Roman landscape 

Curator: Welcome. We’re looking at a painting entitled "Roman Landscape" by Mariano Fortuny Marsal. Editor: It's got a hushed sort of stillness, don't you think? All greys and browns. Feels almost… biblical in its quiet solemnity, like some old etching illustrating a forgotten story. The impasto is really thick too. I keep expecting the breeze to pick up and stir those laundry. Curator: Fortuny Marsal was a painter and printmaker, born in Spain, celebrated for his costumbrismo and later, his genre painting, and his experimentation with printmaking. He actually travelled through Europe, and North Africa. These travels profoundly influenced his aesthetic approach and subject matter, particularly scenes of daily life and landscape. The landscape in a domestic or intimate sphere becomes important in this way of seeing the world. Editor: Definitely domestic. I mean, is that laundry I see hanging back there? Someone’s clearly doing their wash even as empires crumble. I also enjoy this little house with an eerie and dark window: gives depth and weight to the painting and makes it not flat at all. Curator: His landscapes broke free from academic rigidity. We start seeing the effects of plein air painting. Editor: Yes, plein air with laundry. You have to love the ordinariness and the realness that strikes you. Curator: Exactly! By merging elements of both intimate domesticity and natural expansiveness, the artist blurs boundaries, prompting viewers to question conventional categories of artistic representation. It certainly captures how artists, and indeed people, re-imagined landscape as experiential rather than as only purely picturesque. Editor: Well, it has made me reflect upon how the mundane and the majestic always dance together. And sometimes, if you squint just right, you can see the sacred hiding in the ordinary. Curator: Indeed, a very powerful observation on art.