Pair of thin oils on paper laid on board, within gilded wooden frames, attributable to the circle of Charles Louis Clerisseau, depicting The Temple of Clitumnus between Foligno and Spoleto and the Temple of Augustus in Pula, Istria.

The great architect and engraver Giovan Battista Piranesi, a great friend of Clerisseau from whom he was inspired by countless works, executed in 1748 two etchings of the same subjects with slight differences. Clerisseau, from 1756 to 1760, stayed in Pula, Istria, together with the British architects James and Robert Adams, and depicted in countless drawings and watercolors all the antiquities present there.

Writings on the back of the boards.

Period: 1770

Dimensions: cm 45 x 55

Very good condition, commensurate with age.

Charles-Louis Clerisseau (Perigi 1721-Auteuil 1820) In 1746 he obtained the "prix de Rome". In Rome, in contrast with Natoire, who was director of the French Academy, he was excluded. However, he lived for twenty years in Italy. He was much appreciated by the British architects Robert and James Adam who commissioned him to make drawings of the ruins of Diocletian's Palace in Split. A friend of Piranesi and Winckelman, he was also an archaeologist and, having returned to France, published in collaboration with his son-in-law Jacques-Guillame Legrande the "Antiquites de la France". As an architect he created the Government Palace of Metz and the castle of Borely in Marseilles. He executed many drawings and when he was an architect of the Russian empress he could give it his collection of drawings today at the Hermitage. Most of his paintings are in tempera on paper and are not real views, but representations of monuments executed with a decorative spirit. Its major decoration, little known but important for the history of the eighteenth century taste in Rome, is the "room of the ruins" in the convent of the Trinità dei Monti.