Parti af torvet i Amalfi

A sunlit square opens between the pale houses of Amalfi, where a woman in a blue dress pauses beside a basket while a child and a man occupy the lower edge of the scene, the crowded architecture turning the little town into a stage. Martinus Rørbye painted the view in 1835 during his first Italian journey, when he travelled beyond Rome to the Amalfi coast and made the built landscape, its people and its small particulars the material of a new kind of travel picture. The white walls, green shutters and deep blue sky are observed with the precision of an architect, but the scattered figures keep the scene from becoming a mere prospect: they give the square the tempo of ordinary life. Rørbye was one of the central painters of the Danish Golden Age and a favourite pupil of C.W. Eckersberg, whose insistence on exact observation he carried into his views of Copenhagen, Italy, Greece and Turkey. It is held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (National Gallery of Denmark).