This mythologisation was to be tenaciously influential on conceptions of the nature of the Roman landscape and how it was to be represented. It is a caprice. The harrowing contrast of the  campagna with the prospect of the great city was rendered not merely a dramatic anti-climax, but was potentially life-threatening. Indeed, as the nineteenth-century commentator Silvio Negro pointed out, this sense of a continuum was to remain a notable feature of Rome’s appearance until the latter part of the nineteenth century.4, This unusual configuration of urban and rural spaces gave to Rome an identity that fed into perceptions of the city in a way which was just as distinctive as the specific effects produced by individual ruins and monuments. ‘The Roman Campagna Revisited: Art & Environment’, These documents may contain Accounts, Annual Returns, Director appointments, Director resignations, administration and … In this light, the use of screening elements has a function beyond that of compositional equilibrium, and although Valenciennes himself does not address the problem of the campagna’s bad air in his comments on Rome as a place for the education of landscape artists, this could be seen as expressing a form of cautious equivocation. 86–111, Corot’s vivid sketch contains a man-made pigment that was not thought to be available until several years later, Infrared photograph, showing Corot's preliminary sketches of some of the landscape forms, Cross-section from the dull green foreground, showing a combination of deep green viridian, yellow earth, vermilion and perhaps some yellow lake pigment in the paint layer, The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct, Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries, Sainsbury Wing Exhibition: 30 June – 12 September 2010, Revealing the stories behind the paintings. American Heritage® Dictionary of … Richard Wrigley reconnects the Roman campagna – a landscape endowed with considerable artistic significance – with its troubled history as an all but abandoned terrain, notwithstanding its symbolic function for the landowners who oversaw its systematic neglect. However, accounts of the campagna’s appearance are often curiously uninformative precisely because of the burden of expectation weighing on the moment of the travellers’ encounter, and the overwhelming sense of a discrepancy between the anticipated spectacle and the impoverished reality revealed from first-hand inspection. So compelling was this level of experience that Humboldt condemned the excavation of half-buried buildings and viewed the idea of cultivating the  campagna as a calamity.5 By contrast, in the view of Camille de Tournon, former prefect of Rome under the Napoleonic occupation, the fact that city and country were indistinguishable was the result of a local attitude of blasé neglect: ‘No nation could care less about the charms of the countryside than the Romans’.6 However, this aesthetically productive equilibrium has important consequences for our understanding of the place of landscape painting in Rome. Marjorie E. Wieseman is Curator of Dutch paintings at National Gallery. Richard Wrigley, The evidence of this painting would suggest that the elusive Pannetier had made his vivid new pigment available through Colcomb-Bourgeois at least by the mid-1820s. ‘The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct’ was probably made en plein air: it was painted on paper – easily transported – and later mounted on a stretched canvas for greater permanence. The Roman artist Giovanni Battista Lusieri’s Extensive Landscape 1781 (fig.1) shows an interlocking view of buildings, cultivation, and open countryside, in which these different types of structure and terrain are elided together. ISSN 1753-9854. His artistic development during these years was swift and dramatic. In the case of Corot’s The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct, however, the painting can be so securely dated on stylistic grounds that the unexpected identification of the man-made pigment viridian meant revising the history of its usage. The science historian Robert Sallares has recently provided an authoritative account of awareness of and attitudes to this in classical texts, informed by a modern understanding of malaria. in Indeed, the conservatism of landowners to any improvement in agricultural exploitation of the campagna was usually pointed out as the crucially obstructive factor in its almost unrelieved stagnation.2 Thus, as with atmospheric contamination, and in a way which was fundamentally connected, the city was tied by deeply entrenched bonds of ownership and privilege to its hinterland.3, The question of definition extended to the interrelation of the ‘eternal city’ and the country, or more precisely involved recognising that this distinction did not apply in any familiar or simple way. In both respects, the attention given to visual characteristics in the early nineteenth century was a change from more established literary conceptions of the campagna. While sometimes the presence of a pigment with a known date of introduction causes scientists and curators to re-examine the date traditionally assigned to a painting, in this instance the reverse was true. Drawing From Turner is a collaborative project and exhibition jointly organised by Tate Britain and the University of the Arts …, Colour and Line: Turner's Experiments. An infrared photograph shows that Corot first sketched some of the landscape forms, probably in crayon, before applying the paint. The campagna was thus the antithesis of conventional ideas of rural retreat where, in the writer Arthur Young’s words, ‘the peace-loving man has retired from the tumult of cities and centres of intrigue, to devote himself to cultivating the land’.25 It was a space seen as empty, and forbidding; even to antiquarians it was little known. An inscription on the back of this drawing states that the painting was commissioned by a client in Paris. Find out more information about THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA LTD. Our website makes it possible to view other available documents related to THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA LTD. You have at your disposal scanned copies of official documents submitted by the company at Companies House. Other papers relating to this theme can be found in Tate Papers  no.17. The painter Ippolito Caffi’s 1847 views of the campagna from a balloon seem to work in the same way, celebrating the aesthetic pleasures to be had by rising above the glowing but sinister evening mists.19, This tension in the moment of viewing is inherent in the way the area was named. Wilkie’s description shifts into recollection: ‘in the blue distance [we saw] some of those mountains one is familiar with in the pictures of Claude. Articles relating to ‘Art & Environment’ have been brought together in Tate Papers no.17 by Stephen Daniels and Nicholas Alfrey, following the ‘Art & Environment’ conference held at Tate Britain in June 2010. Tate Papers (ISSN 1753-9854) is a peer-reviewed research journal that publishes articles on British and modern international art, and on museum practice today. The editorial team is grateful to both for their vision for this issue and their varied contributions. The composition is presumably based on the topography of the Tiber valley, one of Claude’s favourite locations within the Roman campagna. In the seventeenth century the campagna became endowed with a further form of cultural prestige through the belief that it was here that Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin discovered the inspiring raw material out of which they created ideal landscape painting. Sometimes the presence of a pigment with a well-defined date of introduction can prompt researchers to think again about the date traditionally given to a painting. There was much common ground between the various initiatives to investigate the root causes and identity of this pervasive but mysterious disease-producing agent and the excursions of artists in search of sites which would yield the ideal beauty promised by myth. There are several reasons for assigning such a specific date to the painting. On stylistic grounds Corot’s painting can be dated quite securely to early 1826, but viridian was thought to have been available to artists only from the 1830s. Possible pin holes at the upper and lower left corners (the right corners are damaged) suggest that before it was mounted on canvas, the painting might have been pinned to the wall. Approaching the campagna primarily as a resource for landscape painting’s pursuit of an ideal level of representation was in fact a very effective way of steering historical understanding away from problems which were recognised as intractable and disturbing – a landscape which was thought to produce deadly miasma, devastating what remained of its indigenous population, and threatening those who dared to pass through it. Such scrutiny focused closely on topography and the less tangible matter of air, factors which were assumed to have shaped the physical constitution and appearance of local people. A low-lying region surrounding Rome, Italy. Consonant with the trope of coming across ruined and abandoned villas and buildings is the larger sense that the campagna was considered to be uncharted territory. The historian Jerome McGann’s otherwise compelling idea that Rome was unusual in being the city of Romantic significance par excellence (whereas Romantics usually sought identification with nature), fails to take account of this ambiguous situation.7, Yet ideas of mythic fertility informed a wide range of imagery, both Italian and foreign. Valenciennes, renowned as a reformer of landscape painting, exemplify this tendency to maintain a certain distance, at once aesthetic and precautionary. We could compare this pictorial device to the quintessential Claudeian motif of trees screening a vista: eighteenth-century enthusiasm for this aspect of Claude’s campagna imagery might also have been informed by the idea that trees acted as a cleansing filter, thereby counteracting the threat of  poisoned air, as well as in pictorial terms modulating the intensity of light effects.