Republics and empires provides transnational perspectives on the significance of Italy to American art and visual culture and the impact of the United States on Italian art and popular culture. Covering the period from the Risorgimento to the Cold War, it reveals the complexity of the visual discourses that bound two relatively new nations together. It also gives substantial attention to literary and critical texts that addressed the evolving cultural relationship between Italy and the United States. While American art history has tended to privilege French, British and German ties, these chapters highlight a rich body of contemporary research by Italian and American scholars that moves beyond a discussion of influence as a one-way directive towards a deeper understanding of cultural transactions that profoundly affected the artistic expression of both nations.

Introduction - Melissa Dabakis and Paul H. D. Kaplan
Part I: Hybrid republicanisms
1 Past glories, present miseries: nationality, politics, and art in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home - Leonardo Buonomo
2 'Vivat Republica': Washington, D.C. and Rome in early photographic archives - Lindsay Harris
3 Thomas Nast and Giuseppe Garibaldi: the 'Special Artist' and the 'Italian Washington' - Melissa Dabakis
4 Monuments to tyranny: issues of race and power in nineteenth-century American responses to early modern Italian public sculpture - Paul H. D. Kaplan
5 The picturesque political: Charles Caryl Coleman and Elihu Vedder in the circle of the Macchiaioli - Adrienne Baxter Bell
6 William Wetmore Story, Walt Whitman, and Enrico Nencioni: a node in the web of transatlantic 'traffic' in the second half of the nineteenth century - Marina Camboni
7 The Progress of America (1880) by Andrea Cefaly: Victoria Woodhull, Salvatore Morelli and feminist social reform in Italy and America - Maria Saveria Ruga
Part II: The courses of empire
8 Seeing America's tangled threads in John Singer Sargent's Street in Venice - Jane Dini
9 Francesco Pezzicar's L'Abolizione della schiavitù across empires - Caitlin Meehye Beach
10 A transatlantic cultural landscape: America in Rome at the beginning of the twentieth century - Daniele Fiorentino
11 New Deal murals and the myth of the Renaissance - Sergio Cortesini
12 Eterna primavera: Catherine Viviano, Irene Brin and Italian art's conquest of Hollywood - Raffaele Bedarida
13 Sculpture in the (ancient) city: Alexander Calder, David Smith, and Robert Smithson in Italy - Marin R. Sullivan
14 Paul Thek and the muses of Italy: death, decay, and the Technological reliquaries, 1963-67 - Erika Doss
Index

Editors

Melissa Dabakis is Professor Emerita of Art History at Kenyon College

Paul H. D. Kaplan is Professor of Art History at Purchase College, State University of New York