Roman Market Scene

This painting confronts the spectator with a curious, if not bizarre combination of more or less identifiable topographical elements. A broad, seemingly rural, crowded market square reminiscent of the Campo Vaccino in Rome is bordered on the left by a dark row of large ruins and buildings, which enclose the scene like the wings of a stage set. On the far left is the corner of a classical temple, modelled on the nearby Temple of Saturn. Between the ruin and the tall, sturdy houses further towards the centre of the image is a narrow view of the stairway leading up to the Capitoline, depicted on a noticeably reduced scale.

A prominent place on the market square has been cleared for a powerful sculptural group. In reality, this classical sculpture of a lion attacking a horse was housed in the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline in the seventeenth century. Further to the right, the square gradually gives way to a plain with the fountain from the Campo Vaccino at the far end. The plain is demarcated by the ruins of an imaginary city or palace, beyond which we discern hills reminiscent of the Latian landscape. Both square and plain are crowded with a rich variety of figures, including bird and fruit vendors, a storyteller, beggars, farmers, a horsedrawn carriage and a conspicuously large number of well-dressed Dutch burghers.

It is not known whether Lingelbach’s later work reached Rome and Venice as early as the seventeenth century. Still it seems probable that Luca Carlevaris must have known Lingelbach’s paintings, for compositional formulae characteristic of the Dutch artist recur in many of Carlevaris’s paintings, whether these are topographically correct or not.