Anthony Blunt's review of Edgar Peters Bowron’s edition of Anthony M. Clark’s Studies in Roman Eighteenth-Century Painting was published in the TLS of March 19, 1982.

This book is a manifesto in favour of the thesis for which Anthony Clark campaigned for twenty years until his sudden death in 1976, namely that modern art historians have grossly neglected eighteenth-century Roman painting in favour of Venice and even Naples. The thesis is unassailable. Waterhouse in his Italian Baroque Painting stops his account of Roman painting with Maratta and Trevisani, although in his Roman Baroque Painting his lists of paintings cover the pupils of Maratta up to about 1740; Haskell, even in the second edition of his Patrons and Painters, obstinately refuses to consider Rome after about 1700 worthy of attention; and for a general treatment of the subject one is still forced to use Herman Voss’s Die Malerei der Barock in Rom which, in spite of having been published in 1924, is still valuable and contains accounts – naturally now in need of revision and completion – of all but three of the painters treated at length by Clark. (Only one of them occurs in Waterhouse’s lists.) Studies in Roman Eighteenth-Century Painting will, therefore, prove most valuable.

In a sense, however, it is disappointing, in that it consists solely of reprints of articles already published – though it is certainly a great convenience to have them all together in a single volume. The tragedy is that, though he had accumulated a vast quantity of notes at the time of his death, Clark had not even begun either the general history of Roman eighteenth-century painting or the full-length study of Pompeo Batoni which he proposed to write; and there is no possibility that the editor, to whom all his papers were bequeathed, will be able to concoct such complete works from his notes. In his preface, however, he does promise to us two things in the future: first, a catalogue raisonné of Batoni’s paintings for which almost complete notes exist; second, a series of lists of the works of individual artists working in Rome during the period together with brief biographies and surveys of their development. This book is to be modelled on Waterhouse’s Roman Baroque Painting with the important difference that whereas his lists only cover paintings in Rome, Clark’s will cover paintings and drawings wherever they are to be found. May we hope that it will also incorporate another extension of Waterhouse’s lists, and that the editor will include references to the sources on which individual statements about attribution or dating are based, so that the reader may know whether they are derived from something painted on the picture, on a document or in an archive, or an early biography or a local guide-book? This would make the book a real weapon for research, as opposed to a hand-list.

In the absence of any general treatment of the period it is not always easy to know in what sense Clark uses the stylistic terms applicable to it. It is evident that he had a frame of reference and that he knew what he meant by words such as Baroque, Rococo, classical and neoclassical, but from the glancing references in these essays it is not possible to reconstruct this scheme. In particular it is not clear to me in what sense he used the word “Rococo”. He seems to apply it to a number of artists of the first quarter of the eighteenth century such as Guiseppe Chiari, Andrea Procaccini, Francesco Trevisani, Benedetto Luti, to some of the works of Sebastiano Conca and Michele Rocca and to the whole oeuvre of Giovanni Paolo Panini.

I can just see how Panini’s compositions with tiny figures in architectural settings – or Conca’s “Pool of Bethesda” in the same manner – could be seen as related to the Rococo, and there are certainly features in Trevisani’s “Galatea” (Cassel) which bring it near to French works of the same period, but I am at a loss to find similarities of the same kind in the works of most of the artists named above. I admit, however, that I start with a certain prejudice, because I favour a restrictive as opposed to an expansionist use of the word “Rococo” and I feel that it applies as little to early eighteenth-century Roman painting as it does to the architecture and decoration of the same period, to which – pace Professor Nina Mallory – the term barocchetto seems to me much more appropriate. Should we perhaps try to define a barocchetto school in Roman painting?

The book is well produced and easy to use and the plates, though small, are clear and well chosen to illustrate the points which the author seeks to emphasize. I cannot resist quoting one of the (few) misprints, on p 48, where the author is made to remark “how cessful Bianchi was” in his use of small models for the figures in his paintings.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now