Matthijs Bril

Matthijs Bril or Matthijs Bril the Younger (1550, Antwerp – 8 June 1583, Rome) was a Flemish painter and draughtsman of landscapes. He spent most of his active career in Rome where his drawings of ancient Roman sites played an important role in the development of topographical landscape art. He was also a painter of capricci (architectural fantasies), with typical rustic hills with a few ruins. He died young and his younger brother Paul Bril, who had joined him in Rome, finished his commissions.

Matthijs was the son of the painter Matthijs Bril the Elder. Matthijs and his younger brother Paul Bril likely started their artistic training with their father in Antwerp. Matthijs moved to Rome probably around 1575.

In Rome he worked on several frescoes in the Vatican Palace including the Views of Rome with the Translation of the Remains of St. Gregory Nazianzus, executed soon after the actual transfer of the saint's remains in June 1580. Matthijs was joined by his younger brother Paul probably around or after 1582.

Mathijs Bril’s second project in Rome was in the Tower of the Winds. This building in the Vatican Palace was built between 1578 and 1580 after a design by the Bolognese architect Ottaviano Mascherino as an astronomical observatory to study the Gregorian Calendar Reform implemented by pope Gregory XIII. With the assistance of his brother Paul, Matthijs Bril decorated four rooms with biblical cycles in landscape friezes and two rooms with topographical views of Rome and imaginary vedute within an illusionistic framework. He also painted landscapes in two rooms of the Palazzo Orsini in Monterotondo (north of Rome), which he signed with small glasses (a pun on his surname as the Flemish word 'bril' means 'glasses').

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