Landscape with a Classical Temple and a Hunter

In 1607 agents of Pope Paul V arrested the painter Giuseppe Cesari, known as the Cavalier d'Arpino, for keeping firearms illegally. To win his release he gave up his 107 paintings, which the pope passed to his nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. A few landscapes were among them, and this canvas may be one. It is certain only from the Borghese inventory of 1693, where a clerk described a landscape with a man firing an arquebus at a goose. At lower right a small hunter leans over the rocks and aims at a long-legged bird by the stream, which the museum calls a crane. Above them a round temple crowns the cliff, probably modelled on the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli. The clerk wrote down Paul Bril. The museum keeps that name with a question mark, and some scholars give the canvas to Frederik van Valckenborch, another Fleming working in Italy in the 1590s.