Roman Landscape with Cattle and Shepherds

Johan Heinrich Roos was well known for his imagery of ruins. He composed this idyllic and romantic setting around the Temple of Vespasian in Rome. The building once stood at the foot of the Tabularium, the record office of ancient Rome, and only its very top is visible in Roos’s painting, the way it appeared before the ruins were excavated in 1811. An Italian peasant woman plays a bagpipe, a child dances with a frolicking dog, livestock lay about contentedly on the rich land—motifs comprising an Arcadian atmosphere, an idealized rural life where the simple is good and the poor are happy.