View of St. Peter's Square, Rome

Saint Peter's Square, completed to Gian Lorenzo Bernini's design in 1667, was the greatest architectural statement of Counter-Reformation Rome, and Van Wittel painted it multiple times, sensing both its topographic grandeur and its appeal to the Catholic collectors and diplomats who formed part of his clientele. His 1705 canvas at the Kunsthistorisches Museum presents the square from a slightly elevated frontal viewpoint that allows both arms of Bernini's colonnade to register, with the facade of the basilica closing the composition at the rear. By 1705 Van Wittel had spent thirty years in Rome and knew the square intimately; this is not a tourist's impression but a knowledgeable insider's record. The painting entered the Viennese imperial collections, where it joined other Italian vedute acquired to satisfy Habsburg interest in their Italian domains and allies. Van Wittel's view of Saint Peter's circulated widely through prints and exercised real influence on how Protestant northern Europeans imagined the heart of Catholic Christendom.

Van Wittel exploits the square's bilateral symmetry as a compositional device, flanking the central axis of obelisk, fountain, and basilica facade with the curved colonnades that recede in parallel perspective. The figures populating the piazza are rendered in his characteristic shorthand — a few strokes of warm colour — but are distributed with careful attention to the spatial logic of the square. The Egyptian obelisk at centre is painted as a precise geometric form in pale stone.