Der Dom von Capri

Rudolf von Alt's 1835 view of the cathedral on Capri, executed in watercolour and now in the Albertina, documents the island's principal church during Alt's early Italian travels when he was twenty-three. Capri, the dramatic island at the entrance to the Bay of Naples, was a relatively quiet fishing and farming community in the 1830s — before the tourism that would transform it in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The cathedral church of Santo Stefano, in the central square of Capri town, served a small island population whose way of life had changed little in centuries. Alt was drawn to Capri for the same reasons that attracted later visitors: the extraordinary geological scenery, the luminous Mediterranean light, and the sense of a way of life outside the modernising mainstream of European civilisation. This early work demonstrates the topographic discipline that his father Jakob Alt had instilled, recording the church accurately within its island context while conveying the particular quality of Capri's white-walled, south-facing architecture.

Alt's youthful confidence is evident in the clean architectural perspective and the assured handling of Mediterranean light — direct, intense, and creating sharp shadows quite different from the softer light of northern subjects. The warm whites and creams of Capri's rendered surfaces are achieved through reserved paper and pale washes, with deeper tones used selectively for shadow areas.