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Draper Fellows: 2009 | 2007-08

Richard Wittman
Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara (Visiting Fellow)

Richard Wittman Web Bio

Richard Wittman specializes in the cultural history of architecture and town planning, especially of the modern and early modern periods, with secondary research emphases in theory and the historiography of architecture. His primary interest lies in the emergence of modern conceptions and experiences of space, whether architectural, political, personal, scientific, or virtual. His talks and publications explore these themes mainly in connection to seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century France, and, more recently, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Rome. He welcomes the opportunity to work with graduate students interested in theoretically informed, culturally oriented approaches to virtually any aspect of architectural history.

Research Statement

While at UC Berkeley, I plan to make use of the University's excellent library holdings in order to continue my research on nineteenth-century architecture and planning in Rome. This research centers on two projects, one an article and the other a book. Both projects focus on excavating and tracking contemporary opinion on specific new monuments, and therefore depend heavily on 19th-century Italian periodical literature and other topical publications. The Libraries at UCB have excellent holdings in these areas. I also eagerly anticipate the advantage of discussing these projects with scholars at Berkeley, in the Architecture Department certainly, but also in the Italian Studies department and elsewhere.

The article I am planning examines contemporary press coverage and public opinion on the various monuments erected between 1851 and 1890 to commemorate the 1849 Battle at the Porta San Pancrazio on the Gianiculum Hill. Due to the vicissitudes of Italian unification, the Papal victors and, decades later, the Garibaldian losers of the battle were both able to erect commemorative monuments on this battlefield, a stunning site overlooking Rome. All of these monuments still survive, often within sight of one another, and often referring in complex ways to each other and to the monuments of the city below (especially the dome of Saint Peter's and the Victor Emanuel II Monument). Together, they offer the visitor a rich, poignant, yet highly ambiguous memorial landscape that has hardly received any attention from scholars. By investigating contemporary discourse on these successive waves of monuments, and by reconsidering the visitor's experience of the promenade they create, I hope to illuminate another chapter in one of the central themes in modern Italian history, namely, the struggle to define the historical meaning of Rome and control its contemporary significance. I also hope this essay will broaden our awareness of how historical imagery and memorial land- and cityscapes project messages of authority, and how those messages are received, contested, or even misunderstood by the publics they target.

My ongoing book project concerns the Holy See's long reconstruction of the Early Christian basilica of S. Paolo fuori le mura in Rome between 1825 and 1930. This project, for which I recently spent an NEH Fellowship year in Rome, centers on official representations of the reconstruction and their public reception at the Roman, Italian, and international levels. This work draws on a variety of materials, from letters and manuscript memoranda to prints and newspapers (including both Italian journals and major French, English, and American papers like the Revue des Deux Mondes, London Illustrated News, etc.). The book analyzes these public discourses at the historical level, as reflections of a fluctuating political situation in which the Italian nation and Italian nationalism were developing in competition with, though also in emulation of, Church authority; but also in terms of the changing possibilities for architectural representation and experience in the spatially abstract, increasingly mediatized social frameworks characteristic of modernity. In this second perspective, the focus is on how the Catholic Church – an institution with a unique investment in embodiment (starting with the embodiment of God), and thus in the embodied experience of space and time – used architecture over a period when its status as a territorial entity governing the Papal States was challenged and, eventually, terminated, leading to the Church's reinvention as a spiritual empire. The project thus reflects upon the possible meanings of a representational sacred place within the complicated, unstable configuration of space, publicity, embodied experience, abstraction, and sense of community that characterized the Catholic Church as it passed from its early modern to its modern institutional form.