Cleveland Museum of Art
Outer Staircase of a Gothic Ruin
Domenico Quaglio
- Date
- 1830
- Medium
- gray and brown wash and framing lines in pen and black ink
- Culture
- Germany, 19th century
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
Rejecting the preference for the landscape and architecture of Italy, as seen in the work of many of his contemporaries, Domenico Quaglio portrayed the buildings of his native Germany. Here, Quaglio depicted a man, woman, and child who are dwarfed by the immense scale of a Gothic cathedral’s ruined arch, within which the figures appear. Overrun by vines and set within a dense forest, the architecture signifies the magnitude of God in the Christian faith and the smallness of mankind. Gothic architecture, the type seen in this drawing, was associated with Germany based on a false assumption that a Germanic tribe, the Goths, had originated the style.
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