Fantastic Landscape

Near the bottom edge, towards the left, a small number is painted on the canvas, 583. It was added for the Borghese household inventory of 1693, whose clerk described an oblong picture of about three and a half palms showing countryside with a little town. A Roman palm was just over 22 centimetres, so his estimate comes to about 78, the height of the canvas today. The little town lies across the water on the right, a river port at night with a bell tower, domes and a moored ship, pale against the dark. The clerk named Paul Bril, and the family inventory of 1833 accepted it as entirely his. Later critics saw the hand of a follower or of Bril's workshop, one scholar proposed Frederik van Valckenborch, and in 2006 the art historian Kristina Herrmann Fiore published it as the master's own work, helped by an assistant. It is not on display at present.