Art: Probity in Rome

Classical Landscape, with Figures and Ruins: the title is on dozens of paintings. The image that pervaded European landscape painting for centuries was nearly always of an idealized Rome with its wrecked marble and Arcadian countryside. Curiously enough, the three artists who did most to fix its shape were not Italian but French—Poussin and Claude in the 17th century, Corot in the early 19th. But other French painters, not chiefly known as landscapists, also set down their impressions of that tawny city in which history lay preserved as in amber. None worked with...

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