A Cliff Face

In the early 1850s most painters who reached Rome went looking for its ruins and came home with the Forum and the Colosseum. Böcklin, in his twenties and living in the city for the first time, walked out instead into the Campagna, the empty country around it, in search of places nobody had arranged. This little study, oil on a sheet of paper later laid down on canvas, is one of those finds, a bare wall of rock and very little else. Stay with it for a while and the stone starts to look back. Faces surface in the cliff, a nose here, an eye there, and in places whole profiles emerge from the rock. Böcklin kept sketches like this as working material for his larger pictures, and over the following years the shapes he half saw in rocks and trees came back in his paintings as nymphs, fauns and old gods.