The scene may represent Saint Bruno (with a halo, praying in the left foreground) and the colony of hermits he founded in Calabria in southern Italy. The authorship of this collaborative painting has been much debated, but the landscape is now widely considered to be by Marco Ricci. The monks that populate it were previously ascribed to Alessandro Magnasco, who specialised in scenes of this type, but they are now thought to be by Marco’s uncle, Sebastiano Ricci.