Art and the Campagna

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.

When Sternfeld pictures Tivoli, he tells us that it is still a vacation spot, still a summer retreat. One has a sense of the beauty of the surrounding hills, although now the ancient town is only barely visible on a distant hill. The towers, villas, and baths of the ancient world, and "the grottos, the deep weird chasms, the numerous beautiful cascades" that one nineteenth-century painter described at Tivoli, have been replaced in kind by a modern pleasure palace, the Acqua Piper water park. At Frascati, another ancient town, and one long known for its panoramic views over the Campagna and for its late-sixteenth-century villas, including the Villa Torlonia, where John Singer Sargent painted (and which was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944), and the magnificent, still-surviving Villa Aldobrandini, Sternfeld again avoids the traditional sights. Here he turns instead to modern-day joggers whose innate elegance and beauty, whose very body language and facial expression set them apart; Sternfeld examines them, stares at them, wondering if they are indeed true Romans, possible descendants of Virgil and Augustus, of Agrippina and Livia.

What most interests Sternfeld, however, are not the historic towns in the hills of the Campagna, but rather life in the broad, flat plain itself. Sternfeld's photographs are unflinching pictures of the place as it looks today. They portray the countryside and its people, its buildings old and new, its flowers and its garbage, its cars and parking lots. His work makes frequent reference to the ruins of Rome, the same subjects that Claude and Poussin depicted in the seventeenth century, that Piranesi etched a hundred years later, that Thomas Cole and his American colleagues painted during the nineteenth century. Sternfeld juxtaposes the ruins of a powerful, ancient civilization with the new construction and the debris of our own time. Avoiding obvious contrasts, eschewing heavy-handed irony, this contemporary artist draws our attention to both despoliation and lasting beauty; he suggests many reasons for despair, yet he also has something to say about the nobility of the human spirit. If there is, in the end, a pervasive, deeply felt sadness about his work, then the same can be said about that of most of his artistic predecessors in the Campagna.

The paintings of the classical tradition, by Claude and Poussin, present idealized, mythical views of the Campagna; Sternfeld's pictures are much concerned with the here and now. In this, they are closer to the works of seventeenth-century Dutch painters in Rome than to the works of the French masters. A number of Sternfeld's works depict today's Romans going about their daily business—taking a walk, sitting in the sun, pausing after jogging—ignorant of the grandeur of the ancient ruins around them. In their realism and their irony, these photographs recall the paintings of several artists from Holland who visited Rome during the seventeenth century. One of the earliest such was Cornelis van Poelenburgh, who lived in the Eternal City from 1617 to 1627, and whose works actually prepared the way for those of Claude Lorrain. Poelenburgh's Roman Landscape with a Relief of Marcus Aurelius depicts real ruins—though relocated by the painter—rather than imaginary ones, among which live ordinary citizens; two men argue in the foreground, unaware of their surroundings, while a crone does her wash in a Roman fountain, oblivious of the noble emperor making a sacrifice in the relief above her head. Similarly, a countryman of Poelenburgh in the following generation, Jan Baptist Weenix, became well known for his realistic genre scenes set in the Campagna. In one of these, Italian Peasants and Ruins, Weenix pictures life going on as usual for a bare-breasted mother, who has just finished feeding her son and is about to dress him, while two dogs drink from a stream next to them and an anomalous group picnics in the background—all ignorant of the classical ruins nearby.

The Roman aqueducts, which figure prominently in a number of Sternfeld's photographs, were not a subject of great interest to either Poussin or Claude, although they can be seen in the distance in several of the latter's paintings. Again, northern Europeans provide closer parallels with Sternfeld: several Dutch painters of the mid-seventeenth century, for instance Jan Asselijn and Claes Berchem, depicted the aqueducts close up, marching across the Campagna. During the following century, one finds them increasingly used in paintings and prints, symbolizing ancient Rome and its demise. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the unquestioned master of the architectural veduta, between 1748 and his death thirty years later, made 135 large-scale etchings for his extraordinary book Vedute di Roma. Piranesi's prints celebrate (and often exaggerate) the scale and beauty of urban Rome, depicting ancient and Baroque architecture, the ruined as well as the intact. Late in the series he turns to the Aqueduct of Nero (figure 4), which he shows in a right-to-left composition not unlike that in Sternfeld's photograph of the Claudian Aqueduct (plate 14).

Nonetheless, it was not until the nineteenth century that the plain of the Campagna, and especially the aqueducts that course dramatically across it, became a popular subject for both artists and writers. The aqueducts were painted by a variety of German, Danish, French (Corot, among others), English (including Turner), and even Hungarian artists in Rome, but they took on special meaning and importance for visiting Americans. Washington Irving, who arrived in Rome in 1805 and was thus the earliest American writer of importance to visit, reported that he and his companions in their carriage leaving the city "rode for some distance along the silent deserted Campagna—formerly so celebrated, now a barren unwholesome waste—this seeming neglect owing to the unhealthiness of the air, particularly in summer." By the time James Fenimore Cooper got to Rome in 1829, it was acceptable for an adventurous traveler like him to take long rides through the Campagna on horseback, seeking out the tombs, the aqueducts, and other ruins; he compared the countryside to "a prairie of the Far West." Herman Melville speaks of "Rome's accursed Campagna," and Bayard Taylor, another midcentury writer, wrote that "the country is one of the most wretched that can be imagined." Yet the Campagnawas also deeply alluring, precisely because of the dramatic contrast between its former glories and its present sickly state. A nineteenth-century visitor who sought the ancient world in Rome itself somehow had to ignore the fact that most of Rome had been built since the Baroque period, and the antique could be found only in scattered fragments. But travelers in the Campagna could easily conjure up the past: here there was no Baroque, no modern, only the quiet, majestic ruins standing in the empty landscape.

Thomas Cole in 1832 became the first American to paint the aqueducts. In his picture of that year entitled Aqueduct near Rome (Washington University, St. Louis), Cole—the leading American landscapist of his day—depicts an aqueduct stretching south toward the Alban Hills, anchored at the left by the tall, square medieval Tor Fiscale (Sternfeld shows us just the base of this tower, which today serves as a residence). A decade later, Cole painted a second, even more romantic, view of the aqueduct (figure 5), portraying it at dawn; now the desolate countryside is seen as rich and green, the distant mountains are bathed in the pink light of early morning, and the viewer wonders for a moment whether he is witnessing evidence of Roman decline or the hope of rebirth. In the Campagna one loses sense of time; even today, with suburban construction closing in, you can lose yourself in the quiet, inherent drama of the place; you can easily think yourself a citizen of Cole's time, or Claude's, or Caesar's.

Like Claude and Poussin, Cole imagined that the Campagna was once Arcadia, a place of gods and goddesses, of minstrels and shepherds. He found the shepherds and their flocks, at least, still intact, unchanged for millennia; and Sternfeld in turn discovers a modern shepherd, with the same white sheepdog guarding its flock on the very fields near the ruins of the aqueduct that Cole had painted. A rusted wreck of an automobile intrudes, jarring the eye, straining credibility; it is luminous and somehow beautiful, while deeply discouraging at the same time. The ancient Romans built eleven main aqueducts to supply water to their city, beginning with the Aqua Appia in 312 B.C.; these artificial streams traveled aboveground and below, crisscrossing and intermingling with one another, as they followed more or less parallel routes between the Via Appia Nuova and the Via Tuscolana on their way eastward to fresh water in the hills. The best preserved and most picturesque of the aqueducts is the Aqua Claudia, built by the Emperor Claudius in A.D. 47; this is the one painted by Cole, and it is the one Sternfeld found by lucky happenstance and photographed in March 1989 (plate 14). This aqueduct stood virtually intact until about 1585, when Pope Sixtus V had the new Aqua Felice built largely from its stones. With his own agenda (and not yet knowing about Cole's pictures of the scene), Sternfeld photographed the same section of arches while looking not toward the hills but back toward urban Rome; a sunset brings eerie life to a dark field, its warm light defining the rugged construction of the standing arches. In the distance, at the center, stands an intruder, purposefully included—a newly built suburban apartment building. Even more ominous is the photographer's view of the same aqueduct in winter (plate 18); seen close up, the lonely arches take on the appearance of dinosaurs, and in Sternfeld's central panel one sees the tracks and signals of the railroad that has cut directly through the ancient construction since 1890.

Many nineteenth-century Americans followed Cole in painting the aqueducts or other ancient ruins such as the Tor de’ Chiavi (Tower of the Slaves), which Sternfeld also discovered (plate 38), but others saw the area more as fertile prairie, as Cooper had described it. John Gadsby Chapman, a painter and illustrator who worked in Rome off and on from 1828 to 1884, depicted life in the Campagna in numerous compositions that make use of exaggerated, horizontal formats much like Sternfeld’s. Chapman's Harvesters’ Mass on the Roman Campagna (figure 6) depicts the same wheat threshers who appear in many of his pictures; here they gather to celebrate a mass in the fields where they work. Rather than take what would have been an all-day excursion on foot to a church in Rome and back, they make use of a tiny, portable, horse-drawn chapel with an altar and a priest inside. (Sternfeld includes in his work evidence of the rituals and symbols of the Catholic Church; see plates 3, 6, 23, 26.) In Chapman’s painting one sees the old walls of Rome on the horizon, with the city’s two greatest churches visible in the distance, the massive St. John Lateran on the left, the dome of St. Peter’s on the right. We observe here a phenomenon described by many nineteenth-century visitors—how Rome had not yet grown beyond its ancient walls, and how the delineation between city and countryside was abrupt: one simply stepped through any of the old city gates to find oneself in the Campagna.

Joel Sternfeld is neither the first champion of the Campagna nor its first photographer. The Reverend Calvert R. Jones, an Englishman and a cousin of the photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot, made fine calotype images of Rome in 1845–1846. He was followed by Dr. Robert MacPherson, a Scot and a connoisseur of paintings, who took up photography in 1851. By 1863, according to the contemporary historian Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, MacPherson was offering for sale in his catalogue a number of views of the countryside near Rome, all precisely titled, including The Roman Campagna near the Frascati Railway, View of the Campagna, Four Miles from the Lateran Gate on the Naples Road, and the famous oval composition View of the Aqueduct Aqua Claudia. During the same period, the three Alinaribrothers founded their famous photographic firm in Florence. They documented art, architecture, and the Italian landscape, and made a number of views of the Campagna and the Claudian Aqueduct; their view of the Via Appia Nuovashows the same arches that Cole had painted, and that Sternfeld would later photograph.

The greatest student of the Campagna in modern times was Thomas Ashby, an archaeologist who was Director of the British School at Rome from 1906 to 1925. His early articles deal systematically and thoroughly with the Campagna—its history, topography, and ancient structures. Ashby’s book The Roman Campagna in Classical Times (1927) studies the area in detail from the vantage point of each of the ancient roads that radiate from Rome. However, Ashby’s great monument is his magisterial study Aqueducts of Ancient Rome (1935), in which he painstakingly follows, describes, and maps every known inch of each of the classic aqueducts. Ashby was also a competent photographer, who concentrated on the Campagna; his works in this medium (many of which were exhibited at the British School in 1986) provide an excellent record of the area during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Finally, mention should be made of Esther Van Deman, the first American woman archaeologist in Rome; she was a professional collaborator of Ashby’s and, like him, used photography in her research. Van Deman pushed her photography further than Ashby did his, and in the years between 1901 and 1914 she created a remarkable body of work, in which she brought originality and insight both to her views of the aqueducts and other landscape subjects and to her portraits of colleagues and the people of the Campagna.

Sternfeld thus works in a noble tradition. He records the same scene that Claude and Poussin, Piranesi and Corotdepicted. Like his American predecessor Thomas Cole, Sternfeld finds Italy very different from the United States; comparing Sternfeld’s work in his American Prospects (1987) with the images in this book is much like comparing Cole’s views of Rome with his views of the Catskills. Both the nineteenth-century painter and the contemporary photographer see our national landscape as wilderness; and both see our problem as lying in what we do with an unspoiled land. In Italy the same two opposing factors exist—the natural landscape and the pressure of urban and suburban industrial civilizations—but there a third, often dominant, ingredient is added: the ever-present memory of the human past. The Campagna is a palimpsest of civilizations; when you walk there, you see ancient remains—and when you don’t see them, you still feel their presence. The Roman ruins, especially the aqueducts, take on various guises: it is difficult to regard them simply as man-made when they have such a special aura, when they sometimes appear natural to the landscape, seemingly even older than the mountains, or when at other times they come alive like ancient skeletons, or the creations of giants. Always they make us think of the greatness of Rome, of its decline and fall—and about our own civilization, such as it is.

A keen observer of the Campagna, J. B. Ward-Perkins, observed in 1970: “The mile after mile of empty, rolling countryside, the romantic desolation are gone. New roads and suburbs, speculative development, the spread of light industry, the agricultural reforms of the fifties, all these have added their quota of destruction.” Ward-Perkins concluded, optimistically, that “nothing can really destroy the setting of all this.” Today, seeing Sternfeld’s photographs, one might reach a different conclusion, as the destruction of the area intensifies. We can only hope that Joel Sternfeld is not the last in a long and glorious tradition of artists in the Campagna.