Landscape with Dancing Satyrs

Around 1620 Grand Duke Cosimo II brought this Utrecht painter to Florence. Cosimo was dead by February 1621, aged thirty, of consumption. The four small copper plates this one belongs to appear in the Pitti inventories from 1638, in a room of the grand-ducal apartment beside pictures by Filippo Napoletano, which is why the state catalogue supposes they were painted for Cosimo as well. An inventory of 1687 then reassigns all four to the Bolognese painter Francesco Albani, and under that name they stayed for generations. Poelenburgh repeated these subjects all his working life and the Palatina alone holds some thirty of them, so identifying this one took the inventory number 1221 and the measurement of 44.5 by 63 centimetres. The support is copper, a smooth plate that holds the polish of the light.