A Mountainous Landscape with Pilgrims at a Chapel in a Grotto

Joos de Momper the Younger worked in Antwerp in the early 1600s, and he made a career out of mountains, which most people around him had never seen. Antwerp sits in the flat Low Countries, but Momper had crossed the Alps to Italy as a young man, and back home he turned that memory into towering, half-invented rock faces sold to collectors who loved the drama of them. This one, from 1616, sends a few small pilgrims to a chapel tucked into a shadowed grotto, dwarfed by the cliffs above. The tiny figures were very likely added by another hand, since Momper often left his people to a specialist, most often his friend Jan Brueghel the Elder. The blue, dissolving distance is the part that is all his own.