View of the Campo Vaccino, Rome

By the 1630s the old Roman Forum was a cattle market, and Romans called it the Campo Vaccino, the cow field. Claude painted it as he found it around 1636, with the Arch of Septimius Severus on the left, cattle wandering among the broken columns, and ordinary Romans in the foreground, some bent over a game of dice. The buyer was Philippe de Béthune, twice French ambassador in Rome, who had retired to his château in Berry and probably wanted a souvenir of the city where he had spent a decade. Claude gave him a pair, this ancient Rome and a harbour built around the modern Capitol, the only time he matched the two Romes that way. The Louvre owns both. This one has worn badly, and in 1816 it was valued at less than a tenth of its companion.