ABSTRACT
Rome at the time of the creation of the broadsheet was a vast construction site. Churches, palaces and basilicas were rising up from rubble and ruins as it slowly recovered from the devastation of the Sack of 1527 and the floods of 1530. Chapels were bought and endowed, bridges were built across the Tiber, formal squares were laid out, statues commissioned and erected, villas built and gardens created to display the collections of antiquities which were being discovered and disinterred in the ruins of the ancient classical city. The building of the new St Peter’s, the most ambitious of the projects undertaken, became a financial gauge of the city’s economic vigour and the strength of its financial resources. When work resumed on it, so the city began to grow, when work on it stalled, so too did work on most other building projects.1 Consequently, any portrayal of Rome in image at this time shows a city under construction emerging from ruins. This is what is seen in the landscape of Plates 3, 5 and 6 of the broadsheet: a series of buildings in progress, including St Peter’s, against a backdrop of established ancient buildings which include Castel Sant’Angelo and the Pantheon. When Michelangelo succeeded Sangallo the Younger as architect of St Peter’s in 1546, Paul III was alert to the approaching Jubilee of 1550; but only the apses of the northern and southern transept arms had been completed, and work on the drum to support the cupola had yet to start.
