On the Quirinal Hill

Frontespizio di Nerone

Cat. No. 27 Maarten van Heemskerck Frontespizio di Nerone (or Templum Serapidis) in the Giardino Colonna, with Crater from S. Cecilia in Trastevere in Foreground

Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 79D2 36r 135 × 210 mm. Water Mark: none Notes: Black chalk traces around the Crater’s right handle, right side, left handle, and bottom left side.

Literature: Hülsen and Egger, vol. 1, 20–21.

The famous, often reproduced Crater from the courtyard of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere appears in the extreme foreground.1 It is one of two craters Van Heemskerck is known to have drawn while in Rome.2 In the pictorial reality Van Heemskerck has created here, the ancient Roman Frontespizio di Nerone (also known as the Templum Serapidis, Aedes Serapidis, or Templum Solis) on the Quirinal Hill sits “behind” the crater. Van Heemskerck has placed a figure before

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004380820_017 On the Quirinal Hill 341 the altar, perhaps as a means of revealing its scale. If the figure here is in true scale with the monument, then Van Heemskerck has sug- gested that the sculpture on the frieze was life size. A site of frequent archeological and pictorial scrutiny in the sixteenth century, the altar had become part of the Palazzo Colonna in Van Heemskerck’s time.3 As with some other drawings, Van Heemskerck has here made two objects share pictorial space – he has created the appearance that they are in physical proximity to one another – by blending the foreground line with the middle ground and the background object. However, the objects he has juxtaposed were never in the same part of Rome, let alone in this particular physical relation to one another. Scholars have not noted that Van Heemskerck has perhaps also invented the placement of the vaulted grotto and its attached wall, both of which appear beneath Nero’s altar, oddly constructed for pictorial purposes. A view of the site by ‘Anonymous A’ / Herman- nus Posthumus, also from a comparable vantage point, shows more of the altar’s uphill approach, but no grotto where Van Heemskerck shows one.4 Rather, he shows an arched entrance with voussoirs fur- ther down the approach. An ink wash drawing of the altar by Dosio also shows no place for a grotto and resembles ‘Anonymous A’ / Post- humus’s drawing more closely than this one by Van Heemskerck.5 Van Heemskerck did not draw the buttresses that are visible in ei- ther the “Posthumus” or Dosio view.6 Another drawing by Giovan Antonio Dosio of substructures on the Palatine shows a grotto some- what like the one Van Heemskerck has drawn here, leaving open the possibility that it is a second fictive juxtaposition within the same drawing.7 That these objects appear in the same scale with their parts aligned to one another suggests this drawing as a study of perspec- tive, proportion, scale, and design; the base of the crater corresponds with the ground line beneath the temple, the curves of the crater’s bottom half respond to the arches of the vaulted grotto beneath the temple, the crater’s bottom half ends at the same height as a small wall in front of the temple, and its shaft extends to the same height as the temple’s main wall. The crater’s scrolled handles and the tem- ple’s cornice are also at the same latitude. Van Heemskerck made use of this sheet in a print design. “Job on the Dunghill with his Wife and Three Friends” [fig. 6.7] contains a backdrop with a temple that is clearly based on the Templum as it appears in this sketch.8 He has changed the angle of the grotto. The half-pediment is not reversed in the print.