Rome. The Colosseum Seen through the Arcades of the Basilica of Constantine

Corot reached Rome at the end of 1825, in the closing weeks of a Holy Year proclaimed by Pope Leo XII. He was 29, on his first journey to Italy, and he started painting the ancient city almost as soon as he arrived. In the lower right corner of this small canvas he wrote Xbre 1825, the old French shorthand for December, so this is one of the first things he painted there. He set up inside the Basilica of Maxentius, the huge vaulted hall on the Forum that Constantine completed, and let its brick arches frame the view. Through two of them the Colosseum appears, and through the third only rubble and scrub. The picture stayed with him until his death in 1875. The red wax seal in the lower left comes from the sale of his studio, and in 1906 the painter and collector Étienne Moreau-Nélaton gave it to the Louvre, in the same gift that brought Manet's Luncheon on the Grass into the national collection.