In the second half of the 1800s, Kanoldt achieved official recognition for his classical landscapes, decades after the death of a master of the genre, Joseph Anton Koch. Like his influential predecessor, Kanoldt went to Italy, where he made this finished view of Benevento--a town thirty miles northeast of Naples--in preparation for the commission of a lavishly illustrated travelogue, <i>Italy: A Sojourn from the Alps to Aetna, published in Stuttgart in 1876.
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