The landscape contains a winding river that passes by a group of ruined castles in the distance. In the foreground is a mass of trees on the left and groups of bushes and small trees in the center and right of the watercolor. The sky is misty with diffused light.
In the eighteenth century, ruins all over the world were being rediscovered and reinterpreted aesthetically as their popularity and their importance as artistic subjects increased. An increase in travel and travel literature exposed British society to ruins both local and foreign, spurring interest in capturing their picturesque nature. At the same time, a growing awareness of historical documentation and scientific excavations of sites like Pompeii also affected the prevalence of ruins and commanded the attention of the Romantic audience. Frequently "created" as well as found, Romantic ruins invited spectators' reflections on transience, death, and decay. As such, ruins were a staple in Romantic landscape art and garden design. Goethe created at least one ruin in Weimar.
Few cultural phenomena captured the popular imagination of late eighteenth-century Britain more intensely than the rage for air ballooning, or the “balloonomania” as critics sometimes called it. “The term balloon is not only in the mouth of every one, but all our world seems to be in the clouds,” declared a 1785 book titled London Unmask’d (137). The excitement had begun in France when the Montgolfier brothers launched the first human flight in front of the Royal Family and 100,000 spectators, on October 15, 1783. The first flight in England, by Vincento Lunardi the following September, attracted an estimated 150,000 spectators. The Morning Post reported that “St.
During the Romantic period, panoramas—particularly those of exotic places—emerged as a popular form of public entertainment (Comment 7-8).
Other than maps, this is the only major landscape image Alexander von Humboldt produced in Mexico. It shows Humboldt's interest in Enlightenment notions of authentic re-creation and encyclopedic recording of native flora and fauna, while also invoking many of the concerns associated with Romantic notions of the picturesque landscape.
Pedro Marquez' 1804 book contains the first scientific illustrations of Mexican archaeology to be produced in Europe. By depicting the Pyramid at El Tajin with sharp, clean angles and a lack of geographic context, Marquez sought to visually tie it to Greek and Roman temples, thus showing the technological advancement and social sophistication of native Mexican peoples.
This gallery explores the work of artists and explorers in Mexico and Central America between 1804 and 1844. Romantic explorers visually constructed Mexican history, archaeology, and geography in relation to Romantic conceptions of the picturesque landscape. Their depictions were further complicated by the contemporaneous tension between the visual technologies of the panorama and the camera lucida. Consequently, explorers in Mexico were forced to negotiate between the cultural implications of Romantic visualities—of the sublime and of the picturesque—and the values of Romantic exploration and enlightenment, such as encyclopedic recording and faithful representation.
