Attributed to Paul Bril

Paul Bril came to Rome from Antwerp in the 1570s to join his brother Matthijs, and he stayed until his death in 1626. His landscapes of ruins, hunters and wooded hills sold steadily to Roman collectors, Cardinal Scipione Borghese among them, and other Flemish landscape painters in the city worked close to his manner.

That closeness is why this name exists. Attributed to is the museum's hedge for a picture near a master that it will not simply give to him. The canvas at the Galleria Borghese shows a hunter and a crane below a round classical temple, possibly the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli outside Rome. The inventory of 1693 listed it as Bril's, by 1833 it was only in his manner, and early 20th-century critics thought it the work of followers. In 1980 the scholar Teréz Gerszi proposed Frederik van Valckenborch, a Flemish painter active in Italy in the 1590s, and Francesca Cappelletti, author of the monograph on Bril, agreed. The museum still catalogues it under Bril with a question mark and dates it to the last decade of the 16th century.