Saint Peter's Square, Rome, with a procession of cardinals and cannons firing in salute

Dr Luuk Pijl associates this painting, dated to circa 1610 when van Nieulandt had returned to the Netherlands from Rome, with a series of views including the View of the Pantheon, Rome, with townsfolk at a market (sold Christie’s, London, 28 April 2006, lot 17) and a painting of the Basilicia San Maria Maggiore in the Groninger Museum, Groningen (inv. no. 1931.0117). He suggests that given their near identical scale, similar horizon lines, unity of the tone in the views and similarly scaled figures the pictures must have been intended as a unified series. Van Nieulandt had trained briefly in Antwerp before moving to Rome to work under his uncle Willem van Nieulandt I and later Paul Bril. He made a number of drawings of the architecture, ruins and landscape he saw in and around the city, before retuning north, to Amsterdam and his native Antwerp. This view of Saint Peter’s and the other pictures of the proposed series were evidently inspired by these detailed studies. The series remains distinctive in the artist’s painted oeuvre in the prominence accorded to the architectural details of their compositions.
We are grateful to Dr Luuk Pijl for confirming the attribution on the basis of photographs and for assisting with the cataloguing for this lot.