Imago Romae: Renaissance visions of the Eternal City.

摘要

This study provides an examination of the imaging of Rome in the sixteenth century, with a particular focus on a singular map, the Bufalini Plan of 1551. Measuring roughly 190 x 200 cm, the Bufalini Plan was the largest and most magnificent representation of Rome that had ever appeared in print, as well as the first orthographic map of the city since ancient times: a horizontal ground plan with all elements shown to scale. Contrary to measured appearances, the map presents a specifically (and subjectively) antiquarian vision of Rome, and was destined for prominent display as a work of art as opposed to any utilitarian purpose. As such, the Bufalini Plan contradicts the entrenched notion that maps are objective records of an external reality while also providing a window onto the unique challenges of depicting Rome, the Eternal City.;By the same token, a number of the problems in representing Rome were paradigmatic of those for all cities, and maps were just one of many graphic modes that were deployed in this context. The entire spectrum of Renaissance urban representation therefore forms the broader context for this investigation, particularly the ubiquitous bird's-eye views that eclipsed maps on a popular level. As a visual encomium to a city, the Bufalini Plan shared the function of these pictorial views. As a map, however, it could not have been more different from them in its mode of expression, for it did not simulate a visual experience. Primarily for this reason, it was a commercial failure. Like pictorial views, the Bufalini Plan showed the city in an idealized form, but observers might have failed to recognize this familiar rhetoric beneath its revolutionary graphic language. As such, the very failure of the Bufalini Plan gives valuable insight into the psychology of Renaissance viewers, and turns a new lens on the history of city mapping.