A Mountainous Landscape with an Arched Bridge over a River

While many Northern artists of his generation traveled to the Eternal City, Pynas is unusual in that he stayed in Rome on two separate occasions—between 1605 and 1607, and again in 1616–17. This impeccably preserved landscape was probably made during or soon after Pynas’s first Italian sojourn. Although contemporary sources suggest that the artist studied Italian landscape from life, this drawing certainly derives from the imagination. Many stylistic and technical features of the work—the combination of dense parallel hatching and controlled washes, the carefully ordered composition, and the close attention to the effects of light—indicate Pynas’s familiarity with the landscape tradition developed in Italy by Paul Bril (as seen in the drawing displayed nearby). With its overgrown ruins of ancient buildings, its wild, oversize foliage, and its lack of human figures, the scene evokes a landscape that has been taken over by the powerful forces of nature.