Walks in Rome
In 1870, August Hare published Walks in Rome, an immensely popular guidebook enriched with a wealth of literary quotations. City of the Soul similarly provides an itinerary through visual and literary Rome, allowing visitors to take a virtual walk through the city. An interactive map, based on a digital version of Paul-Marie Letarouilly’s 1841 plan of Rome, permits visitors to the exhibition to contextualize a selection of the works on display in City of the Soul. Clicking on highlighted features on the map brings up descriptions by nineteenth-century authors and images of both the objects in the exhibition and the actual monuments. This cluster of information encourages visitors to consider the objects in City of the Soul within the context of their historical period, and equally importantly to make comparisons between the appearance of the selected Roman monuments then and now.
Letarouilly’s plan admirably depicts the essential topographical features of nineteenth-century Rome: the sinuous course of the Tiber, the celebrated Seven Hills, and the densely built-up core of the city nestled in the bend of the river. To the south and east, a picturesque landscape, studded with ruins rising from vineyards and gardens, extends to the circuit of the city’s ancient walls. On the left bank of the Tiber, the Castel Sant’Angelo guards the approach to St. Peter’s and the Vatican. Allegorical personifications of ancient and modern Rome occupy the two lower corners.
This online exhibition was created in conjunction with the exhibition City of the Soul: Rome and the Romantics on view June 17 through September 11, 2016. The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition is available here.
City of the Soul: Rome and the Romantics is made possible with generous support from the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation and Fendi.
Assistance is provided by Barbara G. Fleischman and the Sherman Fairchild Fund for Exhibitions. The catalogue is made possible by the Franklin Jasper Walls Lecture Fund, the Foundation for Landscape Studies, and the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.
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Read about Fendi's historic restoration of Rome's Trevi Fountain by visiting fendi.com.
Paul-Marie Letarouilly (1795–1855) Plan of Rome, 1841 Engraving. Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
St. Peter's
1819
1983
Enter; its grandeur overwhelms thee not;
And why? it is not lessen'd but thy mind,
Expanded by the genius of the spot,
Has grown colossal, and can only find
A fit abode wherein appear enshrined
Thy hopes of immortality; and thou
Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined,
See thy God face to face, as thou dost now
His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow.;
Thou movest—but increasing with the advance,
Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise,
Deceived by its gigantic elegance;
Vastness which grows—but grows to harmonize—
All musical in its immensities;
Rich marbles—richer painting—shrines where flame
The lamps of gold—and haughty dome which vies
In air with Earth's chief structures, though their frame
Sits on the firm-set ground—and this the clouds must claim.
—Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818)
Turner employed transparent washes to capture the atmospheric effects of St. Peter’s. The flood of light descending from Michelangelo’s dome seems almost palpable as it casts into relief the spiral columns of Bernini’s baldachin in the distant crossing. Turner understood that the titanic architecture of St. Peter’s is not so much an exercise in the deployment of mass and surface as it is about the molding of space, which flows freely through the nave, aisles, and crossing. The artist introduces diminutive human figures to establish the colossal scale of the basilica, which was often criticized in the nineteenth century.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Interior of St. Peter’s Basilica, ca. 1819-20. The Morgan Library & Museum, Thaw Collection. Photography by Steven H. Crossot
Location photography by John Pinto
The Colosseum
1846
2006
Arches on arches! as it were that Rome,
Collecting the chief trophies of her line,
Would build up all her triumphs in one dome,
Her Coliseum stands; the moonbeams shine
As 'twere its natural torches, for divine
Should be the light which streams here, to illume
This long-explored but still exhaustless mine
Of contemplation; and the azure gloom
Of an Italian night, where the deep skies assume
Hues which have words, and speak to ye of heaven,
Floats o'er this vast and wondrous monument,
And shadows forth its glory.
—Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818)
Compared to daguerreotypes, with their sharp detail, salt prints made from early calotype negatives have a softer, painterly appearance. As an accomplished watercolorist, Jones no doubt appreciated this quality. The penumbra of Jones’s print, with its nightlike sky, creates a meditative mood reinforced by the profiled pose of the solitary figure. The appearance of the Colosseum in Jones’s photograph differs from what visitors see today—the substructures of the arena are now exposed, and the flora crowning the arcades has been stripped away. The cross was erected in 1750 to commemorate the Colosseum as a site of Christian martyrdom.
Calvert Richard Jones, The Interior of the Colosseum, 1846. Collection W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg. Photography by Graham S. Haber
Location photography by John Pinto
The Trevi Fountain
1862
2010
They and the rest of the party descended some steps to the water’s brim, and, after a sip or two, stood gazing at the absurd design of the fountain, where some sculptor of Bernini’s school had gone absolutely mad in marble. It was a great palace-front, with niches and many bas-reliefs, out of which looked Agrippa’s legendary virgin, and several of the allegoric sisterhood; while, at the base, appeared Neptune, with his floundering steeds and Tritons blowing their horns about him, and twenty other artificial fantasies, which the calm moonlight soothed into better taste than was native to them. And, after all, it was as magnificent a piece of work as ever human skill contrived. At the foot of the palatial façade was strown, with careful art and ordered irregularity, a broad and broken heap of massive rock, looking as if it might have lain there since the deluge. Over a central precipice fell the water, in a semicircular cascade; and from a hundred crevices, on all sides, snowy jets gushed up, and streams spouted out of the mouths and nostrils of stone monsters, and fell in glistening drops; while other rivulets, that had run wild, came leaping from one rude step to another, over stones that were mossy, slimy, and green with sedge, because in a century of their wild play, Nature had adopted the Fountain of Trevi, with all its elaborate devices, for her own.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, I, 160–161
Constructed in the eighteenth century, the Trevi Fountain celebrates the arrival within the city of the waters of an ancient aqueduct. Anderson’s photograph isolates the center of the fountain, where a profusion of sculpture is displayed against an architectural backdrop recalling a triumphal arch. The central figure represents Oceanus, lord of water in all its forms, issuing from his palatial abode in a shell chariot pulled by sea horses. The Trevi became a tourist attraction only late in the nineteenth century when guidebooks encouraged the practice of tossing coins into the basin to ensure one’s return to Rome.
James Anderson, The Trevi Fountain, ca. 1862. Collection W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg. Photography by Graham S. Haber
Location photography by John Pinto
The Roman Forum
1843
2006
Behold the wrecks of what a great nation once dedicated to the abstractions of the mind! Rome is a city, as it were, of the dead, or rather of those who cannot die, and who survive the puny generations which inhabit and pass over the spot which they have made sacred to eternity.
—Percy Shelley, Letters in Complete Works, X, 14
Corot shared certain concerns, such as the apparently casual cropping of his image and his manipulation of contrast, with early photographers. Through his careful study of the fall of light across each faceted surface, he effected a remarkable fusion of solid structure and intangible, atmospheric space. The Arch of Constantine anchors the left side of this composition. The oblique view casts into bold relief the arch’s projecting elements, especially the columns and Attic statues, which are brilliantly silhouetted. Balancing the arch on the right side are the massive ruins of the Temple of Venus and Rome.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, The Arch of Constantine and the Forum, 1843. The Frick Collection, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Victor Thaw
Location photography by John Pinto
The Equestrian Monument of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol
1843
1974
I walked down by the back streets to the steps mounting to the Capitol... Above, in the piazzetta before the stuccoed palace which rises so jauntily on a basement of thrice its magnitude, are... loungers and knitters in the sun, seated round the massively inscribed base of the statue of Marcus Aurelius. Hawthorne has perfectly expressed the attitude of this admirable figure in saying that it extends its arm with “a command which is in itself a benediction.” I doubt if any statue of king or captain in the public places of the world has more to commend it to the general heart. Irrecoverable simplicity—residing so in irrecoverable Style—has no sturdier representative. Here is an impression that the sculptors of the last three hundred years have been laboriously trying to reproduce; but contrasted with this mild old monarch their prancing horsemen suggest a succession of riding-masters taking out young ladies’ schools. The admirably human character of the figure survives the rusty decomposition of the bronze and the slight “debasement” of the art; and one may call it singular that in the capital of Christendom the portrait most suggestive of a Christian conscience is that of a pagan emperor.
—Henry James, Italian Hours, 141–142
The calotype process allowed multiple prints to be made from a single paper negative, representing an advance on the daguerreotype process, which produced a single image. The subject of Jones’s salt print, the equestrian monument of Marcus Aurelius, is the centerpiece of the Piazza del Campidoglio. Jones angled and positioned the camera to silhouette the statue against the open sky. Unlike many calotypists, Jones did not block out the sky to correct for the oversensitivity of the photographic salts to blue light. As a result, the speckled cloudlike effect in the sky imbues this print with a special aura.
Calvert Richard Jones, The Equestrian Monument of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill, 1846 Collection W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg. Photography by Graham S. Haber
Location photography by John Pinto
Piazza Navona
1862
1972
The grand and picturesque old Piazza Navona...offers in the month of August a spectacle which plainly recalls the old fontali. On Saturday evening all the benches and booths are removed, and the great drain which carries away the water spilled by the three fountains is closed. The basins then fill and pour over into the square, till in a few hours it is transformed into a shallow, shining lake, out of which, like islands, emerge the fountains with their obelisks and figures, and in whose clear mirror are reflected the cupola of St. Agnese and St. Giacomo, the ornate facades of the Doria, Pamfili, and Braschi Palaces, and all the picturesque houses by which it is enclosed. ...Carriages welter nave-deep in the water, and spatter recklessly about; whips crack madly on all sides like the going off of a thousand sharp India crackers; and horses plunge and snort with excitement, sometimes overturning their carriages and giving the passengers an improvised bath.
—William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma, II, 495–496
The Piazza Navona preserves the shape of the ancient Stadium of Domitian, which provides foundations for the buildings that enclose it. In the seventeenth century, it was transformed into one of the great piazzas of Baroque Rome by Pope Innocent x. Bernini’s Fountain of the Moor occupies the foreground; the figure’s serpentine pose is set off against the dark, reflective surface of the water, while the sculptor’s Four Rivers Fountain appears in the distance. During the summer months, the drains of the fountains were occasionally closed and the piazza flooded. Anderson’s photograph records the early stages of this festive diversion.
James Anderson, The Piazza Navona Flooded, ca. 1862. Collection W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg. Photography by Graham S. Haber
Location photography by John Pinto
The Spanish Steps
1856
1975
Directly above the Piazza di Spagna, and opposite to the Via de’Condotti, rise the double towers of the Trinità dei Monti. The ascent to them is over one hundred and thirty-five steps, planned with considerable skill, so as to mask the steepness of the Pincian, and forming the chief feature of the Piazza. Various landings and dividing walls break up their monotony; and a red granite obelisk, found in the Gardens of Sallust, crowns the upper terrace in front of the church. All day long, these steps are flooded with sunshine in which, stretched at length, or gathered in picturesque groups, models of every age and both sexes bask away the hours when they are free from employment in the studios. ... Sometimes a group of artists, passing by, will pause and steadily examine one of these models, turn him about, pose him, point out his defects and excellences, give him a baiocco, and pass on. It is, in fact, a models’ exchange.
—William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma, II, 495–496
Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Piazza di Spagna became the hub around which hotels, lodging houses, and shops catering to tourists and foreign residents were situated. In 1820 John Keats spent the last three months of his life in a house overlooking the Spanish Steps—partially visible on the right. The piazza was also the center of the artists’ quarter. The Caffè Greco, where Macpherson regularly met with other photographers and artists, is nearby. The concentration of foreigners and artists around the Spanish Steps also attracted a picturesque population of models.
Robert Macpherson, The Spanish Steps, ca. 1856. Collection W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg. Photography by Graham S. Haber
Location photography by John Pinto
Castel Sant’Angelo
1783
1975
The next night—Easter Monday—there was a great display of fireworks from the Castle of St. Angelo. We hired a room in an opposite house, and made our way, to our places, in good time, through a dense mob of people choking up the square in front, and all the avenues leading to it; and so loading the bridge by which the castle is approached, that it seemed ready to sink into the rapid Tiber below. There are statues on this bridge (execrable works), and, among them, great vessels full of burning tow were placed: glaring strangely on the faces of the crowd, and not less strangely on the stone counterfeits above them. The show began with a tremendous discharge of cannon; and then, for twenty minutes or half an hour, the whole castle was one incessant sheet of fire, and labyrinth of blazing wheels of every colour, size, and speed: while rockets streamed into the sky, not by ones or twos, or scores, but hundreds at a time. The concluding burst—the Girandola—was like the blowing up into the air of the whole massive castle, without smoke or dust.
—Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy, 407
Fireworks displays were staged on the papal fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo as early as the fifteenth century, and by the 1780s they assumed an almost ritual quality. Desprez employed the hybrid medium of hand-colored prints to exploit the dramatic effects of pyrotechnic light and color. The artist, who later served as stage designer at the court of Gustav III of Sweden, presented the Girandola as a grand scenographic performance. He included the animated crowd of onlookers, some of whom have climbed up on the pedestals of Bernini’s angels on the bridge in order to obtain a better view
Louis-Jean Desprez, The Girandola at Castel Sant’Angelo, ca. 1783–84. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Location photography by John Pinto
The Villa Borghese
1843
2006
In the openings of the wood there are fountains plashing into marble basins, the depths of which are shaggy with water-weeds; or they tumble like natural cascades from rock to rock, sending their murmur afar, to make the quiet and silence more appreciable. Scattered here and there with careless artifice, stand old altars bearing Roman inscriptions. Statues, gray with the long corrosion of even that soft atmosphere, half hide and half reveal themselves, high on pedestals, or perhaps fallen and broken on the turf. Terminal figures, columns of marble or granite, porticos, arches, are seen in the vistas of the wood-paths, either veritable relics of antiquity, or with so exquisite a touch of artful ruin on them that they are better than if really antique. At all events, grass grows on the tops of the shattered pillars, and weeds and flowers root themselves in the chinks of the massive arches and fronts of temples and clamber at large over their pediments, as if this were the thousandth summer since their winged seeds alighted there.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, I, 83–84
The gardens of the Villa Borghese, situated just outside the Aurelian Walls, were a favorite subject for landscape painters of the nineteenth century. Palm’s oil sketch depicts one of the allées defined by ilex trees, laid out in the 1780s by Prince Marcantonio Borghese. Statues from the family’s extensive collection of ancient sculpture define the entrance to a portion of the garden known as the Giardino del Lago. Passing between the statues, a visitor enters the enclosed garden, the visual climax of which is a picturesque Temple of Aesculapius dominating an irregular lake from which the garden takes its name.
Gustav Wilhelm Palm, Entrance to the Giardino del Lago, Villa Borghese, Rome, 1844. The Morgan Library & Museum, Thaw Collection. Photography by Schecter Lee
Location photography by John Pinto
The Villa Medici
1857
2014
With S. to the Villa Medici—perhaps on the whole the most enchanting place in Rome. The part of the garden called the Boschetto has an incredible, impossible charm; an upper terrace, behind locked gates, covered with a little dusky forest of evergreen oaks. Such a dim light as of a fabled, haunted place, such a soft suffusion of tender grey-green tones, such a company of gnarled and twisted little miniature trunks—dwarfs playing with each other at being giants—and such a shower of golden sparkles drifting in from the vivid West! ... I should name for my own first wish that one didn’t have to be a Frenchman to come and live and dream and work at the Académie de France. Can there be for a while a happier destiny than that of a young artist conscious of talent and of no errand but to educate, polish and perfect it, transplanted to these sacred shades?...What mornings and afternoons one might spend there, brush in hand, unpreoccupied, untormented, pensioned, satisfied—either persuading one’s self that one would be “doing something” in consequence or not caring if one shouldn’t be.
—Henry James, Italian Hours, 205–206
Contained in one of the sketchbooks that Degas carried with him during his Italian sojourn (1856–59), this view over the gardens of the Villa Medici to the Villa Borghese beyond is precisely dated: 6:00 p.m. on 6 February 1857. The small size, the summary quality of the drawings, and Degas’s notations produce an effect of great immediacy. The composition consists of three tightly compressed horizontal planes: the foreground (corresponding to the formal garden of the Villa Medici), the middle ground (depicting the Villa Borghese beyond the parapet), and the background, defined by the undulating profile of the distant mountains. The elegant silhouettes of umbrella pines and cypress trees provide vertical accents that frame the composition and bind it together.
Edgar Degas, View of the Villa Borghese from the Gardens of the Villa Medici, 1857. The Morgan Library & Museum, purchased by the Board of Trustees of the Morgan Library & Museum in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Victor Thaw. Photography by Graham S. Haber
Location photography by John Pinto
The Protestant Cemetery
1851
2013
The English burying place is a green slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, & is I think the most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld. To see the sun shining on its bright grass fresh when we visited it with the autumnal dews, & hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, & the coil which is stirring in the sunwarm earth & to mark the tombs mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. Such is the human mind & so it peoples with its wishes vacancy & oblivion.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters, II, 487–488
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Protestant Cemetery expanded westward from where the graves of Keats and Severn lie in the shade of the Pyramid of Cestius. The monuments from this later period follow the interior line of the ancient Aurelian Walls, the brick masonry of which is visible in the background of Amici’s drawing. Two women stand before the monument of Bertie Bertie Mathew, who died in Rome after falling from his horse. The two visitors are dressed in mourning clothes, including black crepe mantles and veiled bonnets, suggesting they are relatives of the deceased.
Domenico Amici, Two Visitors to the Tomb of Bertie Bertie Matthew, 1846. The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of Charles Ryskamp in memory of Mrs. Alan Valentine. Photography by Steven H. Crossot
Location photography by John Pinto
Round Temple by the Tiber
1842
2015
We had gone but a little way...when we saw the Temple of Vesta before us, right on the bank of the Tiber, which, however, we could not see behind it. It is the most perfectly preserved Roman ruin that I have yet seen, and very beautiful, though so very small, that, in a suitable locality, one would take it rather for a garden house than an ancient temple. A circle of white marble pillars, much time-worn, and a little battered, though none of them broken, surround the solid structure of the temple, leaving a circular walk between it and the pillars; the whole covered by a modern roof, which looked like wood, and disgraces and deforms the elegant little structure. This roof resembles, as much as anything else, the round wicker cover of a basket, and gives a very squat aspect to the temple. The pillars are of the Corinthian order, and when they were new, and the marble snow-white, and sharply carved and cut, there could not have been a prettier object in all Rome; but so small an edifice does not figure well as a ruin. ... We got admittance... and found the interior... fitted up as a Chapel, when the Virgin took the place of Vesta.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, French & Italian Notebooks, V, 134–135
Soon after Louis-Jacques- Mandé Daguerre publicly demonstrated his revolutionary process in 1839, de Prangey had mastered the new medium. Like all daguerreotypes, this is a unique image recorded on the highly reflective surface of a silver-coated copperplate—one of over eight hundred de Prangey brought back from his travels in Italy, Greece, and the Levant. This accomplishment is all the more impressive when one takes into account the weight and bulk of his photographic apparatus and the difficulties posed by developing the exposed plates in the field. To produce a horizontal format, which lent itself to panoramic views as well as architectural details, de Prangey cut one of his copperplates in half along its major axis.
Joseph-Philibert- Girault De Prangey, Round Temple by the Tiber, 1842. Collection W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg. Photography by Graham S. Haber
Location photography by John Pinto
Piazza Montecavallo
1822
1981
July 1819 The fountain on the Quirinal, or rather the group formed by the statues the obelisk, & the fountain is however the most admirable of all. From the Piazza Quirinale...you see the boundless ocean of domes spires & columns which is the city of Rome. On a pedestal of white marble rises an obelisk of red granite piercing the blue sky. Before it is a vast basin of porphyry, in the midst of which rises a column of the purest water which collects into itself all the overhanging colours of the sky, and breaks them into a thousand prismatic hues and graduated shadows—they fall together with its dashing water-drops into the outer basin.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters, II, 88–89
Rossini extended Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s conceptual and compositional approach to the graphic depiction of Roman monuments well into the nineteenth century. The subject of this drawing is Piazza Montecavallo on the Quirinal Hill, named after the colossal ancient statues of the horse tamers Castor and Pollux visible at the left. The Papal Palace of the Quirinal anchors the composition on the right, effectively framing an extended vista over the lower portions of the city situated in the floodplain of the Tiber. In the distance, the dome of St. Peter’s projects above the horizon line.
Luigi Rossini, Panorama of Rome from the Piazza Montecavallo, ca. 1822. The Morgan Library & Museum, Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1906. Photography by Graham S. Haber
Location photography by John Pinto
The Triton Fountain
1852
2008
O’ the Barberini by the Capuchins;
Where the Old Triton, at his fountain-sport,
Bernini’s creature plated to the paps,
Puffs up steel sleet which breaks to diamond dust,
A spray of sparkles snorted from his conch,
High over the caritellas, out o’ the way
O’ the motley merchandizing multitude
—Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, I, 28–29
Bernini’s Triton Fountain was designed to announce the presence of the nearby Barberini Palace and lay claim to the piazza, which in the seventeenth century was the enclave of the family. This view is striking for its unusual angle of vision, looking down on the piazza from an upper-story window. The composition cuts off the Triton’s tall water jet and provides only a tantalizing glimpse of the buildings defining the piazza. The American journalist Margaret Fuller would have enjoyed something very close to this perspective when she lived across the piazza from the Barberini Palace in 1848–49.
Gustave Le Gray and Firmin-Eugène Le Dien, Bernini’s Triton Fountain, ca. 1852–53. Collection W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg. Photography by Graham S. Haber
Location photography by John Pinto