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Richard Parkes Bonington

A Portico in St. Mark's, Venice, ca. 1826

Description

Maker

  • Richard Parkes Bonington, 1802-1828, English

Title

A Portico in St. Mark's, Venice

Year

ca. 1826

Medium

Graphite on wove paper

Type

  • Works on Paper,
  • Drawings and Watercolors

Credit

Anonymous gift

Object Number

2005.142.71

Exhibition History

Exhibition History

Pilgrims of Beauty

February 3 - July 8, 2012

In a small but distinctive group of paintings, watercolors, and intricate pencil sketches such as this architectural study, the young British artist Richard Parkes Bonington was one of the first artists to depict Venice as a melancholy city—magnificent but tragic given its former imperial glory and current state of decay. Bonington visited Venice for four weeks in the spring of 1826, and his pictures inspired Turner, Ruskin, and generations of later artists to study and appreciate the city’s unique and beautiful details. Bonington’s interest may have been fueled by Lord Byron’s recent praise for Venice in the poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto 4, Stanza 3, 1818):

In Venice, Tasso’s echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear:
Those days are gone—but beauty still is here.
States fall, arts fade—but Nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!

Use

The images on this website can enable discovery and collaboration and support new scholarship, and we encourage their use. This object is in the public domain (CC0 1.0). This object is A Portico in St. Mark's, Venice with the accession number of 2005.142.71. To request high-resolution files or new photography, please send an email to imagerequest@risd.edu and include your name and the object's accession number.

Feedback

We view our online collection as a living documents, and our records are frequently revised and enhanced. If you have additional information or have spotted an error, please send feedback to curatorial@risd.edu.

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