The work is by the Ancona painter Giovanni Andrea Lilli, an artist trained in the Roman environment around Sixtus V whose style is influenced both by the Barocci painting and by late Roman and Tuscan mannerism.

The View of Ancona is one of the four preserved fragments of the large altarpiece The Virgin crowning St. Nicholas of Tolentino, originally located in the apse of the church of Sant'Agostino (transformed into a barracks after 1860). Although the entire iconographic layout of the altarpiece is not known, this fragment was certainly located in the lower part, since the inscription with the artist's signature and the dating of the work appears at the bottom right, in which the last figure is abraded.

The view of Ancona is particularly suggestive as its condition as a fragment gives it an archaic fixity, from a fourteenth-century town. This impression, to which the unnatural pink and lilac coloring and the geometric simplification of the volumes of the houses, doors and towers of the city contributes. The work is a piece of great interest seen for the purpose of reconstructing the sixteenth-century forma urbis of the Doric city.