Henry Fuseli, The Despair of the Artist Before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins, 1778-80, pen and ink, Kunsthaus, Zurich.

These ruins, in the Belvedere Palace Collection of the Vatican date from the era of Constantine. Fuseli, the Swiss arch-romantic, spent much of his career teaching at the Royal Academy in London. He's famous for imaginatively juxtaposing the human figure with the more or less monstrous, exploiting the contrasts of scale or reality, even, to approximate the newly re-codified aesthetic category of the "sublime." More on that another time. But Fuseli here carefully composes the image with an oddly, half-dressed artist, embracing the foot of Constantine and holding his head in ambiguous grief.

The ruins themselves are a partial collection of fragments of a monumental sculpture of the Emperor Constantine himself, slightly reconfigured for the artist's purposes. He chooses only the reversed hand and the foot, emphasizing scale, not personality.