Art Institute of Chicago
Monks on the Staircase of the Villa of Maecenas at Tivoli
François-Marius GranetLinkedCulture matchlcp-b4f4d4d2508a
- Date
- c. 1826
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash, with touches of watercolor, over traces of graphite, on ivory laid paper, perimeter mounted on cream wove paper
- Culture
- France
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Institution
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Object ID
- 203323
From the Art Institute of Chicago record
In this small but powerful ink and wash drawing, Granet depicts a mysterious procession of monks moving from darkness to light up a vaulted stone staircase as monumental as it is stark. The scene’s enigmatic subject matter and gothic mood place this work in the aesthetic category of the sublime, defined in the late 1700s as a kind of “delightful horror.” The sublime was an alternative to the search for ideal beauty that characterized the more classically inspired art of the period with its emphasis on moralizing and exemplary history.
The authoritative record is held by Art Institute of Chicago. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- Julius Lewis Endowment Fund
Linked open data
Authority identifiers that link this record into the wider web of cultural data — stable references you can follow to the source.
- Object type
- AAT300033973
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Art Institute of Chicago and other institutions.