The Hub of the World: Art in Eighteenth-Century Rome
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Catalogue by Nicholas H.J. Hall. Edited by Alan P. Wintermute, with essays by Edgar Peters Bowron, Alvar González-Palacios, J. Patrice Marandel, and Melissa Beck Lemke.
ISBN: 978-1-7326492-5-5
The Hub of the World: Art in Eighteenth-Century Rome is an exhibition organized by Nicholas Hall in association with Galleria Carlo Orsi. Held at the gallery’s space on 17 East 76th Street in New York, the exhibition celebrates the centenary of the pioneering American scholar, connoisseur and artist Anthony M. Clark (1923–1976). Considered one of the top museum professionals of his generation, Clark held prominent curatorial roles at the National Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, of which he later became director. His taste for art produced in 18th-century Rome, and Pompeo Batoni in particular, had a profound impact on American collecting in the 1950s and 60s. The Hub of the World will bring together more than sixty works of art by artists who lived in or travelled to Rome in the eighteenth century, as well as a selection of the Clark’s personal notebooks on loan from the National Gallery of Art Library, Washington D.C.
The show explores the fundamental role Clark played in the revival of interest among American museums in collecting work from this period. Clark deeply believed in the importance of Roman Settecento painting, drawing and sculpture, and this passion is brilliantly reflected in his scholarship and writings. As a curator, he consistently created a historic context for art by showing sculpture and decorative arts alongside paintings and drawings at a time when it was customary to maintain a ‘hierarchy’ of the arts by studying and displaying the mediums separately.
Edgar Peters Bowron is a leading expert in the paintings of 18th-century Rome. His career spans a number of prominent American institutions, notably as director of the North Carolina Museum of Art, director at the Harvard University Art Museums, Senior Curator of Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, and Curator of European Art at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Bowron authored the catalogue raisonné of Pompeo Batoni, among numerous exhibition catalogues and scholarly publications. He was the executor of Anthony M. Clark’s scholarly papers.
Alvar González-Palacios is an art historian specializing in Italian and French decorative arts. His extensive publications include catalogues for the Mus.e du Louvre, Museo del Prado, Scuderie del Quirinale and the Vatican Museums. In 2018, he was a guest curator for Luigi Valadier: Splendor in Eighteenth-Century Rome at the Frick Collection, where he has lectured, in addition to the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and across England, France, Spain and Italy.
Melissa Beck Lemke (Missy) is the Image Specialist for Italian Art in the National Gallery of Art’s Department of Image Collections where she has cared for over 16 million images since 1999. In addition to the Clark Archive, she has notably worked on the Kress Collection of Historic Images, the archives of Richard Offner and Foto Reali, and presented In the Library: Verrocchio, Connoisseurship, and the Photographs of Clarence Kennedy at the Gallery.
J. Patrice Marandel is the curator emeritus of European art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he mounted key exhibitions on Caravaggio, Dürer and Cranach, among others, during his tenure between 1993-2017. He has also held curatorial positions at the Detroit Institute of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. A native of Paris, he resides in Los Angeles.
CONTRIBUTORS TO THE CATALOGUE
Dr. Bettina Baumgärtel
W. Mark Brady
Enrico Colle
Dr. Jessica Feather
Alvar González-Palacios
J. Patrice Marandel
Marcus Marschall
Claudia Nordhoff
Alan P. Wintermute
Johnny Yarker
Click here to learn more about the exhibition