Vincenzo Camuccini
Roman, 1771–1844
Death of Julius Caesar, 1825–29 ca.
Oil on canvas
28 15/16 x 51"
Glasgow Museums, Bequeathed by Mrs. Cecilia Douglas of Orbiston, 1862
318
COMMENTS
As the champion of the most severe mode of Neoclassicism, Vincenzo Camuccini dominated early nineteenth-century Italian art, rivaled only by Antonio Canova. Showered with prestigious commissions and eminent governmental and academic posts, he was self-consciously the culmination of a long tradition of Roman painting leading back through Maratti and Poussin to Raphael. Yet Camuccini first emerged in the late Settecento as a rebellious outsider, nurtured as a young hero of the avant-garde and styling himself as an artistic, moral, and political reformer.
Camuccini initially trained in the studio of Domenico Corvi, the leading Italian painter working at that time in Rome. He broke from this distinguished apprenticeship for an extended, independent campaign in the late 1780s, drawing the works of Raphael and Michelangelo in the Vatican as well as the corpses in the hospital of S. Spirito. These works (Camuccini Collection, Cantalupo) established his lifelong commitment to High Renaissance models and the careful study of the human body, always retaining the precise, controlled draftsmanship instilled by Corvi. His brother Piero, a fast-rising dealer in Rome, also found lucrative work for the young artist copying Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces for the tourist market, indicating that economics fueled Camuccini's split from Corvi. Nonetheless, in its parallel to the careers of Giuseppe Cades and Asmus Jakob Carstens, the fracture also exemplified the splintering of the studio and academy system at the end of the century.
Camuccini developed instead under the close watch of Rome's avant-garde, who saw the youth as a burgeoning model of the modern, reforming artist. Through his brother's connections he associated with Angelika Kauffmann's circles and from the age of thirteen he drew at the Villa Borghese, where he witnessed the collaboration of Rome's most advanced artists and antiquarians on the villa's decoration. Gavin Hamilton's spare, sentimentalizing classicism proved especially influential for Camuccini's first public commission, "Paris entrusted to the Shepherds on Mount Ida". The antiquarian Ennio Quirio Visconti cast an even longer shadow, commissioning drawings of antiquities for his 1796 catalogue of the Borghese collection. Vicsonti urged Camuccini to study ancient visual and textual sources intensely, marshaling antiquity to convey stoic, heroic virtues to modern audiences. From 1790 to 1796 Camuccini also participated in the Accademia de' Pensieri, an alternative academy run by Felice Giani, where the young artist forged ties with the new wave of Italian artists--including Luigi Sabatelli, Giovanni Battista dell' Era, and Gaspare Landi. The Piensieri sketched their initial ideas quickly and spontaneously, a novel procedure that Camuccini subsequently adapted to his own working method, building up slowly from brilliant, turbulent sketches through increasingly clarified drawings and bozzetti [usually small models of intended works] to sleek, carefully worked paintings.
By the early 1790s Camuccini's supporters encouraged the vanguard artist to make a splashy début on Rome's art scene. "The Death of Caesar" and "The Death of Virginia" stand as Camuccini's most significant achievements and established the direction of Italian painting for the next four decades. Begun in 1793 and completed over the next fourteen years, these colossal works developed under intense public scrutiny (Camuccini destroyed the initial version of Caesar in a dramatic, self-sacrificing response to criticism). Completely rejecting his initial foray into sentimental Neoclassicism, Camuccini now adopted a pure, hard-edged language and a drier palatte to present these stoic, moralizing tales of the Roman republic austerely, in a mode linked both to earlier work by Hamilton and Anton Raphael Mengs as well as the work of progressive French artists he knew in Rome, particularly Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Germain Drouais.
Despite the claim of Camuccini's early biographers that he eschewed politics, both "Caesar" and "Virginia" address burgeoning nationalist ideas in turn-of-the-century Rome. Based directly on tragedies of political oppression by Vittorio Alfieri, Camuccini's paintings express the contemporary playwright's militant tone and anti-tyrannical fervor, borne out by the enthusiastic pro-Roman rhetoric that characterized the pictures' reception...
Camuccini's authority held sway until his death, affecting several generations of Roman artists and scholars as a teacher, policy maker, conservator, and curator as well as a painter. Camuccini represented the end of the Roman classical tradition, already perceived as moribund in his last years by younger Nazarene and Purismo artists [rejected neoclassicism and emulated Raphael]. Nonetheless, his aggressive insistence on upholding the eighteenth-century Roman authority of draftsmanship, the unswerving commitment to the High Renaissance, and the notion of the artist as an engaged public servant remain Camuccini's lasting contributions.
Jon L. Seydl, from Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century (2000), pp. 341-342.
http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/biography/8231.html
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Camuccini was the leading Roman exponent of early 19th-century Neoclassicism. The style is characterized by hard, clear draftsmanship, bold colors, sculptural figures and archaeologically correct details.
This painting is based on the account of the assassination of the Emperor Caesar (44 B.C.) in Plutarch’s Life of Brutus (1st century A.D.) The event took place in the Theater of Pompey, recreated here and overseen by an ancient Roman sculpture thought to represent Pompey, the great Roman leader and general. As he is attacked by knifewielding assailants, Caesar falls to one knee and gestures toward his comrade Brutus, who looks away. The painting is probably also based on a popular play of 1786. The overthrow of a dictator is a subject that would have had strong political overtones in Europe in the 1790s. This painting is a smaller version of a monumentally-scaled original, begun in 1793 and now in Naples. This reduced version was commissioned by Mrs. Cecilia Douglas, a wealthy Scottish woman living in Rome.
- Botticelli, Titian, and Beyond, 2015