BRIL, Paul
(b. 1554, Antwerpen, d. 1626, Roma)

The Port

c.1611
Oil on canvas, 105 x 150 cm
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

Antwerp-born Paul Bril set up his studio in Rome in 1582, where a brilliant career awaited him. Considered one of the best landscape painters of his time, he worked for a series of important patrons, including Popes Gregory XIII, Sixtus V and Clement VII, and Cardinals Scipio Borghese and Federico Borromeo, also the protector of Jan "Velvet" Brueghel. The prestige Bril enjoyed is also attested by his titles of Principe (1620) and of Secondo Consigliere (1623), attributed for the first time to a landscape painter and to a foreigner by the highly reputed Accademia di San Luca.

Bril's seascapes, easel paintings of his mature period, are among his most innovative paintings. Among them this Port, whilst retaining the elevated vantage point typical of the Flemish tradition, offers a unified vision of space of rare amplitude. The composition is no longer based on divergent planes, but is constructed on perspective lines that start from the left and converge towards a vanishing point on the far right-hand horizon. This focal point is also the source of an intense light which, reflecting on the tranquil water, confers a particular serenity to the work. It is the end of the day: in the foreground, sailors and boats are silhouetted against this sunset that is so typical of the Mediterranean. However, this is an imaginary bay, in an idyllic evocation of the open sea. Indeed it is unlikely that vessels of the size of a caravel would moor against such a rocky shore. It has also been observed that the masts are too high and the bowspit too long. But it is precisely these verticals, against the clear sky and sea, that give the painting its balance.

With their perfect synthesis of Flemish and Italian elements, Bril's seascapes deeply impressed his contemporaries. Papal superintendent Giovan Battista Crescenzi, as well as Federico Borromeo, Scipio Borghese and Carlo de' Medici all commissioned port views from the artist. These views were also to strongly influence several generations of painters, among them Claude Lorrain, a drawing of whose, taken from his famous Liber Veritatis and conserved at the British Museum in London, closely follows the Brussels seascape. This grand master of French landscape painting was, moreover, the pupil of Agostino Tassi, who himself learned his trade from Paul Bril.




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