Turner's Love Letter to Rome Passes Through, Briefly

JMW Turner's Rome, From Mount Aventine has returned to Rome for the first time in almost 200 years, the Guardian reported this week, in a visit the paper described as brief and tied to a coming sale. The painting, which the Guardian calls the artist's "great love letter" to the city, is expected to set a record when it goes under the hammer.

Before the auction it will also travel to Hong Kong and New York, according to the Guardian. The itinerary is the ordinary one for a work of this class: a short public viewing in the city that made it, then the commercial circuit that ends in a saleroom.

Seen from Florence, the story is a familiar arithmetic. A picture of Rome is shown in Rome for days, then flown to Asia and America to be valued by buyers who may never stand on the Aventine. The city is the subject; the market is elsewhere.

The Guardian's account places the painting's return in the context of its expected price, which the paper says would be a record. That framing is worth pausing over. A view of Rome, painted by an Englishman, is now an asset whose value is set in Hong Kong and New York before it is settled in a European saleroom — and the city it depicts is, for the purposes of the sale, a stop on a promotional route rather than a home.

Turner's Roman views belong to a long tradition of foreign artists coming south to draw the peninsula, a traffic that has never really stopped. What has changed is the direction of the money. The Grand Tour brought northern Europeans to Italy to look; the present arrangement brings the looking back to them, in climate-controlled cases, with an estimate attached.

For Tuscany the parallel is not exact but it is close enough to be uncomfortable. The Uffizi and the city's churches hold works that were made here and have largely stayed here, which is now unusual. The Turner episode shows the alternative: a masterpiece with a passport, shown briefly where it was conceived, then removed to wherever the bidding is strongest. According to the Guardian, the Rome viewing is itself a rarity — almost two centuries since the last one — which tells you how the rest of the time is spent.

There is a further point, and it is the one the foreign arts press tends to make when these sales come round. A record price is reported as a cultural event. It is in fact a financial one, and its effect on the place depicted is indirect at best. Rome will not see more of Turner for the money. Florence, which has spent decades arguing about how many visitors its own collections can absorb, might reasonably watch the Turner itinerary and recognise the logic: the object travels to the audience, and the city stays where it is, waiting for the next brief return.