Near the ancient port of Rome on its Tiber River, archaeologists have found plenty of wonderful traces of the great temples and altars that once stood and functioned in this part of the City.
Near the ancient port of Rome on its Tiber River, archaeologists have found plenty of wonderful traces of the great temples and altars that once stood and functioned in this part of the City.I recently decided to return to this area with my sketching materials and stool, in order to capture the layering of eras and ways of life that make Rome so unique. After exploring the outside and inside of the Church of San Nicola in Carcere (St. Nicholas of the Prisons) that today sits confidently on the foundations of the middle of three temples built when Rome was a Republic (several centuries before it became an Empire at the time of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.), I decided to slowly compose a drawing that would show how the church and belfry literally rise from the still-intact foundations of Republican age architecture.
It took several very rough approximation sketches and even a good look at some floor plans of the temples displayed inside the church, before I began to make sense of the space and its various corners. In fact, the more I drew these first images, the more confident I grew when I traced my lines on the paper to make it represent sensibly the beauty and fact of this sort of assemblage of time periods and ways of thinking. I found it helpful to read up on the architectural history of the church, too, dating back to the Christian Middle Ages, and to go back and read about the god Janus, so important to Romans that they named the month of January after him!
The four drawings on display here; two in color pencil and two in Sepia colored ink, are the work of several days and of much thought and walking around the site.
Jose Grave De Peralta, Drawing Instructor, Rome Art
Drawings by Jose Grave De Peralta