Landscape near Rome with a View of the Ponte Molle

This famous drawing, which belonged to Pierre-Jean Mariette, includes a five-arch bridge spanning the river on the right. It is Ponte Molle (originally Pons Milvius), built on the Tiber to the north of Rome in 109 BC and rebuilt in the 15th century by Pope Nicholas V. For travelers arriving from the north, Ponte Molle was the point of entry to papal territory. This drawing was a preparatory study for a painting now in the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, but Claude so developed it that it became an autonomous work. It is a masterpiece of his luminous style of the 1640s, when Claude felicitously exploited strong contrasts between dark washes and areas of paper left in reserve.