ABSTRACT: A lawyer, an art collector, and the head of a government organization, Ilo Giacomo Nunes was a complex man who has for the most part been forgotten. A single plaque, overlooked by hundreds of pedestrians daily, serves as a solitary reminder of his existence. Located on the Mattei House in Piazza in Piscinula, this marble relief, here called the Oak Branch Plaque, is the point of intersection for various narratives taking place across time. It speaks to the long history of the Mattei House, which extends back to the thirteenth century. It allows for an exploration of Trastevere in the nineteenth century, before the Tiber Walls were installed, and it invites an examination of the Fascists’ twentieth-century medieval revival. Bearing an oak branch relief and an inscription dated to 1927, this plaque serves as a lens through which each of these aspects can be examined by systematically uncovering basic identifying information about the plaque. This paper utilizes primary sources not yet explored in scholarship, as it attempts to be the first comprehensive examination of the plaque, Nunes, and the Mattei House. Through this investigation it has been determined that the plaque is most likely a reused marble fragment originating from an ancient context. It was placed on the house sometime between December 25, 1926, and 1930, and commemorates a restoration to the Mattei House undertaken by Ilo Giacomo Nunes in 1927. Finally, the plaque likely found itself in either Nunes’ personal collection or the Mattei of Trastevere’s collection before being inscribed and placed on the southern façade of the Mattei House where it appears today. Bearing a relief that appears ancient and an inscription that is clearly not, this Plaque’s existence invites questions about its history. From this investigation, the contentious and varied life of both the Mattei House and Ilo Giacomo Nunes will once again be brought to light.
ABSTRACT: Between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, the Roman luxury villa gained architectural expression and a new interest in the pleasure garden as a “space.” These spaces were marked by their luxurious elements, including fruiting trees, marble statuary, and bubbling fountains. Traditionally, scholarship has analyzed these components individually, as parts that form an implicitly static setting for the social interaction of the elite. However, the formulation of the luxury villa is also characterized by experimentation; hence, by examining the form of the pleasure garden in elite villas spaces, the intersections between painted and real gardens, as well as the viewer experience in the garden, this thesis will argue that the garden is simultaneously a spatial environment and a work of art. It will thus adopt a holistic ‘total site’ approach to the pleasure garden and its villa context as a way to understand the implications of the garden within the visual landscape of the villa. I suggest the term curation to recognize this fabrication as intentional, and to embed the garden with greater meaning and agency than previously appreciated. The result is an assemblage, composed of multiple layers of entangled object–human networks. These function together to form not only the social role of the garden, but also the garden experience in Roman villa culture. This thesis employs a novel interpretive framework: at the core of this methodology is an analysis of climatic and archaeological data, as well as contemporary theories related to spatial interpellation, semiotics, objecthood, and museum studies. The aim is for a reframing of the agency of the garden space within the entangled visual assemblages and constructed experiences that characterize the early Imperial luxury villa.
Catalano Rossi Danielli, Maria Aurelia
ABSTRACT: The brief period of the Roman Republic (1798-1799) envisaged to revolutionize a centuries old city and state government dominated by the absolute power of the Roman Catholic Church into a democratic and secular state. Republican festivities were adopted in this period as propagandistic means to accomplish the new government’s mission to extend public consent as well as to mark a historical justification with Rome’s millenary past. In this thesis I would like to address the case study of two paintings of the Republican Festa della Federazione celebrated on March 20th, 1798 commemorating the Republic’s proclamation by the artist Felice Giani, which are now conserved at the Museo di Roma at Palazzo Braschi. Although the two paintings are now looked uncritically by contemporary public and scholars, the paintings by Giani are instead fundamental in order to address important questions: are Republican festivities and the ephemeral stage sets erected in that period separate from the papal tradition of festivities in Rome? How was the event recorded and transcribed into visual representation? How is the representation of the event to be interpreted nowadays? What was the role of the artists and Academies both in the designing of the festivity and in the commemoration of the event? And finally, why are Republican festivities nowadays looked as separate elements from the history of festivities in Rome?
