Views of Rome by Steven Brooke - 2000

New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2000. Following the generations of view painters who recorded Rome for their time, Steven Brooke's collection of seductive and timeless images provides an extraordinary documentation of Rome in the late twentieth-century. He 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 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. His elegant monochromes bear witness to an enchantment with the past. The most memorable Roman views have always sprung from an intoxication of the senses. Brooke's work is cooly analytical, yet infused with wonder. Inspired by the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Dutch and Italian vedutisti, Steven Brooke emulates rather than… Read More