Travelers on a Hilltop Road

The museum's German title for this copper plate is Landscape with a Baggage Train, and the loaded wagons on the road matter as much as the country they cross. Brueghel painted it in 1610, and the Alte Pinakothek uses it to show how his landscapes had been changing since about 1605. In the older Flemish manner, foreground, middle ground and distance were separate stages, and figures shrank abruptly the further back they stood. Here the joins between those zones are softened, the people take up more room, and even the travellers in the middle distance are painted at a larger scale. In the museum's words, figures and landscape now stand in a more natural relation to each other. The plate is 21 by 30 centimetres, and it belonged to the Bavarian electors' own picture gallery in Munich.