Landscape with Mercury and Battus

In 1606, the year of this copper, Paul Bril stood witness at a wedding in Rome. The groom was Adam Elsheimer, a German painter who had come to the city in 1600 and who painted almost all his pictures on small sheets of copper, a support Bril used too. The two were friends and neighbours, and scholars see each of them learning from the other in that decade. The subject comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Mercury drove off a herd of cattle belonging to Apollo, and the only witness was an old herdsman called Battus. Mercury gave him a cow to keep quiet, then came back in disguise and offered a bull and a cow to anyone who would tell him where the herd had gone. Battus told him at once, and Mercury turned him to stone. Bril keeps the figures small at the lower left, among the animals, and gives most of the plate to the valley, the river and the rocky hills.