The most famous paintings of ruins include Hubert Robert's Louvre in ruins, Thomas Cole's Desolation, Caspar David Friedrich's Abbey in the Oakwood and Turner's Norham Castle. Between the 1630s and the 1840s, painters made ruins a subject in their own right.
A painted ruin can show what is left of the ancient world, how slowly time wears down stone, or how every life ends. Some of the ruins below still stand, and others never existed.
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How These Were Chosen
A work earns its place here in one of two ways. Either its title names the ruin it shows, like Constable's Hadleigh Castle, or the painter invented, moved or altered the ruin to make a point, as Hubert Robert did when he wrecked the Louvre on canvas.
The list counts down from twelve to one. It opens on an imaginary Roman view by Marco Ricci and closes on Panini's Ancient Rome, a vast hall in which the great monuments of the ancient city hang as framed pictures.
12. Marco Ricci, A Capriccio of Roman Ruins (1727 to 1729)
In the foreground, a huge brick arch overgrown with shrubs frames the view like a window. Through it lies a field of broken Roman buildings, with a stone horseman on a pedestal and a column lying in the grass.
Small figures draw water, stand on a rock or point into the distance. Only one man bends over a fallen Ionic capital, the scrolled top of a column, to look closely at the carving.
Marco Ricci made the picture between 1727 and 1729, in the last years of his life. Born in Belluno, north of Venice, in 1676, he died in Venice in 1729, although some sources give January 1730.
The arch, the horseman and the column never stood together. Ricci was making a capriccio, Italian for a whim, a view that assembles real or invented monuments into a place that exists nowhere.
The surface is unusual too. Instead of canvas, Ricci used kidskin, a fine leather, and painted on it in gouache, an opaque watercolor. The smooth, pale skin gave clarity and light to the paint, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which owns the sheet, catalogues it as a drawing.
Small views like this one found eager buyers. The British merchant Joseph Smith, consul in Venice and a man who knew Ricci well, owned 33 of them.
Its subject later made someone think of another painter. On the back of the sheet, a pencil note names Hubert Robert, the French artist nicknamed "Robert des Ruines," who appears near the end of this list. Robert was born in 1733, a few years after Ricci's death.
At a Glance
Artist: Marco Ricci (1676 to 1729)
Painted: 1727 to 1729
Medium: Gouache on kidskin
Where to see it: National Gallery of Art, Washington (1982.38.2)
About This Painting
How big is A Capriccio of Roman Ruins? A Capriccio of Roman Ruins measures 30.9 by 45.3 centimeters, about 12 by 18 inches.
How did it reach Washington? A Capriccio of Roman Ruins was with the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin in 1920, then listed by the Stichting Nederlandsch Kunstbezit, the Dutch foundation set up in 1945 to recover art taken to Germany. It was sold at Sotheby's on 25 March 1982 and bought that year with the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund.
Is the attribution to Marco Ricci secure? The National Gallery of Art catalogues the capriccio under Ricci, and it appears in Annalisa Scarpa Sonino's 1991 monograph on the artist. The Hubert Robert name survives only as a note on the back.
11. Salvator Rosa, Ruins in a Rocky Landscape (about 1640)
A round temple without a roof stands on a rock, with a tall broken wall behind it. Below, shepherds doze on the warm stones while cattle drink, and a dark cliff fills almost the whole left side of the canvas.
Two moods share the canvas: the calm of the shepherds in the sun, and the threat of the black cliff above them. The second one is the side of its painter that England would later admire most.