A View of the Vestibule of St. Peter at Rome (1766): Art, History and Details
A View of the Vestibule of St. Peter at Rome at the Cleveland Museum of Art: 1766, mezzotint printed in black. Explore the work's context, creator attribution and collection history.
A View of the Vestibule of St. Peter at Rome (1766) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Georges Francois Blondel (French, 1730–1800).
The work and its context
The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:
After returning from several years spent in Italy, the French printmaker George-Francois Blondel settled in London in order to take advantage of the English taste for images of Italian sites. This is one of a series of eight prints he published in 1766 depicting imagined and real Italian interiors. Using the relatively new technique of mezzotint, which creates velvety, dark tonal areas, as well as low vantage points, Blondel created towering, awe-inspiring spaces. For special patrons, he printed the plates in sepia ink, rather than in black; the CMA’s set includes two of these unusual sepia impressions.
Object facts
- Title: A View of the Vestibule of St. Peter at Rome
- Date: 1766
- Creator attribution: Georges Francois Blondel (French, 1730–1800)
- Type: Print
- Technique: mezzotint printed in black
- Dimensions: Matted: 71.1 x 55.9 cm (28 x 22 in.); Image: 56.5 x 40.6 cm (22 1/4 x 16 in.); Sheet: 64.3 x 51.6 cm (25 5/16 x 20 5/16 in.)
- Collection: PR - Mezzotint
- Department: Prints
- Accession number: 2022.129
A detail from the museum
Mezzotint was relatively new at the time this print was made and had yet to be utilized for such large plates of an architectural nature as seen here.
Collection credit
Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland
Further reading listed by the museum
- N.G. Stogdon. [forthcoming] Catalogue raisonné of G.-F. Blondel’s prints. Print Quarterly
- Dodgson, Campbell, “The mezzotints of G F Blondel,” Print Collector's Quarterly (IX) 1922
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.
Sources
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