Atardecer: paisaje con acueducto

Théodore Géricault painted this in 1818, in his Paris studio, a year before the vast Raft of the Medusa that would make his name. It belongs to a set of huge landscapes conceived as the times of day, of which he finished three. He built the scene from memories of his Italian journey of 1816 and 1817, folding in the ancient aqueduct he had seen at Spoleto together with the grand manner of older masters like Poussin. What he added was the weather. The heavy, bruised sky and the sense of a storm gathering over the ruins belong to his own moment, when younger French painters were reaching for the Sublime, for landscapes meant to overwhelm the viewer. A tiny figure crosses the foreground, dwarfed by the arches and by the light going out of the day.