In late summer 1828, when the Berlin painter Carl Blechen set out for Italy, he was in the throes of a deep personal and artistic crisis. Yet his stay in the south proved to be a liberating experience. These small, masterful oil studies reveal Blechen at the absolute peak of his artistic radicalism.

While one, from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, focuses on the ruins of the Septizonium, the other depicts the Colosseum. The latter is on permanent loan to the Fondation Custodia in Paris. The two works may even have been created on the same day, so closely related are they. Here they are reunited for the first time since their creation.

Unlike the generation of classical Romantics before him, Blechen did not seek nostalgic poetry or a romanticized, history-laden idealization in the ancient ruins. Instead, he was fascinated by the raw, physical reality of the place under the scorching Italian sun.

With an almost modern, seismographic sensitivity, Blechen breaks down monumental architecture into pure effects of light and color. The ancient masonry is not rendered in detail, but is brought to the canvas with bold, impasto brushstrokes as a two-dimensional composition of warm ochre, brown, and red tones. It is the glaring, relentless midday light that becomes the true protagonist here: it models the sharp edges of the arches and casts sharp shadows against a stark blue sky above. All romantic sentimentality has vanished from this painting; in its place is the pure, immediate visual experience under the open sky. With this uncompromising focus on the atmosphere of the moment, Blechen proved himself during his Roman period to be a revolutionary in German landscape art, thereby paving the way for Realism.