Although French by birth, Claude Lorrain spent his entire working career in Rome. He revolutionized the art of landscape painting by filling his harmoniously ordered scenes (inspired by the campagna, the countryside around Rome) with a golden, hazy light. Painted early in Lorrain's career, Italian Landscape shows a wide, sweeping vista with a wooded hill topped by a structure resembling an ancient Roman temple. The left side of the picture is dark, but the foreground sweeps away in a curve to the right that leads off into an increasingly luminous distance.