View of the Villa Medici at Trinità dei Monti, Rome

Van Wittel was Dutch, spent his working life in Rome, and Italians called him Vanvitelli. In 1685 he painted this view of the Villa Medici on the Pincian hill onto a sheet of parchment barely 30 centimetres high. The garden he was looking at still held its most famous contents. The ancient group of Niobe and her children, dug up in Rome in 1583 and set out at the villa, was a thing every foreign visitor to the city went to see. In 1770 Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo obtained papal permission to take the statues to Florence, and since 1780 they have had a room of their own in the Uffizi, across the river from where this parchment hangs. Van Wittel signed the view on a low stone marker inside it, with the three initials G.V.V. It had a companion piece showing the Tiber, and the pair belonged to Vittoria della Rovere, whose collection was inventoried at her death in 1691.