Rome from Monte Mario

Rome from Monte Mario, painted during Turner's first Italian journey of 1819, captures the panoramic view across the Eternal City from the hill on Rome's northwestern edge that had been a classic tourist viewpoint since the sixteenth century. Turner arrived in Rome in the late summer of 1819 after a journey through France and the Alps, and the city overwhelmed him. He produced hundreds of sketches and watercolour studies in a frenzy of observation, absorbing the Italian light that he had studied at second hand through Claude for twenty years and now encountered directly for the first time. The Monte Mario viewpoint gave him the entire sweep of Rome — the Tiber bending through the plain, the dome of St Peter's dominant on the skyline, the hills of the Campagna stretching to the horizon — and his oil sketch on paper captures the warm Italian light flooding the city with a directness and freshness that his more finished studio paintings sometimes sacrifice for atmospheric elaboration. The Italian journey transformed Turner's colour sensibility permanently, shifting his palette toward the golden and pink tonalities that characterise everything he painted after 1820.

Turner bathes the Roman panorama in warm Italian light, using golden tonalities and atmospheric haze to create a vision of the city that combines topographical scope with poetic luminosity.