Landscape with Herdsmen and Animals in front of the Baths of Diocletian, Rome

Pieter van Bloemen was an Antwerp painter active 1657–1720, specializing in Italianate landscapes with animals and herdsmen — a genre enormously popular in the Netherlands in the second half of the seventeenth century as northern collectors developed an insatiable appetite for the warm, golden light of the Roman Campagna. Landscape with Herdsmen and Animals in front of the Baths of Diocletian, now in the Scottish National Gallery, is a characteristic work: the ancient Roman monument provides a picturesque backdrop for a scene of rustic pastoral life, combining the prestige of classical antiquity with the informal charm of everyday rural activity. Van Bloemen spent years in Rome, absorbing the influence of the Bamboccianti and the Italianate landscape tradition, and his work represents the Flemish contribution to the pan-European taste for Roman pastoral subjects in the late seventeenth century.

Van Bloemen employs the warm golden palette of the Italianate landscape tradition — amber light falling across ancient ruins, dusty paths, and the hides of cattle — with a loose, confident brushwork appropriate to the informal pastoral subject. Animals are rendered with the observational precision that was his particular specialty, and the ancient monument provides architectural mass against the luminous sky.