Italy

American muralists working in Renaissance revival buildings were expected to travel to Italy to see the celebrated frescoes of the Italian Renaissance masters. Oakley visited Italy for the first time after she received the commission for the Governor’s Grand Executive Reception Room at the Pennsylvania State Capitol. In the spring of 1903 she embarked on an extended study trip throughout Italy, visiting Rome, Florence, Perugia, Assisi, Siena, Padua, Venice, and Milan. Thereafter she returned to the country to seek ideas for new commissions. To prepare for the Yarnall House murals in 1909, she visited Rome, where she met American expatriate painter Elihu Vedder. Three years later, after receiving her second commission from the Pennsylvania State Capitol, she returned to Rome and visited Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Ravenna, and Naples. On all these occasions, she filled sketchbooks with studies of paintings, architecture, and scenery. As the instructor in mural painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1912 to 1917, Oakley taught the class to emulate Italian frescoes. Calling herself “Giovanni,” her student Edith Emerson successfully wooed Oakley with a letter in Italian pledging her service as an apprentice and later became her life partner.

Exiled from her favorite country by World War I, Oakley made two posters for Italian War Relief: one of coloratura soprano Amelita Galli-Curci and the other of Siena Cathedral, Italy, Guardian of the World’s Most Precious Heritage of Beauty. When she was finally able to return to Europe in 1927–29, she divided her time between attending League of Nations sessions in Geneva in the autumn and living in Florence in the winter and spring. During these “Florentine Interludes,” as Oakley called them, she and Emerson lived among the Anglo-American community there. From 1937 to 1938, Oakley spent several months in Rome attending to an exhibition of her Geneva drawings at Palazzo Antici-Mattei. The enduring inspiration of Italian Renaissance art in Oakley’s life evokes the words of English poet Robert Browning: “Open my heart and you will see/ Grav’d inside of it, ‘Italy.’”