1795
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
St. Rocco Waterfall and Bridge at Tivoli (Cascata e Ponte di St. Rocco a Tivoli) is a 1795 by Albert Christoph Dies, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a waterfall crashing over rocks, a stone bridge, and a man sketching on a hillside. Dies made this print while living in Italy for twenty years. He walked there from Austria, carrying his tools. The scene isn’t just a postcard—it shows an artist at work, turning nature into lines on paper. Look up *sfumato* to see how other artists softened edges like this.
Throughout the latter part of the 18th century, successive generations of German artists visited Italy in order to study the acknowledged masterpieces of antiquity and the Renaissance. After an unsatisfactory initial course of study of printmaking in Basel, Dies set out on foot to Rome where he remained for twenty years working as a painter and etcher. This etching of an artist sketching a picturesque view at Tivoli came from a series of Italian views. Although at the time Dies’s work was criticized for being executed too freely, this composition articulates the Romantic landscapist’s bond…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Albert Christoph Dies (1755 – 28 December 1822) was a German painter, engraver, and biographer most noted for his biography of Joseph Haydn, although it is now considered sentimental and not entirely accurate.
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