u/monk_hughes

From the Art Institute of Chicago

"The painting of Classical ruins had reached the zenith of its popularity when Hubert Robert, the leading French practitioner of this specialty, was commissioned in 1787 to paint a suite of four canvases for a château near Paris.

The Fountains and its companion pieces were set into the paneled walls of a salon in the château, creating an alternate space that played off of the elegant, Neoclassical decor of the room. Robert had studied in Rome from 1754 to 1765 and there had gleaned his artistic vocabulary.

The Fountains exploits Robert’s typical vocabulary of fictive niches, arches, coffered vaults, colonnades, majestic stairwells, and Roman statuary to create a fantasy of expansive space. The four paintings are inhabited by tiny figures in the foreground; these serve only to set the scale and animate the scene, for the ruins themselves are the true subject of the pictures.

In his use of ruins, Robert embodied the notion of the relationship of humankind and the built environment to nature that was expressed by the French philosopher and encyclopedist Denis Diderot: 'Everything vanishes, everything dies, only time endures.'"

The Fountains, 1787 (SPQR easter egg)

The Old Temple, 1787

The Landing Place, 1788

The Obelisk, 1787

Shonentai, 1986

JUMP '90

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Four Neoclassical masterpieces

Special EFX, 1999