NEW YORK.- The National Academy presents the exhibit Italia! Muse to American Artists. The show is an extraordinary visual journey by 51 American artists who have worked in Italy from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries.

In the early nineteenth century, various sites were mandatory stops on the Grand Tour, a necessary part of an artist's education. While sculptors tended to gravitate toward the art communities in Rome and Florence, painters and printmakers explored nearly every aspect of the Italian landscape, from the intimate canals of Venice in the north, to the dramatically rugged, remote island of Sicily in the south.

Italy continued to serve as an artistic muse for many American artists, even when Paris became the center of the art world and a mecca for art students at the end of the nineteenth century.

In 1895 the American Academy in Rome was formed and American artists and scholars who were awarded the Rome Prize enjoyed a residency, supportive fellowship, and more importantly, a classically-based curriculum as an alternative to the dominant progressive French mode. One National Academician and American Academy alumni wrote in 1929 that, "...it was necessary to brush aside the French influences of the time, to undo the blunders of four centuries of mistaken teaching of the arts, and go back to Rome."

The richness of Italy's physical and cultural landscape has captivated American artists for nearly 200 years, and while not an examination of Italian landmarks, many familiar sights are represented including Roy H. Brown's impressionistic color relief print, Cliffs of Capri, 1847, George Henry Yewell's Interior of St. Mark's, Venice, 1875, and William Gedney Bunce's moody rendering of the Grand Canal, Venice, 1907.

Ernest D. Roth's 1926-27 exquisitely detailed etching, Stones of Venice - Italy, offers a formal approach to a uniquely Italian urban scene. A more modern aesthetic is employed in John Ross's color relief print, Duomo, 1959, and Richard Haas's architectural rendering of the Roman Forum, 1991. Louis Bosa's Monastery in Venezia, 1957, Umberto Romano's playful, Mardi Gras in Italy, 1957, Stephen Antonakos's collage, Sicily, 2001, and Gregory Amenoff's Chianti I, 2004, create a powerful impression of the experiential effect Italy has on artists. The diversity of work and their chronological range in the exhibition testify to the enduring influence that Italy provides.