Dirck van Delen, 'An Architectural Fantasy', 1634

This is a picture of an idealised city square: the loggia (open-sided gallery or room), marble columns, balustrades, arches and statuary all derive from classical Greek and Roman art and architecture. While it’s not a real scene, it has been carefully painted to make sure that the perspective, proportions and the effects of light and shade make it look as realistic as possible. Look at the view straight across the piazza and down the arcade – it continues along an avenue of trees to open an extraordinarily long vista, an illusion which is maintained into the far distance. Then look at the foreground – at the reflections in the moat on the right, the splashing jets of the fountain and the shine on the marble columns. The artist has gone to great trouble to make the details convincing.

Dirck van Delen specialised in painting buildings and imaginary architectural views, and the attention to both detail and perspective we see here is typical of his work. This was a popular genre and the architectural styles of the classical world and buildings of the Italian Renaissance were very fashionable. Van Delen probably never visited Italy himself, but several of his fellow artists did. When the famous Flemish painter Rubens returned to Antwerp after a long stay in Rome, he had a house built that was inspired by classical styles. It had a monumental garden entrance similar in concept to the wall and archway we see obliquely on the right of this picture. Rubens’s wall had three arches rather than one, but it allowed a view down the garden to a statue of Hercules, who also appears in this painting – he is the gilded figure on the fountain, battling the Hydra.

Van Delen often visited Antwerp and no doubt saw Rubens’s house, but as far as we know he almost never copied real buildings in his fantasy paintings. And in any case, in seventeenth-century Holland most houses, palaces and public buildings were designed in a much more restrained way. A painting of Huis ten Bosch, the summer palace built for the wife of the head of state in 1645–52, shows its avenues of classical-style statues and a grand fountain, but the brick-built facade is not decorated with anything like the same extravagance as the multi-coloured stonework and elaborate marble on display in van Delen’s painting. Much of his inspiration most likely came from other painters working in the same genre, handbooks on the techniques of perspective and on classical architectural forms.

The figures were added by another artist, probably either Anthonie Palamedesz. or Jan Olis. Dressed in expensive, fashionable clothes, they parade elegantly around this grand stage, stepping out from behind columns, doors and archways, and gazing down from the windows. Such are their poses and poise that it is sometimes hard to distinguish some of them from the statues. They are an idealised society, populating an idealised city. Just one, in the centre foreground, catches our eye: perhaps he, at least, is real, a portrait of a friend or the man who commissioned the painting.