Day 306 - Roman scene

 July 7, 2022

And - a perfect segue to the last entry - the theme of Gallery 806 is "The Lure of Rome." This rubric  provides a rationale for grouping together works that represent a disparate assortment of genres: mostly  landscapes (often with ruins) but also a couple of genre scenes, a painting of a brigand and his wife in prayer beside a roadside shrine (apparently, brigands in the mountains outside Rome were known for both their criminality and their piety), a Flagellation of Christ, and a study of a female nude. presumably included because the artist who painted her described her as one of the "four most beautiful girls that you could have as a model in Rome."  Most of the works are small, but there are also a couple of large canvases depicting imagined classical figures set in a landscape. One if these shows a Roman orator, Silius Italicus, declaiming Virgil's verses at the poet's tomb near Naples. I never knew that this is where Virgil is buried - I'd have liked to have seen it when we were in Naples - but I read that the tomb was a major destination on the Grand Tour.

Today's work is a small (perhaps 23" wide and 13" high) canvas made  around 1814 or 1815 by a Danish painter, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg.  (The gallery also contains works by Norwegian and Swedish painters who studied and worked in Rome.) It shows the fourth-century Temple of Romulus and Remus, which constitutes the entryway of the sixth-century Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian. In the foreground is a priest in a long brown cassock and a broad-brimmed hat. I think to myself that I could see a similarly-clad priest walking past the church today,  more than two centuries after Eckersberg made this painting, and that's why I like the work so much. It's an apt reminder of the eternal nature of the Eternal City.