Vista de Volterra

In 1834 Corot made his second trip to Italy and stopped for about a month at Volterra, an old hill town in Tuscany, southwest of Florence. He painted small studies outdoors, on the spot, catching the town stacked on its ridge in the clear light. Back in his Paris studio he used those sketches to work up two larger canvases, of which this is one. A road winds up through the green foreground toward the buildings, which sit pale and hazy on the hill, their beige and grey walls nearly dissolving into the warm air. Painting straight from what he saw outdoors, rather than composing an ideal classical scene indoors, was still fairly new for a French landscape painter of his generation. It reached the Louvre in 1906, part of the large collection Etienne Moreau-Nelaton left to France.