LA PERSPECTIVE DV PONT NEVE DE PARIS.

Description

Showing the Louvre, the Statue of Henri IV, and the Teeming Life of Pairs at Its Baroque Peak.

No other image captures the Pont Neuf as completely as this one. Stefano della Bella’s panoramic view of 1646 is a portrait of Paris at its most alive. Courtiers on horseback, carriages threading through traffic, street vendors, dogs, a laden donkey, children, and beggars. Della Bella populates his bridge with dozens of individual figures, each a small study in posture and costume. Together they form a document of seventeenth-century French urban life that no written account could match.

The View in Detail

The composition shows Pont Neuf and the Seine from a low viewpoint on the Île de la Cité. At center, the bronze equestrian statue of Henri IV stands on the bridge’s triangular prow, the place de Dauphine at his back. Left of center, the Tour de la Samaritaine, the great pump tower that supplied Paris with water from the Seine, rises over the left bank approach. To the right, the Louvre’s long Petite Galerie façade is visible across the river. Church spires punctuate both banks; the Tour de Nesle marks the left bank downstream.

In the foreground, the life of the bridge, which was not primarily a thoroughfare but a destination, the place where all of Paris came to see and be seen, unfolds in exhaustive detail. References numbered at left and right margins identify the major landmarks for a French-speaking viewer; a substantial Latin text paragraph below them explains the bridge’s construction and character to the learned reader. The royal arms of France, supported by angels, float in the sky above the scene, dedicating the whole to the crown.

Historical Context

The Pont Neuf was completed in 1607 after three decades of interrupted construction, the first bridge in Paris built without houses obstructing the view of the river. From its opening, it became the city’s nerve center, a place where booksellers and quack doctors, tooth-pullers and fortune-tellers, ballad singers and swordsmen all set up their trades alongside the aristocrats whose carriages crowded the roadway. It was the subject of comedies and songs, the setting of a hundred anecdotes. By 1646, when della Bella made this print, it had been a defining public space of Paris for forty years.

Stefano della Bella arrived in Paris from Florence in 1639, under the patronage of Cardinal Richelieu and later the French court. He had already absorbed the lessons of Jacques Callot, the great Lorraine etcher whose influence shaped an entire generation of printmakers. In Paris, Della Bella found both subjects and an audience equal to his ambitions. His Paris prints, published largely by Pierre Mariette, are among the finest topographic etchings of the seventeenth century. He returned to Florence in 1650, where he worked for the Medici until his death in 1664.

Pierre Mariette (1595–1657), who published this print at his shop on the Rue Saint-Jacques, was the leading print dealer and publisher in Paris in the mid-seventeenth century, the central figure in the French print trade at the moment it reached its first great peak.

Publication History

Etched 1646; published by Pierre Mariette, Rue Saint-Jacques à l’Espérance, Paris. Cum privilegio Regis. The print exists in multiple states. The present example is State II–III, identifiable by the addition of the weathervane with a rooster on the bell tower of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, a physical change to the Paris skyline that della Bella incorporated into the plate. The first state, before the weathervane, is the rarest. The standard reference for state identification is Phyllis Dearborn Massar, Stefano della Bella: Catalog Raisonné (1971).

PONS LVTETLE STRUCTUS DICTUS NOVVS ET QUE EXEO PROSPICIPOSSYNT, etc. Ste. Della Bella Florentinus Inve Fecit . . . 1646 : Cum Privilegio Regis.