Ruins of unidentified cities in 18th century engravings

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Here is an article titled "Photographer Piranesi" I read today on the site "Tartaria".

The 21st century has given to humanity in its incomplete two decades as much as the entire 20th century probably did not. These are iPhones, high-speed trains, algorithms for digital identification of faces from photos from social networks, and much more. But, as they say, everything new is well forgotten old. And this old age is not at all measured in millennia.

As a cultural heritage from past centuries, mankind got the works of catastrophic artists. They differed in that all the works depicted the ruins of various incomprehensible structures, and these ruins in some places were of a huge scale. What was it, an artist's grotesque or sketch from nature? Such ruins of this size cannot be found in Europe. If they were, then it is quite possible that they were dismantled by people or they were finally finished off by numerous wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. Or maybe they were just bombarded by the recent mysterious cataclysm, which all official historical sources prefer to hide. But this is a topic for a separate story.

One of the brightest representatives of catastrophic artists is Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Such a great many articles have been written on his writings that there is no point in going through them now. But he was not the only one who worked in this field. Many of the artists who gave the world paintings and prints remained little known. Their works are found in large numbers in digital archives around the world. And almost no attention is paid to them, except that they are still of interest to indefatigable researchers of history. And of course, many will be surprised by such creations.

Indeed, why would such pyramids come from in Europe? But we will not answer this question, but look at it from a slightly different angle.

Many readers interested in this topic must have noticed that such an engraving, for example, looks very much like it was made from a photograph, but in a very high-quality way. This is not the 20th century, when it was as if they had just learned how to print photographs in newspapers using a raster method. Was it really used in the 19th century? Obviously yes. The fact that the engraving does not come from the hand of the engraver is evidenced by many signs. For example, the correctness of sun shadows, very accurately depicted small details (for example, birds in the sky at a distance of several hundred meters), and many other things that are immediately visible to professional artists.

But since we started with the merits of the 21st century, let's remember one more thing that has already become familiar to everyone, namely Photoshop (although it appeared in the 20th century, it was spread much later). It is not necessary to present it, even with an abundance of simpler programs for editing photos, all professional photographers continue to use it. With this program, you can turn an ordinary photo into any stylized one, including an antique one. And a lot of photos are now being turned into engravings of this kind. Looks stylish and many people like it. And what?

I wonder if anyone tried to do the opposite, namely to translate such engravings by catastrophists into an ordinary photo, from which they were made? The algorithm for such a photo conversion is not at all complicated. One, two, …

oops.. wow picture. Not perfect, of course, but some of the original 19th century photos don't look any better either. Judging by how the clouds turned out, I personally have no doubt that this engraving came from a photo. And who needed it and why? The question is rhetorical. But not Piranesi, that's for sure. Even now, with super-realistic photographs, painting does not go away. This is art, after all. And then, and now it was. Or like this:

The usual picture in the Piranesi style, of which there are a lot. And if you convert?

And here, most likely, Piranesi's comrades-in-arms ran with a camera in the open air, and took such a picture in bright sunlight. It turned out to be painfully realistic on the engraving. So, all these ruins were filmed in the 19th century, or was photography practiced with might and main until the 19th century, but it had to be hidden? The question is rhetorical. But photographs from such engravings, if I may say so, turn out to be very interesting.

I wonder what kind of city was photographed and where is it now? However, the camera with which he was photographed is no less interesting. The people in the photo look more like cartoon characters, but these are the same people, probably from the 17th century. And that is what they were. And in some photos, even smoke and streams of sunlight are clearly visible.

Such is our well-forgotten old.