Vista de Volterra

In 1834 Corot was on his second journey through Italy, and he spent a month in Volterra, an old Etruscan hill town southwest of Florence. He filled small panels out in the open there, quick studies of the town's towers and walls. Back in Paris he built this larger view from them, but he changed the emphasis. The precise buildings give way to the thing that had really struck him, the golden light and the bare, broken ground, with the citadel riding the hilltop and a road threading slowly up toward it. It reached the Louvre in 1906, given by a collector who had gathered a great deal of Corot.