John Goldicutt - Temple of Peace

The subject reflects the characteristics of the Vedutismo movement. Vedutismo is a genre born in the 18th century and developed primarily in Venice. Vedutismo painters aimed to represent a landscape objectively and scientifically, placing it as the protagonist of the work. Leading exponents of the vedutista genre were Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, and Francesco Guardi. There are essentially two types of vedute: the realistic one, taken exactly from reality, and the "capriccio," a fanciful view invented by the painter. This engraving, based on a work by John Goldicutt, can be considered an evolution of Vedutismo, as it was reworked in the midst of the Neoclassical climate and already shows some anticipations of the later Romantic spirit. John Goldicutt's vedute are mostly inspired by Roman antiquities.

In John Goldicutt's works, we can find several aesthetic tendencies typical of his era, in which a certain Romantic spirituality was already beginning to overlap with neoclassical culture. Indeed, his interest was focused on classical antiquity, especially Roman antiquity, whose remains he sought to document with a certain philological precision. At the same time, however, Goldicutt possessed a sense of the visionary and the irrational that already anticipated Romanticism, and his views reflect two aesthetic tendencies typical of that cultural sphere. On the one hand, the "picturesque," or the fascination with evocatively decaying ruins. On the other, the "sublime," found in a certain sense of awe caused by the grandeur of the architecture compared to the viewer. The "sublime" is particularly developed in Goldicutt's style, as can be seen in the juxtaposition of architecture with the tiny human figures and in the evocative perspective. From a formal standpoint, the quality of the life-like reproduction of the objects remains extraordinary.

John Goldicutt (1793–1842) was an English architect, the son of a bank cashier, best known for his architectural drawings rather than his completed buildings. He won medals in London and Paris for his drawings and a gold medal from the Pope for his design of a section of St. Peter's in Rome. Goldicutt was honorary secretary of the Institute of British Architects (1834–1836), a member of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples. He was a judge and commissioner of sewers for Middlesex and Westminster, and from 1828, surveyor for St. Clement Danes and St. Mary-le-Strand.

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