Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino

When Turner painted this in 1839, the Roman Forum was not the tidy excavated ruin visitors walk through now. Romans called it the Campo Vaccino, the cow field, and used it as pasture and a cattle market. Turner had visited Rome years earlier and worked this view up from memory back in London, dissolving the ancient columns and the rising moon into his usual golden haze. He showed it at the Royal Academy the same year he exhibited The Fighting Temeraire, and it was among the last views of Rome he ever painted. The picture then stayed in one Scottish family, the Roseberys, from 1878 until 2010, when the Getty bought it at auction for close to 30 million pounds.