Views of Rome

Steven Brooke believes in the myth of Rome. The intensity of his gaze and the poetry of his visual expression are unusual among artists who have worked in the Eternal City. The two hundred photographs that comprise his Views of Rome transcend the experience of any particular moment. Like the Rome of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the eighteenth-century printmaker, Brooke's Rome is ultimately a Rome of the imagination. Inspired by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and Italian vedutisti, Steven Brooke emulates rather than imitates his artistic predecessors. His goal is to acknowledge the vedute tradition while reshaping and extending it to accommodate the qualities of the photographer's art. Views of Rome is a unique guide to the most significant sites of ancient, Christian, and modern Roman architecture. Steven Brooke produced the work - the first collection of its kind in over one hundred years - during his tenure as a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in the early 1990s. For this book he has written detailed captions that provide the history, location, and, often, directions to each site.