An extensive view of Rome with the Ponte Rotto, seen from the Aventine (recto); Studies after antique wall decorations (verso)

The young Florentine artist Giovanni Battista Naldini, a student of Jacopo Pontormo, undertook his first visit to the Eternal City between September 1560 and May 1561. In a sketchbook of which some sixty drawings are still known, dispersed over several collections (all but five public) and studied by Christel Thiem (op. cit.), he recorded a great variety of landscapes, cityscapes, antiquities and contemporary works of art that offer a precious insight into what a visitor to Rome in those years could experience.

Among the most beautiful drawings from the sketchbook is the present double-sided sheet, that once belonged to the celebrated collection of Dominique Vivant Denon, as well as the very good collection of the lesser-known Jean-Marc (known as John) Du Pan. On the recto, Naldini offers one of his most evocative panoramas of Rome, at the centre of which he placed the late antique bridge that would soon acquire the nickname of Ponte Rotto, after it had succumbed to a flood of the Tiber a few years before Naldini’s sojourn, in 1557. Taken from the Aventine hill, the view also includes at right the round Temple of Hercules Victor (at the time kown as the Temple of Vesta), and, in the left background, the Castel Sant’Angelo. The strong contours of the structure of the landscape, which could almost bring to mind Cézanne, is also found in some of the other views in the sketchbook, including a view of Pisa at the Victoria and Albert Museum (inv. 3436:65; see Thiem, op. cit., no. 1, ill.), which Naldini made on his way from Florence to Rome and which may suggest that the view of the Landolt sheet was made early during his stay.

Entirely different in character are the delicate and accurate renderings of antique painted ‘grotesques’ on the verso, which, as the artist notes in the inscription, ‘are at the Palazzo Maggiore […] in a grotto with paintings’. By ‘Palazzo Maggiore’ Naldini refers to the palatial complex on the Palatine Hill, the decorated rooms of which were still accessible in Naldini’s time. Although the extant sheets from the sketchbook attest to Naldini’s interest in antique sculpture, no other sheets with studies after antique painted decorations survive. He did, however, study several modern interpretations of antique grotesques (Thiem, op. cit., nos. 38, 39, 41, 46, ill.). His interest in these paintings may reflect the influence of Naldini’s companion in Rome, the artist Marco Marchetti, who specialized in such decorations.