Trinità dei Monti

Corot set up in the grounds of the Villa Medici in Rome and looked across at Trinità dei Monti, a French foundation. The kings of France had paid for the church around 1500, and Minim friars lived beside it for more than three centuries. The Louvre dates the canvas broadly, but it is usually placed in his first Italian stay, between 1825 and 1828. In 1828, the year he went home, the friars left, and their house passed to the Society of the Sacred Heart, a French order of teaching nuns. He shows the building from the side, one belltower and the long white convent wing in hard sunlight. The thin needle just beyond is the obelisk Pope Pius VI set up there in 1789, and past it the roofs of Rome run out flat toward the hills.