Die Ponte delle Torri, Spoleto

Turner crossed Umbria on his first journey to Rome in 1819 and drew the Ponte delle Torri at Spoleto, a medieval bridge striding across the gorge below the town's fortress. He came back to the motif on canvas some 20 years later, in his sixties. The composition is reworked from Bridge and Goats, an etching he had published in 1812 in the Liber Studiorum, the print series in which he set out everything he could do with landscape. So the picture descends from his own earlier print rather than straight from the drawings, and Tate notes that the real topography is wrapped in an atmosphere he invented. He never finished it. It was still in the studio when he died in 1851, and Tate Britain has it on the wall.