View of the Sibyl of Tivoli

The round temple perched on the rock here is a real Roman building, the so-called Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli, above the falls east of Rome. The man who painted it, though, was a Fleming from Antwerp, Marten Ryckaert, and it is far from certain he ever saw the place. Northern painters built up these sunlit Italian landscapes partly from other pictures, in the manner of Paul Bril, a Flemish painter who had settled in Rome. Ryckaert worked with one arm, and the Antwerp guild registered him plainly as the painter with one arm. His friend the portraitist Anthony van Dyck later painted him. This little view dates from the first decades of the 17th century.