Roman Holiday

To budding U.S. artists and scholars who need time to polish their talents, a prize indeed is the Prix de Rome--a year or more at Rome's secluded American Academy. In a setting that might have inspired Horace, the yellow-walled palazzo sits serenely atop the Janiculum hill, Rome's highest, where the eye is on a level with St. Peter's dome, and a languid fountain dripping in the courtyard is louder than the city's raucous Vespas. If the place is out of this world, the effect jolts men to hard, realistic work. "I know I'll never get another chance like this in my life," says one sweaty sculptor. Adds a painter: "For me, coming here was like a kick in the pants." The kick is aimed at serious young people who are on the brink of important work in art, architecture, literature and classical studies. Carefully culled by seven juries of U.S. experts, who meet annually in Manhattan, the winners each get $3,000 a year, a free room in the Academy and a spacious studio. They can do what they please, and work pleases most of them. Said one admiring academy director: "They work so hard it frightens me."

Freedom &Riches. This week the academy named 13 new fellows for next year, ranging from Latinist Richard Brilliant, 30, a Yale doctoral candidate, to Latvian-born Astra Zarina Haner, 30, an apprentice of Detroit's famed Architect Minoru Yamasaki. Like the 27 current fellows, all are likely to be profoundly invigorated by the academy's unique formula: freedom amid Rome's riches, from the ancient Forum to the soaring Olympic stadium.

Says California Painter Ricco Lebrun: "Rome's greatness says, 'We have achieved our ideals. You can achieve yours.' " Stirred by the Sistine Chapel, Lebrun is hard at work on a vast vinylite-and-cement mural, depicting scenes from Genesis. Equally inspired by Rome is Harvard-trained Henry Millon, 33, art historian and architect. "I have spent hours staring at St. Peter's," says he, "and I've now decided that Delia Porta was wrong in his elevation of the curve of the dome. It may have all kinds of effect on my work." Rome has also transformed Princeton-bred Musician John Eaton 24, who in his younger days barnstormed the U.S. with a jazz combo. Eaton has set John Donne's sonnets to music, launched a three-hour opera based on Sophocles' Trachiniae and Seneca's Hercules Oetaeus. "I hated this oriental city the first month," says he. "But an eclectic city has made the inner voices clearer. I've narrowed down to composing, and found myself."

The Real World. Founded in 1894 by Charles McKim, a turn-of-the-century architect who designed Chicago World's Fair buildings in a borrowed Roman style, the academy began as a place for young U.S. architects to drink at the source of McKim's inspiration. Endowed partly by J. P. Morgan the elder and chartered by Congress, it soon took in artists and classicists. Now, aided by 50 U.S. colleges and universities, it stands as one of the finest overseas representatives of U.S. culture. Among its alumni: Playwright Thornton Wilder, Classicist Robert F. Goheen (see above), Novelists Ralph Ellison and William Styron, Poets Richard Wilbur and John Ciardi, Composers Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions.

The academy's recently appointed 13th director, New York Architect Richard Kimball, is anxious to renovate the elegant but ailing villa ("With us, it's boiling water or none," says one fellow's wife). But the men on Janiculum hill have little complaint beyond the plumbing. Stimulated by endless debates on life, art and talent in the atmosphere of ancient Rome, they have grown in every way. "Before I came here," says San Francisco Architect Aldo Casanova, 31, "I only studied and taught. Now, in what is supposed to be seclusion, I feel as though I have been exposed to the real world for the first time."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.