"The Athens of the Pacfic". Alejandro Cicarelli and the civilized project of the Fine Arts in republican Chile

The author analyses the ideological and esthetic content of the opening speech to the Acaderny of Santiago, given by the Italian painter Alejandro Cicarelli on 17 March 1849. The speech reveals the profound influence that the German Johan Joachim Winkelmann had on the painter’s artistic ideas, whose writings influenced both the organisation and guidelines of the Academy. Thus, the speech highlights the importance of ideal beauty on l9th Century esthetics, the importance given to environmental conditioning in the development of culture, the enormous influence of the classic Greco-Roman referent, and the importance of other guiding principles of academic artistic life such as rationality, science, freedom, the importance of drawing and Christian values.