A trompe l'oeil with a drawing on blue paper, an etching of the frontispiece for 'Divers Embarquements' after Stefano della Bella, and an etching of figures with ruins in a landscape after Jean le Blond I, a quill, and a wax relief depicting Pallas, held by red ribbon on a wooden board

Antoine Forbera, is believed to have been a Venetian painter, although, nothing is known of his artistic training. A small number of his signed trompe l'oeil paintings survive, including a shaped panel now in the Calvet Museum in Avignon (fig. 1). The Avignon panel depicts a collection of prints, including a reversed copy of Poussin’s In the Kingdom of Flora on an easel, a red chalk drawing of the same subject, another small painting, the reverse of a canvas, additional prints, and a painter’s palette.

The present painting likewise features identifiable works of art, including an etching of a landscape with ruins by Jean Le Blond I, dated circa 1630, and the frontispiece of Stefano della Bella’s Divers Embarquements, a series of etchings depicting ships at sea and in port, printed between 1646 and 1647. The pair of figures in the chalk drawing on blue paper are also drawn from a print by Pietro Santo Bartoli, illustrating scenes from Hadrian’s Column. Bartoli’s print provides a terminus post quem for the dating of this picture, as his series was published in 1672.