12 ON VIEW: WHEN IN ROME ON VIEW/WHEN IN ROME FACULTY PERSPECTIVE: JOHN MOORE, PROFESSOR OF ART AND ART HISTORY IN JANUARY 2015, APRILE GALLANT, CURATOR OF prints, drawings and photographs at SCMA, approached me about a planned series of inaugural exhibitions of Italian, French and Spanish prints that the philanthropist and collector Arthur Ross (1910–2007) had bequeathed to the Yale University Art Gallery. Since the gift was intended to foster collaborations among the gallery and other college museums, colleagues in New Haven encouraged interested faculty at Smith to tailor the selection of objects to specific curricular projects. Ross had a pronounced fondness for the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), and learning that propelled me to devise a course under the rubric of ARH 348: In the Museum, a recent addition to Smith’s curriculum in art history. In Fall 2016, in tandem with When in Rome: Prints & Photographs, 1550 –1900, I taught a seminar on the Grand Tour. As soon as the show opened in September, my students had ready access to framed originals that nourished their appreciation of the print as a medium and sharpened their developing familiarity with a score of important ancient and modern monuments illustrated by Piranesi’s works, by those of other 16th- and 17th- century printmakers, and by 19th-century photographs. After a guest class presentation delivered by John A. Pinto, Howard Crosby Butler Memorial Professor Emeritus of Art and Archaeology at Princeton, we all went to SCMA. I had already asked students to choose one print, whether by Piranesi or another artist, that caught their attention and to tell us why, explaining in the process what they had learned about the print and the monument depicted. Their varied and compelling observations gave rise to lively discussion in the galleries. As a group, we visited the exhibition on three occasions. The show included a framed impression from Yale of Giovanni Battista Nolli’s mesmerizing engraved map, widely held to constitute a milestone in the history of cartography. In addition, Vincent A. Buonanno, an indefatigable lover of all things pertaining to the Roman Baroque, generously lent SCMA an impression of Giuseppe Vasi’s large etched panorama of the Eternal City. The map dates to 1748, the panorama to 1765, and each consists of 12 large sheets of paper that are not normally pasted together, mounted or framed. Having these extraordinary and complementary representations on display in all their glory was a rare treat for all visitors to the exhibition, even though they may not have known it. The juxtaposition of the map and the panorama on opposite walls of the gallery offered my students the added advantage of coming to grips with Rome’s topography. Yale invited me to contribute to a publication that turned on aspects of the Ross collection. I had not previously fancied myself a scholar of Piranesi, but the essay I wrote enabled me to cast some unexpectedly new light on him and his works. Furthermore, SCMA