Paisagem montanhosa com a tentação de Cristo

Flanders is flat, but its painters loved mountains they had never seen. Joos de Momper spent his career inventing them, towering alpine massifs and plunging valleys with a river threading the distance, assembled from imagination and a few prints rather than any real range. Here the drama is all in the rock. The subject that gives the picture its name, Christ led up a high mountain and tempted by the devil, is tucked so far back you can almost miss it. That was the point. The landscape came first and the holy story second. De Momper often left the small figures to a specialist, and in this panel they are the work of his Antwerp colleague Sebastiaen Vrancx, whom other landscape painters called on for exactly that.