Maarten van Heemskerck e il Fascino di Roma. Percorsi visivi della Città Eterna (Maarten van Heemskerck and the Charm of Rome. Visual Journeys through the Eternal City)

The Central Institute for Graphics hosts the exhibition Maarten van Heemskerck e il Fascino di Roma. Percorsi visivi della Città Eterna (Maarten van Heemskerck and the Charm of Rome. Visual Paths of the Eternal City), held in the rooms of Palazzo Poli. Curated by Tatjana Bartsch, Rita Bernini, and Giorgio Marini, with the collaboration of Julia Cosima Hagge and Eleonora Magli, the exhibition is the result of an intense scientific collaboration project with the Kupferstichkabinett of the Berlin State Museums and the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History. The project, supported by the Ministry of Culture, is part of initiatives dedicated to the international promotion of Italian heritage.

The international exhibition presents for the first time in Rome an extraordinary collection of works never exhibited before, offering the public a unique opportunity to understand the construction of the Eternal City's imagery between the 16th century and the contemporary era.

The exhibition focuses on a selection of approximately thirty recently restored drawings by Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574), from the Kupferstichkabinett of the Berlin State Museums. These extraordinary drawings, presented for the first time in Italy, where they were created, convey the artist's intense gaze on the city. During his stay in Rome, between 1532 and 1536, the Flemish artist drew ruins, ancient monuments, cityscapes, and classical sculptures, building a veritable visual archive of the Eternal City. The exhibition thus celebrates the historic centre of Rome, a UNESCO World Heritage site, through the unique testimony of this little-known artist, who captured, with a keen eye and modern sensibility, the ruins of Rome in his drawings, which rank among the first modern examples of systematic representation of the city.

Alongside them, more than sixty works from the Institute's collections - drawings, prints, matrices, and photographs - and a selection of sculptures generously loaned by the Capitoline Museums reconstruct Van Heemskerck's visual journeys, offering the public a broad and nuanced interpretation of sixteenth-century Rome.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Italy and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Italy.

Photo: official poster of the exhibition