A “True Likeness”: The Renaissance City Portrait
Author(s): Jessica Maier
Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Fall 2012), pp. 711-752
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America
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A ‘‘True Likeness’’: The Renaissance
City Portrait*
by J E S S I C A M A I E R
Portraits of cities and of human beings shared a nomenclature and developed along parallel
courses in the Renaissance. This article traces their common history, examining evolving notions
of likeness and approaches to the visual fashioning of identity across both categories of imagery,
then considers one urban subject, Rome, that embodied all the challenges of the genre. In
representations of the Eternal City such as those by Leonardo Bufalini and Mario Cartaro, artists
sought to convey the appearance of Rome in their own time along with that of its glorious past,
and to balance what they could see with an imagined, timeless ideal. In this way, images of Rome
offer new insight into early modern portraiture and representation in general.
1. I N T R O D U C T I O N
R
enaissance city portraits, like those of individuals, made the absent
present not just by collapsing geographical distance, but also temporal
distance. More than just a nomenclature, the two image types shared the
power to make the invisible visible, conveying abstract ideas about identity
along with physical form.1 By preserving an image, portraits of all kinds
allowed a subject long dead to live on, or to gain new life. The ephemeral
and the eternal were delicately balanced. City portraits, like their human
*
Early versions of the ideas in this article were presented as talks at the annual
conference of The Renaissance Society of America in Los Angeles in 2009, and at The Johns
Hopkins University in February 2010. I am grateful to the audiences in both cases for their
helpful feedback, as well as to Julia DeLancey, chair of my session at the RSA conference, and
to Herica Valladares, who invited me to speak at Hopkins. Additionally, I wish to thank
Chriscinda Henry and Richard Brilliant for their thoughtful comments on early drafts, as
well as Evelyn Lincoln for her invaluable critique of a more recent iteration. Finally, my
sincerest gratitude goes to the readers who reviewed the essay with such care and insight for
this journal. The research for this article was generously funded by fellowships from the
American Academy in Rome, the Newberry Library, and the J. B. Harley Research Trust.
Translations are the author’s except where otherwise noted.
1
In Renaissance Italy the term ritratto or portrait was applied to a wide range of subjects,
but most consistently to images of people and of cities. It tended to be used as an equivalent
for the Latin terms imago, simulacrum, and especially effigies. For examples of its use for
city imagery, cf. Veneziano; Forlani; ‘‘Vero disegno e ritratto di Parma’’ in Ballino, n.p.
(28v–29r ); Piccolpasso. The term was also employed outside of Italy. See, for example, the
use of pourtraitz in Gueroult; du Pinet.
Renaissance Quarterly 65 (2012): 711–52
[711]
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counterparts, celebrated a unique entity while confronting universal themes —
about desire, loss, memory, and death — that transcended the life of
a single individual or place. Taking the shared terminology of ritratto as
a point of departure, the following examination will outline developing
notions of likeness and transformations in early modern city portraiture
before turning to one particularly vexing urban subject in which the central
problems of the genre converged: Rome. Early modern portraits of the
Eternal City express a longing to see the past resurrected graphically and
brought into direct dialogue with the present. In this way, representations
of Rome, more than of any other city, express a central concern of portraiture
and of art in general: to fix an image for eternity in the face of inevitable
mortality.
The printed works of Leonardo Bufalini (d. 1551) and Mario
Cartaro (d. 1620) demonstrate the difficulties of representing the urban
palimpsest, the tension between realism and idealism in any true likeness,
the struggle to enfold time in portraits, and the range of graphic strategies
that were deployed to meet these challenges. Published in 1551, Bufalini’s
groundbreaking map of Rome was the first comprehensive, measured city
plan intended for a broad audience. Despite its geometric exactitude, the
map was not a straightforward reflection of the contemporary urban fabric.
Tinged with nostalgia and fueled by the imagination, Bufalini’s map was
meant to be displayed and admired. It shared its commemorative purpose
with imagery of a very different graphic type, epitomized by Cartaro’s
more evocative bird’s-eye views showing Rome as it was in antiquity and in
his own day. Despite the outward contrasts in their works, Bufalini and
Cartaro both aimed to create an image of Rome that distilled its essence and
encapsulated its history in a grand public statement. Modern prejudice
associates cartography with objectivity and pictorialism with creative license,
but in the sixteenth century there was no such dividing line within the
category that Richard Kagan has termed ‘‘public images’’ — those meant
for publication and dissemination to a broad audience.2 In this realm, the
term ritratto was applied to plans and pictures of cities alike, without
apparent distinction.3 One form was not necessarily held to provide a truer
likeness of the urban subject than the other, or was put to a different use.
Bufalini and Cartaro were testing the boundaries of a genre that still
had some flexibility in terms of its terminology, graphic language, and its
2
Kagan, vii.
Cf. ‘‘Il vero disegno et ritrato della fortezza di Crescentino’’ (‘‘The true drawing and
portrait of the fortress of Crescentino’’) in Ballino, n.p. (18v–19r ). The ‘‘drawing and
portrait’’ in question is a pure plan.
3
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713
approach to the city as an entity that changed over time, much as a person
did over the course of a lifetime. What united these and all portraits was
their memorializing nature.
These case studies demonstrate that by the Cinquecento, a city portrait,
like that of a prominent person, was expected to convey concrete physical
form along with the intangible nature of identity, and to flatter. These works
aimed to show an individual subject at a moment in time, while removing
that subject to a timeless realm. Artists forged a careful path between
realism and idealism as they sought to record, honor, and commemorate
a subject. Likeness — in the sense of outward resemblance to the model —
was increasingly important, but secondary to the quality of being lifelike.
In fact, portraiture of all kinds belies the truism that Renaissance artists
took their cues solely from nature and the visible world. Like any work of
art, a successful city portrait was an imitazione, not a replication, of the world
seen. Although the distinction — most fully articulated by Vincenzo Danti
(1530–76) in his Trattato delle perfette proporzioni (1567) — was rarely
upheld dogmatically, the verb imitare denoted artistic intervention, a
judicious intellectual process of perfecting the model to an ideal state.
On the other hand, ritrarre, as indicated by the Latin prefix signaling
repetition, implied a mechanical operation of copying.4 A degree of creativity
was necessary to elevate the subject to an ideal plane. Ultimately, then, this
examination opens a valuable window onto the complex notion of likeness
and its relationship to underlying character, broadening our understanding
of early modern portraiture and representation in general.
2. ‘‘ C I R C U M S P E C T D I S S I M U L A T I O N ’’ :
LIKENESS AND ITS LIMITS
The development of conventional portraiture has been amply documented.5
Early modern portraits are distinguished by increasing emphasis on
outward resemblance, on one hand, and interior character, on the other.
Following the examples of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Albrecht
Dürer (1471–1528), artists began to stress likeness in portraits, a distinct
4
Jacobs, 88; Cranston, 117–19; Woods-Marsden, 2008, 364–65.
For an early study of the genre in the Renaissance, see Pope-Hennessy. For more recent
contributions, see Rosand; Cropper; Woods-Marsden, 1987 and 2008; Campbell; and
especially Cranston. For a succinct overview of theoretical issues and further references, see
Woods-Marsden, 2008. For broader considerations of the genre, see Brilliant; Woodall; and
especially Koerner, 1986 and 1993; Didi-Huberman; and Berger, which have questioned
many established assumptions and reshaped understanding of this complex mode of
representation.
5
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facial topography that suggests that this is a person you would recognize if
you passed him on the street.6 From the early fifteenth to the late sixteenth
centuries, recognizable features and a sense of interior life took on increasing
importance relative to external markers of identity, social status, and virtue.
The invisible — psychology and character — had to be made visible, even as
there was increasing pressure to relay a more exacting physical resemblance:
indeed, the latter was claimed to be an index to the former.7 At the same
time, artists developed nuanced ways of balancing imagery of individuals as
they appeared at a given moment with the representation of their more
enduring qualities — or, at least, those that the subjects wished to project.
Portraits were meant not just to record a person’s appearance, but also to
show that single individual as the embodiment of a social ideal. Realism
had to be tempered in order for portraits to enter into that exemplary
realm, in a delicate balancing act that Harry Berger has termed ‘‘mimetic
idealism.’’8
Many of these notions were expressed and enacted by Isabella d’Este
(1474–1539), Marchesa of Mantua, an eloquent spokesperson for the
genre. In letters, she insists that a portrait must ‘‘resemble our natural [state]’’
and laments ‘‘the difficulty of finding painters who perfectly copy the
natural face,’’ but she also found portraits that betrayed too close a likeness
distasteful.9 It is well known that she preferred to be portrayed in a highly
complimentary manner in paintings as in words, once responding to a
fawning literary portrait with a telling remark: ‘‘in our opinion it is most
elegant and ingenious, even if it goes over and beyond the truth in praising
me, for as the common proverb goes: ‘I know you are not speaking the
truth, but still I like it.’’’10 Correspondence between the marchesa and her
half sister Lucrezia d’Este Bentivoglio discloses another paradox of the genre:
6
For overviews on the notion of likeness, see Woodall, 1–25; Randolph; WoodsMarsden, 2008.
7
It is still a surprisingly common assumption that portraits provide insight into
interiority. This notion has been questioned by Koerner, 1986; Berger, 121–22; Wilson,
2007.
8
Berger, 120.
9
Luzio, 427 (Isabella d’Este to Lucrezia d’Este, 7 August 1511): ‘‘assimigliare al naturale
nostro’’; ibid., 347 (Isabella d’Este to Isabella del Balzo, 3 April 1493): ‘‘cum quanta
difficulta se ritrovano pictori che perfectamente contrafaciano el vulto naturale.’’ On Isabella
d’Este’s responses to portraits, see Woods-Marsden, 1987, 209–10; Brown, 53–54; Syson.
On her patronage, see Fletcher; San Juan.
10
Morsolin, 392: ‘‘al nostro iudicio elegantissima et engeniosa, sebben troppo et fori
della verita excede in laudarmi et perche il vulgar proverbio e: ‘so che tu non dici il vero, pur
mi piace.’’’ The literary portrait in question was Trissino’s Ritratti (Rome, 1524). On that
work, see Rogers.
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THE RENAISSANCE CITY PORTRAIT
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despite the pretense of direct visual observation, the lifelike quality of
a Renaissance portrait did not necessarily depend on it having been made
from life. In an exchange of 1511, both women repeatedly stress the
‘‘natural’’ as a desirable quality in portraiture, but hail a now-lost portrait
of Isabella by Francesco Francia (ca. 1450–1517), done in absence of the
subject herself and hence without the artist’s eyewitness experience, as
a ‘‘living image.’’11 In a letter to Francia, Isabella even writes appreciatively
that he had made her ‘‘more beautiful than has nature.’’12 To the Este sisters,
as to many Renaissance observers, a true likeness did not need to be taken
directly from nature to be declared natural, nor made from life to be praised
as living. The tension between reality and ideality that emerges from this
exchange is part of a larger cultural investment in external appearances.
In The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), one
participant in the fictional dialogue writes approvingly of ‘‘circumspect
dissimulation,’’ whereby skilled social operators deftly draw attention to
their winning qualities and away from their defects. Portraiture was exactly
this type of artifice. Castiglione’s sprezzatura — the art of concealing all
effort, or the ‘‘true art which does not seem to be art’’ — is the epitome of
this cultural ethos.13
Georges Didi-Huberman, Claudia Swan, and others have explored a
key instance of circumspect dissimulation in Renaissance portraits and
related imagery that were frequently certified as being from life — and hence
legitimate — when they were neither dal vivo nor di naturale.14 Such claims
were increasingly advanced with complete assurance, although whether they
were genuinely believed is another matter. Regardless, it is the rhetoric of
the portrait’s authenticity, with its oft-repeated tropes of life, nature, and
truth, that matters in this context. In portraits the goal was not to make
the image mimetically true to life (in fact, there was an aversion to too
much truth), but rather to make it lifelike. This expectation is reflected in
Renaissance tropes, familiar from Petrarch to Vasari, about portraits that
seem to ‘‘move and breathe,’’ ‘‘wanting nothing save speech,’’ that ‘‘appear
truly alive,’’ and so on.15 The greatest requirement of a true portrait, which
aimed to conjure a living subject, was not to record appearance in exacting
11
Luzio, 428 (Lucrezia d’Este to Isabella d’Este, 7 September 1511): ‘‘natural vivente,’’
‘‘viva imagine.’’
12
Ibid., 429 (Isabella d’Este to Francesco Francia, 25 November 1511): ‘‘assai pi
u bella
che non ni ha facto natura.’’
13
Castiglione, 43, 139.
14
Didi-Huberman, esp. 404; Swan. See also Parshall.
15
On the literary context of these tropes, see Land, 81–92.
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detail, but rather to imitate life. Only by doing so could a portrait effectively
fill its exemplary function.
Temporality was another central theme of human portraiture. Even as
it became increasingly desirable for portraits to show individuals as they
purportedly appeared at a specific moment, these representations always
spoke to the implied passage of time. The very idea of fixing a living image
was built on the notion that the subject would change, and that there
was something worth remembering that needed to be portrayed.16 David
Rosand has discussed the use of the label vivens vivo (a portrait ‘‘of the
living, by the living’’) as evidence for the basic memorial function of the
genre and its inherent pathos — a reminder, in its twofold insistence
on life in the present tense, that death lurks in the future.17 Enduring
commemoration, Rosand points out, is what Leon Battista Alberti (1404–
72) celebrates in On Painting (1435/36) as the special power of art.
‘‘Through painting,’’ Alberti writes, ‘‘the faces of the dead go on living for
a very long time.’’18 Leonardo writes, similarly (though at a much later
date), that the painter ‘‘makes his work permanent for very many years, and
of such excellence that it keeps alive [what] nature, for all her powers,
cannot manage to preserve. How many paintings have preserved the image
of a divine beauty which in its natural manifestation has been rapidly
overtaken by time or death.’’19 Not only could portraits make the absent
present, but indeed their poetry was contingent on absence, whether actual
or anticipated.
3. ‘‘ I C A R U S S P R E A D I N G H I S W I N G S ’’ : T H E R E N A I S S A N C E
CITY BROUGHT TO LIFE
In a development that closely parallels portraits of humans, the Renaissance
city portrait emerged in the fifteenth century out of a transformation in
urban representation from medieval depictions of generic cities to portrayals
of specific entities that emphasized verisimilitude based on the pretense of
16
Cranston, 60, discusses human portraits that functioned as reminders to this effect:
‘‘Inevitable death necessitates the existence of the portrait, an image type that serves as
a reminder, not of death exactly, but of life drawn in the shadow of death.’’
17
Rosand, 101–02: ‘‘The declaration that the living created such an effigy for the
living — an allusion, in an eternal present, to the moment of construction of the
monument — acknowledges, in effect, the inevitable death of the subject.’’ See also
Thomson de Grummond on the label vivens vivo.
18
Alberti, 61; Rosand, 95.
19
Kemp, 35.
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THE RENAISSANCE CITY PORTRAIT
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eyewitness experience.20 Analogous to conventional portraits, images of
cities exemplified urban ideals. While innovations in conventional portraiture
unfolded in painting, however, the proliferation of the city portrait was
closely tied to the rise of reproductive media — in fact, it rapidly became one
of the most popular categories of Renaissance print culture. It is true that
some of the earliest examples, by Florentine miniaturist Piero del Massaio
(1420–ca. 1473–80), were manuscripts produced for wealthy patrons, but
the most groundbreaking images were uncommissioned prints aimed at
a nascent commercial market. These works arose from and responded to
the public’s growing desire to see, and thus to know, distant or renowned
places; to understand the geographical context for newsworthy events;
to visualize expanding networks of trade, conquest, and culture; and to
publicly proclaim the splendors of one’s own city. Early high points were
the engraved view of Florence published by Francesco Rosselli (1448–
before 1513) around 1482–90 and the woodcut of Venice by Jacopo de’
Barbari (ca.1460/1470– ca. 1516) published in 1500.21 These were lavish,
multi-sheet works of art, geared toward ostentatious display. They were
meant to memorialize the history and unique qualities of an urban setting,
not to serve documentary or practical purposes.
The surging demand for urban imagery manifested itself in a rich variety
of contexts, formats, and media, and appealed to a wide spectrum of
viewers. Works ranged from cheap, topical ephemera depicting sieges and
battles or newly fortified perimeters, to luxurious illustrated books and
manuscripts, to large, celebratory prints of great and timeless cities, to
painted cycles for the most elite settings. These images could function in
myriad ways: as broadsheets, as didactic tools, and as mementos of a journey
(or as substitutes for one).22 They could express power, prestige, learning,
or longing. The grandest images were enormous and costly, their production
time-consuming and labor-intensive. They often included healthy doses
of imagination. There is remarkable diversity across this genre, which
speaks to its flexibility and widespread appeal. In the end, all city portraits
were united in their aim of harmonizing a city’s visible identity as an
20
The scholarly literature on early modern city imagery has grown exponentially in
recent years. For a recent survey and for further references, see Ballon and Friedman. See also
Schulz; Nuti, 1988, 1994, and 1997; and especially Kagan, 1–18.
21
On Rosselli’s view of Florence, see Friedman (with further references). On Jacopo de’
Barbari’s Venetie MD, see Schulz; Wilson, 2005.
22
In the preface to the bestseller among early modern city atlases, the Civitates orbis
terrarum of Braun and Hogenberg, the authors presented the compendium as a safer, more
pleasant substitute for travel: ‘‘with the present work, we have relieved lovers of history of the
hardship, danger, and expense of traveling’’: Braun and Hogenberg, 1:n.p.
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urbs — a physical unit — with its invisible qualities as a civitas defined by
human associations.23 Just like portraits of individuals, these images were
distillations of identity, never mere records of physical appearance.24
The link between the two kinds of portrait, as well as their shared
emphases, even had an ancient pedigree. The influential Geography of
Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 90–ca. 168 CE) was rediscovered in the context of
Florentine humanism at the turn of the fifteenth century, just in time to
catalyze the growing interest in measuring and representing cities.25 Some
of the first Renaissance city portraits appeared in Quattrocento Ptolemaic
manuscripts.26 Ptolemy had employed a portraiture analogy to distinguish
two cartographic categories — geography, which was global in scope, and
chorography, which was regional — and which Renaissance interpreters
associated with city portraits. ‘‘The goal of chorography,’’ Ptolemy writes
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.’’27 In an edition of the Geography published by
Peter Apian (1495–1552) in Antwerp in 1550, this analogy was illustrated
with a spherical earth next to a depiction of a rather doleful man in bust
length, standing in for geography, and a walled town next to an eye and an
ear alone, for chorography (fig. 1).
The connections linking chorography and portraiture ran deeper than
visual metaphor. On a basic level, their goals were identical. ‘‘Chorography,’’
Ptolemy continues, ‘‘is most concerned with what kinds of places it
describes. . . . Its concern is to paint a true likeness.’’ ‘‘Chorography,’’ he
concludes, ‘‘is the task of an artist, and no one presents it rightly unless he
is an artist.’’28 Ptolemy’s famous analogy stresses intangible qualities, above
and beyond physical qualities, as key aspects of a true likeness, which
23
On these distinctions, see Kagan, 1–24.
In another parallel, the early history of city portraits — like individual portraits — is
linked with literary encomia. Leonardo Bruni’s Laudatio Florentinae urbis (1403–04), for
example, informed several Quattrocento images of Florence: see Rombai, 42; Ballon and
Friedman, 680–81.
25
For an account of the Ptolemaic revival in Renaissance Italy and for further references,
see Gautier Dalche.
26
See Miller, 1998 and 2003.
27
Stevenson, 25–26. I am deliberately quoting Stevenson’s translation, not more recent
ones, because, unlike them, he translated primarily from Renaissance Latin versions as
opposed to the original Greek. For this reason his text, although further from Ptolemy’s own,
more closely approximates the Renaissance understanding.
28
Ibid.
24
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THE RENAISSANCE CITY PORTRAIT
719
FIGURE 1. Woodcut illustration from Peter Apian, Cosmographia. Antwerp, 1550.
London, British Library, General Reference C.114.e.2.(2.). Ó British Library Board.
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therefore calls for the sensitivity of an artist, not the precision of a geometer.
The ramifications of this distinction extend beyond the genre of portraiture
to Renaissance visuality and notions of artistic creativity generally. There
was much more to true likeness than what met the eye and could be
measured or objectively replicated.
At the same time, growing value was indeed placed on depicting what
met the eye. Cities, like people, were increasingly thought of as unique
entities and were represented as such, with much greater emphasis on their
individual features. Medieval effigies tended to depict cities generically in
order to convey the idea of a city rather than signify any particular one, or,
alternatively, to show a given city as an assortment of individual monuments
contained within a schematic rendering of the walls.29 The latter form, the
ideogrammatic type, has close parallels in human portrayals from the late
Middle Ages that present viewers with a variety of visual cues and symbols
that aim, in their totality, to denote the social formation and role of an
exemplary individual.30 An urban equivalent is provided by the early
fifteenth-century fresco of Rome by Taddeo di Bartolo (ca. 1362/63–1422)
in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, which shows the city as an assemblage
of reductive pictograms encircled by a regularized rendering of the city
walls (fig. 2).31 Few of the monuments depicted would count as accurate
by modern architectural standards, or even be identifiable were they to
be extracted from the collectivity. (For example, it sufficed to make the
Pantheon and Colosseum round.) Viewers presumably interpreted the
image cumulatively, combining the ingredients to arrive at the sum total of
a place. These medieval representations, whether of a person or a place, were
not portraits so much as memory pictures, composed of many individual
synoptic elements.
In the 1400s, portrayals of specific entities gradually began to replace
the earlier modalities of urban representation. This shift was facilitated by
a confluence of new techniques: pictorial perspective formulated by Alberti,
cartographic projection as transmitted through translations of Ptolemy, and
advances in practical surveying. These tools together provided a unifying
framework for representing the urban environment, as well as the means
to enhance the illusion of real space, and they offered new expressive
29
For late medieval city imagery, see Nuti, 1997, 43– 67; Miller, 1998, 43– 49.
Perkinson, 696, shows that medieval viewers were required to decode a variety of
different cues — ‘‘inscriptions, coats of arms, gesture, attributes, dress, and placement,’’ few
of which had anything to do with outward resemblance — in order to arrive at the
understanding of a particular French king.
31
Frutaz, 1:25 –26, no. 77; Lavedan, 33.
30
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721
FIGURE 2. Taddeo di Bartolo. Roma, fresco, 1414. Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.
Ó Scala/Art Resource, NY.
possibilities. Early signs of a growing emphasis on specificity and
verisimilitude in city imagery appeared in printed books. In 1486, the first
illustrated edition of the great chronicle published in Venice by Jacopo
Filippo Foresti of Bergamo (1434–1520), the Supplementum chronicarum,
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, this view
was replaced by one that showed Rome in specific detail. This substitution
reflects the increasing expectation that a portrait correspond to actual
appearances, even while expressing character and identity.32 Foresti’s shift
was not an isolated phenomenon. The impulse to individualize images
of cities materialized in publications across Europe in the 1470s and 1480s,
32
See especially Ballon and Friedman.
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not only in the Supplementum, but also in the slightly earlier Fasciculus
temporum (Cologne, 1474) of Werner Rolevinck (1425–1502), the
Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam (Mainz, 1486) of Bernhard von
Breydenbach (ca. 1440–97), and the Liber chronicarum (Nuremberg,
1493) of Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514), all of which initiated the process
of replacing stereotyped representations with recognizable portraits.33
This phenomenon coincided chronologically with the appearance of
the earliest printed editions and translations of Ptolemy’s Geography, both
north and south of the Alps, and with a parallel move toward likeness in
human portrayals.34 Nor was the trend toward individualized city portraiture
limited to illustrated books. In the same period, the Florentine engraver
Francesco Rosselli — who is thought to have started his career painting
miniatures for Ptolemaic manuscripts as an assistant to Massaio — began
to issue separately published images intended for display.35 This tendency
toward greater specificity was by no means linear, however, and as late as
1544 and 1550, Sebastian Münster (1488–1552) could still get away with
using the same woodblock to illustrate a number of different cities in his
bestselling Cosmographia. But the tide had turned. From the late fifteenth
century, likeness was increasingly taken for granted. In the preface to his
1553 atlas of city views — a new type of publication reflecting the increasing
popularity of the genre — Guillaume Gueroult (ca. 1507–69) echoed a
common reassurance when he wrote that each pourtrait would show the
specific topographical features that distinguished the place as ‘‘singular.’’36
The commemorative nature of city portraits meant that realism had
to be tempered in them, as in portraits of people. A view of Florence by
Massaio (ca. 1470) demonstrates the tension between visual documentation
and panegyric in these images, printed or otherwise (fig. 3).37 This view
33
For an overview of this development, see Elliot, 11–25.
Printed editions of the Latin translation by Nicolaus Germanus appeared in Vicenza
(1475), Bologna (1477), Rome (1478), and Ulm (1482), while Francesco Berlinghieri’s
eccentric translation into Italian terza rima was printed in Florence in 1482.
35
Rombai, 49; Armstrong, 73–74 (with further references).
36
Gueroult, n.p.: ‘‘les Fluves, Pays, Villes . . . en ce qui nous en pourra apparoir de
singulier.’’
37
The manuscript in which this view appears is in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris
(B.N. Lat. 4802, dated ca. 1470). Additional manuscripts of the Geography attributed to
Massaio are in the Vatican Library: BAV Cod. Lat. 5699, dated 1469; and BAV Cod. Urb.
Lat. 277, dated 1472. All three were produced in the Florentine workshop of Vespasiano da
Bisticci (1421–98), the main Quattrocento purveyor of magnificent volumes of all kinds.
On Massaio’s manuscripts and city views, see Aujac; Miller, 1998 and 2003. On his views of
Florence, see also Boffito and Mori, 8 –12.
34
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FIGURE 3. Piero del Massaio. Florentia, manuscript, ca. 1470. Bibliotheque
nationale de France, Paris, Ms Latin 4802, fol. 132v. Ó Bibliotheque nationale de
France.
is one of ten early city portraits included in a luxury manuscript of
Ptolemy’s Geography, now in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris,
that was made for Alfonso II of Naples (1448–95). Massaio’s Florence is a
transitional work in that it shares some of the schematic nature of earlier
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ideogrammatic works, but with a greater degree of local specificity. It is
oriented with south and the Oltrarno at the top. Within city walls — whose
circuit is, generally speaking, correctly outlined — Massaio includes dozens
of identifiable landmarks in small but wonderfully detailed perspective
renderings. He also depicts some topographical features, such as the Arno
and Mugnone rivers and the hills above the Oltrarno. In this way Massaio
provides just enough information to define Florence through its built
environment and, to a lesser extent, its natural situation. There could be no
mistaking this city for any other. It is also clear, however, that Massaio’s
commitment to mimesis only goes so far. Neither thoroughness nor measured
accuracy was his concern. Although the city’s features are depicted in their
correct relative positions, they are shown as outsized pictograms with
the distances separating them greatly distorted. Moreover, only the most
prominent buildings are shown, all turned so that their façades or most
distinctive profiles face the viewer. Elements considered less integral to the
city’s identity — streets, anonymous or modest structures — are omitted.
Inclusivity, of course, was not Massaio’s aim. Nor was it expected by
Renaissance viewers. This image was not intended to be a complete and
accurate depiction of the urban environment, but rather to be a reasonable
semblance that celebrated the beauty and select wonders of Florence.
Contemporary spectators would have regarded isolated landmarks like the
Duomo and Baptistery as emblematic features of the city as a whole, part
and parcel of the image’s encomiastic intent. Few would have complained
that the buildings were too big, the streets and taverns missing, the image
skewed, incomplete, or somehow impoverished. A century later, Cipriano
Piccolpasso (1524–79), author of a manuscript atlas comprising plans and
views of Umbrian towns executed for Pope Pius IV (r. 1559–65) in the
1560s, addressed this issue explicitly, writing that visual commemoration
of a city, as of any subject, required selectivity and idealization: ‘‘In making
portraits of natural things the painter must always seek to elect the parts
that are more perfect and to hide or cover . . . [any] less beautiful part.’’38
The art of portraiture relied on this sort of circumspect dissimulation,
which elevated a ritratto to the realm of imitazione.
In urban imagery, moreover, artistic license was not just allowed, it
was unavoidable. 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
38
Piccolpasso, 262: ‘‘sempre il pittore deve cercare nel ritrarre le cose naturali d’elegere
le parti pi
u perfette e fuggire o coprire quanto sia posibile, se la necesita non ne Sforza, la
parte men bella.’’
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features included. This fact posed unique challenges to representation, and
it also conditioned modes of viewing. In order to absorb the meaning of
a city portrait, a spectator had to invest prolonged time and thought. A
viewer was less likely to feel an instantaneous rapport than he was with
a human portrait, the painted subject of which could meet his gaze. This
is not to say that city portraits were necessarily more demanding or their
messages more arcane, but rather that they imposed a different set of
conditions on makers and viewers alike. Piccolpasso addresses 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, nor 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, nor the house of my neighbor Ser Biondo.’ There are many
who say such ridiculous things, all because they do not understand the
principles of pictures.’’39 Piccolpasso implies that viewers more sophisticated
than his doltish interlocutor understood that artistic intervention was not
merely permissible, but even desirable. Of course, those knowing spectators
tended to be members of the cultural elite, who did see concrete emblems
of their power — or an analogous power — represented in a map like
Massaio’s. It was no coincidence, moreover, that they were the class of
consumers for luxury manuscripts like those containing Massaio’s city
portraits. Alfonso II of Naples, like Duke Federico da Montefeltro of
Urbino (1422–82) — who also possessed a Geography by Massaio — could
feel symbolic mastery over the cities represented as he leafed through the
sumptuous manuscript in his library, or showed it off to a visiting
dignitary.40
In city imagery as in human portraits, selectivity was never detached
from external significance. It always had larger political or social
implications, reinforcing a particular view of the subject depicted and of
the consumer. Unsurprisingly, Piccolpasso, who benefitted personally
from a high level of patronage — his own project was, after all, a papal
39
Ibid., 259: ‘‘Altri saranno poi che dal vedere inganati non descernendo a lor muodo
tutte quelle parti o almeno le pi
u signialate che in quella citta o terra che si rapresenta sonno
diranno somigliarsi, come disse colui a quel pittore che havea ritratto Fiorenza: ‘Cotesta
somiglia ben Fiorenza, ma ella non e.’ ‘Perche?’ rispose il pittore. ‘Perche non vi vedo la mia
casa, ne meno la casa di ser Biondo mio vicino.’ Sono molti anzi infiniti che dicono cosı̀
ridicolose cose; tutto nascie che non intendano i termini di pittura.’’
40
Simonetta and Alexander (with further references).
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commission — pointed not to such factors but rather to general aesthetic
considerations, such as the ‘‘perfect,’’ and the ‘‘beautiful,’’ in support of his
claim for artistic license. On a basic level, however, license was inherent
in the very act of portraying the city, not only because of the inevitable
fact of miniaturization, but also because it was an exercise in imaginative
projection. Early modern artists and viewers were earthbound, and there
was simply 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.41 To create a comprehensive city view, it was necessary — as
Piccolpasso eloquently puts it — to ‘‘imagine oneself somewhere above, on
some tower or some mountain, or in the place of Icarus spreading his
wings.’’42 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. But it was also critical that an image appear plausible,
however impossible it was in reality without the aid of artistic intervention.
Early on in the history of the genre, this plausibility was tied to the
recognizability of certain key features — in the case of Massaio’s Florence,
the Duomo and Baptistery were totems — but it soon came to be a more
complex construction, enhanced through measured surveys and on-the-spot
studies that helped artists to knit these features into a larger urban fabric.
Artists informed their imagination, drawing on increasingly sophisticated
pictorial, cartographic, and surveying strategies to lend their images the
semblance of topographical exactitude and 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. In a clear parallel to the language used to describe
Renaissance human portraits, the tendency arose to assert that a city portrait
had been done from life and was therefore living. Artists frequently
announced the beginnings of their images ad vivum, whether explicitly,
by means of an inscription, or through subtler devices.43 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
citt
a (Cremona, 1585), included a map that, he insists, was ‘‘practically
41
Ballon and Friedman, 687.
Piccolpasso, 263: ‘‘bisogna d’immaginarsi di star sopra, essere in qualche torre ovvero
in qualche monte o a guisa d’Iccaro formarsi l’ali.’’
43
On the use of this term, see especially Swan. See also Nuti, 1994, 108; Nuti, 1997,
133–43; Parshall.
42
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a living simulacrum’’ of the town.44 Similarly, Antoine du Pinet (ca. 1510–
ca. 1565), in the introduction to his Plantz, pourtraitz et descriptions de plusieurs
villes (Lyon, 1564), writes that ‘‘chorography represents to the eye the living
portrait of a place.’’45 As in portraits of flesh-and-blood people, the lifelike
quality in any depiction of a brick-and-mortar city depended on the
pretense of real eyewitness experience, which granted authority to
an idealized image. Portraiture was, after all, an art of persuasion.
A living image of a city was put forth as a truthful image — hence the
ubiquity of vero in titles.46 Lucia Nuti has noted that an emphasis on
truthfulness in city imagery became commonplace around 1500. This
notion was, however, a carefully cultivated fiction, one in which artist and
spectator were complicit. As Nuti has pointed out, ad vivum did not
necessarily mean from life, but rather lifelike.47 These images were meant to
bring the city to life for viewers, allowing them to share in the simulated
experience of gazing upon it. Claims to factuality, explicit and implicit,
were legion in Renaissance city portraits. The view of Rome included in
Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia of 1550 proclaimed, 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.48 The View with a Chain
of Florence (ca. 1510), a close copy of Francesco Rosselli’s engraving of
1482–90, includes a draftsman at lower right, as testament to the view’s
origins in direct, situated observation (fig. 4).49 Indeed, the image initially
appears to be a straightforward panorama of the city as glimpsed from a
specific point roughly corresponding to the draftsman’s position in the hills
southwest of Florence. Yet Rosselli’s view is a vivid fabrication. The most
important buildings are shown greatly exaggerated in size to underscore their
prominence and heighten their legibility, while their positions are manipulated
44
Campi, n.p.: ‘‘quasi un vivo simulacro.’’ On Campi’s map, see Visioli.
Du Pinet, xvii: ‘‘Chorographie represente a l’oeil le vif portrait d’un lieu.’’
46
See Ricci; Cranston, 145–47.
47
As Nuti, 1994, 108–09, points out, there was an ambiguity built into the prefix of ad
vivum: ‘‘The first meaning of the Latin expression is ‘lifelike,’ not the world seen as a starting
point, as one might believe, but most of all the world seen as a point of arrival.’’ My
discussion of the relationship between visual experience and representation in city imagery is
indebted to Nuti’s pioneering work.
48
‘‘Romae urbis situs, quem hoc Christi anno 1549 habet’’ (essentially, ‘‘The site of
Rome as it is in 1549’’).
49
No original woodcut version of Rosselli’s Fiorenza survives, but early engraved
derivatives testify to its appearance. See Friedman for the most nuanced and exhaustive
reading of this work. On the function of the draftsman figure as a testament to eyewitness
experience, see Nuti, 1994, 113–15.
45
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FIGURE 4. Francesco Rosselli (after). Fiorenza, woodcut, ca. 1510 (orig. 1482–90). Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museum. Ó Art
Resource, NY.
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to maximize visual impact. 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 interior layout, and
dispenses with the visual obstacles present in real-world viewing conditions.
Rosselli’s encompassing view could not be, as it claims, the record of
anybody’s direct visual experience. The artist probably stitched it together
from a combination of measured surveys and studies genuinely done dal
vivo, using a liberal dose of creative interpolation to smooth over the seams.50
While the pretense is of a largely unmediated view, 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 verisimilitude: its
artistic sleight-of-hand is pulled off with the semblance of complete
effortlessness and immediacy — of breezy sprezzatura — even if its
construction was pondered and laborious. The View with a Chain embodies
Berger’s mimetic idealism at its best, as well as Castiglione’s circumspect
dissimulation. Spectators conversant with Piccolpasso’s principles of pictures
must have known that the image was mediated, but they appreciated its
artifice all the more. This case shows again that in order to count as a true
likeness, a portrait needed most of all to be convincingly lifelike, not,
strictly speaking, from life. To quote du Pinet, the image simply had to be
‘‘as close to life as possible.’’51
4. P O R T R A I T S
OF
ROME,
THE
ETERNAL CITY
Many of these issues crystallized most clearly in imagery of Rome, a city
like no other, and a paradigm for all others, embodying everything that was
good and bad about an urban center. Rome was the Eternal City, a
palimpsest of history, archaeology, and myth, never just a neutral physical
reality, and no straightforward visual record of the contemporary city could
do justice to its multifaceted identity. In portraiture terms, the challenge was
akin to depicting a person not at a single moment, but as a summation
of a lifetime’s experience, encompassing shifting roles, accomplishments,
aspirations, and physical aspects. On a basic level, Rome was the most
anthropomorphized of all cities, and thus eminently suited to portrait
representation. Rome alone had a birthday — 21 April, 753 BCE — and
was insistently personified in literature and art. The city was allegorized
not only as the enthroned, bellicose goddess Roma, as in ancient coinage
or the famous statue on the Capitoline, but also as a meek, bereft widow
50
51
On the constructive processes for Renaissance city views, see Stroffolino, 145–83.
Du Pinet, xiv: ‘‘le plus pres du vif qu’elle peut.’’
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variously mourning the loss of her Caesars or her popes, as in Dante’s
Divine Comedy and other medieval literary works, as well as in manuscript
illustrations.52 Rome’s narrative arc suggested to many observers the
stages of human life, an exemplary biography whose larger message was
disputed in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance: was it a pathos-ridden
morality tale or Roma triumphans?
Almost all city portraits had to contend with history, except in rare cases
where they showed ex novo foundations. But the struggle to negotiate
temporality was much greater for portraits of Rome than for those of a city
like Florence, whose past was not omnipresent, and whose golden age was
agreed to be the present. Mortality was a leitmotif of Rome’s symbolism and
had been since antiquity, when the city was first dubbed aeterna.53 The
preoccupation with the passing of time had special resonance for the Eternal
City, and sensitivity to such notions was at its height in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. The very idea of rinascita presupposes death as a
condition for rebirth. In this period, Rome’s physical condition was seen as
emblematic of the ravages of time, on the one hand, and the self-proclaimed
cultural revival, on the other.54 The transformation of Rome from what
Petrarch (1304–74) in the fourteenth century had termed a ‘‘crumbling
city’’ populated by ‘‘broken ruins’’ into a prosperous Christian capital
coincided with the origins and development of the city portrait as a genre.55
Their histories are closely intertwined. In the Quattrocento the papacy returned
to Rome, spearheading a renovatio aimed at reversing one thousand years
of decline. Over the next century, the urban transformations steadily gained
momentum, in step with the representational techniques for visualizing them.56
52
In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Rome is depicted as a widow, lamenting: ‘‘Come, see your
Rome who, widowed and alone, / weeps bitterly; both day and night, she moans: / ‘My
Caesar, why are you not at my side?’’’: Alighieri, 52 (Purgatorio, 6.112–14). Rome assumes
a similarly pathetic role in Fazio degli Uberti’s fourteenth-century geographical poem, the
Dittamondo. A fifteenth-century manuscript of this work includes an ideogrammatic
bird’s-eye view of Rome with a forlorn personification of the city herself draped in black
and huddling next to the Tiber: see Frutaz, 1:129–30, no. 81.
53
The notion of Roma Aeterna is of ancient origin, and was revived and Christianized
beginning in the Middle Ages and especially during the Renaissance. See Edwards, 86 –88;
Stinger, 292–319.
54
The literature on the culture of Renaissance Rome and on changing perceptions of the
city is vast. Two classic studies are Weiss; Stinger. For an overview, see Rowland.
55
Petrarch, ‘‘Walks in Rome,’’ letter to Giovanni Colonna di San Vito (Ep. Fam. VI, 2),
1337–41, in Thompson, 173. See also Mommsen.
56
For background on the urban planning of Rome in the Renaissance, see especially
Ackerman, 1982; Kostof, 485–509.
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Images of Rome became canvases for documenting the rapid-fire urban
changes initiated by a series of Renaissance popes, and they undeniably
reflected ideological claims that the papacy wished to advance. That said,
almost all printed images of Rome — and it was in these that innovations
were concentrated — were produced for the open market, not for individual
patrons. In this, they diverged from most human portraits, and also from
luxury works like Massaio’s manuscripts, which were made at the behest
of powerful individuals and surely reflected their representational desires.
While the producers of printed images of Rome must have recognized that
it was to their advantage to support papal claims to cultural resurgence —
indeed, they often did so by means of dedications and other devices — and
while they might sincerely have believed in those claims, there was no formal
arrangement in place to compel their rhetoric. Renaissance portraits of
Rome, therefore, were not primarily expressions of power or propaganda.
This is not to say that the makers of these works were operating with
complete creative freedom. In painted portraits of human beings there
was an unspoken agreement between the artist and the subject to create an
idealized representation. Because publishers wanted to reach the largest
possible market for their images, printed portraits of cities entailed a far
less direct agreement between the designer of the view and an intended
audience. Artists and publishers had to gamble about what would appeal to
viewers, with no explicit guidance other than commercial indicators. This
territory was largely uncharted, however. The richness and variety of the
sixteenth-century imagery of Rome speaks to a time of experimentation,
in the early days of the genre and of print collecting, before rules and
preferences were firmly established. Designers were catering to a nascent
class of consumers whose patterns were still in flux. In this way printed city
portraits allow us to look beyond the motivations of single figures —
beyond the poles of artistic intentionality and patronly control — toward
larger cultural attitudes, tastes, and representational desires.57
The Renaissance public for printed imagery of Rome tended to be
the educated elite, primarily antiquarians, and increasingly pilgrims and
tourists — although even the most accurate and detailed of these images
were not yet used for wayfinding purposes.58 Their early modern functions
were more esoteric. Whether hung on a wall, mounted in an album, or
bound in a city atlas, portraits of Rome were objects of contemplation,
mostly destined for the scholar’s study. In this context they could serve as
57
Of course, this is true of all prints, not just city portraits.
City maps were not commonly employed as tools to navigate city streets until the
eighteenth century: see Frangenberg; Woodward.
58
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educational tools, tokens of learning and sophistication, and mementos of
important religious and historical sights seen and unseen, the city as it was
or as it was imagined to have been in the distant past.59 Portraits of Rome
were akin to mementos of fabricated memory. Many of them attempted to
recapture a grand city that print viewers, even those in Rome, had never
really visited, and that was only hinted at by the fragmentary ruins of the
city as they could actually be experienced by travelers in the sixteenth
century. Whether possessed by members of the Roman literati or intellectuals
far away from the city, these images were meant as surrogates for Rome
across history, enfolding time and the desire for an absent subject. As
remembrances, they exemplify the inherent pathos of portraiture: a genre
that was, itself, a type of memento.
Leonardo Bufalini’s map (1551) shows how portraits of Rome became
platforms for projecting ideas and ideals about the much-contested state of
the city, and for romanticizing, aggrandizing, or marginalizing its tangible
signs of antiquity (fig. 5).60 Despite the cartographic language that would
seem to remove it from the realm of the qualitative or chorographic, this
enormous work is in fact one of the most expressive of all Renaissance
portraits of Rome. Bufalini’s map shows a single horizontal slice of the city
taken at the ground plane, with the footprints of many individual structures
embedded in a matrix of streets and topographical features, all contained
within the third-century Aurelian walls and shown to scale. Its measured
graphic language — the language of architecture61 — lends the map an
unmistakable air of objectivity. Bufalini underscores this quality through
several devices: a self-portrait at the lower margin, where he appears as
a dignified geometer brandishing a compass; a depiction of his surveying
instruments to the left of the self-portrait; and a scale that extends across
the top of the map, making it indexical to a measurable, physical entity.
These elements claim, in no uncertain terms, the accuracy of Bufalini’s map,
59
On the notion of the memento or souvenir, see Stewart.
There is a growing bibliography on Bufalini’s map. A fundamental monograph is
Ehrle. See also Frutaz, 1:168–69, no. 109. For recent examinations, see especially Insolera,
112–22; Schlapobersky and Friedman; Maier, 2006, 175–263; Maier, 2007; Huppert;
Maier, 2010.
61
Bufalini’s map pertains to a specific category of orthogonal map known as
‘‘ichnographic,’’ a label derived from the Vitruvian term for a ground plan and applied to
any city plan that includes building plans within the larger urban matrix: see Pinto, 1976.
Bufalini’s plan had one major predecessor as an ichnographic map of Rome, the enormous
second-century marble plan known today as the Forma urbis. The first shattered pieces of the
marble plan, however, were not discovered until more than a decade after Bufalini published
his own ichnography. On the Forma urbis, see especially Almeida; Pinto, 1996.
60
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FIGURE 5. Leonardo Bufalini. Roma, woodcut on twenty-four sheets, approx.
200 x 190 cm. Rome, 1560 (orig. 1551). London, British Library, Maps S.T.R.
(1.). Ó British Library Board.
its status as a true likeness. The authority of Rosselli’s situated, observant
draftsman, assuring viewers of the fidelity of the image, here gives way to
the authority of calculated geometry, as embodied by the learning and
expertise of the cartographer and the fixed scale. All of these devices,
however, mask the degree to which Bufalini mediates his view of the city,
and encourage the spectator to subscribe to the distinctly skewed vision
of Rome that he puts forth. Bufalini mapped the latest urban changes with
care, but he also completed the plans of many ancient monuments that
survived only as ruins, and re-created others that had vanished. Modern
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FIGURE 6. Detail of fig. 5: section of the disabitato in Bufalini’s Roma. Ó British
Library Board.
scholars tend to differ on whether Bufalini’s map should be considered an
imaginative but deeply flawed archaeological plan of Rome or a relatively
accurate plan of the Cinquecento city. In fact, it is both at once.
In the largely deserted section of the city known as the disabitato,
Bufalini created a grandiose vision of ancient Rome, generating plans of
enormous structures that hover over the empty expanse (fig. 6). Some
of these existed in Bufalini’s time, such as the Colosseum and the Baths of
Caracalla — although their condition was considerably worse than he let
on.62 Others, like the Baths of Trajan and the Temple of Diana on the
Aventine, were almost wholly invented. These monuments had once
existed roughly where Bufalini placed them, but he had almost no basis
62
The most useful references to Rome’s ancient structures are Richardson; Steinby.
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FIGURE 7. Detail of fig. 5: the abitato (or Campo Marzio) in Bufalini’s Roma. The
Pantheon, Baths of Agrippa, and Piazza Navona are at center. Ó British Library
Board.
for reconstructing their forms as he did, other than, perhaps, an overly
exuberant application of Vitruvian symmetry to general features cribbed
from other ruins.63 Bufalini had only the faintest echoes of Rome’s former
glory upon which to base his portrait, but the limitations of his knowledge,
rather than posing a handicap, seem to have inspired him. Certainly they
freed him from the constraints of exact replication.
In contrast to his treatment of the disabitato, Bufalini did provide
a relatively straightforward rendering of the densely populated city center,
which occupied roughly the area of the ancient Campo Marzio (fig. 7).
Here he dispensed with reconstruction and embellishment to focus on the
63
Maier, 2006, especially 186–92; Maier, 2007, 13–16.
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contemporary physical reality, shifting the balance from single structures to
the larger urban fabric. No ancient structure is reconstructed or made
disproportionately large in relation to its surroundings; instead, the streets
and public spaces hold them in check. The Pantheon, Baths of Agrippa,
and Piazza Navona (originally the Stadium of Domitian) all appear in
their correct scale and true Renaissance form, even if — as in the case of
the latter two — this form was eroded and irregular, so different from the
geometric perfection of their resuscitated brethren in the disabitato.
If Bufalini’s disabitato testifies to the Renaissance reverence for Rome’s
past, the abitato evinces the promise of the city’s present and future. New or
improved Renaissance streets like the Via Giulia, Via della Lungara, and the
trio radiating from Piazza del Popolo are shown wider than others, taking
on greater visual prominence. Bufalini placed the Capitoline, religious and
governmental center of the ancient city, at the center of the map (fig. 8). This
allusive site was in the midst of Michelangelesque transformations
that rendered it one of the most potent symbols of urban renovatio.64 Nor
is it accidental that the Marcus Aurelius statue, shown at the center of the
Campidoglio and of Rome as a whole, is the sole element that Bufalini
depicts in perspective. This anomaly was a rhetorical flourish, drawing
attention to a primary locus of Roman regeneration.
The second major emblem of urban resurgence was the New St. Peter’s
Basilica (fig. 9), which Bufalini portrays at lower left, its plan corresponding
to Michelangelo’s centralized design of midcentury.65 Bufalini’s chosen
orientation, with north at upper left, again permits him to strategically locate
a meaningful site, in this case such that it becomes the visual anchor to the
entire image. The imposing plan of the new church is the only one that
rivals the ancient marvels of the disabitato, its main counterpoints in
Bufalini’s composition. Never mind that these had never coexisted at any
single point in Rome’s history, and that none existed in Bufalini’s time in
the whole state suggested by their complete ground plans (the ruins were
decaying or gone, while St. Peter’s was a construction site). Transitional
states are not permitted in Bufalini’s perfect, timeless fusion.
Despite Bufalini’s claims to geometric exactitude, his remarkable
portrait is an imitazione of Rome, not a straightforward transcription of
its sixteenth-century physical form. The map is, however, a vivid depiction
of the Renaissance imaginary, in which the ineffable ancient city still lived
alongside its tangible modern twin. As such, it is a truer likeness than
64
On the renovation campaign of the Capitoline, see Ackerman, 1986, 136–70;
Stinger, 254–64.
65
On the New St. Peter’s, see esp. Ackerman, 1986, 193–220; Frommel.
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FIGURE 8. Detail of fig. 5: the Capitoline in Bufalini’s Roma. Ó British Library
Board.
a modern satellite image that would count as accurate by today’s standards.
Bufalini’s map of Rome is a portrait of the highest order, conveying the
invisible alongside the visible, the absent alongside the present, unquantifiable
ideas about an idealized, vanished Rome together with concrete data about
the changing physical form of its modern, Christian twin. Moreover, the
map still managed to embody that all-important quality of the lifelike, or
so Bufalini claims in an ‘‘address to readers.’’ To the viewer, he writes in
a panel at lower left, he offers the very essence of Rome, ‘‘the most beautiful
of all things, and [her] twin . . . united and resurrected. The city which today
is inhabited, he has placed before your eyes: except that he has added also
the old [city], once mistress of the whole world, brought back as if from
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FIGURE 9. Detail of fig. 5: St. Peter’s and the Vatican in Bufalini’s Roma. Ó
British Library Board.
the grave.’’66 Bufalini’s insertion of the modifier ‘‘as if ’’ — quasi — provides
a subtle but significant reminder of his intervention, an acknowledgment
that his map is not mimesis, but mimetic idealism. There could be no
stronger statement of the power of portraiture not only to preserve but
also to re-create an image, in order to make an everlasting memorial.
Bufalini’s map is a most eloquent Renaissance monument to the aeternitas
of Rome.
While Bufalini declared that he had brought the ancient city back to life
in his map, the printmaker Mario Cartaro (d. 1620) claimed to show Rome
reborn in his etched bird’s-eye view of 1576 (fig. 10).67 At upper right he
includes a pictorial cartouche with a rendering of the famous bronze
66
Bufalini: ‘‘Omnium rerum pulcherrimam se dare credit Romam scilicet et hanc
geminam: neque enim satis tibi factum duxit, redivivam istam unam quae hodie colitur ante
oculus posuisse: nisi veterem etiam, totius olim orbis dominam . . . quasi e sepulchro
excitatam addidisset.’’
67
Rocchi, 121–72; Frutaz, 1:185, no. 126. On Cartaro, see Borroni.
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FIGURE 10. Mario Cartaro. Novissimae urbis Romae accuratissima descriptio,
engraving, 91 x 113 cm. Rome, 1576. Rome, Biblioteca di archeologia e storia
dell’arte, Roma X 648 inv 47738. Ó Biblioteca di archeologia e storia dell’arte,
Rome.
She-Wolf nursing the mythical twin founders of the city, Romulus and
Remus, along with the proud (if ironically garbled) Latin motto ‘‘Roma
Renasce[n]s.’’68 In his map, Cartaro adopts a new approach to the Roman
palimpsest and a different graphic mode: a hybrid representational technique
showing the urban perimeter (defined by the Aurelian walls) and the
interior matrix of streets in plan, the built environment in perspective.
Although just as cartographic at base as Bufalini’s plan, Cartaro’s image is
thereby transformed into an evocative view of Rome as if seen from an
oblique angle high above the city. Like Bufalini, however, Cartaro testifies to
the truth of his image with a scale at upper left signifying measured accuracy,
68
This particular iteration of the motto is known from ancient coins. It was not
uncommon in classical Latin to drop the ‘‘n’’ of a gerund when it preceded an ‘‘s’’: see
Madden, Smith, and Stevenson, 694. Whether Cartaro was consciously emulating this sort
of elision is questionable.
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and with the title banner, which trumpets grandiloquently that this is ‘‘the
most accurate map of the newest Rome.’’69 The Latin term accurato/a, as
used in the Renaissance, was not necessarily the equivalent of the modern
term accurate, which denotes exactitude. It could alternatively signify that
something had been executed with diligence. In this case, however, Cartaro
seems to have meant accuracy in the familiar modern sense, asserting the
correspondence of his image to Rome’s current physical state. As we shall
see, however, this meaning was by no means fixed.
The map is, indeed, a more faithful rendering of the Cinquecento city
than Bufalini’s. No vanished buildings rematerialize, nor are any of the
existing ruins cleaned up to some ideal state. The disabitato is left largely
empty, not filled with phantom structures. Within the city itself, the detailed
urban fabric embraces new, straight Renaissance streets as well as winding
medieval ones, and anonymous infill buildings give a clear picture of the
population density. At lower left, the New St. Peter’s is shown in its 1570s
state, complete just to the level of the drum of Michelangelo’s dome.
Unlike Bufalini, Cartaro shows the city in the process of change. This is true
of the built environment generally. For example, the city blocks in the
northern part of the city, defined by the trivium of streets that converge at
Piazza del Popolo, are depicted partly built up and settled, but still partly
open (fig. 11). Rome is growing, but it is a work in progress. In this way,
Cartaro is true to the Latin motto Roma Renascens, the literal meaning of
which is ‘‘Rome being reborn,’’ the gerund suggesting the ongoing nature
of the process.
At the same time, even as the landmarks of the new city are going up,
those of the ancient city are coming down. The Colosseum and Baths of
Caracalla, for example, appear as they were, disintegrating faster than ever as
quarries for the building materials of New Rome (fig. 12). Cartaro’s matterof-fact depiction of their fragmentary state provides a stark contrast to their
wholeness in Bufalini’s plan (compare fig. 6). Unexpectedly, Cartaro’s
evocative picture emerges as flatly unsentimental next to Bufalini’s nostalgic
cartography. Overall, Cartaro’s view also presents itself as a true likeness.
In this case, truth was equated not only with measured accuracy, but also
with thoroughness and adherence to the most up-to-date incarnation of the
newest city. It is worth noting in this regard that novus, like accurato, had
a richer meaning than its modern equivalent, and could indicate not only
new, but also recent, modern, of-the-moment. Certainly all of these could be
invoked for Cartaro’s Roma Nuova.
69
‘‘Novissimae urbis Romae accuratissima descriptio.’’
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741
FIGURE 11. Detail of fig. 10: blocks near Piazza del Popolo in Cartaro’s
Novissimae urbis Romae. Ó Biblioteca di archeologia e storia dell’arte, Rome.
Yet in many subtle ways this portrait too is selectively manipulated to
convey a particular message. The new, straight streets, for example, are
wider than the others, such that they emerge from the urban fabric more
noticeably (fig. 13). They are signs of Rome’s rebirth, as is the Marcus
Aurelius statue on the Campidoglio, its size exaggerated so that it rises to the
level of the surrounding palazzi (at top right in fig. 13). Landmarks that
typify Rome’s modern and ancient wonders are similarly inflated in scale,
towering above the surrounding infill buildings. Even in its unfinished state,
the New St. Peter’s, which again anchors the image at lower left, is the
most prominent single feature of the cityscape (fig. 14). The viewer is left
to marvel at just how impressive the church will be when capped by the
anticipated dome. Surely it will outshine its venerable counterpoint, the
Pantheon, standing out like a button in the city center, convex to St. Peter’s
lingering concavity (at center in fig. 13).70 In sum, Cartaro, like Bufalini,
selectively distorts many elements of this ‘‘most accurate’’ portrait of the city,
in this case to celebrate and call attention to New Rome triumphant. Like
70
Converted to a church in 609, the Pantheon had long since been rehabilitated by
consecration.
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FIGURE 12. Detail of fig. 10: section of the disabitato in Cartaro’s Novissimae
urbis Romae. Ó Biblioteca di archeologia e storia dell’arte, Rome.
many portraits, Cartaro’s Roma Nuova is at once a moment fixed in time,
and a timeless representation.
5. R O M A A N T I C A
AND THE
PARAGONE
Cartaro’s Roma Nuova shares the idealizing impulse of Bufalini’s map, and
of Renaissance culture in general. Where Bufalini balanced ancient and
modern Rome, however, Cartaro seems to have cast off the imagined past to
focus on the sixteenth-century city. Yet Cartaro’s Roma Nuova has a pendant
showing Roma Antica (fig. 15) that discloses the full complexity of the
artist’s intended meaning.71 Although issued three years apart, in 1576 and
1579, Cartaro’s prints are identical in dimensions and compositional
schema, and were clearly intended as a matched pair.72 The mapped
outlines of the city are the same; only the built environment, depicted in
perspective, differs appreciably. These works, like Bufalini’s map, were
71
Rocchi, 80–100; Frutaz, 1:68–69, no. 23.
Each image is composed of several sheets joined, for identical overall dimensions of
91 x 113 cm.
72
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FIGURE 13. Detail of fig. 10: the abitato (or Campo Marzio) in Cartaro’s
Novissimae urbis Romae. Ó Biblioteca di archeologia e storia dell’arte, Rome.
sumptuous and costly prints geared toward display, in this case, display in
tandem. Like that map, moreover, together they allowed viewers to conjure
a city that was distant in time, as well as space, reflecting the substitutive
role of all portraiture.
As with Roma Nuova, Cartaro proclaimed his image of the vanished city
to be a true likeness, again by emphasizing its fidelity and accuracy. With
impressive hyperbole, he titled the image the ‘‘Most faithful topography
of the most celebrated ancient city, delineated with greatest accuracy beyond
all others.’’73 Cartaro’s ancient city is not to be understood as accurate in
the modern sense any more than Bufalini’s: it too is less scientific than
imaginative. Clearly Cartaro uses the term here to suggest that the map was
done with greatest care. The image is crowded with a dizzying array of
structures, each a unique architectural marvel, few of which could be
identified with the real form of any building that had ever existed (fig. 16).
There is little room in Cartaro’s Roma Antica for the clear infrastructure
73
‘‘Celeberrimae urbis antiquae fidelissima topographia post omnes alias aeditiones
accuratissime delineate.’’
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FIGURE 14. Detail of fig. 10: St. Peter’s Basilica in Cartaro’s Novissimae urbis
Romae. Ó Biblioteca di archeologia e storia dell’arte, Rome.
and generic infill that appear in his Roma Nuova — instead, a grandiose
ancient city emerges, dominated by towering architectural wonders. It might
not be an archaeologically sound reconstruction by today’s standards, but
Cartaro’s goal was to capture the overall form and spirit of Roma Antica
more than its historical appearance. Perhaps the image would more aptly be
termed Roma all’antica.74
Cartaro’s two Romes were meant to be understood as complements,
twins across time, in a duality that Bufalini had collapsed into a single
synchronic frame.75 Renaissance culture was steeped in the tradition of
the paragone — the evaluation of one entity or activity in light of another —
and sophisticated viewers were highly attuned to the call-and-response factor
in images like Cartaro’s.76 The paragone was a form of competition or
74
In this overarching concept, Cartaro’s Roma Antica (like many other archaeological
maps) is indebted to Pirro Ligorio’s great Anteiquae Urbis Imago of 1561: see Burns.
75
On the term synchronic, see Ribouillault, 221.
76
The most famous paragone is Leonardo da Vinci’s praise of painting over poetry,
music, and sculpture: see Kemp, 20–46. See also Mendelsohn, 35–85.
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745
FIGURE 15. Mario Cartaro. Celeberrimae urbis antiquae fidelissima topographia
post omnes alias aeditiones accuratissime delineata, engraving, 91 x 113 cm. Rome,
1579. London, British Library, Maps * 155.(10.). Ó British Library Board.
debate, and it seems valid to question just what side Cartaro was taking, that
of the ancients, or the moderns. It is plausible that he meant to privilege the
dazzling city of antiquity over its diminished modern twin. Cartaro’s Roma
Nuova reflects the severe contraction of Rome’s population during the
Middle Ages, and much of the terrain inside city walls appears as little more
than open pasture. It was well known, however, that the disabitato had a
previous life, and Cartaro duly packs every corner of his Roma Antica with
monuments. The resulting contrast between the two images provides a stark
visual reminder of Rome’s decline. Similarly, the built environment of
Roma Nuova appears relatively lackluster next to its ancient counterpart,
its monuments, surrounded by anonymous infill, smaller and plainer.
By contrast, a viewer would be hard-pressed to find a single humble,
nondescript structure among the opulent architectural marvels of Cartaro’s
Roma Antica (compare figs. 13 and 16). It would be reasonable to conclude
that Cartaro meant the contemporary city to serve as a negative foil for the
ancient. The overarching meaning of his pendants would be the familiar
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FIGURE 16. Detail of fig. 15: the Campo Marzio in Cartaro’s Celeberrimae urbis
antiquae. Ó British Library Board.
Petrarchan lament over the city’s debased state, so distant from its erstwhile
glory.
This reading, however, is not entirely convincing. Why, if the modern
city was so wretched, would Cartaro proclaim it as ‘‘Rome being reborn’’?
Closer analysis of the images suggests a subtler message. The ancient city
might eclipse its modern counterpart in sheer magnificence and visual delight,
but the latter compensates with a greater sense of rational organization.
The visual cacophony of Roma Antica gives way to structural harmony
in Roma Nuova. We might see this as a maturation, a coming-of-age, of
Rome under the aegis of the popes, whose new streets and building
projects transformed the urban fabric. The current city has a modern
breed of grandeur, stemming from networks of streets and public spaces
that form a connective tissue for the built environment. A great deal of
Rome’s revival — and of the most prominent papal projects — focused on
these urban features, which were no longer regarded simply as the voids
between monuments.
This shift, in turn, helped to shape a new concept of the city as
an organically unified entity, not a collection of discrete architectural
landmarks: a concept that is perfectly captured in Cartaro’s Roma Nuova.
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Here we see the triumph of the urban fabric over the individual monument.
No longer can a few token features stand for the whole, nor can an
assemblage adequately represent the urbs. Cartaro’s two Romes pay homage
to the ancient city even while they celebrate modern Rome for its distinct
merits. Emerging from the shadow of its classical legacy, Rome is reborn,
but in dramatically different form. Cartaro’s pendants were meant to be
displayed side by side — not so that viewers would disparage one Rome at the
expense of the other, but instead appreciate the very different qualities of each.
Like Bufalini, Cartaro created a delicate equilibrium between past and present,
but it is framed in terms of historical rupture, not ahistorical fusion.
Comparing Cartaro’s two Romes, the most recent incarnation of
the city might have lost some of its bygone aesthetic charms, but it had
gained considerably in other ways. Together, Cartaro’s images honored a
glorified, elusive golden age, even as they relegated it to history. By contrast,
Bufalini — for all his revolutionary graphic language — looks retrograde,
clinging to an outmoded reverence for the past at the expense of the present.
Cartaro’s two views of Rome hinge on a poetic absence, that of the longvanished ancient city, but this absence has been filled with a new, dynamic
presence. The absence also projects forward, in Roma Nuova, to the
anticipated completion of Rome as a fully realized Christian capital. Rather
than a meditation on urban mortality, Cartaro’s pendants constitute an
optimistic celebration of urban rebirth. They were much imitated, spawning
a veritable subgenre of Rome-then-and-now imagery.77 Spectators seem to
have appreciated Cartaro’s distillation of the caput mundi as a locus that
had endured through transformation and evolution, and that was no
longer a pale reflection of its own lost magnificence.
6. ‘‘ N O L E S S T R U E T H A N T R U T H ’’
The monumental portraits by Bufalini and Cartaro hinge on a poetry of
absence and the inexorable passing of time. Both demonstrate that true
likeness, in city portraits as in other forms of representation, went far
beyond outward appearance. In certain instances, close attention to external
features functioned as a means to an end, its primary aim not to record
appearance, but rather to lend credence to ineffable qualities. True likeness
was a rich and flexible concept, as was accuracy, in the early modern period.
77
Cf. Ambrogio Brambilla’s cruder, reduced-format copies of Cartaro’s pendants,
published by Nicolas Van Aelst: ‘‘Antiquae urbis perfecta imago,’’ ca. 1590 (Frutaz,
1:69–70, no. 24) and ‘‘Novissima urbis Romae descriptio MDLXXXX,’’ 1590 (ibid., 192,
no. 133). These, in turn, were reprinted several times as well as copied by others. See
Huelsen, 62–63, nos. 63–65; 71, nos. 80–81.
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Many of the most vivid simulations of likeness were not, strictly speaking,
from life, much as their accuracy was selective, sometimes little more than
a rhetorical stance in itself. What was most important in portraits was that
they seem to be from life and they seem to be accurate — and all this artifice
was tacitly endorsed by Renaissance viewers who embraced what Piccolpasso
called the ‘‘principles of pictures.’’
Ultimately, the much-vaunted Renaissance naturalism was a deeply
ambivalent and paradoxical construct. In the first edition of the Accademia
della Crusca’s Vocabolario (1612), ritratto was defined simply as ‘‘a figure
taken from nature.’’78 But nature as such called for enhancement through
artifice: indeed, nature’s imperfections could only be remedied through art.
In an oft-quoted passage from On Painting, Alberti recommends that the
artist devote himself to the study of nature in order to render ‘‘the likeness
of things,’’ but counsels that it was equally crucial to heighten their beauty.
The painter ‘‘who has accustomed himself to taking everything from Nature,
will so train his hand that anything he attempts will echo Nature. . . . So,
let us always take from Nature whatever we are about to paint, and let us
always choose those things that are most beautiful and worthy.’’79
This became the artist’s imperative, echoed not only by Piccolpasso,
but also by Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), who wrote that the most advanced
artists of his own day knew nature in every detail but surpassed it to achieve
perfection. Their works, he writes in the preface to the third part of his
Lives of the Artists (1568), reflected a new type of sprezzatura — namely a
‘‘spontaneity which, although based on correct measurement, goes beyond
it,’’ granting ‘‘a pervasive beauty to what is merely artistically correct.’’80
Nature could never be left alone, nor was naturalism to be equated with
mimesis, much as the best ritratti rose to the level of imitazione. In art,
nature was but a stepping stone to artistic achievement, an indispensable
model, but one that required intervention to reach an ideal state. In all cases,
it was verisimilitude more than verit
a — naturalism more than nature —
that mattered, and, indeed, that separated the great artist from the merely
competent. Much as Castiglione had celebrated the ‘‘true art which does not
seem to be art,’’ Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) wrote, in a sonnet, that the
ideal portrait might not be true, but it was ‘‘no less true than truth.’’81
MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE
Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, 1st ed., s.v. ‘‘ritratto’’: ‘‘figura cavata dal
naturale.’’
79
Alberti, 99–101.
80
Vasari, 1:250.
81
Castiglione, 43; Aretino, 2:12 (‘‘Tal che il dipinto e non men ver che il vero’’).
78
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