Ruin depicted in art: documentation of catastrophe or just "a popular fantasy art trend"?

JGeropoulas

The Living Force
This is an intriguing video which supports the idea that all those ruins depicted in art from earlier centuries was artists' documentation of the results of a relatively-recent world-wide catastrophe.

The commentator makes some astute observations such as it appears there were two classes of people, well-dressed and peasants, living among the ruins; and that the pyramids depicted are among ruins featuring Roman/Greek architecture--and are of a unique angularity unlike those in Egypt.

He rightly questions how would the painter Giovanni Paolo Pannini 1691-1765 depict pyramids and a Roman stella in one his paintings when he had died 7 years before the official discovery of the Egyptian pyramids and that stella?

Enjoy!

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Interesting. You could call it surrealism although that movement came much later. The juxtaposition of a European Type Statue of a rider on a horse is what makes it seem odd. is not this from a time when realism was still a thing? While I love this, and I think that relooking at more recent history is super important, I don’t think there is any way to know if this was painted in situ with the painter actually seeing what was painted or if it was a flight of fancy or perhaps a rendition of a 2nd hand account.
 
I don’t think there is any way to know if this was painted in situ with the painter actually seeing what was painted or if it was a flight of fancy or perhaps a rendition of a 2nd hand account.

I think it's an interesting video, and I hadn't come across that genre of painting before. But as BHelmet mentioned, without detailed itineraries and field notes from the painters' travels, it's hard to exactly say what they saw and what they created.

But, this video does highlight something that fits with the missing years of the late empire thread. If the "Cataclysm of Justinian" was as thoroughly complete as we suspect, then these ruins may be accurately depicted in the paintings from the 18th century. Conceivably, people would be just taking whatever Roman stone they could move to build small dwellings, but the gargantuan edifices would have to just slowly decay. As the population exponentially grew, then ruins were probably exponentially removed.

I would think that in most of Europe, they may have stood until the Industrial revolution in many places. Only with large scale industrial projects would there be a need to completely remove most of them. The Napoleonic, Great War and WWII would have probably removed many as well.

It's haunting to think that many of our ancestors would be wandering around Roman ruins for generations literally living on a ghost planet with little or no idea what may have befallen their distant predecessors. The scale of the ancient world dwarfing their peasant world. I would guess that the only way to impress the masses that the "new" boss has any power - would be to start building soaring, medieval cathedrals.
 
Interesting. You could call it surrealism although that movement came much later. The juxtaposition of a European Type Statue of a rider on a horse is what makes it seem odd. is not this from a time when realism was still a thing? While I love this, and I think that relooking at more recent history is super important, I don’t think there is any way to know if this was painted in situ with the painter actually seeing what was painted or if it was a flight of fancy or perhaps a rendition of a 2nd hand account.
A good point the commentator made was that one or two painters depicting fantasy ruins would be one thing, but it seems a good number of painters did this, depicting a variety of grand buildings lying in ruin. Reminds me of our being told for years that Egyptians depicted people with enlongated skulls for stylistic reasons, which was refuted once enlongated skulls began to be found.
 
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