Six ink-and-wash paintings over etched lines from his series "Journées pittoresques des édifices antiques dans les environs de Rome"
Rome: A. Fulgoni, 1804[–1810].
- Porte Capene ou Capouane[1] (9” x 11 7/8”, 229mm x 302mm); no. 4, pt. I (1804).
- Cella Mortuaria[2] (9 3/16” x 11 15/16”, 233mm x 303mm); no. 10, pt. I (1804).
- Ruines de la Pinacothéque de Domitien (9 3/16” x 11 15/16”, 233mm x 303mm); no. 16, pt. V (1810).
- Piscine de la Villa de Domitien (9 ¼” x 12”, 235mm x 304mm); no. 17, pt. V (1810).
- Temple de l’Honeur et de la Vertù[3] (9 1/8” x 11 1/16”, 231mm x 297mm); no. 22, pt. I (1804).
- Temple du Dieu Reddicule[4] (9 ¼” x 11 5/8”, 234mm x 295mm); no. 24, pt. I (1804).
Sepia ink and wash over etched lines, bordered in ink and numbered and titled in ink manuscript over green wash. Laid paper mounted on card (for Porte Capene, reusing an engraving as the mount).
Wash borders more or less tanned (though the two views of the Villa of Domitian significantly less so), with some attend cracking and losses, which have been filled and repaired in several campaigns of conservation. Drawing-pin holes at most corners of the borders, sometimes multiple. Hinged and mounted in linen-fronted passes-partouts (uniformly 12 ¼” x 14 3/8”) behind acetate.
Angelo Uggeri (1754–1837) was an abortive seminarian who was wooed to the ways of architecture and art-history. Working in the generation after Piranesi (whose prints continued to be made and sold by his descendants well into the XIXc), he saw the ruins of Rome and the Italian landscape surge in the imaginations of Grand Tourists and scholars both as pathways to history and as embodiments of the aesthetic category of decay. Uggeri came under the patronage of Angelika Kauffmann, who was a nexus for German-speaking (and other Protestant) visitors to Rome; she provided him with introductions as well as, probably, money for the early volumes of his ambitious Journées pittoresques: a series of described and illustrated journeys out of Rome in particular directions.
Although published from 1804, the Journées began from a series of drawings begun in the late 1780’s and into the 1790’s. The first of five journeys, albeit augmented with supplementary discourses on architectural orders and other more academic studies, was the Journée de Capo di Bove, et vallée des Camenes (published in 1804 with parallel text in Italian), and four of the six present works are from this first itinerary along the Via Appia heading southeast from Rome — now the route to Ciampino airport — into the Alban Hills. The remaining two — both depicting the villa of Emperor Domitian (r. AD 81-96) — are in the same area, viz. along the shores of Lago Albano near Castel Gandolfo. These came from the fifth and final journey, Vues pittoresques d’Albano et de Castel Gandolfo (1810).
The published illustrations are etchings, but entirely linear in style; they are really quite spare, doubtless meant principally to indicate that the tourist had reached the right place. The six present pictures are lavishly ink-washed, such that the etching becomes almost invisible (indeed, previous cataloguers and even contemporary museum descriptions call these ink-and-wash drawings). They were presumably produced by Uggeri as de luxe pictures to be hung (as the drawing-pin holes in our plates indicate). Though similar assemblages have come up at auction, these inked etchings are held primarily in a few institutions. In 2015 the Lindenau-Museum in Altenburg had an exhibition from among their 249 Uggeri views, more or less identical to these (although many of theirs without the manuscript title) in execution and format. The catalogue, Souvenir de Rome Ansichten aus Rom und Umgebung von Angelo Uggeri (1754–1837) (edd. Julia M. Nauhaus and Daniel Roberts) has been an essential resource for the above description.
[1] The Porta Capena, set into the Severan walls immediately southeast of the Circus Maximus; now largely dismantled.
[2] The mausoleum of Cecilia Metella, at the southern end of the Parco della Caffarella.
[3] Now the church of Sant’Urbano in Caffarella, a largely standing temple on the property of Herodes Atticus.
[4] The tomb of Herodes Atticus’ wife Appia Annia Regilla (whose other main commemoration is the Odeon in Athens).
Item #JLR0580
Price: $4,200