The Bridge at Narni

When Corot sent this to the Paris Salon of 1827, a landscape was still expected to be composed rather than merely seen. He had spent the previous autumn in Italy, sitting in front of the real thing: the broken Roman bridge over the Nera river at Narni, in Umbria, painting a small quick study out in the open air. That study, now in the Louvre, keeps only what was in front of him. This is the version he built for the public. Back in the studio he reworked the site into an ideal Italian scene, with framing trees, warm even light, and a herdsman driving his animals along the near bank. The ruined arch of the emperor Augustus is still there in the distance, but it now anchors a landscape arranged the way Claude Lorrain had taught two centuries earlier. The same painter made both pictures within a year, one for himself and one for the Salon.