The first is to develop techniques for making multimedia presentations which should work smoothly whatever the subject-matter, and which use the same mix of materials - still images, video clips, text, panoramas, clickable maps (and clickable panoramas), and sound (though not for me).
The second is because of a perceived need by the clients of the web for materials which are "complete" presentations rather than just text, or collections of images. That is, the relative statistics of my server (which receives up to one million hits a week) indicates the popularity of the web presentations developed by my students, which I imagine are being used for teaching purposes at various levels.
The third aim is to proselytise by developing high-quality work. If, indeed, the web is increasingly being used as a teaching and learning tool, then the materials presented should be authoritative, comprehensive, thought-provoking and perhaps multi-levelled (to address various age groups and types of audience). The web will not replace books for a while yet, and will never replace the huge "backlog" of printed books and especially archival materials created before the digital age and destined never to be digitized. Nevertheless, there is no reason why presentations of scholarly value should not appear on the web (and only on the web and its henchman, the CDROM - or downloadable thence to paper by users, in whole or in part); and every reason why the manifold advantages of the web over printed matter (reflected in the agitation of print-publishers to get into the game) should be well demonstrated. Proselytising can, of course, be done across the web, or on CDROM, since the techniques employed are identical. This author believes the advantages of the web over paper publication are manifest (to him) but must also be demonstrated, and hence has put his reputation where his mouth is since January 1994, when his server (http://rubens.anu.edu.au - called ArtServe) went live. The fact that it now attracts up to 1,000,000 million "hits" per week indicates that a growing number of people agree with him.
But I emphasise the importance of quality on the web, itself a welco9ming anarchic medium where quality often has to be filtered by authoritative listings from libraries or universities; and where, very soon, we might well see restricted channels with refereed materials of high quality, creating several classes of travel, so to speak. Piazza del Popolo is intended to be First Class, Air-Conditioned travel!
So what is the level of the Piazza del Popolo presentation? It is intended to be accurate, extensive, well referenced, multi-faceted, and thought-provoking. Although it contains many images and some video, it is far from a video game. It should interest people concerned with architecture, sculpture, Papal politics, town planning, garden planning, the survival of the antique - in short, with the development between the 15th and the 19th centuries of the first "display" area of Rome for those entering from Via Flaminia.
In an attempt to make the project of value to various types of audience, it is "layered":
In sum, this project attempts what the French call "haute vulgarisation" - copper-bottomed scholarship brought before a general or student audience.
The project is also multi-dimensional in that it does not restrict itself to Piazza del Popolo but, rather, uses th3e monuments found there as a disquisition on themes found in art and architecture elsewhere in Rome and, indeed, further afield. So that just as the visitor to Popolo cannot fully understand what is to be seen there without contexts in which to place the ideas and objects there found, so this presentation offersd hints at those other contexts, which will equip the visitor with a brief but accurate overview of several aspects of Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical art and architecture.
The broader context is that of the developing Renaissance, and of the ethos espoused by the papacy and the great Roman families which considered art and architecture worthy oif the expenditure of very large sums of money, usually in a praiseworth effort, inspired by that of pagan Rome, to achieve glory and remembrance.
Why is Piazza del Popolo particularly appropriate for such aq presentation? Several reasons are given below, but two overarching ones are the general reluctance of art historians (IKrautheimer is an exception) to deal with an area across the centuries - context through time, we might call it - and the startling dearth of material (here it is Panofsky who is an exception) on one of the characteristic art forms from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, namely the monumental tomb. This was a genre attacked by all great sculptors andf artist-designers from Donatello and Michelangelo, Raphael and Andrea Bregno, Algardi and Bernini to Canova and beyond. Yet we have no surveys of the genre other than Panofsky, who covers such an enormous period.
Great architectural schemes are developed by people with the funds, arrogance and vision to sweep away the old (or to build on it) in order to produce something original, ordered, witty, monumental - something which adds to the attraction of a city.It is a moot point whether any of the great schemes of the Roman Renaissance, Baroque or modern times - the new S. Peter's; the Via Giulia, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, the Piazza del Popolo - could have been conceived in today's atmosphere of antiquarian protectionism which preserves the past by castrating the potential of the present. The "ville-musee" or the sanitized archaeological site (dead, scrubbed, and systematised for the tourist) instead of the living city is the inevitable result.
The Piazza del Popolo and its adjacent monuments offer several interesting examples of attempts sometimes to eradicate the past, but more frequently to unite the past with contemporary ideas and forms, so that the result is a delicious amalgam of forms, ideas and references.This is the case with several of the chapels in SM del Popolo, where references to the antique are both important to the iconography, and insistant. When Raphael designed the Chigi Chapel, his interest in Roman antiquities informed that design; when Bernini finished the chapel, he extended several of Raphael's concepts.The church has a clean and tidy air because it is a complete 15th-century rebuild, which was then lightly baroqued by Bernini, adding to the sense of unity. What of the previous church? Little survives beyond the tomb slabs which populate the floor. Outside, what of Valadier's neoclassical designs for the Piazza? These are fascinating variations on the monumental "Prix de Rome" architectural designs hatched just up the road at Villa Medici, the seat of the Ecole Francaise de Rome; and their aim is not only to unite all the buildings around the Piazza (with stage-scenery-type facades where necessary), but also to link Piazza del Popolo visually to other adjacent parts of Rome, especially the Pincio and Villa Borghese where, as was well known, there had been important gardens in Antiquity.
The result, now seen in all its pristine glory after a vigorous recent cleaning campaign (and the exclusion of cars from 90% of the Piazza) offers an ensemble uniting SM del Popolo, the city gate and the flanking Aurelian Walls, and the Pincio, with an Egyptian obelisk balanced by Valadier's two fountains, and with Porta del Popolo framed by his neoclassical cladding for the barracks to the west and parts of SM del Popolo to the east, with the same scheme echoed in the palazzi flanking the southern parts of the square - that is, the roads leading into the centre of Rome.
No schemes to match Piazza del Popolo have been seen in Rome since the 1930s, when EUR, the Foro Italico, and the Via dei Fori Imperiali were built. But they are not dead, simply dormant. Indeed, the "Grands Prix" tradition of French architecture lives on in the "grands projets" in which French presidents have indulged, cardinal-like or pope-like, since the 1960s. I am writing these paragraphs in the Bibliotheque de France. No longer the Bibliotheque Nationale just in the centre of town (that section has been renamed Richelieu), the French have constructed a new library beside the Seine, and not too far from the Gare d'Austerlitz, at Tolbiac. This is the BdF (Bibliotheque de France) Francois Mitterand. Massive, multi-storeyed, with four glass towers like open books standing sentinel at the corners, the scale and aspirations of the project (if not the steel-glass-concrete style) would have been perfectly familiar to Boullee, who was designing gigantic libraries in the 1780s.
My point is that there is a direct line of influence from Boullee and the Grands Prix d'Architecture to Valadier, just as there is from the town planning ideas of ancient Rome, and their layout of funerary monuments, pleasure gardens and streets, to the artists and architects of the Renaissance. That this is the case is easily proved by taking a census of ideas and motifs in Sm del Popolo, and then trying to find them in - say - Renaissance churches elsewhere in Italy. True, several of the basic forms will surface (because of the importance of, for example, the ideas of Alberti or, later, of Palladio); but the designed impact is for people in Rome knowledgeadly willing to compare the work of modern artists with the antiquities to be seen all arround them - and, indeed, in much greater profusion in the 15th century than today. Raqphael's Chigi Chapel, with its pyramids, might reasonably have been expected to make a greated impact in the 16th century because of the clutter of ancient Roman funerary monuments just a few yards away outside the Porta del Popolo, on the Via Flaminia.