Ruínas romanas
1776
Hubert Robert, nicknamed 'Robert of the Ruins,' spent his youth wandering through Rome sketching ancient decay, and this scene is the ultimate result of that obsession. It's a 'capriccio'—a fantasy landscape where he mashed up real landmarks like the Pyramid of Cestius with crumbling temples that never actually stood side-by-side. Notice the figures in the middle sketching the stone relief? That's a nod to the 18th-century Grand Tour, where wealthy travelers would pose among the rubble to prove they had culture. Robert turned the melancholy of collapsing empires into a fashionable, romantic playground.
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