フィレンツェの眺め

Thomas Cole is remembered as the painter of wild American scenery, the founder of what became the Hudson River School. This is the other side of him. He had sketched Florence from the hill of San Miniato in 1831 while traveling in Italy, and six years later, back in his New York studio, he worked the small drawing up into this broad golden view. He hung it beside a Catskill Mountain scene to show he could master both the old civilized landscape and the raw new one. The dome of the cathedral and the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio rise out of the haze along the Arno. In the foreground, well away from all that history, he added a few herders and goats resting in the evening light.