The genius of Rome: putting things together

Abstract

The title of the 2001 exhibition ‘The Genius of Rome’, held in London and Rome, is ambiguous. The curatorial meaning is that the simultaneous presence of painters, patrons and other power brokers during two and a half decades made ‘the birth of the baroque’ possible. Through a thematic distribution, the exhibition attempts to convey the temporal and spatial convergence implied by the title. One can also take the title to refer to Rome not simply as a location, as a site where things happened to happen, but as a social, institutional and political unit with causal powers. Rome, then, not only houses people of genius; it itself has genius - that of the power brokers of church and state. A third connotation equally active in this exhibition is the individualizing, narrativizing one that leads up to Caravaggio. Through an analysis of the relationship between the title of the exhibition, the idea or concept of ‘baroque’ and the thematic arrangement of the paintings, the disciplinary distinction between art history, cultural history and visual culture studies is clarified. This article argues that the interdisciplinary study of visual culture is best served when visual culture allows itself to bleed over into cultural history, and the latter allows itself to become self-reflexive to the point of becoming what I have dubbed ‘preposterous’: an interdiscursive understanding of ‘baroque’ can de-center, and then, on different terms, re-center, those art works that help us, ourselves, to be ‘baroque’.