Views of Italy

Carriage is about 1.2 cm tall

Cartographer and cosmographer Sebastian Münster’s tremedously influential Renaissance compendium of maps and views, known as the Cosmographia, first appeared in 1544, and was re-issued in about 40 subsequent editions in various languages up until 1628. The volume had a major impact on sixteenth century geographical knowledge and inspired others to produce rival atlases (see below). The Cosmographia differed from its successors in that it contained woodcuts of creatures, people and battle scenes, with an interest in documenting the fantastical, in addition to over 80 panoramic city views and maps.

This aerial view of Rome is photographed from Civitates Orbis Terrarum, one of the first great city atlases, a first edition of which is held in Special Collections. The ambitious, six-volume tome, published in large folio size, was inspired by Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1544; see above). Georg Braun, the editor, and Franz Hogenberg, the main engraver (succeeded by Simon van den Neuwell for the last two volumes), labored for twenty years to produce this ostensibly comprehensive presentation of modern cities world-wide. With a total of 546 prospects, birds-eye views and city maps, it provided the contemporary reader with a multitude of travel destinations. The vertical line down the center is where the map was bound into the volume by its original owner, French diplomat Gaspard Coignet de la Thuilerie, comte de Courson (1596/97-1653).

In this unusual side view of the cathedral or duomo of Santa Maria Assunta in Siena, British artist Andrew Affleck captured the multiple arches and columns along the exterior, framing a distant view of the 14th century bell tower known as the Torre della Mangia. The cathedral’s exterior was completed in the mid-13th century in the high gothic style. Siena’s duomo is noted for its unusual bands of alternating white and black marble, with elaborate marble inlays on the floor by Domenico Beccafumi.

Barriviera was born in Montebelluna in 1906. He attended a technical school in Florence until 1927, but at the same time he cultivated his artistic skills and in 1925 at the age of nineteen he produced his first engravings. In 1932 he moved to Venice, where he studied at the engraving school of the Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1934 he moved to Rome with his family. During his long, successful career, Barriviera taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples and in Rome; he also served as a member of the “War Artists” group during World War II.

Barriviera was an extremely prolific artist, producing more than 950 plates over his lifetime. His main medium was etching, but he also experimented with other techniques: oil painting, fresco, wood-carving, stained glass, mosaics, ceramics, embossing, stamp engraving and even jewelry-making. In later life, as his artistic production decreased, he devoted his energies to writing a manual of engraving techniques, l’Incisione e la Stampa Originale, published the year before his death in 1985. He is considered a leader of the “Venetian school” of twentieth-century engraving, which focused on the landscape.

“Sand diggers” (renaioli in Italian) were workers who harvested sand and gravel from the riverbeds to be sorted, graded, and used in building construction. They used shovels or large, long-handled ladles to dig out the sand and low, flat barge-like boats to ferry the sand back to shore. Renaioli worked on the river Arno up until very recently, recovering everything from finest sand used in plaster up to marble pillars used to restore grand palazzi.

This drypoint etching depicts a typical farm in the hilly region of Abruzzi in central Italy, which borders on the Adriatic Sea. The area is home to the Apennine mountain range, with the highest peak of Mount Corno, at 9,560 feet.

Artist William Evan Charles Morgan studied art at the Slade School in his native London, and was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome medal at the age of 21 with his wood engraving The Expulsion. The award provided a three-year scholarship to the British School in Rome, where Morgan refined his skills in intaglio print making on copper. While studying in Rome, Morgan made frequent sketching trips to rural areas including the Abruzzi region, and some of those drawings were transferred to the copper plate after he had returned to England. Among them, this drypoint etching is accompanied by a similar scene called Italian Hill Cottage. The Special Collections Research Center holds 49 of the 51 known prints made by Morgan, and mounted a solo exhibition of them in 1994.

In his long and prolific career, Rudy Pozzatti mastered the techniques of intaglio, woodcut, lithography, and silkscreen, and learned to work with the inherent qualities of each so that they complemented and enlivened his own artistic pursuits. His abilities earned him an international reputation as an artist and master printer.

Born in the United States of Italian immigrant parents, Rudy Pozzatti actively sought his roots in the Italian Tyrol and traveled to Italy at every opportunity. His work always revealed a reverence for the art and the religion of his ancestry, often exploring themes and issues surrounding Catholicism.

Palazzo, Florence was commissioned by the Print Club of Cleveland in 1955, soon after Pozzatti returned from a year-long trip to Florence on a Fulbright scholarship.

Although Pozzatti never abandoned subject matter for pure abstraction, in Palazzo the image seems to exist less as a visual record than as a reminder of the artist’s moment of creation; the physical act of working the plate attains a kind of subliminal frenzy that all but overwhelms the subject. This kind of printmaking is expressionist in the fullest sense of the word.

Known for his modernist paintings and color woodblock prints, the Scandinavian-born Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt also created etchings early in his career that reveal the influence of the Whistlerian aesthetic. One of 10 siblings of Scandinavian parents, Nordfeldt immigrated with his family to Chicago at the age of 13. He was gifted at drawing, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago for a year while working for a Swedish newspaper. The next few years were spent abroad in Paris, England and Sweden, where he taught drawing, learned the technique of Japanese woodcut prints, and exhibited a painting at the Salon des Artistes Français. In 1906 he won a silver medal at the International Print Exhibition in Milan, Italy.

Nordfeldt published a series of etchings in Harper’s and the magazine Outlook between 1908 and 1913 that took him to Spain and Italy, with an extended stay in Venice. This view of boats along the Grand Canal is related to an illustration for an article in the November, 1913 issue of Harper’s entitled “Unusual Venice,” by Mary Heaton Vorse.

In 1630 a plague epidemic entered Venice, killing a third of the population. The Venetian Senate decreed, in hope that the plague should abate, that a new church should be built and dedicated to the Santa Maria della Salute (Saint Mary of Health). In 1631 the plague was defeated, and construction began under the direction of 33-year-old architect Baldassarre Longhena.

Every year, on 21 November, the Feast of the Presentation of the Virgin, the city’s officials process from San Marco to the Salute for a service of thanksgiving. This involves crossing the Grand Canal on a specially constructed pontoon bridge. The Festa della Madonna della Salute is still a major event in Venice.

German painter and etcher Paul Geissler studied art in Weimar under Max Thedy. For most of his career, Geissler lived and worked in the city of Munich. During the 1920s and 1930s Paul Geissler’s etchings reached an international reputation. He etched views in France, Spain, Italy and England and in 1929, he was commissioned by the city of New York to depict some of the principal buildings in a series of etchings. His return trip to Germany took him through Sicily and the Italian mainland; it is likely that the etching of the Salute shown here was created at that time.

In this preliminary drawing and subsequent etching we see the majestic church of Santa Maria della Salute on the tip of the island of Dorsoduro in Venice. This spectacular view, on the opposite side of the Grand Canal from St. Mark’s Square, has inspired artists for centuries. The massive dome of the church, above the colonnaded building known as the Dogana di Mare, or Sea Customs Post, appears to have risen out of the canal to capture the admiration of all who look upon it.

Chester Leich was born in Evansville, Indiana, but most of his youth was spent abroad, primarily in Germany. He began his art studies at the age of twenty-one in Florence under Giovanni Giacometti, a Swiss artist and father of the famous sculptor Alberto. He then moved to Munich and Hamburg, where he continued his art training until 1915, returning to the United States when conditions deteriorated prior to the First World War. In the twenties, Leich worked in Evansville, Chicago, and New York, and exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute, and in Milwaukee and New York. He and his family traveled in Europe during the following decade and settled in the American southwest in 1937.

Saint Mark’s Basilica, a monument to the Venetian empire, is unique both in its wealth of history and the magnificence of its façade and interior. While the basic structure of the building has been little altered since its consecration in 1098, its decoration changed greatly over time. The following centuries all contributed to its adornment, and seldom did a Venetian vessel return from the Orient without bringing a column, capital, or frieze taken from some ancient building, to add to the fabric of the basilica. Gradually, the exterior brickwork became covered with various marbles and carvings, some much older than the building itself.

Karoly’s skillful draughtsmanship and meticulous etching bring some order to the chaos of the basilica, famously described by influential Victorian art critic John Ruskin in this passage from The Stones of Venice:

… [T]here rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away; a multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of coloured light; a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory—sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes; and, in the midst of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago.

A Hungarian born painter and etcher of figure studies, landscape and city views, Andrew Karoly studied art in Budapest before the outbreak of World War I. After the War ended in 1918 he began to produce paintings and etchings of scenes in Italy, Germany and particularly France. Karoly came to live in New York around 1920. During the years of the Great Depression, Andrew Karoly worked on a number of art projects commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), including several large, public murals. At this time he often collaborated with another well known Hungarian/American painter and etcher, Louis Szanto.

George Loring Brown was one of the most popular of the expatriate American artists living in Italy in the mid-19th century. A native of Boston, Brown settled in Italy in 1839-40 where he lived for nearly twenty years. During the 1850s his studio in Rome was frequented by tourists who would purchase or commission a painting of their favorite Italian view. The idyllic hill town of Tivoli, about 18 miles east of Rome, was one of Brown’s favored subjects. The town could be visited in a day trip, via a carriage ride of approximately 4 hours, a popular destination for many visitors to Rome at that time. The area features natural wonders with its dramatic cascading waterfalls, the ancient Temple of the Sybil on the cliff top, as well as the nearby Villa d’Este.

In 1853-54 Brown created a series of 9 etchings of the Roman campagna, including this view of the cascades at Tivoli. His 1850 oil on canvas of Tivoli and its falls is in the collection of the Newark Museum.

This etching of the Pincio Gardens in Rome, to the west of the Villa Borghese, affords a distant view of the church of Santa Maria del Popolo to the left of the obelisk built by emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century A.D. The gardens of the Pincio were designed by the Italian architect Giuseppe Valadier at the command of Napoleon, whose younger sister Pauline Bonaparte had married Prince Camillo Borghese in 1803. This public park is filled with over 200 statues of famous Italians, and is still a popular area in Rome for leisure activity.

The Irish-born Robert Charles Goff was a Colonel in the Coldstream Guards before he retired in 1878 to pursue a second career as an artist. He was elected to the prestigious Royal Engravers, and published an illustrated travel book entitled Florence and Some Tuscan Towns in 1905. Goff lived in Sussex, Florence, and in Switzerland.

In addition to winning a Pulitzer Prize for literature and being the first woman to do so, Edith Wharton was a celebrated tastemaker of her day. Her first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897), handled the subjects of architectural style and interior decorating; Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904) examines the relationship of architecture to the surrounding landscape and advises on the design of formal gardens. Wharton not only preached precepts of garden and house design, but she also practiced them herself. On the grounds of The Mount, her home in Lenox, Massachusetts, she gradually realized a variety of landscape designs illustrating principles championed in Italian Villas and Their Gardens.

Years of European travel and life abroad inform Wharton’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction. As Sarah Bird Wright points out, the “cultural capital” Wharton gained was a “constant resource.” Her Italian travel essays between 1894 and 1904 record her enthusiasm for Italian art and cultural history and were the source material for the 1905 collection of travel sketches Italian Backgrounds and the 1902 novel The Valley of Decision.

This first edition of Italian Villas and Their Gardens is illustrated with watercolors by noted illustrator Maxfield Parrish. Parrish used luminous colors to create dreamlike landscapes with a classical influence, seen in many children’s books such as The Arabian Nights and Eugene Fields’s Poems of Childhood. Parrish also received commissions from many magazines such as Hearst’s, Collier’s and Life; he also created many advertisements before focusing on painting starting in the 1920s.