Picturesque And Heroic: Nineteenth-Century Painters Imagining The Eternal City

Tom Loughman, assistant deputy director at the Clark, will present a lecture exploring the myriad responses of nineteenth-century painters to the reality and fantasy of Rome. While some artists, such as Camille Corot, envisioned Rome within the realm of the rustic and threadbare, the likes of Jean-Léon Gérôme generated grandiose riffs characterizing antiquity in hyper-dramatic terms. The lecture will address the curious paradox: long revered as a fountain of inspiration in the visual arts, ancient and modern Rome's place within the nineteenth-century mind was in as much flux as Italy's political and social conditions.