Painting Depicting The City Of Messina From A Bird's Eye View And Its Port ( 1620 About)

 Painting depicting the city of Messina from a bird's eye view and its port. The structure of the port has a direct parallel with a 16th-century painting depicting the port of Messina by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, where the outer edge of the port ends, as in this painting, with a tower. A modification will be reported later to create an arm-shaped protuberance to further enclose and protect the port, a feature we find repeated in engravings from the first half of the 17th century. The painting, in two-tone tones of green and brown and in its variations, executed in a non-meticulous but rapid manner because it was painted 'over the door', suggests that it is by a Flemish master working in Rome and Naples, probably also in Messina and Sicily. The Kings of Spain loved to show their distant possessions to their court, and these rare bird's eye views represent very rare historical documents, which have today become true toponymic 'archaeology'. Work dating back to the first half of the 17th century.