Abraham van Cuylenborch

A long avenue of trees, statues along its edges and small figures strolling toward the front of the Villa Borghese, the garden palace built for Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Rome. That is how Abraham van Cuylenborch, a painter from Utrecht in the Dutch Republic, recorded the place around 1636. The building sits back in the scene, and the park with its visitors carries the picture.

Cuylenborch worked in Utrecht as a follower of Cornelis van Poelenburgh, a local painter of small Italianate landscapes, and he is best known for grottoes and ruins peopled with bathing nymphs. When the Italian State bought this panel in 1931 from Prince Vladimir Argutinsky-Dolgorukov, an émigré collector, it passed as the work of Bartholomeus Breenbergh, another Dutch painter of Roman views. Scholars later moved it to Cuylenborch by comparing it with his signed Bath of Diana. That same year the panel was shown at the exhibition of the Italian garden in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.