The Newport Piccolo Simposio: Italian Influence in Newport
A daylong symposium, which includes The Cultural Landscape Foundation's President + CEO, Charles A. Birnbaum, will examine the centuries of Italian influence that descended on Newport, R.I. during the Gilded Age. Buildings, interiors, landscapes and art collections spread across the island, resulting in a multi-disciplinary tribute to Italian design. While Chateau-sur-Mer began as an Italianate villa, its exterior renovations reflecting French themes occurred while its interiors received Florentine treatments by the acclaimed artist Luigi Frullini. Richard Morris Hunt brought the palazzos of Renaissance Genoa to The Breakers with his colossal 1892 design for the Vanderbilts. Edward Berwind joined the trend of his peers and purchased dozens of Venetian masterpieces to line the walls and halls of The Elms.
Itinerary
8:30 AM: Check in at Rosecliff and continental breakfast.
9 AM– 12 PM: Morning lightning-round sessions at Rosecliff (approximately 30 minutes each with a 10-minute Q&A session following each speaker for in-person audience only).
12:05 – 1:10 PM: Boxed lunch.
1:10 – 2 PM: Final lightning-round speaker at Rosecliff (Q&A for in-person audience only) and closing remarks.
2:15 – 4 PM: House tours of The Breakers, Chateau-sur-Mer and The Elms (previous signup required; more information to come).
5:30 – 7 PM: Reception at Rosecliff.
Video recordings of each speaker’s presentation will be made available for in-person and virtual attendees.
Keynote Speaker: Nathaniel Silver, Associate Director and Chief Curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Italy and the American Collector: Isabella Stewart Gardner and her Gilded Age Peers
Of the more than 37 countries visited by Isabella Stewart Gardner during her lifetime, she returned to Italy more frequently than anywhere else. Silver will explore Gardner's pioneering taste for Italian art, architecture, and culture, how it shaped her collection and the museum she built to house it, and some of the friends and colleagues who helped her bring the Renaissance to life in Boston. This talk will further address Gardner's contemporaries, showing the breadth of their intersecting interests in Italy.
About the speaker: Nathaniel Silver is the Associate Director and Chief Curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. He has fifteen years of experience in fine art museums and cultural institutions including The Frick Collection, J. Paul Getty Museum, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and as Executive Director and CEO at Hancock Shaker Village. In his previous role at the Gardner as the William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection and Division Head, Silver oversaw collections, conservation and archives and curated or co-curated more than a dozen exhibitions. These include the acclaimed Titian: Women, Myth, and Power and Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent. He holds a Ph.D. in art history from University College London.
Catherine Hess, Former Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Getty Museum and former Chief Curator of European Art at The Huntington Museum
The Lure of Italy: The Case of Gilded Age Newport and Chateau-sur-Mer
Just before and after the turn of the twentieth century, American men and women of great means developed a taste for Italian art and furnishings of the past. Their motives can be explained by a complex mixture of yearning, discernment, and insecurity. The material and ideas they brought back to the U.S. impacted the art market, collecting and, indeed, the definition of sophistication for many decades. In Newport, George and Edith Wetmore engaged Luigi Frullini, a brilliant wood carver from Florence, to create a masterpiece of furniture and interior elements for Chateau-sur-Mer's library and dining room. Hess will examine the Wetmores’ selection of Frullini as a vivid, lasting example of Gilded Age Italophilia.
About the speaker: Catherine Hess was a curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Getty Museum, L.A., from 1984 to 2008 and then served as chief curator of European art at The Huntington Museum from 2008 to 2020. She also was director of a small art school for underserved young adults until 2023. In her curatorial work, she published, lectured about and produced exhibitions on European glass, ceramics, furniture and sculpture. She attended the Museum Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University and served on the National Endowment for the Art Indemnity Panel in Washington, D.C. She believes that the craft of art can be a source of profound inspiration, delight and knowledge.
Sarah Cartwright, Chief Curator and Ulla R. Searing Curator of Collections at The John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art
Fundament and Fantasy: Italian Renaissance Inspiration at The Breakers
By examining specific examples, both small and large, Cartwright will consider some of the ways that elements of Italian Renaissance architecture, design and decoration were reinterpreted at The Breakers, the massive Newport summer residence of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and family, designed by Richard Morris Hunt and completed in 1895. Of particular interest will be the contrast in the home’s design between architectural clarity and elaborate ornamentation, as well as the variety of all’antica (classicizing) visions the home conveys.
About the speaker: Sarah Cartwright is Chief Curator and Ulla R. Searing Curator of Collections at The Ringling. She has a PhD in Art History and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Prior to her arrival at The Ringling in 2013, Cartwright was a research associate at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University and a curator at Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy. At The Ringling, Cartwright is responsible for the museum’s collection of European and American paintings, sculpture and works on paper from antiquity to 1900 CE. She has published and presented on a wide array of subjects, ranging from Italian manuscript illumination to ancient carved gemstones to the 19th-century French painter Rosa Bonheur. Recent projects at The Ringling have included curating the exhibition Guercino’s Friar with a Gold Earring: Fra Bonaventura Bisi, Painter and Art Dealer and co-authoring its catalogue.
Charles A. Birnbaum, President + CEO, The Cultural Landscape Foundation
The Influence of the Italian Villa Landscape on Garden Design and Landscape Preservation in America
The Italian Villa landscape has been celebrated in America since the turn of the last century. Since the publication of Charles Platt’s Italian Gardens (1894), there has been a succession of popular books aimed at America’s quest for beauty and antiquity. Birnbaum’s presentation will explore the period from 1890 through the 1930s when Americans had a thirst for Italian Villa landscapes. Although much has been written about these built works, little attention has been paid on the early American Academy in Rome (AAR) fellows and the Italian influences they imported to the U.S. This presentation will explore the palimpsest of historic preservation and design decisions made at iconic Italian villas and gardens, as recorded by early AAR Fellows in Landscape Architecture as part of their documentation plans, planting plans, regional surveys, illustrative landscape “restoration” and “reconstruction” plans.
About the speaker: Prior to serving as The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) President + CEO, Birnbaum spent fifteen years with the National Park Service and a decade in private practice in New York City. Birnbaum was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a Rome Prize recipient. He was awarded American Society of Landscape Architects’ LaGasse Medal (2008), President’s Medal (2009), the ASLA Medal (2018) and the Olmsted Medal (2023). He served as a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (2020-); Visiting Professor, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture (2011-16); and Glimcher Distinguished Professor, Ohio State (2007). In 2019 TCLF unveiled the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, a permanently endowed biennial honor that includes a $100,000 award.
Remy Renzullo, Interior Decorator and Antiques Adviser
Remy Renzullo and Leslie Jones, Director of Museum Affairs and Chief Curator at the Preservation Society, will join in conversation to discuss The Elms. While the 1901 mansion is styled after a French chateau, Italian influence permeates its interior, with the Dining Room in particular paying spectacular homage to Venice. Remy and Leslie’s discussion will also capitalize on Remy's extensive interior design experience and explore how ideas of the past continue to influence the homes of today, both old and new.
About the speaker: Remy Renzullo is an interior decorator and antiques adviser working between the United States, United Kingdom and Italy with a specialty in period interiors. Raised in rural New England and New Mexico, Renzullo founded his design firm in New York eight years ago at the age of 25 and quickly established a reputation for unfussy but thoughtful interiors, with a strong focus on furniture from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Renzullo has since established a notable presence in the United Kingdom and Italy, working on historically and architecturally important projects.