It is not a waterfall that Hubert Robert paints. It is time. Look at what crowns the falls. High above, the small round temple of the Sibyl, the remnant of a world gone for seventeen centuries. Far below, the water falling, indifferent, the same as in the days of the Romans. And between the two, tiny, a few figures washing, walking, going about their day without looking up. Robert said everything in that gap: empires fall, the water goes on, and we, down below, notice nothing.
Hubert Robert was nicknamed “Robert of the Ruins,” and it was not merely a picturesque label. Trained in Rome under Piranesi and Panini, he spent his life painting what was left of civilizations: broken columns, temples overgrown with grass, grandeur reduced to scenery. This painting was composed in 1776, ten years after his return, from memory and imagination as much as from life. The site really exists; the composition, though, is a meditation on ruin.
And that is where the canvas works on us. We think we are admiring a beautiful golden landscape; we are really looking at a lesson in humility. Those foreground figures, the ones that give the scale, are us: busy, tiny, at the foot of a splendor already fallen that we no longer even look at. There is no tragedy in this painting, rather a strange serenity, the serenity of one who has understood that everything passes and finds it beautiful all the same.
This same waterfall at Tivoli, Vernet had painted it before him: he was the master Robert was trying to equal on this motif. Two gazes upon the same water, forty years apart. The water itself has not moved.
There remains a fact the painting, in 1776, could not have known. A few years later, the man who painted worlds in ruins would watch his own collapse: imprisoned under the Terror in 1793, he owed his survival only to the fall of Robespierre. He would then become one of the curators of the young Louvre museum, and would one day paint the imagined ruin of its Grande Galerie. His ruins were not nostalgia. They were lucidity.
A question for you
At the foot of the falls, the small figures do not look up at the ruins. And you, had you looked at those little figures?
Further information
- The Cascatelles of Tivoli, by Hubert Robert, 1776
- 50 x 74 cm
- Collections of the Petit Palais, Museum of Fine Arts of the City of Paris (exhibited in Ground Floor Garden Room 12), Paris Musées
- https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/petit-palais/oeuvres/les-cascatelles-de-tivoli-0
