Veduta di Roma: il ponte e Castel Sant'Angelo con la cupola di San Pietro

Corot arrived in Rome at the end of 1825. He was 29, painting full time for the first time after years in his father's cloth business, and he stayed nearly three years. This is the Tiber seen from the left bank, near what is now the Piazza di Ponte Umberto, with the Ponte Sant'Angelo crossing to the right and the dome of Saint Peter's beyond. The drum on the right was the pope's fortress and prison. Studies like this one, oil on paper, were working documents rather than pictures for sale. Corot kept them in his studio all his life, and it was the sale held after his death in 1875 that first put them in front of collectors.