In a Latin letter of 1341 (Fam. 6.2, ed. Rossi, 2:58), Petrarch described himself standing with his mendicant friend Giovanni Colonna, of the powerful Roman baronial family, on the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, “fragments of the ruins under our very eyes,” as he, Petrarch, discoursed on the “ancient world,” Colonna on the “modern” (see Theodore E. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’” Speculum 17 [1942]: 226–42). Writing in the dark days of World War II, Mommsen saw Petrarch’s letter as the beginning of a Renaissance humanist (i.e., modern) historical view of the past, of historical periodization — rise, fall, rebirth; light, dark, light — based literally on the contemplation and cult of Roman ruins, of ruinated landscapes. Of course, in his supreme Eurocentric view, Petrarch famously proclaimed that “all history is the history of Rome,” just as Edward Gibbon later recounted in his autobiography that while he was sitting “amidst the ruins of the Capitol [on 15 Octotber 1764] as the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” Even in modern times, landscape cultural historian J. B. Jackson analyzed, in The Necessity for Ruins (1980), the “mythic reinvention of past,” of “origin” and “memory,” at Williamsburg, modern theme parks such as Disneyland, or memorials on the Washington Mall: all of which constituted our national memory landscape based on the English grand tour cult of ruins and picturesque garden landscapes. More recently, Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have spoken of the “bending of time,” “the shaping of time and place” (to paraphrase George Kubler’s Shape of Time), in their provocative and insightful Anachronic Renaissance (2010).

Denis Ribouillault specifically relates his study of the “power of landscape paintings and antique views” in Roman villas of the sixteenth century to these refoundational humanist and Christian traditions. Rightfully, Ribouillault points to how Roman studies of villas have focused on architecture and gardens, while relegating landscape painting, and specifically ruinated landscapes, to the background of these monumental Renaissance revivals or claimed evocations and possessions of ancient Rome. The view out the window was complemented — no, reframed and reshaped in space and time — by these ancient and modern narrative-landscape views, panoptic gazes upon “symbolic landscapes” in the tradition of Michel Foucault and modern geographer Denis Cosgrove, among others. There might be a more concerted stress on the Villa Belvedere of Pope Innocent VIII (r. 1484–92) in the development of these (now fragmentary) painted all’antica landscapes of “the most famous cities of Italy” by Mantegna and Pinturicchio, part of the revival of grotesque (i.e., grotto-like) decoration from the Domus Aurea of Emperor Nero, found during this period. These antique landscapes were part of a larger system of ancient-compartment wall and ceiling decorations, stucco and painted fantasies, of Italian and Flemish (Mattheus Bril et al.) inspiration, as they reimagined the Eternal City as classical and modern pilgrimage-spiritual-cultural center of the Counter-Reformation. Placing much-needed focus on Rome during the mid- and late sixteenth century, this ambitious study adds much new material and insight to the study of the city in the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation, as it examines the Vatican and Galleria delle Carte Geografiche, the Tower of the Winds and Loggie, the Villa d’Este in Tivoli (with its heroic, herculean landscape with Rometta and scenic Roman theater), the Villa Lante in Bagnaia and Farnese fortress of Caprarola, the baronial landscape of Orsini north and Colonna south, as well as mural and collection displays, Roman villas in relation to Renaissance scenic-axial urbanism, and early modern ties of landscape and city (“città e contado”) in the imagination as well as in economic and political relations: all anticipations of the classical landscapes of Claude and Poussin, which reimagine past and present, the founding city and its arcadian setting, and space, time, and power.