Paysage de montagne avec ponts

Joos de Momper worked in Antwerp, a city on flat Flemish ground where almost nobody had seen a real mountain, and he built a career painting exactly what his neighbours lacked. These towering peaks and little bridges are largely invented, assembled in the studio from imagination and prints rather than sketched from life. Notice how the land is arranged like a stage set: a flat foreground, steep rocks framing the sides like scenery wings, and the eye led back over the bridges into a blue distance. De Momper usually left the tiny travellers to figure specialists, often members of the Brueghel family, while he handled the rock and the sky. This is one of the mountain views he produced for that market, now in Cologne.