The 19th Century Allure of Roman Ruins

This blog post is one of a two-part series on collections at the Gibson House Museum from Italy.

In 1898, after a year of study at MIT for architecture, Charlie Gibson took an extended trip to Europe. It was common for wealthy American men to make such a trip—to cap off their education and before settling down to work and family—known in nineteenth-century parlance as a Grand Tour. The Grand Tour could include a variety of European destinations (some even traveled as far as Turkey), but the essential stops were London, Paris, Venice, and Rome. Travel to Rome, in particular, was seen as a chance to complete a classical education, specifically through study of the architecture and history of ancient Rome.

Traveling to Rome was difficult in the nineteenth century. A robust tourist industry had developed by the eighteenth century, and yet transportation, lodging, and access to reliable guides remained sketchy. Some Italian architects and artists made a living serving Grand Tourists. Giovanni Batista Piranesi was one. Starting as early as 1740, Piranesi worked in Rome producing views of the ancient Roman ruins. For many, Piranesi’s depictions of Rome were the way they imagined and understood the city.

Veduta dell'Anfiteatro Flavio, c. 1771
Giovanni Batista Piranesi

Red Study, Gibson House Museum

Piranesi’s prints of Roman ruins inspired many artists. Indeed, Piranesi himself was inspired by painters like Giovanni Paolo Panini, who had pioneered a way of depicting ancient Rome that romanticized the ruins through artistic techniques focusing on pastoral landscapes. Matthew DuBourg, a British-based engraver in the early nineteenth century, created a number of hand-colored prints of Roman ruins inspired by the capriccio style popularized by Panini and Piranesi.

While we do not have a record of Charlie Gibson traveling to Rome as part of his European trip, he didacquire a set of six DuBourg engravings, including of the Arch of Constantine, from the estate of his cousin, Mary Ann Palfrey Russell. The Arch of Constantine, made for the first Roman Emperor to recognize and sanction Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, is in a prime location between the Colosseum and Roman Forum; any traveler to Rome would be hard-pressed to miss it. For Charlie Gibson, these objects made sense in a room devoted to a certain kind of western civilization: the Ancient Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the United States.

On Tuesday, May 3, and Saturday, May 7, the Gibson House Museum is offering the specialty tour “The Gibsons in a Global World,” which explores the house and collections with a focus on objects from outside the United States, including Italy. Book your tour today at Boston Design Week.

- Meghan Gelardi Holmes, Curator

To learn more:

• Giovanni Batista Piranesi, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 2003)
• Piranesi in Rome, Wellesley College