Bridge in an Italian Landscape

The Dutch artist Adam Pynacker (1662-73) presents an idealised Dutch vision of Italy. Pynacker’s visit to Italy in the mid-1640s had a significant impact on his career, so much so that on his return to the Netherlands he became one of the leading Dutch Italianate painters of the seventeenth century. Here Pynacker carefully explores the effects of coloured light at sunset, found in the clear skies of the Mediterranean. An intense yellow light surrounds the setting sun, which lies just out of view beyond the left side of the canvas. The evening light transitions imperceptibly through white and into an area of clear blue in the top right hand corner of the painting. Pynacker uses the evening light to pick out individual details in the landscape, right up to the painting’s foreground. The reeds, the bark and the fringes of the right-hand bushes are all aglow, while the flowing stream sparkles, shallow as it moves over the foreground rocks.

Dutch painters like Pynacker saw the Italian landscape as heroic as well as idyllic. This particular landscape features an imaginary ancient Roman bridge, noble even in its crumbling state of decay, while the shepherds evoke the pastoral subjects of ancient classical poetry. Pynacker pays homage to this ancient Roman past with a suitably low view-point which looks dramatically up through the arch, the figures silhouetted against the sky.