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

ROME MEASURED AND IMAGINED

ROME MEASURED AND IMAGINED

EARLY MODERN MAPS OF THE ETERNAL CITY

Jessica Maier

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

JESSICA MAIER is assistant professor of art history at Mount Holyoke College.

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

INTRODUCTION

Icarus Spreading His Wings: The Early Modern City Brought to Life

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)

Late Medieval Origins

Alberti’s Survey of Rome

Rosselli’s Rome in Twelve Sheets

CHAPTER TWO

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

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

Raphael’s Larger Goals and Audience

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

Pictorialism Revisited

CHAPTER THREE

Syntheses: Leonardo Bufalini’s Plan of Rome (1551)

Origins, Form, and Function of Bufalini’s Plan

Bufalini’s Background and Intended Audience

Bufalini and the Art of Surveying

Ancient and Modern in Bufalini’s Map

The Early Reception and Influence of Bufalini’s Map

The Modern Reception of Bufalini’s Map

CHAPTER FOUR

Antitheses: Ancient and Modern Rome in Sixteenth-Century Imagery

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

Stefano Du Pérac, the Ancient Forma urbis, and the City Renewed

Mario Cartaro and the Paragone of Ancient and Modern

Roman Print Culture, Dissemination, and the Market

CHAPTER FIVE

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

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

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

EPILOGUE

The Eternal City Measured and Imagined

Notes

Index

Plates

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 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.

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 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.

———

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, moreover, 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, 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.

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).

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

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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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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 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, 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