Wooded landscape with a road near to a fordable pond

For most of the 16th century, a Flemish landscape was a view from above. Painters put the viewer on an imaginary height and spread the world out underneath, rivers, towns and mountains receding one plane behind another, a type German scholars call the overview landscape. This copper plate, dated 1605, keeps the viewer down on the road. The track runs straight back into the wood with trees rising on either side, and it is that line, pulled inward, that creates the space. The Alte Pinakothek points to exactly this as the sign of a new way of building a landscape. Brueghel came back to the forest road many times in the years that followed. The museum's German title calls the picture simply a busy forest road, and the plate measures about 25 by 36 centimetres.