Cecilia Powell has identified this drawing as a view of the Vicolo Sterrata, a rustic looking street which once ran behind the gardens of the Palazzo Barberini and is today the via Barberini. In his book Walks in Rome, Augustus J.C. Hare recalled this celebrated picturesque corner of the city:
Till late years, there was a pretty old-fashioned garden belonging to this [Barberini] palace, at one corner of which – overhanging an old statue – stood the celebrated Barberini Pine, often drawn by artists from the Via Sterrata at the back of the garden, where statue and pine combined well with the Church of S. Caio; but, alas! this magnificent tree was cut down in 1872, and the church has since been destroyed.
1As Hare notes, the motif of the large stone pine and the adjacent statue of the Apollo Citerado (i.e. playing the cithara) offered an attractive proposition for artists and the spot was painted by a number of nineteenth-century painters including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), Ettore Roesler Franz (1845–1907),
2 and the Danish artist Constantin Hansen (1804–1880).
3 The statue can still be found within the grounds of the palace but now stands in a niche at the back of the gardens. The bell-tower in the background belongs to San Caio, a church which was demolished in 1880 to make way for the building of the Ministry of War.
4The location was also the subject of a poem by the American writer and social activist, Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910). A verse entitled ‘Via Felice’ contains the stanzas:
’Twas in the Via Felice
My friend his dwelling made,
The Roman Via Felice
Half sunshine, half in shade.
A marble God stands near it
That once deserved a shrine,
And, veteran of the old world,
The Barberini pine.
5A further sketch of the statue can be found in the
Vatican Fragments sketchbook (see Tate
D15245; Turner Bequest CLXXX 49).
