The U.S. debut of select Flemish masterworks provide context of the changing culture and society across the 15th through 17th centuries.
By Gabriel Almeida
An exhibition with artworks of over 300 years, and showing side-by-side paintings of masters like Brueghel, Bosch, Patinir and Rubens, always presents a unique opportunity to reflect on the changes of taste and attitude of a society in the process of becoming. Such opportunities for insight are so precious today because increasingly rare. And when that society is such a defining one for our modern sensibility, as that which emerged in the Southern Netherlands, and the works so exquisite and first class, as those of The Phoebus Foundation, it is destined to make a unique contribution to the thought and education of art and history.
Jacob Jordaens, Serenade, about 1640-5. Oil paint on canvas; 54 1⁄8 x 70 1⁄2 in.
© The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp.
“Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks” at the Denver Art Museum is just such an opportunity. It showcases masterpieces from 15th– to 17th-century Flemish art that underscore the extreme earthliness and homely quality of a people who truly enjoyed things of this life. If we are to find a spiritual thread on the tapestry of Flemish art history, it is their delight with the profits of industry, the familiar township and intrigues of love, the rude plenty of well-kept farms. Even their religion adapted itself to this spirit and inspired a simple and unquestioning pietism, where transcendental realities keep a charming, childlike plainness.
The innocent and uncomplicated acceptance of immediate reality gave way to those characteristic qualities we love in the literal spirit of Northern artists: an extraordinary craftsmanship—their perfect control of oil paint and unrivaled accuracy of outlines—and a careful and precise observation. The vision of these painters is so little removed from the everyday attitude toward objects and textures we use to get around the world that it requires little effort to recognize its effectiveness. Yet their greatest achievement comes from the desire to place themselves at a distance from such a vision, and through a detached and contemplative stance, elevate the practical and instinctual aspects of life and express richer and universal truths.
The Flemish school grew spontaneously out of the more general tradition of Gothic design. The latter was an art of isolated forms connected according to decorative rather than plastic principles. Its main purpose being a symbolism based on traditional types, it offered almost no systematic rules of composition and allowed for the introduction of free imitation and naturalism as soon as the desire became manifest. Philippe de Mazerolles’s illustration for the Gruuthuse manuscript, Life and Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ (ca. 1460) is an excellent example of this tradition. Just as the flowers scroll upward in the margins, the bodies of thieves and witnesses swirl around in emphasis of the mystery of Christ’s death, echoed in the solemn uprightness of spears, landscape and architecture. When compared with Hans Memling’s masterful Nativity (ca. 1480), we sense a similar rhythmic possibility and linear expression, but above all we feel that new preternatural skill for accurate description and coherent design that expresses an intensely personal and vivid devotion. The soft curves and accents rid the picture of its schematic structure, exuding rather a feeling of tenderness and charm, and the tone and treatment of the character’s features, particularly Joseph’s, reinforce the central theme, as an accompaniment may reinforce and enrich a melody.
Peter Paul Rubens and Studio, Diana Hunting with Her Nymphs, about 1636-7. Oil paint on canvas, 78 1⁄8 x 157 7⁄8 in.
© The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp.
Early Flemish art had a homegrown character. In the early 16th century, Flemish painters increasingly began to travel to Italy, and Italian pictures found their way to Flanders, producing a generation of Italianizing Flemish artists sometimes called the Romanists. However, the very perfection of Italian technique was combined with a subject matter particular to the mercantile, yet deeply religious, classes of Flanders. A grotesque humor, “the lawless and incertain thoughts” of medieval man, had always been tolerated in Flemish art for its moralizing influence, and this illustrative tradition was kept alive with all its horrors and monstrosities by the incredible school of Hieronymus Bosch. Hell (ca. 1540-50), by a follower of the master, presents the grimmest and most hideous vision of human destruction. Like the caricaturist of today, the eye of this artist picks out from appearances those telling contours and imaginative associations that best capture the most outlandish psychological reality. In this way, the school retains that uncritical delight in the familiar aspects of everyday life of early Netherlandish artists, bringing into these nightmares a richness of content, a diversity and complexity of material.
After traveling to Italy in the 1520s and studying the works of the incredible Quentin Metsys, Romanists like Jan Sanders van Hemessen uniquely merged the techniques of Italian painting with Bosch’s extravagant moralism. His Portrait of Elisabeth, Court Fool of Anne of Hungary (ca. 1525) takes on the theme of human foolery in its condemnation as well as embrace of earthly ambitions. An imitation of then-popular portrait styles, this picture pokes fun at the appetite for luxury and lucre, the overconfidence and desire of the rising merchants. But in Anne’s self-assured face we also see a second meaning. In a world of fools, where nothing is valuable but what guides us to eternity, those who are aware of their humble task (or their foolish calling?) might have an upper hand in the competition of life. Because to accumulate wealth and afford to enjoy the necessaries and conveniences of life is no longer perceived with religious suspicion, but with an increasing sense of jealousy and even respect. In contrast to the linear pattern of Memling, Van Hemessen’s contours evoke volume; changes of lights subtly transform the feeling of local color; his rendering suggests an atmosphere enveloping forms. There is a transformation in the unity of the picture, giving the whole not only the appearance of a truer vision but a new power of pictorial organization.
Follower of Hieronymus Bosch, Hell, about 1540-50. Oil paint on panel, 55 5⁄8 x 45 3⁄8 in.
© The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp.
Van Hemessen’s Double Portrait of a Husband and Wife Playing Tables (1532) is a magnificent portrayal of not only the domestic interests of Flemish painters and patrons, but their sheer delight in the observation and rendering of a variety of materials and textures. Whether it is the soft feeling of furs and velvets, the granular aging of the furnishings, or the incredible detail of the parrot’s feathers, this picture shows a joy of examination, description and study. The astonishing variety of distinct, juxtaposed elements give the picture an exhilarating modern feeling, that of a modern collage. Differently from other portraits that highlight the gravity and piety of the sitters, this joint image focuses on the little details, intimacies and manners of everyday conjugal love. They are suspended in the middle of a marital intrigue, prying each other with the meaning of some move, the winner or loser of chance. This is all depicted with the most charitable gentleness and pleasant disposition, a comedic interplay of errors and disguises, and the most natural charm.
The wealth of experiences accumulated by Flemish artists of the preceding generations—their love of the vivid actualities of life and the Italian technique of volume and composition—found expression in the new and refined style of Rubens. Some of the essential features of Rubens’s Baroque are the enlargement and amplification of the rhythmic phrase, as well as a heightened movement in depth. His picture A Sailor and a Women Embracing (ca. 1615-8) is a beautifully sensuous example of this, as Rubens uses the pronounced curves of the woman’s naked shoulders and turning face to guide us from one end of the composition—his tense glare, her looking away—to others—the grip of his hands. In the narrow, ambiguous stage of the picture they feel incredibly close to us, while the implicit push and pull of their bodies makes that closeness not a formal choice, but rather the sensation of entrapment and danger she encounters. It has often been thought that Rubens here reimagined the popular genre of unequal lovers, the humorous depictions of marriages of convenience or prostitution where painters made fun of the idea of love purchased by money. But the dramatic intensity of the scene, serious and grave, has a feeling of violent and intense passion unusual for such light pictures.
Of Rubens’s students, Anthony Van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens reaped best the advantages of the master’s legacy, while searching on their own ways to free themselves from his dominant attraction. Van Dyck, a more delicate nature, was happy to combine Ruben’s formal discoveries with his gift for finer and graceful designs. His Portrait of Prince William II of Orange as a Child (ca. 1631) is one of the two copies of this composition showing the five-year old prince and his companion dog. Like in Rubens, there is an overall orange tone—the color of the princely house—that unifies the picture, through the silk gown and tapestry, punctuated chiefly by the brightness of the face and gesture. Van Dyck is a Whistlerian purist, a master of slow appreciation. He deftly guides our eyes in and out from the corners through the elegant curves of the prince’s garment, so we encounter first the regal feeling of his pondering eyes and then slowly complement our idea with the symbols on the back, the (orange) tree and the arms and lion of the House of Nassau.
Jan van Hemessen, Double Portrait of a Husband and Wife Playing Tables, 1532. Oil paint on panel, 54 7⁄8 x 61 1⁄8 in.
© The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp.
Jordaens is both more rudely Flemish and more Italianate than his master. Jordaens excels in the kind of glorification of Flemish good cheer and goinfrerie, as is apparent in the exhibition’s jovial Serenade (ca. 1640-5), where a little boy brings all the chivalrous pomposity of music and intrigue to sing his love for a woman way beyond his age. The sonorities and richness of his reds and blacks, and the notes of intense blue, green and yellow, are arranged with a love for the concrete and particular objects. One feels that there is the possibility of malice in Jordaens’s jovial sympathy. He is sympathetically humorous toward the girl and boy but seems to turn bitter over the buffoonish players, who go along with the most absurd schemes for a little money. Chubby and almost breathless by his efforts, the bagpipe player stares back at us from the center—a portrait of the painter and a personal meditation on the status of artists of his time.
The exhibition at Denver and The Phoebus Foundation contain innumerable masterpieces beyond the scope of this review, which I hope can provide an entry point for a multifarious investigation and overall enjoyment of a tremendously rich show. In the devilish tool, the bitter saint, the breathless flesh, there is more to feel than we have felt and more to think than we have thought, and until the last light should sputter out, the sensitive viewer is best guided by the words of Erasmus:
“For anyone who loves intensely lives not in himself but in the object of his love, and the further he can move out of himself into his love, the happier he is.”