ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines early eighteenth-century Rome when we witness a reaction to the elaborate literary devices and illusionistic techniques that characterised the previous Baroque period. During an age of declining papal patronage in the design of palatial palaces, artists and architects sought alternative commissions in the ephemera of festival and stage design, exemplified for example in the famous Festa della Chinea. This provided the impetus for a revival of interest in the pastoral language of the vernaculars, and how returning to simpler (bucolic) narratives in both literature and in the visual arts could eradicate the excesses (and conceits) of Baroque hyperbole. With the decline in papal commissions came initiatives to preserve religious buildings from the early Christian period, an activity that further endorsed the need to return to a more ‘primitive’ language of architecture. The chapter will focus principally on the establishment of the Accademia degli Arcadi on the Janiculum Hill in Rome, a literary academy originally founded by the abdicated Queen Christina of Sweden, which counted among its members clerics, architects and poets. The academy, with its famous garden theatre where poems were recited, played a key role in advancing a new poetic sensibility of language through the so-called ‘Republic of Letters’, a long-distance community of intellectuals where ideas were exchanged through letters. These included the correspondence of Giambattista Vico (professor of rhetoric in Naples), whose transformations of classical rhetoric were also to find parallel architectural developments.
