Jan Brueghel the Elder

Jan Brueghel the Elder was nicknamed “Velvet” Brueghel, and he often painted on small copper plates with a finish so fine that the brushwork almost disappears. He was the second son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who died when Jan was about a year old.

After some years in Italy, where Cardinal Federico Borromeo became his patron, he settled in Antwerp as court painter to the Archdukes Albert and Isabella and often worked with Rubens, adding the flowers, animals and landscape around Rubens’s figures. His flower pieces put blooms from different seasons into one vase, a bouquet no garden could have produced at once.

The painting we offer is Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld, dated 1598, a scene from the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid.