Mount Etna From Taormina, Sicily

Thomas Cole painted this view in the 1840s after a trip to Sicily that left a strong impression on him. He stood among the broken arches of the ancient Greek theater at Taormina, built more than two thousand years ago and later rebuilt by the Romans, and looked out at Mount Etna with a thin plume of smoke drifting from its snowy summit. He called it one of the grandest scenes he had ever seen, and he made several versions of it back in his studio in New York, working from sketches and memory. One detail worth finding: the tiny figure in a dark cloak seated at the bottom center, dwarfed by the rubble, a reminder of how small people are in a landscape this old.

Cole is best known as the founder of the Hudson River School, the first real movement in American landscape painting, and he had a lifelong interest in the rise and fall of civilizations. His famous five-part series The Course of Empire tells that story in paint, and this Sicilian scene makes much the same point without the allegory. The theater is a ruin. The volcano is still very much alive. Everything in between, the plain, the curving bay, the hazy blue mountains, is bathed in the warm light of late afternoon, which Cole used to tie the whole view together and to make the ancient stones feel less like a tragedy and more like part of the scenery.