Landscape 1600 - 1700

This landscape was created using pen and brown wash on paper, but its maker and precise time of creation remain unknown. It shows a tower on a distant hill, with a dense collection of trees in the foreground. Lacking information about its creator, we can only examine the work itself in relation to similar landscape drawings, and to the artistic and social contexts which it may relate. Was this landscape a preparatory sketch for a larger painting? Was it topographical, intended to reflect the real layout of a specific location? Or was it instead a capriccio, an idealized fantasy made by combining real and imaginary elements into a romantic composition? By researching the artistic conventions and social functions of landscape imagery in various times and places, the historian attempts to situate this work within a specific cultural context, and to infer its possible significance to its original audience.