Fiefs of the Mattei Family

In 1598 the Roman nobleman Asdrubale Mattei had begun building himself a new palace in the city, to designs by the architect Carlo Maderno. In March 1601 he turned to Paul Bril for its great hall. He wanted large canvases to go over the doors, each showing one of the family's fiefs, the villages and castles the Mattei held in the hills between Lazio and Umbria. Four of them survive, this one among them. Bril worked from the places themselves. The museum notes that he travelled to each one to make drawings, and his biographer Karel van Mander wrote in 1604 that the views were taken from life. That explains the very high horizon. The patron wanted the whole territory laid out at once and every detail legible. Here the subject is the valley of the river Turano. Shepherds, fishermen and, further off, travellers on foot and on horseback follow the water, and two small villages rise above it. The museum reads them as Castel di Tora and Monte Antuni, though other captions give the view another fief's name. The higher village clings to its crag over the valley, a touch the museum likens to the landscapes of Flanders.