Roman Forum

Cesare Tallone was born in Savona in 1853 and trained at the Brera Academy in Milan before traveling to Rome, where he absorbed the influence of the scapigliatura movement and the broader Italian engagement with Realism and plein-air painting then reshaping European practice. His Roman views belong to a body of work produced in the 1880s when the newly unified Italian state was conducting large-scale excavations of the Forum, stripping away medieval and Renaissance accretions to expose the ancient ground level. That archaeological moment gave painters like Tallone an unusually raw subject: a site simultaneously ancient and freshly uncovered, its stones still bearing the marks of the pick. The composition here owes something to the vedute tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries, but the execution is wholly of its moment: no polished finish, no framing repoussoir device, just a painter working quickly in front of the thing itself. Tallone would go on to become one of Milan's most celebrated portraitists, a professor at the Brera and a figurehead of the Lombard art world, but these earlier Roman landscapes show a directness and informality that his later society portraits would set aside.