Rome
Rome is the capital city and a special comune of Italy. Rome serves as the capital of the Lazio region. With 2,872,800 residents in 1,285 km2, it is the country's most populated comune, it is the fourth most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. It is the centre of the Metropolitan City of Rome, which has a population of 4,355,725 residents, thus making it the most populous metropolitan city in Italy. Rome is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, within Lazio, along the shores of the Tiber; the Vatican City is an independent country inside the city boundaries of Rome, the only existing example of a country within a city: for this reason Rome has been defined as capital of two states. Rome's history spans 28 centuries. While Roman mythology dates the founding of Rome at around 753 BC, the site has been inhabited for much longer, making it one of the oldest continuously occupied sites in Europe; the city's early population originated from a mix of Latins and Sabines.
The city successively became the capital of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, is regarded by some as the first metropolis. It was first called The Eternal City by the Roman poet Tibullus in the 1st century BC, the expression was taken up by Ovid and Livy. Rome is called the "Caput Mundi". After the fall of the Western Empire, which marked the beginning of the Middle Ages, Rome fell under the political control of the Papacy, in the 8th century it became the capital of the Papal States, which lasted until 1870. Beginning with the Renaissance all the popes since Nicholas V pursued over four hundred years a coherent architectural and urban programme aimed at making the city the artistic and cultural centre of the world. In this way, Rome became first one of the major centres of the Italian Renaissance, the birthplace of both the Baroque style and Neoclassicism. Famous artists, painters and architects made Rome the centre of their activity, creating masterpieces throughout the city.
In 1871, Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, which, in 1946, became the Italian Republic. Rome has the status of a global city. In 2016, Rome ranked as the 14th-most-visited city in the world, 3rd most visited in the European Union, the most popular tourist attraction in Italy, its historic centre is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. The famous Vatican Museums are among the world's most visited museums while the Colosseum was the most popular tourist attraction in world with 7.4 million visitors in 2018. Host city for the 1960 Summer Olympics, Rome is the seat of several specialized agencies of the United Nations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agricultural Development; the city hosts the Secretariat of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean as well as the headquarters of many international business companies such as Eni, Enel, TIM, Leonardo S.p. A. and national and international banks such as Unicredit and BNL.
Its business district, called EUR, is the base of many companies involved in the oil industry, the pharmaceutical industry, financial services. Rome is an important fashion and design centre thanks to renowned international brands centered in the city. Rome's Cinecittà Studios have been the set of many Academy Award–winning movies. According to the founding myth of the city by the Ancient Romans themselves, the long-held tradition of the origin of the name Roma is believed to have come from the city's founder and first king, Romulus. However, it is a possibility that the name Romulus was derived from Rome itself; as early as the 4th century, there have been alternative theories proposed on the origin of the name Roma. Several hypotheses have been advanced focusing on its linguistic roots which however remain uncertain: from Rumon or Rumen, archaic name of the Tiber, which in turn has the same root as the Greek verb ῥέω and the Latin verb ruo, which both mean "flow". There is archaeological evidence of human occupation of the Rome area from 14,000 years ago, but the dense layer of much younger debris obscures Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites.
Evidence of stone tools and stone weapons attest to about 10,000 years of human presence. Several excavations support the view that Rome grew from pastoral settlements on the Palatine Hill built above the area of the future Roman Forum. Between the end of the bronze age and the beginning of the Iron age, each hill between the sea and the Capitol was topped by a village. However, none of them had yet an urban quality. Nowadays, there is a wide consensus that the city developed through the aggregation of several villages around the largest one, placed above the Palatine; this aggregation was facilitated by the increase of agricultural productivity above the subsistence level, which allowed the establishment of secondary and tertiary activities. These in turn boosted the development of trade with the Greek colonies of southern Italy; these developments, which according to archaeological ev
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period. Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop and, despite his death at 37, leaving a large body of work. Many of his works are found in the Vatican Palace, where the frescoed Raphael Rooms were the central, the largest, work of his career; the best known work is The School of Athens in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura. After his early years in Rome, much of his work was executed by his workshop from his drawings, with considerable loss of quality, he was influential in his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was known from his collaborative printmaking. After his death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo was more widespread until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael's more serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models.
His career falls into three phases and three styles, first described by Giorgio Vasari: his early years in Umbria a period of about four years absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last hectic and triumphant twelve years in Rome, working for two Popes and their close associates. Raphael was born in the small but artistically significant central Italian city of Urbino in the Marche region, where his father Giovanni Santi was court painter to the Duke; the reputation of the court had been established by Federico da Montefeltro, a successful condottiere, created Duke of Urbino by Pope Sixtus IV – Urbino formed part of the Papal States – and who died the year before Raphael was born. The emphasis of Federico's court was rather more literary than artistic, but Giovanni Santi was a poet of sorts as well as a painter, had written a rhymed chronicle of the life of Federico, both wrote the texts and produced the decor for masque-like court entertainments, his poem to Federico shows him as keen to show awareness of the most advanced North Italian painters, Early Netherlandish artists as well.
In the small court of Urbino he was more integrated into the central circle of the ruling family than most court painters. Federico was succeeded by his son Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who married Elisabetta Gonzaga, daughter of the ruler of Mantua, the most brilliant of the smaller Italian courts for both music and the visual arts. Under them, the court continued as a centre for literary culture. Growing up in the circle of this small court gave Raphael the excellent manners and social skills stressed by Vasari. Court life in Urbino at just after this period was to become set as the model of the virtues of the Italian humanist court through Baldassare Castiglione's depiction of it in his classic work The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528. Castiglione moved to Urbino in 1504, when Raphael was no longer based there but visited, they became good friends, he became close to other regular visitors to the court: Pietro Bibbiena and Pietro Bembo, both cardinals, were becoming well known as writers, would be in Rome during Raphael's period there.
Raphael mixed in the highest circles throughout his life, one of the factors that tended to give a misleading impression of effortlessness to his career. He did not receive a full humanistic education however, his mother Màgia died in 1491 when Raphael was eight, followed on August 1, 1494 by his father, who had remarried. Raphael was thus orphaned at eleven, he continued to live with his stepmother when not staying as an apprentice with a master. He had shown talent, according to Vasari, who says that Raphael had been "a great help to his father". A self-portrait drawing from his teenage years shows his precocity, his father's workshop continued and together with his stepmother, Raphael evidently played a part in managing it from a early age. In Urbino, he came into contact with the works of Paolo Uccello the court painter, Luca Signorelli, who until 1498 was based in nearby Città di Castello. According to Vasari, his father placed him in the workshop of the Umbrian master Pietro Perugino as an apprentice "despite the tears of his mother".
The evidence of an apprenticeship comes only from Vasari and another source, has been disputed—eight was early for an apprenticeship to begin. An alternative theory is that he received at least some training from Timoteo Viti, who acted as court painter in Urbino from 1495. Most modern historians agree that Raphael at least worked as an assistant to Perugino from around 1500. Vasari wrote that it was impossible to distinguish between their hands at this period, but many modern art historians claim to do better and detect his hand in specific areas of works by Perugino or his workshop. Apart from stylistic closeness, their techniques are similar as well, for example having paint applied thickly, using an oil varnish medium, in shadows and darker garments, but thinly on flesh areas. An excess of resin in the varnish causes cracking of areas of paint in the works of both masters; the Perugino workshop w
Vatican Museums
The Vatican Museums are Christian and art museums located within the city boundaries of the Vatican City. They display works from the immense collection amassed by popes throughout the centuries including several of the most renowned Roman sculptures and most important masterpieces of Renaissance art in the world; the museums contain 70,000 works, of which 20,000 are on display, employ 640 people who work in 40 different administrative and restoration departments. Pope Julius II founded the museums in the early 16th century; the Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling decorated by Michelangelo and the Stanze di Raffaello decorated by Raphael, are on the visitor route through the Vatican Museums. In 2017, they were visited by 6 million people, which combined makes it the 4th most visited art museum in the world, it is one of the largest museums in the world. There are 54 galleries, or sale, in total, with the Sistine Chapel, being the last sala within the Museum; the Vatican Museums trace their origin to one marble sculpture, purchased in the 16th century: Laocoön and His Sons was discovered on 14 January 1506, in a vineyard near the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.
Pope Julius II sent Giuliano da Sangallo and Michelangelo Buonarroti, who were working at the Vatican, to examine the discovery. On their recommendation, the pope purchased the sculpture from the vineyard owner; the pope put the sculpture, which depicts the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons being attacked by giant serpents, on public display at the Vatican one month after its discovery. Benedict XIV founded the Museum Christianum, some of the Vatican collections formed the Lateran Museum, which Pius IX founded by decree in 1854; the Museums celebrated their 500th anniversary in October 2006 by permanently opening the excavations of a Vatican Hill necropolis to the public. On 1 January 2017, Barbara Jatta became the Director of the Vatican Museums, replacing Antonio Paolucci, director since 2007; the art gallery was housed in the Borgia Apartment until Pope Pius XI ordered construction of a proper building. The new building, designed by Luca Beltrami, was inaugurated on 27 October 1932; the museum's paintings include: Giotto's Stefaneschi Triptych Olivuccio di Ciccarello, Opere di Misericordia Raphael's Madonna of Foligno, Oddi Altarpiece and Transfiguration Leonardo da Vinci's St. Jerome in the Wilderness Caravaggio's Entombment Perugino's Madonna and Child with Saints and San Francesco al Prato Resurrection Filippo Lippi's Marsuppini Coronation Jan Matejko's Sobieski at Vienna The Collection of Modern Religious Art was added in 1973 and houses paintings and sculptures from artists like Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso.
The group of museums includes several sculpture museums surrounding the Cortile del Belvedere. These are the Gregoriano Profano Museum, with classical sculpture, others as below: The museum takes its name from two popes. Clement XIV came up with the idea of creating a new museum in Innocent VIII's Belvedere Palace and started the refurbishment work. Pope Clement XIV founded the Pio-Clementino museum in 1771, it contained the Renaissance and antique works; the museum and collection were enlarged by Clement's successor Pius VI. Today, the museum houses works of Roman sculpture; some notable galleries are: Greek Cross Gallery:: with the porphyri sarcophagi of Constance and Saint Helen and mother of Constantine the Great. Sala Rotonda: shaped like a miniature Pantheon, the room has impressive ancient mosaics on the floors, ancient statues lining the perimeter, including a gilded bronze statue of Hercules. Gallery of the Statues: as its name implies, holds various important statues, including Sleeping Ariadne and the bust of Menander.
It contains the Barberini Candelabra. Gallery of the Busts: Many ancient busts are displayed. Cabinet of the Masks: The name comes from the mosaic on the floor of the gallery, found in Villa Adriana, which shows ancient theater masks. Statues are displayed along the walls, including the Three Graces. Sala delle Muse: Houses the statue group of Apollo and the nine muses, uncovered in a Roman villa near Tivoli in 1774, as well as statues by important ancient Greek or Roman sculptors; the centerpiece is the Belvedere Torso, revered by other Renaissance men. Sala degli Animali: So named because of the many ancient statues of animals; this museum was founded in the early 19th century by Pope Pius VII, whose surname before his election as pope was Chiaramonti. The museum consists of a large arched gallery in which are exhibited several statues and friezes; the New Wing, Braccio Nuovo, built by Raffaele Stern, houses statues including the Augustus of Prima Porta, the Doryphoros, The River Nile. The Galeria Lapidaria forms part of the Museo Chiaramonti, contains over 3,000 stone tablets and inscriptions.
It is accessible only with special permission for the purpose of academic study. Founded by Pope Gregory XVI in 1836, this museum has eight galleries and houses important Etruscan pieces, coming from archaeological excavations; the pieces include: vases, sarcophagus and the Guglielmi Collection. This museum houses a large collection of artifacts from Ancient Egypt; such material includes papyruses, the Grassi Collection, animal mummies, reproductions of the Book of the Dead. The Museo Gregoriano Egiziano was inaugurated on 2 February 1839 to commemorate the anniversary of Gr
Palazzo Barberini
The Palazzo Barberini is a 17th-century palace in Rome, facing the Piazza Barberini in Rione Trevi. Today it houses the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, the main national collection of older paintings in Rome; the sloping site had been occupied by a garden-vineyard of the Sforza family, in which a palazzetto had been built in 1549. The sloping site passed from one cardinal to another during the sixteenth century, with no project getting off the ground; when Cardinal Alessandro Sforza met financial hardships, the still semi-urban site was purchased in 1625 by Maffeo Barberini, of the Barberini family, who became Pope Urban VIII. Three great architects worked to create the Palazzo, each contributing his own style and character to the building. Carlo Maderno at work extending the nave of St Peter's, was commissioned to enclose the Villa Sforza within a vast Renaissance block along the lines of Palazzo Farnese. Maderno began in 1627, assisted by his nephew Francesco Borromini; when Maderno died in 1629, Borromini was passed over and the commission was awarded to Bernini, a young prodigy better known as a sculptor.
Borromini stayed on regardless and the two architects worked together, albeit on this project and at the Palazzo Spada. Works were completed by Bernini in 1633. After the Wars of Castro and the death of Urban VIII, the palace was confiscated by Pamphili Pope Innocent X and was only returned to the Barberini in 1653; the palazzo is disposed around a forecourt centered on Bernini's grand two-storey hall backed by an oval salone, with an extended wing dominating the piazza, which lies on a lower level. At the rear, a long wing protected the garden from the piazza below, above which it rose from a rusticated basement, battered like a military bastion; the main block presents three tiers of great arch-headed windows, like glazed arcades, a formula, more Venetian than Roman. On the uppermost floor, Borromini's windows are set in a false perspective that suggests extra depth, a feature, copied into the 20th century. Flanking the hall, two sets of stairs lead to the piano nobile, a large squared staircase by Bernini to the left and a smaller oval staircase by Borromini to the right.
As well as Borromini's false-perspective windows reveals, other influential aspects of Palazzo Barberini that were repeated throughout Europe include the unit of a central two-storey hall backed by an oval salone and the symmetrical wings that extended forward from the main block to create a cour d'honneur. The garden is known for its concealment from an outsider's view, it houses a monument to Bertel Thorwaldsen, who had a studio in the nearby Teatro delle Quattro Fontane in 1822-1834. The salon ceiling is graced by Pietro da Cortona's masterpiece, the Baroque fresco of the Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power; this vast panegyric allegory became influential in guiding decoration for palatial and church ceilings. In the palace is a masterpiece by Andrea Sacchi, a contemporary critic of the Cortona style, Divine Wisdom; the rooms of the piano nobile have frescoed ceilings by other seventeenth-century artists like Giuseppe Passeri and Andrea Camassei, plus, in the museum collection, precious detached frescoes by Polidoro da Caravaggio and his lover Maturino da Firenze.
Today, Palazzo Barberini houses the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, one of the most important painting collections in Italy. It includes Raphael's portrait La fornarina, Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes and a Hans Holbein portrait of Henry VIII; the palace houses the Italian Institute of Numismatics. The European Convention on Human Rights, which created the European Court of Human Rights, was signed here on 4 November 1950, a milestone in the protection of human rights. Hidden in the cellars of the rear part of the building, a Mithraeum was found during the construction work of Villa Savorgnan di Brazzà in 1936, dating from the second century AD. Blunt, Anthony, "The Palazzo Barberini", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21. Palazzo Barberini: official site Rome Art-Lover: Palazzo Barberini Palazzo Barberini and Veneto Rome guide Italian army ends museum stand-off, BBC News, Friday, 13 October 2006 Google Maps; the complex constituting the Palazzo Barberini is in the center, set back from the road on all sides, askew.
On the lower side of the image are the start of the Quirinal Palace gardens. Below, in the first corner on the right, is the San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane. Diagonally opposite and above is the triangular Piazza Barberini with the Triton Fountain; the National Gallery of Ancient Art at Barberini Palace
Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca named Piero di Benedetto, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. To contemporaries he was known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art, his painting is characterized by its use of geometric forms and perspective. His most famous work is the cycle of frescoes The History of the True Cross in the church of San Francesco in the Tuscan town of Arezzo. Piero was born Piero di Benedetto in the town of Borgo Santo Sepolcro, modern-day Tuscany, to Benedetto de' Franceschi, a tradesman, Romana di Perino da Monterchi, members of the Florentine and Tuscan Franceschi noble family, his father died before his birth, he was called Piero della Francesca after his mother, who supported his education in mathematics and art. He was most apprenticed to the local painter Antonio di Giovanni d'Anghiari, because in documents about payments it is noted that he was working with Antonio in 1432 and May 1438, he took notice of the work of some of the Sienese artists active in San Sepolcro during his youth.
In 1439 Piero received, together with Domenico Veneziano, payments for his work on frescoes for the church of Sant'Egidio in Florence, now lost. In Florence he must have met leading masters like Fra Angelico, Luca della Robbia and Brunelleschi; the classicism of Masaccio's frescoes and his majestic figures in the Santa Maria del Carmine were for him an important source of inspiration. Dating of Piero's undocumented work is difficult because his style does not seem to have developed over the years. Piero was elected to the City Council of Sansepolcro. Three years he received his first commission, to paint the Madonna della Misericordia altarpiece for the church of the Misericordia in Sansepolcro, completed in the early 1460s. In 1449 he executed several frescoes in the Castello Estense and the church of Sant'Andrea of Ferrara, now lost, his influence was strong in the Ferrarese allegorical works of Cosimo Tura. The Baptism of Christ, now in the National Gallery in London, was completed in about 1450 for the high altar of the church of the Priory of S.
Giovanni Battista at Sansepolcro. Other notable works are the frescoes of The Resurrection in Sansepolcro, the Madonna del parto in Monterchi, near Sansepolcro. Two years he was in Rimini, working for the condottiero Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. In 1451, during that sojourn, he executed the famous fresco of St. Sigismund and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta in the Tempio Malatestiano, as well as a portrait of Sigismondo. In Rimini, Piero may have met the famous Renaissance mathematician and architect Leon Battista Alberti, who had redesigned the Tempio Malatestiano, although it is known that Alberti directed the execution of his designs for the church by correspondence with his building supervisor. Thereafter Piero was active in Ancona and Bologna. In 1454, he signed a contract for the Polyptych of Saint Augustine in the church of Sant'Agostino in Sansepolcro; the central panel of this polyptych is lost, the four panels of the wings, with representations of saints, are now scattered around the world.
A few years summoned by Pope Nicholas V, he moved to Rome, where he executed frescoes in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, of which only fragments remain. Two years he was again in the Papal capital, painting frescoes in the Vatican Palace, which have since been destroyed. In 1452, Piero della Francesca was called to Arezzo to replace Bicci di Lorenzo in painting the frescoes of the basilica of San Francesco; the work was finished in 1464. The History of the True Cross cycle of frescoes is considered among his masterworks and those of Renaissance painting in general; the story in these frescoes derives from legendary medieval sources as to how timber relics of the True Cross came to be found. These stories were collected in the Golden Legend of Jacopo da Varazze of the mid-13th century. At some point, Giovanni Santi invited Piero to Urbino. Between 1469 and 1486 Piero worked in the service of Count Federico III da Montefeltro; the Flagellation is considered Piero's oldest work in Urbino. It is one of the most controversial pictures of the early Renaissance.
As discussed in its own entry, it is marked by an air of geometric sobriety, in addition to presenting a perplexing enigma as to the nature of the three men standing at the foreground. Another famous work painted in Urbino is the Double Portrait of Federico and his wife Battista Sforza, in the Uffizi; the portraits in profile take their inspiration from large bronze medals and stucco roundels with the official portraits of Fedederico and his wife. Other paintings made in Urbino are the monumental Montefeltro Altarpiece in the Brera Gallery in Milan and also the Madonna of Senigallia. In Urbino Piero met the painters Melozzo da Forlì, Fra Carnevale and the Flemish Justus van Gent, the mathematician Fra Luca Pacioli, the architect Francesco di Giorgio Martini and also Leon Battista Alberti. In his years, painters such as Perugino and Luca Signorelli visited his workshop, he completed the treatise On Perspective in painting in the mid-1470s to 1480s. By 1480, his vision began to deteriorate, but he continued writing treatises such as Short Book on the Five Regular Solids in 1485.
It is documented that Piero rented a house in Rimini in 1482. Piero made his will in 1487 and he died five years on 12 October 1492, in his own house in San Sepolcro, he left his possessions to the church. He
National Roman Museum
The National Roman Museum is a museum, with several branches in separate buildings throughout the city of Rome, Italy. It shows exhibits from the pre- and early history of Rome, with a focus on archaeological findings from the period of Ancient Rome. Founded in 1889 and inaugurated in 1890, the museum's first aim was to collect and exhibit archaeologic materials unearthed during the excavations after the union of Rome with the Kingdom of Italy; the initial core of its collection originated from the Museo Kircheriano, archaeologic works assembled by the antiquarian and Jesuit priest, Athanasius Kircher, housed within the Jesuit complex of Sant'Ignazio. The collection was appropriated after the suppression of the Society of Jesus. Renamed as the Royal Museum, the collection was intended to be moved to a Museo Tiberino, never completed. In 1901 the Italian state granted the National Roman Museum the acquired Collection Ludovisi as well as the important national collection of Ancient Sculpture. Findings during the urban renewal of the late 19th century added to the collections.
In 1913, a ministerial decree sanctioned the division of the collection of the Museo Kircheriano among all the different museums, established over the last decades, such as the National Roman Museum, the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia and the Museum of Castel Sant'Angelo. Its seat was established in the charterhouse designed and realised in the 16th century by Michelangelo within the Baths of Diocletian, which houses the epigraphic and the protohistoric sections of the modern museum, while the main collection of ancient art was moved to the nearby Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, acquired by the Italian state in 1981; the reconversion of the area of the ancient bath/charterhouse into an exhibition space began on the occasion of the International Exhibition of Art of 1911. The palace was built on the site once occupied by the Villa Montalto-Peretti, named after Pope Sixtus V, born Francesco Peretti; the present building was commissioned by Prince Massimiliano Massimo, so as to give a seat to the Jesuit Collegio Romano within the convent of the church of Sant'Ignazio.
In 1871, the Collegio had been ousted from the convent by the government which converted it into the Liceo Visconti, the first public secular high school of Italy. Erected between 1883 and 1887 by the architect Camillo Pistrucci in a neo-cinquecentesco style, it was one of the most prestigious schools of Rome until 1960. During World War II, it was used as a military hospital, but it returned to scholastic functions until the 1960s, when the school was moved to a newer seat in the EUR quarter. In 1981, lying in a state of neglect, the Italian government acquired it for 19 billion lire and granted it to the National Roman Museum, its restoration and adaptation began in 1983 and was completed in 1998. The palazzo became the main seat of the museum as well as the headquarters of the Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Roma; the museum houses the ancient art as well as the numismatic collection, housed in the Medagliere, i.e. the coin cabinet. The ground floor features the notable bronze statues of the Boxer at the Athlete.
One room is devoted to the mummy, found in 1964 on the Via Cassia, inside a richly decorated sarcophagus with several artefacts in amber and pieces of jewellery on display. Sculptures of the period between the late Roman Republic and the early imperial period, include Tivoli General Tiber Apollo Via Labicana Augustus Aphrodite of Menophantos Hermes Ludovisi from Anzio Torlonia Vase Sleeping Hermaphroditus Dionysus Sardanapalus Portonaccio sarcophagus Frescoes and mosaics, including those from the villa of Livia, wife of Augustus, at Prima Porta on the Via Flaminia, it begins with the summer triclinium of Livia's Villa ad Gallinas Albas. The frescoes, discovered in 1863 and dating back to the 1st century BC, show a luscious garden with ornamental plants and pomegranate trees; the Museum's numismatic collection is the largest in Italy. Among the coins on exhibit are Theodoric’s medallion, the four ducats of Pope Paul II with the navicella of St Peter, the silver piastre of the Pontifical State with views of the city of Rome.
The building was designed in the 15th century by Melozzo da Forlì for Girolamo Riario, a relation of Pope Sixtus IV. There is still a fresco on one wall of the rooms in the palazzo that celebrates the wedding of Girolamo to Caterina Sforza in 1477, showing the silver plates and other wedding gifts given to the couple; when the Riario family began to decline after the death of Pope Sixtus IV, the palazzo was sold to Cardinal Francesco Soderini of Volterra, who commissioned further refinements from the architects Sangallo the Elder and Baldassarre Peruzzi. When the Soderini family fell on hard times, he in turn sold it in 1568 to the Austrian-born cardinal Mark Sittich von Hohenems Altemps, the son of the sister of Pope Pius IV. Cardinal Altemps commissioned the architect Martino Longhi to improve the palazzo. Cardinal Altemps accumulated a large collection of ancient sculpture. Though his position as the second son in his family meant Marco Sittico Altemps became a cleric, he was not inclined to priesthood.
His mistress bore him a son, made Duke of Gallese. Roberto Altemps was executed for ad
Perspective (graphical)
Perspective in the graphic arts is an approximate representation on a flat surface, of an image as it is seen by the eye. The two most characteristic features of perspective are that objects appear smaller as their distance from the observer increases. Italian Renaissance painters and architects including Filippo Brunelleschi, Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca and Luca Pacioli studied linear perspective, wrote treatises on it, incorporated it into their artworks, thus contributing to the mathematics of art. Linear perspective always works by representing the light that passes from a scene through an imaginary rectangle, to the viewer's eye, as if a viewer were looking through a window and painting what is seen directly onto the windowpane. If viewed from the same spot as the windowpane was painted, the painted image would be identical to what was seen through the unpainted window; each painted object in the scene is thus a flat, scaled down version of the object on the other side of the window.
Because each portion of the painted object lies on the straight line from the viewer's eye to the equivalent portion of the real object it represents, the viewer sees no difference between the painted scene on the windowpane and the view of the real scene. All perspective drawings assume. Objects are scaled relative to that viewer. An object is not scaled evenly: a circle appears as an ellipse and a square can appear as a trapezoid; this distortion is referred to as foreshortening. Perspective drawings have a horizon line, implied; this line, directly opposite the viewer's eye, represents objects infinitely far away. They have shrunk, to the infinitesimal thickness of a line, it is analogous to the Earth's horizon. Any perspective representation of a scene that includes parallel lines has one or more vanishing points in a perspective drawing. A one-point perspective drawing means that the drawing has a single vanishing point directly opposite the viewer's eye and on the horizon line. All lines parallel with the viewer's line of sight recede to the horizon towards this vanishing point.
This is the standard "receding railroad tracks" phenomenon. A two-point drawing would have lines parallel to two different angles. Any number of vanishing points are possible in a drawing, one for each set of parallel lines that are at an angle relative to the plane of the drawing. Perspectives consisting of many parallel lines are observed most when drawing architecture; because it is rare to have a scene consisting of lines parallel to the three Cartesian axes, it is rare to see perspectives in practice with only one, two, or three vanishing points. The earliest art paintings and drawings sized many objects and characters hierarchically according to their spiritual or thematic importance, not their distance from the viewer, did not use foreshortening; the most important figures are shown as the highest in a composition from hieratic motives, leading to the so-called "vertical perspective", common in the art of Ancient Egypt, where a group of "nearer" figures are shown below the larger figure or figures.
The only method to indicate the relative position of elements in the composition was by overlapping, of which much use is made in works like the Parthenon Marbles. Chinese artists made use of oblique perspective from the first or second century until the 18th century, it is not certain. Oblique projection is seen in Japanese art, such as in the Ukiyo-e paintings of Torii Kiyonaga. In the 18th century, Chinese artists began to combine oblique perspective with regular diminution of size of people and objects with distance. Systematic attempts to evolve a system of perspective are considered to have begun around the fifth century BC in the art of ancient Greece, as part of a developing interest in illusionism allied to theatrical scenery; this was detailed within Aristotle's Poetics as skenographia: using flat panels on a stage to give the illusion of depth. The philosophers Anaxagoras and Democritus worked out geometric theories of perspective for use with skenographia. Alcibiades had paintings in his house designed using skenographia, so this art was not confined to the stage.
Euclid's Optics introduced a mathematical theory of perspective, but there is some debate over the extent to which Euclid's perspective coincides with the modern mathematical definition. Various paintings and drawings from the Middle Ages show amateur attempts at projections of objects, where parallel lines are represented in isometric projection, or by nonparallel ones without a vanishing point. By the periods of antiquity, artists those in less popular traditions, were well aware that distant objects could be shown smaller than those close at hand for increased realism, but whether this convention was used in a work depended on many factors; some of the paintings found in the ruins o
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Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). 
