374
state police. In effect it was a priest state, (priests were
the only industry) with many public executions by guil-
lotine. D’Alessandri was used therefore to project the
image of a different society, one of affl uence, stability:
propagating the establishment’s culture, by demonstrat-
ing through photography these perceived virtues. When
the Bourbons fl ed from Naples in 1862 their court added
itself to Rome’s glamorous society, along with Roman
aristocracy and the rich and famous who were still on
the Grand Tour, all became the clients of the photog-
rapher-priest, such as: ‘Alessandro Torlonia and his
daughter,’ 1872, (Torlonia was the richest man in Rome
in the 19th Century) or that of ‘HRH Prince of Wales.
the future King of England,’ 1859. The Pope continued
to demonstrate his control by public displays using his
photographer: ‘Pope Pius IX blessing the Column of the
Immaculate Conception,’ 1857, which commemorated
his 1854 dogma. In 1864, he set his face against science
with his ‘Syllabus of Errors’ that ruled that scientifi c
theory must always be subservient to church teaching.
Just as the photographic topographers, for technical
reasons, displayed the cityscape as an empty, barely
populated, peaceful sanctuary of aesthetic splendour,
of ruin and palace, these organised political photo-
graphs, along with the portraiture of Rome’s ‘nobility,’
hid the real world that was taking place in the street.
D’Alessandri does not portray the fi eld labourers who
lived out their lives, just beyond the boundary of Rome,
in grass huts, or demonstrate a Rome of street beggars,
rampant malaria, unsanitary conditions, poverty, where
the education system, also ran by the church, produced
a country with 78% illiteracy. The mask slips, albeit
unintentionally, only a few times: D’Alessandri took
perhaps the fi rst examples of Italian photojournalism:
the Papal troops at Anzio, 1862, and the battlefi elds of
Mentana and Monterotondo in 1867 which were repro-
duced in the L’Illustration, Journal Universal (Paris),
no doubt to much French enthusiasm. At Mentana,
north east of Rome, Garibaldi’s ragged 4,700 red shirts’
march on Rome were wiped out by 12,000 French and
Papal troops. D’Allesandri depicts the empty battle-
fi eld littered with corpses, not with intended sadness
but presumably as a warning to the citizens. Just as the
photograph of ‘Pius IX blessing the troops at Campi
di Annibale,’ 1868, is meant to signify virtue. But in
1870, with the French once more changing sides, the
breach in the city walls of the 20th September, marked
the end of the Pope’s temporal power after 14 centuries
of rule. His introduction of the ‘Dogma of Infallibility’
in the same year, and his declaration that he was now a
prisoner in the Vatican, did nothing to stop the Unifi ca-
tion. It also marked the end of D’Alessandri’s Pontifi cal
contract: ‘Padri del Concilio Ecumenico,’ 1870, being
one of the last of such photography commissions. But
the great and the good continued to be his clients and,
presumably in defi ance of the Pope, D’Alessandri went
on to photograph the new rulers.
It is most unusual for a priest to become interested
in photography and very rare, if not unique, for one
to run a successful business, even in the Papal States
where all businesses had to obtain a Vatican licence.
To date, there is no understanding of how his interest
came about. As he had no artistic training, this might
explain his gravitation to portraiture, as distinct from
landscape and architecture, but it does not explain his
concentration on producing expensive photographsD’ALESSANDRI, FRATELLI
D’Alessandri, Paolo Francesco. Inner
view of an Intalian Renaissance
Palace.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles © The J. Paul Getty Museum.