Shepherdess with Herd

Around 1700 buyers all over Europe wanted the herd pictures of Philipp Peter Roos, a German painter settled at Tivoli near Rome and known as Rosa da Tivoli. In Naples the young Domenico Brandi admired them and took them as his model, and this small canvas from the early 1700s shows the lesson at work.

A young herdswoman leans over her flock with a lamb held to her chest, while goats and sheep crowd down to a pool to drink. Rocks close off the left side, and a jagged mountain fades into the blue on the right.

The gallery's catalogue notes where he parts from Roos, who charged his herds with drama and hidden moral meanings. Brandi paints the animals plainly, without eerie light, and signed his name low in the foreground. The picture is now on deposit at the Viminale, the Interior Ministry's palace in Rome, and is not on view.