Every Thursday, as part of my personal “enriched environment” initiative, I post a piece of art, usually from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently released online some 400,000 high-resolution images of its collection. All artwork will show a sun (or sunlight) somewhere.
I won’t name the piece or the artist, but instead invite you to study the art and post a comment addressing one or more of these questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
If you have another idea, run with it.
Special Update! The New York Times website does this same exercise every Monday with a news photo that is uncaptioned and contains no text (click!). The Times asks viewers the same three questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
However, at the end of the week, the Times posts the background information on the picture. So, I’ve decided to do the same. I’ll still post an unlabeled piece of art on Thursday. But return on Sunday (for the Sunny Sundays post!) and you’ll find an update on the artwork here.
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
Veduta interna dell’Atrio del Portico di Ottavia (Internal View of the Atrium of the Portico of Octavia), in: ‘Vedute di Roma’ (Views of Rome)
Series/Portfolio: Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome)
Artist: Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Italian, Mogliano Veneto 1720–1778 Rome)
Date: 1760
Medium: Etching
Description
This view places the spectator within the best preserved section of the complex of colonnades originally built in the Republican era and later restored by Emperor Augustus, who dedicated the portico to his sister Octavia. Although the name survives from the Augustan restoration, such visible remains as the elegant Corinthian columns and the form of the pediment, hemmed in by medieval accretions, date to a later reconstruction by Septimius Severus. Piranesi shows the space as it looked in the eighteenth century, with the stalls of the fishmarket, which had long been held within the portico, visible along one wall of the atrium and continuing down a corridor into the distance.
The sensation of brilliant sunlight is masterfully achieved in this etching and may owe something to the example of Canaletto’s views of Venice (1973.634), produced around the time that Piranesi returned home in 1744. Piranesi’s own sensitivity to light effects—one of his early biographers records that he committed to memory the appearance of changing light on the ancient walls, from the full glare of the sun to the cool illumination of the moon—was one of the qualities that made his views of Rome so exceptional. The love for the texture and heft of blocks of stone and the fascination with their manner of cutting and assembly that is so evident here, and in many of his other prints, may have been the legacy of Piranesi’s father, a stonemason and master builder.
Looks like our mall getting ready for Black Friday shopping the day after Thanksgiving next week.
I can’t believe how tiny the people are. And the plants growing at the top of the structure. !
Where’s the sun? The shadows on the right side of the picture suggest that the sun is off to the right. But on the left side of the picture some of the shadows suggest the opposite. Maybe the sun is directly in back of the viewer.
Most of the people are clothed, but the man in the lower left corner is naked above the waist and muscular.
This kind of etching (?) always stuns me because much of it is just straight parallel lines used to create texture. And the detailing of the individual bricks in the walls is both nit-picky and awesome.
I also marvel at humanity’s ability to construct such monstrously large and artistic edifices.
Crumbling infrastructure. It’s everywhere.