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On October 2, 1880, Twachtman left Cincinnati for Florence, arriving early in the next month. There, through the winter of 1881, he taught at the school established by Frank Duveneck in Florence.
In his free time, Twachtman painted in the countryside, and his site in this work is the Valley of the Mugnone, north of Florence and south of Fiesole, through which the Mugnone River—a narrow tributary of the Arno—flows through a narrow canyon below the Badia Fiesolana, a medieval cathedral that became a monastery (it is now the main location of the European University Institute).
Twachtman's view is along the north side of Via Faentina looking toward the bridge at Ponte alla Badia. The original bridge had three arches. An image of it can be seen in Francesco Botticini's The Assumption of the Virgin, ca. 1475 (National Gallery, London). By the mid-eighteenth century, as seen in an etching dated 1757 after a painting of this site by Giuseppe Beneditti (1707–1782), it had been replaced with a single span with a pointed arch at the center (fig. 1.) It is this form of the bridge that Twachtman featured. In his painting, behind the bridge are buildings in the town of Ponte alla Badia. In the left distance is the hill of San Francesco on the Fiesolano side while the slope of Monte Rinaldi is on the Florentine side.
The bridge has subsequently been replaced with a rounded arch and much fortification and a view of it is obscured by hedges. The buildings in the town are very much the same as they were in 1880 (fig. 2).
The beauty of the area, still evident today, was extolled in a book of romantic tales published in 1875 by the English author Anna Kingsford, who described the tiny Mugnone river as “slender and bright as a thread of burnished silver,” winding its “fantastic way along the base of the hill beneath canopies of bending larch and tremulous aspens,” providing the “shadiest of runlets that ever delighted the painter’s eye.”[1]
This painting is on a wood panel and the surface now has significant craqueleur. Twachtman created a second view of the site in a painting on canvas, probably created on the same day: Tuscan Scene (OP.401), but rendered from a lower viewpoint, thus focusing more on the buildings along the shore. In the present work, he suppressed architectural details, emphasizing the unity that had occurred over time between built and natural forms in this cultivated landscape, along with capturing the play of reflective light on white stone walls and rust-red roofs set into the hills.
Twachtman gave this painting, along with View near Florence (OP.402) to his friend Julius Rolshoven (1858–1930), a fellow student in Munich, who taught along with Twachtman in Florence. Rolshoven inscribed the verso with the work's title. The painting has remained in the hands of Rolshoven's descendants to the present.
[1] Anna Kingsford, Rosamunda the Princess, An Historical Romance of the Sixth Century; and other Tales (Oxford and London: James Parker, 1875), pp. 157–58.
From Peters 1995, pp. 133–34
In Twachtman's images of Tuscany, Barbizon modes are seen in his preference for cultivated landscapes, his generalized treatments of natural forms, the greater intimacy in his compositions, and his emphasis on tone rather than on strong contrasts of light and shadow. In Florence, near Fiesole, for example, he borrows a formula from works by Camille Corot (1796–1875) such as Old Bridge at Limay, on the Seine, 1872 [Los Angeles County Museum of Art]. In Twachtman's image, soft veils of light cast a silvery glow over the facades of houses, linger in the reflective surface of a river, and establish a pale luminous glow in the sky. The lazy zigzag of the river that extends through the work suggests the peaceful feeling evoked by this settled landscape.