‘La común patria de los artistas’:
the Spanish colony of artists in Rome (1830-1873)

Abstract

Between 1830 and 1873, over one hundred male Spanish male students of painting, sculpture, engraving, and architecture joined the cosmopolitan community of artists active in Rome, ‘la común patria de los artistas’. This is how one Catalan painter Peregrín Clavé, described Rome in 1845 to a friend after an almost fifteen-year sojourn in the Papal city. The members of this group identified themselves as “Romistas” (artists who completed their artistic education in Rome); a few of them are well-known artists today, some were famous at the time but have since been forgotten, whilst others never managed to achieve any recognition. Drawing on perspectives from art history, social history, cultural history, and a substantial body of nineteenth-century periodicals as well as published and unpublished memoirs and letters, my dissertation studies Rome as a communis patria and relates it to the case of Spanish artists. A study of these forty years allows us to explore the Spaniards’ engagement with Papal Rome – a period that was considered a second renaissance for the arts in Spain – as well as the early stages of what has been considered a ‘second international season’ for Rome, when Rome emerged as the capital of the new Italian nation-state, and in which Spaniards played an active role. Focused on painters and sculptors, the dissertation discusses the value of Rome for the history of Spanish romanticism and its early contribution to naturalism through the young Spaniards’ journey towards becoming entrepreneurial artists. Examining the role of training, exhibitions and criticism, the dissertation reconstructs the artistic production (both identified works and those which have not yet been traced) and social networks of Spanish artists in Rome between the 1830s and the 1870s, exploring how their work responded to the local and international opportunities afforded by Rome.