Cicero at His Villa at Tusculum

Turner had sketched near Frascati back in 1819, but this Italian idyll is largely invented, an imagined view of the country villa where the Roman orator Cicero once withdrew from politics. He showed it at the Royal Academy in 1839, and part of the point was homage. The 18th-century British landscapist Richard Wilson had painted a similar Tusculan scene and then slid into neglect, and Turner, by now in his sixties and secure, seems to have felt the parallel with Cicero, a celebrated man left behind by his own age. The whole scene glows in the warm, borrowed light of the old master Claude Lorrain, umbrella pines and pale buildings dissolving into a golden haze.