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This picture depicts the Gemonian Stairs which were located in the centre of Rome in Piazza del Campidoglio and belonged to the same building complex as the Victor Emmanuel II National Monument, known also as Vittoriano or Altare della Patria. To the left one can see Palazzo Nuovo, but up the stairs there is the back entrance to the Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. The stairs were also known as the Stairs of Mourning, because soon after they were built in the first century AD they came to be used as a place of execution.
An interesting point is that the cross at the apex of the pillar in the middle of the stairs was left ambiguous by Mägi in his rendition: the artist with an interest in various religious teachings chose to turn the symbolically charged pillar into a commonplace column with the sole function of dividing the space.
It was in Rome that Mägi began painting stairways. He must have become interested in stairs mainly as a compositional element which provided an alternative approach to dividing space. On the other hand, old stairs may have been an element in which Mägi perceived the passage of time.
“It is a strange feeling when you look at old Roman ruins, those grandiose buildings and the whole great style,” he wrote in a letter from Rome in December, 1921. “The faded marble, sporadic details, in ruins – all this makes one a bit sad. It is hard to find anything styleless here: even the new buildings have been executed in the old style.”
Such a melancholy fondness for romantic details which reminded Mägi of temporality also characterised his Helsinki watercolours, where old park sculptures caught his attention instead of the modernist urban environment. The Roman staircase and the space surrounding it are significant for Mägi from an essential rather than an architectural point of view. Here we can speak about dramatizing the urban space: tensions and conflicts are important, rendered mainly through contrasting colours, as well as obscurity and mystique constructed through an indented composition, which Mägi has divided into segments both in the foreground and the background.
The work used to belong to Aleksander Warma, who served as the prime minister of the Estonian exile government in the capacity of the president of the republic. In 1946, the painting was displayed at an art exhibition in Värmland. It has been back in Estonia since 2021.