The picture is a view of the port of Naples: it is possible to identify Castel dell’Ovo and the Maschio Angioino. At the centre of the bay a naval battle is being enacted.
Bruegel came to Italy from 1552 onwards, passing through Rome, going on to Calabria and even reaching Sicily. In the course of this journey in the south, or on his return, he had to stop at Naples, where he probably executed the drawing of the port, on which he subsequently drew for this panel.

In this picture, Bruegel takes a place very much at the origins of Flemish sixteenth-century landscape painting, exemplified by the works of Joachim Patinier; these are distinguished by the characteristic “bird’s-eye” view, and by the micrographic treatment of the elements of the composition. The taste for vision extending into the far background also links Bruegel to the landscape painting of the Low Countries. Attention to the “pure” landscape, without narrative contrivances and portrayed exclusively in its natural elements, became a speciality of Bruegel, who was to come to Italy together with Matthew and Paul Brill.

The painting may have been executed late, around 1558. While on the one hand this “View” with sailing boats and the typical prospect from on high displays various
analogies with the “Landscape with ships and city in flames” (The destructionof Sodom?) in Dortmund, dating to 1552-3, on the other Bruegel began to dedicate himself more assiduously to real painting only from the end of the 1550s, when he had returned to Antwerp.

The numerous extraordinary drawings created by the artist during his voyage through southern Europe were probably designed for being turned into engravings rather than pictures, as is demonstrated, for example, by the print of Frans Huys of the “Naval battle at Messina “ (1561) to a design by Bruegel.

The Doria panel was first assigned to Buegel in 1912 on account of its similarity with this print. There are two ancient references to pictures by Pieter on this subject: one in the inventory of 1607 of Cardinal Perrenot de Granville, governor of the Low Countries and collector of paintings by Bruegel (corresponding to the Doria picture also in its measurements), and another in the inventory of the paintings belonging to Rubens in 1640