Joel Sternfeld's photographs of the Roman Campagna take us to a sacred place. Now neglected, the countryside around Rome consists of an undulating lowland which extends from the sea to the semicircular hills about twenty miles to the north, east, and south of the Eternal City. This was ancient Latium, home of the shepherds who founded Rome in 753 B.C. According to Pliny, some twenty-three towns thrived in the Campagna in prehistoric times, but by the time of the Roman Republic, it had become polluted and malarial. Under the Emperor Augustus and his successors, construction of a system of draining and sanitation was undertaken, and numerous aqueducts were built to carry fresh water from springs in the Alban Hills into Rome itself. At the height of the Empire, the Campagna was again populated—now covered with the country houses and gardens of the wealthy ruling class; after the fall of the Empire, the malaria returned and devastated the area. Thus the Campagna that was "discovered" by painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was bleak, deserted, and unhealthy, though redolent with memories of a heroic past.
Just as much of the world, from Luxor to York, from eastern Turkey to the western shore of Spain, had been a province of Rome, so, since the Renaissance, has Rome belonged to the world. Beginning with Roger van der Weyden and Albrecht Dürer in the fifteenth century, northern artists, historians, and archaeologists have gone to Rome seeking the roots of her greatness, searching for antiquity. It was two French painters who lived in Rome during the seventeenth century, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, who established the tradition of classical landscape painting. Claude imagined that the Olympian gods had lived in the Campagna; when he came to paint Apollo and his lady friends the Muses relaxing at home with their music, he chose to depict them on a wooded hillside such as one finds at Frascati or Tivoli. At the top of the hill above the musical party, in his Apollo and the Muses on Mount Helicon, Claude has included a round temple with Corinthian columns, which he thought appropriate for the gods; like the landscape setting, it stems from what Claude observed during his walks in the Campagna; it is based on the famous Temple of Vesta, still extant at Tivoli, which dates from the late years of the Republic. Founded four centuries before Rome, this picturesque hillside town was a popular summer resort in the time of Horace, and was the site of the grandest vacation house ever built, the extraordinary villa that the Emperor Hadrian began in A.D. 126. Tivoli was also famous for its much-painted series of waterfalls, which attracted numerous artists between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
Like Claude, Poussin sketched in the Campagna, and he similarly located the great events of mythical antiquity there. In his Mars and Venus of about 1629 (figure 2), Poussin suggests a rich, convincing woodland landscape as the setting for a scene of love. Mars, god of war and a Roman favorite, has put down his sword and sheds his helmet and his shield with languorous ease under the seductive spell of Venus, who sits beside him surrounded by her assisting cupids. To the right, a bearded river god and his immodest nymph—a pair of experienced lovers indeed—look on.
The Campagna today is much changed, yet life continues there. The notion that it once provided a home for the gods seems far-fetched to modern observers, but lovers—now worldly and mundane—still find it a place of refuge. On the ancient Via Appia, which traverses the Campagna, leading from Rome to the cool volcanic lakes of Albano and Nemi in the hills, one now finds homely prostitutes aggressively flagging down customers. Joel Sternfeld, echoing Poussin, modestly pictures these contemporary Venuses plying their trade—far less comfortably than Poussin's heroine, it would seem—in their small automobiles, parked underneath the gigantic brickwork ruin of a Roman tomb.