Eirik Arff Gulseth Bøhn The Gods in the Gardens: Appropriating and Representing Antiquity in the Roman Baroque Villa

This Ph.D. project is part of Printing the Past. Architecture, Print Culture, and Uses of the Past in Modern Europe (PriArc), an international, multidisciplinary research project funded by the EU’s HERA program (Humanities in the European Research Area) and led by OCCAS (The Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies).
 
How was the ancient Roman past, as known to the seventeenth-century city through the topoi of its literature, enacted within the walled confines of the city’s baroque villas?  This research project will investigate villa properties in Early Modern Rome as topographic, architectural and artistic sites that generated spatial and temporal continuum with the ancient city, and explore how the villa, through the arrangement, rewriting and representation of material fragments of antiquity, constituted a microcosm of Rome and its past.
 
It will investigate how the villa, as a nucleus for artistic production, constituted the genesis for artworks that engaged in dialogues with this material antiquity, giving rise to artistic encounters between a past reformulated and a retrospective present. Finally, it will explore how an apparatus of print culture represented, flattened and disseminated these aspects of the villa, rendering the site as a microcosm in print. By looking at this sum production of images contained within and produced around the villa, the project ultimately aims at an understanding of how Roman seventeenth-century scholars, princes, architects and artists beheld their own times by mirroring themselves in a reconstructed past.
 

Institute of Form, Theory and History / Victor Plahte Tschudi (Supervisor)

PhD started in 2016