The Society for the History of Collecting

Invites you to its Online Lecture

Art and Patronage in Late 19th century Rome: Reverend Robert J. Nevin and the Church of Saint Paul’s Within the Walls

Prof. Paolo Coen

Thursday August 27, 6.30 pm (BST)

On September 20, 1870, the army of the Kingdom of Italy broke into Rome, which became officially the new capital only a few months later. That date marks the end of the popes’ temporal power.  These events made a huge impact on the urban and social structure of the city. One of the very first episodes of this new phase is tightly connected to a U.S. Episcopalian pastor, the reverend Robert J. Nevin (1839-1906). In 1876 Nevin consecrated Saint Paul’s Within the Walls, the first Protestant church ever built in the heart of the capital of Catholicism. To stress the distance to the Catholic Church he referred to Victorian England, commissioning the architecture from George E. Street, the majolica from Frederick Garrard, the designs for the mosaics from Edward Burne-Jones. This talk highlights the key role of Nevin and Saint Paul’s from many aspects: for instance, I shall highlight as one example, the adoption of materials and production methods, which were characteristic of British industrial revolution and which previously had been almost unknown to the Roman milieu.

Paolo Coen (Bienne, Switzerland, 1967) is professor in Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Teramo and affiliate faculty in Communication Studies. He wrote Le Magnificenze di Roma nelle incisioni di Giuseppe Vasi (1997; 2006 rev. ed.) and Il mercato dei quadri a Roma nel diciottesimo secolo (2010), co-edited Le pietre rivelate: Lo ‘Studio di molte pietre’ di Pier Leone Ghezzi (2012) and edited The Art Market in Rome in the Eighteenth Century. A Study in the Social History of Art (2018). As a visiting professor he taught at the Escola Superior Artistica of Porto (ESAP), Scuola Alti Studi of Lucca (IMT) and the universities of Zagreb, Autonoma of Madrid (UAM), Haifa, Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid and Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge (LSU). Coen’s latest book, Il recupero del Rinascimento (2020), deals with the artistic system of Rome, as the new capital of the Kingdom of Italy (1870-1911)

To register for this event please email events@societyhistorycollecting.org