(6) – 1970- St. Peter’s and the Vatican- Greatest of Churches, Greatest of Palaces – Rome, Italy

With its commercialization in the early 1850s, the stereoscope or stereo viewer with its photographic cards optically enhanced the goal of the perspectival vedute, that of presenting the city in three dimensions. In the decades that followed, up to its apogee of popularity around 1900, the stereoscope brought a vast virtual library of images into households of modest income in the United States and Europe, many of whom could never travel to the destinations depicted. This view’s title, for instance, is listed on the card in English, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian. Underwood & Underwood was one of the most successful of the American studios producing stereo views; their pairing of the views with accompanying descriptive booklets and even maps indicating the “viewshed” for each card allowed viewers to take virtual tours of the sights depicted. This represents a nineteenth-century updating of the approach of vedutisti like Giuseppe Vasi, who accompanied his views with substantial description and historical background, keyed to points on a map of Rome produced by fellow engraver Giovanni Battista Nolli, and repeated in small format in a guidebook of walking itineraries. This particular card was part of a set initially issued by Underwood in 1902, entitled Rome Through the Stereoscope, with an accompanying text by Daniel James Ellison. Part of Ellison’s text is printed on the back of the card. In addition to conveying interesting facts about the view, including a comparison of the height of St. Peter’s dome to the great pyramid of Cheops, Ellison waxes rhapsodic about Bernini’s colonnade: “To me, those rows of gigantic pillars have always seemed like giant soldiers, marching and countermarching on that grandest of parade grounds, the Piazza of St. Peter’s.” However, Ellison omits any mention of the woman seen prominently in the frame hanging out laundry; she was apparently taken unawares by Ellison and his associates when they puffed up to the roof to gain this view.

(Andrew C. Weislogel, “Mirror of the City: The Printed View in Italy and Beyond, 1450–1940,” catalogue accompanying an exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, curated by Andrew C. Weislogel and Stuart M. Blumin, and presented at the Johnson Museum August 11–December 23, 2012)