Rome and the Ponte Molle

Rome and the Ponte Molle

1645
Claude Lorrain
ca. 1600–1682
Oil on canvas
29 x 38 in. (73.7 x 96.5 cm)

This painting was in the hands of various London dealers and collectors in the years immediately before its sale to Lord Ashburnham in 1760. It played a major role in Richard Wilson’s transformation of British landscape painting by providing the model for Holt Bridge on the River Dee, which was Wilson’s daring exercise in an intellectual conceit known as an “imitation,” hitherto largely confined to eighteenth-century literature. Imitation of this kind interpreted the present in the light of the past, with reference to a specific, older work of art. The bridge that is the chief feature of Claude’s painting, the Ponte Molle, took the Via Flaminia across the river Tiber into Rome and was a key site for Wilson from his earliest days in the city. 

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