“My project examines the documentary film production in Italy in the late 1940s and 1950s about modernization, including programs of reconstruction and welfare, the establishment of a democratic regime, industrialization of rural areas and the spread of mass production, urbanization, and economic development of the Southern regions. I investigate the ways in which documentary films educated Italian viewers to the practices of a democratic, capitalist, and welfare society, while showcasing Italy's recovery and transition from Fascism to Democracy to the international audiences of Western Europe and the United States.”
Current
Rome Prize Fellows and Projects
The American Academy in Rome awards the Rome Prize to a select group of artists and scholars, after an application process that begins in the fall of each year. The winners, announced in the spring, are invited to Rome to pursue their work in an atmosphere conducive to intellectual and artistic freedom, interdisciplinary exchange, and innovation. The 2011-12 Rome Prize winners are listed here with a brief project summary in their own words.
To download the brochure from the Rome Prize Ceremony held in New York on 13 April, 2011, announcing the 2011-2012 Rome Prize winners click here.
Modern Italian Studies
National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
Paola Bonifazio
Assistant Professor, Department of French and Italian, University of Texas at Austin
Paul Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize
Aaron S. Allen
Assistant Professor of Musicology, School of Music, Theatre and Dance, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Fidelio in Italy: Reception, Historiography and the Crisis of Nineteenth-Century Opera
“Opera dominated nineteenth-century Italy, but that simplistic understanding is complicated when considering the contemporaneous reception of Beethoven. Italians knew and performed his instrumental music, but Beethoven's Italian reception differs from his status as the icon of instrumental music in northern Europe. Italian critics considered Beethoven an opera composer, which is problematic considering he wrote only one unsuccessful opera, Fidelio (1804-14), that was not fully staged in Italy until the 1880s. This Italian misreading of Beethoven can be understood in the context of the crisis of opera: at the same time the Western operatic canon was being ossified, critics lamented the static and provincial nature of the genre and were searching for new possibilities to reinvigorate Italian opera, including the influence of German instrumental music. Understanding Beethoven in Italy provides a more nuanced view of both by rethinking facile notions such as Carl Dahlhaus's ‘twin cultures’ dichotomy.”
Donald and Maria Cox/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize (year one of a two-year fellowship)
Camille S. Mathieu
Department of the History of Art, University of California, Berkeley
Revolutionizing the Antique: French Artists and Artistic Community in Napoleonic Rome, 1803-1819
“In 1813, the Académie de France à Rome, an institution that since 1666 had welcomed elite French artists to Rome to complete their education through immersion in the Antique, faced being dismantled permanently. The state of history painting had been assessed, and Ancient History—the specialty of these young Academic painters in Rome—had lost out to present-day Napoleonic warfare as the subject worthiest of representation. My dissertation project, Revolutionizing the Antique: French Artists and Artistic Community in Napoleonic Rome, 1803-1819, investigates the solutions young painters like Ingres, Blondel, Boisselier, and Géricault invented in Rome to sustain the Antique—the only art they had been trained to reproduce—as an imperative for history painting. My work casts a dynamic, shifting, uniquely Roman Antique as a lens through which to view the development of French history painting during this period. It challenges traditional narratives of Academic instruction and hierarchies, revealing the Roman Académie as a location of dissent and invention as opposed to a sedate training ground for an ever-rigidifying style.”
