The View From Aventine

The Guardian reports this week that J. M. Turner's Rome, From Mount Aventine has come back to the city it depicts, almost two hundred years after it was painted, before travelling on to Hong Kong and New York and then to auction, where it is expected to fetch a record sum. The paper calls it the painter's great love letter to Rome. We note the itinerary with interest: the picture will be seen in the city that made it for a matter of days, and in the market that will price it for rather longer.

There is nothing new in this. The world has always preferred its Rome framed — from a hill, at a distance, in a light that flatters. Turner worked from studies made on the spot, but the finished canvas is an argument about the city rather than a record of it: the dome placed just so, the river burnished, the air thickened to gold. Foreign coverage of Italy has kept the habit. The country is reported as a composition, and the composition is usually beautiful.

The difficulty with the love letter is that it is addressed to an idea. A city that exists to be looked at is a city under obligation — to remain legible, to keep the view clear, to perform the ruin and the sunset on schedule. Romans who live among the sites in the painting are not consulted about the frame. They are, at most, the staff of the composition.

We do not say the affection is false. The Guardian's correspondent is right that Turner loved the place; the record price will be a measure of how much the world still wants a Rome it can hang on a wall. But a country reported at one remove is always being painted, never quite being lived in. It would be a service to the city if, once in a while, the world looked from the street rather than the hill.