French School, XVIII century

French School, XVIII century.
"Landscape with classical ruins".
Oil on canvas.
Measurements: 93 x 128 cm; 117 x 150 cm (frame).

The taste for the artistic remains of the past, the generalization of the trips of writers and artists in search of monuments and works of art that served them as a source of inspiration, and the discovery of important ancient remains such as those of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum undoubtedly contributed to the success of the genre. It is a pictorial genre, moreover, that has its roots in the seventeenth century, in the veduta, not always topographical, but sometimes extremely imaginative, of artists such as Canaletto and others. During Romanticism, the ruin was the most evocative and real representation of the past. While in France theories such as those of Viollet le Duc advocated a historical reconstruction of ruined buildings, England defended the supremacy of the ruin, this English theory had its greatest representative in the figure of the scholar John Ruskin who in his work The Stones of Venice reflects his aesthetic ideas regarding the ruins.