Left: Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941), Urbino, Italy, 1980. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Emmet and Edith Gowin
Right: Claude Lorrain (French, 1600-1682), Landscape with Aeneas and Achates Hunting the Stag, 1669. Pen and brown ink and brown wash, heightened with white gouache, squared in graphite. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1909, I, 273
During his travels in the 1970s, Gowin began photographing what he called “working landscapes”: sites where humanity and nature have shaped one another over decades, centuries, or millennia.
In this mythological scene from The Aeneid Gowin sees Claude Lorrain portraying “the sacred grove, the place to which people retreated for rejuvenation or to be in touch with the sacred,” but also the forest as the artist must have known it, with “a history, darker than what you see.”