Santa Trinità dei Monti in the Snow

André Giroux

National Gallery of Art

From a high vantage point, we look across a snow-covered expanse at the long side of a pale, parchment-colored building with a town beyond in this horizontal landscape view. The scene is painted loosely and mostly in tones of icy blue, cream white, golden tan, and brown. Closest to us but far below, a hedge of moss-green treetops lines the sun-drenched, ivory-white field. The field slopes up to our left and a path, between two rows of cinnamon-brown trees, leads from the bottom center of the painting to the building. Four stories of mostly rectangular windows pierce the wall of the building in front of us. Shadows on the snow-covered roof are painted with thick strokes of steel blue. On the other side of the building, a second long roofline runs parallel to the first. The short side of the building, to our right, has a tower at each corner. A fawn-brown obelisk, which is a tapering, pointed column, is topped with a cross and stands in front of the building façade. Stacked and overlapping rooflines, painted broadly in azure blue and silvery gray, fade toward the distant horizon, which comes halfway up the canvas. A blanket of white clouds with arctic-blue bottoms sweep across the sky, revealing only a few small patches of vivid blue sky beyond.