Gaspar van Wittel and the visual model of Rome by the Tiber

Since his arrival in Rome in 1675, the Dutch painter Gaspar van Wittel had been developing an innovative operational methodology broadly based on a massive use of a camera ottica: it allowed him to compose pictures considered innovative both for their form and content. As a matter of fact, van Wittel is considered the pioneer of the veduta and one of the first artists in Rome to orient his gaze to the Tiber and the river landscape. The hydraulic engineer Cornelis Meyer had introduced him to the river territory as well as to cartographic issues; and certainly his Dutch origins had given van Wittel a special sensitiveness toward the water landscape but the fact that at least 75 of his paintings focus on the Tiber, from at least sixteen different points of view, is also depending on the optical features of his camera. Van Wittel’s interest in unusual subjects and the river in particular, is strictly linked to his use of the camera ottica and the quantity of space it required to reduce post-production work. The Tiber offered both an unedited scenic device and a precious void in the heart of Rome. Similar technical reasons often suggested van Wittel to relegate architectures to the sides of his compositions, as lateral screens useful to frame the landscape. His paintings indirectly favoured an innovative sensitiveness toward the city as an organism as well as the river environment and certainly their wide rectangular format contributed to shift people’s taste from the still point of view of traditional central perspective to the kinematic perception of the panoramic vedute but their visual model was followed and replicated well beyond the contingent causes that produced it, like an image extracted from a picture.