Paul Bril

Around 1582 a young Flemish painter arrived in Rome and never really left. Paul Bril had trained in the Netherlands, probably around Antwerp, but he built his whole career in the south, and within 20 years he was decorating the walls of the Vatican itself.

His largest surviving work is a sweeping landscape in the Sala Clementina, one of the papal state rooms, painted for Pope Clement the Eighth around 1600. Bril had come to specialize in landscape at a time when it was still treated as mere background, filling churches and palaces with wooded valleys, harbors, and distant blue hills. Over the years his manner softened from the crowded, detailed style he brought from the north toward calmer, more open views bathed in even light.

That shift mattered beyond his own work. Bril sits on the line that runs from the panoramic world-landscapes of the early Flemish masters to the golden, idealized countryside that Claude Lorrain would paint a generation later in the same city. One of Bril's Roman pupils, Agostino Tassi, was in turn Claude's teacher. He worked in Rome until his death in 1626.