Veduta di Roma da mia Locanda in Monte Pinso presso la chiesa di St. Trinita dell Monte, is the title that Karl Friedrich Schinkel writes in the foot of a drawing that he made in Rome, between 1803 and 1804, during his first stay in Italy. It seems made for an engraving by the text that he writes after the title, following the classic models of the views of Rome; a listing numbered of references that give name to the most singular places represented in the image: “1. Villa Pamphili, 2. Fontana presso St. Pietro del Monte”, “14. Castello St. Angelo, 15. St. Pietro, 16. Il Vaticano, 17. St. Carlo al Corso“, “19. Mausoleo Augusto, 20. Piazza di Spagna“. Even for completing, the list leaves without text the references 3 to 13 and 18. The drawing is an image of the city of Rome, seen just above the covers of the houses, a point of view that little would say of the city if it was not because it allows to see the domes and the top of some of its singular buildings. It is recognized clearly, to the right, the church of San Carlo al Corso, with the dome of Pietro da Cortona, behind it the profile of the basilica of Saint Peter and, more to the left, the profile of  Castel Sant’Angelo; in a less evident way, down to the right, the plane of the Piazza di Spagna. It is an image that did not differ from the one that Bernini remembered of Rome during his stay in Paris: ‘Saint Peter is seen there in a place, the Campidoglio in another, Farnesio further on, Monte-Cavallo, the palace of Saint Marco, the Coliseum, the Chancellery, the palace of the Colonna and other numerous buildings disseminated here and there, that had greatness and an appearance exceedingly sumptuous and splendid (Fréart de Chantelou).

In the composition of Schinkel, relatively conventional, it stands out in the left side the extreme of a building, with a balcony in which they are three young women. One of them is of backs, observing the city. She do not sign of action, she seems to be paralyzed in front of the vision of Rome, which contemplates in silence, isolated from her two companions. This character shares our orientation and sees what we see. Situated of remembers some of the characteristic compositions of Caspar David Friedrich, with its characters paralyzed in front of the contemplation of the landscape, isolated and in silence; characters without action nor explicit contents that, for this reason, we finish identifying them with the landscape, with the author and with us: they are “the spiritual centre, the conscious element of landscape” (Beenken 1938, p. 175).
 

2. C.D.Friedrich, Paisaje al atardecer con dos hombres, c.1830-1835

In words of Rewald (2001, p. 30), ‘these characters transmit the Romantic sense of the yearging for what is unreachable’ or, in that of Schinkel (Wolzogen 1863), ‘a presentiment of infinity’ or of ‘that which cannot be presented’. As in the pictures of Friedrich, is the own Schinkel  the represented in this figure of backs, an self-representation that was not strange in the art history (already Rafael was included between  the characters of The School of Athens), but was less usual in the landscapes.
 

The others two women are sitting and neither show signs of action. In their taciturn attitude, they remember the image of the artist overwhelmed by the greatness of the ruins of Rome, which Johann Heinrich Fuseli painted after his stay in the city, and which has been interpreted as a symbolic self-portrait, in a sublime confrontation of the artist with the Classic past: the despair of the artist, that recognizes the disproportion between his smallness and the greatness of the antiquity, defeated in front of the magnitude of what surrounds him, which he is seen unable to cover and understand.

Possibly, those that summarize with accuracy the contents of the thought that Schinkel projects in this drawing are the words of Goethe: 'how one can, small as it is and likewise accustomed to the small, to try to be equate with these things, so noble, immense and civilized? And even if in a certain way that was possible, there is an infinite quantity of objects that surrounds to one, into which it is found to every step, and that claims the tribute of the attention. How to avoid that? There is not another exit that to leave, with patience, that everything acts on you go developing, while the works that others have done for our advantage are studied with application ' (Goethe 1816, p. 164).

Possibly Schinkel did not invent a new way to represent the city and not even this apparent originality is it in reality. Schinkel used well-known models in the Roman area for, in a subtle way, to represent the city and the feeling that it causes him. Not only it is the city what Schinkel draws, but the romantic vision that he has of it. If the artists of the Renaissance understood the perspective as the vision through the window, in which the painter "brings" the space that he sees to the other side towards the glass, Schinkel adds the projection of himself towards that glass. Two projections in opposite senses , melting on the same plane. If as it said Thomas Browne (1645, part 2, sec. 11), ‘the world that I regard is myself, it is the microcosm of my own frame that I cast mine eye on’, we are also the drawing that we do of it. The drawing always contains a projection of the draftsman and it would be interesting to analyze the ways in how this self-projection is produced, in how how the artist leaves traces that indicate that he was or had been there. This article tries to deepen thus into this drawing and into others that Schinkel and others draftsmen made with a similar result.

The reference of the three women in the balcony of the drawing and the text of the title are not only rhetorical resources. The title indicates the place from which really the drawing was made, a building of the east side of Via Sistina (before called Felice) in which Schinkel had his housing in Rome. In a letter that Schinkel writes from Rome, he said that 'I have found house among the works of art. From what is high of the mount Pincio my window dominates the western part of the city. Thousands of buildings finished off by domes and towers extend at my feet. It remains in the distance S. Pietro and the Vatican and, behind, plane, the  Gianicolo crowned by the pinewood of villa Pamphili. My door gives almost on the extraordinary stairs of the church of Santissima Trinità dei Monti, that drives from the summit up to the Piazza di Spagna that it is in the feet of the hill'. This is the image that Schinkel sees from his housing and the one that he reproduces in the drawing.
 

Schinkel did many drawings in his first stay in Rome, the majority urban views and landscapes, in which he tended to adopt high points of view (Szambien1989). In all of them he showed a scenographic perception of the space, which he said to have from his adolescence (Forster 1994, p.18); his drawings were not a representation of the space as this appeared, but a valuation of it, and made it introducing an action, a casual or unimportant fact, and a point of view that conditioned the understanding of the character or the image of an entire culture (Forster 1994, p.18-19).

Schinkel went to Italy attracted by the classic world, as so many German, English, French or Spanish artists did, and to Rome as the obligatory goal, essential of the Grand Tour, the centre and the reference of the classic cultural tradition. A trip that was the evocation of a myth that was experienced with the memory of the classic ones, of the Latin poets, of the legends and of the images that painters as Piranesi had given of the former Rome (Milani 2001, p.70). But the architecture did not interest Schinkel as much as the landscape did; a landscape that always contained architecture and an architecture that was always in a landscape, and never isolated; it was in the landscape where he discovered the 'atmosphere of the classicism' (Zoeggeler, en Riemann 1989, p. 29). The feeling for the landscape and the nature had reappeared, in the second half of the seicento, as an opposition to the mathematical logical spirit of the previous centuries and as a revolution of the senses and of the sight particularly. It was a knowledge to see that it affected the aesthetics, the understanding and the morality, which it led to a sort of interior contemplation. It was the nature seen as an aesthetic object, the landscape as the nature that was revealed aesthetically (Simmel 1985), a spectacle that claimed a sincere one and astounded participation of the observer. In this situation, the appeal of Rome also lived in its spectacular nature, in the particular light that gave to its monuments, in the mixture among the nature, that invaded the citizen spaces, and the ruins of a glorious history, in the contrast among the pastoral scenarios that opened out unexpectedly to the animated worldly nature of the streets (Billi 1997, p. 334).

The interest of Schinkel in the landscape had to lead to him to appreciate the work of the Dutch Gaspar van Wittel (1653-1736), resident in Rome since 1675, nationalized Italian, known as Gaspare Vanvitelli, precursor of the vedutismo of the settecento, of the genre that afterwards would develop Luca Carlevarijs, Giovanni Paolo Panini, Canaletto and Bernardo Bellotto (Briganti 1996), and point of reference for the artists of the Grand Tour. However, it is not clear if Schinkel could see the drawing of Vanvitelli known as Veduta panoramica di Rome, sinceit it did not get to be converted in painting, and that during some time was considered as a view from Trinità dei Monti .
 

5.G. Vanvitelli, Veduta panoramica di Roma, s.a.

This drawing, made really from the gardens of the Quirinalle, shows Rome in the same way and with a framing similar to the drawing of Schinkel. It is a drawing of almost four linear meters one, which covers a angle of vision of about 120 degrees. The parallelism with Vanvitelli is repeated in other drawings of Schinkel, as the titled Players with the Spanish Steps and Trinità dei Monti, Rome, at the end.
 

6. K.F. Schinkel, Jugadores con la Scala di Spagna y S. Trinità dei Monti, Roma, al fondo, c. 1803-1804

The drawing is similar in the point of view and the framing to the one that Vanvitelli did of this same place and of the one that is preserved by four painted versions, one of them of little before 1713.
 

13. L. Cruyl, Prospetto del Anfiteatro di Vespasiano e Tito e del Arco di Constantino, c.1664-1666

The framing of the building is similar and the backlighting also, but in Schinkel the self-representation is subtler, when dispensing with the character. It is the frame the one that indicates from where the drawing was done and where its author was; the city that it is seen and who sees it, as if they were two drawings to both sides of the same window.

The one that travels sees with the eyes predisposed by all what of that place he has seen, read or heard. In the same way that the guides repeat in greater or smaller measure the guides written previously (Ebano 1989), the one who draws repeats what has been drawn previously. We see with the eyes that saw before and we draw, recycle or extend drawings that somebody drew before. We continue the drawings that others have started and others will continue, maybe, those that we make. It is difficult to situate the beginning of a drawing and it is impossible to know when a drawing finishes: when will it leave to be the beginning of new drawings.

In this endless process, I want to finish with what would be a continuation of the last drawing of Schinkel, Vanvitelli and Cruyl, in another of Otto Wagner. It is the perspective that he did for the competition of the Berlin Cathedral, of 1891, the plan n. 5 of his proposal.