A Ruined Temple by Attributed to Charles Cornelisz de Hooch

Far beyond the rocky foreground, a hazy landscape beckons – with castles, temples and homesteads peppering the undulating land and mountainous peaks punctuating the vast sky. Among the rustic ruins in the foreground, rural life continues at a languid pace. From the man standing on the right, our eye is led past a trio of resting figures – a woman, a cow and a dog – and over a ramshackle bridge to a flight of steps, which emerge from the shadows to culminate at a dilapidated temple above. Here, a burst of sunlight illuminates the current inhabitants, hanging laundry to dry on the loggia’s walls.

This romanticised view, painted on a panel little larger than a postcard, combines the classical vistas of the Italian campagna (countryside) with a seventeenth-century rural idyll. Dutch Italianate painters, such as Chaerles Cornelisz. de Hooch (c.1577-1638), created imaginary paintings infused with southern Mediterranean light, incorporating – and playfully modifying – ancient landmarks from the Tiber valley, near Rome, such as the round Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, featured here. Together with its pair Landscape with a Roman Ruin, these snapshots of imaginary scenes created an escape into a sunlit world that could be hung in the smallest space.