La natura e le atmosfere nelle istantanee en plein air di Paestum

This essay offers some reflections on the theme of the modern travel, called Grand Tour, mainly in the relationship between the image’s diffusion – therefore the iconography of the places – and the antiquarian interests, originated after the discovery of the Paestum’s archaeological area. From the middle of the eighteenth century the town of Paestum became the destination of theGrand Tour by landscape painters, above all foreigners, who travelled from Rome to the south of Italy to document their travels through the sketchbooks accompanied by noblemen of different nationalities. They left numerous testimonies of their passage in Paestum in their “pictorial journeys”, where it is evident the desire of documentary truth. This study concerns the image of the ancient Poseidonia’s fortune through instant images en plein air of Antonio Joli, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, John Robert Cozens, William Turner, Thomas Jones, Jacob Philipp Hackert and Jean-Léon Gérôme. The main tool for the preparation of this article was the critical and stylistic study of these artist’s drawings, engravings and paintings , who belong to the category of “artist-to-travel”, through the analysis of stylistic and formal reports. We can consider these artists, who worked in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, as pioneers because they promoted the birth of a new genre of landscape painting called “topographical” image which memorized every country that they met on their tour. The contextualization and comparisons between graphics and paintings of the different artists were essential as well as the use of documentary and literary sources in order to achieve the birth of this new landscape painting. It wasn’t influenced by the classic ideal, but it became immediate and characterized by systematic and programmatic practice of painting en plein air. An important point of this article is the discovery of the Gérôme’s image, oil on canvas until now neglected by studies on the fortune of the Paestum’s imagine. It was presented at the Paris Salon in 1852 and published in 1854 by the American Magazine The Illustrated Magazine of Art.