Frederick de Moucheron, 'A Landscape with Classical Ruins', about 1660

Frederick de Moucheron was one of a number of seventeenth-century Dutch artists who specialised in painting idyllic scenes of people with their animals among the antique ruins of the Campagna (the countryside around Rome). As far as we know he never went to Italy, but conjured up imaginary views from the drawings and sketches of artists who had.

In this painting, a peasant woman sits below three classical columns that support some massive, and rather insecurely balanced, blocks of stone carved in the shape of a sarcophagus. They are perhaps the remains of a Roman temple hundreds of years old. Her animals – a mixed herd of sheep, goats and cows – stand or lie quietly, apparently undisturbed by the lively dog that runs towards them. The woman sits upright, holding a baby, while a man with his back to us points towards a sunlit tower overlooking the distant valley. Neither of them seems to notice the rather adventurous dog exploring the fallen masonry under the columns.

The picture was painted shortly after de Moucheron returned to Amsterdam after living in France for several years. His French travels might account for the rather northern-looking pine tree and Lombardy poplars that surround his Roman ruins. It could also be the reason that the scene is bathed in a cool Northern light rather than the soft, golden radiance of most of his landscapes and those by other Italianate artists, like Jan Both and Nicholaes Berchem.

De Moucheron’s ruins tower over the people beneath them, with fresh growth sprouting from cracks in the stone. The columns are very slightly off centre, leaning almost imperceptibly to one side – it’s enough to be unsettling, especially with the tomb-like blocks overhead that look in danger of falling. Similarly, in Berchem’s Peasants with Four Oxen and a Goat at a Ford by a Ruined Aqueduct, the steep perspective of the aqueduct as it seems to tip away from us is disturbing. In both pictures ruins appear to suggest the grandeur of an almost-vanished civilisation; life in their shadow continues calm and serene, untouched by the glories of the past.