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Lot Essay
Hubert Robert departed Rome for Naples on 17 April 1760 in the company of Jean-Claude-Richard, the Abbé de Saint-Non (1727-1791), a wealthy amateur artist and engraver. Robert was an able Latinist and master draftsman who served as Saint-Non’s companion on the four-month-long journey, and recorded the sites and monuments of Naples, Herculaneum, Paestum, Pozzuoli and environs in spectacular red-chalk drawings. In return for paying Robert’s expenses, Saint-Non kept the drawings the young artist made and later engraved many of them in his spectacular four-volume edition of Voyage Pittoresque ou Description des Royaumes de Naples et de Sicile, published in Paris between 1781 and 1786. One of the sites the two men visited was the so-called ‘Tomb of Virgil’ at Posilipo. Robert’s original drawing of the tomb is lost, but it served as the basis for several later prints (see Voyage Pittoresque…, vol. I, facing p. 83), including an etching by Adelaide Allou in a portfolio of six prints after Robert and Fragonard published by Basan in 1771 (fig. 1), and another by Karl-Wilhelm Weisbrod and J.-N. de Ghendt published ten years later. As is evident in the prints, Robert’s lost drawing was a contemporary rendering of the celebrated ancient monument ‘dessiné après nature’ (as Allou’s etching identifies it), peopled with modern, sightseeing tourists.
The site was a popular tourist destination – it still is – and a picturesque subject for many artists of the later 18th century, including Charles-Antoine Châtelet, Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Gaspar van Wittel and Joseph Wright of Derby, who painted the tomb on at least a half-dozen occasions. It was an obligatory stop on the Grand Tour by the time Robert and Saint-Non visited it in 1760, but its identification as the resting place of Virgil, the Roman poet, had already long been controversial. Virgil died at Brindisi in 19 B.C., and his remains were carried to Naples for burial, according to his wishes. Biographies from antiquity state that he was buried beside via Puteolana about two miles outside Naples, but the classical sources are vague about precisely where the grave could be found. It was not until the Middle Ages that the location of the tomb came to be commonly accepted as in the small Roman columbarium in the ancient Grotto of Posilipo. By the time Petrarch and Bocaccio made pilgrimages to the site in the 13th century, it had come to be popularly known as the ‘Grotta Virgiliana’. The tomb was frequently restored over the centuries, but by the middle of the 18th century had fallen once again into a picturesque state of decay. Legend arose around a bay tree which grew from the top of the tomb and was said to miraculously renew itself, and almost every tourist took a sprig from it; Robert included it in his drawing. Saint-Non was unimpressed by the veneration the grotto incited, writing in the Voyage Pittoresque: '…one comes upon ruins…called "Schools of Virgil"; a name given…by the people of Naples, without any other reason than the most ignorant and most senseless superstition for a name that long since has been well known in this country. It is better to follow the opinion of those who think that these are the ruins of the famous pleasure-house owned by Lucullus.'
Hubert Robert was perhaps more charmed by the site and its romantic legend than Saint-Non; in any event, he took up the subject again almost a quarter of a century after his visit to Naples, in this delightful painting, which is signed and dated 1784. It is based directly on the drawing he made during his visit to the tomb in 1760, and is comparable in almost every detail to what we know of that sketch, except for the figures that people it: now, rather than contemporary tourists, the visitors are ancient Neapolitans, dressed in classical garb. Two figures near the center of the composition are poised to enter the poet’s tomb, while a group of pilgrims standing to the right of the entryway reach out in amazement at a broken stone slab inscribed ‘MANTVA ME GENVIT…’, the first words, in Latin, of the elegiac couplet that Virgil reputedly wrote as his own epitaph: 'I sing Flocks, Tillage, Heroes; / Mantua gave / Me life; Brundisium death; / Naples a grave' (Dryden’s translation). On the left side, visitors pause to read the words engraved on another stone tablet: ‘Qui cineres? Tumuli haec vestigia: conditur olim / Ille hic qui cecinit Pascua, rura, duces’ ( ‘Whose tomb? Whose ashes here repose? His tomb we raise / who, erst, did sing of Warriors, Flocks and Rural lays.’). Robert would have been well aware that this tribute could never have been read by ancient visitors to the site, as the commemorative plaque was installed only in 1554, shortly after the urn holding Virgil’s ashes disappeared, permanently, from the tomb. The inclusion of the inscription in his painting not only offered Robert the opportunity to display his impressive command of Latin, but serves as a charming and erudite bridge between the ancient world, to which Robert’s imagination always returned, and the modern, urban life of Paris where Robert and his sophisticated patrons daily dwelled.
The site was a popular tourist destination – it still is – and a picturesque subject for many artists of the later 18th century, including Charles-Antoine Châtelet, Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Gaspar van Wittel and Joseph Wright of Derby, who painted the tomb on at least a half-dozen occasions. It was an obligatory stop on the Grand Tour by the time Robert and Saint-Non visited it in 1760, but its identification as the resting place of Virgil, the Roman poet, had already long been controversial. Virgil died at Brindisi in 19 B.C., and his remains were carried to Naples for burial, according to his wishes. Biographies from antiquity state that he was buried beside via Puteolana about two miles outside Naples, but the classical sources are vague about precisely where the grave could be found. It was not until the Middle Ages that the location of the tomb came to be commonly accepted as in the small Roman columbarium in the ancient Grotto of Posilipo. By the time Petrarch and Bocaccio made pilgrimages to the site in the 13th century, it had come to be popularly known as the ‘Grotta Virgiliana’. The tomb was frequently restored over the centuries, but by the middle of the 18th century had fallen once again into a picturesque state of decay. Legend arose around a bay tree which grew from the top of the tomb and was said to miraculously renew itself, and almost every tourist took a sprig from it; Robert included it in his drawing. Saint-Non was unimpressed by the veneration the grotto incited, writing in the Voyage Pittoresque: '…one comes upon ruins…called "Schools of Virgil"; a name given…by the people of Naples, without any other reason than the most ignorant and most senseless superstition for a name that long since has been well known in this country. It is better to follow the opinion of those who think that these are the ruins of the famous pleasure-house owned by Lucullus.'
Hubert Robert was perhaps more charmed by the site and its romantic legend than Saint-Non; in any event, he took up the subject again almost a quarter of a century after his visit to Naples, in this delightful painting, which is signed and dated 1784. It is based directly on the drawing he made during his visit to the tomb in 1760, and is comparable in almost every detail to what we know of that sketch, except for the figures that people it: now, rather than contemporary tourists, the visitors are ancient Neapolitans, dressed in classical garb. Two figures near the center of the composition are poised to enter the poet’s tomb, while a group of pilgrims standing to the right of the entryway reach out in amazement at a broken stone slab inscribed ‘MANTVA ME GENVIT…’, the first words, in Latin, of the elegiac couplet that Virgil reputedly wrote as his own epitaph: 'I sing Flocks, Tillage, Heroes; / Mantua gave / Me life; Brundisium death; / Naples a grave' (Dryden’s translation). On the left side, visitors pause to read the words engraved on another stone tablet: ‘Qui cineres? Tumuli haec vestigia: conditur olim / Ille hic qui cecinit Pascua, rura, duces’ ( ‘Whose tomb? Whose ashes here repose? His tomb we raise / who, erst, did sing of Warriors, Flocks and Rural lays.’). Robert would have been well aware that this tribute could never have been read by ancient visitors to the site, as the commemorative plaque was installed only in 1554, shortly after the urn holding Virgil’s ashes disappeared, permanently, from the tomb. The inclusion of the inscription in his painting not only offered Robert the opportunity to display his impressive command of Latin, but serves as a charming and erudite bridge between the ancient world, to which Robert’s imagination always returned, and the modern, urban life of Paris where Robert and his sophisticated patrons daily dwelled.