Villa Medicis appeared slowly as an influential place for the early days of Photography, since the experiment of Girault de Prangey in May 1842 till the Golden Age of the Caffé Grecco School in the 1850s. We could also consider the previous twenty years as a decisive moment for Visual creativity. «The Academy was founded at the Palazzo Capranica in 1666 by Louis XIV under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Charles Le Brun and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The Academy was from the 17th to 19th centuries the culmination of study for select French artists who, having won the prestigious Prix de Rome (Rome Prize), were honored with a 3, 4 or 5-year scholarship (depending on the art discipline they followed) in the Eternal City for the purpose of studying art and architecture… In 1803 Napoleon Bonaparte moved it to the Villa Medicis, with the intention of perpetuating an institution once threatened by the French Revolution and, thus, of retaining for young French artists the opportunity to see and copy the masterpieces of the Antiquity or the Renaissance and send back to Paris their “envois de Rome“, the results of their inspiration while in Rome… The heyday of the Prix de Rome was during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.» (Wikipedia)
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