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Antwerp in the Early 1500s

A light-skinned woman wearing a lapis-blue dress sits on a throne, holding a nearly naked pale-skinned baby in this vertical painting. The woman’s long-sleeved dress falls in lively folds as it pools around her legs and feet. Curling tendrils frame her face while the rest of her brown hair is pulled back beneath a cloth headdress. Her body is angled to our left and she looks off just over our left shoulder. She supports the baby who straddles the right arm of the chair and balances on the toes of his right foot. With her right hand, the woman holds a piece of fruit, perhaps a small apple, up by the baby’s mouth. The throne sits low to the ground and is ornately carved and gilded with scrolling arms and intricate tracery up the back around the crimson-red, upholstered center. They sit in a room with a patterned tile floor, thick, brown stone walls, and a window with a view onto other buildings and people in the upper left corner. Three more apples rest on ledges near the window. A thick book lies open in the bottom right corner.

Overview

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, artists from all over northern Europe were drawn to the booming prosperity of Antwerp, in modern Belgium. With the silting up of the harbor in neighboring Bruges and new alliances that brought the English cloth and Portuguese spice trades into the city, Antwerp became the mercantile hub of Europe, where goods from the East, the New World, and the Old World changed hands. The city's cosmopolitan population, wealthy as well as diverse, was a magnet for artists and encouraged experimentation. Painters were little constrained by tradition, since Antwerp had never before attracted important artists. To satisfy their patrons' varied tastes, painters explored new subjects and worked in many different styles, sometimes self-consciously borrowing from the past, at other times taking new inspiration from Renaissance Italy.

The art and humanistic outlook of the Renaissance was imported to the north through travel, printed books, and published prints. Antwerp painter Jan Gossaert accompanied a diplomatic mission to Rome in 1508. He was probably the first artist from the Netherlands to go there. Others soon followed, taking home sketchbooks filled with their drawings of Rome's ancient monuments and the works of Italy's greatest artists. In Antwerp and elsewhere, artists began to adapt the poses of antique statues in their paintings, giving their figures more robust physiques and sculpted muscle. They incorporated ruins and ancient architectural motifs, sometimes in purely fanciful and ambiguous forms, but they continued to paint these new compositions with the same minutely detailed manner of earlier Netherlandish painting. In blending these elements from north and south, they created a unique, eclectic style.

Jan Gossaert, Netherlandish, c. 1478 - 1532, Madonna and Child, c. 1532, oil on panel, Gift of Grace Vogel Aldworth in memory of her grandparents Ralph and Mary Booth, 1981.87.1

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New Subjects: Moralizing and Landscape Scenes

Painters also began to treat new subjects. Men like Quentin Massys, for example, played an active role in the intellectual life of their cities and began to mirror the ethical concerns expressed by humanist thinkers with new paintings that used secular scenes to impart moralizing messages. Vivid tableaux warned against gambling, lust, and other vices.

Artists were also attracted for the first time to landscape painting. Its appearance coincided with exploration and a rekindled interest in mapmaking and geography. Although some earlier artists had turned particular skill and attention to their outdoor settings, the first painter we know of to specialize in landscape was Joachim Patinir, in Antwerp. he created something new and distinctly northern that nonetheless became greatly popular and influential in Italy and the rest of Europe. These works, usually called "world landscapes," often had religious themes, but the figures are diminished in scale and importance. They are dominated by the vastness around them and are glimpsed as if from a high vantage point. The unfolding panorama embraces, with craggy mountains and tidy towns, both the wild and civilized worlds. A wealth of detail invites the viewer to inspect these pictures at close range, to travel through them with the eyes.

Follower of Joachim Patinir, Netherlandish, c. 1485 - 1524, The Flight into Egypt, c. 1550/1575, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.81

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These two panels are painted with the subtly varied grays known by the French term “grisaille,” a palette that mimicked the appearance of stone sculpture and was used most often, as here, on the exteriors of altarpiece shutters.

Seen in the desert where he lived for a time as a hermit, Jerome holds the stone he used to beat his chest in penance for the visions of pleasure that interrupted his meditations. He looks to a crucifix growing out of a gnarled and lifeless tree. The imagery suggests both death and salvation, and it would also recall for contemporary viewers medieval legends connecting the wood of the cross to the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. Jerome is accompanied by the lion who, according to legend, became his faithful companion after the saint removed a thorn from its paw. In the distance unfolds the story of his false accusation of the lion—that it had devoured a caravan donkey—and their subsequent joyful reunion at the upper right.

Gossaert was apparently the first Netherlandish artist to travel in Italy, but it is unclear whether he painted Saint Jerome before or after his trip. Jerome's robust physique and beardlessness, uncommon in medieval representations, could have been inspired by ancient or Italian Renaissance works, but the darkly threatening landscape and the lion's unnaturally flat face seem more at home in northern art.

Jan Gossaert, Netherlandish, c. 1478 - 1532, Saint Jerome Penitent [left panel], c. 1509/1512, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.5.40.a

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Shown from about the waist up behind a forest-green desktop, a man with smooth, pale pink skin writes in an open book with a quill pen as he looks at us, surrounded closely by papers, pens and ink, and other objects in this vertical portrait painting. His body is angled a little to our left but he tips his head slightly back and looks at us from the corners of his dark brown eyes under arched brows. He has a short, round nose, high cheekbones, and his pale pink lips are slightly pursed. His short, chestnut-brown hair curls over his ears, and bangs sweep across his forehead. His black beret is adorned over his right eyebrow, on our left, with a metallic badge with an intertwined

Occupational portraits like this were a northern tradition. The prosperous businessman is depicted with the tools of his trade: writing implements, sealing wax, scales, a pile of coins, and sheafs of paper labeled “letters” and “drafts.’ He may be Jeronimus Sandelin, later a tax collector in Zeeland, where Gossaert worked near the end of his life. In the 1500s merchants and bankers were eyed with suspicion and distrust despite their economic importance. Gossaert captures the man’s cautious frugality without caricature. His large figure fills the picture frame, and the precision of painted detail gives his portrait presence and immediacy.

At times Gossaert chose, as he did here, to re-create the forms (the occupational portrait, for example) as well as the precision and craftsmanship of such earlier northern artists as Jan van Eyck (d. 1441). In other works he was influenced instead by the ancient statues and monuments he had sketched while in Italy. In Gossaert’s small painting, Madonna and Child, Jesus’ robust but ungainly pose, for example, recalls ancient statues of the baby Herakles. This eclecticism met the varied demands of Antwerp’s diverse clientele and show an artist free to choose a self-conscious style.

Jan Gossaert, Netherlandish, c. 1478 - 1532, Portrait of a Merchant, c. 1530, oil on panel, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1967.4.1

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Shown from the waist up, a clean-shaven, pale-skinned man dressed in black gazes at us in this vertical portrait painting, which has an arched top. His body is angled to our right, but he glances back toward us with slightly drooping hazel-green eyes under slender brows. His face tapers to a narrow chin, and his pale pink lips are closed. His ear-length brown hair and bangs are mostly covered by a wide, black hat that sits cocked to our left. He wears a voluminous black coat with a wide fur collar over a black garment with a notched collar. A white shirt beneath is visible at the neck and cuffs. He pulls a bone-white glove onto one hand and wears a gold ring with a green gem on the index finger of his bare hand. The green background behind him glows around his shoulders and deepens to moss green around the arched top of the panel.

Joris Vezeleer headed a small Antwerp company that sold wool, other commodities, and luxury items. He provided tapestries and gems to such clients as French king Francis I and Mary of Hungary, the Holy Roman Emperor’s capable regent in the Netherlands. Diamond cutting, in particular, became an important industry of the Low Countries as new techniques enabled stone cutters to enhance the light reflected from gems by faceting them. Jews recently expelled from Portugal settled in Antwerp in the early 1500s and made it an important center of the diamond trade, as it continues to be today.

Vezeleer’s gesture of pulling on a fine leather glove marks him as a gentleman of means. In her portrait, his wife holds a pink, a flower associated with fidelity and seen often in wedding portraits. (The Vezeleers’ grandson was the famous Dutch poet and statesman Constantijn Huygens [d. 1687]; their great-grandson discovered the rings of Saturn.) In Joos van Cleve, Vezeleer, who was known as a collector of paintings, obtained the services of one of the finest artists working in Antwerp in the early 1500s. His skill with portraiture later led Van Cleve to Fontainebleau, where he painted Francis I and was exposed to the soft sfumato (from the Italian for “smoke”) style of Leonardo da Vinci, who spent the last years before his death (in 1519) working for the French court.

Joos van Cleve, Netherlandish, active 1505/1508 - 1540/1541, Joris Vezeleer, probably 1518, oil on panel, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1962.9.1

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A smiling young woman and an elderly man with exaggerated features embrace and gaze into each other’s eyes while a person dressed in the orange costume of a fool lurks behind them to our left in this horizontal painting. All three have pale skin and are shown from the chest up behind a ledge or tabletop against a black background. The older man to our right wears a dark teal-blue garment and a bright crimson-red head covering that drapes over both shoulders. Wrinkles and age spots cover his face, which is accentuated by a bulbous nose and a leering smile that exposes missing teeth. His arms reach out and encircle the woman to our left. Cradling the right side of her head with his right hand, his left arm reaches across to her upper body, his thumb visible at her breast. A blue and gold band holds the woman’s auburn-brown hair back. A white shift peeks through the slashed sleeves of her emerald-green, gold-trimmed gown. She reaches toward the elderly man with her right arm, her hand holding his chin. Her left arm reaches across her body under his arm and she holds a leather pouch in that hand. A man wearing an orange cap with asses’ ears reaches for the pouch, eyes crossed and his tongue protruding from the side of his mouth. Playing cards and coins lie on the ledge to our left.

Massys settled in Antwerp in 1491, soon becoming its leading painter and an influential citizen. His fame was enhanced by stories, probably exaggerations of the truth, that he had been a blacksmith and taught himself to paint. Among his acquaintances were several of the city's leading humanists. Perhaps his contacts with these men prompted Massys to take up the kind of moralizing secular subject seen here.

An old lecher, whom Massys modeled after a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, fondles a willing young woman. She meanwhile slips his purse to a gnomelike accomplice in a fool’s cap. The large, brightly lit figures press close to the front of the painting, as if seen through a window. This separation makes us aware that we are witnesses of the scene, not participants, and therefore free to judge and make a moral choice. Messages like this one about the consequences of vice were familiar to audiences in Antwerp, not only from books like Sebastian Brandt’s Ship of Fools and Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly, but from a large body of popular poetry and from moralizing skits performed during city festivals. Massys’ painting evokes these lines from an anonymous Dutch poet:

    A rover—short, old, and free
    With purse running over with gold,
    Took a Venusberg lass for a spree
    Who took clients like him in her hold.
    That lass has her loose, lowly wiles,
    Undoing his purse with its glut
    While showing a face full of smiles
    Like the grin of a flat halibut.

Quentin Massys, Netherlandish, 1466 - 1530, Ill-Matched Lovers, c. 1520/1525, oil on panel, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1971.55.1

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We float high above the land, looking across rolling hills toward a shimmering, aquamarine-blue body of water to our left and towns peppered along taller mountains to our right, beneath an incoming storm in this horizontal painting. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting. Only upon closer inspection does one discover dozens of tiny men and women scattered in groups or individually across the landscape. Closest to us but still tiny in scale, at the lower center, a man wearing a scarlet-red tunic and dark pants chops down a tree as another man wearing navy blue walks away from us. A man snoozes on the grass nearby and another squats in the protection of a hollowed out tree, pants down, in the lower left corner of the painting. The rolling, light brown hills angle away from us to our left. Atop a hill to our left, a tall frame holds up two flaming wheels. At its foot, a person wearing robes kneels and looks up, arms raised, at the wheel, which is on fire. Three people, one wearing armor, lie nearby and others run away. A structure on a rocky outcropping nearby is also on fire, and black smoke billows skyward. In the harbor below, at the center of the composition, two ships tip wildly in the water. People walk and work in pairs and groups through the rest of the landscape, including a bustle of activity around a wooden ship being built to our right. Travelers on foot and on horseback follow a winding road along the harbor toward a castle on the far promontory. Beyond that lies a ship-filled port town, and, across a drawbridge on at the far right, a walled city in the hazy distance. Clouds rolling across the left half of the painting are charcoal gray, almost black. To our right, patches of bright blue sky peek through a thin screen of white clouds.

As Europeans came to understand the world through printed maps and geographies, landscape emerged as a popular subject. The Italian artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari noted that “there is no cobbler’s house without its landscape because one becomes attracted by their pleasant view and the working of depth.” Here the torture of Saint Catherine is overwhelmed by the scenery in a way typical of the panoramic “world landscapes” painted by northern artists. Perspective and point of view are manipulated to provide the most information possible: this is a God’s-eye view that sees everything simultaneously. Varied terrain and captivating detail compel the viewer to travel across the picture with his eyes.

This painting may be the work of Matthys Cock, whose brother Hieronymus was a well-known publisher of prints, including many by Pieter Bruegel. Notice the distinctive mountain crags here and similar ones in other landscapes nearby painted by followers of Bruegel and Joachim Patinir. It was Patinir who introduced the world landscape, and these rock formations are found in the Dinant region of southern Belgium, his birthplace. Perhaps Patinir’s landscape tradition was transmitted through Bruegel’s familiarity with the works of Matthys Cock.

Antwerp 16th Century (Possibly Matthys Cock), The Martyrdom of Saint Catherine, c. 1540, oil on plywood transferred from panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.2.18

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From high above the earth, we look down onto a view with a densely wooded area to the right, buildings clustered along a rocky ridge at the center, and a river winding back into the far distance to our left in this horizontal landscape painting. The color palette is dominated by pine and deep, emerald greens for the forest, tawny brown for tree trunks and the earth along the foreground, and slate gray and pale blue for the rocks, river, sky, and distant hazy landscape. Closer inspection reveals surprising and surreal details along the riverbanks and in the sky, beginning with a nightmarish hybrid of creatures and goblins in the lower right corner, at the outskirts of the forest. One creature has the body of a person with the head of a white bird, and another resembles a head walking around on two legs without a body. Tucked under a lean-to in the lower right, a man with a long white beard wearing a black hooded robe sits near goblin-like critters. In the foreground on our left, a group of people with peach-colored skin gathers around an oversized fish washed up onshore, which is covered with a black cloth marked with a large white X. A hooded and cloaked person sits atop the fish, holding a bell. Groups of fantastical creatures move in clusters or individually toward or around the buildings clustered on the rocky ridge. Dark brown plumes of smoke billow from a high steeple, probably a church and bell tower, and a bright light, possibly fire, illuminates the structure from behind. To our left, what first looks like a conical structure turns out to have a pink nose and eyes peeking out from what may be an overturned teacup being worn like a hat. More crowds and creatures line the shore of the river that winds away from us, around a peninsula, and into the distant horizon, which comes about halfway up this painting. The surface of the water has a pearly, opalescent sheen. White clouds swirl across a bright blue sky, as if they were waves in the sea. Incongruously, a group of spindly, insect-like creatures gathers in the sky riding fish or boats.

Pieter Bruegel, the preeminent artist of the mid-sixteenth century, was described by his friend, the mapmaker Abraham Ortelius, as “Nature’s own rival,” and is best known for powerful and evocative scenes that combine landscape and views of peasant life.

This panel was painted by one of his followers but incorporates elements from Bruegel’s own landscapes, the broad silvery river, for example, and a drawing he made of the same subject, Saint Anthony. We see the saint twice. In a foreground hut he resists the devil’s temptations, a motif copied from Bruegel’s drawing. In the upper left, Anthony is tortured and carried aloft. Fantastic demons and bizarre images recall the work of Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516), who was extremely popular in the later sixteenth century. In those years, northern Europe endured warfare and religious violence. Perhaps these monsters reflect a view of a world gone mad.

While most northern artists traveled to Italy to study the remains of ancient Rome and the masterpieces of high Renaissance art, Bruegel was the first to go simply to experience the scenery. To most travelers of the time, mountains suggested only peril: brigands and bad weather. Far from avoiding the Alps, however, Bruegel seems to have gone out of his way to cross back and forth over them. They often appear, snowcapped, in the backgrounds of his works.

Follower of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, c. 1550/1575, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.2.19

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Shown from the knees up, a pale-skinned woman sits in front of a vast landscape and holds a nude baby boy on her lap in this horizontal painting. The woman, Mary, sits with her knees angled to our left, but she looks at us from the corners of brown eyes. She has a delicate nose, smooth cheeks, a pointed chin, and her pink lips are closed. A few strands of blond hair escape from braids that overlap across the top of her head. She wears a rose-red dress over a translucent white undergarment, which is visible along the neckline and on the forearms. A cloth striped with azure and powder blue, pale pink, lemon yellow, and teal drapes across her seated thighs and wraps back around her hips. One hand rests in her lap near one of the baby’s feet, and the other braces the child’s other hip. The baby, Jesus, has tightly curled blond hair and a flushed face. His body resembles a somewhat muscular adult. Jesus rests his shoulders back against the woman’s chest and turns to look up at her. One hand touches one of her breasts and the other holds a butterfly by its parchment-yellow wings. The foot not by the woman’s hand rests on a gold dagger near the woman’s far hip. A gnarled tree with dark green leaves winds from a rocky crag to our left. The pair are lit from our left, and Mary casts a shadow on the large, flat boulder on which she sits. The land dips steeply down beyond the boulder. A man wearing a pale pink garment that flaps in the wind stands on a rocky outcropping near a grazing animal. Tiny in scale, three more people walk or run in the distance to our right. Stone structures are tucked in among tree-dotted hills that roll gently back to a hazy blue, mountainous horizon, which comes about five-sixths of the way up this composition. The sky above is a similar icy blue.

Heemskerck spent several years in Italy, where he supported himself at times with the particularly northern specialty of landscape painting. But this picture was produced before his first trip there. It shows the influence of his teacher, Jan van Scorel, who had already brought back to the Netherlands an Italian feeling for large, sculptural figures and a landscape repertoire that included fanciful ruins and idyllic motifs copied from ancient art. This panel was long thought to be the work of Van Scorel; if Heemskerck painted it while in Van Scorel’s studio, it may have been sold as such.

The story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt to avoid Herod’s legions became a popular vehicle for landscape painting. Here, the exotic locale is reminiscent of sacred groves in ancient Italy.

Against this ambiguous panorama, the large image of the Virgin and Child takes on the quality of an icon. The crystal globe on which Jesus rests suggests his dominion over the world, the butterfly his resurrection. Because they are painted in rich colors and with distinct clarity, they seem quite near to us. Features in the distance, by contrast, are obscured by a progressive shift to blue that mimics the intervening haze of the atmosphere.

Maerten van Heemskerck, Netherlandish, 1498 - 1574, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c. 1530, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.36

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