BRILL

BRILL. — A family of painters from Antwerp; it includes the brothers Matthaeus (b. 1550, d. in Rome in 1583) and Paulus (b. 1554, d. in Rome in 1626), who carried out their activity as landscape painters in Rome. Matthaeus appears as a monotonous and meticulous narrator in the series of frescoes with which he decorated the Galleria Geografica in the Vatican; while Paulus, who arrived in Rome shortly after 1574, enlivens his landscape vision through contact with the rich Venetian-influenced colorism of Adam Elsheimer (works after 1600), and with the landscape painting that had derived more definite characteristics from the Carracci school; proof of this is the fresco decoration of a room in the Casino Ludovisi, which Paulus painted together with Domenichino, Viola, and Guercino. This earned him a tempering of the primitive documentary aridity of his views into a greater breadth and airiness of vision (frescoes of the Casino and Palazzo Rospigliosi, 1605–1609), leading to the soft luminosity of his later works (cf. canvases in the Louvre, from the years 1620–24), which would be communicated even to C. Lorrain himself. A draughtsman and engraver, he had among his pupils A. Tassi. Among the works from his early period are the frescoes in the Lateran and on the Scala Santa (c. 1589), in S. Cecilia in Trastevere (c. 1599), in the Sala Clementina (c. 1602), and in the Sala Ducale in the Vatican, as well as in the sacristy of the Pauline Chapel in S. Maria Maggiore (c. 1605). See Pl. VII.