Fanciful View Of The Piazza Del Popolo In Winter – 17th Century Flemish School

Flemish School, 17th century. Oil on paper mounted on panel.
From the heights of a snowy hill—none other than the Pincio Hill in Rome—on which peasants are busy with their labor, we see the famous Piazza del Popolo, where a crowd of people are milling about. This central square is the scene of a winter festival: the carnival. Everyone is having fun in their own way: in the streets, some are riding sleighs while others are racing on horseback. In the center of the square, people have gathered around the Flaminio obelisk to dance, play jokes, and play ring toss. Taking part in these festivities, some children are playing music while two of their friends relieve themselves behind them. The artist thus delivers a dual vision of winter: the urban entertainments taking place in the center are matched by the two landscapes located in the foreground and background. A low light radiates the scene with yellow and pink reflections as far as the distant hills, creating at the same time frank plays of shadows and backlighting on the architectural elements of the city.
In keeping with the Flemish tradition, our painter gives realism to his work by composing from a point of view lowered to the height of a man. Not seeking to embrace the entirety of the world, he gives us a glimpse of a fragment of life located halfway between the genre scene and the landscape. The artist delivers here a personal interpretation of a work by Paul Bril representing the months of January and February within a calendar series translated into engraving by Aegidius Sadeler II in 1615. While Paul Bril's long journey in Italy led him to paint rather solemn figures, our artist prefers the popular figures and comical situations characteristic of Flemish genre painting since Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

We have chosen to present this painting in a reversed profile frame in ebonized wood.
Dimensions: 38 x 56 – 52 x 70.5 cm with the frame

Biography: Following an early apprenticeship in Antwerp with Damiaan Wortelmans, Paul Bril (Antwerp, c. 1554 – Rome, October 7, 1626) went to join his brother Mathijjs in Rome in 1574, in order to assist him in his papal commissions. His first autograph works date back to the late 1580s; they are mostly monumental frescoes for the Vatican. A landscape painter trained in the Antwerp tradition, his style gained autonomy at the end of the 16th century through contact with Italy and its artists. Abandoning the dramatic effects of the Frankenthal school, he developed a more harmonious and calm style of painting in which classical architecture and ruins occupy an important place. Renowned throughout Italy, he was elected a principal member of the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome in 1620 and his works were collected by the most eminent figures of his time.

Bibliography:
- GIBSON, Walter S., Mirror of the Earth: the World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
- THIERY, Yvonne, Flemish Landscape Painters in the 17th Century: From Precursors to Rubens, Brussels, Lefèbvre and Gillet, 1988.
- VLIEGHE, Hans, Flemish Art and Architecture: 1585 – 1700, Yale University Press, 1998.
- WOOD RUBY, Louisa, Paul Bril: The Drawings, Belgium, Brepols, 1999.