A View of the Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla (1779–81): Art, History and Details

A View of the Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla (1779–81) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Giovanni Battista Lusieri (Italian, 1750–1825).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Lusieri was known among his Grand Tour patrons for his meticulous technique and his originality: for example, his choice of an unusual view of the Baths of Caracalla, as here, taken from within the ancient site. With an astonishing commitment to the truthful depiction of nature and ruins, and an extreme awareness of the nuances of light at different times of day, he depicted the ruins in the late afternoon. The presence of figures emphasizes the massive scale of the ruins in the warm Italian sun in this significantly large, impressive sheet, a welcome souvenir to his patron, an English Lord, when he returned to England.

Object facts

• Title: A View of the Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla
• Date: 1779–81
• Creator attribution: Giovanni Battista Lusieri (Italian, 1750–1825)
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: graphite, pen and black ink, watercolor
• Dimensions: Support: 53.3 x 68.6 cm (21 x 27 in.); Matted: 66 x 86 cm (26 x 33 7/8 in.); Image: 50.9 x 65.7 cm (20 1/16 x 25 7/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - Italian
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2022.93

A detail from the museum

The artist Lusieri accompanied the British Lord Elgin to Athens in the late 1790s and participated in the dismantling of the Parthenon’s metope sculptures there, now famously called the Elgin marbles.

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lusieri, Giovanni Battista, Aidan Weston-Lewis, Fabrizia Spirito, Kim Sloan, and Dyfri Williams. Expanding Horizons: Giovanni Battista Lusieri and the Panoramic Landscape. 2012.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.