Michelangelo said Flemish painting was only fit to please women, children and that handful of gentlemen who lacked “a sense of harmony”. He accused the genre of trying to “trick the eye with pleasant things ... cloths, cottages, green landscapes, shady trees, bridges and brooks, these they call landscapes, with the odd little figure here and there ... without symmetry or proportion ... without substance or backbone”.

This dismissive attitude was typical of the Italian cinquecento, an era that judged the vivid, detailed realism of northern Europe as cluttered and superficial in comparison with the sculptural space and figures that were the classical ideal.