The Waterfalls at Tivoli, with the Villa of Maecenas

In the 18th century travellers called the ruin above these falls the Villa of Maecenas, after the friend of the emperor Augustus who was patron to the poets Virgil and Horace. The name was a guess. The great terraced ruin at Tivoli, east of Rome, is now identified as a sanctuary of Hercules Victor, a temple complex of the late Roman Republic. In the 1740s, when Joseph Vernet painted it, the falls and the ruin were a standard excursion for Grand Tour visitors.

Vernet made the picture as the calm partner to a harbour in a storm. Today it belongs to the Mauritshuis, which hangs it in the Gallery Prince Willem V in The Hague. The Dutch engraver Simon Fokke was the first to make a print of it, and he titled the scene a view near Narni, a town in Umbria some way to the north.