Prospetto della Nobile Piazza Navona con li Nuovi Edifici...

Etching, circa 1675, bottom centre the title 'Prospetto della nobil piazza navona con li nuovi edifici et col'lago delle fontane et passeggio della carrozze in tempo dell'estate'. Signed bottom left:Gio. Batta Falda delin e fece on the same line, toward the center, publisher’s address and the privilege: Gio. Iacomo Rossi le stampa in Roma alla Pace co Priv del S. Pont'. a nine-item legend is distributed in the lower left and right corners.

The plate was printed as single printed sheet and is listed in the 1677 De Rossi’ Indice, (p. 17, c.5), in the section “Diverse opere di Roma Moderna Stampate in fogli volanti”

Splendid view of Piazza Navona flooded, in tempo d’estate, that was every Saturday and Sunday in August.

The practise started in June1652, this was the project of Donna Olimpia Pamphilj in 1652. Olimpia was the all-powerful sister-in-law of Pope Innocent X. As papal family’s palace overlooked Piazza Navona, she decided to turn it into a unique backdrop for aristocratic carriage rides. Olimpia’s idea was to recreate, in this historical plaza, the classical entertainment of staging naval battles.

In short, Olimpia’s idea turned so perfect that became immediately a tradition. Every year until 1866 – when Pope Pio IX forbade it, every weekend in August, Rome had its blue lagoon. Only between 1676 and 1703 this custom was suspended, for hygiene precautions. Pope Clement XI resumed it only in honor of the Queen of Poland, when she visited the Eternal City exactly in the summer of 1703.

Giovan Battista Falda, a native of Valduggia, was sent to Rome at the age of 14 and entrusted to the care of an uncle who pointed him out to Gian Lorenzo Bernini. But it was his meeting with printer Gian Giacomo De Rossi that marked a turning point in Falda's artistic career: in fact, his talent was directed by the publisher to the art of engraving. In De Rossi's workshop he could also appreciate the work of great engravers such as J. Callot, S. Della Bella and I. Silvestre; having completed his apprenticeship, he was benevolently received at the papal court, so much so that Alexander VII commissioned him to design the factories of the Castel Gandolfo residence. In 1665, Falda gave to the presses for the publisher De Rossi his masterpiece: the plates of the first book of the Nuovo Teatro delle fabbriche, et edificii, in prospettiva di Roma moderna sotto il felice pontificato di n. s. Alessandro VII, which was followed, between 1665 and '69, by the second and third. The work was intended to popularize the new image of Rome: the Pope, in fact, decided to open new streets, to embellish the city with fountains and monuments, also as a demonstration of the financial and cultural power of his family. With the Nuovo Teatro, as with the later collections devoted to fountains and palaces, Falda became the popularizer of these aspects; his engraved views, characterized by attention to both perspective rules and scenographic effects, skillfully exploit the vigor of line and the richness of the contrast between black and white, in keeping with the spatial criteria of Baroque art. The specifically popular and commercial aspect of the engraved views was skillfully exploited by the publisher De Rossi, who established an inseparable and effective partnership with Falda, to whom much of the printed production of the century in Rome was owed, with a fortune comparable only to that which would be paid to the work of Giovan Battista Piranesi. Falda's activity was tireless despite the brevity of the time span in which he worked (he died at the age of 35 on August 22, 1678 and was buried in S. Maria della Scala in Trastevere).  By the end of his life he had engraved about 300 plates: many of these are preserved in Rome at the Calcografia nazionale.

Literature

Bellini, p. 289; TIB, 4725.288; Baudi De Vesme, p. 4.