Ferdinand Heilbuth, German
“Please Don’t Touch Any of the Ruins, Folks. We Wouldn’t Want To Damage Them. And Yes, I Realize How Stupid That Sounds,” ca. 1873-75
Oil on canvas
Follow That Is Priceless on Social Media and GoComics (the Link button):
Click to Follow This Blog or Share This Masterpiece:
Info, or links that point to more info, about this artist can be found here, here, here (can be read in full for free on Fridays), here, and here, perhaps in addition to what’s in his Google translated French Wikipedia page.
/// When he toured Excavations in Rome,
(though he’d written a scholarly tome
about Art he’d collected),
the Italians objected
to this Brit shipping anything home.
/// Here, surrounded by ancient high walled
stone façades, and reliefs which were called
the Plutei of Trajan,
he caught a contagion.
On the floor of the Forum he sprawled.
/// But, from Death’s grasp, His Lordship was plucked.
He recovered in time to construct,
on his English estate,
a replica, great,
of the newly unearthed aqueduct.
/// This stone rubble you see was all Roman.
That so much remains is a good omen.
King Ozymandias,
(truly a candy-ass);
now just legs and a head, no abdomen.
/// Roman sculptors made carvings with pride.
For each sculpture a story’s implied.
But the tale will be brief
in a carved bas-relief,
they tell stories, but just from one side.