Paesaggio con una grotta

Joos de Momper worked in Antwerp around 1600, at the moment when landscape was becoming a subject a painter could sell on its own, rather than just a backdrop for saints and stories. His mountains are largely invented. Flanders is flat, and de Momper had probably crossed the Alps only once, but the towering rock and the dark mouth of the cave here owe more to imagination than to any real place. He often left the small figures to other hands, specialists in staffage who dropped travellers or hermits into scenery he had already built. The cave was a favourite device of his, a pocket of shadow to set against the pale distance and pull the eye deep into the view.