département des Estampes et de la Photographie. Paris: Berger- Levrault, 1980. Exhibition catalogue. Siegel, Elizabeth. Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

———. “La pittura a Roma nella prima metà dell’Ottocento.” In La Pittura in Italia: L’Ottocento, edited by Enrico Castelnuovo, 1:399–430. Milan: Electa, 1990. Susinno, Stefano, et al. Maestà di Roma: Universale ed Eterna Capitale delle Arti. Milan: Electa, 2003. Exhibition catalogue. Sutton, Thomas. “On Photographic Paper.” Photographic Notes 1, no. 3 (February 25, 1856): 10–12. ———. “Sir William Newton’s Letter in the Last No. of the London Photographic Journal.” Photographic Notes 2, no. 23 (March 15, 1857): 103. Talamo, Giuseppe, ed. L’Italia di Garibaldi. Rome: Gangemi, 2007.

248  Bibliography

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 248

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Talbot, Henry Fox. The Pencil of Nature. 6 vols. Introduction by Larry J. Schaaf. Anniversary facsimile. New York: Hans P. Kraus Jr., 1989. Originally published 1844. Taylor, Isidore, Alphonse de Cailleux, and Charles Nodier. Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1820–1878. Taylor, Roger. Impressed by Light: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840–1860. Biographical dictionary by Larry J. Schaaf with Roger Taylor. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007. ———. “Jane Martha St. John.” In Taylor, Impressed by Light, 112–17. ———. Photographs Exhibited in Britain, 1839–1865: A Compendium of Photographers and Their Works. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2002. Thomas, D. B. The Science Museum Photography Collection. London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1969. Thomas, Richard W. “Photography in Rome.” Art Journal n.s., 4, no. 5 (May 1852): 159–60. Tiberia, Vitaliano. La Congregazione dei Virtuosi al Pantheon da Pio VII a Pio IX. Galatina: Mario Congedo Editore, 2015. Tinterow, Gary, and Philip Conisbee. Portraits by Ingres: Image

Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène. Lettres d’Italie 1836–1837: Adressées a sa famille. Annotated by Geneviève Viollet le Duc. Paris: Léonce Laget, 1971. ———. Le voyage d’Italie d’Eugène Violet-le-Duc 1836–1837. Paris: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1980. Exhibition catalogue. Vitali, L. “Federico Faruffini fotografo.” Emporium (June 1935): 388–92. “W. J. Stillman.” Photographic Times and American Photographer 17, no. 312 (September 9, 1887): 451–53. Watson, Wendy M. Images of Italy: Photography in the Nineteenth Century. South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 1980. Exhibition catalogue. Weislogel, Andrew C., and Stuart M. Blumin. Mirror of the City: The Printed View in Italy and Beyond: 1450– 1940. Ithaca, NY: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 2012. Wilton-Ely, John. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings. 2 vols. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Alan Wofsy, 1994. ———. The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. London: Thames and Hudson, 1978. Wyatt, [Matthew] Digby. “On the Present Aspect of the Fine

of an Epoch. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,

and Decorative Arts in Italy, with Especial Reference

1999.

to the Recent Exhibition in Florence.” Journal of the

Tittoni, Maria Elisa, Anita Margiotta, Fabio Betti, and Maria Pia Critelli. Il Risorgimento dei Romani: Fotografie dal 1849 al 1870. Rome: Gangemi, 2010. Exhibition catalogue. Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad, or, The New Pilgrims’

Society of Fine Arts, 10, no. 479 (January 24, 1862): 145. Zannier, Italo. Breve storia della fotografia. 2nd rev. ed. Milan: Il Castello, 1974. ———. Le Grand Tour dans les photographies des voyageurs du

Progress. Hartford: American Publishing Company,

XIXe siècle. Introduction by Cesare De Seta. Venice

1869.

and Paris: Canal, 1997.

Uccella, Maria Letizia Casanova, Barbara Tellini Santoni, and

Zannier, Italo, and Paolo Costantini. Cultura fotografica in

Alberto Manodori, eds. Roma in stereoscopia 1855–

Italia: Antologia di testi sulla fotografia 1839/1949.

1908. Rome: De Luca, 1994. Exhibition catalogue.

Edited by Gaddo Morpurgo. Milan: Franco Angeli,

Valentini, Isabella. “Fare gli italiani: L’Italia liberale.” In Fare gli italiani dalla costituzione dello Stato nazionale

1985. Zanot, Francesco. “Giacomo Caneva.” In Photography: The Ori-

alla promulgazione della Costituzione repubblicana

gins, 1839–1890, edited by Walter Guadagnini, 74–81.

(1861–1948), edited by Giuseppe Parlato and Marco

Milan: Skira, 2010.

Zanganella, 55–74. Rome: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2011.

Bibliography  249

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 249

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Index

Italicized page references indicate illustrations. Endnotes are referenced with “n” followed by the endnote number.

Officers of the First and Third Battalions of the Pontifical Army at Rocca di Papa, The, 198 Piazza and Fountain of the Tartarughe, 164

Aberdeen’s British Association, 221 Académie des Sciences, France, 6, 23 Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, 59, 215 Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice, 208, 211 Accademici Filarmonici Romani (Roman Philharmonic Academy), 54, 55, 226 “Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, An” (Davy), 229n4 Achtermann, Wilhelm Theodor, 46 The Acropolis of Athens (Stillman), 65 Adolphe, Edgar (was Adolfo di Parigi), 20, 24, 208 After the Battle of Mentana, November 3, 1867, with the Bodies of the Dead Scattered Among Haystacks (D’Alessandri), 66, 200 Album di Disegni Fotogenici (Talbot, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC), 5 albums, 21, 47, 49, 52, 65, 75, 88, 212 Alcántara, Francisco, 14 Alinari, Fratelli, 69 Almanacco Romano, 208, 209 Altadonna, Giovanni Battista, 39, 208 Cloister of St. Paul Outside the Walls with Drying Glass Negatives, The, 129 Via Appia, 130 Altar Inside the Colosseum, The (de Bonis), 186 Altobelli, Gioacchino, 44, 52, 66, 80, 83, 87, 206, 208–9, 219, 221, 225–26 Arch of the Goldsmiths (The Little Arch of Septimius Severus) and the Church of San Giorgio in Velabro, The (with Pompeo Molins), 52, 160

Piazza of Santa Maria Maggiore with a Photographer, The, 54, 162 Ponte Salario Blown up by Papal Troops and French Zouaves in 1867, 66, 87, 199 Roman Forum from the Capitoline Hill with Moonlight Effect, The, 54, 163 View of the Protestant Cemetery and the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, 165 American Sculptor Harriet Hosmer with Her Studio Assistants, Via Margutta, The (unidentified), 155 Amici, Monsignor Camillo, Minister of Commerce, Arts, and Industry, 42 Ancient Candelabra in the Basilica of Saints Nereus and Achilleus, An (de Bonis), 184 Andersen, Hans Christian, 49 Anderson, Domenico, 209, 233n9, 234n12 Anderson, James (born Isaac Atkinson), 39–44, 46, 49, 65, 69, 80, 206, 209, 232n6, 233n9, 234n12, 234n14 Arch of the Goldsmiths (The Little Arch of Septimius Severus), The, 131 Claudian Aqueduct and Via Appia, The, 41, 133 Harriet Hosmer’s “Zenobia in Chains,” 46, 154 Laocoön and His Sons, 46, 152 Spanish Steps and Trinità dei Monti, The, 41, 134 St. Peter’s Basilica and the Spina di Borgo from Castel Sant’Angelo, 41, 132 Ansiglioni, Giuliano, 49 Antiquités Chrétiennes de Rome du Ve au XVIe siècle décrites par le Chanoine Barbier de Montault et photographiées par C. B. Simelli (Montault), 57, 224

Easter Mass in the Piazza of St. Peter’s Basilica, 167

Antonelli, Cardinal Giacomo, 47, 227

First Vatican Council, June 29, 1868, The, 52, 53

Antonetto, Marco, viii, 208

Fishermen on the Tiber with the Ponte and Castel Sant’An-

Archer, Frederick Scott, 39, 41

gelo, and St. Peter’s Basilica, 166 Fountain of the Triton Covered in Ice, Piazza Barberini, with Figures, The (with Pompeo Molins), 52, 161 Interior of the Colosseum with Figures, 83, 84

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 250

Architectural Photographic Association of London, 217, 221 Arch of Constantine, North Façade, The (Macpherson), 73, 74 Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum, The (Caneva), 26, 27, 231n21, 232–33n21

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Arch of Drusus (anonymous), 230n29

Béguin, Henri (Enrico), 44, 63, 209–10

Arch of Janus with Tripod, The (Girault de Prangey), 15, 93

Mendicant Monk from Life, 148

Arch of Octavius, Rome, 85–86

Team of Yoked Buffalo, A, 44, 45

Arch of Septimius Severus (Ellis), 230n29

Wife and Child of the Artist’s Studio Assistant, The, 44,

Arch of Septimius Severus, Rome, 27 Arch of Septimius Severus and the Church of San Luca and Santa Martina, The (Simelli), 173 Arch of the Goldsmiths (The Little Arch of Septimius Severus), The (Anderson), 131 Arch of the Goldsmiths (The Little Arch of Septimius Severus) and the Church of San Giorgio in Velabro, The (Altobelli and Molins), 52, 160 Arch of Titus (Flachéron), 31–32 Arch of Titus, The (Constant), 110

149 Behles, Edmond “Edmondo,” 63–64, 69, 206, 210 Piazza Colonna with the Column of Marcus Aurelius, The, 64, 194 Belli, Filippo, 57, 206, 210, 214, 222, 224 Console Table in the Private Apartments of the Palazzo Corsini, A, 57, 58 Genre Scene with Two Women at a Well, 179 Right Cordonata of the Fountain of the Dragons, Villa d’Este, Tivoli, 181

Arch of Titus, The (Healy), 59, 60

Study of an Olive Tree, Villa d’Este, Tivoli, 180

Arch of Titus from the Temple of Venus and Rome, The

Washerwomen at Albano Laziale, 57, 178

(Macpherson), 42, 135

Belli, Giuseppe Gioachino, 16

Arch of Titus with the Colosseum, The (de Bonis), 59, 183, 235n37

Berardi, Giuseppe, 16

Arco di Druso (Rossini), 230n29

Bergsøe, Vilhelm, 63, 210

Art Treasures of the United Kingdom, Manchester (1857), 209

Bertoloni, Antonio, 5

Atkinson, Isaac. See Anderson, James (born Isaac Atkinson)

Betti, Giulio, 207

Aubenas, Sylvie, 23, 35, 231n14

Bettini, Carlo Napoleone, 206

Aubert, E., 63, 211

Blanquart-​Evrard, Louis-​Désiré, method, 23–24, 27, 29, 34,

Aubert, Jean Ernest, 230n61

231n18 Bonetti, Maria Francesca, 17, 59, 61, 212, 215, 231n4

Baedeker, Karl, Italien: Handbuch für Reisende / Italy: Handbook for Travellers, 63–64, 210, 211, 214, 222

Bonfigli, Francesco Saverio, Guide to the Studios in Rome, 52, 56, 208, 209, 213, 216, 224

Baker, Nathan Flint, 36

Bonnat, Léon, 63, 219

Barbault, Jean, 14

Bookbinding, 49, 52

Barberi, Tito, 207

Bottoni, Filippo, 16

Barchiesi, Vincenzo, 206

Bouguereau, William-​Adolphe, 32

Barre, Jean-​Jacques, 217

Boyesen, Peter Thyge “Pietro,” 61, 63, 210–11, 219

Barucci, Pietro, 69 Basilica of Saint Peter and Castel Sant’Angelo from the Tiber, The (Lerebours), 11, 13 Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli from the Piazza del Campidoglio, The (Le Dien), 35, 120 Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, The (Morelli), 230n29 Basilica of St. Paul, Rome, 36, 43 Basilica of St. Peter, Rome, 43, 52, 56, 224, 227, 232n11

Study of a Courtyard with a Marble Bust, 63, 191 Braun, Adolphe, 211 The Baths of Caracalla, 63, 192 Braun, Emil, 211 Dolce Far Niente: Self-​Portrait (?) as a Contadino, 44, 147 Panorama of Rome: Taken from the Casino of the Villa Ludovisi, 44 Ruins and Museums of Rome (book), 44

Bate, Gerardine. See Macpherson, Gerardine

Bravo, The (opera, Mercandante), 54

Baths of Caracalla, The (A. Braun), 63, 192

British Association of Glasgow, 1855, 221

Bayard, Hippolyte, 22

Brogi, Giacomo, 69

Becchetti, Piero, viii, 14, 17, 27, 40, 42, 49, 65, 211, 223, 224, 231n4, 232n2, 233n38, 234n14 Becquerel, Alexandre Edmond, 22 Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography (Galassi), 16

Bryant, William Cullen, 213 Bulwer-​Lytton, Edward, 49 Bust Length Portrait of a Young Woman in Costume Clutching Her Necklace (Caneva), 103 Byron, Lord, 76, 81, 89

Index  251

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 251

7/7/22 2:12 PM

cabinet cards, 47, 50, 54–55, 55, 226

Castelli Romani, Italy, 35, 66, 219

Cadorna, General Raffaele, 88, 228

Castel Sant’Angelo and St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome (unidenti-

Caffè Greco, 22, 29–30, 34, 36, 41, 63, 81, 203, 211, 218, 232n2, 234n14 Caffè Greco, Circle of, 29–38, 40–41, 44, 51, 211–15, 217–23 See also Roman School of Photography calotype, 21–28, 31, 36, 38, 42, 51, 80–81, 211–13, 217, 218, 220, 231n4 calotype, wet method, 29, 30, 204–5 Cambrian Archaeological Association at Swansea Castle, 1861, 217

fied), 11, 12 Catalogo Generale delle Riproduzioni Fotografiche Pubblicate per cura del Premiato Stabilimento Fotografico di Enrico Verzaschi Roma (Verzaschi), 226 Catalogue des Travaux Exécutés Photographie dans L’Établissement de P. Dovizielli (Dovizielli), 216 Catalogue of a Series of Photographs Illustrative of the Archaeology of Rome, A (Simelli), 56 Catalogue of Fifteen Hundred Photographs Illustrative of the

camera exposure times, 8–9, 13–15, 23, 42, 44, 46, 204

Archaeology of Rome (Parker), 219

camera lucida, 3, 5

Ceccarius (Giuseppe Ceccarelli), viii

camera obscura, 3, 5, 7

Chalet, Cesere, 207

Cameron, Emma, 17

Chapman, Conrad Wise, 64, 213

Campo Marzio, Rome, 7, 29, 65, 69

Chapman, John Gadsby, 64, 212

Caneva, Giacomo,17, 27, 30–31, 35, 39, 44, 80–81, 99, 203, 211–13, 215, 217, 218, 219, 223 Arch of Constantine and the Colosseum, The, 26, 231n21, 232–33n21 Bust Length Portrait of a Young Woman in Costume Clutching Her Necklace, 103

John Gadsby Chapman in His Studio on the Via del Babuino (J. L. Linton), 195 Chapman, John Linton, 64, 212–13 Acqua Acetosa, May 4, 1869, The, 196 John Gadsby Chapman in His Studio on the Via del Babuino, 195

Costume Study of Six Models Posed as a Family, 102

Chauffourier, Gustave Eugène, 69, 211–12, 224

Della Fotografia Trattato Pratico / Practical Treatise on

Cheney, Robert, 212

Photography, 31, 211

Chevalier, Charles, 32

Forest in the Campagna, A, 108

Chevalier lens, 15, 31, 204

Genre Scene of a Young Shepherdess with Kid Goat, 86, 104

Cianfarani, Valerio, viii

Porto di Ripetta, 32, 66, 106

Chimenti, Antonio, 16

Self-​Portrait (?) with the Ruins of the Temple of the Sun

Church, Frederic Edwin, 54, 59, 64

(Serapis) in the Villa Colonna, 107 Standing Female Model in Costume with Tambour Facing Left, 101 Study of a Stream with Plants, 109 Temple of Vesta, The, 27, 211 View from the Door of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, 34 View Over the Piazza de Popolo Toward the Vatican, 105

Claudian Aqueduct and Via Appia, The (Anderson), 41, 133 Cleman, G., 210 Cloister of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, The (Simelli), 56, 174 Cloister of St. Paul Outside the Walls with Drying Glass Negatives, The (Altadonna), 39, 129, 208 Cloister of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, The (Carr), 36, 127

Capitoline Hill, 14, 34, 212

Cloud Study with Trinità dei Monti (Simelli), 56, 171

Cardwell, Holme, 46

Cogniet, Léon, 63, 219

Carr, T., 36, 212

Coignet, Jules, 217

Cloister of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, The, 127

Colamedici, Giovanni Battista, 56 Collegio Romano, Jesuit seminary, 7, 16, 214, 220

Forum and the Funeral Column of Trajan, The, 128

collodion process, 39, 44, 51

Roman Views, 36

collodion process, dry method, 29, 34, 42, 203

Carta, Natale, 56

collodion process, wet method, 39, 41–44, 52, 65

cartes de visite (calling cards), 47, 52, 56, 208, 219, 224, 226

Colosseum, Rome, 31, 82–83, 89, 231n4

Cassino (San Germano), Italy, 63, 219

Colosseum, The (Piot), 35, 116

Cassino (San Germano), Still Life with Baskets of Fruit (Lebel),

Console Table in the Private Apartments of the Palazzo Cor-

190 Castellani, Augusto, 20

sini, A (Belli), 58 Constable, John, 54

252  Index

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 252

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Constant, Eugène, 18, 30, 31, 35, 203, 213, 218 Arch of Titus, The, 110 Contadini Grilling Chestnuts at Cassino (San Germano), (Lebel), 189

D’Azeglio, Massimo, 51 de Bermond de Vaulx, Octave, Jean-​A ntoine, and Bruno, 215 de Bermond de Vaulx, Pierre-​A ntoine, 32–34, 214–15, 233n25 Palm Tree Near the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, A, 34,

Cooper, James Fenimore, 54 Copmartin, Louis-​Henri-​Eugène, 36, 213 Via Ripetta After the Flood of the Tiber, 1861, 36, 124 Corot, Jean-​Baptiste-​Camille, 35

114 Porto di Ripetta / Ripetta Port, The, 32, 33 Roman Album, 32, 215 de Bonis, Francesco Adriano, 56–57, 59, 61, 63, 215–16, 219, 224

Costume Study of Six Models Posed as a Family (Caneva), 102

Altar Inside the Colosseum, The, 186

Crawford, Allistair, 232n2

Ancient Candelabra in the Basilica of Saints Nereus and

Crawford, Thomas, 46

Achilleus, An, 184

Cruyl, Lievin, 14

Arch of Titus with the Colosseum, The, 59, 183, 235n37

Cuccioni, Isabella Bonafede, 52, 65, 210, 214, 222

Entrance of the Villa Malta, The, 185

Cuccioni, Tommaso, 17, 43–44, 52, 213–14, 216, 222

Fountain of Pope Julius III on the Via Flaminia, The

Fountain of the Moor in Piazza Navona, The, 43, 144 Inauguration of the Column of the Immaculate Conception in Piazza Mignanelli on December 8, 1857, The, 43 Inauguration of the Column of the Immaculate Conception in Piazza Mignanelli on December 8, 1857, The, 145 Palazzo Caffarelli with the Tarpeian Rock and the Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, 43, 143 Piazza del Popolo with the Temporary Carnival Racetrack from the Pincian Hill, The, 43, 146 Statue of Moses by Michelangelo in San Pietro in Vincoli, 153 Cugnoni, Ignazio and Valeriano, 210

(de Bonis/Simelli), 235n29 I vandali a Roma / The Vandals of Rome, 61, 69, 216 Portico of Octavia, The, 86, 187 Rooftops, Rome, 59, 182 De Canson Frères, 212 De Giorgis, Giuseppe Lissone, 17 Delaroche, Paul, 9, 11, 35 Delarue, Charles-​A mbroise, 233n25 Delemer, Louis-​Désiré-​Joseph, 230n61 Della Fotografia Trattato Pratico / Practical Treatise on Photography (Caneva), 31, 211 della Rovere, Vittorio, 16, 49

Daguerre, Louis-​Jacques-​M andé, 5–6, 7, 8, 229n5 daguerrotypes/daguerrotypy, 7–20, 42, 47, 220, 223, 225

de Maria, Mario (Marius Pictor), 66, 69 Ponte Cestio Under Snow During Its Demolition and

D’Alessandri, Fratelli (Antonio and Paolo Francesco), 44, 46–47, 66, 69, 87–88, 206, 214 After the Battle of Mentana, November 3, 1867, with the

Reconstruction, The, 66, 68 de Mondenard, Anne, 222 Desbuisson, Prosper, 230n61

Bodies of the Dead Scattered Among Haystacks, 66,

de Staël, Madame, 76

200

Detail of the Arch of Janus (Girault de Prangey), 94

Papal Army Encampment at Rocca di Papa, 88, 197

de Vico, Francesco, 16

Pope Pius IX and Members of His Papal Court, 46, 87, 156,

de Vonne, Alexandre, 35, 219

234n46 Porta Pia with Figures and Italian Soldiers Studying the

Dexter, Arthur, 64 Di Bello, Patrizia, 9

Damage from the Attack of September 20, 1870, The,

Diebolt, Georges, 231n61

67

Disdéri, André-​Adolphe-​Eugène, 47, 219

View of Mentana After the Battle of November 3, 1867, with the Corpses of Soldiers Lying Along the Road, 88, 201

Dolce Far Niente: Self-​Portrait (?) as a Contadino (E. Braun), 44, 147

Damery, Eugène-​Jean, 231n61

Douglass, Frederick, 83, 85–86

Danesi, Michele, 206

Dovizielli, Cesare and Pompeo, 216

D’Angers, David, 217

Dovizielli, Pietro, 42–44, 64, 212, 214, 216–17

Davanne, Louis-​A lphonse, 34, 214 Temple of Antoninus and Faustina in the Forum, The, 34, 115 Davy, Humphrey, “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass,” 229n4

Catalogue des Travaux Exécutés Photographie dans L’Établissement de P. Dovizielli, 216 Interior of the Colosseum, 43, 141 Ponte and Castel Sant’Angelo, The, 43, 142 Temple of Vesta, The, 139

Index  253

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 253

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Dovizielli, Pietro (continued) View of the Tiber with the Cloaca Maxima, the Temple of

Fitzgerald, Percy Hetherington, 43 Fizeau, Hippolyte, 15, 16, 17

Vesta, the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and the

Flachéron, Caroline, 217

Piazza di Bocca della Verità from the Ponte Rotto, 140

Flachéron, Frédéric, 24, 30–32, 35, 41–42, 80–81, 203, 211, 213,

Du Camp, Maxime, 222

217–18, 221, 223

Dunbar, William Nugent, 40, 233n4, 234n14

Arch of Titus, 31–32

du Pays, Augustin Joseph, 59

Forum Looking Toward the Capitoline Hill, The, 25, 27 Forum with the Column of Phocas, the Arch of Septimius

Easter Mass in the Piazza of St. Peter’s Basilica (Altobelli), 167 Eaton, Robert, 42, 217 Forum with the Temple of Saturn and the Temple of Vepasian, The, 138

Severus, and the Church of Saints Luke and Martina, The, 81, 111 Flachéron, Isidore, 217 Flaubert, Gustave, 222

Edward Towgood & Sons, 212

Flooded Interior Chamber of the Colosseum, A (Verzaschi), 55, 168

Edward VII (was Prince of Wales), 46

Fondo Cugnoni, 57

“effulgent light of a southern sky” (Thomas), 29, 203

Forest in the Campagna, A (Caneva), 108

Elementi di chimica (Chimenti), 16

Forum Looking Toward the Capitoline Hill, The (Flachéron), 25

“El inventor de la fotografía?”/”The Inventor of Photography?”

Forum with the Column of Phocas, the Arch of Septimius

(Alcántara), 14 Eliot, George [Mary Ann Evans], 49 Ellis, Alexander John, 13–14, 73, 226 Arch of Septimius Severus, 230n29

Severus, and the Church of Saints Luke and Martina, The (Flachéron), 32, 81, 111 Foucault, Jean-​Bernard-​Léon, 15 Franco-​P russian War, 66, 228

Entrance of the Villa Malta, The (de Bonis), 185

Fratelli Alinari. See Alinari, Fratelli

Enzmann, Carl, 22

Fratelli D’Alessandri. See D’Alessandri, Fratelli

Excavations of the Emporio Tiberino (Ninci), 52, 158

Freeman, James Edward, 22, 30, 232n6, 233n4

Excursions daguerriennes/Daguerrean Excursions (Lerebours),

French Academy in Rome, 7–8, 15, 23, 27, 29, 32, 35, 80, 216, 217,

11, 15 Exhibition of the Architectural Photographic Association 1861 (London), 217

218, 222, 229n5, 232n22 French Photographic Society, 213 Frezzolini, Francesco, 17, 231n3

Exposition réligieuse de Rome 1870 (Montault), 57

Frith, Francis, 42, 217

Fabbri, Augusto, 206, 214

Galassi, Peter, 16, 56

Fabbrica di San Pietro, 56

Galdi, Vincenzo, 69

Fabris, Giuseppe de, 176

Gallardo, Helena Pérez, 30, 220, 235n7

Fagioli, Vittoria (Widow Mengarelli), 207

Gándara, Jerónimo de la, 232n22

Farochon, Jean-​Baptiste, 232n22

Garibaldi, Giuseppi, 27, 65–66, 86–87, 88, 224, 227, 228

Faruffini, Federico, 61, 63

Garric, Jean-​Philippe, viii

Faun of Praxiteles, The (Mang), 50, 157

Gatley, Alfred, 46

Felici, Giuseppe, 206, 207

Gautier, Théophile, 223

Fermanelli, Bonaventura, 207

Gay-​Lussac, Louis Joseph, 6

Fernández, José, 232n22

Genre Scene of a Young Shepherdess with Kid Goat (Caneva),

Fernando Shakery, Adrian, 232n22

86, 104

Ferrando, Salvatore, 206

Genre Scene with Two Women at a Well (Belli), 57, 179

Ferretti, Raffaele, 206

Gensbauer, Heinrich, 17

Ferrier, Claude-​M arie and son, 63, 225

Gérard, Léon, 35, 219

Fetridge, Willam Pembroke, 51

Gericault, Théodore, Race of the Riderless Horses, The, 43

Fici, Antonio Gambina, 17

German Archaeological Institute, 44, 211

First Vatican Council, June 29, 1868, The (Altobelli), 52, 53

Gernsheim, Helmut, 40, 42

Fischer, C., 17–18, 19

Gérôme, Jean-​Léon, 35, 222

Fishermen on the Tiber with the Ponte and Castel Sant’Angelo,

Gibson, John, 22, 46

and St. Peter’s Basilica (Altobelli), 166

Gigi’s academy on the via Margutta, 20

254  Index

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 254

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Girault de Prangey, Joseph-​Philibert, 20, 73, 217–18

Hefner, Massimiliano, 224

Arch of Janus with Tripod, The, 15, 93

Hernández Latas, José Antonio, 14–15, 27

Detail of the Arch of Janus, 94

Herschel, John, 3, 5, 21

Maremmana Cattle in the Forum, 15

Rome from the Pincian Terrace Beyond the Villa Medici, 4

Pifferari, 16, 95

Herzog, Peter, viii

Tiber Island with the Bridge of Cestius and Basilica of

Historical Photographs (Parker), 235n24

St. Bartholomew, The, 15, 92 Two Details of the Arch of Septimius Severus, frontis

History of Art in Antiquity, The (Winckelmann), 82 Hivert, Jean-​Baptiste-​A mbroise, 233n25

Gladstone, William Ewart, 55

Hogan, John, 56

Glasgow Photographic Association, 1855, 209

Honour, Hugh, 59

“Gleanings in Italy” (Freeman), 22

Hosmer, Harriet, 46, 50

Gli Scavi al Palazzo dei Cesari sul Palatino in Roma Pianta e Vedute Fotografiche (Spina), 225

American Sculptor Harriet Hosmer with Her Studio Assistants, Via Margutta, The (unidentified), 155

Godde, Charles Joseph, 231n61

Fountain of the Siren (sculpture, Hosmer), 46

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 75, 81

Harriet Hosmer’s “Zenobia in Chains” (Anderson), 46, 154

Graffiti d’Italia (poetry, Story), 64

Zenobia in Chains, 50

Granet, François-​M arius, 54

Hunt, Leavitt, Richard, and William, 36

Great Exhibition of 1851 in London’s Crystal Palace, 31, 36, 217,

Hunt, Robert, 22, 31

220 Gregorovius, Ferdinand, 44

Iller, Le Cavalier, 17

Gregory XVI Cappellari, 7, 16, 21, 227

Imhof, Heinrich Maximilian, 46

Gros, Jean-​Baptiste Louis, 17, 230n51

Imperial Mint, Istanbul, 223, 232n11

Fountain of Trevi, The, 230n51

Improvisatore, The (Andersen), 49

Italian Port, An, 230n51

Inauguration of the Column of the Immaculate Conception in

Ruins of a Roman Church, 230n51 St. Mark’s Campanile, Venice, 230n51 Group of French Artists in Rome, A (Perraud), 18, 96 Group of Spanish Artists with Giacomo Caneva, A (Téllez-​ Girón), 27, 99 Guide to the Studios in Rome (Bonfigli), 52, 56, 208, 209, 213, 216, 224

Piazza Mignanelli on December 8, 1857, The (Cuccioni), 43, 145 Ingres, Jean-​Auguste-​Dominique, 7, 27, 217, 229n5 Sistine Chapel, The (Ingres), 52 Insigne Artistica Congregazione de’ Virtuosi al Pantheon (now Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Letters of the Virtuosi al Pantheon), 56, 224

Guillot, Jacques-​M ichel, 23, 218

Interior of the Colosseum (Dovizielli), 43, 141

Guillot-​Saguez, Amélie (also Saguez), 23, 218, 231n14

Interior of the Colosseum with Figures (Altobelli), 83, 84

Rome, 24

Interior of the Palace of Caligula on the Palatine Hill (Spina), 177 International Exhibition in London, 1862, 212, 216

Handbook of Rome and Its Environs (various years, Murray), 41, 43, 47, 49, 221, 234n21

Italian Exposition at Florence, 209, 216 Italian Industrial Exposition in Milan, 1871, 226

Hare, Augustus, 57, 215–16

Italian Port, An (Gros), 230n51

Harper’s Hand-​Book for Travellers in Europe and the East

Italy Daguerreotyped (Ellis), 14, 226

(Fetridge), 42, 51 Harriet Hosmer’s “Zenobia in Chains” (Anderson), 46, 154

Italy: Handbook for Travellers / Italien: Handbuch für Reisende (Baedeker), 63–64, 210, 211, 214, 222

Harrison, John, 63, 211

Italy of Silver, The / L’Italia d’argento (Bonetti and Maffioli), 17

Harvey, Eleanor Jones, 235n38

I vandali a Roma / The Vandals of Rome (de Bonis), 61, 69, 216

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 46, 49, 50, 80, 85 Marble Faun, The, 49, 80

James, Henry, 50, 64

Hayard, Caroline and Charles, 217

Jameson, Anna Brownell, 46, 221

Hayard, Caroline. See Flachéron, Caroline

Jammes, André, 35

Hayard-​Flachéron shop. See under Flachéron, Frédéric

Janis, Eugenia Parry, 34

Healy, George Peter Alexander, 59

Jappelli, Giuseppe, 211

Arch of Titus, The, 59, 60

Jareño y Alarcón, Francisco, 232n22

Index  255

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 255

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Jewish people, 61, 85–86, 89, 228

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 59

John Gadsby Chapman in His Studio on the Via del Babuino

Louis Philippe I, French king, 208

(J. L. Linton), 195

Louvel, Constant, 36, 220

John Manson: A Studio Story (Stillman), 65, 236n51

Fountain of Trevi, The, 121

Johnson, John, 63, 211

Vegetation on the Pincian Hill, 36, 122

Jones, Calvert Richard, 22–23, 80, 218–19, 231n4 Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, The, 98

Lundberg, W. Bruce, viii Luswergh, Angelo, Giacomo, and Tommaso, 36, 47, 49, 77, 79, 206, 214, 220, 233n38

Kakou, Serge, 215, 231n70

Pantheon, 77, 78–79

Kanzler, Hermann, 66

Piazza del Campidoglio with the Equestrian Statue of

Kinnear’s camera, 65 Knudtzon, Frederik Gotschalk, 210 Kopf, Joseph von, 46

Marcus Aurelius, 125 Temple of Saturn and the Roman Forum from via Campidoglio, The, 126 Luswergh, Tommaso, 220

Lais, Filippo, 56, 206, 219 Via Appia, the Second Columbarium of Vigna Codini, West and North Sides (Lais), 175 Lais, Stefano, 206, 219, 221 Landscape Study Near Tivoli (Le Dien), 35, 119

Macdonald, Lawrence, 46 Macpherson, Gerardine, 46, 221 Macpherson, Robert, 39, 40–42, 43, 44, 46, 64, 69, 73, 80, 212, 214, 220–21, 222, 232n6, 234n21

Lanoüe, Félix-​H ippolyte, 231n61

Apollo Belvedere, The, 44, 151

Laocoön and His Sons (Anderson), 46, 152

Arch of Constantine, North Façade, The, 73, 74

Last Days of Pompeii, The (Bulwer-​Lytton), 49

Arch of Titus from the Temple of Venus and Rome, 42

Lebel, François-Désiré, 219

The Arch of Titus from the Temple of Venus and Rome, 135

Lebel, Edmond, 61, 63, 219

Palazzo Altoviti on the Tiber, 137

Cassino (San Germano), Still Life with Baskets of Fruit, 190

Sculptures of the Capitol, 44

Contadini Grilling Chestnuts at Cassino (San Germano),

Statue of the Nile and Its Tributaries, in the Vatican Muse-

189 Young Female Model in Costume in Lebel’s Studio, 63, 188 Lecchi, Stefano, Casino Valentini, Rome, 28, 28 Le Dien, Firmin Eugène, 34, 35, 219–20 Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli from the Piazza del Campidoglio, The, 120

ums, 150 Vatican Sculptures, 42 View of the Aquaduct—Acqua Claudia, 136 Madrazo, Luis de, 218, 232n22 Madrazo y Kuntz, Federico de, 14–15 Maffioli, Monica, 17

Landscape Study Near Tivoli, 35, 119

Maggia, Filippo, viii

Poussin’s Walk at Acqua Acetosa, 35, 118

Maillart, Louis-​A imé, 231n61

Lefèbvre, Jules, 63, 219

Maldura, Ettore, 207

Le Gray, Gustave, printed for Le Dien, 34–35, 219–20, 222, 223

Mang, Michele, 44, 50, 69, 206, 221

Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli from the Piazza del Campidoglio, The, 120

Faun of Praxiteles, The, 50, 157 Manuale artistico ed archeologico, 217

Landscape Study Near Tivoli, 119

Marble Faun, The (Hawthorne), 49, 80, 85

Poussin’s Walk at Acqua Acetosa, 118

Marchis, F. de, 219

Lerebours, Noël-​M arie-​Paymal, 11, 13, 34 Basilica of Saint Peter and Castel Sant’Angelo from the Tiber, The, 13 L’Italia d’argento/The Italy of Silver (Bonetti and Maffioli), 17 L’Italie monumentale (Piot), 35, 223

Maréchal, René-​A mbroise, 231n61 Maremmana Cattle in the Forum (Girault de Prangey), 15 Mariannecci, Antonio, 207 Market Day in the Piazza Navona with the Church of Sant’Agnese in Agone (Ninci), 52, 159

Llewelyn, John Dillwyn, 38

Marzio, Paolo, 17–18

Loescher & Co., 64, 210

Masini, Cesare, 9

Lombardi, Giovanni Battista, 46

Massé, Victor, 230n61

London Photographic Society Exhibition, 1861, 216

Mauche, Eduard, 31, 213

Long, William, 56

Mazio, Paolo, 17

256  Index

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 256

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Mazzini, Giuseppe, 27, 86, 227

Nota dei Fotografi e Stabilimenti Fotografici / Note of the Pho-

McEntee, Jervis, 59

tographers and Photographic Establishments Existing in

McGuigan, John F., Jr., 1–69, 73, 76, 208–26

the Different Districts of Rome, 65, 206–7

McKee, Katherine, 227–28 McLean, Melhuish, Napper and Co., 217 Meissner, C., 17

Officers of the First and Third Battalions of the Pontifical Army at Rocca di Papa, The (Altobelli), 198

Mendicant Monk from Life (Béguin), 44, 148

Olivieri, L., 52, 235n6

Mentana, Italy, 66, 88, 214

Ottin, Auguste-​Louis Marie, 232n22

Mercandante, Saverio, 54

Overbeck, Johann Friedrich, 56

Mercurj, Filippo, 8 Merley, Louis, 230n61

Paccard, Alexis, 23, 231n61

Meta Sudans (fountain), 35

Pagniucci Zumel, José, 232n22

Méthode théorique et pratique de photographie sur papier

Palatine Hill, 54–55, 216, 225

(Guillot-​Saguez), 23 Michel, Ernest Barthélemy, 216 Minardi, Tommaso, 52, 56, 208, 221 Miraglia, Marina, 28, 31, 51 Molins, Pompeo, 52, 57, 69, 80, 206, 208, 221–22, 235n25 Arch of the Goldsmiths (The Little Arch of Septimius

Palazzo Caffarelli with the Tarpeian Rock and the Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli (Cuccioni), 43, 143 Palm Tree Near the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, A (de Bermond), 34, 114 Panorama of Rome from the Campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin (Suscipj), 9, 10

Severus) and the Church of San Giorgio in Velabro,

pantoscopic camera, 63, 211

The (with Altobelli), 52, 160

papal army, 65, 87–88, 219, 228

Fountain of the Triton Covered in Ice, Piazza Barberini, with Figures, The (with Altobelli), 52, 161 Monaldi, Alessandro, 8

Papal Army Encampment at Rocca di Papa (Fratelli d’Alessandri), 88, 197 Parker, John Henry, 56, 222, 224, 225, 235n25

Monaldini’s Library, 208

Archaeology of Rome, The, 57, 216, 224, 225, 235n24

Montañés, Bernardino, 27, 40, 218, 232n4, 232n22

Catalogue of Fifteen Hundred Photographs Illustrative of

Montault, Xavier Barbier de, 57, 224 Exposition réligieuse de Rome 1870, 57 Photographs of Christian Antiquities at Rome and the Neighborhood, 57, 224 Monumenti di Roma in Fotografia (Ninci), 52 Morelli, Achille, 14, 73 Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, The, 230n29 Moscioni, Romualdo, 69

the Archaeology of Rome (Parker), 219 Historical Photographs, 235n24 Passinati, Gaetano, 206 Patrignani, Luigi, 206 Pécarrère, Pierre-​Émile-​Joseph (incorrectly Pecquerel), 34–35, 222–23, 233n33 Temple of Castor and Pollux (Tempio dei Dioscuri), Also Known as the Temple of Jupiter Stator, The, 35, 117, 222

Mozier, Joseph, 46

Pelizzari, Maria Antonella, 35

Múgica y Pérez, Carlos, 232n22

Pencil of Nature, The (Talbot), 44

Murray, John, 41

Perraud, Philibert, 18, 213, 223

Napoleon III, 66, 87, 216, 227–28

photogenic drawing, 5, 21

Negro, Silvio, viii, 40

Photographic Gallery of Manchester, 1857, 209

Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore, 5–6

Photographic Institution of London, 221

Niépce de Saint-​Victor, Abel, 31, 41, 213

Photographic Notes (Sutton), 39

Ninci, Giuseppe, 52, 214, 222

Photographic Society of London, 209, 221

Group of French Artists in Rome, A, 96

Excavations of the Emporio Tiberino (Ninci), 52, 158

Photographic Society of Scotland, 209, 221

Market Day in the Piazza Navona with the Church of

Photographic Times and American Photographer, 65, 236n51

Sant’Agnese in Agone, 52, 159 Monumenti di Roma in Fotografia, 52 Normand, Alfred Nicolas, 32, 222 Three French Academicians in the Gardens of the Villa Medici (Normand), 112

Photographs of Christian Antiquities at Rome and the Neighborhood (Montault), 57, 224 “Photography in Rome” (Thomas), 203–5 Piale, Luigi, 36, 57, 209, 210, 220, 224 Rome Seen in a Week, 57

Index  257

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 257

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Piazza del Campidoglio with the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius (Luswerghs), 125 Piazza del Popolo with the Temporary Carnival Racetrack from the Pincian Hill, The (Cuccioni), 43, 146 Piazza of Santa Maria Maggiore with a Photographer, The (Altobelli), 54, 162

Ravenna, Pietro, 207 Richebourg, Pierre-​A mbroise, 17 Ricois, François- Edme, 217 Right Cordonata of the Fountain of the Dragons, Villa d’Este, Tivoli (Belli), 181 Rinaldi, Rinaldo, 56

Pifferari (Girault de Prangey), 16, 95

Rinehart, William Henry, 46

Pinelli, Bartolomeo, 13, 16, 43

Ripetta Port (Porto di Ripetta), The (de Bermond), 32, 33

Piot, Jean Baptiste Eugène, 34–35, 223

Rive, Roberto, 69

Colosseum, The, 35, 116

Risorgimento (nationalist movement), 27–28, 65–69, 87, 227, 228

L’Italie monumentale, 35

Ritter, Dorothea, 40

Rome from the French Academy, 35

Robertson, James, 31, 223, 232n11

Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 14, 75–76, 77 Veduta della Facciata di dietro della Basilica di S. Maria Maggiore, 230n29 View of the Pantheon of Agrippa, 79 Pius IX (Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti), 21, 27, 29, 52, 54, 66, 87–88, 214, 226–28

Temple of Vesta, Tivoli, The, 100 Robinson, Arthur (incorrectly, Albert) “Robby,” 29–30, 39, 40, 41, 203, 218, 232n2, 232n6 View of the Casino Called the “Casale Cenci-​Giustiniani” in the Borghese Gardens, Rome, Italy, 232n4 Rocca di Papa, 66, 88

Pius IX and Victor Emmanuel II Arm in Arm (Verzaschi), 55, 56

Roesler Franz, Ettore, 69

Plüschow, Wilhelm von, 69

Rogers, Randolph, 46

Podesti, Francesco, 56

Roma Fotografia Artistica ed Archeologica (Simelli), 224

Ponte and Castel Sant’Angelo, The (Dovizielli), 43, 142

Roman Album (de Bermond), 32, 215

Ponte Salario Blown up by Papal Troops and French Zouaves in

Roman Campagna, 22, 31, 35, 212

1867 (Altobelli), 87, 199 Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Letters of the Virtuosi al Pantheon (was Insigne Artistica Congregazione de’ Virtuosi al Pantheon), 56

Roman Candles (Fitzgerald), 43 Roman Forum from the Capitoline Hill with Moonlight Effect, The (Altobelli), 54, 163 Roman Ghetto in Rione Sant’Angelo, 61, 85–86

Porta Pia, Rome, 66, 88

Roman Model (Suscipj), 20, 231n70

Porta Pia with Figures and Italian Soldiers Studying the

Roman Model in Profile with Bare Shoulders and Gold Earring,

Damage from the Attack of September 20, 1870, The (D’Alessandri), 67 Portico of Octavia, The (de Bonis), 86, 187 Porto di Ripetta (Caneva), 32, 66, 106 Porto di Ripetta, Rome, 11, 36, 66

A (unidentified), 20, 97 Roman Philharmonic Academy (Accademici Filarmonici Romani), 54, 55, 226 Roman School of Photography, 29–38, 40–41, 44, 51, 211–15, 217–23 See also Caffè Greco, Circle of

Porto di Ripetta / Ripetta Port, The (de Bermond), 32, 33

Romola (Eliot), 49

Portrait of an Unidentified Woman with Two Parts in Her Hair

Rooftops, Rome (de Bonis), 59, 182

(Fischer), 19

Rossi, Count Pellegrino, 27

Poussin, Nicolas, 35

Rossi, Giuseppe, 207

Poussin’s Walk at Acqua Acetosa (Le Dien), 35, 118

Rossini, Luigi, 14, 230n29

Prince Albert, 212

Rossiter, Thomas Pritchard, 232n4

Prince Giron des Anglonnes. See Téllez-​Girón, Pedro

Ruins and Museums of Rome (book, E. Braun), 44

Prix de Rome, 80, 216, 217, 222

Ruins of a Roman Church (Gros), 230n51

Pugnaloni, Ferdinando, 207

Ruisè, 22, 231n3

Pugnaloni, Giovanni, 207 Pugnaloni, Samuele, 207

Saguez, Amélie (also Guillot-​Saguez), 23, 218 Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome. See Basilica of St. Peter

Quagliotti, Augusto, 207

Sainz Pinto, Francisco, 232n22 San Giacomo degli Spagnoli (now Nostra Signora del Sacro

Race of the Riderless Horses, The (Gericault), 43 Rappaini, Giovanni, 206

Cuore), 15 Sanglau, Achille, 206

258  Index

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 258

7/7/22 2:12 PM

San Pietro in Montorio, 14

Sprosse, Carl, 44

Sartori, Stanislao, 206

Stabilimento Litografico Fotografico (Photographic Lithographic

Sbrascia, Filippo, 207

Establishment), 210

Schafhäutl, Karl Emil, 22

Staël, Madame de [Anne-​Louise Germaine], 76

Schauenburg, Konrad, 44

Standing Model in Costume with Tambour Facing Left

Schnetz, Jean-​Victor, 15, 56 Schönefeldt and Gensbauer. See Schönefeldt, Ernst and Gensbauer, Heinrich Schönefeldt Ernst, 17 Schulze, Johann Heinrich, 5 Sciolari, Andrea, viii, 32, 40, 59, 215 Sculptures of the Capitol (Macpherson), 44

(Caneva), 101 Statue of Moses by Michelangelo in San Pietro in Vincoli (Cuccioni), 153 Statue of St. Peter by Giuseppe De Fabris (1840), Outside St. Peter’s Basilica (Sidoli), 176 Statue of the Nile and Its Tributaries, in the Vatican Museums (Macpherson), 150

Seconda Roma (Negro), 40, 231n4

stereographs/stereoscopic camera, 47, 49, 54, 63, 225, 226

Self-​Portrait (?) with the Ruins of the Temple of the Sun (Sera-

Stillman, William James, 3, 39, 64–65

pis) in the Villa Colonna (Caneva), 107 Sgarzi, Raffaele, 17 Sidoli, Francesco, 56, 206, 224 Statue of St. Peter by Giuseppe De Fabris (1840), Outside St. Peter’s Basilica (Sidoli), 176

Acropolis of Athens, The, 65 “John Manson: A Studio Story”, 65 St. John, Jane Martha, 37, 38 St. Mark’s Campanile, Venice (Gros), 230n51 Story, William Wetmore, 64, 89

Siegert, Dietmar, viii

St. Peter’s, the Vatican & St. Angelo, Rome (Robertson), 232n11

Simelli, Vincenzo Carlo Domenico Baldassarre, 57, 80, 207,

St. Peter’s Basilica and the Spina di Borgo from Castel Sant’An-

210–11, 216, 219, 224–25 Arch of Septimius Severus and the Church of San Luca and Santa Martina, The, 173 Catalogue of a Series of Photographs Illustrative of the Archaeology of Rome, A, 56 Cloister of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, The, 56, 174 Cloud Study with Trinità dei Monti, 56, 171 Fountain of Pope Julius III on the Via Flaminia, The (de Bonis/Simelli), 235n29

gelo (Anderson), 41, 132 Study of a Courtyard with a Marble Bust (Boyesen), 63, 191 Study of an Agave Plant (Simelli), 56, 172 Study of an Olive Tree, Villa d’Este, Tivoli (Belli), 180 Study of a Stream with Plants (Caneva), 109 Suscipj, Lorenzo, 8–9, 14, 16, 20, 22, 47, 49, 73, 206, 225–26 Panorama of Rome from the Campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, 9, 10 Roman Model, 20, 231n70

Roma Fotografia Artistica ed Archeologica, 224

Tableau in the Studio, 48, 49

Study of an Agave Plant, 56, 172

View of the Bridge and Castel Sant’Angelo, 8

Wheat Mills on the Tiber from Isola Tiberina with the Ponte Sisto (Simelli), 61, 62

Sutton, Thomas, 32, 39, 231n18 Swan, Joseph Wilson, 63, 211

Simonetti, Attilio, 63 Simonetti, Giulio, 206

Tableau in the Studio (Suscipj), 48, 49

Sistine Chapel, The (Ingres), 52

Tadolini, Adamo, 56

Society of Arts, Exhibition of Recent Specimens of Photography

Talbot, William Henry Fox, 3–6, 21–23, 29, 203, 218, 229n4

at the House of (London), 31, 35, 211, 213, 217, 222, 223 Sommer, Giorgio / Sommer & Behles, 63–64, 210 Soulier, Charles, 63, 225 Panorama with the Tiber from the Aventine Hill, 63, 193

Album di Disegni Fotogenici (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC), 5 Pencil of Nature, The, 44 Tartaglini, Filippo, 206

Smeaton, Charles, 56, 224

Tassinari pharmacy, 17, 22

Spanish Steps and Trinità dei Monti, The (Anderson), 41, 134

Tauchnitz, Bernhard, 49

Spence, Benjamin Edward, 46

Taupenot, Dr. J. M., 42

Spina, Filippo, 56, 224–25, 226

Team of Yoked Buffalo, A (Béguin), 44, 45

Gli Scavi al Palazzo dei Cesari sul Palatino in Roma Pianta e Vedute Fotografiche, 225 Interior of the Palace of Caligula on the Palatine Hill, 177 Spithöver, Josef, 41, 49, 57, 209, 224, 234n12

Téllez-​Girón, Pedro (Prince of Anglona), 27, 30, 203, 217, 218 Group of Spanish Artist with Giacomo Caneva, A, 27, 99 Temple of Antoninus and Faustina in the Forum, The (Davanne), 34, 115

Index  259

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 259

7/7/22 2:12 PM

Temple of Antoninus and Faustina in the Forum, The (Jones), 23, 98 Temple of Saturn and the Roman Forum from via Campidoglio, The (Luswerghs), 126 Temple of Vesta, Tivoli, The (Robertson), 31, 100 Tétaz, Jacques-​M artin, 23, 230n61

View from the Door of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome (Caneva), 34 View of Mentana After the Battle of November 3, 1867, with the Corpses of Soldiers Lying Along the Road (A. D’Alessandri), 66, 88, 201 View of Mentana After the Battle of November 3, 1867, with

Thierry, J., 17, 230

the Corpses of Soldiers Lying Along the Road (D’Alessan-

Thiollier, Felix, 69

dri), 201

Thomas, Richard Wheeler, 29, 81, 203–5, 213, 218

View of the Aquaduct—Acqua Claudia (Macpherson), 136

Thorvaldsen, Bertel, 81

View of the Bridge and Castel Sant’Angelo (Suscipj), 8

Three French Academicians in the Gardens of the Villa Medici

View of the Casino Called the “Casale Cenci-​Giustiniani” in

(Normand), 32, 112 Tiber Island with the Bridge of Cestius and Basilica of St. Bartholomew, The (Girault de Prangey), 15, 92 Tiber River, Rome, 11, 61, 66, 85, 89, 228

the Borghese Gardens, Rome, Italy (Robinson), 232n4 View of the Pantheon of Agrippa (Piranesi), 79 View of the Protestant Cemetery and the Pyramid of Caius Cestius (Altobelli), 165

Titeux, Philippe Auguste, 23, 230n61

View of the Tiber, Rome (van Wittel), 11

Tivoli, Italy, 16, 30–31, 32, 35, 57, 203

View of the Tiber with the Cloaca Maxima, the Temple of

Trattoria Lépre, Rome, 203

Vesta, the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and the

Tuminello, Ludovico, 27–28, 69, 211

Piazza di Bocca della Verità from the Ponte Rotto (Dovi-

Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 56

zielli), 140

Twain, Mark, 82–83`

View Over the Piazza de Popolo Toward the Vatican (Caneva),

Universal Exposition in Paris, 43, 211, 216, 223

Viollet-​le-​D uc, Eugène, 7–8, 229n5

105 Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France Valicourt, Edmond de, 17, 230

(Picturesque and Romantic Journeys in Ancient France,

Vandals of Rome (de Bonis), 61, 69, 216

lithograpic compilation), 11

van Wittel, Caspar “Vanvitelli,” 9, 11 Vasari, Cesare, 69

Walks in Rome (Hare), 57, 215–16

Vatican Museums, 36, 44, 57, 216, 220

Washerwomen at Albano Laziale (Belli), 57, 178

Vedder, Elihu, 69, 221

waxed paper process, 34, 35, 36, 219, 223

Veduta della Facciata di dietro della Basilica di S. Maria Mag-

Wedgwood, Thomas, 229n4

giore (Piranesi), 230n29 Vegetation on the Pincian Hill (Louvel), 36, 122

Wey, Francis, 59, 216 Rome: Descriptions et souvenirs, 61

Vegetation on the Pincian Hill (unidentified), 36, 123

Whatman, J., at Turkey Mill, 32, 204, 212

Venuti, Raffaele, 206

Wheat Mills on the Tiber from Isola Tiberina with the Ponte

Verzaschi, Enrico, 44, 54–55, 57, 69, 206, 209, 225, 226 Catalogo Generale delle Riproduzioni Fotografiche Pubblicate per cura del Premiato Stabilimento Fotografico di Enrico Verzaschi Roma, 226 Flooded Interior Chamber of the Colosseum, A, 55, 168 Palazzo Doria Pamphili and the Corso from the South, The, 55, 169

Sisto (Simelli), 61, 62 Wife and Child of the Artist’s Studio Assistant, The (Béguin), 44, 149 Williams, Penry, 22 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, The History of Art in Antiquity, 82 Wyatt, Matthew Digby, 216

Pius IX and Victor Emmanuel II Arm in Arm, 55, 55 Via dei Due Macelli Looking Toward Via del Babuino and Piazza del Popolo, 55, 170

Young Female Model in Costume in Lebel’s Studio (Lebel), 63, 188

Victor Emmanuel II, first king of United Italy, 55–56, 65, 66, 87, 88, 228

Zamboni, Filippo, 16

Victoria, queen of the United Kingdom, 46

Zanetti (incorrectly Zapetti), José Ramos, 14, 15, 20

Vienna Universal Exposition, 54, 226

Zenobia in Chains (Hosmer), 46, 50, 154

260  Index

McGuigan, InLIght_book.indb 260

7/7/22 2:12 PM