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Hieronymus Cock's view of the Capitoline Hill, published in his 1562 series on Roman ruins, has long been considered a useful document by historians of art and architecture for the key historical and topographical information it contains on one of Rome's most celebrated sites during the Renaissance. Beyond its documentary nature, which, as will appear was essentially rhetorical, the view also offers much information as to how a mid-sixteenth-century Flemish artist might perceive Rome's illustrious topography and celebrated ancient statuary. In other words, Cock's engraving enables us to put into practice what may be called an "archaeology of the gaze." Through previously unnoticed details, Cock invents a comical—verging on the satirical—vision of the antique sculptures proudly displayed on the famous piazza. Such an ironical reversal of Italian classical dignity is typical of the attitude of some contemporary Flemish artists, such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who was then close to Cock, and exposes the ambivalent position of some Northern European artists towards the classical tradition and Italian art theory. Finally, the analysis of other engravings of ruins by Hieronymus Cock where two emblematic characters—the draftsman and the kakker (the one who defecates)—appear side by side, sheds light on the origin and possible significance of these comical and subversive details. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the conflict in the 16th Century between the principles of artistic production and critical judgment, mainly the tensions between the imitation of artistic models and the imitation of nature, the rationality of disegno and the naturalism of colorito, manifested during the polemic of Florentine and Venetian aesthetics. On the one side, this study highlights the aesthetical principles and the progressive model of art history directed by the dialectics of the decadence and Renaissance, formulated by Giorgio Vasari in his major work Vite de'più eccelenti Pittori, Scultori ed Architettori (1550/1568), which are commanding his critical judgments. On the other side, the study points out the original contribution of the Venetian critique, in particular of Lodovico Dolce's Dialogo della Pittura (1557), which consists not only in coding the practice of Venetian artists like Titian and asserting the primordial role of colorito, but also in a rhetorical foundation of painting different to that operated by Alberti in Florence a century before, and in formulating a "classical" alternative to the mannerist theory concerning the principles of the artistic creation and the relations between painting and nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]