Fantastic landscape

Circle of Bril Paul

(Antwerp 1554 - Rome 1626)

In terms of collections, the history of the painting, already attributed to Paul Brill, still remains rather uncertain today. There are hypotheses that it may have been one of the confiscated works of the Cavalier d’Arpino (1607). The small copper painting shows a “pure” landscape, with the absence of any human figures. It falls under the tradition of Italianised Flemish landscape painting of which Bril was one of the greatest proponents, and which was much in demand by 17th-century collectors.

Object details

Commentary

This painting forms part of a series of landscapes in the Borghese Collection which are for the most part the work of Paul Bril or his school, although over the last few decades some of these have been attributed to Frederik van Valckenborch. The latter artist was also from Antwerp, some 15 years younger than Bril but certainly influenced by him. Especially during the 1590s, Van Valckenborch adopted some of the typical elements of the master’s pictorial production.

This work is a ‘pure’ landscape, without human figures. This type of painting is quite rare in the Borghese Collection, as most outdoor scenes contain some human presence. Those held by the Galleria are generally of small dimensions and belong to the genre of fantastic landscapes, which in the times of Scipione Borghese received the appellation ‘wild’. Indeed, Scipione Francucci (1613, st. 126-127), who authored a poem celebrating the Cardinal’s art collection, referred to a group of landscapes in the style of Bril, including perhaps the one in question, in terms which clearly show that nature plays the dominant role in these scenes. Where human figures and their traces occupy landscapes, they are assigned a minor part, being almost absorbed by the natural elements. Nature, then, is the great protagonist of this genre of paintings, which sometimes incorporate small figures of saints and shepherds or churches and buildings in the background (Herrmann Fiore 1985, p. X; Cappelletti 2006, pp. 178-179, note 38).

These characteristics are clearly visible in this work as well. The setting is a vast hilly landscape which develops on different planes of depth. The centre of the composition is occupied by a church, which is partially covered by leafy tree branches. Other buildings appear in the background on the right side as well as on the hilltops farther in the distance: their representation becomes less and less defined, to the point that they almost blend into nature itself. The vegetation is finely rendered, especially in the foreground, where sunbeams cross through the leaves of the trees, giving rise to dynamic juxtapositions of light and shadow. 

The chiaroscuro contrast between foreground and background is an element found frequently in the late-16th century production of Bril and his school. Here, though, it is less pronounced than in the Landscape with Saint Francis of Assisi (inv. no. 265), which has the same format and support medium and can be traced to the same milieu.

The work can be dated to sometime between the 1590s and the first years of the 17th century.

The provenance of the Fantastic Landscape is still uncertain. Some scholars believe that it entered the Borghese Collection in the wake of the well-known confiscation of the works of art owned by Cavaliere d’Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari) in 1607, which subsequently became the property of Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Nonetheless, it is impossible to identify the work in the inventory of confiscated items, given the lack of attributions and the vague descriptions of the landscapes. More than one entry in this list may indeed correspond to this painting: for example, item no. 32 is described as ‘another work on copper of a landscape with a walnut frame (Della Pergola 1959, pp. 151-152, no. 212; Herrmann Fiore 2000, pp. 62-63). Similarly, a precise identification of the work cannot be found in the Borghese inventories. Della Pergola (op. cit.) believed that it is mentioned in the fideicommissum list of 1833, where we read of ‘two landscapes on copper by Paul Bril, 9 inches wide, 6 inches high’: yet the dimensions reported here do not exactly match those of the work in question.

The attribution of the painting to Bril continued until at least the late 20th century. Adolfo Venturi (1893, p. 139) was sure of this ascription, as was Anton Mayer (1910, p. 76), who included it among those few works which were undoubtedly by the master himself; he dated it to roughly 1600. In the 1950s, both Leo Van Puyvelde (1950, p. 74) – who backdated it to Bril’s first period – and Della Pergola (op. cit.) were of the same opinion.

In 1990, the painting was displayed at an exhibition in Rome with the attribution to Bril, together with the above-mentioned Landscape with Saint Francis of Assisi.

Most recently, however, critics have tended to remove the work from the artist’s catalogue (Cappelletti, op. cit.). Indeed, Herrmann Fiore (2006, p. 89) ascribed the painting to Frederik van Valckenborch; yet her opinion is not shared by Alexander Wied (2016, p. 28), author of a recent monograph on this painter and his brother Jillis: Wied considers the work in question to be distant from Van Valckenborch’s production and rather attributes it to an unknown artist.

Pier Ludovico Puddu