Modern Rome, Campo Vaccino
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 to 1851) · 1839
Rome dissolves in golden evening light. You are looking from the Capitoline Hill across the Roman Forum, which in Turner's day was a cow pasture called the Campo Vaccino, toward the Colosseum in the far distance. The columns of the temples of Saturn and Vespasian rise at the left, the arch of Septimius Severus sits in the middle ground, and the moon has risen in a lavender sky while the sun still burns behind the hill on the right. Goats, monks and peasant women wander among the ruins as if the empire had never existed.
Turner painted it in London from sketches made on his second visit to Rome ten years earlier, and he treated the topography loosely, shifting buildings for effect. Look closely and the picture is almost abstract: thin glazes of yellow and white scumbled over a warm ground, with the architecture floating in haze and only the foreground figures sharply drawn. Turner's contemporaries thought his late style was madness, but this canvas shows how carefully the mist is controlled, thickening and thinning to lead your eye from the dark foreground to the glowing distance.
The painting was a companion to Ancient Rome, now in Tate Britain, and it was bought by Turner's friend and patron Hugh Munro of Novar. It later spent more than a century with the earls of Rosebery in Scotland, hanging in the same house and almost never lent. When it was sold in twenty ten the Getty paid about forty five million dollars, a record for the artist, and it hangs here as the museum's greatest British painting. Find the tiny moon, a single touch of white in the lavender sky.
Did You Know? The painting left Britain only after a temporary export bar, since no British museum could raise the price to keep it.
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