Ruins in Italy by Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem
Nicolaes Berchem's Ruins in Italy (1658, Rijksmuseum) was painted by an artist who likely never saw the country. Berchem belonged to the Dutch Italianate painters, artists who traveled to Italy, or simply imagined it from the sketchbooks others brought home.
Look first at the crumbling Roman arch, its stone blocks worn by centuries of weather. Vines thread through the masonry, nature has been dismantling this structure longer than anyone built it. Then scan the distant haze for a herdsman smaller than a grain of rice.
Berchem was astonishingly prolific: some 850 paintings, nearly all Italian landscapes he never walked through. Dutch collectors could not get enough of these sun-soaked fantasies, and Berchem was hired by other painters to add the tiny human and animal figures that brought their landscapes to life.
An Italy imagined in a Dutch studio, by a man who built a career on a country he never visited. Next time you are at the Rijksmuseum, look for the herdsman.
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Transcript
This painter never set foot in Italy. Every ruin he painted came from other people's sketchbooks. Vines pull the stonework apart, century by century. Distant mountains dissolve into a soft haze. A herdsman, smaller than a grain of rice.