17th century italian school Landscape with fortified town Oil on canvas Height 73 cm - Width 98 cm Arcadian landscape art developed in 17th-century Italy as an idealized vision of nature, inspired by Antiquity and pastoral poetry. The term "Arcadia" refers to a mythical region of ancient Greece, imagined as a place of harmony between man and nature. In painting, this landscape becomes a peaceful, balanced and luminous setting, where gentle hills, majestic trees, ancient ruins and pastoral scenes mingle. The painters of the Carracci family - in particular Annibale Carracci - played a key role in this evolution. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Annibale renewed landscape painting by seeking a balance between the observation of nature and the classical ideal. In his frescoes and paintings, the landscape is no longer a mere background: it becomes a harmonious space that expresses an almost poetic order of the world. This concept had a lasting influence on European painting, notably on artists such as Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, who made the Arcadian landscape one of the great aesthetic models of classicism.