Aldea con luna llena

Joos de Momper worked in Antwerp in the early 1600s as a specialist, one of many painters there who did nothing but landscape. His usual subject was the mountains, great craggy views he had partly seen crossing the Alps to Italy and partly invented. This is a quieter thing, a village settled under a full moon, the kind of nighttime scene that was just becoming a genre of its own in Flanders. The small figures in the road were very likely added by another hand, since Antwerp painters routinely divided the labour, one man laying in the land and sky, another dropping in the people. What Momper supplied is the light of the moon over the roofs and the dark bulk of the land around them.