Brill

BRILL. - Family of painters from Antwerp; to it belong the brothers Matthew (b. 1550, d. in Rome 1583) and Paul (b. 1554, d. in Rome 1626), who carried on their activity as landscape painters in Rome. MATTHEW appears a monotonous and meticulous narrator in the series of frescoes with which he decorated the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican; whereas PAUL, who arrived in Rome shortly after 1574, enlivens his landscape vision through contact with the rich Venetian-style colorism of Adam Elsheimer (works after 1600), and with the landscape painting that had derived more defined characteristics from the Carracci school; proof of this is the fresco decoration of a room in the Casino Ludovisi that Paul painted together with Domenichino, Viola and Guercino. This served him to temper the primitive documentary aridity of his views into a greater breadth and airiness of vision (fresco of the casino and of the Palazzo Rospigliosi, 1605-1609) so as to arrive at the soft luminosity of the later works (cf. canvases in the Louvre, from the years 1620-24), which would be transmitted to C. Lorrain himself. A draughtsman and engraver, he had among his pupils A. Tassi. Among the works of the first period are the frescoes in the Lateran and in the Scala Santa (ca. 1589), in S. Cecilia in Trastevere (ca. 1599), in the Sala Clementina (ca. 1602) and in the Sala Ducale in the Vatican, in the sacristy of the Pauline Chapel in S. Maria Maggiore (ca. 1605). - See Pl. VII.

Maria Vittoria Brugnoli