Italianate Landscape with Church on Cliff n.d.

Gaspard Dughet made this Italianate Landscape with Church on Cliff using black chalk and white gouache on blue paper, likely sometime in the mid-17th century. Dughet, who took his brother-in-law Nicolas Poussin's last name, presents us with an idealized version of the Roman countryside. But there's a tension here. This landscape, with its classical architecture perched high above the untamed wilderness, speaks to the 17th century's obsession with taming nature, of imposing order onto what was perceived as chaos. What does it mean to build these bastions of culture, these churches, on the precipice of something wild and unknowable? Consider your own place within these spaces. Do you find solace in the structured architecture, or a thrill in the wildness of nature? Dughet’s landscape invites us to ponder our relationship with the world around us, to find a balance between control and freedom. It’s in this tension, this negotiation, that we find ourselves reflected in the landscape.