The alleged documentary reality of sixteenth-century drawings portraying the Roman “ruinscape” lives among several overlapping concerns. The phrase “drawn from life,” for example, foregrounds the notion that such drawings show pictorial, visual truths. More broadly, the medium of drawing itself possesses a perceived immediacy; even a highly finished work’s status as a drawing suggests its “in-the-moment” aura, its fidelity to the “real.” However, comparisons of many views of Rome’s ruins with the topographical truths – scientifically discerned, found on site – suggest deliberate lapses: monuments appear in altered conditions or in different places in relation to one another. Furthering a book project on landscape’s sixteenth-century emergence as a rhetorically potent genre, this paper reconciles the apparent divergences described above. At the enriched interstices of documentation, invention, the rise of antiquarianism and collecting, sixteenth century Rome’s everchanging topography, and the impetus to inventions all’antica, the Roman “ruinscape” bears a “fluid vista” promoting artistry, but not exclusively or primarily. In a tenuous relation with “reality,” thematizing the ruin’s ephemerality, such images picture destabilized landscapes, refashioning them as collections of antiquities for antiquarian collectors eager to engage evolving interpretations of antiquity. They do so in response to the lived landscape’s status as a fluid text document.

Anton van den Wyngaerde (c. 1490–1571) traveled in Charles V’s train as the emperor journeyed north through the Italian peninsula in 1535–36. The artist’s views of Naples and Rome record the settings of Charles’ triumphal entries, which transformed those urban environments into demonstrations of imperial hegemony. Van den Wyngaerde’s lost view of Florence similarly originated from the emperor’s entry into that city on 29 April 1536. Its appearance is mostly preserved in Hieronymus Cock’s (1518–70) engraved Florentia published in 1557. A comparison of Cock’s Florence with van den Wyngaerde’s View of Rome from the Quirinal indicates changing intentions due to different subjects. Rome emphasizes the city’s ruins; Florence presents a tidier, more modern city. Both van den Wyngaerde’s Florence and Rome reference a past, then, but different pasts for different effects: a Republican Florence brought into the Imperial fold as opposed to Charles’ renovatio of the Roman Empire. Rome, however, appears faithful to the city’s topography, reflecting van den Wyngaerde’s famed naturalism, while Florence is full of topographical errors. These differences reflect contemporary political rhetoric, but also Aristotle’s views on imitation in the Poetics. As van den Wyngaerde created his artworks in imitation of both the natural world and the ancient Roman painter Studius, the city view artist also incorporated Aristotelian recommendations for mimesis. More than just representations ad vivum, van den Wyngaerde presented us with poetic portrayals of the world, and the opportunity to consider city views a genre all’antica.

This project combines scholarly and computational methods to create a 3D map of Rome’s most prominent vertical features: the towers, bell towers, repurposed ruins, and hills that dominated the skyline during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Working with original sources such as the mid-sixteenth-century panoramic vedute by van Heemskerck and Wyngaerde and ichnographic maps such as Bufalini (1551), Tempesta (1593) and Nolli (1748), the multi-year project employs the technique of reverse projection to develop an unprecedented cartographic representation of the Early Modern city. With a completed map, the goal will turn to explore the interconnectedness of sight and sound, topography and movement, ritual and tradition, in order to recapture the urban network of forms inspired by matters of symbolism, surveillance, status, and power.