Faces of Rome : A small but fascinating exhibit at the Getty center uses materials from 1450-1800 to examine transformations of the Eternal City

Afew cities have always existed as much in the mind as in mundane reality. The idea of them is as palpable as their stones and structures. People on the outside long for them as if they were distant lovers. Such cities are symbols--usually of goodness or power, but sometimes of wickedness and excess. However mean and tawdry their actual streets, such cities are irresistible sirens who sing their songs to all the gifted, hungry souls who believe there has to be something better than Dubuque.

Jerusalem is one such city, Hollywood another. And so, of course, is Rome. As Laurence Olivier, playing the most knowing of Romans, observes in the movie “Spartacus”: “Rome is not a city. Rome is an eternal thought in the mind of God.”

Rome, the place and the idea, is the subject of a small but fascinating exhibit now at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica.

Called “Inventing Rome: Interpretations of an Urban Landscape,” the show uses maps, guidebooks and other materials dating from 1450 to 1800 to document the different Romes that have often existed simultaneously, including the Christian capital city and the Rome of the imagination.

Organized by the Getty’s Kevin Salatino, the exhibit is especially successful at documenting Rome’s most important transformation--its reinvention by the Popes and artists of the Renaissance.

“Rome languished for more than a thousand years after the fall of the ancient empire,” Salatino points out. “It approached the stature of its ancient self only with the return of the popes in the 15th Century and their consolidation of papal power. In the period covered by this exhibition, Rome was actually thought to be better than in the classical period because it was Christian.”

Before the 15th-Century reign of Pope Nicholas V, it was not clear that Rome would win the imaginative struggle that eventually made it the leading city of Christendom.

Although no other city in Europe had a past as magnificent as Rome’s, other cities were far more successful in temporal terms. In the mid-1400s Rome was smaller than Florence and a real backwater. As Salatino reminds us, brigands and even wolves prowled its filthy medieval streets. In the century before Nicholas V, even the Popes lived much of the time in the French city of Avignon.

But Nicholas V was the first of a series of humanist Popes blessed with what is probably best characterized as chutzpah who saw the glory that could again be Rome. He had a grand plan for creating a Christian Rome inside the ancient wall that would outshine even its imperial ancestor.

In this reinvented Rome, new Christian monuments would be created by the greatest artists of the age, and the Pantheon and other surviving glories would be restored and transformed by being dedicated to the one, true God.

Nicholas and his successors even had a plan for paying for this city, which would be nothing less than a temporal reflection of God’s celestial glory. Pilgrims from all over the world would flock to Rome to visit its churches to win indulgences, promises of release from the pain of Purgatory accumulated in the course of a sinful life. And the pilgrims would bring their money with them.

According to Salatino, Nicholas V set into motion the process of revitalizing Rome that reached its apogee in such papal-commissioned treasures as Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican itself.

Because so many early saints had been martyred in Rome, including Peter (the first Pope) and Paul (the enormously influential apostle to the Gentiles), there was a natural bridge between ancient Rome and the New Jerusalem that the Popes envisioned.

Such important ancient relics as the Colosseum had real resonance for Christians as well as the theatricality and scale that the new monument builders aspired to. Had it not been invented by the ancient Romans, Hollywood would have had to dream up something like the Colosseum, where so many martyrs went to their deaths while the audience roared its approval--a cast of thousands of Christians, thousands of lions.

During the Dark Ages, the church had thought of the pagan world as damned and damnable, but the Renaissance church found a way to accommodate the past.

A section of the show is devoted entirely to the obelisks that were so salient a feature of ancient Rome and that also became an important part of Rome reborn. As Salatino explains, the obelisks, originally plundered from Egypt, were literally exorcised of their supposed demons and turned into symbols of the church’s power. The process began with Pope Sixtus V in the late 16th Century.

“Sixtus arrogated their potency, divesting them of pagan connotations and investing them with Christian significance,” Salatino says. “He placed them, capped with crosses, at the service of the new religion: revived ancient witnesses of the martyrs’ ultimate victory.”

The 40 or so objects in the show represent a tiny fraction of the Getty’s holdings relating to Rome, Salatino says. But they give revealing glimpses of how the idea of Rome was refined and disseminated throughout a world where images such as engravings were rare and powerful things.

One engraving, for instance, shows Rome as it appeared to the pious in the 16th Century. It shows nothing of the city but the Tiber River, the ancient wall and Rome’s seven principal churches--all of Rome that really mattered to the devout.

Many of the maps and views of Rome in the show were made by people who had never been there. Such maps and schematic drawings wouldn’t help much if you were actually trying to get from St. Peter’s to the Isola Tiberina (the ship-shaped river island that appears in document after document). But these maps and views are extremely useful as evidence of what their makers thought about this most imagined of cities.

Giambattista Piranesi, the great 18th-Century engraver, shows ancient tombs along the Via Appia, not as they ever were, but as they might have been. “Piranesi stretches the truth in order to stretch the imagination,” Salatino says. And Piranesi did fire imaginations. One result of his compelling reinvention of Rome was that artificial ruins, called follies, began to appear on the grounds of mansions all over Europe. Even today simulated bits and pieces of Rome are back-yard favorites.

In the view of Thomas F. Reese, acting director of the Getty Center, the show is as much about politics as about art. “This exhibit doesn’t simply celebrate beautiful images of Rome. It shows how radically different representations of a city were constructed at different points in time by people with distinct cultural and political agendas.”

“Inventing Rome” continues in the 7th Floor Gallery at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 401 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, through April 24. Exhibition hours are 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays. Admission free. Metered parking on 4th Street, directly across from the center. Salatino will conduct a tour of the show from 3 to 4 p.m. Saturday. Reservations required. Call (310) 458-9811, Ext. 4177.