Fantastic Landscape

In 1587 the Antwerp painter Gillis van Coninxloo, a Calvinist refugee, settled in Frankenthal, a small town in the German Palatinate full of Protestant exiles from Flanders. Over the next eight years he painted forests in which the trees became the real subject, and the painters around him are still called the Frankenthal school. This canvas carries their habits to Rome. In the foreground reeds and marsh plants rise from wet ground beside a splintered stump, details the museum traces to that circle. Two big trees, their leaves in strong light and shadow, open onto a hill town far off in the middle. Borghese inventories gave the picture to Paul Bril, the Flemish landscape specialist in Rome, and the museum still lists it under his name with a question mark. The scholar Teréz Gerszi attributed it instead to Frederik van Valckenborch, an Antwerp painter working in Italy, and dated it to 1595 or 1596.