A Bell Tower in the Twilight

During my six years as a curator at Escher in The Palace, I have noticed that two particular prints are often confused: S.S. Giovanni e Paolo, Rome (1936) and Dusk (Rome) (1946). Looking at the images, it is easy to see why. Both of these small prints depict the belltower of the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Rome at dusk. Though they are mirror images, they appear nearly identical. There are differences between them, nevertheless. Made exactly ten years apart, M.C. Escher used two different techniques to produce the prints. While S.S. Giovanni e Paolo is a lithograph, Dusk is in fact the very first mezzotint Escher ever made. In this edition of Escher Today, I explore the story of these two remarkably similar prints. 

Escher and his wife Jetta lived in Rome for over a decade. Their children George and Arthur were born there. Escher loved the place he had made his home, but he also enjoyed getting away from the city to visit small Italian villages in mountainous regions. There, he would make countless sketches and photographs which he would later develop into prints back in Rome. The city itself features less frequently in his graphic work. Escher was not so keen on ‘all the baroque excesses’* of Rome, preferring to focus on the wilder Italian landscape. Nevertheless, in 1934 he produced an extraordinary series of twelve woodcuts depicting the city at night. In 1940, during the Second World War, Escher looked back nostalgically on this unique process in a letter to his friend Hein ‘s-Gravesande. He described how, in the evening, generally between 8 and 12, he would spend hours drawing, capturing the magic of this global city. Seated on his folding chair, he used an electric torch tied to his jacket so that he could see the dark paper, on which he drew in white chalk. At his studio, he quickly converted his drawings into woodcuts, completing the entire series in six weeks – a remarkably short length of time by his standards, making this a highly productive period. It would sometimes take Escher months to complete a single print. The remarkable thing about the series is the range of shading techniques he used. In one print, Escher experimented with hundreds of crosses placed close together, while in another a web of lines criss-cross each other. This variation in creative ideas is even more extraordinary considering the short time in which the series came about. 

But not every drawing Escher made of Rome at night immediately became a print. It was not until 1936, two years later, that he developed a drawing of the belltower of the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo into a lithograph. The drawing was made on 1 April 1934, putting it in the same period as the drawings he made for his series on Rome at night. The piece corresponds visually to other nighttime drawings. Escher made them on the same dark paper, using white chalk to draw the buildings and their surroundings. He produced similar sketches of San Giorgio al Velabro and Trajan’s Column slightly later in April, while those of the churches on Piazza Venezia and the colonnade at Saint Peter’s Basilica had been produced in March. The drawing of Santi Giovanni e Paolo has the same atmosphere, but there is less contrast than in other drawings in the series. Now housed at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, this drawing is lighter, as if night had not quite fallen, and Escher had started earlier – at dusk, hence the title of the 1946 mezzotint. 

Why Escher did not publish the drawing as a print until two years later remains a mystery. The circumstances are also unusual. From 26 April to 28 June 1936 he was on an extended trip to Spain, Malta, France and Italy. He had proposed to the Italian shipping line Adria that, in exchange for a voyage, he would make several prints of the locations where the ship docked. This led to a number of distinctive prints of Marseille, Venice, Senglea and other places. It was an eventful trip, during which Escher experienced all kinds of things and made a lot of drawings on location. He wrote many pages about his experiences in his travel journal, but did not make any mention of the lithograph Santi Giovanni e Paolo, which he made in May 1936 during this trip.

The lithograph is in the collection of Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and bears the inscriptions ‘geschaafde litho’ (‘scratched lithograph’) and ‘eenig exemplaar’ (‘sole copy’). The technique for producing a scratched lithograph differs from ordinary lithography – a technique that Escher had mastered by the mid-1930s – in that scratched lithography works from black to white, rather than from white to black. The stone used for printing is first covered with a dark layer. Then the artist uses a pen, needle or blade to scratch an image on it. The base is dark, therefore, not light as is usually the case.** This is reminiscent of the scratch drawing technique that Escher had used previously, and also of his first lithographs from 1929. In these works, too, he first made the stone dark, and worked from dark to light. According to Bruno Ernst, Escher did not use the ordinary lithography technique, drawing directly onto the lithography stone without first covering it with a dark layer, until after 1930.*** In making this image of the basilica in Rome, he therefore returned to the scratched lithography technique that he had used for his very first lithographs. 

According to Escher’s inscription, this scratched lithograph is the only copy. It could be that only one print was made because Escher had limited access to a lithography stone, or because he did not want to take the stone with him on his entire trip. Why he chose this moment to develop his sketch of this particular church in Rome we can only guess. It could be that he was missing Italy, now he no longer lived there. In 1935 he had moved to the Swiss village of Château-d'Oex, where he did not feel at home. The Italian weather, its people and natural environment were more appealing to him. When I visited Santi Giovanni e Paolo in February 2024, it looked to me like a location that would suit Escher. It is close to the Colosseum, but at the same time it is also a quiet, green spot, located on the Caelian Hill near Villa Celimontana. The basilica has an ornate baroque interior, which was not really to Escher’s taste, but its exterior architecture is more sophisticated. It is dedicated to Saint John and Sain Paul, two fourth-century martyrs. The basilica was built in the year 398 and has a turbulent history, having been destroyed and rebuilt several times. Escher chose to focus in his drawing and prints on the Roman red-brick belltower added centuries later. The arches and columns are the type of element that Escher found interesting. They feature in many of his early Italian prints, and prefigure his later optical illusions like Other World (1947) and Convex and Concave (1955).

Ten years after this lithograph was made, in May 1946, Escher produced the mezzotint Dusk. It was the first of eight mezzotints that he would make between 1946 and 1951. It was Louis Lebeer, a Belgian curator who purchased work by Escher for the print room at the Royal Library of Belgium, who drew his attention to this technique. The mezzotint technique, which was developed in the 17th century, is also known as ‘black art’, because of the rich, velvety depth of black achieved, and also because the process works from dark to light. At the bottom of the sheet, Escher refers to the technique used to create Dusk, calling it a ‘zwartekunstprent’ (‘black art print’). The technique was a stimulating challenge for Escher, and he took it up with great enthusiasm, making a further three mezzotints that year. It is understandable that he would choose a familiar image for his very first mezzotint, as it allowed him to focus on mastering the complex technique, without having to think too much about the image itself. 

Despite the similarities, there are also differences between S.S. Giovanni e Paolo and Dusk. In the latter, the time of day is more readily apparent. Darkness has almost fallen, so the lights at the top of the tower and in the bottom left contrast more with their surroundings. The windows are also darker and more mysterious. In S.S. Giovanni e Paolo the grey tints are softer and the contrasts less stark, reducing the effect of the twilight. In both prints, the soft transitions differ from the harsh shading in the series of prints depicting nighttime Rome. In the earlier print the belltower is shown in mirror image, while in Dusk the campanile appears as it does in real life. Ten years later, Escher thus brought his viewers closer to the actual site. 

Although Escher had his reservations about the grandeur and opulence of Rome, the city was important to him in an artistic sense. It is typical of Escher the printmaker, who worked with light and dark, that he would focus on nighttime scenes when depicting the city. And on the transition from day to night, the dusk. He did so in images of a whole series of buildings during the period when he lived in Rome, but the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo was not issued in the form of a print until after he left Italy. In the drawing of April 1934, the lithograph of May 1936 and the mezzotint of May 1946, the basilica occupies a special place in his body of work.