Achterzijde van de Villa Medici te Rome 1699

This print of the Villa Medici in Rome was made by Alessandro Specchi, sometime in the late 17th or early 18th century. It's a reproduction, and the image comes entirely from the engraver’s hand, working with burins and other tools to translate the architecture into a language of line. The original building, of course, was the product of countless hands – stonecutters, brickmakers, plasterers, glaziers, all contributing their labor. But here, that social reality is abstracted into a system of marks. The architecture is rendered with absolute clarity, but the human figures in the foreground are miniaturized, almost incidental. This gives a sense of the distanced relationship that most people would have had to the Villa, an emblem of aristocratic power. Prints like these were important vectors of design ideas in this period. Consider how they helped to circulate aesthetic values and, by extension, social hierarchies. The print flattens a complex world of making into a single, repeatable image.