Santa Maria Nuova

UNKNOWN FIRST STATE

Etching, 1629, signed in plate at bottom. First state, before the number 21 and title Dictio Santa Maria houa added at top.

Magnificent proof, rich in tone, printed on contemporary laid paper, with very thin margins, in perfect condition. 

The view belongs to the important collection Alcune vedute et prospettive di luoghi dishabitati di Roma, a series of 52 engravings by the baroque painter and engraver Giovanni Battista Mercati. Bartsch and Rossetti do not describe these proofs before the numbering and text. In the frontispiece of the collection in our possession - unfortunately not complete with the 52 plates that for this reason are offered individually - we find at the bottom right the indication of the privilege, the Superior permissu, while the inscription Cum privilegio Regio is missing, which is found in all the other exemplars of the collection examined, such as this one in the British Museum:

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1868-0822-8618

“In 1629 Mercati published a series of fifty etched views of Rome which were dedicated to Ferdinand de' Medici. His approach was remarkably innovative. Unlike many earlier view prints of Rome which, like Falda's later ones, emphasized architectural accuracy and were essentially documents and records, Mercati's etchings anticipated Piranesi's more evocative, romantic approach. Mercati's views are delightfully informal, picturesque, and impressionistic. The prints are small and intimate, and the buildings and monuments are often seen from odd points of view. The artist was as concerned with space — empty places (luoghi dishabitati) — and with the light and shadow that fill them as he was with the monuments themselves. His etchings give a vivid sense of the city as it would be glimpsed by someone rambling behind the scenes. Their execution was similarly free and casual, with the etched lines sketchily rendered and stop-out varnish freely and expertly applied to lighten the far distance and to "paint in" bright highlights in the foreground. Especially effective was Mercati's stopping out of a wall seen through the most distant archway, making it look as if its solidity had been bleached away by the sun. The irregular, quivering lines and the intense passages of light and dark give the impression of forms and spaces vibrating in sunlight, flickering with light and shadow. The irregular, frayed quality of the darkest shading lines also evokes the worn, eroded surfaces of the ruins, which seem to be crumbling away before the viewer's eyes. In addition to his knowledge of the etchings of Ventura Salimbeni and Raffaello Schiaminossi, Mercati must also have been aware of similar approaches to views and landscape seen in the prints of Jacques Callot, Stefano della Bella, and Israel Silvestre. In this context it is interesting that Giovanni Battista Falda was strongly influenced by the same three artists, but he assimilated their approach in a way almost the opposite of Mercati's, achieving great clarity and order in the rendering of line and tone” (cfr. Richard Wallace in Italian Etchers in the Reinassance & Barocque, pp. 160-162).

Born in Sansepolcro in Tuscany in 1591 and died in 1645, after an apprenticeship with fellow countryman Raffaello Schiaminossi he eventually moved to Rome, which certainly offered more work opportunities, and was a member of the Academy of San Luca. Author of some known drawings, some sacred paintings and a small handful of prints of invention or translation (from classical sculptures or paintings by Correggio and Pietro da Cortona), is in some relationship with characters of Barberini's Rome, to which he dedicated his engravings. To name but a few, Cassiano Dal Pozzo, Marcello Sacchetti, his cardinal nephew Antonio Barberini, Paolo Giordano II Orsini Duke of Bracciano, and finally Francesco Borromini. Especially close appear his friendships with the Tuscans, to whom he will be linked affinity of geography and linguistic inflection. We know that in 1623 he designed and engraved the conclave for the election of Urban VIII in a very rare edition that I have never been able to find. His close friend and protector was the Lucchese Lelio Guidiccioni, secretary of Card. Antonio Barberini.

Alcune vedute et prospettive di luoghi dishabitati di Roma bears a long dedication to Granduca di Toscana Ferdinando II dei Medici: perchè lo splendore, che riceverono l'anno passato gli inculti luoghi di questa Città, dalla presenza, et vista di V(ostra) A(ltezza), le mie carte di loro imprinted dovranno riceverlo dalla comparsa del suo chiariss(imo) nome.

The series follows a well reconstructed topographic order, from Sant'Agnese on the Nomentana to the Metelli's sepulchre on the Appia. The Views are as if divided into three "chapters", with a prologue (nrr. 3-5) and an epilogue (nrr. 51-52) to mark the entry into the city and then the departure. In the first "chapter" (nrr. 6-22) the painter moves from the Esquiline to the Baths of Diocletian and then to the Caelian, he goes around the Colosseum or sits at its feet to look, again, towards the Caelian, he goes back to the Esquiline and then descends into the Forum to then return around the Colosseum, towards the Temple of Venus and Rome and the Caelimontane slopes with SS. John and Paul: in short, it makes a tour of "ruins" in the part where they were more intense and frequent. The second "chapter" is an urban interlude (nrr. 23-29), with the two obligatory views of the Trajan and Antonine Columns, and then views of Palazzo Madama and of the "temple of the Sun" on the Quirinale, and finally a leap beyond the Tiber: with San Giorgio al Velabro and the Arch of Janus the third "chapter" begins (nrr. 30-49), where a new archaeological itinerary takes place across the Tiber. But what unifies Mercati's work is the singular exercise in which he engages: depopulating the city, as if for a curfew, selecting points of view for the most part unpublished. Mercati keeps faith with the purpose expressed in the title and dedication, and in order to lead us through "uninhabited places" and "uncultured" empties the city of inhabitants. The Rome of Urban VIII appears only in foreshortening or in the background in the views of the series: not the glittering churches, fountains and palaces, not the populous squares nor the gardens. The absolute protagonist is the expanse of ruins, cut out of the fabric of the city and amplified; the ruins, I say, and not the ancient monuments, since even the most illustrious do not deserve a place in the series (the Pantheon, for example, is missing). The question is, therefore, where does such a taste come from that appears, at first glance, countercurrent. But it is not. These views are part of that real visual genre that was the landscape of ruins, investigated especially by artists from the North - almost as if the Italians, too immersed in that landscape, could not "see" it, thematize it and translate it into painting - and then became the common heritage of European art. (cf. S. Settis, Il fondamentale ruolo della città nel catalogo de Il Polifilo).

Magnificent example of this very rare first state.

Bibliografia

Bartsch vol. XX, nn. 12-63; Petrucci A., Le acqueforti romane di Giambattista Mercati in Dedalo, n. 2, pp. 477-489; Reed & Wallace, Giovanni Battista Mercati, in Italian Etchers in the Reinassance & Barocque, pp. 160-162, nn. 78-79; Nicolette Mandarano, MERCATI, Giovanni Battista, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 73, Roma, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 2009; Salvatore Settis, Il fondamentale ruolo della città nel catalogo de Il Polifilo, in “Sole 24 Ore” del 7 novembre 2018; Rossetti, Rome, A bibliography form the invention of printing trough 1899, n. 6997.