Page 55 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.
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‘THE AMAZING AND STUPENDOUS
REMAINS OF ANTIQUITY’:
JOSEPH WRIGHT I N ITALY AND LATER
REFLECTIONS oN VIRGIL’S TOMB
n anonymous English poem of 1741, first tion in the development of this subject in British
landscape painting, and one that reflected many of
A published in London in 1758, included a the lessons the artist had learned during his nearly
description of the dilapidated state of a two-year-long sojourn abroad.
structure generally identified as the bur-
ial site of the great Roman author of the first cen- Drawing on a growing understanding about antiq-
tury BCE: uity through direct observations and careful studies
of texts and artifacts, British artists increasingly al-
‘A mean unhonour’d ruin faintly show’d luded to well-known sites and monuments. These
The spot where once thy mausoleum stood: relics did not simply function as a provocative back-
Hardly the form remain’d; a nodding dome drop, but were often included to complement, ex-
O’ergrown with moss is now allVirgil’s tomb.’1 plicate, or expand the subject of a history painting or
a nostalgic genre picture. Eventually, by the late eigh-
The vestiges of ancient monumental buildings in Italy teenth century, a number of painters became increas-
had long attracted the interest of British poets and ingly attracted to the notion of considering actual
travelers, who often wrote about the paradox be- ruins as objects for pleasurable contemplation. In both
tween profound reverence for antique remains and cases, either as moralistic symbols or as picturesque
the overwhelming awe of the current state of deteri- settings, representations of antique remnants fre-
oration. However, artists from the British Isles only
began to explore these themes regularly in the sec- 1. A Collection of Poems in SixVolumes..., 3 vols., [fifth edition],
ond half of the eighteenth century. As Arthur Flett London, 1758,Vol. III, pp. 110-115. Earlier editions included
noted, it was during this period of time that the ruin another poem dedicated to Virgil’s Tomb.
– with all its associations of time, death, and the tran-
sience of life – became an important motif in the 2. Arthur L. Flett, ‘Ruins:The Development of a Theme in
fledgling Romantic movement.2 The original com- Eighteenth-Century Landscape Painting, c. 1760-1800,’ Ph.D.
position of Virgil’s Tomb of 1779 by Joseph Wright Thesis, Indiana University, 1981.
(1734-1797) was an early and significant contribu-
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