Mountain road

Flanders has no mountains. Brueghel spent the 1590s in Italy, in Naples, then Rome, then Milan in the service of Cardinal Federico Borromeo, and came back to Antwerp at the end of 1596. Mountain country turns up in his work after that journey. Here it is a road cut along a slope with a horse-drawn carriage on it and cattle being driven, painted on a plate of copper 16 centimetres high and 27 across. Copper holds a finer line than wood and gives the paint a faint gloss, which is why cabinet pictures this small were made on it. The Prado dates it no more precisely than the 17th century. In 1808 it was at the Casa del Labrador, the small royal retreat in the gardens at Aranjuez, and it reached the museum in 1848.