1665
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Eighteen Views of Rome: The Campidoglio is a 1665 by Lievin Cruyl, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a bird’s-eye view of Rome’s Campidoglio square, with Michelangelo’s grand steps and twin palaces framing a statue in the center. Cruyl drew this in 1665, one year before it was turned into an etching. The angle is odd—you’re looking down from above, as if floating over the city. Michelangelo had flipped the square’s direction decades earlier, turning its back on the old Roman Forum to face St. Peter’s instead. For more views like this, look up *etchings*.
Flemish artist Lieven Cruyl made a number of drawings of emblematic vistas of Rome for the Roman publisher Giovanni Battista de Rossi, of which ten were published as etchings in 1666. The Campidoglio features architecture designed by Michelangelo. The Campidoglio was an important ritual space atop the Capitoline Hill overlooking the Roman Forum. Michelangelo reoriented the piazza to look away from the forum and toward Saint Peter’s Basilica, creating a link between the civic buildings on the piazza and the home of the Catholic Church. He had the piazza paved in a trapezoidal shape and placed…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Lievin Cruyl or Lieven Cruyl was a Flemish priest and a draughtsman and etcher of landscapes, seascapes, and architectural views.
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