Rome Measured and Imagined: Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City 9780226127774

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R o m e M e a s u r e d and Imag i ned

E a r ly M o d e r n M a p s of the E te r nal C i ty

Rome Measured and Imagined Jessica Maier

T h e U n i v e r s i t y of C h ic ago Pr e ss C hicag o a nd London

is assistant professor of art history at Mount Holyoke College.

Jessica Maier

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­12763-­7 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­12777-­4 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226127774.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Maier, Jessica, author. Rome measured and imagined : early modern maps of the Eternal City / Jessica Maier. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-­0-­226-­12763-­7 (cloth : alk. paper) —­ ISBN 978-­0-­226-­12777-­4 (e-­book)  1. Cartography—­Italy—­ Rome.  2. Rome (Italy)—­Maps.  3. Rome (Italy)—­Description and travel.  I. Title. DG809.M35 2015 912.456'32—­dc23 2014024563 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–­1992

(Permanence of Paper).

To my parents—­my father, Charles Maier, and the memory of my mother, Pauline Maier—­with great love, admiration, and gratitude

Contents

Acknowledgments · xi Introduction

“Icarus Spreading His Wings”: The Early Modern City Brought to Life  ·  1 Chapter One

Toward a New City Image: Leon Battista Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae (ca. 1450) and Francesco Rosselli’s Lost View of Rome (ca. 1485–­90)  ·  19 Late Medieval Origins  ·  20 Alberti’s Survey of Rome  ·  25 Rosselli’s Rome in Twelve Sheets  ·  31 Chapter Two

Putting Rome into Drawing: The Lessons of Architecture and Antiquity in the Early 1500s  ·  49 Raphael’s Call to Preserve, Measure, and Draw the Ruins  ·  51 Raphael’s Larger Goals and Audience  ·  57 Drawn from the Grave: Illustrated Works on Ancient Rome after Raphael  ·  60 Pictorialism Revisited · 70

vii

Chapter Three

Syntheses: Leonardo Bufalini’s Plan of Rome (1551)  ·  77 Origins, Form, and Function of Bufalini’s Plan  ·  79 Bufalini’s Background and Intended Audience  ·  86 Bufalini and the Art of Surveying  ·  91 Ancient and Modern in Bufalini’s Map  ·  96 The Early Reception and Influence of Bufalini’s Map · 108 The Modern Reception of Bufalini’s Map  ·  117 Chapter Four

Antitheses: Ancient and Modern Rome in Sixteenth-­Century Imagery · 119 Bartolomeo Marliani, Pirro Ligorio, and the “Memory of Ancient Things”  ·  120 Stefano Du Pérac, the Ancient Forma urbis, and the City Renewed  ·  133 Mario Cartaro and the Paragone of Ancient and Modern · 143 Roman Print Culture, Dissemination, and the Market  ·  152 Chapter Five

“Before the Eyes of the Whole World”: The City Writ Large, 1593–­1676  ·  163 Antonio Tempesta’s Prospectus and Its Progeny: Painterly Approaches to the Reenergized City  ·  167 Matteo Greuter, Giovanni Battista Falda, and Architectural Approaches to Seventeenth-­Century Rome  ·  190

Contents

 · viii

Epilogue

The Eternal City Measured and Imagined  ·  211 Notes · 231  Index · 263 Plates follow page  ·  148

Contents

 · ix

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the goodwill and generosity of colleagues, librarians, institutions, and funders, not to mention friends and family. I received the gift of space and time to work, as well as material assistance and countless stimulating discussions, while resident at the American Academy in Rome in 2003–­5, the recipient of a Donald and Maria Cox–­ Samuel H. Kress Foundation Predoctoral Rome Prize Fellowship. Other sponsors include the Newberry Library in Chicago, the J. B. Harley Research Trust, Columbia University, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. I spent many happy hours doing research in Avery Library at Columbia University, the Vatican Library, and the British Library, among others. More recently, my home institution, Mount Holyoke College, gave me leave to finish my manuscript and contributed to the costs of publication. Many individuals helped this project at various stages. Its seeds were sown while I was a graduate student at Columbia University, where I had the great fortune to work with David Rosand, Hillary Ballon, and Richard Brilliant. More recently, Evelyn Lincoln, Pamela Long, and Sarah McPhee read drafts of various chapters and offered helpful critique. Equally valuable was the input

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of the anonymous reviewers who read the manuscript as first submitted to the University of Chicago Press. I have been privileged to work with a marvelous team at UCP—­in the beginning, Susan Bielstein, who encouraged me to rework and submit my manuscript, then Abby Collier, Mary Laur, Logan Smith, and Erik Carlson, who saw it through to publication. Others who have made meaningful contributions include Peter Barber, Mario Bevilacqua, Michael Bury, Allan Ceen, Joseph Connors, Brian Curran, Catherine Delano-­Smith, David Friedman, Allyson Glazier, James Harper, Chriscinda Henry, Ann Huppert, Victoria Morse, John Pinto, Dana Prescott, Katherine Rinne, Ingrid Rowland, Jim Tice, Herica Valladares, and Dena Woodall. Vincent Buonanno deserves special mention, for his generosity in sharing his extraordinary collection of printed material on Rome has been a major catalyst for studies like my own, and for exhibitions on the Eternal City throughout the United States. I would also like to thank my colleagues at Mount Holyoke and the Five Colleges, including my chair, Bettina Bergmann, as well as Gülru Çakmak, Monika Schmitter, John Varriano, Wendy Watson, and too many others to name. On a professional and personal level, my husband, Nick Camerlenghi, not only bolstered morale at critical junctures but also read every chapter and footnote, sometimes multiple times, bringing his extensive knowledge about Rome and an eye to subtlety of argument. Our son Matteo, born when the book was close to complete, provided some much needed diversion at the painful late stages. My parents, both historians, have been my greatest inspirations as scholars, and my most ardent supporters. My mother did not live to see this book finished, but she cheered me on through much of its long gestation, and I can only hope it lives up to her high standards.

Acknowledgments

 · xii

Introduction

“Icarus Spreading His Wings” The Early Modern City Brought to Life

In 1551, Leonardo Bufalini (d. 1552), an otherwise obscure military engineer, published an extraordinary map of Rome (plate 1). This enormous woodcut is the first surviving monumental printed image of the city. Its appearance set the stage for a remarkable series of works over the next two centuries by Stefano Du Pérac, Antonio Tempesta, Matteo Greuter, Giovanni Battista Falda, and others, culminating in Giovanni Battista Nolli’s Pianta grande of 1748 and Giuseppe Vasi’s breathtaking panoramic view of 1765. Taking its place alongside magnificent predecessors like Francesco Rosselli’s view of Florence (ca. 1482–­90) and Jacopo de’ Barbari’s bird’s-­eye view of Venice (1500), Bufalini’s map helped to inaugurate the Roman line of a grand commemorative tradition that was a highlight of early modern print and heralded a new appreciation for great cities. The history of that genre, recounted through imagery of the Eternal City, is the subject of this book. Bufalini’s map was a rarity in this realm, for it was a horizontal ground plan based on survey and made to scale—­the first such orthogonal representation of Rome since antiquity. With its measured graphic language, the map

1

presents a stark contrast to the pictorial views that dominated urban imagery. In fact, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the street plans of today and is indeed their ancestor with regard to graphic type, but Bufalini’s plan should not be mistaken for a modern, utilitarian map of the city. It was not intended for wayfinding or documentary purposes. Despite its geometric exactitude, the map is tinged with nostalgia and fueled by creative license, much like its pictorial brethren. Bufalini reconstructed invisible ruins to a state of invented wholeness even as he mapped the latest urban changes with unprecedented accuracy, creating a timeless fusion of classical and Christian, imagination and reality. Poised at the juncture of antiquarian, artistic, and technical culture, his map was a visual monument to Rome across time, not a faithful rendering of its sixteenth-­century form. For this very reason, it is at once an eloquent testament to the unique status of the Eternal City in the early modern imagination and an important test case for the representation of all cities. Bufalini’s plan was a watershed that rested on more than a century of advances in urban and architectural representation, and it heralded a particularly intense period of experimentation during which artists continued to seek new ways of depicting the city and its built environment. The map is, therefore, the fulcrum of this study, which spans the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries—­ encompassing the rise and peak of city imagery as a genre for popular consumption, as well as the entirety of the early modern period. The story begins with a transformation in urban representation, from medieval depictions of cities that tended to be generic or schematic, to Renaissance portrayals of specific places that emphasized eyewitness experience and measurement while still allowing room for creative intervention. This development ultimately reached its grandest realization in highly sophisticated works of the 1600s. The following century brought another decisive shift, this time toward the modern: a new impulse to segregate imagery according to empiricism and invention, cartography and artistry. This book traces this larger narrative, along the way offering a synthesis of an extraordinary corpus of imagery. But it does more than that, for it also recounts the history of a genre that developed in step with a rapidly changing city and culture; expands our knowledge of a category of printed imagery that has not received its due; explores core questions of representation that preoccupied scholars, artists, and architects; enhances our understanding of the development of early modern cartography; and grants new insight into larger historical forces such as the extent and limits of ruling power as reflected through maps and other visual forms of communication.

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The most common label applied to city images of all types in Renaissance Italy was not “map” or “view”—­although these terms came to be used frequently enough in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—­but rather ritratto, or “portrait.” This choice was not accidental. In the late Middle Ages, culture came to be concentrated in cities as urban populations grew across Europe. Beginning in the 1400s, cities, like people, were increasingly seen as individual entities defined by distinct features, qualities, and symbolic virtues that artists and patrons sought to commemorate visually, idealizing the subject. Abstract ideas about identity had to be conveyed by means of external appearances—­that is, invisible virtues and markers of character had to be made visible. Both kinds of portrait answered to a desire to create a lasting memorial. The subject, more­ over, had to be recognizable: it was critical that the image embody a physical resemblance.1 In city imagery, the shift toward likeness was facilitated by a convergence of parallel developments: pictorial perspective formulated by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–­72), cartographic methods transmitted through the second-­century geographer Claudius Ptolemy, and improvements in surveying spearheaded by architects and military engineers. Together these techniques provided the framework for representing the urban fabric—­including its buildings, infrastructure, and topography—­as a unified whole, as well as new illusionistic and expressive possibilities. Because these advances took place in a variety of realms, this book will address a broad range of materials relating to architecture, surveying, antiquarianism, and the visual arts. The main focus is, however, the category that Richard Kagan has described as “public images”—­prints that were published and circulated fairly widely.2 From its origins in the fifteenth century, the city portrait rapidly became one of the most popular categories of early modern print culture. Indeed, while the earliest examples considered in this book are miniatures or paintings for a restricted audience, soon enough prints became the source of innovation that then radiated outward to other media. The proliferation of this genre was tied to additional historical factors: the growing desire to see and thus to know distant or renowned places; to understand the geographic contexts for newsworthy events; to visualize expanding networks of trade, conquest, and culture; or alternatively to proclaim publicly the splendors of a given town. Some early examples are closely tied to the verbal genre of encomiums (or elaborate praise) of cities—­essentially,

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literary portraits that lauded the virtues of a particular place as though it were an exceptional human being, singling out physical features as manifestations of intangible qualities. Florence, the proudest city of the early Renaissance, is a case in point. A mid-­fifteenth-­century manuscript of Poggio Bracciolini’s history of the city includes a view isolating its most important monuments, while Rosselli’s independently published view of Florence from about a half century later echoes the content of Leonardo Bruni’s Laudatio Florentinae urbis (ca. 1403–­4), illustrating many of the same urban features as the text. Whether written or visual, city portraits pointed to a city’s visible identity as an urbs—­a place built of brick and mortar—­to reveal its virtues as a civitas, a place defined by human associations and the spirit of its citizenry.3 More generally, city portraits offered a novel forum for a competitive comparison or paragone of places. Proud natives could declare the beauty of their own city over all rivals with an image more easily than they could build a larger cathedral or taller bell tower. Remote readers leafing through a book like the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, with its hundreds of town views, could compare cities the world over without leaving their libraries. Viewers became visitors, traversing the cityscape with their eyes. In the preface to Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s wildly popular city atlas, the Civitates orbis terrarum, or Cities of the World (Cologne, 1572–­1617), the editors famously presented the compendium as a safer, less arduous alternative to a real journey. “With the present work,” they wrote, “we have relieved lovers of history of the hardship, danger, and expense of traveling.”4 The surging demand for urban imagery manifested itself in a rich variety of contexts and formats. Works were produced in great numbers, ranging from cheap, topical ephemera depicting recent sieges and battles or newly fortified perimeters to sumptuous illustrated books and manuscripts; large, commemorative prints of great and timeless cities; and painted cycles for the most elite settings. These images could function in myriad ways: as broadsheets spreading news of recent events, didactic tools, travel substitutes, mementos, and symbols of prestige. They could express power, learning, or longing. Their diversity responded to the desires of a wide spectrum of viewers. The grandest works were enormous and costly, their production time consuming and labor intensive. Rosselli’s engraved view of Florence and Barbari’s woodcut view of Venice—­the two most famous early printed examples—­were luxury items: lavish, multisheet works of art meant for ostentatious display. Like portraits of people, these evocative images were never mere records of appearance. Instead, they were distinctly celebratory distillations of identity, meant to memorialize the history and unique qualities of an urban setting.

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Renaissance city imagery was thought to be sanctioned by classical authority. Ptolemy’s influential Geography resurfaced in the context of Florentine humanism around 1400, helping to catalyze an already growing interest in measuring and representing places.5 Although the treatise addressed the mapping of larger regions and the world, Ptolemy’s principles for mapping territory according to a system of geometric coordinates were adapted to urban cartography by Alberti, and some of the first Renaissance city portraits appeared in manuscripts of the Geography by the Florentine miniaturist Piero del Massaio (1420–­ca. 1473/80). Ptolemy’s theoretical introduction, in particular, affected Renaissance attitudes toward city imagery. Early in his treatise, Ptolemy laid out mathematical rules for representing the three-­dimensional world on a flat surface, and he distinguished two cartographic categories: geography, which was global in scope, and chorography—­a more obscure term derived from the Greek for “region” (chora)—­which referred to smaller-­scale mapping, and which many Renaissance interpreters associated most closely with city imagery. “The goal of chorography,” Ptolemy wrote in a well-­ known prefatory passage, “is to deal separately with a part of the whole. . . . For, as [is the case] in an entire painting, we must first put in the larger features, and afterwards those detailed features which portraits and pictures may require.”6 Ptolemy’s portraiture analogy became something of a trope in learned Renaissance circles. In an edition of the Geography published by Peter Apian in Antwerp in 1545, the idea was illustrated with a spherical earth next to a man’s bust, standing for geography, and a walled town next to an eye and ear alone, for chorography (fig. 1). The connections linking chorography and portraiture ran deeper than such a visual metaphor. On a basic level, their goals were identical. “Chorography,” Ptolemy continued, “is most concerned with what kinds of places it describes. . . . Its concern is to paint a true likeness [similitudinis vero].” He concluded: “Chorography is the task of an artist, and no one presents it rightly unless he is an artist.”7 Ptolemy stressed intangible qualities, above and beyond measurable quantities, as key aspects of a true likeness, which therefore called for the sensitivity of an artist, not the precision of a geometer. There was much more to true likeness than what met the eye and could be quantified or replicated mechanically. The physical fabric of a place had to be balanced with its symbolism—­the urbs with the civitas. That said, there was indeed growing emphasis placed on depicting what met the eye: namely, a given city’s external features. In 1486, the first illustrated edition of the great chronicle published in Venice by Jacopo Filippo Foresti of Bergamo (1434–­1520), the Supplementum chronicarum, had employed a view of Genoa to stand not only for that city but

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Figure 1. Woodcut illustration from Peter Apian, Cosmographia (Antwerp, 1545), fol. 2. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps C.7.b.33.

also for Rome. Just a few years later, for the second illustrated edition of 1490, that view was replaced by one that showed the Eternal City in specific detail. This substitution reflects the increasing expectation that a city portrait correspond to actual appearances, while also expressing abstract traits relating to character and identity. The impulse to differentiate images of cities materialized not only in the Supplementum but also in many other publications across Europe in the 1470s and 1480s that began to replace stereotyped representations with recognizable imagery.8 A highlight of this development was Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam (Mainz, 1486), the first printed

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pilgrimage account, which included highly reliable and much-­copied images of Venice and Jerusalem, among other cities. The trend, which coincided with early printings of  Ptolemy’s treatise, was not limited to illustrated books.9 In the same period, Rosselli (1448–­before 1513), a Florentine engraver, became the first to issue separately published city portraits intended for commemoration and display. Despite this momentum, the move toward individualized city imagery was hardly immediate or direct. As late as the mid-­1500s, Sebastian Münster (1488–­1552) could still get away with using the same woodblock to illustrate a number of different places in his popular Cosmographia universalis. Still, the tide had turned, and viewers increasingly expected a city image to provide a reasonable visual simulation. In the preface to his 1553 atlas of city views—­a new type of publication reflecting the growing popularity of the genre—­Guillaume Guéroult (ca. 1507–­69) assured his readers that each pourtrait would show the specific topographical features that distinguished the place as “singular,” neatly summing up the intention of chorography.10 The new emphasis on likeness, however, did not preclude license. Cipriano Piccolpasso (1524–­79), author of a manuscript comprising plans and views of Umbrian towns executed for Pope Pius IV (r. 1559–­65) in the 1560s, wrote that visual commemoration of a city, as of any subject, required idealization. “In making portraits of natural things,” he wrote, “the painter must always seek to elect the parts that are more perfect and to hide or cover . . . [any] less beautiful part.”11 Nature as such called for enhancement through artifice; indeed, nature’s imperfections could only be remedied through art. In city portraits, moreover, a degree of artistry was not just allowed—­it was required. A city portrait was inevitably selective, for it could never be life size, like a human portrait. As a radical miniaturization of a highly complex totality, it required an artist to reduce the scale and number of features included. Piccolpasso addressed this issue explicitly: “There are some [silly people] who will [not appreciate a city view] because they are unable to discern every single part of a city, or the most distinguished parts, in the manner in which they are accustomed. . . . [For example there was the case where] a certain man said to the painter who had represented Florence, ‘That [painting] looks a lot like Florence, but that’s not Florence.’ ‘Why?’ responded the painter. ‘Because I don’t see my house there, or the house of my neighbor . . .’ There are many who say such ridiculous things, all because they do not understand the principles of pictures.”12 Piccolpasso implied that knowing viewers—­those conversant with pictorial conventions—­understood that artistic intervention was not merely permissible, but even desirable.

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License was also inherent in the very act of portraying the city, because it was an exercise in imaginative projection. Early modern artists and viewers were earthbound, and—­in an age before flight and aerial or satellite photography—­ there was no way for them to behold an entire city in a single glance. The most complete view obtainable was from an elevated spot like a hill, and any single vantage point on the ground offered only a tiny fragment of the urban whole.13 To create a comprehensive city view, it was necessary—­as Piccolpasso eloquently put it—­to “imagine oneself somewhere above, on some tower or some mountain, or in the place of Icarus spreading his wings.”14 Only by means of the imagination (and perhaps a touch of hubris) could an artist transcend the limits of natural vision to make the entire city visible. It was also critical, however, that an image appear plausible. To that end, artists informed their imagination, turning to ever-­more-­sophisticated pictorial, cartographic, and surveying strategies to lend their urban images the semblance of architectural and topographical realism. They also developed rhetorical tactics to suggest that their images were true likenesses, based in physical fact, even when such claims concealed considerable subterfuge. The view of Rome included in Münster’s Cosmographia of 1550 announced, in a title banner, that it showed Rome in its current state—­even if the view, based on a model more than fifty years old, was woefully outdated given how rapidly Rome was changing during that period.15 Similarly, it was common to proclaim that an image had been done “from life” (ad vivum or dal vivo) and was therefore “living”—­whether explicitly, by means of an inscription, or through subtler devices.16 This was a pledge of accuracy, ensuring that the picture, as a “living image,” showed the city as it really appeared. Antonio Campi (ca. 1522–­87), in his Cremona fedelissima città (1585), included an orthogonal plan—­one of the few other than Bufalini’s from this period intended as a public image—­that, he insisted, was “practically a living simulacrum” of the town.17 Similarly, Antoine du Pinet (ca. 1510–­ca. 1565), in the introduction to his Plantz, pourtraitz et descriptions de plusieurs villes (1564), wrote that “chorography represents to the eye the living portrait of a place.”18 Of course, no city could literally be alive, like a human subject. As in portraits of people, however, the lifelike quality, which ostensibly depended on the real visual experience of the artist being transmitted to the viewer, granted authority to the idealized image. These trends come to the fore in two early highlights of the genre. The “View with a Chain” of Florence (ca. 1510), a copy in woodcut of Rosselli’s lost engraving of 1482–­90, includes a draftsman at lower right testifying to the view’s basis in direct observation (fig. 2).19 Indeed, the image initially appears to be a straightforward vista of the city as glimpsed from a point

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Figure 2. Lucantonio degli Uberti after Francesco Rosselli, Fiorenza, ca. 1510, woodcut, 23 × 51¾ in. (58.5 × 131.5 cm). Photo: Bpk, Berlin/Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen/Joerg P. Anders/Art Resource, NY.

roughly corresponding to the figure’s position in the hills southwest of Florence. Yet Rosselli’s view is a vivid dissimulation. The most important buildings are shown greatly exaggerated in size to underscore their prominence and heighten their legibility, while their positions are manipulated to show them to best advantage. The ground plane shifts so that the city center is tilted up, as if seen from a great height—­one far greater than the highest elevations outside Florence. This maneuver clarifies the urban layout and dispenses with the visual obstacles that would be present under real viewing conditions. Rosselli’s encompassing view is not the eyewitness record it claims to be. The artist probably stitched it together from a combination of localized surveys and studies genuinely done dal vivo, using a liberal dose of creative interpolation to smooth over the seams.20 The pretense is of a largely unmediated view, a kind of snapshot; the truth is that it is profoundly mediated: a flight of the informed imagination. As a whole, however, the image maintains a remarkable degree of freshness and verisimilitude despite its pondered and laborious construction. An even greater imaginative leap comes into play with the spectacular woodcut of Venice by Jacopo de’ Barbari (ca. 1460/70–­ca. 1516). This revolutionary work is the first true bird’s-­eye city view, for it abandons any pretense to a real foothold on earth (fig. 3).21 The spectator gazes out at what must have seemed a miraculous revelation of the city seen from high above its lagoon. Yet, however omniscient, Barbari’s minutely detailed rendering of the Serenissima is still a

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Figure 3. Jacopo de’ Barbari, Venetie MD, 1500, woodcut, 52¾ × 110⅝ in. (134 × 281 cm). British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

convincingly evocative picture of the city “as it was” in 1500. Piccolpasso’s skeptical interlocutor, who complained that he could not see his own house or that of his neighbor in a view of Florence, would have delighted in Barbari’s astonishingly comprehensive picture of Venice. In this work, the sheer accumulation of exacting architectural and topographical information validates an impossible vision. It also masks substantial distortion, while advancing the rhetoric of the image: namely, the mythos of Venice as a great, prosperous, and secure seafaring power, presided over by Neptune and Mercury. In so doing, it makes the invisible visible—­and credible. Early modern spectators conversant with what Piccolpasso called “the principles of pictures” must have known that Barbari’s Venice, like the “View with a Chain” of Florence, was mediated, but appreciated its artifice all the more. In order to count as a true likeness, a city portrait needed most of all to be convincingly lifelike, not, strictly speaking, from life. To quote Antoine du Pinet—­the same who wrote that chorography represents the “living portrait of a place”—­the goal was really to make the image “as close to life as possible.”22 In short, the goals and expectations that factored into city imagery were extraordinarily complex. All of these issues converged in representations of a most singular place: Rome—­a city like no other, and a paradigm for all others, embodying all that

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was good and bad about an urban center. Known variously as the caput mundi (head of the world) and the Eternal City, Rome was a quintessential palimpsest: an amalgam of history, archaeology, and myth, with a patrimony that was ancient, medieval, and modern, as well as pagan and Christian. This city remained a magnet for scholars and pilgrims even through its nadir in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, after which it eventually recovered enough to become a symbol of the church triumphant to Catholics, and of worldly corruption to Protestant Reformers. Given this complexity, no straightforward visual record of the contemporary city could truly capture its identity. Contemporaries openly acknowledged this difficulty. In the Civitates orbis terrarum, Georg Braun wrote that “describing a city such as this does not seem a lesser or easier undertaking than if someone should take it upon himself to illustrate or to describe the whole world.”23 Similarly, the French poet Joachim du Bellay (ca. 1522–­60), who resided in the city in the mid-­1500s, wrote a sonnet declaring that “Rome was all the world, and all the world is Rome”; hence “the plan of Rome is the map of the world.”24 Urbi et orbi, to the city and the world: Rome was a place where the local had global significance. To do it justice, a wealth of information both abstract and concrete had to be compressed into just two dimensions. Rome’s identity was an especially fraught matter during the Renaissance, when its condition was seen as emblematic of cultural renewal, on one hand, and the ravages of time, on the other. There was ongoing debate as to where it lay along the larger urban life cycle of growth and decay—­and this debate, in turn, had important implications for images of the city. Mortality and its opposite were twin leitmotifs of Rome’s symbolism and had been since ancient times, when it was first dubbed eternal, but the question of which was more apt gained new urgency in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This factor distinguished Rome from a city like Florence, whose past was less fabled, and whose golden age was clearly the present. A few places did approximate the historical complexity that shaped portrayals of Rome—­Jerusalem and Constantinople/Istanbul come to mind—­but in neither case did it result in the same representational fervor, or in a comparably magnificent and continuous series of images. In sum, Rome’s special historical and cultural circumstances were uniquely favorable to radical developments in imagery. The revival of Rome from what Petrarch about 1340 had termed a “crumbling city” populated by “broken ruins” into a prosperous Christian capital coincided with the birth and proliferation of the city portrait as a genre.25 In the mid-­1400s, with the return of the papacy, Rome had begun to emerge from a millennium of decline. Over the next century, the renovatio, or renewal,

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accelerated, as did the representational techniques for visualizing its outward signs of progress. Great strides were made to improve the urban infrastructure; public and private architectural projects enriched the cityscape; scholarly and artistic endeavor flourished. For many observers, these transformations seemed to bring the modern city into active competition with its ancient self, and Renaissance Rome was no longer felt to be overshadowed by the spectral presence of its own former grandeur.26 Hand in hand with the renovatio, the growing enthusiasm for archaeological study on the part of Roman architects and antiquarians meant that a wealth of new graphic modes were applied to imagery of the city. The impulse to record the concrete vestiges of Rome’s classical past in drawings spurred innovation from the first years of the fifteenth century, when—­legend holds—­the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–­1446) journeyed to the city specifically to measure and draw the ruins, and thereby to learn their secrets.27 That tale might be apocryphal, but it reflects the early days of a very real passion that fueled many of the developments outlined in this book. Around 1450, Alberti applied the precepts of Ptolemaic geography to the mapping of Rome in his short but pioneering treatise Descriptio urbis Romae. Several decades later, Raphael’s so-­called letter to Pope Leo X of 1513–­20 documented his project to record the vanishing ruins in architectural drawings and perhaps a plan of the city. Bufalini’s map expanded on these precedents as the first comprehensive, measured city plan intended for a broad audience. Yet this narrative—­for all its quickening pace—­should not be misconstrued as a relentless march of scientific progress toward greater and greater accuracy. Bufalini’s plan alone proves that measured rendering was not reserved for documenting physical fact, that it was equally suited to creative expression: another way for Icarus to spread his wings. Thus the history traced in this book is, to an extent, one of modernization, but it also confounds any conventional teleology—­in keeping with a time before boundaries became rigid. Just as a map like Bufalini’s resists classification as an objective, rational city image, so too do pictorial views defy neat reduction to the realm of imaginative representation. Indeed, like maps, they often embodied a new emphasis on measured exactitude. Beginning in the fifteenth century, information from surveys was increasingly incorporated in artists’ representations, and geometric perspective was another a critical tool for those seeking to create visually evocative pictures of the city. The interplay of various techniques in pictorial views is addressed throughout this study, from the lost engraving of Rome by Rosselli, examined in the first chapter as the major alternative to Alberti’s cartographic paradigm, to Vasi’s sweeping Prospetto of 1765, discussed in the

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epilogue as the counterpoint to Nolli’s orthogonal Pianta grande of 1748. All of these images are positioned at various points along a continuum of measured and pictorial rendering, reportage and fabrication, as well as the city’s past and present; all are evidence of flexible, shifting approaches to representation and to Rome itself. Rome had a very active print industry that facilitated the rapid dissemination of new trends in imagery, and most of the works discussed in this book were produced locally for pan-­European consumption.28 In many cases, they became canvases for documenting and broadcasting the rapid-­fire urban changes initiated by a series of early modern popes and illustrious patrons, and undeniably they reflect claims that such powerful entities wished to advance. It should not be assumed, however, that the popes wielded absolute or consis­ tent control over the production of imagery; indeed, such control would be predicated on a stronger, more stable regime than most popes (or the institution as a whole) managed to attain. The papacy consisted of a nonhereditary series of rulers, many of whom reigned only briefly and had disparate goals, or even worked at cross-­purposes. Papal power was shifting and unsteady, balanced by other forces.29 Print, while carefully monitored in Rome, was still an independent business. After faltering attempts by earlier popes, Sixtus V (r. 1585–­90) did manage to establish a Vatican printing press, and prints issued in his time come closest to establishing an official public image for his papacy’s goals and accomplishments—­but subsequent popes did not share his interest in the medium. The following century, Alexander VII (r. 1655–­67) also grasped the potential of print as a means for propagandistic display, and managed to wield some control—­albeit indirect—­over the messages transmitted therein. But such exceptional figures notwithstanding, Rome itself was the driving force in its own image—­the city more powerful and lasting than any individual or collective effort to transform it. Almost all printed images of Rome were produced for the open market, not on commission. Many bore sycophantic dedications, but these tended to be opportunistic and easily transferable afterthoughts. In truth, the messages of these works were geared primarily toward garnering a larger public, not pleasing a single patron. Publishers surely recognized that it was in their best interest to support papal claims to cultural resurgence, not least because many applied to the papacy for a privilege—­the Renaissance version of copyright—­to protect their work. In that sense, official sanction did exist and must have factored into editorial calculations. Generally, however, a privilege was sought only after the matrix for an image—­the woodblock or copperplate—­was largely complete. There was no formal arrangement in place to compel the rhetoric

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of artists or publishers at the design stage; instead, they entered into a more complex game of anticipating the ideal parameters of a quasi-­official image of Rome and balancing that with the more generalized desires of print buyers. Rarely were these factors at odds: the interests of producers, popes, and public converged more often than not, but—­again, with some exceptions—­it would still be reductive to view the imagery discussed in this book through an overtly ideological lens. It would be questionable, for example, to assert that Rosselli’s late fifteenth-­century view of Rome reflected a concrete papal agenda, but such an argument is more fitting for myriad seventeenth-­century works that express the triumphant tenor of Rome as the capital of the Catholic Reformation. Again, the sheer variety of works considered in this study confounds blanket statements and demonstrates that a wide spectrum of possibilities existed. Printed city portraits are the focus of this book in part because they were trendsetters, and in part because they allow us to look beyond the motivations of single figures—­beyond artistic intentionality and patronly control—­toward larger cultural attitudes about Rome and tastes in imagery. Renaissance representations of Rome were tailored to an audience that consisted of the educated elite, primarily antiquarians, and increasingly pilgrims and tourists. As late as the eighteenth century, the primary audience for imagery of the city remained the literati.30 Whether included in books or separately published and intended for display, most of these works were objects of contemplation, destined for the scholar’s study. For this reason, they have much to teach us about the intellectual as well as the visual culture of early modern Italy. More than expressions of power or propaganda, early modern images of Rome were platforms for declaring ideas and ideals about the state of the city, and for romanticizing, aggrandizing, or marginalizing its tangible signs of antiquity—­and, for that matter, modernity. In this way, they articulate a most complex cultural ethos. As a reflection of such a wonderfully diverse subject matter, this book is geared toward a widely interdisciplinary readership of scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Rome and print culture, as well as historians of art, architecture, urbanism, and cartography. The works under consideration range from minuscule to monumental, factual to factitious, exultant to nostalgic, cartographic to pictorial. In their overall richness, they offer a summa of the early modern city portrait. This study builds on a growing body of impressive scholarship devoted to images of cities, but despite the best efforts there still exists a lingering, positivist tendency to devalue these works for their perceived errors—­or, conversely, to judge their value in proportion to their accuracy. This line of thinking misses the point. To be sure, they included their share of genuine

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mistakes, but even the most scientific portraits of Rome were creative works. To fully appreciate them it is crucial to recognize the difference between deliberate choice and unknowing error—­to interpret them according to culturally specific “principles of pictures,” not anachronistic post-­Enlightenment standards for empirical accuracy. The special circumstances surrounding each work’s production and anticipated reception fueled its unique, carefully calibrated mixture of observation and imagination. Accordingly, this book evaluates these images on their own terms to give proper due to a printed genre of central importance, while tracing the history of maps of Rome, and the history of Rome in maps. The story begins in chapter 1 with two fifteenth-­century counterpoints that established the cartographic and pictorial approaches to urban representation. Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae (ca. 1450) was a short treatise that gave instructions for making a map of the city by plotting its monuments as points on a Euclidean grid. This concept of a planimetric diagram was a major departure from previous imagery of Rome. Equally groundbreaking was Francesco Rosselli’s panoramic view of Rome (ca. 1485–­90), now lost but known through derivatives, which purported to recreate the cityscape as it could be seen. The latter proved much more suited to popular imagery, inspiring a plethora of imitations and becoming the defining icon of Rome for a century. Alberti’s principles had a subtler, but equally significant, influence on the practice of surveying and urban mapping. These works had differing intentions and forms, but they were united by a commitment to measurement and exactitude that set them apart from all that had come before, and provided a foundation for all that came after. Chapter 2 addresses the sequel to Alberti’s map: Raphael’s project to create measured renderings of the Roman ruins and possibly to merge them in a plan of the city, as recorded in his official missive to Pope Leo X from the second decade of the sixteenth century. Although geared toward single buildings as opposed to the larger urban fabric, Raphael’s technique relied on the same principles that Alberti had put forth the previous century, and it anticipated those that informed Bufalini’s grand map three decades later. The only surviving evidence for Raphael’s project is textual, but the drawings of many of his colleagues and a spate of subsequent illustrated books bear out his program and testify to its larger cultural relevance. The ensuing popularization of ar­ chitectural plans and cartography was another critical development that paved the way for Bufalini’s plan, ensuring an audience that could decipher its graphic

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language. In his letter to Leo X, Raphael also formulated a theoretical stance on the value of perspective rendering vis-­à-­vis measured forms that gives insight into the Renaissance reception for these modes—­hinting at a nascent association of aesthetic qualities with pictorialism, not cartography. These trends came to fruition in Bufalini’s plan, the subject of chapter 3. This map was a milestone: the first measured, unified portrayal of the entire urban fabric—­including its streets, topography, natural features, and built environment—­and the first single image to enfold all of Rome’s history. Yet Bufalini’s plan inspired few imitations, remaining the most noteworthy orthogonal plan of Rome published for a general public until Nolli’s Pianta grande two centuries later. There was a much greater demand for mimetic works showing the city as if glimpsed from a hill on its outskirts, in the tradition of Rosselli’s view. The overriding popularity of pictorial works speaks to a desire on the part of audiences to experience the city vicariously, through visually evocative imagery. Today, Bufalini’s map emerges as a revolutionary stride in urban representation, but in its own time public response was ambivalent. Far from an anticlimax, however, its fate speaks volumes about early modern visual culture and aesthetic taste. The richly layered history and identity of Rome—­or any city, for that matter—­could not be expressed adequately by means of a diagram. Chapter 4 traces the efforts of subsequent mapmakers who turned away from Bufalini’s timeless fusion as well as his graphic language in order to sift through the Roman palimpsest layer by layer. Their desire to recreate the ancient city as a counterpoint to the modern resulted in a veritable subgenre of Rome-­then-­and-­now imagery. The quintessential Renaissance theme of paragone runs through these works, which express a longing to see the past resurrected and brought into direct dialogue with the present. It is a case of comparing not just one city to another, but one city to its former self. High points include Pirro Ligorio’s dazzling reconstruction of Roma antica (1561)—­ the only image from midcentury to rival Bufalini’s in scale and grandeur, although a stark contrast in its exuberant pictorialism—­and Mario Cartaro’s pendant etchings (1576/1579) that paired the ancient city and “new” Rome, or Roma nuova. These works reveal shifting perceptions of Rome’s venerable past and Renaissance renewal, as well as a growing sense of historical rupture. Chapter 5 traces imagery of Rome from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century, focusing on a splendid sequence of large-­scale prints by Antonio Tempesta (1593), Matteo Greuter (1618), Giovanni Maggi (1625), Giovanni Battista Falda (1676), and others. In these, the deliberate temporal slippage of previous works was replaced by a determined and unswerving attention to the

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most recent form of the city. Roma antica faded into the background, as Roma nuova carried the day. With their jubilant tone and emphatic present tense, these images reflect the high spirit and militancy of the baroque city. Rome was being remade as a grand theater that proclaimed the church’s triumph over grave challenges—­foremost among them the Reformation, along with the ensuing religious and political aftershocks that, in a sense, supplanted the city’s own past greatness as a shadowy but ever-­present specter. Works by Tempesta, Falda, and the others were archetypal expressions of this atmosphere. In their sheer size, technical finesse, architectural detail, and overall magnificence, they far surpassed imagery of previous generations. Their general form, however, upheld the hybridity of earlier works, and their authors made few cartographic advances. The images discussed in this chapter are the capstone of this book not because they reinvented the wheel, but because they refined themes that were first manifested in the mid-­1400s and brought them to a glorious pinnacle. As recounted in the epilogue, the flexible, inclusive approach to urban representation in the early modern period was abandoned in the eighteenth century with the publication of Nolli’s Pianta grande and Vasi’s Prospetto dell’alma città di Roma. At base, Nolli’s great map employed the same graphic language as Bufalini’s but was far more accurate and exhaustive: a decisive turn toward modern urban cartography. Vasi’s sweeping vista, by contrast, was an atmo­ spheric feat—­perhaps the most complete, evocative view of Rome ever published. These works studiously segregated the cartographic and the pictorial as modes of urban representation, which in due time would come to have different goals and uses—­the former more scientific and documentary, the latter more artistic and commemorative—­that have carried through to today. That the mid-­eighteenth century was a time of transition, however, is indicated by Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s sublime map of the Campo Marzio district of ancient Rome, published in 1762. In this cartographic tour de force, Piranesi memorialized a city composed of archaeologically informed but brilliantly inventive phantoms. His work, however idiosyncratic, is an important reminder that all maps up to his day were fusions of measurement and imagination. It is also the end of an era. There exist several authoritative sources on imagery of Rome without which this study would not have been possible. Monographs on individual maps and mapmakers have been one critical source. Foremost among them is the early twentieth-­century series by Franz Ehrle devoted to the most important printed maps of Rome. Published under the auspices of the Vatican Library,

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these include foundational studies on maps by Du Pérac (1908), Bufalini (1911), Maggi (1915), Falda (1931), Tempesta (1932), and Nolli (1932). More recently, Stefano Borsi has carried the tradition forward, updating Ehrle’s work with his own key studies, all published in Rome by Officina, on Tempesta (1986), Maggi (1990), and Nolli (1993); the latter has also been the focus of a superb monograph by Mario Bevilacqua, Roma nel secolo dei lumi: Architettura, erudizione, scienza nella pianta di G. B. Nolli “celebre geometra” (Naples: Electa, 1998), which situates Nolli and his map in the larger cultural context of eighteenth-­century Rome, much as my own book attempts to do for dozens of images spanning four centuries. Catalogues raisonnés have been indispensable, among which two stand out: Christian Hülsen’s “Saggio di bibliografia ragionata delle piante icnografiche e prospettiche di Roma dal 1551 al 1748,” Archivio della Reale Società Romana di Storia Patria 38 (1915): 5–­105; and especially Amato Pietro Frutaz’s unsurpassed Le piante di Roma, 3 vols. (Rome: Istituto di studi romani, 1962).31 More recently, those works have been supplemented by two invaluable exhibition catalogues: Mario Gori Sassoli, ed., Roma veduta: Disegni e stampe panoramiche della città dal XV al XIX secolo (Rome: Artemide, 2000); and Clemente Marigliani, ed., Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private (Rome: Provincia di Roma, 2007). A recent and important contribution that is interpretive rather than descriptive is Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, ed. Mario Bevilacqua and Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: Artemide, 2012), a chronologically organized collection of essays on key maps authored by various experts. Perhaps the work closest in spirit to this one is Steffen Bogen and Felix Thürlemann’s Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten von der Antike bis heute (Darmstadt: WBG, 2009), which offers an engaging diachronic synthesis of almost forty maps spanning two millennia. My own book differs in its more scholarly orientation, tighter chronological lens, and organically unified narrative that interweaves individual maps with larger cultural and art historical themes. No comparable study has appeared previously in English or any other language.

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Chapter One

Toward a New City Image Leon Battista Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae (ca. 1450) and Francesco Rosselli’s Lost View of Rome (ca. 1485–­90)

In the fifteenth century, two novel approaches to urban representation signaled the arrival of a new era in the way cities were depicted. Neither survives in concrete form, so we must rely on written and visual traces to partially reconstruct these elusive monuments. There is no doubt, however, that they espoused diametrically opposing forms and had very different repercussions. Leon Battista Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae (Delineation of the City of Rome) of about 1450 is not an image but a short treatise outlining the scholar’s method for creating a measured rendering of the city. His instructions conjure a mathematical plan based on Euclidean coordinates in which sites are reduced to points, the urban infrastructure and topography to planimetric outline. Unlike Alberti’s urban diagram, Francesco Rosselli’s great view of Rome, published for a larger audience some four decades later, was naturalistic and independent of text: an encompassing visual evocation of the city that needed no explanation. Alberti’s treatise and map did not gain a wide circulation and seem to have anticipated future developments rather than shaping them directly. Rosselli’s image, by contrast, had an immediate and lasting impact that resounded far beyond Italy, initiating a long and rich afterlife in print. Yet for all their differences, both

19

milestones reflected an underlying attention to measurement and exactitude with regard to the urban fabric, as well as the mounting excitement of Rome’s cultural renewal. Together, they established the alternatives that dominated city portraiture for the rest of the early modern period.

Late Medieval Origins

The prehistory of Alberti and Rosselli’s advances dates back as far as the late 1200s, so it might be more fitting—­as with so many things “Renaissance”—­to see their fifteenth-­century developments as marking a critical shift in emphasis rather than a true rupture with existing practice. It is true that in the late Middle Ages, most images of Rome, and of cities in general, fell into certain categories that put little stock in direct observation and bore scant resemblance to what was to come.1 By this time, the practices of Roman land surveyors (agrimensores) had faded, and we know of few examples of measured town plans before Alberti.2 P. D. A. Harvey has suggested that the ancient Roman tradition of maps to scale died out completely during the Middle Ages, with one of its last known descendants being the famous ninth-­century St. Gall plan of a monastic complex, which is akin to a miniature city; Juergen Schulz, on the other hand, believes that the tradition never disappeared entirely but did become extremely rare as other forms predominated.3 Whatever the case, cities were most commonly denoted by conventionalized pictograms of one or two buildings and urban features, made nongeneric only by means of identifying labels. There also appeared stereotyped images of walled, turreted towns that stood for the idea of a city rather than any particular place, sometimes “personalized” by the insertion of one or two vaguely recognizable monuments or a label. Yet these types—­which persisted into the Renaissance—­were increasingly balanced by approaches that favored greater specificity and realism. About 1300, there appeared early signs of a move toward individualization—­architectural and, to a lesser extent, topographical. In a fresco of about 1280 labeled Ytalia on the vault of the Upper Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi, the Florentine painter Cimabue (ca. 1240–­1302) packed together a dozen recognizable Roman monuments as emblems not just of the city, but of the entire peninsula, its history and culture.4 This impulse was taken a step further in the 1300s, when there emerged a trend among city images to embed monuments in a thicket of undifferentiated, generic buildings—­thus giving a better sense of urban density and variety.5 Meanwhile, the historian Fra Paolino Veneto (ca. 1270–­

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ca. 1344) included several detailed town plans in manuscripts of  his Chronologia magna dating from the 1320s and 1330s. His plans of Rome now at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice and the Vatican Library (fig. 4), both thought to have been based on a prototype of the late 1200s, show the city with a number of faintly recognizable and often labeled monuments (such as the Colosseum, medieval towers, St. Peter’s Basilica, and aqueducts) as well as topographical features (Rome’s famed hills, the Tiber River), all contained within a regularized, oblong circuit of crenellated walls. Streets link various features, lined by anonymous structures including many simple A-­frames, but with enough variation to suggest a plausible urban mixture of forms and functions.6 Fra Paolino’s maps of Rome lack a scale or other explicit references to mea­ sured data, and their monuments and street networks bear just a passing resemblance to the city’s real architecture and layout. Any single element considered in isolation might confound proper identification. Together, however, they add up to a picture of a place that could only be Rome. The maps demonstrate firsthand knowledge of the city and, in depicting it as an integrated fabric, embody a concept of continuous urban space that anticipates Alberti, Rosselli, and others. It was but one step from that concept to measurement. In fact, the plan of Venice included in the Marciana’s copy of Fra Paolino’s Chronologia is more accurate than that of Rome and is thought to incorporate information from rudimentary surveying.7 There also exists documentary evidence that measured ground plans were known in Italy in the late fourteenth century, and there is no reason to suppose that the rest of Europe lagged far behind. A plan of Vienna and Bratislava dating from mid-­1400s but copied from a work of the early 1420s includes a graduated scale, further bolstering the theory that measured city plans were far from unknown during that gray period as the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance.8 The conceptual underpinnings for measured, integrated city plans existed, therefore, but maps like those of Rome, Venice, and Vienna were highly un­ usual in the realm of medieval urban representation. If these isolated instances predicted subsequent developments, there were important differences in how the ingredients came together and were then taken up by mapmakers. More than basic principles, it was consolidation, commitment, and especially momentum that set the Renaissance exemplars apart from their closest predecessors. Parallel patterns can be found across the culture of the later Middle Ages—­not least in the very concept of history. An important development in the writing of the past was the move from chronicles, which recorded events in a disconnected fashion akin to a time line, drawing indiscriminately on a variety of sources, to more selective narratives that explored how and why events

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Figure 4. Fra Paolino Veneto, plan of Rome, manuscript, 1334–­39. Vatican Library, Vatican City, BAV Cod. Vat. Lat. 1960, fol. 270v. © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

unfolded and were interrelated.9 Peter Burke has written that the medieval approach to history yielded to that of the Renaissance in the fifteenth century, when there arose a real sense of difference and distance from the past, as well as a new, critical approach to evidence, and an effort not just to describe change but to interpret it in light of cause and effect.10 But as Patricia Fortini Brown and others have reminded us more recently, this development—­far from sudden—­ had sporadic origins well before 1400. The difference is that it took on the force of a cultural movement only the following century. The historian Petrarch was a key transitional figure of the early to mid-­1300s, much like Fra Paolino, who moved in the same extended intellectual circles—­and who considered maps integral tools for imparting an understanding of history.11 Returning to city imagery, the type that took hold in the fourteenth century was not Fra Paolino’s forward-­looking paradigm but a category known to modern scholars as the ideogrammatic view, which presented the town as a collection of isolated monuments within a schematic rendering of the walls.12 Like the plan and bird’s-­eye view, the ideogram had origins in antiquity. In the late Middle Ages it evolved to couple an interest in the forms of individual structures with an emergent desire to give their relative positions, and to incorporate some topographical features. Among representations of Rome, one exemplar of this basic type dominated from the mid-­fourteenth to the mid-­ fifteenth centuries. It was primarily a manuscript tradition, although it worked its way into monumental contexts, as witnessed by Taddeo di Bartolo’s fresco of 1414 for the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena (plate 2).13 This work was just one of a family of closely related images, among them the miniature of Rome in the Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (ca. 1413–­16), all based on a single unknown prototype.14 These medieval effigies were not portraits so much as memory pictures, composed of many discrete elements from across eras. In all adaptations of this model, Rome is represented with south at the top—­ the “pilgrim’s perspective,” so called because it reflects the vantage point of a traveler arriving on foot from the north, who would have first glimpsed the city from Monte Mario. As evident from Taddeo’s fresco, however, the oblique view from above does not pretend to simulate a real vision. The Aurelian Walls are delineated in plan and regularized into a nearly circular form, with the exception of two bulges at right (corresponding to the areas of Trastevere and the Vatican, both across the river from the city center). The only topographical elements included are the Tiber and its island—­although there are also a few paths that must allude to streets, a subtle but notable innovation not present in the other versions. Within city walls, the view presents a compendium of Rome’s

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Christian and pagan landmarks: the Colosseum, Pantheon, Lateran Basilica, St. Peter’s, Castel Sant’Angelo, Column of  Trajan, Horse Tamers (Dioscuri ) and Marcus Aurelius equestrian statues, and so on and so forth. All are depicted as outsize, synoptic pictures, evenly sprinkled across an otherwise barren plain. Although none of these images has been associated with a manuscript of the popular medieval guidebook known as the Mirabilia urbis Romae (Marvels of the City of Rome), they reflect the same general emphases.15 The Mirabilia is a group of closely related texts that originate in the twelfth century and focus on the ancient monuments of Rome. Based on a pastiche of different sources and liberally mixing fact, fantasy, and legend, the Mirabilia embody the medieval attitude to the past as described by Burke: namely, a “historical innocence” and “lack of historical curiosity”—­that is, of any impetus to search objectively for the real causes of change over time. As potent relics of the past, Rome’s ruins are not interrogated, but accepted unquestioningly as part—­albeit a wondrous part—­of the cityscape.16 The Mirabilia recount Rome’s sites, landmarks, and associated stories without reference to urban topography or infrastructure. Although one part of the guidebook does follow a vaguely topographical organization, it is only implicit; there is little sense of spatial relationships among sites or of how a visitor would progress from one to another. The narrative as such is disorienting, and only a reader already familiar with Rome would grasp that the order of sites discussed reflects their real locations in the city. For the most part, Rome is treated as a series of disconnected points of interest, not an interwoven fabric: an attitude perfectly encapsulated in Taddeo di Bartolo’s ideogram. Views from the third quarter of the fifteenth century by Piero del Massaio and Alessandro Strozzi (b. 1452) are often seen as advances, reflecting a more rigorous, scholarly approach to antiquity.17 The similarities of these images attest to their common foundation in a lost prototype of the mid-­fifteenth century that was, in turn, at least partly inspired by a recent text: Flavio Biondo’s Rome Restored of 1444–­46. This work, discussed in detail below as a critique and revision of the Mirabilia model, took a decisive step toward historical method.18 Correspondingly, Massaio and Strozzi’s images surpassed the ideograms of the previous century by taking greater care in depicting architectural detail and, to a lesser extent, topography, major streets, orientations, and relative distances. Massaio’s view of 1471–­72 (plate 3), one of nine early city portraits adorning a luxury manuscript of Ptolemy’s Geography, illustrates these shifting impulses. It is a transitional work, sharing something of the aggregate nature of Taddeo di Bartolo’s fresco, but with a greater degree of local specificity. Buildings are more readily identifiable, and their positions as well as the spaces between

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them bear some relationship to their real configurations within city walls. Massaio also depicts Rome’s famous hills, giving a hint of the city as more than a blank slate to populate with monuments. Despite such modifications, the overarching form of this representation did not break away from the medieval framework established a century earlier: the orientation, schematic form of the walls, and basic image type all remained fundamentally unchanged. Already by the time of Massaio and Strozzi, however, a more radical step had been taken toward a new city image.

Alberti’s Survey of Rome

Leon Battista Alberti’s project to map Rome is a founding moment in urban cartography—­the first unambiguous evidence of a measured city plan since antiquity.19 Alberti’s goals and method were put forth in two treatises dating from his second prolonged Roman stay, in 1443–­55, when the noted Florentine polymath was serving as papal secretary at the court of Eugenius IV and, from 1447, Nicholas V. The first of the treatises, Ludi rerum mathematicarum or Ludi matematici, presents a series of “mathematical games” that rely on cleverly adapted instruments and practical geometry, including several surveying methods.20 The second treatise, Descriptio urbis Romae, begins with a brief introductory text describing a technique Alberti had devised to generate a map of Rome using methods outlined in the Ludi, followed by series of tables listing the data acquired by means of those methods.21 No map by Alberti has survived, and there is some question whether it was even his intention to create one, or simply lay out his principles.22 Regardless, Alberti’s technique was prophetic. Over the following century it was widely adopted by architects and disseminated in a plethora of popular books on surveying and fortification—­ books geared toward an ever-­expanding audience of educated amateurs in the tradition of Alberti himself. In the Descriptio urbis Romae, Alberti explains the synthesis of data into an image of Rome. The Latin term descriptio was primarily used to denote a map, plan, or diagram, and only secondarily a verbal description, and Alberti’s title would seem to conflate these meanings by denoting a written account of a vi­ sual image. The treatise gives  just a partial explanation of  his map’s preparation, for Alberti is silent on his measuring process, instead detailing the subsequent stage at which, having already done his fieldwork, he creates a smaller-­scale depiction of the city on paper. He begins: “Using mathematical instruments, I have recorded as carefully as I could the passage . . . of the walls, the river, and

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the streets of the city of Rome, as well as the sites and locations of the temples, public works, gates, and commemorative monuments, and the outlines of the hills, not to mention the area which is occupied by habitable buildings, all as we know them to be in our time.” Alberti writes that his method, which “some intellectuals, friends of mine,” urged him to develop, is a foolproof way to reproduce his map “on any surface, however large.”23 There follows a series of tables—­lists of numerical coordinates—­fixing the positions of many points along Rome’s walls, gates, and river, and of monuments interspersed throughout the city. These features can then be plotted on a gridded armature at any scale desired. Only in the Ludi does Alberti provide clear instructions for the preceding step, measuring “the site and area of a place and of its streets and things,” so the two treatises must be cross-­referenced to reconstruct how he compiled the data given in the Descriptio’s tables.24 In both works, Alberti describes an instrument, called the horizon in the Descriptio, that consists of a graduated circle with a pivoting radial arm. On the more elaborate version described in the Descriptio, this “radius” is also graduated into degrees that correspond proportionally to a certain number of feet—­an actual distance—­although Alberti never specifies the scale. In order to survey Rome, Alberti fixed the horizon at a central, elevated point in the city, the Capitoline Hill. From there he proceeded to measure bearings—­the directions of various monuments from his station point—­by rotating the radius from a baseline at the degree zero till it pointed at them, then recording the angle of deviation from zero. These readings allowed him to begin plotting his map as a series of lines radiating from a center point, like spokes on a wheel (fig. 5). It is less clear how Alberti obtained the second key ingredient in a measured survey, distances, which would allow him to fix the position of each monument as a single point along the radiating line. (Bearings indicate what direction something lies in, but not how far away it is.) It is possible that Alberti measured the distances from his station point at the Capitoline to his places of interest by using a primitive odometer—­in fact, he describes one in the Ludi—­ but it seems equally likely that he relied on old-­fashioned pacing: a more painstaking process that he might not have been so eager to showcase. In either case, the measurement of distances cannot have been a straightforward operation, given that it was (and is) nearly impossible to walk a straight path through the labyrinthine Roman streets. However Alberti obtained his information, the tables in the Descriptio list bearings and distances for each site, thus providing the coordinates that would enable anyone—­“even a man endowed only with an average intellect”—­to reproduce the map for himself.25

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Figure 5. Luigi Vagnetti, reconstruction of Alberti’s map from the Descriptio urbis Romae, from “Lo studio di Roma negli scritti albertiani,” in Convegno internazionale indetto nel V centenario di Leon Battista Alberti, Problemi attuali di Scienza e Cultura, quaderno n. 209 (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1974), Figure 6b. The outline map made from Alberti’s coordinates appears in black; a modern outline map of fifteenth-­century Rome, for purposes of comparison, in gray. © Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, Rome.

Several modern scholars of greater than average intellect have used Alberti’s tables to reconstruct and analyze his map (see, for example, fig. 5).26 While they might differ about certain details, in important ways their conclusions are consistent. First, the map that results from Alberti’s calculations is remarkably accurate considering the rather primitive technology available to him. It is, however, more limited in scope than Alberti acknowledged. He claimed to have measured “the walls, the river, and the streets,” as well as many

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monuments and hills, but his tables omit any mention of topography and the network of roads. Second, Alberti was not entirely forthcoming about his method—­and not just in his silence about how he had ascertained distances. Even bearings are impossible to measure from the Capitoline for all of the monuments he lists, since many are not visible from that vantage point. To survey Rome properly, Alberti must have employed not just one station point but multiple elevated spots across the city, then used a process of rudimentary triangulation to harmonize his data. He describes just such a technique in the Ludi, so it was familiar to him. Despite his claims, he did not execute a single, overarching survey, but must instead have taken a series of localized measurements that he then wove together in his map of Rome. His reticence in this regard again suggests that he wished to present his technique as a more orderly and elegant operation than it was. Scholars also concur that Alberti’s map was an orthogonal plan, not a pictorial view. As such, it was a complete departure from previous representations of Rome, such as Taddeo di Bartolo’s fresco, and most later ones, like Massaio’s miniature. It emphasized exactly what they did not: precise spatial locations of monuments and proportionate distances separating them. Alberti was seeking a new way to represent the city as a planimetric diagram that privileged quantitative, not qualitative, information, and that conceived of space as a continuous matrix. To achieve these goals, he appropriated his basic principles from Ptolemaic cartography.27 In the Geography, Ptolemy had employed a system of polar coordinates to plot sites across the globe. Alberti’s innovation was the application of that system to a much smaller subject—­a city—­that Ptolemy himself would have placed in the realm of chorography. In a sense Alberti’s task was simpler, for unlike Ptolemy he did not need to account for the curvature of the earth. It is difficult to gauge the direct influence of Alberti’s treatises on subsequent practice. The Descriptio urbis Romae circulated only in manuscript form until modern times, while the Ludi rerum mathematicarum was not published until the late sixteenth century, when it appeared in Cosimo Bartoli’s Opuscoli morali di Leon Batista Alberti (Venice, 1568). Alberti was a brilliant synthesizer of information more than an inventor of new techniques. Much as he inge­ niously adapted the Ptolemaic scheme to his own purposes, his horizon was a modification of the common astrolabe, rotated 90 degrees so it could be aimed outward at the earth, not upward at the stars. His methods were similarly assimilated from nautical and astronomical practices, and found parallels in drawings by Mariano Taccola (1382–­ca. 1453) and other artist-­engineers.28 Alberti’s procedure was an innovative amalgam, therefore, that had a basis in existing

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practices—­but he was the first to adapt them expressly to land survey, which previously relied on simple tools like rods or cords for measuring lengths and staking out rectangles, whose dimensions could be multiplied for a rudimentary calculation of a larger surface area.29 Alberti’s instrument and procedure were a major advance, foreshadowing techniques that would soon become the norm for urban mapping. Leonardo da Vinci’s famous plan of Imola (1502)—­the first fully realized orthogonal city map of the early modern period—­was based on very similar precepts (plate 4).30 To do his fieldwork, Leonardo employed an instrument that was almost identical to Alberti’s horizon, save for the important addition of a magnetic compass to establish a constant baseline at magnetic north (rather than an arbitrarily chosen degree zero). The resulting map, like Alberti’s, is fully planimetric, although Leonardo—­anticipating works by Bufalini and others—­represented the whole built fabric in ground plan, rather than reducing individual structures to mere points. Alberti’s apparatus and methods were also taken up by architects to measure buildings, as witnessed by Raphael’s letter to Pope Leo X, and they reverberated through a series of surveying manuals that circulated widely in the mid-­to late sixteenth century, including Niccolò Tartaglia’s popular Quesiti et inventioni diverse (Venice, 1546), Jacopo Fusto Castriotto and Giacomo Maggi’s Della fortificatione delle città libri III (Venice, 1564), and Cosimo Bartoli’s Del modo di misurare le distantie . . . (Venice, 1564).31 By that point, these techniques had become common currency, within and outside architectural and engineering circles. Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae might appear something of an abstract intellectual exercise, but it was very much a product of its Roman context. By choosing the Capitoline Hill—­center of ancient government and religion as well as medieval civic power—­as the linchpin for his map, Alberti belied the dispassionate tone of the treatise. (In truth, the Janiculum would have been a much better position from which to take sightings, but it did not have the same associations.) He composed the Descriptio as a member of the mid-­fifteenth-­ century papal court, where he was an eyewitness to the earliest steps toward urban renewal during the pontificate of Eugenius IV (r. 1431–­47), and then became an active participant in their acceleration under Nicholas V (r. 1447–­55). Often considered the first Renaissance pope, Nicholas V undertook the first great rebuilding projects to restore the papal city, both for the long-­term goal of reestablishing it as the Christian caput mundi and for the short-­term goals of readying Rome for the Jubilee of 1450—­when tens of thousands of pilgrims

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flocked to the city—­and for the visit of Emperor Frederick III, who was crowned at St. Peter’s in 1452.32 During this time Alberti, a friend and adviser to the pope, became increasingly involved in architecture and urban planning. His monumental treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria (On Building) of 1452, is generally considered the culmination of this interest, but his efforts to map the city should also be situated in this larger sphere of interests and cultural milieu. At the papal court Alberti joined a cohort of innovating scholars. In the time he was writing his Ludi and Descriptio, Poggio Bracciolini (1380–­1459) was completing his Vicissitudes of Fortune (1431–­48) and Flavio Biondo (1392–­1463), another papal secretary, was drafting his Rome Restored (1444–­46). As literary works focused on the ruins and topography of ancient Rome, these two books differ markedly from Alberti’s more technical treatises, but all are quintessential products of fifteenth-­century Roman antiquarianism.33 Dedicated—­like On Building—­to Nicholas V, Poggio’s Vicissitudes of Fortune was a moralizing tract aimed at demonstrating the instability of fortune through an exploration of the ruins of the once-­preeminent city. This antiquated message was familiar from the medieval Mirabilia guidebooks and other sources, but Poggio parted ways from those hoary predecessors by employing a more scholarly method—­ one that looked to the structures themselves for evidence, as well as to ancient texts. The shifting approach to history outlined by Burke is fully evident in this move toward an investigation of causes and a newly critical stance toward sources. In Biondo’s Rome Restored, which similarly focused on the ruins of Rome, these impulses took flight. Biondo methodically sifted through a variety of sources in an attempt to separate myth from fact, taking an analytical approach to the city’s ancient remains. Like Poggio, he began to look beyond classical texts to archaeological evidence, and he went even further by considering coins, inscriptions, and the late antique regionary catalogues, which were lists of buildings in each district or rione that came down to the Renaissance through somewhat corrupted later recensions.34 Poggio’s summary and moralizing treatment of the monuments was superseded by Biondo’s comprehensive, empirical, and discerning account. In place of the Mirabilia tradition, which perpetuated a fragmentary, mytho-­magical notion of the once-­great city, Biondo substituted a relatively objective, sweeping overview that harmonizes with Alberti’s cartographic approach. There is good reason to suppose that the “intellectuals, friends of mine” whom Alberti mentions in the opening of the Descriptio were none other than his colleagues at the papal court, especially as he added that he was motivated

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to write his treatise “to assist their studies.”35 Poggio begins his account of the ruins by describing how he had taken stock of Rome’s condition from the top of the Capitoline Hill in the company of a friend—­not Alberti, but one is tempted to imagine him there too, busily taking his measurements. The Descriptio is not focused on antiquity—­in fact, the monuments whose positions are listed comprise an evenhanded mix of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance structures “as we know them to be in our time”—­but like Vicissitudes of Fortune and Rome Restored, it reflects a new, rigorous approach to the city, along with the excitement of a major renovatio, or renewal, at its moment of inception. Alberti’s geometric framework, moreover, was a flexible platform that others could expand and embellish as the modern city was transformed, and as investigations into the ancient city intensified—­a framework that subsequently proved equally adaptable to creative expression and to documentation. Not till the next century do we pick up its trail with Raphael’s letter to Leo X, which applied a similar method to the graphic restitution of Roman antiquity. In the meantime, however, a very different paradigm that had a more instantaneous and dramatic effect on popular imagery of Rome took hold.

Rosselli’s Rome in Twelve Sheets

Forty years after Alberti recounted his method for mapping Rome, Francesco Rosselli published a panoramic pictorial view that became the primary portrait of the city for the better part of a century. Rosselli was a groundbreaking figure in the early history of Renaissance print culture, cartography, and city imagery.36 Like Alberti, he was Florentine, but his background was in the artisan class, not the intellectual elite. The half brother of well-­known painter Cosimo Rosselli (1439–­1507), he began his career as a miniaturist but eventually became one of the earliest craftsmen in his native city to specialize in engraving and to make a living by selling his wares on the open market. A 1527 workshop inventory drawn up after the death of his son and successor Alessandro (1476–­1525) lists no fewer than 140 items, including views of Pisa, Rome, Constantinople, and Florence.37 This suite constitutes the first known printed series of what was soon to become a highly popular genre. Unfortunately, all that survives of the four images is one of the six engraved sheets that composed Rosselli’s Florence; otherwise the original of that work, dated to about 1480, is known through copies alone, the most famous and faithful being the slightly later woodcut known as the “View with a Chain” for the curious attribute that runs along its border (fig. 2).38

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Rosselli’s monumental engraving of Rome is also known only through derivatives, but certain facts about it can be surmised.39 The original seems to have been published between 1485 or 1487—­the time frame for construction of the latest structure included in all the copies—­and 1490, when the first of those copies appeared.40 The inventory furnishes a critical bit of information by listing it as “a Rome in three pieces [or copperplates] and twelve royal folio sheets.”41 This number of plates and large sheets of paper means that the view as a whole must have measured nearly three by six feet—­making it the largest item in Rosselli’s inventory, and perhaps the largest print of the incunabular period (that is, of all prints before 1500).42 Such a distinction might help to explain why no example of Rosselli’s original survives. The circumstances of display for multisheet prints were often inherently hazardous. It was not unheard of, for example, for them to be glued directly to a wall. Works on paper in general are highly vulnerable to decay, damage, and neglect—­their fragility magnified in proportion to their size. Simply put, the attrition rate for early modern large-­scale prints is dreadful.43 The extraordinary dimensions of Rosselli’s view of Rome also shed light on its ambition and intended function, signaling that it was not a hastily made, ephemeral print, or a small-­scale engraving destined to be mounted in an album—­but rather a grand, commemorative work, meant for prominent display. Large prints were often mounted on linen or canvas for exactly this purpose. The Rosselli inventory lists a number of examples, including one print of Rome, probably the lost view in twelve sheets, ready to be purchased and hung on a wall.44 We can also safely assume that Rosselli’s view cost a lot to produce, and correspondingly to purchase—­by one rough estimate, the equivalent of three months’ wages for a manual laborer (to whom it was, effectively, off limits).45 The appearance of Rosselli’s Rome can also be partially reconstructed, given that it served as the dominant prototype for imagery of the Eternal City, produced north and south of the Alps, for a century.46 The clear kinship of its many derivatives leaves little doubt that they shared a common ancestor, long ago identified as the inventory’s Rome in twelve sheets.47 Judging from traits common to its progeny, Rosselli’s print of Rome shared the basic compositional scheme of the “View with a Chain” (compare figs. 6, 7, and 10 and plate 5 with fig. 2). In both cases, the cityscape unfolds before the viewer as if glimpsed from an elevated spot outside the walls. The key feature of each image is a major church: the Duomo in the case of Florence, St. Peter’s Basilica in the case of Rome. Monuments are depicted recognizably, their positions within the city fairly true to life (their orientations and proportions more subject to manipulation). They are embedded within a convincingly dense urban

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fabric that gives a sense of Rome as a living, bustling place—­quite different from the frozen, distilled version of the fourteenth-­century ideograms. The topography, generally speaking, is also rendered with some care for its distinctive features. Rosselli’s views of Florence and Rome were among the first such images to be constructed according to geometric principles of measurement, survey, and pictorial perspective. They embodied a new attention to accuracy and naturalism in the rendering of urban topography and the built environment, as well as a new understanding of the city as a unique entity defined by its own special character and appearance. These novelties quickly radiated across Europe by means of print. The earliest adaptation of Rosselli’s Rome is the small woodcut that appeared in Jacopo Filippo Foresti’s Supplementum chronicarum (Venice, 1490), replacing a generic townscape that had stood for Rome in earlier editions.48 There soon followed a double-­page woodcut in Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum—­the Nuremberg Chronicle—­published in 1493; at the end of the same decade, Lucantonio degli Uberti, to whom we owe the “View with a Chain,” produced a large copy of Rosselli’s Rome, itself now lost.49 A spalliera (or decorated furniture) panel of about 1485, now in the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt, is the first known painted example.50 Dating from closer to the turn of the century is a miniature in a French manuscript of Livy, now in the Vatican Library, that adapted the prototype for a representation of the ancient caput mundi.51 An anonymous, large painting executed in tempera on canvas several decades later, now in the Museo della città in Mantua, is generally considered the finest and most faithful rendering of Rosselli’s prototype.52 Unlike the earlier versions, this one shows the entire city rather than a truncated glimpse. It seems to have been the basis for a midcentury panel by an unknown Flemish artist—­in which the cityscape becomes the backdrop for a violent scene of the Sack of Rome (1527)—­and two other painted derivatives executed soon thereafter.53 After a half century during which few new images of Rome were published, Rosselli’s engraving, now some sixty years old, served again as the model for the view in Sebastian Münster’s best-­selling Cosmographia universalis, first published in Basel in 1550.54 That work, in turn, spawned a secondary string of descendants.55 The original was emulated clearly for the last time around 1570. But if we count the dozens of later editions and translations of Münster’s Cosmographia, as well as the French adaptation of that work first published by François de Belleforest in 1575, which spawned its own series of imitations, Rosselli’s prototype endured with few major changes well into the seventeenth century.56 Of course, some later versions were based on intermediaries rather than directly on Rosselli’s engraving. Still, there was clearly a

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single forefather to this extended family tree of imagery, which flourished for more than a century. Like the fourteenth-­century paradigm that inspired Taddeo di Bartolo’s fresco and the Limbourg brothers’ manuscript but to a much greater degree, Rosselli’s view became a veritable urban icon, a touchstone for imitation and innovation, as the medieval copying tradition took flight in print. The heterogeneity of its offspring demonstrates the adaptability of print to multiple viewing publics and uses, encompassing a wide spectrum of early modern visual culture: from grand display items symbolizing power and worldliness on palace walls to smaller works included in mass-­produced compendia that enabled readers to learn about far-­flung places from the comfort of their libraries; from mementos of travel, or travel substitutes, to models for artists to adjust to their own purposes—­not only in generating new iterations of the city but also in creating a convincing urban stage for figural compositions. That Rosselli’s composition was as suited to reconstructing ancient Rome as to staging an episode from recent memory, as adaptable to paint and manuscript as to other print media and decorated furniture, speaks to its remarkable versatility.57 These images should not be considered simulacra of Rosselli’s Rome any more than that work was a simulacrum of the city itself. They display a great deal of variety in size, format, and detail, but compositionally, much more unites than separates them. The smallest, earliest version, from Foresti’s chronicle of 1490, exhibits the essential qualities (fig. 6). Like the others, it portrays Rome from the northwest. The view is slightly elevated, taken from outside the Porta Pinciana and Porta Pia. The city walls spread out in the foreground, parallel to the picture plane. At far right, the Porta del Popolo, the northernmost city gate, provides a viewer’s entrance into the picture, much as it provided the entrance into Rome itself for visitors and pilgrims coming from the north—­some of whom are depicted in the foreground, acting as surrogates for the viewer within the image. Inside city walls, pagan and Christian marvels, ancient and modern, nestle together in the dense settlement. The Pantheon is easily identifiable toward the center, disproportionately large and turned so it faces east toward the viewer (not north, as it does in reality). At far left, an edge of the Colosseum is just squeezed in, while across the Tiber River, St. Peter’s Basilica rises proudly, capped by an exaggeratedly attenuated campanile, or bell tower, the cross at its apex rising above the horizon to crown the entire picture and serve as its interpretative key: this is a Christian capital. The view takes careful account of recent changes to Rome, the pace of which had increased dramatically since Alberti’s time.58 A number of papal

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Figure 6. View of Rome from Jacopo Filippo Foresti, Supplementum chronicarum (Venice, 1492 [orig. 1490]), fol. 48r, woodcut, 4⅜ × 5⅜ in. (11.25 × 13.75 cm). Private collection.

improvements are readily discernible. The most recent is the Belvedere Villa, at upper right, built for Pope Innocent VIII in 1485–­87 (thus yielding the earliest approximate date for Rosselli’s prototype). Beneath it, punctuating the ninth-­ century Leonine Walls that encircled the Vatican, is the round tower of Nicholas V, an imposing new fortification. Nearby, St. Peter’s—­shown twenty years before the initiation of Julius II’s massive reconstruction campaign sounded its death knell—­is seen with its benediction loggia, begun under Pope Pius II in 1462. Just below and to the left of the basilica, on the river, is Sixtus IV’s Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia of 1473–­82. To the left of that structure, in turn, is the Ponte Sisto, a bridge rebuilt on ancient foundations at the behest of Sixtus IV to connect Trastevere with the city center, and to ease circulation during the Jubilee of 1475. Indeed, this view speaks very much to the Rome of

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Sixtus IV (r. 1471–­84), whose urban and architectural interventions were the most radical to date in the emergent renovatio.59 And renewal is the overarching theme of the image. Rome appears as a bustling metropolis, attracting visitors from far and wide, with boat traffic along its river signifying trade and commerce. There is little sign of decay, and the city is teeming with glorious structures from all eras. The ancient monuments in the foreground do not dominate but instead function a bit like a preface for the Christian ones rising proudly in the background. Important landmarks are shown reductively, but still with an impressive degree of architectural accuracy, given that this particular derivative is a woodcut (a medium that allowed for less fine detail than engraving) and that it measures not quite 4½ × 5½ in. (11.25 × 13.75 cm): about one-­hundredth the size of the original engraving. This degree of miniaturization in a city portrait—­which was already, by its very nature, a radically miniaturized version of a real place—­meant that artists had to be resourceful if they hoped to convey a reasonable likeness and a sense of urban character. Yet artists evidently managed to exploit this challenge for rhetorical ends. Even this tiny image, for example, conveys the growing excitement of Rome reborn. In the slightly larger view from Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, the modern, Christian Rome is privileged to an even greater degree (fig. 7). Rome’s historic center is compacted relative to the Vatican across the river, which now takes up more of the image, fully dominating the visual field. In a variation on the classical High Renaissance compositional formula, St. Peter’s is at the apex of a pyramid whose baseline is formed by two highly allusive and prominent structures: at left, the Colosseum, symbol of ancient might and Christian martyrdom, and at right, the Castel Sant’Angelo, which denoted imperial grandeur rehabilitated by papal appropriation and Christian miracle (namely, the legendary appearance of an angel to Pope Gregory the Great in the late sixth century, signaling the end of the plague). In this view, Rome appears balanced, complete, distinctive, and prosperous. It also puts its best face forward. The angle of vision is again manipulated so that the important monuments face the viewer. The increasing concern for accuracy clearly did not prevent artists from using the tricks of their trade to put forth a triumphant image of the city. The Painted Version in Mantua  ·  At the other end of the spectrum from the woodcuts of Foresti and Schedel is the breathtaking if abraded painting in Mantua (plate 5), which stands out for its medium and refinement; expansive, panoramic composition; vivid, naturalistic color; fine detail; and size—­at

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Figure 7. View of Rome from Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg, 1493), n.p., woodcut, 9 × 20⅞ in. (23 × 53 cm). The National Library of Israel, Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, Shapell Family Digitization Project and The Hebrew University of  Jerusalem, Department of Geography—­Historic Cities Research Project.

almost four by eight feet, it is even larger than Rosselli’s original. Little is known with certainty about its origins, but the painting probably formed part of a cycle of murals depicting famous cities that Isabella d’Este (1474–­1539), marchesa of Mantua, commissioned in the 1520s and 1530s with the intention of displaying in a loggia of the ducal palace.60 Several letters to her ambassador in Venice record the marchesa’s hunt for the most “true and faithful” printed views to serve as models for paintings of “notable cities.”61 Isabella d’Este’s plan was perhaps inspired by the monumental fresco cycle that had been executed by Pinturicchio in the loggia of the Belvedere Villa for Pope Innocent VIII in the 1480s, or—­closer to home—­by the cycle of cities her husband, Francesco II Gonzaga, had commissioned in the 1490s for the Camera de le Citate (or Chamber of Cities) in his villa at Gonzaga.62 Few traces remain of either project, but it is clear that such suites were intended to project political power and prestige in symbolically charged settings.63 There are a number of signals that the Mantua canvas provides a good window onto Rosselli’s original engraving of 1485–­90. With the exception of two statues of Saints Peter and Paul installed on the Ponte Sant’Angelo—­the bridge connecting the Vatican’s major fortress with Rome’s center—­in 1534, the city depicted here does not reflect the urban changes of the previous fifty years. The artist, it seems, was knowingly representing an earlier incarnation of Rome. An inscription adjoining a picture of the Marcus Aurelius statue next to the

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Basilica of St. John Lateran, for example, notes that it had been moved to the Capitoline Hill.64 This transfer occurred in 1538, which thus furnishes the earliest possible dating for the painting. Similarly, the Meta Romuli, a pyramidal monument believed to have been the tomb of Romulus, is shown in the Vatican Borgo, along with a label noting that it had been destroyed in the time of Pope Alexander VI (r. 1492–­1503).65 Whatever its rationale, this dutiful adherence to an out-­of-­date prototype indicates that the Mantua canvas is indeed a critical point of reference for Rosselli’s engraving. The painting seems to reflect the full composition of the original. Working on an even larger scale, the artist was not required to make the drastic selections that were necessary in the much-­reduced woodcut versions of the 1490s. In the Mantua canvas, the image of Rome extends much farther to the right and left, encompassing the entire circuit of city walls and whole sprawling cityscape—­ thus assuming the same general format as the view of Florence. Space, too, is not as compressed. There is a sense of greater distance to Rome’s center, and the view is less telescoped, although it still incorporates considerable distortion, evident, for example, in the disproportionate size of select monuments relative to the surrounding structures. Looking at all three derivatives, we can now see that the authors of the earlier woodcuts had effected two operations: lowering the angle of vision and cropping the image to its central portion. These tactics surely responded to the smaller format of the illustrations and the need to harmonize them with other city views included in the volume. At the same time, both maneuvers favored a particular rhetoric, for they deliberately privileged the inhabited city center and omitted the disabitato: the vast, sparsely settled area in the southern and eastern zone of the city that embodied Rome’s decline since antiquity.66 Its forlorn expanse is noticeable only in the painting, at left and in the foreground. It provides a counterpoint to the densely packed northern quadrant of the city at right, establishing a visual yin-­and-­yang relationship between the dormant and living parts of Rome. The inclusiveness and higher viewing angle of the Mantua painting allow for a more complete picture than the woodcuts and a subtle shift in meaning. This view makes it clear how dramatically Rome had shrunk since late antiquity, when it had occupied much more space within the third-­century Aurelian Walls, with a population more than twenty times greater. What appeared as a lively, boisterous mass of buildings arbitrarily cut off by the edges of the picture plane in the small woodcuts is here revealed as a diminutive island surrounded by an encroaching sea of pastureland. While the inhabited core and the Vatican fade into the far distance, the disabitato dominates the foreground and the entire left side, taking center stage. This greenbelt includes some

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Figure 8. Anonymous, view of Rome (detail). Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

churches, most notably the Lateran Basilica—­cathedral of Rome and historic seat of the popes—­as well as other structures and patches of settlement. Still, there was considerably more life and activity in this zone of the city than this view lets on, for the disabitato was increasingly crisscrossed by orchards, walled gardens, and retreats belonging to prominent individuals, powerful families, and monastic communities.67 The Mantua canvas nonetheless presents it as the realm of ruins, a poetic landscape with bits of marble and broken aqueducts poking out here and there, fragmentary emblems of a vanished golden age. A small banderole in the foreground makes this symbolism explicit with the inscription, now barely legible, “Quanta ego iam fuerim sola ruina docet”: “How great I [Rome] once was, now only the ruins show” (fig. 8, top center). In this version of Rosselli’s prototype, the optimism of a renewed city is balanced against nostalgia for its glorious ancient predecessor. This message is also conveyed through visual strategies. The artist favors ancient monuments by highlighting many of them in white, so they stand out clearly against the predominantly reddish hue used for most of the built environment. They are also depicted disproportionately larger than prominent medieval and Renaissance constructions. Both tactics are evident in the city center, where, for example, the Palazzo Venezia, a mammoth palace built by Pope Paul II in the 1450s and 1460s, is implausibly dwarfed by the Pantheon, and the column of Trajan appears much taller and higher than the medieval Torre delle Milizie, when it was actually shorter and on lower ground (fig. 9). Similarly, where the Vatican was the linchpin of the earlier woodcuts, here

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Figure 9. Anonymous, view of Rome (detail). Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

its role is decidedly reduced (plate 5, upper right). Not only does it recede to a remote position in the background, but its scale is also diminished, its campanile relatively unobtrusive. Ancient monuments are also shown in greater (often fictional) detail than their recent, more intact counterparts. The Pantheon, for example, is the most elaborately rendered structure, as well as the most inflated in scale, of the entire painting. In this way, it replaces St. Peter’s as the most conspicuous feature. Lovingly depicted with its double pediment, stepped saucer dome, and oculus, it is also given an imaginary classicizing facelift: a gleaming marble cladding, complete with string courses and engaged columns, to mask the brick core that had been revealed after centuries of despoliation. It rises above its surroundings on an imaginatively restored grand stylobate, or encircling staircase, as if set on a podium. In this way, its erstwhile function as an ancient temple—­not its postantique identity as the Church of Santa Maria ai Martiri—­is brought to the fore. The Colosseum, the only structure larger than the Pantheon, is not restored to a false state of  wholeness, but it is similarly spruced up with architectural ornament (see plate 5, center left). While the artist’s antiquarian bias is far from absolute, the overtly Christian cast of the earlier woodcuts is minimized in the Mantua canvas, in keeping with the rhetoric of the banderole: How great Rome once was, now only the ruins show. This lament was an enduring literary trope that suffused works

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from the poetry of Hildebert of Lavardin (d. 1133) to the Mirabilia guidebooks and Poggio’s Vicissitudes of Fortune.68 In the painting, the nostalgic tone is reinforced by a second inscription written on a cartello, or fictive placard, at the bottom margin toward the right (fig. 8).69 This vernacular verse questions the city’s lost magnificence: “Where, Rome, are your honors from ancient times? / . . . Gates, arches, temples, statues, arms, obelisks, / Baths, colossi, fora, amphitheaters / . . . Where are they? / . . . No earthly state [is] therefore eternal, / As one learns from you . . .”70 In this moralizing commentary, Rome’s decline symbolizes the fleetingness of earthly achievement and the futility of human endeavor. To press this point even further, the destructive power of time is personified by a winged figure, now barely visible, menacingly brandishing a scythe, to the right of the text. In this way, Rome becomes a cautionary tale—­an urban memento mori. Again, there is nothing original in this idea. As early as the mid-­twelfth century, Magister Gregorius, author of De mirabilibus urbis Romae, wrote that “all temporal things soon pass away, especially as Rome, the epitome of earthly glory, languishes and declines so much every day.” This platitude is not, however, the only message of the Mantua canvas. The view might incorporate a timeworn rhetoric of loss, but it also represents the city in approximately 1500 in a distinctly celebratory way—­as a stage for marvels both pagan and Christian, ancient and recent. Multiple implications could be concentrated in an image of the allusive urban palimpsest, none of which was necessarily seen to contradict the others. The sight of faded Roman grandeur could simulta­ neously spark a sense of nostalgia and wonder, much as it did for Magister Gregorius himself, who—­directly on the heels of his lamentation over the city’s state—­wrote that “although all of Rome lies in ruins, nothing intact can be compared to this.”71 The presumed patronage of the Mantua canvas might provide a clue to its complex message. Unlike prints that were designed to resonate broadly—­and that embraced a rosy vision of the modern, Christian, renewed Rome—­the painting was a commissioned work destined for a particular setting. In the context of a hall of state like the Ducal Palace in Mantua, this city portrait was carefully tailored to make a political statement. Although the Gonzaga court had no claims to Rome, the view shows their emblem, the eagle, emblazoned on a yellow pennant fluttering over the city, next to the flag of Rome, at the bottom margin (fig. 8, left). In this way, the rulers of Mantua took symbolic possession of the Eternal City—­a claim that was only worth making if the city still preserved some of its grandeur. Hence Rome is not just reduced to a tragic tale, but also commemorated in the painting. It is also important to consider

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the personal motivations of Isabella d’Este herself, for she was one of the most astute collectors of the sixteenth century, and her passion for antiquity might also help to explain the painting’s emphasis on Rome’s past.72 The Gonzaga court in general cultivated a highly learned, humanist atmosphere. The rhetoric of loss in the image might also have fit the larger program of its elite patronage. Perhaps Isabella d’Este or an adviser who oversaw her hall of cities wished to suggest that Rome’s time had come and gone. A capital of the past, it was now supplanted by centers of power and culture that lay elsewhere—­like Mantua itself, a new Rome. Such a message only made sense in a work shaped by special interests and destined for a specific viewership. It is impossible to determine whether Rosselli’s original engraving incorporated a sentiment comparable to that of the Mantua canvas. The painting’s message was fashioned through inscriptions and marginalia, then bolstered by representational strategies at work within the cityscape. None of these factors was necessarily present in Rosselli’s original. The expressive content of the prototype is lost to us, and we cannot determine if it embraced the relatively optimistic vision of the early woodcuts, the greater pathos of the Mantuan version, or a more neutral statement somewhere in the middle. It is clear, however, that Rosselli’s original—­much like Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae—­provided a flexible framework on which to project a rich range of meanings, adaptable to a variety of purposes and publics. Innovation, Dissemination, Anachronism  ·  If the overarching message of the Mantua canvas was outmoded, its approach to urban representation was decidedly progressive. This aspect, unlike the heavy-­handed marginalia, surely reflects Rosselli’s prototype and helps to explain its lasting influence. The artist not only altered the conventional orientation by placing north at right—­an obvious sign that he was staking out new territory—­but he also radically changed the entire cityscape. Like Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae, Rosselli’s work conveyed an understanding of the city as an integrated physical entity. His views of Florence and Rome made dramatic strides toward incorporating realistic proportions, topographical specificity, urban infrastructure, and a more accurate, comprehensive built environment. Another important innovation was their fusion of architecture and setting. Unlike ideogrammatic images that extract and isolate monuments, the “View with a Chain” and the Mantua canvas incorporate them into their surroundings, stressing interconnections among natural and man-­made features. As we have seen, there were medieval precedents for Rosselli’s vision of the city as an inhabited, densely packed urban center, yet none was so convincing.

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Rosselli also went further to shape his image by means of infrastructure and thereby create a kind of connective tissue—­a unifying armature—­in a manner that parallels Alberti’s concept of space as a continuous matrix. At first glance, the Mantua canvas seems to portray inhabited Rome as a dense screen of buildings with no breathing room separating them, but closer inspection reveals otherwise. Open spaces are given new prominence, suggesting an understanding of them not just as voids between buildings but rather as volumes: positive features of the urban fabric. They are not only pictured, but in some cases also named and individualized. Streets and piazze appear in front of the Pantheon and the nearby Campo de’ Fiori, as well as throughout the Vatican Borgo and at the foot of the Ponte Sant’Angelo (fig. 9). Below and to the left of that bridge, the Via dei Coronari (or Via Recta)—­an important artery funneling traffic toward the river crossing—­carves a straight, wide path between palazzi and churches. Such details are admittedly few and subtle, but they point to larger changes. Overall, this image has nothing generic, schematic, or compendious about it, and despite the wealth of detail, it gives the impression of the city as a cohesive whole. The process by which this view was constructed also differs notably from typical medieval urban representations. Whereas ideograms were more akin to memory pictures compiled from literary sources, Rosselli’s portrayals were based largely on direct observation of the physical city. Linear perspective and survey together provided their foundation—­the former for representing buildings as a viewer might see them from a distance, the latter for uniting all features in a measured framework. A strategy for depicting three-­dimensional objects and space on a two-­dimensional surface, one-­point perspective was invented in the early 1400s by Brunelleschi and then formulated by Alberti in his treatise On Painting (1435). The technique was ill suited to a subject as vast as a city, but in Rosselli’s view of Rome, the artist seems to have adapted its basic principles to his purpose by applying them piecemeal. As Marcello Fagiolo has demonstrated through a careful analysis of the Mantua canvas, Rosselli’s Rome was a pastiche, stitched together from multiple elevated observation points, mainly east of the city, but also within the walls.73 From each point, the artist must have made preliminary studies that he then stitched together to create the desired panoramic vista. In this sense, the constructive process for the view is akin to that of Alberti’s map, which also entailed such an aggregation. Simultaneously, those same elevated vantage points would have served the artist in creating a rudimentary survey of Rome, sufficient to grant his image its degree of measured exactitude. The practice of surveying cities had begun to make significant advances by Rosselli’s time, as witnessed by Alberti’s move

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toward a measured city plan, which was soon to have concrete realization in Leonardo da Vinci’s map of Imola. Of course, Rosselli’s city views were vi­ sually evocative pictures, not orthogonal plans. They have horizons, among other obvious optical references, but it is still clear that they were not assembled purely “by eye.” The city is seen obliquely from above, so that its layout is clearer than it would be from even the highest hill or tower. As we have seen with Alberti’s mapping procedure, there simply was no point in Rome from which to gain such an encompassing vista. Rosselli’s image purports to show the city as it appears from the northeast, but no such vantage point exists. Irrespective of its graphic type, the Mantua canvas—­or rather, its prototype—­ provided the earliest generally accurate picture of Rome’s physical situation, one that must have entailed some topographical measurement: if not a scrupulous survey of the entire city executed with a magnetic compass—­which is quite unlikely—­then plausibly a series of localized, baseline surveys to fix the relative positions of major points. The rest could be filled in.74 Greater precision was not necessary in a view intended for display, as opposed to, say, administrative or strategic purposes. Explicit testimony about a related procedure comes from none other than Giorgio Vasari (1511–­74). In his Ragionamenti, he explained the process he had used to construct a panoramic view showing Florence during the siege of 1530 (plate 6)—­a view with many formal similarities to the Mantua canvas: “It would have been difficult to make this representation relying on a natural viewpoint, in the usual manner of drawing cities and towns—­by means of direct visual observation—­considering that the tall things block those that are shorter.” He had sought the highest vantage points possible to accomplish his task, Vasari wrote—­naming a whole series of hills and tall structures—­but still had not been able to achieve an all-­embracing vision. His solution was to supplement direct observation with measurement: “Thus to make my drawing more exact, and so that it would encompass everything that was in that territory, I used this manner, to help with skill [arte] where nature was lacking.”75 He went on to outline the skill in question, namely, that of making a compass survey of Florence—­the same technique used by Leonardo da Vinci to make his map of Imola and an elaboration of Alberti’s procedure, even if the end result assumed a different representational form. Now, there is some doubt whether Vasari ever really implemented the technique as described.76 Theory and practice often diverged in the making of Renaissance city imagery. Regardless, Vasari’s combination of nature and arte—­of what he could see with his own eyes and a larger armature he could only measure—­approximates the building blocks of Rosselli’s Rome.

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As a group, the Rosselli derivatives embody a new, early modern approach to the city as an urban environment, a unified fabric, so different from the late medieval concept of it as a series of discrete pictograms. Rome, in a sense, has been transformed from a medieval staccato chronicle into a flowing Renaissance narrative. In their careful attention to specific detail, these images also signal an understanding of the city as a unique entity, distinct from other places. These shifts went hand in hand with the invention of the city portrait as a genre and its development into a major category of printed imagery. Early examples appeared in a variety of media, from luxury manuscripts like Massaio’s Ptolemy atlases to painted cycles like Pinturicchio’s for the Belvedere Villa and published works. But the proliferation of books like the Nuremberg Chronicle and of lavish, separately issued engravings like Rosselli’s signals a decisive shift toward print by the end of the fifteenth century. Increasingly in these works, innovation took place in the realm of print, then reverberated in painting. This pattern inverted the more typical one seen in figural prints that disseminated artistic experiments taking place in more prestigious media. The Mantua canvas, for example, took its form from an engraved prototype, and it was not an isolated case. Several other paintings based on Rosselli’s original exist, and the pattern of transmission is nearly identical with his view of Florence.77 Rosselli’s engravings have been proposed as possible models for both the Belvedere cycle and that of the Camera de le Citate of Francesco II Gonzaga.78 We have seen that Isabella d’Este, one of the most discerning patrons of Renaissance Italy, explicitly sought printed imagery of cities to serve as “true and faithful” exempla for her murals in Mantua. A century later, in one of the most elite contexts possible—­the Vatican Gallery of Maps—­printed views served as prototypes for many of the frescoed city maps. The map of Rome, for example, is based on an updated version of a surprisingly modest engraving of 1590.79 This phenomenon is a clear instance of the city portrait as a printed genre that influenced other media, rather than the other way around. Yet, for all of the advances we have seen across these works, they could also perpetuate anachronistic pictures of the city. By the time the later Rossellian images appeared, the Rome depicted was a thing of the past. The woodcut from Münster’s Cosmographia universalis (fig. 10) declares its accuracy in a banner heading asserting, somewhat disingenuously, that it records “the site of Rome as it is in 1549.”80 At this time, however, the Vatican, which figures so prominently, was in a state of transformation. Old St. Peter’s was in the midst of prolonged demolition, as the new basilica, initiated in 1506 by Julius II and his architect Donato Bramante (1444–­1514), went up around it.81 As illustrated

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Figure 10. View of Rome from Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia universalis (Basel, 1550), 150–­51, woodcut, 9⅜ × 14 in. (23.7 × 35.5 cm). British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

by the more documentary drawings of Marten van Heemskerck (1498–­1574), the Vatican was in fact a construction site at midcentury. Moreover, Bramante’s Belvedere Courtyard had long since tamed the unkempt outcropping north of the Vatican, but this zone still appears in its late-­1480s form in the upper right corner of Münster’s view. There is another sign of a rather cavalier attitude toward the city’s architecture among later printed derivatives of Rosselli’s Rome. From Münster on, they all betray a glaring omission—­none other than the Colosseum—­along with a note in the key, breezily explaining that there simply “was not enough space” for it.82 Münster’s woodcut might be the most detailed, complete, and technically accomplished of the printed Rosselli descendants, but it demonstrates

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that attentiveness to the current state of the city, so noteworthy in the early examples, began to fade—­at least in the realm of printed book illustrations. In other categories of imagery—­namely, separately published prints geared toward display, in the tradition of Rosselli’s original engraving—­new visions and modes of representing the city were coming into being. The year after Münster’s view was issued, Bufalini published his groundbreaking map of Rome. Over the rest of the sixteenth century, a series of artists like Mario Cartaro, Stefano Du Pérac, and Antonio Tempesta made their own distinct contributions to the grand, commemorative, pictorial tradition that Rosselli had initiated, while hewing carefully to Rome’s rapidly changing physical state. Alberti’s map of Rome did not have anything like Rosselli’s impact. Not once was it translated into print, and there is no clear evidence that it was translated into visual representation before modern times. The Descriptio urbis Romae originated in a rarefied intellectual milieu, and there it remained, where only a few had access to it. Of those who did, no one seems to have been tempted to publish it, or a map done in accordance with Alberti’s cartographic principles. The notion probably did not occur to them, for such a plan was simply not suited to popular imagery. It was not a public image, meant to be seen by many people. Moreover, in Alberti’s formulation, it was largely devoid of symbolism—­of some larger message about Rome’s status. Most maps like Alberti’s were carefully guarded military tools or administrative records not meant for popular consumption. Indeed, the diagram evoked in the Descriptio would have been alien to many viewers in Alberti’s day. During the fifteenth century and much of the sixteenth, its coded form of representation remained specialized knowledge: the province of mathematicians, architects, military engineers, and—­to a lesser but growing extent—­antiquarians interested in quantifying the remains of ancient Rome. For this select group, Alberti’s instructions would have been an erudite puzzle, but their larger implications were still unresolved. This situation began to change early the following century. As we shall see, Alberti’s principles ultimately did have a profound if surreptitious influence on subsequent architectural projects and did eventually work their way into printed representations and popular consciousness. And it would be a mistake to assume that the cartographic mode was adapted to purely documentary purposes—­rather, like Rosselli’s prototype, it became a platform for creative expression by artists seeking to distill the essence of the Eternal City.

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Chapter Two

Putting Rome into Drawing The Lessons of Architecture and Antiquity in the Early 1500s

For half a century, between the appearance of Francesco Rosselli’s engraving of Rome in the late 1480s and the publication of an archaeological plan by Bartolomeo Marliani in 1544, there was a curious hiatus in printed imagery of the Eternal City. Even accounting for the very real possibility of attrition, there is no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that any new portrayal materialized. In the same period, however, critical groundwork was put in place for a surge after midcentury. The early 1500s were marked by fervent graphic experimentation and technical innovation on the part of architects in Rome, their efforts fired by a dual stimulus: the desire to generate a graphic reconstruction of antiquity and the actual construction of New St. Peter’s, a project of unprecedented scope.1 Initiated in 1506 by Pope Julius II (r. 1503–­13), this enormous undertaking was a magnet for the most talented Renaissance architects even as it bedeviled them with unique challenges—­structural and organizational—­ that called for ingenious solutions. In this context, the remnants of ancient structures offered not just insight into the past, but also lessons for architectural design and practice with

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immediate relevance for the present. Raphael’s ambitious plan to measure and reconstruct the vanishing Roman ruins on paper, recorded in his letter to Pope Leo X , as well as drawings realized by his fellow architects and a series of illustrated books, all trace their origins to this catalyzing atmosphere. The techniques for measuring sites and drawing buildings pioneered in Rome in the early 1500s—­together with Alberti’s principles for mapping the entire city—­provided a critical foundation for Bufalini’s plan and all measured representations. Disseminated in printed treatises on architecture and antiquity, these strategies also helped to create an audience for maps, familiarizing a wider public with the conventions of orthogonality and whetting its appetite for imagery of Rome. Yet even as Raphael and others embraced this technical form of representation, they did not disavow pictorialism, for it alone was thought to convey intangible qualities. Ultimately, this notion had important ramifications for the reception of maps and all forms of city imagery later in the century. Architects were not the only protagonists in this narrative, nor did any one hero serve as its driving force. In this chapter, Raphael and his innovations stand for a larger, diverse cohort made up not just of practicing architects, but also members of the intellectual elite—­and for their common cultural program. Scholars were equally passionate about antiquity, and they were eager to master the practical, hands-­on knowledge of their architect-­ counterparts. Similarly, architects understood that historical method could complement their own more empirical understanding of the ruins. The result was an informal partnership based on shared purpose: reconstruction of the ancient city in words and images. The boundary between architect and humanist, craftsman and thinker, blurred during this time of pronounced professional and intellectual mobility in Rome, when many individuals moved easily across spheres. Alberti, the previous century, was a rarity for having channeled his privileged classical education and scholarly brilliance into architectural practice as well as theory.2 Such convergence became more common in the sixteenth century, as witnessed by figures like Raphael, Bufalini, Pirro Ligorio, and others whose names appear frequently in this and subsequent chapters. Renaissance Rome was marked by a fusion of technical and scholarly culture, with antiquity at the nexus. Raphael’s letter, a project that resists single authorship or easy classification according to genre, perfectly encapsulates this collective effort, which gave way, by the end of the sixteenth century, to increasing specialization and fixity.

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Raphael’s Call to Preserve, Measure, and Draw the Ruins

Raphael’s letter to Leo X is a groundbreaking document, embodying a progressive attitude toward antiquity while codifying new surveying techniques and guidelines for architectural drawing. In many respects, the letter reflects Raphael’s synthesis of developments that were already in play among his associates in Rome rather than his own inventions, but he bears the distinction of being the first to put them in writing. This intriguing document has garnered considerable debate regarding dating, authorship, and intent.3 The attribution to Raphael (1483–­1520) has generally been accepted, as has the assistance of his friend, the noted scholar Baldassare Castiglione (1478–­1529). But many points remain unresolved. Recently, new names have been added to the list of potential collaborators, figures who might have assisted in executing drawings for the project—­the scope of which was far too ambitious for one man alone to execute—­as well as others who might have had a hand in writing the text.4 There has also been much discussion over who deserves most credit for the ideas expressed in the letter, what exactly those ideas mean, and whether the text originated about 1513–­14, or closer to Raphael’s death in 1520—­at which point the project was left unfinished—­or, as seems most likely, evolved gradually over that period.5 Further complicating matters, the letter exists in several versions that were drafted at different times and disagree in important respects.6 It is not the goal here to settle these points of contention, but rather to explore the significance of the document for the intellectual climate and architectural culture of sixteenth-­century Rome, along with its larger implications for imagery of the city in its wake. Raphael, the letter signals, had been officially charged by the pope with the task of creating a graphic record of the Roman ruins. The text, written in high-­ style vernacular, was meant as a preface to a series of drawings. Raphael begins with a poignant appeal to the pope to preserve Rome’s ancient patrimony, invoking an old lament—­familiar from Petrarch to Poggio Bracciolini—­about “the corpse of this great, noble city, once queen of the world, [now] so cruelly butchered.” His goal, Raphael writes, is to “muster what little ability I have so that, as far as possible, an image may survive—­barely more than a shadow—­of what is in fact the universal homeland of all Christians and which at one time was so noble and powerful that the men of those times began to think that she alone of all cities on earth was above fate and, contrary to nature, not subject to death but would last forever.” What remains of that golden age, he writes, is akin to “the bones of the body without the flesh,” for the city has fallen

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victim to Goths, Vandals, and unprincipled popes—­“men who held the same office as Your Holiness but who had neither your wisdom nor your qualities or magnanimity.” Raphael names antiquities that even in his own time he has seen vanish, demolished to clear a path or fed into the lime kilns to create mortar for new constructions: “the Meta that was in the Via Alexandrina, the arch that was once at the entrance to the Baths of Diocletian, the Temple of Ceres in the Via Sacra and a part of the Forum Transitorium.”7 It is a litany of the dead. Raphael’s plea on behalf of the monuments is an early preservationist manifesto, but it was not without precedent, and he also was an active participant in the very same destructive villainy he decries.8 In his dual capacity as overseer of antiquities and head architect for St. Peter’s, Raphael was responsible for protecting the ruins from unauthorized looting, on one hand, and for deciding which ones should be looted to provide building materials for the massive new basilica at the Vatican, on the other. However paradoxical this stance, Raphael’s goal was graphic preservation more than physical safeguarding of the monuments. After going through the causes of the demolition and expressing regret about its ongoing nature, Raphael returns abruptly to the task at hand, which is to “put ancient Rome into drawing, to the extent that it can be known from what we see today, with the buildings that have sufficient remains on their own that, in truth, they can be infallibly restored to what they once were, [by] making those members that are completely ruined or that have vanished correspond to those that are still standing and can be seen.”9 With this brief procedural explanation, Raphael outlines a new approach to graphic reconstruction, one that Cammy Brothers has aptly characterized as “proto-­archaeological” in contrast to the creative liberty of earlier architects.10 Physical evidence, not imaginative speculation, was to dictate reconstruction. The modern science of archaeology did not yet exist, but Raphael’s approach points in that direction. He also speaks of correlating physical evidence obtained by inspecting buildings—­“making every effort to consider them in great detail and measure them carefully”—­with ancient texts that were formerly the province of humanists: “assiduously reading the best authors and comparing the built works with the writings of those authors.”11 Among those written sources, he singles out the same late antique regionary catalogues that Flavio Biondo had consulted the previous century for his Rome Restored, although Raphael places much greater emphasis on cross-­referencing the texts with physical remains—­as befitted someone who had expert knowledge of those remains. In another novelty, he makes documentation of the ruins an end in it­ self, rather than a tool for brainstorming new designs or solving new problems. Raphael shows himself to be more a creature of his time when he identifies

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which sorts of buildings merit documentation: mainly those by “the worthy ancients,” not those from the Middle Ages, which he summarily dismisses as being “without skill, measure or any grace whatsoever.”12 Raphael wants to set Renaissance Rome as the stage for a second golden age of architecture, but his goal is also didactic: he seeks to characterize good building principles. Having established his criteria, Raphael returns to the subject of drawing ancient Rome in order to “tell you the way that we decided to survey [misurare] and draw” the ruins. At this point the tone of the letter shifts abruptly from the poetic and literary to the practical, becoming more akin to a technical treatise, as Raphael sets forth his method of surveying buildings. His instrument, the bussola, is a graduated circle with rotating arms for establishing a baseline and measuring bearings. But for a few key improvements, most notably the addition of a magnetic compass at center to fix the baseline along the north-­south axis, Raphael’s device is identical to the horizon that Leon Battista Alberti had described in his Descriptio urbis Romae some seventy years before. Leonardo had used the same instrument to make his plan of Imola in 1502 (plate 4), and it became a fixture of popular surveying manuals later in the century (figs. 11–­12). Raphael does not claim to have invented the bussola, which is the ancestor of the modern theodolite. He explains, vaguely, “I think that it was invented by the moderns. However, it seems to me to be worthwhile to give careful instruction in it to those who know nothing about it.”13 In this way, Raphael hints that the tool and its usage are common knowledge in his professional circle, while implying that his own intended audience is a wider group of nonexpert enthusiasts who, he must have presumed, would appreciate his techniques and measured representations of the ancient city. Raphael then provides instructions—­more complete than Alberti’s—­for a surveying method that was soon to become standard for mapping both buildings and towns.14 His directions for manufacturing the bussola and using it on site anticipate a plethora of printed treatises that began to appear on the same subject a few decades later, beginning with the highly popular handbook Quesiti et inventioni diverse (1546) by Niccolò Tartaglia (1499/1500–­1557). In Raphael’s formulation, the surveyor measures a structure by circumnavigating its perimeter, using the magnetic compass to note the orientation of each stretch of wall, and calculating its length (like Alberti, he is unforthcoming about how distance is to be determined). The same basic method, just on a larger scale, was described three decades later by Tartaglia for measuring the perimeter of a town, and it was also employed by Bufalini to map Rome. In all cases the resulting diagram was known as an ichnography—­meaning, essentially, a footprint—­the word derived from the ancient architect Vitruvius’s term for a

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Figure 11. Niccolò Tartaglia, Quesiti et inventioni diverse (Venice, 1546), bk. 5, 56r. British Library, London. © British Library Board, General Reference 534.g.21.(1.).

ground plan.15 There might seem to be a gulf separating a simple building plan from Bufalini’s complex map, but the difference is one of degree, not kind. At base, their making and graphic language were identical. In his Quesiti, Tartaglia describes two ways to use a bussola to survey a given area: “One is to be in the middle, that is, inside the site or area with the instrument placed, fixed, and stable, and the other is to travel [from point to point] along the circumference of the site, or area.”16 The first, fixed method (fig. 12), which involves measuring bearings from a central station point, was essentially that described by Alberti in his Descriptio urbis Romae. The second method, which entails traversing the boundary to be surveyed, approximates Raphael’s procedure in the letter to Leo X. Although this mobile method is less trustworthy, Tartaglia writes—­since problems in taking accurate bearings can arise from moving the temperamental bussola—­it is called for when an area to be measured is particularly large, or when a surveyor is unable to take all necessary sightings from a single interior station point due to visual obstructions like buildings, hills, or trees. In practice, the two approaches were complementary and often needed to be deployed in tandem to survey a large site—­as they were earlier by Alberti and later by Bufalini. Buildings, on the other hand, were small enough to be measured using Raphael’s tactic alone.

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And they frequently were. Few drawings by Raphael himself have been connected with the project outlined in the letter to Leo X, but the same principles resonated through Roman architectural circles in the early sixteenth century. Raphael’s contemporaries Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–­1536) and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1484–­1546), for example, left behind a multitude of careful ground plans with meticulously noted dimensions and orientations, hinting at how commonly architects used the procedures outlined in the letter. Again, Raphael did not invent these methods for measuring buildings and showing them to scale—­Christoph Frommel has suggested that he learned them (and much more) from Bramante, his mentor and predecessor as head architect at St. Peter’s—­but he made a significant contribution by codifying them.17 It is also clear that architects adopted the same techniques to measure larger sites, even if Raphael is silent in this regard. Several drawings by Sangallo, now in the Uffizi Museum, record compass surveys of Florence taken from single station points.18 Others relating to the fortifications of Rome,

Figure 12. Tartaglia, Quesiti, bk. 5, 56v. British Library, London. © British Library Board, General Reference 534.g.21.(1.).

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dating from the 1530s and 1540s, show his expertise in using the mobile method of proceeding from point to point along a walled perimeter.19 Sangallo also seems to have been familiar with a rudimentary form of triangulation—­a technique of cross-­referencing survey data from two points to attain information for a third—­a time-­saving device as well as a way to verify accuracy. Triangulation was increasingly known and practiced, often as a complement to other measuring procedures.20 Following Raphael’s description of his surveying method in the letter, he outlines the types of drawings he considers proper to his task, and to architecture. This section is another milestone: the first clear articulation of the array of orthogonal drawings—­plan, section, and elevation—­that eventually became the professional standard. Orthogonality as such had been commonly practiced in the Middle Ages and was not exactly a new graphic technique.21 But Raphael’s formulation is equally significant for what it pointedly leaves out: perspective and other pictorial strategies that architects shared with artists, which aimed to imitate the appearance of three dimensions on paper. He insists on measured, “flat” or planimetric drawings that must be made to the same scale, and must maintain true angles and correct proportions. “In drawings of this sort,” Raphael admonishes, “there is never to be any diminishing at the extremities . . . because an architect cannot get correct measurements from a foreshortened line. This is necessary for such a discipline, which demands complete accuracy of measurements and lines drawn parallel, not lines that appear to be parallel but are not.”22 Perspective drawings, according to Raphael, were useless and misleading to architects. Raphael’s dogmatic stance in favor of orthogonal drawings at the expense of perspective renderings echoes ideas that Alberti had expressed in his On Building of 1452. In a well-­known passage, Alberti had rejected in no uncertain terms a pictorial category, scenography, that had been sanctioned by Vitruvius in his De architectura—­the only surviving ancient Roman treatise on architecture, dating from the last decades of the first century BCE.23 “The difference between the drawings of the painter and those of the architect,” Alberti asserted, quarreling with the venerable ghost of Vitruvius, “is this: the former takes pains to emphasize the relief of objects in paintings with shading and diminishing lines and angles; the architect rejects shading, but takes his projections from the ground plan and, without altering the lines and by maintaining the true angles, reveals the extent and shape of each elevation and side—­he is one who desires his work to be judged not by deceptive appearances but according to certain calculated standards.”24 Alberti was an important antecedent to Raphael in advocating that architects avoid “deceptive appearances,” or

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artistic illusionism, and instead adopt orthogonal drawings based on “calculated standards.” Wolfgang Lotz speculated that Raphael’s formulation might have been spurred by his experience managing the construction of St. Peter’s, where there was a practical need for standardized, measured scale drawings that would enable him to delegate responsibilities—­although Brothers has countered that he was just as likely to have been inspired solely by his goal of documenting the ruins.25 In either case, Raphael joined Alberti in praising orthogonality, and went beyond him by defining the canonical graphic trio. As we shall see, however, Raphael later reversed course, reaffirming the usefulness of perspective, so the matter was by no means decided in his mind. The desired outcome of the project outlined in the letter is not entirely clear. It has long been assumed that Raphael, anticipating Bufalini by thirty years, intended to make a map of Rome to provide the overarching context for his drawings of individual monuments.26 But there are conflicting indications in this regard. Raphael referred to a “universal drawing of all Rome” incorporating its fourteen regions, or rioni, in an early draft of the letter, but then expunged any mention of such a plan from later versions.27 Anecdotal evidence is also ambiguous. Some contemporary commentators with knowledge of the project make vague allusions to a comprehensive plan of the city, others to a suite of drawings organized according to the rioni.28 In the end, there is no way to determine the precise nature of Raphael’s ambitions, which in any case seem to have changed over time. Whether or not he planned to create a map of Rome to go along with the drawings of  buildings, his topographically ordered, meticulously measured project was undeniably a form of mapping the city and its built environment. More important than the planned end result of the letter is the new lens that Raphael turned on the study of the Eternal City and its ruins. This aspect of his program makes it a key chapter in the prehistory of Bufalini’s plan and all later Renaissance imagery.

Raphael’s Larger Goals and Audience

Whatever uncertainties linger about Raphael’s project, scholars have traced a change in his ambitions across the three versions of the letter, from a formal missive directed at one powerful patron to the raw material for a printed treatise aimed at a wider public.29 This goal separates Raphael’s project from Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae, penned just before the advent of print. Raphael had a possible precedent in the Codex Coner, a meticulously organized collection of drawings after the antique from about 1515 that he probably knew

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and that is thought to have been geared toward such a purpose.30 Through his collaborations with the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi (ca. 1480–­ca. 1534), Raphael, as Madeleine Viljoen has demonstrated, had already come to recognize the “restorative power” of print.31 Along with many others who hatched similar publication plans around the same time, Raphael was taking his cues from an established genre: books of drawings by artists and architects made with the express purpose of disseminating graphic material on antiquity. As Arnold Nesselrath has observed, there was a strong interest and thus a market for copies of these works, which probably motivated the development of printed treatises on the same subjects.32 The likelihood that Raphael harbored these ambitions raises the key question of the audience he anticipated for such a project fusing text and illustration, as well as history, topography, architecture, and mapping. He knew well that all of these realms, including the technical, were of abiding interest to literati. Architectural treatises were clearly intended for this readership, often to the exclusion of professionals. Some were meant for the edification of discerning patrons more than practitioners. Alberti’s On building was written in Latin—­the language of the learned elite—­and dedicated to Nicholas V, the first great builder pope of the Renaissance; manuscripts and, from 1485, printed versions of the treatise worked their way into the most illustrious libraries of Italy. Similarly, early editions of Vitruvius, like Fra Giovanni Giocondo’s Latin version of 1511 or Cesare Cesariano’s Italian translation of 1521, were luxury items, calculated to attract a humanist audience more than working architects. By the mid-­sixteenth century, classically trained intellectuals, not experienced professionals, were sometimes the guiding hands behind such works. The erudite Venetian patrician Daniele Barbaro (1514–­70) published the most well-­regarded and widely circulated Renaissance commentary and translation of Vitruvius, with illustrations by Andrea Palladio (1508–­80), in 1556. This close collaboration between an architect and a scholar parallels that of Raphael and Castiglione in the letter to Leo X earlier in the century.33 Both works also point to other features that were increasingly deemed integral to the success of such works: the presence and quality of illustrations as a complement to text. The mapping and measuring skills that Raphael outlined were also valued highly outside professional circles, spreading into the upper reaches of Roman and Italian society. Seventy years earlier, Alberti had written his Descriptio, in Latin, to impart such techniques to like-­minded intellectuals (“friends of mine”) at the papal court. Similarly, the Ludi matematici—­although written in Italian, so nominally it would have been comprehensible to readers lacking

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knowledge of Latin—­had a princely pedigree. Drafted while Alberti was resident at the Este court in Ferrara, it was dedicated to (and seemingly requested by) Meliaduse d’Este (1406–­52), brother of the Marquis Leonello d’Este (1407–­ 50).34 Neither treatise was a manual geared toward craftsmen; together they testify that surveying procedures and practical mathematics appealed to scholars and nobles—­and were considered worthwhile skills—­long before Raphael included these ingredients in his letter. This interest only intensified in the sixteenth century. The popular success of a book like Tartaglia’s Quesiti of 1546 hinged on its appeal to nonprofessional enthusiasts; as Pamela O. Long has pointed out, one of his aims in publishing that and other works was to secure patronage.35 Ingrid Rowland’s examination of the prominent Roman humanist and papal secretary Angelo Colocci (1474–­1549) reveals a man enamored of ancient units of measure as well as the Corpus agrimensorum—­the ancient surveyors’ treatises.36 Indeed, Rowland has identified Colocci as a collaborator in the latest version of Raphael’s letter, so his personal preoccupations are of more than exemplary significance here.37 In the fifteenth century, cognoscenti from an elite sphere had also begun to take a keen interest in the kinds of tools that were otherwise associated with craftsmen. The learned Florentine scion Bernardo Rucellai (1448–­1514) commented favorably on Alberti’s Descriptio in his brief tract De urbe Roma of the 1490s, noting that “Baptista Alberti has very cleverly examined the site of the walls and the measurement of the city, so that it is described with the utmost study by means of mathematical mechanisms.”38 Similarly, in the middle of the following century, Barbaro, in his edition of Vitruvius, described skill with instruments or machines as “a beautiful, useful, and marvelous practice.”39 Technical proficiency was clearly admired by nonexperts eager to learn the trade secrets of architects like Raphael and Sangallo, who were adept at using the magnetic compass for measurement. When Fra Giocondo (1433–­1515) died before completing his treatise on the subject, it passed into the eager hands of Colocci, who studied it along with his collection of agrimensoria.40 These figures appreciated practical tools and techniques for their inherent ingeniousness, and increasingly for their applicability to the study of ancient Rome.41 Raphael could reasonably expect his project to appeal to intellectuals, therefore, and it was equally likely that it would resonate with his fellow architects—­ even if they had no need to master the methods outlined in the letter. Architects in Raphael’s extended circle were fervently engaged in investigating the ruins and recording them in drawings. Many aspired to correlate their firsthand observations with historical perspective that could only be gleaned from books and classical sources, but for the most part they lacked the education to do so.

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Raphael knew these frustrations personally and went to great lengths to find solutions, enlisting expert literary assistance from Castiglione to draft his letter in elegant vernacular, and even procuring an in-­house translation of Vitruvius from the humanist Fabio Calvo (ca. 1450–­1527) for his own self-­instruction as well as eventual publication.42 For Raphael’s colleagues, the highbrow preface to the letter would have helped to provide missing context, and to situate their activities in a venerable historical tradition—­thus elevating their profession as a whole. All of these factors help to explain the public that Raphael envisioned for his projected treatise, one that print would allow him to reach most efficiently. As much as his letter might seem a curious hybrid, it was perfectly calibrated to his cultural moment, and its collaborative spirit exemplifies that of early sixteenth-­century Rome. In this setting, the tools, texts, and visual apparatus of architects and scholars came together to forge a new, more archaeological approach to antiquity.43 Given that the materials in question were fascinating to learned circles across Europe, moreover, Raphael’s potential market stretched far beyond the Aurelian Walls.

Drawn from the Grave: Illustrated Works on Ancient Rome after Raphael

Raphael’s sudden death at the age of thirty-­seven in 1520 means he did not live to complete his treatise, but its impulses resonated through a series of related works that appeared over the following decades by scholars and architects with close connections to his circle. Like Raphael, these figures increasingly approached their investigations with an eye to publishing their findings and profiting from them. Although not every project was expressly geared toward visitors to Rome, they were all, in a sense, rejoinders to the medieval Mirabiliae tradition, meant to replace myth and legend with solid knowledge. All stemmed from the same ethos and sources of inspiration as the letter to Leo X—­if not always the same innovating synthesis of methods.44 On one hand, several publications that shared Raphael’s topographical and historical framework appeared, but they were marked by a stronger antiquarian bent. Dominated by text, not illustration, their authors tended to rely more on the evidence of ancient texts, inscriptions, and coins. These books were less concerned with the physical remains of ancient Rome as they could be known through excavation and measurement, and more preoccupied with toponyms and philology. In this way they did not deviate significantly from patterns established by humanists the previous century. On the other hand, there was

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a second category consisting of illustrated books on ancient architecture that were more in tune with Raphael’s goal “to put ancient Rome into drawing” in a systematic way. Profusely illustrated and highly attuned to the concrete forms of the monuments, these works, for their part, dispensed with Raphael’s larger historical and topographical principles. A split developed along antiquarian and architectural lines, but by midcentury, there were signs of reconciliation: a renewal of Raphael’s fusion. The resulting projects belonged to a different genre from maps and views intended to stand alone, but they bore close affinities in the types of information they provided and functions they served. No less than Alberti’s Descriptio or Rosselli’s city view, they were key forebears for later prints that sought to encapsulate all of Rome in a single image. In 1527, Andrea Fulvio (ca. 1470–­1527), a friend and humanist adviser to Ra­ phael, published his Antiquitates urbis, an erudite handbook to the city that—­ like Raphael’s project—­was organized geographically, in this case according to the seven hills rather than the fourteen ancient regions.45 Fulvio was not concerned with architectural documentation, but rather with history and place-­names. The orientation of his Antiquitates fell in line with an older tradition of topographical guides in the manner of Flavio Biondo’s Rome Restored of the mid-­fifteenth century. This genre—­an ancestor of the modern guidebook—­remained popular, but Fulvio’s was one of the last to be published without accompanying illustrations.46 Also in 1527, another friend and associate of Raphael’s, the scholar Fabio Calvo—­whose translation of Vitruvius Raphael had commissioned—­published his Antiquae urbis Romae cum regionibus simulachrum, which consisted of minimal text and twenty-­four woodcuts by one Tolomeo Egnazio da Fossombrone.47 Invoking Raphael, Calvo wrote, “It is deplorable that [Rome] has descended to [the state of ] such a filthy cadaver, having endured so much madness, rage, ravings, and raids of the Goths, Ostrogoths, Huns, Attila, and monstrous barbarians.”48 Like Raphael, Calvo ordered his study according to distinct historical periods and the ancient regions, and he similarly limited himself to the history of Rome through the imperial age. His decision to begin his book with a series of five maps also echoes Raphael’s goals. Calvo was not particularly interested in the physical properties of the ruins or the city, however, and his illustrations consist of schematic, unmeasured renderings that modern scholars have tended to disparage, even if they are not lacking in charm and internal coherence. Calvo’s map of Augustan Rome, for example, shows the city walls forming a perfect circle aligned to the wind

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Figure 13. Fabio Calvo, map of Augustan Rome from Antiquae urbis Romae cum regionibus simulachrum (Rome, 1532 [orig. 1527]), n.p., woodcut, 10¾ × 16¾ in. (27.5 × 42.5 cm). Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

directions, within which the ancient rioni (their numbers increased by two to permit a more perfect geometry) make up identical triangular wedges, each labeled, punctuated by a gate, and containing a single emblematic monument shown in perspective (fig. 13). The artificial geometric regularity of Calvo’s map is closer to ideal Renaissance city plans—­such as the circular, radial Sforzinda envisioned by Filarete (ca. 1400–­ca. 1469)—­than it is to Raphael’s cartographic method, or to Rome’s actual form at any point in its history.49 In sum, Calvo, like Fulvio, shared Raphael’s goal to reconstruct Rome’s topography as recorded in ancient texts but did not aim for accurate graphic preservation and reconstruction when it came to the entire city or its individual monuments. Published in Venice in 1540, Sebastiano Serlio’s Terzo libro . . . nel qual si figurano, e descrivono le antiquita di Roma stands on the opposite side of the equation:

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the work of a practicing architect who shared Raphael’s graphic sophistication and didactic aim, but not his historical method or topographical organization. Serlio (1475–­1554) was a native of Bologna who had come to Rome in 1514 and worked as an assistant to Peruzzi. The biographer Giorgio Vasari reported that Peruzzi—­much like his colleague Raphael—­had planned a book of antiquities, and Serlio based many of his illustrations on his late mentor’s drawings.50 At the very start of the Terzo libro, Serlio adopts a lamenting tone much like Raphael’s. The book’s frontispiece depicts a ruinous capriccio (or architectural fantasy) with the motto “Roma quanta fuit, ipsa ruina docet” (fig. 14)—­How great Rome once was, the ruins themselves show—­familiar also from the painted version of Francesco Rosselli’s view of Rome and many other iterations. The token pathos falls away quickly, however, for the Terzo libro was meant as a kind of practical textbook centered on the lessons of real buildings—­a formula that

Figure 14. Sebastiano Serlio, frontispiece to Il terzo libro di Sabastiano Serlio Bolognese, nel qual si figurano e descrivono le antiquita di Roma (Venice, 1544 [orig. 1540]). Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

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Figure 15. Serlio, plan and combined elevation/section of the dome of St. Peter’s, from Il terzo libro, 39–­40. Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

proved highly popular. Among the illustrations, Serlio included an impeccable iteration of Raphael’s orthogonal trio: a plan and combined elevation/ section showing Bramante’s design for the cupola of St. Peter’s (fig. 15). This was admittedly a modern building, but one that Serlio felt equaled those of antiquity. He also illustrated Bramante’s Tempietto (ca. 1502) and a succession of architects’ plans for St. Peter’s. In this way he, like Raphael, suggested that Renaissance Rome was the setting for a new golden age of architecture. Serlio also employed some of Raphael’s terminology and phrasing, admonishing his reader: “Do not be at all surprised if, in these things which touch on perspective, no foreshortening, depth or plane can be seen, because I wanted to raise these things up from the plan showing only the heights in scale, so that the measurements would not be lost in the diminishing resulting from the foreshortened sides.”51 The Terzo libro, moreover, favored illustration over text, for the latter served to explicate the former, rather than vice versa. Organized

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according to building type, the Terzo libro, like all contemporary architectural treatises, was also profoundly indebted to Vitruvius’s De architectura—­perhaps more than to any other single source. Nonetheless, Serlio espoused some of the same goals as Raphael in his attempt to provide a corpus that would set rules for good architectural practice, and in taking actual ruins rather than ideal types as his point of departure. Similar in format to Serlio’s book, Antonio Labacco’s Libro appartenente a l’architettura, first published in 1552 and then in a number of subsequent editions, is another conceptual heir to Raphael’s letter.52 Labacco (ca. 1495–­after 1567) had joined the ranks of the papal architects as a young man in the the second decade of the sixteenth century, eventually becoming an assistant to Sangallo at St. Peter’s and assisting him with his infamous, interminable wooden model of the church.53 Like Serlio, Labacco was deeply involved in Roman architectural circles, and his book reflects that background. In his prefatory note, Labacco aligns himself with Raphael’s goals from three decades before, echoing the rhetoric of the letter, by now something of a trope: “If the many ruined structures that can be seen today in Rome were whole,” he wrote, “their grandeur would doubtless be manifest, but they have been reduced to this [ruined state] by war and fire. So having always delighted in antiquity, and having seen in my time excavations in various places, I applied myself . . . to their reconstruction. I have taken great satisfaction from this [activity], especially when the buildings that one sees almost completely ruined [come to be] restored to wholeness in drawings.” Labacco shares Raphael’s emphasis on archaeological investigation, and his faith in the powers of graphic documentation to revive the ancient city; he also has little doubt that his treatise, which privileges illustration even more than Serlio’s, will appeal to amateurs (studiosi ) as well as professionals: “And also [this work will be useful to] the many men who go about measuring and searching among the ruins themselves but cannot find great satisfaction there, and likewise others who will see that they do not have to go to such great pains, but instead can attain understanding in a short time that would otherwise take many years of effort.”54 Labacco’s stated aim is instructional, and he addresses an ever-­widening market for architectural treatises. Lovers of antiquity no longer needed to get their hands dirty to quench their thirst for concrete knowledge. Labacco and Serlio both followed Raphael in seeking to impart sound ancient architectural principles through graphic means, but both discarded their forerunner’s historical and topographical organization. These diverse strands did come together, however, in projects that embody the spirit of Raphael’s letter even more closely. Perhaps the strongest reverberation is in the planned

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activities of the Accademia della Virtù, centered around the figure of the scholar Claudio Tolomei (1492–­1555), who had been closely connected to the court of Leo X.55 The main project of this learned society, a definitive illustrated commentary of Vitruvius, was described by Tolomei in a 1543 letter where he placed equal emphasis on text and image, explicitly adopted Raphael’s three orthogonal modes as well as perspective views, and repeated his predecessor’s insistence on informed (as opposed to creative) reconstruction. The goal, Tolomei writes, is “a very beautiful and useful work that puts into drawing all the antiquities of Rome,” with “figures of all the plans, profiles, foreshortened views, and many other parts as necessary, with their right and true measurements. . . . And accompanying these figures will be two descriptions: one historical . . . ; and the other architectural.” In addition to being helpful for architects, Tolomei continues, this project “will also draw from the grave the Rome that is already dead, and give her new life; if perhaps not as beautiful as before, at least she will regain some semblance or image of beauty.”56 Tolomei, like Raphael, aspired to a semblance—­“barely more than a shadow,” as per the letter to Leo X—­of a Rome that had been resurrected, if only graphically. This fundamental longing was a critical impetus for imagery of the entire city. Tolomei’s Vitruvius never came to fruition, but a project with related goals appeared a year later. In 1544, Bartolomeo Marliani (1488–­1566) published his Urbis Romae topographia, which was, in essence, the second edition—­now illustrated—­of his 1534 guidebook to Roman antiquities, the Antiquae Romae topographia.57 Marliani was one of the most noted antiquarians of his time, a man whose learning had earned him the support of important cardinals and the friendship of intellectuals like Annibale Caro (1507–­66). While the first edition of Marliani’s Topographia had followed in the purely textual tradition of Flavio Biondo and Andrea Fulvio, the enhanced second edition spoke to the rising importance of illustration in scholarly as well as architectural publications—­ and of the converging interests of the two fields. Marliani included engravings of ancient monuments in plan, elevation, and section, many of them lifted directly from Serlio’s Terzo libro. More original was the sequence of three maps that graced the opening pages of the treatise (figs. 16, 17). Showing Rome as it appeared in successive stages of its ancient history, these fully orthogonal plans were meant to provide the urban context for the images of individual monuments that followed. The idea of using maps in this way was perhaps taken from Calvo, but it was also much like Raphael’s initial concept of a “universal plan of all of Rome” to complement drawings of specific buildings. The first in Marliani’s series is a small, schematic plan of the city at the time of its mythical founding by Romulus;

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Figure 16. Bartolomeo Marliani, woodcut maps of Romulan and imperial Rome, from Urbis Romae topographia (Rome, 1544), 3, 7. Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

the second a full-­sheet map showing a composite image of Rome as it appeared under various emperors; the third and most ambitious a double-­sheet map of the caput mundi at the height of the imperial period. This deceptively modest woodcut was a milestone: the first measured plan of Rome ever to appear in print. It includes a number of structures, streets, the Tiber, Aurelian Walls, and even the hills in relatively accurate ground plan, all keyed to a scale in Roman stadia at lower left. So close is the conception of this map to Bufalini’s that Amato Pietro Frutaz, the foremost twentieth-­century authority on maps of Rome, asserted that Bufalini must have assisted Marliani in its preparation.58 There is no convincing evidence to that effect. Still, the kinship is uncanny. Bufalini’s map (plate 1)—­the next logical step in cartographic sophistication—­ could almost appear on the following page of Marliani’s Topographia. The lavishly illustrated books on Roman architecture that followed on the heels of Raphael’s letter to Leo X reflect a burgeoning market among the

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Figure 17. Marliani, double-­page map of imperial Rome, from Urbis Romae topographia, 12–­13, woodcut, 11¾ × 18½ in. (30 × 47 cm). Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

literati—­exactly the public that would soon eagerly begin collecting maps and views of the city. At the same time, these publications prepared those viewers to understand and appreciate new graphic languages. The dissemination of printed architectural treatises to a relatively broad audience indicates that orthogonal imagery was becoming comprehensible far beyond the specialized confines in which it originated. Samuel Edgerton, Jr., has traced a related phenomenon in illustrated technical books on engineering, fortification, hydraulics, and various other subjects relating to practical geometry—­the majority intended not for specialists but for amateurs—­noting that these works propagated new drawing techniques including the cutaway, exploded, and transparent views. Print was instrumental in spreading visual literacy for such technical forms of representation.59 Such was the case with orthogonality. Ground plans were ubiquitous in early sixteenth-­century architectural publications, often accompanied by perspective renderings that helped to translate their coded language into more familiar, mimetic terms, or by verbal description that filled the same function.

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Enthusiasts who bought works like Serlio’s, Labacco’s, and Marliani’s became fluent with the pure abstraction that was the horizontal plane, the footprint of a building. The same treatises that familiarized audiences with ground plans also introduced their big brothers: ichnographic maps. The earliest printed city plans did not appear in geographic atlases, but rather in treatises on Roman architecture and antiquity. Serlio’s Terzo libro, for example, included a schematic but unmistakably ichnographic map of the port of Ostia Antica (fig. 18), based on surveys made by Peruzzi. The accompanying text explained the diagram in words, guiding the viewer through features like the “warehouses encircled by arcades with ambulatories in the middle”—­to someone unschooled in the conventions of an architectural plan, little more than an orderly series of lines and dots.60 Labacco’s Libro appartenente a l’architettura included a larger foldout plan of the same subject, derived from the same source, with similar verbal

Figure 18. Serlio, ancient port of Ostia from Il terzo libro, 83. Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

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Figure 19. Antonio Labacco, ancient port of Ostia (detail), from Libro d’Antonio Labacco appartenente a l’architettura nel qual si figurano alcune notabili antiquita di Roma (Rome, 1552), n.p. Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

indications to help decode its otherwise recondite visual language (fig. 19).61 Marliani’s plans of Rome went furthest, their sequentially increasing complexity providing an abridged narrative of expanding cartographic literacy. These works suggest that by midcentury, a broad swath of educated viewers had become (or was in the process of becoming) well versed in the measured drawings of the architect, and thus prepared to make sense of a map like Bufalini’s. Whether they found it a “semblance or image of beauty,” to borrow Tolomei’s words, is another issue.

Pictorialism Revisited

Raphael’s strong stance on the three orthogonal modes was not his final word on the subject of pictorialism in architecture. In the third and latest version of the letter, Raphael—­or, it has been suggested, a meddling, posthumous coauthor—­added an appendix reinstating perspective drawings in the architectural toolbox. “In order to satisfy even more completely the desire of those who like to see and understand well all the things that are to be drawn, we have

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in addition [to the three orthogonal modes] drawn in perspective some buildings we thought lent themselves to it. We did this so as to enable the eye to see and judge the grace of that likeness, which is demonstrated by the beautiful proportion and symmetry of these buildings, and which does not appear in the drawing of buildings that are measured architecturally. . . . And even though this type of drawing in perspective is the preserve of the painter, it is nevertheless also useful for the architect.”62 Pictorialism is reevaluated here in a positive light, as the means by which a viewer gauges aesthetic qualities and visual likeness, which cannot be conveyed by an orthogonal diagram. Raphael’s formulation of plan, section, and elevation is sometimes seen as a decisive step toward the specialization of architectural drawings as distinguished from other forms of representation—­and by extension, a benchmark in architecture’s emergence as a distinct profession—­but the man himself seems to have wavered on the role of perspective imagery in architecture.63 Due in part to the internal contradictions in this third version of the letter, there has been considerable disagreement over the authorship of the appendix, as of the entire text.64 That point has limited relevance here, because Raphael’s personal convictions are not really at issue. Whatever the identity of the author, his overall ambivalence—­not Raphael’s earlier dogmatism—­best sums up the graphic inclusivity of early sixteenth-­century architectural drawings and printed works. To be sure, architects in this time were increasingly taken with measured rendering and adept at using it. They were rapidly embracing orthogonality as a stand-­alone form for working drawings and finished pre­ sentation plans, meant to be seen and used by architects themselves and sometimes their patrons.65 Drawings of this type certainly had practical applications. Catherine Wilkinson, while unconvinced that the orthogonal trio was adopted systematically in the St. Peter’s project, has observed that measured architectural drawings did become important means of communication between head architects and workmen on construction sites in the sixteenth century.66 Sangallo was a key figure in the development of this critical professional vocabulary.67 Taking charge of several of the most complicated architectural enterprises of his time, he embraced the same strict principles outlined in the first versions of Raphael’s letter. But even the corpus of this relative purist shows that pictorialism remained common—­almost a default mode—­in sketches and studies, where it seems to enter spontaneously, bearing witness to a thought process, an idea in progress (or a “melee of undigested ideas,” in James Ackerman’s memorable formulation).68 This phenomenon attests to the continuing relevance of perspective images for visualizing a building in three-­dimensional terms, sometimes for thinking through problems or spatial

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relationships—­playing a role early on that a model supplanted later, once the stage of construction had been reached.69 Ann C. Huppert has argued that the use of perspective drawings actually escalated in the milieu of New St. Peter’s, for architects increasingly saw them as integral to the design process; thus pictorialism was in fact part and parcel of the new architectural professionalism, not a compromising factor.70 In any case, it is clear that the “drawings of the painter” were not edged out of the repertoire in the early 1500s. Perspective and other artistic tools like shading were also employed in presentation drawings meant for the eyes of nonprofessional viewers who might have been less conversant with orthogonality. In the end, pictorialism was useful for both personal and publicizing reasons, so that architects as well as their lay patrons could—­as Raphael said—­“see and understand well.” Early sixteenth-­century printed works published for a broader audience remained even more accepting of nonorthogonal forms. Serlio, for instance, might have illustrated Bramante’s cupola in textbook plan, section, and ele­ vation—­and even paid lip service to Raphael’s initial admonition against pictorialism—­but his illustrations tell a different story. They include many perspective renderings of buildings, in which the painterly effect is sometimes even enhanced with dramatic chiaroscuro and picturesque decay (fig. 20). Although Labacco’s illustrations were less expressive, he followed a similar pattern, in certain instances espousing a clever composite method. His reconstruction of a ruined temple from the site of the Forum Holitorium in Rome takes the form of a cutaway perspective section rising from a foreshortened ground plan (fig. 21).71 Tolomei, for his part, advocated not just “plans and profiles” but also “foreshortened views” in his planned treatise. Dogmatism was rare in printed works as in drawings—­a situation that began to change only gradually after midcentury. In his 1556 edition of Vitruvius, Daniele Barbaro expressly counseled architects against using perspective, and Palladio’s strictly orthogonal illustrations reinforced that message. Palladio’s own Quattro libri di architettura (Venice, 1570) was, in turn, the first case in which the three orthogonal modes were used rigorously and exclusively. There was one noteworthy contrarian who presaged the polemicism of Barbaro and Palladio: Marliani. In the preamble to his Topographia, he comes out as a strong supporter of orthogonality and adversary of pictorialism. Referring to the maps in his treatise, he writes: “If we had wanted to show this figure and the following ones according to natural perspective, it would have been impossible to locate the buildings on their proper sites, because only one side of the hills is visible [in this kind of representation]. For this reason we thought it better for everyone to reduce the figures to flat planes than to amuse certain people

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Figure 20. Serlio, view of the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine, from Il terzo libro, 24. Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

with some worthless picture.”72 Marliani’s doctrinaire position is the exception that proves the rule: perspective imagery had ongoing appeal to architects and to wider audiences. A building’s abstract geometric relationships could only be depicted orthogonally, but viewers also enjoyed the immediacy—­not to mention the beauty and grace—­of a visual impression. This preference reverberated through city imagery later in the century, when pictorial views and hybrid forms mixing perspective and orthogonality far outnumbered pure ichnographies like Bufalini’s plan of Rome. The myriad graphic techniques for representing architecture developed by Raphael and his colleagues in Rome had significant repercussions for urban imagery—­not only for ichnography in the manner of Bufalini’s plan, but also for a whole spectrum of inventive techniques that were brought to bear on the

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Figure 21. Labacco, reconstruction of a Doric temple in the Forum Holitorium, from Libro appartenente a l’architettura, n.p. Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

much larger and infinitely more challenging subject of the entire city. Parallel perspective, a compromise solution where buildings are shown obliquely from above but without convergence of parallel lines toward a vanishing point, became standard in bird’s-­eye views and related strategies for urban representation. Raphael’s validation of pictorialism also points forward to the reception of later works. By the mid-­sixteenth century, Renaissance spectators seem to have acquired the basic skills to decipher a plan like Marliani’s and, for that

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matter, Bufalini’s, as well as an appreciation for the quantitative information such a map conveyed—­but that does not necessarily mean they valued its vi­ sual charms. Raphael’s notion that pictorial rendering alone conveyed beauty and grace hints at an incipient preference for “worthless pictures” over “flat planes.” For viewers, pictures simply brought an image to life more vividly and appealingly than orthogonal diagrams. Over the next two centuries, both forms would coexist in a dynamic, highly fruitful tension in imagery of Rome.

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Chapter Three

Syntheses Leonardo Bufalini’s Plan of Rome (1551)

Published in 1551, Leonardo Bufalini’s monumental plan of Rome was the most ambitious, exhaustive, and accurate map of the city since ancient times (plate 1). It was also a unique synthesis—­of documentation and invention, technical and antiquarian interests, the physical fabric of modern Rome and a glorious specter of the ancient caput mundi. An architect who specialized in military engineering, Bufalini was following on the heels of Raphael, Sebastiano Serlio, Claudio Tolomei, and others who attempted to resurrect the lost city graphically—­to “draw from the grave the Rome that is already dead, and give her new life,” as Tolomei wrote in the 1540s, the very years that Bufalini was preparing his map for publication. Yet Bufalini alone sought to fuse the city of the past with that of his own time, and he alone resolutely banished pictorialism from his portrayal. In a Latin address “to the reader” placed at the lower left margin of the map—­a highbrow device appropriated from treatises on antiquity and other subjects—­Bufalini declared that his image offered spectators the true essence of Rome, “the most beautiful of all things, and [her] twin . . . united and resurrected.” Referring to himself in the third person, he continued: “The city which today is inhabited, he has placed before your eyes:

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except that he has also added the old [city], once mistress of the whole world, brought back as if from the grave.”1 These are grandiose claims, but even so they do not fully describe Bufalini’s achievement. In fact, he mapped not only the buildings of his own time alongside others that no longer existed, but also some that had never existed in the form he gave them, or did not yet exist. In this way, he exploited the ostensibly objective cartographic mode to collapse past, present, and future into a perfected Roman cityscape. Bufalini’s tendency was toward creative completion—­an impulse common enough among his contemporaries, but one that he took to greater heights than most. More than uncovering the historical forms of lost monuments, Bufalini’s reconstructions reveal his own architectural sensibilities, which were very much in line with his time. Far from a documentary glimpse of mid-­sixteenth-­century Rome, then, his map is a quintessentially Renaissance monument embodying an imaginative approach to the city and to the restoration of antiquity. The dual nature of Bufalini’s plan—­as measured survey of the living city and creative reconstruction of its ancient alter ego—­encapsulates sixteenth-­century Roman culture, where the past sometimes encroached on the present, and mathematics could be pressed into the service of the imagination. By invoking the resuscitation of a long-­buried Rome, Bufalini proclaimed his plan to be the ultimate humanist achievement, but he stressed its basis in measurement more than classical learning. “This [plan of the] city,” Bufalini continued in his address to readers, “was realized not only with the geometer’s square and compass, but also with the mariner’s compass, taking into account the location of the sun and the heavens. Know that it is precise.”2 Bufalini’s words are an assurance of accuracy, as well as a testament to the growing stature of surveying—­and military engineering generally—­in Renaissance society. His emphasis would have resonated strongly with the ruling elite, for whom such skills were closely linked to power, and with scholars, who increasingly valued technical expertise as a means to advance their own learned pursuits. Bufalini’s context is key to understanding his fusion of a vanished Rome with the city of his own time in a single measured representation. Much as Raphael’s letter to Leo X reflects the shared goals of architects and humanists in the early 1500s, Bufalini’s plan reveals the degree to which Roman engineering circles embraced the study of antiquity at midcentury. Both men were spurred, in part, by their participation in a massive building campaign that brought together many talented professionals and became a laboratory for innovation: for Raphael, New St. Peter’s, for Bufalini, the modernization

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of Rome’s fortifications during the papacy of Paul III (r. 1534–­49). There was significant overlap between the two projects in terms of individuals involved, the skills and techniques at their disposal (for engineering at this time was a subfield of architecture), and their shared fixation on the built fabric of ancient and modern Rome. Bufalini’s map—­a product of the antiquarian desire to “put Rome into drawing” that was endemic in his circle, and of the catalyzing atmosphere of the Roman campaign—­is a consummate expression of this energized atmosphere. The reception of Bufalini’s map was, however, mixed, for it remained a glorious anomaly in representations of the Eternal City for two centuries. A surge in printed imagery followed on the heels of his plan—­imagery of a very different type. Tellingly, later artists did borrow certain elements of the map to incorporate in their own more naturalistic, pictorial representations, and the sheer variety of transformations they wrought constitutes a veritable catalogue of influence and dissemination in the Roman print industry. At the same time, their selective appropriations shed light on contemporary taste in imagery—­ and scholarship. When it came to imagery of Rome, audiences were no more enamored of Bufalini’s smoothed-­over temporality than they were of his unadulterated cartography.

Origins, Form, and Function of Bufalini’s Plan

A monumental woodcut on twenty-­four sheets, Bufalini’s map spans more than six by six feet (almost 200 × 200 cm)—­making it by far the largest image of Rome yet published, more than twice the size of Francesco Rosselli’s lost view of about 1490, itself something of a giant. In Bufalini’s map, all elements of the detailed urban landscape—­city walls, buildings, streets, bridges, topography—­are reduced to ground plan.3 Bufalini had an ichnographic pre­ cedent in the massive early third-­century marble plan known today as the Forma urbis Romae, but he was unaware of its existence, for its first shattered pieces were discovered in 1562, a decade after his death.4 Bartolomeo Marliani’s archaeological plan of 1544 was an even closer relative, and one that Bufalini surely knew (fig. 17). Both men recognized that ichnography was well suited to the depiction of antiquity, since so many structures survived only at the level of their foundations. Marliani’s map was, however, a more modest endeavor than Bufalini’s: smaller, more sparing in its detail, subordinate to a text, and limited to a narrower period of Roman history. No one prior to Bufalini had presented a comprehensive, measured portrayal of the city in such a strong

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public statement. In the same period, but far from Rome, two ichnographic maps of Vienna appeared—­one by Bonifaz Wolmuet (1500–­1579) in 1547 and another by Augustin Hirschvogel (1503–­53) in 1552—­that were based on the same basic surveying methods, now widespread among European military engineers.5 The Vienna plans were both made at the behest of a civic government, while Bufalini’s independently produced map did not serve a particular political agenda. As an ichnography, Bufalini’s map was anomalous in the realm of public city imagery—­a fact that has caused some lingering confusion about its intended function. Although it was the first printed street plan of Rome, it was not meant to serve as a wayfinding tool for visitors. City maps were not commonly employed in that capacity in the sixteenth century—­and a map of its dimensions would have been impractical, to say the least. With its unwieldy size and merging of distinct eras, Bufalini’s plan was not well suited for plotting military strategy or navigating city streets. Like the most sumptuous of  bird’s-­ eye city views, it showed an idealized version of the city and assumed a mural scale, indicating that it was geared toward prominent display. In this regard, it was comparable to Rosselli’s great panoramic view from the previous century, and, for that matter, Barbari’s majestic bird’s-­eye view of  Venice from 1500. Yet Bufalini’s map was distinct among such grand, celebratory images for taking the form of a planimetric diagram, and for seeking to enfold all of the city’s complex history in a single frame.6 Bufalini prepared his plan for publication in the workshop of the Roman publisher Antonio Blado (1490–­1567). Blado was an important figure in the early professionalization of the Roman print industry, a development that took on greater momentum with the activities of his competitor Antonio Lafreri (ca. 1512–­77) and especially the De Rossi family in the 1600s. A transplant from near Mantua, Blado was one of many printing experts who emigrated from points north—­in Italy and beyond—­to join a rapidly expanding Roman cohort. Publications bearing his imprint first appeared in 1516, including the misleadingly titled Mirabilia Romae (an indulgence guide to Roman churches, not the medieval guidebook), but Blado’s business did not take off in earnest until he was named official papal printer in 1535—­a prestigious and lucrative appointment that entailed producing thousands of bulls, edicts, and other pontifical documents. In this capacity, Blado was also charged with establishing the first Greek press in Rome, a project overseen by the Vatican librarian Cardinal Marcello Cervini (1501–­55).7 Blado also continued to publish independently, focusing on a wide spectrum of items that catered to clerics, pilgrims, and humanists. Along with

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additional versions of the Mirabilia guidebooks in Latin and Italian, he issued various works on architecture and antiquity, including the first (unillustrated) edition of Marliani’s topography and Antonio Labaco’s Libro appartenente a l’architettura, as well as editions of Greek, Latin, and patristic texts, along with more recent authors like Machiavelli and Ariosto. The works that originated in his shop, therefore, ranged widely in genre, cost, intended audience, and—­to use a modern term—­production values. Bufalini’s plan was one of a smattering of cartographic works to emerge from Blado’s shop, its emphasis on Rome and antiquity in line with his overall production. Perhaps the most important map that Blado published, other than Bufalini’s, was the Totius Graeciae descriptio, a celebrated large-­scale antiquarian map of Greece by Nikolaos Sophianos (ca. 1500–­after 1551) that first appeared in 1540.8 It has been speculated that Bufalini himself not only surveyed Rome but also designed the image and cut the woodblocks for his map, a rare combination of roles in a period defined by increasing division of labor in cartography and in print publishing.9 At the time of Bufalini’s involvement with Blado, the production of prints was an increasingly specialized business, with different figures assigned to the tasks of designing, engraving (often with different individuals responsible for the image and the lettering), printing, sometimes coloring, and selling an image, usually under the direction of a single impresario or editore. In modern Italian, this term refers to publishers, but in the 1500s it encompassed a broader range of managerial tasks relating to the production, sale, and distribution of prints. A sixteenth-­century editore like Blado could hire specialists in various aspects of printing to become fixtures in his workshop, or alternatively to provide their services in a more piecemeal or “freelance” fashion. Another of Blado’s business practices was to oversee the production and sometimes the distribution of outside works, rather like a custom publisher today. Bufalini’s map probably fell into that category—­a personal, independently financed, and speculative venture. This supposition is bolstered by a surviving document, Bufalini’s will, which was drawn up at the time of his death, shortly after the map was published. Among the debts listed there is one to a third party for paper he had purchased to print his plan, and compensation owed to Blado for unspecified reasons: probably a professional service like the printing of the map, or the use of supplies, equipment, and workspace.10 As we shall see, Bufalini’s primary vocation was engineering, not printmaking; perhaps he was an amateur with a compelling project whom Blado welcomed into his workshop, and with whom he forged a short-­term partnership, with both men assuming some risk for the investment of time and resources. Given

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the scarcity of documentation, it is impossible to speculate further on the arrangements between the two men. No example of the 1551 edition of Bufalini’s map has come to light. The map is known today in three examples, one of which is incomplete, all from the second edition precisely dated November 16, 1560 and issued—­with minor changes to the marginalia—­by the hydraulic engineer Antonio Trevisi.11 A contemporary manuscript version of the map also survives, but it is thought to be an anonymous copy after Bufalini, not a preparatory work. 12 Bufalini’s original drawing is untraced, and his blocks too have long since gone by the wayside, presumably victims of neglect and wood-­eating insects.13 The fate of Bufalini’s map is similar to that of many other multisheet prints, the fragility of which has led so few to survive to the present. On the one hand, it is regrettable that not a single example has come down to us from the 1551 printing. By contrast, there exist two examples of Matteo Pagano’s great woodcut view of Cairo, which was published in Venice in 1549 and measured over three by six feet. Still, it is a stroke of luck that any early examples of Bufalini’s map are known. Rosselli’s engraved view or Rome is hardly alone for surviving only through later derivatives. Among the many other casualties of time and neglect is a twelve-­sheet view of Jerusalem published by Pagano and Giovanni Domenico Zorzi in Venice in 1546, which is also known only through smaller-­ scale copies.14 Bufalini’s plan shared the physical vulnerability and commemorative function of other large-­scale printed city portraits, but it did not share their visual language. As an ichnography, the map is defined by graphic clarity as it unfolds across the two-­dimensional plane. Except for a tiny picture of the Marcus Aurelius equestrian statue on the Capitoline Hill, the few pictorial devices of the print are segregated from the map proper, pushed beyond the lines that frame its geographic information. At the top, the title, “Roma,” appears in classical Roman capitals. Vigorously blowing wind heads adorn the borders, and a pictorial panel at bottom center contains Bufalini’s self-­portrait and an illustration of his surveying instruments. Also around the edges of the map are coats of arms and symbols relating to the figures mentioned in the printing privilege found to the right of Bufalini’s address to the reader: Pope Julius III, the Venetian Senate, Charles V of Spain, and Henri II of France. The fact that Bufalini petitioned for multiple printing privileges from the most prestigious European powers is a clear sign of his ambition: he expected his map to reach an international audience and sought official protection for what would be termed intellectual property today.15 As we shall see, however, no amount of official sanction could dissuade resourceful printmakers from adapting Bufalini’s plan

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to their own purposes. In this regard, too, the map had much in common with other innovative city images like those by Rosselli and Pagano, which were eagerly seized upon by later artists as templates for their own portrayals. Bufalini’s recondite visual language lacks the immediacy of a naturalistic picture and requires some decoding, but an image of the city soon takes shape out of its abstract conventions. Within the ruled borders of Bufalini’s map, the Aurelian Walls snake an irregular circuit, demarcating the urban perimeter. The map is on a scale of roughly 1:2,800 and is oriented with northeast at the top, such that the Vatican appears at lower left. (This orientation, which had also been used by Marliani, remained the most common until Giovanni Battista Nolli’s plan of 1748 established north as standard.) Above and to the right of the Vatican, the most densely populated areas of the city—­the medieval center and Trastevere—­appear as a warren of streets and structures in ground plan, nestled in the bends of the Tiber. By contrast, roughly two-­thirds of the intramural area comprises the largely deserted disabitato, its vast expanse interrupted only by the sprawling footprints of several ancient bath complexes, their isolation a consequence of the dramatic contraction of Rome’s population since late antiquity. Less vulnerable to the effects of time were the city’s famous hills, most of which are shown as a series of contiguous open forms that appear to creep across the city as a highly irregular ridge, mirroring the curves of the river below. The craftsmanship of  Bufalini’s map is well below highlights of  Renaissance woodcut printing like Jacopo de’ Barbari’s splendid view of Venice (1500) and Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse series (1498). Despite a background in carpentry, Bufalini might have been hampered by lack of experience in cutting woodblocks—­a quite specialized skill.16 Even in the best of circumstances, woodcut allows for less fine detail than engraving and etching. That said, Bufalini marshaled an impressive range of graphic conventions to denote architectural and topographical features (fig. 22). Many of these tactics were refined versions of those employed in Marliani’s plan (fig. 17), but they were otherwise unprecedented in city maps and had few analogs in architectural imagery. More than clever adaptations of drawn conventions to print, they were new conventions appropriate to a new medium and approach to the city. Bufalini delineated the hills with minute cross-­and parallel hatching to indicate relative heights and to distinguish slopes from flat terrain. The Aurelian Walls and fortifications appear as chunky, hatched lines. The streets are defined by parallel axes in the areas of the city that were sparsely populated or outside the walls, and by their adjoining blocks within the built-­up areas. Aqueducts are depicted as broken lines composed of hatched rectangles, like rows of

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Figure 22. Bufalini, Roma, details (  from left): hills; Aqua Vergine aqueduct; walls and bastion near Porta San Sebastiano; streets, Tiber, and Ponte Sisto. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps S.T.R. 175.

dominoes. The water of the Tiber is signaled by short undulating lines—­the most mimetic and familiar convention that Bufalini employed. When it came to depicting important structures such as churches, palazzi, and ancient monuments, Bufalini had no need to devise new forms. These buildings are shown in reductive, sometimes generic plans—­their simplification partly dictated by the large scope of Bufalini’s map, in which each individual structure constituted just one small part of a very large and intricate whole. Labels, done in blocky Roman capitals, are mainly in Latin with a sprinkling of Italian and vary widely in size. Altogether, the map comprises a rich and inventive aggregate of features. The presence of reconstructed and imaginary elements notwithstanding, Bufalini’s map provides an informative window onto mid-­sixteenth-­century Rome. Recent developments in urban planning and improvements to the city’s infrastructure can be traced clearly (figs. 22–­23), such as the Acqua Vergine aqueduct, partly repaired under Nicholas V in the mid-­fifteenth century; the Ponte Sisto, whose construction had been initiated by Sixtus IV in 1474; streets like the Via Giulia and Via della Lungara, completed during the papacy of  Julius II, on opposite sides of the Tiber, and the grand trivium radiating from the Piazza del Popolo, which had been laid out or improved by Leo X (r. 1513–­21), Clement VII (r. 1523–­34), and Paul III. Bufalini also provides a useful, if selective, record of the city’s architecture (fig. 24)—­including notational ground plans of prominent projects like New St. Peter’s (begun 1506), private palaces like the Palazzo Venezia (begun ca. 1455), the Cancelleria (ca. 1485–­1511), the

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Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne (begun 1532), and the Palazzo Farnese (begun 1514, expanded from 1534), as well as the gardens and villas of many elite Roman families. For all the architectural features that Bufalini identifies, however, his approach was far from comprehensive. He was most interested in important structures and those owned by prominent individuals. Buildings devoted to the humbler aspects of daily life, such as commerce and habitation, are omitted, and it is clear that even in his relatively comprehensive treatment of the contemporary city, Bufalini made deliberate selections to show Rome as a city of monuments. However different his map was in its form from other city portraits, it was still a public image that memorialized Rome’s multifaceted identity.

Figure 23. Bufalini, Roma, detail: city center. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps S.T.R. 175.

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Figure 24. Bufalini, Roma, details (clockwise from left ): Saint Peter’s, Palazzo Venezia, Palazzo della Cancelleria, Palazzo Massimo, Palazzo Farnese. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps S.T.R. 175.

Bufalini’s Background and Intended Audience

Bufalini’s background is a natural starting point for understanding the conception of his map. Little is known of his biography, but the few surviving testimonials—­summarized by Franz Ehrle in his foundational monograph of 1911—­along with information Bufalini provided on the map itself, allow us to piece together a vague picture.17 Bufalini was a native of Udine in the Friuli-­ Veneto region of northern Italy. His date of birth is unknown, but he died in Rome—­where he had settled by the 1530s—­in 1552. The nonliterary if grandiose Latin that Bufalini employed in his prefatory address indicates that he had probably not received a classical education, yet other surviving documents suggest that he otherwise had a unique combination of talents and interests that made him ideally suited to produce his map. In his will, he is identified as a woodworker (  faberlignarius), a term that could encompass a number of vocations, including building as well as carpentry. It certainly suggests some facility with the medium he used to make his print. Faberlignarius or the Italian falegname was also a title sometimes given to architects, including those of high rank. Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, for example, is often referred to as

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such in documents related to his role as capomaestro, or head architect, at St. Peter’s.18 Bufalini’s primary profession in Rome was, however, military engineering, for he is recorded as participating in the renewal of the city’s defenses in the 1530s and 1540s.19 Under the direction of Sangallo and later Michelangelo (1475–­1564), this enormous enterprise engaged many of the most celebrated figures in the history of Renaissance architecture and military engineering.20 At its most ambitious, the plan was to encircle Rome with an entirely new, tighter belt of modern bastioned walls, much better suited to early modern warfare than the third-­century Aurelian circuit. Little materialized from this grand scheme—­ultimately, it proved so costly that Pope Paul III turned his attention instead to refortifying the Vatican alone—­but the project engendered debates about military architecture that resounded throughout Europe, disseminated in numerous printed treatises by professionals who had participated directly.21 Bufalini’s inclusion among the experts convened by Paul III is documented by several records of payment and admiring mentions by colleagues, including the engineer Francesco De Marchi (1504–­76), whose treatise on fortification—­ though published much later, in 1599—­contains recollections of his Roman experiences.22 In one passage, De Marchi mentions Bufalini in the same breath as Sangallo and several other noteworthy military engineers of the time: Jacopo Fusto Castriotto (ca. 1500–­ca. 1563), a protégé of Michelangelo who would later become head of the project and publish his own popular book on fortification; Francesco da Montemellino (fl. mid-­1500s), whose discourse on the defenses of the Vatican Borgo was published along with Castriotto’s volume; and Alessandro Vitelli (d. 1556), also a respected professional.23 Bufalini’s specific role in the fortifications project is unknown. He was most likely a midlevel expert—­somewhere below the luminaries, like Sangallo and his closest assistants, who generated the master plans and coordinated the minions, but well above the water fetchers—­perhaps one of dozens of skilled engineers marshaled to execute fieldwork, such as measuring stretches of walls. Whatever his exact role, Bufalini’s professional circumstances provided him with talented colleagues and stimulating discussions, not to mention a wealth of data for his map, which was in preparation in those very years. The fortification treatises written by Bufalini’s friends and associates in the Roman campaign all include sections on surveying, thus confirming that it was a key practice in their trade. By extension, we can assume that Bufalini really did possess the measuring skills to which he alluded in his address to readers. This assumption is bolstered by the map itself. True to his prefatory statement,

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Bufalini’s treatment of the urban defenses is meticulous beyond any previous city portrait. He notes the precise dimensions for many individual stretches of the Aurelian Walls and includes two new bastions in whose construction he might well have participated: one on the Aventine overlooking the Tiber, the other—­Sangallo’s Ardeatine Bastion (labeled “Propugnacula Pauli III”)—­on the southern side of the city, near the Baths of Caracalla (see fig. 22). Bufalini used additional strategies to underscore his surveying expertise and the accuracy of his map. A scale, measured in Roman passi, extends horizontally across the top, making the map indexical to a measurable, physical entity. Bufalini’s self-­portrait at the lower border—­a rare and wonderful device that had few precedents in city imagery but many relatives in the printed author portraits of technical treatises—­shows him as a seasoned professional with a piercing, intelligent gaze and prominent, furrowed brow, brandishing a pair of dividers, symbol of geometry and of architecture (fig. 25). To the left of this self-­ portrait, he illustrated his surveying tools, which include the bussola, familiar from Raphael’s letter to Leo X as a standard tool for measuring bearings. With all of these vignettes, Bufalini commemorated not only the accuracy of his map, but also himself as its author, and his profession in general. It is little surprise that Bufalini was eager to tout his technical prowess in words and images. In his time, such military skills held considerable value for aristocrats and intellectuals. Not only were they integral to the power and wealth of rulers, but they were also seen as valuable knowledge in general. Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, the authoritative source for noble deportment in Renaissance Italy, named “knowledge of arms” as a key attribute of the gentleman. Books on the military arts appeared in increasing numbers and became best sellers. As Pamela O. Long has shown, the proliferation of fortification treatises aimed at a wide readership—­almost all of which included sections on surveying—­indicates the rising esteem accorded to technical knowledge in sixteenth-­century Europe.24 These treatises were more than practical manuals geared toward aspiring professionals. In fact, they were probably meant for amateurs. Significant attention was devoted to their literary merits. These books often included elaborate, even grandiloquent prefaces. Some took the lofty form of dialogues, usually between practitioners and nobles, thereby implicitly affirming that the subject matter was common ground for these groups while claiming high stature for their authors. Bufalini’s map employed many of the same tactics, from the self-­ portrait—­nearly identical to one that appeared in certain editions of Niccolò Tartaglia’s treatises—­to the aspirational Latin preface highlighting his practical expertise.25

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Figure 25. Bufalini, Roma, detail: surveying instruments and self-­portrait. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps S.T.R. 175.

The interests of rulers, scholars, and professionals united around the military arts, in a de facto partnership that was not just confined to books. A case in point is Leonardo da Vinci. Famously, when he wanted to advertise his talents to his future patron, Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan (1452–­1508), Leonardo wrote a letter listing ten of his talents. Numbers 1–­9 boasted his knowledge of fortification, ballistics, hydrography, instruments and weapons of war, and other bellicose matters. (Painting was mentioned, almost as an afterthought, in number 10.)26 Similarly, two decades later, Leonardo was valued as “family architect and general engineer” by the ruthless military commander Cesare Borgia (1475/76–­1507).27 It was in Borgia’s service that Leonardo made his survey of Imola, the first known ichnographic plan of the Renaissance.28 The possession of such a map—­and the skills of its maker—­would have been invaluable to any powerful ruler. Bufalini’s plan, like Leonardo’s, stemmed from his involvement in military matters, but it was intended for public consumption—­more like the plethora of fortification treatises that were also by-­products of the Roman campaign. If the books gave instructions for surveying sites, Bufalini’s map showed the glorious results that could be obtained by using those very methods. While the treatises that emerged from the Roman defenses furnish evidence about Bufalini’s professional skills and milieu in general, one of them also confirms his enthusiasm for antiquity specifically. De Marchi, whose book on fortification linked Bufalini to the Roman campaign, also mentioned his presence at an excursion to Lake Nemi outside Rome in 1535 to inspect the sunken ancient ships that had intrigued generations of scholars, including Leon Battista Alberti the previous century.29 De Marchi wrote that one of his companions

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was “master Leonardo of Udine, a skilled architect, the one who measured all of Rome inside and out, and had it printed with all the hills, theaters, temples, streets and other things indicated, [an endeavor] in which I helped maybe six months for my own pleasure, and to learn more.”30 De Marchi’s respectful testimony helps to fill in a picture of Bufalini as more than just a technician. He shared the collective fascination of his circle with ancient Rome’s physical traces, and this factor helped to shape his map. There is a persistent misconception that Bufalini’s plan was dominated by military concerns and thus geared exclusively toward specialists in his own field. But military subjects, as we have seen, had widespread appeal to nonprofessionals, and the ambition evinced by the sheer scale of Bufalini’s map as well as his printing privileges argues further against such a limited audience. In any case, there is much more to Bufalini’s map than scrupulously measured urban defenses. His inclusion of structures that were no longer or had never been part of Rome’s built fabric offers another clue that the map was aimed at a wider public, for these features would have been little use to military strategists. Bufalini produced his plan for an open market, not a patron, and he must have anticipated that it would have commercial appeal in learned circles. His imagined historical city was surely inspired by the efforts of humanists and created with them in mind. Moreover, as we saw in the context of Raphael’s letter to Leo X—­and as Bufalini was well aware—­scholars were increasingly interested in technical professions like architecture and engineering for the insights they could shed on antiquity. More and more, these were seen as suitable pursuits for highborn intellectuals, who therefore would have appreciated the specialized aspects of Bufalini’s plan. Alberti had led the charge in this regard, but the trend had spread considerably since the mid-­1400s. One of Bufalini’s acquaintances and admirers was the Venetian nobleman and military engineer Mario Savorgnano (1513–­74), who visited Rome in 1548. The purpose of this visit, he wrote to a friend, was “to inspect the ancient and modern walls,” which he discussed with “the man who recently made the plan of this city”—­surely Bufalini.31 This conversation must have been much like the dialogues recounted in contemporary fortification treatises: a mutually respectful meeting of minds where class differences were temporarily suspended in deference to technical expertise, in what Long has termed a “trading zone of knowledge exchange.”32 Savorgnano’s popular treatise Arte militare, terrestre e maritima, published posthumously in 1599, is further testament to the confluence of antiquarianism and technical studies, for it not only addresses such subjects as Renaissance artillery and military maneuvers, but also compares ancient and modern warfare. The lessons

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of antiquity were not just abstract and historically distant. Instead, they were mined for their bearing on current problems. Similarly, it would be a mistake to assume that Bufalini’s professional colleagues were so narrow minded in their own interests that they would have been indifferent to the antiquarian aspects of his map. As Long has demonstrated, engineers in mid-­sixteenth-­century Rome were deeply engaged in the study of antiquity—­eager to uncover the secrets of ancient technology in building, hydraulics, and other spheres. Their concerns were practical, often geared toward applying ancient precedents to modern problems, and historical, aimed at turning their professional expertise to expanding the collective store of knowledge about antiquity.33 Surveying, in particular, was seen as an important skill that they could contribute. Savorgnano was not the only one to single out Bufalini’s accomplishment in that regard. The gifted antiquarian Onofrio Panvinio (1530–­68) admired Bufalini for having “measured the entire city with the incredible labor and steadfast study of twenty years, and printed his ichnography as a woodcut,” and for that feat ranked him among such distinguished scholars of Roman antiquity as Fabio Calvo, Sebastiano Serlio, and Bartolomeo Marliani.34 Bufalini’s map closely reflected his context and was carefully calibrated to appeal to like-­minded consumers in Italy and throughout Europe.

Bufalini and the Art of Surveying

Bufalini made strong claims about his mapping expertise and the consequent accuracy of his plan, but he did not explain his techniques for making it. As with his professional background, we must look to Bufalini’s fellow engineers and to the map itself for clues to his surveying method. We have seen that Bufalini represented the bussola among his measuring tools; this is the “mariner’s compass” to which he refers in his address to readers. A second signal that he had measured bearings according to the cardinal directions is the prominent north-­south arrow, marked “Septentrionis Linea,” that he depicted extending diagonally from the upper left corner of the map. Together these elements indicate that he followed the same basic surveying methods that Alberti described in his Descriptio urbis Romae, and that Raphael outlined in his letter to Leo X. Tartaglia’s Quesiti et inventioni diverse (1546) subsequently codified their procedures of using the bussola to measure a place from a single point on the interior, and from a series of points along its perimeter, respectively. The same principles were echoed with minor variations in treatises by Bufalini’s associates De

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Marchi and Castriotto, as well as Galasso Alghisi (1523–­73), who also took part in the meetings convened by Paul III.35 These theorists all focused on measuring the walled circuit of a town, not its interior features, so their instructions only go partway toward an understanding of Bufalini’s procedure. Giorgio Vasari later described how these methods could be combined, along with basic triangulation, to make a more comprehensive city plan. In his biography of the artist Niccolò Tribolo (1500–­1550), Vasari recounts how Tribolo assisted the architect Benvenuto di Lorenzo della Volpaia (1486–­1550) in mapping Florence and its surroundings, showing “the entire region, with the hills, mountains, rivers, houses, churches and other things . . . the piazze and streets, the walls and bastions and other defenses.” Tribolo and Volpaia had exerted themselves by “measuring the streets, and noting the distances in braccia from place to place, and . . . intersecting [i.e., triangulating] with the bussola for all directions, and going outside to check the hills with the cupola [of the Duomo], which they had chosen as their center.”36 Vasari implies that Tribolo’s map, like Bufalini’s, included buildings, streets, and public spaces along with defenses, and the fieldwork of the two men surely involved the same methods. The process Vasari describes is painstaking and laborious, requiring a strong commitment to achieve the greatest possible accuracy. Vasari’s account is also almost certainly embellished. Ryan E. Gregg has argued compellingly that Vasari did not actually survey Florence in the manner described—­that he did not even use the bussola but instead relied on visual observation alone.37 It is probably true that Vasari and many other makers of panoramic views did much less measuring than has been supposed, or than they claimed. There was plenty of incentive to exaggerate or even invent such claims, which added the legitimizing stamp of expertise to artists’ portrayals. In reality, a thoroughgoing survey was unnecessary to produce a plausibly realistic effect in city views meant for public consumption; a selection of  baseline measurements in conjunction with on-­the-­spot sketches would suffice (indeed, sometimes measurement could be dispensed with entirely). Rosselli’s view of Rome, for example, seems to have been the product of just such an approach. By contrast, Bufalini’s stated ambition to present an exhaustive, measured plan of the city would seem to leave little room for such flexibility. Yet despite Bufalini’s presumable mapping expertise and all his assurances that he had measured Rome personally, there is some question whether he really executed the entire survey himself—­an all but insurmountable task with the tools that he had at his disposal. It was much more demanding to survey a sprawling, irregular urban fabric like Rome than a small, orderly town like Imola, which Leonardo had done with such skill and thoroughness in 1502,

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or little Florence, with its gridded Roman core. For one man alone to map Rome with sixteenth-­century technology was heroic, or perhaps foolhardy. According to Trevisi, Bufalini spent seven years compiling his data; another commentator, Onofrio Panvinio, claimed that the map took twenty years to prepare.38 They spoke reverently of his feat, but no one else seems to have been particularly eager to take it on. Raphael, for his part, had wisely abandoned his plan to make a “universal drawing of all Rome.” Reasonably, Bufalini seems to have relied not just on personally gathered data but also on whatever was readily available. In this sense, he was not one man working alone. He surely had access to working plans shared by the architects and engineers working on the Roman fortifications. Such plans often existed in multiples in order to facilitate efficiency and coordination in otherwise decentralized projects, where responsibility had to be delegated on a number of levels. This organizational system was honed by Sangallo and his workshop, driven by the demands of huge, complex projects like St. Peter’s and the Roman defenses.39 In fact, there exists an anonymous manuscript map relating to the fortifications campaign, now at the Vatican Library, that bears a striking resemblance to Bufalini’s plan (fig. 26). Datable to the 1540s, it shows just the Aurelian Walls and the Tiber, but their outlines, proportions, and orientations correspond precisely to the same features on Bufalini’s map, if on a smaller scale.40 Bufalini might or might not have known this specific sheet, but he was well acquainted with precisely this type of material from his everyday professional activities. As much as Bufalini underscored his personal commitment to measuring the city, it is clear that he was working with a number of anonymous, perhaps unknowing collaborators. This conclusion should in no way lessen Bufalini’s achievement; indeed, given the limited surveying technology of the time, his plan would never have materialized had he not taken advantage of others’ work. To a certain extent, then, Bufalini’s stress on precision was a rhetorical stance—­one that was still rather novel in city imagery. Sixty years earlier, the “View with a Chain” of Florence had included a small depiction of a draftsman, attesting to the basis for the image in visual experience (fig. 2). Bufalini’s shift in emphasis is revealing. By his time, measured accuracy, to use the modern term, was beginning to have appeal in the abstract sense; the concept steadily gained luster in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, along with the theorization of architecture as a discipline. Of course, accuracy of this sort had been a practical necessity in the medieval building trades, but the exactitude required in order for—­say—­cut stones to fit together perfectly, or for complex structures to rise symmetrically according to fixed modules, was usually achieved on the ground

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Figure 26. Anonymous, manuscript plan of Rome, 1540s. Vatican Library, Vatican City, BAV Cod. Barb. Lat. 4391(B), fol. 1. © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

by expert masons. Renaissance writers elevated this quality to a lofty ideal. Alberti, it will be recalled, insisted that architecture demanded “certain calculated standards” in On Building, and Raphael similarly called for “complete accuracy of measurements” in his letter to Leo X. It makes perfect sense that this quality would become so desirable—­and that Bufalini would make so much of it—­just as technical expertise was gaining intellectual and social currency. Still, given Bufalini’s stern admonition to “know that [the map] is precise,” it seems fair to examine it on just those terms. The goal here is not to disparage him for his errors, but rather to explore the distance between Bufalini’s rhetorical bravado and the reality of his survey—­thereby shedding light on his representational priorities as well as the capabilities of contemporary technology. The accuracy of  Bufalini’s map has been analyzed by a number of scholars, including Allan Ceen, Paul Schlapobersky and David Friedman, and myself.41

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The specific methods and goals of these examinations vary, but they support the same overarching conclusions. On one hand, there are undeniable flaws in Bufalini’s survey. Ceen has demonstrated that it was more accurate for the populated urban center (the abitato) than for the disabitato, and that the whole was executed in a piecemeal fashion—­as if Bufalini chopped the city into manageable pieces. Schlapobersky and Friedman have noted that many of the smaller byways appear to have been drawn freehand rather than scrupulously measured and plotted. Bufalini seems to have measured only the major thoroughfares before sketching in the positions of smaller streets, and he did not hesitate to adjust dimensions, shapes, and alignments to fit the space prescribed. Even in Bufalini’s treatment of the long, straight streets that would have been easiest to survey—­for they presented the clearest sight lines—­he made mistakes. The three major thoroughfares radiating from the Piazza del Popolo, to name the most obvious example, are skewed: the Via del Babuino—­the easternmost of the three axes—­swings too sharply inward toward the central Via del Corso. Despite such surveying errors, however, Bufalini’s results were quite impressive given his technical constraints, and they far exceeded any previous effort. His depiction of the network of streets, for example, is surprisingly complete, he captures the irregularities of inhabited blocks, and certain passages correspond very closely to modern maps. On the whole, his results should be judged by Renaissance, not modern, standards. Given the instrumentation available to him and the challenges he faced, Bufalini’s results were remarkably accurate, and they remained unsurpassed for decades. Less impressive by the standards of Bufalini’s own time are the architectural ground plans of structures embedded in the urban fabric. In these, Bufalini showed a tendency to generalize. Of course, Bufalini’s map—­although closely related to architectural rendering—­was focused on the urban fabric as a whole more than its individual components. It would be unfair to expect exactitude on the order of an architectural treatise illustrating single buildings in detail. Nonetheless, his treatment of Rome’s buildings can be quite crude and slipshod for a professional architect. Many of the structures in the city center are little more than repetitions of the same square module multiplied in different numbers and slightly varying configurations, which sometimes make token, distant reference to their actual forms, but just as often do not (see, for example, figs. 24, 32). Most buildings would be entirely unidentifiable were it not for their locations and labels; many, for that matter, seem little more than synechdoches for the built environment. The most prominent landmarks, like New St. Peter’s Basilica, are shown more accurately, but still schematically.

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It would be reasonable to assume that Bufalini was better equipped to represent with precision structures to which he had ready access—­namely, those with a public function—­but then again, one wonders how conscientiously he sought access. After all, the making of his map was a herculean task even without poring over each structure in the city. Bufalini clearly did not mea­ sure every building any more than he did every little alley. Had he done so, an entire lifetime would not have sufficed to complete the map. Bufalini needed to be ingenious and resourceful, and he was. For the forms of some buildings he could rely on the corpus of common knowledge recorded in drawings by the circle of architects working on the Roman fortifications.42 In other cases he could make use of widely available sources, like topographical guidebooks, which provided insight into the locations of lost structures and the identifications of existing ruins. Andrea Fulvio’s Antiquitates urbis had been translated into Italian in 1543, while Marliani’s Urbis Romae topographia had appeared in the vernacular in 1548 (published by Blado, Bufalini’s own publisher). Bufalini also surely knew Serlio’s Terzo libro delle antichità di Roma (Venice, 1540), which could have furnished him with architectural models for known structures, while printed editions of Vitruvius’s De architectura could have provided templates for unknown or vanished ones.43 The shortcuts provided by these works were more than convenient—­they were indispensable. Bufalini’s reliance on borrowing belies the clichéd Renaissance focus on individual achievement, a trope he deliberately perpetuated. Much like Alberti’s Descriptio urbis Romae and Raphael’s letter to Leo X, Bufalini’s map emerged from a groundswell of converging intellectual stimuli, not one man’s heroic solo endeavor. If there is any single protagonist to this tale, it is the activating factor of Rome itself.

Ancient and Modern in Bufalini’s Map

Bufalini’s emphasis on accuracy was not the end of his rhetoric. In fact, his map provides a subtle commentary on the tension between Rome’s glorious past and revivalist present, most evident in the contrasts between his treatment of the abitato and the disabitato. The latter seems to have been the realm of glorious reconstruction for Bufalini, a place to resurrect a Rome long dead and to suppress signs of contemporary life in a zone that was, in fact, in the process of renewal and certainly far from a wasteland. In this part of the city, Bufalini betrayed a nostalgia much like that of the painted version of Rosselli’s view of Rome discussed in chapter 1 (plate 5), where this zone was populated

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Figure 27. Bufalini, Roma, detail: disabitato. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps S.T.R. 175.

by decaying wonders suggestive of Rome’s decline. In Bufalini’s plan, toward the upper right, the most prominent ruins appear as reconstructed leviathans creeping unencumbered across a depopulated cityscape (fig. 27). These include the long-­buried Baths of Trajan and Circus Maximus, as well as the ruinous Colosseum and Baths of Caracalla, all shown fully intact, their proportions exaggerated, chambers multiplied, and footprints radically expanded.44 Dwarfing the very real, prominent, and large papal basilica of St. John Lateran and its adjoining palace complex, these ancient structures disclose Bufalini’s preference for grandeur and symmetry—­a preference that might derive from a free interpretation of Vitruvian ideals or any number of secondary sources, but in any case does not originate in sound archaeological knowledge.45 Bufalini’s reimagined monuments are a quintessential instance of fragmentary remains inciting creative completion. As Leonard Barkan has observed in his exploration of  Renaissance responses to ancient statues, “The less there is of

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Figure 28. Hendrick van Cleef III, view of Rome looking west from the Oppian Hill, pen, ink, and wash, 1583. Gabinetto nazionale delle stampe, Istituto nazionale per la grafica, Rome, FN 495. Image courtesy of the Ministero dei beni e le Attività Culturali e del Turismo.

material Rome, whether historical, urbanological, or aesthetic, the greater the space for the poet.”46 This general rule applies well to Bufalini’s enterprise. Just how much space he found for poetic intervention in the disabitato is signaled by a more literal view of the same area by Flemish artist Hendrick van Cleef (1524–­89) (fig. 28).47 Although executed several decades later, this drawing—­ probably a preparatory step toward a printed panoramic view such as one from the Janiculum that was later published from his drawings—­was made from studies done on the spot by the artist in the early 1550s. Van Cleef was one of many Dutch and Flemish artists, among them Anton van den Wyngaerde (1525–­71) and Marten van Heemskerck, who specialized in such fresh, apparently unenhanced vistas.48 He shows the city from the Oppian Hill looking west, toward the abitato, its dense settlement visible in the distance beyond the Colosseum and the Capitoline Hill. In the right foreground, the half-­ submerged ruins of the Baths of Trajan rise above a series of walled, cultivated complexes—­the suburban rustic holdings of wealthy families and landed monasteries. Some of these properties are indicated by Bufalini, too, with the label “vinea,” but the extent to which the disabitato was crisscrossed by them and

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casini (or rustic houses) is masked in his map, leaving a blank slate for his creativity. On paper, real enclosures give way to fictitious walls. Bufalini’s taste for improving on the originals in accordance with his own Renaissance sensibilities was hardly unique among his Italian contemporaries, but the degree to which he took liberties with the physical remains puts him more in line with the architects of previous generations—­figures like Francesco di Giorgio (1439–­1502), who had a penchant for transforming the ruins he saw and sketched in situ into finished drawings that showed more order and magnificence.49 By the early sixteenth century, however, the leading architects—­Bramante, Raphael, Peruzzi, and Sangallo, among others—­had begun to privilege physical evidence in their drawings. Palladio, who visited Rome in the very same years that Bufalini was active there, was hardly immune to the elaboration impulse, but on the whole he was a highly perceptive student of the ruins whose corpus remains unsurpassed as a source for buildings that have decayed further since his time.50 Bufalini’s reconstructions—­both more fanciful and more less nuanced than Palladio’s—­are not in the same league, and probably left sophisticated viewers of the mid-­1500s unimpressed. Bufalini’s treatment of the bath complexes is particularly revealing, for it ranges from informed restraint to imaginative exuberance—­often in proportion to how much was left of them to see on the ground. His representation of the Baths of Diocletian (ca. 298–­306 CE) northeast of the Quirinal and Viminal Hills, for example, is reasonably accurate. This monument—­one of the largest to appear on the map (visible toward the top center of plate 1)—­was quite well preserved, and Bufalini seems to have heeded the physical evidence. His reconstruction is also nearly identical and probably indebted to the one included by Serlio in his Terzo libro. In other cases, where physical evidence was scant, it can be difficult to gauge when and to what extent Bufalini consulted other authors or printmakers, and at what point his own ideas came to the fore. For example, the Baths of Trajan (104–­9 CE), on the Oppian Hill above the Colosseum, had left very few traces in Renaissance Rome. For Bufalini, this lacuna was an irresistible invitation to design a structure of the utmost complexity and vastness, far beyond its original form or indeed that of any Roman bath (fig. 27). In this he might have been partly inspired by Fulvio, who wrote in his Antichità della città di Roma that the structure—­which he, like many others, mistakenly identified as the Baths of Titus—­“occupied almost the whole space of the hill,” but otherwise there is little precedent for Bufalini’s imaginative rendering.51 He seems to have accepted Fulvio’s label and his description of the structure’s great size, but the physical form he depicted—­with its filigree of multiplied geometric spaces—­can only be chalked up to Bufalini’s own invention.

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Figure 29. Sebastiano Serlio, the Baths of Caracalla, from Il terzo libro di Sabastiano Serlio Bolognese, nel qual si figurano e descrivono le antiquita di Roma (Venice, 1540 [1544]), 88–­89. The image is inverted for clearer comparison with Bufalini’s treatment in Figure 27. Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

In the case of the Baths of Caracalla (212–­16 CE), Bufalini showed himself capable of imaginative inspiration even when he had access to more complete remains that could, in theory, have provided the basis for a more accurate reconstruction. Unlike the Baths of Trajan, the Baths of Caracalla were relatively intact, and there existed abundant traces of their original ground plan. Yet Bufalini did not just embellish the material remains of the building—­he deliberately diverged from them, as is clear in a comparison of his treatment (fig. 27) with Serlio’s more accurate rendering (fig. 29). Bufalini doubles the interior spaces around the central round chamber to form a more regular, square ground plan, thereby imposing symmetry and better filling the space within the external walls. He also lengthens the outer walls so that the semicircular exedrae are centered along them, thus forcing greater regularity upon the whole complex, and he adds a third, fictitious exedra to close in its southwestern side. In this way, Bufalini heightens symmetry, spatial complexity,

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and magnificence, even to the point of contradicting the physical remains. Again, this impulse discloses a somewhat outmoded approach to reconstruction. Raphael, in his letter to Leo X, had urged architects to take a rigorous approach by “making those [structural] members that are completely ruined or that have vanished correspond to those that are still standing and can be seen.”52 Bufalini seems to have disregarded that advice, unlike many of his contemporaries who generated drawings that were considerably more faithful to the archaeological evidence.53 Further signs of Bufalini’s tendency to overlook physical traces in an effort to maximize antiquity come from two other prominent structures that lie well outside the inhabited center of Rome. His representation of the so-­called Temple of Minerva Medica (fourth century CE)—­a structure whose function and identity still pose a bit of a quandary for scholars—­embodies a mixture of observation and invention (fig. 30).54 Bufalini took his cues from Marliani (who was, in turn, following Flavio Biondo and Andrea Fulvio) in mistakenly identifying this structure as the Basilica and Porticus of Caius and Lucius Caesar, grandsons of Augustus.55 But while Marliani had illustrated this supposed basilica on his map with a cautious and perfunctory dot, Bufalini chooses to reconstruct it completely. He represents with reasonable accuracy the domed

Figure 30. Bufalini, Roma, detail: Temple of Minerva Medica. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps S.T.R. 175.

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Figure 31. Bufalini, Roma, detail: the Aventine Hill with the Temple of Diana at center. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps S.T.R. 175.

central hall, much of which still survives, as well as the projecting exedrae (even if he splits their inward-­facing curves in half and inverts them, so they point outward—­resembling the second-­century CE double temple of Venus and Rome near the Colosseum, which had an analogous configuration). The rather generic if enormous three-­aisled basilica that he represents extending to the north (left) from that central core is, however, pure embellishment—­a conspicuous flourish that accords with the speculative (and, as it happens, erroneous) identification of the structure’s building type.56 Presumably, Bufalini accepted the scholarly label, then imaginatively reconstructed an appropriate building. A very similar basilican ground plan provides the forecourt for another conspicuous and imaginary building, the Temple of Diana on the Aventine (fig. 31). There was no surviving vestige of this famous cult site—­the first and most significant one dedicated to the goddess in Rome, the legendary foundation of which dates to the time of Servius Tullius in the sixth century BCE. On Bufalini’s map, its footprint occupies a vast swath of the hill. The fictitious

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forecourt alone is roughly the size and shape of the immense Church of San Paolo fuori le mura southwest of the city (at the lower right corner of the map), and the whole occupies an area even greater than Michelangelo’s New St. Peter’s. The temple complex looks just like the footprint of a typical Early Christian aisled basilica with an apse altar, fronted by an atrium. It dwarfs the legitimate and very real Early Christian churches that surround it: Santa Sabina, Santa Prisca, and San Saba. Curiously, while Bufalini takes such reconstructive delight in this nonexistent structure, he barely intervenes in the nearby Baths of Trajan Decius (252 CE), which partly survived, and which appear on the map as a reductive but clearly ruinous sequence of irregular chambers, reminiscent of a pile of broken twigs. In fact, the complex appears twice. Bufalini hedges his bets, identifying two separate fragmentary groupings on the northeastern crest of the Aventine as the “Thermae/Terme Decii.” Bufalini’s approach to ruins, so varied and liberal in the disabitato, takes a dramatic turn in the densely populated urban core. Bufalini suddenly reins in his creativity, reconstruction largely ends, and the physical reality of Renaissance Rome overrides the conjured Rome of the past. Almost every street and alley appears—­the organic medieval byways as well as the new, straight thoroughfares—­as the overall balance of the map shifts from monumental structures to the larger urban fabric. Nestled within this matrix, the palazzi of important families and curates mingle with churches and monuments, but no vanished structure is resuscitated, no decayed building flagrantly reconstructed or inflated beyond its true proportions. Those ancient buildings that still existed in the center of Rome, like the largely intact Pantheon (118–­25 CE) and the vestiges of the nearby Baths of Agrippa (ca. 25–­19 BCE), are not elaborated like those on the fringes of the living city (fig. 32). Instead, they are embedded in Renaissance Rome—­hemmed in by the streets and blocks around them—­ much as they were still integrated in Renaissance life. Bufalini does not entirely suppress his impulse to complete ruinous structures in the abitato, but he tends to tread much more carefully. He depicts the Theater of Marcellus (dedicated 13 BCE)—­whose form is again indebted to Serlio’s version—­as intact, but his reconstruction is simple and fully in line with conventional wisdom about this type of structure (fig. 32). In another case, Bufalini reconstructs a recently demolished monument, but he goes to the trouble of inventing a graphic strategy to signal its current nonexistence. In the Vatican Borgo, he shows the square ground plan of the so-­called Meta Romuli—­the pyramidal tomb believed to be the resting place of Romulus—­superimposed transparently upon the Via Alessandrina, the new street to which it had succumbed just a half century before (see fig. 35, top right corner).57 Memory of

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Figure 32. Bufalini, Roma, detail: the Pantheon and Baths of Agrippa at upper left; the Theater of Marcellus at lower right. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps S.T.R. 175.

this landmark was clearly still fresh—­Raphael, for example, had mentioned it specifically in his letter to Leo X as one of the latest ancient casualties. Mostly, however, Bufalini was content to let sleeping dogs lie in the inhabited center. The irregular Renaissance form of Bufalini’s Stadium of Domitian (ca. 80 CE), later rechristened Piazza Navona, provides a telling contrast to the showy perfection of his Circus Maximus (founded ca. 600 BCE). The former is shown as it was prior to the renovations of the seventeenth century, an eroded ruin nestled in the Renaissance city (fig. 33), while the latter is a glorious, overblown specter on the urban fringes. (The circus is also mistakenly reconstructed as having equally curved ends, when in fact one was flatter than the other.) Yet the Piazza Navona had ongoing relevance to Roman daily life, while the Circus Maximus was obsolete, not to mention buried. The differing treatment of these two otherwise comparable structures confirms that Bufalini observed certain rules of decorum in his rendering, allowing himself imaginative license only at the margins, where there was room for it. Relegated to the edges, his creative impulses did not infringe on the business of modern Rome, or on the business of mapping it with a discipline worthy of any modern cartographer. The relative accuracy of Bufalini’s city center does not mean, however, that it was free from rhetoric—­in fact, it is infused with a distinctly Renaissance brand of triumphalism. The new streets, for example, are shown disproportionately wide, such that they emerge from the urban fabric with greater clarity. Bufalini’s focus on the footprint of the city also enabled him to minimize

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some of the most prominent medieval buildings. Baronial towers appear as small, unobtrusive squares, giving no hint that they were in fact dominating features of the Roman skyline. In this way, Bufalini effectively marginalized the Middle Ages—­sharing, perhaps, Raphael’s opinion that “the buildings of the Goth period” were “completely lacking in any grace whatsoever”58—­the better to permit ancient and modern Rome to emerge as two sides of a coin. Stretching across the middle portion of Bufalini’s map, for example, the long, straight Via Lata (today’s Via del Corso) becomes a visual spine terminating at the Capitoline Hill at the very center of the entire woodcut (see fig. 23). The prominent placement of these elements is not accidental, especially given that the orientation of city maps was not fixed in this period. Both were ancient sites that had been recently rehabilitated by papal decree and were thus redolent of rebirth.59 Along the same lines, in the middle of the Capitoline, Bufalini showed the second-­century CE equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, moved there in 1538, in perspective—­appearing to project outward from the otherwise planimetric diagram (fig. 34). This venerable landmark had featured prominently on maps for centuries. Fra Paolino Veneto had portrayed it, for example, on his

Figure 33. Bufalini, Roma, detail: Piazza Navona. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps S.T.R. 175.

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Figure 34. Bufalini, Roma, detail: the Capitoline Hill. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps S.T.R. 175.

map of about 1320, near St. John Lateran, together with fragments of a colossal statue of Constantine (fig. 4, right). But Bufalini makes the equestrian statue even more conspicuous, and its central placement is new and meaningful. With this lone, conspicuous deviation from strict orthogonality, Bufalini stressed the symbolic importance of this primary locus of Roman regeneration—­the most grandiose project in Renaissance papal urbanism. Moreover, even if many scholars were already aware of the true identity of the emperor depicted in the famed equestrian statue, there persisted the popular belief that he was Constantine, the first Christian emperor.60 The outsize Marcus Aurelius statue underscores the Christianized cast of the Roman renovatio. This one tiny element becomes emblematic of a much larger idea: the triumphant emperor—­standing at the center of the revamped Capitoline, the city as a whole, and Bufalini’s map—­is a visual summation of Renaissance Rome’s self-­definition as the Christian revival and culmination of antiquity. Finally, one modern building does rival the scale of the sprawling ancient structures outside the city center. On the map, New St. Peter’s, which

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surpassed even the Capitoline as the most potent symbol of Rome’s resurgence, takes pride of place at the lower left corner, across the Tiber from the inhabited center (fig. 35). The church was in transition, roughly at the midpoint of a protracted construction process that ultimately lasted more than a century.61 Bufalini shows it with the centralized core of Michelangelo adjoining the remains of the fourth-­century nave, but his complete ground plan masks the actual half-­dismantled/half-­built state of the basilica in the mid-­1500s—­offering no clue that it was still missing its defining vertical feature: the famous dome, to this day the most prominent feature of the Roman skyline. In Bufalini’s day, St. Peter’s was no more intact than the ruins of the disabitato. Yet in contrast to the ghostly ancient marvels that appear to float, weightless and ethereal, across that open expanse, the basilica—­locked in place by a formidable circuit of new Vatican defenses, themselves signs of renewal—­becomes the visual anchor of the image. It is paired with the venerable Basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura, which Bufalini takes pains to squeeze in at the very edge of the lower right

Figure 35. Bufalini, Roma, detail: St. Peter’s and Vatican fortifications. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps S.T.R. 175.

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corner. Together, these churches—­dedicated to the two apostolic patron saints of Rome—­bracket the map and frame it in distinctly Christian terms.

The Early Reception and Influence of Bufalini’s Map

Today, Bufalini’s map emerges as a remarkable monument to the Eternal City and a milestone in urban cartography. Its early reception is less clear. Documentary evidence is scant, and there is no way to gauge the map’s commercial success.62 It is possible, however, to assess its influence on later imagery and thereby draw some general conclusions. Bufalini’s work was copied much less than Francesco Rosselli’s view of Rome and other pictorial city portraits of comparable scale and ambition. Barbari’s view of Venice, for example, was not only reprinted several times but also the basis for a multitude of imitations throughout the early modern period.63 Pagano’s view of Cairo similarly remained the standard Western depiction of that fabled city for two centuries, with derivatives appearing in all shapes and sizes.64 Sophianos’s Totius Graeciae Descriptio—­not a city portrait, but another multisheet map with an antiquarian bent produced by Bufalini’s publisher, Blado, for a similar audience—­also met with success, becoming a much-­copied best seller for generations.65 In contemporary imagery of Rome, Pirro Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago of 1561, comparable to Bufalini’s as a large printed view of Rome destined for a scholarly audience, reverberated through at least fourteen subsequent editions and derivatives through the late eighteenth century.66 Bufalini’s map, by contrast, inspired few obvious imitations. In 1616, Alò Giovannoli published a much-­ reduced and cruder version, updated to show the urban changes of Pope Sixtus V.67 Small sections of Bufalini’s plan were also copied—­without credit, as was typical—­in a couple of publications, to illustrate particular zones of Rome.68 But in general it does not seem to have been a widely adopted model, and it remained the only major ichnography of Rome until Nolli’s considerably more famous map of two centuries later.69 It is possible to blame this lackluster reception on Bufalini’s idiosyncratic approach to the ruins, and to Rome’s history. We have seen that his reconstructions did not conform to the ideas of his most advanced contemporaries. His map as a whole, moreover, is synchronic, not diachronic. It compresses all time into a single perfected instant, discarding the notion of time unfolding, or evolution over time. This strategy ran counter to the strides of many scholars toward historical organization—­the effort to establish a sense of temporal sequence, difference, and distance. Raphael, for one, had spent a section of his

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letter to Leo X defining the characteristics of successive eras in building, and Claudio Tolomei had stated his intention to “consider, and understand well all the ancient remains by way of history . . . [in such a way that] one can see . . . the growth of Rome little by little.”70 In a similar vein, Bartolomeo Marliani’s map of 1544 was one of a series meant to show the city’s development over time. Moreover, it was focused on a narrower temporal range than Bufalini’s plan, more restrained with regard to reconstruction, and supplemented by text that further sorted through chronological stages of building and topography. Even Fabio Calvo had planned a suite of three maps showing successive eras for his Antiquae urbis Romae of 1527. Seen in this context, Bufalini’s plan was almost willfully contrarian. Another potential contributing factor is Bufalini’s ichnographic language, which simply might have left viewers—­who were accustomed to lively naturalism in their city portraits—­cold. This theory is supported by the fact that Bufalini’s map did have a decisive if disguised effect on later imagery, as many later artists appropriated the outlines of his survey to lend topographical accuracy to pictorial views. The early twentieth-­century scholar Christian Hülsen speculated, reasonably, that a map “as big as the workshop” listed in an inventory of the heirs of the Roman print mogul Lafreri was an example of Bufalini’s plan, which served as a model for mapmakers in Lafreri’s employ.71 The first evidence of this phenomenon is a map by Francesco Paciotto (1521–­91), etched by Nicolas Béatrizet (fl. 1540–­65) and published by Lafreri in 1557 (fig. 36).72 Paciotto, a well-­regarded military engineer, duplicates Bufalini’s plan of the city walls, network of streets, and topography precisely (if on a smaller scale) but superimposes the built environment in perspective. Paciotto’s map is the earliest example of a hybrid graphic technique that soon became ubiquitous, which Lucia Nuti has aptly termed the perspective plan.73 Such an image shows the city walls and street matrix undistorted, in orthogonal plan. Unlike a bird’s-­eye view, where the city is at least nominally foreshortened, there is no horizon and the overall effect is more cartographic. Architecture, however, is depicted in perspective, as though glimpsed from a vantage point above and outside the city. This highly artificial technique combines the measured quantities of orthogonality with the visual qualities of pictorialism—­preserving the clarity of a map with regard to the city’s layout, while giving some sense of its three-­dimensional appearance by means of its buildings. Paciotto uses Bufalini’s map as an armature to show the city of his own time, discarding his predecessor’s fictitious monuments along with his graphic purity but retaining his emphasis on exactitude. In terms of form and content,

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Figure 36. Francesco Paciotto (designer) and Nicolas Béatrizet (engraver), Urbis Romae formam . . . (Rome: Antonio Lafreri, 1557), engraving, 18⅞ × 21⅝ in. (48 × 55 cm). Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Novacco 4F 249.

Paciotto’s depiction of the disabitato is a study in contrasts from Bufalini’s representation (fig. 37; compare fig. 27). In the area of the Oppian Hill, for example, fragmentary remains of the Baths of Trajan rise beyond the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, surrounded by open and cultivated fields. Similarly, at lower left of Paciotto’s map, New St. Peter’s does not appear deceptively intact, but rather with a gaping hole where its cupola was to be. Paciotto is more attentive to the current, transitory state of Rome than Bufalini, leaving ruins ruinous, unfinished buildings unfinished. Two maps published in 1565 were equally dependent on Bufalini’s map but used his survey as a base for archaeological plans. The small woodcut that Bernardo Gamucci (fl. late 1500s) included in his topography of that year duplicates Bufalini’s circuit of the Aurelian Walls on a much-­reduced scale.74 Similarly, in his Anteiquae urbis imago, Panvinio—­who had written so appreciatively of

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Bufalini’s plan—­used it as a basis for his own, rotating it 180 degrees and stripping away all postantique elements, thereby adapting the map to his goal of reconstructing the ancient city (fig. 38). Although his focus was not modern Rome, Panvinio, like Paciotto, showed architecture in perspective and turned away from Bufalini’s anachronic treatment.75 As we shall see in the next chapters, Stefano Du Pérac (1535–­ca. 1604) also used Bufalini as a scaffold for two lavish perspective plans of the city published in the 1570s. The artist Giovanni Antonio Dosio (1533–­1609) was the stealthiest. His pictorial view of Rome (fig. 39), engraved by Sebastiano del Re (fl. 1550s–­60s) and

Figure 37. Paciotto, Urbis Romae formam, detail: disabitato. Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Novacco 4F 249.

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Figure 38. Onofrio Panvinio, Anteiquae urbis imago (Venice, 1580 [orig. Rome, 1560]), engraving, 13 × 17¼ in. (33 × 44 cm). The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content program.

published by Bartolomeo Faletti (fl. 1560s) in 1561, bears no outward resemblance to Bufalini’s orthogonal plan, but surprisingly it too is reliant on that model.76 Dosio shows the city from outside and above the Porta del Popolo, looking south. The Vatican and St. Peter’s anchor the image at lower right, the base of the dome still uncapped by its cupola and open to the elements. The Via Flaminia leads vertically from the bottom margin into the city, where it becomes the Via del Corso, drawing the viewer’s gaze into the built-­up center and up to the Capitoline Hill. The disabitato stretches to the left and into the distance. On the other side of the city, beyond the southernmost gate at the Porta San Sebastiano, the viewer’s gaze follows the Via Appia, lined with tombs, toward the horizon, just squeezed in at the top. Dosio’s atmospheric image recreates Rome as glimpsed from high above, but of course this glimpse was impossible in the early modern period, when the highest view available was from a hill or tower. To achieve his illusionistic vision, Dosio used Bufalini’s survey as a base, which he reoriented by placing north at the bottom, and distorted by imposing a vanishing point, horizon line, and the concomitant suggestion of optical experience (fig. 40)—­thus creating a true bird’s-­eye view. The net result

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is, yet again, the transformation of Bufalini’s plan into a picture of Rome that is both accurate and visually evocative. Dosio’s complicated manipulation was doubly removed from direct contact with the city. Yet it was, paradoxically, meant to give a greater sense of immediacy to his image, which now simulated the experience of a visitor arriving from the north (albeit by air). The maps by Paciotto, Panvinio, and Dosio all reflect appreciation for Bufalini through the act of imitation, and critique through their reinsertion of pictorialism—­the latter betraying the same impulse that had led Raphael to reconsider the role of perspective drawings in architecture a half century before. How else to “see and understand well”? Marliani, for his part, had embraced orthogonality, singing the praises of “flat planes” over “worthless pictures,”

Figure 39. Giovanni Antonio Dosio (designer) and Sebastiano del Re (engraver), Roma (Rome: Bartolomeo Faletti, 1561), engraving, 16½ × 21⅝ in. (42 × 55 cm). Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Novacco 4F 250.

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Figure 40. Overlay of the walls and some interior features of Bufalini (in black) and Dosio (in gray), with Bufalini distorted and rotated. Diagram by the author.

but he was far outnumbered by others who sought ingenious ways to bring orthogonality and pictorialism together. A later commentator better expressed the prevailing taste in imagery. Floriano dal Buono (1599–­1647), author of a view of Bologna (1636), wrote: “If I had made the image as a plan, I would have been indulging in the impossible, satisfying the imagination rather than vision. The portrait of a city does not consist of its plan . . . but rather the representation of that which the eye can see from a determined height.” In his own city view, Dal Buono wrote, “I aimed [to satisfy] the curiosity of the human eye . . . and, determined to put reality before imagination, I did not deny my senses in order to concern myself with improbable fictions.”77 To Dal Buono, a pictorial image that simulated visual perception, not a diagram, privileged fact over fiction to express the true character of a place. Yet such views were not necessarily more real, true, or natural than maps—­ they were just more naturalistic. They were built on the pretense of real visual observation and mimicked the effects of optical experience, but that so many were derived from maps signals an even greater degree of remove from visual reality. The sophisticated artifice of these works means that verisimilitude, not verità, or literal truth, mattered most in city imagery.78 After all, Dal Buono did not condemn fiction in representation—­he condemned improbable fiction. The makers of printed views were propagating and responding to a widespread preference among viewers for a more vivid, perceptual type of imagery than

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an orthogonal diagram could provide. Again, this is perhaps the factor that best explains the two hundred years between Bufalini’s map and its first true successor by Nolli. During the same period, countless pictorial views of Rome were published—­their naturalism more in tune with popular taste than was the abstract geometry of a plan. Tellingly, the image of Rome from the late 1500s with the longest afterlife and widest circulation was also the most pictorial. The Urbis Romae descriptio of 1555 was designed by Ugo (or Hugues) Pinard (fl. 1550s), etched by Jacob Bos (fl. ca. 1549–­80), and published by Antonio Salamanca (1478–­1562), then quickly republished the same year bearing the imprint of Lafreri (plate 7).79 This view shows the city unfolding from a viewpoint slightly above the  Janiculum Hill, looking east, and provides a striking counterpoint to Bufalini’s map, with which it shares an orientation but little else. The angle of vision is lower in this view than in Dosio’s and the others, the distant horizon lined with the Alban Hills and surrounding towns that are indeed visible from high atop the Janiculum on a clear day. In the foreground, the city walls rise up along with the terrain such that the viewer can almost perceive their masonry patterns, as well as admire some of the impressive new bastions of the Vatican Borgo at left. The benediction loggia of Old St. Peter’s is visible above those defenses, while an edge of the drum of Michelangelo’s dome is just squeezed in. On the other side of the view, at far right, the foreground is bookended by the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, flanked by a courtyard above which it is just possible to make out the domed cap of Bramante’s Tempietto (ca. 1502) rising above Trastevere. Beneath the irregular ridge of the hill, Rome stretches out panoramically before the viewer: first the Via della Lungara, lined with villas, extending horizontally across the base of the image, then the Tiber, and beyond that, the city center, with the Via Lata providing another horizontal axis to lend visual stability to the image. Prominent structures and sites are readily identifiable, even in the distance, including the Palazzo Farnese, Cancelleria, Pantheon, Capitoline Hill, ancient obelisks, and medieval towers. A recent addition is visible at far left: the Villa Giulia, built for Pope Julius III (r. 1550–­55). In the background, the disabitato appears as a vast pasture punctuated by churches, orchards, and decaying ruins. Labels do not obscure the view’s expanse, for they have been displaced to a key lining the bottom of the map. This device had first appeared on regional maps a few decades earlier, but its only precedent among images of Rome—­where it was soon to become standard—­ was in the view included in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia of 1550.80 Pinard’s image is a remarkably accurate and evocative picture of mid-­ sixteenth-­century Rome. Yet no hill in Rome, not even the Janiculum, affords

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such an encompassing and complete view. Pinard, following the pattern of the “View with a Chain” of Florence, tilted the city up toward the picture plane such that the horizon is unnaturally high, thus permitting the pattern of streets and general layout of the city to emerge clearly. His perspective scheme is selectively manipulated, not uniform. The Aurelian Walls, for example, do not disappear in the distance, remaining legible even on the far side of the city, while the streets are widened considerably—­with narrow, winding roads becoming grand boulevards. Important monuments are part of a greater matrix of anonymous structures, but they are shown disproportionately large to draw attention. The image, as a whole, is carefully constructed and idealized. Yet it is an eminently plausible fiction, answering to the “curiosity of the human eye” even as it rises up to an imaginary sphere. Pinard’s view proved immediately popular and inspired many imitations, most notably by Fabio Licinio (1557) and Giovanni Francesco Camocio (1569).81 In 1572, via one of these derivatives, it was used as a prototype for a view of Rome included in Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum (Cologne, 1572–­1617).82 This momentous work was eventually translated from Latin into German and French, and stretched to six volumes containing more than five hundred city portraits.83 The unprecedented success of the Civitates signals the full realization of the genre. The inclusion of Pinard’s prototype in Braun and Hogenberg’s collection meant that it was disseminated internationally, becoming the defining image of sixteenth-­century Rome—­the first to surpass Rosselli’s view. It is also the forefather of a long line of views taken from the Janiculum Hill, from Antonio Tempesta’s Prospectus of 1593 to Giu­ seppe Vasi’s Prospetto of 1765. The Janiculum, while not one of Rome’s fabled seven hills, was the highest in Rome and remains the best spot on the ground from which to enjoy a view of the city. The choice to represent the city from the Janiculum also had an erudite classical association, for the ancient poet Martial had described the view from his own villa located on its crest: “From here you can see the seven lordly hills, and measure the whole of Rome.”84 By adopting this vantage point in their views, artists allowed spectators to savor the same magisterial vista. The rich variety of Rome imagery produced in the mid-­sixteenth century speaks to a time of experimentation, before rules and preferences became entrenched. Bufalini, Pinard, and others were testing the boundaries of a genre that still had some flexibility in terms of its terminology, graphic language, and approach to the city. There exists a modern prejudice associating cartography with objectivity and pictorialism with creative license, but in the Renaissance there was no such dividing line among public images. The term ritratto, or

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portrait, was applied to plans and pictures of cities alike, without apparent distinction.85 Descriptio was, with ritratto, the most common term for these images, and it too was applied to all types of representation. Pinard’s pictorial view was entitled Urbis Romae descriptio, the same label that Alberti had used a century before for his treatise on making a very different kind of image—­an orthogonal plan—­of the city. Renaissance city imagery was characterized by this kind of openness and fluidity. Later, in the seventeenth century, Floriano dal Buono asserted polemically that “the portrait of a city does not consist of its plan,” but Bufalini clearly thought otherwise in his own time. Popular taste was, however, rapidly crystallizing into distinct patterns—­patterns in the production and consumption of imagery that solidified over the following two centuries.

The Modern Reception of Bufalini’s Map

It is largely thanks to Nolli—­who published a reduced version of Bufalini’s map along with his own Pianta grande of 1748 (fig. 79)—­that Bufalini’s achievement did not fade into permanent obscurity. Nolli’s move initiated a belated vogue for Bufalini’s plan, as a series of similar tributes followed.86 On one hand, it is fitting that cartographers in the Age of Reason recognized Bufalini as one of their own, for his map was a critical precursor to Nolli’s empiricism. On the other hand, for Bufalini, cartography served purposes other than objective physical documentation. To be sure, it could be put to that end—­as it was in his rendering of the inhabited center—­but it was equally effective for fabricating an idealized, timeless, conceptual city. While it is entirely correct to recognize his map as a key model for scientific treatments like Nolli’s, therefore, it was also very much a work of the imagination. This very duality means that Bufalini’s map risks being framed as a primitive prelude to Nolli’s technical triumph.87 Nolli himself perhaps intended to insinuate as much by reprinting Bufalini’s plan along with his own; even if that move was outwardly an homage, it also implied that progress had been made. For all its modern graphic language, Bufalini’s work seems far less scientific, by today’s standards, than Nolli’s Pianta grande. On a basic level, Nolli’s map, which combines etching and engraving, is more finely detailed and expertly executed than Bufalini’s occasionally crude woodcut. Even if we account for the differing possibilities of the two print media and talents of the artisans, Nolli’s map surpasses Bufalini’s in thoroughness, meticulous measurement, accuracy, and precision. In these respects, Nolli’s plan can even compete with modern digital maps and satellite images of the city. Several factors worked in

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Nolli’s favor in this regard: scientific instrumentation had improved considerably since Bufalini’s time; Nolli was working with a team of expert surveyors; and he had quasi-­official sponsorship for his project. If Bufalini’s survey looks incomplete and flawed by comparison to Nolli’s, it is important to remember that he did not have previous models to base himself upon, lacked a similar support structure, and had recourse to more rudimentary surveying technology. Another factor that seems to have tempered modern praise for Bufalini’s plan—­at least relative to Nolli’s—­is that Bufalini, unlike Nolli, frequently took liberties with the physical evidence. The assumption of steady advancement toward scientific objectivity pervades the study of cartography, and Bufalini’s map simply does not fit the linear model of progress as neatly as Nolli’s. It is not just a matter of unintentional flaws in Bufalini’s survey (i.e., practical problems of execution having to do with unavoidable technological limitations), but also of his deliberate divergence from the real condition of Renaissance Rome (i.e., more systemic problems in his approach to the city). Bufalini’s map does not provide unambiguous evidence of a newly rigorous approach to urban representation—­or even of the author’s resolute commitment to such an approach. Of course, Bufalini’s goal was not an archaeologically sound reconstruction. The very concept of accuracy was inchoate in his time, as was the modern science of archaeology. Bufalini was capable of accuracy, but he applied it selectively. Like many of his contemporaries, he approached the ruins in a dynamic, active, and creative manner. Bufalini’s measured survey and his creative reconstructions are two sides of the same coin. This unique fusion of past and present, imagination and reality, makes his plan a crowning work of Renaissance thought, much as Nolli’s map is a crowning work of Enlightenment rationalism. Like the distinction between art and science, the notion of accuracy is more suited to Nolli’s time (and ours) than to Bufalini’s. Bufalini never would have conceived of his project in terms of these modern polarities. They are imperfectly applied to the sixteenth century, when an embracing synthesis was possible, and Bufalini could be simultaneously a geometer and an artist. In his map as in the Renaissance mind, the ineffable ancient city still lived alongside its tangible modern twin. In view of that, Bufalini’s plan is all the more rich as a record of perceptions of the city—­its antiquity, its modernity, its evolving history. More eloquent than any single snapshot, this work is an extraordinary monument to the aeternitas of the Eternal City, to the ingenuity of its maker, and to the vibrant culture from which it originated.

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Chapter Four

Antitheses Ancient and Modern Rome in Sixteenth-­Century Imagery

Bufalini’s desire to recreate the ancient city on paper followed on the heels of predecessors like Raphael, but few others, before or after, combined monuments from different eras so flagrantly. In the second half of the sixteenth century, there was a move toward clear separation of past and present. Maps of modern Rome became increasingly faithful to the current state of the urban fabric and its architecture, while those of the ancient city, which developed into an independent and immensely popular category, were given over to reconstruction.1 These Roma antica images often resulted from informal partnerships between the learned amateurs who designed them and the professional printmakers who saw to their production. They are sometimes referred to as archaeological plans, but that label is a misnomer: they are no more archaeological in the modern sense than they are plans in the strict sense of that term. Instead, they are vivid pictures of an imaginary, glorious ancient city, far greater than anything that had ever existed. That said, these images are not outright inventions. Based on an impressive foundation of antiquarian knowledge, they are highly learned fantasies: plausible fictions. The term imago appears often in their titles, and it gets at the crux of the matter. For imago means not just image

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or picture, but also vision or ghost from the past, as well as concept or idea. Its polyvalence suggests the complexities of representing the Roman palimpsest. The splitting of ancient and modern in imagery of the city also resulted in a new subgenre of Rome-­then-­and-­now imagery—­that is, twin images meant for competitive comparison, or paragone. Renaissance culture was steeped in this tradition, which was at its core a literary device of pitting the arts against each other, as in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous praise of painting over poetry, music, and sculpture.2 More broadly the notion of paragone became a competitive ethos that could entail the evaluation of any entity or activity in light of another, usually with the victor predetermined by authorial intent. The central paragone of sixteenth-­century Rome was that of the ancient versus the modern city—­a contest that was played out most intensely, and most publicly, in printed imagery, in which the victor was by no means certain. By the late 1500s, the subtle commentaries on Rome’s past and present states that had inflected Bufalini’s map and earlier images became more pointed and overt, just as Rome itself became more of a battleground with the escalation of the Counter-­Reformation. In this atmosphere, claims about the city’s current condition, as well as its identity as pagan or Christian, had far-­reaching implications that were political, cultural, and religious. With the dissemination of printed imagery, these debates could reach an international audience, shaping ideas of Rome—­and all that it stood for—­throughout Europe. What emerged in the late sixteenth century was a nascent but unmistakable celebration of Renaissance Rome as a city that had surpassed not only all others, but also its own former self to become a modern Christian capital.

Bartolomeo Marliani, Pirro Ligorio, and the “Memory of Ancient Things”

Bartolomeo Marliani’s woodcut plan of late imperial Rome (fig. 17) was more than an ichnographic precedent for Bufalini’s map, for it also set the stage for many separately published images of the ancient city that came soon after.3 The largest and most elaborate of three maps included in Marliani’s Urbis Ro­ mae topographia (Rome, 1544), it is signed at lower left by the calligrapher and woodcutter Giovanni Battista Palatino (ca. 1515–­ca. 1575) (“Io. Bap. Palatinus haec scripsit”)—­who probably executed the lettering alone, with another, unnamed person responsible for carving the map itself. In any case, the map’s design was probably Marliani’s own. Oriented with north at left, it is a streamlined representation, focusing on just a handful of monuments and sites from

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a relatively circumscribed era in the city’s history. The reductive nature of the image was partly dictated by its woodcut medium as well as the size and format of the volume, but its spare, uncluttered appearance is also a result of Marliani’s restrained approach to reconstruction. There is just one obvious anachronism: the ninth-­century Leonine Walls encircling the Vatican at lower left. Otherwise, only those architectural features of imperial Rome that were still visible and fairly intact during Marliani’s time, such as the Baths of Caracalla and the Colosseum, are represented in plan. Those that had disappeared, but whose locations he was able to glean from ancient authors, are signaled in text alone. In this way, Marliani’s choices reflect the physical reality of the sixteenth-­century city, so that his representation is not a reconstruction of ancient Rome per se, but rather a map of its contemporary twin from which he has peeled away all later accretions to leave only the survivals from antiquity. Marliani’s strategy has a distinct logic, emerging as moderate, even conservative, when compared with the tactics of others—­like Bufalini—­who followed on his heels. The brilliant, eccentric antiquarian, artist, and architect Pirro Ligorio (ca. 1513–­83) provides a counterpoint to Marliani and, for that matter, to Bufalini.4 A native of Naples, Ligorio was active in Rome in roughly the same period, well versed in measured drawings, engineering, and surveying as well as pictorial representation, and utterly fixated on Rome’s antiquities—­as recorded in some forty volumes of notes and drawings, now held by the Biblioteca nazionale in Naples and the Archivio di Stato in Turin, for a grand publication that was interminably in preparation.5 As an architect, Ligorio operated at the highest levels of patronage, designing the jewel-­like Casino of Pius IV in the Vatican precincts as well as the gardens of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, and taking over as head architect at St. Peter’s—­albeit briefly—­after the death of Michelangelo in 1564. Even more than Bufalini and others, Ligorio seems to have been determined to achieve a profound understanding of antiquity that would allow him to recreate it, live in its midst, and share that privilege with the public. A later commentator, Horace Walpole (1717–­97), reportedly commented that Italy is a place where the memory sees more than the eyes.6 In Rome especially, Ligorio—­like many others—­seems to have suffered acutely from this peculiar impairment to vision. Or perhaps it would be more suitable to deem it a heightened vision, since Ligorio’s feeling for Roman antiquity was of extraordinary virtuosity and sensitivity—­even if it has, until relatively recently, been maligned as sham knowledge. In his Libro . . . delle antichità di Roma (Venice, 1553), Ligorio wrote that he desired “with all my heart to refresh and preserve the memory of ancient things, and at the same time to satisfy those who delight in them.”7 His steps toward achieving this goal are nowhere better

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encapsulated than in his maps. Published by the Venetian printer Michele Tramezzino in 1552, 1553, and 1561 (the last in collaboration with Tramezzino’s brother Francesco), they are superb demonstrations of Ligorio’s formidable intellect, as well as his unique approach to reconstruction and to the urban fabric. They cannot be dismissed as eccentric curiosities, for—­in stark contrast to Bufalini’s map—­they were much copied, and appreciated, for centuries. Ligorio’s work resonated strongly with the learned public. Ligorio’s first map, of 1552 (fig. 41)—­one of two relatively small, double-­ sheet maps he issued with Tramezzino—­is disingenuously titled Urbis Romae situs cum iis quae adhuc conspiciuntur veter. monument. reliquiis (Layout of the city of Rome, along with those remains of old monuments that are to this day still visible).8 An oblique view from above, with north at left, it is based on the pretense of a view from high above the Janiculum Hill. Despite the title’s claim to a faithful rendering of sixteenth-­century Rome, the map embodies a brazen mixture of monuments from across time. Ligorio did not restrict his inventiveness to the margins of the inhabited city, as Bufalini had done. Instead, throughout the populated center as well as the disabitato, glorious, reconstructed antiquities are scattered cheek by jowl with existing modern and medieval constructions. On the Capitoline, the Franciscan Church and Monastery of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, together with the Marcus Aurelius equestrian statue moved there in 1538, preside over the long-­vanished Circus Flaminius of the third century BCE at the foot of the hill. Nearby, the ruinous Theater of Marcellus and entombed Circus Maximus are fully reimagined, coexisting peacefully with medieval and Renaissance structures. The Piazza Navona is fully restored as the Stadium of Domitian (labeled Circus Agonalis), nestling comfortably amid later constructions, an obelisk at its center. (Where Marliani left ancient obe­ lisks horizontal—­lying prone where they had toppled—­Ligorio fastidiously rights them.) Toward the bottom of the image, the fifteenth-­century Church of San Pietro in Montorio and Bramante’s Tempietto rise over Trastevere. At lower left, the invisible Circus of Nero is shown adjoining the Vatican and New St. Peter’s, which is depicted in progress. In other cases, Ligorio refrains from reconstruction, as with the ruins of the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill, which are left decaying. He seems to revel in anachronism and temporal disjunction. Ligorio makes his fair share of archaeological errors. The Circus of Nero, for example, is situated on the wrong side of the Vatican, while the Theater of Marcellus is represented as a fully round amphitheater, not a true theater with a semicircular ground plan. But he also gets much right. The Baths of Titus and of Trajan, next to the Early Christian Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, are

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Figure 41. Pirro Ligorio, Urbis Romae situs, cum iis quae adhuc conspiciuntur veter monument reliquiis (Rome: Michele Tramezzino, 1552), etching and engraving, 18¾ × 21½ in. (40.2 × 54.5 cm). British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps * 155.(5.).

shown as separate complexes on the Oppian Hill above the Colosseum. Bufalini had fused them into one enormous structure in his own map. Ligorio correctly reconstructs the Circus Maximus with one end flat, rather than both round. Many of his identifications are on the mark, attesting to his careful reading of ancient sources and surpassing the knowledge of many contemporaries. Not as prominent as the monuments but equally noteworthy are the anonymous infill buildings that Ligorio includes in his map. These are not mere space fillers, but rather stand for the countless humbler structures devoted to the practical needs of Roman life. In Ligorio’s picture, they signal urban density and serve as a connective tissue for monuments. They become a standard feature in subsequent imagery, carving out the paths of streets and creating a continuous built fabric. Although their structural role is not fully developed in this map, their very appearance was a decisive step away from medieval depictions that

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Figure 42. Pirro Ligorio, Urbis Romae . . . (Rome: Michele Tramezzino, 1553), etching and engraving, 16½ × 28 in. (42 × 71 cm). British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps * 155.(35.).

showed Rome as a collection of isolated landmarks. The ruins, for Ligorio, are but the most conspicuous features of a single urban whole. In this map, Rome is a harmonious, balanced aggregate, where the marvelous ancient curiosities are held in check and balanced by their context. Soon after, in 1553, Ligorio published his second map with Tramezzino (fig. 42), perhaps intending it as a companion piece to his book on Roman antiquities, Delle antichità di Roma, which came out the same year.9 This map, like the first, purports to show the city with “the ancient and modern buildings” (veterum novorumque aedificiorum) but it is considerably skewed to antiquity. In its general lineaments, this print follows its predecessor—­sharing the same orientation and general format, as well as similar dimensions, and incorporating pictures of many of the same monuments. But there are no infill buildings as in the Urbis Romae situs of the previous year, and the physical fabric of contemporary Rome has largely gone by the wayside. Gone are the medieval churches and towers, as well as the Renaissance urban interventions that were included in the earlier map. In their place, Ligorio has filled the print with minute labels, particularly in the city center, where text crowds every

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corner, threatening to overtake the image and compromise its legibility. The act of mapping here is textual more than visual or even diagrammatic. The profusion of toponyms reflects Ligorio’s goal of locating the sites of long-­lost monuments within the proper Augustan regions of the city, to the extent that their locations could be known from the late antique regionary catalogues—­ the same lists of places that had proven useful to Flavio Biondo, Raphael, Fabio Calvo, and others. Ligorio’s rigorous focus is tempered, however, by a couple of glaring anachronisms (fig. 43). At lower left, New St. Peter’s rises proudly above remnants of the original basilica, flanked by Bramante’s Belvedere Court and capped by a dome that was decades from completion. Visually, the church stands out for being relatively free of surrounding text and for its location across the Tiber from the heart of the city. In this way, Ligorio separates it both spatially and temporally from the core of the image. The church appears taller and more prominent than the ancient structures in the city center, and its placement makes it a viewer’s entrance into the picture. As in Bufalini’s map, the church is

Figure 43. Ligorio, Urbis Romae, 1553, details: the Vatican and St. Peter’s (left); San Paolo fuori le mura (right). British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps * 155.(35.).

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mirrored by its counterpart, the venerable fourth-­century Basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura, at far right. If Ligorio’s map is akin to a text on ancient Rome, these churches, dedicated to the two patron saints of Rome, serve as the introduction, declaring that this history is written from a Christian, Renaissance perspective, and anchoring it in the present. The great Anteiquae urbis imago of 1561 was Ligorio’s masterpiece, driven by the same reconstructive impulse that had motivated Bufalini’s map, but taken to even greater heights (plate 8).10 Also like Bufalini’s work, it was a labor of love, long in preparation and lavished with care, its sheer size instrumentally symbolic. Considerably larger than Ligorio’s two previous maps, the “Roma grande,” as it was sometimes called, was meant as a showpiece. In it, Ligorio abandoned all pretense of interest in the contemporary city in favor of a phantasmagoric vision of the past. Where his map of 1553 had been largely textual, this one is emphatically iconographic. The image is crowded with a dizzying array of architectural marvels, each one a unique feat of imaginative study. Yet despite the profusion of landmarks, this work differs markedly from earlier representations that show Rome as an empty plain upon which isolated monuments rise like megaliths. Ligorio included a multitude of unidentified multistory insulae, or apartment buildings. These are cut from an entirely different cloth than the standard Renaissance infill, but they similarly give a sense of the ancient city as a living, breathing being. Moreover, even unlabeled structures tend to exhibit variety and grandeur in the Roma grande, with most depicted as magnificent, exciting structures, not generic filler. One gets the impression that Ligorio was formulating his idealized version of ancient architecture by means of these anonymous structures as much as known landmarks. In the Anteiquae urbis imago, the most humble dwelling is a palace, the overall effect vibrant and dazzling. Although later artists often differed from Ligorio in their renderings of specific details, their larger visions were indelibly shaped by his. In Ligorio’s title banner, he proclaimed the Anteiquae urbis imago to have been “most accurately made from [evidence furnished by] the ancient monuments” (accuratissime ex vetusteis monumenteis formata), but this pledge does not mean that his constructive process entailed careful measurement or even direct observation. The Latin term accurato was not necessarily the equivalent of the modern term denoting exactitude or fidelity to a physical state. It could alternatively signify that a work had been executed with great care or diligence, and this seems to have been Ligorio’s meaning. His image presents a cacophonous, glittering picture of the ancient caput mundi—­a stark contrast to the graphic clarity and streamlined appearance of the ichnographies by Marliani and Bufalini. Engraved by Jacob Bos—­who was also responsible for Ugo Pinard’s Urbis

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Figure 44. Ligorio, Anteiquae urbis imago, details: Colosseum and Circus Maximus (right); Pantheon (bottom left); Mausoleum of Augustus (top left). British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps C.25.d.9.(1.).

Romae descriptio of 1555—­the Anteiquae urbis imago shows countless grandiose structures in intricate detail, packed together, seeming to jut into the surrounding space. Important landmarks are almost lost in the dense urban fabric, which reveals scant evidence of a street matrix or similar organizing principle. Some ancient roads are indicated—­close inspection reveals labels for the Via Flaminia north of the Capitoline and the Via Sacra in the Forum, among others. But their paths are largely obliterated by the exuberant architectural overgrowth. Even the all-­important walled circuit—­which some have mistakenly thought Ligorio appropriated from Bufalini—­is somewhat obscured.11 The image is disorienting, even overwhelming in its sheer accumulation of detail (fig. 44). Yet recognizable landmarks like the Pantheon (albeit facing

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the wrong direction) and Colosseum could help to orient spectators, serving as anchors that linked the image to the physical city as they knew it. The same was also true, if less so, for buildings that Ligorio built up from ruinous foundations, such as the Mausoleum of Augustus, which rises on six tiers like an elaborate wedding cake, or ziggurat, north of the Pantheon. For most structures, however, Ligorio had no physical evidence to use as a point of departure, despite his title’s assertion that this image was based on precisely that. This dissimulation does not mean, however, that he resorted to outright fabrication. In an inscription at the upper left of the view, Ligorio expanded his list of sources to include ancient texts, coins, and inscriptions, in addition to physical remains.12 For his Anteiquae urbis imago, Ligorio, like Flavio Biondo and Raphael before him, also relied on the regionary catalogues, carefully combing them to correctly situate many structures that had left no traces, and to identify remains that had stymied other scholars.13 Inscriptions further helped him with identifications and locations, while the imagery on ancient coins provided iconographic clues about architectural forms. Ligorio tended to rely on the principle of analogy in his reconstructions. When he had no direct evidence—­ archaeological or numismatic—­about the physical appearance of an individual building, he looked to available data regarding structures of the same type to fill in the gaps. The Circus Maximus, for example, pertains to a generic type of structure that Ligorio repeated in countless other circuses and stadiums. This was not an entirely original method. Raphael had outlined a similar process in his letter to Leo X, where he recommended “making those [structural] members that are completely ruined or that have vanished correspond to those that are still standing and can be seen.”14 Bufalini, too, seems to have employed a similar principle in his reconstructions. That said, neither predecessor took as wide a spectrum of materials into consideration as Ligorio. In his authoritative study of the 1561 map, Howard Burns observed that Ligorio was less concerned with capturing precise details of architectural form and measurements than he was with conveying the general appearance of buildings in antiquity, even to the point of representing them as he imagined an ancient artist would have.15 Ligorio depicted buildings using a type of perspective that evokes ancient representational techniques as he knew them from coins and sculptural reliefs. Parallel lines in architecture do not converge toward a vanishing point, and buildings are sometimes “unfolded” to show multiple sides simultaneously. In contrast to maps of Rome that imposed a uniform parallel perspective on the entire built environment, Ligorio eschewed an overriding system. Each structure in his Roma grande seems to follow its own unique logic, an almost maverick individualism. In all of these tactics, Ligorio was seeking

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not just to imagine the city as it appeared to ancient eyes, but rather to imagine himself as an ancient artist and to represent Rome accordingly. Erna Mandowsky and Charles Mitchell perhaps put it best in their 1963 study of Ligorio, where they wrote that his grand map “[rises] on the wings of Ligorio’s learned imagination above the particular world of specific archaeological remains into an ideal exemplary sphere where all is made perfect. It is Ligorio’s version of Roma Triumphans.”16 It was the ultimate imago, an astonishing vision of the past, seemingly from the past. Even in this image, however, there are the subtlest indications that Ligorio was either unable or unwilling to shed his own Renaissance mind-­set—­to allow the memory to take over from the eyes. At lower left, the Circus of Nero is now placed correctly, and there is no anachronistic depiction of St. Peter’s. But its later presence is foreshadowed by a minute inscription: “Here today is St. Peter’s.” Similarly, close by, “Here is the Palazzo of St. Peter’s” (i.e., the Vatican Palace), and “Here they say Belvedere [Villa].” There are many of these tiny labels across the image, plain to see for anyone who engages in close inspection—­small but meaningful testaments to hindsight.17 Their modern cursive, insistent present tense, and references to “today” pull the viewer back to the sixteenth century. Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago might be an image of antiquity perfected, but it is still a prelude. Well into the twentieth century, there was a tendency among scholars to denounce Ligorio as a forger who had muddied the archaeological record by inventing iconographic forms and inscriptions while heedlessly reconstructing ancient buildings.18 In his Roma grande as in his other work, however, Ligorio was not attempting to deceive viewers by convincing them that his image was a faithful visual replica. Instead, Ligorio’s goal was to grant them a restored and idealized vision of a lost golden age that could only be achieved through his remarkable store of knowledge about antiquity.19 In past scholarship, Ligorio also came across as something of a hypocrite, since he pilloried rival scholars for engaging in precisely the same kinds of fraudulent reconstructive activities as himself. Yet Ligorio’s greatest contempt was reserved not for forgery per se, but rather for bad forgery that lacked a solid foundation in ancient principles—­ much as Floriano dal Buono condemned improbable fiction in city imagery, not all fiction.20 Renaissance art theorists made similar distinctions. Giovanni Andrea Gilio (d. 1584), in his Counter-­Reformation treatise addressing artistic wrongdoings (Dialogo . . . degli errori e degli abusi de’ pittori; Camerino, 1564), distinguished between the finto (or fictitious), which had merit, and the favoloso (fabulous or

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fantastical), which lacked it. “The fictitious is that which is not,” he wrote, “but could be. . . . [W]here there is no truth, there can be no fiction, because fiction is simply a mask of truth”—­by which he meant that proper fiction had a basis in truth. Gilio wrote that the fabulous, by contrast, “is that which is not and cannot be.”21 For him and other commentators, the problem was lack of credibility, not failure to be factual. There was a well-­known ancient precedent for this formulation. In De inventione, Cicero distinguished the narrative categories of fable, history, and argument. Fable, like Gilio’s favoloso, consisted of statements that were “neither true nor probable.” History was a more straightforward factual account, while argument was hypothetical but convincing: “an imaginary case, which still might have happened”—­in other words, a plausible fiction.22 Ligorio’s Roma antica fell well within the bounds of this reputable category. In sixteenth-­century Italy, to indulge in invention and elaboration all’antica was admissible, even laudable, as long as it was based on solid knowledge of the antique rather than pure fantasy, and was consequently convincing. Good fiction was akin to good rhetoric. Not coincidentally, it was in this era that Giorgio Vasari admired the young Michelangelo for passing off a sculpture of his own as an ancient work to an unsuspecting collector (the collector, once the ruse was revealed, was less impressed). Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago and its brethren were meant as learned evocations rather than precise visual recreations, and the contemporary audience—­mainly intellectuals who liked to consider themselves “in the know”—­understood and appreciated them as erudite puzzles. These works are marked by a spirit of improvisation all’antica and were never meant to bear the literal stamp of historical antichità, or antiquity. The difference between verisimilitude and verità (or truth) must be taken into account to appreciate them fully, and to understand why they resonated in their own time. There is no question that Ligorio’s great Roma grande of 1561 struck a chord, delighting those who reveled in “the memory of ancient things.” It was reprinted from the same plates at least five times through the eighteenth century, and also in at least nine reduced-­size versions.23 The Anteiquae urbis imago also inspired a long trail of looser imitations and derivatives. Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg dedicated two double-­sheet spreads to Ligorio’s image in the Civitates orbis terrarum (1572–­1617), the best-­ selling compendium of city views that also included a copy of Pinard’s Urbis Romae descriptio.24 Other cities were accorded half or even one-­quarter of this space. Of the more than five hundred views included, only Jerusalem—­another great, enduring, sacred city—­received comparable treatment. Braun and Hogenberg were apparently unwilling to condense Ligorio’s grand concept into

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a small package. The title of their print, elaborated from Ligorio’s original version, noted that “the present plate shows everything with great accuracy so that the viewer, if so inclined, can enjoy it with little effort.” In his commentary, Braun wrote, “I believe, gentle reader, that the mind of almost no man is capable of imagining the appearance of the city of Rome in its entirety or explaining it, if he wishes to do justice to its beauty and political system before it was devastated and ravaged by foreign peoples.”25 Ligorio, Braun clearly believed, had managed just such a feat with his Roma grande. Like early modern spectators in general, he embraced Ligorio’s plausible fiction—­and not just this one. For good measure, the Civitates also included a copy of Ligorio’s map of 1552, complete with all of its anachronisms. Early twentieth-­century scholars were less attuned to the nuances of Ligorio’s maps, failing to ascribe them any merit whatsoever. In his 1911 monograph on Bufalini, Franz Ehrle contrasted the “hardly serious,” even “fantastical” visions of Ligorio to the “true” and “just” maps by Bufalini and Marliani. Ligorio’s map of 1553, Ehrle wrote, “was stigmatized, not unreasonably, by Marliani himself as charlatanic, inspired by ignorance and common curiosity. By contrast, we see Marliani and Bufalini holding themselves to strictly scientific criteria in their renderings, with all the sobriety and seriousness possible. These men drew the remains of ancient Rome as they saw them, without adding or completing a single thing.”26 Ehrle was perhaps unwittingly taking sides in a battle that went beyond the merits of individual images, since Marliani and Ligorio were bitter rivals who constantly attacked each other publicly, in print.27 Still, Ehrle’s misconceptions—­which are oddly dissonant with the work of this foremost authority on early maps of Rome—­slight both Ligorio’s erudition and Bufalini’s imagination. Generally speaking, it is the case that direct observation and measurement were of greater importance to Bufalini than to Ligorio, who favored texts, coins, and other sorts of evidence. But Bufalini fell short of Ligorio when it came to reconstructing ancient buildings in a plausible manner or identifying them correctly. In meaningful ways, however, the two men had fundamental affinities in approach. Both augmented the information they could glean from the diminishing remains of the ancient city, rather than representing only the extant ruins. They shared an urge to recreate and re-­present the city, espousing a creative approach to archaeological reconstruction—­one that was also taken up by their followers. A useful comparison to the works by Ligorio and Bufalini is the splendid map of biblical Jerusalem published by the Dutch priest Christian van Adrichom (1535–­85) in Cologne in 1584 (plate 9).28 Here, too, a mapmaker was challenged to represent “the memory of ancient things.” Whereas the maps of Rome

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were separately published, Adrichom’s was accompanied by a booklet titled Ierusalem et suburbia eius, sicut tempore Christi floruit ( Jerusalem and its suburbs, as it flourished in the time of Christ), and was later used again as a foldout illustration in his 1590 book Theatrum terrae sanctae (Theater of the Holy Land). Like most Westerners who sought to map that sacred city, Adrichom, a scholarly authority on the geography of the Holy Land, had never laid eyes upon it. He was not personally familiar with its topography or monuments, so his sources for compiling the map were primarily textual. To reconstruct his long-­lost and faraway Jerusalem, Adrichom consulted the Old and New Testaments, and especially the writings of first-­century CE historian Josephus Flavius, a Roman Jew whose account was based on firsthand observation. Needless to say, Adrichom did not execute a survey or engage in direct engagement of any kind with Jerusalem’s urban fabric. Instead, he used an earlier text-­based portrayal from the 1560s as a template for his own much more detailed and elaborate cityscape—­even though topographically accurate maps were available, such as the one published in 1578 by the Franciscan monk Antonio de Angelis, who had lived in Jerusalem for eight years.29 The precociously accurate view included in Bernard von Breydenbach’s 1486 Peregrinatio in terram sanctam was still very much still in circulation, too, for copies of it continued to be published.30 As a result of his circumscribed constructive process, Adrichom’s portrayal of Jerusalem is schematic and conceptual—­in this sense rather reminiscent of a medieval map. The overarching contours of the city are regularized into a gridded rectangle that bears little relationship to the urban reality, divided into quadrants and oriented to the east, as dictated by sacred convention. Small vignettes around the edges show scenes from the life of Christ as well as other biblical events. The map includes hundreds of biblical and historical features, all imaginatively visualized: not only sites from the time of Christ like the palaces of Herod and Pilate, but also much older ones like the Temple of Solomon and palace of David. Lacking personal knowledge of Jerusalem and iconographic sources for its monuments, Adrichom chose to depict architectural features in a distinctly European style. By contrast, Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago, which similarly sought to restore a lost city, complements imagined elements with archaeologically sound supposition and real topography—­the same basic ingredients that would shape Roma antica imagery throughout the early modern period. Bufalini’s map, for its part, was like Adrichom’s in its disregard for chronological differentiation and its creative liberties in reconstructing ancient architecture, but it differed radically in its surveyed base and topographical fidelity; ultimately, this kind of measured exactitude would also be applied to the Roma antica genre. In short,

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both Ligorio’s and Bufalini’s maps appear considerably more grounded than that of their Dutch colleague. They are what Gilio, the art theorist, would have termed fiction, while Adrichom’s Jerusalem is fable. Be that as it may, Adrichom’s Jerusalem became authoritative, rivaling Ligorio’s Roma grande in popularity. It was copied by mapmakers as late as the nineteenth century and was the model for the four-­sheet map included in Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates—­again, the only other image to be granted such prominence in that best-­selling publication. The Civitates also included more realistic views of contemporary Rome and Jerusalem, but the preeminent position accorded to the invented ancient versions of Ligorio and Adrichom—­as well as the long afterlives of both maps—­demonstrates their nostalgic appeal. In the case of Jerusalem, this attraction was heightened because the real city was the ultimate pilgrimage destination, but it was remote and in Ottoman hands, thus out of reach for most Westerners. Adrichom’s biblical city was both temporally and spatially distant, whereas viewers of Ligorio’s and Bufalini’s maps could potentially measure those representations against the real Rome. Perhaps for this reason, maps of Roma antica were never as thoroughly imaginary—­as favoloso—­as Adrichom’s Jerusalem. In them, fact and fiction existed in a delicate balance. Stefano Du PE´ rac, the Ancient Forma urbis , and the City Renewed

Ligorio, no less than Bufalini, was building on previous investigations into Roman antiquity, but his particular vision drove the production of imagery more forcefully and had a decisive influence on its subsequent form. In the wake of Ligorio’s trendsetting Anteiquae urbis imago, a fully fledged Roma antica genre developed. Perhaps the finest single work in this vein to emerge soon after Ligorio’s is the Urbis Romae sciographia of 1574 by Stefano Du Pérac, who is thought to have been a friend and sometime collaborator of the Neapolitan polymath.31 Born Étienne Dupérac in Bordeaux, he was one of a number of French artists who settled in Rome—­in his case, after a period in Venice—­ where he became part of the inner circle of the editore Antonio Lafreri, himself born Antoine Lafréry in the Franche-­Comté region of eastern France. After his arrival in 1559, Du Pérac became well respected for his technically accomplished drawings and prints of the ruins, which he contributed to the projects of several learned antiquarians, including not just Ligorio but also Onofrio Panvinio. Among other works, Du Pérac is credited with designing,

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Figure 45. Stefano Du Pérac, Urbis romae sciographia ex antiquis monumentis accuratiss. delineata, 1574, etching on eight sheets, 41¼ × 62½ in. (105 × 159 cm). (Original sheets joined digitally by author.) British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

etching/engraving, and publishing (independently or with Lafreri and others) several maps, many architectural images, and a book comprising evocative views of Roman ruins (I vestigi dell’antichità di Roma, 1575) over the course of his career.32 Du Pérac’s first map of the ancient city, the relatively modest Specimen, seu perfecta urbis antiquae imago of 1573, was a thinly disguised copy of Onofrio Panvinio’s Anteiquae urbis imago of 1565.33 (In point of fact, Du Pérac is known to have engraved at least some plates for Panvinio’s publications in the mid-­ 1560s, and it is likely that he designed and executed the map to Panvinio’s specifications—­thus in a sense he was copying himself.)34 The following year, Du Pérac published his considerably more original and ambitious Urbis Ro­ mae sciographia, a monumental etching on eight sheets (fig. 45).35 It is uncertain whether Du Pérac published this work with Lafreri, with some other Roman editore—­Lorenzo Vaccari is a likely candidate—­or independently. The earliest surviving example, at the British Library, bears the date 1574, but was probably

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produced later, as it also carries the imprint of Francesco Villamena (1564–­ 1624), who would have been just a boy in 1574 and in any case did not settle in Rome until 1585–­90.36 Printers frequently added their own name to a plate when they acquired it, often effacing an earlier one to do so; in this case Villamena left Du Pérac’s dedication cartouche and original date intact at lower right, inconspicuously adding his own signature and “excudebat” (or “printed it”) to a separate line just below. Other than Villamena’s small intervention, the British Library example is the work of Du Pérac alone, who designed as well as etched it. In the car­ touche, he dedicated the map to King Charles IX of France (r. 1560–­79), thus employing an increasingly common tactic by which printmakers made a show of offering their works to powerful, wealthy individuals. Their goal in so doing was to curry favor and solicit monetary rewards above and beyond what could be achieved through straightforward sale of the print.37 Like Ligorio, Du Pérac claimed, in his title, to have delineated his map “most accurately from [evidence provided by] the ancient monuments” (ex. antiquis monumentis accuratiss. delineata). In the dedication cartouche, he elaborates further on his preparation, writing that he spent fifteen years of great effort and diligence personally investigating every “little wall” of the ruins and all relevant inscriptions. In another familiar assurance, he mentions that he also consulted ancient writers to supplement the physical evidence.38 The boilerplate disappears, however, when Du Pérac adds a new and noteworthy source: “the ichnography of the city in marble tablets” that had recently been unearthed and to which he had been granted access by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–­89).39 Du Pérac was alluding to one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the sixteenth century, that of the third-­century Forma urbis—­a watershed in the history of Roman urban cartography that merits an excursus.40 The first fragments of this massive marble plan of Rome dating from the time of Emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193–­211 CE) were unearthed behind the Basilica of SS. Cosmas and Damian, on the site of the ancient Templum Pacis in the Forum of Vespasian, in 1562 (see fig. 83, which illustrates some of its broken pieces at right and left).41 Even in its ruined and incomplete form, the Forma urbis was immediately recognized to be of signal importance, and its appearance created a sensation. Observers quickly surmised that the marble fragments were but tiny pieces of a monumental map of the entire city (now estimated to have been about 60 × 43 feet, or 18.1 × 13 m), with ground plans of all buildings, down to the most humble structure, shown to scale, along with streets, public spaces, and some topography. It is an extraordinary coincidence that the Forma urbis was discovered

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scarcely a decade after the publication of Bufalini’s map, its first successor—­ after more than 1,300 years—­as a full-­blown ichnographic plan of the Eternal City. It is equally remarkable that Bufalini and his predecessors had developed a nearly identical form of representation independently, with no knowledge of the map or of ancient surveying techniques. The discovery seems to have done little to encourage artists to adopt ichnography, but scholars instantly recognized the Forma urbis as a potential treasure trove of information about the ancient city and its architecture. The fragments were placed in the possession of Cardinal Farnese, who charged Panvinio, his antiquities adviser, with their study, and Giovanni Antonio Dosio—­author of the 1561 bird’s-­eye view of Rome considered in the previous chapter—­with the task of recording them graphically. Despite this initial excitement, the Forma urbis proved to be an unsolvable puzzle. One of the first to comment on the marble plan—­and on its frustrations—­was antiquarian Bernardo Gamucci in his Libri quattro dell’antichità della città di Roma (Venice, 1565). Gamucci hailed the newly unearthed “drawing of the plan of the city of Rome,” then, in the same breath, lamented that it “has not been possible to draw out [the plan] completely yet, or to rediscover how those [buildings] were arranged on their site, since [practically the whole plan] has been consumed by time and fire. And if only it had pleased God to conserve it intact to our days, because there would be those who by its information would have been able to know and touch with their hand all that has foiled them in their desire to locate the ancient buildings of this most noble city.”42 Written just three years after the discovery, Gamucci’s words proved as prophetic as they were poignant. Too little of the map came to light, and what did was in too fragmentary a form, to have a major impact on reconstructions of the ancient city. Following Panvinio as Farnese’s librarian, Fulvio Orsini (1529–­1600) was also hampered in his attempts to make sense of the Forma urbis. It remained a tantalizing riddle, but for a handful of structures that the most dauntless intellectuals were able to identify among the broken marble slabs. The early flurry of activity evaporated. Within decades of the discovery, scholars effectively gave up on the map, and its remains fell into neglect. In typical Renaissance fashion, some of the fragments ended up as recycled building materials for Farnese constructions, while others were locked away in a cellar and forgotten. When Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–­96) decided to seek out and reexamine the map a century later, he found that many of the pieces that Dosio had recorded in drawings were missing, and others had been left to crumble. Bellori promptly issued a series of etchings, Fragmenta vestigii Romae ex lapidibus

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Farnesianis . . . (Rome, 1673), in an attempt to preserve the pieces graphically. From that time to the present, the remains of the Forma urbis have been better treated, but not much better understood. In 1741, the architect and cartographer Giovanni Battista Nolli was put in charge of arranging the fragments for display along the main stairway of the Capitoline Museum. Nolli surely recognized in these broken marbles the venerable ancestor of his own great plan, which he was then preparing for publication. Nolli, too, was unable to put the pieces in any order, grouping them arbitrarily.43 When Piranesi published an etching of some of the identifiable fragments in his Antichità romane of 1756, he made no effort to reassemble them, instead depicting a selection gathered haphazardly around a map of the ancient city that appears ostentatiously intact in the contrast (see fig. 83). The Severan plan posed an archaeological puzzle that continues to challenge scholars today, even though many more fragments have come to light in the intervening centuries.44 More than a valuable source of information about the ruins, the Forma urbis—­in its elusiveness—­became one of them, symbolizing an irretrievably lost golden age: close enough to touch, perhaps, but not to know. Du Pérac was one of many enthusiasts of Roman antiquity who became fascinated by the ancient marble plan. He claimed to have consulted it in the dedication cartouche of his Sciographia (fig. 45), and his personal connection to Panvinio, as well as to Fulvio Orsini, supports the notion that he had direct familiarity with the Forma urbis.45 Yet even with the advice of such expert scholars, Du Pérac could not have gleaned more than a smattering of architectural details from the map’s broken pieces—­certainly not enough to warrant the scholarly claim of his dedication. It is unlikely that he had any special insight into the inscrutable relic, but his explicit reference to it must have carried some intellectual cachet, elevating him to an elite scholarly sphere and validating his image of Rome with the seal of ancient authority. Despite Du Pérac’s rhetoric, the overriding conception of his Sciographia betrays little influence from the Forma urbis. Du Pérac’s real debt was to a more recent map that he neglected to cite among his sources: Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago of 1561. Like Ligorio, Du Pérac depicted the city’s general outlines in plan, its topography and buildings in perspective. (The unusual label of sciographia was an alternate version of the Vitruvian term scaenographia, a perspectival form of architectural representation—­just what Raphael had espoused in the latest version of his letter to Leo X as “useful for the architect” even if it was “the preserve of the painter.”)46 Du Pérac’s map shares the same orientation as Ligorio’s, with northeast at the top—­although this choice, like the perspective-­plan format,

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was common currency by this point. More concretely, many of Du Pérac’s monuments owe a debt to Ligorio’s versions in terms of their identifications and specific forms. Some prominent structures even seem directly modeled on those in the Roma grande. Du Pérac’s major debt to Ligorio was, however, his overridingly grand vision of ancient architecture and of a city dominated by towering, outlandish monuments, almost to the point of sensory overload: an erudite ancient Roman theme park. Yet Du Pérac also takes important steps to move beyond and thereby critique Ligorio’s paradigm. He forgoes the small inscriptions alerting viewers to the more familiar contemporary incarnations of the sites depicted, perhaps considering them distractions. And while Du Pérac’s monuments are at least as grand and impressive as his predecessor’s, they do not exhibit the same collective nervous energy. The Sciographia appears distinctly more orderly and sedate than Ligorio’s Roma grande, for several reasons. Du Pérac has imposed a more consistent parallel perspective on the cityscape, in contrast to Ligorio’s urban anarchy, where each structure seems to obey its own laws. (Du Pérac has also “righted” the orientations in certain cases, as for example in the Pantheon, which now correctly faces north.) Fewer buildings compete for attention, because Du Pérac has cleared away some of Ligorio’s chaos, reducing the number of insulae and anonymous structures. In so doing, he also leaves more room for interstitial spaces. Piazze and streets give shape to the built environment, creating a unifying urban matrix that is contained by the Aurelian Walls. Buildings are aligned with this larger matrix. The city’s overall organization is further underscored by labels identifying each Augustan region. In sum, the dense, formless, agitated intramural mass of Ligorio’s Roma grande has been structured, clarified, and tamed. Du Pérac did not invent this breed of urban discipline. In fact, it is derived directly from Bufalini’s Roma of 1551—­another source Du Pérac conspicuously failed to cite. Du Pérac’s access to Bufalini’s map might have come through Lafreri, who, as noted in the previous chapter, seems to have kept a copy of it in his workshop for just this kind of consultation. Du Pérac’s walls and streets are precisely modeled on that prototype, although he has omitted the new, straight Renaissance streets, in keeping with his goal to provide a more authentic glimpse of the ancient city. Still, even if the remaining thoroughfares lack the pronounced axiality of their modern counterparts, Du Pérac’s Roma antica betrays a preference for urban order and for the whole over the individual parts that is very much of his own time. Bufalini’s map has furnished an orderly platform for a very different kind of image: a grandiose vision of three-­dimensional ancient grandeur tinged by Renaissance ideals.

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Three years later, in 1577, Du Pérac again turned to Bufalini’s map as the point of departure for a remarkably faithful image of Rome as it appeared in his own time—­thereby effectively “correcting” his predecessor not only by espousing a different graphic mode, but also by segregating the eras Bufalini had conflated. Du Pérac’s third and final map of Rome, published by Lafreri, was another large-­scale etching almost as grand as his Roma antica but focused on the modern city, as trumpeted by the title—­Nova urbis Romae descriptio (New map of the city of Rome)—­spelled out in classicizing Roman majuscule across the top of the map (plate 10).47 Du Pérac’s rendering of the city walls, street network, and web of hills is still modeled closely on Bufalini’s prototype, albeit rotated 180 degrees and compressed slightly, perhaps to grant it a more foreshortened appearance. This subtle allusion to optical experience accords with the perspective renderings of architecture, which is depicted as though glimpsed from high above the northeastern part of the city. Du Pérac’s original contribution was not the overarching framework but rather the details, including loving renderings of the city’s buildings in their current state, which—­as Emmanuel Lurin has observed—­seem to have been based primarily on the artist’s own preparatory studies, done on site.48 This groundwork stands in contrast to his depiction of ancient Rome, where he drew heavily on the antiquarian expertise of others, not his own investigations. In Du Pérac’s New Rome, a great number of structures, more than had appeared in any previous map of the city, are shown in exacting detail, most of it personally gathered. Similarly, his attention to variations in topography and land use is impressive—­visual testament to the rigorous observation that went into his map to supplement the orthogonal information derived from Bufalini. Du Pérac uses naturalistic shading, created with cross-­hatching, to separate undulating hills from flats below, and—­while his vegetal symbols are fairly conventional—­he does manage to distinguish cultivated fields, orchards, gardens, and open meadows. His map stands apart from its contemporary brethren for its vivid, atmospheric quality: a naturalism attributable to the considerable skills of the artist as both an etcher and a landscapist. Du Pérac’s map is also unusual for its orientation, with north at lower right—­ approximately 180 degrees from what had become standard. This choice was a simple but clever means to distinguish his image from the many others that had followed Marliani and Bufalini in placing north at upper left—­including one published just the previous year by his greatest competitor, Mario Cartaro, that otherwise has many superficial compositional similarities to Du Pérac’s map. This unorthodox orientation also had important consequences for Du Pérac’s overall composition. In a sense, it allowed him to foreground the

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Figure 46. Du Pérac, Nova urbis Romae descriptio, detail: disabitato. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps * 23805.(8.).

disabitato—­although admittedly any distinction between foreground and background is negligible in this map, given that there is no perspectival convergence or foreshortening into the distance. Buildings in the nominal foreground are no larger, proportionately, than those on the far side of the city. Still, the vast zone that for so long had symbolized Rome’s decline clearly dominates the image, much as it dominated the city itself in terms of sheer area. Yet it does not seem to have been Du Pérac’s intention to portray the disa­ bitato as a sprawling swath of decay, as it had appeared in the Mantua canvas based on Francesco Rosselli’s paradigm of 1485–­90, which shared the same orientation. Du Pérac’s disabitato is an area in development, its growth indicated in myriad ways (fig. 46): by the neatly plowed fields in the midst of cultivation; the walled, demarcated gardens and properties that are given more individual attention here than in any previous map; new streets like the Via Merulana (marked “Via Gregoria”), initiated under Pope Gregory XIII Boncompagni (r. 1572–­85) in 1576–­77 to link Santa Maria Maggiore to the Lateran complex (its regularization here shown just partly complete); new constructions like Michelangelo’s Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, suggestively built into and rising from the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian, and his Via and Porta Pia—­the

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regularized street and monumental city gate that together provided a theatrical new entrance into Rome—­all initiated under Pope Pius IV. The life and activity of the so-­called disabitato—­and it is useful here to remember that this is a sometimes misleading modern term—­is also signaled in the private properties dotting the Quirinal and Pincio Hills. The mid-­to late sixteenth century witnessed early signs in the transformation of many of these rustic intramural retreats (orti or vigne, many of which included modest residences, or casini), held by powerful families and cardinals, into the lavish suburban villas that became jewels in the crown of baroque Rome. Du Pérac depicts many enclosed gardens, including those belonging to the Ricci (soon to be acquired by the Medici), Orsini, Pio da Carpi, and others, all labeled and individualized. Many of these had also appeared on Bufalini’s map, but their presence there was overshadowed by gigantic, imaginary ruins, which are nowhere to be found in Du Pérac’s avowedly modern, real city. Ruins are left crumbling, neither reconstructed to intact perfection nor sentimentally exaggerated in their picturesque decay. This is the Rome of the eyes, not the memory. Given his attentiveness to Rome’s greenbelt, Du Pérac’s map could hardly be said to embody a nostalgic, archaizing lament about the vicissitudes of fortune as embodied by a deserted, ghostly cityscape. Curiously, however, Du Pérac’s formal address to King Henri III of France, to whom he dedicated the map, suggests that this message is precisely what he intended. Written in Latin and occupying a cartouche at lower left—­a fictive, inscribed marble tablet all’antica—­the text first draws attention to the Sciographia, published three years before and dedicated to the king’s brother and predecessor, Charles IX. “Now, to you,” the address continues, “I offer this image of Rome as it is today,” including the “remains of antiquities that have escaped the injuries of time,” such that “you might recognize the vicissitudes of human affairs.”49 By this time, however, such a moralizing statement was little more than a humanist trope. In fact, Du Pérac did not even write the dedication. Lurin has demonstrated that the missive was the work of a scholarly collaborator, Giovanni Francesco Peranda (1529–­1612), and was essentially a finishing touch after the map was otherwise complete.50 Du Pérac must have had a role in formulating its basic message, but its tone is nonetheless at odds with the overarching meaning of the map. Du Pérac’s disabitato is not a poetic landscape where all signs of growth and life have been effaced, as in the Mantua canvas, nor does he grant the ruins undue prominence. Rather, he presents it as an industrious quarter, buzzing with activity.

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Figure 47. Du Pérac, Nova urbis Romae descriptio, detail: abitato. British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps * 23805.(8.).

Not surprisingly, Du Pérac’s rigor with regard to the current state of the city is also evident in his depiction of the inhabited part of Rome, which occupies the upper right quadrant of his map (fig. 47). In the top right corner, the modern ring of fortifications around the Vatican, recently completed under the supervision of the engineer Francesco Laparelli (1521–­70) in the 1560s, present a formidable defensive circuit. Within those new walls, New St. Peter’s rises above the nave of the old basilica, still partly standing. Michelangelo’s dome has risen to its base, while to the right of it, Bramante’s Belvedere Courtyard—­as close to complete as it would become before his design was obscured by subsequent interventions—­rises on three terraced, manicured levels. Just above it is Pirro Ligorio’s Casino of Pius IV (1558–­62); beneath it, the Borgo Pio, a new street laid out in the early 1560s, links the Vatican complex and the Castel Sant’Angelo, although the lots flanking it remain sparsely built. The papal stronghold at the Castel Sant’Angelo, meanwhile,

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has received its own new ring of pentagonal bastions, also completed by Laparelli. Within the city center, the streets are widened for legibility and overall structure, and important structures are readily discernible—­palaces, churches, even individual fountains, as well as all the usual ancient landmarks (imperial columns, Pantheon, etc.). Many houses now line the streets converging toward the Piazza del Popolo, although several blocks are still empty lots awaiting construction. On the far side of the river, an increasing number of villas line the Via della Lungara, while the gracious Villa Lante, designed by Giulio Romano (1499–­1546) around 1520, perches high above, on the Janiculum crest. This residence was deliberately situated on what was believed to be the exact site of the ancient villa belonging to Martial, from which the poet had admired the view of the city unfolding before him. Although Du Pérac chose an opposing vantage point, his Nova urbis Romae descriptio gives an equally majestic vista of the city rising. This map was as ardent an homage to Renaissance Rome as his Sciographia was to the ancient city. The Nova urbis Romae descriptio evinces an energized city, and it demonstrates a new commitment to up-­to-­the-­minute accuracy that subsequently became obligatory in maps of the modern city. From this point, no paradigm could survive largely unchanged, without registering alterations to the urban fabric, as with Rosselli’s view—­remarkably, still in wide circulation at the moment Du Pérac published his emphatically New Rome.

Mario Cartaro and the Paragone of Ancient and Modern

Du Pérac’s implicit comparison of the two Romes became explicitly contrapuntal in the work of his main rival. The printmaker Mario Cartaro (d. 1620) was a native of Viterbo who was also linked at times to Lafreri as well as operating independently.51 Cartaro specialized in a wide range of subject matter, from architecture and ruins to geographic material and sacred scenes derived from the compositions of famous artists. His reputation rests primarily on the large etchings of ancient and modern Rome that he published in 1579 and 1576 (figs. 48 and 49, respectively), in the midst of a heated competition with Du Pérac. Although issued three years apart, Cartaro’s prints are identical in compositional format and dimensions—­both measuring about 36 × 44½ in. (91 × 113 cm)—­and were clearly intended as a matched pair. The mapped outlines of the city and, to a large extent, the network of streets are the same (derived, as was typical, from Bufalini); only the built environment differs appreciably.

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Figure 48. Mario Cartaro, Celeberrimae urbis antiquae fidelissima topographia post omnes alias aeditiones accuratissime delineata (Rome, 1579), etching, 35⅞ × 44½ in. (91 × 113 cm.). British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps * 155.(10.).

Like the maps by Bufalini, Ligorio, and Du Pérac, Cartaro’s pendants were sumptuous and costly prints geared toward display—­in this case, display in tandem. That these and similar works were sold together for this very reason is indicated by the 1594 workshop inventory of Lafreri’s heirs, where prints of “Roma moderna” and “Roma antica” are frequently mentioned in the same breath, sometimes mounted on canvas or a stretcher (“telaro”) to hang on a wall.52 Cartaro gave his image of Roma antica a grandiloquent title: Celeberrimae urbis antiquae fidelissima topographia post omnes alias aeditiones accuratissime delin­ eate (Most faithful topography of the most celebrated ancient city, delineated with greatest accuracy beyond all others).53 But instead of surpassing all others, Cartaro in fact borrowed heavily from them. His clearest debt is to Du Pérac, whose Sciographia had appeared five years earlier. While not an outright copy

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of that work by any means, Cartaro’s image has very similar lineaments and structure, embodying the same balance between marvelous monuments and the urban whole. Like Du Pérac, Cartaro puts into place a matrix of ancient roads that give structure to the larger picture—­essentially consisting of those that were still evident in the Renaissance city, and omitting all later axes. Cartaro did not copy the outlines of Bufalini’s map (or Du Pérac’s) precisely, but he must have based his image on a slightly modified version of that prototype or a closely related plan. Many archaeological details seem lifted directly from Du Pérac or perhaps Ligorio, such as the placement of the Marcus Aurelius statue as the centerpiece of the Roman Forum, fronted by two obelisks. That said, the forms of some features—­like circuses and bath complexes—­were fairly common currency by this point. There are sufficient idiosyncrasies in Cartaro’s treatment to suggest that he was not slavishly dependent on any single precursor, but neither can he be credited with originality of conception.

Figure 49. Mario Cartaro, Novissimae urbis Romae accuratissima descriptio (Rome, 1576), etching, 35⅞ × 44½ in. (91 × 113 cm.). Biblioteca di archeologia e storia dell’arte, Rome, Roma X 648 inv 47738.

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Be that as it may, Cartaro’s decision to pair his Roma antica with a matching image of Roma nuova (or new Rome) was nothing short of inspired. Du Pérac arguably preceded him by publishing images of the city in both guises, but he did not conceive of his two Romes in a comparably direct dialogue or harmonize their forms to the same extent. Cartaro’s concept has parallels in a few slightly earlier instances of drawings and prints attributed to Panvinio and Du Pérac, which paired images of individual monuments in ancient and contemporary form. The beautifully illustrated manuscript generally attributed to Du Pérac that uses this then-­and-­now strategy dates from about 1569–­75. Bearing the title Disegni de le ruine di Roma e come anticamente erono (Drawings of the ruins of Rome, [as they are now] and as they used to be), it was probably intended as a gift for Pope Gregory XIII and shows not just ruins but also small sections of the city in reconstruction and as they were in his time.54 It also includes some modern marvels, like St. Peter’s and Bramante’s Belvedere Court, thus implicitly embracing the paragone mode. Yet the joint message of Cartaro’s pendants is perhaps best compared to Bufalini’s map published a quarter century earlier, which embodied a similar attempt to juxtapose the form of the city as a whole in two distinct eras, albeit by interlacing them within a single frame. Bufalini, we have seen, expressed his goal to show the “city which today is inhabited” along with “the old [city], once mistress of the whole world, brought back as if from the grave.”55 Cartaro was determined to do the same, but by splitting eras he could give full treatment to each, while espousing a patently comparative framework. In his map of New Rome, Cartaro, like Bufalini, stressed accuracy. He included a scale in a cartouche at upper left—­a motif previously reserved for ichnographic plans—­and a disk with the four cardinal directions, as on a magnetic compass, in the mirroring cartouche at upper right. His title banner, meanwhile, proclaims that this is the “most accurate map of the newest Rome” (Novissimae urbis Romae accuratissima descriptio).56 The references to accuracy in Cartaro’s pendants hint at the flexibility of the term, for they point to different meanings. In his Roma antica, Cartaro used the term as Pirro Ligorio had—­to suggest that the map was done with greatest care, capturing overall form and spirit more than precise historical appearance. In his Roma nuova, he seems to have meant it in the modern sense, asserting the correspondence of his image to Rome’s current physical state. Accuracy was equated with good fiction in one case, and with plain factuality in the other. Cartaro’s Roma nuova is indeed a faithful rendering of the sixteenth-­century city, just like Du Pérac’s version of the following year—­although his level of detail and precision does not match that of his French rival. No vanished

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buildings rematerialize, nor are any of the existing ruins cleaned up to some ideal state. The disabitato is left largely empty, not filled with phantom structures. (Here, again, it should be noted, Cartaro does not match the artistry that Du Pérac achieved: where the latter individualized topography, properties, and structures, Cartaro flattens hills, generalizes vegetation, schematizes landholdings, and omits a great deal of Rome’s architectural richness.) Within the city itself, the urban fabric has expanded to embrace new, straight streets as well as more organic ancient roads and winding medieval alleys, while anonymous infill buildings give a clear picture of Rome’s population density. At lower left, New St. Peter’s is shown in its 1570s state, complete just to the level of the drum of Michelangelo’s dome. Rather than emulating Bufalini’s timeless perfection, where ruins and unfinished buildings alike are made whole, Cartaro—­following Du Pérac—­shows the city in the process of change. Like St. Peter’s, the city blocks in the northern part of the city, defined by the trivium of streets that converge at the Piazza del Popolo, are shown in a transitional state—­depicted partly built up and settled, but still with a number of empty lots. Rome is growing, but it is a work in progress. At the same time, even as the landmarks of the new city are going up, those of the ancient city are coming down. Ruins like the Colosseum and ancient bath complexes appear as they were—­disintegrating faster than ever as quarries for the building materials of New Rome. Cartaro provides a relatively matter-­of-­fact depiction of their decay, in stark contrast to their wholeness in Bufalini’s plan and in the whole gamut of Roma antica imagery. Overall, Cartaro’s view presents itself as a true likeness. In this case truth was linked to measured accuracy, as well as thoroughness and adherence to the most up-­ to-­date incarnation of the “newest” city. It is worth noting in this regard that novus, like accurato, had a richer meaning than it does now, and could indicate not only new, but also recent, modern, of the moment. Certainly all of these associations could be invoked for Cartaro’s Roma nuova. Yet, in many subtle ways, the image is selectively manipulated to convey a particular message (fig. 50). The new, straight streets are wider than the others and emerge from the urban fabric more noticeably. They are signs of Rome’s rebirth, as is the Marcus Aurelius statue on the Campidoglio, its size exaggerated such that it rises to the level of the surrounding palazzi. Landmarks that typify Rome’s modern and ancient wonders are similarly inflated in scale, towering above the surrounding infill buildings. Even in its unfinished state, New St. Peter’s, which anchors the image at lower left, is the most prominent single feature of the cityscape. The viewer is left to marvel at just how impressive the church will be when capped by the long-­anticipated dome. Surely it will

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Figure 50. Cartaro, Novissimae urbis Romae, detail: abitato (the Vatican at lower left, the Capitoline at upper right, and the Pantheon toward center). Biblioteca di archeologia e storia dell’arte, Rome, Roma X 648 inv 47738.

outshine its venerable counterpart, the Pantheon, standing out like a button in the city center. In sum, Cartaro, like Bufalini, selectively distorts many elements of this “most accurate” portrait of the city, in this case to celebrate and call attention to New Rome triumphant. His message is reinforced by a pictorial cartouche at upper right, containing a vignette of the famous bronze She-­ Wolf nursing the mythical twin founders of the city, Romulus and Remus, along with the proud (if ironically garbled) Latin motto “Roma Renasce[n]s” (fig. 51).57 Often translated simply as “Rome reborn,” the literal meaning of the Latin motto is Rome being reborn, or perhaps Rome rising again. In either case, the gerund suggests the ongoing nature of the process, which, in turn, is perfectly encapsulated by Cartaro’s picture of the city in transformation.

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Plate 1 Leonardo Bufalini, Roma (Rome: Antonio Trevisi, 1560 [orig. Antonio Blado, 1551]), woodcut on 24 sheets, approx. 78¾ × 74¾ in. (200 × 190 cm). British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps S.T.R. 175.

Plate 2 Taddeo di Bartolo, view of Rome, fresco, 1414. Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. Plate 3 Piero del Massaio, Roma, manuscript, 1472. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Ms Latin 4802, fol. 132v. Plate 4 Leonardo da Vinci, Plan of Imola, 1502, pen, ink, and watercolor, 17⅜ × 23¾ in. (44 × 60.2 cm). Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015, RL12284. Plate 5 Anonymous, view of Rome, ca. 1538, tempera on canvas, 46½ × 91¾ in. (118 × 233 cm). Museo della Città, Mantua. Photo: Scala/ Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

Plate 6 Giorgio Vasari, Siege of Florence in 1530, fresco, 1556–­61 (detail). Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY. Plate 7 Ugo Pinard (designer) and Giacomo Bos (engraver), Urbis Romae descriptio (Rome: Antonio Lafreri, 1555), engraving, 21 × 34 in. (53.5 × 86 cm). Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Novacco 4F 247. Plate 8 Pirro Ligorio, Anteiquae urbis imago accuratissime ex veteribus monumenteis formata (Rome: Michele and Francesco Tramezzino, 1561), etching and engraving on 12 sheets, 50¾ × 57 in. (129 × 145 cm). British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps C.25.d.9.(1.).

Plate 9 Christian van Adrichom, Ierusalem, et suburbia eius, sicut tempore Christi floruit . . . (Cologne: Birckmann, 1584), engraving, 20 × 29 in. (50.5 × 73.5 cm). The National Library of Israel, Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, Shapell Family Digitization Project and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Geography—­Historic Cities Research Project. Plate 10 Stefano Du Pérac, Nova urbis Romae descriptio (Rome: Antonio Lafreri, 1577), etching, 31¼ × 39¾ in. (79.4 × 100.7 cm). British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps * 23805.(8.). Plate 11 Giovanni Battista Falda, Nuova pianta et alzata della città di Roma con tutte le strade piazze et edificii de tempii palazzi giardini et altre fabbriche antiche e moderne come si trovano al presente nel pontificato di Papa Innocentio XI . . . (Rome: Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, 1676), etching and engraving, 61 × 61¾ in. (155 × 157 cm). Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno; photograph courtesy of Digital Production Services, Brown University Library.

Plate 12 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Ichnographiam Campi Martii, (Rome, 1762), etching, 54¼ × 46 in. (135 × 117 cm). Houghton Library, Harvard University, *63–­368.

Cartaro’s two Romes were meant to be understood as complements, twins across time, in a duality that Bufalini had collapsed into a single synchronic frame. Renaissance viewers knew the custom of the paragone and were highly attuned to the call-­and-­response factor in images like Cartaro’s. In a sense, paragone was implied in any image of Roma antica, with its inherent otherness, its premise of historical difference. But Cartaro’s twin images were bald expressions of the concept. Given that the paragone was a form of competition or debate, it seems valid to question just what side he was taking—­that of the ancients, or the moderns. Upon first inspection, it seems plausible that Cartaro meant to elevate the flashy city of antiquity over its diminished modern twin. Cartaro’s Roma nuova reflects the severe contraction of Rome’s population during the Middle Ages, and much of the terrain inside city walls appears as little more than open pasture. It was well known, however, that the disabitato had a previous life, and Cartaro duly packs every corner of his Roma antica with monuments. The resulting contrast between the two images provides a stark

Figure 51. Cartaro, Novissimae urbis Romae, detail: cartouche. Biblioteca di archeologia e storia dell’arte, Rome, Roma X 648 inv 47738.

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Figure 52. Cartaro, details of Rome’s northeast quadrant in Roma Antica (left) and Roma Nuova (right). British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps * 155.(10.); Biblioteca di archeologia e storia dell’arte, Rome, Roma X 648 inv 47738.

visual reminder of Rome’s decline (fig. 52). The new city looks shrunken next to the ancient version, as though it is wearing a belt that is too large for its gaunt frame. Similarly, the architecture of Roma nuova appears relatively lackluster next to that of its ancient counterpart, its monuments—­surrounded by anonymous, undistinguished infill—­smaller and plainer. By contrast, a viewer would struggle to find a single humble, nondescript structure among the opulent architectural marvels of Cartaro’s Roma antica. It would be reasonable, then, to conclude that Cartaro meant the contemporary city to serve as a negative foil for the ancient. The overarching meaning of his pendants would be the familiar Petrarchan lament over the city’s debased state, so distant from its erstwhile glory. That reading, however, is not entirely convincing. Why, if the modern city was so wretched, would Cartaro trumpet it as “Rome being reborn”? Closer analysis of the images suggests a subtler message. The ancient city might eclipse its modern counterpart in sheer magnificence and visual delight, but the latter compensates with a greater sense of rational organization. The boisterous visual pandemonium of Roma antica gives way to structural harmony in Roma nuova. We might see this as a maturation, a coming-­of-­age, of Rome under the aegis of the popes whose new streets and building projects transformed the urban fabric. The current city has a modern breed of grandeur, stemming

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from the connective tissue of public spaces and infrastructure, new and improved with the insertion of the straight Renaissance axes. A great deal of Rome’s revival—­and the most prominent papal projects—­focused on these urban features. This shift, in turn, helped to shape the new concept of the city as an organically unified entity, not a collection of discrete architectural landmarks. Cartaro’s Roma nuova, like Du Pérac’s Nova urbis Romae descriptio of the following year, exemplifies the triumph of the urban fabric over the individual monument. No longer can a few token features stand for the whole, nor can an assemblage adequately represent the entire urbs. Cartaro’s two Romes pay homage to the ancient city even while they celebrate modern Rome for its distinct merits. Emerging from the shadow of its classical legacy, Rome is reborn, but in dramatically different form. Cartaro’s pendants were meant to be displayed side by side—­not so that viewers would disparage one Rome at the expense of the other, but instead appreciate the very different qualities of each. Like Bufalini, Cartaro created a delicate equilibrium between past and present, but he framed it in terms of historical rupture, not ahistorical fusion. When Cartaro’s two Romes are compared, the most recent incarnation of the city might have lost some of its bygone aesthetic charms, but it had gained considerably in other ways. Together, these images honored a glorified, elusive golden age, even as they relegated it to history. By contrast, Bufalini—­for all his revolutionary graphic language—­looks retrograde, upholding an outmoded reverence for the past at the expense of the present. Cartaro’s optimistic message of urban rebirth seems to have struck a chord among print consumers, for his pendants were much imitated, spawning a veritable subgenre of Rome-­ then-­and-­now imagery. Spectators must have appreciated Cartaro’s distillation of the caput mundi as a locus that had endured through transformation and evolution, and that was no longer a pale reflection of its own lost magnificence. His two views of Rome still hinge on a poetic absence, that of the long-­vanished ancient city, but that absence has been filled with a new, dynamic presence. The absence also projects forward, in Cartaro’s Roma nuova, to the anticipated completion of Rome as fully realized Christian capital. In fact, the map predates by less than a decade the radical urban changes initiated by Pope Sixtus V, which called for an interlinked, radiating network of axial streets laid across the disabitato to facilitate pilgrims’ circulation among the major station churches, and to provide the infrastructure for future development. Sixtus’s program was revolutionary in part because it was no longer concerned with retrofitting the existing urban matrix, but instead geared toward laying the groundwork for expansion. By depicting Rome as an integrated whole governed by urban order, Cartaro’s Roma nuova anticipates Sixtus’s plan to unite

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the entire city in a single fabric, testifying to the cultural momentum that brought about that pope’s ambitious program. This collective mind-­set is signaled not just by the relatively grand images produced by Cartaro and Du Pérac, but even more by the waves of imitations—­lesser in quality but great in quantity—­that followed in their wake.

Roman Print Culture, Dissemination, and the Market

A key figure responsible for disseminating imagery of Rome is Lafreri, who began his publishing career in competition, then in partnership, with the much older Antonio Salamanca—­who had, in turn, collaborated previously with Bufalini’s publisher, Antonio Blado.58 Many maps of Rome discussed in these pages—­bearing Lafreri’s imprint and not—­were included in heterogeneous collections that emerged from his shop, made to order and adorned with frontispieces denoting them either Speculum romanae magnificentiae (Mirror of Roman magnificence), or Geografia (containing “modern maps of most places in the world . . . with drawings of many cities”).59 Lafreri was the major entrepreneur of the Roman print industry in the sixteenth century, usually credited with setting it on the path to modernization. Like Blado, but on a larger scale, the ambitious Lafreri coordinated an impressive stable of talented craftsmen—­ some of whom worked exclusively for him, others freelance—­who specialized in various aspects of print production. He was also the first known printer to distribute a stocklist, organized by category, from which buyers could select images to purchase. Maps were but one of the many sorts of printed materials, visual and textual, that Lafreri and others used to publicize various aspects of the Eternal City.60 By the mid-­1500s, this enterprise had become a booming business. In addition to city imagery, Roman and Venetian editori also published guidebooks, which were, as we have seen, a parallel tradition: not only the ever-­popular Mirabilia urbis Romae, or Marvels of Rome, but also works pertaining to the more scholarly topography genre by Marliani, Andrea Fulvio, Lucio Fauno, and others. With the editore Vincentio Lucrino (active 1550s–­60s), a sometime collaborator with Blado, Andrea Palladio issued two extremely popular guides to the antiquities and churches of Rome that first appeared in 1554 and have remained in print, with little pause, down to the present.61 Alongside these types were the many books on Roman antiquity and architecture by Serlio, Labacco, Ligorio, and others. Additionally, pamphlets and separate sheets were issued by the thousands, embracing all kinds of subject matter: Christian and pagan ritual,

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artworks, antiquities, ruins, Renaissance landmarks, cartography, and so on. The Speculum collections that emerged from Lafreri’s shop were an ingenious marketing strategy by which to profit from the strong encyclopedic impulse among scholars and enthusiasts of all things Rome.62 As these assemblages indicate, rarely was any single item meant to stand alone—­often, rather, they took their place in a constellation of texts, images, objects, and printed works of all kinds compiled by individual collectors in personalized, expandable repositories of knowledge about the city. For people near and far, these collections became surrogates for the city, or, to borrow Rebecca Zorach’s apt formulation, a “virtual Rome.” Lafreri was not, however, the only editore in town, and images of the city in its various forms were published by a number of Roman printers in the late 1500s. Lafreri’s colleagues and competitors in Rome included Blado; Bartolomeo Faletti (d. 1570); Lafreri’s nephew Claudio Duchetti (a.k.a. Claude Duchet, d. 1586), who took the reins of the business after Lafreri’s death in 1577; the Belgian Nicolas Van Aelst (1526–­1613); Lorenzo Vaccari (fl. 1574–­ 1608), and others. Often these figures copied one another’s prints or acquired one anothers’ plates, which they effaced to add their own imprint. Thievery was practically a legitimate business practice in the Roman publishing world, where printing privileges, when obtained, were not always enforced.63 A similar situation prevailed in the other major Italian printing center, Venice, and there was a fair amount of cross-­pollination between the two cities.64 Italian publishers were highly cosmopolitan, catering to an increasingly international public, and imagery of Rome is a prime instance where local subject matter had universal appeal. As was the case with Rosselli’s engraving, moreover, printed works were used as models for monumental painted representations in Italy and beyond. The Landkartengalerie commissioned by Prince-­Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau (r. 1587–­1612) for the Salzburg Residenz around 1608 includes frescoes of ancient and new Rome, based on maps by Ligorio and Cartaro, respectively.65 This prestigious decorative scheme was rife with symbolism. Not only did it allude to the sophistication and learning of the patron, but it also implicitly compared the power of the prince-­archbishops to that of the popes—­for the space itself emulated the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican—­ and likened Salzburg to Rome, in yet another instance of Rome’s history and mystique being appropriated for another place. Countless maps of Rome circulated throughout Europe, based on a surprisingly small number of prototypes. In the realm of paragone imagery of Rome, a typical case, the mechanisms of print popularization are exemplified by the activities of the artist and engraver Ambrogio Brambilla (active 1575–­90), a

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native of Milan who worked in Rome in the last decades of the sixteenth century and who specialized in smaller-­scale derivatives of larger, finer works.66 Through the 1580s and 1590s, in collaborations with Duchetti and Van Aelst, Brambilla executed a series of cruder, reduced-­format maps variously copied from or strongly reminiscent of the maps by Ligorio, Du Pérac, and Cartaro.67 For Duchetti in 1582, Brambilla engraved a close copy of Du Pérac’s first map of ancient Rome—­itself, as we have seen, closely modeled on Panvinio’s of 1565, which, in turn, had borrowed heavily from Bufalini.68 Brambilla’s title declared his patently reproductive map to be a “perfected image of the ancient city, most accurately delineated” (antiquae urbis perfecta imago accuratissime delineata), although he would have been hard pressed to verify the truth of that claim. By now this sort of language was an obligatory cliché. Also in 1582, Brambilla and Duchetti issued a reduced copy of Cartaro’s small map of contemporary Rome, the Urbis Romae descriptio of 1575. More modest than the pendants that followed it, this map’s specific derivation is obscure. It is vaguely reminiscent of Pinard’s view of 1555, perhaps with a sprinkling of Dosio’s image of 1561 added into the mix for good measure. However unoriginal, Cartaro’s map of 1575 had a long afterlife, primarily via Brambilla’s copy, which spawned a trail of imitations that endured through the late seventeenth century, including a smaller scale copy by Brambilla himself, published in 1587 by Girolamo Franzini (1537–­96).69 Around 1590, Brambilla engraved two plates of Roma antica and Roma nuova for Van Aelst that could work equally well singly and as a pair, in clear emulation of Cartaro’s pendants. The Antiquae urbis perfecta imago and Novissima urbis Romae descriptio MDLXXXX shared the same dimensions and a closely related compositional structure—­their overall lineaments derived again from Cartaro’s small map of 1575—­with the main difference being their treatment of the urban interior (figs. 53 and 54).70 The basic dichotomy of the originals is maintained, but their complexity is largely lost in translation. Brambilla’s Roma antica shows the city as a collection of disproportionately large structures, sprinkled fairly evenly over a blank cityscape. In response to the smaller format, the number of monuments has decreased dramatically, while their size in relation to the city as a whole has increased. There is considerably less architectural detail and specificity than in Cartaro’s version, or for that matter Ligorio’s and Du Pérac’s. The image is a watered-­down, almost cartoonish reflection of the earlier prototypes. Other than the containing walls, there is little urban organization to be found—­not a single street and scarcely any indication of topography—­even if Brambilla has left a bit more breathing room

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Figure 53. Ambrogio Brambilla, Antiquae urbis perfecta imago (Rome: Nicolas van Aelst, ca. 1590), etching, 16¼ × 21⅜ in. (41.2 × 54.2 cm). British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

among monuments. Visually, the image seems a reversion to the late medieval ideograms considered in chapter 1 (cf. plate 2). In Brambilla’s Roma nuova, by contrast, the built environment shrinks down to size and infrastructure takes over, just as in Cartaro’s version. Crudely rendered infill structures—­all of the same schematic, oddly non-­Roman peaked-­ roof type—­crowd together and line the streets, interrupted here and there by simplified renderings of monuments. The image embodies some important novelties, namely, the new streets of Sixtus V crisscrossing the disabitato and the dome of St. Peter’s, only recently completed, as well as the obelisk that was placed before the basilica with great fanfare in 1586, along with other obe­ lisks similarly peppered across the city. (These had been placed upright at key junctures as part of Sixtus’s massive urbanization campaign.) Still, in terms of

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Figure 54. Ambrogio Brambilla, Novissimae urbis Romae descriptio MDLXXXX (Rome: Nicolas van Aelst, 1590), etching, 16¼ × 21½ in. (41.2 × 55.5 cm). British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

scale, quality of design and execution, and originality, Brambilla’s pair cannot hold a candle to their predecessors. Yet their more manageable size and cheaper price tag contributed to their immense popularity. The frequency with which Brambilla’s works appear in copies of the Speculum as well as in separate sheets indicates a high demand and wide distribution. These images, in turn, were reprinted several times as well as copied by others.71 All derivatives show the degradation of Cartaro’s original concept, but they also signal its wide dissemination beyond rarefied intellectual and illustrious circles. Brambilla and his colleagues made imagery available to classes other than the wealthy who could afford lavish, large-­scale works. In addition to the long-­standing market for maps of Rome among the resident educated elite, prints like Brambilla’s were often exported, and there was an ever-­increasing market for them among visitors to the city.72 With regard to

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the last category, it is not always possible to distinguish between the tastes of pilgrims and more secular tourists, for there was considerable overlap between the two groups. Religious travelers had never been immune to Rome’s pagan attractions, while visitors more taken with classical Rome, or whose primary motivation for coming was something other than piety, surely devoted attention to the city’s impressive Christian patrimony—­some of it, after all, late antique. Similarly, it would be mistaken to assume a different market for images of Roma antica and Roma nuova—­which, in any case, were often marketed as a pair. With regard to both categories, the pace of publication picked up considerably in Jubilee years, which usually came at twenty-­five-­year intervals.73 Du Pérac might well have timed his grand Sciographia of 1574 to anticipate the Jubilee of 1575, assuming it would find favor among affluent pilgrims, while his small map of Roma nuova was issued in that very year and would have been affordable to many more. Brambilla’s prints of 1590 coincided with a special  Jubilee declared for that year by Sixtus V. Editori often kept a stockpile of plates on hand so that they could print images to order, or in small batches as needed—­ thus even maps that bear non-­Jubilee publication dates could be produced in great numbers during those years, or whenever demand arose. (The nominal publication dates of images signal the time of completion—­or most recent alteration—­of the plate more than the date of a chronologically specific edition in the modern sense.) While tourists were omnivorous in their taste, there was also a growing category of Jubilee imagery marked by a decidedly Christian cast. In 1575, Lafreri issued his Sette chiese di Roma (Seven churches of Rome), which though unsigned was probably designed and etched by Du Pérac (fig. 55).74 This groundbreaking, distinctive image was the first geared expressly toward pilgrims. The cartouche at lower right explicitly mentions the Jubilee as its motivating occasion. The print shows outsize perspective renderings of the seven major pilgrimage churches, all turned so their facades face the viewer, arrayed across a highly simplified urban stage that consists of the Aurelian Walls and Tiber River alone. In contrast to the virtually empty city, shown with south at the top, the Christian marvels are depicted quite accurately and in detail. St. Peter’s takes pride of place at bottom center, still with its Constantinian facade, Early Christian atrium, and fifteenth-­century benediction loggia, beyond which the new church appears, completed to the drum of the dome. On axis above it is St. John Lateran, the other major papal basilica. Other than the Castel Sant’Angelo—­the papal stronghold built on the ruins of the Mausoleum of Hadrian—­no identifiable secular monuments appear within the walls, or any streets leading from one landmark to another. The print is meant to

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Figure 55. Stefano Du Pérac (attrib.), Le sette chiese di Roma (Rome: Antonio Lafreri, 1575), etching, 15¾ × 20¼ in. (40 × 51.4 cm). British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

encapsulate the devotional and ritual experience of Roman pilgrimage, not Rome’s urban fabric or ancient monuments. Lines of the pious enter at lower left through the Porta del Popolo and march in an orderly procession from one church to the next, their progress unimpeded by the tortuous layout and urban density of the real city. In front of several of the major churches, the namesake saints appear, disproportionately large, with groups of worshippers kneeling in prayer at their feet. Lafreri’s Sette chiese provided the quintessential pilgrim’s souvenir, and encapsulates the fervor of the Roman Church and its adherents at the height of the Counter-­Reformation. The vast popularity of the print is signaled by the many imitations it inspired. Yet the image also suggests that Rome’s pagan antiquities were not entirely absent from the minds of devout Christian visitors. Toward the top left of the view, in the distant background, are several

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noteworthy ruins that were clustered close together on the Via Appia south of the city, including the tomb of Cecilia Metella and the Circus of Maxentius. Hovering at the periphery of the image, these structures appear less substantial than their sacred counterparts in the foreground, more lightly etched in and hazy, their glory decidedly faded. Their shadowy presence was perhaps meant as a foil for Christian Rome’s ascendancy. Still, while these features might not be central, they, too, occupied the mental horizons of pilgrims to the Eternal City. Images of Rome across time appealed to a wide spectrum of collectors—­local and international, architect, antiquarian, and pilgrim, affluent and not so affluent (the poor as such were not buying maps). Whatever guise of the city these works showed, class of viewer they catered to, and format they assumed, they did not function like modern tourist maps. There is no clear evidence that they were used for wayfinding purposes before the eighteenth century, and even then, most of the works produced were geared toward more esoteric ends. They could serve as educational tools, tokens of piety, learning, and sophistication, grand display items, as well as mementos—­of sights seen and unseen, the city as it was, could be in the future, or might have been in the distant past.75 Images of Roma antica in particular gained significant popularity as mementos of fabricated memory. Like illustrations for fictional memoirs, they attempted to recapture a grand city that viewers had never really visited, and that was only hinted at by the fragmentary ruins of Rome as they could actually be experienced by travelers in the sixteenth century. The Roma antica genre bears witness to a phenomenon that recent theorists in the disciplines of anthropology and history term “cultural memory formation.”76 These works do not depict the dispassionate facts of history, but rather the collective framing of history—­a willed construction of the past that is actively conditioned by the current perspective of a given group or culture, and predicated on rupture between “now and then.” Thus at the most basic level, they reveal more about the needs and longings of the culture that produced them than about the nature of previous cultures. Images of Rome were meant as surrogates for the city across history, enfolding time and the desire for an absent subject—­an idealized notion of a lost golden age. By the late sixteenth century, they increasingly framed that longing not in terms of melancholy and pathos but in terms of triumph: immortal Rome rising again. Nostalgia for a vanished city never disappeared—­nor did the Roma antica genre, which persists in various forms to the present day—­but it was effectively counterbalanced by

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Figure 56. Goert Van Schayck, Roma antiqua, 1620–­35, etching and engraving, plate size 14⅛ × 19¼ in. (36 × 49 cm). Speculum romanae magnificentiae, A6, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

a new validation of Roma nuova. Although the paragone images addressed in this chapter were not overtly propagandistic, their underlying message was often the celebration of papal Rome. Given the active export market, these images constituted a quasi-­official campaign to assert Rome’s primacy in the face of Reformist attack: a message perfectly suited to the militant atmosphere of the Post-­Tridentine city. A map that appeared the following century exemplifies the conceptual shift toward a positive assessment of modern Rome and serves as a fitting postscript to this chapter. In 1620, Goert van Schayck, a native of Utrecht who made his career in Rome, published a single-­sheet image entitled Roma antiqua (fig. 56).77 This map was a reconstruction of the ancient city in the vein of Du Pérac, Cartaro, and any number of intervening derivatives. Van Schayck’s map does, however, embody a novel approach in one respect. More than any other image of Roma antica, it is dominated by streets—­a varied but distinctly

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orderly matrix arranged in diagonal grids in the eastern and southern zones of the city (the top and right quadrants of the map), and parallel curving patterns in the historical center. With these highly inventive, sinuous but regularized networks, Van Schayck imposed greater infrastructural order than had ever existed in the unplanned ancient city, which had grown organically over time. Reversing the typical direction of influence—­where ancient reconstruction creeps into images of the modern city—­Van Schayck projected recent interventions back in time to leave their imprint on Roma antica. At left, for example, the streets radiating from the Porta del Popolo (or Porta Flaminia) unmistakably correspond to the grand trident of streets laid out according to papal decree in the early 1500s. If earlier images suggested the weight of the past on the present, by the seventeenth century, it was not out of place for Van Schayck to rewrite history, imposing early modern urban ideals upon the past to create a utopic vision of the city.

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Chapter Five

“Before the Eyes of the Whole World” The City Writ Large, 1593–­1676

The rich variety in sixteenth-­century representations of Rome speaks to a time of experimentation, before rules and preferences became fixed. Designers were mastering new techniques while catering to a nascent class of consumers whose tastes were still in flux. This situation changed in the 1600s, as clear patterns and categories emerged. Most printed works from this period can be divided into two distinct types that might be termed painterly and architectural; they also become larger, more polished, more current and propagandistic than their predecessors—­yet remain rather conservative cartographically. Perhaps the most conspicuous trend is, however, a different approach to the city’s temporal existence. If many earlier depictions addressed Rome’s long history by collapsing or parsing time, seventeenth-­century imagery is marked by a fervent attentiveness to time—­namely, to the incremental traces of its passing as registered in the contemporary built environment. Artists competed to keep their maps as up-­to-­date as possible by focusing on the architectural minutiae of the city, embracing the new and loudly proclaiming their fidelity to the present state of a rapidly changing city. This shift is part of a larger trend—­a growing interest in topical or newsworthy information as also signaled, for example,

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by the proliferation of printed news pamphlets, or avvisi a stampa, that allowed readers to keep up with the latest developments of all kinds (although as physical objects these were considerably more ephemeral in intent than the maps addressed in this chapter).1 Accordingly, reconstruction of ancient monuments and anachronism of all sorts largely disappeared from the great views of Antonio Tempesta (1593), Matteo Greuter (1618), Giovanni Maggi (1625), Lieven Cruyl (1665), and Giovanni Battista Falda (1676). This chapter traces their efforts to commemorate Rome in its most recent form and to surpass each other in lavish decoration, sheer size, and technical bravura. These figures recorded new streets with the same obsessive care as they did new buildings and those in the midst of transformation, but unlike their predecessors of the 1500s, they were not particularly keen to revisit the larger footprint of Rome or to devise new ways of representing it. Instead, artists strove to perfect atomized, scrupulously updated visions of the city within established formulas. Ultimately, their works refined and did not revolutionize existing trends—­but what a dazzling series of refinements. This era might not have produced the most groundbreaking portraits of the city, but it did produce the most glorious. In part these shifts are due to the emergence of the professional printmaker as the guiding hand in imagery of Rome, in step with the increasing specialization and commercialization of the city’s print industry. There was no seventeenth-­century equivalent to Leonardo Bufalini, who accomplished every step in the production of his map, from surveying the city to designing the image to carving the woodblocks—­perhaps (and only perhaps) stopping short of operating the printing press himself. Of course, he was not equally skilled in all respects. Bufalini’s unmatched survey testifies to his prowess as a military engineer, even as the technical shortcomings of his woodcut signal that he was an amateur printmaker (its antiquarian shortcomings that he was a self-­trained scholar). In the 1600s, images became more expertly engraved and etched, beautifully polished, detailed, and presented, but their makers were less invested in mapping the city anew—­nor did surveying technology change sufficiently in the seventeenth century to necessitate such an endeavor. For all these reasons, artists appropriated and compiled their information about Rome’s contours and often its architecture rather than gathering it personally. On the whole, maps from this period exhibit major improvements in craftsmanship and detail, but little cartographic change. Stefano Du Pérac had set the tone for many of these developments with his Nova urbis Romae of 1577 (plate 10), the major advance of which was its artistry and its up-­to-­the-­minute accuracy—­not its mapped base, which was adopted from a previous model, specifically Bufalini’s map of 1551. One hundred years

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later, when Falda designed his pianta grande (or large plan) of 1676—­widely acclaimed as the most complete and accurate visual record of baroque Rome—­he similarly began by copying the contours of Greuter’s sixty-­year-­old map, then enhanced it with his own painstakingly collected and precise representations of the built fabric. Some mapmakers even included architectural projects that were planned but as yet unexecuted—­thus hypothetical—­in their eagerness to trump their competitors. Because a premium was placed on abundant, timely details rather than the larger urban stage, maps were commonly reissued in new states, their plates altered to keep up with the latest architectural developments but their overarching form unchanged. This practice was also cost effective, given the expense of copperplates and the labor required to etch or engrave them. For imagery of Rome, then, the seventeenth century was a time of recycling, incremental change, and aesthetic enhancement. The century between Du Pérac and Falda witnessed the publication of a splendid series of grand works—­as breathtakingly massive as they were microscopically detailed—­all intent on doing justice to the great theater of baroque Rome. The size of Bufalini’s plan had been extraordinary in the mid-­1500s, as had that of Francesco Rosselli’s engraved view in the late 1480s. Tempesta outdid them both with his monumental etching of 1593, and in his wake the trend continued to the point of bombast, reaching a pinnacle in Maggi’s gargantuan woodcut on forty-­eight sheets stretching over one hundred square feet. Works of this scale were sold in two ways: as separate leaves bound in volumes exclusively for close inspection and study, or with their sheets joined to form wall maps, intended for display.2 In all cases, such magnificence was reserved for imagery of Roma nuova. No comparably sized view of Roma antica was published in the 1600s, or any noteworthy reconstruction of it; instead, derivatives of earlier maps prevailed. The paragone impulse of the previous century, best epitomized by Mario Cartaro’s pendants of the 1570s, also fell by the wayside. The desire to make a grand public statement defining Rome as a contemporary locus reflects an important historical shift, as the city entered a new chapter of cultural ascendancy. On a basic level, modern Rome suddenly seemed more exciting than the ancient city. After a brief but cataclysmic dip following the Sack of 1527, when the city’s population had fallen to fewer than twenty-­ five thousand, the number of permanent residents rebounded to approximately one hundred thousand by the end of the century. New churches and palaces sprang up in a frenzy of construction, the artistic community swelled, and intellectual life flourished (albeit with the occasional interference of the Inquisition). Pilgrims thronged the city: the Jubilee of 1600 attracted some five hundred thousand: five times the population of Rome at that time. It was

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a heady time in the Eternal City. Its progressive refashioning into a shining, modern capital—­a process triumphantly declared and minutely inventoried in imagery—­was also a rebuke to Luther and other critics who saw Rome as the embodiment of church corruption. In the wake of the Counter-­Reformation, the city became the center and flagship of Christian renewal, and its role as such overshadowed its identity as ancient caput mundi. In this cultural climate, it is no surprise that Rome’s pagan past receded somewhat from the public consciousness, and that prints of Roma antica—­ while they continued to be published and attract scholarly interest—­never rivaled the dimensions or numbers of maps depicting Roma nuova. Similarly, by the seventeenth century there could be no conflation of pagan past and Christian present, as in Bufalini’s plan, or direct comparison of them, as in Cartaro’s pendants. For subsequent generations, Christian Rome—­having supplanted its former incarnation—­was discontinuous and incommensurable with it. This is not to say that the tangible signs of Rome’s antiquity were disavowed, or even lost their allure, but they did take a backseat to the new. In the maps discussed in this chapter, the modern city was not construed as ancient Rome reborn, but rather as the embodiment of the church renewed and triumphant. The images that promulgated this notion might not have been issued under the aegis of church authorities, but they were very much in line with the official image of papal Rome. The same was true of a wide spectrum of printed material published in the city at this time, from inexpensive booklets glorifying church pageantry to lavish illustrated publications recounting the myriad festivals, processions, and ceremonies enacted on the cityscape. Rome—­the “world’s theater”—­was conceived as a grand stage for these spectacles and displays of power that amazed onlookers; print fixed the messages of these ephemeral events and rendered them exportable.3 Indeed, even if the term teatro did not appear in the titles of city maps at this time, as it did in other types of publications on the city and its topography (as well as in world maps and atlases), it was their underlying principle. As Laurie Nussdorfer has pointed out, the popes were not as aggressive as the French monarchy at harnessing the propagandistic capabilities of print in the seventeenth century, but their interests were still well served by Roman printers whose motives were shrewdly commercial as well as political and religious.4 The grand maps of Rome discussed in this chapter were not papally sponsored, but they were considerably more ideological than their predecessors, in keeping with the general tenor of the time. Their statements were at least as powerful and dogmatic as the written tracts and religious art that proclaimed Catholic beliefs as truth. Rome itself was an article of faith, and its image reflected the new militancy.

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Antonio Tempesta’s Prospectus and Its Progeny: Painterly Approaches to the Reenergized City

The bird’s-­eye view of the city designed, etched, and published by the Florentine artist Antonio Tempesta (1555–­1630) in 1593 (fig. 57) was a dominant paradigm in imagery of Rome through the end of the seventeenth century. 5 Tempesta had trained in his native city under the Flanders-­born Mannerist painter Joannes Stradanus ( Jan van der Straet, 1523–­1605).6 Having established himself in Rome from the late 1570s, Tempesta won a number of prestigious commissions to paint frescoes in villas and palaces belonging to important cardinals. He also enjoyed the patronage of Pope Gregory XIII , at whose behest he contributed to a cycle of saints’ martyrdoms in the Church of Santo Stefano Rotondo (1583–­85) and to the decoration for one of the Vatican loggias, together with the Antwerp-­born landscapist Matthijs Bril (1550–­83), around 1580. It is often assumed that Tempesta’s close contacts with Flemish artists like Stradanus and Bril, and his exposure through them to the northern tradition of topographical representation, helped to shape his map of Rome: an early and ambitious example of his activity as a printmaker. Tempesta, in fact, was an early pioneer in the medium of etching and became one of the most prolific printmakers active in Rome in the first decades of the seventeenth century—­ issuing some 1600 prints by the time of his death in 1630. He had benefited personally from papal favor, and it is not surprising that many of Tempesta’s prints comprised religious subjects that advanced Catholic tenets. He was very much a Counter-­Reformation artist, and his great view of Rome should also be seen in this light. Tempesta’s expansive etching of 1593 is commonly referred to as Prospectus, or Prospect—­an abbreviated form of its full title, given in an inscription in Roman capitals running along the lower border: Recens prout hodie iacet almae urbis Romae cum omnibus viis aedificiisque prospectus accuratissime delineatus (Recent prospect of the nourishing city of Rome with all its streets and buildings, as it lies today, most accurately delineated). Outside the contours of the city, the edges of the immense print are adorned with grandiose heraldic ornament. A banner at left, fluttering above the Vatican, contains Tempesta’s address dedicating the map to the prominent cleric Giacomo Bosio (1544–­1627), official historian of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, whose insignia and motto occupy the top left corner. At lower right, Tempesta proudly signed and dated the image in a cartouche declaring him its designer, draftsman, and etcher (“Antonio Tempesta Florentinus invenit delineavit et incidit”)—­a rare combination indeed in this era of ever-­increasing specialization in print production. This was one

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Figure 57. Antonio Tempesta, Recens prout hodie iacet almae urbis Romae cum omnibus viis aedificiisque prospectus accuratissime delineatus (Rome, 1593), etching, 40¾ × 96 in. (103.5 × 244 cm). Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Novacco 4F 256.

of Tempesta’s earliest and most ambitious works, clearly meant to announce his skills to the public, and his name is even more prominent than the map’s descriptive title. At the bottom of the signature cartouche is the escutcheon and coat of arms that Tempesta had devised for himself, flanked by a small cursive inscription stating his printing privilege; above is a female personification of Rome in armor, enthroned on a pile of war trophies and bearing a small winged victory who extends a wreath in her direction—­a motif that subsequently became common in imagery of the city.7 In the top right corner of the map, a larger winged figure blows one horn and holds a second. With his vigorously blowing cheeks he is akin to a more elaborate version of the wind heads that often graced maps (cf. plate 1; fig. 3), but he lacks a label identifying him with any particular vento and is surely another symbol of Rome victorious. The clearest progenitor of Tempesta’s composition was Ugo Pinard’s enduringly influential Urbis Romae descriptio of 1555 (plate 7). Like Pinard, Tempesta shows the city unfolding panoramically from a vantage point on the Janiculum Hill at the western confines of the city. The remarkable detail of Tempesta’s work separates it from that model—­which appears rudimentary and reductive in comparison—­as does its medium and vast proportions. An etching on twelve sheets, its overall dimensions when joined approach 40¾ × 96 in. (103.5 × 244 cm): far larger than any previous printed representation of Rome. Also in contrast to Pinard’s view, which included the surrounding countryside, Tempesta’s Rome is a flattened, irregular ellipse extracted from its extramural surroundings—­a denatured, floating apparition—­as if all life ended at the Aurelian Walls. Whereas Du Pérac, in his map of 1577, had sought to distinguish his image from others by choosing an unusual orientation, Tempesta did so with this strange and memorable form. Rome’s appearance as a hovering cutout is enhanced even further by Tempesta’s exaggeration of the Aurelian Walls to emphasize the urban perimeter. These tactics make Rome seem unique, fully self-­contained, and impervious to the outside world. Refuting the upheaval that the city had experienced over the course of the sixteenth century, this image squelches any hint of vulnerability to external forces. True to his title, Tempesta depicted just about every Roman palazzo, church, piazza, fountain, and footpath as they were just prior to the time of publication, including those that were in ephemeral states of construction or decay. With but one exception—­the Septizonium Gate, a much admired ruin that had been demolished in 1588 but is still represented here, perhaps because it was still standing when the map was in preparation8—­Tempesta provided a fairly true-­to-­life vision of a reinvigorated city as it approached the turn of the century. At the top of the image, in the eastern quadrant of the city, the

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new, straight streets of Pope Sixtus V linking the major pilgrimage basilicas form regular axes in a zone dotted with churches, casini (or rustic houses), and suburban palaces of such families as the Medici, Sforza (on the future site of the Palazzo Barberini), and Peretti. At left, the trivium of arteries converging at the Piazza del Popolo is almost entirely built up, while below it, the new Borgo Pio in the Vatican—­which had been fairly open and bucolic in Du Pérac’s map of just fifteen years before—­is similarly dense with recent constructions (the majority of these, however, represented conventionally), all of them dwarfed by St. Peter’s. To the right of the Vatican, the Via della Lungara stretches laterally toward Trastevere, implausibly widened to form a stable baseline along the map’s lower margin. Above that street and the river to which it runs roughly parallel lies the minutely detailed city center, where many recent architectural additions to Counter-­Reformation Rome are discernible. Just to the southeast (i.e., above and to the right) of the Pantheon, it is possible to make out the Jesuit college, or Collegio Romano, in construction close to the Gesù, the mother church of that new and powerful religious order (fig. 58). Below that complex, Sant’Andrea della Valle, the Church of the Theatines, begun in 1591, is a construction site, while Santa Maria in Vallicella, the Church of the Oratorians, in progress since 1575, is close to complete. The selectivity and schematism of previous views has largely gone by the wayside. Tempesta showed ancient ruins true to life, their eroded forms in full evidence yet unexaggerated, along with contemporary monuments and an abundant variety of relatively modest structures. Although in places the latter tend toward generic infill, Tempesta went much further than any previous artist to individualize all aspects of the architectural fabric. He also devoted a great deal of attention to variations in topography and vegetation, conveying the irregular, undulating terrain of the disabitato while differentiating cultivated fields from untended meadows and orchards, cypresses from deciduous trees and even the occasional umbrella pine. His inclusive etching is closer in spirit to Jacopo de’ Barbari’s bird’s-­eye view of Venice (fig. 3) than it is to earlier depictions of the Eternal City. Recalling the words of Cipriano Piccolpasso’s imagined interlocutor, who—­as discussed in the introduction—­complained that he could not find his own house in a view of Florence, one has the sense for the first time with a picture of Rome that even the humblest resident would be able to identify a trace of his presence. Moreover, although this work—­like most urban imagery from the early modern period—­lacks human figures, it includes vignettes that show the city to be living and populated. Along the Tiber, for example, Tempesta depicted the floating mills that jutted into the river’s current (fig. 58), the ferries on cables that transported Romans from one

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Figure 58. Tempesta, Prospectus, details: Santa Maria in Vallicella (Chiesa Nuova); Collegio Romano (left) and Il Gesù (right); ferries and mills on the Tiber. Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Novacco 4F 256.

bank to another, and boats of various sizes moored at the city’s major port, Ripa grande, and its smaller upriver port, Ripetta, near the Mausoleum of Augustus. Tempesta’s map was published just three years after the death of Sixtus V, and it bears witness to the dramatic urban changes initiated by the pope and executed by his architect, Domenico Fontana (1543–­1607). In the former disabitato, the new streets making wide slashes through the undulating terrain converge around Santa Maria Maggiore, prominently situated toward the top center, its importance underscored by the presence of a newly raised obelisk (fig. 59). The church appears with a recent addition at its left flank: the domed chapel of the Blessed Sacrament constructed for Sixtus by Fontana. At upper left of the map as a whole, Fontana’s Moses Fountain (the Fontana dell’Acqua Felice), a showy display of Sixtus’s repaired and renamed aqueduct, dominates an improbably widened piazza on the Via Pia. Its counterpoint at upper right is the Lateran complex. The venerable basilica is fronted by Fontana’s arcaded north facade adjoining the massive new residential palace and enclosure for the Scala Santa (the holy stairs, believed to be those of Pontius Pilate’s palace that Christ climbed on the day he was condemned to death). All of these renovations are centered on another towering obelisk, the tallest of many that were proudly reerected at important sites and intersections following the first triumphant raising of the Vatican obelisk in front of New St. Peter’s in 1586. These are the great urban exclamation points of Sixtus and Fontana, and they are all

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shown bearing the crosses with which they had been crowned to symbolize Christian Rome’s triumph over its pagan past. Similarly, within the city center, the imperial columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius are capped by new statues of Saints Peter and Paul to replace the old imperial effigies (fig. 60). Tempesta depicts Rome’s two patron saints towering over the city, much larger relative to the columns’ shafts than they are in reality. Tempesta’s Prospectus was one of many printed works that glorified the ambitious urban program of Sixtus V but were not subsidized by the papacy. Giovanni Francesco Bordini’s De rebus praeclaris gestis a Sixto V p.m. of 1588, for example, was an illustrated volume that celebrated the pope’s urban and architectural works. Among its woodcuts was a schematic map showing Rome in the form of a star, its contours defined by new thoroughfares. Similarly, Nicolas Van Aelst issued a separately published, distinctly commemorative print in 1589 that depicted Sixtus in bust length surrounded by vignettes of many of the same projects. Sixtus—­who more than most popes recognized print as a vehicle for propagandistic display—­encouraged the development of the industry in Rome, even seeking to establish a Vatican printing office.9 Tempesta’s Prospectus certainly provided a glorious portrait of the Sistine city, one that would have pleased Sixtus greatly—­albeit several years after the pope’s death. Still, it was not an homage to the achievements of Sixtus alone, for it was meant to glorify papal Rome and the church’s renewal in general. In his dedication to Bosio, Tempesta drew attention not to any single individual but rather to “the holy popes” in general under whom the city was flourishing.10 His orientation—­more than a slavish imitation of Pinard or anyone else—­was the most effective window onto the glories of Counter-­Reformation Rome.

Figure 59. Tempesta, Prospectus, details: Moses Fountain; Santa Maria Maggiore; Lateran complex. Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Novacco 4F 256.

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Figure 60. Tempesta, Prospectus, details: Columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Novacco 4F 256.

The Campidoglio, Gesù, and new papal palace on the Quirinal Hill were just some of the recent monuments that turned their faces toward the Janiculum. Of course, this orientation had long been favored because it situated the Vatican in a privileged position at lower left. Tempesta’s device of cutting Rome off from its surroundings causes this zone to stand out more than in any previous map (fig. 61). Isolated on a visual promontory, the Vatican is the symbolic gateway and interpretive key to Tempesta’s Rome. St. Peter’s faces east, but Tempesta turned it laterally and enlarged it substantially. The church appears from the side, its dome finally complete and capped by the orb put in place in 1593, its nave and facade not yet complete, with the last vestiges of Old St. Peter’s still standing in front. The jumble of medieval and early Renaissance structures surrounding the Early Christian atrium are yet to be cleared away, while the piazza with its obelisk awaits the grand transformation of Gianlo­ renzo Bernini (1598–­1680). Beyond the church, Bramante’s Belvedere Courtyard is now bisected by the Vatican Library wing—­which was also to have housed the new Vatican printing office—­constructed for Sixtus V by Fontana, who was also responsible for the new papal palace shown further to the right, adjacent to the ninth-­century Leonine Walls. The meticulously documented

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transitional state of St. Peter’s and the Vatican is a sign of forward momentum that stands for Rome as a whole. Compositionally and stylistically, Tempesta espoused a deeply pictorial approach to representing Rome. Not only did he seek to create a visual evocation of its likeness as glimpsed from a positioned vantage point, but he also employed a medium that lent itself well to painterly and atmospheric effects. Like Du Pérac, Tempesta appreciated the fluid and flexible line of etching, which was closer to drawing than was the more rigid and exacting technique of engraving. The Prospectus is characterized by a light touch and sketchiness that set it apart from previous works. In Tempesta’s hands these qualities went along with a certain freedom with regard to precise forms, proportions, dimensions, and orientations. St. Peter’s is a prime example. Not only did Tempesta take some liberty with its positioning, but he also drew its dome hemispherical when it was in fact ovoid, and compressed the lateral extent of the church complex, truncating severely the as-­yet undemolished forecourt of the early Christian basilica. Stemming both from his background as a painter and his personal

Figure 61. Tempesta, Prospectus, detail: Vatican and St. Peter’s. Photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, Novacco 4F 256.

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inclination, Tempesta was indifferent to a more architectural breed of mea­ sured representation. This holds true for the urban features and topography as well as buildings. Streets and piazze seem to expand and contract at will; the Via della Lungara is just one instance of Tempesta transforming a narrow Roman street into a grand promenade. To the left and right of it, respectively, the Borgo Santo Spirito and the open space outside the Church of San Cosimato in Trastevere become vast plains. Similarly, the Ponte Santa Maria, the bridge south of the Tiber Island that would soon become known ignominiously as the Ponte Rotto (broken bridge) after it washed away in the Tiber flood of 1598, is markedly inflated in width. Tempesta favored the circulation networks of Rome, and his emphasis is distinctly arterial. Indeed, such biomorphic analogies are not out of place: the entire city assumes the appearance of a great and complex living organism. Tempesta’s bird’s-­eye view is exhaustive without being exact. His painterly, free approach is reflected in the term he chose for his etching: prospectus. Normally translated as “prospect,” Tempesta’s usage is an early instance of this Renaissance Latin coinage meaning topographical view or cityscape. Unlike the terms ichnographia, pianta, and sciographia, it was not taken from the ancient lexicon of architecture, and it was more specifically artistic than the general descriptio so often used for maps. The term prospectus underscores Tempesta’s desire to simulate a visual experience, for the word derives from the past participle of the verb prospicio—­to look into the distance. Finally, with Tempesta, a term appeared that was well suited to the sort of evocative pictorial view popular since Rosselli. Tempesta’s Prospectus was a defining moment in the representation of Rome, one of a handful of images from across time that capture the ethos of the city during a given era. Surprisingly, scholars believe that it was not a commercial success.11 In fact, few such large-­scale prints of Rome seem to have sold well enough to be profitable—­a tall order given the time and expense that went into their creation, and their correspondingly high price tag. While contemporary valuations are scant, some comparative clues to this effect can be gleaned from the 1738 catalogue of Roman editore Lorenzo Filippo de Rossi (1683–­after 1738), who inherited a considerable inventory of plates, including those for several large-­scale maps from the previous century, as part of his family business.12 For the same price as an updated version of  Tempesta’s Prospectus—­one Roman scudo and twenty baiocchi (1/100 of a scudo)—­a patron could purchase a bound volume containing approximately fifty smaller city views engraved by Giacomo Lauro,

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or alternatively a multisheet etching—­almost as large as Tempesta’s—­by Carlo Cesio after Giovanni Lanfranco’s Assumption of the Virgin fresco (1625–­27) for the dome of Sant’Andrea della Valle.13 In the same period, by comparison, an easel painting by a respected artist might cost several hundred scudi.14 Du Pérac’s 1574 Sciographia, embellished further with scenes of Roman triumphs around its margins, cost a bit more than Tempesta’s Prospectus: one scudo and fifty baiocchi.15 To acquire Falda’s Nuova pianta, first published in 1676, a buyer would need to pay the even greater sum of two scudi and twenty baiocchi. But if that price proved prohibitive, it was possible to purchase a smaller version—­Falda’s map of 1667—­for a mere thirty baiocchi.16 Big-­ticket items are rare in Lorenzo Filippo de Rossi’s inventory, where they are far outnumbered by smaller, less expensive items, most of them printed on single sheets or half sheets and costing from five to forty baiocchi. This discussion raises a critical question—­who did purchase large works like Tempesta’s and Falda’s, and why? Francesca Consagra has unearthed documentation that sheds light on the collecting and display of these objects in Roman circles. She notes that owners of villas in the city’s greenbelt liked to decorate their residences with printed maps and city views, a fashion “observed by popes and merchants alike.”17 In 1665, Pope Alexander VII commissioned the editore Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi (1627–­91)—­Lorenzo Filippo’s grandfather, who dominated the Roman print industry in the late seventeenth century, in fierce competition with members of his own extended clan—­to decorate the papal summer estate at Castel Gandolfo outside the city with a remarkable 176 sumptuously hand-­colored, printed maps of Europe and the Americas, along with views of Rome, to emulate the Gallery of Maps at the Vatican. Later, Giovanni Giacomo decorated his own suburban casino with seventeen large printed maps of the world and European regions, as well as city views. This trend was embraced by collectors throughout Europe; Eckhard Leuschner has observed that the German architect and author Joseph Furttenbach (1591–­1667) advised affluent readers to adorn their residences with maps of Rome in his Architectura privata of 1641.18 Furttenbach explicitly mentioned the works of Tempesta and Greuter, as well as Pirro Ligorio’s Roma grande of 1561, among others, as ideal decoration for a well-­appointed study. Indeed, foreign collectors—­especially British—­were an increasingly important part of the market: a development that would culminate with Grand Tourists the following century. In some cases, these collectors did not even visit the Eternal City, instead acquiring works through agents. The diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–­1703) charged his nephew, John Jackson (1673–­1723), with the task of purchasing maps and other items on his behalf while the younger man was

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traveling through Italy and Europe.19 Pepys, in London, seems to have consulted the 1696 stock list of Domenico de Rossi, né Freddiani (1659–­1730)—­Giovanni Giacomo’s adopted son and Lorenzo Filippo’s father—­to help make his selections from afar. The use of such a stock list to publicize one’s wares had originated with Lafreri the previous century, and it functioned like a catalogue for eager print consumers like Pepys. A 1693 watercolor of his famous London library shows Falda’s Nuova pianta taking pride of place as it hangs on a wall (fig. 62). The map is mounted on a backing—­probably canvas or linen—­and suspended between horizontal cylindrical rollers that could facilitate storage or, as in this case, display. Pepys also owned Giovanni Maggi’s enormous woodcut of 1625—­although with all forty-­eight sheets bound in a volume, not joined—­as well as Matteo Gregorio de Rossi’s Nuova pianta di Roma presente of 1668 and Antonio Barbey’s Nuova pianta della città di Roma of 1697. De Rossi’s map is recorded as being on display, like Falda’s, but in an elaborate gilded frame—­ not just on rollers.20 Libraries like Pepys’s, Kate Loveman has observed, were places of sociability for well-­to-­do, cultivated men in seventeenth-­century England.21 In such contexts, large-­scale prints of Rome were more than study aids—­they were also showy conversation pieces, as well as signs of worldliness. Elite collecting groups aside, it is evident that smaller, more manageable, and affordable maps—­like those by Ambrogio Brambilla, discussed in the previous chapter—­were considerably more popular and earned more money for their publishers, with less initial investment of money and effort. For images like Tempesta’s and Falda’s, innovation, ambition, and quality did not always translate into immediate financial reward. Their success must be measured in subtler ways than by direct revenue. It is possible that these works were never even expected to make a profit in themselves. Print sellers seem to have used them as advertisements; Giovanni Domenico de Rossi (1619–­53)—­who was the brother of Giovanni Giacomo and was largely responsible for establishing the Roman printing dynasty earlier in the century—­is recorded as having a large wall map hanging in his shop.22 These tours de force publicized the talents of their makers, raising their public profile and creating a market for their other endeavors while attracting the attention of potential buyers, sponsors, or patrons. According to these terms, Tempesta’s Prospectus—­whether or not it sold well—­was an unmitigated triumph if judged by the artist’s subsequent career success, not to mention the later editions and imitations that followed in its wake. The map was reprinted from the same plates with few adjustments other than the date and dedicatee in 1606, 1645, and 1648.23 In 1662, Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi had new plates made with updates explicitly intended to

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Figure 62. Sutton Nicholls, Samuel Pepys’s Library, watercolor, ca. 1693. © The Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

show Rome as it appeared under Pope Alexander VII Chigi.24 In his title, De Rossi gave authorial credit to Tempesta even as he declared his own version “newly etched, expanded, and embellished by streets, piazze, palazzi, temples [i.e. churches], and buildings in keeping with [the city as] it is found in the present.”25 That map was issued again in 1664 and 1693, the latter now updated, according to its title, to commemorate the Rome of Innocent XII Pignatelli (r. 1691–­1700).26 The selling point of these versions was their incorporation of the very latest developments, much as Tempesta himself had stressed his adherence to the present-­day city in 1593. Less conscientious in that regard—­ and in giving credit to Tempesta—­were the many reduced-­scale derivatives, originating for the most part in northern Europe, that paid him the sincerest form of flattery.27 This pattern, familiar also from Rosselli’s engraved view of a century before, persisted into the seventeenth century and beyond. The production of printed city imagery in Italy and throughout Europe continued to be a predominantly imitative process. More original were the maps published in Rome by artists who were clearly inspired by Tempesta’s Prospectus but used it as a point of departure for personal expression. The most noteworthy work to fall into this category is Maggi’s woodcut of 1625.28 Maggi (1566–­ca. 1618–­25), from Lombardy, was an artist,

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architect, and printmaker. He produced several images of Rome over the course of his career. The first, published by Lorenzo Vaccari for the Jubilee of 1600, was a single-­sheet engraving of relatively modest dimensions (15½ × 19 in.; 39 × 48 cm), patently aimed at the pilgrimage market (fig. 63).29 At its center is a truncated map closely modeled on one by Matteo Florimi, itself derived from Brambilla’s Novissimae urbis Romae descriptio of 1590. Around the edges, Maggi included views of the seven major churches and a vignette showing the pope’s ritual opening of the holy door at St. Peter’s to inaugurate the holy year. Not particularly original in its individual components, this engraving was, however, an innovative fusion of the “seven churches” paradigm in the vein of the Lafreri–­Du Pérac etching of 1575 (fig. 55) with a more cartographic treatment of the city. It was instantly and enduringly popular, updated and reprinted at least five times into the late eighteenth century: the perfect pilgrim’s souvenir, with art, ritual, Christianity, antiquity, topography, and history all rolled into one.30 Maggi’s second print, loosely derived from Tempesta, was more ambitious and refined but a less resounding success. Published by Andrea Vaccari in 1603 and known only through derivatives, it was larger than Maggi’s map of 1600 and aimed at a more bookish and elite audience.31 The influence of Tempesta was still present more than two decades later in Maggi’s final bird’s-­eye view, of 1625, the Disegno nuovo di Roma moderna (New drawing of modern Rome), but nothing truly predicted this most audacious seventeenth-­century representation of the city (fig. 64). While Tempesta’s map was the work of a young man boldly proclaiming his talents to the world, Maggi’s was the grand finale to a prolific and prosperous career. His name, sadly, appears nowhere on the woodcut—­which is signed, instead, by French editore Paul Maupin—­but it has long been attributed to Maggi based on Giovanni Baglione’s reference to a woodcut of “Roma grandissima” in his brief 1642 biography of the artist. Baglione also wrote that Maggi had been unable to finish the project for financial and other unspecified reasons, and that Maupin assumed the task of cutting the blocks—­implying that the immense woodcut was designed by Maggi, while Maupin, having acquired the preparatory drawing, saw to the arduous task of cutting the blocks or of hiring a craftsman to do so.32 Maupin was also responsible for the large cartouche that contained a dedication to Prince Władysław of Poland (1595–­1648), an important ally of the papacy who made a state visit to Rome on the eve of the Jubilee of 1625, in a column at left and a lengthy description of Rome’s lost antiquities in four columns at right. The image, however, was Maggi’s alone. His debt to Tempesta’s Prospectus is clear in its overall compositional form. Like Tempesta, Maggi shows the city

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Figure 63. Giovanni Maggi, Descriptio urbis Romae novissima (Rome: Lorenzo Vaccari, 1600 [second state, 1610]), etching and engraving, 15½ × 19 in. (39 × 49 cm). Rome, Istituto nazionale per la grafica, FC 75924. Image courtesy of the Ministero dei beni e le Attività Culturali e del Turismo.

unfolding pictorially before the spectator from a nominal vantage point on the Janiculum Hill. In the foreground, the ground rises up in craggy swells, vegetation sprouts, and trees bracket the view on either side. (In the minds of erudite viewers, their weathered limbs might have brought to mind “Tasso’s oak,” the ancient tree in the shade of which the sixteenth-­century author Torquato Tasso [1544–­95] liked to admire Rome.) Beyond, the hillside falls away to reveal the city in all its glory. Baglione wrote that Maggi had depicted Rome “with all the streets, piazze, churches, palaces, and private houses—­that is, all there is to be found there,” and the image is indeed exhaustive.33 Aside from the shared compositional format, Maggi’s view differs from Tempesta’s prototype in important respects—­first, of course, in sheer size. Measuring approximately 89¾ × 168½ in. (228 × 428 cm) with all forty-­eight sheets joined, it remains the largest print of the city ever to see the light of day. It is surely no accident that the two surviving examples of the original woodcut are preserved as separate sheets bound in a volume or protected by a slipcase (for this reason, also, the whole example illustrated here is from the

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Figure 64. Giovanni Maggi, bird’s-­eye view of Rome (Rome: Carlo Losi, 1774 [orig. Paul Maupin, 1625]), woodcut, 89¾ × 168½ in. (228 × 428 cm). (Title panel and lettering replaced by Losi for this second state.) Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Rome, 18 P.A. 16, 1–­2.

1774 reprint by Carlo Losi, who replaced Maupin’s cartouche with his own).34 Maggi’s image was also unusual simply by virtue of being a woodcut. This medium, rare enough in the sixteenth century when Bufalini employed it for his own plan, had largely gone out of fashion by Maggi’s time. Stefano Borsi has speculated that the choice was made for economic reasons.35 Woodcut was more labor intensive than copperplate engraving or etching, but it required less initial investment in materials—­and given the projected size of the map, those costs would have been astronomical. (Indeed, even the frugal choice of medium does not seem to have prevented Maggi from running out of money, if Baglione is to be believed.) Whoever the artisan responsible, the woodcut was executed with skill, incorporating a wealth of detail given the relative coarseness of the medium, not to mention the sheer surface area that had to be laboriously carved. Woodcut is much more cumbersome than etching, but the Disegno nuovo is characterized by an expressive, nimble touch that is analogous to Tempesta’s painterly handling: another sign of the craftsman’s skill, and presumably an indication of the qualities that characterized Maggi’s original drawing. Maggi’s map was timed to coincide with the Jubilee of 1625, which fell early in the pontificate of Urban VIII Barberini (r. 1623–­44). As with Tempesta’s Prospectus, however, the image provides a window not onto the current pope’s achievements but rather those of a recent predecessor, in this case Paul V Borghese (r. 1605–­21). New St. Peter’s is now finished, its nave lengthened and facade presumably in place (the church is depicted from the back), the last vestiges of the old basilica having been demolished in the first decade of the seventeenth century, and the fifteenth-­century benediction loggia cleared away in 1616 (fig. 65). Maggi is quite complete—­even including the bell towers designed by Carlo Maderno (1556–­1629) and never executed—­but in certain respects he treated the church somewhat cavalierly, flattening out its apse end and inflating its proportions relative to the adjoining Belvedere Courtyard. To the right, on the Janiculum Hill above Trastevere, it is possible to make out the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola (1610–­12), the imposing fountain erected to mark the entrance of the repaired Aqua Traiana into Rome, designed by Domenico Fontana’s brother, Giovanni, in emulation of Sixtus V’s Fontana dell’Acqua Felice across the city. Paul V also followed his illustrious predecessor by lavishing attention on the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore (fig. 66), to which he added his own domed chapel (the Borghese or Pauline Chapel, designed by Flaminio Ponzio and dedicated in 1613). On Maggi’s map it can be seen mirroring the one constructed for Sixtus by Fontana several decades before.36

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Figure 65. Maggi, bird’s-­eye view of Rome, detail: Vatican and Saint Peter’s. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Rome, 18 P.A. 16, 1–­2.

Yet, in truth, viewers must consciously seek out such recent transformations to the cityscape, or any landmark they might wish to identify. Maggi’s map is oddly dispassionate in its approach to Rome, registering all elements without highlighting any in particular. No monuments or urban features are favored, nor does he emphasize the infrastructure by widening streets or clearing paths. The sheer graphic density of the woodcut overpowers individual elements. In a sharp departure from typical Renaissance impulses, Maggi betrays neither

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Figure 66. Maggi, bird’s-­eye view of Rome, detail: Santa Maria Maggiore. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Rome, 18 P.A. 16, 1–­2.

nostalgia for antiquity nor preference for axiality. Compared to Tempesta’s Prospectus, Maggi’s image is flatly neutral—­and, in this sense, more literal. Streets and landmarks are brought down to size and almost lost in the mass of detail, much of it schematized, repetitive infill buildings that do not shrink around important landmarks—­if anything, they engulf them (fig. 67); topography is leveled out. Maggi smoothed monumental Rome into a continuous and mostly undifferentiated urban tapestry, in a reversal of the old ideogrammatic paradigm. If Tempesta amplified the achievements of Sixtus V and of papal Rome in general, Maggi amplified nothing other than the physical dimensions of his

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print. He also departed from Tempesta by reinserting the city into its extramural surroundings. In fact, Maggi provided an important record of this suburban zone, which was increasingly dotted with properties both rustic and palatial. The Villa Borghese, completed in 1614 for Paul V’s nephew Scipione Borghese (1577–­1633), appears in the upper left corner, surrounded by neat parcels of cultivated land (fig. 68). In Maggi’s map, Rome is no longer self-­contained but insistently contextualized in the larger world, which continues beyond the edges of the massive woodcut. The overall effect is of a somewhat amorphous, “all-­over” composition—­highly descriptive but lacking in visual hierarchy and guidance. Clearly, however, Maggi’s idiosyncratic work is not a stale rendition of an existing paradigm, as it has sometimes been held to be. A very different adaptation of Tempesta’s Prospectus is the relatively compact map of 1665 designed by Lieven Cruyl (ca. 1640–­1720), etched by Giulio Testone, and published by Giovanni Battista de Rossi (ca. 1601–­78)—­cousin and competitor of Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi (fig. 69).37 A native of Ghent in Flanders, Cruyl was a priest, architect, artist, and printmaker known for views of Roman sites that deftly combine broad scope and architectural precision.38 For his map of 1665, Cruyl, like Maggi, used Tempesta’s overarching form as a base and did not make any move to redraw the city’s contours. But where

Figure 67. Maggi, bird’s-­eye view of Rome, detail: city center. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Rome, 18 P.A. 16, 1–­2.

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Figure 68. Maggi, bird’s-­eye view of Rome, detail: Villa Borghese. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Rome, 18 P.A. 16, 1–­2.

Maggi obscured the urban footprint with overgrowth, Cruyl stripped away most of the built environment to expose a geometricized rendering of the street network, leaving only the most important monuments to rise in perspective from that cartographic armature. Fittingly, Cruyl identified his image as a plan ( pianta), not a prospect, thus placing it squarely within the realm of a more measured than mimetic kind of representation. He underscored this emphasis at lower right, where a godlike hand wielding a geometer’s compass emerges from a cloud bank. Moreover, if Maggi was impartial and inclusive, Cruyl patently favored a small number of prominent structures—­“the most notable sites,” as his title openly states—­which protrude conspicuously from the planimetric cityscape, their proportions inflated.39 Undistracted by lesser structures and infill, the spectator of this map is immediately drawn to a number of recently completed projects. In the foreground, the fortified walls of Urban VIII on the Janiculum (1623–­44) sharply define the new western border of the city. At the Vatican, St. Peter’s is now preceded by Bernini’s vast, keyhole-­ shaped, colonnaded piazza (constructed in 1656–­67 for Alexander VII).

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Cruyl also reverted to Tempesta’s tactic of extracting Rome from its countryside, thus limiting a viewer’s focus to the urban interior, and to the select glories depicted therein. Cruyl’s map is an orderly, selective encapsulation of Rome that leaves no ambiguity—­no possibility that the viewer’s eye might wander, get lost, or miss the point. It is didactic, not descriptive. Part bird’s-­eye view, part plan, it helpfully highlights key monuments and the pathways connecting them. The practical utility of this type of hybrid was recognized quickly. In 1706, François Nodot published an account of his voyage to Italy and Rome that included a copy of Cruyl’s map, noting in the title banner that it was “very useful for travelers.”40 In Nodot’s version, the index—­a feature common on maps since the mid-­sixteenth century—­plays a new role, for now it is meant to point viewers beyond the print, to real sites in the city. This work, following Cruyl’s, anticipates a whole genre of modern tourist imagery consisting of a street plan with prominent buildings shown in perspective. Whether or not Cruyl envisioned such a purpose, his map was readily adaptable to a functionality that was entirely alien to the monumental works by Tempesta and Maggi

Figure 69. Lieven Cruyl (designer) and Giulio Testone (etcher), Pianta di Roma come si trova al presente colle alzate delle fabbriche più notabili così antiche come moderne (Rome: Giovanni Battista de Rossi, 1665), etching, 19¾ × 33 in. (50 × 84 cm). British Library, London. © British Library Board, Maps* 23805. (17.).

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(and Cruyl himself at least as groundbreaking as those more lauded peers, even if his map was less flashy). Similarly, in contrast to both predecessors, Cruyl’s style is crisp and precise, not painterly and atmospheric. He did not share their casual disregard for architectural forms and proportions. Cruyl’s appropriation of Tempesta’s paradigm should be seen more as a critique of that model than as a validation of it, his merciless elision of the urban fabric a corrective to the clutter of maps like Maggi’s. Cruyl might have adapted some of his basic format from Tempesta, but his streamlined clarity and exactitude point to the second main trend that dominated imagery of Rome in the seventeenth century.

Matteo Greuter, Giovanni Battista Falda, and Architectural Approaches to Seventeenth-­C entury Rome

In 1618, Matteo (or Matthäus) Greuter (ca. 1565–­1638), a native of Strasbourg who spent most of his working life in Rome, published a magnificent map that established the main alternative to Tempesta’s paradigm (fig. 70).41 In it, the pretense of a view from an elevated point on the ground disappears and the spectator soars high above the city. From this stratospheric vantage, Rome’s footprint, including its network of streets, emerges much more plainly than in the illusionistically distorted views of Tempesta, Maggi, and even the more geometrically inclined Cruyl. The streets of Sixtus V, in particular, are left unforeshortened, in their full, uninterrupted axiality. Greuter underscores the measured foundation of his image with depictions of a magnetic compass and a scale measured in Roman passi at the lower right corner—­Tempesta, Maggi, and even Cruyl had omitted a scale—­as well as the title banner trumpeting it as an “exact plan” ( pianta esatta). From this cartographic core, buildings drawn in parallel perspective appear to project three-­dimensionally into space, as if glimpsed from a spot west of the city, far above the Janiculum. Of course, Greuter did not invent this image type. His map is a glorified perspective plan in the tradition of Francesco Paciotto’s of 1557 (fig. 36), Mario Cartaro’s of 1576 (fig. 49), and Du Pérac’s of 1577 (plate 10). Greuter’s direct inspiration might well have been an intermediary map from about 1590—­perhaps the first to celebrate the urban improvements of Sixtus V, known today only through a splendid derivative of 1593 by Timanno van Veen—­that superimposed the Sistine changes upon Du Pérac’s contours and inflated his dimensions to enhance visual impact.42 This graphic type took on new life in the seventeenth century after Greuter’s marvelous print of 1618 brought it to a new level of refinement and precision, inciting a host of imitations.

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Figure 70. Matteo Greuter, Disegno nuovo di Roma moderna con le sue strade, siti et edifitii in pianta esatta (Rome, 1618), etching and engraving, 51¼ × 84½ in. (130 × 214.7 cm). (Original sheets joined digitally by author.) Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Rome, P. G. 6A.

Greuter, like Tempesta, saw to every step in the production of his map—­ designing, engraving, and publishing it himself. Just one example survives, battle scarred but splendid. Printed on multiple sheets, it measures an impressive 51¼ × 84½ in. (130 × 214.7 cm). The full title, which extends across the top in the customary Roman capitals (albeit in Italian, not Latin), is Disegno nuovo di Roma moderna con le sue strade, siti et edifitii in pianta esatta (New drawing of modern Rome with its streets, sites, and buildings in exact plan). The city is at center, surrounded by copious pictorial vignettes and textual addresses. Except for a few roads that continue outside the walls and a lightly inked zone lying to the northeast (at upper left), Rome is extracted from its surroundings, and the Vatican appears yet again like a ponderous anchor at lower left. Greuter’s map is exceptional among seventeenth-­century images of Rome in that it was based on a new survey of the city, the pianta esatta to which he referred in the title. Its cartographic exactitude represents an advance over Bufalini and others, but this development is accompanied by little fanfare. The source of the new survey is unknown—­indeed, the only evidence of it is the map itself—­and there is no indication that Greuter himself had anything to do

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with it. Judging from his address to the public in a cartouche at upper right, Greuter was more eager to emphasize a different contribution, namely, his depiction of “the buildings all in detail with real likeness.”43 True to his rhetoric, Greuter lavished care on individual urban and architectural features, which were probably worked up from careful on-­the-­spot studies. Despite the large size of his map, its meticulously rendered detail seems to invite inspection with a magnifying glass. Following Greuter, this focus on painstakingly precise treatment of the built fabric in its current state became entrenched. In the meantime, however, his map was the last to incorporate a new survey for 130 years. Published well into the papacy of Paul V Borghese, Greuter’s map presents a much clearer record of Rome during that pope’s reign than did Maggi’s sweeping woodcut, which it preceded by a few years. St. Peter’s is represented in its newly complete state, with its three final nave bays and facade by Maderno, its proportions rigorously correct (in contrast to its lax treatment by Tempesta and Maggi) (fig. 71). So detailed is Greuter’s etching that one can even make out the statues of Christ and the apostles that crown the facade, if only as silhouetted verticals facing out toward the city. Greuter did not forgo distortion entirely. The Vatican obelisk, for example, is exaggerated in height, as are the others around Rome. Still, the image is remarkable for its commitment to factuality. To the right of the Vatican, in Trastevere, the new Via di San Fran­ cesco a Ripa can be seen opening a path through the medieval matrix of one of Rome’s denser neighborhoods. Across town, Santa Maria Maggiore is depicted in greater, more specific and correct detail than it was in Maggi’s map (fig. 72). Paul V’s renovations figure prominently: the Pauline Chapel and the piazza on the far side of the basilica are readily visible, as is the monumental Corinthian column that the pope had placed in front of the church after removing it from the Basilica of Maxentius in the Forum. That column, now capped by a statue of the Virgin Mary, mirrors the obelisk that Sixtus V had raised on the other side of the building, much as Paul’s chapel mirrors that of his predecessor across the nave. Paul also followed in Sixtus’s footsteps by improving circulation near the church, inserting a series of short, straight streets in the Suburra neighborhood just west of the church, and completing the Via Gregoriana (today’s Via Merulana) linking Santa Maria Maggiore with St. John Lateran to the south.44 On the whole, Paul V’s urban interventions were much more modest than those of his forebear. Even so, the heraldry crowding the edges of the map glorifies Paul’s accomplishments by catering to his self-­fashioning as the successor of Sixtus V. Greuter devoted considerable attention to this decorative entourage, which takes up more than half the surface area of the print as a whole and

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Figure 71. Greuter, Disegno nuovo di Roma, detail: allegorical imagery and Saint Peter’s. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Rome, P. G. 6A.

establishes its rhetoric. Two columns of vignettes at left and right—­which adjoin vertical lists of popes and emperors, respectively—­draw flattering parallels between the monuments of the two popes. In a panel at top left, for example, Paul V’s newly erected Marian column is represented between the imperial columns that Sixtus had crowned with statues of Saints Peter and Paul in the late 1580s, its height compared favorably with theirs (in a wonderfully Freudian touch). One register down, the interior of the Pauline Chapel at Santa Maria Maggiore is shown as the twin to that of Sixtus in the corresponding vignette at right. Several rungs below, the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola appears

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Figure 72. Greuter, Disegno nuovo di Roma, detail: Santa Maria Maggiore. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Rome, P. G. 6A.

as the counterpart to the Fontana dell’Acqua Felice, with which it shares a triumphal-­arch format. A depiction of the Palazzo del Quirinale, at right above the Acqua Paola Fountain, notes that it was begun by Sixtus and completed by Paul, who had in fact made it the official papal residence. Similarly, in an address to the reader, Greuter obsequiously praised Paul’s “notable enhancements” to the city, singling out the completion of the “excellent” St. Peter’s and the “most sumptuous” Pauline Chapel. These and other papal marvels, Greuter wrote, had inspired him to “spare no effort to put before the eyes of the whole world almost a new, and modern Rome,” which seems “in a certain way reborn under the happiest pontificate of Pope Paul V.”45 Yet Greuter balances his solicitous focus on one powerful pontiff with the achievements of the popes and splendors of Rome in general. He does not

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limit his praise to the doings of Paul V, but also mentions “the magnificence of the streets newly straightened” and “the churches newly erected.”46 Similarly, several of the landmarks depicted in the vignettes at the sides of the map were long-­term projects associated with earlier papacies—­St. Peter’s itself being a prime example, as is the Campidoglio, at right, which was the brainchild of Paul III. At the lower border, views of the seven major pilgrimage basilicas, along with a list of more than three hundred churches in the city, commemorate Rome’s Christian heritage. Allegorical imagery surrounding the map refers to the city’s mytho-­historical past but inflects it with a modern, Christian message. An enthroned personification of Rome bearing a winged victory at upper left is flanked by the city’s patron saints, Peter and Paul. Beneath this trio, a vignette shows the well-­known Tiber river god statue—­next to the bronze She-­Wolf nursing Romulus and Remus—­being “fed” by personifications of the city’s recently repaired aqueducts, who pour ewers of water upon him (see fig. 71). These winsome female figures are labeled “Vergine,” “Felice,” and “Paola,” for the conduits repaired from the 1570s through 1620s by Pius V, Sixtus V, and Paul V, respectively—­in a clear allusion not to ancient engineering prowess but rather to the recent popes who had renewed the city’s water supply by repairing these aqueous lifelines.47 Greuter was able to adapt his map easily to subsequent papacies, reprinting it twice with just minor adjustments in 1626 and 1638.48 The real protagonist of this map, as of Tempesta’s, is papal Rome: the modern summa of the city’s greatness. Greuter’s Disegno nuovo set a new standard on many counts—­fineness of detail, skill of execution, exactitude, accuracy, legibility, quality. It was not replaced as the dominant image of Rome for almost six decades, until 1676, when Giovanni Battista Falda (1643–­78) published his splendid wall map (plate 11). Even then, that work was a glorified elaboration of Greuter’s prototype, not a new chapter in imagery of the city. Falda, from the remote Piemontese village of Valduggia, came to Rome as an adolescent in the mid-­1650s. There he became the protégé of Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, who discovered Falda when he was one of many apprentices in Bernini’s workshop. De Rossi took the young man under his wing, seeing to his training in architectural rendering and perspective, as well as in etching and engraving. Under De Rossi’s guidance, Falda became one of the most skilled designers and printmakers of architectural views in late seventeenth-­century Rome.49 Their collaboration was highly fruitful until it was cut short by Falda’s untimely death just two years after the publication of his most celebrated work, the pianta grande of 1676. In addition to that

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map, Falda and De Rossi together produced an earlier, smaller one in 1667, as well as several books of architectural views, including Disegno delle fabriche prospettive e piazze fatte nuovamente in Roma (1663); Nuovo teatro delle fabbriche et edificii in prospettiva di Roma moderna (1665–­69); Palazzi di Roma (1670–­78; with Pietro Ferrerio); Fontane di Roma (1675); and Giardini di Roma, published posthumously in the early1680s.50 The views of Roman sites, or vedute, that appear in these publications are important forebears of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s considerably more famous eighteenth-­century etchings of Roman sites, and of the whole veduta genre that took flight in the 1700s, but there are important differences.51 Falda’s oeuvre, although not lacking in distortion, is much more architectural and documentary in emphasis. His etched line is crisper and more precise, and he was relatively sparing in his use of anecdotal detail. In contrast to many later views, Falda’s works are not atmospheric and betray little desire to romanticize ruins—­in fact, he was not particularly interested in them, as his publications were explicitly focused on the “new” and “modern” parts of Rome. The same impulse and aesthetic shaped his maps of the city, which were produced in a heated publishing competition that pitched Falda and Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi as one camp against the latter’s cousin, Giovanni Battista de Rossi, and his own talented if often uncredited protégé, Lieven Cruyl.52 Heightening the tension—­not to mention the confusion for modern scholars—­the two De Rossi maintained workshops within blocks of each other in Rome’s center. The opening salvo in their cartographic rivalry was Cruyl’s Tempestan Pianta di Roma come si trova al presente (fig. 69), published by Giovanni Battista in 1665. Two years later, Falda and Giovanni Giacomo countered with a two-­ sheet map that is referred to, in hindsight, as Falda’s pianta piccola, or small plan, although it was of perfectly respectable dimensions (26⅞ × 34⅝ in.; 68.2 × 88 cm).53 This etching of 1667 was essentially a reduced-­scale version of Greuter’s map, duplicating its contours but updated to commemorate the city under Pope Alexander VII, to whom it was dedicated.54 Not only was its cartography derived from Greuter’s model, but also many of its decorative and rhetorical motifs, down to personifications of the Tiber and of recently repaired aqueducts bearing ewers. Derivative or not, Falda’s pianta piccola was an instant success: one of the most frequently and enduringly copied maps of the early modern period.55 Also widely imitated—­if slightly less so—­was the rejoinder published by the Giovanni Battista de Rossi–­Cruyl camp the following year, the Nuova pianta di Roma presente of 1668 (this, incidentally, is the map that Samuel Pepys hung in a gilded frame) (fig. 73).56 Measuring an imposing 66½ × 50¾ in. (169 ×

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Figure 73. Matteo Gregorio de Rossi and Lieven Cruyl, Nuova pianta di Roma presente (Rome: Carlo Losi, 1773 [orig. Giovanni Battista de Rossi, 1668]), etching and engraving, 66½ × 50¾ in. (169 × 129 cm). Digital image courtesy of Allan Ceen, Studium Urbis, Rome.

129 cm), it is considerably larger than Falda’s pianta piccola of the previous year, but it too derives from Greuter’s survey and includes a host of decorative marginalia. Giovanni Battista’s son Matteo Gregorio (1638–­1702) is given credit on the map’s face for its design, but it is Cruyl, again, who seems to be the unsung protagonist. His drawings were the basis for most of the twenty-­two small views (or vedutine) adorning the bottom margin, and probably for the architectural renderings within the city proper.57 Aside from a handful of the most

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Figure 74. Antonio Barbey, Nuova pianta della città di Roma (Rome: Domenico de Rossi, 1697), etching and engraving, 20½ × 22¾ in. (52 × 58 cm). The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content program.

prominent buildings shown in parallel perspective, the map is ichnographic: an anomaly among seventeenth-­century images of Rome. Its only peer in this regard is a relatively modest print that circulated less widely, Antonio Barbey’s Nuova pianta della città di Roma, which was published in 1697 by Domenico de Rossi, Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi’s adopted son and heir (fig. 74).58 This map was yet another in the vein of Greuter (and yet another that Pepys acquired), but with the three-­dimensional built environment stripped away entirely. De Rossi’s map of 1668 and Barbey’s of 1697 merit mention not for particular originality but because they are the lone orthogonal (or nearly so) representations of the city from the 1600s. The vast majority of works published for

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public consumption incorporated more perspectival enhancement to simulate the visual appearance of the city and its component parts. Almost a decade passed before Falda and Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi completed the series triumphantly with what became the last word in seventeenth-­ century imagery of Rome. Published in 1676, their pianta grande is a massive etching on twelve sheets, together measuring 61⅜ × 60¼ in. (156 × 153 cm) (plate 11).59 Its typically grandiloquent title proclaims it to be all-­encompassing and profoundly current: Nuova pianta et alzata della città di Roma con tutte le strade piazze et edificii de tempii palazzi giardini et altre fabbriche antiche e moderne come si trovano al presente nel pontificato di Papa Innocentio XI . . . (New plan and elevation of the city of Rome with all the streets, piazze, and buildings of temples, palaces, gardens, and other constructions, ancient and modern, as they are found in the present during the pontificate of Pope Innocent XI). Larger than any map since Maggi’s, the Nuova pianta combines colossal scale with minute treatment of all urban features, granting the viewer the most vivid illusion yet of floating far above the city. Falda’s choice to employ the architectural terms pianta and alzata (plan and elevation) in his title was telling. His image is not a prospect—­a view into the distance—­nor was it meant to be. With measured precision, it brought the perspective-­plan tradition to a culmination. In style as well as overall form, Falda’s Nuova pianta differed from contemporary prospects of Rome. Unlike Tempesta or Maggi, who cultivated a picturesque, lively, beguilingly unkempt vision of the city, Falda rendered a version that is burnished, static, and airless. The differences emerge most clearly in a direct confrontation of the Nuova pianta with Tempesta’s Prospectus (fig. 57). While Tempesta deliberately exaggerated the meanderings of Rome’s streets and the undulations of its hills, Falda suppressed the same qualities. In the Prospectus, the Tiber seems to become an animate being, flowing through the city, expanding and contracting; again, the entire city is treated zoomorphically such that it resembles a living organism. In Falda’s Nuova pianta, by contrast, the river is locked into place—­a stabilizing force that ties the city down, not an animating feature. Topography is smoothed out, the city’s natural variations and rolling terrain minimized such that Rome’s surface is close to planimetric. The overall effect is highly legible, fastidious, even clinical—­an aesthetic very much in keeping with that of Falda’s architectural views. Much of the decorative surround of the Nuova pianta is derived from Greuter, just as it had been for the small plan of 1667. Falda copied Greuter’s device of showing the Castro Pretorio (ancient military barracks) on the eastern perimeter of the city illusionistically overlapping the title banner at the top of the map, and many other motifs are closely related in content, if not in exact

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form, to those found on the earlier image. At the lower margin of the Nuova pianta is a cartouche containing vignettes of the major pilgrimage churches, their numbers increased by two to include the Chiesa delle Tre Fontane, which marked the presumed spot of St. Paul’s martyrdom south of the city, and the Chiesa dell’Annunziata, also outside city walls near San Sebastiano. At upper left, an enthroned female figure wearing a papal tiara personifies not Rome but instead the church—­in a sense, however, she is both, for by now the two were synonymous. She is accompanied by a personification of justice holding a scale as well as the fasces—­or bundle of wooden rods—­that symbolize authority. To the right of this allegorical duo is the family arms of Innocent XI Odescalchi (r. 1676–­89), surrounded by papal insignia and held aloft by cherubs; beneath these features is a dedication to the pope on a banner unfurled by floating putti. Further down the left margin is a small inset map of the Roman campagna, oriented with north at left, showing the Tiber’s path to Ostia on the Tyrrhenian coast—­in a sense it provides the context that Falda excluded in the larger map of Rome, extracted as it is from all surroundings. Below the inset is an index to the titular and diaconal churches of the city. At upper right, De Rossi included a public address, encircled by heraldry of the rioni and of Rome as a whole, above a cartouche with an index to the city’s palaces. Beneath it is a compass rose indicating the orientation, and at lower right is a final cartouche containing an index to the churches of Rome that are not mentioned in the list at left (as well as monasteries, convents, parishes, etc.). Perhaps the most intriguing element is the decorative border that adorns this last cartouche, for suspended from its crown of gracefully curling acanthus leaves are two bundles of surveying instruments, including a ruler, bussola, and foldable measuring rod on the left side, and dividers and mason’s level on the right. These are basically the same tools that Bufalini had used to map the city and depicted on his plan 125 years earlier. Falda was laying claim to accuracy by representing them here—­an accuracy his map achieved more than Bufalini’s had—­but he had not surveyed Rome. The cartography of the Nuova pianta, even more closely than the pianta piccola of 1667, was adopted from Greuter’s Disegno nuovo. Indeed, were Falda’s map to be extracted from its decorative framework and inspected from a reasonable viewing distance, it would be all but indistinguishable from that prototype.60 The instruments that Falda represented could also be used to measure individual buildings, but the extent to which he employed them in that capacity is again open to question. Joseph Connors has argued that the views of individual Roman sites that Falda published in volumes such as his Nuovo teatro were largely pilfered from Cruyl’s designs, and there is no reason to suppose

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he would forswear such borrowing when it came to his map.61 Still, it seems likely that Falda executed at least some of his own architectural surveys. His preoccupation with accuracy is stated clearly in his title, with its emphasis on architecture and measured representation, and there is little doubt he had the requisite technical knowledge to back up his rhetoric. An inventory made after his death reveals that his belongings included an impressive library—­consisting of almost three hundred volumes, modern and classical, on subjects both practical and theoretical, together with nearly the same number of maps (Greuter’s probably among them)—­as well as many of the very instruments that appear at the lower right of his Nuova pianta.62 In light of these possessions, it seems reasonable to conclude that Falda’s map resulted from a combination of personal data gathering and the long-­standing tradition of compilation from carefully chosen sources. Falda’s debt to Greuter is undeniable, but his improvements on that model become evident upon closer scrutiny of his map. While Falda still included some generic infill structures, for example, he went further to depict Rome’s buildings in striking and convincing detail (compare the treatment of structures near St. Peter’s in figs. 71 and 75). And where Greuter’s map invites inspection with a magnifying glass, Falda’s calls for a microscope. For the first time, a majority of buildings seem to have been drawn from life and based on careful firsthand observation. The particularizing quality of the map reflects Falda’s background as a designer and etcher of vedute, and the synergy of his publications is clear. The legwork that went into his many views of the city’s architecture and urban spaces, especially his Nuovo teatro, informed his meticulous treatment of the same elements in his Nuova pianta. He and Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi must also have expected that collectors would be inclined to purchase both of these mutually reinforcing works. Published in three volumes, the Nuovo teatro was just as insistently focused on modern Rome and covered many of the architectural categories that Falda singled out in the title of his map, while his other publications filled out the remainder. In other words, Falda had already accumulated a wealth of graphic research that was readily applicable to the design of his Nuova pianta. Regardless of whether that research originated with himself or Cruyl, Falda stood out for insistently embedding Rome’s buildings in their urban settings in his vedute, thereby highlighting the city’s connective tissue. In many of his prints, the streets and piazze of Rome are presented not just as a framing device for architecture but as the central nexus of the image. Falda’s focus on environments rather than buildings alone reflects a cartographic predisposition toward the urban matrix that was fully realized in his Nuova pianta. Not coincidentally,

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Tempesta, Maggi, and Cruyl—­who also represented the built fabric in greater detail than their predecessors—­had similarly produced views of Roman buildings and sites. They were all outdone, however, by the virtuoso handling evident in Falda’s map. If Falda’s vedute served as preparation for his pianta grande, then the latter, in turn, did much to publicize those volumes. On one hand, it did so implicitly, by demonstrating the talents of the author and whetting the public’s appetite for more detailed treatments of the individual elements depicted. It also did so explicitly. In his address to “the noble and studious reader” at the upper right of the map, encircled by insignia of the city’s fourteen rioni, Giovanni Gia­ como de Rossi enumerated the other items he had worked tirelessly to publish for the benefit of eager viewers. Included in the self-­congratulating litany are the Nuovo teatro and books on a variety of architectural and urban subjects, all “delightfully done.”63 His one remaining goal, he wrote, was to “perfect the plan of modern Rome, better arranged and more correct than others issued up to now, with the elevations and internal compartments of the buildings, churches, palaces, and other constructions, as now I present to you in these sheets such that you can see the form of each, and admire again all together the appearance and greatness of Rome, wandering with your eyes through all the streets, piazze, gardens, and quarters of the city.” De Rossi concluded with an entreaty to “enjoy my efforts, so that I might continue to serve you with the novelty of my prints, and live content.”64 Self-­advertising and gallant pandering aside, the Nuova pianta does indeed entice the viewer to wander with his eyes through the astonishingly detailed city, more so than any previous image. Although dedicated to the current pope, Innocent XI, the map is really a window onto the Rome of Alexander VII, whose urbanistic changes overshadowed those of his successor. Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi had cultivated a particularly good rapport with this pope, who bestowed important favors on him—­most notably a ten-­year, blanket printing privilege on works as yet unspecified: quite an extraordinary concession. That privilege of 1664 was granted to De Rossi in return for publishing imagery favorable to the pope, and in anticipation of more such imagery. The first two volumes of the Nuovo teatro were duly dedicated to Alexander’s architectural and urban renewal projects—­in fact, the pope seems to have closely monitored the preparatory stages of the publication—­followed by the pianta piccola of 1667.65 Although the pianta grande appeared several years into the next papal regime, it was, in effect, a posthumous homage to Alexander, who did more to transform the face of Rome—­and to exploit the propagandistic capabilities of

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Roman printers—­than any other pope since Sixtus V the previous century.66 Alexander’s interventions were of a different nature than those of that forebear: more urban aggrandizement than urban planning. He was less concerned to lay out new arteries and processional routes in underused areas, and more driven to create scenographic stages within the existing matrix. The notion of Rome as a theater—­a place of grand public settings—­originated with this pontificate.67 To transform the city accordingly, piazze were expanded and regularized to be more gracious, then adorned with new fountains and architectural scenery. Building facades were also enlisted in the larger scheme. Alexander’s program constituted stage design on a vast scale. The two great projects in this vein are the squares designed for St. Peter’s at the Vatican and the Porta del Popolo at the northern entrance to the city. Sixtus V and Domenico Fontana had been the first to exploit the scenographic potential of the vista by laying out straight streets between terminal monuments and marking them with obelisks, but Alexander VII and his architects—­foremost among them Bernini—­brought that potential to its apogee. At least as important were the efforts of the editori who publicized these interventions well beyond the confines of Rome and the Italian peninsula—­ who were uniquely positioned, as Greuter wrote, to “put before the eyes of the whole world almost a new, and modern Rome.” Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi was a savvy operator who ingratiated himself with the Chigi pope, but it was a mutually beneficial relationship. Alexander VII was quite happy to bestow papal favor on the publisher who—­as purveyor to the world of modern Roman marvels—­could act as a quasi-­official image maker. The pope was able to remake Rome, but only print could aggrandize the city and its image on a global scale. More than his forerunner Lafreri, Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi recognized the power of his role and capitalized on it. Accordingly, Alexander’s theater of urban showpieces comes to life in Falda’s map (fig. 75). At left, the Piazza del Popolo—­begun 1655—­is in progress. The new, twin domed churches of Santa Maria di Montesanto and Santa Maria dei Miracoli (1662–­79) face the city gate across the open space and demarcate the three streets that radiate from there into the city like spokes of a wheel. In the lower left corner of the map, St. Peter’s Square appears in its complete state, as it already had on the pianta piccola—­although there Falda had represented it with the “third arm” of columns closing in the entrance end that were part of Bernini’s original plan, but were never to be executed. As in other cases, the map transcends one pope’s accomplishments to become an invaluable architectural record of Rome as a whole in 1676. Recent monuments shown here in accurate detail are too numerous to list in full. Among the

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Figure 75. Falda, Nuova pianta, details: Piazza del Popolo (left); Vatican and St. Peter’s (right). Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno; photograph courtesy of Digital Production Services, Brown University Library.

highlights are Bernini’s Church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale (1658–­71); Fran­ cesco Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (begun 1634) and Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza (1642–­60); the hulking Palazzo Barberini (completed 1633); the Piazza Navona, regularized at the impetus of Innocent X Pamphili (r. 1644–­55), whose family palace (1644–­50) is visible there, as is the new Church of Sant’Agnese in Agone (1652–­57) and Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain (completed 1651) (fig. 76). The Campidoglio had finally been finished according to Michelangelo’s specifications in 1655 (except for its pavement design, not completed until the twentieth century). Falda depicted the final element that had been put in place: the Palazzo Nuovo mirroring the Palazzo dei Conservatori, the two together grandly bracketing the Palazzo del Senatore and Marcus Aurelius statue. In the eastern quadrant of the city, Falda was equally exacting in his representation of Rome’s greenbelt. His work for his book on gardens surely doubled as research for this aspect of his map. The sumptuous Villa Montalto, begun by Domenico Fontana for Sixtus V in the 1570s and expanded after he became pope, rises on the Esquiline just beyond Santa Maria Maggiore, preceded by a forecourt comprising two symmetrical, triangular gardens (fig. 77). The grounds of the Villa Medici, on the Pincio near the Porta del Popolo, consist of neat, square plots; also visible in Falda’s map are the fountain and small obelisk that were on axis with the rear entrance of the villa itself. Vegetation is rendered in unprecedented detail. The Nuova pianta distinguishes individual gardens from orchards, registering those that are divided

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into perfectly geometric, manicured rectangles as well as those that form irregular trapezoids. Deciduous and coniferous trees are clearly differentiated. Avenues of cypresses divide plots and create grand approaches to suburban palaces; formal, ornamental gardens can be distinguished from farmed fields, fallow parcels from those in active cultivation. No previous map had devoted such attention to the lavishly tended villas of Rome, which were, not coincidentally, becoming major cultural strongholds in these very years. Falda reduced some of Greuter’s residual distortion. Obelisks, for example, have been brought down to size. Yet for all his rigor with regard to Rome’s architecture, he was not immune to manipulations of scale in the larger urban

Figure 76. Falda, Nuova pianta, details (clockwise from top right): San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and Sant’Andrea al Quirinale; Capitoline Hill; Piazza and Palazzo Barberini; Piazza Navona (with Sant’Ivo at upper right). Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno; photograph courtesy of Digital Production Services, Brown University Library.

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Figure 77. Falda, Nuova pianta, details: Villa Medici (left); Villa Montalto/Santa Maria Maggiore (right). Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno; photograph courtesy of Digital Production Services, Brown University Library.

fabric, as is particularly evident in his widened streets and inflated squares. Francesca Consagra and Italo Insolera have both observed that Falda’s tendency was to regularize, amplify, and sanitize Alexander’s Rome, in order to maximize its scenographic potential.68 Indeed, the word sanitize is not out of place with regard to Falda’s Nuova pianta, or, for that matter, any map from the early modern period. Rome in this time was a gritty, even seedy place punctuated by the grand set pieces of papal urbanism. Pilgrims, priests, prostitutes, and pigs jockeyed for position on the unpaved streets, which tended to be filthy and choked with carriage traffic. None of this vibrant tumult makes an appearance on Falda’s map or any other; the genre as a whole is oddly depopulated. The cartographic prominence given to streets also hints that they were much more than sites of passage. Indeed, they were central to Roman life, and not just because they enabled circulation. Streets were the lifeblood of any city, and in Rome they were the public settings for religious ritual, displays of power, carnivals and festivals, the exchange of news, commerce of all kinds, the meting out of justice, and the performance of identity as defined by gender, class, and other social markers. When the Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay wrote that “Rome was all the world, and all the world is Rome,” he might have had this frenetic spectacle in mind.69 To a significant extent,

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then, all early modern mapmakers whitewashed the colorful, often squalid reality of Rome, but Falda outdid his peers in presenting an idealized, orderly city. At the same time, Falda’s Nuova pianta exemplifies how maps could both disclose and obliterate social and class differences. In earlier works like Bufalini’s plan (plate 1), or even late medieval ideograms like Taddeo di Bartolo’s (plate 2), places (and by implication populations) that were deemed unworthy were simply omitted. Falda and his contemporaries placed a premium on thoroughness, so by default they were more inclusive—­and in a sense more revealing—­than their predecessors. “Urban space,” Laurie Nussdorfer has written, “displayed, publicized, concealed, dominated, excluded, enclosed, separated, trapped, and protected.”70 The same could be said for seventeenth-­century representations of Rome like the Nuova pianta, despite their lack of human beings. Grand papal squares and thoroughfares, for example, are clear statements of the regime’s authority, but the pope was not the only powerful force in town. Recent churches like Il Gesù or the Chiesa Nuova are testaments to the growing influence of new religious orders over the cityscape, as over the church and its adherents. Similarly, the sprawling, aggregate compounds of prominent families like the Farnese, Borghese, Barberini, and Colonna bear witness to their power over Roman space, and Roman politics (fig. 78; see also fig. 76). Private palazzi were often fronted by public piazze that were just as clear signals of status as were the hulking residences themselves, for it took considerable sway to create a clearing in Rome’s dense urban fabric. As visible on Falda’s map, these piazze often bore the names of the families—­not only Barberini, Borghese, and Farnese, but also Cenci, Altieri, and dozens of others—­who managed to carve up the city in just this way, thus reinforcing and publicizing their power. Marginalized segments of the population are also recorded in Falda’s map. He meticulously depicts the Jewish Ghetto close to the Tiber Island, for example, with its gated, confining precincts in full evidence (fig. 78). The Nuova pianta, like other maps, is also a gendered representation. Nussdorfer notes that streets and public space were “coded as male”; the same could be said for the maps that necessarily favored the depiction of these urban features, and that were geared primarily toward male consumers (exceptional figures like Isabella d’Este aside).71 The female realm was the private sphere; most women’s lives unfolded within the walls of homes or convents that could not be opened to cartographic representation. The territorial mastery that was implied in any map’s sweeping coverage was a distinctly masculine breed of mastery. In this sense, a map, no matter how exhaustive, was grievously impoverished: a “man’s-­eye view” of the city. Yet even as maps excluded, they also granted

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Figure 78. Falda, Nuova pianta, details: Piazza and Palazzo Farnese (top left); Piazza and Palazzo Borghese (bottom left); Jewish Ghetto (right). Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno; photograph courtesy of Digital Production Services, Brown University Library.

access—­albeit limited—­to places generally off-­limits to the public at large. The elevated viewpoint of Falda’s Nuova pianta allowed spectators to peer into walled gardens, explore closed palace courtyards, and savor the meditative peace of secluded monastic cloisters. A Rome that was inaccessible in reality became available—­visible and visitable—­through imagery. The map of 1676 wielded more influence than any previous picture of the city, including Tempesta’s and Rosselli’s. Not until Nolli’s plan of 1748 was it supplanted by a new paradigm. The Nuova pianta was reissued in Rome from the same plates in 1697, 1705, 1730, and even in 1756—­after Nolli’s map.72 Curiously, these editions retained the dedication to Innocent XI, the title banner of 1676, the names of Falda and Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, and even the latter’s preface, long after all interested parties had died—­perhaps because the original was deemed authoritative, so these names carried considerable prestige. Yet the reprints were in fact new states, updated to reflect the latest changes to the city and its buildings. In each, a fluttering banderole at the top is now included just below the title, bearing an inscription attesting to “the addition of new

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constructions of churches and other buildings done up to the present year”; the year in question is noted beneath. There also appeared a plethora of reduced-­scale versions that were translated into different languages and practically mass-­produced north of the Alps—­in Amsterdam (ca. 1691, ca. 1693, 1696, 1704, ca. 1710, ca. 1720, ca. 1740), Nuremberg (1719, ca. 1720), Paris (1713), London (ca. 1720), and Augsburg (ca. 1725, ca. 1730).73 Some of these derivatives gave credit to Falda in their title, but most did not. Unlike the restrikes from the original plates, these smaller copies did update the coat of arms, now placed at upper right, to reflect the current pope, but they did not update the map itself, such that for seven decades the image of Rome perpetuated across Europe was the increasingly anachronistic city of Alexander VII. Falda’s “new” map of Rome lived on long after it had become obsolete as a picture of the modern city. The fetishization of the new, so pronounced in imagery published in seventeenth-­century Rome, was mostly limited to works issued within the Aurelian Walls. This is not to say that modern Rome was the province of Romans. On the contrary, the artists and publishers active in the city who were so keen to outdo each other in their timely, detailed representations were almost all outsiders—­be they from Piedmont, like Falda, Florence, like Tempesta, Lombardy, like Maggi, Flanders, like Cruyl, or Alsace, like Greuter. Even the De Rossi clan originated near Milan. This trend had already been established in the sixteenth century, with Lafreri, Du Pérac, and others. A truly international cohort of talented artisans was drawn to the city, to draw the city, and then to export it. As much as their enterprise was a business—­and a backstabbing, cutthroat one at that—­it is hard to escape the conclusion that it was also a labor of love, fired by passion for this most magnetic and beguiling of places. Like the grand urban interventions of Alexander VII that transformed the cityscape into a great spectacle, the maps of seventeenth-­century Rome were teatri. They were, to borrow Richard Krautheimer’s phrase, “shows worth seeing”—­but unlike their brick and mortar counterparts, they could be brought home and restaged.74 Even as seventeenth-­century publishers sought to produce the most glorious image of the increasingly magnificent city, the papacy was losing ground on the international political stage. In his classic study of the city under Alexander VII, Krautheimer noted that the pope was acutely conscious of Rome’s waning influence in the wake of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.75 His ambitious program of urban embellishment was a form of statecraft. With the city fading as a world power, Alexander transformed it into a cultural capital. In

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so doing, he catered to a growing class of connoisseur-­tourists—­distinct from pilgrims—­who were omnivorously interested in the great sites of classical and Christian Rome. This group of amateurs came into full flower the following century with the Grand Tour. The market for maps of the city expanded accordingly, but the nature of those maps—­the subject of the epilogue—­ changed in the 1700s. The works examined in this chapter are a fitting culmination of this book, for with them many of the trends traced in this study reach maturity. This chapter has stressed differences between sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century images, as well as between painterly and architectural paradigms, while exploring the nuances of individual works. Ultimately, however, all of these works share important characteristics, especially as defined against those that came later. They are unabashedly celebratory, without pretense to neutrality—­even if they do increasingly sing the praises of their own accuracy. To varying degrees, they are also all fusions of pictorialism and cartography, stemming from the desire to combine verisimilitude with quantitative information. Tempesta showed Rome from a relatively low viewpoint, but one that still rises high enough in the air to give a glimpse of the city’s footprint from above. Even Maggi’s urban welter affords determined spectators an opportunity to trace a path through Rome’s streets, imagining their journey from one place to another. Similarly, Cruyl invented a distinctive hybrid form, and Falda, too, resisted pure ichnography, choosing instead to depict buildings in a visually recognizable form. All of these works beckoned viewers to go wandering with their eyes through Rome’s streets, bridges, and piazze, while also granting access to places that were off-­limits to most in real life. The next century brought a more rigid division between graphic types, drawing a curtain on centuries of fervent experimentation. It also ushered in a new, Enlightenment emphasis on factual representation. Although more great images of Rome were still to come, the city portrait genre as a mode of creative commemoration had peaked and was on the wane by the end of the seventeenth century.

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Epilogue

The Eternal City Measured and Imagined

The centuries of images traced in this study are united not only by their ingenious fusions of graphic modes but also by their boundless inventive momentum. Even as they grow increasingly commercial—­the means of their production and their visual forms ever more codified—­these works radiate innovative fervor, from the first steps toward mapping Rome by Leon Battista Alberti and the earliest convincingly realistic view of the city by Francesco Rosselli to the virtuoso performances of Antonio Tempesta, Giovanni Battista Falda, and all who came between. The lenses turned on the Eternal City were as varied as the messages that were teased out of it. Still, a clear narrative arc emerges from this rich history. Much as Rome changed a great deal over the early modern period, so too did the images celebrating it. First and perhaps foremost, the dominant tone shifted in step with the guiding preoccupations of the day and the city’s growing prosperity—­from a yearning to equal the city’s past glory to an ideal synthesis of Rome’s many historical layers and finally a more polemical insistence on Rome’s exceptional status as a modern Christian metropolis: a beacon on the global stage.

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Representations of Rome also became increasingly, self-­consciously propagandistic. While they were not governed by papal dictate, by the late seventeenth century they might as well have been—­and in the case of works issued by Falda and Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, a de facto partnership was forged between publisher and pontiff. At the same time, the mechanisms of production shifted. The entire process grew more professionalized, the roles of individuals involved at every stage more specialized. By contrast—­except for the work of Rosselli, one of the earliest professional printmakers, in the late 1400s—­most early Renaissance maps of Rome originated in a small circle of scholars and architects active in that city. These figures were enthusiasts driven by an abiding passion for antiquity more than entrepreneurialism, and they intended their works for the delectation of like-­minded peers rather than broad public dissemination. This state of affairs began to change in the mid-­1500s with Antonio Lafreri, but the decisive turn came with the De Rossi family in the seventeenth century. The age of the amateur map-­and printmaker ended even as the target audience expanded dramatically to encompass pilgrims and Grand Tourists from across Europe. Savvy publishers understood that their images promulgated an officially sanctioned view of Rome that had the potential for international reach, and they adjusted their ambitions accordingly. They also began to recognize the opportunity for profit in maps suited for practical as opposed to symbolic ends—­a shift that contributed, eventually, to a division along the lines of utility and visual rhetoric, with cartography tied mostly to the former. In modern times this functionality is signaled by the ubiquitous tourist plans that are given away at information kiosks, then heedlessly discarded by visitors leaving a city. But the story has become more interesting recently. The first years of the twenty-­first century have witnessed an explosion in the forms and uses of maps, fewer and fewer of which are on paper. Maps and mapping are increasingly instrumental to innovative scholarship (as in the digital humanities), to the sciences (as in genomic mapping), and to people’s everyday lives (as in our growing dependence on global positioning system technology). This exciting new territory has distinct parallels to the experimental period of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, when new technology enabled new modes of representation and of thinking. But while maps are still appreciated for their practical and educational value, their symbolic, aesthetic dimensions have largely fallen by the wayside, along with the custom of treating them as prestigious consumer objects to be prized and displayed. Indeed, fewer and fewer of them can even be described as objects any longer. Perhaps for this very reason, the last few decades have also seen a surge in the market for antique maps, which command ever-­higher prices from wealthy collectors.

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Figure 79. Giovanni Battista Nolli, Nuova pianta di Roma data in luce da Giambattista Nolli l’anno MDCCXLVIII (Rome, 1748), etching and engraving, 69¼ × 81⅞ in. (176 × 208 cm). Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno.

Even if that scenario was still on the distant horizon three centuries ago, the mid-­1700s marked the beginning of a new era in imagery of Rome. The first half of the century had been something of a dry spell, populated mainly by copies and reissues of earlier works, not anything new. But as with a similar lull two hundred years before—­when five decades separated the prints by Rosselli and Bartolomeo Marliani—­techniques were developing that soon bore fruit and pointed in new directions. Giovanni Battista Nolli’s great map of 1748, the first orthogonal rendering on a grand scale since Bufalini’s of 1551, was the turning point (fig. 79).1 Like so many other key figures discussed in this study, Nolli (1701–­56) was not Roman. An engineer from Como, he had participated in the official campaign to remap Milan that had been initiated by Charles VI of Austria (1685–­1740) and supervised by Hapsburg court mathematician Giovanni Giacomo Marinoni (1676–­1755). With this and other surveying experience under his belt, Nolli came to Rome in 1736 well prepared to spearhead a similarly ambitious project in that city. With him we see the advent of the

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specialized cartographer whose expertise surpassed that of architects trained in surveying. Nolli’s efforts were sponsored by several members of the cultural elite, including the Milanese abbot Diego Revillas (1690–­1746), a well-­connected mathematician and cartographer, who provided financial backing as well as introductions to powerful and learned individuals—­all of which made the Nuova pianta di Roma possible. Thanks to an illustrious support network, Nolli was able to convene a large team of assistants, obtain a passe-­partout letter from the pope granting him access to private properties for the sake of measurement, and overcome all sorts of practical and bureaucratic challenges.2 Nolli’s task was also facilitated by improvements in surveying techniques and instrumentation since Bufalini’s time. The method of triangulation had progressed considerably, and Nolli also had at his disposal a more advanced version of Bufalini’s bussola, a rotatable plane table known as a tavoletta pretoriana—­developed by Marinoni—­which allowed him to measure bearings with greater precision and to convert them instantly into a plan by means of a sheet of paper affixed directly to the instrument’s surface. The process of mapping a city was, in other words, faster, more precise, and easier than it had been two centuries before.3 Nolli’s plan was originally framed as a collaborative effort by a select group of scholars, architects, and engineers, who envisioned a comprehensive and diachronic map of Rome. No preexisting data was to be incorporated—­instead, every building, ruin, apartment block, and alley was to be measured anew, along with Rome’s topography, to ensure the greatest precision. As executed, the map was more limited in scope, for it focused on documenting modern Rome rather than the city across time, but even so it revolutionized urban cartography. Nolli’s plan, when all sheets are joined—­a decision left to the buyer—­is similar in size and scale to Bufalini’s: 69¼ × 81⅞ in. (176 × 208 cm); 1:2900. The map’s twelve sheets were issued along with a reduced-­scale version of the large plan (often called the pianta piccola) and a small copy of Bufalini’s map: Nolli’s nominal tribute to his predecessor, as well as an implicit assertion of progress. Also included was an index to more than 1,300 sites that are numbered on the map itself. By choosing to orient his plan to north, Nolli set a standard for all subsequent maps of Rome, ending once and for all the practice of placing that cardinal direction at left. He also took pains to distinguish between true and magnetic north by including a compass rose that indicated both directions at lower right (fig. 80, top)—­the former with a thin arrow, the latter with a thick arrow capped by a fleur-­de-­lis at the top of the compass. Beneath this motif is a vignette that depicts winged putti reenacting Nolli’s measuring process.

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Figure 80. Nolli, Nuova pianta di Roma, detail: pictorial vignette at bottom right. Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno.

Designed by artist Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691–­1765), not Nolli himself—­who was responsible for the cartography alone—­this scene nonetheless presents a good picture of his working methods. The chief putto-­surveyor, a stand-­in for Nolli, records bearings on a plane table equipped with an alidade for taking sightings, a magnetic compass, and a sheet of paper, while behind him, his assistants unfold thin rods to measure distances. Playful as it may be, this vignette has a serious message, for it leaves little doubt that the map was based on mathematical principles and executed by a team of experts. Nolli’s cartographic tour de force emerges from the map’s ornamental framework. At the top, the Piazza del Popolo caps the familiar form of the Aurelian Walls. From that northern gateway, the trio of Renaissance thoroughfares radiates down into the city. Nolli depicted the inhabited center using a deceptively simple binary scheme. Public and open spaces like streets, piazze, churches, and courtyards are left white, while private spaces like palazzi and convents are hatched to appear gray. Their impenetrability is well conveyed through this visual strategy, by which they are effectively canceled from the

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image. Figure and ground oscillate, as the public spaces do not appear blank or interstitial but rather seem to emerge from the gray backdrop like molded volumes. Collectively, they form an almost corporeal network of interconnected arteries and organs that appear to expand and contract—­much like Rome’s streets and piazze do for visitors moving through the city. Nolli’s validation of urban space as an integrated fabric is the pinnacle of a development that began with Rosselli in the fifteenth century. The level of detail in Nolli’s map would put even Falda to shame. Nolli devised symbols to stand for such minutiae as drains and water fountains, among many other urban features. Outside the city center, he methodically depicted Rome’s green expanse, noting separate plots, properties, and distinct categories of plantings. Nolli also honed graphic strategies to convey a wealth of information about Rome’s built environment. He showed surviving ancient buildings in solid black, for example, to contrast with the hatched gray of later constructions. For partially ruined structures, he distinguished existing architectural members from those he had reconstructed—­conservatively—­by depicting the latter in outline only. Nolli sometimes included buildings that no longer stood, but only if there was a reliable record of them, and even then he used stipple to signal the conjectural nature of his representation. While these tactics provided a degree of chronology that had been absent in Bufalini’s map, Nolli was still painting with a relatively broad brush. At a time when many scholars were moving toward a more sensitive periodization, Nolli limited his differentiation to ancient and later. He was not concerned with the nuances of Rome’s palimpsest, and to an extent he maintained antiquity’s privileged status by treating it as something apart. Rather than reconceiving what was possible in cartographic representation to accord with the most progressive scholarship, he was working within an established paradigm for maps that maintained a simplistic dichotomy between past and present. These subtleties aside, Nolli’s map was still accurate beyond all competitors, exhaustive to an unprecedented degree, and sophisticated in its graphic conventions, establishing a benchmark in the cartography of Rome and of all cities. This is not to say that it broke with all previous tradition. In important respects, Nolli’s plan should be seen as heir to the grand views of the previous century. Its aesthetic (and commercial) ambition is evident in its sheer size, technical virtuosity, and decorative surround. At the map’s lower margin, Panini’s splendid capriccio—­a fanciful combination of Roman monuments and allegorical figures—­is at least as striking and rhetorical as the ornamentation gracing imagery of the 1600s. It also reiterates a familiar message relating to the paragone of ancient and modern. At far left, a marmoreal personification of

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Roma antica, based on a real statue of the goddess Roma at the Campidoglio, sits enthroned, leaning against a sarcophagus and gazing wearily to the right. She is surrounded by famed sculptural antiquities including the Tiber river god statue and the She-­Wolf—­the latter transformed from bronze to marble and exaggeratedly broken. In the background, the Temple of Castor and Pollux, Column of Trajan, Colosseum, Arch of Constantine, and other famed ruins appear in picturesque decay. To the right of Roma antica, the object of her gaze becomes clear, for it is returned by another enthroned female personification, Roma nuova (fig. 80). Holding court in a setting that includes modern marvels such as St. Peter’s, the Campidoglio, and St. John Lateran—­which had just received a new facade by Alessandro Galilei (1691–­1737)—­she is as fluid, graceful, and vivacious as her counterpart is stiff and gloomy. Significantly, it is in the shadow of Roma nuova that the team of putti-­surveyors performs its task, the implication being that modern science is the province of modern Rome. In a trompe l’oeil flourish, the whole scene is shown to unfold beneath the map itself, which hovers above like a great paper cutout, its edges curling up to reveal the stage set beneath—­a play on the tension between illusion and reality, the imagined and the measurable city. Nolli’s map shared some of the rhetoric of its predecessors, and no less than they, it was meant to be appreciated, admired, displayed, and showed off. Still, the austere ichnography at the center stands apart from the decorative exuberance of the edges, a reminder that at its core, Nolli’s map is a radical departure from all that came before. True, its graphic language is essentially identical to that of Bufalini’s plan, but it is otherwise a very different enterprise. Nolli’s commitment to accuracy and comprehensiveness in his treatment of the contemporary city distinguished him sharply from his precursor, as did his ability to realize those qualities in his map thanks to technological and other advantages. While Bufalini’s plan is often considered a relatively crude prelude to the technical sophistication of modern cartography, Nolli’s is uniformly celebrated as the first scientific rendering of Rome—­in fact, only after Nolli did the earlier work come to be deemed imperfect. In that respect and others, Nolli’s influence was immediate and decisive. In his wake, a new dogmatism took hold in imagery of Rome, a rigorously rule-­based approach to representing the city that epitomizes Enlightenment rationalism. Nolli’s project cannot be understood apart from this larger cultural phenomenon, for his map—­more than just an inevitable outgrowth of changing technology—­was a response to the new ethos. This shifting attitude is encapsulated by Nolli’s adoption of north as the orientation for his map: a signal that Rome would henceforth be represented

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according to a convention that applied equally to all cities and places, rather than being specially tailored to its distinct topography and symbolism. This move neutralized what made this place singular in order to regard it from an aloof, objective, leveling remove. During the same period, many cities similarly came to be mapped according to Enlightenment principles that favored large-­scale geometric urban survey: not only Milan by Marinoni (1734), but also Paris by Jean Delagrive (1728), London and Westminster by John Roque (1746), Naples by Giovanni Carafa duca di Noja (1775), and many others. As Mary Sponberg Pedley has observed, “The significance of these maps is not only that they marked turning points or changes in the graphic representation of the city, but rather that they represented the response to a demand for these images.”4 Public expectations had changed along with cartographic technology and modes of representation. The same rationalist tenor and standardizing impulse permeated Western cartography generally in the mid-­eighteenth century. In France, the Cassini family, working under the auspices of the Paris Observatory, inaugurated the first large-­scale, scientific national survey in the 1740s, at exactly the moment when Nolli was publishing his plan.5 In England, meanwhile, longitude was finally becoming measurable with precision thanks to instrumentation developed by John Harrison; finally, the earth as a whole could be accurately gridded—­a process that Ptolemy had conceptualized 1,500 years earlier in the principles of his Geography but that could only be realized with the advent of modern science.6 In maps of Rome as in other realms, however, there existed a clear alternative to the geometry of Nolli’s plan, and the two might be seen in light of the old Ptolemaic distinction between quantitative geography and qualitative chorography. In 1765, Giuseppe Vasi (1710–­82) published a breathtaking, immense panorama of the city that reinstated the traditional viewpoint from the Janiculum Hill along with a pictorialism that was completely at odds with Nolli’s ichnography, in order to present Rome as exceptional (fig. 81).7 In homage to Tempesta’s Prospectus—­a key source of inspiration—­Vasi titled his view Prospetto dell’alma città di Roma (Prospect of the nourishing city of Rome). A native of Corleone, Sicily, Vasi had arrived in Rome in 1736, where he became known for his vedute catering to Grand Tourists’ insatiable desire for souvenirs of the Eternal City. Like Falda the previous century, Vasi specialized in relatively unembellished interpretations of Rome’s settings and architecture that situated monuments in their urban context.8 In this regard he distinguished himself from his competitor Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose vedute offered a more romantic vision of Rome’s monuments, and often isolated them for dramatic effect.

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In addition to the Prospetto, Vasi’s sizable corpus includes suites of etchings dedicated to the Farnese villa at Caprarola (1746), the yearly Chinea festival (1745–­78), the four patriarchal basilicas of Rome (1765 and 1771), and St. Peter’s (1778), as well as a Roman guidebook (the Itinerario istruttivo of 1763). He was also responsible for engraving the plates for Nolli’s pianta grande. More than any other work, however, his reputation rests on the ten-­book Magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna (1747–­61), which was intended more as a commemorative set than a guidebook. With each volume dedicated to different architectural and urban categories, such as gates, squares, palaces, basilicas, convents, hospitals, bridges, and streets, the Magnificenze follows a taxonomic approach similar to that established by Falda in his own books. Comprising a large body of vedute accompanied by verbal descriptions, the Magnificenze also reaffirms the long-­ standing interplay between text and image in representing Rome. Vasi also innovated by using both means to establish links among his various publications—­even anticipating those that had yet to be published. He referred readers to his forthcoming Prospetto in two separate volumes of the Magnificenze, for example, as well as in his Itinerario, which shares the same numbering system as the large panorama for convenient cross-­referencing; the Itinerario guidebook also points back to the Magnificenze. The Prospetto, which includes almost four hundred numbered sites that are named in a legend at the bottom of the view, provides overall urban context for the places included in the books, while the books go into greater depth on those locations and offer complementary kinds of information. Vasi’s large prints of the four patriarchal basilicas were issued with exactly the same vertical dimensions as the Prospetto in order to grant uniformity to and enhance the aesthetics of collective display. In Vasi’s scheme, then, any single work could stand alone, or be enriched through association with related material. By adopting this correlative tactic Vasi was again taking cues from Falda and his publisher Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, the latter of whom, it will be recalled, placed a public address on the large map of 1676 to publicize his other etchings. Vasi, however, transcended mere self-­advertisement, enfolding all of his works into a larger project that John Pinto has likened to a “modern interrelational database linking texts and images.”9 It also might be described, in today’s terms, as a clever marketing strategy. Part of Vasi’s genius, therefore, lay in building on the commercial innovations of previous Roman editori like Lafreri and De Rossi. The Prospetto, a massive etching on eighteen sheets, is Vasi’s best-­known single work. Long admired as the most encompassing, accurate picture of the eighteenth-­century city, it has a grandeur and fidelity to Rome’s physical reality that make it comparable to Nolli’s plan. There, however, the similarities

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Figure 81. Giuseppe Vasi, Prospetto dell’alma città di Roma (Rome, 1761), etching, 40½ × 104 in. (103 × 264 cm). Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno.

Figure 82. Vasi, Prospetto, detail: draftsman. Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno.

end. Unlike Nolli’s urban diagram, Vasi’s dazzling panoramic vista situates the viewer on a crest, the trees and meandering topography of which gradually give way to the city’s countless palazzi, domed churches, and landmarks stretching toward the horizon. As Vasi’s title indicates, he was following in the tradition of Antonio Tempesta’s great Prospectus of 1593—­which itself took after the views by Rosselli in the fifteenth century and Pinard in the sixteenth—­by presenting a powerful illusion of a direct perceptual experience of the city: a view into the distance. This conceit is bolstered by the inconspicuous figure of the draftsman, a surrogate for Vasi, in the shadows of the foreground, drawing the city that unfolds before his eyes (fig. 82). This device is familiar from the fifteenth-­century “View with a Chain” of Florence (fig. 2). Here as there, however, the pretense of straightforward eyewitness experience only goes so far. As a maker of vedute, Vasi is indeed known for his literal approach to the Roman cityscape, but like generations of artists before him he was not above manipulating spatial relationships or scale to achieve a desired effect. For example, there exists no single vantage point on the Janiculum that would allow a viewer to glimpse both St. Peter’s Basilica at left and the Acqua Paola fountain at right, but Vasi curved the edges of the visual field to do just that. These monuments provide weighted bookends to the Prospetto,

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and Vasi also enlarged their proportions to grant them additional prominence. Thus he allowed himself a degree of creative license. That said, Vasi was much more committed than his predecessors to simulating a faithful rendering of the same view that he purported to have seen and sketched from high atop the Janiculum. He employed all the tricks in the artistic toolbox to make that illusion as complete as possible: atmospheric and linear perspective, foreshortening, shading, and so on. Features in the foreground block those in the background, and the further the eye wanders into the distance, the smaller, less distinct the various elements become. Remote monuments are not magnified for legibility, as was so common in earlier views, and Vasi was judicious in his manipulation of their positions. All of these strategies contribute to the Prospetto’s unmatched evocative power as a “living image” of Rome. So convincing is this view that one can almost feel the breeze stirring the leaves in the foreground and feel the warm Roman sun as one gazes out upon the city shimmering in the filtered light. Vasi’s splendid picture sought to capture the essence, and not just the measurements, of this place. Different as it was in outward form from Nolli’s plan, the Prospetto was no less radical a departure from previous imagery. As a consequence of Vasi’s staunch verisimilitude, the image does not invite the spectator to go wandering through Rome’s streets in the manner of views by Rosselli, Pinard, Tempesta, and others. The horizon is much lower—­closer to what one would actually see from the Janiculum—­and the vantage point does not rise high enough above the city to give an understanding of the urban layout. Vasi largely turned away from Cipriano Piccolpasso’s entreaty to “imagine oneself somewhere above . . . , or in the place of Icarus spreading his wings.” There is nothing plan-­like in Vasi’s view—­he left that to the cartographers. The crystalline architectural exactitude of Falda’s map of 1676 also goes by the wayside. Buildings merge into a hazy mass as they fade into the distance. Vasi privileged atmospheric immediacy over the airless, inventorial treatment of a perspective plan. The spectator of the Prospetto, like the draftsman half hidden in the foreground, is meant to admire Rome as a scenographic, distant prospect—­to take it all in at once, not to get lost wandering through its streets or examining each building in minute detail. There is no use here for a magnifying glass, as there had been with Falda’s plan. Rome itself has become a work of art to be admired from afar, and the image as a whole is a splendid exemplar of the veduta tradition, which stemmed from concern for the specifics of the observed natural world and was, in this way, as characteristic of the Enlightenment as geometric survey. Vasi’s Prospetto, then, is just as dogmatic as Nolli’s plan, for much as Nolli banished the pictorialism that so often crept into maps, Vasi did

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away with the cartographic impulses of earlier views. This might have been another clever marketing strategy—­a way for Vasi to stake his own territory by distinguishing his work from Nolli’s. Whatever the reasons, it is clear that there was no halfway measure for either figure, and this inflexibility—­this sense of choosing sides—­came to prevail in the modern period. Yet, even as this period witnessed a more rigid demarcation between mimesis and geometric abstraction in city imagery, the latter had not yet taken on its common modern association with straightforward documentation. The most striking testament to the expressive possibilities of cartography is the famous Campus Martius ichnography of 1762 by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–­78) (plate 12).10 Considered the greatest printmaker of the 1700s, Piranesi was an architect whose extraordinary designs, fueled by his profound knowledge of antiquity, were destined to remain primarily on paper. Born near Treviso in the Republic of Venice, Piranesi’s early experiences included training in building from his father, a master mason, and in engineering from an uncle employed by the Venetian republic as a hydraulic specialist. During the same years, Piranesi was introduced to ancient studies by his brother, a Carthusian monk. It seems likely that Piranesi also gained some background in the visual arts during these years, although there is no documentation to that effect. Certainly the Venetian vedutismo tradition was thriving, its most famous exponent—­Canaletto—­active in those very years. After 1740, when Piranesi arrived in Rome, he mastered the highly specialized skill of etching during a relatively brief stint in Vasi’s workshop. Piranesi was also linked to Nolli, for whom he engraved the decoration of the pianta piccola. He followed closely and might have assisted Nolli’s efforts to put some order to the Forma urbis Romae fragments, then housed in the Capitoline Museum.11 In those ruined marble shards Piranesi glimpsed not just a poignant metaphor for the lost past, but also, like Nolli, a model of cartographic representation. But Piranesi’s own abiding passion for antiquity—­nurtured by his contact with scholars resident at the French Academy in Rome—­led him to channel his cartographic impulses in a different direction. Piranesi’s career gained critical momentum when he began issuing his large-­ scale Vedute di Roma in the 1740s, the most famous of which portray the ruins looming in tragic glory over the modern city. To provide the larger urban context for these etchings, Piranesi’s publications include a number of maps, which encompass the full spectrum of approaches to the cityscape: from neutral to nostalgic, documentary to fantastic, cartographic to pictorial.12 The map of Rome’s ancient monuments that accompanied his Antichità romane of 1756

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Figure 83. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Pianta di Roma disegnata colla situazione di tutti i Monumenti antichi . . . , from Le antichità romane (Rome, 1756), vol. 1, plate 2, etching and engraving, plate size 18¼ × 26¾ in. (46.5 × 68 cm). Digital image courtesy of Allan Ceen, Studium Urbis, Rome.

(fig. 83), for example, is a sober archaeological record in the spirit of Bartolomeo Marliani’s woodcut plan of 1544.13 Here, Piranesi gave a pared-­down glimpse of the locations and current forms of the ruins, which appear as lonely features on a cityscape stripped of all postantique structures. Piranesi bypassed reconstruction and adopted some of Nolli’s graphic strategies for conveying the conditions of the ruins (much as he appropriated the outlines of Nolli’s map as a basis for his own). The ground plans of standing structures like the Pantheon and Mausoleum of Augustus, for instance, appear in black, while those that had left fewer concrete remains, like the Stadium of Domitian (Piazza Navona), are etched lightly in gray. There is a hint of wistful commentary at the map’s margins, for here Piranesi depicts the broken pieces of the Forma urbis, which never fully divulged their secrets—­to him or anyone else. That said, the inclusion of the marble plan here serves more to assert Piranesi’s reliance on evidence than to further his rhetorical agenda, and the map as a whole

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shows him to be fully capable of the unsentimental approach more often associated with Nolli. At the same time, the largely empty cityscape left Piranesi with a nearly blank slate to populate with his own antiquarian-­fueled architectural designs. This is exactly what he did in the Campus Martius etching, the centerpiece of his volume dedicated to this low-­lying ancient Roman district in the floodplain of the Tiber (plate 12).14 In his meticulous and overwhelmingly detailed ichnography, Piranesi expertly deployed the same visual language as Nolli—­ and Bufalini before him—­to execute a project that was closer in spirit to Pirro Ligorio’s exuberantly inventive Roma antica of 1561 (plate 8). As glorious as any of the works discussed in this book, Piranesi’s large foldout map stretched to 53⅛ × 46 in. (135 × 117 cm). The image, which Piranesi dedicated to his friend, the Scottish architect Robert Adam (1728–­92), was meant to provide the larger urban context for his book. It is oriented with north at upper right: an almost willfully individualistic choice that flouts both the new and old stan­ dards. Piranesi cleverly depicted the map as if inscribed on an irregular marble tablet, like some rediscovered, otherworldly segment of the Forma urbis. The damaged state of this slab, which seems to have been pried roughly from a larger one, presents a foil to the perfect geometry and wholeness of the ground plans carved into its surface. As Joseph Connors has pointed out, the map lacks boundaries other than those imposed by the fictive edges of the marble block; no natural or manmade features delimit the urban space. Instead, the city seems arbitrarily cut off at the edges, as if it could continue indefinitely.15 As Ligorio had done with his great Roma antica, Piranesi included some surviving monuments—­such as the mausoleums of Augustus and Hadrian—­that were familiar to his audience. But whereas those buildings were among the more impressive freestanding landmarks still visible in early modern Rome, Piranesi portrayed them as little more than gateways to massive, grandiose complexes, such as the “Bustum Hadriani”—­an invented crematory-­funereal compound extending upward from the round plan of the Mausoleum of Hadrian, perched above the bend in the Tiber (fig. 84).16 In this way, the recognizable vestiges of ancient Rome became Piranesi’s springboard to imagine a city that surpassed reality, past and present, to rise to the level of the sublime. Piranesi was so enamored of these sprawling, multifaceted structures—­which give the impression of cities within the city—­that he allowed them to crowd out other elements of the urban fabric. There are no houses or infill structures, and in this respect the Campus Martius departs from Ligorio’s precedent, which had included countless unidentified residential structures—­although, like the Roma antica of 1561, Piranesi’s map largely dispenses with streets, which

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Figure 84. Piranesi, Ichnographiam Campi Martii, detail: Bustum Hadriani. Houghton Library, Harvard University, *63–368.

here too are sacrificed to architectural showpieces. Some hills and the river appear, but topography, like infrastructure, is downplayed in favor of monuments. In a sense, this was true to the ancient Roman way of building—­where successive emperors made their mark on the city by privileging architecture over streets, as indeed had been the case in the real Campus Martius. In another echo of Ligorio’s Roma grande, Piranesi’s map was the product of the informed imagination rather than unfettered creativity. As Connors has demonstrated in his recent study of the etching, Piranesi brilliantly synthesized a wide variety of sources, making his map a feat of highly original scholarship. In fact, Piranesi based his map on a comparable array of evidence and many of the same principles as Ligorio. Although coins were less important to him

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than to his sixteenth-­century counterpart, Piranesi similarly looked to ancient authors like Strabo and Suetonius as well as archaeological evidence from the ruins, to which he added what he could glean from identifiable (and semi-­ identifiable) parts of the Forma urbis—­a resource unknown to Ligorio. Piranesi also followed Ligorio in relying on the principle of analogy to fill in the forms of lost structures with reference to known ones. This approach helps to explain the proliferation of stadiums, circuses, and amphitheaters across the map. It does little, however, to explain why so many of Piranesi’s architectural marvels align themselves along the same underlying diagonal grid—­an armature that seems to extend from lower left to upper right. This configuration must originate in Piranesi’s desire to impose an abstract surface pattern and overriding order to his image, in stark contrast to Ligorio’s riot of unruly monuments. Piranesi’s preference for complicated, symmetrical arrangements is, in fact, more reminiscent of Bufalini than Ligorio. Piranesi often doubles architectural features to mirror each other within a monumental complex; twin circuses, for example, lie perfectly parallel within the walls of the Bustum Hadriani, and two porticoes with plans recalling imperials baths flank each other within the “Hortus Sallustiani” (or Gardens of Sallust) at lower right.17 These magnificent, almost futuristic compounds typify Piranesi’s approach, for he based them on kernels of solid knowledge gleaned from trustworthy sources but then extrapolated in a highly speculative manner, interpreting the evidence so it was in keeping with his larger vision, while disregarding any pieces that failed to fit. It is also worth noting that he knowingly designed them with a flair that was entirely consistent with the most ambitious ancient Roman architectural complexes. He said as much in the dedication of his volume on the Campus Martius to Adam, where he wrote: I am rather afraid that some parts of the Campus which I describe should seem figments of my imagination and not based on any evidence: certainly if anyone compares them with the architectural theory of the ancients he will see that they differ greatly from it and are actually closer to the usage of our own times. But before anyone accuses me of falsehood, he should, I beg, examine the ancient [marble] plan of the city . . . , the villas of Latium and that of Hadrian at Tivoli, the baths, the tombs and other ruins . . . and he will find that the ancients transgressed the strict rules of architecture just as much as the moderns. Perhaps it is inevitable and a general rule that the arts on reaching a peak should then decline, or perhaps it is part of man’s nature to demand some license in creative expression as in other things.18

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Recognizing a disconnect between practice and theory, Piranesi made a persuasive case, based on solid historical principles, for imaginative license. He understood, moreover, the distinction between falsehood, or baseless lies, and fiction: to quote Giovanni Andrea Gilio, discussed in chapter 4, “that which is not, but could be.”

Piranesi’s Campus Martius etching tends to be viewed as an artistic polemic—­a refutation of Enlightenment values, or an apologia for architectural creativity.19 But the map is fraught by apparent contradictions, refuting any straightforward interpretation. While Piranesi turned away from the empiricism of Nolli, he was far from irrational; we have seen that he based his image on profound knowledge and granted it a distinct, quasi-­scientific order. Personal observation and archaeological research fed Piranesi’s artistry rather than being at odds with it. In that sense, the Campus Martius is closely allied with many earlier works investigated in this study. Piranesi’s goal was neither documentary nor reconstructive. He sought, rather, to construct anew an ideal ancient city: a plausible fiction that rested on much more than empirically gathered data. Cartography, rather than being antithetical to his concept, was perfectly suited to it. Piranesi’s words—­together with his map, like Bufalini’s two hundred years before—­suggest that measurement and imagination were compatible in the early modern period, before a line was drawn between science and art. Piranesi’s impulse to forestall criticism by justifying his approach, and his very self-­awareness, signal that the tide was turning. Still, if the splendid images of Nolli and Vasi speak to a new stringency in urban representation, Piranesi’s map indicates that it had not yet fully taken hold. The eighteenth century, like the preceding three, allowed for an approach to the city that was more rich and nuanced than our own, not less perfect.

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Notes

Introduction

1. The literature on early modern city imagery has grown substantially in recent years. See esp. Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before 1500,” Art Bulletin 60 (1978): 425–­74; Lucia Nuti, “The Perspective Plan in the Sixteenth Century: The Invention of a New Representational Language,” Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 105–­28; idem, Ritratti di città: Visione e memoria tra medioevo e settecento (Venice: Marsilio, 1997); Richard L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–­1793 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 1–­18; Hilary Ballon and David H. Friedman, “Portraying the City in Early Modern Europe: Measurement, Representation, and Planning,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 3, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pt. 2, 1680–­1704; Marco Folin, ed., Rappresentare la città: Topografie urbane nell’Italia di antico regime (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2010). See also the excellent contextualization provided in Nicholas Warner, The True Description of Cairo: A Sixteenth-­Century Venetian View, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1:115–­41. 2. Kagan, Urban Images, vii. 3. On these distinctions, see ibid., 1–­18, 19–­24. On Bruni’s notion of the city as embodiment of its citizens’ virtues, see also Christine Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence, 1400–­1470 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 176–­80.

231

4. Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Civitates orbis terrarum, 6 vols. (Cologne, 1572–­1617), 1:n.p. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 5. Patrick Gautier Dalché, “The Reception of Ptolemy’s Geography (End of the Fourteenth to Beginning of the Sixteenth Century),” in Woodward, The History of Cartography, vol. 3, pt. 1, 285–­364. 6. Claudius Ptolemy, The Geography of Claudius Ptolemy, trans. Edward L. Stevenson (New York: New York Public Library, 1932), 25–­26. 7. Ibid. Emphasis mine. 8. Examples are Werner Rolevinck’s Fasciculus temporum (Cologne, 1474) and Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg, 1493). 9. Printed editions of the Latin translation by Nicolaus Germanus appeared in Vicenza (1475), Bologna (1477), Rome (1478), and Ulm (1482), while Francesco Berlinghieri’s idiosyncratic translation into Italian terza rima was printed in Florence in 1482. 10. Guillaume Guéroult, Épitomé de la corographie d’Europe illustré des pourtraitz des villes plus renomées d’icelle (Lyon, 1553), n.p. 11. Cipriano Piccolpasso, Le piante et i ritratti delle città e terre di Umbria sottoposte al governo di Perugia (manuscript, 1560s; facsimile ed., Rome: Istituto nazionale di archeologia e storia dell’arte, 1963), 262. 12. Piccolpasso, Le piante et i ritratti, 259. Emphasis mine. 13. Ballon and Friedman, “Portraying the City,” 687. 14. Piccolpasso, Le piante et i ritratti, 263. 15. The title reads “Romae urbis situs, quem hoc Christi anno 1549 habet” (essentially, “The site of Rome as it is in 1549”). 16. On the use of this term, see esp. Claudia Swan, “Ad vivum, naer het leven, from the life: Considerations on a Mode of Representation,” Word and Image 11 (1995): 353–­72. See also Nuti, “Perspective Plan,” 108; idem, Ritratti di città, 133–­43. 17. Antonio Campi, Cremona fedelissima città (Cremona, 1585), n.p. Emphasis mine. On Campi’s map, see Monica Visioli, “ ‘Quasi un vivo simulacro della Patria nostra’: La pianta di Cremona di Antonio Campi, 1582–­1583,” in Folin, Rappresentare la città, 261–­83. 18. Antoine du Pinet, Plantz, pourtraitz et descriptions de plusieurs villes et forteresses (Lyon, 1564), xvii. Emphasis mine. 19. No original example of Rosselli’s Fiorenza, which was done in woodcut, survives, but early derivatives in engraving testify to its appearance. For the most nuanced and exhaustive reading of this work, see David Friedman, “ ‘Fiorenza’: Geography and Representation in a 15th-­Century City View,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 64 (2001): 56–­77 (with further references). On the function of the draftsman figure as a testament to eyewitness experience, see Nuti, “Perspective Plan,” 113–­15. 20. On the constructive processes for Renaissance city views, see Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice”; Daniela Stroffolino, La città misurata: Tecniche e strumenti di rilevamento nei trattati a stampa del Cinquecento (Rome: Salerno, 1999), 145–­83; for a different hypothesis, see Ryan E. Gregg, “Panorama, Power, and History: Vasari and Stradano’s City Views in the Palazzo Vecchio” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2008), 30–­37. 21. On the Barbari view, the classic study is Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice.” See also Susan Spinale, “The Specifics of Time and Place in the View of Venice of 1500,” in Coming About . . . : A Festschrift for John Shearman, ed. Lars R. Jones and Louisa C. Matthew (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2001), 297–­302; Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City and Early Modern Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 23–­69. 22. Du Pinet, Plantz, pourtraitz et descriptions, xiv.

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23. Stephan Füssel and Johannes Altdof, Civitates orbis terrarum/Cities of the World, facsimile ed. (Cologne: Taschen, 2011), 338. 24. Sonnet 26 from Joachim du Bellay, Antiquitez de Rome, ed. Malcolm C. Smith (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1993), 70–­71. 25. Petrarch, “Walks in Rome,” letter to Giovanni Colonna di San Vito (Ep. Fam. VI, 2), 1337–­41, in The Idea of Rome, from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. David Thompson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971), 173. 26. The literature on the culture of Renaissance Rome and on changing perceptions of the city is vast. Two classic studies are Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969); and Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). For an overview, see Ingrid Rowland, “Rome at the Center of a Civilization,” in The Renaissance World, ed. John Jeffries Martin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 31–­50. 27. Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, intro. by Howard Saalman, trans. Catherine Enggass (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970). On the question of whether Brunelleschi went to Rome, see Marvin Trachtenberg, “Brunelleschi, ‘Giotto,’ and Rome,” Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smyth, ed. Andrew Morrogh, 2 vols. (Florence: Giunti Barbèra, 1985), 2:675–­97 (with further references, n. 1). 28. Key sources on Roman print culture include Francesca Consagra, “The De Rossi Family Print Publishing Shop: A Study in the History of the Print Industry in Seventeenth-­ Century Rome” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1993); and Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Print Publishing in Sixteenth-­Century Rome: Growth and Expansion, Rivalry and Murder (London: Harvey Miller, 2008). For more bibliography, see chap. 4, n. 58, and chap. 5, n. 24. 29. Henry Dietrich Fernández, “The Patrimony of St. Peter: The Papal Court at Rome c. 1450–­1700,” in The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime, 1500–­1750, ed. John Adamson (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), 141–­63. On the question of papal absolutism, see also Laurie Nussdorfer, “The Politics of Space in Early Modern Rome,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 42 (1997): 161–­86. 30. On the use of city maps in the Renaissance, see Lucia Nuti, “The Mapped Views by Georg Hoefnagel: The Merchant’s Eye, the Humanist’s Eye,” Word and Image 4 (1988): 545–­70; Thomas Frangenberg, “Chorographies of Florence: The Use of City Views and City Plans in the Sixteenth Century,” Imago Mundi 46 (1994): 41–­64; David Woodward, Maps As Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors and Consumers; The 1995 Panizzi Lectures (London: British Library, 1996); Genevieve Carlton, “Making an Impression: The Display of Maps in Sixteenth-­Century Venetian Homes,” Imago Mundi 64, no. 1 (2012): 28–­40. 31. Other critical catalogues are Giovanni Battista de Rossi, Piante icnografiche e prospettiche di Roma: Anteriori al secolo XVI (Rome: Salviucci, 1879); Enrico Rocchi, Le piante icnografiche e prospettiche di Roma del secolo XVI (Rome: Roux e Viarengo, 1902); Domenico Gnoli, Mostra di topografia romana ordinata in occasione del congresso storico inaugurato in Roma li 2 aprile del 1903 (Rome: Tipografia cooperativa sociale, 1903); Camillo Scaccia Scarafoni, Le piante di Roma possedute della Biblioteca dell’Istituto e dalle altre biblioteche governative della città (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1939). In most cases, the notes in this study will refer only to Hülsen and Frutaz, the latter of which can be consulted for additional references. More recent sources in the same vein include Giovanni Aragozzini and Marco Nocca, Le piante di Roma dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento (Rome: Dino Audino, 1993); Barbara Tellini Santoni and Alberto Manodori, eds., Roma, disegno e immagine della Città Eterna: Le piante di Roma dal II

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secolo d.Cr. ai giorni nostri (Rome: Edizioni de Luca, 1994); Mario Bevilacqua and Marcello Fagiolo, eds., Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti (Rome: Artemide, 2012).

Chapter one

1. On late medieval imagery of Rome, see esp. Carroll William Westfall, In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447–­55 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974), 85–­92; Silvia Maddalo, In Figura Romae: Immagini di Roma nel libro medioevale (Rome: Viella, 1990); idem, “Tracce di un mito tra Trecento e Quattrocento: Roma miniata, Roma affrescata,” in La storia dei Giubilei, vol. 1, 1300–­1423, ed. Gloria Fossi (Florence: Giunti, 1997), 118–­33; Enrico Parlato, “Vista da Nord: Immagini di Roma dal Medioevo al Quattrocento,” in Roma memoria e oblio, by Laura Biancini et al. (Rome: Tielle Media, 2001), 199–­207. On small-­ scale medieval mapping more generally, see esp. P. D. A. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 464–­501; Victoria Morse, “The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 3, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pt. 1, 25–­52 (esp. 37–­44, 46–­51). 2. On the agrimensores, see O. A. W. Dilke, “Roman Large-­Scale Mapping in the Early Empire,” in Harley and Woodward, The History of Cartography, vol. 1, 212–­33 (esp. 213–­25). 3. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 466–­73; Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before 1500,” Art Bulletin 60 (1978): 444–­45. 4. Amato Pietro Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 3 vols. (Rome: Istituto di studi romani, 1962), 1:113–­14, no. 70; Steffen Bogen and Felix Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten von der Antike bis heute (Darmstadt: WBG, 2009), 32–­34. 5. An early example is the fresco of Florence in the Sala del Consiglio of the Oratorio del Bigallo in that city, dated 1352. See Naomi Miller, Mapping the City: The Language and Culture of Cartography in the Renaissance (London: Continuum, 2003), 45–­46. In the realm of Rome imagery, Masolino’s 1435 fresco of the city for the baptistery at Castiglione Olona illustrates the type (Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:128–­29, no. 80), as does a miniature by Leonardo da Besozzo dating from midcentury (Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:131–­32, no. 82). 6. On Fra Paolino and the maps that appeared in his Chronologia Magna, see esp. Bernhard Degenhart and Annegrit Schmitt, “Marino Sanudo und Paolino Veneto: Zwei Literaten des 14. Jahrhunderts in ihrer Wirkung auf Buchillustrierung und Kartographie in Venedig, Avignon und Neapel,” Romisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 14 (1973): 1–­134; Nathalie Bouloux, Culture et savoirs géographiques en Italie au XIVe siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 45–­68; Morse, “The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society,” 46–­47 (with further references). On his plans of Rome specifically, see Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:115–­19, no. 72, 120–­22, no. 74; Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 55–­59; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 27–­32. 7. Juergen Schulz, “The Printed Plans and Panoramic Views of Venice (1486–­1797),” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 7 (1970): 16; idem, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice,” 445.

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8. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 474, 478. 9. Two key studies addressing these genres are Louis Green, Chronicle into History: An Essay on the Interpretation of History in Florentine Fourteenth-­Century Chronicles (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 10. Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), 1–­20. 11. Brown, Venice and Antiquity, 51–­54, 55. While maintaining his central thesis, Burke himself implicitly problematized his early periodization in later essays. See, for example, “The Sense of Anachronism from Petrarch to Poussin,” in Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, 2001), 157–­73. 12. Pierre Lavedan, La représentation des villes dans l’art du Moyen Âge (Paris: Vanoest, 1954), 33. 13. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:125–­26, no. 77; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 38–­40. 14. On the sequence, see Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:119–­20, no. 73; 123–­24, no. 76; 126–­27, no. 78; 129–­30, no. 81; Millard Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry: The Limbourgs and Their Contemporaries (New York: George Braziller, 1974), 209–­14. 15. Roberto Valentini and Giuseppe Zucchetti, eds., Codice topografico della città di Roma, 4 vols. (Rome: Tipografia del Senato, 1946), 3:3–­65; Francis Morgan Nichols, trans., Marvels of Rome = Mirabilia urbis Romae, rev. Eileen Gardiner (New York: Italica Press, 1986); Dale Kinney, “Fact and Fiction in the Mirabilia urbis Romae,” in Roma Felix: Formation and Reflections of Medieval Rome, ed. Éamonn Ó Carragáin and Carol Neuman de Vegvar (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 235–­52 (with further references). 16. Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past, 1–­2. 17. On Massaio’s view, which is known in three versions, see Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:137–­ 38, no. 87; 139–­40, no. 88; 142–­44, no. 90; Mario Gori Sassoli, ed., Roma veduta: Disegni e stampe panoramiche della città dal XV al XIX secolo (Rome: Artemide, 2000), 134, no. 1. On Massaio’s imagery of cities in general, see esp. Germaine Aujac, “Le peintre florentin Piero del Massaio et la Cosmographia de Ptolémée,” Geographia Antiqua 3/4 (1995): 187–­ 204; Miller, Mapping the City. On Strozzi’s view, see Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:140–­42, no. 89; Gustina Scaglia, “The Origin of an Archaeological Plan of Rome by Alessandro Strozzi,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 137–­63; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 135, no. 2; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 51–­55. 18. Scaglia, “The Origin of an Archaeological Plan,” 155. 19. On Alberti, see esp. Joan Kelly Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). 20. The Ludi rerum mathematicarum is included in Leon Battista Alberti, Opere volgari, ed. Cecil Grayson, 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1960–­1973), 3:131–­73. See also Luigi Vagnetti, “Considerazioni sui Ludi Matematici,” Studi e documenti di architettura 1 (1972): 173–­259; Kim Williams, Lionel March, and Stephen R. Wassell, The Mathematical Works of Leon Battista Alberti (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010), 9–­140. 21. See esp. Luigi Vagnetti, “Lo studio di Roma negli scritti albertiani,” in Convegno internazionale indetto nel V centenario di Leon Battista Alberti (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1974), 73–­110; Mario Carpo and Martine Furno, ed., Descriptio urbis Romae: Édition critique, traduction et commentaire par Martine Furno et Mario Carpo (Geneva: Droz, 2000); Mario Carpo and Francesco Furlan, ed., Leon Battista Alberti’s Delineation of the City of Rome (Descriptio urbis Romae) (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007). The latter includes the first English translation of the treatise, by Peter Hicks (“Leon

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Battista Alberti’s Delineation of the City of Rome,” 97–­108; previously published in Albertiana 6 [2003]: 197–­208). See also Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 45–­48. 22. Because Alberti does not provide a scale and focuses on procedure over product in the Descriptio, Mario Carpo has argued that a map was not his ultimate goal and never accompanied the text. Mario Carpo, “La Descriptio urbis Romae: Ecphrasis géographique et culture visuelle à l’aube de la révolution typographique,” in Carpo and Furno, Descriptio urbis Romae, 67–­68. 23. Hicks, “Alberti’s Delineation,” 97. 24. Alberti, Ludi, 163. A discussion of Alberti’s procedure is given in Daniela Stroffolino, La città misurata: Tecniche e strumenti di rilevamento nei trattati a stampa del Cinquecento, intro. by Cesare De Seta (Rome: Salerno, 1999), 16–­19. 25. Hicks, “Alberti’s Delineation,” 97. 26. Vagnetti, “Lo studio di Roma”; Jean-­Yves Boriaud and Francesco Furlan, “Note on the Sources and the Textual Tradition,” in Carpo and Furlan, Leon Battista Alberti’s Delineation of the City of Rome, 71–­75. 27. See Nuti, Ritratti di città, 119–­24; Carpo, “La Descriptio urbis Romae,” 81–­83; Grafton, Alberti: Master Builder, 244. 28. See Gadol, Alberti: Universal Man, 171–­72; Grafton, Alberti: Master Builder, 242–­43. 29. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 493–­95. 30. On Leonardo’s plan of Imola, see John Pinto, “Origins and Development of the Ichnographic City Plan,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 35 (1976): 38–­42; David Friedman, “La pianta di Imola di Leonardo, 1502,” in Rappresentare la città: Topografie urbane nell’Italia di antico regime, ed. Marco Folin (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2010), 121–­44 (with complete bibliography, 414). 31. On surveying manuals of the Renaissance, see Stroffolino, La città misurata. 32. Westfall, In This Most Perfect Paradise; Torgil Magnuson, “The Project of Nicholas V for Rebuilding the Borgo Leonino in Rome,” Art Bulletin 36, no. 2 (1954): 89–­115. 33. On the milieu of Alberti, Poggio, and Biondo, see Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), esp. 59–­72; Angelo Mazzocco, “Petrarca, Poggio, and Biondo: Humanism’s Foremost Interpreters of Roman Ruins,” in Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium, ed. Aldo Scaglione (Chapel Hill: Dept. of Romance Languages, University of North Carolina, 1975), 353–­63; Philip Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity: The Origins of Rome in Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 95–­121; Grafton, Alberti: Master Builder, 225–­59. On antiquarianism in general, see also the classic study by Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–­315. 34. The late antique rioni as detailed in the regionary catalogues had evolved from the Augustan division of the city into fourteen regions, or wards. See Samuel Ball Platner and Nicholas Ashby, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (London: Humphrey Milford, 1929), 444–­47. 35. Hicks, “Alberti’s Delineation,” 97. 36. On Rosselli, see esp. Konrad Oberhuber, “Francesco Rosselli,” in Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art, by Jay A. Levenson et al. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1973), 47–­62; Mark J. Zucker, The Illustrated Bartsch, 24, Commentary, pt. 2: Early Italian Masters (New York: Abaris Books, 1994), 1–­109; Suzanne Boorsch, “Francesco Rosselli,” in Cosimo Rosselli, Painter of the Sistine Chapel, ed. Arthur R. Blumenthal (Winter Park, FL: Cornell Fine Arts Museum, 2001), 208–­44; idem, “The Case for

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Francesco Rosselli as the Engraver of Berlinghieri’s Geographia,” Imago Mundi 56 (2004): 152–­69. 37. For the inventory, see Jodoco del Badia, “La bottega di Alessandro di Francesco Rosselli merciaio stampatore,” Miscellanea fiorentina di erudizione e storia 2 (1894): 24–­30; Attilio Mori and Giuseppe Boffito, Piante e vedute di Firenze: Studio storico topografico cartografico (Florence: Tipografia Giuntina, 1926), 146–­50; Arthur M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving, 7 vols. (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1938), 1:304–­9. 38. David Friedman, “ ‘Fiorenza’: Geography and Representation in a 15th-­Century City View,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 64 (2001): 56–­77 (with further references). See also Mori and Boffito, Piante e vedute di Firenze, 12–­21; Leopold D. Ettlinger, “A Fifteenth-­ Century View of Florence,” Burlington Magazine 94 (1952): 160–­67. 39. There remains one possible vestige of that view of Rome in Rosselli’s surviving corpus, in his large engraving after Sandro Botticelli’s Assumption of the Virgin (1490s), where a slice of Rome’s center and prominent monuments is just visible in the background. See Hind, Early Italian Engraving, 1:141–­42, no. B.III.10; Zucker, Early Italian Masters, 91; Boorsch, “Francesco Rosselli,” 243–­44. 40. See Marcello Fagiolo, “Quanta ego iam fuerim sola ruina docet: La construzione prospettica e antiquaria della veduta di Mantova,” in Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 77, no. 2. 41. Hind, Early Italian Engraving, 1:307: “1a roma in tre pezi in 12 fogli reali.” 42. In Rosselli’s workshop, a royal folio was approximately 11⅜ × 17⅜ in. (29 × 44 cm). See Hind, Early Italian Engraving, 1:305; David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print: 1470–­1550 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 376, no. 51. My overall estimate of size assumes that they were arranged in three rows of four sheets or two rows of six. The “three pieces” refer to plates, probably engraved on both sides. See Hind, Early Italian Engraving, 1:141; Boorsch, “Francesco Rosselli,” 243. 43. On the display and survival of mural-­scale prints, see Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 231–­37; Nicholas Warner, The True Description of Cairo: A Sixteenth-­Century Venetian View, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1:94–­108; Elizabeth Wyckoff and Larry Silver, “Size Does Matter,” in Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian, ed. Elizabeth Wyckoff and Larry Silver (Wellesley, MA: Davis Museum and Cultural Center, 2008), 8–­13; Suzanne Boorsch, “The Oversize Print in Italy,” in Wyckoff and Silver, Grand Scale, 36–­37. 44. The first section of the inventory lists a “roma in tela inn istanpa del pupillo” (a Rome mounted on canvas, printed—­Hind speculated—­by Rosselli’s grandson, a minor or “pupillo” in the family workshop): Hind, Early Italian Engraving, 1:305. 45. None of the woodblocks or engraved plates is given a value in the inventory, but the individual prints are. The printed “roma in tela” listed in the inventory is given a value of three lira (see Hind, Early Italian Engraving, 1:305). My estimate of its value is based on Landau and Parshall’s calculation that one lira was roughly equivalent to the monthly wages of a manual laborer (see Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 295–­97). 46. On Rosselli’s view of Rome, see Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:151–­55, no. 97; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 136, no. 3; Fagiolo, “Quanta ego iam fuerim sola ruina docet”; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 55–­60; Jessica Maier, “An Urban Icon and Its Progeny: Francesco Rosselli’s Lost View of Rome,” Art Bulletin 94 (2012): 396–­412 (with complete bibliography, 408n11). 47. This connection was established in Heinrich Brockhaus, “Die grosse Ansicht von Rom in Mantua: Die Frage nach dem Zeichner ihres Vorbildes,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 1, no. 4 (1910): 151–­55.

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48. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:148–­49, no. 95; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 138, no. 4; Clemente Marigliani, ed., Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private (Rome: Provincia di Roma, 2007), 114–­15, nos. 5–­7. 49. On the Nuremberg Chronicle version, see Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:149–­50, no. 96; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 138, no. 5; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 116–­17, nos. 8–­10. The woodcuts for the tome were executed by Michael Wolgemut (1434/37–­1519) and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff (ca. 1460–­94). On Lucantonio degli Uberti’s lost print, see Mark McDonald, The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus (1488–­1539): A Renaissance Collector in Seville, 2 vols. (London: British Museum, 2004), 1:105, 111, 193; 2:571, no. 3170. 50. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:145–­46, no. 92. See also R. Hiller von Gaertringen, Italienische Gemälde im Städel 1300–­1550: Toskana und Umbrien (Mainz: Zabern, 2004), 371–­91. 51. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:50–­51, no. 6. 52. Ibid., 1:151–­55, no. 97. 53. On the Flemish version, formerly and speciously attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, see M. Destombes, “A Panorama of Rome by Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” Imago Mundi 14 (1959): 64–­73; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:157–­58, no. 99. Additional painted derivatives are listed in Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice,” 430n13. 54. On Münster’s view, see Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:156–­57, no. 98; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 140–­41, no. 6; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 118, no. 11; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 60–­64. 55. French copies of Münster’s view were included Guillaume Guéroult’s Épitomé de la corographie d’Europe illustré des pourtraitz des villes plus renomées d’icelle (Lyon, 1553) and Antoine du Pinet’s Plantz, pourtraitz et descriptions de plusieurs villes et forteresses (Lyon, 1564). Italian derivatives were published in Ferrando Bertelli’s Disegni di alcune più illustri città, et fortezze del mondo (Venice, 1568), Giulio Ballino’s De’ disegni delle più illustri città et fortezze del mondo (Venice, 1569), and Donato Bertelli’s Le vere imagini et descritioni delle più nobili città del mondo (Venice, 1572). On Ballino’s view, see Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:159–­60, no. 101. Smaller, cruder derivatives of Münster’s view also appeared in 1552 and 1560. For the entire group, see Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 120–­26, nos. 15–­22. 56. Some forty editions of the Cosmographia appeared in French, German, and Italian, as well as the original Latin, between 1544 and 1628. For the views of Rome that appeared in these, see Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 119, nos. 12–­14. 57. On the markets, audiences, and uses of early modern prints, see esp. Susan Karr Schmidt and Kimberly Nichols, Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). On the use of printed city views and maps, see intro., n. 30. 58. For background on the development of Rome in the Renaissance, see esp. James Ackerman, “The Planning of Renaissance Rome, 1450–­1580,” in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth; Papers of the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, ed. P. A. Ramsey (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), 3–­17; Spiro Kostof, “The Popes as Planners: Rome, 1450–­1650,” in A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 485–­509. 59. For an overview of Sixtus IV’s projects and for further references, see Jill E. Blondin, “Power Made Visible: Sixtus IV as Urbis Restaurator in Quattrocento Rome,” Catholic Historical Review 91, no. 1 (2005): 1–­25. 60. See Destombes, “Panorama,” 69; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:153–­54. On the connection to Isabella d’Este, see Giovanni Battista de Rossi, “Panorama circolare di Roma delineato

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61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

nel 1534 da Martino Heemskerck pittore olandese,” Bullettino della commissione archeologica comunale di Roma 19 (1891): 337. Isabella d’Este to Giovanni Battista Malatesta, April 18, 1523, and July 24, 1523. Both transcribed by A. Bertolotti in Il Bibliofilo 9 (1888): 72. On Pinturicchio’s cycle, see Juergen Schulz, “Pinturicchio and the Revival of Antiquity,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 25 (1962): 35–­55. On the Camera de le Citate, see Molly Bourne, “Francesco II Gonzaga and Maps as Palace Decoration in Renaissance Mantua,” Imago Mundi 51 (1999): 52–­53. For an overview of Renaissance mural map cycles, see Francesca Fiorani, “Cycles of Painted Maps in the Renaissance,” in Woodward, History of Cartography, vol. 3, 804–­30; Juergen Schulz, “Maps as Metaphors: Mural Map Cycles of the Italian Renaissance,” in Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 97–­122; Mark Rosen, “The Cosmos in the Palace: The Palazzo Vecchio Guardaroba and the Culture of Cartography in Early Modern Florence” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2004), 90–­122. “Haec aenea equestris statua M. Aurelii Antonini Severi aut Septimii Severi, nunc posita est Capitolio.” “Destructa per Alexandro VI.” On this monument, see Lawrence Richardson, Jr., A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 252–­53. On the disabitato, see Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312–­1308 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 311–­26; Robert Coates-­Stephens, “Housing in Early Medieval Rome, 500–­1000 AD,” Papers of the British School at Rome 64 (1996): 239–­59. Coates-­Stephens, “Housing in Early Medieval Rome.” On the connection to Hildebert of Lavardin, see Michael Greenhalgh, The Classical Tradition in Art (London: Duckworth, 1978), 45. The first more-­or-­less verbatim iteration of the phrase is in the opening lines of book 3 of Francesco Albertini’s Opusculum (Rome, 1510); it subsequently appeared with minor variations in a number of contexts, including the title page of Sebastiano Serlio’s Terzo libro . . . nel qual si figurano, e descrivono le antiquita di Roma, e le altre che sono in Italia (Venice, 1544). For a discussion of the inscriptions and imagery, see Fagiolo, “Quanta ego iam fuerim sola ruina docet.” See also Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:152–­54. For a line drawing of the canvas that clarifies the images and inscriptions, some of which are quite abraded and difficult to make out on the painting itself, see Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 2:n.p., nos. 97b–­c, figs. 168–­69. “U’ son Roma gli honor de’ tempi prisci? / . . . Porte, archi, temple, statue, arme, obelisci, / Therme, colossi, fori, anfitheatri, / . . . U’ son? . . . / Nullo terreno stato dunque eterno, / Per te s’impari . . .” Master Gregorius, The Marvels of Rome, trans. John Osborne (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987), 18–­19. Rose Marie San Juan, “The Court Lady’s Dilemma: Isabella d’Este and Art Collecting in the Renaissance,” Oxford Art Journal 14 (1991): 67–­78. Fagiolo, “Quanta ego iam fuerim sola ruina docet.” On the constructive processes for Renaissance city views, see intro., n. 20. Giorgio Vasari, Le opere complete di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1906), 8:174–­75. On Vasari’s view of Florence, see Mori and Boffito, Piante e vedute di Firenze, 31–­33. See Ryan E. Gregg, “Panorama, Power, and History: Vasari and Stradano’s City Views in the Palazzo Vecchio” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2008), 30–­37.

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77. Derivatives of Rosselli’s Florence appeared in many of the same publications as his view of Rome: Foresti, 1490 (Mori and Boffito, Piante e vedute di Firenze, 22–­24); Schedel, 1493 (ibid., 24); Münster, 1550 (ibid., 33–­35); Donato Bertelli, 1568; Ballino/Zenoi, 1569 (ibid., 35–­36); Claudio Duchetti, ca. 1580 (ibid., 39); Pietro Bertelli, 1599–­1629 (ibid., 47–­48). There is also an early tempera-­on-­panel version in a private collection in England, which Ettlinger dated to ca. 1495 and attributed to Rosselli himself. See Ettlinger, “Fifteenth-­ Century View of Florence,” 163. 78. Destombes, “Panorama,” 67; Bourne, “Francesco II Gonzaga and Maps,” 54. 79. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:210–­11, no. 149. On the Vatican Gallery of Maps, see esp. Francesca Fiorani, The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography and Politics in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 80. “Romae urbis situs, quem hoc Christi anno 1549 habet.” 81. Christoph L. Frommel, “St. Peter’s: The Early History,” in The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture, ed. Henry A. Millon and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 399–­423. 82. This omission is first evident in the Münster view, where the rather unsatisfactory explanation for it appears in the key at the bottom of the map: “Templum pacis, ubi quoque stare debuerat Collosseum ingens aedificium, sed loci angustia exclusit.”

Chapter two

1. On these two subjects, see esp. Ian Campbell, “The Development of Architectural Drawing after the Antique, before 1600,” in The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, ser. A, pt. 9, Ancient Roman Topography and Architecture, 3 vols. (London: Royal Collection, 2004), 1:19–­36; Christoph L. Frommel, “St. Peter’s: The Early History,” in The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture, ed. Henry A. Millon and Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 399–­423. 2. Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–­1600 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011), 66–­73. 3. The authoritative sources on the letter to Leo X are Francesco P. Di Teodoro, Raffaello, Baldassar Castiglione e la Lettera a Leone X: “. . . con lo aiutto tuo mi sforcerò vendicare dalla morte quel poco che resta . . .” (Bologna: Minerva Edizioni, 1994; rev. ed., 2003); and John Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 1483–­1602, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:500–45. See also Christof Thoenes, “La ‘Lettera’ a Leone X,” in Raffaello a Roma: Il convegno del 1983, ed. Christoph L. Frommel and Matthias Winner (Rome: Edizioni dell’elefante, 1986), 373–­81; Arnold Nesselrath, “Raphael’s Archaeological Method,” in Frommel and Winner, Raffaello a Roma, 357–­71. 4. For the participation of the humanist Angelo Colocci, see Ingrid Rowland, “Raphael, Angelo Colocci and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders,” Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 81–­104. For the nomination of architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, see Christof Thoenes, “Vitruvio, Alberti, Sangallo: La teoria del disegno architettonico nel Rinascimento,” in Sostegno e adornamento: Saggi sull’architettura del Rinascimento; Disegni, ordini, magnificenza (Milan: Electa, 1998), 163–­64. For possible contributors of drawings, see Nesselrath, “Raphael’s Archaeological Method,” 364 (with further references). 5. For overviews of arguments regarding dating, see Thoenes, “La ‘Lettera’ ”; Di Teodoro, Raffaello, Baldassar Castiglione e la Lettera, 44–­56; Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 1:537–­43.

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45 –51 · 240

6. The three versions are transcribed and analyzed exhaustively in Di Teodoro, Raffaello, Baldassar Castiglione e la Lettera; and Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources. 7. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, trans., “The Letter to Leo X by Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione (c. 1519),” in Palladio’s Rome: A Translation of Andrea Palladio’s Two Guidebooks to Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 179–­80. 8. David Karmon, The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 47–­75, 88–­92. See also Cammy Brothers, “Architecture, History, Archaeology: Drawing Ancient Rome in the Letter to Leo X & in Sixteenth-­Century Practice,” in Coming About . . . : A Festschrift for John Shearman, ed. Lars R. Jones and Louisa C. Matthew (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2001), 135–­40. 9. Raphael, letter to Leo X (Munich MS), in Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 1:520–­21. 10. See Brothers, “Architecture, History, Archaeology.” See also Nesselrath, “Raphael’s Archaeological Method.” 11. Hart and Hicks, “The Letter to Leo X,” 179. 12. Ibid., 183. 13. Ibid., 185. For technical treatises, many of which touted the bussola, see Daniela Stroffolino, La città misurata: Tecniche e strumenti di rilevamento nei trattati a stampa del Cinquecento (Rome: Salerno, 1999). 14. Stroffolino provides a succinct analysis of Raphael’s technique in La città misurata, 20–­22. 15. John Pinto, “Origins and Development of the Ichnographic City Plan,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 35 (1976): 35–­50. 16. Niccolò Tartaglia, Quesiti et inventioni diverse (Venice, 1546), bk. 5, n.p. On his surveying method and instrument, see Stroffolino, La città misurata, 68–­73. 17. See Christoph L. Frommel, “Introduction: The Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger: History, Evolution, Method, Function,” in The Architectural Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and His Circle, ed. Christoph L. Frommel and Nicholas Adams (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994–­2000), 1:1–­60 (esp. 31). 18. The drawings are in the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence: U771Ar, U771Av, U772Ar, U773Ar, and U774Ar. See Mario Bencivenni, “La rilevazione del perimetro urbano fiorentino in alcuni disegni di Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane,” Storia architettura 5 (1982): 25–­38. See also Nicholas Adams and Simon Pepper, “The Fortification Drawings,” in Frommel and Adams, Architectural Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo, 1:61–­74, 128–­30. 19. Francesco P. Fiore, “Rilievo topografico e architettura a grande scala nei disegni di Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane per le fortificazioni di Roma al tempo di Paolo III,” in Il disegno di architettura: Atti del convegno, Milano, 15–­18 febbraio 1988, ed. Paolo Carpeggiani and Luigi Patetta (Milan: Guerini e Associati, 1989), 175–­80. See especially Uffizi 892Ar, discussed in Frommel and Adams, Architectural Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo, 1:163–­64. 20. The first Italian manuals to outline the technique of triangulation with the bussola were Giovanni Francesco Peverone’s Due brevi e facili trattati, il primo d’Arithmetica: L’altro di Geometria (Lyon, 1558); and Cosimo Bartoli’s Del modo di misurare le distantie . . . (Venice, 1564). These were preceded by Gemma Frisius’s Libellus de locorum describendorum ratione (Antwerp, 1533). 21. James S. Ackerman, “The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” in Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 27–­65. 22. Hart and Hicks, “The Letter to Leo X,” 189.

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23. Vitruvius defined scenography as “the shaded rendering of the front and the receding sides as the latter converge on a point.” See Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), bk.1, chap. 2, 24–­25. On the relationship between Alberti and Vitruvius, see Richard Krautheimer, “Alberti and Vitruvius,” in Studies in Early Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance Art (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 323–­32; Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 269–­76. 24. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. J. Rykwert, N. Leach, and R. Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 34. 25. Wolfgang Lotz, “The Rendering of the Interior in Architectural Drawings of the Renaissance,” in Studies in Renaissance Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 22–­23. Cammy Brothers has taken issue with this theory in “Architecture, History, Archaeology.” 26. For a proponent of the map theory, see Francesco P. Di Teodoro, “Echi albertiani nella Lettera a Leone X di Raffaello e Baldassar Castiglione,” in Raffaello, Baldassar Castiglione e la Lettera, 333–­50. For the opposing view, see Thoenes, “La ‘Lettera,’ ” 375. See also Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 202. 27. Di Teodoro, “Echi albertiani,” 335. For the passage in question, see Di Teodoro, Raffaello, Baldassar Castiglione e la Lettera, 86–­87. 28. See, for example, Marcantonio Michiel’s comments regarding Raphael’s “descrittione, et pittura di Roma antiqua” (description and picture of ancient Rome) as cited in Vincenzo Golzio, Raffaello nei documenti, nelle testimonianze dei contemporanei e nella letteratura del suo secolo (Vatican City: S. A. Arti Grafiche Panetto & Petrelli, 1936), 113. 29. Cf. Thoenes, “La ‘lettera,’ ” 374–­75; Nesselrath, “Raphael’s Archaeological Method,” 365; Rowland, “Raphael, Angelo Colocci,” 92–­93. 30. Hubertus Günther, Das Studium der antiken Architektur in den Zeichnungen der Hochrenaissance (Tübingen: E. Wasmuth Verlag, 1988), 165–­202; Campbell, “Development of Architectural Drawing,” 22–­23. On books of drawings after antiquity from this period, see also Arnold Nesselrath, “I libri di disegni di antichità: Tentativo di una tipologia,” in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, vol. 3, Dalla tradizione all’archeologia, ed. Salvatore Settis (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 89–­174. 31. Madeleine Viljoen, “Raphael and the Restorative Power or Prints,” Print Quarterly 18 (2001): 379–­95. 32. Nesselrath, “I libri di disegni di antichità,” 134–­40. 33. On this confluence between scholars and practitioners, see Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), esp. 222–­34; and idem, Artisan/ Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, esp. 62–­93. 34. Grafton, Alberti: Master Builder, 221–­24. 35. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship, 195. 36. Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-­ Century Rome (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 109–­30. 37. Rowland, “Raphael, Angelo Colocci.” 38. Bernardo Rucellai, De urbe Roma, in Codice topografico della città di Roma, ed. Roberto Valentini and Giuseppe Zucchetti, 4 vols. (Rome: Tipografia del Senato, 1946), 4:455. Translation adapted from Philip Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity: The Origins of Rome in Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 161. 39. Daniele Barbaro, I dieci libri dell’architettura di M. Vitruvio (Venice, 1556), 253. 40. Jacks, Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity, 186.

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41. The pattern outlined here fits Long’s notion of “trading zones of knowledge exchange” (see Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship, 243; and idem, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 94–­126), as well as the contention, shared by Pamela H. Smith, that artisan culture played an important role in the production of knowledge and the development of new epistemologies in early modern Europe (see Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004]). 42. Rowland, “Raphael, Angelo Colocci,” esp. 88–­91. 43. For relatively recent studies that provide rich intellectual portraits of Raphael’s Rome, see esp. Jacks, Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity; Rowland, Culture of the High Renaissance; Karmon, Ruin of the Eternal City. 44. For an overview of many of these works, see Campbell, “Development of Architectural Drawing.” 45. Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 86–­89; Jacks, Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity, 189–­91. 46. For an overview of guidebooks to Rome, see Ludwig Schudt, Le guide di Roma: Materialien zu einer geschichte der römischen topographie (Vienna: B. Filser, 1930); Sergio Rossetti, Rome: A Bibliography from the Invention of Printing through 1899, vol. 1, The Guidebooks (Rome: Leo S. Olschki, 2000). A good recent synthesis is Hart and Hicks, Palladio’s Rome, xlv–­xlviii. 47. Philip Jacks, “The Simulachrum of Fabio Calvo: A View of Roman Architecture all’antica in 1527,” Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 453–­81. See also Pier Nicola Pagliara, “La Roma antica di Fabio Calvo: Note sulla cultura antiquaria e architettonica,” Psicon 8 (1976): 65–­87; Jacks, Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity, 191–­204; Steffen Bogen and Felix Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten von der Antike bis heute (Darmstadt: WBG, 2009), 64–­70; Alberto Caldana et al., Roma antica: Piante topografiche e vedute generali (Vincenza: Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, 2013), 73–­74, no. I.1. 48. Fabio Calvo, Antiquae urbis Romae cum regionibus simulachrum (Rome: Valerio Dorico, 1532 [orig. Ludovico Vicentino, 1527]), preface, n.p. 49. For an overview of Sforzinda, see Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 186–­89. 50. Campbell, “Development of Architectural Drawing,” 25–­26. See also Howard Burns, “Baldassare Peruzzi and Sixteenth-­Century Architectural Theory,” in Le traités d’architecture de la Renaissance, ed. Jean Guillaume (Paris: Picard, 1988), 207–­26. 51. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, ed., Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture: Books I–­V of “Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 103. 52. On Labacco, see esp. Arnaldo Bruschi’s intro. to Antonio Labacco, Libro appartenente a l’architettura, 1559, facsimile ed. (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1993). See also Campbell, “Development of Architectural Drawing,” 26–­27. 53. Henry A. Millon, “Models in Renaissance Architecture,” in Millon and Lampugnani, Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, 19–­73 (esp. 35–­47, with further references). 54. Antonio Labacco, Libro d’Antonio Labacco appartenente a l’achitettura nel qual si figurano alcune notabili antiquità di Roma (Rome, 1552), n.p. 55. On Tolomei, see Brothers, “Architecture, History, Archaeology”; Campbell, “Development of Architectural Drawing,” 25–­26 (both with further references). 56. Claudio Tolomei, De le lettere di M. Claudio Tolomei libri sette (Venice, 1547), 83r. 57. On Marliani, see Jacks, Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity, 206–­14. 58. Amato Pietro Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 3 vols. (Rome: Istituto di studi romani, 1962), 1:56–­57, no. 12; Caldana et al., Roma antica, 74–­75, no. I.2.

Notes to pages

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59. Samuel Edgerton, Jr., The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 148–­92. 60. Sebastiano Serlio, Terzo libro . . . nel qual si figurano, e descrivono le antiquita di Roma, e le altre che sono in Italia (Venice, 1544), 83. 61. See Günther, Das Studium der antiken Architektur, 288–­94. 62. Hart and Hicks, “The Letter to Leo X,” 190–­91. 63. See Lotz, “The Rendering of the Interior”; Ann C. Huppert, “Envisioning New St. Peter’s: Perspectival Drawings and the Process of Design,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68 (2009): 158–­77. On the architectural profession in the Renaissance, see James Ackerman, “Architectural Practice in the Italian Renaissance,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 13 (1954): 3–­11; Catherine Wilkinson, “The New Professionalism in the Renaissance,” in The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, ed. Spiro Kostof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 124–­53. 64. Thoenes attributes the appendix to Raphael in “La ‘Lettera,’ ” 375; and “Vitruvio, Alberti, Sangallo,” 163–­64. John Shearman, by contrast, contends that the appendix was someone else’s intervention in Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 1:537. 65. For an overview of the types and functions of drawings used by architects, see Ackerman, “Architectural Practice,” 8–­9; idem, “The Origins of Architectural Drawing.” Expert orthogonality abounds in drawings from the first decades of the project for New St. Peter’s. See the many examples in Millon and Lampugnani, Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, 598–­630. 66. Wilkinson, “New Professionalism,” 148–­49. 67. Frommel, “Introduction: The Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo.” 68. Ackerman, “Architectural Practice,” 8. For examples, see Sangallo’s drawing of ideas for St. Peter’s from ca. 1519 (Uffizi 70Ar), illustrated in Frommel, “Introduction: The Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo,” 31; his drawing of the Pantheon from ca. 1535 (Uffizi 874Ar), illustrated in Millon and Lampugnani, Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, 443–­44, no. 31; and his study for one of the minor domes of St. Peter’s from 1539 or later (Uffizi 58A), illustrated in Millon and Lampugnani, Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, 639, no. 354. 69. Ackerman, “Architectural Practice,” 8; Millon, “Models.” On architects’ reluctance to abandon pictorialism, see also Ackerman, “The Origins of Architectural Drawing.” 70. Huppert, “Envisioning New St. Peter’s.” 71. Labacco had a precedent for this sort of representation in Peruzzi’s famous drawing of the St. Peter’s project of ca. 1535 (Uffizi 2Ar), which interweaves ground plan, elevation, and section, harmonizing all forms in a unified perspective. See Millon and Lampugnani, Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, 436, no. 15 (with bibliography). 72. Bartolomeo Marliani, Urbis Romae topographia (Venice, 1544), 2. Emphasis mine.

Chapter three

1. “Omnium rerum pulcherrimam se dare credit Romam scilicet et hanc geminam: neque enim satis tibi factum duxit, redivivam istam unam quae hodie colitur ante oculus posuisse: nisi veterem etiam, totius olim orbis dominam [. . .] quasi e sepulchro excitatam addidisset.”

Notes to pages

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2. “Hanc tu (sive novam, sive antiquam inspicies) non ad normam solum, et circinum: sed ad pyxidem etiam nauticam; Coeli, et solis situs et intervallorum ratione habita; exactam scito.” Emphasis mine. 3. The authoritative source on Bufalini’s map is Francesco Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Giulio III: La pianta di Roma di Leonardo Bufalini del 1551 riprodotta dall’esemplare esistente nella Biblioteca Vaticana a cura della biblioteca medesima (Rome: Danesi, 1911). Additional sources on the map include Enrico Rocchi, Le piante icnografiche e prospettiche di Roma del secolo XVI (Rome: Roux e Viarengo, 1902), 32–­42; Christian Hülsen, “Saggio di bibliografia ragionata delle piante icnografiche e prospettiche di Roma dal 1551 al 1748,” Archivio della Reale Società Romana di Storia Patria 38 (1915): 12–­15, 38–­39, no. 1; Amato Pietro Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 3 vols. (Rome: Istituto di studi romani, 1962), 1:168–­69, no. 109; Italo Insolera, Roma: Immagini e realtà dal X al XX secolo (Bari: Laterza, 1980), 112–­22; Jessica Maier, “ ‘Imago Romae’: Renaissance Visions of the Eternal City” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2006); idem, “Mapping Past and Present: Leonardo Bufalini’s Plan of Rome (1551),” Imago Mundi 59 (2007): 1–­23; Ann C. Huppert, “Mapping Ancient Rome in Bufalini’s Plan and in Sixteenth-­Century Drawings,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 53 (2008): 79–­ 98; Steffen Bogen and Felix Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten von der Antike bis heute (Darmstadt: WBG, 2009), 75–­81; Jessica Maier, “Come se resuscitata dalla tomba: La pianta di Roma di Leonardo Bufalini, 1551,” in Rappresentare la città: Topografie urbane nell’Italia di antico regime, ed. Marco Folin (Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2010), 258–­78. 4. For sources on the marble plan, see chap. 4, n. 40. 5. For the history of this type of map, see John Pinto, “Origins and Development of the Ichnographic City Plan,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 35 (1976): 35–­50. On its uses, see also Barbara Naddeo, “Topographies of Difference: Cartography of the City of Naples, 1627–­1775,” Imago Mundi 56 (2004): 23–­47. 6. Lucia Nuti has examined the meaning and function of the plan as a means for representing cities in Ritratti di città: Visione e memoria tra medioevo e settecento (Venice: Marsilio, 1997), 117–­31. 7. F. Barberi, “Blado, Antonio,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 10 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1968), 753–­57; Gian Ludovico Masetti Zannini, “Una dinastia di stampatori: I Blado,” in Stampatori e librai a Roma nella seconda metà del Cinquecento: Documenti inediti (Rome: Fratelli Palombi, 1980), 61–­84. For bibliography on the Roman print trade, see intro., n. 28; chap. 4, n. 58, and chap. 5, n. 24. 8. George Tolias, “Nikolaos Sophianos’s Totius Graeciae Descriptio: The Resources, Diffusion and Function of a Sixteenth-­Century Antiquarian Map of Greece,” Imago Mundi 58 (2006): 150–­82. 9. Ehrle drew this conclusion based on Bufalini’s known links to Blado and a document listing the staff of Blado’s workshop, which includes one “Leonardus Venetus, intagliator,” whom he identifies as Bufalini. See Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Giulio III, 17, 56. On the various roles that individuals played in map and print production, see especially David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors and Consumers (London: British Library, 1996). On the print and map trade in sixteenth-­century Rome, see Francesco Ehrle, Roma prima di Sisto V: La pianta di Roma du Pérac–­Lafréry del 1577 riprodotta dall’esemplare esistente nel Museo Britannico; Contributo alla storia del commercio delle stampe a Roma nel secolo 16 e 17 (Rome: Danesi, 1908). 10. Cited in Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Giulio III, 55. 11. Ibid., 22–­25. The shelf marks of the complete examples are, for the Vatican Library, Stampati St. Geogr. I. 620. Riserva, and for the British Library, Maps S.T.R. 175 (formerly Maps S.T.R. [1.]). The Vatican’s incomplete example is in Vat. Cod. Barb. Lat.

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4432. On Antonio Trevisi, see Pamela O. Long, “Hydraulic Engineering and the Study of Antiquity: Rome, 1557–­70,” Renaissance Quarterly 61 (2008): 1098–­1138. 12. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:169–­70, no. 110 (with further references); Leonardo Bufalini, La pianta di Roma di Leonardo Bufalini, da un esemplare a penna già conservato in Cuneo (Rome: Bruno e Salomone, 1879). The manuscript is now in the Biblioteca nazionale di Roma (P.A. 1 ter). 13. As Ehrle noted, damage wrought to the blocks by furniture beetles is reflected already in the exemplars printed in 1560 (Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Giulio III, 23). The subsequent fate of the blocks is unknown. 14. Nicholas Warner, The True Description of Cairo: A Sixteenth-­Century Venetian View, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1:70. 15. See Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Copyright in the Renaissance: Prints and the Privilegio in Sixteenth-­Century Venice and Rome (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 241. See also Michael Bury, The Print in Italy: 1550–­1620 (London: British Museum, 2001), 128. 16. David Woodward, “The Woodcut Technique,” in Five Centuries of Map Printing, ed. David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 25–­50. See also Warner, The True Description of Cairo, 1:98–­99. 17. The relevant documents on Bufalini are summarized in Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Giulio III, 13–­22. 18. Ibid., 22. 19. Several official records of payment from the fortifications campaign specifically indicate Bufalini’s participation in the construction of a bastion at the Vatican. See Rodolfo A. Lanciani, Storia degli scavi di Roma e notizie intorno le collezioni romane di antichità, 4 vols. (Rome: Loescher, 1902–­12), 2:104–­5. 20. On the history of the fortification project, see Alberto Guglielmotti, Storia della marina pontificia, vol. 5, Storia delle fortificazioni sulla spiaggia romana (Rome: Tipografia Vaticana, 1887), 305–­85. See also Luciana Cassanelli et al., Le mura di Roma: L’architettura militare nella storia urbana (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), 149–­54; Simon Pepper, “Planning versus Fortification: Sangallo’s Project for the Defense of Rome,” Architectural Review 159 (1976): 162–­69; Francesco P. Fiore, “Rilievo topografico e architettura a grande scala nei disegni di Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane per le fortificazioni di Roma al tempo di Paolo III,” in Il disegno di architettura: Atti del convegno, Milano, 15–­18 febbraio 1988, ed. Paolo Carpeggiani and Luigi Patetta (Milan: Guerini e Associati, 1989), 175–­80. 21. See especially Girolamo Maggi and Jacopo Fusto Castriotto, Della fortificatione delle città (Venice, 1564); Galasso Alghisi, Delle fortificationi (Venice, 1570); and Francesco De Marchi, Della architettura militare (Brescia, 1599). For background on these figures and their treatises, see Martha Pollak, Military Architecture, Cartography and the Representation of the Early Modern European City (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1991). On Castriotto, see Carlo Promis, “Biografie di ingegneri italiani dal secolo XIV alla metà del XVIII,” Miscellanea di storia italiana 14 (1874): 295–­311. 22. R. Ciasca, “Francesco de’ Marchi e il suo trattato sull’architettura militare,” Archivio storico italiano, ser. 5, no. 46 (1910): 363–­75; Daniela Lamberini, “De Marchi, Francesco,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 38 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1990), 447–­54. 23. De Marchi, Della architettura militare, bk. 3, chap. 34; see also Guglielmotti, Storia della marina pontificia. 24. Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), esp. 201–­9.

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25. Tartaglia’s self-­portraits appeared in the 1554 edition of his Quesiti et inventioni diverse and in his Ragionamenti of 1551. 26. J. P. Richter, ed., The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, Compiled and Edited from the Original Manuscripts by Jean Paul Richter, 2 vols. (New York: Phaidon, 1970), 2:326, no. 1340. 27. See Augusto Marinoni, “La Pianta di Imola,” in Leonardo artista delle macchine e cartografo, ed. Rosaria Campioni (Florence: Giunti, 1994), 77. 28. See chap. 1, n. 30. 29. Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 248–­53. 30. De Marchi, Della architettura militare, bk. 2, chap. 32. 31. Letter from Mario Savorgnano to Giangiacomo Leonardi, March 17, 1548; cited in Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Giulio III, 19. On Savorgnano, see Promis, “Biografie di ingegneri italiani,” 385–­93. 32. See Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship, 243, further developed in Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–­1600 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011), 94–­126. 33. Long, “Hydraulic Engineering and the Study of Antiquity.” 34. Cod. Vat. 6683, 202, cited in Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Giulio III, 20. 35. On Alghisi, see Promis, “Biografie di ingegneri italiani,” 186–­89. 36. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, 6 vols. (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1966), 5:202–­3. 37. Ryan E. Gregg, “Panorama, Power, and History: Vasari and Stradano’s City Views in the Palazzo Vecchio” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2008), 30–­37. 38. Trevisi gave this figure in an address, “Alli virtuosi architetti,” that he appended to the bottom of the map for the 1560 edition. Panvinio’s estimate is found in an unfinished manuscript of ca. 1558, now in the Vatican Library, cited in Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Giulio III, 20. 39. See James Ackerman, “Architectural Practice in the Italian Renaissance,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 13 (1954): 3–­11; Nicholas Adams and Simon Pepper, “The Fortification Drawings,” in The Architectural Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and His Circle, ed. Christoph L. Frommel and Nicholas Adams, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994–­2000), 1:61–­74. 40. On the sequence, see Paolo Marconi, “Contributo alla storia delle fortificazioni di Roma nel Cinquecento e nel Seicento,” Quaderni dell’Istituto di storia dell’architettura dell’Università di Roma, ser. 13, no. 78 (1966): 109–­30. 41. Paul Schlapobersky and David Friedman, “Leonardo Bufalini’s Orthogonal Roma (1551),” Thresholds 28 (2005): 10–­16; Maier, “Mapping Past and Present,” 12–­13; Allan Ceen, “Bufalini 1551: Distortion and Rectification,” in Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, ed. Mario Bevilacqua and Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: Artemide, 2012), 128–­33. 42. Huppert discusses the collaborative nature of graphic investigations by architects in this circle in “Mapping Ancient Rome in Bufalini’s Plan.” See also Arnold Nesselrath, “I libri di disegni di anitchità: Tentativo di una tipologia,” in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, vol. 3, Dalla tradizione all’archeologia, ed. Salvatore Settis (Turin: Einaudi, 1986), 89–­174; Hubertus Günther, Das Studium der antiken Architektur in den Zeichnungen der Hochrenaissance (Tübingen: E. Wasmuth, 1988); Ian Campbell, “The Development of Architectural Drawing after the Antique, before 1600,” in The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, ser. A, pt. 9, Ancient Roman Topography and Architecture, 3 vols. (London: Royal Collection, 2004), 1:19–­36.

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43. Ingrid Rowland, “Vitruvius in Print and in Vernacular Translation: Fra Giocondo, Bramante, Raphael, and Cesare Cesariano,” in Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise, ed. Vaughn Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 105–­21. 44. For references to Rome’s ancient structures see esp. Lawrence Richardson, Jr., A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Eva Margareta Steinby, ed., Lexicon topographicum urbis Romae, 6 vols. (Rome: Quasar, 1993–­2000). 45. Maier, “Mapping Past and Present,” 13–­16. Vitruvius celebrated symmetry in an influential passage on temples in his De architectura. See Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 47. 46. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), xxix. 47. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:165, no. 106; Insolera, Roma, 122–­25; Mario Gori Sassoli, ed., Roma veduta: Disegni e stampe panoramiche della città dal XV al XIX secolo (Rome: Artemide, 2000), 152, no. 15 (with further references). On Van Cleef and his views of Rome, see esp. Nadine Orenstein, “The Large Panorama of Rome by Hendrik Hondius I after Hendrick van Cleef III,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 38 (1990): 25–­36. 48. Gregg, “Panorama, Power, and History,” 50–­60. 49. Howard Burns, “I disegni di Francesco di Giorgio agli Uffizi di Firenze,” in Francesco di Giorgio architetto, ed. Francesco Paolo Fiore and Manfredo Tafuri (Milan: Electa, 1993), 330–­57. On approaches to reconstruction, see esp. Cammy Brothers, “Reconstruction as Design: Giuliano da Sangallo and the ‘Palazzo di Mecenate’ on the Quirinal Hill,” Annali di architettura 14 (2002): 55–­72. 50. For an overview of Palladio’s drawings, see Douglas Lewis, The Drawings of Andrea Palladio (New Orleans: Martin and St. Martin, 2000). 51. Andrea Fulvio, Opera di Andrea Fulvio delle antichità della città di Roma, & delli edificii memorabili di quella (Venice, 1543), 109. 52. Raphael, letter to Leo X (Munich MS), in John Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 1483–­1602, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:520–­21. 53. Huppert, “Mapping Ancient Rome in Bufalini’s Plan.” 54. Richardson argues that it might have been a nymphaeum or dining hall in New Topographical Dictionary, 269–­70. 55. The Basilica of Gaius and Lucius Caesar, in fact, had been one dedication and incarnation of the Basilica Julia in the Roman Forum. The porticus was actually a separate monument dedicated to the same duo, which had also been located in the Forum, and was associated with the Basilica Aemilia. 56. Other than Bufalini and Marliani, most mapmakers identify the structure as the Temple of Minerva Medica: cf. Ligorio 1552 and 1553, Paciotto 1557, and Panvinio 1565. They all also show it more accurately, with no hint of the invented basilica. 57. Bufalini mislabels the tomb as that of Scipio Africanus, an identification that had been discussed by Fulvio in Opera di Andrea Fulvio delle antichità, 167–­68. 58. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, trans., “The Letter to Leo X by Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione (c. 1519),” in Palladio’s Rome: A Translation of Andrea Palladio’s Two Guidebooks to Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 182. 59. The Via Lata/Via del Corso was the intramural extension of the Via Flaminia. It was widened and systematized beginning during the papacy of Paul II Barbo (r. 1464–­1471). On the Capitoline, see Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 254–­64.

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60. James S. Ackerman, “Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill,” Renaissance News 10 (1957): 69–­75; Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 206–­8, no. 176. 61. On New St. Peter’s, see esp. Christoph L. Frommel, “St. Peter’s: The Early History,” in The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture, ed. Henry A. Millon and Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 399–­423. 62. Surviving documents reveal that at the time of his death—­within a year of the map’s publication—­Bufalini was in debt, part of which his widow later repaid not in currency but in maps, implying that finances were tight and (unsold) maps plentiful. These documents include Bufalini’s will, reprinted in Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Giulio III, 13–­16; and two records relating to a payment reprinted in Antonino Bertolotti, “La pianta di Roma di Leonardo Bufalini,” Archivio storico, artistico, archeologico e letterario di Roma e della provincia 4 (1880): 157–­63. 63. For the original woodcut and a plethora of images that follow Barbari’s to varying degrees, see Juergen Schulz, “The Printed Plans and Panoramic Views of Venice (1486–­ 1797),” Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte 7 (1970): 41–­75. 64. See Warner, The True Description of Cairo, 1:143–­83. 65. Tolias, “Nikolaos Sophianos’s Totius Graeciae Descriptio,” 166. 66. See Hülsen, “Saggio,” 52–­57, nos. 31–­46. 67. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:204, no. 144; Alberto Caldana et al., Roma antica: Piante topografiche e vedute generali (Vincenza: Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, 2013), 87–­88, no. I.24. 68. Giulio Ballino’s city atlas, De’ disegni delle più illustri città e fortezze del mondo (Venice, 1569), includes a map of the Vatican Borgo adapted from Bufalini’s rendering of that zone. See Clemente Marigliani, ed., Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private (Rome: Provincia di Roma, 2007), 150. Paolo De Angelis’s Basilicae S. Mariae Maioris de urbe a Liberio papa I. usque ad Paulum V . . . descriptio et delineatio (Rome, 1621) similarly included a one-­sheet engraved copy of a section of Bufalini’s plan showing the Esquiline. 69. Two other ichnographic plans appeared in the meantime, by Fausto Veranzio ca. 1593 (Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:96, no. 137) and Antonio Barbey in 1697 (ibid., 1:225, no. 162). Both are considerably more modest than Bufalini’s map. Matteo Gregorio de Rossi’s Nuova pianta di Roma of 1668 also has an ichnographic base, but many monuments are shown in perspective (ibid., 1:221–­22, no. 158). 70. Claudio Tolomei, De le lettere di M. Claudio Tolomei lib. sette (Venice, 1547), 82v. 71. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 17. The inventory is reprinted in Ehrle, Roma prima di Sisto V, 48–­53. The “pianta di Roma anticha, grande come la bottegha” appears on page 50. 72. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 51, no. 29; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:175, no. 116. 73. Lucia Nuti, “The Perspective Plan in the Sixteenth Century: The Invention of a New Representational Language,” Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 105–­28. 74. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:64, no. 18. 75. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 57, no. 47; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1: 65–­66, no. 20; Caldana et al., Roma antica, 82, no. I.13. 76. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 51–­52, no. 30; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:177, no. 117. On Dosio, see also Campbell, “Development of Architectural Drawing,” 29 (with further references). 77. Floriano Dal Buono, Ritratto overo profilo della città di Bologna (map; Bologna, 1636). See also Giovanni Ricci, “Città murata e illusione olografica: Bologna e altri luoghi (secoli XVI–­ XVIII),” in La città e le mura, ed. Cesare De Seta and Jacques Le Goff (Bari: Laterza, 1989), 284.

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78. For a discussion of this distinction in light of city imagery, see Giovanni Ricci, “ ‘Verare la città’ (La città e suo doppio),” in L’immagine delle città italiane dal XV al XIX secolo, ed. Cesare De Seta (Rome: De Luca, 1998), 67–­71. 79. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 45–­46, no. 17; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:171–­72, no. 112; Insolera, Roma, 125–­28; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 142–­43, no. 8; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 142–­43; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 81–­84. 80. Catherine Delano-­Smith, “Cartographic Signs on European Maps and Their Explanation before 1700,” Imago Mundi 37 (1985): 9–­29. 81. On Licinio’s version, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 46, no. 18; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:174, no. 115. On Camocio’s, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 48, no. 21; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:181, no. 122. For the derivatives of Pinard’s view, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 46–­49, nos. 18–­24. 82. On Braun and Hogenberg’s view, see Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 182, no. 123; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 148, no. 12; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 152, no. 52. See also the derivatives of that version of Pinard’s view in Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 153, nos. 53–­54, 165, no. 66. 83. On the Civitates orbis terrarum, see Stephan Füssel, “Natura sola magistra: The Evolution of City Iconography in the Early Modern Era,” intro. to Civitates orbis terrarum/Cities of the World, by Stephan Füssel and Johannes Altdof, facsimile ed. (Cologne: Taschen, 2011), 8–­41. 84. Martial, Epigrams, 4:64, trans. Donald L. Dudley (Aberdeen: Phaidon, 1967), 219. 85. Cf. “Il vero disegno et ritrato della fortezza di Crescentino” (The true drawing and portrait of the fortress of Crescentino) from Ballino’s 1569 city atlas. The “drawing and portrait” in question is a pure plan. 86. See Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 133–­35. 87. For bibliography on Nolli, see epilogue, n. 1.

Chapter four

1. On this genre, see Christian Hülsen, “Saggio di bibliografia ragionata delle piante icnografiche e prospettiche di Roma dal 1551 al 1748,” Archivio della Reale Società Romana di Storia Patria 38 (1915): 30–­34; Marcello Fagiolo, Roma antica (Cavollino di Lecce: Capone, 1991); and especially Alberto Caldana et al., Roma antica: Piante topografiche e vedute generali (Vincenza: Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, 2013). 2. For cultural background on the paragone, see also Leatrice Mendelsohn, Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi’s Due lezzioni and Cinquecento Art Theory (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), 35–­85. On Leonardo and the paragone, see Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Paragone”: A Critical Interpretation with a New Edition and English Translation of the Text in the Codex Urbinas (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 3. Amato Pietro Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 3 vols. (Rome: Istituto di studi romani, 1962), 1:56–­57, no. 12. 4. On Ligorio, see esp. Erna Mandowsky and Charles Mitchell, Pirro Ligorio’s Roman Antiquities: The Drawings in MS XIII. B. 7 in the National Library in Naples (London: Warburg Institute, 1963); Robert W. Gaston, ed., Pirro Ligorio: Artist and Antiquarian (Florence: Silvana Editoriale, 1988); David Coffin, Pirro Ligorio: The Renaissance Artist, Architect, and Antiquarian (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). On Ligorio’s cartography, see Roberto Almagià, “Pirro Ligorio Cartografo,” Rendiconti dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, cl. di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, ser. 8, 11 (1956): 49–­61; Robert

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.



14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

W. Karrow, Jr., Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and Their Maps: Bio-­bibliographies of the Cartographers of Abraham Ortelius, 1570 (Chicago: Speculum Orbis Press, 1993), 349–­58. On Ligorio’s engineering pursuits, see Pamela O. Long, “Hydraulic Engineering and the Study of Antiquity: Rome, 1557–­70,” Renaissance Quarterly 61 (2008): 1123–­29. See Andrew Wilton and Ilaria Bignamini, Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London: Tate Gallery, 1996), 141. Pirro Ligorio, Libro di m. Pyrrho Ligori napolitano, delle antichità di Roma, nel quale si tratta de’ circi, theatri, & anfitheatri (Venice, 1553), 18. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 30–­32, 41–­42, no. 10; Frutaz, Le Piante di Roma, 1:170–­71, no. 111; Mario Gori Sassoli, ed., Roma veduta: Disegni e stampe panoramiche della città dal XV al XIX secolo (Rome: Artemide, 2000), 141–­42, no. 7. On this view, see also Coffin, Pirro Ligorio, 16–­17. For early derivatives and copies, see Clemente Marigliani, ed., Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private (Rome: Provincia di Roma, 2007), 138–­39, nos. 36–­37. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 30–­32, 43–­44, no. 15; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:60–­61, no. 16; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 140–­41, no. 38; Caldana et al., Roma antica, 75, no. I.3. For a more recent and contextualized treatment, see Philip Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity: The Origins of Rome in Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 216–­18; Coffin, Pirro Ligorio, 17–­19. See esp. Howard Burns, “Pirro Ligorio’s Reconstruction of Ancient Rome: The Anteiquae Urbis Imago of 1561,” in Gaston, Pirro Ligorio: Artist and Antiquarian, 19–­92. See also Hülsen, “Saggio,” 30–­32, 52–­53, no. 31; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:61–­63, nos. 17, 17a–­b; Steffen Bogen and Felix Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten von der Antike bis heute (Darmstadt: WBG, 2009), 84–­91; Mario Bevilacqua, “Roma antica: Produzione e circolazione dell’immagine a stampa in Europa tra Rinascimento e Barocco,” in Caldana et al., Roma antica, 19–­24; Caldana et al., Roma antica, 78, no. I.7. Sources that assert Ligorio’s reliance on Bufalini include Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 62; Burns, “Pirro Ligorio’s Reconstruction,” 22; Coffin, Pirro Ligorio, 25. Yet the delineation of the city walls and streets in Ligorio’s Roma grande does not closely correspond to Bufalini’s map. “Effigies antiquae Romae ex vestigiis aedificiorum / ruinis testimonio veterum auctorum fide/ numismatum monumentis aeneis plumbaeis saxeis / tiglinisque collecta atque in hanc tabellam redacta / atque descripta à Pyrrho Ligorio.” As Burns has pointed out, for example, it was through careful study of the regionaries that Ligorio, unlike Bufalini, correctly identified the structure adjoining Santa Croce in Gerusalemme as the Amphitheatrum Castrense. Burns, “Pirro Ligorio’s Reconstruction,” 25, 53, n. 47. See chap. 2, n. 9. Burns, “Pirro Ligorio’s Reconstruction,” 32. Mandowsky and Mitchell, Pirro Ligorio’s Roman Antiquities, 43. “hoggidi qui è san pietro”; “Qui il palazzo di sanpietro”; “qui si dice belvedere.” On the historiography, see Tancredi Carunchio, “L’immagine di Roma di Pirro Ligorio: Proposta metodologica per lo studio dell’opera dell’antiquario napoletano,” Ricerche di storia dell’arte 3 (1976): 25–­42; Mandowsky and Mitchell, Pirro Ligorio’s Roman Antiquities, esp. 50–­51. Burns, “Pirro Ligorio’s Reconstruction,” 37. Robert W. Gaston, “Introduction,” in Gaston, Pirro Ligorio: Artist and Antiquarian, 16. Giovanni Andrea Gilio, Dialogo nel qual si ragiona degli errori e degli abusi de’ pittori circa l’istorie, in Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: Fra manierismo e controriforma, vol. 2, Gilio—­Paleotti—­ Aldrovandi, ed. Paola Barocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1961), 100.

Notes to pages

121 –130 · 251

22. Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, vol. 4, The Fourteen Orations against Marcus Antonius, trans. C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852), 1.19, 263. 23. For the copies and derivatives of Ligorio’s Roma grande, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 53–­57, nos. 32–­46; Karrow, Mapmakers, 354–­56; Bevilacqua, “Roma antica: Produzione e circolazione,” 20-­24. 24. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 54–­55, no. 38. 25. Cited and translated in Stephan Füssel and Johannes Altdof, Civitates orbis terrarum/Cities of the World, facsimile ed. (Cologne: Taschen, 2011), 338. 26. Francesco Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Giulio III: La pianta di Roma di Leonardo Bufalini del 1551 riprodotta dall’esemplare esistente nella Biblioteca Vaticana a cura della biblioteca medesima (Rome: Danesi, 1911), 26. Following Ehrle, Christian Hülsen wrote that Ligorio’s 1553 view of Rome, characterized as it was by “arbitrary and fantastical identifications,” was a “perfect contrast with the simple and serious work of Marliani” (Hülsen, “Saggio,” 31). 27. For an overview of their polemics, see Jacks, Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity, 214–­16. 28. Rehav Rubin, Image and Reality: Jerusalem in Maps and Views ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1999), 110–­22. 29. Ibid., 87–­99. 30. Ibid., 63–­75. 31. On the connection between Ligorio and Du Pérac, see Cristina Bragaglia Venuti, “Etienne Dupérac and Pirro Ligorio,” Print Quarterly 23 (2006): 408–­13 (with further references). 32. On Du Pérac, see Anna Grelle, ed., Vestigi delle antichità di Roma . . . et altri luoghi: Momenti dell’elaborazione di un’immagine (Rome: Quasar, 1987), esp. 71–­96; Emmanuel Lurin, “Étienne Dupérac vedutista e cartografo: La costruzione della pianta di Roma del 1577,” in Le città dei cartografi: Studi e ricerche di storia urbana, ed. Cesare De Seta and Brigitte Marin (Naples: Electa Napoli, 2008), 49–­59 (with further references). 33. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:66–­67, no. 21; compare 1:65–­66, no. 20. 34. Rudolph Wittkower, intro. to Disegni de le ruine di Roma e come anticamente erono (Milan: A. Pizzi, 1963), 35; Henri Zerner, “Observations on Dupérac and the Disegni de le ruine di Roma e come anticamente erono,” Art Bulletin 46 (1965): 507–­12 (509); Jean-­Louis Ferrary, Onofrio Panvinio et les antiquités romaines (Rome: École française de Rome, 1996), 34–­35. 35. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:67–­68, no. 22; Giovanni Aragozzini and Marco Nocca, Le piante di Roma dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento (Rome: Dino Audino, 1993), 38–­39; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 91–­99; Caldana et al., Roma antica, 80–­81, no. I.12. 36. On Vaccari’s involvement, see Clemente Marigliani, “Storia di una Collezione,” in Caldana et al., Roma antica, 53. On the career of Villamena see Franca Trinchieri Camiz, “The Roman ‘Studio’ of Francesco Villamena,” Burlington Magazine 136 (1994): 506–­16. 37. Michael Bury, The Print in Italy 1550–­1620 (London: British Museum, 2001), 78. 38. “Quindecim iam annos, magno cum labore. . . . Quo toto tempore descripsi infinitam quondam vim veterum inscriptionum, omnia rudera, omnes parietinas, omnes denique cuiusque generis, vetustatis reliquias et curiosissime inspexi, et diligentissime expressi, perpetuo adnotans, quo quidque loco repertum atque erutum esset. Cum autem haec omnia collegisem, et cum iis quae a vetustis scriptoribus eodem pertinentia accepimus.” 39. “Multum autem mihi ad id efficiendum et animi et auxilij attullit vetus eiusdem urbis ichnographia in tabulis marmoreis effossa Pii IIII temporibus ad aedem Sanctos Cosmae et Damniani.” 40. There is a vast and growing bibliography on the Severan marble plan. See esp. Gianfi­ lippo Carettoni et al., La pianta marmorea di Roma antica: Forma urbis Romae, 2 vols. (Rome: Danesi, 1960); Emilio Rodríguez-­Almeida, Forma urbis marmorea: Aggiornamento generale 1980 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1981); David West Reynolds, “Forma Urbis

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Romae: The Severan Marble Plan and the Urban Form of Ancient Rome” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1996). For an overview and account of its early reception, see John Pinto, “Forma Urbis Romae: Fragment and Fantasy,” in Architectural Studies in Memory of Richard Krautheimer, ed. Cecil L. Striker (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 1996), 143–­ 46; Joseph Connors, Piranesi and the Campus Martius: The Missing Corso; Topography and Archaeology in Eighteenth-­Century Rome (Milan: Jaca Book, 2011), 66–­69 (both with further references). 41. Ingrid Rowland has proposed an earlier date for the discovery based on a passing reference to “certain ancient marbles” in Raphael’s letter to Leo X. See Ingrid Rowland, “Raphael, Angelo Colocci and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders,” Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 88. The allusion strikes me as too vague to substantiate her theory, however intriguing. 42. Bernardo Gamucci, Libri quattro dell’antichità della città di Roma (Venice, 1565), 33. 43. Pinto, “Forma Urbis Romae,” 144. 44. For a good summary of these events, see the Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project: http://formaurbis.stanford.edu/docs/FURmap.html (accessed June 17, 2014). 45. Ferrary, Onofrio Panvinio, 35–­36. 46. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, trans., “The Letter to Leo X by Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione (c. 1519),” in Palladio’s Rome: A Translation of Andrea Palladio’s Two Guidebooks to Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 190–­91. On the Vitruvian terms, see Maria Teresa Bartoli, “Orthographia, Ichnographia, Scaenographia,” Studi e documenti di architettura 8 (1978): 197–­208. 47. Francesco Ehrle, Roma prima di Sisto V: La pianta di Roma du Pérac–­Lafréry del 1577 riprodotta dall’esemplare esistente nel Museo Britannico; Contributo alla storia del commercio delle stampe a Roma nel secolo 16 e 17 (Rome: Danesi, 1908); Lurin, “Étienne Dupérac vedutista e cartografo.” See also Hülsen, “Saggio,” 66–­67, no. 73; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:186, no. 127; Italo Insolera, Roma: Immagini e realtà dal X al XX secolo (Bari: Laterza, 1980), 134–­38; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 153, no. 16. 48. Lurin, “Étienne Dupérac vedutista e cartografo.” 49. “Veteris Romae immaginem a veteribus monumentis, magno meo labore diligenter expressam, Henrice Regum Maxime superioribus annis dicavi Karolo IX fratri tuo, cuius desiderium eo tantum nomine acquiore animo ferimus, quia te successorem reliquit. Nunc tibi eius Romae quae hodie est, non minus accurate descriptam offero, expressis etiam iis quae tempor. iniuriam effugerunt, antiquitatis reliquiis; Munus non indignum, quo aliquando pascas oculos et in quo humanarum rerum vicissitudinem agnoscas.” 50. Lurin, “Étienne Dupérac vedutista e cartografo,” 50. 51. On Cartaro, see Fabia Borroni, “Cartaro, Mario,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 20 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1977), 796–­99 (with further references). See also the extensive treatment his views are given in Enrico Rocchi, Le piante icnografiche e prospettiche di Roma del secolo XVI (Rome: Roux e Viarengo, 1902), 80–­100, 121–­72. 52. See the transcription of the inventory in Ehrle, Roma prima di Sisto V, 48–­53, esp. 49 (“quattro fogli l’una Roma Moderna quattro, et un altra Roma Vecchia, un poco rotta”; “Roma Anticha e Moderna grande in telaro”) and 51 (“la Roma moderna, di sei pezzi grande” followed immediately by “la Roma anticha, di sei pezzi grande”). 53. Rocchi, Le piante icnografiche, 80–­100; Hülsen, “Saggio,” 68–­70, no. 76; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:68–­69, no. 23. 54. See the facsimile edition with accompanying commentary: Disegni de le Ruine di Roma e come anticamente erono, intro. by Rudolf Wittkower, 2 vols. (Milan: A. Pizzi, 1964). Zerner discusses that collection as well as Panvinio’s prints—­and the relationship between the two—­in “Observations on Dupérac,” 509.

Notes to pages

135 –146 · 253

55. “Omnium rerum pulcherrimam se dare credit Romam scilicet et hanc geminam: neque enim satis tibi factum duxit, redivivam istam unam quae hodie colitur ante oculus posuisse: nisi veterem etiam, totius olim orbis dominam . . . quasi e sepulchro excitatam addidisset.” 56. Rocchi, Le piante icnografiche, 121–­72; Hülsen, “Saggio,” 65–­66, no. 72; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:185, no. 126; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 150, no. 14. 57. This particular iteration of the motto is, however, known from ancient coins. It was not uncommon in classical Latin to drop the n of a gerund when it preceded an s. See Frederic William Madden, Charles Roach Smith, and Seth William Stevenson, A Dictionary of Ancient Roman Coins: Republican and Imperial (London: Bell and Son, 1889), 694. Still, it seems more likely that Cartaro was making a Latin error than knowingly employing an arcane formulation. 58. On Lafreri and the Roman printing trade during the Renaissance, see esp. Ehrle, Roma prima di Sisto V; Fabia Borroni Salvadori, “I centri incisori di Roma e Venezia,” intro. to Carte, piante e stampe storiche delle raccolte lafreriane della Biblioteca nazionale di Firenze (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1980), vii–­xlix; David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print: 1470–­1550 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 298–­309; David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors and Consumers (London: British Library, 1996), esp. 41–­73; Bury, Print in Italy, esp. 121–­35; Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Copyright in the Renaissance: Prints and the Privilegio in Sixteenth-­Century Venice and Rome (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Peter Parshall, “Antonio Lafreri’s Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae,” Print Quarterly 23 (2006): 3–­28; Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Print Publishing in Sixteenth-­Century Rome: Growth and Expansion, Rivalry and Murder (London: Harvey Miller, 2008); Rebecca Zorach, ed., The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome: Printing and Collecting the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2008). For an overview, see Marigliani, “Storia di una Collezione.” 59. “Tavole moderne de la maggior parte del mondo di diversi autori raccolte et messe second l’ordine di Tolomeo con i disegni di molte citta et fortezze di diverse provintie stampate in rame con studio et diligenza.” On the frontispieces, see Bury, Print in Italy, 50. On the Speculum, see esp. Parshall, “Antonio Lafreri’s Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae”; Zorach, The Virtual Tourist. 60. See esp. Rose Marie San Juan, Rome: A City out of Print (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 61. Hart and Hicks, Palladio’s Rome. For bibliography on the guidebook tradition, see chap. 2, n. 46. 62. Zorach, The Virtual Tourist. 63. Woodward, Maps as Prints, 65–­69; Bury, Print in Italy, 128; Witcombe, Copyright. 64. On the various centers, see Bury, Print in Italy. See also R. V. Tooley, “Maps in Italian Atlases of the Sixteenth Century, Being a Comparative List of the Italian Maps Issued by Lafreri, Forlani, Duchetti, Bertelli and Others, Found in Atlases,” Imago Mundi 3 (1939): 12–­47; Borroni Salvadori, “I centri incisori.” 65. Lisa Roemer, “Rom in Salzburg: Ein Beitrag zur Landkartengalerie der Salzburger Residenz,” in Die Salzburger Residenz 1587–­1727: Vision und Realität, ed. Ulrike Steiner (Horn: Berger, 2009), 94–­117. See also Denis Ribouillault, “Peindre Rome à la Renaissance (XVe–­ XVIe siècles): Des loggias à l’antique aux nouveaux systèmes géopolitiques,” in Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, ed. Mario Bevilacqua and Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: Artemide, 2012), 153.

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66. On Brambilla, see C. Alberici, “Brambilla, Ambrogio,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 13 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1971), 729–­30. 67. On Duchetti, see Ehrle, Roma prima di Sisto V, 19–­20; S. P. Fox, “Duchet (Duchetti, Duchetto), Claude (Claudio),” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 41 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1992), 755–­56. On Van Aelst, see Ehrle, Roma prima di Sisto V, 21; Bury, Print in Italy, 127; Witcombe, Print Publishing, 360–­70. For an overview of Brambilla’s work with Duchetti along with similar collaborations linking any number of figures, see Witcombe, Print Publishing, 303–­76. 68. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 59, no. 53; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:70, no. 25. 69. On Cartaro’s map of 1575, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 62, no. 60; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:184, no. 125. On Brambilla’s copy of 1582, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 70, no. 77; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 155, no. 56. For derivatives of Brambilla’s version, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 70–­71, nos. 78–­81; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 163, no. 63; 189, no. 93; 206–­7, nos. 110–­11. For the 1587 version published by Franzini, see Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 161, no. 60; 162, no. 62. Prior to Brambilla, Cartaro’s map of 1575 was copied by Luca Bertelli in Venice. See Hülsen, “Saggio,” 62, no. 61; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 154, no. 55. 70. On the Antiquae urbis perfecta imago, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 106, no. 40a; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:69–­70, no. 24. On the Novissima urbis Romae descriptio MDLXXXX, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 63, no. 62; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:192, no. 133. 71. For copies of Brambilla’s Roma nuova, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 63–­65, nos. 62–­71; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 177–­79, nos. 80–­82; 185, no. 90. Smaller works that appear to be based on the same prototype are illustrated in Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 164, nos. 64–­65; 181–­82, no. 84–­87. 72. Bury, Print in Italy, 121–­22. 73. On the Jubilee as a recurring catalyst for image production, see Alessandro Rinaldi, “Le mappe della salvezza: Cartografia urbana e anni santi (1450–­1826),” in Roma sancta: La città delle basiliche, ed. Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna (Rome: Gangemi, 1985), 253–­63. 74. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:183, no. 124; Insolera, Roma, 162–­65; Alessandro Rinaldi, “Le sette meraviglie della Roman cristiana: L’invenzione del Lafréry,” in Fagiolo and Madonna, Roma Sancta, 269–­74; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 150, no. 13; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 99–­102. 75. On the idea of the memento or souvenir, see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 76. Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” trans. John Czaplicka, in “Cultural History/Cultural Studies,” special issue, New German Critique 65: 125–­33. See also Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–­24. 77. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 56, no. 42; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:73, no. 28; Caldana et al., Roma antica, 88, no. I.25.

Chapter five

1. Laurie Nussdorfer, “Print and Pageantry in Baroque Rome,” Sixteenth-­Century Journal 29 (1998): 448–­51 (with further references).

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2. Franz Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Urbano VIII: La pianta di Roma Maggi-­Maupin-­Losi del 1625, riprodotta da uno dei due esemplari completi finora conosciuti a cura della Biblioteca Vaticana (Rome: Danesi, 1915), 17. In fact, many multisheet works survive because they were bound in examples of the Speculum romanae magnificentiae published by Antonio Lafreri and his heirs, and thus protected by the volume itself. Maps of Rome mounted on canvas and/or on a framework (telaio or telaro) for the purpose of display are mentioned in the 1594 workshop inventory of Lafreri’s nephew and successor Claudio Duchetti. For the inventory, see chap. 3, n. 71. These were more vulnerable, and the few that survive are often in bad shape. 3. Mario Rosa, “The ‘World’s Theatre’: The Court of Rome and Politics in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” in Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–­1700, ed. Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 78–­ 98. See also Joanna Norman, “Performance and Politics in the Urban Space of Baroque Rome,” in Perspectives on Public Space in Rome, from Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Gregory Smith and Jan Gadeyne (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 211–­29. On spectacles in early modern Rome, see Marcello Fagiolo, ed., La festa a Roma dal Rinascimento al 1870, 2 vols. (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1997). 4. Nussdorfer, “Print and Pageantry.” 5. On Tempesta and his map, see esp. Christian Hülsen, “Saggio di bibliografia ragionata delle piante icnografiche e prospettiche di Roma dal 1551 al 1748,” Archivio della Reale Società Romana di Storia Patria 38 (1915): 24–­26, 74–­75, no. 84; Franz Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Clemente VIII: La pianta di Roma di Antonio Tempesta del 1593 riprodotta da una copia vaticana del 1606 (Rome: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1932); Amato Pietro Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 3 vols. (Rome: Istituto di studi romani, 1962), 1:192–­93, no. 134; Italo Insolera, Roma: Immagini e realtà dal X al XX secolo (Bari: Laterza, 1980), 198–­205; Stefano Borsi, Roma di Sisto V: La pianta di Antonio Tempesta, 1593 (Rome: Officina, 1986); Giovanni Aragozzini and Marco Nocca, Le piante di Roma dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento (Rome: Dino Audino, 1993), 63–­65; Eckhard Leuschner, “The Papal Printing Privilege,” Print Quarterly 15 (1998): 359–­70; Mario Gori Sassoli, ed., Roma veduta: Disegni e stampe panoramiche della città dal XV al XIX secolo (Rome: Artemide, 2000), 156, no. 18; Ekhard Leuschner, The Illustrated Bartsch, 35, Commentary, pt. 1: Antonio Tempesta (New York: Abaris Books, 2004); Steffen Bogen and Felix Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten von der Antike bis heute (Darmstadt: WBG, 2009), 106–­14; Ekhard Leuschner, “Prolegomena to a Study of Antonio Tempesta’s ‘Map of Rome,’ ” in Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, ed. Mario Bevilacqua and Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: Artemide, 2012), 158–­167. 6. On Stradanus’s work in Florence, see esp. Ryan E. Gregg, “Panorama, Power, and History: Vasari and Stradano’s City Views in the Palazzo Vecchio” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2008). 7. For Tempesta’s privilege, see Leuschner, “The Papal Printing Privilege,” 366–­68, 370. 8. Lawrence Richardson, Jr., A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 350. 9. For basic background on the Roman print industry in the time of Sixtus V see L. Bel­ lingeri and P. Costabile, “Dinamiche produttive e mercato editoriale,” in Roma di Sisto V: Le arti e la cultura, ed. Maria Luisa Madonna (Rome: Edizioni De Luca, 1993), 487–­93. 10. “Urbem non illam veteram, sed quam hodie sub Sanctis Pontifibus florentem aspicimus.” 11. Borsi, Roma di Sisto V, 20. 12. Anna Grelle Iusco and Lorenzo Filippo de’ Rossi, Indice delle stampe intagliate in rame a bulino e in acqua forte esistenti nella stamperia di Lorenzo Filippo De’ Rossi: Contributo alla storia di una stamperia romana (Rome: Artemide, 1996).

Notes to pages

165 –176 · 256

13. Ibid., 160, 188, 236 (commentary: 378, 394, 430). 14. See the Getty Research Project’s Payments to Artists Database (Pilot Project: 17th-­ Century Rome), http://piprod.getty.edu/starweb/prices/servlet.starweb?path=prices /prices.web (accessed June 17, 2014). 15. Iusco and de’ Rossi, Indice delle stampe, 172 (commentary: 379). 16. Ibid., 188 (commentary: 394). 17. Francesca Consagra, “The De Rossi Family Print Publishing Shop: A Study in the History of the Print Industry in Seventeenth-­Century Rome” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1993), 346–­48. 18. Leuschner, “Prolegomena,” 163. 19. Sarah Tyacke, “Introduction,” in Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, vol. 4, Music, Maps and Calligraphy, ed. John Latham (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1989), vii–­xvi. 20. Ibid., viii. 21. Kate Loveman, “Books and Sociability: The Case of Samuel Pepys’s Library,” Review of English Studies 61 (2010): 214–­233. 22. Consagra, “The De Rossi Family Print Publishing Shop,” 347. 23. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 75, nos. 85–­86; Clemente Marigliani, ed., Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private (Rome: Provincia di Roma, 2007), 170–­71, no. 73, 202–­4, no. 108. 24. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:214–­15, no. 152. On the De Rossi family and the Roman print industry in the 1600s, the authoritative study is Consagra, “The De Rossi Family Print Publishing Shop.” 25. Disegno et prospetto dell’alma città di Roma, già delineato d’Antonio Tempesta e di nuovo rintagliato accresciuto et abbellito di strade piazze palazzi tempii et edificii conforme si truova al presente nel pontificato di N. S. Alessandro VII con la cura di Gio. Giacomo de Rossi l’anno 1662. 26. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 75–­76, no. 87; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:223–­24, no. 160. 27. See, for example, Hülsen, “Saggio,” 76–­77, nos. 88–­90; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:194, no. 135, 1:217–­18, no. 155; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 172–­75, nos. 74–­77, 180, no. 83. 28. Sarah Tyacke, The Map of Rome, 1625, Paul Maupin: A Companion to the Facsimile Reproduced from the Original in the Pepys Library (London: Nottingham Court Press, 1982); Daniela Gallavotti Cavallero, “Giovanni Maggi, la pittura di paesaggio e la Pianta di Roma del 1625,” in Bevilacqua and Fagiolo, Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, 198–­211. Other key sources—­whose authors, however, discuss a version printed by Carlo Losi in 1774—­include Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Urbano VIII; Hülsen, “Saggio,” 85–­86, no. 106; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:208–­9, no. 147; Insolera, Roma, 262–­69; Stefano Borsi, Roma di Urbano VIII: La pianta di Giovanni Maggi, 1625 (Rome: Officina, 1990); Aragozzini and Nocca, Le piante di Roma dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento, 92–­93; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 163, no. 23; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 192–­93, no. 95. 29. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 77, no. 91; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:203, no. 143; Borsi, Roma di Urbano VIII, 25–­27; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 159, no. 21. 30. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 78–­79, nos. 92–­97. 31. This map is known through a version published by Goert van Schayck in 1630. See Hülsen, “Saggio,” 24–­25, 79–­81, nos. 98–­101; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:209–­10, no. 148; Borsi, Roma di Urbano VIII, 28–­29. 32. Giovanni Baglione, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (Rome, 1642), 393–­94. 33. Ibid., 394. 34. Tyacke, The Map of Rome, 24, outlines the surviving exemplars. 35. Borsi, Roma di Urbano VIII, 38.

Notes to pages

177 –184 · 257

36. On Paul V’s interventions at Santa Maria Maggiore and his emulation of Sixtus V, see Steven F. Ostrow, “Paul V, the Column of the Virgin, and the New Pax Romana,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69 (2010): 352–­77. 37. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 27–­28, 87, no. 110, and 87–­88, no. 111 (edition of 1696); Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:216–­17, no. 154; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 175, no. 31 (a later edition, published by Carlo Losi in 1773); Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 216–­17, no. 124; Barbara Jatta, “La pianta di Roma di Lievin Cruyl del 1665,” in Bevilacqua and Fagiolo, Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, 212–­17. 38. On Cruyl, see esp. Joseph Connors, “Cruyl contro Falda,” in Vedute romane di Lieven Cruyl: Paesaggio urbano sotto Alessandro VII, by Barbara Jatta and Joseph Connors (Rome: American Academy in Rome, 1989), 17–­23; idem, “Giovanni Battista Falda and Lievin Cruyl: Rivalry between Printmakers and Publishers in the Mapping of Rome,” in Bevilacqua and Fagiolo, Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, 218–­31. 39. The complete title is Pianta di Roma come si trova al presente colle alzate delle fabbriche più notabili così antiche come moderne. 40. The full title of the map was Nouveau plan de la Ville-­Rome tiré par ordre du Pape par Matteo Gregoria de Romans tres utille pour les voiageurs, in Nouveaux Memoires De Mr. Nodot, Ou Observations Qu’il a faites pendant son Voyage d’Italie, sur les Monumens de l’Ancienne & de la Nouvelle Rome (Amsterdam: François l’Honoré, 1706). Hülsen, “Saggio,” 88, no. 112; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:228, no. 164; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 252, no. 158; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 133–­37. 41. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 26–­27, 81–­83, no. 102; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:205–­6, no. 145; Aragozzini and Nocca, Le piante di Roma dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento, 80–­81; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 114–­20; Augusto Roca de Amicis, “La Roma di Matteo Greuter, ritratto moderno di una città moderna,” in Bevilacqua and Fagiolo, Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, 182–­85. The last is part of a larger, forthcoming study on Greuter’s surprisingly neglected map. 42. On the lost plan, the existence of which is speculative but well founded, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 21–­24. The derivative is the map published by Timanno van Veen in Leiden in 1593, itself reprinted with some changes by Francesco de Paoli in 1623. On these, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 72–­73, nos. 82–­83; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:207, no. 146; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 158–­59, no. 19. 43. “io mi sono messo ad esprimere con ritrarre gl’istessi edifitii tutti in particolare a vera somiglianza di essi.” 44. Insolera, Roma, 216–­20. 45. “I notabili accresimenti dell’Alma città di Roma per tanti et così ampi edifitii et principalmente per l’eccelsa fabrica del tempio di S. Pietro in Vaticano, condotto quasi all’ultima fine, per la sontuosissima Capella di S. Maria Maggiore dell’ottimo e Sommo Pontefice Paolo Quinto . . . hanno talmente acceso l’animo mio a fare il presente disegno et intaglio, che sono stato costretto a benefitio publico di non risparmiare a fatiga per porre avanti gl’occhi del Mondo tutto quasi una nuova, et moderna Roma, la quale si come pare che sia in un certo modo rinata sotto il felicissimo Pontificato di Papa Paolo Quinto.” 46. “la magnificenza delle strade di nuovo addirizzate . . . , oltre alle molte Chiese di nuovo erette.” 47. On Rome’s hydraulic infrastructure in this time, see Katherine Rinne, The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 48. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 84, nos. 103–­4.

Notes to pages

184 –195 · 258

49. This background is summarized in Francesca Consagra, “De Rossi and Falda: A Successful Collaboration in the Print Industry of Seventeenth-­Century Rome,” in The Craft of Art: Originality and Industry in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque Workshop, ed. Andrew Ladis and Carolyn Wood (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 187–­203. 50. For an overview of Falda’s publications, see Anita Margiotto, G. B. Falda e suoi divulgatori: Scenografie urbane di Roma barocca (Rome: Comune di Roma, 1994). On the Nuovo teatro, the most celebrated of these works, see esp. Paul A. Wilson, “The Image of Chigi Rome: G. B. Falda’s Il nuovo teatro,” Architectura 26 (1996): 33–­46. See also Paolo Bellini, The Illustrated Bartsch, 47, Commentary, pt. 2: Giovanni Battista Falda (New York: Abaris Books, 1993). 51. On Piranesi, see epilogue, n. 10. 52. On this rivalry, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 27–­30; Connors, “Cruyl contro Falda”; idem, “Giovanni Battista Falda and Lievin Cruyl: Rivalry between Printmakers and Publishers in the Mapping of Rome,” in Bevilacqua and Fagiolo, Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, 218–­31. 53. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 89–­91, no. 116; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:218–­19, no. 156. Whether Falda alone was responsible for the etching is unclear, as the name of Giovanni Lhuillier appears in a small inscription at the bottom: “Ioannes Lhuilier sc.” The abbreviation is for sculpsit, which was often used to indicate “etched” or “engraved.” At the top, however, Falda is listed prominently as the one who incidit, which has the same meaning. Perhaps Lhuilier was responsible for the inscriptions. 54. Falda has also been given credit for a slightly earlier, very similar, unsigned map published by Joan Blaeu (Amsterdam, 1663). This map is even more dependent on Greuter, for it does little to update the city to reflect recent changes, such as Bernini’s piazza for St. Peter’s. If Falda’s authorship is assumed, this work represents a first step toward the map of 1667 and, ultimately, that of 1676. See Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:215–­16, no. 153; Gori Sassoli, Roma veduta, 174, no. 30 (the version illustrated is the edition of 1704); Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 215, no. 123. 55. For reprints from the same plates, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 91, nos. 117–­18. For copies and derivatives, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 91–­93, nos. 119–­27; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 218–­19, nos. 125–­26; 268, no. 186; 279, no. 200. 56. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 94, no. 128; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:219–­20, no. 157; Georg Schelbert, “All’ombra di Falda: La pianta di Roma di Matteo Gregorio de Rossi del 1668,” in Bevilacqua and Fagiolo, Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, 272–­83. For reprints and copies, see Hülsen, “Saggio,” 94–­95, no. 129; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 246–­47, no. 152. 57. For the theory that the unnamed Cruyl deserves the lion’s share of credit for the map, see Connors, “Cruyl contro Falda,” 20–­21. 58. Hülsen, “Saggio,” 98, no. 135; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:225, no. 162; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 253, no. 159; Allan Ceen, “Antonio Barbey’s ‘Nuova pianta della città di Roma,’ 1697,” in Bevilacqua and Fagiolo, Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, 298–­303. 59. On Falda’s map of 1676 see esp. Sarah McPhee, “Rome 1676: Falda’s View,” in Bevilacqua and Fagiolo, Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, 232–­43; James Tice, “ ‘Tutto insieme’: Giovanni Battista Falda’s Nuova Pianta di Roma of 1676,” in Bevilacqua and Fagiolo, Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, 244–­59. See also Hülsen, “Saggio,” 95–­97, no. 130; Franz Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Clemente X: La pianta di Roma di Giambattista Falda del 1676 (Rome: Danesi, 1931); Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:221–­22, no. 158; Insolera, Roma, 269–­76; Aragozzini and Nocca, Le piante di Roma dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento, 109–­11; Gori

Notes to pages

195 –199 · 259

Sassoli, Roma veduta, 177, no. 32; Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 224–­25, no. 129; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 120–­28. 60. On the relationship between the two maps, see esp. Tice, “Tutto insieme.” 61. See Joseph Connors, Francesco Borromini: Opus Architectonicum (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1998), lxiv. 62. Consagra, “De Rossi and Falda,” 195–­96. 63. “Per il corso di molti anni mi sono affaticato a sodisfare con le mie stampe al suo nobile e studioso genio. . . . Tra le cose insigni di Roma moderna, l’ho fatta ritrarre a parte a parte nella sua maggiore bellezza; prima con due libri di Palazzi con le loro alzate, piante e profili regolati con architettura et con altri tre libri del Theatro delle fabbriche con le Chiese Palazzi et Piazze più conspicue et vedute in prospettiva, vaghissimamente condotte.” 64. “Mi restava solo di perfettionare la Pianta di Roma moderna più aggiustata et corretta dell’altre divulgate sin’hora, con l’alzate et scompartimenti interni de gli edificii Chiese Palazzi et altre fabbriche, come ora ti porgo in questi fogli in modo che tu possa vedere la forma di ciascuno, et mirare ancora tutto insieme l’aspetto et grandezza di Roma, spatiando con gli occhi per tutte le vie piazze giardini et contrade della città. . . . Onde ti prego a gradire queste mie fatiche, accioche io possa continuare a servirti con la novità delle mie stampe e vivi felice.” 65. Consagra, “De Rossi and Falda,” 196–­97. 66. Richard Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Dorothy Metzger Habel, The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 67. Habel, The Urban Development of Rome, 3–­7. 68. Insolera, Roma, 269; Consagra, “De Rossi and Falda,” 193–­94. 69. For du Bellay, see intro., n. 24. For a thorough review of the range of recent scholarship on issues having to do with “street life,” see Fabrizio Nevola, “Street Life in Early Modern Europe,” Renaissance Quarterly 66 (2013): 1332–­45. For a synopsis of Roman street life, see Rudolph M. Bell, Street Life in Renaissance Rome: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013), 1–­32. 70. Laurie Nussdorfer, “The Politics of Space in Early Modern Rome,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 42 (1997): 183–­84. On the power dynamics that were played out on the Roman cityscape, see also Joseph Connors, “Alliance and Enmity in Roman Baroque Urbanism,” Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 25 (1989): 207–­94. 71. Nussdorfer, “Politics of Space,” 162–­64. 72. Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Clemente X, 9–­10; Hülsen, “Saggio,” 97–­98, nos. 131–­34. 73. Marigliani, Le piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 226–­35, nos. 130–­40. 74. Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, 7. 75. Ibid., 138–­44.

Epilogue

1. The key monograph on Nolli’s map is Mario Bevilacqua, Roma nel secolo dei lumi: Architettura, erudizione, scienza nella pianta di G. B. Nolli “celebre geometra” (Naples: Electa, 1998), with complete bibliography. See also Francesco Ehrle, Roma al tempo di Benedetto XIV: La pianta di Roma di Giambattista Nolli del 1748, riprodotta da una copia vaticana (Rome: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1932); Amato Pietro Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 3 vols. (Rome: Istituto di studi romani, 1962), 1:234–­35, no. 169a; Italo Insolera, Roma:

Notes to pages

200 –213 · 260

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

Immagini e realtà dal X al XX secolo (Bari: Laterza, 1980), 303–­18; Allan Ceen, “Portrait of a City,” intro. to Rome 1748: The Pianta Grande di Roma of Giambattista Nolli (Highmount, NY: J. H. Aronson, 1984), iii–­vii; Stefano Borsi, Roma di Benedetto XIV: La pianta di Giovan Battista Nolli, 1748 (Rome: Officina, 1993); Steffen Bogen and Felix Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten von der Antike bis heute (Darmstadt: WBG, 2009), 137–­44. See the University of Oregon’s Interactive Nolli Map Website spearheaded by James Tice and Allan Ceen, http://nolli.uoregon.edu/ (accessed June 17, 2014)”. See esp. Bevilacqua, Roma nel secolo dei lumi, 19–­45. These developments are outlined in Mary Sponberg Pedley, “Urban Map Production in the European Enlightenment: Rome in Context,” in Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, ed. Mario Bevilacqua and Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: Artemide, 2012), 285–­97. Pedley, “Urban Map Production in the European Enlightenment, 296. David Turnbull, “Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 5–­24. See the popular and engaging account by Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Penguin, 1995). A summary of these developments is John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2001). On Vasi, see esp. Luisa Scalabroni, Giuseppe Vasi (1710–­1782) (Rome: Multigrafica, 1981); James T. Tice and James G. Harper, eds., Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour (Eugene, OR: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, 2010); Jessica Maier, “Giuseppe Vasi’s Nuova Pianta di Roma (1781): Cartography, Prints, and Power in Settecento Rome,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 46 (2013): 259–­79. On the Prospetto, see Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 1:239, no. 171; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 156–­60; Tice and Harper, Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome, 104, nos. 9, 9a. John Pinto, “Giuseppe Vasi as Interpreter of the Eighteenth-­Century Architecture of Rome,” in Tice and Harper, Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome, 53–­58. Pinto, “Giuseppe Vasi,” 53. See also Maier, “Giuseppe Vasi’s Nuova Pianta di Roma,” 271–­75. On Piranesi, see esp. John Wilton-­Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978); idem, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings, 2 vols. (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1994); Mario Bevilacqua, Mario Gori Sassoli, and Fabio Barry, eds., The Rome of Piranesi: The Eighteenth-­Century City in the Great Vedute (Rome: Artemide, 2006). For comparative discussions of the figures discussed here, see Allan Ceen, “Piranesi and Nolli: Imago Urbis Romae,” in Piranesi: Rome Recorded (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 17–­22; Mario Bevilacqua, “Nolli, Piranesi, Vasi: L’immagine cartografica di Roma nel Settecento tra scienza e arte,” in L’Europa moderna: Cartografia urbana e vedutismo, ed. Cesare De Seta and Daniela Stroffolino (Naples: Electa, 2001), 218–­27; idem, “The Rome of Piranesi: Views of the Ancient and Modern City,” in Bevilacqua et al., The Rome of Piranesi, 39–­60; idem, “Plans, Views, and Panoramas: The Visions of Vasi, Nolli, and Piranesi,” in Tice and Harper, Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome, 37–­51. Bevilacqua, “The Rome of Piranesi: Views of the Ancient and Modern City,” 49. Allan Ceen, Roma Piranesiana (Rome: Studium Urbis, 2011). Bevilacqua, “Plans, Views, and Panoramas,” 42; Alberto Caldana et al., Roma antica: Piante topografiche e vedute generali (Vincenza: Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, 2013), 290–­91, no. II.17. There is a vast bibliography on the Campus Martius map. See esp. Joseph Connors, Piranesi and the Campus Martius: The Missing Corso; Topography and Archaeology in Eighteenth-­Century

Notes to pages

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Rome (Milan: Jaca Book, 2011), with further references. See also Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, I:81, no. 37; John Wilton-­Ely, “Utopia or Megalopolis? The ‘Ichnographia’ of Piranesi’s Campus Martius Reconsidered,” in Piranesi tra Venezia e l’Europa, ed. Alessandro Bettagno (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1983), 293–­304; Bogen and Thürlemann, Rom: Eine Stadt in Karten, 145–­52; Caldana et al., Roma antica, 296–­97, no. II.13. 15. Connors, Piranesi and the Campus Martius, 43. 16. Ibid., 85–­89. 17. Ibid., 94–­96. 18. Translated in Jonathan Scott, Piranesi (London: Academy Editions, 1975), 166–­67. 19. See Wilton-­Ely, “Utopia or Megalopolis?”

Notes to pages

226 –229 · 262

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. abitato: in Bufalini’s map of  Rome, 103–­8; in Cartaro’s Roma nuova, 147–­48; in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis Romae descriptio, 142–­43 Accademia della Virtù, and definitive illustrated commentary of Vitruvius, 66 accuracy: claims, 8, 45, 78, 88, 146, 200, 210; increase, 12, 33, 143, 217; notions of, 15, 93–­94, 118, 146, 147. See also measured accuracy Ackerman, James, 71 Adam, Robert, 226 Adrichom, Christian van: Jerusalem, et suburbia eius, sicut tempore Christi floruit, 130, 131–­32, plate 9; Theatrum terrae sanctae (Theater of the Holy Land), 132 agrimensores, 20, 59 Alban Hills, in Pinard’s view of Rome, 115 Alberti, Leon Battista, 89; adaptation of Ptolemy’s principles to urban cartography, 5; architectural practice as well as theory, 50; De re aedificatoria (On Building), 30, 56–­57, 58, 94; On

Painting, 43; and pictorial perspective, 3. See also Alberti, Leon Battista, project to map Rome Alberti, Leon Battista, project to map Rome, 25–­31, 50, 211, 236n22; application of precepts of Ptolemaic geography, 12; Capitoline Hill as center, 26, 28, 29; concept of planimetric diagram, 12; Descriptio urbis Romae, 12, 15, 19, 25–­29, 30–­31, 47, 53, 54, 57, 58, 117; horizon (surveying instrument), 26, 28, 29, 53; influence of, 28–­29, 47; Ludi rerum mathematicarum (Ludi matematici), 19, 25, 26, 28, 30, 58–­59; movement toward a measured city plan, 43–­44; orthogonal plan, 28; surveying methods, 26, 28, 91; Vagnetti’s reconstruction of map from the Descriptio urbis Romae, 26, 27–­28 Alexander VII Chigi, Pope, 13, 177, 179, 188, 196; and Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, 203; urban renewal projects, 202–­3, 209–­10 Alghisi, Galasso, 92 alidade, 215

263

analogy, principle of in graphic reconstructions of antiquity, 128, 228 Angelis, Antonio de, 132 antiquarianism and antiquarians, 12, 14, 30, 47, 60–­ 61, 66, 121, 133; convergence with engineers, 90–­91. See also humanism and humanists; scholarly culture antiquity, Roman: illustrated books on, 60–­70; interest of fifteenth-­century scholars in, 30–­31; interest of sixteenth-­century scholars, architects, and engineers in, 49–­50, 59–­60, 78–­79, 90–­91. See also reconstruction, graphic, of antiquity; ruins Apian, Peter, woodcut illustration from Cosmographia, 5, 6 Aqua Traiana, 184 archaeological plans, 119. See also reconstruction, graphic, of antiquity architects of Rome, early 1500s, 49–­50, 55, 71, 99, 247n42; graphic techniques developed by, 73–­74; interest in antiquity, 59–­60, 78; measured architectural drawings, 71; support for perspective imagery, 73 architecture: architectural treatises, 58, 68, 71; scholarly interest in sixteenth century, 90; theorization of as a discipline, 93 argument, as plausible fiction, 130 Ariosto, Ludovico, 81 astrolabe, 28 Aurelian Walls, 23, 38; in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 83, 88; in Du Pérac’s Sette chiese di Roma (Seven churches of Rome), 157, 158; in Nolli’s Nuova pianta di Roma, 215; in Pinard’s view of Rome, 116; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 170 Baglione, Giovanni, 180, 181, 184 Barbari, Jacopo de’, Venetie MD (bird’s-­eye view of Venice), 1, 4, 9–­10, 80, 83, 108, 171 Barbaro, Daniele, translation of  Vitruvius, 58, 59, 72 Barberini family, 207 Barbey, Antonio, 249n69; Nuova pianta della città di Roma, 178, 198 Barkan, Leonard, 97–­98 Bartoli, Cosimo, Opuscoli morali di Leon Batista Alberti, 28 Bartolo, Taddeo di, fresco for Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, 23, 24, 28, 34, 207, plate 2 Basilica Julia, 248n55 Basilica of Gaius and Lucius Caesar, 248n55 Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine, in Serlio’s Terzo libro, 73 basilicas of Rome, imagery of: Du Pérac’s Sette chiese di Roma (Seven Churches of Rome),

Index

157–­59, 158; Greuter’s seven pilgrimage basilicas, 195; Vasi’s prints of four patriarchal basilicas, 219; vignette in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 200 Baths of Agrippa, in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 103, 104 Baths of Caracalla: in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 88, 97, 100–­101; in Marliani’s woodcut map of late imperial Rome, 121; in Paciotto’s Urbis Romae formam . . . , 111; in Serlio’s Terzo libro, 100 Baths of Diocletian: in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 99; in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis, 140 Baths of Titus, 99; in Ligorio’s map of 1552, 122 Baths of Trajan: in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 97, 99; in Ligorio’s map of 1552, 122; in Paciotto’s Urbis Romae  forman . . . , 110, 111 Béatrizet, Nicolas, 109, 110 Bellay, Joachim du, 11 Belleforest, François de, 33 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, Fragmenta vestigii Romae ex lapidibus Farnesianis, 136–­37 Belvedere Courtyard, 46; in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis, 142; in Ligorio’s 1553 map, 125; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 174 Belvedere cycle of cities by Pinturicchio, 37, 45 Belvedere Villa: in Foresti’s woodcut of Rosselli’s Rome, 35; Pinturicchio’s fresco cycle for, 37, 45 Bernini, Gianlorenzo, 174, 195, 203; Four Rivers Fountain, 204; piazza for St. Peter’s, 188, 259n59; Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, 204 Besozzo, Leonardo da, 234n5 Bevilacqua, Mario, 18 Biondo, Flavio, Rome Restored, 24, 30, 31, 52, 61, 66, 101 bird’s-­eye views, 1, 9, 23, 74, 80, 109, 112, 136, 167, 171, 176, 180, 189 Blado, Antonio, 80–­81, 108, 152, 153, 245n9 Blaeu, Joan, 259n54 Bordini, Giovanni Francesco, De rebus praeclaris gestis a Sixto V p.m., 173 Borghese, Scipione, 187 Borghese family, 207 Borgia, Cesare, 89 Borgo Pio. See Vatican Borsi, Stefano, 18, 184 Bos, Jacob (Giacomo), 115, 126–­27, plate 7 Bosio, Giacomo, 167 Botticelli, Sandro, Assumption of the Virgin, 237n39 Bramante, Donato, 45, 46, 55, 99; design for the cupola of St. Peter’s, 64, 72 Brambilla, Ambrogio, 153–­56, 157, 178; Antiquae urbis perfecta imago, 154–­55; copy of Du Pérac’s first map of ancient Rome, 154; Novissimae urbis Romae descriptio MDLXXXX, 154, 155–­56,

 · 264

180; reduced copy of Cartaro’s Urbis Romae descriptio, 154 Braun, Georg, Civitates orbis terrarum, 11, 116, 130–­ 31, 133 Breydenbach, Bernhard von, Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam, 6–­7, 132 Bril, Matthijs, 167 Brothers, Cammy, 52, 57 Brown, Patricia Fortini, 23 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 12, 43 Bruni, Leonardi, Laudatio Florentinae urbis, 4 Bufalini, Leonardo, 249n62; background, 86–­90; and Blado, 81–­82, 245n9; identification in will as woodworker ( faberlignarius), 86; measuring skills, 87–­88; participation in modernization of Rome’s fortifications, 86–­87, 246n19; profession as military engineer, 87–­88, 164. See also Bufalini, Leonardo, map of Rome Bufalini, Leonardo, map of Rome, 1–­2, 18, 47, 67, 77–­118, 104, 207, plate I; accuracy of, 78, 94–­96; Aqua Vergine aqueduct, 84; Ardeatine Bastion (“Propugnacula Pauli III”), 88; and art of surveying, 91–­96; Aurelian Walls, 83, 88; Aventine Hill with Temple of Diana, 102–­3; Baths of Agrippa, 103, 104; Baths of Caracalla, 88, 97, 100–­101; Baths of Diocletian, 99; Baths of Trajan, 97, 99, 103; Bufalini’s multiple roles of surveying, designing the image, and cutting the woodblock, 81, 164; Capitoline Hill, 105, 106; Circus Maximus, 97, 104; collaborators, 93; Colosseum, 97; detail of architecture, 86; detail of city center, 85; diachronicity, 108; disabitato, 83, 96–­99, 97, 107; dual nature of as measured survey and creative reconstruction, 77–­78, 132; existing examples of from second edition of 1560, 82; first measured city plan of Rome intended for broad audience, 12, 16, 79–­80, 92; first printed street map of Rome, 80; fusion of ancient and modern, 1, 77, 96–­108, 146; graphic conventions, 83–­84; ground plans of structures, 95; as ichnography, 73, 80, 82, 108, 109; influence on later imagery, 109–­17; intended audience, 90–­91; intention to create ultimate humanist achievement, 78; largest image of Rome published at time, 79; Latin address “to the reader,” 77–­78; liberties with physical evidence, 118; Marcus Aurelius equestrian statue on Capitoline Hill, 82, 105–­6; marginalization of Middle Ages, 105; Meta Romuli, 103; modern reception of, 117–­18; New St. Peter’s, 84, 86, 95, 106–­8, 107; origins, form, and function of plan, 79–­85; orthogonal representation of Rome, 1, 8; Palazzo della Cancelleria, 84, 86; Palazzo Farnese, 85, 86;

Index

Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, 85, 86; Palazzo Venezia, 84, 86; Pantheon, 103, 104; Piazza del Popolo, 84; Ponte Sisto, 84; and principle of analogy, 128; printing privileges, 82, 90; reception of, 16, 79, 108–­9; record of Rome’s architecture, 84–­85; rejection of pictorialism, 77–­78; San Paolo fuori le mura, 103, 107–­8; scale measured in Roman passi, 88; self-­portrait and surveying instruments, 88, 89, 91; St. John Lateran, 97; Temple of Minerva Medica, 101–­2; Tiber, 84; treatment of bath complexes, 99–­101; treatment of network of streets, 95; treatment of ruins in the abitato, 103–­8; treatment of urban defenses, 88; triumphalism of Christian revival, 104–­6; Vatican fortifications, 107; Via Alessandrina, 103, 107; Via Giula and Via della Lungara, 84; Via Lata (now Via del Corso), 105 Burke, Peter, 23, 24, 30 Burns, Howard, 128–­29 bussola, 53, 54, 55, 88, 91, 92, 200, 214, 241n20 Cairo, Pagano’s woodcut view of, 82, 108 Calvo, Fabio, 60, 66, 91; Antiquae urbis Romae cum regionibus simulachrum, 61, 109; map of Augustan Rome, 61–­62 Camera de le Citate (Chamber of Cities), Gonzaga villa, 37, 45 Camocio, Giovanni Francesco, 116 Campi, Antonio, Cremona fedelissima città, 8 Campidoglio: in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 204; in Greuter’s Disegno nuovo di Roma, 195; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 174 Campo de’ Fiori, in Mantua painting of Rosselli’s Rome, 40, 43 Canaletto, 224 Capitoline Hill, 30; Alberti’s horizon fixed at, 26, 28, 29, 53; in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 105, 106; in Cartaro’s Roma nuova, 148; in Dosio’s Roma, 112; in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 205; in Nolli’s Nuova pianta di Roma, 217; in Pinard’s view of Rome, 115 capriccio (architectural fantasy), 63, 216 Carafa, Giovanni, duca Di Noja, survey of Naples, 218 Caro, Annibale, 66 Carpo, Mario, 236n22 Cartaro, Mario: debt to Du Pérac, 144–­45; etchings pairing ancient and “new” Rome, 16, 47, 143–­52, 154–­55, 165; reference to accuracy in pendant maps, 146; Roma antica, 144, 146, 149–­ 50; Roma nuova, 145, 146–­48, 149–­51, 150–­52; Romulus and Remus cartouche in Roma nuova, 148, 149

 · 265

cartography, 2; advent of specialization in Nolli, 213–­14; modern association with objectivity, 116; and Ptolemy, 3, 5; turn toward modern urban cartography in eighteenth century, 17, 213 casini (rustic houses), 99, 141, 171 Casino of Pius IV: in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis, 142; Ligorio’s design of, 121 Cassini family, France, 218 Castel Gandolfo, 177 Castel Sant’Angelo: in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis, 142–­43; in Du Pérac’s Sette chiese di Roma (Seven churches of Rome), 157, 158; in Nuremberg Chronicle, 36 Castiglione, Baldassare, 51, 60; Book of the Courtier, 88 Castriotto, Jacopo Fusto, 87, 92; Della fortificatione delle città libri III (with Maggi), 29 catalogues raisonnés, 18, 233n31 Cecilia Metella, tomb of, 158, 159 Ceen, Allan, 94, 95 Cervini, Marcello, Cardinal, 80 Cesariano, Cesare, 58 Cesio, Carlo, 177 Charles V of Spain, 82 Charles VI of Austria, 213 Charles IX of France, 141 Chiesa dell’Annunziata, 200 Chiesa delle Tre Fontane, 200 Chiesa Nuova. See Santa Maria in Vallicella (Chiesa Nuova), Church of chorography, 5, 8, 28, 218 chronicles, movement toward historical narratives, 21, 23 Cicero, concept of fable, history, and argument in De inventione, 130 Cimabue, Ytalia fresco, Upper Basilica, San Fran­ cesco, Assisi, 20 Circus Flaminius, in Ligorio’s 1552 map, 122 Circus Maximus: in Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago, 127, 128; in Ligorio’s 1552 map, 122, 123 Circus of Maxentius, in Du Pérac’s Sette chiese di Roma, 158, 159 Circus of Nero: in Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago, 129; in Ligorio’s 1552 map, 122 city imagery: demand for, 4; as genre for popular consumption, 2; importance of verisimilitude to, 114; of late Middle Ages, 20–­25; new emphasis on likeness, 3, 5–­7; transformation from medieval depictions to Renaissance portrayals, 2. See also Rome, imagery of city portrait, 2, 5; artistry and selectivity, 7–­8; and city identity as an urbs and civitas, 4; competitive comparison or paragone of places, 4;

Index

imaginative projection, 8; miniaturization, 36; one of most popular categories of early modern print culture, 3; as printed genre that influenced other media, 45; rhetorical tactics, 8. See also Rome, imagery of Civitates orbis terrarum (Cities of the World) (Braun and Hogenberg), 4, 116, 133; Adrichom’s map of  Jerusalem in, 130, 133; Ligorio’s map of 1552 in, 131; Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago in, 130–­ 31; Pinard’s Urbis Romae descriptio in, 130 Codex Coner, 57–­58 Collegio Romano, 171, 172, 174 Colocci, Angelo, 59 Colonna family, 207 Colosseum: in Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago, 127, 128; in Mantua painting of Rosselli’s Rome, 40; in Marliani’s woodcut map of late imperial Rome, 121; in Nuremberg Chronicle, 36; in Paciotto’s Urbis Romae formam . . . , 111 Connors, Joseph, 200, 226, 227 Consagra, Francesca, 177, 206 Corpus agrimenorum, 59. See also agrimensores Cosmographia, 238n56; Apian’s woodcut illustration from, 5, 6 Counter-­Reformation, 120, 158, 166 Cruyl, Lieven, 164; Nuova pianta di Roma presente (with Matteo Gregorio de Rossi), 196–­98, 197, 210; Pianta di Roma come si trova al presente colle alzate delle fabbriche più notabili così antiche come moderne, 187–­90, 189, 196 Da Fossombrone, Tolomeo Egnazio, 61 Dal Buono, Floriano, 114, 117, 129 Delagrive, Jean, survey of Paris, 218 Del Re, Sebastiano, 111, 112 De Marchi, Francesco, 89–­90, 91–­92; treatise on fortification, 87 De Rossi, Domenico, né Freddiani, 178, 198 De Rossi, Giovanni Battista, 196 De Rossi, Giovanni Giacomo, 177, 178–­79, 187, 195, 196, 199, 201, 202, 219; relationship with Pope Alexander VII, 202, 203 De Rossi, Lorenzo Filippo, 178; catalogue of, 176–­77 De Rossi, Matteo Gregorio, and Lieven Cruyl, Nuova pianta di Roma presente, 178, 196–­98, 197 De Rossi family, 80, 212 descriptio, 117 disabitato, 38–­39; in Dosio’s Roma, 112; in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis Romae descriptio, 140–­41; in Mantua painting of Rosselli’s Rome, 38–­39; in Paciotto’s Urbis Romae  formam . . . , 110, 111; in Pinard’s view of Rome, 115; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 171, 172, 173

 · 266

Dosio, Giovanni Antonio: and Forma urbis, 136; Roma, 111–­14, 113 Du Bellay, Joachim, 206 Ducal Palace, Mantua, 41 Duchetti, Claudio (Claude Duchet), 153, 154, 256n2 Duomo (Cathedral of Florence): as key feature of Vasari’s survey, 92; and the “View with a Chain,” 32 Du Pérac, Stefano, 1, 18; debt to Bufalini’s Roma, 138; debt to Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago, 137–­38; Disegni de le ruine di Roma e come anticamente erono (attrib.), 146; and Forma urbis, 137; perspective plans of Rome, 111; Sette chiese di Roma (attrib.), 157–­59, 158; Specimen, seu perfecta urbis antiquae imago, 134; Urbis Romae sciographia, 133–­35, 134, 137–­38, 144, 177. See also Du Pérac, Stefano, Nova urbis Romae descriptio Du Pérac, Stefano, Nova urbis Romae descriptio, 139–­43, 151, 164, 190, plate 10; abitato, 142–­43; Baths of Diocletian, 140; Borgo Pio in Vatican, 171; disabitato, 140–­41; enclosed gardens, 141; formal address to King Henri III of France, 141; Quirinal and Pincio Hills, 141; Santa Maria Maggiore, 140; St. John Lateran Basilica, 140; unorthodox orientation of, 139–­40; Via Merulana, 140; Via Pia, 140 Dürer, Albrecht, Apocalypse series, 83 Edgerton, Samuel, Jr., 67 Ehrle, Franz, 17–­18, 86, 131, 245n9, 246n13 encomiums of cities, 3–­4 engineers of Rome: and renewal of Roman fortifications, 86–­87; scholarly interest in, 90–­91; study of antiquity at mid-­sixteenth century, 78, 90–­91 Este, Isabella d’, 37, 42, 45, 207 Este, Leonello d’, 59 Este, Meliaduse d’, 59 Eugenius IV, Pope, 25, 29 Fagiolo, Marcello, 43 Falda, Giovanni Battista, 1, 16, 17, 164; architectural views, 196; Nuovo teatro, 200, 201; pianta piccola, 196, 197, 200, 202, 203; unsigned map published by Joan Blaeu, 259n54; vedute, 201–­2. See also Falda, Giovanni Battista, Nuova pianta Falda, Giovanni Battista, Nuova pianta, 165, 177, 178, 195, 199–­209, 210, 211, 259n53, plate 11; borrowing from Greuter, 200–­201, 259n54; Campidoglio, 204; Capitoline Hill, 205; cartography of, 200; cartouche containing vignettes of major pilgrimage churches, 200; cartouches with index to palaces and churches

Index

of Rome, 200; Castro Pretorio, 199; decorative border with surveying instruments, 199–­200; dedication to Innocent XI, 200, 202, 208; homage to Pope Alexander VII, 202–­3; inset map of Roman campagna with Tiber’s path to Ostia, 200; Jewish ghetto, 207, 208; Marcus Aurelius equestrian statue, 204; obelisks, 205; Palazzo dei Conservatori, Palazzo Nuovo, and Palazzo del Senatore, 204; personifications of church and justice, 200; Piazza Altieri, 207; Piazza and Palazzo Barberini, 204, 205; Piazza and Palazzo Borghese, 207, 208; Piazza and Palazzo Farnese, 207, 208; Piazza Cenci, 207; Piazza del Popolo, 203, 204; Piazza Navona, 204, 205; privileged viewpoint, 208; prominence given to streets, 206; reduced-­scale version in different lan­ guages, 209; reissue from same plates up to 1756, 208; rendering of vegetation, 204–­5; San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane and Sant’Andrea al Qui­rinale, 204, 205; Santa Maria di Montesanto and Santa Maria dei Miracoli, 203; Vatican and St. Peter’s, 203, 204; Villa Medici, 204; Villa Montalto and Santa Maria Maggiore, 204, 206 Faletti, Bartolomeo, 112, 113, 153 Farnese, Alessandro, Cardinal, 135, 136 Farnese family, 207 Fauno, Lucio, 152 Filarete, plan of Sforzinda, 62 Filippo, Lorenzo, 177 finto (fictitious) versus favoloso (fabulous or fantastical), 129–­30 Flemish artist (anonymous), Rosselli’s map as background for Sack of Rome, 33 Florence, 11; encomiums of, 4; humanism, 5; “View with a Chain,” 8–­9, 10, 31, 32, 33, 93 Florimi, Matteo, 180 Fontana, Domenico, 184, 203, 204 Fontana, Giovanni, 184 Fontana dell’Acqua Felice (Moses Fountain), 184; in Greuter’s Disegno nuovo di Roma, 194; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 172, 173 Fontana dell’Acqua Paola: in Greuter’s Disegno nuovo di Roma, 193; in Maggi’s 1625 bird’s-­eye view of Rome, 184 Foresti, Jacopo Filippo of Bergamo: Supplementum chronicarum: view of Genoa, 5–­6; woodcut of Rosselli’s Rome, 6, 33, 34–­36, 35 Forma urbis Romae, 79, 135–­37, 224, 225, 228 fortification, Roman: anonymous manuscript map relating to renewal campaign, 93, 94; Bufalini’s participation in modernization of, 86–­87, 246n19; fortification treatises, 88, 89; renewal of, 86–­87 Forum of Vespasian, 135

 · 267

Frederick III, Emperor, 30 French Academy, Rome, 224 Friedman, David, 94, 95 Frommel, Christoph, 55 Frutaz, Amato Pietro, 67 Fulvio, Andrea, 152; Antichità della città di Roma, 99; Antiquitates urbis, 61, 66, 96, 99; and Temple of Minerva Medica, 101 Furttenbach, Joseph, Architectura privata, 177 Galilei, Alessandro, 217 Gallery of Maps, 45, 153, 177; Library, 174 Gamucci, Bernardo: Libri quattro dell’antichità della città di Roma, 136; woodcut map of Rome, 110 Gesù, Il, Church of, 171, 172, 174, 207 Gilio, Giovanni Andrea, concept of finto (fictitious) and  favoloso (fantastical), 129–­30, 133 Giocondo, Fra Giovanni, 58, 59 Giorgio, Francesco di, 99 Giovannoli, Alò, 108 Gonzaga, Francesco II, 37, 45 Gonzaga court, 41, 42 Grand Tourists, 177, 210, 212. See also pilgrims graphic techniques: developed by architects of Rome in early 1500s, 73–­74; hybrid, 109 Gregg, Ryan E., 92 Gregory the Great, Pope, 36 Gregory XIII Boncompagni, Pope, 140, 146 Greuter, Matteo (Matthäus): Disegno nuovo di Roma moderna con le sue strade, siti et edifitii in pianta esatta, 165, 190–­95, 191, 200, 203; allegorical imagery and St. Peter’s, 192, 193, 201; aqueducts, 195; based on new survey of city, 191; Campidoglio, 195; Fontana dell’Acqua Felice, 194; Fontana dell’Acqua Paola, 193–­94; Greuter as designer, engraver, and publisher of map, 191; Marian column, 192, 193; Palazzo del Quirinale, 194; Santa Maria Maggiore, 192, 193–­94; seven pilgrimage basilicas, 195; She-­ Wolf nursing Romulus and Remus, 195; size, 191; Suburra neighborhood, 192; Tiber river god statue, 195; Vatican obelisk, 192; Via di San Francesco a Ripa, 192; Via Gregoriana (now Via Merulana), 192 Guéroult, Guillaume, 7 guidebook tradition, 24, 61, 152. See also Mirabilia urbis Romae Harrison, John, 218 Harvey, P. D. A., 20 Heemskerck, Marten van, 46, 98 Henri II of France, 82 Hildebert of Lavardin, 41 Hirschvogel, Augustin, 80

Hogenberg, Franz, 4, 116, 130–­31, 133 horizon (Alberti’s surveying instrument), 26, 28, 29, 53 Hülsen, Christian, 109, 252n26 humanism and humanists, 5, 42, 50, 52, 58, 59, 60, 61, 78, 80, 90, 141. See also antiquarianism and antiquarians; scholarly culture Huppert, Ann C., 72, 247n42 Icarus, 12 ichnography, 53–­54, 79, 126, 136, 198; Antonio Barbey’s 1697 plan, 178, 198, 249n69; Bufalini’s plan as, 73, 80, 82, 108, 109; and early sixteenth century imagery of Rome, 69–­70; Fausto Veranzio’s ca. 1593 plan of Rome, 249n69; Labacco’s ichnographic map of port of Ostia Antica, 69–­70; maps of Vienna, 80; Matteo Gregorio de Rossi’s Nuova pianta di Roma, 178, 196–­98, 197, 249n69; Nolli’s Nuova pianta di Roma, 217; Piranesi’s Campus Martius ichnography, 17, 224–­29, 227, plate 12; Serlio’s ichnographic map of port of Ostia Antica, 69. See also Leonardo Da Vinci, map of Imola idealization, 3, 7, 8, 14, 80, 116, 117, 126, 129, 159, 207, 211, 229 ideograms, 23, 33, 43 imago, 119–­20 Innocent VIII, Pope, 35, 37 Innocent X Pamphili, Pope, 203 Innocent XI Odescalchi, Pope, 200, 202 Innocent XII Pignatelli, Pope, 179 Insolera, Italo, 206 Jackson, John, 177 Janiculum Hill, 29, 98; in Cruyl’s Pianta, 188; in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis, 143; in Maggi’s 1625 bird’s-­ eye view of Rome, 184; views taken from, 116 Jerusalem: Jerusalem, et suburbia eius, sicut tempore Christi floruit (Christian van Adrichom), 130, 131–­32, plate 9; lost view of by Pagano and Zorzi, 82 Jewish ghetto, 207 Josephus Flavius, 132 Jubilees, imagery of, 157; 1450, 29–­30; 1575, 157; 1600, 165, 180; 1625, 180 Julius II, Pope, reconstruction of St. Peter’s, 35, 45, 49 Julius III, Pope, 82, 115 Kagan, Richard, 3 Krautheimer, Richard, 209 Labacco, Antonio: Libro appartenente a l’architettura, 65, 69–­70, 81, 152; ancient port of Ostia, 70;

Index

 · 268

emphasis on archaeological study and graphic documentation, 65; perspective renderings, 72; reconstruction of Doric temple in Forum Holitorium, 74 Lafreri, Antonio, 80, 109, 115, 133, 138, 139, 143, 212; first known printer to issue stocklist, 152, 178; major entrepreneur of Roman print industry in sixteenth century, 152; publishing of Sette chiese di Roma (Seven churches of Rome), 157; Speculum romanae magnificentiae, 153, 156, 256n2 Landkartengalerie of Prince-­Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, 153 Lanfranco, Giovanni, Assumption of the Virgin, 177 Laparelli, Francesco, 142–­43 Lauro, Giacomo, 176 Leonardo Da Vinci: list of self-­proclaimed talents, 89; map of Imola, 29, 44, 53, 89, 92, plate 4; paragone or praise of painting over poetry, music, and sculpture, 120 Leonine Walls: in Foresti’s woodcut of Rosselli’s Rome, 35; in Marliani’s woodcut map of late imperial Rome, 121; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 174 Leuschner, Eckhard, 177 Lhuillier, Giovanni, 259n53 Licinio, Fabio, 116 Ligorio, Pirro, 121–­33; anachronism and temporal disjunction, 121, 122; Anteiquae urbis imago of 1561 (Roma grande), 108, 126–­29, 127, 130, 132, 137–­38, 177, 226, 227, 252n26, plate 8; archaeological errors, 122; architectural designs, 121; Baths of Titus, 122; and Bufalini, 127, 131; Circus Maximus, 122, 123; Circus of Nero, 129; idealized version of golden age of Rome, 129; imagery on ancient coins as sources for maps, 128; infill buildings in maps of 1552 and 1561, 123–­24, 126; Libro . . . delle antichità di Roma, 121, 124; and Marliani, 131; mixture of monuments over time, 122; Oppian Hill, 123; and principle of analogy, 128; reconstruction of Roma antica, 16, 108; San Pietro in Vincoli, 122–­23; twentieth-­century criticism of, 131; Urbis Romae of 1552, 122–­24, 123; Urbis Romae of 1553, 124–­26, 125; Vatican and St. Peter’s and San Paolo fuori le mura in 1553 map, 125–­26 Limbourg brothers, Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 23, 34 Livy, 33 Long, Pamela O., 59, 88, 90, 91, 243n41 longitude, measurement of, 218 Lotz, Wolfgang, 57 Loveman, Kate, 178 Lucrino, Vincentio, 152

Index

Lurin, Emmanuelle, 139, 141 Luther, Martin, 166 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 81 Maderno, Carlo, 184, 192 Maggi, Giovanni, 16, 18, 29, 164; Descriptio urbis Romae novissima, 180, 181; Disegno nuovo di Roma moderna (bird’s-­eye view of Rome), 165, 178, 179–­87, 182–­83, 186, 187, 188, 192, 210; “seven churches” paradigm, 180 Magister Gregorius, De mirabilibus urbis Romae, 41 magnetic compass, 59 Mandowsky, Erna, 129 Mantua painting (anonymous), of Rosselli’s Rome, 36–­45, 39, 140, plate 5; Campo de’ Fiori, 40, 43; Colosseum, 40; column of Trajan, 39, 40; com­­ memoration of Rome, 41; earliest nearly accu­­ rate picture of Rome’s physical situation, 44; greater inclusiveness and higher viewing angle than Rosselli’s original, 38–­39; highlighting of ancient monuments over later ones, 39–­40; individualized open spaces, 40, 43; inscriptions with commentary on Rome’s decline, 39, 40–­42; Marcus Aurelius statue, 37–­38; Meta Romuli, 38; Palazzo Venezia, 39, 40; Pantheon, 39, 40, 43; patronage of, 41–­42; Ponte Sant’Angelo, 37, 40, 43; privileging of disabitato, 38–­39; re­­ duced role of Vatican, 39–­40; reflection of Rosselli’s original engraving, 33, 37–­38; St. John Lateran, 39; Torre delle Milizie, 39, 40; Vatican Borgo, 40, 43; Via del Coronari (or Via Recta), 40, 43 maps: explosion in forms and uses of in early twenty-­first century, 212. See also cartography; city imagery; city portrait; ichnography; orthogonality; print industry, of Rome; Rome, imagery of Marcus Aurelius column, in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 173, 174 Marcus Aurelius equestrian statue, 37; in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 82, 105–­6; in Cartaro’s image of Roma antica, 145; in Cartaro’s Roma nuova, 147; in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 204; in Ligorio’s 1552 map, 122; in Mantua painting of Rosselli’s Rome, 37–­38 Marian column of Paul V at Santa Maria Maggiore, 192, 193 Marinoni, Giovanni Giacomo, 213, 214; survey of Milan, 218 Marliani, Bartolomeo: Urbis Romae topographia, 49, 66, 70, 81, 91, 96, 152; anachronism, 121, 122; orthogonality, 72–­73, 113; relation to Bufalini’s map, 67; sequence of three maps of Rome in successive stages of ancient history, 66, 109;

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Marliani, Bartolomeo (cont.) and Temple of Minerva Medica, 101; woodcut map of late imperial Rome, 66, 67, 68, 79, 83, 120–­21; woodcut map of Romulan Rome, 66–­67 Martial, 116, 143 Masolino, fresco for baptistery at Castiglione Olona, 234n5 Massaio, Piero del: manuscript of Ptolemy’s Geography, 5, 24, 45; Roma, manuscript, 24–­25, 28, plate 3 Maupin, Paul, 180 Mausoleum of Augustus: in Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago, 127, 128; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 172 measured accuracy, 93–­94 Medici family, 141, 171 memory pictures, 23–­24, 43 Meta Romuli, 38; in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 103; in Mantua painting of Rosselli’s Rome, 38 Michelangelo, 87, 103, 130 Milan, Marinoni’s survey of, 218 military arts: books on, 88; interests of rulers, scholars, and professionals in, 89, 90 military engineering, and renewal of Roman fortifications, 86–­87 Minerva Medica. See Temple of Minerva Medica Mirabilia urbis Romae (Marvels of the City of Rome), 24, 30, 41, 60, 80, 81, 152 Mitchell, Charles, 129 Monte Mario, 23 Montemellino, Francesco da, 87 Münster, Sebastian: Cosmographia universalis, 7; view of Rome from, 8, 33, 45–­47, 46, 240n82 naturalistic views, 114, 115 Nesselrath, Arnold, 58 Nicholas V, Pope, 25, 29, 58; round tower of in Foresti’s woodcut of Rosselli’s Rome, 35 Nicholls, Sutton, Samuel Pepys’s Library, 178, 179 Nodot, François, copy of Cruyl’s Pianta, 189 Nolli, Giovanni Battista: and advent of specialized cartography, 213–­14; empiricism, 117; and Forma urbis, 137. See also Nolli, Giovanni Battista, Nuova pianta di Roma Nolli, Giovanni Battista, Nuova pianta di Roma, 1, 13, 16, 17, 18, 115, 213; Aurelian Walls, 215; binary scheme of city center, 215–­16; decorative surround, 216–­17; dichotomy between past and present, 216; first scientific rendering of Rome, 217; ichnography, 217; index, 214; issued with copy of Bufalini and advances over Bufalini, 117–­18, 214; orientation to north, 214–­15, 217–­18; personification of Roma antica, 216–­17; personification of Roma nuova, 215, 217; Piazza

Index

del Popolo, 215; pictorial vignette, 215; size and scale, 214; symbols for urban features, 216 Nuremberg Chronicle. See Schedel, Hartmann, Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle) Nussdorfer, Laurie, 166, 207 Nuti, Lucia, 109 obelisks: in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 205; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 172–­73; Vatican obelisk, 172, 192 Old St. Peter’s Basilica: and Cosmographia universalis, 45; in Foresti’s woodcut of Rosselli’s Rome, 34; as key feature of Rosselli’s lost view of Rome, 32; in Nuremberg Chronicle, 36. See also St. Peter’s Basilica Oppian Hill, 99 Order of St. John of Jerusalem, 167 Orsini, Fulvio, 136, 137, 141 Orsini family garden, 141 orthogonality, 56–­57, 68, 71; and Alberti’s project to map Rome, 28; and Bufalini’s map of Rome, 1, 8; and Marliani’s Urbis Romae topographia, 72–­ 73, 113; merging of with pictorialism, 113–­15; Palladio and, 72; Raphael’s three orthogonal modes, 64, 66, 70–­71 Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia, 35 Ostia Antica, port of: Labacco’s rendering of, 70; Serlio’s map of, 69 Paciotto, Francesco: Urbis Romae formam . . . , 109–­ 10; depiction of disabitato, 110, 111 Pagano, Matteo: lost view of Jerusalem (with Zorzi), 82; woodcut view of Cairo, 82, 108 Palatino, Giovanni Battista, 120 Palazzo Barberini, 171; in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 204, 205 Palazzo Borghese, 207, 208 Palazzo dei Conservatori, 204 Palazzo della Cancelleria: in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 84, 86; in Pinard’s Urbis Romae descriptio, 115 Palazzo del Quirinale, 194 Palazzo del Senatore, 204 Palazzo Farnese: in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 85, 86; in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 207, 208; in Pinard’s Urbis Romae descriptio, 115 Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, 85, 86 Palazzo Nuovo, 204 Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Taddeo di Bartolo’s fresco for, 23, plate 2 Palazzo Venezia: in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 84, 86; in Mantua painting of Rosselli’s Rome, 39, 40 Palladio, Andrea, 99; guides to antiquities and churches of Rome, 152; illustrations for

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Barbaro’s edition of Vitruvius, 58; orthogonal illustrations, 72; Quattro libri di architettura, 72 Panini, Giovanni Paolo, pictorial vignette for Nolli’s Nuova pianta di Roma, 215, 216 Pantheon: in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 103, 104; in Cartaro’s Roma nuova, 148; in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis, 142, 143; in Foresti’s woodcut of Rosselli’s Rome, 34; in Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago, 127–­28; in Mantua painting of Rosselli’s Rome, 39, 40, 43; in Pinard’s view of Rome, 115 Panvinio, Onofrio, 91, 93, 133, 137, 145; Anteiquae urbis imago, 110–­11, 112, 134, 154; and Forma urbis, 136 Paolino, Fra: plan of Rome in Chronologia magna, 20–­21, 22, 105–­6; plan of Venice in Chronologia magna, 21 paragone, 4, 16, 120; imagery of, 120, 146, 149, 153, 160, 165, 216 parallel perspective, 74 Paris Observatory, 218 Paul III, Pope, 87, 92, 195 Paul V Borghese, Pope, 184, 192, 194, 195 Pedley, Mary Sponberg, 218 Pepys, Samuel, 177–­78, 198; library, 179, 196 Peranda, Giovanni Francesco, 141 Peretti family, 171 perspective plans, 109, 111, 137, 190, 199, 223 perspective renderings. See pictorialism Peruzzi, Baldassare, 55, 63, 99; drawing of St. Peter’s project, 244n71 Petrarch, 11, 23 Piazza Barberini, 171; in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 204, 205 Piazza Borghese, 207, 208 Piazza del Popolo: in Cartaro’s Roma nuova, 147; in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis, 142, 143; in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 203, 204; in Nolli’s Nuova pianta di Roma, 215 Piazza Navona: in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 104, 105; in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 204, 205; in Ligorio’s 1552 map, 122 Piccolpasso, Cipriano, 7, 8, 171, 223; “the principles of pictures,” 10 pictograms, 45 pictorialism, 109; Alberti and, 3; Bufalini and, 77–­78; Du Pérac and, 111; merging with orthogonality, 113–­15; Raphael and, 16, 56–­57, 70–­71, 72, 74, 75, 113, 137; reassessment of in early 1500s, 70–­73; Rosselli and, 32, 43; Serlio and, 72, 73; Tempesta and, 175–­76 pilgrims, 165, 212. See also Grand Tourists “pilgrim’s perspective,” 23 Pinard, Ugo (or Hugues), Urbis Romae descriptio, 115–­16, 117, 126–­27, 154, 170, plate 7

Index

Pinet, Antoine du, Plantz, pourtraitz et descriptions de plusieurs villes, 8, 10 Pinto, John, 219 Pinturicchio, fresco cycle of cities for Belvedere Villa, 37, 45 Pio da Carpi family garden, 141 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista: eighteenth-­century etchings of Roman sites, 196; engraving of decoration of Nolli’s pianta piccola, 224; map of Rome with Forma urbis fragments from Antichità romane, 137, 224–­26, 225; vedute, 218, 224. See also Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, Campus Martius ichnography of 1762 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, Campus Martius ichnography of 1762, 17, 224–­29, 227, plate 12; “Bustum Hadriani,” 226, 227, 228; evidence and sources, 227–­28; “Hortus Sallustiani” (Gardens of Sallust), 228; mausoleums of Augustus and Hadrian, 226; and principle of analogy, 228; as a product of the informed imagination, 227–­28 Pius V, Pope, 195 planimetric drawings, 56. See also ichnography; orthogonality Poggio Bracciolini, Vicissitudes of Fortune, 4, 30, 31, 41 Ponte Santa Maria (Ponto Rotto), 176 Ponte Sant’Angelo, 37, 40, 43 Ponte Sisto: in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 84; in Foresti’s woodcut of Rosselli’s Rome, 35 Pontius Pilate, 172 Ponzio, Flaminio, 184 Porta del Popolo: in Du Pérac’s Sette chiese di Roma (Seven churches of Rome), 157, 158; in Foresti’s woodcut of Rosselli’s Rome, 34; project of Pope Alexander VII, 203; in Van Schayck’s Roma antiqua, 161 Porta San Sebastiano: in Dosio’s Roma, 112; walls and bastion near in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 84 print industry, of Rome, 13, 80–­81, 152–­59; fre­ quency of copying in maps of Rome, 153; in­­ creasing specialization and commercialization in seventeenth century, 164, 212; Jubilee imag­ ery, 157; market for prints of Roma antica and Roma nuova, 156–­57; news pamphlets (avvisi a stampa), 164; papacy and, 13, 166, 173, 202–­3; prices and purchasers of large and small 17th­century maps, 176–­78; types of printed ma­ terials, 152–­53; use of large maps as advertisements, 178. See also De Rossi, Giovanni Giacomo; Lafreri, Antonio printing press, 13, 173, 174. See also Old St. Peter’s Basilica; St. Peter’s Basilica

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printing privileges, 13, 153; Bufalini’s plan and, 82, 90; Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi and, 202; Tempesta’s Prospectus and, 170 prints and print culture, 2, 3, 4, 6, 13–­14, 31, 32, 33, 34; display and attrition of large-­scale prints, 32, 82; dissemination of technical forms of representation, 68–­69; and innovation, 3, 45, 46–­47; Raphael and, 57–­58. See also print industry, of Rome; Rome, imagery of prospectus, 176 “proto-­archaeological” approach, 52 Ptolemy, Claudius: cartographic categories of geography and chorography, 3, 5, 218; effect on Renaissance attitudes toward city imagery, 5; Geography, 5, 28, 45, 218; system of polar coordinates to plot sites across the globe, 28 putto-­surveyors, 215, 217 Quirinal Hill, 99, 141, 174 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 58 Raitenau, Prince-­Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von, 153 Raphael, and New St. Peter’s, 79 Raphael, letter to Pope Leo X, 12, 29, 31, 50, 51–­ 57, 60, 101; anticipated audience, 58; appeal to intellectuals and architects, 59; and bussola, 53; call for “complete accuracy of measurements,” 94; on characteristics of successive eras in building, 108–­9; collaboration with Castiglione, 58; cross-­referencing of antique regionary texts with physical remains, 52; goal of graphic preservation of Roman ruins, 15, 16, 51, 52, 53; on “Goth period,” 105; larger goals and audience, 57–­60; and magnetic compass, 59; on pictorial rendering, 16, 56–­57, 70–­71, 72, 74, 75, 113, 137; and principle of analogy, 128; reference to “universal drawing of all Rome,” 57, 66; surveying methods, 53, 91; three orthogonal modes, 66, 70–­71 reconstruction, graphic, of antiquity, 49, 50, 119–­ 20; in Adrichom’s Jerusalem, 131–­33; in Brambilla’s Rome Antica, 154–­55; in Bufalini’s plan, 96–­104, 108, 118, 131; in Cartaro’s Rome Antica, 154–­55; disappearance of in seventeenth-­ century maps of Rome, 164, 165; in Du Pérac’s Disegni de le ruine di Roma, 146, and Urbis Romae sciographia, 135, 137–­38; Forma urbis as source for, 135–­37; in illustrated works on ancient Rome, 60–­70, 77–­78; in Ligorio’s maps, 121–­ 31; in Marliani’s woodcut map of late imperial Rome, 109, 120–­21; in Nolli’s Nuova pianta di Roma, 216; in Piranesi’s map of Rome with Forma urbis fragments, 225-­26, and Campus

Index

Martius ichnography, 226–­28; principle of analogy in, 128, 228; in Raphael’s letter to Leo X, 51–­53, 57; in Van Schayck’s Roma antiqua, 160–­61. See also antiquity, Roman; ruins Reformation and Protestant Reformers, 11, 13, 17 regionary catalogues, as topographical sources, 30, 52, 125, 128 renovatio (renewal), 11–­12, 31, 36, 106 Revillas, Diego, 214 Ricci family garden, 141 rioni, 62, 202, 236n34 Ripa grande and Ripetta, 172 ritratto (“portrait”), 3, 116–­17 Roma, goddess, statue of on Campidoglio, 217 Roma antica genre, 119–­20; and cultural memory formation, 159; fact and fiction in, 133; and paragone mode, 149; in second half of sixteenth century, 119, 132; in seventeenth century, 165–­66 Romano, Giulio, 143 Roma nuova: maps of seventeenth century, 163–­66; and shift toward positive assessment of modern Rome, 160 Rome: disabitato, 38–­39; growing interest in archaeological study of, 12; identity during the Renaissance, 11; renovatio, 11–­12; Sack of 1527, 165; Urbi et orbi, 11. See also print industry, of Rome; Rome, imagery of Rome, imagery of late Middle Ages, 20–­25; ideogrammatic view, 23; memory pictures, 23–­24; move toward individualization, 20–­21; “pilgrim’s perspective,” 23; underpinnings for measured city plans, 21 Rome, imagery of early modern period, 14–­15, 16; caput mundi, 11, 29, 33, 67, 77, 126, 151, 166; foreign collectors of, 177–­78; historical complexity and radical developments of, 11–­13; as platforms for ideas about state of the city, 14–­15; printed images produced for open market, 13 Rome, imagery of early sixteenth century: fusion of technical and scholarly culture, 49–­50; ground plans in architectural publications, 68–­ 69; illustrated works on ancient Rome, 60–­70; nonorthogonal forms in printed works, 72 Rome, imagery of second half of sixteenth century: ancient and modern Rome in, 119–­ 61; experimentation, 116–­17; invention and elaboration based on solid knowledge, 130, 133; maps of modern Rome, 119; move toward separation of past and present, 119; paragone imagery, 120 Rome, imagery of seventeenth century, 16–­17, 163–­210; architectural approaches, 163,

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190–­209; attentiveness to time, 163–­64; emphasis on triumph of the church, 16–­17; focus on Roma nuova, 16–­17, 160, 165; lack of conflation or comparison of pagan past and Christian present, 166; large-­scale prints, 176–­77; official images of papal Rome, 166, 212; painterly approaches, 163, 167–­90; prices and purchasers of large and small maps, 176–­78; refining of themes first manifested in mid-­1400s, 17, 165; updated versions of city within established formulas, 164 Rome, imagery of eighteenth century, 213–­29; turn toward modern urban cartography, 17, 217–­18 Romulus and Remus: in Cartaro’s Roma nuova, 148, 149; in Greuter’s Disegno nuovo di Roma, 195 Roque, John, surveys of London and Westminster, 218 Rosselli, Alessandro, 31 Rosselli, Cosimo, 31 Rosselli, Francesco: engraving after Sandro Botticelli’s Assumption of the Virgin, 237n39; first engraver to issue separately published city portraits, 7; portrayals based on linear perspective and survey, 32, 43; use of one-­point perspective, 43 Rosselli, Francesco, lost view of Florence, 1, 4, 31. See also Uberti, Lucantonio degli, “View with a Chain” of Florence (after Rosselli’s lost view of Florence) Rosselli, Francesco, lost view of Rome, 12, 31–­ 47, 96, 211; consisting of three copperplates and twelve folio sheets, 32, 79, 80, 237n42; constructed from multiple elevated observation points, 43; defining icon of Rome for a century, 15, 19, 31, 32; measured exactitude, 43–­44; as possible model for Pinturicchio’s Belvedere cycle and Camera de le Citate, 45; published between 1485 or 1487 and 1490, 32; St. Peter’s Basilica as key feature of, 32; Uberti’s lost copy of, 33. See also Rosselli, Francesco, lost view of Rome, adaptations Rosselli, Francesco, lost view of Rome, adaptations, 32, 34–­42, 45–­47; anachronisms, 45–­47; early modern approaches to city as unified environment, 45; Foresti’s woodcut, 6, 33, 34–­36, 35; innovation from print to painting, 45; Mantua painting, 36–­45, 39–­40, 140, plate 5; Münster’s view in Cosmographia universalis, 8, 33, 45–­47, 46; omission of Colosseum in later printed derivatives, 46–­47; Schedel’s woodcut in Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle), 4, 33, 36, 37; spalliera painted panel, 33. See also Rosselli, Francesco, lost view of Rome

Index

Rowland, Ingrid, 59, 253n41 Rucellai, Bernardo, De urbe Roma, 59 ruins, 12, 24, 39, 65, 96; in Cartaro’s Roma nuova, 146–­47; in Du Pérac’s Vestigi, 133–­34, Nova urbis Romae descriptio, 140–­41, and Sette chiese, 158–­ 59; in Falda’s oeuvre, 196; interest of scholars, architects, and engineers in, 30–­31, 49–­50, 59; in Paciotto’s Urbis Romae formam . . . , 110; in Panini’s pictorial vignette for Nolli’s Nuova pianta di Roma, 217; in Pinard’s Urbis Romae descriptio, 115; in Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma, 224; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 171. See also antiquity, Roman; reconstruction, graphic, of antiquity Salamanca, Antonio, 115, 152 Salzburg Residenz, 153 San Cosimato, Church of, in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 176 Sangallo, Antonio de the Younger, 65, 71, 86–­87, 93, 99; Ardeatine Bastion, 88; as capomaestro (head architect) at St. Peter’s, 87; compass surveys of Florence, 55; and magnetic compass, 59; triangulation, 56 San Paolo fuori le mura, Basilica of, 125, 126; in Bufalini’s plan, 103, 107–­8; in Ligorio’s 1553 map, 125–­26 San Pietro in Montorio, Church of: in Ligorio’s 152 map, 122; in Pinard’s view of Rome, 115 San Pietro in Vincoli, Church of: in Ligorio’s map of 1552, 122; in Paciotto’s Urbis Romae formam . . . , 110 San Saba, Church of, 103 Santa Maria ai Martiri, Church of, 40. See also Pantheon Santa Maria in Aracoeli, Church and Monastery of, 122 Santa Maria in Vallicella (Chiesa Nuova), Church of, 171, 172 Santa Maria Maggiore: and chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 172, 173; in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis, 140; in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 204, 206; in Greuter’s Disegno nuovo di Roma moderna, 192, 193–­94; in Maggi’s bird’s-­ eye view of Rome, 184, 186 Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, Church of, 204, 205 Sant’Andrea della Valle, Church of: dome of, 177; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 171 Santa Prisca, Church of, 103 Santa Sabina, Church of, 103 Santo Stefano Rotondo, Church of, 167 Savorgnano, Mario: Arte militare, terrestre e maritima, 90; and Bufalini, 90 Scala Santa, 172 scenography (scaenographia), 56, 137, 242n23

 · 273

Schedel, Hartmann, Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle), view of Rome from, 4, 33, 36, 37 Schlapobersky, Paul, 94, 95 scholarly culture, interest in technical proficiency and military arts, 50, 58–­59, 89, 90. See also antiquarianism and antiquarians; humanism and humanists Schulz, Juergen, 20 Septimius Severus, Emperor, 135 Septizonium Gate, 170 Serlio, Sebastiano: Terzo libro . . . nel qual si figurano, e descrivono le antiquita di Roma, 62–­65, 66, 91, 96, 99, 152; Baths of Caracalla, 100; debt to Peruzzi, 63; debt to Vitruvius’s De architectura, 65; favoring of illustration over text, 64; frontispiece to, 63; ichnographic map of port of Ostia Antica, 69; iteration of Raphael’s orthogonal trio, 64; perspective renderings, 72, 73; plan and combined elevation/section of the dome of St. Peter’s, 64; as practical textbook on lessons of real buildings, 63–­64; view of the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine, 73 Servius Tullius, 102 Severan plan. See Forma urbis Romae Sforza, Ludovico, Duke of Milan, 89 Sforza family, 171 She-­Wolf nursing Romulus and Remus: in Cartaro’s Roma nuova, 148, 149; in Greuter’s Disegno nuovo di Roma, 195; in Nolli’s Nuova pianta di Roma, 217 Sixtus IV, Pope, architectural interventions in Rome, 35–­36, 108 Sixtus V, Pope, 13, 171, 195, 204; and development of Roman print industry, 173; Fontana dell’Acqua Felice, 184; Jubilee of 1590, 157; maps glorifying urban program of, 173; urbanization program, 151–­52, 155, 203 Smith, Pamela H., 243n41 Sophianos, Nikolaos, Totius Graeciae descriptio, 81, 108 spalliera panel, painted copy of Rosselli’s Rome, 33 Speculum romanae magnificentiae (Lafreri), 153, 156, 256n2 SS. Cosmas and Damian, Basilica of, 135 Stadium of Domitian, 122. See also Piazza Navona St. Gall plan, 20 St. John Lateran, Basilica of: in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 97; in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis, 140; in Du Pérac’s Sette chiese di Roma (Seven churches of Rome), 157, 158; in Mantua painting of Rosselli’s Rome, 39; in Paciotto’s Urbis Romae formam . . . , 110; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 172, 173 St. Peter’s Basilica: benediction loggia of in Pinard’s view of Rome, 115; in Bufalini’s map

Index

of Rome, 84, 86, 95, 106–­8, 107; in Cartaro’s Roma nuova, 147; construction of, 49; and Cosmographia universalis, 45–­46; in Cruyl’s Pianta, 188; in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis, 142; in Du Pérac’s Sette chiese di Roma, 157, 158; in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 203, 204; in Greuter’s Disegno nuovo di Roma moderna, 192, 193, 201; in Ligorio’s 1552 and 1553 maps, 122, 125–­26; in Maggi’s bird’s-­ eye view of Rome, 184, 185; Michelangelo and, 103; in Paciotto’s Urbis Romae formam . . . , 110; Peruzzi’s drawing of project, 244n71; Raphael and, 79; Serlio’s plan and combined elevation/ section of dome, 64; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 171, 174, 175; in Vasi’s Prospetto dell’alma città di Roma, 222–­23; Vatican obelisk, 172 Strabo, 228 Strozzi, Alessandro, 24 Suetonius, 228 surveying: of cities, 43–­44, 55–­56, 91–­93; improvements in, 3, 214; key practice in military engineering, 87; lack of change in technology in seventeenth century, 164; Roman agrimensores, 20; and study of antiquity, 91 Taccola, Mariano, 28 Tartaglia, Niccolò: Quesiti et inventioni diverse, 29, 53, 54, 55, 59, 88; procedures of using the bussola, 91 Tasso, Torquato, 181 tavoletta pretoriana, 214 teatro, notion of Rome as, 166, 203 Tempesta, Antonio, 1, 18; as Counter-­Reformation artist, 167; patronage of Pope Gregory XIII, 167; as printmaker, 17, 47, 164, 167 Tempesta, Antonio, Prospectus, 116, 165, 167–­76, 168–­69, 184, 199, 210, 222; Belvedere Courtyard, 174; Borgo Pio in Vatican, 171; Borgo Santo Spirito, 176; Campidoglio, 174; city center, 171–­75; Collegio Romano and Gesù, 171, 172, 174; columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, 173, 174; dedication to Giacomo Bosio, 167–­68, 173; as designer, draftsman, and etcher of map, 167, 169, 170; dimensions and orientation, 170; disabitato, 171, 172, 173; dominant paradigm of Roman imagery through end of seventeenth century, 167; exaggeration of Aurelian Walls, 170; influence of, 178–­90; later editions and imitations, 178; Leonine Walls, 174; maps inspired by Tempesta, 179–­90; Mausoleum of Augustus, 172; Moses Fountain (Fontana dell’Acqua Felice), 172, 173; new papal palace on Quirinal Hill, 174; pictorial approach, 175–­76; Ponte Santa Maria (Ponto Rotto), 176; printing privilege, 169, 170;

 · 274

reduced-­scale derivatives, 179; Ripa grande and Ripetta, 172; San Cosimato, 176; Santa Maria in Vallicella, 171, 172; Santa Maria Maggiore and chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, 172, 173; Sant’Andrea della Valle, 171; Septizonium Gate, 170; St. John Lateran, 172, 173; St. Peter’s, 171, 174, 175; Tiber Island, 176; up-­to-­date depiction, 170; Vatican, 174, 175; Via della Lungara, 171, 176; Via Pia, 172, 173 Tempietto: in Ligorio’s 1552 map, 122; in Pinard’s view of Rome, 115 Temple of Minerva Medica, 101, 248n56; in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 101–­2; in Marliani’s Urbis Romae topographia and woodcut map of late imperial Rome, 101 Templum Pacis, site of as find spot of Forma urbis fragments, 135 Testone, Giulio, 187, 189 Theater of Marcellus: in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 103, 104; in Ligorio’s 1552 map, 122 theodolite, 53 Tiber Island, 176 Tiber River: in Du Pérac’s Sette chiese di Roma, 157, 158; in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 200; in Pinard’s view of Rome, 115; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 171, 172 Tiber river god statue, 195 Tolomei, Claudio, 72, 109 topographical guides, 30, 61, 96 Torre delle Milizie, 39, 40 tourist imagery, 189 Trajan, Column of: in Mantua painting of Rosselli’s Rome, 39, 40; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 173, 174 Tramezzino, Francesco, 122 Tramezzino, Michele, 122 Trevisi, Antonio, 82, 93 triangulation, 56, 92, 214, 241n20 Tribolo, Niccolò, 92 Uberti, Lucantonio degli, “View with a Chain” of Florence (after Rosselli’s lost view of Florence), 8–­9, 10, 32, 33, 93, 116, 222. See also Rosselli, Francesco, lost view of Florence Urban VIII Barberini, Pope, 184 Vaccari, Lorenzo, 134, 153, 180 Vagnetti, Luigi, reconstruction of Alberti’s map from the Descriptio urbis Romae, 26, 27–­28 Van Aelst, Nicolas, 153, 154, 173 Van Cleef, Hendrick, view of Rome looking west from the Oppian Hill, 98 Van Schayck, Goert, Roma antiqua, 160–­61 Van Veen, Timanno, 190, 258n42

Index

Vasari, Giorgio, 63, 130; surveying methods, 44, 92; view of Florence during siege of 1530, 44, plate 6 Vasi, Giuseppe: engraving of plates for Nolli’s Nuova pianta di Roma, 219; Itinerario guidebook, 219; Magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna, 219; prints of four patriarchal basilicas, 219; Prospetto dell’alma città di Roma, 1, 12–­13, 17, 116, 218–­24, 220–­23; suites of etchings, 219; vedute, 218, 222 Vatican: Borgo, 40, 43, 115, 171; Borgo Pio, 142, 171; in Cartaro’s Roma nuova, 148; in Cruyl’s Pianta, 188; in Falda’s Nuova pianta, 203, 204; fortifications in Bufalini’s map, 107; Gallery of Maps, 145, 153, 177; Library, 174; in Ligorio’s 1553 map, 125–­26; in Maggi’s bird’s-­eye view of Rome, 185; in Mantua painting of Rosselli’s Rome, 39–­40; obelisk, 192; printing press, 13, 173, 174; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 174, 175. See also Old St. Peter’s Basilica; St. Peter’s Basilica veduta genre, 196, 201–­2, 218, 222, 224 vedutine, 197 Venetian Senate, 82 Venice: Barbari’s bird’s-­eye view of, 1, 4, 9–­10, 80, 83, 108, 171; Fra Paolino’s plan of in Chronologia magna, 21; printing industry, 153 Veranzio, Fausto, ca. 1593 plan of Rome, 249n69 verisimilitude vs. verità, 130 Via Alessandrina, 103, 107 Via Appia, 112 Via dei Coronari (Via Recta), 40, 43 Via della Lungara: in Bufalini’s map of Rome, 84; in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis, 143; in Pinard’s view of Rome, 115; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 171, 176 Via di San Francesco a Ripa, 192 Via Flaminia, 248n59; in Dosio’s Roma, 112; in Ligorio’s Anteiquae urbis imago, 127 Via Giulia, 84 Via Gregoriana (Via Merulana), 140, 192 Via Lata (Via del Corso), 112, 115, 248n59 Via Pia: in Du Pérac’s Nova urbis, 140–­41; in Tempesta’s Prospectus, 172, 173 Via Sacra, 127 Vienna, ichnographic maps of, 80 “View with a Chain” of Florence. See Uberti, Lucantonio degli, “View with a Chain” of Florence (after Rosselli’s lost view of Florence) Viljoen, Madeleine, 58 Villa Borghese, 187, 188 Villa d’Este, Tivoli, 121 Villa Giulia, 115 Villa Lante, 143 Villamena, Francesco, 135 Viminal Hill, 99 Vitelli, Alessandro, 87

 · 275

Vitruvius, 53–­54; De architectura, 56, 65; definition of scenography (scaenographia), 137, 242n23; early editions of, 58 Volpaia, Benvenuto di Lorenzo della, 92

Władisław, Prince of Poland, 180 Wolmuet, Bonifaz, 80 Wyngaerde, Anton van den, 98 Zorach, Rebecca, 153 Zorzi, Giovanni Domenico, lost view of Jerusalem (with Pagano), 82

Walpole, Horace, 121 wind heads, 10, 82, 170, plate 1

Index

 · 276