Painting Depicting The City Of Messina From A Bird's Eye View And Its Port (1590-1620.)

 Painting depicting the city of Messina from a bird's eye view and its port. The structure of the port has a direct parallel with a 16th-century painting, representing the port of Messina by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, where the outer end of the port ends as in this painting, with a tower. A modification will be reported later for the creation of an arm protuberance, to close and further protect the port, a relief which we find taken up again in the engravings of the first half of the 1600s.
The painting made in the bichromatic tones of green and brown and in its variants, executed in a non-detailed but rapid way because it works 'over the door', makes us compare the attribution to the work of the Flemish painter Monsù Desiderio who worked in Naples from 1610 and probably also in Messina and Sicily. The Kings of Spain loved to show their distant possessions to their court and these rare bird's eye views represent very rare historical documents, which have now become true toponymic 'archaeology'. Work dating back to 1590-1620.