Drawing of the month #8

Herman van Swanevelt (ca. 1603–1655)

Porta Pinciana in Rome, ca. 1629–41

Brush and brown ink over traces of black chalk or graphite, 206 x 272 mm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. RP-T-1902-A-4593

Austėja Mackelaitė, Curator of drawings at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, has kindly chosen our eighth drawing of the month.

Among the eighteen gates that once punctuated Rome’s Aurelian Walls—the still partially extant system of fortifications, begun in the third century AD—the Porta Pinciana was neither the grandest nor the most important. Yet, for Herman van Swanevelt, the peripatetic Dutchman who had spent over a decade living and working in the Eternal City in the middle years of the seventeenth century, its picturesque potential seems to have been the only thing that mattered.

In the Rijksmuseum drawing, Van Swanevelt approached the Porta Pinciana from the northern end of what today is the glitzy Via Venetto. After outlining the gate’s complex architecture using chalk or graphite, he executed the rest of the sheet entirely in brush. With this single ordinary tool, Van Swanevelt produced the full gamut of strokes and marks, rendering the gate and its environs—from the delicate cracks in the facade to the messy foliage, which partially obstructs and threatens to overtake the building—with confidence and speed.

The drawing’s main protagonist, however, is light. The artist used the reserve of the paper to convey the impression of intense Italian sunshine hitting the crumbling walls of the ancient structure. Pools of brown wash—delicately transparent in some areas, dark and impenetrable in others—further enhance the feeling of overwhelming radiance. Like the Dutch Italianate artists who sojourned in Rome shortly before him—namely, Cornelis van Poelenburch and Bartholomeus Breenbergh—Van Swanevelt was more concerned with atmosphere than precision. Although it is unclear whether Van Swanevelt knew the two men personally, it is impossible to look at his bold, nearly abstract experiments with washes without imagining that he had direct access to their drawings and closely studied their approach to the Roman landscape.

While this fully resolved study could have easily found a Roman buyer, the sheet seems to have stayed in the artist’s hands, forming a part of his visual archive. Upon leaving Rome and settling in Paris in 1641, he returned to the composition and used it as the basis for an etching. For the next fifteen years, until his death in 1655, the decade he spent in Rome, captured in drawings such as this, remained the fixed axis around which his career as a draughtsman, printmaker, and painter rotated.