Some Sites in Rome

 August 2012 Reprise 

Columns en ressault at the Forum of
 Nerva along the via dei Fori Imperiali

LAST YEAR I posted an image of a painting of the Forum of Nerva in progress on my easel; having finally varnished that painting (oil on canvas board), and another from last August as well (oil on paper), I thought it would be opportune to post those two works as a spur to some thoughts on painting in Rome (a topic I’ve addressed before).

While the Eternal City seems to most eyes to be an intact relic of the past, in reality much has changed there in relatively modern (for Rome at least) times: the via dei Fori Imperiali, Piazza Venezia, and so much else of the centro storico felt the impact first of the unification of Italy and the creation of Rome as the capitol, and then Fascist planning, particularly under Mussolini. For me, at least, it is no small challenge to find the Rome of Corot or Valenciennes (and little had changed between the middle of the 18^th century and the middle of the 19^th). Some spots that still evoke that pre-Modern Rome include this site behind the church of Ss. Giovanni e Paolo on the Celio (at my back, however, was a rather grotesque outdoor bar); and focused views of the Imperial Fora can be timeless. It is good news to me that the new mayor of Rome, Ignazio Marino, seriously intends to close the via dei Fori Imperiali to traffic, making of it a vast archeological park (still not clear whether it will be an open, public park, or a pay-as-you-go museum). Rome takes some work to discover, and if one is seeking out plein air sites without the visual clutter of the modern city, it takes an attentive eye and a sense of how the city used to be.

 

Ss. Giovanni e Paolo

Watercoloring Like it Was Oils

Saturation and Transparency

What often stops me and makes me choose a scene to paint out of doors is usually a saturated, brilliantly lit scene combining architecture and landscape. In Lucca the circuit of walls offers a wealth of options, cyclical as the sun winds its way around the city over the course of the day. From below or above, the walls, their balluardi (bastions), and gates present simple, powerful architectonic forms juxtaposed to rigorously planted rings and crowns of trees.

I painted the Porta San Donato from above over the weekend, with one of the city’s bishop-saints surveying the landscape beyond. Painting between about 5:45 and 7:45pm, the late afternoon summer light was saturated, the shadows growing longer on the ground, but the upper register of the gate illuminated fairly constantly by the westerly sun.

As I’ve moved from watercolor to oils in my outdoor painting over the last decade or so, I’ve found the experience of oil has pushed my watercolors to greater density and saturation in the darks, while giving me a new appreciation of the brilliance of un-watercolored white paper. As a painter-architect, I value the constant back and forth between disciplines, and the same fertile exchange I believe exists in alternating media. These are not lessons that can be taught, but they can be learned by experimentation and repetition.

For a view from below of the same area, see last year's post here.

Paint Like Whom?

Emulation Out of Doors

As I gear up for a season of painting in Italy, I thought it might be worthwhile to consider the role of models for the plein air artist. While the underlying assumption in working out of doors is that one is reacting directly to the scene in front of him or herself, that reaction is not unmediated, but depends on the culture of artists one admires and attempts (consciously or not) to emulate. All artists either imitate or emulate, whether knowingly or unknowingly. So, here are some of my models:

Valenciennes

Granet

Corot

Art as Subject

Outdoors in the Museum

Ancient urn in the atrium/forecourt of S. Cecilia

Plein air, or open air, painting inevitably conjures up images of landscapes and artists perched in splendid isolation. But one of the most compelling aspects of the Italian landscape is the evidence of human artifice, with or without a juxtaposition with Nature. So much of Italy, both in and out of town, is a museo all’aperto, and I am mostly drawn to subjects that include the marvelous works of the human hand that the country abounds in, seen in brilliant, changing outdoor light. Rome in particular offers this, indeed there is nowhere one can go in Rome, even something as ostensibly rural as the Parco della Caffarella near the via Appia Antica is full of fragments of the manmade.

So, offered here are two ancient remains, prominently and picturesquely sited in the Eternal City. Just watching the light change on the Trophies of Marius as the afternoon sun descends is a lesson in plein air painting.

The Trophies of Marius, on the parapet of the Campidoglio

Plein air in the new year

A show at the Met, and painting in Lucca in the winter

A survey of plein air painting classes and tours in Italy inevitably shows a preference for the sunshine and palette of late spring through mid-fall; winter in Italy offers a different landscape and palette, not as immediately seductive. So if there is less inclination to paint out of doors these days, there are other ways to hone one’s skills. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has a show of French plein air painters up now through 21 April. The Path of Nature: French Paintings from the Wheelock Whitney Collection, 1785–1850 documents both the recent appreciation of the genre and some lesser known artists, not to mention their ubiquitous fascination with the Italian landscape as subject. While plein air as a subject implies direct observation of Nature, it is wrong to think that observation is unmediated through the experience and skills of other painters’ observations. I’ve learned as much if not more about painting out of doors from looking at Corot or Valenciennes than from any particular subject. More information on the Met’s show is on their site here.

oil on primed (light raw umber, revealed in the sky) paper

In December I had the chance to be in Lucca, where the walls are such a compelling feature of the city’s image. They are also seductive subjects for outdoor painting, surrounded by a swath of green, their simple, powerful forms are enriched by the patina of time and their crown of diverse trees. Girdling the city, they are differently related to sun and light depending on orientation and time of day. Shown here is a sketch done in about an hour and a half, on an afternoon that started sunny and ended rather grey.

The Architectural Landscape

Man & Nature

Palatine from Circus Maximus, 2006

Max Gillies has an article in the January/February issue of Fine Art Connoisseur, “When Architecture and Art Converge”, that features a number of contemporary plein air artists particularly interested in architecture. Among them is my friend Victor Deupi, like me a classical architect as well as artist. The article’s last illustration is my painting of the Palatine from across the Circus Maximus, one of those surprisingly rare views in Rome that hasn’t changed much since Corot’s day.

While Italy affords spectacular landscapes up and down the peninsula and on its islands, it seems to me at least that what makes working here uniquely appealing is the poignant relationship of landscape and architecture. It part it is designed to be so: villas and their gardens, churches and cloisters, villages and hillsides were in fact considered with respect to each other, complementing one another with the common structure of classical geometry. But there is also the aspect of entropy that artists like Fragonard and Hubert Robert reveled, that visually compelling effect of Nature taking over again those things that Man had imposed on her—crumbling stone walls, overgrown trees invading courtyards, fountains covered in moss; these are things never intended by the original creators, but are tolerated and perhaps even appreciated by later inhabitants. In both cases Italy is unmatched for the abundance of paintable settings. But it is also worth musing on, as previous cultures have, what it all means: the power of geometry to give structure to our world, the tension between formal order and natural form, the relentless power of Nature to push back on our interventions, the strange appeal of decay.

at the Villa Lante, Bagnaia, September 2012

Good landscape paintings have structure, and nothing so deliberately structures our world as architecture. While one may stumble upon happy accidents in a wholly natural environment (views that capture our imagination and compel us to capture them), I find it even more natural that we would use human interventions as the underpinnings of a painting’s compositional structure. Nature civilized, made even more beautiful because of human effort, was what artists formed in the classical crucible always found most appealing. And especially when landscape documentation served primarily as prelude to studio paintings of more “elevated” subjects did a judicious juxtaposition of the natural and manmade serve to inform the figurative compositions overlaid upon it.

A tutti coloro che dipingono all'aperto in Italia, vi auguro un

Buon Anno.