FRATELLI ALINARI (19th) Circle, Baths of Caracalla,... Lot 429

FRATELLI ALINARI (19th) Circle, Baths of Caracalla, Rome, around 1880, albumen paper print Fratelli Alinari (19th century) Circle: View through the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla 'Italy: The Baths of Caracalla in Rome', ancient bathing facilities, c. 1880, albumen paper print Technique: albumen paper print, mounted on Cardboard Inscription: Inscribed below. Date: c. 1880 Description: The construction of the Baths of Caracalla was probably begun in 206 under Septimius Severus and completed in 216 under Emperor Caracalla. Original photograph with high sharpness of detail. An early testimony of travel photography. Around the middle of the 19th century, more and more tourists from middle-class circles travelled to Italy. At that time, photographs could only be taken with a great deal of time and expensive, unwieldy equipment. This made many tourists all the more grateful for the work of the professional photographer's studios on site to bring back a souvenir from afar for those who stayed at home or to collect as souvenirs. Famous photographers such as Carlo Naya, Giorgio Sommer or the Alinari brothers photographed the most famous sights of their home towns and went on journeys themselves to photograph the most popular destinations of their clients and offer them as albumen prints. Ancient art treasures were also photographed and offered to travellers. The high-quality photographs of sculptures and frescoes continued to make an important contribution to documenting art treasures and making them accessible to scholars from all over Europe, who previously had to rely on tracings or engravings if they could not view the original for themselves. "Fratelli Alinari" in Florence are the oldest photographic company still in existence in the world: founded in 1852, a good two decades after the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in capturing an image on a tin plate. The Alinari brothers were Romualdo (1830-1891), Leopoldo (1832-1865) and Guiseppe (1836-1892). Leopoldo began taking photographs in the daguerreotype era and worked for the lithographer Guiseppe Bardi, with whom he set up a joint photographic studio in 1850. In 1854, Leopoldo bought Bardi's shares and, together with his brothers, founded the Fratelli Alinari studio. It became one of the most important Italian studios of the 19th century and later one of the largest photo archives in the world, which still exists today. Keywords: 19th century, Historicism, Architecture, Italy, Rome (Latium), Size: Cardboard: 29,3 cm x 34,0 cm (11,5 x 13,4 in), Depiction: 20,2 cm x 26,0 cm (8 x 10,2 in)