著者

佐藤 直樹

出版者

19世紀学学会

雑誌

19世紀学研究 (ISSN:18827578)

巻号頁・発行日

no.8, pp.77-97, 2014-03

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In the 19th century there were many colonies of foreign artists in Rome, but we have limited documents about their international exchanges. The purpose of this article is to find some traces of visual cross-references between international artists there, analyzing especially the works by a German landscape painter, Johann Christian Reinhart. At his time, Rome was occupied by Napoleon and the French Academy had established a branch school at the Villa Medici in the center of Rome. In spite of the French rule, not only political but also cultural, the overall majority of the artists operating in Rome was German. Reinhart, the leading figure of the German artists, had rediscovered Tivoli, Castelli Romani and some picturesque areas around Rome, of which he likely got information from French artists in Rome. With these new subjects he created a realistic and heroic engraving series titled "Mahlerisch-radierten Prospecte aus Italien" (1792-99). The series inspired international young artists to go sketching in the surroundings of Rome, and it was originally planned by Reinhart as a collaboration with two French artists whose names are not mentioned in any of his letters, because he recognized that the French had advanced in the outdoor painting and he wished to learn its realistic representation. In the end he could not work together with them, but he developed his picturesque engravings in his own new style. Reinhart painted "Four Views from Villa Malta" (1831-35) in tempera for King Ludwig I. of Bavaria. Villa Malta was the king's residence in Rome and he wanted to bring the unforgettable city views as large paintings back to Munich. Reinhart's challenge was to reproduce a precise panorama, the so-called Veduta. For these panoramic views he might have used a new optical instrument, the Camera Lucida, which had been invented in England in 1786 and was used by British landscape painters for tracing the reflected scene through a prism. I suppose that Reinhart had gained the information about this tool from his artistic milieu, for example the French engraver Noël-François Bertrand and the British painter Samuel Bellin, who were also active in Rome in the same period. The similarity of their optic angles cannot be imagined without them using the instrument. My research has just started, therefore I would like to study further the possibility of the three artists having shared the Camera Lucida in Rome.