For three centuries, painters crossed Europe to learn their trade in Rome, and most of them went home with a city slightly different from the real one. Even the most faithful views here hide a correction somewhere, sometimes as large as a fountain painted complete five years before its builders were done.
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How These Were Chosen
Before the late 1700s, few public museums existed, so the famous ancient statues could be studied only in Rome itself. From 1666, France sent the winners of its Prix de Rome there, and wealthy travelers on the Grand Tour followed, eager to take the city home on canvas.
That demand produced two kinds of picture. A veduta, Italian for view, records a real place in precise detail. A capriccio gathers real monuments into a scene no one could ever have stood in front of. Many pictures sit somewhere between the two.
Every painting here shows real places in Rome, or an event the city actually staged in the painter's lifetime. Scenes of ancient history set in an imagined Rome were left out. Almost every painter on the list still changed something in the city.
12. Scipione, Piazza Navona (about 1930)
The bare back of a statue glows red at the center of a stone basin in this panel, while four tritons twist around it in dark water. The statue is the Moor, the figure at the heart of the Fontana del Moro, and behind it Piazza Navona runs north under a red, smoky sky toward the obelisk of Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers.
Scipione was the name used by Gino Bonichi, a young painter from Macerata who worked in Rome. He painted the panel around 1930 and showed it in Rome the same year.
Why would a painter bathe one of Rome's great squares in that light? The Italian state catalog reads it as a judgment. In its interpretation, the square stands for the harm done by the Church's temporal power, its rule as a worldly state, and the catalog ties the panel to The Cardinal Dean, Scipione's portrait of Cardinal Vincenzo Vannutelli, then dean of the College of Cardinals.
To my eye, the way the panel is painted supports that reading. Scipione saves his hottest red for the Moor's back and lets the house fronts on the right glow a pale salmon pink. On the left, the dome and twin bell towers of the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone stay a dark silhouette, the one building in the square he keeps in shadow.
At a Glance
Artist: Scipione, born Gino Bonichi (1904 to 1933)
Painted: About 1930
Medium: Oil on wood panel
Size: Not published
Where to see it: Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome
About This Painting
What is the history of the fountain in the foreground?
It is the Fontana del Moro, a patchwork of three centuries. Giacomo della Porta built the basin in 1575, and the Moor arrived in 1655, carved by Giovanni Antonio Mari to a design by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for Pope Innocent X Pamphilj. The tritons Scipione painted were copies by Luigi Amici, installed in 1874.
11. Johannes Lingelbach, Carnival in Rome (about 1650 to 1651)
Above a carnival crowd in Piazza Colonna, a man in a tall white cone hat and a black half mask rises over the heads, while masked faces press around a wagon of comic actors. Behind them climbs the column of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, which gives the square its name. Anyone who crossed Piazza Colonna in those years would have known that column, and would have struggled to recognize almost everything around it.