Pieter van Bloemen Antwerp 1657 - 1720

This is an immensely rare, perhaps unique, surviving example of an entire album of drawings of Rome and its surrounding countryside, made by one of the better known artists from the Netherlands who worked in Rome towards the end of the 17th century.  Although it was undoubtedly rebound during the 18th century, probably in France, the album gives every impression of being complete and in its original sequence (the three different sequences of numberings that have been applied to the drawings are uninterrupted).  In itself a remarkable object of beauty, this previously undocumented album is also an extraordinary record of the sort of compendia of visual images that many Northern artists in Rome must have assembled, to use as the basis for background motifs in their paintings, perhaps long after they had returned to their native lands.

It is highly unusual for such an album to have escaped the fate of dismemberment long ago suffered by most objects of this type, date and quality.  Although many drawings by Northern artists in Italy may once have been contained in similar volumes, they are now preserved individually, or in a few cases in small groups, such as the series of eight sketchbook pages by Asselijn, very similar in spirit to the present drawings, which remain together in the British Museum (see A.C. Steland, Die Zeichnungen des Jan Asselijn, Fridingen 1989, cat. no. 104 a-h).  In the present case the album has probably survived intact because no fewer than 22 of the 255 individual drawings extend across an entire double-page spread, meaning that if the album were to be taken apart, many of the finest and most elaborate drawings in the volume would be destroyed.  By this fortunate eccentricity in the way that he used his album sheets, Van Bloemen inadvertently ensured the survival of the album that he clearly worked so hard to assemble. 

Although the large, double-page drawings, some of which are astonishingly free and poetic in composition, are certainly the highlights of the volume, it also contains drawings of very varied types and sizes.  In some cases, Van Bloemen made as many as three separate studies on a single side of a sheet, and these smaller studies are often very rapidly drawn in black chalk and lightly washed in grey.  The larger drawings are for the most part freely drawn with the brush in a rich range of greys, with strong highlights very skilfully created using only the paper tone.  In about 15 drawings, however, the artist used white heightening for the highlights, and these sheets he prepared with a light ochre wash before starting the drawing.  

In terms of subject matter, the drawings are also rather varied, and intriguingly intimate.  The album does, of course, include classic vistas across the Eternal City and studies of most of the famous monuments, but these are heavily outnumbered by less overtly topographical studies.  These are clearly not drawings made as a picture-book record of the major monuments of Rome, but rather a much more intimate record of more down-to-earth corners of the city and its buildings.  The Coliseum, for example, does appear - in fact in no fewer than 17 of the drawings - but almost all of those show close-up details of the magnificent ruins, rather than the more formulaic, overall views favoured by many of the earlier Dutch and Flemish artists working in Italy.  Almost all the drawings in the album are identified in one way or another in ink inscriptions in an early Dutch hand, very probably that of the artist himself.  Yet only in 95 of the 255 drawings do these inscriptions name the locations or monuments depicted;  in most of the others, the inscription simply says "in Rome", "outside Rome", "ancient stones in Rome" etc.  In addition to views within the city, a substantial number of the drawings are rather general views in the Roman Campagna, and a number record details of antique stones, fragments of ruins and sculptures.  Some contain a few rather insignificant figures, but human beings do not play much of a part in this album:  apart from the few very indistinct chalk figure studies on the three prepared pages at the front of the album, the only drawing entirely devoted to a living creature is a single, small study of a donkey.

The balance of subjects depicted in these 255 drawings is very revealing of the taste of Van Bloemen and his contemporaries, for whom the atmosphere and romance of the medieval buildings that nestled under the crumbling walls of Rome, and the small churches and fountains found in the countryside outside the city itself, were of just as much interest as the great monuments of antiquity.  These were themes and interests that were also explored by earlier generations of visitors such as Jan Asselijn, but are in sharp contrast to the more theatrical and topographical style, and interest in the Roman Baroque, that characterises the art of Vanvitelli and his successors.  (For a representative selection of the identified views in the album, see the list below.)

Pieter van Bloemen, together with his brothers Norbert and Jan Frans (called Orizzonte), formed part of the third major wave of artists from the Netherlands who lived and worked in Italy.  Van Bloemen trained in his native Antwerp with the battle painter Simon van Douw, after which he set out for Italy, travelling by way of Lyon and arriving there in 1685.  His younger brother Jan Frans, who had been working in Paris, joined him there, and together they joined the Schildersbent, the famous - sometimes infamous - fraternity of Dutch and Flemish artists working in Rome.  Each member of the Bent was given a nickname, and Pieter van Bloemen was dubbed Standaart, probably in recognition of his training as a battle painter.  Military and other equestrian subjects did continue to form a significant part of Van Bloemen's artistic output, but in Italy he also expanded his range to include more varied landscape and genre subjects.  He did not, however, venture much into pure landscape, and the type of motifs seen in these drawings fit perfectly with what we see in the backgrounds of many of his paintings.  

The emergence, still intact, of this remarkable album represents a major advance in our attempts to understand and document the working practice of an artist such as Van Bloemen, and indeed the whole way that Northern artists viewed and approached the city and landscape of Rome at the end of the 17th century.   

Selected list of identified locations (with drawing numbers)

Arch of Constantine (32, 102)
Arch of Titus (164)
Aventine Hill (156, 192)
Baths of Diocletian (79, 108)
Campidoglio (47, 191, 229, 247)
Campo Vaticano (42, 51, 52, 70, 101, 157, 194)
Coliseum (29, 34-39, 43, 49, 92, 126, 174, 177, 179, 190, 233, 236)
Palace of Nero (221)
Palatine Hill (193)
Ponte Lamentano (222)
Ponte Pinsirano (223)
Porta del Popolo (25)
Porta Latina (17, 30, 143, 165)
Porta Maggiore (140)
Porta Salare (66, 96)
Porta S. Paolo (160, 161)
Porta S. Sebastiano (118, 214)
S. Agnese (94, 146, 156)
S. Bibiena (141)
Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme (196, 218, 227)
S. Francisca Romana (42)
S. Giovanni e Paolo (91, 93, 95, 235, 245)
S. Giovanni in Laterano (149, 204)
S. Gregorio (238)
S. Lorenzo (230)
S. Luca (52)
S. Maria Maggiore (159, 243)
S. Sebastiano (197)
S. Stefano Rotondo (75)
Temple of Bacchus (138)
Temple of Janus (175, 224)
Temple of the Sun (87, 100)
Temple of the Tiburtian Sibyl (162)
Temple of Venus (50, 154)
Tomb of Sestius (8, 27)
Trophies of Marius (220)
Vatican (158)