Curatorial description (accessed: 13 October 2016)
Jones set out from England on an ambitious photographic Grand Tour of Italy and Malta in 1846 after having learned the negative-positive calotype process from its inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot. Intending to distribute his photographs through Talbot's printing house, the Reading Establishment, Jones recorded commercially appealing sites well known from guidebooks and printed illustrations. Despite the familiarity of the locations, Jones's Italian compositions are distinct for their fresh observation and surprising vantage
points. In this photograph, one of the earliest known pictures of Milan, shop awnings project from a nineteenth-century edifice and frame an oblique view of the cathedral's Gothic Revival façade.
