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Vol. LXV, No. 9
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Wednesday, March 2, 2011
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Vol. LXV, No. 9
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Wednesday, March 2, 2011
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“Lasting Impressions of the Grand Tour: Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome” will open Saturday, March 5, at The Princeton University Art Museum, where it will be on view through June 12. “When Men and Mountains Meet: China as Land and People” also opens on March 5 and will be up through June 26. Rome in the 18th century was the ultimate goal for upper-class visitors from Northern Europe and especially Britain, where the term “the Grand Tour” first appeared in print in the late 17th century. Of the numerous contemporary artists in Rome who catered to the demand for mementos of the Grand Tour, the printmaker Giuseppe Vasi (1710-82) was one of the most prolific and affordable, producing etchings that were either individually framed or displayed in bound volumes.
Vasi’s career covers a 46-year period, almost all of it spent in Rome working as a print maker and specializing in vedute (views) of the city, its monuments and spectacles, many of which were inspired by earlier examples by such artists as Israel Silvestre, Giovanni Battista Falda, and Gaspar Van Wittel. His output can be divided into his views of ephemeral structures such as those erected for the Chinea festivals, and secondly his larger output of views of the city of Rome, and especially the 10 volumes of the Magnificenze di Roma (1747-1761), containing over 200 images, and his large horizontal panorama of the city as viewed from the Janiculum Hill, the Prospetto dell’alma città di Roma (1765); the latter was intended to be flanked by his four vertical “prospetti” of the four Patriarchal Basilicas of Rome, thereby creating a uniform ensemble suitable for adorning the wall of a prelate’s apartment in Rome or the study of a Grand Tourist abroad. In an effort at cross marketing, Vasi also published several editions of his pocket-sized guidebook Itinerario istruttivo… in 1763 and 1765, specifically linking his eight-day walking itineraries with the plates and monuments portrayed and indexed in the Magnificenze and Prospetto. While providing historical information on the monuments, he also referenced useful information concerning excellent bakeries and inns.
While Giuseppe Vasi’s works represent over half of the total number of objects in the Princeton venue, there is a strong contextual component, further enhanced by over 10 additional loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Firestone and Marquand Libraries at Princeton University, and by several works from the Museum’s own collections. The exhibit was organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene.
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“When Men and Mountains Meet: China as Land and People” concerns the relationship between land and people in China, and how has it changed from past to present. Selected from the Museum and private collections of Chinese painting, prints, and photography, various ways of imaging man’s relationship to mountains are explored through the ages. The title of the exhibit, which was organized by Curator of Asian Art Cary Y. Liu, is based on William Blake’s line, “Great things are done when Men and Mountains meet /This is not done by Jostling in the Street.” While in traditional China, people can be said to have lived in balance between the unpredictable forces of nature and the manufactured order of civilization, the champions of modernization, progress, and reform in China called for a new relation to the land and to the world, in effect reversing Blake’s line by believing that mankind can dominate nature and control its own destiny “through science, reason, hard work, and perseverance. The past values of a balanced landscape became a casualty of this revolution in culture, which is now undergoing its own serious reevaluation.”
For further information on either exhibit, call (609) 258-3788.