La Maison Carree, Nimes

The Maison Carrée in Nîmes is a Roman temple built around 20 BCE. This photograph of it originated in Les Villes de France photographiées, a state-sponsored project to document architectural views in Paris and the French provinces. Édouard-Denis Baldus, a technical master of the still-new medium of photography, received his initial government assignment in 1851 and was back in the south by the fall of 1853. He continued to manipulate and make use of the Maison Carrée negative for many years. In this version, he painted out the sky area of the negative, as well as the background, in order to isolate the Roman temple from its nineteenth-century urban surroundings, which were retained in an earlier 1851 view of the same monument. The historical purism of this version results in some flattening, even falsening, of the image as a whole.