Forthcoming Issues

Forthcoming Issue

The next  issue of MAJ will be published by “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, Rome, in March 2014 (http://www.lerma.it) (search ‘Site of Rome’). A limited number of copies will be available for purchasers in Australia and New Zealand. For information email daytopiapress@netspace.net.au.

The Site of Rome: Studies in the Art and Topography of Rome 1400–1750

Melbourne Art Journal 13
Edited by David R. Marshall

Introduction
Chapter 1
Julie Rowe
Rome’s Mediaeval Fish Market at S. Angelo in Pescheria
Chapter 2
Joan Barclay Lloyd
Memory, Myth and Meaning in the Via Appia from Piazza di Porta Capena to Porta S. Sebastiano
Chapter 3
Louis Cellauro
Roma Antiqva Restored: The Renaissance Archaeological Plan
Chapter 4
Donato Esposito
The Virtual Rome of Sir Joshua Reynolds
Chapter 5
Lisa Beaven
Claude Lorrain and La Crescenza: The Tiber Valley in the Seventeenth Century

Chapter 6
David R. Marshall
The Campo Vaccino: Order and the Fragment from Palladio to Piranesi
Chapter 7
Arno Witte
Architecture and Bureaucracy: The Quirinal as an Expression of Papal Absolutism
Chapter 8
Tommaso Manfredi
Arcadia at Trinità dei Monti. The Urban Theatre of Maria Casimira and Alexander Sobieski in Rome
Chapter 9
John Weretka
The ‘Non-aedicular Style’ and the Roman Church Façade of the Early Eighteenth Century

Contributors and Abstracts

Chapter 1
Julie Rowe
Rome’s Medieval Fish Market at S. Angelo in Pescheria
Rome’s main fish market was firmly established at the church of S. Angelo ‘in Pescheria’ (‘in the fish market’) by 1192. Fish was sold there in both wholesale and retail quantities. It was a good location close to the Tiber River and other city markets, and fish could be delivered there from Rome’s port in Trastevere and from the Campagna by way of the Tiber Island bridges. The site also connected directly to a major city thoroughfare for distribution purposes. A clear picture of how fish were sourced and how the market was organised and operated emerges from archival records. Key players were the canons of S. Angelo (in the retail market), the fishmongers’ guild (in the wholesale market) and the fishmongers (pescivendoli) whose involvement was spread across all facets of the market operations

Chapter 2
Joan Barclay Lloyd
Memory, Myth and Meaning in the Via Appia from Piazza di Porta Capena to Porta S. Sebastiano
This is a topographical and art historical study of the urban section of the Via Appia, which ran from the Servian to the Aurelian Walls, from modern Piazza di Porta Capena to the Porta S. Sebastiano (Porta Appia). Historical records, inscriptions, place names, monuments, ruins, churches and monasteries reflect the rich heritage of this part of Rome, from antiquity to the present. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this area became part of a vast archaeological park, which here focused on the ancient consular road and a series of ancient Roman buildings, such as the Baths of Caracalla. In the Middle Ages churches and convents, like the Dominican nunnery of S. Sisto, were built in this region on the edge of the city, where the population had gradually dwindled. Renaissance remodelling of churches along the Via Appia culminated in the Counter-Reformation renovation of SS. Nereo ed Achilleo and S. Cesareo by Cardinal Cesare Baronio and Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605). These churches contain medieval mosaics, re-used liturgical furniture, and sixteenth-century paintings of the early Christian martyrs. This paper recalls the historical significance of this place, as reflected in the art and architecture of the monuments along the road.

Chapter 3
Louis Cellauro
Roma Antiqva Restored: The Renaissance Archaeological Plan
Images of ancient Rome, published from the mid sixteenth century onwards, constituted an important antiquarian phenomenon, which was representative of the general concern with ancient architecture and topography among architects, antiquarians, and humanist-scholars. This chapter investigates Bartolomeo Marliani’s topographical map of 1544, the two maps of ancient Rome of the Neapolitan painter, architect, and antiquarian Pirro Ligorio (1553 and 1561), the map of the historian and antiquarian Onofrio Panvinio (1565), the small archaeological plan and the large bird’s-eye view of the French architect and antiquarian Etienne Dupérac (1573 and 1574), the map made by the engraver, draughtsman, and dealer in prints Mario Cartaro (1579), and the two images designed by the Milanese printmaker, painter, and poet Ambrogio Brambilla (1582 and 1589/90). These maps are of two different types, which correspond to two different approaches to the imaging of the ancient city. The first is the small archaeological plan representing such features as the seven hills, the geographic boundaries of the fourteen Augustan regions, and a few major ancient monuments. The second type was the large-scale panoramic bird’s-eye view of the fully reconstructed ancient city. Antiquarians, including Ligorio, Dupérac and Brambilla, often produced both types of maps, the first of which emphasised ancient topography, while the second presented an imaginative interpretation designed to stress the magnificence of the long-vanished Imperial capital and visualise its splendour and monumentality. Scholars have tended to conflate these two traditions of the representation of Roma Antica, and this chapter draws out the their differences in format and content.

Chapter 4
Donato Esposito
The Virtual Rome of Sir Joshua Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) was in Rome from 15 April 2021 to 3 May 1752. He was there to form, in his own words, ‘an idea of what is to be seen here, the remains of antiquity, the sculpture, paintings, architecture etc.’. In due course Reynolds assembled a large collection of works of art—paintings, prints and drawings—associated with Rome, its ancient history, numerous landmarks and decorative schemes. Reynolds’ many Roman artworks both serve as ‘virtual’ surrogates of the city and as ‘souvenirs’ of his Italian sojourn, which was the foundation of the young artist’s future success.

Chapter 5
Lisa Beaven
Claude Lorrain and La Crescenza: the Tiber Valley in the Seventeenth Century
Claude Lorrain’s paintings have been associated more with pastoral poetry and literary texts than with the topography of the Campagna, partly because of their idealisation. Yet he spent much time in the Campagna and the Tiber Valley, where he made hundreds of drawings (especially during the 1640s). This chapter examines Claude’s depictions of the Tiber Valley from the Porta del Popolo in Rome north to La Crescenza, a fortified casale (farmhouse), in relation to the social and climatic conditions of the seventeenth-century Campagna. Claude was drawing the banks of the Tiber at a critical time for the river and the surrounding landscape, when the environment was unhealthy and the ecology precarious.

Chapter 6
David R. Marshall
The Campo Vaccino: Order and the Fragment from Palladio to Piranesi
This chapter explores the relationship between the authority of the Cinquecento treatises on the orders (especially Vignola and Palladio) and the representation of Roman ruins in architectural painting and engraving from Viviano Codazzi (c.1604–1670) to Piranesi (1720–1778), by way of Niccolò Codazzi (1642–1693), the Monogrammist GAE, Giovanni Ghisolfi (1623–1683), Alberto Carlieri (1672–after 1720) and Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691–1765). It is argued that the conceptual foundations of architectural painting lay in the five orders, but these were undermined by a combination of naturalistic observation of actual ruins, especially the ruins of the Forum Romanum (then known as the Campo Vaccino) and scene-painters’ tricks designed to give the effect of ruinousness. Piranesi, it is argued, represents the point at which the naturalism of ruin-representation peaks, in parallel with a collapse of faith in the orders, causing Piranesi to seek new ways of composing the ruinous fragment.

Chapter 7
Arno Witte
Architecture and Bureaucracy: The Quirinal as an Expression of Papal Absolutism
The Quirinal Palace, nowadays mostly regarded as the seat of Italy’s republican government, was built between the late sixteenth and late eighteenth century as the new seat of papal power. It started out as a summer retreat, but soon was provided with all the necessary spaces for official receptions, state meetings and ministerial offices. This continuing architectural expansion shows how a unified court located at the periphery of Rome, on the Vatican Hill, was transformed into an absolutist state apparatus situated in the centre of the expanding city, in a new and predominantly secular residence. The Quirinal palace therefore shows us how the papal government was in certain respects ahead of other European states in the innovation of political and bureaucratic structures, not lagging behind in comparison with France and other countries, as often has been suggested in historical studies.

Chapter 8
Tommaso Manfredi
Arcadia at Trinità dei Monti. The Urban Theatre of Maria Casimira and Alexander Sobieski in Rome
On 9 August 2020 the serenade Dialogo tra Amor Divino e la Fede, dedicated by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni to Maria Casimira, the widow of John III Sobieski, King of Poland, was performed in the piazza between the church of Trinità dei Monti and the Palazzo Zuccari above the slope where the Spanish Steps would be built in 1727–38. This chapter explores the way this area served as an ‘urban theatre’ that was subject to transformations that were both real and ephemeral, and which were dense with political and diplomatic implications. In particular, this chapter examines the way the upper part of this area was reconfigured by the restoration of the Villa Torres and the Palazzo Zuccari by Maria Casimira, which included the construction of a bridge across the modern Via Sistina and the loggia of Palazzo Zuccari that faces the piazza in front of the church of Trinità dei Monti.

Chapter 9
John Weretka
The ‘Non-aedicular Style’ and the Roman Church Façade of the Early Eighteenth Century
Architectural historical criticism has characterised the early eighteenth century as torn between the works and styles of the borroministi and the berninisti. These style-historical terms have been often been used in a simplistic way, utilising ‘Morellian’ characteristics such as the forms of mouldings and applied ornament as synecdoches for the style as a whole. Furthermore, the use of these terms has obscured the rich give-and-take that took place between these supposedly opposed stylistic positions. Through an analysis of six church façades erected in the city of Rome between 1721 and 1741, this chapter moves beyond the ‘brute facts’ presented by these façades towards hypotheses concerning their ‘institutional facts’, and shows that buildings of this period can be read as providing a lively commentary on one of the most persistent norms of architectural organisation in the Baroque church façade, the aedicule. The liberation from the aedicule present in some of these buildings forms the operating rationale for a distinct style of architectural conception typical in Rome at the start of the eighteenth century.