Vista de Volterra

Corot climbed around the old Tuscan hill town of Volterra in 1834, on his second trip to Italy, and spent about a month there making small oil sketches on the spot, the towers, the fortress, the bare hills around it. This larger view was not painted in front of the place at all. He worked it up back in his Paris studio four years later, in 1838, from those sketches and from memory. That is why it reads less as a portrait of Volterra than as a recollection of it, all golden light and rolling ground, the specific buildings softened into an impression. Painted in France, it now hangs about as far from Tuscany as a picture can get, in a small museum in San Diego.