The Pontine Marshes at Sunset

Inhabited by herds of black buffalo, a focus of malaria that often afflicted Rome, the marshy landscape of the Paludi Pontine once stretched southeast of Rome on both sides of the Via Appia. After the ancient drainage systems fell into disrepair, they were not drained again until the 20th century. "One looks," Kopisch wrote to his patron about the painting, "across the Pontine marshes into the Tyrrhenian Sea, into which the sun's disc is about to sink. The crimson sky of Scirocco is mirrored by flood waters, which the river Nymphaeus leads to the sea. In the background, to the left, the promontory of Monte Circello rises from the reedy plains, the former island of the Kirke, still further one of the Ponza Islands. To the right of the river one sees a dilapidated water conduit from the times of the Caesars; in the foreground a half-Roman, half-medieval castle ruin with a round tower. The staffage is a herd of wild buffaloes swimming from bank to bank."

The view from above, directed towards the distance, spares the foreground. Kopisch's attention to extreme colored light phenomena was certainly strengthened by his rediscovery (together with Ernst Fries) of the Blue Grotto on Capri (which we have featured in DailyArt before; please check it in our Archive). Here visibly, light—primordial phenomenon and spectacle—seems to reveal, far more than the presence of the divine, the power of physical forces.

The subject of the painting was a favorite motif of Romantic German painters for decades, such as Caspar David Friedrich (check out his most famous works).

We present today's work thanks to Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. 

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