Offered by Antichità di Alina
Flemish landscape with castle, hilltop town and Mary Magdalene, early 17th century
Oil on canvas, 75 × 95 cm
This painting presents a wide Flemish landscape structured across several planes, where the range of greens — at times close to emerald, elsewhere more copper-toned or silvered — defines the depth and articulation of the terrain. In the lower section stands a Renaissance-period castle, with a tower featuring elegant cross-windows; higher up extends a hilltop town, marked by slender towers, continuous walls and terraced slopes.
The scene is animated by travellers crossing the bridge and by small, almost translucent sailing boats, closely reminiscent of those found in engravings from the circle of Brueghel. Mary Magdalene, seated near the grotto with her skull and open book, is painted in a slightly different manner, consistent with the Flemish practice of dividing landscape and figural work between different painters.
This raises the question: is the hilltop town real or a constructed invention?
The urban structure corresponds to the vast visual repertoire circulating between the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Several features recall the Civitates Orbis Terrarum, published in six volumes between 1572 and 1617, which assembled more than 540 city views from across Europe. Far from being a simple atlas, it functioned as a systematic repository of architectural models, used by painters to build composite views grounded in documented walls, towers, castles and hillside profiles. Alongside the engravings of Sadeler, Willenberg and Hoefnagel, it provided a shared visual language covering much of Central Europe.
Some elements of the painting — the pointed towers, the sequence of roofs, the rhythm of the slope — allow, with due caution, a connection to historical Bohemia and to the visual culture of Rudolphine Prague, where architecture and landscape were often interwoven through real motifs reinterpreted by the artist.
The richness of the greens and the orderly construction of the spatial planes find a distant echo in the hardstone views executed by Castrucci, not as a direct source, but as evidence of a shared Central European visual environment.
Condition
The 19th-century lining canvas has been removed in restoration, revealing the original early canvas, thick and irregularly woven. A small retouch is visible in the upper right corner. The paint surface is well preserved, with clear readability of both the architectural and landscape elements.
