El palacio y el puente de Calígula

Suetonius reports that the emperor Caligula had boats lashed together across the bay between Baiae and Puteoli, a few miles of floating road, and rode over it wearing a breastplate he claimed had belonged to Alexander the Great. Nothing of the bridge survived, and very little of the palace. Turner had walked that shore on his Italian tour of 1819, sketching the ruins above the water, and in 1831 he showed this reconstruction at the Royal Academy, a golden bay filled with buildings of his own invention. It hung at Somerset House next to Constable's view of Salisbury Cathedral across the meadows, an English downpour beside Turner's Mediterranean light, and reviewers picked up the comparison immediately. The canvas is nearly two and a half metres wide. Turner never sold it, and it came to the nation with the rest of what was still in his studio when he died.