Italian Landscape with Ruins

Jacob Sibrandi Mancadan painted Italy without, as far as anyone can tell, ever going there. The exhibition the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden devoted to him in 2001 concluded that he probably never travelled south at all. His Italian ruins came second-hand, from Dutch painters who had worked in Rome, such as Cornelis van Poelenburch and Bartholomeus Breenberg, and from prints of ancient remains that circulated in the Republic.

The panel is long and low, about 30 by 50 centimetres, and the museum leaves it undated. It belonged to Vitale Bloch, an art historian and collector living in The Hague, and the Mauritshuis bought it from him in 1951. It belongs to the Mauritshuis and hangs in the Gallery Prince Willem V on the Buitenhof.