Fabriques à Tivoli (Buildings at Tivoli) 1828

Jules Coignet made this print, "Fabriques à Tivoli," around 1828, using lithography. It captures the town of Tivoli perched dramatically on a cliffside near Rome. This image reflects a broader 19th-century fascination with picturesque views and the Italian landscape, but also a shift in how artists engaged with their environment. Coignet, trained in the academic tradition, moved towards direct observation and plein-air sketching. This print would have been part of a series. The rise of lithography enabled wider distribution of such images, shaping the cultural imagination of places like Tivoli. Visual codes of the picturesque, with its emphasis on the sublime and the natural, were highly commercial. To understand this image more fully, we might consult travel guides and art journals of the time. We could delve into the market for prints and the institutional structures of art education, which would shed light on the social conditions that shaped its production and consumption.