Roman Landscape with a Shepherd and Sheep

Roman Landscape with a Shepherd and Sheep, 1648, painted on copper and now in the Metropolitan Museum, exemplifies Castiglione's engagement with the Roman Campagna as a landscape setting. Copper as support was associated with small-format cabinet pictures of high finish, and Castiglione uses it here to achieve luminous sky tones impossible on canvas or panel. By 1648 he had spent years in Rome absorbing the classical landscape tradition — Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and the Dutch Italianists who populated the Academy of St. Luke. The shepherd and flock are relatively small within the wide landscape, shifting the work toward pure landscape rather than genre painting. Roman ruins punctuate the horizon, grounding the pastoral in the historic land.

Copper support gives exceptional luminosity to the sky, which is worked in smooth graduated layers from pale gold at the horizon to a cooler blue at the apex. The paint film is thin and fluid, exploiting the non-absorbent copper ground. Minute detail in the architectural ruins is possible at this scale without the coarseness that would appear on canvas.