An imaginary view of Egypt by Hubert Robert

In scholarly Europe, from the^16th century to the dawn of^{the 19th century} , Egypt and its civilisation captured the attention of many artists and scholars. The false, the true and the imaginary were often intertwined with a taste for the extravagant or the mysterious, a fundamental aspect of Orientalism in its early days, which, according to art historian Jurgis Baltrusaitis, stemmed from a fundamental need of ‘modern’ humanity in the face of an overly staid history of ‘progress’.

The scholarly circles of^18th-century Europe were particularly susceptible to Egyptomania, blending elements borrowed from the art of ancient Egypt, reinterpreted and reused in accordance with the sensibilities of the time. The great art lover Caylus, in his voluminous *Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques et romaines* (1752–1767), was the first to demonstrate the aesthetic value of Egyptian art, whilst in Italy, Cardinal Alessandro Albani, the most important Roman collector of the^18th century, regarded Egyptian civilisation as the equal of the Greek and Roman civilisations. Similarly, Piranesi delivered a eulogy in favour of Egyptian art in the preface to a work published in 1769 on ‘Various Ways of Decorating Fireplaces’. Thus, from the early years of the^18th century, sphinxes and obelisks began to appear on andirons and clocks.

During their travels in Italy, artists and private individuals could admire the Egyptian-style antiquities from Villa Adriana, which had been on display at the Capitoline Museum since 1748, thanks to Pope Benedict XIV, where they stood alongside the Isiac finds made in Rome. In the Eternal City, one could admire a wealth of obelisks, sphinxes and Egyptian lions, as well as the steep-sided pyramid of Gaius Cestius. Artists such as Hubert Robert and Pierre-Adrien Pâris brought these Egyptian influences back to France, where they fuelled the revolutionary imagination, which for a time envisaged supplanting the Christian faith with that of Isis.

The motif of the pyramid is a recurring theme in the work of Hubert Robert, at a time when Europe, in the throes of an aesthetic fascination with antiquity, viewed ruins as a memento mori, a meditation on the end of civilisations, as part of a school of thought which, at the turn of the century, was questioning the future of Europe. Despite the precise references to Egypt and its ruins, with sphinxes guarding the entrance, the view from beneath a bridge is strongly reminiscent of Hubert Robert’s Venetian views, as is the waterfall in the foreground. The scene depicted by the painter thus becomes powerfully imaginative, straddling Egypt and Venice, the wild and the urbanised, ruins and sites of human activity.

Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Essay on the Legend of a Myth: The Quest for Isis – An Introduction to Egyptomania, Paris, Perrin, 1967.

Hubert Robert, 1733–1808: A Visionary Painter, [Paris, Louvre Museum, 9 March–30 May 2016], exhibition catalogue edited by Guillaume Faroult, Paris, Louvre Museum / Somogy, 2016.

J.-M. Humbert, Egyptomania in Western Art, Paris, Art Creation Realisation, 1989.