The importance of the reception piece is underlined by a series of directives, drafted from its founding until 1715, that deal with the admission of new members to the academy. Reception pieces were to lay proof of the technical and stylistic accomplishments that academicians expected of an applicant, and went on to become a public and enduring testimony of the competences and skills accrued by the academic body. However, the limited number of reception pieces within the collection of the Accademia di San Luca prompts questions about why these pieces have not come down to us. In this essay we will attempt to clarify the specific stories and deeper cultural causes behind the gaps in the current collection. The lacunae in the collection of reception pieces indeed highlight the hiatus between regulation and practice, and the difficulties that arose throughout the eighteenth century in living up to the statutory ruling from August 4th, 1715, designed to enforce the reception piece. In order to reconstruct this history it will be necessary to compare an administrative intent with practices documented in the so-called ‘Registri delle Congregazioni’, minutes of the academy meetings. A long list of academicians that had defaulted on the requirement to donate a piece of work was compiled on July 19th, 1744, providing a good example of the evasive and ambiguous attitude towards the reception piece. This list highlights one of the episodes of resistance to the academy’s directives about the dono ‘in memory of his admittance’ – a rule that many sculptors would interpret to mean that they were submitting a temporary donation. The scarce impact of the directives drafted in the 1715 statute emphasizes the ambiguous relationship between artists and institution, along with the difficult coexistence taking shape in that ‘century of academies’ between the Accademia di San Luca’s directive vocation and the Roman art system, which revolved around the market generated by the Grand Tour.
Rolfi Ozvald, S. (2016). History of an absence: the morceaux de reception submitted by sculptors at the Accademia di San Luca. In J. Myssok (a cura di), Die bildhauerischen Aufnahmestücke europäischer Kunstakademien im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (pp. 105-127). Wien : Böhlau.
History of an absence: the morceaux de reception submitted by sculptors at the Accademia di San Luca
Rolfi Ozvald, S.
2016-01-01
Abstract
The importance of the reception piece is underlined by a series of directives, drafted from its founding until 1715, that deal with the admission of new members to the academy. Reception pieces were to lay proof of the technical and stylistic accomplishments that academicians expected of an applicant, and went on to become a public and enduring testimony of the competences and skills accrued by the academic body. However, the limited number of reception pieces within the collection of the Accademia di San Luca prompts questions about why these pieces have not come down to us. In this essay we will attempt to clarify the specific stories and deeper cultural causes behind the gaps in the current collection. The lacunae in the collection of reception pieces indeed highlight the hiatus between regulation and practice, and the difficulties that arose throughout the eighteenth century in living up to the statutory ruling from August 4th, 1715, designed to enforce the reception piece. In order to reconstruct this history it will be necessary to compare an administrative intent with practices documented in the so-called ‘Registri delle Congregazioni’, minutes of the academy meetings. A long list of academicians that had defaulted on the requirement to donate a piece of work was compiled on July 19th, 1744, providing a good example of the evasive and ambiguous attitude towards the reception piece. This list highlights one of the episodes of resistance to the academy’s directives about the dono ‘in memory of his admittance’ – a rule that many sculptors would interpret to mean that they were submitting a temporary donation. The scarce impact of the directives drafted in the 1715 statute emphasizes the ambiguous relationship between artists and institution, along with the difficult coexistence taking shape in that ‘century of academies’ between the Accademia di San Luca’s directive vocation and the Roman art system, which revolved around the market generated by the Grand Tour.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
