View of Florence from San Miniato

Thomas Cole painted this view in 1837, back in his New York studio, working from sketches and memories of the months he spent in Florence a few years earlier. The vantage point is the hill of San Miniato, still the spot where visitors climb today to see the whole city laid out at once. Brunelleschi's red dome rises on the right, Giotto's bell tower beside it, and the square tower of the Palazzo Vecchio punches up through the rooftops in the center. The Arno curls away to the left, crossed by the little bridges, and beyond it the Tuscan hills fade into a pale haze that swallows the late afternoon sun.

Cole is usually remembered as the founder of the Hudson River School and the painter of grand moral allegories like The Course of Empire, which he had just finished when he started this. Compared to those thundering pictures of rising and falling civilizations, this one is relaxed, almost affectionate. He still could not resist a bit of foreground storytelling: a broken stone pedestal and a cracked urn on the left, a goatherd driving his animals along the wall on the right, and a cluster of people sitting and chatting as if the famous skyline behind them were nothing special. For Cole, that was part of the appeal of Italy, a place where ruins, farm animals and masterpieces all shared the same hillside.