In this oil sketch Venus depicts the surroundings of Rome, a favourite with painters, without ancient ruins. Instead, he drew the viewer's attention to the atmosphere and the colourful horizontal structure of the vast landscape: the ochre-toned, steppe-like foreground is followed by a zonw with hills in brown tones in the middle ground. While the foreground, devoid of vegetation, remains undefined and is laid out in fleeting brushstrokes, the mountains behind it are rendered more precisely towards the centre of the picture. They stand out in pale shades of grey against the blue sky with white to light grey clouds.