Lecchi's contemporary photographers

Immediately after the fall of the Roman Republic, among the many artists who visited the battlefields, there was no lack of photographers. Among those active in the places where the war had just ended, we should remember, first and foremost, Frédéric Flachéron (1813-1883), one of the founders of the so-called Scuola romana di fotografia,, who probably worked at the behest of the Parisian publisher Soulier for a translation and dissemination of images in a collection of engravings. From 1848 to 1853 the artist, described as a "paesista" (landscape artist). took many views of Rome, especially of Roman monuments. In July 1849 he photographed the Casino Savorelli, the Casino dei Quattro Venti, Porta San Pancrazio, San Pietro in Montorio, the Casino Savorelli, the Vascello, and a breach in the Janicolense walls. A series of six negatives on paper, relating to buildings or places of combat, with date and signature in negative, are now preserved in the Fratelli Alinari Museum Collections.

From a comparison with Lecchi’s photographs, it is possible to determine who had been the first to execute a photograph of a particular subject, on account of the differing presence of mounds of ruins, or because of details that are present or absent in a particular photograph.

Giacomo Caneva from Padua, also a member of the same circle and also a painter and photographer, is credited with two different images: a paper negative preserved at the Istituto centrale per il Catalogo e la documentazione in Rome representing the dome of St. Peter's with an anti-shrapnel protection shield in the foreground, and a salt paper depicting the ruins of the Casino Savorelli.

Later works were done by Ludovico Tuminello, who had supported the Roman Republic and went into exile after it fell. Around 1875 he produced a series of circular panoramas from Villa Medici to the Casino Savorelli, a reverent, melancholic homage to the heroic defenders of the Roman Republic (now preserved at the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione in Rome).

(Maria Pia Critelli)