The work of Maarten van Heemskerck, the illustrator and painter of Rome during the Renaissance, is being shown in its entirety for the first time in Berlin.
The Dutch painter and draftsman Maarten van Heemskerck (1498 to 1574) is one of the most famous unknowns in art history. You can’t open a history of post-antique Rome, or even a book on the early modern period, without coming across one of his drawings. These sheets, intimate in format, filigree in execution, are so trustingly precise, they appear so timelessly contemporary, that history and archeology treat them like sources, almost like transparent media – transparent to a past reality that would be inaccessible without them. They show the Rome of the High Renaissance as an open-air garden in which ancient ruins, piles of medieval houses and half-finished modern giant projects – St. Peter’s Church – rise into a bright, wide sky. There are beautiful fragments along the way everywhere.