ATLANTA, GA.- The Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University presents the exhibit Discovering Rome: Maps and Monuments of the Eternal City through October 22. Enjoy a tour of Rome through images of the city’s ancient ruins, churches, Renaissance villas and gardens. Most of the works in the exhibition come from Giovanni Battista Falda’s seventeenth-century Gardens of Rome and Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s eighteenth-century Views of Rome. A sixteenth-century etching of the Colosseum by the Netherlandish artist and publisher Hieronymous Cock will also be on view, attesting to the long-standing appeal of the city to pilgrims and tourists. At the center of the exhibition will be Giambattista Nolli’s Great Map of 1748, a landmark in the history of topography, enabling viewers to explore the city as a whole and to understand how the individual monuments fit within their urban context.

Giovanni Battista Falda: Showing artistic gifts at an early age, Giovanni Battista Falda studied art in his native town under the painter, Francisco Ferrari. At the age of fourteen he traveled to Rome where he was soon employed by the publisher, Giacomo de Rossi. Concentrating almost solely upon architectural views, Falda's recorded opus runs to 298 original etchings. Most of these works of art are found in his three greatest sets of etchings, the Nuovo Teatro (1665-1669), The Gardens of Rome (1670), and The Fountains of Rome (1675).

Falda's artistic style was quite unlike any other mid seventeenth century Italian etcher or engraver. His strong contrasts of light and shade, his architectural accuracy and the care he took delineating incidental figures and objects have led scholars to compare his etchings most frequently to those of his great French contemporaries, Jacques Callot and Israel Silvestre. Falda's influence upon Italian architectural art was far reaching. In the following generations such great etchers as Venturini, Alessandro Specchi and Guiseppi Vasi were directly inspired by Falda's art. It was Falda, in fact, who created the foundation for the great school of Italian eighteenth century architectural etching, most notably led by Piranesi.