In his 1959 pioneering study on Italian Cinquecento landscape painting, Richard Turner highlighted the importance of Girolamo Muziano (1532–92) for the development of the genre during the sixteenth century and the transmission to Rome of the figurative culture elaborated in Venice at that time. After him a few other scholars added further crucial reflections on Muziano as a landscape painter and draughtsman, stressing his role as founder of a new visual culture of nature. This re-evaluation of the artist culminated with Michel Hochmann, who wrote that Muziano was ‘among those who in the final years of the sixteenth century initiated a tradition that founds its apogee in a vision of nature, so grandiose, spectacular and imaginative that it can be qualified as sublime’. Muziano was, in fact, one of the major artists of his time, especially in the field of landscape. Born in Brescia around 1532, he arrived in Rome in 1550, after earlier apprenticeships in Padua and Venice in the workshops of two leading painters, Domenico Campagnola (1500–64) and Lambert Sustris (c.1515-post 1591?). His sophisticated understanding of natural scenery and the innovative interpretation of landscape was unquestionably fundamental for artists active in late sixteenth-century Rome, who, on the strength of his example, radically changed the way in which they conceptualized and portrayed the natural environment.