Saturday, April 5, 2025

Northerners in Picturesque Italy

Hendrik Hondius the Elder after Pieter Stevens
Colosseum Interior, Rome
1600
engraving
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

 
François-André Vincent
Park of an Italian Villa
ca. 1774-75
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Simon Fokke
Italian Ruins with Cattle passing through an Arch
before 1784
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Franz Théobald Horny
Italian Country Life
ca. 1820
watercolor on paper
Museum Behnhaus Drägerhaus, Lübeck

Franz Théobald Horny
Colosseum, Rome
ca. 1822-23
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Franz Théobald Horny
Italian Landscape
before 1824
drawing
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Thomas Fearnley
Pergola with Oranges
ca. 1834
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Paul Flandrin
Oaks along the Appian Way near Albano
1834
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Paul Flandrin
Ruins of the Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill, Rome
1834
oil on card
Art Institute of Chicago

Hippolyte Flandrin
View of Rome by Night
1836
watercolor on paper
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Constantin Hansen
Group of Danish Artists in Rome
1837
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Thomas Fearnley
Lo Specchio della Diana
ca. 1838-42
etching
British Museum

Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey
Escalier du Jardin, Villa Albani, Rome
1842
daguerreotype
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Calvert Richard Jones
Colosseum, Rome
1846
daguerreotype
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Frédéric Flachéron
The Colosseum, Rome
ca. 1850
salted paper print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Frédéric Flachéron
End View of the Arch of Constantine
with the Colosseum, Rome

ca. 1850
salted paper print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

John Singer Sargent
Marble Fountain in Italy
ca. 1907
watercolor on paper
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Pierre Gusman
Paysage en Italie
ca. 1910
wood-engraving
Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, Ontario
from Saint

                                   Below
Your hotel window, the piazza blackens
And hisses. You do not draw back,
You hold it all in your eye's mind. The women
Limp toward the chapel named for him.
Their gums water. They mumble hocus-pocus
Before the painted wood baroque
Sebastian. Already his left foot is missing.
The strong white ankle, kiss by kiss
Borne past the dyed breaths and the human acids,
Celebrates elsewhere its mass –
While the saint, trammeled not at all by worm-drilled drapery
In his ambition to escape
No least caress, studies the whole procedure
Exuberantly. He appears, indeed,
To dip himself into their unfathomable craving
As into a pure, upholding wave . . . 

– James Merrill (1959)