Expanding Horizons: Giovanni Battista Lusieri and the Panoramic Landscape presents the first ever solo exhibition of the meticulous pencil, pen, and watercolour landscapes of Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1754-1821). One of the most popular landscape artists of his day, Lusieri has been largely forgotten since. The exhibition, directed by Chief Curator Aidan Weston-Lewis, banks on the assumption that the exacting realism of Lusieri’s scenes from Italy and Greece, the attention to every leaf, ripple, and stone that so appealed to his contemporaries, will equally please today’s viewers, despite their habituation to photography.

But why revive Lusieri now, and why here? Answers to these questions lie just across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh, in the Kingdom of Fife, where the estate of Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin still stands today. For while Lusieri began his career in Rome selling pictures to the British on the Grand Tour, he ended it in Athens as Lord Elgin’s right-hand man, overseeing archaeological excavations and the now infamous removal of the Parthenon’s marble friezes. Late in life, Lusieri lamented that this work kept him from greatness and fame, but his current turn in the spotlight certainly owes everything to Lord Elgin’s decision to purchase and conserve the contents of Lusieri’s studio after his death. Lusieri owes a further debt to the current Lord Elgin who lent much of the material for this show and helped revive scholarly and museological interest in him with the decision to sell parts of his collection at auction in 1986.

The show’s four rooms move chronologically through Lusieri’s career. It opens with Rome, the city of his birth, and his winning combination of panoramas and picturesque views of ruins. The curators have lavished particular praise on the notably ‘informal’ viewpoints of his Ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. The next two rooms contain work made after Lusieri established himself in Naples in 1781/2, including what the curators have described as his magnum opus – a 1791 view of the Bay of Naples from Palazzo Sessa that measures a full 101.8 x 271.9 cm and spreads over six sheets of paper – as well as some of Lusieri’s popular nocturnal eruptions of Mount Vesuvius. 

Prompted by Napoleon’s invasion, Lusieri fled to Sicily in 1798, and the fourth room contains pictures produced there. Of note in this section is a Panorama of Palermo and the Conca d’Oro from Monreale framed on the left by a particularly tactile rendering of a rust-tinged cliff face dotted with shrubbery and cacti. Lusieri left Sicily a scant two years later to travel to Greece under Lord Elgin’s commission, and the rest of the room contains sketches, drawings, and a handful of completed works from his time there. The pairing of a watercolour drawing of a bronze dinos, or bronze bowl, with the actual object (on loan from the British Museum), provides particularly tangible evidence of Lusieri’s role in the accumulation of Greek antiquities. 

The show’s chronological procession and display of sketches alongside finished and unfinished drawings allow visitors to build an understanding of a working process that remained remarkably unchanged over more than four decades. Lusieri started with detailed pencil drawings, then retraced outlines in ink, and finished (when he did) with meticulous watercolour, giving finished works an almost paint-by-number feel. The curators and a catalogue essay by Italian Lusieri expert Fabrizia Spirito emphasize the importance of Lusieri’s habit of working from nature: his detailed renderings sought to capture the world as it was, not recreate it in the studio. His imagination came into play at the level of compositional collage with the insertion of framing repoussoir trees and idealized peasants, soldiers, and tourists (all drawn from nature, of course). The exhibition’s rich presentation of these preparatory drawings alongside finished works allow the visitor to imagine Lusieri mulling over which neighbourhood dog – Morgante, Giordano, Romanella, or Chiappino – would best fit into the view of Lake Avernus (Chiappino won out). 

The combination of posed representatives of local character and precise renderings of vistas and ruins made Lusieri’s drawings the picture postcards of the day. Although he did work for several patrons, the curators have also done an excellent job of showing Lusieri’s production for a general market. It is little wonder that French and British visitors, eager to bring something of the Mediterranean back home, abandoned camerae lucidae and sketchbooks to snap up watercolour drawings of Mount Vesuvius’s fiery plumes or the washed-out heat of the Roman sky. The curators’ decision to display multiple versions of the same views, some still bearing their original cardboard backings, gives visitors an idea of Lusieri’s keen understanding of mass production and merchandising. 

The combination of the mass nature of Lusieri representations and their ‘hyper-realism’ pushes the curators into interesting, yet unresolved, tensions. Wall texts jump between contemporaries’ descriptions of the ‘beauty’ and ‘eloque[nce]’ of Lusieri’s scenes and the curators’ judgement of their ‘detached neutrality’. Does Lusieri’s greatness – presumably one reason for this solo exhibition – lie in his artistic interpretations or in his ability to erase himself from his work? Contemporaries described his panoramas not as painted or drawn but as ‘taken from’ real life. The curators parrot this contradiction with their gestures to the photographic: attributing an ‘informal snapshot quality’, for example, to one scene of a hunter. And yet, as the catalogue essays make clear, Lusieri’s relationship to mechanical reproduction only went so far. He did not employ a camera lucida to trace reality onto the page, nor did he simply colour in printed etchings of his own drawings. On the other hand, he did often use a pantograph to create multiple copies of the same image and had at least considered producing engravings of his work. Viewers may well leave the exhibition wondering if we should value Lusieri for this use of quite common tools of the trade as a sort of prescient anticipation of photography or if these lapses into mechanical reproduction are something for which we need to forgive him.

Those who did not make it to Edinburgh this festival season will value the exhibition’s finely produced catalogue. With reproductions of every piece on display and a collection of finely researched and argued essays, all future Lusieri scholarship – and indeed any research into eighteenth-century landscape – will have to start here.

Viewers hoping to find salacious fodder for the ongoing debate about the Elgin marbles may well come away conflicted. The sheer painstaking nature of Lusieri’s work suggests a life and career marred by neither haste nor rashness. And in some sense Lusieri’s collaboration with Lord Elgin seems the natural extension of a career spent packaging the Mediterranean into easily-exportable snippets. Yet, as a Roman – and someone who depended on the circulation of people, not just goods – shouldn’t Lusieri have felt some sympathy for the Greeks’ loss? Perhaps, but the inclusion of the small figure of a Greek peasant in his watercolour The Monument to Philopappos suggests otherwise. In all of Lusieri’s scenes figures point, gesture, and look, thus guiding the viewer’s gaze through the composition. Here, however, in this rendering of marble sculptures Lord Elgin had contemplated removing, the lone figure turns his back on the ruin and points away from it, off into the distance beyond the frame. The peasant’s pointing finger seems to embody Lord Elgin’s own finger-pointing: the accusation that the Greeks did not care for or value the antiquities in their midst. The fact that the monument to Philopappos made it through the past two centuries in situ and relatively unscathed suggests the possible fallacy of that oft-repeated justification of Lord Elgin and Lusieri’s actions in Athens.