Landscape with Shepherds and Sheep

Many of Pietro Paolo Bonzi's landscapes were long taken for the work of Agostino Tassi, a leading landscape painter in Rome in the same years, so close are the two in manner. The museum dates this small canvas, under 65 centimetres wide, to 1621 or 1622, and it belonged to the Sacchetti, Florentine bankers who had settled in Rome. Soon afterwards the Sacchetti brothers became the first patrons of a much younger painter from Bonzi's home town of Cortona, Pietro da Cortona, and the Pinacoteca also keeps two tiny oval landscapes on wood that he painted for them. The German art historian Erich Schleier sees Bonzi's example in one of them, a wooded hillside with a waterfall and a bridge.