Landscape with a Town on a River

The art of pietra dura, in which various different coloured hardstones are artfully combined to create a convincing illusion of reality, was originally a Florentine speciality. It was exported to the court of Emperor Rudolph II in Prague in the early seventeenth century, where Giovanni Castrucci, his son Cosimo di Giovanni, and his son-in-law Giuliano Pandolfini were its supreme exponents.
In plaques such as these four in the Princely Collections with the inventory numbers SK 1460, SK 1461, SK 1462, and SK 1463, the pictorial possibilities of the medium are taken to their utmost limit. The sheer beauty of the individual stones is spectacular, while the subtlety of the evocation of distance is seemingly effortless. The specific compositional basis for the first of these plaques (SK 1461) is an engraving of 1593 signed by Johannes Sadeler, but other variants of the composition are known, and they may all have as their ultimate source an original design by the Netherlander Paul Brill, one of the pioneers of independent landscape painting who also worked in Italy. The only significant modification to the Sadeler print is the figure of a man at the right margin walking uphill, but he too is based upon an earlier invention, also doubtless through the intermediacy of a print. In this instance, the prototype is one of the attendant figures in Andrea del Sarto’s fresco of the 'Visitation' in the Chiostro dello Scalzo in Florence, a celebrated work which was engraved by both Enea Vico and Antonio Salamanca around the middle of the sixteenth century, the only differences being that the direction has been reversed and that in the pietra dura panel part of a column replaces the basket in the original. Given the fact that this plaque demonstrably involved the cannibalising of one print for the landscape and another for the figure element, it is tempting to suppose that a similar procedure was adopted in the other plaques, for all that no such sources have yet been identified. In the case of the third plaque (SK 1462), the existence in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna of an inferior variant, which nevertheless gives every indication of having been made in the same workshop, only serves to underline the extraordinary virtuosity of this particular group of pieces.