After a five-month sojourn in Rome, the author Henry James departed with “an acquired passion for the place.” The year was 1873, and he wrote eloquently of his ardor, expressing appreciation for the beauty in the “solemn vistas” of the Vatican, the “gorgeous” Gesù church, and the “wondrous” Villa Madama. Such were the impressions of a Bostonian who spent much of his adult life in Europe. By contrast, in June of 1885, the young Boston architect Herbert Langford Warren wrote to his brother about how he was “glad to be out of Italy.” He had just concluded a four-month tour there. He had also visited England and France, and he was convinced that the architecture and sculpture of those countries were superior to what he had seen in Italy, although he admired Italian Renaissance painting. When still in Rome, he told his brother how disagreeable he found the “Renaissance architecture in Italy contemporary with Michael Angelo and later under Palladio and Vignola,” preferring the work of English architects Inigo Jones and Wren. Warren appreciated some aspects of the Italian buildings of the 15th and early 16th centuries, but he considered the grandeur and opulence of later Renaissance architecture especially distasteful.
Building a Mystery: Giorgio de Chirico and Italian Renaissance Painting
