Landscape with a River, a Bridge, and Animals

A low bridge crosses the river in the middle of the scene, patched and a little broken, with cattle and sheep watering below it and a herdsman driving a few more along the bank. That half-ruined bridge is doing quiet work. In the Venetian landscapes of these years a bridge that has seen better days, a leaning tree, a bit of tumbledown stone all signalled the picturesque, the mild pleasure of decay in a setting that is otherwise calm and well fed. The animals carry the rest of the meaning. Grazing herds beside still water were shorthand for a peaceful, well-run country, the kind of place a Venetian buyer liked to imagine lay just past his city. It is dated to 1730, painted for that appetite and not from any particular riverbank.