Page 59 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.
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Fig. 20. RICHARD WILSON, Temple of Minerva Medica, Rome, 1754, Fig. 21. GIOVANNI BATTISTA PIRANESI,View of theTomb of Caecilia
black and white chalk on blue paper, 28.6 x 41.9 cm.Yale Center Metella on the AppianWay outside Rome, 1760s, etching.
for British Art, New Haven, CT.
Interestingly, Wright seemed to model his own Throughout his career he produced carefully pre-
landscapes after some of the best French painters ac- pared views and measured images of antique struc-
tive in Rome around the middle of the eighteenth tures and ruins in and around Rome. He infused
century – although the extent of his firsthand knowl- conventional topographical scenes of well-known
edge of their work remains unknown. Claude-Joseph monuments and ideal reconstructions with unique
Vernet (1714-1789), who remained in Italy from representational techniques, such as exaggerating the
1734 to 1753, Jean Barbault (1718-1762), who ar- scale of the buildings and manipulating the perspec-
rived at the Académie de France in Rome in 1749 and tive through the use of multiple vanishing points.15
stayed in the city until his death, and Hubert Robert
(1733-1808), who lived and worked at the Académie 14. T. Barton Thurber, ‘From ‘Learned Architecture’ to the ‘Poetics of
from 1754 to 1765, brilliantly rendered ruins by em- Ruins’: Classical Building Types and Motifs in Selected French
ploying a combination of archaeological curiosity and Landscape Paintings from Claude to Robert,’ in The Splendor of
vivid effects.14 In addition, from the late 1740s on- Ruins in French Landscape Painting, 1630-1800, edited by S. D.
ward, all artists in Rome were strongly influenced by Borys, exhibition catalogue, Oberlin, Ohio, 2005, pp. 1-15.
the prints of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778),
who derived his principal inspiration from firsthand 15. See in particular Malcolm Campbell, ‘Piranesi and Innovation in
examinations of surviving antiquities (Fig. 21). Eighteenth-Century Roman Printmaking,’ in Art in Rome in the
Eighteenth Century, eds. E. P. Bowron and J. J. Rishel, exhibition
catalogue, Philadelphia, 2000, pp. 561-567.
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