Dal clivus Scauri al vicus Capitis Africae: gli affreschi della vigna Guglielmina a Roma nei disegni dei Bartoli

Two frescoed room discovered on the Caelian hill during the seventeenth century and reproduced by Pietro Santi Bartoli in four drawings were published by the Comte de Caylus in his Recueil de peintures antiques (Paris, 1757). Their findspot has since been situated in the vineyard of Stefano Guglielmini (also known as the “vigna Guglielmina”), located by Lanciani on the Clivo di Scauro facing the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. The first room (plates XXIII, XXIV and XXV of the Recueil), discovered in 1639, became famous in art–historical studies due to the presence of portraits of a Roman family on the vaulted ceiling and due to the controversial interpretation of two lunettes with marine iconography; the second room (plate XXVI in the Recueil), less well known, is decorated with a fresco of three mythological figures, each placed in a rectangular panel. Following archival research, the author has been able critically to re–examine both the topographical context of the find and the composition of the frescoes. This has led him to reject the traditional conclusions, hitherto conditioned by a misinterpretation of the Recueil made by the antiquary Ridolfino Venuti in the mid–eighteenth century. In the first place, the author has revised the location of Stefano Guglielmini’s vineyard: it should be situated, in his view, not on the Clivo di Scauro but on the road that ascended from the Colosseum to the Navicella. This finding then led in turn to a different topographical distribution of the frescoes: while those of the first room are to be located within the vineyard of S. Gregorio al Celio, the second fresco should be placed in the vigna Guglielmina proper. The identification of four other drawings of Bartoli based on Roman frescoes in the vigna Guglielmina in the collections of RIBA in London and Holkham Hall in Norfolk has permitted the author to understand that this latter fresco was not isolated, but must have formed part of a larger cycle that decorated the interior of a triple–apse room, probably the triclinium of a rich late–antique domus overlooking the ancient vicus Capitis Africae