Getty Museum
The Ramasseum, Thebes
Creator
Alphonse-Eugene-Jules ItierFrench Daguerreotypist · 1802–1877
All works by this person →Born in Paris and schooled in France, Alphonse-Eugène-Jules Itier began his professional life working in the Customs Service. He became active in scientific circles in the 1830s and 40s and thus learned about the invention of the daguerreotype early on. From 1842 to 1843, Itier traveled to Senegal and Guiana in Africa and Guadaloupe in the West Indies. He carried daguerreotype equipment, presumabl
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1845/1846
- Medium
- Daguerreotype
- Culture
- French
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
When the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley saw drawings of these ruins of ancient Egypt, he wrote: "Look on my works ye mighty and despair." This is a view of the Ramasseum, the funerary temple of Ramses II on the west bank of the Nile River at Thebes. The remains of a 57-foot (17 meter) seated statue of Ramses II litter the foreground. Jules Itier photographed the scattered remains twenty-five hundred years after the temple's destruction by earthquake and subsequent quarrying. The shattered colossus was the subject of Shelley's poem "Ozymandias."
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