Landscape with Ruins

This is one of the most important known canvases of LIuis Rigalt’s first period. In it a strong attachment to the Italianising classicistic landscape tradition can still be discerned: the tradition of the painters of Greco-Roman “ruins” which had in Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1691-1764) a model followed by many – such as Michele Marieschi, Piranesi and Hubert Robert already in the 18th century – but which could go back to Claude Lorrain and even to Renaissance artists such as Bellini and Mantegna.

“Ruins”, said Henri Coulonges, ”became a genre of painting of a lower rank than history, but more noble than simple landscape”, and many painters and decorators availed themselves of this “prestige” even at the beginning of the 19th century, before a more lively concept of art traded the classical stones which were already merely scenographic for the still painfully bleeding mediaeval monuments, victims of neglect or social convulsions. Rigalt, who would find his best period when he claimed these other ruins of the Gothic age, had not been able at the outset to drag himself away from the previous vogue, and this excellent oil painting (the composition of which was possibly pure fantasy since I do not know of any journey by the artist to countries rich in classical ruins), is an exceptional witness to this.