#clouds

The Three Graces come out of Greek and Roman myth — three sisters standing in for charm, beauty and good cheer, and painters kept returning to them for centuries as a reason to put a trio of women together in one frame. Past that I couldn't turn up much on this particular one; even the photo of it going around is black and white.

This was made for a church altar rather than a gallery. According to what I found, Pope Julius II was the one who commissioned it — about as prestigious a job as a painter could land back then.

Views across the water like this were a whole genre in Holland at the time — a way of showing off a town and the trade money running through it, according to Wikipedia. This is apparently the only cityscape he ever bothered with; nearly everything else of his is one or two people in a room.

Apparently the enormous trees that turn up over and over in his landscapes get traced back to a stint in Italy filling sketchbooks with old villa gardens, or so I've read. Big decorative pictures like this were often ordered to fill a particular wall in somebody's house — furniture, more or less, for people who could afford painted furniture.

This was originally made to open one of his illustrated prophecy books, not meant to hang on its own. From what I can find, he loved this particular design enough to keep redrawing it for the rest of his life - one copy was finished only weeks before he died.