Post by Pino Blasone

It might seem as if the drawings below were made by the same painter or draughtsman. In reality, they are three artists, from different countries in Northern or Central Europe at different times. The first is the Dutch Renaissance painter Maarten van Heemskerck (cf. at https://lnkd.in/dADQnVj3). The second is the Swiss Neoclassic or Pre-Romantic Johann Heinrich Füssli. The third is the British late Romantic John Ruskin (cf. at https://lnkd.in/dV2n6EyD). In these cases, all three are engaged in depicting and documenting the vestiges of antiquity during their travels or stays in Italy. From left to right, in the top images: Van Heemskerck, “Hercules of the Forum Boarium” (from his “Roman Sketchbook”: Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin; 1532-37); Füssli, “The Artist Moved to Despair by the Grandeur of Antique Fragments” (Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; 1778-79). The former shows a bronze statue, discovered in the 15th cent. in the Forum Boarium and now in the Capitoline Museums. No less important, the extant marble fragments of the colossal statue of Emperor Constantine, once in the Basilica of Maxentius, later in a courtyard of the same museums. Let's notice, these details are the same as those appearing in Füssli's drawing, causing his sense of amazed impotence to equal the majesty of that past. In the lower images, the cultural context changes; no longer classical antiquity, but the Byzantine and medieval architecture preferred by Ruskin: 1853 watercolour for his treat “The Stones of Venice”, depicting a Byzantine-style capital; an external detail of the Romanesque “Apse of the Duomo, Pisa” (watercolour on paper: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University, UK; 1872). In such a development of representations, even more than a chronology there is a logic, which differentiates art history from other histories. The latter can record the reality of the facts. The former reflects the dialectical maturation of a unified identity of European civilisation, despite recurring and disastrous conflicts.