Bartholomäus Breenbergh
Deventer 1599-1659 AmsterdamTorre di Chia
In the early years of the seventeenth century, Dutch artists were encouraged to visit Italy by Karel van Mander, the influential art critic and historian. Breenbergh travelled there in 1619 and stayed for ten years . Along with Cornelius van Poelenburch, he developed a style in which the use of brush and wash, and the leaving of areas of blank paper to create a feeling of light and space, became the dominant force. Unlike the artist Paul Bril, whose work precedes them, their landscape drawings were often made on the spot, though finished later in the studio. It seems probable that the grey wash which describes the partially shaded areas was added at this stage, in order to add to the contrast between the darker and more brightly lit parts of the landscape.
There is another drawing of the Torre di Chia in the Hermitage, Leningrad which is signed and dated 1624. It is smaller and drawn with wash, the details added with a broad-nibbed pen or point of the brush. A more highly finished version, also smaller than ours, is in the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris .
Recently our drawing has been examined by Peter Schatborn and Martin Royalton-Kisch, who both confirmed Breenbergh’s authorship. The former noted that the use of black chalk underneath the brown washes may indicate that our sheet was the first version of the three and the one drawn on the spot.
Breenbergh was in the habit of making second and third versions of his major drawings. Other examples are A View near Bracciano , A view of Tivoli and A view of Mugnano . The fleur-de-lis watermark is similar to that on a drawing, signed and dated 1627, of the Roman Ruins at Tivoli . Like our drawing, and many of his other large Italian landscape drawings, it has a vertical fold in the middle . It seems likely that these drawings, were at some point, part of an album.
Torre de Chia is four miles from Bomarzo and was a fief of the Orsini Family.
Acquired by a private collector.