Richard Wrigley’s Roman Fever: Influence, Infection, and the Image of Rome, 1700–1870 is a thought-provoking look at Rome—and, it should be noted, also at its wider environs—from an unlikely point of view: the filthy public sanitation and insalubrious atmospheric conditions of the city and outlying areas, and how these factors, together with the evidence surrounding the Roman phenomenon of mal’aria (bad air or climate), affected the “making and viewing of art” by artistic pilgrims sojourning there. Borrowing his title from the 1934 short story “Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton dedicated to the sentimental and physical dangers of Rome’s deadly nighttime climate, Wrigley instead identifies as a “fever” the “irresistibly invasive power” of the attraction of Rome for travelers and artists as a force for creative inspiration, but which, paradoxically, could become a malign force liable to cripple or pervert artistic sensibility and endanger health. While Wrigley claims in his introduction that his is, in part, “an anti-Grand Tour book,” the pages teem with tourists—artists, writers, diarists, and all manner of visitors—whose drawings, paintings, poems, and anecdotal accounts and reports provide the color and background chatter for this intriguing interpretation of Rome’s timeless allure.

The volume is divided into six chapters, the first of which (“Influence: Between Magic and Malady”) addresses the communal and well-established practice of artist and architect travelers copying the great works in situ—the “influence” of Rome as artistic meta—not only to improve their artistic range, but also for professional reasons of patronage, as a sojourn of study in the Eternal City was the best referral for a young artist or architect once returned home. Here Wrigley poses his objective: “How are we to understand influence as being translated into forms of practice and response within the particular conditions of Rome in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?” (12)

Following on from this consideration, and expanding his argument beyond the confines of art-historical debate, in the next three chapters Wrigley identifies a variety of topographic, atmospheric, physical, and physiological aspects affecting visitors in Rome and those who traveled through the Roman outskirts (Campagna) as his point of departure (chapter 2: “Succumbing to Rome”; chapter 3: “‘Something in the Air’: Climate and Inspiration”; chapter 4: “Confronting Mal’aria”). He begins by focusing on the fluctuating Italian definition of the word influenza (from exerting influence to transmitting epidemic or disease)—allied to the English sense of the word “influence”—interpreted not only as aesthetic, but also as the effect of physical climate or setting. Mal’aria is here broadened into a metaphorical expression for the social and ambient conditions plaguing the city and Campagna, as well as for artistic, literary, or cultural stultification or decay. For some visitors, the decline of ancient Rome was caused by mal’aria, while for others, such as Lord Byron, it was the contagion caused by the crush of visitors to the city “pestilential with English” that resonated. To an impressive degree, travelers to Rome couched their words about their cultural experiences in vivid terms of atmospheric, environmental, or health-related jargon, a catalogue of literary effusions which are cited at a dizzying rate.

Throughout the first four chapters, Wrigley evaluates individual travelers’ responses to the lure of the city, ranging from the delusions and anxiety that met some—such as Benjamin Robert Haydon, who could not make the trip but nonetheless dreaded its psychological impact; to Henry Fuseli, who carried his melancholy along with him from abroad; to enthusiasts such as Hector Berlioz, who magically experienced a sense of the poetically sublime at his first glimpse of the city. Others, such as François Boucher, were crushed by the cultural weight of the city’s artistic legacy, unable to invent or design, yet this inadequacy was later construed in terms of physical illness. Traveling to Rome was not just about coming to terms with antiquity and the great Renaissance masters Raphael and Michelangelo, but was a journey of self-discovery and, in some cases, about spiritual and religious convictions and conversions. Freud realized that traveling to Rome was akin to a reckoning with his psyche and that his postponing the journey was “deeply neurotic.” Florence Nightingale was deeply moved by devotional or confessional impulses—she relived a near biblical nighttime journey through the Campagna as a passage that she associated with a migration through the “Valley of Death.” The encounter with Rome engendered as much tribulation as joy, and Wrigley documents that this process had as much to do with experiences of nature and philosophical ideas about health and climate as with the strivings of the human spirit.

Chapter 5, “Fatal Prospects: Visions of the Campagna,” the longest chapter by far (it includes an introduction plus eight separately titled sections), is dedicated overall to a discussion of the representational modes and models adopted by landscapists of the Campagna, from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth century, and how they may be related to changing ideas about topographical and atmospheric conditions. In tracing the art-historical debate over how this genre adopted particular sites and views, and especially over the importance of Claude Lorrain to this development—making critical use of the fundamental investigations on Claude and the Campagna by Mirka Beneš (“Claude Lorrain’s Pendant Landscapes of 1646–50 for Camillo Pamphilj, Nephew of Pope Innocent X. Classicism, Architecture, and Gardens as Context for the Artist’s Roman Patronage,” Storia dell’arte 112 [September–December, 2005]: 37–90) and Lisa Beaven (who has dedicated a series of public lectures to this subject, including the one referred to by Wrigley, “Plague, Pestilence and Death: The Sanitised Vision of Claude Lorrain” [conference paper delivered at international conference, “Claude and the Roman Landscape,” British School at Rome, Rome, June 27 and 28, 2003])—Wrigley builds his argument over the contrast between idealized images and the reality of the barren, deforested landscape. Claude is the touchstone, whether for J. M. W. Turner’s rivalry with the “acknowledged master of Italianate light,” or the Russian Sergey Ivanov, who painted plein air views of the Pontine marshes and also composed a large-scale history painting set in this same scenery, and about whom it would be interesting to know why he was there and why he painted these pictures. Moreover, it should be noted here that the Pontine marshes were topographically very different and visually distinct from the sites Claude generally depicted.

The fourth section of chapter 5, entitled “Corot In Extremis,” treats the radical experimentation of the landscape sketches of the Campagna by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot—early examples of plein air painting produced in 1826–27—from the atmospheric conditions that affected Corot’s ability to compose his pictures. Corot wrote of the climate and how it nearly overcame his artistic facility: “The sun shines with a light which is impossible for me. I feel the complete impotence of my palette.” Sun and heat are themes carried across the last three sections of chapter 5, which treat, in order, Léopold Robert’s Salon painting Arrival of the Harvesters in the Pontine Marshes (1831) and “Primitivism,” which is dedicated not only to contemporaneous historicism and an interest in the indigenous local population but also to commentary and texts that discuss the harsh physical conditions of life in the Campagna. In the last section, entitled “Reception,” Robert’s contemporary critic, Auguste Jal, describing the figures of peasants that Robert has depicted in his Arrival of the Harvesters, writes that they are swarthy because “they are the natural inhabitants of this roasting countryside which is covered by a sky so hot that it would destroy whoever was not fit to endure it” (153–54), a quotation that neatly sums up the author’s points. In concluding this chapter, Wrigley explains that Robert’s Arrival of the Harvesters served as a benchmark for critics of another famous picture exhibited in Paris featuring the Pontine marshes, Ernest Hébert’s La Malaria. Famille italienne fuyant la contagion of 1848–49, a potent image of the treacherous climate which conjures up perfectly the deadly fevers associated with the unforgiving landscape and the human cost to the local populace.

In the final chapter (“‘It Was Dirty, But It Was Rome’: The Perils of Proximity”), Wrigley states: “I will suggest that we should understand the experience of the assembled set pieces and itineraries of Rome’s antiquities, art, and architecture as being intimately connected, both physically and conceptually, to problems of cleanliness and hygiene and the threat of disease” (170). This affirmation is the fruit of a partial interpretation of the extremely complex question of the artistic perception of Rome in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Wrigley notes, other European capitals also struggled with their own disease and hygiene problems. The fact that Rome was filthy and insalubrious and had been so for a great deal longer than other cities was widely broadcast and commented on exactly because Rome was a renowned site of pilgrimage, whether artistically, culturally, touristically, or religiously. Indeed, in Rome, from antiquity onwards, a flow of travelers from all over the world had necessarily come to terms with the ugly urban reality in order to get to the best parts, while also trying to keep their health, sanity, and even life. It is not surprising that these essential questions associated with survival in the city and Campagna were also the subject of correspondence, criticism, diaries, diatribe, and novels, which provided fodder for the visual arts. This is evident from the many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century examples Wrigley has assembled. These he interprets with sensitivity, gauging the nuances of travelers’ responses to Rome and the environment. Roman Fever is a very courageous and, at the same time, very subjective book.