Flemish school, mid-17th century.
"Landscape.
Oil on canvas. Relined.
It has an inscription on the back stating its provenance: Cepero Collection, Seville.
It has restorations and repainting.
Measurements: 51 x 72 cm.
During the 17th century there was a break with religious themes in the plastic arts, being relegated to the background to give way to landscape and genre themes. In particular, there was a profusion of landscape representations in the northern countries, in which the natural wealth was shown through a great chromatic diversity. This development was due in part to the boom in collecting during the 18th century.
Like other genres that became very popular in Flanders during the 17th century, landscape painting has its roots in the Dutch painting tradition of the 15th century. The background landscapes in the religious works of Van Eyck, de Bouts and van der Goes occupy a much more important place as an artistic element in these works than landscape painting in Italian painting of the same period. With regard to the representation of the narrative, the landscape of the Flemish Primitives plays an essential role, not only as a natural setting for the characters but also to separate and set the various episodes of the story narrated in the work. With regard to the imitation of nature, 15th-century Flemish painters sought to depict the countryside and towns of their native country in their religious landscapes, detailing their flora with botanical precision and even giving an idea of the time of day and the season of the year in which the scene takes place. This special interest in depicting the landscape increased as the 16th century progressed, when a new type of landscape was developed and popularised for sacred scenes: the panoramic view. Very soon, however, it was the depiction of the landscape itself that was to receive the attention of painters and, of course, of the public. In the panoramic views of Joachim Patinir and his followers the roles are reversed: the religious subject is an excuse for the landscape. In these paintings the landscape becomes completely independent of any narrative, and this is the direction that the Flemish and Dutch painters of the late 16th and early 17th centuries were to follow, a time when landscape painting became very popular in the Low Countries and specialists in the genre began to proliferate. Gillis van Coninxloo, Paul Bril, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Joos de Momper are the most distinguished landscape painters of the transition from the 16th to the 17th century, and each of them gave their vision of landscape a very personal stamp.