It began, quite rightly, in Rome. Consisting of thirty-eight meticulously selected works from the architectural drawings collection of the Albertina in Vienna, the exhibition filled both of the Tchoban Foundation's exhibition rooms. The bringing together of exquisite, and in some cases paradigmatic, individual works amounted to an exhibition that was itself an artistic achievement. It began with a delicate study of a Gothic tower on parchment from Pisanello's workshop. Although this work originated in Rome as part of a sketchbook, as an ideal study and as the product of an international court culture, it was not bound to any particular place. Next was a drawing by Maarten van Heemskerck completed about a hundred years later, immediately after the Sack of Rome, the greatest crisis of the Roman High Renaissance. With his view of Saint Peter's Square, Heemskerck, using a sharp perspective, plunges down into the very soil of the Eternal...

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