View of Jerusalem with the Temple of Solomon

This large, vigorously worked drawing, made in red chalk on two attached sheets of paper, is a study for a view of ancient Jerusalem for the background of a painted Crucifixion given by the artist to the church of the Chartreuse de Vauvert in Paris (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Champaigne’s characteristic fidelity to biblical texts is here manifest in the research that underpinned his conception of the Temple of Solomon, the hilltop structure at upper right. Destroyed before the birth of Christ, but looming large in 17th-century theological and archeological debates, the Temple of Solomon was the subject of several illustrated treatises, including In Ezechielem Explanationes et Apparatus Urbis ac Templi Hierosolymitani published in Rome in 1596 with plans and elevations after designs by Juan Bautista Villalpando.

While his temple may be based on Villalpando’s elevations, its placement within a luminous panoramic view of the ancient city is a tour-de-force of Champaigne’s imaginative powers, incorporating borrowed architectural elements into a dense jumble of imagined buildings, dramatically lit by the setting sun. In the rushed, abbreviated handling of certain areas (the crenellation of the fortified walls, the foreground), one senses the artist’s urgency as he rushed to get his ideas down on paper.

Perrin Stein, May 2014