This exhibition opens with a lecture, 'The most glorious place in the universal world': Rome in the Age of the Grand Tour, by John Pinto, Howard Crosby Butler Memorial Professor of Art and Archaeology, at Princeton University. 

 

The exhibition, which opens January 22 through May 26, explores the multiplicity of views of Rome that appear in prints produced from the 16th to the 18th century. Artists such as Giovanni Battista Piranesi captured the shifting balance between ancient and modern that defined the Eternal City as it went through three centuries of extensive changes. The transformation culminated in the redesigned early modern city so magnificently rendered by Giambattista Nolli in his 1748 map of Rome, also on view. The prints in this show examine a wide range of themes including burgeoning popular antiquarianism, the monumental construction projects sponsored by various popes, and the influence that the Grand Tourists who flocked to Italy from across the globe had on the art market.