The Lived Present

What most clearly distinguishes these artists (most of them Dutch) who gathered in Rome between 1600 and 1650 is their capacity to depict the picturesque life of the city’s lower quarters: seasonal street vendors, workers in kilns where ancient marble was burned into lime, draught animals, and players of morra. These bambochades were led by Pieter van Laer (1599–1642), known as Il Bamboccio, and the artists associated with this current were called the Bamboccianti.

If collectors of the period were no doubt drawn to such scenes in part for their moralising undertones, the works themselves tend less to judge than to observe. They do not document reality in a strict sense. They present popular life without caricature, with a sensuous attention to light and atmosphere.

Prints made directly from life in Rome were probably rare. Once back in the Dutch Republic, Breenbergh reworked his sketches into etchings, producing around 1640 his Seventeen Views of Rome. Jan Both probably did the same, after the death of his brother Andries in Venice, on their way back to Utrecht. As for Thomas Wijck, it cannot be firmly established that he travelled to Rome; yet his etchings display the same acute attention to urban detail as those of artists who certainly did.

Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) moved within this same milieu: he lived in the same neighbourhood as Breenbergh (1598–1657). Together they explored the Roman campagna, sketching trees, rocks, hills, reflections in the Tiber, and the waterfalls of Tivoli. Yet the outcome is fundamentally different: whereas Claude constructs a subtle relation between space, light, and time, suspending the scene within an idealised temporality, the Bamboccianti remain anchored in the present. They animate the ancient city through labour, poverty, and movement: ruins are not inert monuments of transience; they are inhabited—alive because they are lived in.