National Gallery of Art

This volume reexamines the establishment and early history of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, one of the most important centers of governance, education, and theory in the arts for the early modern period and the model for all subsequent academies of art worldwide. Eleven essays by an international group of historians, archivists, and art historians provide the most comprehensive history of the Accademia to be published in more than forty years, and the first in nearly two hundred years to be based almost entirely on primary and documentary material. The authors examine the institution’s founding and development through unpublished documents as well as reinterpretation of technical materials and theoretical treatises. In so doing, they also provide new means for following the progress of the most significant artists—in addition to a host of lesser-known painters, sculptors, and architects—who were working in Rome in the early seventeenth century. Copublished by the National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press.

The studies of artists and concepts in this volume present Dada as a prodigiously creative avant-garde that cohere, for all their diversity, around the radical reinvention of the nature of the art object. Among the strategies elaborated are the appropriation and transformation of the structures of a new media culture and marketplace, the performance of forms of modern identity, and the reworking of history and memory. Filling a broad gap in the history of modern art, this collection of twelve essays offers both an important revision of our understanding of this influential movement and a starting point for reflection on the origins of many forms of contemporary artistic practice.