Antonio Sciortino and the British Academy of Arts in Rome

Abstract

In Spring 2010 in Malta Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci began researching the activities of the Maltese Sculptor Antonio Sciortino at the British Academy in Rome, and in particular his role as Director there in the early twentieth century. Meanwhile at the National Portrait Gallery in London Sarah Moulden was mounting a display about the birth of the British Academy over a century before. The present publication is the marriage of these two interlocking research projects, and presents to the reader a fine historical picture of the activities of the leading protagonists at the Academy in Rome from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, a survey sadly incomplete however, since the Academy’s archives went missing after its demise in the late 1930s. This is primarily an art historical story, but is at the same time a gripping political and cultural narrative, evoking the vexed relationship between the British Academy and its older and grander sister institution, the Royal Academy in London. The British Academy, for all its achievements, certainly became the Cinderella of the British artistic presence in Rome. [Excerpt from the introduction by Marjorie Trusted]