1780
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
A View of the Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla is a 1780 by Giovanni Battista Lusieri, a Romanticism work, depicting Ruins, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You’re looking at a giant, crumbling brick wall with arches and columns—what’s left of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. A few tiny people stand in the shadows, showing how huge the ruins really are. Lusieri painted this from inside the ruins, not the usual tourist angle. He worked at different times of day to catch the exact light, like late afternoon sun turning the bricks gold. It’s almost like a photograph, but made with paint. If you like this careful, quiet way of showing old buildings, look up *sfumato*.
Lusieri was known among his Grand Tour patrons for his meticulous technique and his originality: for example, his choice of an unusual view of the Baths of Caracalla, as here, taken from within the ancient site. With an astonishing commitment to the truthful depiction of nature and ruins, and an extreme awareness of the nuances of light at different times of day, he depicted the ruins in the late afternoon. The presence of figures emphasizes the massive scale of the ruins in the warm Italian sun in this significantly large, impressive sheet, a welcome souvenir to his patron, an English Lord,…
The artist Lusieri accompanied the British Lord Elgin to Athens in the late 1790s and participated in the dismantling of the Parthenon’s metope sculptures there, now famously called the Elgin marbles.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1755–1821) was an Italian landscape painter from Naples.
See the richer artist page
