ABSTRACT
Rome in 1555 was a city engaged in the recovery of its classical past.1 In addition to heading the list of the most popular pilgrimage sites in Europe, it had, since the middle of the previous century, become a Mecca for scholars, artists and architects from all over Europe who came to what they perceived as the cradle of humanist culture. Its classical ruins, sculptures and frescoes were excavated, measured, reconstructed, marvelled at and, crucially, coveted and collected. When major works such as the Laocoön were uncovered crowds flocked to see them knowing that they would quickly and inevitably be lost to view again, installed in private collections on the Capitoline hill, in the Belvedere court of the Vatican and houses of the rich.2 This wealth of newly discovered material was recorded by artists such as Jan Gossaert and Maarten van Heemskerck who came to Rome to learn from the antiques by drawing them and the city itself. They drew everything from individual buildings to large landscapes.3 The resulting canon of work, engraved, printed and sold
1 Leon Battista Alberti, the humanist, architect and initiator of Renaissance art theory, had set the pattern in the previous century. His study of Rome’s ancient sites, ruins and objects set out in his text De re aedificatoria (Florence, 1485), written between 1443 and 1452, had been published in Italian for the first time in 1546 as I dieci libri de l’architettura/di Leon Battista de gli Alberti: nouamente de la latina ne la volgar lingua con molta diligenza tradotti, trans. Pietro Lauro (Venice, 1546) and was republished in 1550 by Cosimo Bartoli as L’architettura di Leonbatista Alberti; tradotta in lingua florentina da Cosimo Bartoli; con la aggiunta de disegni (Florence, 1550). A recent translation is Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria: On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).
