Roma - Itália
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OST - 57x109
Caspar van Wittel, better known by his
Italianized name Vanvitelli, painted this magnificent view of Rome’s celebrated
Piazza del Popolo – his most frequently painted Roman view – in 1711, the year
he was elected to the Accademia di San Luca. By this date he had undertaken
several trips around Italy, including an extended sojourn in Naples between
1700 and 1702. He then returned to Rome, where his reputation as the leading
figure in topographical view painting flourished and he continued to work there
with great success for the rest of his life. Signed and dated as if written
onto the church wall, this spectacular view of contemporary Rome creates a
vivid impression of the city’s appearance in the early eighteenth century.
Van Wittel’s vedute held
great appeal not only for collectors in Rome but also for visitors on tours of
Italy wishing to take back mementoes of their travels. This view is among the
finest depictions of one of the city’s greatest public spaces. Indeed, the
Piazza del Popolo would have been the first landmark encountered by visitors
coming to Rome from the north, via the Porta del Popolo, this veduta’s vantage point and the
principal northern entrance to the Eternal City. The picture’s central focus is
one of Rome’s oldest obelisks, the red granite monolith originally brought to
Rome by the Emperor Augustus after the conquest of Egypt in 30 BC and erected
in the Circus Maximus. The celebrated landmark was moved to its present
location in 1589 under Pope Sixtus V. Beyond it, at the southern end of the
piazza, are the matching domed churches of Santa Maria di Monte Santo and Santa
Maria dei Miracoli. From there radiate the three principal arteries, known as
the tridente, leading to
the heart of the city. Against a backdrop that includes famous landmarks such
as, from left, the Villa Medici, the twin towers of Santa Trinità dei Monti,
and the Quirinal Palace, Van Wittel animates the cityscape of his day with
figures going about their daily business. On the right are the buildings later
demolished by Giuseppe Valadier (1762–1839) in his remodelling of the piazza,
seen here in a valuable record of the city as it once was.
Van Wittel’s earliest recorded Italian veduta is his depiction in tempera of this very same view,
a work on parchment dated 1680, now at the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin.1 Not long
after that, in 1683, he provided his fellow Dutchman, the hydraulics engineer
Cornelis Meyer (1629–1701), with an etching taken from essentially the same
vantage point as the present painting, published by Meyer in L’arte di restituire a Roma la tralasciata
navigatione del suo Tevere. The popularity of the view is attested by
the large number of autograph treatments that are known today: Van Wittel
captured the Piazza del Popolo in no fewer than fifteen paintings (eight in oil
and seven in gouache), ranging in date from 1680 to 1718. These include a work
in tempera datable to 1688 in the celebrated Colonna collection in
Rome and an oil of similar dimensions to the present painting in the Devonshire
collection at Chatsworth.2 The present work has been compared to the veduta in the Intesa collection
of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, signed and dated 1718 and of comparable
size.3 They
probably all derive from a preparatory drawing that remains untraced, since
they each vary in minor ways although the perspective remains broadly
unchanged. At the far left of this composition Van Wittel has included the
side-aisle façade of Santa Maria del Popolo, with the dome of the Cybo chapel
visible above the wall of the adjacent Augustinian monastery, its gardens
extending over the slopes of the Pincian Hill.
In this veduta Van
Wittel renders with consummate skill the sweeping vista of the city captured in
the afternoon light and brings to the scene a vivid sense of atmosphere.
This View of Piazza del Popolo encapsulates
his clarity of vision, meticulous depiction of architecture and profound
understanding of panoramic perspective.
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