https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Roman+Campagna. Equally, cognate qualities were assumed to have been inherited by the inhabitants of this landscape from their ancient forebears. Eugène Pelletan’s claim that the Popes had deliberately maintained the desolation of the Roman countryside so as to increase the drama of visitors’ sense of encounter with a beautiful and sanctified city was vigorously rebuffed by the parliamentarian Corrado Tommasi-Crudeli. Like many of his predecessors, Corot spent his time sketching and painting the picturesque Italian landscape. By virtue of this literary evidence, later commentators were able to carry on an extended debate on the changing condition of the ancient and modern Roman landscape. There are several reasons for assigning such a specific date to the painting. The celebrated oil sketches of P.H. It was a favorite residential area during ancient times but was largely abandoned for centuries because of the prevalence of malaria. Indeed, that Roman culture was too successful in its struggle with an inhospitable climate and environment was for him further evidence of the indomitable spirit of these early generations of Romans.24. Caruelle d’Aligny’s print from 1844 (fig.2) shows a remarkably intact aqueduct running across the campagna, in the midst of which a group of peasants are placed before a solid wall of corn, with a fig sprouting vigorously from a ruin.9 Precisely the same juxtaposition of monument and cultivation is found in some photographic views of Rome from the mid-nineteenth century. One notable exception is viridian, identified microscopically and by EDX in the mid-green strip extending from the left side of the composition and in the dull green of the foreground and the foliage on the right. The nineteenth-century historian of Rome Jean-Jacques Ampère, for example, sought to establish a physical context for the evolution of early Roman history. Undertaking a tour of Latium in search of Virgil’s sites and settings, the Swiss philosopher Charles Bonstetten justified his project by claiming that previous scholars had neglected empirical observation in favour of predominantly poetic concerns (they had not looked around them but remained fixated on texts). Turner noted ‘The first bit of Claude’ on his way to Rome in 1819,17 and a ‘Wilson-Brown Campagna’ once he had arrived.18 The invocation of artists’ names is a way to distance the viewer from any sense of discomfort, but yet also to identify with and lay claim to the prospect. From Albano to this place [Velletri] we passed through scenes that realise all that Salvator Rosa conceived or Poussin drew’.16 Similarly, J.M.W. Seen from this perspective, these studies retain their sense of being products of a desire to explore Rome as a source of landscape imagery, but express that engagement precisely through setting the motif at one remove from the space occupied by the artist. A low-lying region surrounding Rome, Italy. The tension between these contrasting models can be explained in terms of an interplay between the topographical determinants of health and a biological notion of cultural inheritance. In Lusieri’s watercolour a bourgeois couple are looking at a seated peasant; the harmoniously complementary unit of difference which they embody echoes the similar disposition of agriculture framed by a river valley in the view which extends behind them.8 Such benign conventions for showing the campagna continued through the nineteenth century almost unchanged in their ingredients. Articles relating to ‘Art & Environment’ have been brought together in Tate Papers no.17 by Stephen Daniels and Nicholas Alfrey, following the ‘Art & Environment’ conference held at Tate Britain in June 2010. However, an important aspect of the complex of ideas and images associated with the campagna is its special place in the history of art as the site of the creation of a new form of landscape painting. Such well-established expectations might block out the recognition of disturbing signs of chronic ill health, or else lead to jarringly discordant observations of such deterioration. As was repeatedly observed, the whole farmland around Rome was owned by a small number of families, who in turn paid tenant farmers to manage their property. Other papers relating to this theme can be found in Tate Papers no.17. Richard Wrigley, ‘The Roman Campagna Revisited: Art & Environment’, One explanation sought the key to this in the impact of Rome’s notorious ‘bad air’ – in this sense there was recognised to be a physical and symbolic connection between the city and its surrounding countryside, which was as unwelcome as it was undeniable. 14 The Scottish painter David Wilkie commented that: ‘In approaching [Rome], we had to pass an immense plain, uncultivated, unwholesome, and yet beautiful’.15 That beauty could be substantiated, and indeed aggrandised, by calling to mind artists’ names. Much of the region was reclaimed and repopulated in the 19th and 20th centuries. Richard Wrigley is Professor of Art History at the University of Nottingham. For the philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, writing to his compatriot Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, it was indeed impossible to compare Rome and its surroundings with any other place; the incomparable physical presence of the city – its ‘loveliness of forms’, the ‘grandeur and simplicity of its figures, the richness of the vegetation … the definition of outlines in the translucent medium, and the beauty of the colours’ – engendered a sense of ‘pure aesthetic pleasure without a trace of desire’. Richard Wrigley reconnects the Roman campagna – a landscape endowed with considerable artistic significance – with its troubled history as an all but abandoned terrain, notwithstanding its symbolic function for the landowners who oversaw its systematic neglect. Richard Wrigley reconnects the Roman campagna – a landscape endowed with considerable artistic significance – with its troubled history as an all but abandoned terrain, notwithstanding its symbolic function for the landowners who oversaw its systematic neglect. Such scrutiny focused closely on topography and the less tangible matter of air, factors which were assumed to have shaped the physical constitution and appearance of local people. Tate Papers Autumn 2011 © Richard Wrigley. in Théodore Caruelle d’AlignyRoman Campagna. In the case of Corot’s The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct, however, the painting can be so securely dated on stylistic grounds that the unexpected identification of the man-made pigment viridian meant revising the history of its usage. Correlating the locations depicted in paintings and the evidence provided by drawings, notebooks and correspondence, it is possible to establish a chronological framework for these works. Rather it was a territory which predominantly encouraged quick traversal, cautious if not distant inspection, accompanied by melancholy reflections perhaps alleviated by scientific curiosity. Corot made about 150 paintings during his three-year stay in Italy (1825–8). There is a parallel here between historians of Rome and medical investigators, the former aiming to name and map the sites of ancient history, the latter to discover and plot a topographical answer to the causes of bad air as a means to improve public health.12 More general scientific investigation was also undertaken in the form of natural history, and the cataloguing of flora and fauna. For all its density of monuments ancient and modern, the city of Rome was a patchwork of archaic and majestic townscape juxtaposed with parcels of cultivation (known as the disabitato), which filled the spaces left vacant as the city had shrunk within its ancient walls. Having taken the trouble to use his eyes, however, he found that the image of nature given by Virgil, ‘although disfigured, still exists in the landscape’ (quoique défigurée, existe encore dans le paysage).1, The campagna played a fundamental role in ideas and images of Rome, because the city was viewed and understood to be co-extensive with the surrounding landscape. We could compare this pictorial device to the quintessential Claudeian motif of trees screening a vista: eighteenth-century enthusiasm for this aspect of Claude’s campagna imagery might also have been informed by the idea that trees acted as a cleansing filter, thereby counteracting the threat of poisoned air, as well as in pictorial terms modulating the intensity of light effects. In the eighteenth century, emptiness was more likely to be recuperable through a picturesque reading of the expanse of the campagna and its incidents. Approaching the campagna primarily as a resource for landscape painting’s pursuit of an ideal level of representation was in fact a very effective way of steering historical understanding away from problems which were recognised as intractable and disturbing – a landscape which was thought to produce deadly miasma, devastating what remained of its indigenous population, and threatening those who dared to pass through it. Representing such contiguity as natural acts to hold at bay not only anxieties about the campagna as barren and poisoned, but also the unwelcome spectre of modernity. However, the campagna could also be envisaged as a sanctifying frame, residually aesthetic but primarily providing a way of imagining the city as exclusively dedicated to prayer and meditation. So compelling was this level of experience that Humboldt condemned the excavation of half-buried buildings and viewed the idea of cultivating the campagna as a calamity.5 By contrast, in the view of Camille de Tournon, former prefect of Rome under the Napoleonic occupation, the fact that city and country were indistinguishable was the result of a local attitude of blasé neglect: ‘No nation could care less about the charms of the countryside than the Romans’.6 However, this aesthetically productive equilibrium has important consequences for our understanding of the place of landscape painting in Rome.
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