Piazza del Popolo in Rome

The Piazza del Popolo in Rome was one of the great urban spaces of the Eternal City, its twin baroque churches and the Egyptian obelisk at its center making it among the most iconic of Roman views. Gierymski painted this square during his late Italian period when he was moving between Verona and Rome as his mental health declined, and the Piazza del Popolo with its multiple axes and its grand scale gave him a very different compositional challenge from the intimate medieval spaces of Verona. The National Museum in Kraków holds this view as part of its collection of Gierymski's Italian work, preserving one of the last sustained phases of a major Polish painter's career. The light effects of the Roman piazza — intense, Mediterranean, very different from Warsaw — clearly absorbed his attention.

Gierymski renders the Piazza del Popolo with the warm, broken color of his Impressionist method, capturing the broad expanse of the piazza and the twin churches' facades in the bright Roman midday light. The composition uses the square's natural geometry to structure the canvas while the loose touch keeps it from becoming architectural illustration.