Thursday, December 17, 2015

European images of Roman arches, 17th-19th centuries

Robert Macpherson
Arch of Titus
albumen silver print
1850s
Getty

European artists of the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries came to Rome and made pictures of the triumphal arches left behind by the ancients. What those arches looked like to successive waves of idealistic visitors can today be pondered because museums have preserved their long-ago impressions. The monuments themselves have in most cases been greatly spruced up since these images were made. Undoubtedly they were more suggestive  and more powerful as works of art  when the marks of time were more prominent.

French painter
Arch of Titus
oil
c. 1824-35
Metropolitan Museum

Gian Paolo Panini
Arch of Titus
drawing
17th century
Prado

Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo
Arch of Titus 
oil
1657
Prado

Domenichino
Triumphal Arch
oil
c. 1607-15
Prado

Anonymous
Arch of Constantine
albumen silver print
1860
Getty

Anonymous
Arch of Constantine

albumen silver print
1860
Getty

Robert Macpherson
Arch of Constantine
albumen silver print
1850s
Getty

Gian Paolo Panini
Architectural Capriccio of Rome with Arch of Constantine
oil
c. 1740
Royal Collection, Great Britain

Canaletto
Arch of Constantine & Colosseum
c. 1742-45
Getty

Lancelot Turpin de Crissé
Arch of Constantine
c. 1818-38
Metropolitan Museum

Samuel Prout
Arch of Constantine
c. 1850
Victoria & Albert Museum

Robert Macpherson
Arch of Drusus
albumen silver print
1860s
Getty

Robert Macpherson
Arch of Septimus Severus
albumen silver print
1850s
Getty

Anonymous
Arch of Septimus Severus and Temple of Vespasian
albumen silver print
1860
Getty

Anonymous
Temple of Vesta
albumen silver print
1860
Getty

After all those magnificent arches, the small round Temple of Vesta (immediately above) looks a little forlorn in the photograph from 1860. The pointed roof was a late addition, not in keeping with the original structure. In the foreground a Baroque fountain inspired by Bernini features a pair of intertwined mermen rising from a heap of carved marble rocks and supporting a scalloped basin. There are woman washing clothes on either side of the wide lower basin, though they are only ghosts in the time-exposure. Grass and weeds grow from the mermen's rocks. The fountain is in much better shape now, gushing thick spouts of water and not a weed in sight, but on the down side it is surrounded by roaring traffic instead of washerwomen.