View of the Marshes at the Possible Former Site of the Port of Metapontium c. 1783

Curator: This is François Nicolas Barthélemy Dequevauviller's, View of the Marshes at the Possible Former Site of the Port of Metapontium, etched sometime in the late 18th century. Editor: It feels like a stage set, doesn't it? All muted drama and impending… something. Curator: It’s interesting how the image proposes a kind of history-making through landscape. The scene stages an encounter with a site of potential significance. Editor: I suppose there’s a melancholy to it. Knowing a port may have once thrived there and now… just marshes. I wonder what he felt when he etched it? Did he romanticize that vanished port? Curator: The depiction of the land here suggests a kind of speculative engagement, a dialogue between the present and a possibly imagined past. Editor: It makes you think about the layers of time, doesn't it? What was and what might have been. Curator: Exactly, and the very idea of history being open to interpretation. Editor: A landscape painting full of questions instead of answers—I like it.