Ponte Rotto

Reference: S42959
Author Giovanni Battista MERCATI
Year: 1629
Zone: Ponte Rotto
Measures: 127 x 93 mm
Not Available

Reference: S42959
Author Giovanni Battista MERCATI
Year: 1629
Zone: Ponte Rotto
Measures: 127 x 93 mm
Not Available

Description

UNKNOWN FIRST STATE

Etching, 1629, signed in plate at bottom. First state, before the number 32 and title Ponto resto di Santa Maria 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.

Giovanni Battista MERCATI (Borgo Sansepolcro, 1591 – Roma, 1645 circa)

Born in Borgo Sansepolcro in 1591 by Raphael, was baptized October 1 of that year, was formed in the workshop of Raphael Schiaminossi, of which he was a nephew. His first work was in 1608 the decoration of the sacristy of the church of San Francesco in his hometown in collaboration with his uncle. According to one part of the critics, the collaboration continued also with regard to engravings: Mercati made four of them in 1616, representing Modestia, Sorte, Contento amoroso and Spia, which are the completion of a series made by Schiaminossi in 1605. Other critics think more of an autonomous work, highlighting the considerable difference in time and size with the first series, even if there are undoubted derivations from the style of the master. What is certain for everyone is that, from an iconographic point of view, these are derivations from the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa in the 1613 edition, the only one containing all four subjects engraved by Mercati. Around 1620 he moved to Rome with his uncle to perfect his artistic training; in 1620 he dedicated to Lelio Guidiccioni an engraving representing the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine from a painting by Correggio. In 1622 he returned briefly to Borgo Sansepolcro because of the death of Schiaminossi to estimate the works left by the master. It was a temporary return, since he had already created a solid clientele in Rome. The first documented work in Rome dates back to 1624 and was commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli-Borghese: it was the altarpiece for the altar of St. Charles Borromeo for the Basilica of San Crisogono. In 1626 he engraved Santa Bibiana who refuses to worship idols, with dedication to Marcello Sacchetti, taken from the fresco of similar subject made by Pietro Berrettini da Cortona and finished a short time before in the church of Santa Bibiana. Later, he made a new engraving with the Beheading of John the Baptist with a dedication to Nicolò Alemanni, keeper of the Vatican Library, librarian and philologist in the service of the Barberini family; in this case too he seems to have been inspired by a painting by Pietro Berrettini. In 1629 he produced a collection of fifty-two engravings, published in Rome under the title Alcune vedute et prospettive di luoghi dishabitati di Roma. His main achievement during the Roman period was the decoration of the chapel of the Orsini of Pitigliano in the basilica of San Bartolomeo all'Isola with frescoes depicting Stories of the Virgin, probably commissioned by Paolo Giordano Orsini, a friend of both Guidiccioni and Alemanni. He returned briefly to Borgo San Sepolcro, where he painted a Madonna offering the Child to San Felice da Cantalice for the church of San Michele Arcangelo and an Immaculate Conception with Saints, preserved in the Civic Museum of Sansepolcro. Since at least 1633 he was a member of the Roman Academy of San Luca, as evidenced by a payment for the registration fee; this association was particularly linked and between 1637 and 1643 took part in numerous meetings of the academicians. In 1639 he painted a Noli me tangere for the church of Santa Maria delle Vergini in Rome; in 1642 he made the engravings of four of the eight tondi of Hadrian's Arch of Constantine and dedicated them to Paolo Giordano Orsini, Francesco Borromini and Carlo Paolucci, Count of Calboli and Dean of the Segnatura. The drafting of his will dates back to January 1645 and it is assumed that he died in Rome a few months later. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Giovanni Battista MERCATI (Borgo Sansepolcro, 1591 – Roma, 1645 circa)

Born in Borgo Sansepolcro in 1591 by Raphael, was baptized October 1 of that year, was formed in the workshop of Raphael Schiaminossi, of which he was a nephew. His first work was in 1608 the decoration of the sacristy of the church of San Francesco in his hometown in collaboration with his uncle. According to one part of the critics, the collaboration continued also with regard to engravings: Mercati made four of them in 1616, representing Modestia, Sorte, Contento amoroso and Spia, which are the completion of a series made by Schiaminossi in 1605. Other critics think more of an autonomous work, highlighting the considerable difference in time and size with the first series, even if there are undoubted derivations from the style of the master. What is certain for everyone is that, from an iconographic point of view, these are derivations from the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa in the 1613 edition, the only one containing all four subjects engraved by Mercati. Around 1620 he moved to Rome with his uncle to perfect his artistic training; in 1620 he dedicated to Lelio Guidiccioni an engraving representing the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine from a painting by Correggio. In 1622 he returned briefly to Borgo Sansepolcro because of the death of Schiaminossi to estimate the works left by the master. It was a temporary return, since he had already created a solid clientele in Rome. The first documented work in Rome dates back to 1624 and was commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli-Borghese: it was the altarpiece for the altar of St. Charles Borromeo for the Basilica of San Crisogono. In 1626 he engraved Santa Bibiana who refuses to worship idols, with dedication to Marcello Sacchetti, taken from the fresco of similar subject made by Pietro Berrettini da Cortona and finished a short time before in the church of Santa Bibiana. Later, he made a new engraving with the Beheading of John the Baptist with a dedication to Nicolò Alemanni, keeper of the Vatican Library, librarian and philologist in the service of the Barberini family; in this case too he seems to have been inspired by a painting by Pietro Berrettini. In 1629 he produced a collection of fifty-two engravings, published in Rome under the title Alcune vedute et prospettive di luoghi dishabitati di Roma. His main achievement during the Roman period was the decoration of the chapel of the Orsini of Pitigliano in the basilica of San Bartolomeo all'Isola with frescoes depicting Stories of the Virgin, probably commissioned by Paolo Giordano Orsini, a friend of both Guidiccioni and Alemanni. He returned briefly to Borgo San Sepolcro, where he painted a Madonna offering the Child to San Felice da Cantalice for the church of San Michele Arcangelo and an Immaculate Conception with Saints, preserved in the Civic Museum of Sansepolcro. Since at least 1633 he was a member of the Roman Academy of San Luca, as evidenced by a payment for the registration fee; this association was particularly linked and between 1637 and 1643 took part in numerous meetings of the academicians. In 1639 he painted a Noli me tangere for the church of Santa Maria delle Vergini in Rome; in 1642 he made the engravings of four of the eight tondi of Hadrian's Arch of Constantine and dedicated them to Paolo Giordano Orsini, Francesco Borromini and Carlo Paolucci, Count of Calboli and Dean of the Segnatura. The drafting of his will dates back to January 1645 and it is assumed that he died in Rome a few months later. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)