Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market 9780812207439

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Illustrations
Preface
1. Introduction: ‘‘Cultural Selection’’ And The Origins Of Pictorial Species
2. Antwerp As A Cultural System
3. Town And Country: Painted Worlds Of Early Landscapes
4. Money Matters
5. Kitchens And Markets
6. Labor And Leisure: The Peasant
7. Second Bosch: Family Resemblance And The Marketing Of Art
8. Descent From Bruegel I: From Flanders To Holland
9. Descent From Bruegel Ii: Flemish Friends And Family
10. Trickle-Down Genres: The ‘‘Curious’’ Cases Of Flowers And Seascapes
11. Conclusions: Value And Values In The Capital Of Capitalism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

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Copyright 䉷 2006 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Silver, Larry, 1947– Peasant scenes and landscapes : the rise of pictorial genres in the Antwerp art market / Larry Silver. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-10: 0-8122-3868-0 (alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-3868-6 1. Genre painting, Flemish—Belgium—Antwerp—16th century. 2. Landscape painting, Flemish—Belgium—Antwerp—16th century. 3. Art—Economic aspects—Belgium—Antwerp— History—16th century. 4. Art and society—Belgium—Antwerp—History—16th century. I. Title ND1452.B42 S57 2005 381⬘.45754⬘0949322209031—dc22 2005050371

CONTENTS

1.

List of Illustrations

vii

Preface

xiii

Introduction: ‘‘Cultural Selection’’ and the Origins of Pictorial Species

1

2.

Antwerp as a Cultural System

16

3.

Town and Country: Painted Worlds of Early Landscapes

26

4.

Money Matters

53

5.

Kitchens and Markets

87

6.

Labor and Leisure: The Peasant

103

Second Bosch: Family Resemblance and the Marketing of Art

133

Descent from Bruegel I: From Flanders to Holland

161

Descent from Bruegel II: Flemish Friends and Family

186

Trickle-Down Genres: The ‘‘Curious’’ Cases of Flowers and Seascapes

208

Conclusions: Value and Values in the Capital of Capitalism

226

Notes

235

Bibliography

317

Index

353

Acknowledgments

371

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

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I L L U S T R AT I O N S Chapter 2 2.1 2.2 2.3

Joannes Stradanus/by Philips Galle, Nova Re`perta Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Two Monkeys 24 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Tower of Babel 25

19

Chapter 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17

Hieronymus Bosch, St. Jerome in Prayer 28 Joachim Patinir, Landscape with St. Jerome 29 Joachim Patinir and Quinten Massys, Temptation of St. Anthony 31 Joachim Patinir, Rest on the Flight into Egypt 32 Joachim Patinir, Charon Crossing the River Styx 33 Joachim Patinir, Burning of Sodom 34 Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Lucas Gassel, Landscape with St. Anthony 37 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with Mining Scenes 39 Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pilgrims to Emmaus 41 Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wooded Region 42 Hieronymus Cock after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with Temptation of Christ 43 Matthys Cock, Landscape with Rest on the Flight 44 Hieronymus Cock after Matthys Cock, Landscape with Mercury Holding the Head of Argus 46 Master of the Small Landscapes, Village View 47 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Parable of the Sower 48 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Conversion of St. Paul 50 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Census at Bethlehem 51

Chapter 4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12

Hieronymus Bosch, Seven Deadly Sins 54 Hieronymus Bosch, Death of the Miser 55 Jan Provoost, Old Miser with Death 56 Hieronymus Bosch, Allegory of Luxury 57 Hieronymus Bosch, Hay Wain Triptych 59 Follower of Bosch, Beggars and Cripples 61 Lucas van Leyden, False Pilgrims 63 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Cripples 64 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Charity 65 Hieronymus Bosch, Wanderer, Hay Wain Triptych 66 Hieronymus Bosch, Wanderer 67 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Battle Between Carnival and Lent

68

vii

Illustrations

4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16 4.17 4.18 4.19 4.20 4.21 4.22 4.23 4.24 4.25 4.26

Lucas van Leyden, Tavern Scene 70 Quinten Massys, Ill-Matched Pair 71 Jan van Hemessen, Prodigal Son 72 Jan van Hemessen, Loose Company 73 Quinten Massys, Money Changer and His Wife 75 Quinten Massys, Grotesque Old Woman 76 Quinten Massys, Grotesque Old Man 77 After Quinten Massys, Banker and His Client 79 Marinus van Reymerswaele, Banker and His Wife 80 Marinus van Reymerswaele, Tax Collectors 81 Jan Massys, Tax Collector’s Office 82 Jan van Hemessen, Calling of Matthew 84 Jan van Hemessen, Parable of the Unmerciful Servant 85 Marinus van Reymerswaele, Parable of the Unjust Steward 86

Chapter 5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9

Pieter Aertsen, Meat Stall 88 Pieter Aertsen, Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha 89 Pieter Aertsen, Christ and the Adulterous Woman 91 Joachim Beuckelaer, Market Scene with Ecce Homo 92 Joachim Beuckelaer, Miraculous Draft of Fishes 94 Pieter Aertsen, Cook 96 Pieter Aertsen, Produce Seller 98 Joachim Beuckelaer, Fish Market with Ecce Homo 99 Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Everyman (Elck)

101

Chapter 6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11 6.12 6.13 6.14

viii

Pieter Aertsen, Village Festival 104 Pieter Aertsen, Peasant Company 105 Pieter Aertsen, Egg Dance 106 Albrecht Du¨rer, Peasants Dancing, Bagpiper 107 Cornelis Matsys, Loose Company 109 Cornelis Matsys, Peasant Love Triangle 110 Frans Huys after Cornelis Matsys, Lute Tuner 111 Pieter van der Heyden after Hieronymus Bosch, Peasant Interior 112 Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fat Kitchen 113 Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Kermis of St. George Frans Hogenberg after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Kermis at Hoboken 115 Pieter van der Borcht, Peasant Kermis 116 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Kermis 117 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Wedding Dance 118

114

Illustrations

6.15 6.16 6.17 6.18 6.19 6.20 6.21 6.22 6.23 6.24 6.25 6.26

Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Wedding Dance Pieter van der Borcht, Peasant Wedding 120 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Magpie on the Gallows 122 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wheat Harvest 124 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Summer 125 Jan Brueghel after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Visit to the Peasants 126 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fall of Icarus 127 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Land of Cockaigne 128 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant and the Bird-Nester 129 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Beekeepers 130 After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Blind Leading the Blind 130 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Misanthrope 131

119

Chapter 7 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10 7.11 7.12 7.13 7.14 7.15 7.16 7.17 7.18 7.19 7.20

Hieronymus Bosch, St. Anthony Triptych 135 Jan Mandijn, Temptation of St. Anthony 136 Pieter Huys, Temptation of St. Anthony 137 Pieter Huys, Last Judgment 138 Jan Mandijn (?), Last Judgment 139 Hieronymus Cock after Hieronymus Bosch, Last Judgment 141 Bosch Workshop, Last Judgment Triptych 141 Hieronymus Cock after Hieronymus Bosch, St. Martin in a Boat 143 Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Temptation of St. Anthony Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Last Judgment 145 Pieter van der Heyden, Patience 146 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Mad Meg 148 Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Anger 149 Philips Galle after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fortitude 150 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Triumph of Death 151 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Big Fish Eat Little Fish 153 After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Battle Between Carnival and Lent 154 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Painter and the Connoisseur 156 Jan Brueghel, Temptation of St. Anthony 159 Jan Brueghel, Aeneas in the Underworld 160

144

Chapter 8 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

Hendrick Goltzius, Mountainous Landscape 163 Simon Frisius after Hendrick Goltzius, Mountainous Landscape Jacob Savery, Mountain Landscape with Four Travelers 165 Jan Brueghel, Temptation of Christ 166 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wooded Landscape with Mills 167

164

ix

Illustrations

8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 8.10 8.11 8.12 8.13 8.14 8.15 8.16 8.17 8.18 8.19 8.20 8.21 8.22

After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Forest Landscape with Wild Animals 168 Jan Brueghel, Swamp Landscape with Angler 169 Gillis van Coninxloo, Forest Landscape 170 Nicolaes de Bruyn after Gillis van Coninxloo, Discovery of Moses 171 Pieter van der Heyden after Hans Bol, Winter 172 Frans Huys after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Skating Before the Gate of St. George 173 Jan van de Velde II, Winter 174 Jacob Savery, Village Kermis 175 Jan van Londerseel after David Vinckboons, Landscape with Travelers Attacked by Robbers 176 Claes Jansz. Visscher after David Vinckboons, Leper Procession 177 Jacob Savery, Blind 178 David Vinckboons, Village Kermis 179 David Vinckboons, Bird-Nester 180 Hessel Gerritsz (?) after David Vinckboons, Bird-Nester 181 David Vinckboons, Festive Peasants, Soldier, and Harlots 182 Nicolaes de Bruyn after David Vinckboons, Pleasures of Mary Magdalene 183 Nicolaes de Bruyn after David Vinckboons, Garden Festival 184

Chapter 9 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 9.9 9.10 9.11 9.12 9.13 9.14 9.15 9.16 9.17

Peter Paul Rubens, Kermis 187 Peter Paul Rubens, Rainbow Landscape 187 Pieter van der Heyden after Hans Bol, Autumn 189 Abel Grimmer after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Summer 191 Lucas van Valckenborch, Landscape with Mining Scenes 192 Lucas van Valckenborch, Angler Beside a Woodland Pond 193 Lucas van Valckenborch, Spring 194 Joos de Momper, Mountain Landscape 195 Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Census at Bethlehem 197 Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Wedding Dance in the Open Air 200 Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Village Lawyer 201 Jan Brueghel, Landscape with Windmill 203 Jan Brueghel, Woodland Road with Travelers 203 Jan Brueghel, Wooded River Valley with Pathway 204 Jan Brueghel, Temptation of St. Anthony 206 Jan Brueghel, Aeneas in the Underworld 207

Chapter 10 10.1 10.2

x

Jan Brueghel, Flower Still Life in Blue Vase 210 Joris Hoefnagel, Still-Life Allegory on Transience of Life

211

198

Illustrations

10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8 10.9 10.10

Roelandt Savery, Still Life in a Niche 213 Jan Brueghel, Animal Study (Dogs) 214 Jan Brueghel, Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark 215 Jan Brueghel and Peter Paul Rubens, Allegory of Sight and Smell 216 Jan Brueghel, Four Elements 217 Frans Floris, Feast of Sea Gods 218 Peter Huys after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Armed Four-Masted Ship Sailing Toward Harbor 219 Hendrick Vroom, Arrival in Vlissingen of Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart 221

xi

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P R E FAC E

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. —Isaac Newton

How can we know the dancer from the dance? —William Butler Yeats, The Tower

T

his book deals with artistic change over time—both within the span of time examined in its confines, roughly the sixteenth century, and within the larger span of European painting, where these more localized changes played out to lasting consequences (at least through the nineteenth century and, with mutations, well into the twentieth). In order to study historical change, we have to focus on pictorial forms themselves and their alterations over time, whether in dramatic shifts, slow drifts, or static continuity. I take as a starting point the theorizing about visual change developed by George Kubler in his Shape of Time. In order to use Kubler’s concepts and test them, however, I employ a case study, well located in both time and place: sixteenth-century Antwerp. The phenomenon under consideration is the development of what we have come to think of in art history as pictorial genres, that is, families of artworks with similar subjects and conventionalized forms such that we recognize them as groups.1 One of the problems with defining genre comes from the determination, so frequently a problem in visual studies, whether the subject or the form provides the primary determination of the group, as in the quotation, ‘‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’’ Frequently genres are defined by ‘‘essential’’ individual works that are deemed to arise at a formative moment and to influence later examples. We shall see the usefulness of this model for Antwerp, where significant individual artists (especially Bosch and Bruegel; see Chapters 7, 8, 9) and their favorite themes and forms (hell scenes and peasant scenes, respectively) shaped later imagery for generations. Genres also pose difficulties in the basic tension between categories and individual examples (akin to Ferdinand de Saussure’s theories of semiology, opposing a theoretical ‘‘language’’ to a particular usage, ‘‘word’’).2 However, the other key ingredient of any language group is a community of use, linking producers to audiences. Thus, as with language, there are shifts in any kind of picture-making over time, as the priorities and interests of these interactive groups change. Circumstances alter cases. Genres cannot be understood entirely as systems or outside history. Moreover, the relationships of parts to whole in any single instance of a genre can charge particular pictorial elements with enriched meaning, just as the syntax of any statement can shift its tone or content. There are no exact synonyms. This book will perforce have to focus on a succession of related but individual works by single artists as well as sequences of artists working in the same genre. We also have to recognize the phenomenon that the term ‘‘hybrid’’ denotes: that there are often mixed or compound genres within a single picture. Perhaps the most familiar (in both senses of that word) and persistent of visual genres is landscapes,

xiii

Preface

but this book will treat other pictorial groups as well: scenes of peasants, markets, hell settings, flower still lifes, animals, and ‘‘seascapes,’’ featuring both ships or naval battles and tempests. Besides trying to articulate the pictorial history of each genre, this study will also attempt to consider the origins of individual genres. Its first premise is that one can never pinpoint a fully originating moment, despite leaps and innovations. Rather, genres unfold in the fullness of time and take shape after a viewing community has become accustomed to seeing and grouping certain related works and seeing a sequence or development in the cluster. Indeed, many of the newer genres, as we shall see, begin with what I shall be calling ‘‘hybrid’’ traits. Their first instances, therefore, are often compounds, such as ‘‘landscapes-with-,’’ physical settings whose inhabitants, often religious figures like isolated saints or component narratives, add an extra dimension. Most genres are defined by a basic subject matter, such as flower still lifes or peasant scenes, but their presentation also implies a calibration of such content with conventions of form, such as standard locations (village or even taverns for peasants) or features (caricatural exaggeration of peasant faces). There is another, individual dimension to the Antwerp development: artistic identity. In an era when religious subjects and portraits no longer dominated the output of paintings—and, increasingly, the output of intaglio prints as well—certain artists quickly came to be identified with their favorite subjects and characteristic forms, so that a ‘‘brand name’’ prototype imagery readily came to be associated with a noted individual, even if that artist added features to existing images. Most of the genres considered in this book, therefore, also have a principal innovator: Joachim Patinir for (world) landscapes, Pieter Aertsen for markets and peasants, Hendrick Vroom for marine paintings. The earliest manifestation of this crystallization of a brand name imagery was the hell scenes and imaginative demons of Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516). Not surprisingly, these popular traits were frequently imitated by lesser artists, who might directly copy famous individual works or else make their own, more creative imitations of Boschian types, sometimes with the intent to forge the master and take advantage of his popularity for their own gain. Bosch’s works remained popular and recognizable throughout the sixteenth century, and at various moments they enjoyed widespread imitations in both paintings and prints (which often freely credited Bosch as the ‘‘inventor’’ of the imagery, usually falsely). Pieter Bruegel began as an imitator of Bosch in his own right, chiefly producing designs for prints but also favoring the Boschian idiom of demons and hellfire for some of his inventive paintings. Bruegel also picked up the conventions of landscape settings, specifically the popular panoramas known today as ‘‘world landscapes,’’ while adding his own wrinkles to the genre, including some forms imported from Italy as well as forest landscapes, which would be more widely developed in the succeeding generation. Bruegel’s own signature style, however, revolved around peasant images, showing village life in all its manifestations. Like Bosch before him, Bruegel was original but also patently imitable by his successors, including his own painter sons, Jan Brueghel and Pieter Breughel the Younger. While it would be an exaggeration to claim that either Bosch or Bruegel became a genre in his own right, we can certainly see their artistic progeny focusing on certain particular models while ignoring others from their repertoire. The same kind of signature imagery appears in the favorite or best known films by certain twentieth-century film directors, often with a repertory company of favorite star actors, such as the western

xiv

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subjects with John Wayne created by John Ford or the suspense thrillers with Cary Grant or James Stewart and a succession of beautiful blonde female leads by Alfred Hitchcock. The relationship of genre creation to preexisting theory has vexed scholars ever since the classical pronouncements on tragedy and other literary genres in Aristotle’s Poetics seemed to be prescriptive rather than descriptive, for example in the ‘‘unities’’ of action and time, which loomed so large in the neoclassical French tragedies of Corneille and Racine: ‘‘I propose to treat of poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential qualities of each,’’ said Aristotle at the outset of his influential treatise. Later, Horace’s Ars poetica inveighed against any mixture of genres and called for unity and simplicity of form by using the metaphor of painting: Should some painter take the fancy to draw the neck of a horse joined to a human head, and to overlay with varicolored plumage limbs gathered from anywhere and everywhere, making what appeared at the top a beautiful woman to end below as a foul fish, when you were admitted to the spectacle, should you, even though his friends, restrain your laughter?3 Genre theory in Renaissance literature, such as the seven-volume Poetics by Julius Caesar Scaliger (1561), seemed to be a surefire formula for production of literature but could also generate unwitting caricatures of hybrid combinations like those of Polonius’s speech in Hamlet: ‘‘The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral; scene individable, or poem unlimited.’’ (2.2, 405–8, ll. 396– 400).4 The dominant explanation offered by Ernst Gombrich for the rise of landscape in the sixteenth century also ultimately hinges on the revival of artistic theory during the same period that experienced the revival of Aristotelian poetic theory.5 To explain why Italian commentators, notably Marcantonio Michiel in Venice in 1521, already referred to certain pictures as landscapes (paesi), Gombrich turns (as most students of Italian painting still readily turn) to published theory—first to Alberti (Ten Books on Architecture) on building decoration and then to Leonardo (Paragone) on the capacity of painters as creators to invent distant settings. He also cites the frequent comparison between ancient artists, documented by Pliny, and living artists, including a Roman painter Studius (or Ludius), whose wall paintings featured villas and parks. While claiming that such written testimony suggests that Italian viewers were thus prepared to seek out and appreciate landscapes, particularly Northern imports, Gombrich credits the demand to a new aesthetic attitude and an emerging collector mentality. He also makes distinctions, anachronistic to the sixteenth century, between inhabited countrysides with human activity and ‘‘pure’’ landscapes, as understood from later nineteenth-century artistic practice. For Italians like Paolo Giovio, landscapes were still parerga, that is, ‘‘accessories,’’ or marginalia and diversions.6 In effect, this outlook only confirms the eventual hierarchy of genres as codified by the French Royal Academy in the later seventeenth century, as theorized by Fe´libien, which would then dismiss as inferior the very categories whose origins and early development we are exploring here.7 Gombrich characterizes the academic conventions of art as ‘‘not only pedantic rules made to cramp the imagination and to blunt the sensibility of genius’’ but rather as ‘‘the syntax of a language without which expression

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would have been impossible.’’ We are back to Saussure’s tension between langue and parole but with the added celebration of transcendent genius capable of inventing entirely new concepts.8 Yet such academic conventions and rules, the ‘‘preexisting mold’’ for artistic ideas, were actually the product of later centuries and of cultures alien to the Netherlands, where such images actually arose and flourished. They could play no role in the generation or the varied developments of landscapes or the other novelties we are about to examine closely in sixteenth-century Antwerp. We cannot account for Netherlandish landscapes, let alone the other pictorial genres of this book, by preexisting models and precedents from Pliny or from contemporary Italian theorists (though we shall also see that for kitchen scenes, for example, scholars have drawn connections there to Pliny and painters of humble objects, or rhyparography; see Chapter 5). The other principal interpretation for the emergence of pictorial genres is a kind of essentialism, perhaps best exemplified by Max Friedla¨nder in his book Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life.9 Friedla¨nder reveals his conceptual bias when he speaks of the ‘‘Emancipation of Landscape in the Sixteenth Century,’’ ostensibly the precise phenomenon that we are examining here. However, from this point of view, ‘‘pure’’ landscape, adduced by Gombrich, is already implicit as a kind of ideal formula at the initial appearance of the genre and struggles for its own, independent existence against the conservative viewing habits of a tradition-bound audience. Production is dependent on audience taste and cannot achieve ‘‘understanding and response’’ if it is too far ‘‘ahead of its time.’’ According to Friedla¨nder, in sixteenth-century Antwerp ‘‘landscape-painting extricated itself from the altarpiece and stood on its own two feet, but was distinct from fine art.’’10 His history quite acutely identifies the sixteenth century as the time when production for an art market led to professionalization and specialization by painters as well as the shaping of a ‘‘personal manner’’ (as noted above for Bosch and Bruegel), presented to an increasing body of ‘‘art lovers’’ (in fact the connoisseurs at the end of the century in Antwerp were referred to as precisely this, liefhebbers, ‘‘art lovers’’).11 Here anachronism, shared also by Gombrich, inclines toward a purely aesthetic experience, something that would rise in the early modern era of collecting but really find its fulfillment in the latter eighteenth century.12 Landscape artists in Holland by the height of the seventeenth century are already viewed as expressing individual subjectivity and personal feelings through their works akin to the later ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ dictates of the recent Impressionist era in France. By contrast, this book will chart the origins of various genres and their evolution over the course of a single century of production in the same civic center. Using case studies, this analysis will examine the genealogy of works of art and will trace what art historians conventionally call ‘‘influence.’’13 But there is a new set of assumptions here, which emerge from the valid observations of Friedla¨nder about specialist painters working for a new, open market for art in Antwerp. Rather than trying to assess the attitudes of art buyers in that market, for which there is scant evidence, my purpose instead is to note that successful formulas usually get repeated by their makers and soon imitated by aspiring lesser or younger artists. Moreover, the market itself should be viewed as a competitive environment, in which new or different forms have to find their own buyers or else disappear. The artists who survive, even thrive, in such competition usually manage to innovate their products, through novelties that stretch or even add a distinctive personal stamp to the familiar conventions of a genre, or else to innovate

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their processes, finding new ways to be more efficient and productive through technique or workshop procedures.14 After we have taken stock of the varieties of pictorial types in Antwerp and observed how they emerge from complex, compound combinations of themes and formal staging, such as Patinir’s foundational world landscapes with religious figures, we can then begin to assess how individual pictures and genre types grow out of their earlier instances—sometimes largely preserving the conventional forms they inherited, but sometimes also offering substantial novelties in their turn.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION ‘‘Cultural Selection’’ and the Origins of Pictorial Species

Genealogy is not an historical narrative, but has the essential function of renewing our perception of the . . . system as in an X-ray, its . . . perspectives serving to make perceptible the articulation of functional elements of a given system in the present. —Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious

Each species is a biological experiment, and there is no way to predict, as far as an incipient species is concerned, whether the new niche it enters is a dead end or the entrance into a large new adaptive zone. Even though evolutionists may speak of broad phenomena such as trends, adaptations, specializations, and regressions, they are not separable from the progression of the entities that display those trends, the species. —Ernst Mayr, This Is Biology

M

odern viewers of art take for granted the conventional formulas of easel paintings that adhere to expectations of pictorial genre, such as landscape or ‘‘genre’’ painting (scenes of ‘‘daily life’’ and ‘‘ordinary’’ people). Yet these categories have their own origins and early histories, and the easel paintings that constitute their principal medium—as well as another vital new medium, inexpensive prints—did not always exist in a visual culture composed primarily of wall paintings or altarpieces and portraits of the elite. As we shall see, the rise of these pictorial genres and their media coincided. Sixteenth-century Antwerp, the most volatile commercial and financial center in Europe, also gave rise to the first permanent open art market, located at the city Bourse.1 In addition, Antwerp generated the first major successful print publishing house, appropriately named ‘‘At the Sign of the Four Winds,’’ run by entrepreneurial etcher Hieronymus Cock (and afterward by his widow).2 This book offers an investigation of the origin and the early evolution of both the new pictorial types and their media, easel paintings and intaglio prints, as a local and historical Antwerp art phenomenon.

1

Chapter 1

Origins are notoriously difficult to pinpoint. When does a painting of a saint in a landscape become a painting of a landscape with a saint? That is precisely the transition that occurred over the span of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, particularly in Antwerp and principally in the oeuvre of Joachim Patinir, designated already by Albrecht Du¨rer in 1521 as ‘‘the good landscape painter.’’ Modern scholars have agreed in assigning Patinir an innovator’s role in the formulation of landscape, despite the presence of saints in his settings. Of course for these scholars to use the same word, ‘‘landscape,’’ as Du¨rer had during his artist’s own lifetime (Patinir died in 1524), suggests that they are seeking origins for this pictorial category, finding continuities with current practices and concepts still recognized by that name (if considerably altered in appearance and variety). While such continuities surely remain relevant, both historically and conceptually, we also have to beware of drawing the contemporary conclusion that the saint is just an excuse in Patinir’s picture—precisely what Max Friedla¨nder did assert early in the twentieth century, when he viewed this kind of painting as an origin for the pictorial category that he knew through its later instances, such as Monet’s gallery canvases. In a chapter entitled ‘‘The Emancipation of Landscape in the Sixteenth Century,’’ Friedla¨nder claims that ‘‘landscape-painting extricated itself from the altarpiece and stood on its own feet, but was distinct from fine art.’’3 This kind of art history posits historical change as evolution, and its kind of evolution implies teleology, seeing in the prototype an anticipation or seed of the mature phenotype, or essential body type. This is the same kind of thinking that Erwin Panofsky promotes when discussing Gothic architecture as the fulfillment of an ‘‘ideal type’’ (in the sense used by Max Weber), what he calls a ‘‘final solution.’’4 It assumes, as noted in the Preface above, that style types, like organisms, have ‘‘lives’’ of their own and that they have youth, maturity, and decline, with a high point of maturity constituting their ‘‘classic’’ phase.5 Obviously artworks of similar kinds are joined over time in linked solutions to common problems, something that theorists have noted for some time.6 Antwerp offers a situation not only for the initiation of such lasting series of what George Kubler calls ‘‘prime objects,’’ but also for consideration of the shifts of form and meaning across the series over time, in this case the span of the sixteenth century. Patinir made hybrid works—at once both religious pictures and protolandscapes. His paintings were the product of his own repetition and specialization in this kind of painting, even sometimes of his collaboration with other artists, where the saintly figures were designed instead by either Du¨rer (in the case of a drawing of eight St. Christopher figures, mentioned by the artist in his journal) or Quinten Massys (with whom Patinir coproduced a notable Temptation of St. Anthony, now in the Prado; see Figure 3.3).7 Friedla¨nder already noted correctly that this specialization itself resulted from a new condition of art-making: instead of individual commissions by individuals, the production of artworks for Antwerp’s open market resulted in replication of successful pictorial formulas and an increasing tendency toward specialization, precisely the conditions of Patinir’s several variations on the theme of St. Jerome in a panoramic world landscape. In addition to the evolution of genres like landscapes, however, another major innovation flourished in the Antwerp art market: the phenomenon of recognizable artistic identity, in which both favorite forms and themes merge into viewer—and consumer—recognition. Here again one can look first to Bosch as a formative influence. One nonmodern category of works, ‘‘devilries’’ (diableries), based on the inventive formulations of grotesque monsters by Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516), enjoyed sustained

2

Introduction

popularity over the entire sixteenth century, especially for hell scenes or temptations of saints in landscapes. This combination can be seen in the image Patinir produced in collaboration with Massys (see Chapter 3).8 Bosch’s own favorite forms and themes were succeeded in Antwerp by a host of imitations and adaptations, by such artists as Jan Mandijn and Pieter Huys, as well as the more celebrated works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (act. 1551–69), both prints and paintings after mid-century (Chapter 7). Later Bruegel’s own distinctive inventions would be widely esteemed and frequently imitated, especially his scenes of peasants in landscapes, imitated among others by his own pair of painter sons, Pieter the Younger and Jan Brueghel. Thus was born a dynasty of painters over multiple generations, each practicing the family business with what can only be termed ‘‘trademark’’ consistency (see Chapter 9).9 Patinir’s formula for religious scenes in a world landscape formula was immediately extended by Herri Met de Bles, who may have been his nephew, as well as by various imitators from the following generation up until the mid-sixteenth century.10 Indeed, this very development of a recognizable ‘‘signature’’ style, linked with favorite subjects by an individual artist, attests to another important new outgrowth of the nascent art market—and the early history of collecting, including print collecting—especially when those emerging ‘‘name artists’’ are imitated by later, lesser epigones. ‘‘Brand recognition’’ of celebrated leading masters generated a resulting demand even for their ‘‘knockoffs,’’ pictorial derivations in an era before copyright. While today we take such typical artists’ formulas as commonplace, along with their frequent use of identifying signatures (a ‘‘Rothko’’), they emerged together within this early modern art market condition, on prints as well as on paintings. After a century when only a few artists inscribed their names on their works, first Bosch and later Bruegel would add visible, sometimes prominent signatures to the bulk of their mature paintings.11 Indeed, prints provide a useful index for the diffusion of the concept of artistic identity through name recognition, in addition to the emerging notion of copyright, or as it was known in the early sixteenth century, ‘‘privilege.’’ In some ways we associate this convergence of artistic identity and copyright with German prints, particularly around the name of Albrecht Du¨rer, whose monogram was famous throughout Europe and was even forged by the young Marcantonio Raimondi in a famous 1505 copyright case in Venice, cited by Vasari.12 Such distinctive and personal marks had already been the prerogative of engravers since the mid-fifteenth century, notably with the unknown Master ES, and probably grew out of the legal use of goldsmiths’ marks to guarantee both the maker and the quality of metalwork. Privilege is nothing more than legal protection of that maker’s mark on an artistic work, and the outcome of Du¨rer’s suit against Marcantonio resulted only in the protection of the artist’s mark, not the protection of his designs against replication by another.13 Thus authorship, in the form of a legal mark or a signature by an artist, was deemed to be an essential element of the marketing of artworks in the emerging commercial sector of printselling. Du¨rer soon extended the practice of monogramming from engravings to woodcuts, paintings, and even some drawings. He further extended the notion of copyright from a representation of authorship to something resembling intellectual property. His Latin colophon to his large woodcut cycles, published together in 1511, warns: Beware, you envious thieves of the work and invention of others, keep your thoughtless hands from these works of ours. We have received a privilege from the

3

Chapter 1

famous emperor of Rome, Maximilian, that no one shall dare to print these works in spurious forms, nor sell such prints within the boundaries of the empire.14 Du¨rer copyists also frequently imitated or even forged his famous monogram.15 In the case of Du¨rer’s contemporary Bosch, Paul Vandenbroeck is surely right to note that his distinctive Latinized signature (albeit in Gothic lettering), ‘‘Jheronimus Bosch,’’ indicates both cultural aspirations and a rare self-assertion within Netherlandish art, which would be imitated (and even forged) by later artists.16 Moreover, the fact that he signed works of a distinctly unconventional cast, which modern scholars tend to label ‘‘secular’’ rather than ‘‘sacred’’ (distinctions that would probably not have been made in the early sixteenth century),17 suggests that his own inscription is not just a conventional piety, confined only to religious works. Some of the best evidence for this brand-name recognition as a part of market success comes from the labels that survive on intaglio prints produced by Hieronymus Cock during the 1550s at his shop, ‘‘At the Four Winds,’’ in Antwerp. Cock was ever alert to diversification of his portfolio, and his stock of designs by celebrated artists included several by renowned Italian Renaissance masters from Rome, such as his prints (engraved by an Italian professional print-maker, Giorgio Ghisi) after Raphael’s School of Athens (under the title Paul Preaching in Athens, 1550) and Disputa (1552). Cock also produced other prints after Giulio Romano, Andrea del Sarto, and Lambert Lombard, a Lie`ge artist who had gone to Rome. At the same time, Cock also issued several prints ascribed (sometimes falsely) to Bosch’s design,18 and his earliest figural commissions from Bruegel comprised images done in the signature Bosch manner, including such favorite Bosch subjects as a Last Judgment (Figure 7.10) and a Temptation of St. Anthony (Figure 7.9), as well as a demon-filled series of the Seven Deadly Sins.19 But perhaps the most indicative sign of the pressure of brand name recognition in the art market is the substitution of Bosch’s name for Bruegel’s on one of the earliest prints designed by Bruegel for Cock, Big Fish Eat Little Fish (Figure 7.16), a work produced at a moment when the deceased artist (Bosch) was a household word but the emerging painter of peasants (Bruegel) had yet to establish his own reputation and distinctive subjects or figure types.20 It is surely significant that in his 1567 Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, Lodovico Guicciardini makes mention of Cock, sole printmaker cited among the artists of Antwerp, characterizing him chiefly for his prints after the works of Bosch: ‘‘Girolamo Cock inventore, e gran’ divulgatore per via di stampa dell’ opere di Girolamo Bosco, e d’altri eccelenti Pittori’’ (Hieronymus Cock, inventor and great publisher by means of prints of the works of Hieronymus Bosch and of other excellent painters).21 Just as Cock presented Bruegel’s designs alongside a range of other options by Italians and Italianate print designers, such as Frans Floris and Maarten van Heemskerck, each of these individuals succeeded in establishing his own signature style as well as favorite subjects. Thus when we think of Bruegel we immediately evoke images that became the staple of his imitative sons, particularly the inferior painter and slavish copyist Pieter Brueghel the Younger, such as peasant weddings, Dutch proverbs, and seasonal labor and leisure in the countryside landscape. Often these painted copies stem not from painted originals but from Bruegel prints produced for Cock, multiple images that already had achieved a widespread popularity on the art market (Chapter 9). Bruegel the Elder, of course, produced a number

4

Introduction

of works in the Boschian idiom, almost throughout his career, and he also produced his own unconventional versions of religious narratives, such as the Flemish countryside location of Christ’s Infancy (Census at Bethlehem [Figure 3.17], Adoration of the Magi in the Snow, Massacre of the Innocents). Yet his defining images, at least those that were most frequently imitated and copied literally, were his peasant scenes. Here, too, Bruegel was not a complete innovator. Before him a number of works in prints by sixteenth-century German artists had already introduced such subjects to consumers of visual culture.22 Bruegel’s innovation lay in his recasting of such peasant scenes from prints to the large-scale color of paintings, just as Pieter the Younger would make paintings out of his father’s earlier prints. In the Netherlands, this condescending viewpoint of middle-class urban dwellers was first picked up a few years earlier by Pieter Aertsen, who virtually naturalized his peasants in conjunction with their vegetable produce in market scenes (Chapter 5). Aertsen also showed peasants in festive leisure in such large, painted works as Egg Dance (Figure 6.3), Village Festival (Figure 6.1), and Peasant Company (Figure 6.2). It is a short step from these precedents to Bruegel’s own Peasant Wedding Feast (Vienna) and Peasant Kermis (Figures 6.12, 6.13), even though we could also mark the perceivable differences in attitudes between these two artists, as scholars have frequently done to Bruegel’s advantage. What is worth underscoring here is that innovation need not always be the initiative of artists who are conventionally singled out as great or canonical. We should also recall that Bruegel’s successes were not achieved without vigorous contemporary protest and polemic. In particular, the poet and painter Lucas de Heere, an ardent adherent of the idealizing Frans Floris camp in Antwerp, attacked Bruegel in everything but name in a much-studied poem, published in 1565, entitled ‘‘Invective Against a Certain Painter Who Scoffed at the Painters of Antwerp.’’23 The painter of peasants is called ‘‘seeing-blind’’ and ‘‘bereft of his senses’’ for scorning true beauty and criticizing it as ‘‘sugar images,’’ and instead ornamenting his own paintings ‘‘like kermis dolls.’’ He is deemed a ‘‘bungler’’ who uses coarse brushes rather than the fine tools of a true artist, to produce works by the dozen in ‘‘wretched, bad strokes, / That truly look neither Romish nor antique.’’ Thus the world of Bruegel was not without its contemporary challengers, both in the marketplace within Cock’s shared print stable and in the marketplace of early criticism. Yet today de Heere and his ‘‘Romish’’ master Frans Floris are almost totally unknown, whereas Bruegel has become a household word. That such critiques were still current in the seventeenth century is clear from the texts advanced and analyzed by Eric Jan Sluijter in his book Seductress of Sight.24 In a 1624 poem by Dirck Raphaelsz Camphuyzen, painting itself is called the ‘‘mother of all foolish vanities’’ and a ‘‘frivolous vexation’’ that is ‘‘the common bait for the uneasy heart overwhelmed by choice . . . / Painting bred from the dalliances of the fickle brain, / Is an ever-flowing fountain for the foolish desire of the eye.’’ The problem here is not the success of one kind of picture-making but rather that of painting itself, tied to the ‘‘evil of the eye.’’ We can often gauge such long-term success and dispersion of pictorial types and styles through multiples of prints as well as the various later painted copies and imitations of an artist’s signature imagery. We find a half-century of Boschian knockoff Last Judgments and temptations of saints, filled with the artist’s trademark hybrid demons, and Bruegel himself began his career within this familiar

5

Chapter 1

and popular idiom. Thereafter, not only Bruegel’s sons but also his forgers, such as Jacob Savery in his delicate flecked landscape drawings, or else production-line painters of peasant landscapes in his idiom like Jacob Grimmer or David Vinckboons, extended his distinctive ‘‘brand’’ of form and content into the seventeenth century on both sides of the Scheldt border between Flanders and Holland (for the forgeries especially, see Chapter 8). Sluijter published an article in 1999 citing complaints around 1610 by both the Amsterdam and Leiden painters’ guilds about the inexpensive paintings from Antwerp then flooding the northern art market.25 Indeed, such market pressures seem to have induced Dutch artists during the teens of the seventeenth century to adopt both the specialization in landscape formulas for paintings and the efficient techniques of monochrome paintings and etched prints, as the example of Esias van de Velde demonstrates in Haarlem.26 At exactly the same time and place, the engraved plates for Cock’s Small Landscapes series, first issued in 1559, then again in 1561, were republished in Amsterdam by Claes Janszoon Visscher in 1612, with a renewed if erroneous attribution to Pieter Bruegel himself.27 The original title page had indicated that these landscapes were drawn from nature in the vicinity of Antwerp; the later Dutch reprint ambiguously designates them as ‘‘some country farms and cottages of the duchy of Brabant, drawn by P. Bruegel and, to please painters, engraved and published by Claes Jansz. Visscher.’’ As far as landscape is concerned, we first find Cock producing several print sets, notably the Large Landscapes, a set of mixed subjects, featuring designs—by Bruegel—of both religious subjects and nonnarrative world landscapes, beginning in the mid-1550s. Here the uniform format suggests a series, but Cock provided neither a title page nor any numbering sequence, so these landscapes may well also have been sold singly. A later series of 1558, Landscapes with Biblical and Mythological Scenes after designs by his brother Matthys Cock, does bear a title page in both Latin and Dutch; the longer Dutch title reads: ‘‘Various sorts of landscapes with fine histories composed therein, from the Old and New Testaments, and several merry Poems, very convenient for painters and other connoisseurs of the arts.’’28 From this preface we see that landscapes were beginning to assume their own attraction in the midcentury marketplace, where serious subjects might well still be considered appropriate figural interest for the collector but without any particular need for consistency of either religion or mythology. As noted, the Small Landscapes then appear the very next year with virtually no figures whatsoever and with a close-up, local, picturesque rendering at eye level of either country villages or estates: ‘‘Many and very attractive places of various cottages, farms, fields, roads, and the like, ornamented with animals of all sorts. All portrayed from life, and mostly situated in the country near Antwerp.’’ With this series of forty-four prints, the earlier, panoramic views of world landscape have now been replaced, and the formative model of much seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting has already been firmly established. In each of these cases, it is obvious that the audience for these new entertainments are urban, middle-class consumers, whose view of both the countryside and the peasants would be from an essential, even hierarchical distance of superior wealth and status, susceptible to pleasurable condescension and (pace Miedema) even humor. We also note the repeated phrasing for the overall titles to the series of Dutch countryside views of such terms as ‘‘Delightful views’’ or ‘‘Very pleasant views to delight the eyes.’’29 What happened with the advent of an open art market was the reformulation and broadening of the category of the image to include new conventions in replicable formulas, often combined with familiar subjects as a form of visual pleasure.

6

Introduction

Walter Gibson in his Pleasant Places has stressed anew this key linkage between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century presentation of landscape compositions derived from local and typical views. He further stresses the basic differences of type between this kind of setting and the composite panoramas that constituted the earlier model of Patinir and Bruegel, the ‘‘world landscape’’ (the object of his earlier study, Mirror of the Earth). What is clear is that this evolving genre emerged in successive steps of formal experimentation—from the Bosch saints in landscapes to the Patinir and Bruegel landscapes with saints (and also with peasants) to the Cock Landscapes with Biblical and Mythological Scenes to the eventual Cock-Visscher Small Landscapes and the derived seventeenth-century Haarlem paintings and prints around Esias van de Velde. These innovations and replications suggest the conditions of producing art within its new market situation, specifically connected to the use of either medium, easel paintings or printed images, linked with standard subjects, that is, the emerging pictorial genre of landscapes. Both kinds of images were usually relatively small and consistent in format. These works also suggest the importance of artist brand-name recognition, in conjunction with favorite forms and subjects, as a component of successful marketing of works in a crowded selling environment. We have noted already the importance that should be attached to individual artistic innovation, reshaping, even warping or challenging, the inherited conventions, even to the point of adopting both replicable and recognizable personal stylistic traits, which I have termed the ‘‘brand name’’ effect of artistic identity around a pictorial type. Another of the elements that emerges from the origins of landscape art is that these types were taken to be distinct expressions of a national character and location. To a certain extent this indigenous fusion of form with setting can be understood from the present as the anachronistic self-confirmation of modern nationalists, particularly in the scholarly community. That is, the ‘‘Dutchness of Dutch art’’ is a kind of essentializing in praise of this major cultural phenomenon by modern museums and art historians, who seek out those country scenes with canals and windmills as the marker of distinctive Netherlands topography.30 At least for the Netherlandish naturalism of landscape settings or ordinary peasants, we can still confirm some similar contemporary understanding of the phenomenon as we turn to the chestnut quotation, attributed to Michelangelo but penned by Francisco de Hollanda, a Portuguese in Rome in the 1540s, who makes a similar essentialist argument for Flemish pictures: In Flanders they paint with a view to external exactness or such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and prophets. They paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art.31 Reinforced by these near-contemporary insights, we still have to acknowledge the existence of landscapes as more than latter-day chimeras, as emerging and contingent phenomena, shaped in the competition of the marketplace and addressed to the attention of a newly constituted, urban community of viewers and readers. In effect, the pictures taught their own new consumers a new competence of

7

Chapter 1

how to read them, especially as pleasurable diversions or entertainments, though not without a strong countercurrent of cultural resistance and arguments about decline and moral corruption. Our modern notion of the artist emerges in each instance from this same matrix; each work offers a dialectic within its medium between individual innovations and collective reshapings of shared conventions, often steeped in reality effects, and refined in the crucible of market competition. In this fashion Patinir refines Bosch. The new entertainment engages a medium-based leisure of diversion through a process of stimulating the imagination and curiosity by the arrangement of either nature or art.32 What happens in the Antwerp art market is that a new, emerging form transforms the previous dominant forms and modes of reading them. In that process, the dominant taste-makers become distinctive artists, whose subsequent creations receive repeat commitments from consumers and collectors. We find this marketing in the successes achieved first by Bosch and later, supplanting him, by his chief follower, Bruegel; in England we find a close analogy in the assertiveness of Hogarth. We can even credit an Antwerp publisher, Hieronymus Cock, for his productive collaboration. In the modern visual industry of films we find analogous dynamics of both production and consumption. The dynamics of production and consumption in this living art remind us that films offer complex interactions around the artwork between industry production, audience responses, and critical or scholarly communities. Defining what a genre can be at any moment results from this kind of negotiation, of an object with both its previous models and its contemporary examples, reinforced by the tastes of purchasers and aficionados (including potential theorists or critics—something much more prevalent in later centuries).33 Current genre theory, grounded in Hollywood films, suggests that recognition and definition of genres occurs retrospectively and often cannot be noted as a self-consciousness in their early stages. Rick Altman notes that later critics seek the origins of what they see in later films, finding them to be a component of what was initially mixed imagery, which served a variety of needs for a diverse audience, the more so in the open marketplace of films.34 These historical developments, still firmly located within a evolving sequence of definable genres, surely expand the range of works that could be included in the shifting genre boundaries, and they can extend a full spectrum of responses by diverse audiences over time to such works. Yet because the process of changing genres is culturally constructed and refined through human choices and readings, art genre history—the subject of this book—can be made up out of sudden or voluntary change as much as by willed adherence to models or traditions, including willed revivals of dormant forms and themes (‘‘renascences’’ or ‘‘neo-’’ movements). This kind of ‘‘cultural selection’’ can thus operate without the biological constraints of genes and with either great suddenness or emphatic persistence. The early evolution of genres—whether Bosch-like diableries or early landscapes—originate from initial individual inventions or mixed thematic hybrids and then become well conventionalized formulas. These innovations and individual contributions to inherited themes and forms need not originate only in the form of inexpensive works for the open art market. Indeed, there is some counterevidence to suggest that a certain freedom from the demands of earning an income could also foster greater inventiveness and personal distinctiveness on the part of painters. Bosch was clearly a wealthy, largely independent artist, who worked for a number of elite patrons, including the regent duke Philip the

8

Introduction

Fair.35 In similar fashion, Pieter Bruegel the Elder numbered several eminent political and cultural figures among the patrons of his paintings, which were chiefly created in the second decade of his career after an initial specialization in drawing designs for Cock engravings.36 We also find whole pictorial categories emerging out of such expensive virtuoso media as luxury illuminated manuscripts or large-scale wall paintings and tapestry—to cite the cases of flower painting and naval pictures (Chapter 10), which remained relatively costly pictorial genres in the seventeenth century. We can see such institutionalization built into the hierarchy of genres, with most of the favorite Netherlandish genres bringing up the rear, in the (producers’ side) ideology of the French Academy after the middle of the seventeenth century. When we return to Patinir’s landscapes with saints as the very models of a mixed genre, we note that the later derivative possibilities were manifold, even in just the works of Bruegel alone. They could just as easily develop in the field of religious pictures of hermit saints as in the secular realm of landscapes without figures. Imitation and repetition of certain aspects of successful pictures leads precisely to those later branches of development, which establish the importance of influential artists, such as Bosch and Bruegel, as well as the viable traits of emerging genre conventions, such as landscapes and peasant pictures. The marketplace provides the ongoing feedback of success through repeated sales and encouraged the repetition of formulas and artistic specialization for an appreciative and increasingly competent audience. It also increasingly led to collaborative productions between pairs of specialists, such as landscape and figure painters. This phenomenon of collaboration by specialists, especially characteristic of the career of Jan Brueghel in the early seventeenth century, becomes increasingly tied to another phenomenon: the emerging body of collectors, who drew up inventories and acknowledged therein the clear importance of an individual artist’s authorship of works.37 Moreover, the collaboration of genre specialists, particularly figure painters with painters of either landscapes or still life (or animals, such as Rubens’s collaborations with Jan Brueghel or Frans Snyders), marked much of the production of larger or more finished pictures by the early seventeenth century. Elizabeth Honig has argued that this collaboration actually enhanced the market value of such works for discerning collectors, in effect offering doubled authorship as well as virtuoso specialization for the sophisticated connoisseur. Historically, we can consider the relationship of the new genres and their favorite themes, especially landscapes and peasants, to issues of ultimate cultural significance in the historical circumstances of sixteenth-century Antwerp—namely, burgeoning urbanism and capitalism in their transformations of religion and morality away from a meditative and essentially monastic ideal to a serious engagement with various forms of worldly temptations (see Chapter 11). In this evolution both Bosch and Bruegel are again key figures, whose visual themes of either sin or folly profoundly shaped the values of an emerging urban, bourgeois culture. Their several representations of familiar yet alien persons (peasants, beggars) and spaces (rural fields or mountain peaks) form a pictorial laboratory for urban, prosperous art buyers to measure themselves.38 Sometimes these comparisons function as a usefully pointed contrast (a ‘‘mode’’ in the sense of Northrop Frye)39 to their own norms of behavior and physical spaces. Such pictures can be taken as part of the larger historical shift of the ‘‘civilizing process’’ toward ‘‘manners’’ and self-constraint in bourgeois culture, which also points to the importance of kitchen scenes and peasantry in the general cultural formation of these pictures.40 In many respects we see here the

9

Chapter 1

roots of a pictorial culture of seventeenth-century Holland (and eighteenth-century London for William Hogarth, as well as nineteenth-century Paris, with its own revived interest in Dutch art). Thus, like the retrospective definition of artistic genres and formative artists, we can truly see these developments of the art market in sixteenth-century Flanders to be the epicenter of an emerging ‘‘early modern’’ visual culture. It will be one of the tasks of this book to try to survey and analyze the values, shifting over time, of these themes in turn, as well as to chart their relative importance in providing social norms toward the discipline of an ongoing ‘‘civilizing process.’’41 In particular, the negatively critical Antwerp figural genres shift from an early preoccupation with images of actual handlers of money (money-changers, bankers, and tax collectors; see Chapter 4) to dark interior tavern scenes (some of which show more and more rural characters and constructions) to the in-between site of markets with rural produce (Chapter 5) to scenes of peasant leisure excesses at either kermis festivities or rural weddings (Chapter 6). Increasingly the imagery takes on a more socially distant (in terms of class) and physically distant (from urban settings to rural) presentation or staging of characters and sites. This combination of themes and localities, as well as finer elements of visual choice, can often be said to constitute ‘‘style.’’ The traditional art historical separation of style or form from content or subject is an arbitrary and unsustainable distinction. One cannot have formless content, nor can one have pure form. If anything, the complex mixture of figures and settings, such as religious figures in landscape, is an intricate dialogue of parts to a whole that is greater than its individual components. As that formative example also makes clear, even to define or name the nascent genre of a landscape-with-religious-figure is arbitrary and limiting, though often either the setting or the main figures will provide the descriptor, for example, ‘‘peasant pictures’’ or ‘‘markets.’’ Only in later centuries were ‘‘pure’’ landscapes, where figural population was not significant and could be regarded as only an extension of the countryside itself, a conceptual possibility. In this formative period of Antwerp’s pictorial experimentation with (usually mixed) genres from the standpoint of later, retroactive definitions of genres, the complex, hybrid pictures held varied appeal in the marketplace and found both imitations and further innovations. Their appeal emerged, as we shall see, from their pertinence to the new urban culture of the expanding city as well as its attendant problems.

Art History and Art Theory Our current thinking about art offers a contradiction between two main approaches. The first, more traditional approach, perhaps best theorized in George Kubler’s The Shape of Time, sees art as a sequence of original creations, what Kubler calls ‘‘prime objects.’’ These ‘‘key monuments’’ are what art historians usually assign critical weight to and inscribe in what has come to be called the ‘‘canon.’’ These are the works that give rise to the imitations and knock-offs that we usually call ‘‘artistic influence.’’ The greater the influence, the greater the major monument, or so the argument usually goes. The other, more currently fashionable poststructural approach situates art works as collaborative creations, conditioned by social and cultural conventions and constraints, not to mention a constellation of materials, markets, and other elements of production that condition any manufacture and distribution. In this view, the art work more closely resembles a published book, where author and publisher,

10

Introduction

let alone distributor, are all part of the process; perhaps an even more collaborative modern art form would be the studio motion picture, with participants too numerous to mention. A film gives ‘‘credits’’ to a whole host of co-producers and individual technicians as well as to actors and a guiding director, who sometimes is given special credit as an ‘‘auteur,’’ despite the constraints and collaborations of studio production. By this reckoning, the print produced in Antwerp by Cock is closer than an easel painting to a modern book or movie, but even there we have to take account of replication and the workshop production line of designers, engravers, and distributors, not to mention the overall structure of guild, market, and urban audience who are in dialogue with the production of the images.42 Both the Kubler formulation and a contemporary theoretical approach to this material yield particular heuristic benefits, either in classifying works by innovative artists or by success in the marketplace.43 Formal experiments and variations of pictorial forms are akin to variation in nature, and their success (or failure) in the marketplace is a cultural process akin to what Darwinians call ‘‘natural selection.’’ Clearly some (visual) forms are going to flourish and find replication and imitation—the traditional measure of what art history terms ‘‘influence.’’ Others are going to fall flat, from being too costly or too radically inventive or just unattractive to buyers compared to the competition. What these pictures have in common with the Darwinian world of ‘‘nature red in tooth and claw’’ is precisely that— their competition, albeit here in the marketplace.44 There are other differences. Constraints in the biological world are often considerable and immutable, limited by such facts as genes and body makeup (or phenotype). A bird’s body, for example, cannot be larger than a certain size in order to permit efficient flight. In the art world certain pictures, such as altarpieces in churches, cannot be smaller than a certain size in order to be seen across vast spaces. But, genres can intermix, creatively and arbitrarily, in ways that mutually incompatible species cannot (this infertility is in fact an essential part of the definition of boundaries between species).45 Constraints of the open marketplace might be considerable, but they are not immutable. Instead of the long-term conservatism and constancy of genetic material and the physical constraints of living creatures, pictorial images, by contrast, can be adapted rapidly and at will. Of course, there can be another kind of pictorial conservatism in the form of audience expectations, as well as size, cost, and other market variables. But when there is a breakthrough, such as the hellish inventions of Bosch or the landscape formulas of Patinir, we can clearly and instantly see the success of the inventor as well as the potential flourishing of a larger circle of followers who imitate those novelties. In other traditions, such as the icon-painting tradition of religious art in Orthodox countries, where replication with relatively little alteration is a long-term trend, innovations are marked only by small, usually individual, often momentary differences. Indeed, in such deliberately conservative situations, sometimes public need, filled by icons or works like pharaonic portraits in ancient Egypt, would be compromised in their purpose by too much formal innovation. One of the findings of evolution in biology states that natural selection can either extend over eons or be very rapid.46 For example, bacteria replicate so rapidly and in such quantities that many of them have become drug-resistant in a matter of decades. Sometimes after an initial period of radical innovation, organisms can maintain long stretches of stasis, an oscillating process that Stephen J. Gould called ‘‘punctuated equilibrium.’’ Artworks, too, often closely connected to political or religious traditions,

11

Chapter 1

seem to settle in to long periods of conservative traditionalism after initial periods of experiment and ferment. Moreover, just as there can be boom times and busts for art sales in the general economic marketplace, so too can there be major population expansions and tolerance for greater varieties in periods of natural prosperity, as in times of abundant rainfall, in contrast to those of droughts and other catastrophic climatic or ecological devastation. The geological history of the earth is marked by a few periods of disastrous extinctions, of which that of the dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic era is the most familiar. Observations in the controlled environment of the Galapagos Islands with Darwin’s finches revealed that minute differences in size and shape of beaks could make enormous differences in survival during lean times, when the population thinned down to the most versatile competitors; variety and numbers swelled during periods of ecological accommodation.47 We find the same boom and bust cycle in the tulip craze and crash of the same period in Holland, which involved artists as speculators, customers, even portraitists of the coveted flowers (see Chapter 10).48 As cited by Sluijter, the flood of Brabant (i.e., Flemish) imitations of Bruegel formulas in the early seventeenth century in Holland began to overwhelm the nascent Dutch landscape makers, and they complained bitterly, precisely in terms of competition.49 The Dutch were able to adapt, however, finding cheaper means of production in the monochrome style of painting or in etching instead of engraving for prints, and they soon produced the next wave of innovation, the Haarlem school of landscape: Esias and Jan van de Velde and later Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruisdael. Yet even here, those who could not produce in quantity were in peril; the cautionary case of Hercules Seghers as both a painter and a printmaker shows us that not all of the innovators of this generation thrived or found imitators.50 Though his economic explanation has been criticized for being overly monocausal, Jonathan Israel, has even suggested that the monochrome techniques of seventeenth-century Dutch easel paintings developed out of the conditions of an economic downturn during the 1620s as a cost-cutting efficiency for struggling artists.51 In fact, the shift to simplified graphic and painting techniques—to etching from engraving, to monochrome tonal washes from slow-drying, underpainted, and detailed Flemish techniques—marked a new kind of simplicity and sketchy suggestion of ‘‘directness’’ as a pictorial hallmark of Dutch naturalistic picture-making.52 While efficiency of production might have been a consideration in the adoption of these new techniques, particularly for an artist like Jan van Goyen (1596–1656), whose output of low-priced landscapes was prolific, the monochrome imagery was also closely associated with the gray skies and muted colors of the Dutch landscape and provided a means to display the virtuoso manipulation of limited means for illusionistic naturalism.53 Moreover, this technique provided a striking local contrast to the meticulous inherited Flemish techniques still practiced by many of the followers of Bruegel. While research in this area is still relatively new, we can already see that technical consideration of workshop procedure and the handling of a medium—of painting or of graphics—has its own continuity. Moreover, the abrupt change of technique can also be seen as a competitive strategy, one that drew a vividly visual distinction between ‘‘progressive’’ Dutch pictures and the ‘‘mannered’’ legacy of earlier (and ongoing) Flemish traditions, in effect creating a new pictorial taste and a market niche or sales demand among collectors.54 This is process innovation, one of the two major novelties that can make a

12

Introduction

picture distinctive—the other is product innovation, broadly defined—in the assessment of (art) value by John Michael Montias.55 Evolution even suggests a number of other testable hypotheses for art historians. One of the main discoveries about speciation—that is, the multiplication and diversity of life forms in a setting—is that this kind of natural expansion of types and numbers occurs most readily in a favorable but peripheral environment, such as a tropical island, where biota have been isolated from predators and competitors and can then expand to fill all the available niches in the ecosystem through their own numbers and diversification. One wonders whether our marketplace for art in the Low Countries presents a similar situation. Isolated geographically in northwest Europe and by the dominant Protestant attitude toward art from traditional demand for works for monarchs and churches, these Dutch images (and Flemish genres other than history paintings) were reinforced chiefly by their own successes and failures in the marketplace. Those images that were either innovative in acceptable ways to a buying audience or else conventionally competent and readily affordable were able to flourish and find imitations, in which case they became more diverse and varied within the same basic types. What remains significant about the overall analogy to evolution of art in a historically situated marketplace is that here we have a common model that stresses variation and selection, whose success can be seen in terms of either innovation or longevity and quantity. Art historians used to see a period style as an organism, a ‘‘life of forms’’ with its own growth and change.56 We no longer have to use that biological metaphor of style as an organism with its own life span and development—already well criticized for its biological teleology and determinism by both James Ackerman and Meyer Schapiro.57 Instead, we can see changes of artworks within larger relationships of genre over time as a process, contingent rather than inevitable and analogous to the historical model of evolution. Yet we also need to remember that our objects are cultural artifacts, made by conscious human choices in relation to their models and precedents. Innovation is one option, but so is the desire to return to earlier, discarded models (even at a broad cultural level, as the Renaissance and Neoclassicism demonstrate). Defining inevitability of change or charting unfolding, essential genre characteristics can only be the result of selective hindsight, such as the retrospective critical unification of markets, kitchens, and flower pieces, originally all discrete form classes in inventories (see Chapters 5, 10), into a single genre, still life (also codified in the French Royal Academy as nature morte). Besides defining a period style or a form class like a genre, this kind of organic thinking usually assumed an inevitable shift—from youth to maturity to old age, from simple/archaic to classic to baroque/complex (implying decline), rather than a cyclical return to the same sequence. Such shifts need not be either inevitable or irreversible. Artists make choices from the traditions they receive, within the expectations of an audience and a market, but also with the possibility of either modest or radically imaginative innovation. Even Kubler’s approach celebrates originality and creativity, which he calls ‘‘prime objects’’ in the linked sequence of related works. These are the works traditionally singled out as ‘‘key monuments’’ in art history, what survey classrooms and textbooks inscribe in a ‘‘canon.’’ They are also the works that get imitated by lesser epigones, through Kubler’s ‘‘replications,’’ in the process usually called ‘‘influence.’’ As noted, the usual argument asserts that the greatest works have the greatest influence. That view sees art as evolving in the manner of a single phenotype, from simple to complex, from primitive to baroque, like the shells of a complex nautilus, or else on the basis of some naive assumption, harshly

13

Chapter 1

critiqued by historical biologists themselves, that life evolves in a progressive fashion from simple forms to more complex forms on an ascending chain of being. Instead, what we have as a workable model, when conditions are right, is the analogy that compares the marketplace to the natural setting. There cultural competition and cultural selection determine success. There is where chance arises for innovation and variation as well as for continuity or extinction of a form. This kind of model would enable us to identify what forms had lasting influence, to construct our own historical chains of succession, as paleontologists trace lineages of particular animal types, such as the evolution of the modern horse from eohippus. In this case, however, we need to remember that there were nine other ‘‘horse’’ genera, cousins from common ancestors who were dead ends and do not survive today. We can also think of works that we still consider major or even ‘‘great’’ that come at the end of a tradition, such as the Isenheim Altarpiece by Gru¨newald. Other works participate in the usual historical sequence only in a later period upon being revived; examples include paintings by El Greco and Vermeer.58 Biologists inform us that evolution is the selection from whole populations and that evolutionary changes are neither accidental nor predetermined, but rather the result of survival from wide variation within a conditioning environment. Likewise, there is no essential form or ideal type in the history of art, nor is there a predictable rate of change. In fact, this is a point stressed emphatically by another form of historical biology, called cladistics.59 This particular kind of analysis of forms over time does not attempt (partly because of the ‘‘deep time’’ assumed for most evolutionary changes) to determine how changes occurred; instead, it focuses solely on the points at which the branches of the tree of life (clades) diverged. It takes note of the fact that degree of difference does not depend on how recently a shift occurred. For example, the acknowledged kinship between modern birds and a major class of dinosaurs, normally separated in evolutionary history, might be the basis for a grouping, based on common ancestors, by cladists. This approach also offers a conceptual framework for dealing with the willed, cultural phenomenon of revival or resemblance to establish continuities even after long gaps of time, for example, Neoclassicism or Renaissance movements in relation to a past ancient world. Having this flexible evolutionary model enables us to have our cake of innovation and to eat it too, within the complex interaction of artwork, producer and associates, audience, and market. If we remember that individual artists can produce their own variations and elect to experiment, whether to succeed or to fail, then we can also view their outcomes in the competitive and collaborative world of early modern open markets for visual art. Thus we resolve the tension, even the potential conflict, between a modernist celebration of individual originality and a postmodernist construction of social constraints, collaborations, and contingencies. What this book proposes, then, is a reconciliation between these two alternate models of analysis—by considering works and genres by innovative artists as well as by examining their sequences of successful formulas over time in the marketplace. Its working hypothesis is that the market competition and the unfolding of pictorial forms over time is analogous to the situation, well studied now for a century and a half, of biological evolution. At the same time, as noted earlier, cultural products like paintings and prints are not subject to the genetic constraints or built-in limits (such as the body size of a bird) in the natural world, so we need to take account not just of pictorial sequences but also of cultural choices and historically conditioned meanings in the forms and genres that flourished in Ant-

14

Introduction

werp. We note that the constraints of the marketplace in terms of replicating successful works might be considerable; Friedla¨nder already identified the pictorial conservatism of a broad viewing public, and there are also market constraints on objects, such as size or cost, especially for easel paintings and prints. However, pictures can also be adapted rapidly and at will by innovative artists. When there is a breakthrough by individuals such as Bosch or Patinir or Bruegel, the ensuing success of their novelty quickly spills over to a larger circle of imitative followers. Change can be either very rapid or quite gradual, though Antwerp’s art market is a far more volatile, more competitive setting than centralized and traditional societies, such as pharaonic Egypt or the Byzantine empire. Before we can posit any wider theoretical understanding of innovation and evolution, we must first evaluate the art history of emerging genres in sixteenth-century Antwerp. To do so, we must first begin with the city in history, its rapid economic rise and centrality, and the direct responses by artists to those new, often unsettling circumstances.

15

CHAPTER 2

ANTWERP A S A CULTURAL SYSTEM

‘‘The renowned and splendid city of Antwerp, which owes its bloom to trade, has succeeded in attracting to itself from all over the most important representatives of our art, who have also taken themselves there in great numbers, because art stops gladly in the vicinity of riches.’’ —Karel van Mander, ‘‘Life of Joachim Patenier’’

‘‘In the same measure as Florence earlier in Italy, so does Antwerp now seem to be a mother of artists in the Netherlands. So much has this renowned city also brought forth various artists, who have exercised diverse tasks of art.’’ —Karel van Mander, ‘‘Life of Mathijs and Hieronymus Cock’’

O

ver the span of the sixteenth century, the Brabant port city of Antwerp on the river Scheldt bestrode the economic world of Europe like a colossus.1 Up to the end of the fifteenth century, Antwerp had served as the site of prosperous annual trade fairs (along with nearby Bergen-op-Zoom), where imported textiles from the English Merchant Adventurers competed with nearby Flemish textile industries for the Continental market. Trade ‘‘colonies’’ from rival Bruges, particularly the Hanseatic Germans, the Spaniards, and a variety of Italian merchant groups, established local communities in the city and began to filter business.2 Indeed, their move was a symptom of and exacerbated Antwerp’s supplanting of Bruges’s earlier economic dominance, a situation that had been compounded recently by both the silting up of Bruges’s ship channel to the North Sea via the river Zwin and opposition from Emperor Maximilian I, who had been imprisoned in 1488 by the rebellious citizens of Bruges who opposed his rule.3 When the first Portuguese vessels arrived at Antwerp in 1501 with their imported Indian spices, the city’s fortunes skyrocketed, and soon the wealthy financiers and metal brokers from south Germany (chiefly Augsburg) formed a nexus of exchange that extended to Portuguese allies along the African coast.4 Antwerp offered the finest location for this rich exchange, because the city enjoyed the protection of Habsburg imperial interests, which nurtured both the German traders as well as the Iberian royal houses. Another important development of expanding trade and an emerging international system of banking credit in Antwerp was the expansion of note transfers, or bills of exchange; this in turn generated varied money services and calculations in the form of accountants, money changers, and lawyers (which had a corresponding imagery in art; see Chapter 4).5 When a panoramic multiblock woodcut of

16

Antwerp as a Cultural System

the Antwerp skyline was produced in 1515, a banner floating above it proclaimed its identity as Antverpiae Mercatorum Emporium (Antwerp, Emporium/Market of Merchants).6 Significant and symbolic was the construction of a new, multistory courtyard building, the Bourse (1531), financed by the city itself to serve as the exchange center in Antwerp.7 Local population swelled from forty thousand at the turn of the sixteenth century to more than one hundred thousand around 1560, making the city one of the largest in Europe.8 However, with the political catastrophes of the next twenty-five years, the population fell back to its earlier size, from 100,000 to 42,000. The city experienced a series of boom and bust cycles, including disruptions by the recurrent wars between Habsburg and French forces, as well as the bankruptcy declared by Philip II of Spain in 1557 (as well as 1560, 1576, and 1596). Expansion was strong in the first two decades of the new century and for much of the second third, from 1535 to about 1564. But the most severe blows to the city’s long-term prosperity came shortly afterward on the home front, where the advent of the Eighty Years’ War, or Dutch Revolt (1568–1648), against Spanish rule began in this region, across the Scheldt in Holland and Zeeland. This warfare was punctuated by a series of disastrous events, such as the sack known as the Spanish Fury (1576, by unpaid troops in the city) and the eventual fall of Antwerp to victorious Spanish Habsburg forces after a siege in 1585. Thereafter many foreign merchants abandoned the city, and a wave of religious and political exiles produced a ‘‘brain drain’’ of Antwerp talent in all fields, including visual art.9 Antwerp already enjoyed the distinction of being the first official open art market, specifically located in an artists’ gallery (pand) next to the newly built financial exchange, the Bourse.10 Artists follow money, and the early sixteenth century brought a swarm of talent to Antwerp, as the enlistments in the local St. Luke’s guild reveals.11 On the eve of the new century, the numbers of artists began to swell: no fewer than thirty-nine new masters registered in the guild list in 1492/93, and soon thereafter some Antwerp artists began to make their presence felt.12 Hendrik van Wueluwe (free master 1483, d. 1533), probably to be identified with the Master of Frankfurt, and Quinten Massys (master 1491, d. 1530) became two of the most visible painters in the first decades.13 Albrecht Du¨rer spent a protracted Antwerp visit and richly described his experiences among both his fellow artists and the German merchant community in a journal during the years 1520–21.14 When Lodovico Guicciardini produced his 1567 publication on the region, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, he counted over three hundred artists working in the city, twice the number of bakers (bread was the dietary staple, so this points to an extraordinary population size for the profession, even if the number is not fully accurate).15 Antwerp’s market soon came to be a site where works of art on sale, first easel paintings and later prints (connected closely to the burgeoning industry of book publication),16 proliferated and began to develop formulaic conventions of themes and forms that we associate today with definable pictorial types. Print publishing was dominated after mid-century by the commercial press, At the Four Winds (Aux Quatre Vents), a name already redolent of Antwerp’s wide commercial expanse, run by Hieronymus Cock.17 Study of the emerging open sales market for art in Antwerp (as well as Bruges) has been active of 18 late. The artists’ pand, a sales hall and gallery for art akin to the financial center of the Bourse, already existed in Antwerp by 1460; the principal site for such art sales was originally centered on a space beside the main church, Our Lady, and it was soon open all year rather than around the seasonal fairs.19

17

Chapter 2

In 1540 an official painter’s gallery, or schilderspand, opened near the Bourse itself. A careful study of Flemish carved altarpieces in Antwerp (as well as Brussels) by Lynn Jacobs reveals that both finished and semifinished retables were offered for sale at the pand, since ready-mades or patterned production provided considerable savings—of time as well as price—over specially commissioned works.20 Indeed, her entire study suggests strongly that sellers of Flemish retables satisfied ‘‘medieval tastes’’ through ‘‘mass marketing.’’ Moreover, the lengthy production schedule of carved retables evoked a new kind of efficiency, a nearly ‘‘industrial’’ production in workshops—what John Michael Montias would call ‘‘process innovation’’—consisting of delineated division of labor (between shrineworkers, carvers and painters of the wings), prefabrication of parts for insertion, as well as repetition of standard patterns and models.21 Such repetition and use of patterns also predominated in small panel paintings; often the technique used was a form of tracing, known as pouncing, through pricked outlines around a model sketch or template.22 Moreover, division of labor in painting also developed. Not only were portions of individual pictures in a workshop increasingly assigned to apprentices, but also increasing numbers of specialists in a particular kind of painting, such as landscape backgrounds or animals or other kinds of figures, were able to collaborate with one another. One of the best known early versions of this delegated work was the Temptation of St. Anthony (Figure 3.3), where the main figures were painted by Quinten Massys within a panoramic world landscape by the landscape specialist Joachim Patinir, who also signed the painting (see Chapter 3). Rubens’s workshop in early seventeenth-century Antwerp furnishes the epitome of this practice of delegated subspecialization and collaborative production (Rubens himself collaborated successfully with a number of other painters, most notably Jan Brueghel).23 As an example of actual selling practice of paintings, Filip Vermeylen published documents about one art dealer’s stock of goods, inventoried after his death (1581).24 Jan van Kessel had over a hundred paired canvases ‘‘of various types, some not finished,’’ one old painting on canvas attributed to Bosch (one of the rare artists to be named specifically in inventories of this date), almost five hundred ‘‘double canvases,’’ six wooden boxes with paintings, three prints ‘‘by Raphael depicting martyrdom,’’ and nineteen other prints ‘‘by Raphael, Parmigianino, and others.’’ Some of the paintings are described as ‘‘depicting figures from Kortrijk,’’ which probably means that they were painted with cheap, fugitive distemper or watercolor pigments, like the other inexpensive pictures on canvas, which van Mander mentions as coming from Mechelen (Malines).25 Of course, elaborate division of labor was built into Cock’s print workshop, shared between designers and professional engravers (see Figure 2.1), not to mention the actual printers of the intaglios, in a further elaboration of this process. Its products, engravings, were inexpensive multiple images, always intended for market sale rather than commission.26 Some of Cock’s printmakers worked exclusively for him, while others worked for other Antwerp print publishers, his competitors, or even issued their own prints. Some sent in their work from considerable distances, several from Haarlem in the North Netherlands; one printmaker, Cornelis Cort, emigrated to Italy, where he worked to produce prints after designs by such distinguished artists as Titian and Barocci.27 Bruegel himself moved to Brussels in 1563, after which he was less active as a designer for Cock, though prints after his drawings (and paintings) still continued to be produced. Another of the consequences of art made for market sale was product innovation, the multiplication

18

Antwerp as a Cultural System

2.1. Engraving in Copper, Nova Re`perta, plate 19, engraved after designs by Joannes Stradanus, published by Philips Galle, Antwerp, late sixteenth century. Civica Raccolta Bartarelli, Milan. Art Resource.

of subjects for sale through the development of pictorial genres, especially those that combined two or more kinds of images to attract varied buyers.28 A good example of this combined, hybrid genre is landscape pictures with religious figures in them, a ‘‘product innovation’’ of Patinir (master 1515, d. 1524), who, as noted above, was not averse to an occasional collaboration, with figures painted by other specialists. Landscape offers a telling instance of one extensive genre that emerged within the Antwerp art market (see Chapter 3). Indeed, the first painter closely identified with this pictorial type, Patinir, was already described by Du¨rer in his travel journal of 1520–21 as ‘‘the good landscape painter.’’29 Thus, even though the theory of landscape as part of the constellation of painting categories was not yet fully worked out prior to their initial creation,30 the pictures themselves show an emerging practice, which would soon find many imitators and adherents in the generation following Patinir, including one landscape specialist believed to be Patinir’s nephew, Herri met de Bles.31 Moreover, landscapes also became a staple of early print publishing: Hieronymus Cock issued several suites of landscape images during the 1550s, including designs by Pieter Bruegel and his own brother, Matthys Cock. This book will pursue, in turn, the origins and developments of the main pictorial genres that arose within Antwerp’s sixteenth-century art market: landscapes (Chapter 3), money handlers and beggars (Chapter 4), markets (Chapter 5), peasants (Chapter 6), and the demon-filled scenes of saints or hell scenes (diableries) painted as imitations of the product innovations of Hieronymus Bosch until the end of the century (Chapter 7).

19

Chapter 2

Antwerp’s busy markets and expanding prosperity also formed topics for rhetorical consideration in this highly verbal city. Making money was a charged emotional activity, particularly in an era that was still trying to extricate itself from medieval canon law’s proscriptions on the making of interest as a form of usury.32 Thus it came to serve as a frequent target of satirical writing, particularly in the ‘‘folly refrains’’ and dramas of the local Dutch guild of rhetoricians, the rederijkers.33 Merchants were frequently equated with deception, as articulated in this verse collected in a refrain anthology of Jan van Stijevoort by 1524 (as translated by Honig): All the world used to be filled with riches When the merchant was without trickery He bought, he carried, then everyone became fat He made riches fly throughout the land He knew nothing of cheating or lying Of pushing or badgering, but only happy living But now things have really gone beyond the pale.34 Merchants also were often associated with manipulation of supply and prices for profiteering, even by popular authors, such as Sebastian Brant in his 1494 Ship of Fools, as well as learned Latinists like Erasmus in his Praise of Folly (ca. 1511).35 This was the charge by playwright Cornelis Everaert of Bruges in his 1530 play, The Coin of Varying Value, which blames scheming merchants in connection with fluctuating exchange rates.36 Around 1540 Cornelis Crul, a local merchant and poet, portrays a foreign trader in Antwerp in his play Heynken de Luyere as the following: ‘‘Now God has granted him such riches / That he wants to return to his own country.’’37 For the arrival in 1549 of Prince Philip of Spain, its future sovereign (as Philip II), Antwerp put its own best face forward in the program for a Gate of Honor built by the city.38 Above a representation of the local river, Scaldis (Scheldt), appeared Mercury, the god of trade, on top of bales and barrels; opposite him the figure of Negotiation, with letters and bills of exchange in hand. These two figures were accompanied by personifications of the international merchant colonies: North Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, England. The city clearly identified itself with both its commerce and its cosmopolitan merchant communities. In 1561 the Chambers of Rhetoric of various cities in the province of Brabant gathered for their competitive arts festival, the Landjuweel, around the assigned theme of how useful businessmen were for society, or literally ‘‘how important to us are those brave spirits, merchants who justly trade.’’39 Most of these writers strove to praise the merchants for providing markets for farmers, workers, and craftsmen. All other trades depended upon such merchants, and the city’s prosperity resulted perforce. But one chamber, ’s-Hertogenbosch, found those merchants rare who ‘‘kept their word, showed charity, did not argue about debts, used no dirty tricks, et cetera.’’40 The city itself made a powerful impression, both positive and negative, on contemporaries. Chief among the positive visions is Guicciardini’s apostrophe to the city in his 1567 Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, dedicated to the Antwerp city magistracy, which underscores the grandeur of the city, including her unparalleled structures, some of which were illustrated in the second edition in 1581.41 His list of

20

Antwerp as a Cultural System

‘‘notable things’’ includes town walls, gates, bridges, the new town, harbor, tower of the cathedral, the ‘‘new’’ Bourse, the Mint, guild halls, butcher’s hall and fish market, City Hall, Hanseatic house, English and Portuguese houses, glass house, and Plantin press. He also rehearses the roster of commodities brought to Antwerp from ‘‘diverse countries,’’ headed by his native Italy, and notes what Antwerp returns in exchange. The other preoccupation focused on the city as temptress and site of moral corruption. Already in the famous play Mariken van Nieumeghen (ca. 1500), the devil takes the protagonist female to a tavern in Antwerp in order to complete her apprenticeship in debauchery: ‘‘Now we’re at Antwerp your wish to fulfil. / Now will we triumph and feast as we will!’’ This tavern area then becomes a site for every kind of sinfulness.42 The devil continues in praise of this tavern location: We should be sorry to go from this inn Since all spend their time in wildness and cheer, Gamblers, fighters, and pimps together, Adulterers, tarts, and birds of such feather, Of these one can always find plenty here. A generation later, Cornelis Crul’s Heynken de Luyere (ca. 1540) again presents a city center with brothels and taverns and a risque´ lifestyle.43 These are the settings that appear in contemporary Antwerp paintings and prints, emphasizing the excesses of drinking and sensual indulgence that linked taverns with brothels (see Chapter 4).44 They also serve as the appropriate site of the seasonal excesses of carnival indulgence within the overall urban square of Pieter Bruegel’s large painting, Battle Between Carnival and Lent (see Figure 4.12).45 For Guicciardini, as for most Antwerp burghers themselves, the countryside formed an extension of the city, its breadbasket and support.46 Recent ‘‘central place theory’’ defines the model city within a hierarchy of settlements, whose productive economy is zoned according to the nature (i.e., perishability or transportability) of cash crops to a proximate market (as well as to other, distant, equivalent cities).47 By this reckoning Antwerp is not a true center but rather a threshold, with crossroad ties to an international network through the foreign ‘‘colonies’’ along with its own agricultural hinterlands. Its importance is embodied by the space and concept of the marketplace (see Chapter 5), where the country meets the city.48 Another of the 1561 rhetorician competitions in Antwerp for ‘‘hedge-plays’’ (haagspelen) focused on a different core question: ‘‘Which trade [handtwerck] is most necessary to do, and most honorable, but is, nevertheless, very little valued?’’49 The answer, offered by all four competing chambers, was farming. Laboring peasants (see Chapter 6) had formed one of the conceptual ‘‘three orders’’ of medieval society, along with those who pray and those who fight. Their unselfish contributions to the other two orders while remaining contented in their station was one of the comforting tropes of an ordered society.50 Contemporary Netherlandish prose, including passages in the Adages by Erasmus, praises local peasants for their diligence and productivity, even in soil that is mainly sand.51 In addition, an established classical tradition, beatus ille, founded in Horace’s second epode, praises country life as the antipode of city corruption: ‘‘Happy the man who, far from business cares . . . works his ancestral acres with his steers, from all money-lending free.’’52

21

Chapter 2

This stereotype of noble labor also forms the basis of its opposite—the peasant’s enjoyment of natural bodily pleasures. This view is well presented about the unrestrained freedom of the ‘‘jolly’’ marketplace (vrolijker mert), site of both merchants and peasants, in the short comic play (factie) of the Mechelen chamber, Lischbloeme.53 Like the tavern-become-brothel, a market also could quickly become the site of license and sexual favors in a locality of commercial exchange. Moreover, peasants were taken by their very nature to be indulgent and unrestrained creatures, like wild beasts. This is a theme well discussed by scholars such as Hessel Miedema, Keith Moxey, and Hans Raupp.54 The other structural polar opposite of the noble laborer is the ignoble beggar, who is often accused in contemporary sources of being capable of work but a malingerer.55 Antisocial and noncontributing, with no fixed abode, these figures are anything but objects of sympathy from the standpoint of a bourgeois citizen, and by modern standards both poor relief and attitudes toward urban poverty were cruelly unsympathetic. Beginning with paintings by Hieronymus Bosch of vagrant landlopers and culminating with Bruegel’s images of beggars, especially the figures in his 1568 Blind Leading the Blind, beggars formed a substantial subgenre of figures in Flemish paintings (and prints, e.g., Cornelis Massys, including a series of twelve 1538 engravings; see Chapter 6). Most modern studies of peasants or the urban poor in Netherlandish art have focused on the relationship between social realities and pictorial representations.56 While these fundamental conditions surely shaped visual imagery, especially in light of the predisposition toward verisimilitude in the Netherlandish painting and printmaking tradition, the cultural system of assumptions and values concerning the peasant, the beggar, or even other groups, such as children, not only participated in the way images of such groups were depicted (or, as some authors like to say, were ‘‘reflected’’ in art), but such forms also, in turn, helped shape those very assumptions and values.57 Paul Vandenbroeck’s study makes clear the degree to which a negative self-definition, that is, the projection of antithetical values and behaviors, forms the basis of imagery—cultural concepts as well as pictorial imagery—of beggars and peasants (as well as wild men and fools of all kinds). In short, the predominant themes that developed in Antwerp art emerged from Antwerp’s own emerging self-definition, often inflected with negative characters and traits. The principal genres of easel paintings and prints can be studied together as a cultural system. For the metropolis of Antwerp, social definition through cultural criticism of classes and roles lies behind most of the city’s novel sixteenth-century visual culture of easel painting and prints, purveyed in the marketplace and on offer for a largely anonymous but generally definable customer base of urban bourgeoisie (Chapter 11). However, many influential artists, particularly Hieronymus Bosch (based in nearby ’s-Hertogenbosch) and Pieter Bruegel (who painted many of his large pictures in nearby Brussels), enjoyed private commissions and the patronage of a social and cultural elite. Yet their own artistic formulations soon came to be widely copied by lesser epigones, who then enjoyed their own sustained success in the marketplace (Chapters 7–9). So we should not insist too strongly on any distinction between anonymous bourgeois buyers and known, named collectors. Their favorite works and pictorial formulas largely overlapped and remained the same, usually rooted in the same genres and consistent cultural values that will be studied in this book. For it was the combination of a new, competitive art marketplace along with the cultural complexity of a large, prosperous urban local setting, which led Antwerp artists to engage first with those problems associated with later phases of modernity, chiefly nineteenth- century expansion of urbanization and capitalism in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.58

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Antwerp as a Cultural System

Bruegel in many ways stands at the heart of this book, in part because he arrived in Antwerp at the literal mid-century and after two full generations of predecessors had worked on producing art for the market. He also began as one designer among many for the ultimate entrepreneurial producer, Hieronymus Cock’s print publishing house, At the Four Winds. He also engaged deeply with emerging genres, particularly landscapes, while personally inflecting a more recent pictorial type, the peasant picture. But in many individual works Bruegel also reflected on the forms and the effects of early capitalism as they shaped the metropolis.59 Some of the Cock prints focus specifically on the uselessness of goods: Everyman (Elck, 1558; see Figure 5.9) and the Alchemist (ca. 1558), and the Merchant Robbed by Monkeys (1562), as well as the posthumously published engraving Battle of the Moneybags and the Strongboxes.60 Each of these images in its distinctive way equates the quest for goods, gold, or trinkets with folly that can only bring disappointment and frustration as well as both literal and spiritual poverty.61 For example, to make its editorial point explicit, the text in front of the eponymous, scholarly Alchemist in Bruegel’s drawing splits the orthography of his name into ‘‘Alghe Mist’’ (meaning, quite literally, ‘‘all shit’’); meanwhile, he employs a costumed fool to assist him in working the bellows for the chemical processes, which transpire within a dilapidated cottage. If one wanted to see Bruegel imagery as a critique of folly and vice, then in the Merchant Robbed by Monkeys the cupidity of the thieving monkeys can only be achieved through the sloth of the sleeping peddler.62 One of the most poignant images of shallow materialism and the city appears in Bruegel’s tiny panel of 1562, Two Monkeys (Figure 2.2).63 In contrast to the numerous, active robber monkeys around the sleeping country peddler in Bruegel’s contemporary print, here a forlorn, chained pair of exotic monkeys huddle together on the ledge of what looks like a fortress window. A few shell husks, remnants from their meal of nuts, show their meager subsistence. Behind them, in utter contrast to their dark, prisonlike condition, the opening reveals a bright, hazy view of a skyline for a port filled with ships and impressive church towers, plus the further contrast of large flying birds above. This city bears more than a passing resemblance to the active harbor of Antwerp itself. Both the ships (subject of a series of Bruegel prints only a few years later)64 and these exotic African beasts point to the far-flung maritime empire of the oceangoing merchants from the city. The image contrasts bondage with freedom, subsistence with prosperity (though the underprivileged here are captive creatures rather than the urban poor or rural laborers). It could well celebrate humanity’s transcendence of its animal limitations and its global dominion of both earth and seas. Upon further reflection, however, we can no longer be sure whether the relationship between front and rear is one of contrast or analogy. After all, the captivity of the monkeys could be close to captivation of the urban populace with such imported luxuries as these pets along with material goods in general. Like the Merchant Robbed by Monkeys, the folly of these lesser creatures might not be so different from our own sensual fetters and preoccupation with consumption.65 A final theme that has not usually been connected with the cultural problems of Antwerp capitalism is Bruegel’s pair of representations of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9), influential works that were imitated by a succeeding generation.66 Bruegel’s 1563 Tower of Babel (Figure 2.3) seems to have been the commission of a prosperous toll-collector, Nicholas Jongelinck, who also owned Bruegel’s cycle The Months (1565) and installed both works in his home in the Antwerp suburbs.67 In this dated, earlier version (1563) the legendary Nimrod commands construction; the later, smaller image (ca. 1568) omits the monarch. In both works Bruegel showed the tower, time-honored symbol of overweening human

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2.2. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Two Monkeys, 1562. Gemaeldegalerie. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Foto Marburg/Art Resource.

pride, within a distinctly Netherlandish setting. This megalomaniacal structure arises out of a flatland region like the seaside terrain of the Low Countries, while the prosperity of the region is evident through both the expanse of adjacent farmland as well as a busy harbor, filled with seagoing ships. The artist expended quite a considerable effort to suggest his fascination with the technological details of construction, including foot-driven cranes and other lifting devices, as well as the carefully delineated ships, which echo his prints.68 Here the swarm of tiny and anonymous laborers who do the actual construction contrasts with the identifiable hybrids of Nimrod (in the 1563 work) and the viewer’s knowledge of the untimely end of this grand project at the hand of divine wrath. Some scholars have connected the dissolution of the tower project with the contemporary dissolution of Christendom between Catholics and Protestants (or in turn between Lutherans and Calvinists, whose numbers were increasing in the Netherlands).69 Since we do not know the beliefs of either Bruegel (who was buried in Notre-Dame de la Chapelle, a Catholic church in Brussels) or his patron Jongelinck, such interpretations remain highly speculative. But just as the artist situated New Testament religious scenes in Flemish country villages, usually covered with wintry snow,70 so did he transpose

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2.3. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Tower of Babel, 1563. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalrie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

his Tower of Babel imagery into a familiar, composite Flemish world, composed of both countryside and port city. In the process he reminded his viewers of the relationship between moral issues and the various characters who appear within these opposed structures of city and country. We have now surveyed the structures and observed the cultural system of their figure types. In the chapters that follow we will examine their developments in sixteenth-century Antwerp art, especially at the hands of leading (i.e., often imitated) artists—Bosch, Patinir, Bruegel—but also within a wider constellation of ordinary, often anonymous, paintings and prints.

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T O W N A N D CO U N T R Y Painted Worlds of Early Landscapes

Come, behold the works of the Lord. —Psalm 46: 8

in the peace and quiet of his home . . . he can enjoy himself among the castles, towns, and estates, and see cattle, cows, villages, and towns; oaks, fields, hedges and fences; springs and waterfalls—all in his own room. —Joost van den Vondel

C

onsider this scenario: Serious pictorial production began to get underway in the boom town during the teens of the new century. Thereafter local images showed an increasing dominance of certain stereotypical subjects. These resulted partly from copying famous models and partly from the demands of finding ready buyers for the new works. Increasingly the middle classes of the city began to be familiar with those models and their pictorial formulas, which in turn stimulated new, more rapid production of the same pictorial types. What started out as the innovative, if hybrid works of a few visual pioneers soon became by mid-century a veritable picture industry, where production and consumption mutually reinforced and stimulated one another. Soon those pictorial formulas were exported and came to serve an entire continent. This generalized survey could certainly pertain to the rise of popular studio films in twentiethcentury Hollywood and to our own experience of formulaic film genres of themes and settings, particularly Westerns. It can suggest also some conclusions about early landscape painting, since this outline of visual history also applies equally well to the growth of an art market for both easel paintings and prints in sixteenth-century Antwerp, where new pictorial genres, such as landscape, peasant scenes, and tavern subjects arose and proliferated. Often these images were produced as the work of anonymous artists, but they also served as the mainstay of painters and printmakers as familiar today as Pieter Bruegel. In Antwerp in the early days of international capitalism, an open sales market for visual art stimulated both production and repetition of familiar and consoling imagery that catered to a broad, urban public. To repeat the question posed in the Introduction: when does a painting of a saint in a landscape become a painting of a landscape with a saint? That is precisely the transition that occurred over the

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span of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, particularly in Antwerp and principally in the oeuvre of Joachim Patinir, the artist designated by Albrecht Du¨rer in 1521 as ‘‘the good landscape painter.’’1 The change is evident from comparison of a painting by Patinir with one of its major models from the previous generation, Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516). Both works feature a popular late medieval saint, Jerome, in one of his characteristic activities, isolated meditation in what his hagiography characterized originally as ‘‘the desert.’’2 In Bosch’s painting, St. Jerome in Prayer (ca. 1505; Figure 3.1) the saint lies outstretched across the near foreground of the setting, occupying center stage within a lush and verdant landscape, marked by a high horizon and a wealth of fascinating anecdotal details, such as the parish church amid trees in the right distance. Bosch surely took considerable pains to render for the viewer a convincingly plausible and attractive environment, from which the saint deliberately has averted his own gaze in order to prostrate himself humbly as he embraces a crucifix and absorbs himself fully in prayer. When Patinir takes up the same subject in a series of related paintings (more on this phenomenon below), St. Jerome is still an isolated center of attention for the viewer, but his place in the painting and his actual size are much reduced in comparison to Bosch’s rendition of Patinir’s paintings at the Prado. In addition to a version in Madrid (ca. 1515–20; Figure 3.2), there is another variant (Louvre, Paris) with its own workshop replica (Ca d’Oro, Venice), and even a third version (National Gallery, London).3 In the Madrid painting, St. Jerome appears in the lower left corner of the image, a foreground focus in front of a panoramic landscape with an even higher horizon than Bosch’s, one that nearly reaches the top of the panel. Moreover, the rocky crag supporting the saint’s lean-to shed echoes still higher and more distant peaks, which directly contrast with the flatlands and open water of the expanses that make up the entire right side of the image. Indeed, the broad panoramas and inclusion of elements from various kinds of topographies resemble a legend or key on a modern map—the roster of all the symbolic colors or signs contained within that world. Patinir is evidently setting out stark juxtapositions of highlands and lowlands, of wilderness and cultivation, of country and city, and even of storms and clear skies, composites which modern scholars from Ludwig Baldass to Walter Gibson have christened a ‘‘world landscape,’’ acknowledging Patinir’s inventor’s role of this influential pictorial type.4 Du¨rer’s early use of the term ‘‘landscape’’ during Patinir’s lifetime (d. 1524) implies that, in Northern art, practice of landscape was well established before any theoretical formulations of its purpose were formulated. According to Ernst Gombrich, the opposite was the case, at least for Italian art, which needed to have a sanction for landscape from classical precedents, documented from the surviving descriptions of ancient paintings, especially by Pliny the Elder.5 For Italians, landscapes were defined as parerga, marginal or accessory areas, in contrast to the real center of paintings’ prestige, their figural narratives.6 Clearly Patinir’s images (and contemporary German works, such as the etchings and panels of Albrecht Altdorfer),7 provided the seed in Europe for the modern idea of landscape. For the most part, painters and the viewers of landscapes are city people, and the places they paint are construed as a contrasting rural environment, whether wild, pastoral, or georgic. Town and country are mutually defining opposites, as fully as horizontal and vertical. Earlier notable examples of landscapes in European art include such works as the Effects of Good Government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico or the productive farming scenes in the images of the months of the calendar pages of the Tre`s riches heures by the Limbourg Brothers for Duke Jean de Berry of France.8 However,

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3.1. Hieronymus Bosch, St. Jerome in Prayer, ca. 1505. Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent. Art Resource NY.

Town and Country

3.2. Joachim Patinir, Landscape with St. Jerome, ca. 1515–20. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Bridgeman Art Library.

these groundbreaking monuments provide an image of productivity and order for ruling elites, who survey these territories with their activities and thereby confirm their wealth, status, and power. By implication, almost all landscape depictions—except for the powerful images of untamed wilderness— seem to imply a form of possession on the part of the viewer. But the nature of that possession shifts once we begin to consider landscape images of a more generic kind, that is, without the specific acknowledgment of a definable owner, such as the particular civic leaders of Siena or the duke of Berry. The development of a market for easel pictures in Antwerp during the course of the sixteenth century meant that artists relied more on replicable formulas to define the country worlds of their images. Moreover, their landscapes still retained the significant, if small-scale presence of human figures, usually religious figures, as important actors in their landscapes. From this point of view, it may be anachronistic to term such pictures landscapes, if by that term we mean images understood with a detached notion of aesthetic appreciation of nature transformed into a work of art, or if we feel that such a segment of nature cannot be sullied by notable human figures. During the nineteenth century, any occupants of a landscape were supposed to be momentary and insignificant passers-through; they were even labeled as ‘‘staffage,’’ as if they were so much interchangeable or discardable excess.

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But the early landscapes of Antwerp easel painting frequently have important figural scenes, such as the Flight into Egypt or St. Jerome in the Wilderness. Sometimes those figures, while smaller, still visually dominate the foreground or center of the setting. Art historians love to see developments as linked chains of family ties, so they have tended to perceive the backgrounds from within the framework of their modern concept of landscape, to argue that these early sixteenth-century religious subjects are present as mere excuses, provided for a public that was ‘‘not yet ready’’ for a purer landscape, purged of human presence altogether. These early experiments, they contend, are tentative way stations on the evolutionary track toward our modern concept of Landscape, with a capital L. Joachim Patinir arrived in Antwerp by 1515, the year he enrolled in the local St. Luke’s painters’ guild. His short career ended with his death in 1524. Du¨rer met Patinir during his visit to Antwerp in the year 1521, and he records in his travel diary that he presented his new Flemish colleague with a series of St. Christopher studies that could be used as the figure groups in front of one of Patinir’s typical landscape formulas. Patinir collaborated with other artists, using either designs for saintly figures, such as Du¨rer’s drawing of four St. Christopher figures on gray paper, mentioned in his journal, or else painted figures by Quinten Massys (with whom Patinir coproduced a notable Temptation of St. Anthony, ca. 1520–24; Figure 3.3).9 From these two instances we learn two things: first, that early landscapes were—by modern standards—a ‘‘hybrid’’ category that also contained significant scenes with figures, usually religious figures; and second, that early landscapes therefore grew out of previous religious artmaking in the Low Countries. This simple observation will become central to our understanding of early landscapes in Antwerp painting (and, eventually, in Antwerp prints). Patinir’s hybrid works, at once both religious pictures and protolandscapes, become the cumulative product of his own repetition and increasing specialization in this same kind of painting. One of the chief qualities of Patinir’s ‘‘world landscapes’’ is their composite, assembled effect, ranging in elevation from sea level to craggy peaks. Of course this juxtaposition does not usually occur in nature. But even the more plausible local scenes of farms, villages, and large cities at river basins are surveyed from a height that makes them appear surprisingly close together. At the same time, even the most distant landscape feature is presented with a sharp focus that denies the softening effects of atmosphere. Yet there is some accommodation to the effects of distance through the means of color; in the Landscape with St. Jerome (Figure 3.2), for example, close-up areas are rendered with a richer palette, centered on the yellow of Jerome’s hut, and display more vivid shading, especially of the rocks. In the middle distance, greens predominate and extend almost to the horizon, where a pale blue softens the outlines and suffuses all local color. Despite the overall elevated viewpoint, a tilting ground plane presents these elements as if each of them were seen more or less from just above. As we spend more time with Patinir’s calculated terrains, we notice that they actually do not have continuous recession but rather jump from spot to spot, forming what earlier scholars called ‘‘space cells.’’ Thus the overall effect of this world landscape seems contradictory—out of a cluster of well-observed natural phenomena emerges a highly artificial spatial and pictorial composite. What is also striking on further reflection is the degree to which this saintly hermit occupies a foreground zone, which is meant to be distinguished from the remainder of the distant world behind him. He has chosen to inhabit the ‘‘wilderness’’ portion of the image, isolating himself in a rocky cleft whose cavelike mouth restricts access to the land beyond—whether the rocky mountaintop monastery

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3.3. Joachim Patinir and Quinten Massys, Temptation of St. Anthony, ca. 1520–24. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

or the verdant cultivation. By implication he has also chosen the most inhospitable zone, where dark storm clouds roll left to right, from uplands to lowlands, when surveyed with a reader’s eye (of course in Israel or China the opposite would be true). Recent scholars have interpreted these contrasting settings. Reindert Falkenburg sees a distinction between saintly renunciation and worldly temptation and error; he points to the blind man about to cross the narrow bridge over a stream as an antitype to the saint.10 In contrast, Gibson sees a more benign opposition between Jerome’s life of contemplation in his mountain retreat and the active world beyond his hermitage.11 In any case, it is clear that the remainder of the picture exists just to show the places in the world expressly renounced by the pious St. Jerome. A similar contrast of regions across a panorama emerges from one of Patinir’s largest and most ambitious landscape pictures: Rest on the Flight into Egypt (ca. 1520–24; Figure 3.4). Falkenburg stresses the legacy of the affective piety of late medieval iconic images (Andachtsbilder)—and texts—by pointing

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3.4. Joachim Patinir, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, ca. 1520–24. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Bridgeman Art Library.

to the focus on the holy figures, here the nursing mother with her child, as an evocation of viewer compassion for the suffering of the Madonna during this period of travail and empathy for her humble and shared humanity.12 Symbolic Marian flowers and grapes alongside the figures in the image also continue the Flemish painting tradition of the previous century, best embodied in recent pictures of the same Rest on the Flight subject by Gerard David of Bruges.13 Falkenburg also points out, citing contemporary spiritual texts, how the empathic visual experience of following the pilgrimage of the principals is equivalent to a spiritual pilgrimage by the devout beholder. Without being so specific in our reading of the picture, we can certainly see the contrast between its two sides, with the Madonna and Child poised midway in the spatial arc of their journey. The contrasting spaces also frame the narrative events of Christ’s infancy. Beginning at the far right, a small scene in a village displays the Massacre of the Innocents, the brutal murder of children that prompts the Flight in the first place. Reading inward, we see what Robert Koch perceptively identified as the apocryphal Miracle of the Wheatfield, where alongside depicted sowing of seeds, a mature field of wheat, which immerses the armed soldiers in pursuit, has sprung up to cover the tracks of the holy refugees.14 Just behind the Madonna and Child on the viewer’s right is the round pedestal of a broken statue, whose bronze feet are still attached; this is a synecdoche of the pagan idols that fell before the presence of the holy figures, a detail that Patinir had already included more visibly in his tiny early Landscape with the Flight into Egypt (now in the Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp).15 On the opposite side

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3.5. Joachim Patinir, Charon Crossing the River Styx, ca. 1520–24. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

of the large painting we see pagan idols that are in full use: sacrificial offerings before a composite figure with a ram’s head take place upon a massive, rounded temple (perhaps redolent of the traditional, domed, centralized image of the Hebrew Temple of Jerusalem in Flemish art),16 which represents ‘‘Egypt,’’ toward which the Flight is still tending. The overall effect produced by this large landscape is another combination. On the one hand, it provides a religious picture in the Flemish tradition of the previous century, replete with inherited natural symbols around the humble and appealing holy figures. These figures are now combined with a new, structured, and encompassing ‘‘world landscape,’’ where spatial variety is used in the service of narrative while also providing a marked contrast between the familiar ‘‘local’’ world of cultivated countryside and the explicitly ‘‘foreign’’ world of dark hills and exotic architecture. These are the same building blocks of landscape that Patinir employed for his series of St. Jerome images; however, in this case the contrasting sides are reversed—now a pagan, evil world of Egypt is the upland, and the contrasting, benign Flemish farmland is accessibly flat. Some evidence for the suggested contrast of good versus evil comes from another, more explicit, late Patinir painting: Charon Crossing the River Styx (ca. 1520–24; Figure 3.5). Here the same opposition of bright sky and clouds underscores the duality of earthly paradise and the flames of hell. This latter work incorporates much of the earlier imagery by Bosch, such as the crystalline chamber on the heraldically favorable dexter (viewer’s left) side or the silhouetted fire and brimstone on the ominous sinister (viewer’s right) side.17 Such an artificial and arbitrary three-part arrangement reminds us anew of how much Patinir’s landscape is conceptual and constructed, in this case with a traditional Netherlandish triptych articulation, akin to a Boschian Last Judgment altarpiece, such as the one in Bruges (Groeninge Museum).18

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3.6. Joachim Patinir, Burning of Sodom, ca. 1520. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

A similar contrast is employed by Patinir in one of his rare narrative subjects from the Old Testament: the Burning of Sodom (ca. 1520; Figure 3.6), where the contrast between the lowland city of sin is contrasted with the upland area reserved for the saved figures of Lot and his daughters (even though they will go on to profane this section with the sin of incest). At the boundary area, where a natural arch separates sin from salvation, the figure of Lot’s wife marks the distinction in the form of a pillar of salt—on the side of ‘‘spice’’ and vice, marked also by the fire and brimstone of a worldly version of Bosch’s Hell.19 This conceptual organization of the imagery of Patinir’s landscapes is important for our understanding of the eventual success of the genre as a whole, even after the last vestiges of religious figures had disappeared from its settings. We might just as easily compare the integral relationship between figures and settings in one of our own conventionalized, modern pictorial genres: the Western film of Hollywood studios. Scholars of Westerns have also pointed to contrasts between desert and garden, representing savagery versus civilization, and it is equally clear that the opposition in Westerns between the untamed wilderness and an emerging town space sets up most of the environmental tensions that will unfold in the story narrative.20 Just as the figure of the saint in retreat activates the spaces of a Patinir landscape through exclusion, so does the arrival of the heroic individual with his gun and survival

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instincts charge a Western frontier landscape, even as that lone hero serves to mediate as an outsider between the old lawlessness and the new civil order.21 Setting and figure become inextricably linked— both the hermit saint and the Western gunman cannot find their identities and their codes of conduct except in relation to wilderness and settlement. In both cases, landscape is much more than a formal backdrop; it is a conceptual essence, an arena for the appropriate action of a myth. Obviously, such a conceptualized landscape should never be confused with topographic description of a specific locality for its own sake. Even if a picture distills convincing simulacra from visual experience, such as villages and farms in the Flemish countryside or distant alpine mountains—which were obviously only imagined by Patinir—that picture still is a mental construct, not an actual place. What this view implies for Patinir’s world landscapes is that there can be another conceptual or structural side to the coin: either a city, presumably corrupt, or a countryside, preferably simple, which complements the isolated wilderness of the foreground saint, who forms the focus of the picture. In fact, it is the areas of city and country that eventually receive their own share of pictorial attention in the generations of landscape that followed Patinir, who died in 1524. In every instance, the degree to which those spaces can be said to be pictorially mimetic varies with the artist. Most, in fact, are quite conventional and interchangeable, with certain motifs recurring from picture to picture. Moreover, these spaces, too, are populated by appropriate characters, who engage in appropriate activities. In short, pictorial spaces of early landscape art are inhabited spaces—whether the market squares of towns or the fields of the nearby countryside. Those spaces can be understood as mutually defining, just as they already were for Lorenzetti’s fresco or the Limbourg brothers’ miniatures. But now the consumer of such works is the anonymous townsman of sixteenth-century Antwerp, who buys an easel painting on panel, often reasonably small, from the workshop of an artist like Patinir. The development of a landscape specialization involves an artist in the repetition of favorite themes by means of replicable formulas of motifs and forms. We have already seen how Patinir constructs the spaces of his ‘‘world landscapes’’ around a sequence of color zones ranging from yellow-brown to green to blue, as well as his combination of high horizons with discreet, uptilted spatial pockets, seen from the side. We also note that his repertoire of saints is fairly limited, led by the Madonna and Child in various versions of the Rest on the Flight as well as meditating saints, such as Jerome. If we examine the extant pictures in the Patinir oeuvre, we find several works that can be seen as higher quality ‘‘originals,’’ backed by other versions, usually taken to be workshop ‘‘replicas’’ or variations.22 In addition, we note the presence of several repeated motifs, which migrate from painting to painting, probably due to a tracing process from pattern drawings; similar forms of replication are used to generate replica images of devotional paintings, as Jean Wilson has demonstrated for the Bruges art market.23 Technical studies of underdrawing can help determine those primary works that use free and original preparatory designs; to date, little technical study on Patinir has been published. Arianne Kolb suggests that such smaller, reused motifs might have been traced from separate pattern drawings, and she further observes that traced motifs tend to enlarge slightly in their repetition as copies.24 What is clear from surviving works is that Patinir and his workshop, perhaps augmented by successful imitators, produced—and reproduced—the new, hybrid landscape images in a series in various sizes of originals, replicas, variants, and derivatives. In the following artistic generation, production of landscapes, still dominated by religious figures,

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exploded in Antwerp.25 The larger number of active landscape artists and their greater surviving production make it easier to assess the workshop processes and the emerging formulas of the new genre. The two principal painters were Lucas Gassel, active in Brussels (according to Karel van Mander in 1604) but probably trained in Antwerp, and Herri met de Bles, possibly Patinir’s own nephew or relative (a Herry de Patinier enrolled as master in the Antwerp St. Luke’s guild in 1535). Though based on the same three-color sequence of spatial layers, their works are often more unified in space than Patinir’s, often with a greater melding through hazy atmosphere and the use of framing foreground motifs in front of the distant, often diagonal vistas to high horizons. Gassel often signed and dated his works, which span the years 1542 to 1568, so his artistic identity can be assumed to have been distinctive and worthy of marking, in contrast to another, anonymous follower of Patinir, known only as the Master of the Half-Lengths.26 Moreover, Patinir’s landscapes look positively uninhabited compared to the bustling, populated settings of Gassel. Gassel’s constructed landscape formulas enjoyed a wider distribution through their replication in the form of prints: during the 1550s, Hieronymus Cock published a series of Gassel landscapes at his shop, ‘‘At the Four Winds.’’27 They were professionally etched by the Doetecum brothers, who also produced landscape prints for Cock after Bruegel designs.28 Such reproduction after Gassel’s designs suggests that he had already established his own following by mid-century. These prints confirm the aptness of the characterization given to Gassel works by Heinrich Gerhard Franz, ‘‘constructed landscapes.’’ In particular, the prints offer traditional Bosch and Patinir subjects of hermit saints, such as Anthony and Jerome. They depict tiny holy figures in foreground corners, behind which extends a densely settled valley with either varied village hamlets or larger settlements (a manor in the Landscape with St. Anthony; Figure 3.7, a monastic complex in Jerome), occupying the middle distance and presenting emphatic perspectival recession. Gassel’s own renown was even sufficient to generate an ambitious imitator, a ‘‘Pseudo-Gassel,’’ who went so far as to copy his LG monogram with a deceptive LC variation, akin to the numerous spinoffs on the renowned AD monogram of Albrecht Du¨rer by his younger printmaking contemporaries in Germany, such as Albrecht Altdorfer (AA) and Heinrich Aldegrever (AG).29 Careful examination of workshop procedures under infrared light shows that some artists, such as Herri Bles, successfully repeated motifs without the need for careful tracing of pattern drawings; however, workshop division of labor almost always exacted some form of preliminary drawings on panels, even if the underdrawing might be sketchy, partial, or modified in the paint layers. Occasionally, landscape drawing studies survive, some of them clustered into albums. The two most famous albums of the second quarter of the sixteenth century survive in museums, one (known as the ‘‘Errera Sketchbook’’) in Brussels and another in Berlin.30 Drawings attributed to Gassel have also survived separately.31 Moreover, there are close correspondences between compositions in the albums and completed paintings by landscape artists. The most impressive linkage ties the Berlin Sketchbook to a panel associated with Herri met de Bles, now in Princeton, as Robert Koch first noted, though its status as either prior to the picture or a replica after it remains unsettled.32 Herri met de Bles, the other principal landscape specialist, was listed by Vasari (1568) as coming from Dinant (‘‘Enrico da Dinant’’), the same Mosan region as Patinir, and he was also praised by Lomazzo in his 1584 treatise on painting as a major Flemish landscape painter, called by the nick-name Civetta, or ‘‘little owl,’’ which early commentators, including van Mander (1604), took to be a disguised

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3.7. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, etching after Lucas Gassel, Landscape with St. Anthony, after 1554. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943.

form of signature inserted into his paintings.33 Clearly this artist was recognized, even prized, in Italy by collectors during the later sixteenth century,34 and both Lomazzo (calling him ‘‘Bohemian’’) and van Mander, who knew the collections in Prague of Emperor Rudolf II, suggest that his reputation also extended to the imperial collections. Yet at the same time, especially compared to the limited surviving output by Patinir, Bles and his workshop were prolific producers of landscapes (Lou Serck’s catalog surpasses one hundred works, while Gibson dubs the workshop ‘‘Herri Bles and Company’’). In fact, Bles painted a number of versions of the same theme, such as the Road to Calvary, and within some of these works he used the same pattern of figure groups, disassembled and reassembled in different configurations.35 Technical investigations published to date show that some Bles workshop paintings, such as the Cincinnati Sacrifice of Isaac, are painted with minimal preparatory drawing and in subtle, delicate washes of color, while others, such as the Princeton Road to Calvary, offer a contrasting outlined precision of black chalk underdrawing, although in both cases the landscape sections proper offer less delineation compared to the essential figures of the narrative.36 Even allowing for such diversity of handling and wide-ranging quality of works issued from his own workshop, Bles also had several less distinguished followers, notably the Master of Lille Sermon.37 Gibson’s sensitive analysis of Bles suggests his basic continuities with the established formulas of the ‘‘world landscape.’’ Usually the religious figures that define the narrative are located across the

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foreground in such crowd scenes as the Preaching of John the Baptist or the Road to Calvary, or else they are situated as an entry point, usually in an elevated left corner, if there are only one or two figures. Bles adopts Patinir’s interest in distant mountains, though his peaks seem both more natural and more logically connected to the plains below them without the older artist’s stark contrast of terrain. As noted, the three-color formula is also retained by Bles but instead suffused with a soft, atmospheric haze in the distance, so that the crisp detail of Patinir is moderated. As with Gassel, the setting is populated with small, active accessory figures, whose roles seem unconnected to the main story.38 Like Patinir, Bles offers a frequent repetition of landscape motifs, complemented by occasional repetition of figure groups in various recombined subgroups.39 Thus Herri met de Bles seems to extend and refine the pictorial formula, which we can appropriately term ‘‘landscape with religious scene,’’ that Patinir had introduced to Antwerp art. The numerous examples and variant repetitions of both themes and formal constructions reveal how much this workshop production became standardized (albeit variable in quality and size) over approximately two decades of production and sales. The presence of connections to sketchbook albums (particularly of the Bles workshop to the sketchbook in Berlin) also underscores the variety of working procedures, further revealed by the technical study of the extant panels with their various kinds of preparatory drawings. Moreover, the lighter, more transparent veils of color used by Bles to achieve atmospheric effects might also serve, like the later tonal landscapes in Dutch seventeenth-century painting, as a procedural technique that could offer more efficient production than the meticulous renderings of even distant details, practiced by Patinir.40 Taken as a whole, then, the Bles oeuvre did develop its own visual character, both in the syntax of its diagonally constructed settings for crowds of small figures and in the semantics of its religious subjects, now expanded in range and augmented with crowds. It clearly postdates (none of the Bles pictures is actually dated) and depends upon the Patinir landscape repertoire with religious subjects, modifying its model to achieve its own distinctive look. Patinir’s original distinction still pertains, contrasting wilderness, often sanctified by holy figures and their actions, against worldliness in all of its variety; however, increasingly Bles and Gassel landscapes display smoother spatial transitions. In addition, a wealth of details and characters distract the viewer (toward the worldly, which might still be a message in itself ) and disrupts the clarity of the basic contrast.41 One distinctly new subject appears during the second quarter of the sixteenth century: Landscape with Mining Scenes, painted by both Bles (several versions; see Figure 3.8) and Gassel (1544).42 Gibson rightly notes the importance of mining and precious metals to the economy of Antwerp as a transshipment center, where the copper and silver of the Tyrolean Alps were exchanged by South German merchants for such items as spices and gold, brought to the city by Portuguese maritime vessels.43 The sixteenth century was a major epoch in the development of mining and metallurgical technology, particularly in Germany, highlighted by the appearance of Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica (1556), but there were also iron and coal mines in the Mosan region from which Bles (and Patinir) originated. Here, as with the representations of money and wealth in sixteenth-century Antwerp painting (see Chapter 4), our reading of this theme will depend on whether we assume the artist to have a critical or a favorable outlook. Even the presence at the mine of foreground figures resembling the Holy Family in the Bles painting (Figure 3.8) does not resolve this interpretive issue, for one could easily see this presence of holiness as a possible contrast, juxtaposed to the predominant materialism (as in the case

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3.8. Herri met de Bles, Landscape with Mining Scenes. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

of Pieter Aertsen’s 1551 The Meat Stall, Figure 5.1, of a few years later, where similar, tiny figures appear in a background scene that contrasts with the dominant foreground; see Chapter 5).44 Both Bles and Gassel, however, do display a considerable fascination with the processes and the numerous activities of tiny figures engaged with the extraction of such metals from the earth. What is obvious is the importance attached to wresting commercial benefit from the raw materials provided by nature itself, particularly the mountainous world that had been so remote and forbidding in Patinir’s landscapes. As scholars have long recognized, the ‘‘culmination’’ (Gibson’s term) of the world landscape in Flemish sixteenth-century art comes in the next generation, just after mid-century, chiefly in the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (master 1551, d. 1569). Yet often neglected is its dominant medium—not paintings but prints, issued as series of landscapes by the publisher Hieronymus Cock at his shop, At the Four Winds (Aux Quatre Vents) in Antwerp.45 The landmark print series is the one designed by Bruegel, the Large Landscapes, published around 1555.46 As the modern name implies, this cycle was large and standardized in size and horizontal format; however, the subjects vary. Several continue the Patinir-Bles tradition of landscapes with religious figures (Mary Magdalene and the long familiar St. Jerome), but half of the dozen images bear labels that identify them only as country scenes with farmers, plus such accessory figures as bird-catchers, peddlers, and soldiers. No particular order seems to per-

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tain, as these prints are neither numbered nor otherwise arranged. As is always the case in the Cock workshop, designs by an artist are transposed onto copper plates by professional printmakers, usually engravers but sometimes (as in this case) etchers. The Large Landscapes (and the Gassel landscapes by Cock) have convincingly been ascribed to the brothers Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, who worked for Cock between 1554 and around 1575.47 Bruegel’s name appears as the designer (inventor) on most of these prints, also contemporary with Cock’s landscapes after Lucas Gassel designs. The inventory of Cock’s widow in 1601 also reveals that these twelve large Bruegel plates were grouped with two others on the basis of size as ‘‘fourteen copperplates of landscapes by Bruegel,’’ suggesting that they were not always regarded as a discrete series and might also have been sold separately.48 As Gibson’s overview makes clear, the religious subjects descend from the world landscape tradition, established half a century earlier. In some respects the landscapes of Bruegel’s prints are constructed in relation to the subjects chosen. For example, St. Jerome (labeled Hieronymus in Deserto) and Mary Magdalene, depicted as the penitent hermit of her latter days (with another, background vision of her ascent to heaven for celestial nourishment), both appear in craggy mountain settings, elevated ‘‘far from the madding crowd.’’ In Jerome’s world, however, a flat river delta makes up a counterpoint to his highland hermitage, so the uplands/lowlands contrast has been maintained. In another religious print, Pilgrims to Emmaus (Figure 3.9), for which Bruegel’s drawing has survived (in damaged condition, Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp),49 the contrasts are more relaxed, as if Bruegel was using Bles (for whom this was a favorite theme) rather than Patinir as his model. The three travelers are not easily identified, and in the print a discreet halo was added by the etcher to the figure of Christ, seen from behind, to clarify the identity of the pilgrim protagonists. Here the ambiguity of their identification as holy figures rather than ordinary travelers is surely part of the message, so that an attentive viewer (perhaps cued by the caption) would have the same experience as the apostles in the Gospels, who only recognize the risen Christ among their number with the force of a revelation. Bruegel would later use this same viewing process as a didactic device in his paintings of holy figures in landscape settings (see below). Similar ambiguity attaches to the Holy Family, also depicted as travelers in the now familiar theme of the Rest on the Flight. Though they still hover in exile on a central hillock between uplands and lowlands, in this print there is little left of Patinir’s charged contrast, and even these figures attract less attention.50 Another cluster of Large Landscapes have titles and main figures that are manifestly not part of the tradition of religious narratives: The Cunning Bird Catcher, Country Concerns, The Belgian Wagon, Soldiers at Rest, and Rustic Peddlers. In some of these, like The Belgian Wagon or Country Concerns, the world landscape is still employed, albeit bereft of its religious core. Indeed, Bruegel uniquely blends plausible mountains, based on his personal Alpine travel experiences en route to Italy, with flat riverine expanses, while formulaically situating his solitary, eponymous peasant figures and carters on a precarious foreground corner ledge to overlook the whole. What is striking about the larger portion of the Large Landscapes is how this print series now offers its major focus on activities connected with the land itself, as if the holy figures of Patinir or Bles had been dropped from their depicted spaces. Country Concerns, Rustic Peddlers, and Belgian Wagon provide a rural, peasant-filled world of both labor and leisure that would be thematized by Bruegel in his paintings a full decade later (see Chapters 8 and 9).51 Dorothy Levesque considers this realm to be the

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3.9. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, etching after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pilgrims to Emmaus, ca. 1555–56. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

representation of the active life in contrast to the contemplative life of the hermit saints.52 She also points to the association of one theme, The Cunning Bird Catcher, with inherent deceitfulness as well as enticement, a form of worldliness at odds with the productive labor by anonymous peasants in fields or villages of the other landscapes.53 Similar kinds of suspicions attach to peddlers, and Bruegel also satirized their useless goods in a later engraving, The Merchant Robbed by Monkeys (1562), where the figure is actually shown before a country village rather than a town, so his itinerant profession stands close to the Rustic Peddlers.54 More threatening still are the Soldiers at Rest, who inhabit their named print in a position of surveillance and provide nothing but the threat of danger to the countryside; this somber mood is reinforced by the hunter with crossbow who is stalked by a manfrom behind a tree in Bruegel’s etching of 1560, The Rabbit Hunt.55 The most naturalistic of the Large Landscapes is the village setting entitled Wooded Region (Figure 3.10). This print uses a lower horizon and offers a thick forest in the right corner rather than the elevated corner ledge convention, and it eliminates the background mountains. Careful observers will note that this print, too, retains the three zones of the world landscape tradition in having the forest as the image of wilderness, complemented by a Flemish country hamlet with its parish church and Belgian wagon, and completed by open water and the skyline of a port city at the left horizon, just as in a

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3.10. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, etching after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wooded Region, ca. 1555–56. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926.

number of the other country scenes from the Large Landscapes. In part because of its plausible rendering of a local setting with a more natural, lowered horizon, this print enjoyed a lasting influence in the formulation of typical Dutch countryside settings in the early seventeenth century, especially in Haarlem, along with the related village scenes of Cock’s Small Landscapes by an anonymous master (see below).56 Once again a surviving drawing (British Museum, London) replicates the composition of Country Concerns, and, like the case of the Berlin sketchbook in relation to Bles compositions or motifs, debate rages about whether this drawing served as preparation for the print, minus the corner figures, or else was recorded after the print as a record of its design (though this need is obviously much less for a print multiple than for a single unique work like a painting).57 Another drawing, gravely damaged but authentic and dated 1555 (Louvre, Paris), clearly modeled the Alpine Landscape in the same series.58 In the case of the Cock print publishing house, the structure of workshop production and mass marketing of images is built into the production of landscapes and other pictorial genres. What is striking here is how print production seems to provide a new technology for mass production after the earlier workshops of Patinir, Gassel, and especially Bles had been working in Antwerp toward a similar kind of replication of stock themes and forms on small painted panels.

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3.11. Hieronymus Cock, etching after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with Temptation of Christ. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Katherine Elliot Bullard Fund.

Cock’s earliest collaboration with Pieter Bruegel involved a small religious subject in front of another thick forest, the Landscape with Temptation of Christ (Figure 3.11), and for this work an extant (damaged) drawing, minus the two figures, survives in Prague, a Landscape with Bears (1554).59 The presence of the wild animals in the drawing (eliminated in the print, though a deer grazes beneath a tree) reinforces our intuitive understanding from fairy tales or other forest scenes that this setting depicts a fundamentally untamed and frightening wilderness.60 In light of the early date established by the drawing, the absence of Bruegel’s name from the credits on this print is not surprising, since the artist had just returned from Italy and had yet to make a name for himself in the art market. Taken together with the later image of the Wooded Region, we can also see Bruegel adapting the three-zone construction of landscape from Patinir here, but again using the forest and a flattened horizon in lieu of the mountains for wilderness that had formed the basic structure of the original world landscape. At the right side of the print, beyond the dominating tall trees of the thicket, is an open space, where a village appears before the open water and port city at the low horizon. In contrast to the empty darkness of the forest, this open space has a few figures, a herd of cows, and a few manmade structures (tower, windmill). In terms of the themes of Patinir landscapes, the Temptation of Christ, a subject presumably added by the publisher, Cock, fits perfectly. Once more, the print (but not the Bruegel drawing) offers the viewer a holy figure, here Christ himself, undergoing spiritual trial at the hand of Satan, as well as

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3.12. Matthys Cock, Landscape with Rest on the Flight. Collection Frits Lugt, Institut Ne´erlandais, Paris. Lugt Collection, Paris.

willed self-abnegation in a wilderness retreat, just as St. Jerome, Mary Magdalene, and the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt had already demonstrated in Flemish world landscape settings.61 Cock did not rely only on Bruegel and Gassel for landscape designs. His own brother, Matthys Cock (master before 1540; died before 1548), was already a celebrated master of landscape, praised by van Mander (1604) as a renovator of landscape ‘‘in the antique or Italian’’ manner. Several extant drawings, with dates ranging from 1537 to 1544, have been attributed to Matthys Cock.62 Indeed, the drawings associated with him, such as the Landscape with Cephalus and Procris (1544; Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid) do show formal ties to Italian working methods, especially in broad, hatched strokes of foliage, sometimes heightened with white or enhanced with tonal wash, like the Venetian drawings of Titian and his prote´ge´ Domenico Campagnola.63 The name Matthys Cock has also been associated with a group of related landscape paintings, formerly given to Cornelis Matsys and linked to the generation of Bles but now grouped under the anonymous Master of the Toledo Judgment of Paris. As this designation suggests, several of these landscapes with small figures utilize narratives drawn from classical mythology, along with familiar religious fare (St. Jerome,1541, Berlin; Temptation of St. Anthony; Landscape with Rest on the Flight; Figure 3.12).64 Although this particular painter-draftsman remains tantalizingly anonymous or unspecified with explicit signatures—as well as short-lived—his work shows the vital importance of innovation within the basic framework of landscape settings as an emerging genre. While still maintaining the fundamentals of Patinir’s world landscape ingredients, ‘‘Matthys Cock’’ introduced new visual elements and a more tightly integrated landscape setting, in which he also inserted a variety of new, serious, but also

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explicitly Italianate subjects for his discerning viewers to contemplate. Moreover, his increased use of finished drawings as artworks suggests a circle of sophisticated collectors, who would by this time have been attracted by the hand of the maker as much as by the disposition of the setting or the instructive content of the subjectmatter.65 Hieronymus Cock remained ever the diversified marketer of a wide range of print types and styles; he produced figural images after designs by leading Italian masters, such as Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, and the Italian engraver Giorgio Ghisi, as well as Italianate Netherlanders, such as Lambert Lombard, Frans Floris, and Maarten van Heemskerck.66 Thus, to broaden his range of landscape offerings, he could easily turn to the designs of his own late brother, Matthys Cock, for ‘‘Italianate’’ settings, often featuring mythological subjects, already heralded in the drawing Landscape with Cephalus and Procris. A dated work of 1551, Sacrifice of Isaac, provides the first instance of Hieronymus Cock’s utilization of his brother’s landscape design formulas, and in 1558 he published an entire suite, entitled Landscapes with Biblical and Mythological Scenes.67 On the title page the name of Matthys is not designated, and the prints only say ‘‘Cock fecit.’’ The Dutch description of these thirteen works alongside the Latin on the title page declares, ‘‘Various sorts of landscapes with fine histories composed therein, from the Old and New Testaments, and several merry poetic works, very convenient for painters and other connoisseurs of the arts.’’68 The term ‘‘poetic works’’ (Poetereyen) suggests connection with the mythologies used in painting as the rival of poetic fiction, as in the case of Titian’s celebrated poesie, painted for Philip II of Spain during this same period.69 The grammar of the spaces in these prints, however, no longer provides any pointed contrasts between the protagonist’s wilderness space and the remainder of the landscape; instead the actors appear as small but isolated figures in the foreground, usually in the center rather than a corner, and the varied elements of a world landscape unfold in Bles-like successive vistas behind. One of the drawings associated with Matthys Cock, a Landscape with St. Christopher (private collection, Netherlands), reappears in this print series but with an altered subject, as a Landscape with Hero and Leander. In this case the stark contrast between towering cliffs and open water is reminiscent of Patinir, but the change of subject shows the new temper of landscape aspirations toward cosmopolitan inclusion of serious classical themes, in this case the lesson of risking all for love.70 As Gibson noted, another Cock drawing, a Flight into Egypt (Lugt collection, formerly The Hague), dated 1543, reappears (unreversed) in the 1558 series with its subject newly transposed into classical guise, Landscape with Mercury holding the Head of Argus (Figure 3.13), by which Jupiter uses the seduction of godly musicianship to recover his lost love (disguised as a heifer) from her vigilant, multieyed guardian. Most of these print mythologies center around cautionary tales of excessive love and loss: Hero and Leander, Apollo and Daphne, Venus and Adonis, Cephalus and Procris. Indeed, they are counterbalanced by biblical tales of devotion and patient suffering (Abraham and Isaac, Flight into Egypt, Tobias and the Archangel Raphael, Good Samaritan) or else divine intervention in marital love (Judah and Tamar). Clearly these Cock landscapes were still intended to convey serious, didactic edification to viewers while also delighting them visually. Cock also produced smaller landscape prints by a distinctive, third designer—known still as the anonymous Master of the Small Landscapes—in a pair of sets, totaling forty-four etchings, issued in 1559 and 1561.71 The difference in the title page signals the marked change from either the Bruegel Large Landscapes or the Cock sequence of religious and mythological themes: ‘‘Many and very attractive

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3.13. Hieronymus Cock, etching after Matthys Cock, Landscape with Mercury Holding the Head of Argus, 1558. Philadelphia Museum of Art, photo Lynn Rosenthal.

places of various cottages, farms, fields, roads, and the like, ornamented with animals of all sorts. All portrayed from life, and mostly situated in the country near Antwerp.’’ These claims go well beyond the mimetic assertions of any previous landscapes: they are asserted to be ‘‘portrayed from life’’ and expressly local, ‘‘in the country near Antwerp,’’ where the prints were published and sold. Their subjects are humble and rural, so they are anything but the comprehensive and diverse constructed spaces of the world landscape as inherited up until that point. The images themselves are close-up representations of villages and fields but also of castles and manors, so the series offers different class markings in its depicted spaces. Horizons are low and flat, and figures invariably small and anonymous, when they appear at all. The only real precedents for this focus on a few buildings or village views are the sketches in the Berlin Sketchbook, and these were never systematically featured as the basis of finished works of art, painted or printed.72 Bruegel’s closest comparison, executed a few years prior to the Small Landscapes is his Wooded Region, but its three-zone construction is glaringly apparent and appears quite artificial in comparison with these subsequent village views. The powerful and lasting influence of the Small Landscapes on the history of Flemish and Dutch village depictions in the following centuries has been well charted recently by such scholars as Gibson (also see Chapter 8).73 Yet the very anonymity of this artist and the close correspondence between his drawing designs (see Village View, Figure 3.14) and the Small Landscapes prints, realized by the Doetecum brothers and published by Cock, remind us of the collaborative nature of workshop print produc-

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3.14. Master of the Small Landscapes, Village View, drawing, ca. 1555–60. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1906.

tion after mid-century in Antwerp.74 Moreover, it serves as a cautionary reminder that not all influential innovations need result from famous artists. While it was a natural conclusion for the early seventeenth century (and subsequent centuries until the twentieth) to attribute the Small Landscapes to Bruegel himself and for specialists to seek plausible alternatives, ranging from both Cock brothers to the engraver Cornelis Cort, Cornelis Matsys, Cornelis van Dalem, and (now) Joos van Liere, the fact remains that we simply do not know the identity of this anonymous master who redirected the entire history of landscape design. After this period, as we shall see, landscapes either followed the tradition of the world landscape construction or else fell in line with this more contained local and rural idyll. Thus, when Pieter Bruegel came to produce paintings, none of them ‘‘pure’’ landscapes like his landscape drawings, the traditions of world landscape painting from the previous two generations of artists, from Patinir through Bles and most recently Matthys Cock, he had inherited quite a developed vocabulary to utilize.75 Not surprisingly, most of his pictures with landscape settings followed suit by featuring religious subjects, even when they seem at first glance to be more countryside. Often the viewer has to be particularly attentive to small, background details or figures in order to make the proper reading of a Bruegel landscape painting. A case in point is the (damaged) Landscape with the Parable of the Sower (dated 1557; Figure 3.15). The source for this image is the teaching of Christ (Matthew 13: 3–23) that speaks of the various kinds of seeds, which fall on barren or fertile ground, just as the word of God, Christ’s own spoken messages, exemplified by this, his first parable, variously reach different kinds of hearers. Also very basic to this message is the previous, more explicit rationale in the biblical text for speaking in parables at all: some will not see even what is before their eyes, while those who heed the word will see and hear—and be healed. In Bruegel’s picture, the larger foreground figure of a sowing farmer only becomes meaningful when the viewer notes the small-scale but dense crowd across the background river, which is in fact the followers of Christ, who listen to the first parable being spoken aloud as Jesus stands in a boat. In similar fashion, Bles’s Landscape with John the Baptist (ca. 1540, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art) juxtaposes the presentation of an oral gospel message, delivered in the foreground, against the tiny but essential Baptism itself in the background. Bruegel, by contrast, disguises his religious theme entirely, only revealing it through the representation of a sermon in the distance. There may be subtle

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3.15. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Parable of the Sower, 1557. Timken Museum of Art, San Diego. The Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art.

cues in the items within the farm landscape, where tall, slender framing trees at the left are balanced visually by their contrasting opposite: a dead stump at right, a synecdoche of the seed in rocky or infertile soil that did not flourish. Perhaps the fact that the sower himself turns his back on the sermon by the river and casts his gaze downward at the land suggests his own obliviousness to the spiritual message hidden in the background.76 He does occupy the same space that was reserved in the Large Landscapes for penitent and contemplative hermits, Jerome and Mary Magdalene, but they, by contrast, turn their backs on worldliness. There is another side to this coin, where allegorical figures are contrasted with normative values represented by country life, based on the parables of Christ. Spatially, Landscape with the Parable of the Sower closely mirrors the recent print construction of Country Concerns from the Large Landscapes, with its elevated (but much broader) corner ledge and diagonal view over an expansive river valley to a wall of forbidding Alpine peaks. Unlike Patinir, Bruegel produces lifelike peaks, but their proximity to the harbor betrays the conceptual clustering of the world landscape, and details, such as the castle on a bluff above the sermon scene, extend the patterns and motifs of the Bles studio. In 1568 Bruegel produced another parable (Matthew 15: 14) painting: The Blind Leading the Blind (Capodimonte Museum, Naples), whose steep plunge downward into a ditch occurs in front of a wellmanicured village with a parish church on a strongly level ground plane.77 Lost from the damaged

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Naples original but visible in accurate copies (such as the Louvre version, sometimes ascribed to Jan Brueghel; see Figure 6.25) is a cowherd, who stands at rest against his staff, while one of his herd ranges dangerously close to the ditch that will soon capture the line of blind men.78 This painting will be an important index of Bruegel’s outlook toward both beggars and peasants (see Chapter 6), but it receives its fundamental opposition from the contrasts of spatial construction for each group in the landscape. Bruegel’s paintings continue to use landscape to amplify his religious subjects during the decade of the 1560s. However, the large scale and high finish of most of his paintings plus the lack of formulaic replicas suggest that, like Bosch, this artist managed to achieve a different level of success, where private clients, probably via commission to the artist, purchased works directly instead of finding less expensive workshop variants on the open market.79 In one rare case, we believe that we know the identity of an important owner of a small Bruegel landscape with religious figures: Landscape with the Flight into Egypt (signed and dated 1563; now in the Seilern Collection, London).80 It was inventoried in the collection of Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (1517–86), archbishop of Mechelen (1560), then cardinal and primate of the Netherlands Catholic Church (1561); he was also the powerful but resented president of the Netherlands Council of State, where he represented the interests of the king of Spain before having to be recalled by Philip II from this administrative position in 1564.81 This picture shows Bruegel’s assimilation of Bles’s atmospheric veils of color and succession of framing cliffs along the left side of the composition; of course, the subject was a standard theme of world landscapes, including the Large Landscapes. Another small but highly intricate work, the 1562 Suicide of Saul (Vienna), uses landscape constructions akin to the mountainous images of the Large Landscapes. Antlike mobs of tiny soldier figures clash in the valley between rocky uplifts, as the first king of the Jews falls on his own sword upon a plateau at the left foreground corner. Most interpreters of this subject have taken its moral message to be punished pride, another cautionary narrative from the Old Testament, akin to the destruction of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9, as well as Flavius Josephus), subject of two Bruegel paintings (one in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, dated 1563; Figure 2.3; the other, undated, at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam).82 There may also be a condemnation of warfare itself in the Suicide of Saul, which would further accord with the overwhelming destruction caused by the skeletal forces—in a devastated and burned-out landscape—of the artist’s subsequent Triumph of Death (Prado, Madrid).83 Bruegel still continued to apply Patinir’s religious charge to landscape spaces in some of his later religious paintings, most notably his Conversion of St. Paul (1567; Figure 3.16). Here the epiphany of the soldier Saul occurs deep within the stormy peaks of a vertiginous mountain setting, like the spiritualized wilderness setting of St. Jerome or Mary Magdalene. This place is located high above contrasting worldly lowlands, still bathed in warm sunlight. Bruegel’s work evokes comparison with a Dutch painting of the previous generation, which contrasts Moses, receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments amid storms on Mount Sinai, against the idolatrous and sensual Israelites dancing down below, as represented around 1530 by Lucas van Leyden.84 Bruegel paintings also occasionally make a distinctive point about the humility of the holy figures by submerging them within the bustle of an apparently Flemish farming village. For example, his Census at Bethlehem (1566; Figure 3.17) deliberately obscures the differences between Mary and Joseph with their donkey amidst the overall composition of small figures, again seen from an elevated viewpoint

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3.16. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Conversion of St. Paul, 1567. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

like that of Patinir but now within the setting of a mere country hamlet. Bethlehem is imaginatively recreated for the contemporary Flemish viewer as if it were an ordinary, snow-covered village near Antwerp, like the Small Landscapes engravings. In this case, collapsing the differences between modern and biblical eras, between anonymous, profane peasants and holy figures, and between local settings and distant sacred spaces makes a theological point about the humanity of Christ’s Incarnation as well as the importance of everyday activity that could contain such mundane holiness. Just as the viewer had to seek the tiny figure of St. Paul among his crowd of soldiers in order to grasp the significance of that event as a kind of personal discovery, so, too, does the spiritual point of this image get disguised within the secular appearance and everyday winter concerns that so closely resemble Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with Skaters of the previous year (1565; Muse´es Royaux, Brussels). Where corruption prevails is the city. At first sight, Bruegel’s ports in the distance of his world landscapes seem to carry no particular negative burden. Even in the Conversion of St. Paul there is no sharp distinction between the port and the surrounding countryside, as both remain equally remote from the spiritual theater of the foreground mountaintop. However, in his two versions of the Tower of Babel (1563; Vienna, Figure 2.3; Rotterdam) Bruegel situates the gargantuan building project, the product of overweening pride by humankind, at the edge of a major waterway, filled with a flotilla of oceangoing vessels, the very ships that made Antwerp a world economic power. Beyond the tower one sees the cultivated fields whose produce feeds the giant metropolis, but there can be no doubt that both

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3.17. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Census at Bethlehem, 1566. Muse´e d’Art Ancien, Brussels. Scala/Art Resource.

the potential and the plan for such a mad construction could arise only out of the prosperity and ambition of such a port city (and perhaps the megalomania of an unchallenged autocrat). By the time of the second, Rotterdam version, Bruegel went so far as to eliminate the legendary figure of King Nimrod from the foreground, thus placing the collective responsibility for both avarice and pride squarely on the overall population of urban citizens.85 Of course, in its direct divine punishment of pride without conversion, the Tower of Babel can be taken to be the opposite religious event to the Conversion of St. Paul, just as Bruegel constructs the two landscape settings as opposites, dominated respectively by the flatlands of materialism and the highlands of revelation. Taken together, these two paintings operate as if they were fragmented halves of the original Patinir composite. Thus the world landscape of a half-century earlier was still very much current well into the late 1560s. As the Landscape with the Parable of the Sower and the Blind Leading the Blind reveal, Bruegel increasingly focused on the peasants who labor within a country landscape (see Chapter 6). One last image, however, will demonstrate his ongoing propensity for both allegorical figures and for moralized landscape spaces. The Misanthrope (1568; Figure 6.26), a round work on canvas (copied in a posthumous engraving as well as in paintings after that print by Pieter the Younger), contrasts a dominant pair of foreground figures against a flat, placid landscape with a sheepherder in the middle distance. This picture is inscribed with a Flemish rhyme, which serves as a speech by the main figure, dressed entirely in black with a monk’s hood: ‘‘Because the world is so untrue, thus I withdraw filled with rue.’’86 This

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supposedly spiritual and ascetic man, the equivalent of a hermit like St. Jerome, is actually revealed to be a secret hypocrite, incapable of renouncing worldly goods, as he carries a contrasting red coin purse beneath his robes; however, that booty is being pilfered surreptitiously from behind by a ragged, poor figure, surrounded by a globe that underscores his allegorical significance (the way of the world).87 Moreover, the cloaked figure is so self-absorbed that he fails to notice the additional danger before him of tacks in his path. These two figures offer contrasting responses to a money economy. One is a casualty, turned into a grasping thief; the other affects monkish retreat but turns out to be a dissembling, secret participant. In contrast to both of these figures, the quiet herdsman in the background remains immersed in his natural surroundings, akin to the cowherd in the background of the Blind Leading the Blind (who, however, fails to warn or aid the blind beggars). At first glance, the benign countryside would appear to be an antidote to the problems of worldliness in the immediate foreground; however, even here trouble looms on the horizon, in the form of a distant fire, visible behind the back of the shepherd (who thus fails to see it). At the end of Bruegel’s career the dominant world landscape formula was well established, although already modified over three successive artistic generations from Patinir to Bles to Bruegel. The workshop efficiencies and techniques of replication that had dominated painting in the first half of the century now took on the form of intaglio print publishing by Hieronymus Cock, who also began his own modifications within the emerging genre of landscapes, now departing from the usual religious subjects to include mythologies or even anonymous figures and settings from the local Flemish countryside. While Bruegel served the market as a designer for Cock’s less expensive landscape prints, he also managed to cater to a more exclusive and prosperous clientele with unique landscape paintings, still populated by religious scenes as well as serious moral allegories. There, too, Bruegel would make his own pictorial innovation in the emerging genre of landscape—to explore its relation to the lives of its own laborers, the peasants. That combination of pictorial form and novel subject matter will form the topic of Chapter 6.

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MONEY MATTERS

Just balances, just weights . . . shall ye have. —Leviticus 19: 36

But the most foolish and sordid of all are your merchants in that they partake in the most illicit business by the most illegal means they can find. —Erasmus, Praise of Folly

A usurer, a miller, a money changer, and a tax collector are the four horsemen of Lucifer. —Flemish proverb

A

ll that urban growth and financial activity in the city of Antwerp during the early sixteenth century (Chapter 2) inevitably influenced art-making. As a result, new themes engaging urban problems and the money economy formed a new kind of painting. Today these scenes are usually defined in a group called ‘‘genre subjects’’ by scholars, based upon the dismissive categorization of such themes as inferior by the critics of the French Academy of the late seventeenth century.1 ‘‘Everyday’’ subjects, however, whether involving labor or leisure, were often produced in combination with a sacred subject, like the landscape paintings and prints examined in the previous chapter. Even in seeming isolation most others had an unmistakable vocabulary of moral allegory. Here, too, as in the case of landscapes, the roots of the new phenomenon can be traced clearly to Hieronymus Bosch, despite his modest distance from Antwerp in the provincial center of ’s-Hertogenbosch. Although he still produced works in the traditional triptych form usually used for fifteenth-century altarpieces, Bosch’s discerning and elite clientele, consisting of ruling dukes (led by regent Philip the Fair and the count of Nassau in Brussels) as well as nobles, allowed him to indulge his own untraditional visual formulations, which centered on the correction of sinful human morality.2 Bosch himself was a prosperous man, a substantial property owner, and a high status citizen, well married and honorably buried by his local religious brotherhood, the Confraternity of Our Lady. The powerful originality of Hieronymus Bosch set in train a reorientation of painting away from purely religious works, whether church altarpieces or private devotional icons, toward a more didactic and moralizing representation using everyday life. With Bosch lie the origins of the category of the Sittenbild, or image of morals. An early work by Bosch situates the Seven Deadly Sins (Figure 4.1) around

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4.1. Hieronymus Bosch, Seven Deadly Sins. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

and within the watchful eye of God. At the eye’s central pupil appears a suffering Christ, while around the outer darkness of this cosmic circle appear smaller roundels of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell.3 Yet this essentially late medieval construction still uses lively vignettes from daily life to exemplify each of the seven sins. For the most part, Bosch focuses his attention squarely on the leaders and the pillars of society or on characteristic and prosperous urban burghers like himself. For example, Bosch uses aristocratic indulgence in wine, women, and song to serve as the enactment of excessive sensual Luxury (Lust).4 Pride takes the ordinary form of a primping bourgeoise whose mirror is held up by a demon. Removed from the context of demons and hellfire, this kind of subject could become an isolated image of idle vanity, turned monstrous in the hands of Antwerp painter Quinten Massys (see below). This image uses attention-grabbing archaic costume, here the headdress, to alert the viewer to the historical distance marking an allegorical significance for this vain woman. Bosch still uses the world of angels and demons to signal the moral universe in which human sinfulness succumbs to temptation. His deathbed scene from the Seven Deadly Sins reappears in a separate panel as the Death of the Usurer (or Death of the Miser; Figure 4.2), which must once have been part

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4.2. Hieronymus Bosch, Death of the Miser, ca. 1485–90. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Samuel H. Kress Collection 1952.

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4.3. Jan Provoost, Old Miser with Death, ca. 1515. Groeningemuseum, Bruges. Foto Marburg/Art Resource.

of another triptych devoted to sins and their consequences. In effect, both deathbed scenes stem from one of the most popular of all late medieval books, The Art of Dying Well, in which a series of temptations are paraded before the dying man in his bed, to be contested by his better spirit.5 In both of these works an angel and a demon contend for the attention and the final selection of moral paths by the deceased. In the Washington panel, a heavy chest with a bag of coins, silver vessels, and sealed notes combines with the heavy cloak and trappings of armor in the foreground to signal the accumulation of worldly goods and honors; it is probable that these items have been acquired in pawn by the scrawny deathbed figure, clearly not a nobleman, who would then be understood as a usurer rather than just an avaricious miser.6 Significantly, he takes note of the skeletal figure of Death at his door, but he still reaches for a bag of gold offered by a demon and ignores the exhortation of the guardian angel at his shoulder to look upward at the beam of divine light and the crucifix in the window.7 A similar interaction, but with the parties engaged in active exchange, appears in a pair of shutters (ca. 1515–21; the exterior of another triptych) by Bruges artist Jan Provoost, showing an Old Miser with Death (Figure 4.3), who has come to claim his soul in pawn. This scene unfolds at half-length within a crowded counting-house, laden with the props of records and moneybags, that would become a staple of Antwerp painting (see below).8 For Bosch, idleness and spiritual indifference shape the theme of this moralizing shutter, but the underlying condition is avarice, too much money and too little spirituality. Indeed, usury was a deadly sin in its own right during Bosch’s era, condemned by the Church because it made money from

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4.4. Hieronymus Bosch, Allegory of Luxury, ca. 1485–90. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

money without human labor.9 Like the Luxuria of the Seven Deadly Sins we behold the sinful folly of the idle rich, whose pleasure here lies in his worldly goods.10 The Louvre Ship of Fools, as well as its lower segment, now separated, an Allegory of Luxury (Figure 4.4), once probably formed the pendant wing to the National Gallery Death of the Usurer.11 Here, too, the images depict varied social groups, including a monk and nun as well as a costumed fool, indulging in sensory overload of food and drink, while an ominous owl, signal of evil, perches in the tree-mast

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above the ship. Once more the message is moral excess, prodigality rather than miserliness and usury. The exterior scene of this triptych depicted a Wanderer (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; see below). One of the most powerful visual metaphors produced by Bosch as a satire of universal greed is his triptych of the Hay Wain, a gigantic wagon stuffed with hay, from which every social group struggles to grab as much as it can.12 It should be noted at the outset that there are actually two extant versions of this triptych, both in Spain (one in the Prado, Madrid, Figure 4.5; the other at the Escorial).13 The Hay Wain Triptych transforms the traditional shape and function of an altarpiece into a private meditation on the compulsion to avarice on the part of all humankind. In that work, the hay wagon is drawn by demons, and it will inevitably drag the universe of sinners into the walls of Hell itself. The left wing shows the creation of man and woman in the Garden of Eden as well as their expulsion. Above the corrupting hay wagon in the center, Christ appears in his guise as the Man of Sorrows displaying his sacrificial wounds, but he remains ignored by all except for a praying angel atop the wagon.14 In brief, Bosch indicts all of humankind by offering a cross-section of society, ranging from the idle aristocrats who make love and music (accompanied by a music-playing blue devil) atop the wagon down to the struggling poor literally grasping at straws at its base. Figures of wealth, status, and power parade proudly and effortlessly on horseback behind the wagon, led by the two great representatives of Christendom in the form of the pope and emperor, followed closely by the princes, including an image of the Burgundian duke who ruled the Netherlands. In the foreground of the image, several clustered groups in isolation indulge their own forms of greed in front of the Hay Wain itself.15 Some of them are as much a familiar part of the social fabric as the comfortable aristocrats—particularly the fat friar in the corner who has a team of obedient nuns fetching hay for him. Next to them, dressed in the traditional costume with ass’s ears, stands a fool, playing a bagpipe, the folk instrument of folly and simplicity, in his role of entertainer at large.16 Beside them an outdoor barber-surgeon’s table professes healings, but this is the sign of a quack, whose capacity for deceitful practice on gullible but desperate patients remained the image of the medicine man up to the previous century. This is precisely the image still retained in Gerrit Dou’s Quack (1652; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam), where the comical charlatan is even associated with the deception of art-making itself (a self-portrait of Dou leans out a window just behind the expostulating quack) and with greedy immorality (in the form of a pickpocket in the lower right foreground).17 Bosch also produced his Conjurer (best version, at the Muse´e Municipal, Saint-Germain-en-Laye), portraying an itinerant performer outdoors, whose prestidigitation cons his onlookers, leading to one man in the foreground having his purse snatched.18 Once more it is the gullible and the short-sighted who are victimized by either conjuring or else theft by such scoundrels, preying at the margins of respectable society. Two other pairs of figures in the Hay Wain foreground deserve attention. At first glance, they seem out of place here. The first is the turbaned palm reader, who is counseling a smartly dressed lady while a ragged, unsupervised child clings to her skirts. Below this pair and next to a campfire, another woman with the same kind of turban is diapering an infant, an activity which some commentators have taken to be a general metaphor for the entire smelly enterprise of underlying deceit and manipulation across the bottom of this picture.19 These two exotically dressed women with turbans are surely to be under-

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4.5. Hieronymus Bosch, Hay Wain Triptych, center panel, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Erich Lessing/Art Resource NY.

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stood as being gypsies—marked distinctly as social outsiders, often suspiciously associated with both superstition and deceit.20 As their name implies, gypsies were believed to have descended from ancient Egyptians, which accounts in part for the Islamicizing turban headgear they wear. They are first recorded in Brussels around the year 1420. As a result they soon appear in certain biblical depictions as authentic Levantine scene-setters, as in the case of one of the earliest surviving Flemish panels, the Entombment by Robert Campin (Courtauld Institute, London), also from around 1420, as well as subsequent images, such as the socially mixed image of Pieter Bruegel’s The Sermon of St. John the Baptist of 1566 (Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest). In fact, the headgear of these alien people identify them as a rare example of a distinct ethnic group within the otherwise homogeneous population of Flemish painting.21 Equally alien, but identified by behavior and costume more than racial or ethnic origins, are the other vagrants of Bosch’s Hay Wain: the blind beggar and his youthful guide.22 In Chapter 3 we met another blind man and youthful guide, presented by Patinir as polar opposites to the adjacent figure of the meditating St. Jerome, as they approach the danger of a narrow path over a stream (Figure 3.2).23 Inevitably in Flemish paintings blind men should be understood as beggars, like their counterparts on crutches. We saw some of these same features among the beggars in Bruegel’s later Blind Leading the Blind, where the pilgrims’ costumes and the visible beggar’s bowl indicate that these figures are wanderers and mendicants, sometimes employing the recently invented hurdy-gurdy to make music that might attract donors.24 Often these disabilities of beggars are the result of leprosy.25 Leprosy was relatively rare but dreaded in Europe. However, its biblical pedigree made it understood as implying spiritual as well as hygienic ‘‘impurity,’’ which could be cured by the intervention of a holy man, like the case of Namaan in the River Jordan, healed by Elijah.26 Hence leprous beggars as well as other disabled mendicants were taken to be deformed, seen against a norm of able-bodied well-being. Thus beggars could inspire pity and fear but also a reflex aversion at odds with traditional Christian calls to practice charity. Lepers in particular were banished outside city walls and obliged to wear prescribed dress as well as to carry distinctive rattles or bells. Beyond blindness, the loss of limbs resulting from ravaging diseases such as leprosy could reduce a man to begging. For the most part, beggars were looked down upon as social inferiors and suspected of deceitfulness, even in displaying their infirmities, by an urban burgher class. A number of works by Bosch and his imitators, such as a drawing (Figure 4.6), probably from the period of Bruegel rather than Bosch, isolate clusters of crippled figures on crutches or with makeshift walkers, or costumed, singing fools with a lute.27Although some commentators have attempted to see a satire on the Church as the motivation of these negative remarks using clerical hierarchy, in all likelihood that hierarchy simply represents a counterculture mirror of the prevailing social structures, akin to analogous literary take-offs on dominant society.28 This topicality seems less plausible and very likely anachronistic. However, when this drawing was engraved by Bruegel’s printmaker, Hieronymus Cock, an accompanying inscription made clear that the viewer was not expected to have a modern attitude of compassion and sympathy for those less fortunate—quite the contrary. The inscription goes so far as to accuse these characters of faking their disabilities and preferring to live on alms rather than on their own labors: ‘‘All who would gladly live by the blue beggar’s sack [blue was the color of deceit] / Go mostly as cripples

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4.6. Follower of Bosch, Beggars and Cripples, drawing, ca. 1550–60. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

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[but] on both sides / Thus the Cripple’s Bishop has many servants / Who for a fat living avoid the straight and narrow path.’’29 A similar attitude emerges from a 1520 engraving, False Pilgrims (Figure 4.7) by Lucas van Leyden, which essentially accuses a wandering pilgrim of accumulating crowds of children who are not really his own in order to deceive townsmen into giving to him more generously. The idea for this print stems from the verses (‘‘Of Beggars’’) and a similar woodcut illustration in a 1494 German publication, appropriately entitled The Ship of Fools, by Sebastian Brant. Moreover, the bagpipe played by this wanderer adds to his negative impression, for this simple and vulgar peasant instrument repeats the worthless pastime of idlers and fools.30 Many other contemporary tracts and sermons vilified such beggars for being idle malingerers, actually faking their disabilities or else being punished divinely for their earthly transgressions or moral shortcomings (although the deserving poor might be distinguished from those who are accused of fakery). Such dismissive attitudes were well codified by the end of the fifteenth century in German in a volume entitled the Liber vagatorum, or Book of Wanderers, a work issued in various editions, including one by Martin Luther himself (1528).31 This compendium enumerates no fewer than twenty-eight varieties of false beggars, akin to the visual series presented in a 1524 woodcut by the Nuremberg printmaker Barthel Beham. Overlapping categories of unsavory, antisocial, and beggarly characters can also be discerned in the 1531 edict issued in the Low Countries by Emperor Charles V, warning of the punitive policies to be directed at the various forms of begging poor: ‘‘Egyptians [gypsies], Lepers, Beggars, Vagabonds, Landlopers, Spies, and Thieves.’’ The list goes on to encompass a variety of itinerants and marginal figures who earned their livings in unpopular or irregular but necessary trades: ‘‘peddlers, cobblers, tinkers, coopers, quacks, and sellers of matches or rat poison, who do nothing but travel about as swindlers, ruffians, thieves and evildoers.’’32 If we look carefully at this roster of negative categories, we note that these antisocial groups are defined precisely by what they are not. In brief, they form a negative antitype to the positive characteristics of urban, bourgeois behavior. They are lazy rather than industrious, dirty rather than clean, unproductive and parasitic rather than contributing to society. The texts go on to castigate them as profligate and deceitful, while visual representations depict them as ugly, an external sign of internal corruption.33 Bruegel would go on to produce the most emphatically ugly of all beggar pictures in his small 1568 panel (Figure 4.8). Even more than the figures on crutches in the Vienna drawing with its harsh subtext, this image of Cripples takes a pitiless, unblinking look at the deformities and the infirmities of its subjects, who are surely to be understood as victims of leprosy. Strangely enough, an early collector of this image attached to its reverse a Latin distych that praises Bruegel precisely for his unstinting fidelity to appearances in his art: ‘‘Here Nature, transformed into painted images and seen in her cripples, is amazed to see that Bruegel is her peer.’’ Of course, this is a humanistic topos, or cliche´ of praise, for the artist’s rivalry of nature,34 but it is striking to find such warmth for a painting modest in both size and ambition, especially for a work taking as its subject such humble characters. The social and educational distance between such a learned owner and these miserable creatures could not be more explicit. This scene also includes a woman who assists the beggars with their alms. In fact, we see here a specific event on the annual urban calendar in the Netherlands: ‘‘Copper Monday,’’ just after Epiphany, when

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4.7. Lucas van Leyden, False Pilgrims, engraving, 1520.

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4.8. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Cripples, 1568. Louvre, Paris. Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux/Art Resource.

such beggars, complete with their identifying badge of foxtails, were allowed free passage through the streets.35 The festive nature of the season explains their carnival hats. That Bruegel was not averse to the Christian injunction to almsgiving can be seen in his 1559 design for Charity (Figure 4.9), one of a series of prints of the Seven Virtues.36 In this image, a conventional repetition of the visual formulas used by Netherlandish artists to depict the Seven Acts of Mercy from Christ’s sermon on the Last Judgment (Matthew 25: 35–40), needy beggars in the urban environment are receiving food, clothing, and shelter from charitable burghers, who act out this virtue of charity. Such a litany of pious generosity appears in an earlier example from the late fifteenth century by the anonymous Dutch Master of Alkmaar (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).37 As an analogue to the Cripples of 1568, we note at the far left a gruesome cripple receiving bread in the immediate foreground, while in comparison to the wanderers of The Blind Leading the Blind, we note the frequent appearance of travelers’ cloaks and pilgrims’ costumes. Clearly these categories blurred easily—the pilgrim’s profession of religion was easily conflated (as in the text by Sebastian Brant) with the wandering homelessness

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4.9. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Charity, 1559. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

of the permanent beggar or vagrant (varende luyden), while all were suspected of laziness, hypocrisy, even deceit.38 At times, however, the figure of the poor and homeless wanderer can be taken as an image for all humankind on the ‘‘pilgrimage of life.’’39 The best examples of this extension of the image of a wanderer also come from the exterior of Bosch’s Hay Wain Triptych (Figure 4.10), part of that deeply pessimistic general view of human sinfulness. Bosch’s scruffy, solitary wanderer, however, is an unsympathetic, elderly figure, more a vagrant than a pilgrim.40 Beset by a savage dog while trying to negotiate a narrow bridge, he attends both to the dangers of brigands on the road and to more alluring temptations to abandon work, specifically the couple dancing to the bagpipe music of an idle, thus irresponsible, shepherd. Warnings of death are visible in this landscape in the form of a decaying cow skeleton in the foreground as well as the distant gallows. But it is clear that this aging wanderer goes through life with nothing but the peddler’s pack on his back to sustain him and little to guide him on a path of dangers.41 Another Bosch painting in a round frame (Figure 4.11), once the exterior of the Washington/Paris/ New Haven wings, shows this same vagrant surrounded by symbols of worldly evil in different form.42 Here a ramshackle rural brothel and a trough of pigs suggest resonance with the story of the Prodigal

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4.10. Hieronymus Bosch, Wanderer, Hay Wain Triptych, exterior. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

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4.11. Hieronymus Bosch, Wanderer. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Bridgeman Art Library.

Son, but the message of the vagabond with a rucksack remains the same—an unsuccessful, possibly wastrel figure with only the baggage on his back. In this case, the presence of additional elements in the environment help to clarify the moral valence of the image. For example, the owl above in the tree is a Northern symbol—not of the wisdom of Minerva from classical tradition but rather of the evil and danger inherent in a bird that literally flies by night.43 The precise meaning of the catskin remains unclear, but it is reminiscent of the foxtails worn on their backs to identify Bruegel’s cripples. The backpack marks a peddler, who might be a swindler or just an itinerant, but the connotation of suspicion attached to his homelessness dovetails with the temptation toward evil in the roadside inn, which doubles as tavern and brothel. Even the act of looking back, exemplified by these two older wandering men by Bosch, can be interpreted as a form of preoccupation with worldly concerns, still offering temptations along the pathway instead of looking forward on the proverbial narrow gate of Christian teaching. Bosch’s imagery thus uses the figure of an aging landloper as a negative example to provide a generalized warning of sinfulness and a call to repentance, even in the latter stage of life. Dutch literature, including woodcut illustrations, also featured a younger version of a similar allegorical figure, akin to the Prodigal Son but renamed Careless (Sorgheloos), who squanders his money in taverns in the company of figures named Ease and Luxury, but then meets Poverty and Need before he finally repents.44 Bruegel, by contrast, situates religious practice as a ritual behavior within the cycle of the church calendar. His large painting, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559; Figure 4.12) situates the activities of feasting and fasting, carnival and confession, in the arena of the city market square. Within this open urban space the artist situates many of the activities we have already met, including the procession

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4.12. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 1559. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalrie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

of the beggars on Copper Monday, which appears just to the left of the center of the image. The Lenten emphasis on almsgiving includes both blind and crippled beggars as recipients of charity. Most commentators on this picture have seen the side of Lent as one of virtue and penitence, in contrast to the gluttony and license of Carnival; however, the distinctive costuming and seasonal activity of each time and space suggests that there is a parity between the serious cultural games of Carnival and Lent, represented by equally ludicrous allegorical figures of fat and thin characters drawn forward on floats by their followers. What is instructive for us here is the degree to which polarized structural oppositions inform this entire universe: fat versus thin, colorful versus somber, gluttonous versus abstemious—in general body versus spirit. Indeed, Carnival itself is only defined by contrast with the Lenten period that follows it—just as the familiar Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, celebrations of modern day New Orleans are preconditioned by the advent of Ash Wednesday and the period of contrition prior to Easter. Ultimately, the contrast can be summarized as a polarity of rejection of what Bosch had already included in his wings of the Ship of Fools/Allegory of Luxury and the Death of the Usurer—that is, excess of luxury or greed rather than practice of self-denial. Yet for Bruegel each behavior has its season and its spaces, carved out of the raw material of time in the annual calendar and space in the open square.45 Significantly, what is not represented here is the normal activity in this space during most of the year: the

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market and its daily goods, which are only implied by the specific holiday presence of festive waffles and Lenten fish on sale. The precedent for Bruegel’s image almost certainly comes from Bosch, whose own, earlier version of Carnival and Lent is known from copies.46 That, in turn, derives from folk festivals of seasonal change, with extensive literary remains from the period of Bosch’s lifetime. To judge by the copies, Bosch’s grisaille image also featured tables carried aloft with the emblems of the two principals: a fool with bagpipe for Carnival, a large fish for Lent. Unlike Bruegel, Bosch’s world is grossly unbalanced—chiefly dominated by figures of Carnival (only a single nun and monk stand for Lent). Yet as usual for Bosch the foolishness of their behavior seems to be an object of scorn from the viewpoint of sobriety and soberness. This cast of self-indulgent characters basically repeat the repertoire of the Ship of Fools/ Allegory of Luxury. We shall see this same imbalance in the abundance of produce in market scenes, juxtaposed with small background religious subjects, in pictures after mid-century by Pieter Aertsen (see Chapter 5). Such hybrid religious and secular mixtures extend the moral authority of Bosch’s original allegories. Whether or not we see Lenten activities as more virtuous than the indulgence of Carnival, it is clear that when self-indulgence is not spilling out into the public square, its chief locality is the public tavern, represented at the left of Bruegel’s picture by an inn bearing the sign of the ‘‘Blue Ship,’’ a Ship of Fools in Dutch parlance.47 If there is any place that can be understood as the antithesis of the isolated wilderness hermitage of a lonely and virtuous saint, it is precisely this kind of urban, public tavern—full of crowds, noise, indulgence, and vice. This is precisely the kind of world of sin and the body that saints such as Jerome and Anthony fled. We find such an environment portrayed as a school for life’s frankly physical functions in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, where the master teacher is the fat and lusty Falstaff, who as Plump Jack echoes the figure of Carnival in Bruegel’s allegory. Netherlandish literature of the sixteenth century provides a host of satires and allegories to warn about the dangers of drinking.48 We have already seen Bosch’s Wanderer passing by the temptations of a tavern with the sign of the swan, where women as well as drink seem to be readily available. Taverns are the unchallenged province of the lower classes and of any others who exploit their license as a site for sin as well as the relaxation of social norms and moral constraints. Tavern scenes derive from a few precedents, such as Lucas van Leyden’s woodcut Tavern (ca. 1520; Figure 4.13), where a cunning, attractive young harlot chucks the chin of a young gallant while she deftly picks his coin purse. These two are observed by an old crone, who becomes a standard figure in later scenes by Jan van Hemessen. Meanwhile, in the window above, a wise fool performs the role of moralizing truth-teller with the inscribed commentary that directs the viewer to ‘‘Watch how it turns out.’’ This is still an ‘‘everyday’’ scene in which the artist uses stereotype figures in order to provide an explicit and literal moral. Perhaps the earliest easel painting devoted entirely to sinful idleness was produced in the early 1520s by the Antwerp artist Quinten Massys in his Ill-Matched Pair (Figure 4.14).49 Although it does not show an explicit tavern space, this panel implies a setting fit for gambling, complete with cards and coins at the corner of a table. Massys reintroduces some of the characters from Lucas’s woodcut, juxtaposing a lustful old man having his chin chucked together with the cunning dexterity of a pretty young

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4.13. Lucas van Leyden, Tavern Scene, woodcut, ca. 1520. Muse´e du Louvre, Paris.

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4.14. Quinten Massys, The Ill-Matched Pair, ca. 1520–25. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

woman, who picks his pocket. In this case, the mediating bawd is absent, and a dirty old man rather than a gullible young swain succumbs to her allure. The fool is not a commentator here; instead, he is an accomplice in the mutual folly. In Antwerp painting, the tavern-brothel was particularly associated during the second quarter of the sixteenth century with the works of Jan van Hemessen and his associates, such as the anonymous Master of the Brunswick Monogram.50 Here prostitution is the direct and overt result of too much drinking and carousing. Besides peddlers, akin to Bosch’s wanderers, taverns also feature the other great idle, wandering group, soldiers, who indulge in decadence while dressed in their high fashion costumes with slashed sleeves. In addition to drinking and the enjoyment of the festive fare of waffles, couples are pairing off, visible in an adjacent bedroom or ascending the stairs. Such tavern images provide no overt external moral frame of reference, and some scholars have even claimed for them the same kind of neutral, even comical reporting one might associate with seventeenth-century tavern scenes, such as the works of Adriaen Brouwer or Jan Steen.51 But that kind of teleology or search for origins of a later phenomenon obscures the grimmer atmosphere and moral charge of these sixteenth-century tavern paintings and charts a genealogy (see Introduction) that might have taken other turns. Hemessen began his images of tavern scenes with an explicitly religious subject, involving both sinful indulgence and aggressiveness by harlots in a tavern: The Prodigal Son (Figure 4.15). The theme uses Christ’s parable of dissolution and subsequent repentance (Luke 15: 11–32). In this image we see a number of the temptations pulled together, including the idle music of a bagpiper, the dice games

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4.15. Jan van Hemessen, The Prodigal Son, 1536. Muse´e d’Art Ancien, Brussels. Foto Marburg/Art Resource.

offered by a wanderer with a backpack, and of course the pleasures of food and drink as the accompaniment to sexuality. But as that story tells us, the waste of his patrimony on such pleasures soon led to the expulsion of the Prodigal Son and his later abasement among the swine—two tiny scenes that are visible in the background of Hemessen’s version. From that contrition came repentance and the unmerited joyous reunion of son with father in the upper right corner of the image. In essence, the moral path and outcome offered by Christ’s story become the hidden resolution available for discovery by the viewer, who can see beyond the superficial earthly pleasures and visual temptations of the foreground. Just as Bosch challenged his viewers with distracting and encompassing images of sinful dissolution and provided only small details of alternative choices, so do some later painters also invert the moral priorities of their narrative presentations in order to provide a sense of discovery and spiritual conclusion to the very experience of seeing their religious narratives.52 A parable like the Prodigal Son (or the Blind Leading the Blind) is by definition a blend of sacred and secular, in which the stories told by Christ use everyday subjects or homely metaphors to communicate larger spiritual truths. For this work, Hemessen freely contrasts apparent worldliness with religious consequences, which have to be worked out by the viewer. As a result, many scholars have also attempted, retrospectively, to read a Prodigal Son message into other apparently dissolute earlier images, ranging from Bosch’s Wanderer to Lucas van Leyden’s woodcut Tavern Scene. Jan van Hemessen produced a pair of tavern scenes in which warnings against excess appear to be more overt. While the English title of these works is often given as Merry Company, the German version,

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4.16. Jan van Hemessen, Loose Company, ca. 1540. Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. Foto Marburg/Art Resource.

Lockere Gesellschaft, or Loose Company, conveys better the suggestion of unbridled license, where drinking leads to more sinfulness. The first of Hemessen’s pictures (Figure 4.16) shows a young man in the background being cozened by food and drink as well as by available women, as if in reprise of the Lucas van Leyden woodcut. Significantly, he still holds the long staff of the wanderer. Meanwhile, in the foreground we see the old bawd with her tankard and a young seductress offering a glass and playing-cards to a well-dressed but aged client. This man might almost be the brother of Bosch’s Wanderers except for his costume; his outlandish fashion, with its decidedly archaic headgear, signals that this image should also be understood as moral allegory. In the doorway, a sailor enters the tavern, whose caged bird at the doorsill is the equivalent of a modern red light marker of prostitution within. Reading left to right, the viewer has a before-and-after progression into tavern vice, with the hesitation of the old man in the middle as the crucial turning point. Satirical verses (‘‘folly poems’’) of the sixteenth century, written by poets in the Antwerp Chambers of Rhetoric, frequently lament the loss of judgment—and with it the loss of one’s money—in the banquets of Venus and the company of harlots, so this kind of visual imagery complements verbal enactments of folly.53 Another de Hemessen tavern scene (dated 1543; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford) has a more explicit comparison between foreground and background, before and after, because the distinctive, archaic broad-brimmed hat of the older man in the foreground reappears on the slothful older figure

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asleep in the rear by the fire. The main figure displays his ambivalence by warding off the advances of one woman while simultaneously clasping the hand of another. Aggressive animals around the central table underscore the baser nature of the scene itself. A thieving cat grabbing artichokes out of the plate on the table should probably be understood as an analogue to the assertive harlots swarming after their new visitor. Clearly the issue of what constitutes a genre subject is at stake in such pictures. Bosch began to represent worldly avarice, luxury, and gluttony in works that manifestly situate the immoral behavior of ordinary people of various classes in a larger vision of religious punishment, whether in the Seven Deadly Sins with the watchful eye of God, or else in the Hay Wain with its flames of Hell as the ultimate destination. Later works, such as the Lucas van Leyden Tavern Scene or the Massys Ill-Matched Pair, still employ a commentary by an observing fool as well as a surprise detail, offered to an attentive viewer, of a pickpocket theft as an unsettling lesson. Other works, such as the Bosch Wanderer, might seem to provide a neutral setting, but in fact the viewer is given little choice to sympathize with unkempt, ugly, or deformed characters, least of all with grotesque beggars as depicted by Pieter Bruegel. Moreover, the original context of viewing many Bosch images situated them in a religious sphere, in which today’s fragments were once paired with other wings populated by supernatural figures of angels and demons, like the Death of the Usurer or the Four Last Things around the Seven Deadly Sins. In Antwerp Quinten Massys transformed the allegory of choice into a separate easel picture, The Money Changer and His Wife (1514; Figure 4.17). This image attempts to balance the demands of worldly activity with spiritual concerns, but without any angels or demons from Bosch’s moral juxtapositions. Most commentators on this work have seen the paired opposites of husband and wife in this image as a contrast between materialism, his weighing of coins, and the spiritual path, her open prayer book, from which her attention is obviously distracted for the moment. However, the scrupulous care that the man gives to his activity, a careful balancing of coins with weights in the scales, shows that he performs neither a frivolous nor an overtly avaricious activity. Indeed, an injunction to be fair was originally conveyed by an inscription on the original frame, now lost but recorded by a seventeenth-century biographer; taken from Leviticus (19: 36), it reads: ‘‘Just balances, just weights . . . shall ye have.’’54 Archaic fifteenth-century hats remind us that these figures are not transcriptions of contemporary life, let alone actual portraits, but instead detached moral allegories of behavior. These two figures must thus be seen against what we detect as a fuller spectrum of conduct, ranging from gossip in the street, visible out the door, to contemplative meditation in a private chamber, visible in the foreground mirror. This is a painting that, like the poised prayer book page and the settling scales, literally hangs in the balance.55 Its serious demeanor and tone—plus its original inscription—suggest that this image does pose the difficult challenge to pursue worldly commerce while informed by spiritual values; however, scholars who see here a latent or overt satire might also be correct. After all, Bosch’s pessimism could have been shared by Massys, and the woman’s distracted gaze does pull her away from the purely spiritual world of her personal prayers. Massys made a portraitlike pair of images of male and female figures in outlandish and archaic costume with the particular purpose of satirizing material excess.56 His Grotesque Old Woman (Figure 4.18) and Grotesque Old Man (Figure 4.19), which date from around 1520, depend on a pair of Italian models. The Old Man uses a portrait medal of Cosimo de’ Medici, renowned as a wealthy banker and

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4.17. Quinten Massys, The Money Changer and His Wife, 1514. Muse´e du Louvre, Paris. Cliche´ des Muse´es Nationaux.

owner of a branch office in Bruges until 1480, within the memory of Massys’s youth. A drawing by Leonardo da Vinci (Windsor Castle, no. 12492) is closely replicated in the Old Woman. Massys has provided a mild interaction between these two figures, as if the woman makes an amorous overture by proffering a tiny rosebud, only to have him emphatically reject her advances with an upraised hand in a gesture of denial. Her vanity is exemplified by a lowcut dress, which reveals her sagging breasts, and by an absurd turbanlike headdress, akin to the old-fashioned wimples worn in the Low Countries (used for similar satirical purposes by Bosch in his female image of Pride in the Seven Deadly Sins). His

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4.18. Quinten Massys, Grotesque Old Woman, ca. 1520. National Gallery, London.

4.19. Quinten Massys, Grotesque Old Man, ca. 1520. Private collection, New York.

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materialism is visible through a fur-lined coat but even more through his prominent thumb ring, a sign of wealth and possibly political office; a similar dress adorns the corrupt magistrate who takes a bribe in the Avaritia scene of the Seven Deadly Sins.57 Just as in the case of the lustful old man in Massys’s IllMatched Pair, discussed above, here the artist again uses grotesque facial features, often based upon replicas of Leonardo drawings, to convey moral turpitude. Indeed, the Old Man/Old Woman pendants have a portrait-like character like the half-length figures in the Ill-Matched Pair, and they reverse the poles of those younger figures—now the old woman is the lustful partner and the man is the greedy one, but both are clearly consumed with vain Pride. Massys also seems to have gone on to make a much less ambiguous image of money changers, a lost image of two grotesque men in a similar small wooden stall. They should be identified either as a Banker and his Client, or more likely, from their shared ugliness, as Two Tax Collectors. This work, or something like it, was documented in several seventeenth-century inventories as the work of Massys, and it served as the model for a number of replications of varying quality from later imitators (see Figure 4.20).58 Here the financial transaction is fastidious and meticulous, although subject to alteration in details by copyists; indeed, the text (in French) shown in the Hampton Court version presents rates of exchange current in Antwerp between 1548 and 1551.59 One figure, dressed in another archaic turban and wearing spectacles (both elements with a potential for satire, since spectacles can also connote moral shortsightedness) holds a coin and enters an account into his ledger. The second man grimaces outward toward the viewer while pointing down to that account book and clasping a moneybag in his other hand. The action here is related to weighing coins for their metal content and value in exchange between currencies. Raymond de Roover, a historian of early banking, explains the connection between bankers and money changers, who provided opportunities for financial exchange or fund transfers for their clients. Thus the image would depict an oral order, delivered in person to a banker by his client. The evaluation of a coin in relation to the entry in the ledger would thus be a literal accounting of what might have been a deposit to a current account.60 This transaction no longer took place in the Antwerp of Massys’s day (it was outlawed by the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Fair, in 1489), so (like the archaic costume) the artist’s depiction of an outmoded activity added further, critical distance to his harsh moral castigation of finances in these images. If we look at successor images to these models from the next generation in Antwerp, the variations on Massys’s theme of money changing make us think even more favorably about his initial experiments in secular moral allegory. Marinus van Reymerswaele’s 1538 Banker and His Wife (Figure 4.21) further exaggerates Massys’s outlandish fashions, and it fully eliminates the spiritual pole of the dialogue by replacing Massys’s prayer book of the wife with an accounts ledger.61 The activity is still coin-weighing, but here the tone of moral censure seems sharper, less ambiguous, reinforced by the frankly financial nature of the book, often legibly inscribed in Marinus’s various repetitions with the ledger entries of city tax collectors or customs officials. This image should be construed as satire, and it would have had special topicality in a city dominated by financial transactions. Marinus also made his own living from repeating it. Numerous versions of varied quality survive, attesting to its popularity and cogency in the Antwerp art market. Unlike Massys, who produced only a single signed image as an early experiment in depicting urban commerce, Marinus produced a number

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4.20. After Quinten Massys, Banker and His Client. Private collection.

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4.21. Marinus van Reymerswaele, Banker and His Wife, 1538. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

of replicas of this favorite subject, using it as a successful formula in the manner of Patinir’s world landscapes with saints. In similar fashion, Marinus produced a successful series of images, usually called Tax Collectors or The Banker and His Client (best version in the National Gallery, London; Figure 4.22), which go still farther in the direction of exaggerating archaic and outlandish costume, while providing still more grotesque and aged faces to score easy satirical points.62 If we might still hesitate to describe The Money Changer and His Wife as vivid satire on commerce, these pairs clearly use grotesque features to evoke revulsion from the viewer. Moreover, in contrast to the smaller number of eight versions by Marinus of images of money changers with both sexes, this unisex formula was constantly repeated by the artist and his studio or his imitators—more than sixty survive. Indeed, the issue of when Marinus left off and his imitators began is another important indication of the long-term marketability of this theme in Antwerp. Concerning the subject of this image and its copies, most of the legible ledgers record tax revenues, for either a municipal treasurer or a tax-farmer.63 The London painting by Marinus has a legible Dutch inscription noting the receipts of the city as taxes of various kinds as well as various payments as ‘‘allowances.’’64 The accountant or bookkeeper’s role is clear, but whether the other figure

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4.22. Marinus van Reymerswaele, Tax Collectors. National Gallery, London. Bridgeman Art Library.

is the actual tax collector or a wealthy man making a payment remains moot; most interpreters have taken his holding of a moneybag to suggest the latter. Even today city taxes remain odious but necessary elements of urban living, so the success of such panels in sixteenth-century Antwerp might be tied to presenting this activity, either critically or comically. Most of the preaching about money matters was negative, whether it came from learned scholars like Erasmus and Thomas More or from the satirical urban rhetoricians (rederijkers), who also castigated brothels and drinking.65 But after all, moral censure is the business of preachers. It is equally possible to suppose, with Basil Yamey and Keith Moxey, that the bureau scenes held a topical interest precisely for those people in the city who were involved in commerce; at least they could readily have afforded to purchase such works. A little moral censure might even have served as healthy self-criticism on the part of a tax collector-owner of pictures like these. This outlook would be consistent with the burned-down candle on the bookcase of most of these pictures, a metaphor that inevitably carries a vanitas connotation about the brevity of life.66 In addition, the consistent presentation of the figures in these pictures

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4.23. Jan Massys, Tax Collector’s Office, ca. 1535–40. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Foto Nationalmuseum.

at half-length echoes the conventions of portraiture, such as the impressive—and handsome—halflength Jan Gossaert Portrait of a Banker (National Gallery, Washington), in the same kind of paper-filled shallow space.67 Yet the sheer number of copies after Marinus, some of them quite weak and presumably cheap, argues against an exclusively professional clientele for such works, and their grotesque features surely signal a harsh departure from any portrait likeness. A pair of related images by Jan Massys, Quinten’s painter son, depict images of commerce, the TaxCollector’s Office (one in Stockholm, Figure 4.23; the other in Dresden, dated 1539).68 Both images depict a peasant (with his family) visiting the bureau, crammed with coins and moneybags as well as ledgers. This is the office of another money-man, adorned with archaic millinery in the Stockholm work and a soft beret in the Dresden one. The wealth of the tax collector is signaled in both images by the shiny metalwork vessels in the office cupboards as well as his luxurious costume.69 He is visited by a disconsolate, well-tanned peasant, who even brings a laying hen and a basket of eggs in barter (Dresden) for his rent or tax.70 Their encounter mixes cultures as well as classes, as the tradition-bound rural farmer fails to grasp the money economy of the city. Pictorial contrasts between rich and poor, old and young, ugly and fair (as well as male and female) further emphasize their clashing differences. Another contrast with the main scene of fiscal exchange in Dresden is given by a background scene, visible out the door, which shows a woman dispensing alms to a blind beggar (with a hurdy-gurdy) and his boy. Jan Massys follows his father Quinten in both layout and moral choice.

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Marinus also produced several related images of petitioning peasants before grotesque urban professionals in his various versions of a Lawyer’s Office.71 There a corpulent, well-dressed, smiling lawyer gestures across at his opposite, a gaunt and grotesque client figure, who empties coins from his purse onto the table. The setting remains the same: a table, stacked high with papers and writing implements as well as coins. Rather than the office of a notary or tax-farmer, this space belongs to a smug and prosperous local lawyer, then as now an urban object of both envy and scorn, in literature as well as in pictures. Much of this analysis of images of commerce depends upon readings of the grotesque faces and the archaic costumes, and we have no evidence to reconstruct how contemporaries would have viewed such depictions. But related works by Hemessen and Marinus do modify the bureau de change formula into religious narratives that are far less ambiguous. What is impressive about these works in relation to those seen earlier is how they reintegrate scenes of commerce into a hybrid work with religious content, as if in a throwback to Bosch’s scenes or the world landscapes with saints. Almost all of these works follow the preaching of Christ against riches in this world, and they contrast the world of the money bureau with its opposite realm of the spirit. The most frequent subject of biblical money matters by Hemessen is the Calling of St. Matthew (Matthew 9:9 ; Mark 2: 14–17; Luke 5: 27–28), an apostle who, after all, began as a publican, precisely the kind of tax collector depicted by Marinus. Christ says ‘‘Follow me,’’ and Matthew directly abandons worldly concerns to become an apostle.72 The first Hemessen example of The Calling of Matthew (Munich, 1536), contemporary with his parable image of the Prodigal Son, shows Christ almost as an intruder or afterthought, situated at the right margin within the bureau and its bustle; indeed, technical examination reveals that the figure of Christ was added, possibly by a later artist, to a preexisting genre painting in order to provide an antithesis to the claustrophobia of the office.73 In this version, Matthew is dressed not in archaizing costume but in fashionable contemporary garb. A few years later (around 1540), another pair of Hemessen versions of the subject (both in Vienna; see Figure 4.24) present an older type of Matthew that is far less contemporary and clearly dependent (especially in their flamboyant headwear) on the tax collectors of Marinus. Here the emphatic gesture of Christ is directly opposed to the publican and evokes an energetic, if surprised response from the pretty office assistant, who is at once the analog of the tavern harlots around the Prodigal Son and the equivalent of the money changer’s wife by Massys and Marinus. The figure of Christ appears directly above a money box to underscore the contrast between Mammon and God. In the background of one work, Christ appears at the feast of publicans and sinners in the great house of Matthew, in the follow-up scene, where he declares in response to a challenge from the Pharisees that ‘‘I am not come to call the righteous but sinners’’ (Matthew 9: 13). Marinus, too, produced his own Calling of Matthew (Thyssen Collection, Madrid), perhaps even earlier than the Hemessen image of 1536.74 This version uses the table of the accounting house to separate the two main figures and to emphasize the contrast between Christ and Matthew, who is already in the process of discarding his elaborate, pointed hat, possibly a marker of the Semite,75 to abandon his worldly calling. In effect, this juxtaposition returns to the spiritual message first represented by Bosch in the Death of the Usurer. The antithesis between world and spirit was also illustrated by other parables of Christ. Both Hem-

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4.24. Jan van Hemessen, The Calling of Matthew, ca. 1540. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

essen and Marinus chose such parables as extensions of their critical visions of worldly commerce. Hemessen’s Parable of the Unmerciful Servant (Figure 4.25) narrates the tale from Matthew (18: 23–35) where a king forgives the massive debt owed to him by one of his servants only to see that same servant throw a fellow servant into debtor’s prison over a much more trivial note.76 This tale, of course, exemplifies the conduct of the Lord’s Prayer, to ‘‘forgive us our debts.’’ The fatherly king is depicted dispensing judgment, supervising the eventual punishment of the unmerciful servant, which takes place in the background, like the denouement of Hemessen’s Prodigal Son. The foreground remains a table covered with coins, moneybags, and ledgers, like the bureaus of tax-collectors. This scene reminds the viewer, like the Massys Money Changer, that earthly justice is the microcosm of divine justice. Appropriately, an hourglass for vanitas occupies the background bookcase. In similar fashion, Marinus recounts the Parable of the Unjust Steward (Figure 4.26) from Luke (16: 1–13).77 The wasteful steward for a rich man actually discounted the debts owed to his rich master and was praised for his surprising act of virtue. In this case it is the figure of the steward who is portrayed

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4.25. Jan van Hemessen, Parable of the Unmerciful Servant, ca. 1548–52. The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Museum purchase.

in the foreground, contrasted with his fat, miserly master (with his own [anti-]Semitic hat), seated at another familiar table with ledgers and accounts. The steward even has Christ-like features, and he points heavenward to underscore his virtuous role, which is acted out in the background scene of negotiations, visible through the shop window. Both parables suggest that wealth and financial administration are inevitable in the new world of venture capitalism, but both use their biblical stories as examples of how spiritual values can effect deeds of virtue even in the execution of what we now call accounts receivable. Otherwise, the views of a Flemish proverb are altogether clear about the inherent evils of such activities: ‘‘A usurer, a miller, a money changer, and a tax collector are the four horsemen of Lucifer.’’78 One final Hemessen religious painting is more unequivocal in its opposition of God and mammon: Christ Expelling Money Changers from the Temple (1556).79 This event is mentioned in all four gospels (Matthew 21: 12–13; Mark 11:15–18; Luke 19: 45–46; John 2: 14–17), commanding ‘‘Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!’’ Amid the general tumult of Hemessen’s version, which seems to use the nave space of the Antwerp Cathedral as the model for its location, prominence in the foreground is accorded to overturned moneybags and tables of money changers, some of whom wear turbans rather than archaic headgear to convey their alien character. The presence in the temple of country people with their produce also evokes comparison to Pieter Aertsen’s images of peasants in market scenes combined with background religious events (see Chapter 5). Hemessen’s art reminds us anew of how much of the depiction of commercial and monetary transactions remains tied up with religious issues. Quinten Massys had made an earlier effort to ground his images in seemingly secular isolated figures, eliminating the spiritual rivalry between angels and demons

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4.26. Marinus van Reymerswaele, Parable of the Unjust Steward, ca. 1540. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

for the souls of humankind, which had been the staple of Bosch and his generation. Massys was followed in his moralizing genre works by his son Jan and by Marinus van Reymerswaele. While Hemessen was willing to follow this model in his images of licentious tavern behavior, he also grounded even that topic within the matrix of the parable of the Prodigal Son, and his own images of commerce focused exclusively on scenes of the Calling of Matthew and Christ’s parables and actions concerning money lending. Thus the combined religious and secular character of early genre pictures about commerce in Antwerp retained a hybrid character until mid-century, akin to the world landscapes with saints and Gospel narratives as well as parables. However, these pictures can be taken to be the response by Antwerp’s painters to the urban temptations they saw around them. Their overall message might well be those words of Christ, spoken at the background scene of Hemessen’s Calling of Matthew (Vienna). At that banquet, where tax-gatherers and other sinners have gathered in the company of the newly converted St. Matthew, Christ declares: ‘‘They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. . . . I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance’’ (Matthew 9: 12–13). In contrast to the isolated hermit saints atop Patinir’s painted landscapes, we have now plunged into the city, the spiritual heart of darkness.

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CHAPTER 5

KITCHENS AND MARKETS

What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. —Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.4

The most contemptible occupations which serve the appetites, such as fishmongers, butchers, cooks, pastrycooks, perfume-sellers, dancers, and all manner of gamesters. —Cicero, De Officiis, I.150

L

ike the cases of world landscapes and commercial images, scenes of markets and kitchens began as hybrid works, with attached religious subjects presented in miniature in the background. Also like the landscapes, which came to include peasant laborers and eventually began to exclude both religious and mythological scenes from their settings, the new foundations of what would later be called ‘‘still life’’ soon began to take on an increasingly secular character, a world composed exclusively of peasants hawking produce in the market or servants preparing meals in the kitchens of these large panels. Sometimes the presence of the human figures in these spaces filled with objects makes the images appear more like ‘‘genre’’ images, that is, scenes from everyday life, though the foodstuffs basically define the picture type. In the case of both markets and kitchens the inventive, originating principal images were painted by a pair of artists in Antwerp: Pieter Aertsen and his nephew Joachim Beuckelaer. The earliest of these formulations seems to be the 1551 Meat Stall (several versions; see University Museum, Uppsala, Figure 5.1; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh), painted by Pieter Aertsen, an Amsterdam native (active 1535–75) who spent the bulk of his early career in Antwerp before returning to his home town in 1559.1 This unprecedented work offers several different spaces, each with its own figure groups and behaviors. The foreground is dominated by the colorful display of a vast array of rich and fatty foods, chiefly meats and sausages as well as suet, lard, and butter, which provide a virtual screen to distract the viewer. Off to the right distance a tavern scene is visible through an open door; there, beside another hanging beef carcass, pairs of men and women are drinking at a table and cozying up to a warm fire. Between these spaces under a roof shelter a young servant fetches water in a large jug from a well; he stands amid scattered shells (perhaps suggesting aphrodisiacs)2 underneath a ‘‘land

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5.1. Pieter Aertsen, The Meat Stall, 1551. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.

for sale’’ sign. That sign provides the same kind of contemporary and topical reference as we have seen in a few of the legible documents within commercial scenes (such as Marinus’s Lawyer’s Office; see Chapter 4). Charlotte Houghton has demonstrated that this advertisement echoes the sale of land in Antwerp for commercial development by the city’s major entrepreneurial developer Gilbert van Schoonbeke.3 That land, in turn, had been condemned by the city and appropriated—in a hostile takeover— from a working hospital of St. Elizabeth, so it vividly mirrors a current conflict between religious charity and commercial real estate. In similar fashion, the pleasure- and profit-seeking right side of the picture contrasts fundamentally with the left side, where an opening reveals a small outdoor scene with figures of the Holy Family on the road, akin to the Flight into Egypt, with a group of villagers walking toward a church in the left distance. Although noticing this tiny scene through the screen of meats takes effort, the Virgin can be seen dispensing alms to a poor beggar boy. Significantly, the scene appears beyond an anomalous foreground still-life element: a pair of fish arranged in the shape of a cross. This abstemious food offers a small but distinct contrast to the indulgent edibles around it. In fact, these opposed food groups comprise the principal cuisine, respectively, of Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras) during Carnival (‘‘putting away of flesh’’) and of Lent (pretzels as well as fish), as seen in Bruegel’s Battle between Carnival and Lent (Figure 4.12) (and a lost work by Bosch; see Chapter 4). Thus Aertsen’s picture, while foregrounding the stuff of Carnival and also displaying its indulgent enactment, also affords the attentive viewer with

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5.2. Pieter Aertsen, Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha, 1552. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

a moral alternative, true charity, just as Bruegel’s Carnival and Lent features soberly dressed burghers on the Lenten side offering alms to beggars outside the church. Reindert Falkenburg and Elizabeth Honig make clear how much of the appreciation of Aertsen by learned critics later in the same century, Karel van Mander and Hadrianus Junius, focuses on the artist’s ability to render hunger-inducing foodstuffs for visual delectation. Junius compares him specifically to the ancient artist Piraeicus, known from Pliny as a rhyparographer, or painter of common and ordinary things.4 This kind of tempting visual pleasure resembles the temptations offered by the tavern scenes of Hemessen (Chapter 4), where large foreground figures entice the (male) gaze with available females of persuasively physical insistence.5 Such palpability also induces a superficial viewer to opt for the sensual over the spiritual, as Jan Emmens first argued, yet Aertsen (like some of the landscape painters discussed above) also provides the religious alternative, as a ‘‘still small voice,’’ through his background religious act.6 This moral choice of the immaterial over the material forms the core of Aertsen’s next work with foodstuffs, the first ‘‘kitchen scene,’’ the 1552 Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha (Figure 5.2). Based on a Gospel text (Luke 10: 38–42), the scene contrasts Martha’s bustling efforts at hospitality for Christ’s visit, an active life, with the contemplative path of her sister Mary, who sits listening at Christ’s feet.7 The emphatic concluding line of Christ to Martha, written in a Dutch inscription on the mantel in Aertsen’s Vienna painting, reads: ‘‘Mary has chosen the better part.’’ In the background, again in a soft focus distance, these two principals appear along with some humble companions, presumably the apostles. Martha appears clad as a kitchen worker in her guise as homemaker. As various scholars have

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noted, that very mantel setting, with its Italianate architecture derived from the printed design book of Serlio, signals a different spatial realm, in this case a historically remote and spiritually charged contrast to the oversized, close-up material objects in the foreground: moneybags, a chest full of valuable documents, crockery and a vase of flowers, a giant slab of meat, a wine canister with bread rolls, and a plate with butter (holding a carnation).8 By implication of the biblical text, all these seemingly solid objects are ephemeral compared to the spiritual reward accorded to those with true faith like Mary. Aertsen’s next, larger version of Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha (1553, now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) offers an even more assertively Italian architecture, again based on Serlio, and its religious scene appears at the center background, discrete and separate from the kitchen servants in the left foreground and the relaxing figures before a fireplace at the right. Those figures with their porridge and drink, however, seem to be the apostles, who instead of cleaving to Christ like Mary, appear to be distracted into a moment of self-indulgence; in particular, St. Peter, marked by his usual white hair and bald pate, leans back and drinks and even caresses one of the kitchen maids as he sits at the border between the flesh-filled kitchen and the spiritual space of the background courtyard.9 Prominent foodstuffs on the foreground table as well as a meticulous flower still life (marked by a prominent lily, traditional symbol of the Virgin)10 in an elaborately decorated contemporary majolica vase establish this segment of the Aertsen work as a foundational image for later market scenes as well as flower still lifes (see Chapter 10).11 Both Aertsen and his nephew Joachim Beuckelaer continued to produce variants on the Mary and Martha theme until the end of the 1560s. Aertsen’s hybrid mixtures of religious scenes with foodstuffs continue with outdoor market scenes before Gospel narratives, again rendered in the distant background with the same kind of soft, monochrome colors as in the Mary and Martha images. A pair of these pictures feature another event (John 8: 3–11), Christ and the Adulterous Woman (one, undated, in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Figure 5.3; the other, 1559, in Frankfurt), located in the distance with a framing group of peasants displaying their wares and facing outward toward the viewer in the foreground. Several scholars have noted the erotic connotations of the phallic root vegetables and even of the bird held up by a young male peasant in the foreground of the Stockholm picture.12 The implication drawn by most of these interpreters is that the peasants are conceived as ‘‘naturals,’’ closely connected, as natives, to the land and to their produce, but also types, conceptually opposed to the self-restraint and cultured behavior manifested by more sophisticated city folks. A specific instance of this outlook is the prominent presentation of a large black cock by a peasant in the foreground. Not only is this bird readily associated with sexuality in general and with the male genitals in particular, but it is also associated in Dutch with the verb vogelen, ‘‘to bird,’’ a slang phrase for intercourse.13 Along with the prominently phallic vegetables and the association of peasants with naturalness and barnyard behavior, this marker underscores the sexual enticement of the representation. The scene of the Adulterous Woman, however, was not only an image of sexual indulgence brought up for punishment. It also became a centerpiece for arguing against self-righteousness and displaying Christ’s forgiveness, as in the case of the small Pieter Bruegel grisaille panel, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (1565; Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London).14 Honig uses this set of associated values to argue for a more tolerant outlook towards these vulgar peasants, or at least to claim an undermining by Aertsen of any moral superiority on the part of the viewer.

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5.3. Pieter Aertsen, Christ and the Adulterous Woman, ca. 1557. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Foto Nationalmuseum

Equally noteworthy, however, is Aertsen’s distinct pictorial construction of two contrasting worlds of religion and the market.15 The foreground peasants are depicted with forceful plasticity and rich color, like their produce, whereas the background image of the Gospel narrative is presented in soft focus and muted colors, with figures who are lankier, even dematerialized in comparison. Their costumes are also differentiated into contemporary modes for the peasants and ‘‘historical’’ or ‘‘antique’’ representation of the religious figures. These peasants, while sober in demeanor, remain coarse in feature, and many of them look outward at the viewer, pointedly turning away from the detached time and space of the scene with Christ. They and their produce, as well as their associations with fecundity and sexuality, offer a frieze of desire (as Honig argues), beyond which a viewer’s gaze must pass in order to discern the religious message of the Gospel narrative. This is the same inversion of priorities already seen in Aertsen for the Meat Stall and the Mary and Martha scenes. It is also an inversion practiced by Bosch, by Lucas van Leyden, and by many of the landscape painters discussed earlier (Chapter 3), in whose works the discovery of religious scenes and moral significance requires vigilant attention to marginal or distant details on the part of the pious beholder.16 Here the very market and its linked peasant staff become associated with the material world, past whose literalness a viewer must penetrate to discover deeper concerns and true moral understanding, just as in this narrative scene Christ surpasses the literal legalisms of the Pharisees. Aertsen thus uses inverted images to pose moral impasses and dilemmas for a viewer, while only hinting at their transcendence and spiritual resolution. These works were also reinforced by similar formulations by Aertsen’s nephew Joachim Beuckelaer

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5.4. Joachim Beuckelaer, Market Scene with Ecce Homo, 1561. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Foto Nationalmuseum.

(active 1560-ca. 1574), usually depicting Christ Presented to the People (Ecce Homo; John 19: 1–15) instead of the Adulterous Woman as the background religious subject juxtaposed to the peasants and their wares in the foreground marketplace. Aertsen made an earlier, more conventional version of this same subject, a small panel in Rotterdam (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), which depicts the event as a civic judicial process in front of a city hall with exclusively biblical figures in turbans and exotic dress, following a tradition extending back to Bosch.17 He also produced an image that survives only in its lower, market fragment (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), revealing only the feet of the figures of Pilate, Christ, and the other judicial officials while focusing on a bustling display of food carts and baskets. Here the peasants appear in the same space and scale as the Gospel scene, and they are spatially more integrated with the larger scene. Their negative valence can be gleaned partially by the presence of a quack doctor among the vendors, an image of false appearances and deception that casts light on the humble appearance and seeming insignificance of Christ before the people, who will mistakenly judge against him.18 Beuckelaer produced seven Ecce Homo paintings between 1561 and 1570, and his architecture deliberately incorporated Serlian vocabulary, specifically stage sets as well as obelisks (some with ‘‘hieroglyphs’’), for his exterior settings (see Figure 5.4).19 The overall appearance of these highly artificial structures resembles theatrical productions, including the formal presentation of allegories on the occa-

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sion of state progresses, such as the 1549 Joyous Entry of Prince Philip II into Antwerp.20 Thus these background localities had clear associations with Antwerp public culture, including its guild (shared with the painters) of rhetoricians, or rederijkers, as well as with the spaces of city halls where justice was dispensed to the public. In addition, city squares formed the site of church-sponsored religious dramas, so the Ecce Homo scene also could be taken to be a modern, theatrical presentation. Beuckelaer’s much more crowded markets provide a large population of smaller-scale peasants, again offering both poultry and vegetables as in the Adulterous Woman scenes by Aertsen. Just as these Ecce Homo scenes incorporate both theater and justice components from the contemporary city, Gospel scenes and spaces in the background now blend with the overall market setting, in an ambiguous blend of the modern and the historical, of secular and sacred. Beuckelaer’s hybrid mixture is even more thorough than Aertsen’s. Honig rightly considers the root issue of these Beuckelaer paintings to be judgment itself. These Ecce Homo images thus complement the Aertsen Adulterous Woman pictures. Christ’s clemency and toleration in the one case contrast with pharisaical rigidity of justice; in the Ecce Homo Pilate’s potential clemency is rejected by the very people who comprise the marketplace, whose venality and baseness are presented explicitly, either in sexual availability (the very crime of the adulteress) or else in deceptive presentation, such as quack nostrums. In this respect Honig’s detailed cultural observations offer telling interpretive points. She notes that the vendors themselves offer a hybrid identity—neither actual farming peasants nor urban citizen vendors, who were members of the regulated guilds of meat and fish or vegetable sellers, but rather occasional visitors to the city, ‘‘outsiders’’ (buitenlieden) from the margins of the city proper, who were only allowed to offer their wares on certain ‘‘week market’’ days.21 Certainly the kinds of enmity chiefly reserved for commodity speculators and profiteers, even within the city guilds, could safely be discharged upon such figures, just as similar feelings had been generated around the earlier money changer images by Massys and Marinus (Chapter 4) and their implied analogy between just weights and divine judgment.22 Moreover, Christ’s own identity is also hybrid—both fully human and Son of God, a frail and broken man who is also all-powerful. Christ is often presented frontally in Beuckelaer Ecce Homo paintings, as if the viewer too were called upon to judge his fate. It would be easy to mistake the ultimate, spiritual significance of such a figure by attending only to his humble and humiliated appearance. Thus judgment remains the central thematic concern of the Beuckelaer Ecce Homo scenes, as they engage the fraught issue of economic exchange on the marketplace and the vanishing tradition of the earlier theory of the ‘‘just price,’’ or appropriate, inherent value of goods.23 These issues get admixed and willfully confounded with a more fundamental choice between deceptive appearances and ultimate (i.e., spiritual) values. Peasant vendors clearly still fall on the far side of this moral divide of social justice. They simultaneously proffer tempting and attractive goods for profit yet turn their backs on the one truly significant, ultimate judgment. Honig argues that this admixture of the modern distinction between sacred and secular means that Beuckelaer’s viewers could not have seen a dichotomy between the peasants and the religious spheres. It is clear that the sharper contrasts of Aertsen’s representations have been blurred afterward by Beuckelaer; however, that very hybridity only points more clearly to the problematic confusion between appearances and essentials. This means that the viewer must exercise a nicer judgment than the characters

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5.5. Joachim Beuckelaer, The Miraculous Draft of Fishes, 1563. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

within the picture, attending to the background with the Gospel scene and its deeper significance. The moment of the delicate balance between spiritual contemplation and serious worldly activity, as in Massys’s 1514 Money Changer and His Wife (Figure 4.17) lies a half-century in the past. That period has interposed a series of harsh and unambiguous grotesque images of sinful tax-collectors and other money handlers, including the clear choice posed by Hemessen in particular, in the Calling of Matthew as well as Christ Expelling Money Changers from the Temple. Aertsen’s own inverted, hybrid images of meat stalls and kitchens contrast with their background religious subjects. While choice may still be open to the peasant vendors situated in the ambiguously articulated town centers of Beuckelaer, their licentious and profiteering actions or even their preoccupation with their work routines clearly distract them from making the right decision in the fundamental matter of judging the fate of Christ. As if to confirm this reading of the Beuckelaer Ecce Homo scenes, the artist also produced a scene of miracles on the Sea of Galilee with peasant fishermen in the foreground (1563; Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Figure 5.5).24 The depicted narratives stem from John (21: 1–24) and occur after the Resurrection. Both the miraculous draft of fishes and Peter’s attempt to walk toward Christ on shore appear in the background, while ordinary and daily routines by fishermen, the marine equivalent of peasants, fill the foreground. While again the figures are relatively consistent in scale and part of a unified landscape space, the same pictorial distinctions pertain between foreground density of figures and colors and background sparseness of holy figures in soft focus (reinforced in this picture by a shadow that gives way to light at the very edge of the religious scene). There is less direct address outward to the viewer by these fisher-folk, but again they are so preoccupied with their labors that they fail to note the miraculous events—including a miracle in the same sphere of activity, net fishing—that unfold in the distance. Certainly this is a more readily legible picture than Aertsen’s Meat Stall, whose religious scene

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is obscure in its corner location as well as its meaning, and these activities are more related to each other than directly contrasted; however, it too remains a hybrid scene, which still mixes religious narrative with daily activities and obliges a viewer to distinguish between them.25 Both Aertsen and Beuckelaer developed images that increasingly detached the voluptuary world of produce from the religious component of their earlier hybrid images. Resulting works depict either kitchens or markets as well as the figures associated with those activities, more often women than men. One of the first of these images, a vertical format piece that seems to be an excerpt from the crowded kitchen of the Mary and Martha images, is a monumental single figure, again before a Serlian fireplace, Aertsen’s 1559 Cook (Musee´s Royaux, Brussels; Figure 5.6).26 Here we see a woman depicted with all the solidity and vivid color of Aertsen’s kitchen maids. She holds before her the bounty of both meat stalls and produce markets in the form of poultry and meat as well as cabbages and root vegetables. Her oblique glance shows her awareness of the viewer but deflects a direct visual encounter. By implication, this is an image of a servant who works for someone quite wealthy, capable of mounting such a feast. Class privilege for a viewer (and for the possessor of such a picture) is suggested by the depiction of this figure, closely associated with such abundance and such a formal and sturdy mantel (again ornamented with Serlian details), yet there is no suggestion of license or vice in this serious image (except perhaps behind her back, the ceramic crock, which would have contained beer). By its very size and presence this picture commands attention and respect. Falkenburg has suggested about this painting that it corresponds to a contemporary rhetorical trope, best exemplified by Erasmus’s satirical text The Praise of Folly (ca. 1511), known as the ‘‘paradoxical encomium.’’27 He notes that at this moment of pictorial invention there was not yet any codified secular pictorial tradition. He contends further that in The Cook Aertsen practices an experimental form of innovation by attending to figures previously confined at the margins of society as well as restricted to the literal margins of serious art-making, such as the marginal drolleries at the bottoms of pages in illuminated manuscripts, and then elevating them to the same kind of pictorial status and dignity accorded to religious figures.28 He underscores the paradox and tension built into the large-scale and imposing representation of such a socially humble figure. If the image presents a figure from a lower class than the presumed viewer from a prosperous urban elite, this kitchen figure nonetheless conveys the power of both physical presence and virtuoso illusionism. Instead of remaining a marginal gloss or detail in dialectic with a principal scene or main narrative figure, as was the case in the Mary and Martha representations by Aertsen and Beuckelaer, The Cook now can stand independently as a paragon of domestic virtue like Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) from a century later, whose care at her task of pouring milk resembles the fastidious weighing of coins by Massys’s Money Changer.29 We also recall in this context that Martha’s energetic domesticity is not a negation of Mary’s virtuous spirituality, but that ‘‘Mary has chosen the better part.’’ In addition to being a class-specific figure assigned to a kitchen role in the home of a rich man (and woman, who would surely not herself perform this role of kitchen maid), this Cook stands tall as a dignified and serious representative of work itself. In this respect, The Cook differs utterly from the eroticized, dull-witted cast of characters who comprise Aertsen’s market vendors. She is singled out for particular attention, in addition to the literary trope of the kitchen maid (maerte, a designation that derives from the biblical Martha) as an object of

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5.6. Pieter Aertsen, The Cook, 1559. Muse´es Royaux, Brussels. Foto Marburg/Art Resource.

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lust and of the senses.30 This particular picture, with its vertical format and three-quarter length pose redolent of ambitious portrait conventions, remains an exceptional anomaly in kitchen scenes, a potentially positive experiment that was never repeated (except in a Beuckelaer imitation) and was only really taken up a full century later in the exemplary image, Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid. How anomalous this kind of dignity for a kitchen maid could be is revealed by the later images of maids and markets, where the connotations (sometimes explicit denotations) remain chiefly erotic and sensory, with maids often associated, like peasants, with laziness and lust.31 In fact, seventeenth-century Dutch images of the maidservant as consumer, shopping in the marketplace, even link the two subaltern groups.32 Honig has laid out a sequence of pictures by Aertsen that chart a progression of presentation of produce by rural producers, such as a life-sized 1562 Four Peasants with Market Goods (Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn), dominated by large, serious, but lounging males preparing a lunch (akin to his 1561 Peasant in a Niche [Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest], who bears a large wooden barrel on his head).33 Later Aertsen works and most of the later paintings by Beuckelaer feature a greater profusion of foodstuffs (including fish) in the market presentation, along with a more prominent foregrounding of peasant females immersed within these inanimate items: Aertsen’s Peasants with Market Goods (1560s, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne; extended in Beuckelaer’s Vegetable Market—1567, Antwerp and 1569, Ghent) as well as Beuckelaer’s two images of solo females, Produce Seller (1563, Valenciennes; 1564, Kassel; echoed by Aertsen’s 1567 Berlin Produce Seller, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Figure 5.7). Here the viewer is brought quite close to the wall of goods as well as to their woman vendor, whose own fecundity and sexual availability are powerfully suggested by objectifying her amid these fruits and roots. A secondary scene in the background of the Berlin picture (also in Aertsen’s Valenciennes painting) underscores this suggestion of eroticism by showing a similar female being seduced by a male companion.34 Aertsen’s Berlin painting alludes to the contrasting seasons of license and control, Carnival and Lent, through the presence of waffles and a single fish (recall the items in his Meat Stall; Figure 5.1) as well as some palm leaves, redolent of the end of the Lenten period before Easter. Beuckelaer also produced several images of fish stalls, often with background religious scenes, but occasionally completely separated from any additional narrative or reference. A 1570 Fish Market (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Figure 5.8) unfolds before a distant, barely visible scene of the Ecce Homo; unlike the artist’s 1561 version of Christ Presented to the People in the public square, this is truly an image of a market scene with an Ecce Homo instead of the reverse. A pair of similar paintings (at the Capodimonte Museum, Naples) also feature fish stalls, one with Christ Appearing to the Apostles on the Sea of Tiberias (1570), the other (1569) without any evident religious scene. Here the vendors are both male and female, and the abundance of the sea is still presented forthrightly to the viewer, with less emphasis on the erotic than in the market scenes with poultry or vegetables.35 Increasingly Beuckelaer’s work focuses on the everyday rather than on the hybrid image, juxtaposing market scenes with religious scenes. A set of four images (1569–70; now in Ghent; a second version is in the National Gallery, London) include three works with religious subjects (Fish Market with Christ appearing to the Apostles; Vegetable Market with the Flight into Egypt; Kitchen with Mary and Martha) as well as one work, a poultry market, without any evident religious backdrop (though its erotic scene in the center background has been associated with the Prodigal Son).36 In this case the religious scenes now connect more to the established

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5.7. Pieter Aertsen, Produce Seller, 1567. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

foreground sites than to each other, and the balance of interest has clearly shifted toward a prime consideration of the represented comestibles and of the behavior of the vendor figures rather than a recognition of the holy figures and an alternative path of the spiritual. Markets and kitchens now exist as picture types in their own right—as sites of quotidian food and epicurean game, as workplaces either erotically enticing or industriously serious. Recent research into the technique underlying Beuckelaer’s canvases reveals how often the artist recycled compositions of his produce from one image to the next, employing patterns of clustered items in the form of tracings to recompose his pictures with apparent variety.37 This kind of shortcutting in both the composition and completion of his large and dense forms points to the artist’s accommodations to production efficiency, enabling him to cut costs in time and effort. So does the increasing choice of

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5.8. Joachim Beuckelaer, Fish Market with Ecce Homo, 1570. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Foto Nationalmuseum.

canvas rather than traditional panel as a support, especially on this large scale, though this decision might also have facilitated his export of pictures. Several versions of Beuckelaer compositions are extant, including the larger, later works. Honig has also pointed out how many imitations or workshop variants on Beuckelaer’s inventions appeared on the art market around the time of his death, attesting to the new popularity in the Antwerp art market of his market scenes, particularly with a heightened tone of eroticism for the large figures.38 Taken together, these production methods and imitations suggest that Beuckelaer achieved a certain success and recognition in the marketplace in the latter years of his short career and that his innovations of production were an accommodation (perhaps with the assistance of a substantial workshop) to increased demand. Though his complaints about the low prices and undervalued quality of Beuckelaer during his lifetime can quite properly be discounted as rhetorical claims for the general value of art, Karel van Mander reports that Beuckelaer’s canvases never brought decent prices and thus forced the artist to collaborate in the production of artworks within other people’s studios.39 Van Mander also provides additional evidence that Beuckelaer enjoyed the patronage of wealthy, even aristocratic and foreign clients, and the large four-part series in both Ghent and London, though not a unique cycle, suggests a prosperous commission.40 The artist (who died by sometime in 1574) did produce many of his large

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dated market scenes, usually with reduced attention to religious subjects, during a turbulent political and economic decade in Antwerp between the 1566 iconoclastic destruction of religious images and the brutal sack of the city in 1576 by unpaid soldiers, the so-called ‘‘Spanish Fury.’’ What does remain clear from the overall contribution of Aertsen and Beuckelaer during the third quarter of the sixteenth century is how much their work developed together. From hybrid beginning images with religious scenes in the background of foreground kitchens and markets, they eventually concentrated their focus on the exclusive presentation of working people in either location. By the end of the 1560s, Aertsen and, chiefly, Beuckelaer had developed a repeated formula of imagery that conflated figures with their produce goods at market as fully as Marinus’s moneymen befitted their countinghouses. These images would be readily imitated by followers in the next generation and eventually would fuel the category of the game piece in both Flanders and Holland during the seventeenth century.41 When these market and kitchen images are compared to the money images discussed in Chapter 4, they indicate a generational shift as well as a shift in content of images relating to Antwerp commerce. Honig argues that temptation and desire as well as judgment are issues at stake in the market scenes, which shows how much such scenes emerge from the coin-filled tables of the prior generation and from combinations of lust and avarice such as Massys’s Ill-Matched Pair (Figure 4.14). The Mary and Martha narrative directly thematizes the choice between worldly and spiritual activities, just as did Massys’s original 1514 Money Changer (Figure 4.19). What has not yet been pointed out, probably because of the distinctive themes and character of their images, is how much Aertsen and Beuckelaer owe to the achievement of the previous generation, particularly Jan van Hemessen. Their large-scale, self-indulgent figure types in the marketplace and even in the carousing corners of the kitchen are as fully engaged in their settings as the pleasure-seekers of Hemessen’s Prodigal Son (1536; Figure 4.15) and tavern scenes or the entourage left behind in his Calling of Matthew (Figure 4.24). There, too, desire and the choices between material and spiritual concerns had energized the activities of the depicted figures, and Hemessen also presented religious narratives within the format of hybrid works, distracting the gaze while placing the interpretive burden and moral conclusions squarely in the eye of the beholder. What has changed in Antwerp painting is that the site of the dilemma has been displaced from the countinghouse and the tavern to the marketplace and the kitchen. Both artistic categories use pictorial types to present an ethical situation, displaced away from the actual contemporary urban bourgeois who is the viewer of either kind of image, although the market and kitchen scenes offer more plausible, less compromising situations. But what has been retained in both cases is the consistent demand of such pictures on the viewer for discernment and for moral decision-making. Pieter Bruegel reprises this shared concern in his early graphic work, particularly the drawing design and engraving of ‘‘Everyman,’’ Elck (1558; Figure 5.9).42 This work incorporates issues of both money and the marketplace (here for goods rather than produce) and the problem of self-knowledge. A series of identically garbed old men, each labeled Elck, or ‘‘Everyman,’’ are busy delving with lanterns into barrels, baskets, and bushels of merchandise; there is also a tug-of-war between two of these figures. The Latin text explains the concept of the allegory: ‘‘No one does not seek his own advantage everywhere, no one does not seek himself in all that he does, no one does not look everywhere for private gain. This one pulls, that one pulls, all have the same love of possession.’’ Clearly worldly goods are not the pathway to true self-knowledge. In the distant background, at the site usually occupied by

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5.9. Pieter van der Heyden, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Elck (Everyman), ca. 1558.

a reversing religious scene in the inverted images of Aertsen and Beuckelaer, there is indeed a parish church in a village, toward which a weary Elck figure drags himself, but he also visits a major military encampment with infantry pikes as profuse as a forest thicket (and a leafless tree separates the two spaces). Thus he encounters the twin institutions of church and state as a lone individual and only as an outsider. The interpretation of this image underscores the vanity of seeking self-knowledge through material goods. For one thing, the old Elck vainly seeks his identity and meaning with a lantern in the daylight. His use of spectacles points to his shortsightedness and other inadequacies of either delusion or stupidity. He is also accompanied by another allegorical figure, Nobody, who is depicted as a foppish fool in a framed picture next to an extinguished candle (equally useless in comparison to the lantern by daylight) at the top center of the image. This is again paradox of the kind adduced by Falkenburg but now in the realm of allegory.43 The picture shows Nobody in the midst of cluttered objects, including a lute and toys as well as a possible palette in the corner, but he gazes only at his own face in a mirror rather than rummaging through these items. The caption of this image-within-an-image reads, ‘‘Nobody

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knows himself,’’ which is both literal truth as he gazes into the mirror but also a maxim applicable to the drawing/print as a whole. The objects examined by Elck include accessories of games such as dice, a chessboard, and cards, as well as essential tools of labor such as trowels, shears, and ax. We also see a pair of scales, the very emblem of fairness and probity in Massys, plus a possible suggestion of eventual divine Judgment (cf. Vermeer’s Woman Balancing Scales).44 Another round hand mirror, without any glass, hence useless for any self-knowledge, lies on the ground at the lower center of the print. Beside it under the title figure appears a large orb with cross, the usual image of Christian dominion and universalism, which also has a visible crack at its bottom. This is a flawed world, filled with cupidity as well as delusion. If the city remained the nexus of all commerce, the center of all spaces was its market square, usually beside the main church. This is precisely the place that Pieter Bruegel used for the location of his allegory, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559; Figure 4.12), though this is a conceptual image, with a tavern at left opposed to a church site across the square at the right. What is noteworthy about this picture is that it depicts very little of the ordinary daily marketing of goods or produce, but focuses instead on the sale of foodstuffs appropriate to of the opposed seasons. Behind the fat male allegory of Carnival, who sits on a large wine barrel and holds a long spit skewered with fatty meats (like Aertsen’s Cook),45 we see a woman in the square making festive waffles over an open fire made of twigs. Carnival is accompanied by gamblers and by masked figures making noise rather than music on improvised instruments (such as the ‘‘rommel-pot,’’ a crock topped with a tightly stretched pig bladder).46 On the opposite side of the picture, the gaunt and monastically clad female(?) figure of Lent sits on a triangular church chair (carried by her followers in the background) draped with onions and holds both a prayerbook and a twig scourge. Above her, another group of women at an open table sort and slice fish for sale (that favorite subject of Beuckelaer) for use during the meatless season, while a woman with vegetables in her basket draws water from the well, the minimal sustenance of Lent. Other foods among the followers of each personification mark the contrasts between the seasons: waffles, butter, and eggs plus tavern-based carousing on the side of Carnival; pretzels, plain bread, and mussels alongside the austere Lent. Little of the produce to be found in everyday market scenes is seen here—in part because its own harvest season will be later, during summer (as we learn from Bruegel’s Months cycle, especially the Haymaking in Prague and the Wheat Harvest in New York). Also important is how this picture incorporates so many activities and figures (including processions of both lepers and beggars) from a variety of moments in the calendar, including plays and bonfires from Epiphany to winter’s end as well as spring cleaning and alms-giving to the blind and the halt.47 At complex space in the very center of the image a fool in motley (like the figure of Nobody in Elck), again carries a torch in daylight. He walks before a pair of sober and pious pilgrims (like the figure of Everyman, the woman holds her lamp in reserve). Each one pursues his own part of the whole but misses the point of these complementary, even dialectical oppositions: feasting versus fasting, shrovetide versus shriving, burlesque theatricality versus sober spirituality. Seen from an Olympian height, this vast painted array of nonmercantile activities confronts the viewer with contrasting if mutually defining and equally unreal choices, almost as bewildering and material as the commodities pursued by Elck. If the Battle Between Carnival and Lent can only result in a draw, its location is in the urban space of the marketplace—as well as in the soul of its urban burgher, where the personal conflict takes place.48

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L AB OR A ND L EI S UR E The Peasant

If you look for manners of everyday life, there is no race more open to humanity and kindness, or less given to wildness or ferocious behavior. It is a straightforward nature, without treachery or deceit, and not prone to any serious vices, [so much as] to pleasure, especially of feasting. —Erasmus, Adages

Who isn’t sickened by the feast and peasant kermis? All they do is guzzel, swil and get bloated.’’ —Bredero, Boertigh amoreus

E

xamination of landscape images from the early sixteenth century showed—after about half a century of imagery with religious (sometimes mythological) narratives in these expanded-setting easel paintings and prints—that landscapes with peasants were introduced shortly after midcentury. In similar fashion, we have seen how pictures with moral concerns, first addressed in an urban context of tavern scenes and countinghouses, shifted increasingly after mid-century into a marketplace setting dominated by peasant produce vendors. Perhaps not surprisingly, Pieter Aertsen, who principally introduced the figures of peasant vendors into hybrid religious subjects (Chapter 5), also produced some of the first images of peasant celebrations shortly after mid-century. But the artist who was ever afterwards most associated with peasant images—and most widely imitated for those peasant subjects— was Pieter Bruegel the Elder.1 Aertsen’s earliest dated image of peasants in the countryside is Village Festival (1550; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Figure 6.1), a work that shows a group of three close-up large figures around a foreground table with a variety of other figures and tables at either side. Above, a secondary space made of brick reveals a small scene with indulging figures, clearly structured like the 1551 Meat Stall. In fact, the sensual indulgence at table of this image resembles the tavern scenes with backgrounds by Hemessen, his 1536 Brussels Prodigal Son (Figure 4.15) as well as his two tavern scenes (Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, Figure 4.16; 1543, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford).2 Indeed, as we shall see below, the connection between peasants and (rural) taverns is a close one. An overall broad horizontal format (the same kind

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6.1. Pieter Aertsen, Village Festival, 1550. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

regularly supplied for marketplace subjects a decade later by Beuckelaer and for his own kitchenlike Tavern Scene, Antwerp, 1563)3 suggests the conventions of landscape and the close identification of these figure types with their surroundings. These peasant figures are inelegant, the men even coarse-featured and dull-witted in appearance but without the grotesqueness so evident in the money changers of Marinus van Reymerswaele. However, their sensual indulgence is as clearly marked as the Allegory of Luxury by Bosch (Figure 4.4) half a century earlier. Their principal activities are eating and drinking, and provisions for a large crowd are being readied—a pair of men at left stir and serve from a large cauldron of cereal, while the foreground table is fully set with both glasses and platters. The old man at left center is drinking from a large jug rather than the more elegant (and small) glass vessels set before him at the outdoor table. Like Hemessen’s cat in the tavern a greedy dog in the lower left corner devours leftovers from a used bowl on the ground. Overtly erotic gestures abound, such as a hand in the crotch of his female companion by the peasant figure (holding his own large jug) in the center of the image or by the better dressed couple on the ground behind them in the shadowy middle distance. Not all these figures are dressed like peasants. Among a row of dancers to a bagpipe (a peasant instrument)4 at the right distance and the figures in the brick structure are a pair of elegantly dressed (gentle)men, akin to the figures in Hemessen’s taverns, who appear to join the general carousing. One of them even wears the sword of privilege. Like the foreground empty table, these figures seem to offer an invitation for the more prosperous urban viewer of such a picture to imagine himself within it. Since both the site and the impetus for such festivity seems to be a rural village of peasants, these men are marked as visitors, if not strangers. Clearly the license of the countryside can be a potentially tempting outlet for social outings, and the interior darkness of the urban tavern of Hemessen has been fully displaced to the open outdoors of the countryside by Aertsen. Aertsen produced several other images of peasant festivity during the 1550s, which are more overtly

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6.2. Pieter Aertsen, Peasant Company, 1556. Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

animated and erotic in their character. His 1556 Peasant Company (Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp; Figure 6.2) presents a quartet of full-length peasant figures inside a rural interior that even more closely suggests Hemessen’s taverns.5 Here the same weathered older man with his drinking jug reappears, but in the Antwerp picture he closely examines its empty condition with a look of disappointment. Beside him is another young couple, but this active young woman seems to climb off the lap of a complacent youth with his arm around her and to nudge the thigh and the prominently phallic dagger in the adjacent lap of the old man. A wary child, completes the quartet. He wears a colored woodcut as a crown, like the festive Epiphany crowns shown in Bruegel paintings (Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 1559, Figure 4.12, lower left; and The Dark Day, 1565, lower right). Once more a large pot is heating in the hearth, but there are other food items on the set table and strewn along the floor, including empty mussel shells, possibly associated (like oysters) with aphrodisiacs. An explicit clustering of sexually suggestive root vegetables with a pair of bread loaves appears in front of a vaginal jug.6 A large foreground pot with batter for festive waffles or pancakes of Carnival is opposed by the bound twigs that with mussels are a staple of Lent in Bruegel’s Carnival and Lent. Indeed, the caged bird out front often signals the presence of a bordello, whether in Bosch’s tondo of the Wanderer (Figure 4.11) or in Hemessen’s Loose Company (Figure 4.16), whose interior makes the identification explicit.7 And hanging up behind the erotic couple is the usual tool of virtuous cottage industry of women, a spinning frame

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6.3. Pieter Aertsen, Egg Dance, 1552. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Foto Marburg/Art Resource.

or ‘‘niddy-noddy,’’ put aside for the indulgence taking place instead. Even with the license granted by Carnival feasting, this is still a more enacted form of Luxuria, the sin of overindulgence of appetites, and its tone is more confrontational and explicit as a counterexample for the viewer. To reinforce this message and to pose a choice, Aertsen positions a secondary scene outside the doorway in the right distance (akin to the alternative world of religious scenery in his hybrid kitchen and market scenes; see Chapter 5). There two lankier and more dignified, but still affectionate couples walk past the peasant interior, pausing on the threshold as if to decide whether or not to join the revelers inside. They echo the amours of the interior rather than contrasting with such behavior. This same device of choice reappears in the doorway of Aertsen’s 1552 Egg Dance (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Figure 6.3), as a couple with their young child peer into the peasant interior.8 Here the emphasis focuses on a rustic folk dance (in the midst of more foodstuffs, leeks and eggs, on the floor),9 a motif particularly strong in German graphics of peasants from earlier in the sixteenth century (see below), and once more the instrument is a bagpipe. For this work the upraised jug is held by a young man, apparently singing, who lifts his drink with one hand while fondling the breast of his female companion with the other. Once more the cast of characters is consistent in facial types, dress, and demeanor. In Aertsen’s 1560 Interior with Pancake Eaters (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) large, half-length figures before a hearth are indulging in the food of festivity as well as visible drinking jugs, though boisterous eroticism is more muted.10 Of all Aertsen’s images of peasants, this one shows the most restrained behavior and monumentality, even while its figures and setting remain entirely rustic and corporeal, recalling the sturdy Cook (1559; Figure 5.7). A final Aertsen image shows a village kermis with more of the collective breadth that the artist usually assigned to his hybrid religious scenes in markets. His Return from the Procession (ca. 1550; Muse´es Royaux, Brussels), later echoed by a Beucklaer composition, Village Fair (1563; Hermitage, St.

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6.4. Albrecht Du¨rer engravings. Left: Peasants Dancing, 1514 (B. 90); right: The Bagpiper (1514, B. 91). Muse´e du Petit-Palais, Paris. Giraudon/Art Resource.

Petersburg), shows a variety of figure types, from roadside beggars to well-dressed urban visitors who have come for a day in the countryside (even by wagon).11 Near the church in the distance, religious observances with banners and torches, as well as pennants for individuals, mark the saint’s day that is the occasion for the kermis (kerk-mass or church mass day). Dancing is visible in the center, near market stalls that provide momentary opportunities for purchases on this ‘‘day off.’’ Beuckelaer’s work eliminates the religious procession and emphasizes the amorous pairing-off of couples and more market stalls. But both of these works offer a more decorous notion of village life and peasant conduct, even on a special day of festivity. Aertsen’s peasant pictures thus span the full range of representations of these rural figures, from a body-centered naturalness of gluttony, eroticism, and instincts to a hardy yet dignified work ethic, defined by intense labor on the very land with which they are so readily identified. In most early sixteenth-century images, particularly German graphics from the era of Albrecht Du¨rer, peasants were objects of urban bourgeois disdain, part of a pictorial genre that Hans Raupp defines comprehensively as a genus satiricum.12 For example, Du¨rer’s mature engravings depicted peasants as stout, bumbling, coarse-featured figures, such as a couple at market (1519, B. 89) or in abandoned dance (1514, B. 90; also a Bagpiper, 1514, B. 91; Figure 6.4); these followed upon some earlier experiments with the same subjects, a Cook and His Wife (ca. 1496, B. 84) and Three Peasants in Conversation (ca. 1497, B. 86). Large multiblock woodcuts in Nuremberg after Du¨rer pointedly show peasants at festivities as objects of satire, indulgent and excessive vulgarians—drunkenly vomiting, openly shitting (at a time when

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disciplined public manners were becoming increasingly important),13 and wildly dancing. Even German sculptures represented peasants, but more in the character of amiable country visitors to the city, most notably in the Nuremberg Goose Bearer Fountain (ca. 1540), originally in the central fruit market by the Frauenkirche.14 Social distinction and hierarchy lay at the foundations of all peasant depictions, marking most peasant representations in art as objects of social distance, even if peasants could sometimes be inverted from their usual notion of inferiority to be made into paragons, a rural kind of ‘‘noble savage.’’15 Peasants were literally marginal figures in late medieval decorative arts, especially in their role as drolleries at the margins of medieval manuscripts. To make them the center of attention for prints and then paintings (even of tapestries during the fifteenth century) was a major, self-conscious innovation of artistic content, which implied the use of both the usual peasant subjects and activities as well as their characteristic forms of grotesque and inelegant appearance. While even a great and ambitiously varied artists such as Albrecht Du¨rer, could show both versatility and virtuosity even in his images of humble peasants (including images of peasants in the marginal drawings he made in a prayer book for the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I),16 it is precisely that wide-ranging interest in capturing the fullness of all of humanity and nature that leads him to such considerations. In the Netherlands, isolated themes of peasants also began to appear more frequently in prints, though, as Raupp has noted, background figures in larger Bosch scenes often feature images of peasant follies, such as shepherds neglecting their work and dancing to the music of a bagpiper on the exterior scene of the Hay Wain Triptych, the Wanderer (Figure 4.10), or the drunken fight outside a country tavern to exemplify Anger in the Seven Deadly Sins tabletop (Figure 4.1).17 An isolated peasant subject, with erotic undertones, identifying these earthy figures with their rural environment, appears in Lucas van Leyden’s 1510 engraving The Milkmaid.18 But the first larger body of peasant images in Netherlandish prints, often conflating peasants with cripples and beggars, was produced just before the first paintings by Aertsen by Cornelis Matsys, son of the early genre painter Quinten Massys.19 The model for his twelve engravings, The Beggars’ Dance (1539), comes from a very recent engraved series, Peasants’ Dance (1537) by Hans Sebald Beham; another pair of prints, Beggars’ Mealtime and The Strife Between Beggars and Beggar-Women (1539), derive in turn from peasant equivalents by Beham.20 Clearly the influence was rapid and powerful. German engravings directly prompted Flemish engravings, with modifications of the subject to utilize crippled beggars as the equivalent offenders in their raucous and excessive behavior. Cornelis Matsys did produce one print of peasants in a tavern, which embodies the ‘‘loose company’’ (Figure 6.5) well sketched for such locations by Konrad Renger and presented in van Hemessen paintings (see Chapter 4).21 It features a pair of female pickpockets at left, a fool in motley, and a pair of lustful peasants entertaining tavern wenches at table and getting fleeced (earlier commentators saw here a scene from the Prodigal Son in the tavern, akin to Hemessen’s 1536 Brussels painting; Figure 4.15). One other Matsys print (Figure 6.6), again based on Sebald Beham, shows three peasants in dialogue over what Jan van der Stock calls Allegory of Excess (1549).22 Trapped in infidelity, a peasant is placing eggs (synecdoche for his sexual favors) from his market basket into the lap of one woman, who in turn grabs the handle of his basket, while the other one, observing from above, laments, ‘‘My husband lays his eggs / In the nest of another and leaves me unrequited.’’ Two further prints, engraved by Frans Huys after Cornelis Matsys designs and published after his

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6.5. Cornelis Matsys, Loose Company, engraving, 1539.

death, overlap more closely with the peasant paintings of Pieter Aertsen.23 The first of these (1558) features an egg dance in front of a tavern. Boschian elements like a small dog with a fool’s cap and a burning building in the background set a tone of moral censure, and the facial features of these older peasant figures are unattractive. This is an image with relatively little suggestion of movement, considering the dance subject, though its principal purpose seems to be a demonstration of their laziness and folly. A companion image shows the Holy Family denied place at an inn in a country village by a group of even more indolent and unattractive peasants. A final work by Cornelis Matsys engraved by Frans Huys, The Lute Tuner (Figure 6.7) uses the uterine shape of the instrument to suggest that the male’s stringing and playing of it for his old (with cane) female visitor serves as a metaphor of a sexual act.24 The layout of this image comes quite close to formulations by Aertsen, with which it is surely contemporary. It shows a hearth with a steaming cauldron, decorated on the mantel above by a frieze of pasted engravings, based on the Peasant Dance by Hans Sebald Beham, already noted as a formative influence on Matsys. A view out the doorway shows a half-timbered country house; at the doorway another older woman, wearing an eyepatch but escorting a small child with a stick horse, turns up with another stringless lute in hand. Meanwhile, unminded animals, a cat lapping at a bowl (predatory) and a dog in a pouch worn by the man (stingi-

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6.6. Cornelis Matsys, Peasant Love Triangle, engraving, 1549.

ness), roam freely, as in Hemessen’s taverns, seeming to mimic the main characters, while an owl, emblem of evil and folly, perches beside the door.25 A similar composition, ascribed to ‘‘Bosch’’ and preserved in several copies (one of them called Cornelis Matsys) shows a similar ‘‘repair’’ shop; in this case a one-eyed old man with an eyepatch is approached by two women for help with their ‘‘bellows.’’26 The painting, ascribed to Cornelis Matsys, is in Tournai Museum and bears two conversational inscriptions that make the theme explicit: ‘‘Master, please, my niece is in sorry plight / her bellows are not airtight,’’ to which he responds, ‘‘Dried out and wrinkled as this old leather is / I have no intention of repairing it.’’ One old woman with a cane wears a rosary and is accompanied by a fat young child with a whirligig toy and sausage (the indulgent food of carnival). The other one is dressed as a nun, but the bird cage above suggests a visit to a brothel, and an owl perches ominously in a wall niche. Once more, the lower classes, here clearly old but only sketchily presented as rural peasants, serve as objects of scorn for their inappropriate sexuality and lack of restraint, akin to the animals in their environment. Though the actual Bosch only occasionally made images of peasants within his overall dour view of human conduct, a number of prints from the period of Frans Huys and Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp

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6.7. Frans Huys, engraving after Cornelis Matsys, The Lute Tuner.

after mid-century purported to derive from designs by ‘‘Bosch,’’ and these more often featured peasant (mis)behavior. A prime example is the Peasant Interior (1567; Figure 6.8), again suggestive of a tavern at carnival, engraved by Cock’s professional engraver Pieter van der Heyden after a surviving drawing (credited to Bosch as ‘‘inventor’’ on the mantel).27 The principal action of this print occurs at right, where a fool in costume with bells is being shaved and shorn (the hair clippings are visible on the floor before him). Most of the figures, both fat and old, look like the carnival revelers in Bruegel’s Carnival and Lent (1559; Figure 4.12). Waffles are being made at the hearth, eggshells litter the floor, and gridirons and spits with meats are carried like banners and used for raucous noisemaking. The figure on the mantel print here is another owl, this time dressed as a pilgrim and a vagabond beggar in the landscape, once more suggesting the ready equivalence of peasants with beggars as images of laziness and more sinister deceptions. The Flemish and French inscription urge participants to indulge in the waffles and piping as well as shaving the fool, for ‘‘’tis already kermis.’’ Some of this same caricatural imagery and peasant hearth location survive in the print designs that Pieter Bruegel himself made for Hieronymus Cock’ shop, ‘‘At the Four Winds.’’ Perhaps the closest and simplest imagery is the pair of engravings of 1563, The Fat Kitchen (Figure 6.9) and The Thin Kitchen, which reprise the contrast of the 1559 Carnival and Lent painting but without the religious practices.28 Fat Kitchen still offers an excess of carnival meats, including hanging hams and sausages, and Bruegel emphasizes the selfishness of these gluttonous peasants (and fat animals) at their hearth, who expel a thin and ragged bagpiper from their doorway. By contrast, the Thin Kitchen stick figures are more

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6.8. Pieter van der Heyden, engraving after Hieronymus Bosch, Peasant Interior, 1567.

generous (The inscription reads, ‘‘Where the thin man stirs the pot, meager fare is offered’’), but the fat man at their door, still greedy, refuses their invitation to enter. These images remain amusing caricatures of socially distant figures, and it is difficult to imagine any great social sympathy for the plight of the hungry poor, who are presented simply as counterpoint to the corpulent and gluttonous. No artist is more identified with the image of peasants in village life and farming in the countryside than Pieter Bruegel the Elder, nor (as we shall see) was any artist more imitated for this subject matter than Bruegel, whose reputation in part depends on that afterlife, as the numbers of peasant images is perhaps less than one might expect. Nevertheless, ‘‘Peasant Bruegel’s work has already received considerable analysis.’’29 The earliest works are print designs from the late 1550s: Kermis of St. George (ca. 1559, issued by Hieronymus Cock, Figure 6.10) and Kermis at Hoboken (1559; extant drawing in the Courtauld Institute, London; uniquely engraved for Bruegel by Frans Hogenberg and published by Bartholomeus de Momper, Figure 6.11).30 Both depict outdoor village fairs, dedicated to saints’ days that occur once a year, and both feature license in the form of dancing and drinking, even compared with the same kind of kermis subject as treated by Aertsen and Beuckelaer). Indeed, these very fairs had already formed the basis of the unmitigatedly satirical woodcut prints a generation earlier by Sebald Beham (especially his 1535 Large Church Festival, as examined by both Alison Stewart and Keith

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6.9. Pieter van der Heyden, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fat Kitchen, 1563.

Moxey). Indeed, the lines in Dutch at the base of the Hoboken etching make a critical tone explicit: ‘‘The peasants rejoice at such festivals in dancing, jumping, and drinking themselves drunk as beasts / They must observe church festivals even if they fast and die of cold.’’ On the St. George print a banner proclaims, from a position of social superiority, ‘‘Let the peasants have their kermis.’’ In contrast to the eye-level close-up presentations of Aertsen’s peasant paintings, both of Bruegel’s printed kermis images are presented with a high horizon, akin to the Large Landscapes series, which Bruegel, following the formula of the ‘‘world landscape’’ derived from Patinir (see Chapter 3), had produced a few years earlier for Cock.31 Some of the same characteristics of peasant ‘‘dancing, jumping, and drinking’’ are evident in both prints. In the St. George image, a festive round dance takes place before the tavern with the banner at lower right, and a sword fight has broken out in a clearing at the upper left. Several couples have paired off. These are the chief instances that conform to the cruder image of peasant misbehavior or excess, though the conduct before the tavern already anticipates the close-up painting a decade later, Peasant Kermis (Figure 6.13). Meanwhile a variety of ritual activities and structured games takes place around the image (some of which will recur within Bruegel’s contemporary 1560 painting Children’s Games, now in Vienna).32 Many of these have a closely observed, ethnographic quality, such as the structured

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6.10. Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, etching after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Kermis of St. George, ca. 1559.

sword dance in the center or the archery contest in the left distance, where the object is to shoot arrows above a tall pole atop a windmill. Other ritual observances outside the country church in the top center include the staging of a conflict between a mounted St. George and a mock dragon on wheels as well as an open-air drama. Across the foreground occur more individual games (by adults as well as children), which include riding a stick horse, a complex tumbling exercise with four bodies, a game of ball and hoop, and a swing. Decorous on the whole compared to the German prints, these activities still afford the artist a chance to make some ready points about human folly. He uses a pair of figures in the right foreground as the nearest foils for the viewer. One of them looks out of the print and points inward at the awkward tumblers, while to the left a fool in costume (marked by asses’ ears) leads a procession of children and wears what looks like a mock yoke (it has been called a basket though it has no closure) as he passes by a resting cart. In the Hoboken print, a fool leads a pair of children across the front center of the image, while many of the ritual scenes and games unfold behind him: archery contests, ring dancing to bagpipes, open-air drama, church processions and pilgrimage, and even a game of children tossing eggs in the lower left corner. The biting tone of the text on this latter print need not reflect Bruegel’s own outlook toward village life or peasant kermis activities, but the high viewpoint (eliminated by the late 1560s, the time of the Vienna Peasant Kermis) does literally provide a level of condescension as well as omniscience concerning the variety of carefully described activities. Scholars have noted that Bruegel’s kermis prints follow as much from other, very recent Antwerp prints of the same subject, chiefly by Pieter van der Borcht (see Figure 6.12).33 When dated, these works

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6.11. Frans Hogenberg, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Kermis at Hoboken, ca. 1559.

are contemporary with Matsys’s later prints and with the peasant paintings by Aertsen; the most important of these are the broad format 1553 etching and 1559 engraving, which bears an inscription that virtually echoes the harsh prose on Bruegel’s Hoboken engraving: ‘‘Drunkards delight in such feasts / Brawling and fighting and getting drunk as beasts. / To go to the kermis, be they men or women, / So let the peasants have their kermis.’’34 In these images, especially the 1559 engraving, such bestiality is pictured, as gross peasants dance, get drunk, then vomit and fight, just as they did in the 1535 Sebald Beham woodcut Large Church Festival. Dense crowds of tiny figures appear like a frieze nearly at eye level across the entire foreground of the prints, with villages extending into depth and accessory scenes on one side. This compositional strategy shapes the Peasant Kermis painted by Bruegel about a decade later, in the late 1560s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Figure 6.13). Large foreground figures of a couple enter the dance from the right to the tune of a seated bagpiper in front of an outdoor table with fighting and smooching drinkers at the left. Children by the table mimic the dance steps, as they do in Children’s Games (1560), and the distant view at right includes not only a parish church but also a fool among the dancers. However, the sense of a panorama or an overview for the setting has disappeared in favor of a ground-level viewpoint and large, close-up figures, whose large bodies and round faces have the coarse features of Aertsen’s, relieved somewhat by a cartoonlike simplicity. Kaveler’s commentary fo-

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6.12. Pieter van der Borcht, Peasant Kermis, engraving, 1559. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, A. Hyatt Mayor Purchase Fund, Marjorie Phelps Starr Bequest, Barbara E. and Howard A. Fox Gift, Charles Z. Offin Fund, 2000.

cuses on the debt of Bruegel’s painting to the print heritage of Sebald Beham and Cornelis Matsys, particularly the scenes of rustic dancing and peasant meals with full-length figures assembled into a composition. Giving such concentrated attention to dancers and drinkers is standard fare for kermis scenes by the time of Bruegel and reinforces the characterization of country peasants, whose very nature is taken to be vital and energetic yet at the same time more primal and earthy in indulging both their bodies and their passions. Scholarly discussion about Bruegel kermis scenes has debated whether the artist invited a more detached and negative viewpoint toward the kermis (as in the two prints, particularly in the text of the Hoboken), or immersed a viewer inside their world with a more benign or tolerant outlook of observerparticipant.35 The small figures of the fool in the (central) distance of the Peasant Kermis painting or within the actions of the kermis prints could easily be registered as alienated from the observer by virtue of both their dress and behavior, as Paul Vandenbroeck asserted in his study linking fools to both beggars and peasants.36 Yet the fool fails to dominate the Vienna painting and acts as just one more participant. A viewer is visually compelled to acknowledge his own presence at eye level amid the revelers in the Vienna picture, just as urban guests appear in the countryside for the processions of Aertsen and Beuckelaer or for the Bruegel painting, Peasant Wedding Feast (Vienna; see below).37 This effect can make one self-conscious, simultaneously aware of both social distance and difference from the peasant figures and their behavior yet at the same time implicated in their unmitigated naturalness, which under the veneer of cultivated manners remains common to all humanity. This double realization

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6.13. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Kermis, ca. 1568. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/ Art Resource.

comes complete with the awareness that a kermis (or a wedding celebration; see below) is a rare and exceptional day on the calendar (and in the life cycle), so excusable as an occasion for license and release: ‘‘’tis not a kermis every day.’’38 In addition to the kermis day, an annual occasion for festive leisure, peasant life singled out marriage rites as unique moments for celebration.39 Bruegel’s biographer Karel van Mander (1604) asserts that Brueghel used to enjoy ‘‘slumming’’ in villages, going with his merchant friend (a real Antwerp marker) Hans Franckaert to peasant ‘‘fairs and weddings . . . claiming relationship or kinship with the bride or groom’’ while disguised as peasants themselves.40 Thus there is plausible reason to think that his images of weddings incorporated local customs with some accuracy. His large 1566 painting, Peasant Wedding Dance (Institute of Arts, Detroit; Figure 6.14) combines elements of pictorial convention for peasant festivity with ethnographic precision. Again the music is played by peasant instruments, bagpipes, played by a pair at the lower right corner. The viewpoint remains high, with the horizon running just below the top of the picture, yet the foremost figures are large and active, forming the strong shapes with round, cartoonlike faces that would soon recur in the Vienna Peasant Kermis. Yet here particular customs also recur, as noted by Svetlana Alpers (following the careful researches of Pamela Larson): earthen tables in the distance, dug out of the ground for guests at large peasant banquets, as well as hat decorations (laces or coins) worn to mark the occasion.41 Bruegel extended his observations on wedding festivities into a design, published as a posthumous

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6.14. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peasant Wedding Dance, 1566. Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, City of Detroit Purchase. Bridgeman Art Library

engraving by Cock’s widow (after 1570), The Peasant Wedding Dance (Figure 6.15), whose inscription (again surely not by Bruegel himself ) has a sense of wry satire: ‘‘Keep it up musicians and make it last, / So long as the flute and drum play. / Liz will pluckily move her rump/ Because her wedding is not every day. / / Tricky Dicks are doing fancy steps, / I’m listening to the fife and you’ve missed a beat. / Our bride has given up dancing, / Which, by the way is for the best, because she’s full and sweet.’’42 The later publication and the different engraving style by van der Heyden both suggest that a painting rather than a drawing lies behind this image, which resembles but does not match the 1566 image. Moreover, a number of copies after the same prototype (or after the print, as was often the case in such replications; see Chapter 9) were generated by both Pieter Breughel the Younger and Jan Brueghel, sons of the artist, in the first quarter of the sixteenth century (see below).43 Comparison of this image with the 1566 original (Figure 6.14) can be instructive. For one thing, in the painting the bride, dressed in black, is a lively participant amid her guests in the dance itself, whereas in the print she sits at a table in frontal dignity, immobile beneath a crown and a cloth of honor while attended by a pair of matrons. As Walter Gibson first noted, the idea of showing a bride, adorned with crown and long flowing hair and sitting in solemn stillness, has a prehistory in Netherlandish

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6.15. Pieter van der Heyden, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Peasant Wedding Dance, after 1570. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1933.

painting, particularly scenes of the Marriage at Cana (such as the one by Gerard David, Louvre, Paris), but also seems to reflect contemporary wedding customs.44 Thus her part in the dance in the painting is more anomalous, her stillness in the print is more customary, though the text suggests that ‘‘Our bride has given up dancing.’’ Moreover, the prose commentary suggests, sardonically, that it is just as well that she does not dance, since she is ‘‘full and sweet’’ (i.e., already pregnant, yet another association of peasants with available sexuality, in this case premarital sex). The painting’s setting does present a background table with crown and cloth of honor, but the bride clearly is no longer installed there. She can be recognized by her unbound long hair and dark dress at the left center of the painting, dancing with an older man in the reel. The print shows her still at table, receiving gifts of coins in a platter set before her. Another distinctive feature in the Bruegel print is the background activity, peasants arriving with both stools and tools, brandished like banners. The use of tongs and gridirons, perhaps to make noise, recalls carnival festivities already seen in prints of peasant hearths or taverns. They serve to

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6.16. Pieter van der Borcht, Peasant Wedding, engraving, 1560. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1956.

remind us that, like carnival and kermis, ‘‘her wedding is not every day.’’ Indeed, one of the pieces of furniture offered to the bride is a cradle, anticipating the outcome of her pregnancy. Similar customs appear in a 1560 print (issued by de Momper) by Pieter van der Borcht of a Peasant Wedding (Figure 6.16), where the bride sits passively at table in the very center of the image and receives gifts of tools, including a butter churn as well as a child’s chair with hole for toilet training.45 In van der Borcht’s representation, drinking is stressed more and intemperance exaggerated by a vomiting woman at the lower right corner; in addition, shitting in the wheat field and more overt amours lower the level of behavior. This kind of grossness reaches its nadir of excess in the paintings on canvas by the Mechelen family Verbeek, analyzed by Paul Vandenbroeck, although these figures at weddings are not explicitly identified as peasants and might be revelers of a more generalized sort (again, we recall the slippage between peasants and carnival or tavern figures). It is this very extreme, reminiscent of the German prints, which reminds us of the moderation and relative sympathy for peasant life and customs that Bruegel offered in his works.46 Both the Cock print and the painting feature kissing couples, public drinking, and energetic dancing (with codpieces), as well as a few detached and watching figures (whose costumes are not so distinctive that they can be readily associated with urban guests, but which suggest the same kind of on-site observation of customs and behavior signaled for Bruegel himself by van Mander). We find just

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such a figure (sometimes taken to be a self-portrait), isolated at the end of a festive wedding banquet table but clearly included within its numbers in Bruegel’s celebrated Vienna Wedding Feast.47 Kaveler emphasizes the ‘‘respectful portrayal’’ here of harmony in the village community, which is conveyed by both this gathering and its very inclusiveness in welcoming both the dark-clad urbanite and his companion, a Franciscan monk. Such harmony is accompanied by plenty: the abundant wheat, stored behind the figures as a towering wall of gold, is marked by a symbolic crossed final sheaf, indicating that this is well-earned leisure after the hard work of a big harvest.48 Here, too, the bride sits motionless and smugly composed, standing out in her dark dress and unbound hair in front of a green cloth of honor festooned with a crown. Some observers have been troubled by their difficulty in identifying her bridegroom (though we have already noted the importance of folkloric emphasis on the bride but not the groom), who as host might be either the red-capped server of bowls at the end of the table or the pourer of ale into jugs in the lower left corner.49 The music is still peasant fare as well, performed by a pair of bagpipers. This image in particular, especially when compared to a Verbeek canvas or even a van der Borcht print, does suggest mutual aid and dignity, even in a leisure situation where festivity could easily be exaggerated into license, celebration into excess, like the self-indulgent tavern scenes. If it is paradoxical encomium, then this encomium seems heartfelt and sincere, and the paradox lies only in making peasants the nonsatirical subjects of large-scale painting with all of the decorum usually assigned to the banquets and other activities of the highest ranks of society. Compared to the tradition out of which Brueghel fashioned his genre prints and paintings, which usually saw the peasant as little better than a vulgarian, this image (like Aertsen’s Cook; Figure 5.7) confers its own admiring gaze on what we might well take for a nostalgic sympathy for the dignity of a simpler life, tied to the rhythms of nature and the seasons (see below for Bruegel’s series of the Months, with a subject of peasant labor, completed in 1565, probably two or three years before the Peasant Wedding Feast). Peasant wedding rituals must once have formed a larger part of the Bruegel output than is shown by extant pictures, since later copies by the Bruegel family workshop, particularly by Pieter the Younger, suggest that there were once several lost works of processions to the wedding by parties of both bride and groom.50 The principal Wedding Procession (best version in the Maison du Roi/Muse´e Communal, Brussels) provides a broad panoramic country landscape, marked in the middle distance by a central windmill, along which an extended parade of the wedding party proceeds to the parish church in the wooded village at the left edge. Their progress, from right to left, echoes in reverse the layout of Bruegel’s large 1564 Procession to Calvary (Vienna). Accompanied by bagpipers and led by a crowned groom followed by two senior men, presumably the fathers, the rest of the party spreads across the picture; the bride, still crowned and dressed in dark costume, appears at right center. Both principals advance solemnly with folded hands. This picture, too, emphasizes folkloric or ethnographic aspects of peasant village wedding customs and situates the solemn, if festive participants firmly within the same rural countryside as their labors. The other work that most fully situates peasants within a landscape is Bruegel’s 1568 Magpie on the Gallows (Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt; Figure 6.17).51 Here, along with Bruegel’s most breathtakingly atmospheric vista into a distant river valley, the key imagery appears in the foreground in a juxtaposition of dancing peasants outside their village with the central and dominant structure of

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6.17. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Magpie on the Gallows, 1568. Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt. Foto Marburg/Art Resource.

an empty gallows, echoed by a wooden cross. While one pair of observers (like the figures in the Kermis of St. George, 1559) points upward toward the gallows, another figure behind them squats and drops his trousers to ignore it by proverbially ‘‘shitting by the gallows.’’ In between the cartoonlike plump peasant trio dance to the music of a bagpiper, while others approach. Thus the image appears to contrast life with death, or the grandeur of eternal nature with momentary pleasures and insignificant physical needs. Some scholars (notably Gibson) have discerned a reference to danger and death; after all, this small picture was produced at the onset of the Dutch Revolt, and van Mander reported in 1604 that Bruegel still possessed the work at the time of his early death in 1569, when he bequeathed it to his widow.52 Kaveler sees the gallows as a synecdoche of governmental authority and social order (Bruegel had used this among the many punishments in his allegorical print of Justice, 1559) and stresses the mediating role of the observers, whose costume and posture elevates them above the class level of the dancers, as in the kermis prints, but who nonetheless also share the space of these indulgent, self-

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absorbed peasants. He also uses both visual and verbal research to underscore the unsavory reputation of the ignoble magpie as chattering gossip, the animal antipode to self-control. Unlike Bruegel depictions of kermis or wedding celebrations, there is nothing in this picture to suggest that dancing is an activity either appropriate to the season or contained to a proper location. Instead, like the shitting man in the corner, these dancers here have lost sight of the structuring symbols of state and church, and they fail to note what is so evident to the viewer in the magnificent vista. What is missing here is the earnest, disciplined effort by laboring peasants within the verdant landscape, which Bruegel would epitomize in his series of the Labors of The Months. One of Bruegel’s most celebrated accomplishments, The Months (1565) was conceived as a series of six panels, spanning the changing seasons.53 It presented a large, painted version (probably in six rather than twelve parts; five still extant) of the staple medieval formula of the Labors of the Months, formerly presented primarily in the calendar pages of illuminated manuscripts or, earlier, in the sculpted portals of Gothic cathedrals.54 In that tradition as well as in Bruegel’s representation of the cycle of The Months, peasants are presented as laborers integral to the fecund landscape, immersed within it as natural extensions of agriculture itself. This is particularly true of their tending to their seasonally defined work: polling plane trees and gathering twigs in The Dark Day (early spring; Vienna); mowing hay and harvesting fruits and vegetables in Haymaking (early summer; Prague); reaping and stacking wheat in Wheat Harvest (summer; New York; Figure 6.18); grape harvesting and herding cattle down from the highland meadows in Return of the Herd (autumn; Vienna); slaughtering and roasting the fatted pig in Hunters in the Snow (winter; Vienna). Even their leisure practices are shaped by seasonal weather, whether ice games in Hunters in the Snow, festive carnival hats and waffles in The Dark Day, archery contests (Haymaking; Wheat Harvest), swimming, or napping outdoors (Wheat Harvest). The missing panel surely was a later spring scene, probably representing sowing (usually March), shearing (April), and flowers (May). We can compare this multipart Bruegel landscape series to his later drawing designs Spring (1565) and Summer (1568; Figure 6.19) for a four-part series of the Seasons, engraved by Hieronymus Cock and issued in 1570; the latter two seasons were furnished by Hans Bol of Mechelen.55 Spring in particular features sheep-shearing and (formal) garden planting (under the watchful supervision of a well-dressed woman with a younger companion in front of a pergola); in the distant background, other spring (May) activities unfold in a courtly love bower, the prerogative of wealth and status. On the other hand, Summer is a wheat harvest like The Months and unfolds before a similar hillside with village and parish church. In all these works, the laboring peasants are thick and powerful bodies whose faces are often obscured by the torsion of their efforts or the items on their heads; others are reduced to schematic and cartoonlike masks of simplicity. Unlike the Seasons prints, Bruegel’s painted Months were produced for the suburban home of a known, ambitious patron, Nicholas Jongelinck, a toll-collector for Zeeland, thus a wealthy political appointee associated with the Habsburg court in Brussels (where Bruegel had moved from Antwerp in 1562 for unexplained reasons, though patronage opportunities might well have been decisive).56 We note that the Labors of the Months cycles had come to be associated with aristocratic patrons through their inclusion in rich cycles of illumination in costly manuscripts; such vestigial cycles were still being produced in the Ghent-Bruges workshop of Simon Bening in the early part of the sixteenth century.57 There is also a subtle indication of the seigneurial point of view incorporated into the title figures of

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6.18. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wheat Harvest, 1565. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1919.

Bruegel’s Vienna Hunters in the Snow from the Months: these are not peasant villagers, but rather a cluster of returning game-seekers with their hounds who have surely spent their energies and time on the land preserves of some noble sportsman.58 Moreover, the large herd and team of herdsmen in Return of the Herd suggest a wealthier landlord than the herdsmen themselves, as do the tracts of land in the summer harvests. For the most part, however, Bruegel’s Months images focus closely on the peasants themselves in and on the land they till, rather than incorporating the imagery of aristocratic or noble courtiers, as his imitators in the next generation, such as Lucas van Valkenborch, would do in their cycles (see below).59 Bruegel’s representation of the seigneurial visit to a peasant cottage survives not only in the Vienna Peasant Wedding Feast but also in another lost work, which survives in various copies, some of them high-quality works, including grisailles (Figure 6.20), ascribed to Jan Brueghel: The Visit to the Peasants.60 The scene features a pair of well-dressed, dark-clad city folks visiting the extended family and household of a farmer, perhaps in their role of patrons or godparents; a newborn child is being nursed by the woman seated on the floor next to a cradle and the warmth of the open fire. The visitors’ actions are benevolent donations: a sugar cone (‘‘hat’’) to the farmer and a small purse of coins to his oldest child. Signs of peasant industry in the cottage abound: yarn-winders and other tools on a wooden bench, winnowing- baskets hanging above, churning of butter by a pair of peasants at the side wall.

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6.19. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Summer, drawing, 1568. Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Bridgeman Art Library.

These are the kinds of activities that underlay the Peasant Wedding Feast itself, and this orderly household is also enjoying the fruits of its labors in the form of a large cauldron, hanging from an elaborate hook and heating in the center of the room in front of a fully set table, laden with bowls of porridge (akin to the fare in the Peasant Wedding Feast), bread, and butter. The respectful and circumspect demeanor of these peasants toward their guests once more suggests that Bruegel is quite conscious of the social distinctions between the two classes and localities, but that his view of peasant labors can be equally respectful in turn, true condescension without criticism. Indeed, a cluster of other Bruegel pictures contrast peasant activity on the land with other kinds of behavior, usually to the advantage of the hardworking if anonymous farmers. The first of these, the Fall of Icarus (Figure 6.21), also possibly preserved only in copies, is usually dated too early but actually stands close in time to the Visit to the Peasants and probably to the dated 1565 Months.61 Here the plowing peasant, accompanied by other laborers on the land—a shepherd and a fisherman, both mentioned in the reference text from Ovid (Metamorphoses 8.217–20)—has a positive valence. As a ‘‘noble peasant’’ reinforcing the other labors seen in The Months, he emerges from a venerable tradition of proverbs and other prosaic formulations that praise the honest and persevering farmer as an epitome of both harmony with nature and knowing one’s proper place.62 This is precisely the formulation to be

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6.20. Jan Brueghel after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Visit to the Peasants, grisaille. Collection Frits Lugt, Institut Ne´erlandais, Paris.

found in more allegorical form within Heemskerck’s contemporary prints, exemplified by his engraving The Task of the Laboring Class (no. 4 in his series of The Divine Charge to the Three Estates, ca. 1566–70), where farmers on the land, akin to Bruegel’s peasants in his 1568 Summer, are sowing, plowing, and reaping, and the text by Hadrianus Junius enjoins them, while distinguishing them from the other estates, their social superiors: ‘‘The people must plow, plant, dig, mow, avoid idleness and forbear to perform tasks belonging to kings or clergy.’’63 Heemskerck’s later series of 1572, entitled The Reward of Labor and Diligence, also features a print (no. 4) with the message, ‘‘The Lord Endows the Diligent Worker with Food and Clothing.’’ Labor is thus assigned to peasants, the representatives and the sustenance of all humankind, as a divine task, as in the words of Genesis (3: 19; also Job 5: 7) ‘‘man is born to toil.’’ Literal ‘‘humility,’’ staying close to the earth, is precisely the virtue lacked by the crashing Icarus, visible only from his—nonearthbound—feet. His tragic flaw was the hubris of overweening ambition and lack of cooperation with the forces of nature, so ably mastered by the crew of the ship seen beside him. Also by way of contrast, the often overlooked fat green partridge below the splashing feet of Icarus and beside the fisherman is the nephew of Daedalus, Perdix, cited by Ovid in the next passage as the bird who prudently avoids high flying and building its nest on towering cliffs.64 We note further that a few of the sheep of the somewhat inattentive shepherd already stray dangerously close to the cliff’s edge in their own right.

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6.21. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fall of Icarus. Muse´e d’Art Ancien, Brussels. Scala/Art Resource.

Idleness is the opposite of diligent labor and leads to poverty as well as the sin of sloth.65 Bruegel’s remaining pictures with peasant foils feature characters who might be accused of indolence. For instance, his small fantasy ensemble, The Land of Cockaigne (1567; Figure 6.22), features the traditional three orders in the corpulent and bulky form of a soldier, a scholar, and a peasant, respectively. All are lying indolently on the ground, and they wait for cooked and rich foods—again the fare of carnival indulgence—to come to them, including a boiled egg with legs, a pig with its own knife, and pies on the roof.66 This folkloric land, called ‘‘lazy-luscious land’’ (Luilekkerland) in Dutch, can only be reached by tunneling in with a spoon through its barrier of pudding.67 Another late Bruegel work, with larger and more imposing figures, is his Peasant and the BirdNester (1568; Figure 6.23).68 This image purports to present another Netherlandish vernacular proverb, recorded on Bruegel’s late (ca. 1567–68) drawing of The Beekeepers (Figure 6.24): ‘‘He who knows where the nest is has the knowledge / He who robs it has the nest.’’69 It shows a large and bulky peasant with a comically simple face emerging out of the picture toward the viewer while gesturing back up toward a second character with peasant costume, who hangs precariously from a tree while grasping for a bird’s nest. Yet for all of the complacency of the main figure with his seeming ‘‘knowledge,’’ he is remarkably inattentive and exposed to danger, as he is about to step into a slippery creek. In striking contrast to the precariousness of both these figures and their strongly vertical arrangement among the trees at the left half of the painting, the entire right side is dominated by a brighter, green horizon region with a substantial, well-tended farm, featuring a second building for chickens (whose eggs do not

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6.22. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Land of Cockaigne, 1567. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Scala/Art Resource.

require climbing a tree) and horses as well as a pair of tiny human figures—firmly on the ground— underneath a distant tree: a father instructing a child. We can imagine that he is providing just such a proverb and its consequences, compared to the careful husbandry employed on the farm (recall the ordered labor in The Visit to the Peasants). This same kind of prudent management lies at the heart of the Beekeepers drawing, where the well-protected, masked (and thus anonymous) toilers in the apiary, who carefully tend to their own nests, contrast utterly with the risk-taking nest robber above. This is real knowledge, not just of nests as per the proverb, but more broadly of nature—in both her dangers (stings as well as falls) and her gifts (honey or eggs). Such cooperative nurturing of nature herself resembles the successful labors of plowman, shepherd, angler, and the crew of anonymous sailors on the great seagoing vessel already featured in Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus. Stability and groundedness, practiced by cooperative, collective, even anonymous laborers will outlast and surpass high flying, especially by individual risk takers. In this respect, paintings by the mature Bruegel show a deep appreciation of what peasants can accomplish together as they work together with nature, like those laborers in the changing seasons of the series of The Months. A final pair of late Bruegel pictures, displayed together today in Naples (Capodimonte Museum), complete this vision of peasant labor as the anonymous alternative to recklessness or pride. Behind the six blind beggars who fall precipitously downward into a ditch in The Blind Leading the Blind (1568), there once stood a cowherd tending his flock by a stream (preserved in good copies, especially the large painting in the Louvre; Figure 6.25).70 Some other commentators, notably Hans Sedlmayr, have

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6.23. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Peasant and the Bird-Nester, 1568. Kunsthistorisches Museum Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

emphasized the contrast between the steep foreground pitch of the ditch for these blind men, in contrast to the stable background horizon with the country village and parish church, just as The Peasant and the Bird-Nester contrasted the risky, arboreal vertical half (with its own ditch) against a cultivated, horizontal, agrarian alternative half.71 Now we realize that this contrast also pits blind, vagrant beggars against the enduring, responsible herdsman, akin to the shepherd in the Icarus. In similar fashion, Bruegel’s Naples tondo The Misanthrope (1568; Figure 6.26) presents another small shepherd with his flock in the background along with a cottage and a windmill, but he contrasts with a mismatched pair of unsavory large characters who dominate the foreground. The large figure in dark monkish robes seems to be withdrawing from the open meadows of the setting into a forested area at left, traditional site of hermitage living. He has been described as a misanthrope because of his words, conveyed by a Flemish text inscribed on the tondo, ‘‘Because the world is so untrue I am going into mourning.’’72 Yet his own hypocrisy is also revealed, as an opportunistic figure of a poor beggar in a

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6.24. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Beekeepers, drawing, ca. 1567–68. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Foto Marburg/Art Resource.

6.25. After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Blind Leading the Blind. Muse´e du Louvre, Paris. Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux/Art Resource.

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6.26. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Misanthrope, 1568. Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. Scala/Art Resource.

world globe is surreptitiously stealing a large, bright money purse hidden under the cloak of the ascetic. That figure resembles another ragged beggar in a globe at the right foreground of the 1560 Brueghel painting Netherlandish Proverbs, who is depicted having to bend low in order to make his way through the world. Even the self-absorbed misanthrope seems destined to fall victim to the same kind of danger in his path as those who fall into ditches, for right in his path are a cluster of sharp tacks, man-traps. At the right horizon a visible fire further underscores the instability of this seemingly undisturbed countryside. The larger world and its many dangers variously intrude into the would-be idyll of undisturbed nature in the countryside. In such circumstances, peasants can become alternative figures of nostalgic urban wish-fulfillment. Looking back from the latter years of Bruegel’s career, we can see the variety of values he assigned to the nearby outsider figure of the peasant and how that variety tallies with the general harshness of peasant representation in Netherlandish art. Clearly for Bruegel, peasants held their own identity, distinct from the beggars or tavern rowdies which were their alter egos in the art of earlier artists, particularly Cornelis Matsys but also Pieter Aertsen. We can also see that productive peasant labor on the land had a particular esteem for him, to be contrasted with beggars or hypocrites or even with reckless adventurers. Yet almost all of these Antwerp artists associated peasant leisure with carousing and carnival-like excess, whether at kermis or at weddings, even if their reactions ranged from benign amusement

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to outraged satire and critique. Bruegel may have admixed his sense of social superiority with actual country observations and some real sympathy for the rigors of peasant life, and some of his outlook might have been informed by his circle of patrons, at least in the rare case of Nicholas Jongelinck and The Months, where we know who commissioned his peasant images.73 Indeed, that rare documented instance reminds us how little we know about the individual consumers and the wider audience of the paintings and prints that have been discussed here.74 We can now certainly agree with Fritz Grossmann in laying to rest the traditional myth of ‘‘Peasant Bruegel,’’ except as an index of the artist’s influential association with this same theme. We can also see Bruegel’s kinship with the imagery and values he inherited from predecessors, such as Matsys and Aertsen as well as the German printmakers, while also acknowledging that his fascination with observed peasant customs and with the dignity of peasant labor reshaped a primarily satirical outlook. Indeed, the very theme of peasant life, especially peasant leisure, is based upon social distinction and distance, a contrast confirmed rather than denied by juxtaposing them through the presence of well-dressed urban visitors at the depicted village festivities. Benign engagement (rather than neglect) for such peasants, with their simplified features and standardized stocky bodies, surely offered artists a chance to soften their presentation of ‘‘outsiders.’’ After the grotesque money changers and tavern dwellers of the first half of the sixteenth century, and compared with representations of wretched and unsightly beggars of both city and countryside, these leisure excesses of peasants seemed considerably more tolerable, temporary, and even more amiably amusing, than the ugliness of sin itself.

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SECOND BOSCH Family Resemblance and the Marketing of Art

Posterity weaves no garlands for imitators. —Schiller, Wallenstein’s Camp

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. —Charles Caleb Colton

I seem to be a verb. —Buckminster Fuller

I

f Buckminster Fuller could summarize his own contributions to twentieth-century futuristic inventions by asserting that ‘‘I seem to be a verb,’’ then the artistic contributions of Hieronymus Bosch to the history of Netherlandish painting in the ‘‘long’’ sixteenth century could be aptly encompassed by another proposition—that he became an entire pictorial category. The best sign of Bosch’s success with his artistic descendants can be found in the several testimonials after mid-century that dubbed Pieter Bruegel a ‘‘second Bosch.’’ Such testimonials begin already in 1572 with the verse tribute by Domenicus Lampsonius appended to an engraved portrait of Bruegel: ‘‘Who is this new Hieronymus Bosch, reborn to the world, who brings his master’s ingenious flights of fancy once more so skillfully with brush and style that he even surpasses him?’’1 The basic fact remains that Bosch monsters and his other inventive figures were widely copied; Bosch Last Judgment scenes and other compositions spawned countless remakes; and Bosch’s entire mise-en-sce`ne—high horizons, encompassing overviews of sinful humanity, demonic tormentors— formed the armature of countless imitations and knockoffs as well as inspiration for two generations of Bruegel family members. Until now, scholars have noted this phenomenon chiefly to dismiss it, since the field of art history prizes originality over copying, inventiveness over derivation, even variations sprinkled with novelties.2 We know how avidly King Philip II of Spain collected Bosch images after the middle of the sixteenth century for his royal palaces, making Madrid still the finest place to see the painter’s works today. Well below this level of royal collection, broader pictorial demand for Bosch imagery led to a host of imitators

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in Antwerp and elsewhere by the middle of the same century. Testimony to that effect comes from a Spanish writer around 1560. Don Felipe de Guevara, a nobleman in the entourage of Philip II and the son of a court majordomo and noted connoisseur of Flemish paintings (who collected Bosch originals, among other works), describes and evaluates this Boschian phenomenon in his Commentaries on Painting. There he attempts to distinguish the master he admires from the gaggle of current imitators: That which Hieronymus Bosch did with wisdom and decorum others did, and still do, without any discretion and good judgment; for having seen in Flanders how well received was this kind of painting by Hieronymus Bosch, they decided to imitate it and painted monsters and various imaginary subjects, thus giving to understand that in this alone consisted the imitation of Bosch. In this way came into being numbers of paintings of this kind which are signed with the name of Hieronymus Bosch but are in fact fraudulently inscribed: pictures to which he would never have thought of putting his hand but which are in reality the work of smoke and of short-sighted fools who smoked them in fireplaces in order to lend them credibility and an aged look.3 Indeed, Guevara spoke the truth. Several Antwerp painters made quite a good living out of the reprise of favorite Bosch motifs. One of them was Jan Mandijn, who like many sixteenth-century painters came to Antwerp from the north, specifically from Haarlem.4 His noted Bosch figural imitations incorporate the same inventive vocabulary of hybrid demons, called diableries in contemporary inventories, composed of various parts of insects, amphibians, reptiles and birds. One of Bosch’s favorite subjects, adopted by Mandijn, was the temptation of St. Anthony, a hermit saint who withdrew to the wilderness, where he was beset by tribulations from demons who beat him up as well as by temptations from demons who appeared to him in the guise of voluptuous nude women.5 Bosch’s main rendering of this legend is the St. Anthony Triptych (Museu Nacional, Lisbon; Figure 7.1), but this smallish altarpiece was copied literally on numerous occasions (e.g., the exact copy in Muse´es Royaux, Brussels) and must have been both a celebrated and accessible object in the Low Countries after its completion, even though we do not know its original site.6 The early, if general, influence of the Bosch St. Anthony can also be deduced from the large landscape with St. Anthony, now in the Prado and signed by Joachim Patinir (Figure 3.3; the figures were almost surely painted as a collaboration by Patinir’s friend and executor Quinten Massys), in this case emphasizing the sexual temptation of the saint in the foreground, with his tribulations above and behind that main scene.7 Around mid-century, Jan Mandijn produced his own original variation on the theme of the Bosch St. Anthony Triptych (Temptation of St. Anthony, now in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, signed; Figure 7.2). He retained the use of a ruined hut to signal the hermitage of the reclusive saint, and he provided his own version of the hybrid monsters—part bird, part pig, part toad or insect. As usual in Bosch, the sky is filled with flying creatures, many of them, such as the flying fish, foreign to the element. Bosch’s oversized, overripe fruits of evil appear as another marker of the unnatural presence of evil in this environment, while at the horizon burning buildings evoke the inevitable brimstone glows of Bosch’s hell scenes, in this case hell on earth. Another mid-century Antwerp artist, whose Bosch-like work is often confused with that of Mandijn

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7.1. Hieronymus Bosch, St. Anthony Triptych. Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon. Giraudon/Art Resource.

in the absence of signatures, was Pieter Huys, an Antwerp native.8 He produced several more dated works, ranging from 1547 to 1577; eight of them focus on the St. Anthony theme, beginning with the signed and dated 1547 Louvre panel.9 The final dated work of the painter, a 1577 panel (Mayer van den Bergh Museum, Antwerp; Figure 7.3), retains the black mass from the center of Bosch’s Lisbon triptych (reversed) but places its smaller figures within an expansive landscape that includes a burning building, perhaps a monastery. Another Huys St. Anthony composition, which survives in several versions (led by the signed and dated 1547 Paris version), shows larger figures in the foreground, closer to the viewer. Most of the same thematic ingredients appear here as well, but the saintly anchorite is directly accosted by female figures, one nude and others corresponding to the stereotype of the witch as aged crone. Once more, a fantastic crew of hybrid demons fill the landscape, which itself is a rich blend of the four elements: earth, air, water, and Bosch’s inevitable fire. In these Anthony scenes the temptations concentrate principally on sybaritic pleasures, what Bosch would have classified (cf. the Prado tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins, Figure 4.1) as Luxuria, punctuated by the offering on a platter held by the topless female demon of a carnival dish, a calf’s head.10 This setting of indulgence can be compared to another Bosch original, the fragment known today as the Allegory of Luxury (Figure 4.4).11 What both Mandijn and Huys achieve in their St. Anthony images is a fluid combination of thematic elements that stem from Antwerp art over the period since Bosch’s prime: first the characteristic Patinir landscape formula of religious retreat into a landscape wilderness by a holy hermit, to which is added specific physical temptation toward luxury in the form of wine, women, and song.12 Like the collaboration between Patinir and Massys over a quarter of a century earlier, these images by Mandijn and Huys give less emphasis to the external tribulations, where the saint is actually assaulted by armies

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7.2. Jan Mandijn, Temptation of St. Anthony, ca. 1550. Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem. Tom Haartsen.

of demons; instead, these depictions favor the internal struggle of his ascetic spirit against the weakness of his fleshly desires. In this respect they are consistent with one another but subtly chart a new direction (albeit visible already in the right wing of the Bosch Lisbon triptych) of subjective viewer engagement with conscience rather than focusing on the physical tortures exacted by external demonic foes, as stressed by Bosch. Whereas the later artists share Bosch’s delight in inventive possibilities for creating demons of all types to populate their scenes, in the absence of direct physical combat between an outnumbered saint and an army of demons, the outcome seems more assured. If the demons now chiefly symbolize the vices but do not assault St. Anthony, we can then be more confident in the bedrock faith and the emotional resistance of a stalwart hermit struggling with his own desires. The grim and pessimistic world of Bosch’s hell on earth thus gives way to a more entertaining and reassuring vision of the eventual triumph of good over evil. Confirmation of this impression comes from Karel van Mander himself, who characterized the output of Mandijn as ‘‘clever pictures of spooks and drolleries’’ (Ian Mandijn, di seer op zijn Ieronimus Bos fraey was van ghespoock en drollerijen).13 For Mandijn and Huys as well as for other mid-century epigones of Bosch, demons still remain the central figures of their depictions in this pictorial idiom. What Guevara noted from Spain at just this moment could still apply to these cases. In defense of the integrity of Bosch’s originals, and in opposition to the excesses of some of his imitators, the would-be critic argued as follows: ‘‘I do not deny that he

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7.3. Pieter Huys, Temptation of St. Anthony, 1577. Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp. A.C.L., Brussels.

painted strange figures, but he did so only because he wanted to portray scenes of Hell, and for that subject matter it was necessary to depict devils and imagine them in unusual compositions.’’14 To a certain extent, the continuity with Bosch is even more pronounced in the Judgment and Hell scenes produced by Pieter Huys, such as his large panel in Baltimore (Walters Art Gallery; Figure 7.4), itself a replica version of a dated 1554 image in Brussels.15 If we compare this work to its basic model, the large Vienna Last Judgment Triptych by Bosch, we note the same distant and tiny holy figures in the top center space of heaven, presiding over a devastated earth and its ongoing travails of punishment. As is usual in Bosch Judgment scenes, hell dominates the results of the Last Judgment, with the comforting balance of heaven largely absent as any visual solace to the viewer, except for the activities of a few angels (in the upper left-hand corner), who seem intent on rescuing the rare souls they can round up and herding them up a promontory toward the Bosch-like ‘‘wormhole’’ of heavenly salvation underneath the clouds and behind the Virgin Mary.16 In this image, too, the viewer feels overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of the demons, but theirs is mostly a process of gathering, lacking the sting of the cruel punishments that they exact on mortals in the Vienna triptych by Bosch.

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7.4. Pieter Huys, Last Judgment, ca. 1555. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

The very fact that there is a Brussels prototype with copies in both Baltimore and Springfield, Massachusetts (Figure 7.5), suggests that by mid-century in Antwerp it was not exclusively Bosch who was being copied. Variations in quality between these copies suggest that not only were consistent workshop ‘‘house styles’’ at work but lesser artists also were making ‘‘knockoffs’’ in an era when the notion of copyright did not exist, all the more so when images by Bosch himself were not readily on view, since they were often in the private collections of kings and nobles. Moreover, the fact that the image in Springfield varies the composition but not the handling of the Baltimore panel further suggests

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7.5. Jan Mandijn (?), Last Judgment, ca. 1554. Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts, James Philip Gray Collection.

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what we already can observe from the confusion between the named artists Mandijn and Huys and their respective oeuvres, not to mention the host of anonymous, usually lesser epigones after Bosch or even after Huys and Mandijn—namely, that a veritable industry of ‘‘Boschiana’’ was flourishing in the open art market of Antwerp after the middle of the sixteenth century. Bosch’s home town of ’s-Hertogenbosch was a smallish center, in Brabant north of mighty Antwerp, which served as the financial capital of both Europe and the emerging international world economy, and thus naturally also a major art emporium (see Chapter 2). Antwerp held art sales in stalls in the courtyard by the church of Our Lady up until the year 1540, when a new covered gallery center was constructed just opposite the new financial exchange, the Bourse. Dan Ewing has declared this to be ‘‘the first art market in post-classical Europe to be housed in a building specially constructed for the specific purpose of art exhibitions and sales.’’17 From that time on, what had been a short local sales period, concentrated around a pair of large annual trade fairs, became a year-round business of selling art. In addition, Antwerp had become a European leader in the printing and selling of books, and local printmakers quickly realized that they could also reach a large market with their engravings and etchings. One of them, Bartholomeus de Momper, located near the painters; his prints declare his address to be ‘‘by the New Bourse.’’ This was where Hieronymus Cock established his print shop At the Four Winds, and set about garnering leading designers and professional engravers.18 It was within such a market setting that formulaic repeated images were produced and sold, such as the landscape paintings, made according to the formulas and conventions established by Patinir (d. 1524) during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Landscapes, and related themes such as laboring peasants, quickly became replicable and familiar categories, where success bred success, and artists continued to produce those works that sold well. As a first focus, let us look at the print publisher Cock, along with his young painter-designer Pieter Bruegel, in order to see more closely both production circumstances and consumer successes in the Antwerp art market.19 Cock actually published a varied line of print offerings, some of them produced by the Italian engraver Giorgio Ghisi, after famous Italian painters such as Raphael (School of Athens) and Bronzino. Cock also contributed particularly to the popularity of Bosch’s inventions by issuing prints after designs ascribed to that late master, who had died already in 1516, as well as in his pictorial manner.20 One good example of Cock’s production of ‘‘Bosch’’ prints is his version of The Blind Leading the Blind, published well before Bruegel’s famous 1568 canvas, and credited to Bosch, even though the actual designer might well have been a Bosch imitator.21 Other designs ‘‘after’’ Bosch for Cock’s prints reveal how works in the more familiar Bosch manner continued to be quite popular long after his death, so much so that it is artistically possible to talk of a ‘‘Bosch survival’’ rather than a ‘‘Bosch revival.’’ For example, Cock published his own version of the Last Judgment in the manner of Bosch (Figure 7.6), crediting the master as the inventor within an uncharacteristic heaven wing of a three-part simulated triptych. The formula goes back to Bosch or to his close imitators, as exemplified by the early sixteenth-century triptych of the Last Judgment in Bruges (Museum Groeninge Museum, Brussels; Figure 7.7).22 In the case of Cock’s print, however, the original drawing design survives, traced in its outlines (and thus probably the model for the print rather than a literal copy of the print), in the Princeton Museum. It is certainly not a Bosch original but rather the work of an anonymous, rather ordinary

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7.6. Hieronymus Cock, engraving after Hieronymus Bosch, Last Judgment, ca. 1550–55. Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, gift of Dr. James H. Lockhart, Jr.

7.7. Bosch Workshop, Last Judgment Triptych. Groeningemuseum, Bruges.

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Bosch imitator (though at one time there was speculation and hope that Bruegel himself might have been the author).23 As Gerd Unverfehrt has observed, the absence of Christ from the top center of the Judgment scene in the center presents a major anomaly relative to Bosch and most Last Judgment images, and there are numerous direct quotes from previous works, including the Bruges Last Judgment Triptych, which would disqualify the design as having its ultimate origin in the works of Bosch.24 Instead of dismissing such a drawing or print produced by Cock as a pale imitation of what are usually regarded as the ‘‘great and original’’ inventions of a celebrated ‘‘master,’’ in this case Bosch, one could examine the sheer numbers of those imitations as part of an ongoing success story—a story abetted by the open art market in both paintings and prints. In fact, Cock was here using the name and the persuasive pictorial manner of Bosch in conjunction with a typical and favorite Bosch Last Judgment subject in order to sell prints. The very existence and survival of so much Bosch imagery around mid-century in the major market of Antwerp offers prima facie evidence of the successful marketing of that imagery, so we need to examine the attractions of Bosch’s trademark imagery. Another Cock image situates St. Martin, the patron saint of beggars, in a boat with his acolytes swarming around him and fighting with one another, especially for free drinks (Figure 7.8).25 An inscription accompanies the busy action, and it contrasts the virtue of the saint with the viciousness of the grasping beggars: ‘‘The good St. Martin is depicted here / Among all these cripples, vile, poor scum/ Now they fight one another for the loot, this evil commotion / Dividing his mantle instead of coin.’’ This image is also credited by Cock on the print to Bosch, and it also resembles the authentic Bosch painting fragment Allegory of Luxury (Figure 4.4), with its floating wine-barrels and swimming hedonists; however, this St. Martin image, too, was surely a new invention in the manner of Bosch made expressly for Cock’s shop. The print vividly and viciously captures the hostility toward wanderers and vagabonds who abounded in mid-century Antwerp.26 It also has a local folkloric basis in the tasting of the new wine (akin to the craze for the annual arrival of Beaujolais nouveau today) on the autumnal feast day of St. Martin, when wine was also doled out to the poor.27 Here, as in the case of Bruegel’s massive 1559 painting, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (Figure 4.12), festival becomes the time frame within with such license is acted out, and its principal exemplars are the beggars and cripples at the margins of society. In this case, there is even the suggestion of the ritual exclusion of the hygienically unclean, mentally ill, or socially unacceptable in a ‘‘Blue Ship’’ or ‘‘Ship of Fools,’’ outside and away from the protective boundaries of city gates and walls (note the presence of the inn of the ‘‘Blue Ship’’ in Carnival and Lent). Indeed, Cock also issued an engraving, ascribed to ‘‘Bosch’’ on the plate (1559; produced by van der Heyden), of just such a Ship of Fools, or Blue Ship.28 As an image of virtue, the handsome and upright features of St. Martin are emphatically contrasted with the ugly, misshapen deformities of the crowd of cripples, and we can further compare his exemplary spirituality to the use of blind beggars as a negative antipode, as in Cock’s Blind Leading the Blind print. We can compare these beggars to demons in their capacity to stir disgust and fear from their opposites, the clean and respectable, attractive and industrious clients for such images. Once more the significance for us of such an image is its inherent social definition of, and its address to, an urban,

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7.8. Hieronymus Cock, engraving after Hieronymus Bosch, St. Martin in a Boat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection.

bourgeois audience through the harsh depiction of an opposing, negative stereotype. That stereotype also takes the pictorial form of grotesquerie, evoking a gratuitous laugh at the expense of the deformed figures.29 Of course, the celebrated artist Pieter Bruegel (the Elder) worked as a principal designer for Cock prints; he was the most prolific and renowned of the Bosch imitators—one might well say that he was the unique Bosch emulator, that is, an artist whose work is regarded as surpassing its renowned model. Upon reexamination, the 1572 Latin verses by Lampsonius, artist and author, not only inscribe their verbal impression of Bruegel as the true heir to Bosch, but they also suggest the fundamental shift in tone between the two visionaries: Who is this new Jerome Bosch come into the world, who imitates his Master’s clever dreams and lets us experience them with the brush, and imitates his style so ably that in the meantime has even exceeded him? . . . The wit and inventiveness of his painting in the manner of his old master is certainly worthy of laughter; and he is his equal and deserves to be praised.30

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7.9. Pieter van der Heyden, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Temptation of St. Anthony, 1556.

From this outline we learn not only how much Bruegel’s imagery was identified with the prior model of Bosch, but also how its inventiveness and its unnatural combinations, in short its bizarre fantasy, could be seen as the stimulus to visual pleasure, even laughter. The seriousness of Bosch, still stoutly defended by Felipe de Guevara, was now less a source of praise than the younger artist’s creativity or wit. We shall return to issues of interpretation after examining Bruegel’s own Boschian imagery. Bruegel’s Boschian career began early—in the service of drawing designs for engravings published by Cock in his shop At the Four Winds. Some of his earlier designs are precisely the types of demons and tiny figures as well as the subjects favored by contemporary painters led by Mandijn and Huys. The earliest Bruegel design in the Bosch idiom for Cock was the inevitable Temptation of St. Anthony of 1556 (Figure 7.9), whose original drawing survives in Oxford.31 The engraving, produced by Pieter van der Heyden, is accompanied by an inscription drawn from Psalm 34: ‘‘Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.’’32 Here the boat of Luxury, akin to the pleasure craft with its cloth tent in the heaven panel of the Bruges triptych, reappears in the lower left corner, while the typical Bosch motif of the giant house made from a human figure occupies the middle ground. Yet here there are no naked women and no real attacks by the demons who surround the saint; only a

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7.10. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, drawing, Last Judgment, 1558. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. Foto Marburg/Art Resource.

small bag of money seems to provide a foreground distraction from his otherwise concentrated meditations. This is a tame, unproblematic temptation scene. At this early date in Bruegel’s career, it is significant that no artist is named on the print—neither Bruegel nor Bosch. In similar fashion, the Last Judgment, designed by Bruegel and published by Cock in 1558 (Figure 7.10), captures the drama of Christ and the saints in the heavens as well as the separation of the resurrected souls.33 In this case, Bruegel does indicate some substantial numbers of saved figures, though in the print they are largely anonymous and bunched in a crowd that heads off up a hillside at viewer left, like the background figures in the Huys/Mandijn Judgments. But he follows the Bosch model in featuring fanciful hybrid monsters and demons as the principal visual focus of the image, who shove the damned into the traditional open mouth of Hell (based upon the description of Leviathan in Job, 41);34 even the angels who blow trumpets above on the same sinister side have hellish inclinations, expressed by their pernicious insect wings. Bruegel’s figure of Christ is larger and more imposing in the center of the composition, and the gestures of salvation and damnation are confirmed by the accompanying traditional devices of lily and sword.

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7.11. Pieter van der Heyden, engraving, Patience, 1557.

This Last Judgment might well be the theological culmination of the major Bosch revival creation that Bruegel produced for Cock in just these years: a 1558 series of the Seven Deadly Sins (engraved by van der Heyden after drawings from the previous year) as well as a suffering allegorical figure of Patience from 1557 (Figure 7.11).35 In each of these works the female personification of the vice or virtue appears front and center in the midst of a Boschian cosmos of people houses, active demons, and burning buildings on the horizon. The Patience engraving even contains a series of veiled criticisms of Church officials and clerics; monks’ habits, cardinals’ hats, and a papal bull in this demonic world suggest together that the Church establishment is a threat to, rather than a support of, the virtuous subject of the image.36 In this respect Patience as an allegory has the same power of spiritual resistance as St. Anthony, and her passivity triumphs over the monstrous world surrounding her. For both the allegory and the saint, the viewer is spared real anxiety about the eventual triumph of virtue over vice, so the atmosphere of threat and dread that Bosch produces from his own unequal combats with demons is basically dispelled in the work. This viewer anxiety is lessened still further in the series of the Seven Deadly Sins that Bruegel produced for Cock, where the allegories personify the vices themselves rather than offering examples of vulnerable humans beset by those demonic vices. Once again, however, the inscriptions on the prints offer only homilies or platitudes, derived from

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compendia of commonplaces, learned anthologies of Latin phrases and aphorisms suitable for quotation in rhetorical compositions, like a font of stored wisdom.37 Patience features an attributed line from book 5 of Lactantius’s Divine Institutions: ‘‘Patience is the tranquil endurance of evils which assail you or happen to you.’’ For Anger (derived from Ovid’s Art of Love) we read, ‘‘Anger makes the face swell up and the veins grow black with blood.’’ Such banality, however learned, contrasts with the fertile imagination of the Boschian fantasy creatures within their broad landscape setting. Clearly this pictorial inventiveness by Bruegel has become an end in itself, which can even be multiplied through the production of established series, such as the Seven Deadly Sins and, afterward, the Seven Virtues. As both Guevara’s and Lampsonius’s appreciations suggest, it is the artist’s fantasy that is celebrated in his creation of such bizarre or marvelous creatures, called grillos in Spanish already by Felipe de Guevara and grillen in Flemish, or what Karel van Mander called in his 1604 Schilderboeck, or Book of Painting, ‘‘phantasms and drolleries’’ (spoockerijen en drollen).38 We find a similar, almost nervous appreciation of the Bosch images in Spain in the early seventeenth century, when Brother Jose´ de Sigu¨enza offered the following apologetic in his History of the Order of St. Jerome: Of him [Geronimo Bosco] I want to speak at somewhat greater length for various reasons: first, because his great inventiveness merits it; second, because they are commonly called the absurdities of Geronimo Bosco by people who observe little in what they look at; and third, because I think that these people consider them without reason as being tainted by heresy.39 Sigu¨enza defends the Bosch demons against such charges by invoking the celebrated piety of King Philip II, who so avidly collected them. He further claims that the Church leaders and prelates are rendered respectfully, something that is arguable. But he does make a basic point for our purposes: If there are any absurdities here, they are ours, not his, and to say it at once, they are painted satires on the sins and ravings of man. . . . The differences that, to my mind, exists between the pictures of this man and those of all others is that the others try to paint man as he appears on the outside, while he alone had the audacity to paint him as he is on the inside.40 The good father then goes on to compare Bosch to writers of macaronic or comic poetry, as a painter who chose a skillful yet alternative path to the high style practiced by Michelangelo, Raphael, or Du¨rer. Conceding that these are inventions ‘‘of so many kinds that one must admire him for his ability to give shape to so many ideas,’’ he argues that Bosch invented the demons in his St. Anthony temptation scenes for a reason, namely, to prove that a soul that is supported by the grace of God and elevated by His hand to a like way of life cannot at all be dislodged or diverted from its goal even though, in the imagination and to the outer and inner eye, the devil depicts that which can excite laughter or vain delight or anger or other inordinate passions. . . . He made variations on this theme so many times and with such invention that it arouses admiration in me that he found so much to deal with.41

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7.12. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Mad Meg, ca. 1562. Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp. Erich Lesser/Art Resource.

In short, Sigu¨enza recognizes both the laughter and the delight in such pictures as well as their depiction of the attractiveness or diversion offered by the vices, although of course the friar wishes to take the steadfast Anthony, or one might add the figure of Bruegel’s Patience, as his own role model in resisting them. He stresses less the fear and loathing that such demonic presences could evoke than their fascination. Bruegel sometimes showed the forces of evil in fascinating isolation, such as his painting of around 1562 of Mad Meg (Figure 7.12), a shrewish virago who with her army of women storms and plunders the very gates of hell against an ineffective resistance by the usually all-powerful mobs of demons. This image effectively recirculates the earlier personification of Anger from Bruegel’s 1558 Deadly Sins suite with Cock (Figure 7.13).42 But its tone is now much more mirthful, by the very juxtaposition of a successful, if shrewish troupe of women against the earlier invincible forces of evil. At other times, the artist depicts the forces of good actively combating evil, as in his vividly colorful 1562 painting of St. Michael and the Apocalyptic Dragon (usually known as The Fall of the Rebel Angels) as well as his 1560 engraving of the virtue of Fortitude (Figure 7.14).43 While the Apocalypse is the ultimate struggle between good and evil, the outcome is no more in doubt that God’s victory over Satan in the primal Fall of the Rebel Angels. The fascination of the painting lies in its details, such as counting the seven crowns upon the seven heads of the apocalyptic beast (which confirms the identification of

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7.13. Pieter van der Heyden, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Anger, 1558.

the theme), or observing the clever ways in which Bruegel seems to have surpassed Bosch in his hybridization of reptile, insect, fish, and amphibian parts for his demons.44 On the Fortitude print, too, the message remains a platitude of ascetic submission, like Anthony’s own passive aggression, as if subscribing to the biblical suggestion that the meek will inherit the earth. The Latin inscription reads: ‘‘To conquer one’s impulses, to restrain anger and the other vices and emotions, this is true fortitude.’’ In this visualization, the outcome of the battle for self-control is not in any doubt, as the mounted cavalry and infantry of virtues have put the disorganized troops of demons to flight and in the foreground have nearly completed the slaughter of all the allegorical animals of individual vices from the earlier series of the Seven Deadly Sins. Both of these works display a predictable outcome, as the seemingly effortless triumph of righteousness prevails. They serve to remind us that either the physical frailty of St. Anthony or the painful torments of hell in Bosch’s depictions of those scenes are far more vivid and suspense-filled for a viewer than the comparable imitations by Mandijn, Huys, or even Bruegel. Taken together, those latter-day Bosch imitators held more closely to the appreciation of his inventions, what the Italian visitor to Flanders, Lodovico Guicciardini, meant when in 1567 he called Bosch ‘‘inventore nobilissimo e mara-

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7.14. Philips Galle, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Fortitude, 1560.

viglioso di cose fantastiche ed bizarre’’ (the most noble and marvelous inventor of fantastic and bizarre things), even as he went on to call Bruegel a ‘‘second Bosch.’’ From such praises of the forms rather than the chilling contents of these pictures, we realize that now—a full half-century after the 1516 death of Bosch—artworks are being prized anew for their aesthetic properties and for the recognizable, signature styles of their inventive creators. In fact, it is the foundation trademark style of inventive demonic combinations and unpredictable scales or hybrid settings that marked Bosch for a viewing public and provoked his imitators to follow his example. To be sure, some of Bruegel’s pictures still carry warnings. Love of possessions has terrible consequences and leads to avarice, anger, and the inversion of normal world order in a warlike image like Mad Meg. Moreover, Bruegel shows armies of skeletal figures leveling the possessions and symbols of power, wealth, and status in his monumental Triumph of Death (Madrid; undated and probably later than the usual date of 1562 affixed by scholars; Figure 7.15).45 Some version of this particular work must have remained in the Low Countries, for it served as the model for a large-scale replica by Pieter the Younger (dated 1626; Mildred Andrews Fund, Cleveland).46 The fire landscapes of these hellish settings of the Bruegel family depend upon yet fully invert the fecund and varied ‘‘world landscape’’ panoramas associated with Patinir in the ongoing Antwerp genre tradition. A viewer would surely

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7.15. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, ca. 1565–66, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

emerge from an image of such devastation with an overriding sense of the vanity of human endeavor in the face of inevitable mortality. Yet testimonials by those articulate commentators on either Bosch or Bruegel primarily concentrate on the delight and admiration for the artists’ fantasies. Moreover, such pictures—with their stock subjects, with even their commonplace inscriptions on the prints—evoke a paradox of possession. These are works that surely evoked pleasure if not laughter, and their artifice is obvious, even while their subjects deal with issues of ultimate destiny and the deepest of spiritual questions. The paradoxical point that emerges offers a contradiction: the commodified image, sold on the open market, yet nonetheless preaching about the vanity of possessions. And here are the torments of hell brought close to a pious saint in retreat or else used to threaten the immortal soul of a viewer, yet chiefly arousing fascinated amusement, even delight, at the skill and the inventiveness of the painter. In such an image, the medium overrides or threatens to drown out the message of spirituality. One particular advantage of its cartoon-like qualities to evoke delight proved telling for the success of this formula in a contemporary climate of charged spirituality. During a period of intense religious conflicts between Catholics and reformers, when many religious subjects in both images and texts became increasingly provocative or suspicious to either party, this kind of Boschian imagery could at once receive enthusiastic endorsement by the pious King Philip II while preserving its own kind of

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spiritual neutrality in the commonplace struggle of good versus evil, which was difficult to find fault with. Sometimes an artist can find safety amid controversies or danger in repeating or updating a popular cliche´. It is not too difficult to follow the commentators who praise Bruegel and liken him to Bosch, nor to understand their enthusiasm for Bosch himself, who has remained so popular in our own time. But another aspect of Bosch’s success in the sixteenth century can be underscored through evoking his lesser imitators. That there were so many imitators is testimony not only to Bosch’s popularity but also to his marketability, which is not the same thing. Bosch was unique and distinctive, but he was also patently imitable. He was recognized as having brought a new kind of painting into the world, in the novel pictorial forms of his demons even when applied to traditional, late medieval concerns like the Last Judgment or the importance of an ascetic life as a spiritual model, such as St. Anthony. Hence the major Bosch imitators stayed with his demonic depictions of temptation, sinfulness, and hell—in short, diableries. However, Bosch also had the ability to use commonplace themes or metaphors as allegories for living, as in the satires on materialism in his Hay Wain Triptych. And this kind of allegorical thinking also provided a new direction, for Hieronymus Cock at least. In 1556, when Bruegel created a drawing, now in Vienna for a print on the subject of greed and the way of the world, he also used a local Flemish proverb: Big Fish Eat Little Fish (Figure 7.16). This is a work very much in the Bosch idiom, with fish that either fly or walk, with imaginary background buildings and the oversized knife blade, whose inscribed orb shows it to convey the way of the world. However, when Cock issued the print, engraved by Pieter van der Heyden, he credited it to Bosch as ‘‘inventor’’ rather than to Bruegel. Of course, this principal case—produced before Bruegel had acquired a reputation or a signature style of his own— casts basic doubt on all those other alleged Bosch designs for Cock prints, though this is a unique instance of being able to disprove the authorship claims of the print because of the surviving drawing by Bruegel. For Cock’s prints of St. Martin in a Boat or The Blind Leading the Blind we can only harbor suspicions that these, too, were new inventions in the spirit of Bosch rather than original, surviving designs from his hand, replicated by the printmaker. The same could be said for images that lie close to Bosch and might be based on lost paintings; they might equally be based on inventions in the Boschian manner, such as the Last Judgment print in the form of a triptych (Figure 7.6), where the surviving Princeton drawings clearly show that neither Bosch nor Bruegel was the actual designer for Cock. Once a Boschian composition was in circulation, whether as a painting or as a Cock print, it became fair game in turn for further imitation. Obviously Pieter Bruegel’s 1568 canvas (Capodimonte, Naples) of the Blind Leading the Blind takes up the earlier Cock print after ‘‘Bosch’’ and shows the later artist capitalizing on a prior theme rather than relying (as the traditional celebration of originality would suggest) on his own invention. Another painted example by Bruegel, seemingly based upon an earlier Bosch invention, is the allegorical Battle Between Carnival and Lent (Figure 4.12).47 Indeed, Bruegel’s own large picture of 1559 spawned a number of smaller imitations, including a painted work now in Boston that was once called an original Bruegel but is now thought to be a copy by one of his own painter sons (Figure 7.17).48 Even here we note the continuity with some of Bosch’s figural inventions,

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7.16. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Big Fish Eat Little Fish, drawing. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. Foto Marburg/Art Resource.

particularly the fat man on the barrel, who resembles the floating figure of the Allegory of Luxury fragment (Figure 4.4). As the smaller Carnival and Lent suggests, Bruegel became the ‘‘new Bosch’’ in more ways than one. Indeed, the distinctiveness of his own broadly fashioned, often caricatured figures combined with the popularity of his new peasant subjects made him, like Bosch, almost an inevitable source for imitators. Some of them were remarkably skillful; their forgeries, signed with the characteristic Bruegel block letters, went undetected until the past quarter century.49 But we are now much more aware of how widespread the phenomenon of Bruegel forms and themes became in the latter years of the sixteenth century. For example, the so-called naer het leven drawings, depicting peasant figures supposedly ‘‘from life,’’ turned out to be accomplished imitations, some of them derived from spectators in sections in larger Bruegel compositions, such as the 1564 Vienna Way to Calvary. Others wear costumes related only to works produced a generation later in Holland by the artist Roelandt Savery, as Joaneath Spicer correctly observed in redating and reattributing them. In the meantime, some of the most celebrated Bruegel landscape drawings are now being reassigned by modern scholars to Roelandt Savery’s brother Jacob and other skilled imitators from the end of the sixteenth century, as Hans Mielke and William Robinson have argued. There is basic overlap between these later peasant or landscape drawings within an overall project

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7.17. After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Battle Between Carnival and Lent. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Seth K. Sweetser Fund, Abbot Lawrence Fund, Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund, William Wilkins Warren Fund, and Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection.

of continuing and extending the Bruegel oeuvre into a new art market, extending from Pieter the Elder’s death in 1569 to that of Pieter the Younger in 1637/38. Just as we began to push further into the world of Bosch imitations to take their larger phenomenon more seriously, so too in the case of the Boston ‘‘Bruegel’’ and the Savery Brothers drawings we now need to move beyond the sorting process, beyond what is original to Pieter the Elder and what is not. As in the case of Bosch, we need to consider why such works were popular as commodities on the art market, that is, what values they conveyed that made them popular with their urban audience. Much more literal repetition of Bruegel works was usually the province of his son Pieter the Younger, such as his images after the 1565 Winter Landscape with Skaters (Brussels; Figure 9.10). Pieter the Younger also made paintings out of his father’s figural designs, including drawings for prints, like Charity, from the Cock series of the Seven Virtues. Just as in the case of Bosch, there are ambiguities about whether Bruegel the Elder actually produced the lost original of a design that was later copied by one or more of his sons. The Bruegel family, along with a host of other followers, spent half a century generating images that in some cases are next to impossible to dismiss from the paternity of the founding father of this artistic dynasty (see Chapter 9).50 In the art market of Antwerp, Pieter Bruegel’s peasants supplanted Bosch’s demons just as surely as Bruegel’s name came to replace Bosch’s on the labels of the prints issued by Cock. In fact, Cock and later printmakers continued to issue posthumous prints after Bruegel designs, even reproducing paintings (such as The Land of Cockaigne; see Figure 6.22) that were never intended for distribution as prints.51 Cock sold for the open market, and by selling prints directly without relying on specifically com-

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missioned work in the manner of painters, he quickly learned what would sell and what would not. Demand by clients in turn stimulated new production, in the form of literal copies or variations on proven successes or with a clear consciousness of what kinds of figures and themes were appreciated by a succession of buyers. Bruegel’s own wonderful and witty drawing of the market situation (Albertina, Vienna; Figure 7.18) shows a scruffy and grouchy painter who toils intently at his easel, only to be misunderstood by a shortsighted if enthusiastic patron, who reaches for his coin purse. This ironic commentary on the artist’s dependence on a purchaser of such ordinary discernment became in its turn one of his more popular subjects for copies so close in style as well as theme that they verge on forgery.52 It was the new phenomenon of the open market in Antwerp that brought about both the commodification of art and the resulting emphasis on replication and reformulation of successful models into pictorial genres of the kinds of pictures that were selling. It was the lively economic center of Antwerp that served as their environment. Prints after drawn or painted designs and literal copies in later paintings provide the surest index of this phenomenon. And an early byproduct was the fame and success of an individual artist’s signature style. Yet we must remember that this early modern form of the art market is necessary but not sufficient to account specifically for the wild growth of Boschian—or later Bruegelian—imitations. We need also to look—specifically here for Bosch demons—at the value systems and emotions conveyed by these images to their owners. (The same approach is necessary for appreciating Bruegel’s images of laboring or idle peasants, a separate topic, as both media and message rather than as objects of pure delectation.) For those ideological constructs in images were really the kinds of comforting—or in the case of Bosch, discomforting, even unsettling—messages brought into their homes by Antwerp’s urban collectors of prints and paintings. Those owners found in their images precisely the kinds of self-confirming messages that merited purchase in the first place, messages that provided a shared community between producers and consumers, artists and audiences, in the crowded urban environment of early capitalist Antwerp. However, sixteenth-century data, in the form of inventories or critical response (beyond the references adduced above) are scanty. This process of making Boschian artworks grew out of a market response to satisfy—and to stimulate further—audience demand, like the modern, parallel example of filmmaking, specifically in its most commercial form: the Hollywood feature film, where ‘‘Creature features’’ or ‘‘monster movies,’’ under the larger rubric of horror films or science fiction, offer a striking modern analogue to the phenomenon of Bosch’s demons and hellish scenes around either St. Anthony or the Last Judgment. One of the commercial aspects of classic Hollywood horror movies is that they began with a series of ‘‘A movies,’’ that is with more lavishly produced and high-priced films, with leading actors and directors in their credits, but they quickly spawned a host of imitations in their own right, both in the form of sequels by the same studio or in the form of remakes and imitations by lesser studios, whether in the form of ‘‘B pictures’’ or low-budget ‘‘independents.’’53 Ironically, the horror genre quickly became such a familiar formula, a cliche in its own right, that it could even spawn comedic parodies.54 The relationship of a successful staple and the establishment of a recognized genre, composed of both formal qualities and consistent thematic material, should be apparent in relation to the phenome-

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7.18. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Painter and the Connoisseur, drawing, ca. 1565. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

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non of Boschian pictures as a genre during the course of the sixteenth century in and around Antwerp. The pictorial production and distribution planning by Hieronymus Cock included Boschian themes as only one of many diverse varieties of image for sale at his own trademarked studio, At the Four Winds, in Antwerp. Nomen est omen. To choose a name like ‘‘At the Four Winds’’ suggests the ambition for wide distribution and sales at the very outset of the printmaking enterprise of Cock, something akin to the varieties of imitations of Bosch’s imagery by both distinguished and less distinctive artists, including those working primarily in other genres. These included landscape painters such as Joachim Patinir or Herri met de Bles (Chapter 3), but also epigones and imitators, ranging from Mandijn and Huys downward in quality and anonymity.55 We have traced the shift of tone toward delight and even laughter in contemporary reactions to the Bosch followers, after the initial frissons occasioned by Bosch himself. In particular, what many of the Bosch imitators, including Bruegel, seem to have delighted in as the basis of their own works is the plethora of inventive and complicated monsters. In Boschian images the monsters are all clearly legible, except for being lost amid crowds of their swarming host. They derive their identities from loathsome components, body parts from the least favorite of most people’s phobic animals, such as insects, fish, toads, snakes, and lizards. Often they are larger in scale relative to humans than would be normal in nature. The sheer variety, numbers, and omnipresence of Boschian monsters underlie some of the dread they inspire. These, in turn, are combined in unpredictable (hence the additional fascination with their fantasy or inventiveness) and noxious juxtapositions, violating the distinct categories associated with each organism as a separate entity. According to Noel Carroll, these category violations (inside/outside, living/dead, insect/human) are as important to their demonic danger and impurity as their component parts.56 The distinction was made earlier between the truly fear-inspiring (by Bosch) and the merely fascinating or almost reassuringly familiar (by the Bosch epigones), later inventions within this evolving genre. Yet all these images still have a mythic clarity, contrasting absolute evil or villainy, often fully alien, with sympathetic human protagonists.57 One of the paradoxes about the long-lived success of the Boschian genre remains its stark contrast to what most art historians view as the basically naturalist trajectory of Netherlandish art tradition. In contrast to the familiar, natural world, the depicted world of Bosch, though often truly persuasive to a viewer, is still a radically alien and alternative world, whether associated with the Last Judgment or a hell on earth experienced as the tribulation of a hermit saint or even by a personification of vice itself. The grotesque and monstrous often remains poised in a delicate balance between the horrific or repulsive and the comical. Yet even where the monsters are more amusing or cartoonlike than threatening, the vision that they present to the viewer serves to generate or reinforce a confidence in either personal or collective abilities to surmount such threats to human capacity (in the case of Bosch’s characters, the capacity for redemption, despite severe demonic challenge in the originating works of the genre) while simultaneously rejecting and surpassing the world of material reality that forms the foundation of most Netherlandish painting, even of holy figures. The key issue for interpreting any instance of the Boschian genre seems to be the degree to which the dangers that demons present can be construed as nightmarish projections from the character of the saintly figures or humans in general or else seen as a detached, if still ominous threat from outside. Whether generated as a serious danger or emerging as a

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surely surmountable threat, Boschian demons provide a warning and a call for vigilance—to both the saintly exemplar and the less exceptional viewer. The kind of framed experience where one can encounter horror, yet emerge with a pleasurable sensation because control is never really suspended, is called ‘‘recreational terror’’ in a recent study.58 One is reminded of the audience response of pity and fear, as posited for an audience of tragedy in Aristotle’s classic formulation in the Poetics. In horror the viewer response includes sympathy for the suffering saint and even personal worry or concern for the viewer’s own spiritual condition in relation to the torments of hell for sinners in general. Significantly, the utter evil of these creatures is rarely in doubt, and for the most part, with the exception of Bosch’s truly frightening creations, neither is the positive outcome of the conflict. What began in Bosch as an overpowering, inescapable menace, arising out of despair and deep pessimism about human society and its values, rapidly transformed into a genre of reassurance and confidence, where the ‘‘spooks’’ offered only token threats to stalwart spiritual heroes, whose triumph was confidently assured. The Boschian genre of the sixteenth century was enough of a popular, market-sensitive art form to gravitate toward restoration of the status quo and to celebrate the triumph of good over evil, despite the challenging threat of the conventionalized demonic adversaries. Pictorial convention as well as consumer familiarity with that convention could sustain a lively, continuous art market, whose net result is not only the standardization of the genre but also its increasingly unthreatening or reassuring sequels and remakes. As late as the turn of the seventeenth century, ongoing examples of the Boschian genre display both the longevity of its conventions and the draining of threat or tension from its demons. To make this point, we can examine principal examples from the turn of the seventeenth century (see Chapter 9) from Pieter Bruegel’s own son Jan Brueghel, sometimes associated with the nickname ‘‘Hell Brueghel’’ (though this was mistakenly attached by mid-century to his brother Pieter the Younger).59 Jan Brueghel first created a rash of demon-plagued scenes, such as his Temptation of St. Anthony (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Figure 7.19), repeating a prototypical Bosch subject but in a setting where the monsters attack the small saint in the corner of a large and dense forest landscape, by then the generic substitution in landscape for the earlier expanded panoramas of Patinir.60 Another hell scene, included amidst other ‘‘landscapes’’ within a single frame, was produced in identical format on copper for Cardinal Federico Borromeo in Milan between 1595 and 1597.61 For such early works by Jan Brueghel, however, the use of the copper support with finely delineated figures in miniature against broader but exquisitely tiny settings clearly points to a collecting mentality on the part of his clients, as in the case of the hell scene for Borromeo. This newer, elite audience of learned and sophisticated collectors is further underscored by the numerous works by Jan from the turn of the century, where the hell scenes provide the setting for mythological rather than religious subjects, dominated by the Vergilian scene of Aeneas in Hades, escorted by the Cumaean Sibyl (Aeneid 6.269–82; examples in Vienna and in Budapest, 1600; Figure 7.20) or else the Ovidian image of Juno visiting Hades (Metamorphoses 4.451–56; Dresden 159[8]).62 In each of these scenes brightly colored as well as fantastic but relatively unthreatening monsters provide the ‘‘recreational terror’’ of the later manifestations of Boschian design while offering images that fuse mythological rather than religious moralizing onto the successful model, now a full century old. The change of theme to a pair of temporary visits to Hades by protagonists from classical Latin literature underscores the degree of intellectual

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7.19. Jan Brueghel, Temptation of St. Anthony, ca. 1603–4. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

and emotional distance from the potentially threatening scenes of hell as punishment for human sinfulness within a Christian framework. Erudition and curiosity fully replace spirituality as the basis of contemplation of such scenes. With these Jan Brueghel mythologies we see the Boschian genre in its latter stages, a century after its foundation, and we can note that it has evolved into a new kind of imagery while still employing similar, inherited forms of the ongoing conventions. But this is a waning, decadent genre in a newer era where naturalism has become truly dominant, particularly in the other works of Jan Brueghel. As in the case of the wide variety of subjects in the print repertoire of Hieronymus Cock in mid-century Antwerp, Jan Brueghel also produced a range of topics, including village scenes, peasant subjects, miniature biblical scenes with crowds, as well as flower still-lifes and elaborate allegories featuring naturalistically detailed flora and fauna. Within this diversity, Boschian vocabulary had come to seem relatively repetitive and old-fashioned after the year 1600, yet Jan Brueghel still included such choices among his coveted collectors’ items in the emerging ‘‘era of art.’’

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7.20. Jan Brueghel, Aeneas in the Underworld, 1600, detail. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Bridgeman Art Gallery.

CHAPTER 8

DESCENT FROM BRUEGEL I From Flanders to Holland

[Raphael] took so many models that he became himself a model for all succeeding painters, always imitating, and always original. —Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art

O

nly recently has the importance of the Bruegel tradition been acknowledged for the North Netherlands, because of the anachronistic separation of art history scholarship between Flemish and Dutch art traditions along the modern national borders between Belgium and the Netherlands.1 Attending simultaneously to artists on both sides of the river Scheldt—including in particular those Flemish artists who migrated northward after 1585—actually underscores the ranges of Bruegel’s extended influence, even while showing the decisive evolution of his own pictorial ideas into new but related ideas of landscape and figure groups. Both the forms and contents of this next generation of Bruegel influences points to a pervasive phenomenon—what should be termed not a Bruegel revival, but rather a Bruegel survival. For Flemish art, particularly the continuing tradition in Antwerp itself, Bruegel continued to serve as a model, not least because of the ongoing production of paintings by his sons: Pieter Breughel the Younger (1564–1637/38), who most often made literal copies after the compositions of his father; and Jan Brueghel (1568–1625), the more inventive artist and sometime collaborator with Rubens and other artists (see Chapter 9).2 However, the importance of Bruegel imagery for later Dutch art, particularly in the formative period of the early seventeenth century, has not been so widely acknowledged. That influence took many forms. Perhaps most notable was the adoption of Bruegel’s formulas of landscape, less in terms of the sixteenth-century panoramic vistas but rather more through adoption of what had been minor emphases in Bruegel’s graphic works, chiefly his thick forest wilderness representations. In addition, Bruegel’s own distinctive representations of winter scenes with skaters took on their own afterlife well into the seventeenth century. In addition, Bruegel’s constant fascination with themes of peasant life, both festivities and labors in the countryside, provided continuing inspiration for Dutch artists and also included scenes of peasants acting out folk sayings and proverbs. The principal means of continuity between Bruegel’s Flemish art and the subsequent creative development of his ideas in Dutch art derived from a generation of Bruegel successors, Flemish artists who emigrated to the North Netherlands during the turbulent early years of the Dutch Revolt, chiefly after the fall of Antwerp in

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1585.3 Chief among these artists were Hans Bol, Gillis van Coninxloo, Jacob and Roelandt Savery, and David Vinckboons. Some continuity of the Flemish ‘‘world landscape’’ tradition was transmitted from the early sixteenth-century founders, headed by Joachim Patinir (d. 1524) through Pieter Bruegel the Elder (d. 1569) and on to the generation active in the new century, including Rubens, but for the most part this heritage was maintained chiefly in Flemish painting of the South Netherlands.4 Karel van Mander’s justified praise for Bruegel in his 1604 Schilderboeck focused on the artist’s greater naturalism of Alpine mountain settings as a big improvement over Patinir’s fully conventional and imagined crags.5 Yet scholars have focused instead on the model of a definitive paradigm shift between Flanders and Holland, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they have consequently not attended to the ongoing interest in mountain scenes by later Dutch artists (such as Hercules Seghers and even the paintings of Rembrandt) who followed Bruegel. The same shortsightedness that has generally separated nationalistic scholarship, divided between Belgium and Holland, has also kept the influences of Bruegel mountains out of those accounts, which seek to identify ‘‘progressive’’ landscape trends with the artistic depiction of flat, typically ‘‘Dutch’’ countryside. A vivid case in point is Hendrick Goltzius, usually invoked as the breakthrough draftsman of Holland because of his panoramic drawings from the top of dunes in the vicinity of Haarlem (signed and dated 1603; Rotterdam).6 Yet for all his vaunted realism, which also included direct experience of the Alps on his own trip to Italy in 1592, Goltzius’s drawings of mountains are astoundingly conventional, even while still Bruegelian, in their forms. His Mountainous Landscape drawing in the Morgan Library, New York (ca. 1596–97; Figure 8.1) not only includes a distant and arbitrary step-back structure of its mountains but also assembles a nonnatural ‘‘world landscape’’ juxtaposition of mountain with coastline, like both Patinir and Bruegel. This image was not confined to a single sheet in a private collection: it was etched for public distribution (published in The Hague by Hendrik Hondius; Figure 8.2) by Simon Frisius (b. Harlingen, ca. 1580; d. The Hague, 1629).7 Moreover, within a broader discussion of the importance of convention in Dutch landscape images of the seventeenth century, Lawrence Goedde has astutely observed how much the technique, if not always the chosen sites, of Goltzius landscapes derive from the stipple and dot penwork of Bruegel. The enduring importance of Bruegel’s mountain formula for the next generation of artists, including Flemish e´migre´s, emerges most vividly from a cluster of drawings that modern scholarship (only in the past twenty years) has unmasked as outright forgeries. Drawn in the characteristic Bruegel broad pen strokes with stipple technique in order to evoke atmosphere, these landscapes usually feature a dominant cliff in one half of the picture and a deep river view in the other half. Virtually all these drawings are signed ‘‘BRUEGEL’’ in capital block letters and dated in the early 1560s (for example, Mountain Landscape with Four Travelers, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Figure 8.3). Researches by Hans Mielke, seconded by William Robinson, have identified the real artist of these drawings to be Jacob (or Jacques) Savery (1565/67–1603), who trained with a Bruegel contemporary, Hans Bol; however, like Bol, he left for Holland in the 1580s, settling eventually in Amsterdam.8 Thus at the very moment when Goltzius was producing his own emulations of Bruegel mountain landscapes, Jacob Savery was producing outright Bruegel landscape forgeries, complete with false signature and date.

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8.1. Hendrick Goltzius, Mountainous Landscape, drawing, ca. 1596–97. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, gift of the Fellows with the special assistance of the Lore and Rudolf Heinemann Foundation. The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource.

But by the end of the sixteenth century, the production of mountains in the older idiom of the ‘‘world landscape’’ was a relatively old-fashioned pictorial construct. By contrast, the principal formula for a remote wilderness site, still under a formative Pieter Bruegel influence, had become the turn-ofthe-century fascination with ‘‘forest landscape.’’9 In fact, a prime object that established Bruegel’s forest vision stands at the very outset of his career, in the drawing without figures (Na´rodnı´ Galerie, Prague; unsigned but dated 1554), which was later enhanced for print publication by Hieronymus Cock into an etching of the Temptation of Christ (see Figure 3.11). Jan Brueghel made his own copy after the Cock etching in a drawing (Lugt Collection, Paris; Figure 8.4), signed and dated 1595.10 In addition, Bruegel’s forest landscape concept helped to shape his own later print for Cock, Pagus Nemorosus (Wooded Region; Figure 3.10), where the village clearing appears to have been carved out of the wild growth of the thick trees, which occupy fully half the print surface. Moreover, a number of subsequent copies attest to a lost, early drawn work (ascribed to the period of his trip to Italy, i.e., 1552–54; see also an authentic drawing, now in the Ambrosiana, Milan; Figure 8.5). What is striking about the Milan original as well as the numerous copies (including the Forest Landscape with Wild Animals in the British Museum, London; Figure 8.6) is the emphasis on foreground trees, seen close up but strikingly artificial in their sinuous S-curves and evocatively sketchy hatchings and stipplings. In all of these images the viewpoint (and horizon) are low and the contrasts of near and deep spaces strong.11 The several copies after Bruegel’s lost forest landscape(s) do not make the pretense of either Roe-

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8.2. Simon Frisius, etching after Hendrick Goltzius, Mountainous Landscape, 1608. British Museum, London. Copyright British Museum.

landt or Jacob Savery to simulate/forge (often with false signatures) original Pieter landscape drawings. Moreover, several of these wooded drawings, which include wild animals such as bears or goats suggest that at least several Pieter originals remained part of the Bruegel family artistic patrimony and also contributed to the later powerful, and personal contribution made by Jan Brueghel to the forest landscape tradition in both paintings and drawings. A splendid example of this phenomenon is the 1593 drawing bu Jan Brueghel, Swamp Landscape with Angler (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Figure 8.7), which does not closely copy the Pieter prototypes but instead offers an emulation and variation of the model of the forest landscape.12 The Bruegelian innovation of the forest landscape met with phenomenal success in Flemish as well as Dutch painting around the year 1600. Alongside Jan Brueghel, whose forest landscapes, with and without figures, occupied his career on either side of 1600 and from as early as 1594,13 the painter usually credited (even overcredited) with the greatest contribution to the development of various images set in forest landscapes is Gillis van Coninxloo (b. Antwerp, 1544; d. Amsterdam, 1607). Indeed, Karel van Mander said of Coninxloo in his 1604 Schilderboeck that Dutch trees ‘‘that were somewhat withered, now begin as much as possible to grow according to his manner.’’14 A dated forest landscape painting (1598; Figure 8.8) in Vaduz offers a jumping-off point for dating and discussion of the Coninxloo contribution, but his influence was extended by means of his designs for large-scale prints, engraved principally by another (understudied) print-producer, Nicolaes de Bruyn (b. Antwerp, 1571; d. Rotter-

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8.3. Jacob Savery, Mountain Landscape with Four Travelers, drawing, ca. 1600. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, purchased 1958.

dam, 1656, with the publisher’s address of Frans van Beusecom) as well as Jan van Londerseel (b. Antwerp, 1578; d. Rotterdam, 1628), who published with Claes Jansz. Visscher.15 It should also be noted that some of the earlier Gillis van Coninxloo compositions, engraved by de Bruyn, show a combination of foreground hilltop forest settings with more distant mountain peaks on the opposite side, as if in their own extension and refinement of the Pieter Bruegel formula of world landscape. In most of these designs the crown of foliage of one of the near trees bends over to conform to the top of the composition. Again, the roots of this formula can be found in Pieter Bruegel designs, chiefly the composition copied (and dated 1554, presumably from the original) in a drawing in Berlin.16 The significance of the forest landscape lies in its successor role to mountains as the localities of wilderness experiences, and its concentrated isolation as the site of moral trials for hermit saints and other biblical scenes involving ethical decision-making or even physical tests of strength. We can note the roster of Old Testament subjects depicted in the Coninxloo-designed prints Jacob and Esau, The Discovery of Moses (1601; Figure 8.9), Elisha and the Children of Bethel (1602), The Prophet Hosea Praying, and Samson Fighting with the Lion (1603); from the New Testament come Christ and the Woman with an Issue of Blood, and The Way to Emmaus (a theme previously included by Bruegel among the suite of the Large Landscapes almost half a century earlier), and from Greek mythology comes the ultimate moment

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8.4. Jan Brueghel, Temptation of Christ, 1595. Collection Frits Lugt, Institut Ne´erlandais, Paris.

of choice: The Judgment of Paris (1600). In particular, the obscure theme of Elisha using bears to attack mocking children (2 Kings 2: 23–25) shows the power as well as the isolation of the prophet, scourge of kings. In similar fashion, Christ and the Woman with an Issue of Blood (Matthew 9: 20–22; Mark 5: 25–34, Luke 8: 43–48) is an image of healing through faith. In fact, these works are complements. Just as the prophets had done, Christ has the power to work miracles and healing as well as curses. And the outcome of the scenes depends on ‘‘right seeing’’ by the figures involved, whether the wrong choice made by the children around Elisha or by the judging Paris or the revelations afforded to Abraham or the pilgrims to Emmaus.17 For such extraordinary powers, the isolated setting of a forest, far from the mundane and quotidian world of the city, provides the appropriate setting for both holy and mythic figures. As with the world landscape, the figures and setting are truly matched, and as Falkenburg and Silver have both argued, the distance and scale of the forest (or earlier, mountain) wilderness setting is the marker of the sanctity or gravity of the scene (however small in scale), which the discerning viewer has to seek out and read as significant. This is even more the case in the ways Jan Brueghel and Coninxloo refined and redefined the kind of small-figure religious scenes of the Pieter Bruegel pictorial tradition, both in paintings and in graphics.18 Besides these wooded landscapes with exceptional figures, such as prophets or saints, a much more

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8.5. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wooded Landscape with Mills, drawing, 1552. Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.

ordinary kind of setting, usually filled with crowds of ordinary people, passed from Bruegel to succeeding generations as a major contribution: the winter landscape.19 Here the Bruegel models lay in both paintings and prints. Surely Bruegel’s most often copied of all paintings is his Winter Landscape with Skaters (1565; Musee´s Royaux, Brussels), which became a veritable cash cow for Pieter the Younger in his numerous reprises, usually on the same small scale if not exactly in the same dimensions.20 Another image of winter activities is the engraving by Hans Bol (Figure 8.10) that completed the 1570 Cock print series of the seasons, for which Bruegel had earlier designed both Spring (1565, drawing in the Albertina, Vienna) and Summer (1568, Hamburg).21 Thus, this drawing has a once-removed pedigree to Bruegel’s own designs, and it too was copied often by Pieter the Younger (e.g., in a painted series of 1616 now in Bucharest). This design features larger-scale human figures as much as it does the ice and snow of the frigid season, and it is noteworthy for the way it mingles classes in the leveling process of skating across the frozen river.22 Bol’s design, in turn, relates closely to a Bruegel drawing (private collection, U.S.), published as an engraving by Cock, Skating Before the Gate of St. George’s Gate (Figure 8.11) and (back-)dated 1553.23 Bruegel’s skating scenes have also been related to the tradition of moral choices in a landscape, where the risk of ice skating and crossing on foot is compared to the

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8.6. After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Forest Landscape with Wild Animals. British Museum, London. Copyright British Museum.

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8.7. Jan Brueghel, Swamp Landscape with Angler, drawing, 1593. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

bird trap in the 1565 Brussels painting by a number of authors, so there is some possible relation between this setting and the forest discussed above.24 That this winter subgenre became a basic staple of art after 1600 on both sides of the Scheldt can be seen clearly in the case of painter Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634), whose whole career consisted of such images, elaborated with many more figures, beginning around 1608–9.25 Moreover, winter scenes from the suite of the four seasons continued to inspire later versions of print series, such as the village scenes and seasons images of Jan van de Velde II (1617; Figure 8.12).26 Instruments of transmission from the generation of Pieter Bruegel to these successors in early seventeenth-century Holland are the very same artists who have already been mentioned—and who will remain important for many successive pictorial forms and themes: Hans Bol, Gillis van Coninxloo, Jacob and Roelandt Savery, and David Vinckboons, all Flemish e´migre´s who came north to Holland in 1585 for religious reasons. All of them settled in Amsterdam, and all practiced an extended and modified version of Pieter Bruegel’s artistic formulas.27 The key link is Bol (1534–93), who began his career in nearby Mechelen but came to work in Antwerp (and to continue his association with Cock’s print publishing) in the period 1572–84 after the Spanish sack of his hometown (he took Antwerp citizenship in 1575).28 Eventually he wound up in Amsterdam, where he became a citizen in 1591. Jacob (1565/ 67–1603) was a Bol pupil, who also enrolled in 1591 as an Amsterdam citizen, and who died there in 1603.29 We have already met him as an outright forger of Bruegel landscape drawings, complete with signatures and date to complement the deceptive stippling technique.

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8.8. Gillis van Coninxloo, Forest Landscape, 1598. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

Jacob Savery, however, was equally interested in another staple of the Bruegel heritage: peasant scenes, usually festive scenes of the ‘‘village kermis,’’ which he produced in the form of both drawings and paintings.30 This subject has been so often studied by scholars over the past several decades that it might seem to be a cliche´ by now, but as the later emulation of Bruegel makes clear, this kind of peasant subject is one of Bruegel’s most potent legacies.31 This subject not only was promulgated in his latter decade in the form of paintings but also formed a critical element of his print output, including both the Kermis at Hoboken, published by Bartholomeus de Momper in 1559 (see Figure 6.11), and the Kermis of St. George of Cock (Figure 6.10), as well as later prints, such as The Peasant Wedding Dance (published after 1570 by Cock’s widow; Figure 6.15).32 Of course, peasant subjects were not invented or exclusively offered by Bruegel, but they were certainly closely associated with his contribution and became a major staple of the e´migre´ artist community (first for Hans Bol and then his pupils Jacob Savery and David Vinckboons) as well as generating the numerous closer replicas of Bruegel originals by Pieter the Younger back in Antwerp (Chapter 9). For the most part such images continue to present small figures in great crowds of dancing, feasting, fighting, and other festive or leisure activities, usually within the open market space of a village center, adjacent to a church front (Figure 8.13). As Svetlana Alpers and other commentators have noted, these images not only feature peasant festivities, but also often include visits from observing, well-dressed patrician figures (the scholarly debate about interpretation of this motif hinges on whether the gesture of a visit should be taken to be social condescension or rather, as Alpers contends, an upper-class

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8.9. Nicolaes de Bruyn, engraving after Gillis van Coninxloo, The Discovery of Moses, 1601. Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

affiliation with the perceived freedom and license of the boisterous lower classes). The sheer abundance of this subject matter has tended to obscure its decisive origins in the later imitations of Bruegel models (or literal copies and variants after his own originals) by generations of Dutch painters as well as his own two sons in Antwerp and their own descendants, such as David Teniers. In this respect the early designation of Pieter the Elder as ‘‘Peasant Bruegel’’ and the anecdotes by van Mander about his visit to peasant festivities point to the early identification of this artist with this subject matter.33 What is striking about these peasant village scenes of the next generation after Pieter the Elder is that they embrace the local setting (and suggest considerable sympathy for peasantry, even where boorish manners are foregrounded), sometimes against either mountains or forest landscapes (which offer the very opposite of Netherlandish topography). Such village events present an image of social cohesion and order, however much fantasized and nostalgic, at the very moment when the Dutch Revolt (the cause of the emigration of the Flemish artists into Holland) was most destabilizing that social order. Even if Bruegel did not necessarily anticipate the nostalgia for innocent merriment amid peasant village life when he first created his images around 1560, his successors surely appreciated the halcyon qualities of that environment all the more during their generation of dislocation and strife. In this respect, one other, related theme that intensely developed out of a core idea of Pieter Bruegel would find a particular resonance in this next generation of artists: the boerenverdriet, or ‘‘distress of the peasantry,’’ as it is called in the inventories.34 The wellspring of this imagery lies in Bruegel’s painted work (or a work close to Bruegel, adapted by a follower), where a small cluster of peasants are beset on

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8.10. Pieter van der Heyden, engraving after Hans Bol, Winter, 1570.

a road in open country by armed bandit soldiers (Peasant Couple Attacked by Soldiers, 1567, Stockholm University Art Collection).35 However, this scene is by no means unique in Bruegel’s oeuvre. If we start with the projection of contemporary soldiers harassing villagers in the (snowbound) biblical scene of the Massacre of the Innocents, we also note the relatively unsettling and frequent presence of soldiers earlier in Bruegel’s printed works. For example, the Large Landscapes prints by Cock, dating from a decade earlier, also contain one scene, Soldiers at Rest, with eponymous figures who loiter alongside a roadway as a pair of journeying travelers pass by safely. In addition, Bruegel’s only etching, The Rabbit Hunt (1560) shows a soldier, armed with a pike and wearing a helmet, stalking a hunter with crossbow from behind a tree. The significance of this subject remains unclear, though the basic interpretation tends to be some vision of a hunter hunted, but the menace of manhunting is inescapable in this print, despite the attractive expanse of the open river landscape in the distance.36 This theme of boerenverdriet was adopted by both Jacob Savery (1596 drawings in Staedel, Frankfurt; undated drawing, British Museum, London) and David Vinckboons at the end of the sixteenth century.37 Such scenes can also be found along roadsides in landscape settings reminiscent of Bruegel the Elder, in both prints and paintings, such as an etching by Bol (cf. also a print designed by Vinck-

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8.11. Frans Huys, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Skating Before the Gate of St. George, Antwerp, ca. 1558. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926.

boons, engraved by Jan van Londerseel; Figure 8.14) and panels by Jan Brueghel (1607, with figures by Sebastiaan Vrancx; Antwerp).38 The fullest reception of all these various Pieter Bruegel formulas by the next generation within the North Netherlands emerges when we examine the output—paintings, drawings, and prints—by David Vinckboons (1576–1632/33), who in many ways can be seen as the paradigmatic Bruegel follower (other than the two sons of Pieter the Elder).39 Certainly the biography of Vinckboons is exemplary of the general trends: born in Mechelen, the city of Hans Bol, he moved with his painter father Philip (1545–1601) first to Antwerp (1580–86), then to Middelburg, and by 1591 to Amsterdam. In that same year, Philip Vinckboons enrolled in the Amsterdam citizens rolls alongside Hans Bol and Jacob Savery, so his young son and apprentice was connected to the very mainstream of ongoing Bruegel influence in the North. Within the history of Dutch painting, David Vinckboons has been credited (on stylistic grounds) with training some of the leading artists, particularly those sensitive to the Bruegel themes and forms, of the next generation: Claes Jansz. Visscher, Gillis d’Hondecoeter, and Esias van de Velde (all of them, like him, closely connected with the production of prints). Documents reveal a tangible connection between Vinckboons and Coninxloo (who had been in Amsterdam since 1595), specifically, his purchase of some of the older artist’s drawings at an auction of his estate in March 1607,40 and old inventories suggest that Vinckboons might have provided figures for Coninxloo forest

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8.12. Jan van de Velde II, Winter, etching, 1617. British Museum, London. Copyright British Museum.

landscapes. Certainly the two artists converge in their designs toward small-figure narratives within towering, great, bosky wilds; moreover, designs by both of them were engraved by Nicolaes de Bruyn on large-scale plates (yet another reason to learn more about that neglected printmaker). The landscapes of Vinckboons often include biblical scenes, like those of Coninxloo. In addition he often produces subjects with upper-class figures, who for the most part do not play a large role in the art of Bruegel, except by way of contrast, within such works as the 1560 Netherlandish Proverbs. Sometimes these two worlds overlap, as the pleasure worlds of the Prodigal Son or the Magdalene could be centered in the same garden settings as ‘‘merry companies.’’41 Vinckboons did produce small-figure biblical narratives in forests that grow directly out of Pieter Bruegel’s crowded paintings of similar themes, such as The Preaching of John the Baptist (ca. 1610, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), but these are often painted on the more miniature, virtuoso scale of Jan Brueghel or Coninxloo, the manner of picture favored by liefhebbers, the collecting connoisseurs of the next generation.42 Vinckboons, more than most of his contemporaries, made further use of the Bruegelian theme of peasant activities, ranging from festive peasants to beggars. Sometimes these images seem to be the paired oppositions in contemporary collections (as outlined by van Mander in his 1604 Schilderboeck, fol. 299) to religious images from the ministry or Passion of Christ. Indeed, a number of Vinckboons images emulate the deceptive presentation of Pieter the Elder, compositions where the secondary figures

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8.13. Jacob Savery, Village Kermis, drawing, 1598. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Victoria and Albert Museum/Art Resource.

are placed in great numbers and larger scale in the near foreground and the true religious subject of the image is hidden at the side or in the distance, to be discovered later (often with the force of a revelation) by the attentive and persistent viewer (cf. Bruegel’s Census at Bethlehem, 1566; Conversion of St. Paul, 1567, discussed in Chapter 3; see Figures, 3.16, 3.17). This structuring of pictures, especially evident in the Vinckboons prints by Nicolaes de Bruyn, retains the essence of Bruegel’s pictorial purposes, even if the figures or the forests or the apparent subjects (as well as the smaller size of the images) seem at first glance to differ from the moral universe of choice and right vision from the sixteenth century. In this respect, Vinckboons is the proper heir of Coninxloo and of the continuing Bruegel tradition. Also close to the Bruegel tradition is Vinckboons’s inclination to produce designs for prints: about half of his extant drawings were designs for replication, most as engravings.43 Among the other principal subjects Vinckboons adopted from Bruegel are representations of beggars.44 Bruegel himself featured beggars in larger works, but he specifically singled them out in a pair of 1568 paintings, The Blind Leading the Blind (Capodimonte Museum, Museum) and the Cripples (Louvre, Paris), in addition to repetition of such images as the Twelve Flemish Proverbs series in roundels, engraved posthumously by Hieronymus Wierix (both The Misanthrope, Van Bastelaer 171, after the other canvas painting in Naples; and The Blind Leading the Blind, Van Bastelaer 181). Succeeding artists extended this Bruegel emphasis in beggar images of their own.45 Here in particu-

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8.14. Jan van Londerseel, engraving after David Vinckboons, Landscape with Travelers Attacked by Robbers. British Museum, London. Copyright British Museum.

lar David Vinckboons picked up the initiative, including beggar figures, often blind ones, within his own general interest in broader scenes of village life, for example, his Blind Hurdy-Gurdy Player (1609; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). A similar image with Vinckboons influence was produced by an etcher of the next generation, Claes Jansz. Visscher, in his 1608 Leper Procession (Figure 8.15).46 A deliberate Bruegel imitation, now attributed by Mielke to Jacob Savery, of The Blind (Figure 8.16), situated just outside a village on a road, even bears a false Bruegel inscription and date of 1562.47 This work, too, might follow the parable line of ‘‘the blind leading the blind’’ (Matthew 15: 14), which informed Bruegel’s Naples canvas and served as a tiny background image in his 1560 Netherlandish Proverbs, but it does not indicate any misfortune to the travelers and seems rather to feature a peasant woman with her basket (for similar figures, cf. also the Roelandt Savery ‘‘naer het leven’’ drawings) as much as the picturesque if scruffy vagabond men. The drawings for prints by Vinckboons (52 of his 84 known drawings) begin with a dated work of 1600, although a few undated works might stem from a few years earlier, and the bulk of this production for engravings originated in the first decade of the new century.48 About a dozen of the drawings focus on a favorite Bruegel theme, the peasant village kermis, set in the same kind of location: a central space, backed by a church steeple but also flanked by a country inn, before which groups of dancers

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8.15. Claes Jansz. Visscher, etching after David Vinckboons, Leper Procession, 1608.

cavort (Figure 8.17). Sometimes background processions by the church identify the moment as a specific annual church holiday, the kermis (mass) in honor of a local patron saint, as recorded in Bruegel’s designs for two engravings on this theme: one for Cock (ca. 1559, Kermis of St. George; Figure 6.10), the other for Bartholomeus de Momper (1559; Kermis at Hoboken; Figure 6.11).49 Vinckboons also responded to the use of proverbs underlying a number of Bruegel scenes, particularly peasant scenes. Bruegel’s own comprehensive painting of Netherlandish Proverbs (1560; Berlin) was followed by both a painting, The Peasant and the Bird-Nester (1568; Figure 6.23) as well as a signed drawing, The Beekeepers (1567–68; Figure 6.24), that featured the proverb ‘‘he who knows where the nest is, has the knowledge; he who robs it has the nest.’’50 Reckless nest-robbing in the painting is contrasted with smug complacency in the drawing (along with the prudent working with nature of the apiaries). Vinckboons picked up directly on the Bruegel model of peasant figure types as well as this proverbial thematic content in his drawing (now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Figure 8.18) and subsequent etching of 1606 (Figure 8.19), where the inscription on the print leaves no doubt that it is precisely the same proverb that is invoked.51 In the case of Vinckboons’s drawing, underneath a thick forest canopy, evocative of Coninxloo, a pair of large, standing peasants gape upward (a man instructing a boy) and point to the bold nest robber as an exemplum of the proverb, although the central adult

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8.16. Jacob Savery, The Blind, drawing, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Photo: Jo¨rg P. Anders.

figure ignores his own purse, only to have it stolen in broad daylight by a furtive thief (akin to the ragged, thieving figure in Bruegel’s 1568 Misanthrope; Figure 6.26). In the distant background, anglers empty a fish trap, as if in emulation of the careful and productive beekeepers of the Bruegel drawing. In the Bird-Nester drawing, a farmer carefully and prudently leads a horse across a bridge and into a stable, much as the Bruegel Bird-Nester (Vienna) painting offers a background georgic farm scene with horses in a clearing, which contrasts with the danger-filled forest world of the foreground.52 Both the costumes and the family group, including a nursing mother with children and a dog, in the right corner of the etching suggest that Vinckboons wanted to underscore the poverty of this group and also to indicate, by means of a large cage and long pole, that they live marginally from the forest by birdcatching—the subject of yet another Bruegel print from the Large Landscapes, Insidiosus Auceps (Cunning Bird Catcher).53 In prints (e.g., Figure 8.14, Jan van Londerseel after Vinckboons, Landscape with Travelers Attacked by Robbers, engraved and published by Claes Jansz. Visscher)54 as well as paintings and drawings, Vinckboons was a particular proponent of representing scenes of ‘‘peasant distress’’ (boerenverdriet), which Bruegel had inaugurated with his cruelly contemporary, snow scene presentation of the Massacre of the Innocents and followed with his Peasant Couple Attacked by Soldiers (1567[?], University Art Collection, Stockholm), where a trio of vagabond soldiers attack a peasant couple on the open road.55 Vinckboons’s presentation of peasant distress appears in a pendant pair of painted works (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1609): one shows the peasants humiliated in their home (an inn?) by well-dressed soldiers

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8.17. David Vinckboons, Village Kermis, drawing, 1603. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource.

with harlots, the other in contrast shows the same peasants exacting their revenge outside the inn with knives, axes, and flails as weapons. Vinckboons also designed related subjects for prints, engraved by Boe¨thius a` Bolswert, as an allegory on the Truce (Zinneprent op het Bestand).56 The scene opens with an attack on the closed door of a cottage by soldiers with a writ for their billeting and provision; then, after a couple of images akin to the paintings of 1609, a fourth print shows reconciliation between soldiers and peasants at a feast outside the inn, while one peasant even dances with a soldier’s harlot (Figure 8.20). The inscription on the final print indicates that the theme is reconciliation during the Truce: ‘‘Behold how the Treaty turns all upside down: / The turbulent soldier sits down with the peasant (Siet nu hoe den frefves alles verkeeren gaet / Den moetwillige Soldaet, comt bij den Huisman bancken). This final print derives closely from Bruegel’s own lightly comical image of communal village life, the Peasant Kermis (ca. 1568; Figure 6.13), whose smooching couples and dancers would prove so inspirational to Rubens. But there is trouble brewing even in this would-be paradise, as theft of beer, purses, and sweethearts promises almost certain future conflicts. As if in social inversion of the peasant scenes, or a new focus on the fashionable soldiers and their well-dressed companions, Vinckboons also specialized in a hybrid scene of upper-class festivities, situated within parklike gardens that partake of the Bruegel-Coninxloo forest canopies.57 This new subject

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8.18. David Vinckboons, Bird-Nester, drawing. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

offers an almost calculated evolution of earlier Vinckboons subject types, which include a number of biblical subjects of dubious moral indulgence, such as The Pleasures of Mary Magdalene (Figure 8.21) or Susannah and the Elders or David Spying Bathsheba.58 What emerged from these combinations of unmarked upper-class pleasure groups was a new subgenre for the seventeenth century, the ‘‘merry company in a garden,’’ developed and popularized by such artists as Esias van de Velde, a student of Vinckboons, in the next decade, following similar small panels of the theme by Vinckboons himself (such as the 1615 painting now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).59 Vinckboons provided one such touchstone in the chateau and garden in his own 1601 Garden Festival engraving (executed by Nicolaes de Bruyn; Figure 8.22), which in fact includes an almost invisible, contrasting scene of punishment on the distant hill in the right background—a crucifixion scene (along with a gallows).60 Such pleasure garden imagery in its own right had already been anticipated and established (following an older tradition in manuscripts and early engravings of the ‘‘garden of love’’) by Hans Bol after his move from Antwerp to the North Netherlands when he began to paint miniatures in gouache on parchment of courtly life in The Hague.61 Of course, with this emerging new theme of the ‘‘merry company,’’ we have moved a considerable distance from any of the cues and subjects provided by Pieter Bruegel himself. The pleasure/leisure

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8.19. Hessel Gerritsz (?), etching after David Vinckboons, Bird-Nester, 1606. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

subjects of winter skating and peasant kermis grew naturally out of Bruegel’s stimulus, whereas the forest settings, so richly developed by Coninxloo, and the ‘‘peasant distress’’ scenes of Vinckboons and others were based upon a narrower but still tangible Bruegel pictorial foundation. In fact, even the image of the love garden appears in one of Bruegel’s prints—albeit in miniature—in the background left scene of his 1565 Spring (drawing in Vienna, Mielke, no. 64), published as one of the four seasons by Cock in 1570 (together with the Bol image of Winter [Figure 8.10] with its own subsidiary skating scene).62 This extension of Bruegel inventions by his successors in the next generation points to an important difference in art history from the traditional emphasis on ‘‘influence’’ or ‘‘legacy.’’ What we have discovered instead is that part of the ‘‘reception’’ of Pieter Bruegel lies especially in inventive developments growing out of his own initial suggestions, sometimes even from his marginal or background imagery, as well as the potential inherent in later variations on both motifs and general themes. In the process, we see a next generation’s attempt to surpass its model more than to imitate it literally—in short we see ‘‘emulation.’’63 The term aemulatio, tied to prior terms translatio and imitatio in classical rhetorical tradition, operates as the highest level of independence of an imitator from his model, spurred by competition and the sense of artistic rivalry between contemporaries or (with an implied notion of progress)

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8.20. David Vinckboons, Festive Peasants, Soldier, and Harlots, drawing. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

between later generations and their predecessors.64 This same emulative striving had already been associated with Bruegel as a ‘‘second Bosch,’’ whose praise lies precisely in his ability to infuse his own sensibility into the creative reworking of the forms and themes of his celebrated model.65 Some of this emulative ambition can be grounded in the aesthetic program of the last quarter of the sixteenth century, led by the artistry of Goltzius, whose ‘‘master prints’’ simulate both the forms (handelingen) and themes of famous old master printmakers and designers from both North and South (Du¨rer, Lucas van Leyden, Barocci, Titian), whose achievements had been codified verbally in the contemporary writings of Karel van Mander.66 The term ‘‘emulator’’ was also used explicitly in the inscription around the engraved portrait of Bruegel made in Prague for Rudolf II by Aegidius Sadeler in 1606; there the artist is the ‘‘rival and scion’’ to nature but also to the precedents and achievements of earlier art.67 Even Bruegel himself, although a ‘‘founding father’’ of the Northern tradition in the vision of such a print and in the works of a succeeding generation of artists, as we have seen, becomes a source for imitation as well as exploration in terms of variety and richness of detail, like nature itself. Traditionally (and mostly in the Italian context) art historians have considered this kind of extension from the touchstone model, whether ‘‘nature’’ or model artists, as ‘‘mannerism,’’ and within this framework, it is perfectly possible to view the works of Bol, Coninxloo, the Savery brothers, and Vinckboons—in addition

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8.21. Nicolaes de Bruyn, engraving after David Vinckboons, Pleasures of Mary Magdalene, ca. 1601. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Elisha Whittelsey Collection, Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949.

to Jan Brueghel—as ‘‘mannered’’ variations on a Bruegel theme, an intentional reconciliation of ‘‘art’’ with ‘‘nature.’’ Thus the succeeding generation’s relation to Bruegel can, at its best, be described as emulation. But in fact the range of Bruegel imitations runs the full gamut of relations to a model presented by the same rhetorical theory. For copying, the literal replication (with inevitable fall-off of quality and imagination) of Pieter the Elder occurs with Pieter the Younger, although almost entirely in the medium of smallerscale paintings. Other copies after Bruegel models include those drawings after such component elements as forest scenes or copies after celebrated compositions (perhaps prized by early collectors and liefhebbers), such as Bruegel’s drawing The Painter and the Connoisseur (Figure 7.18).68 For imitation proper, we have the excerpting of individual figures and addition of his own naer het leven versions of single figure drawings by Roelandt Savery, as well as the imitative and even outright forgery drawings (complete with fake block signatures and misdatings to Bruegel’s lifetime in the early 1560s) by Jacob Savery and the relatively unchanged reprises of favorite and well-developed Bruegel themes, such as peasant festivals. From such examples, it seems more appropriate to speak of a Bruegel ‘‘survival,’’ or even of a continuous evolution of Bruegel visual imagery, rather than referring at the turn of the century to a Bruegel ‘‘revival.’’ But the real process of emulation stretches the Bruegel model into new directions, or inventively composes new forms and themes from Bruegel suggestions, such as the boerenverdriet, the winter skating scenes, or the variety of thickly forested settings. Here the principal continuator of the tradition, Hans Bol, extends that tradition into emulators of the new century, particularly Coninxloo and Jacob

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8.22. Nicolaes de Bruyn, engraving after David Vinckboons, Garden Festival, 1601. British Museum, London. Copyright British Museum.

Savery (for landscapes), or Roelandt Savery and especially Vinckboons (for peasants). A few themes, such as ‘‘merry companies,’’ which are only nascent within Bruegel’s own oeuvre, emerge quickly and fully once the forest settings of their elite subjects resolve into the newer form of gardens and the biblical scenes of indulgence and temptation take on a contemporary cast of characters. In the new century, an emerging Dutch national culture (including a substantial youth culture during the peacetime prosperity),69 as well as a powerful sense of contemporaneity and national identity as issues for art (rather than the heritage of morally challenging Old Testament subjects), led to the growth, with Vinckboons at its center, of a new thematic core—within what we now call ‘‘genre’’ subjects—merry companies in pleasure gardens as well as festive peasants in village squares. Of course, Bruegel’s contribution to the development of those peasant scenes and village sites is patent, but it should be said that even mistaken ‘‘Bruegel’’ identification could contribute to important innovations in the emerging seventeenth-century formulation Dutch landscapes.70 In Haarlem in 1612, the series of landscapes, originally issued—without attribution to any designer—by Bruegel’s publisher, Hieronymus Cock as the Small Landscapes of 1559 and 1561, was reissued under the heading (in Latin) ‘‘Some country farms and cottages of the Duchy of Brabant, drawn by P. Bruegel, and, to please painters, engraved and published by Claes Jansz. Visscher. At Amsterdam. 1612.’’ Ironically, this seemingly informal and intimate emphasis on the local and even the topographical as the subject of landscape offered a new way out of the ‘‘mannered’’ and obviously composed pictorial formulas that had evolved and

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dominated in the preceding generation since Bruegel himself, particularly the dense forests of Coninxloo and Jan Brueghel. Visscher deserves credit, followed and even surpassed by Esias and Jan II van de Velde in etchings produced before 1618, for effecting this revolution of vision in Dutch landscape forms and themes.71 Yet, ironically, Visscher was able to produce this major shift through his evocation for these images of the name and precedent (wrongly ascribed, we now believe) of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In a ‘‘back to the future’’ strategy of picture-making, Visscher’s Charming Country Districts (Plaisante Plaetsen) reinstalled anglers, skaters, and travelers into the village world of canals and ‘‘country farms and cottages’’ where they belong. Thus, even under conditions of mistaken identity (the Brabantine Country Farms and Cottages by the Master of the Small Landscapes was published instead as ‘‘Bruegel’’ by Visscher in 1612), Pieter Bruegel continued to exercise decisive influence on the course of subsequent Netherlandish art, particularly in the field of prints and drawings in the early seventeenth century.

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DESCENT F ROM BRUEGEL II Flemish Friends and Family

Greatness of name in the father oft-times overwhelms the son; they stand too near one another. The shadow kills the growth. —Ben Jonson, Timber

F

or Flemish art, particularly the continuing tradition in Antwerp itself, Bruegel continued to serve as a model, not least because of the ongoing production of paintings by his sons: Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1637/38), who most often made literal copies after the compositions of his father; and Jan Brueghel (1568–1625), the more inventive artist (and sometime collaborator with Rubens and other artists).1 Perhaps more surprisingly, Rubens himself occasionally took Bruegel as a model and painted ‘‘in Flemish,’’ both for scenes of peasant festivities (such as Rubens’s Louvre Kermis; Figure 9.1) and for panoramic landscapes with peasant labors (Figure 9.2).2 In this respect, it is worth recalling that at his death in 1640 Rubens owned no fewer than eight works by Bruegel, including a lost Alpine landscape and a Flight into Egypt (now identified as the work in the Courtauld Institute, London, dated 1563).3 But there were many other Bruegel followers in Flanders, from his own generation until well into the seventeenth century. If we compare the Flemish legacy of Bruegel to the transposed Dutch influence of his work, discussed in the last chapter, the basic contrast between them centers on Montias’s contrast between product innovation and process innovation. With the Flemish e´migre´ artists making their way anew in Holland, the name Pieter Bruegel did not have the same cachet of instant marketability, so many of those artists worked out his themes in their own distinctive hands. Their works ranged from kermis and winter scenes that had been Bruegel’s own stock-in-trade to creative variants of what had been either discarded or minor innovations in Bruegel’s work, such as the wooded forests and the themes of ‘‘peasant distress.’’ They even took the implications of the cultural system of peasant pictures, which showed how the ‘‘other half’’ lived in terms of rural location and hard labor relieved by intense festivity, and found another antipode—the ‘‘merry company.’’ Those images of rich people feasting, often outdoors in pleasure bowers, could be said to stem from Bosch’s depictions of Luxuria amidst the upper classes, but they also represented a novelty in nascent Dutch seventeenth-century painting (particularly by Vinckboons and Esias van de Velde; see Chapter 8), but they can certainly also be seen as a major

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9.1. Peter Paul Rubens, The Kermis, ca. 1635. Muse´e du Louvre, Paris. Scala/Art Resource.

9.2. Peter Paul Rubens, Rainbow Landscape, ca. 1636–37. Wallace Collection, London. Bridgeman Art Library.

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product innovation, particularly suited to the historical situation of prosperity and youth culture during the period 1609–21.4 In Flanders Bruegel’s name and fame were widely admired and relatively easy to copy, so successors had a predilection to market works of his favorite themes and forms, particularly in his favorite genres of landscapes and peasant pictures, as we shall see. We have already met the e´migre´ artist Jacob Savery literally forging Bruegel landscape drawings, adding false signatures and appropriate dates from the 1560s to works that were produced with Bruegel’s own distinctive stipple technique as late as the 1590s. In fact, technique, especially in paintings, would turn out to be one of the principal marketing strategies of Bruegel imitators, led by his son Pieter the Younger, who built on the short-cut processes of the previous generation to generate not only literal copies of his father’s works but also prolific quantities of those works for ready sale at lower prices as well as for export. Here, where the imagery remained fairly constant and the claims to Bruegel heritage were asserted most strongly, it was often process innovation that replaced originality and invention of new product to sustain a semi-industrial workshop career in the later Antwerp marketplace. Jan Brueghel provides a complex and varied exception to this generalization; he must be discussed instead as a synthesis of all the varied responses to Bruegel’s heritage. Bruegel’s younger contemporaries quickly assimilated from him various pictorial types, such as world landscapes.5 Hans Bol (1534–93) from nearby Mechelen readily immersed himself in landscapes as well as peasant subjects.6 Perhaps the most familiar of his works are the paired designs of Autumn (Figure 9.3) and Winter (see Figure 8.10), which Bol produced to complete the suite of Seasons for Cock after Bruegel had earlier designed the Spring (1565; Vienna) and Summer (1568; see Figure 6.19).7 This kind of print cycle of a natural series (seasons, planets, senses, temperaments and ages) enjoyed its own wide following in the next generation of print publishers in Antwerp and Holland; such series had the advantage of organizing knowledge while also stimulating sales of multiple prints from a series—each of these factors associated with the nascent vogue for collecting graphics.8 Bol’s art, however, primarily survives in his graphic work, with several hundred, often dated, drawings (earliest, 1557).9 His earliest landscape drawings begin where the young Bruegel left off, where tall, spindly trees shape a setting, like Cornelis Matsys’s drawings of the 1540s with an overlay of Venetian landscape drawings (chiefly by Campagnola and Titian).10 Many of his prints were issued by Cock in the 1560s (particularly a series of landscapes from 1562), which suggests that Bol essentially replaced Bruegel as the principal landscape designer for Cock prints.11 These more dramatically composed works, emptied of any vestiges of either religious or mythological narrative, still feature the essential and varied elements of world landscape conventions: framing hills or mountains, village commons, and frequent recession of roads or riversides within the strongly diagonal compositions favored by Bruegel. At the same time their lower horizons and greater attention to country life evoke the recent intimacy of the series of Small Landscapes by a still anonymous master (see Chapter 3).12 Some of the subjects also extend Bruegel topics; one depicts a peasant village festival, another an inn with a banner of St. Sebastian. Bol did produce another print series of dense world landscapes (with higher horizons) built around an unfolding religious narrative, akin to Cock’s mythological and religious landscapes of 1558: the Tobias cycle (1565), produced by Cock’s rival Gerard de Jode.13 Thus we cannot impute to Bol any particular form of ‘‘progress’’ or development, either away from the hybridity of forms and subjects in the world landscape or even

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9.3. Pieter van der Heyden, engraving after Hans Bol, Autumn, 1570. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, gift of Henry P. McIlhenny.

toward a more unified, low horizon space. Clearly this artist responded to the situations posed by his print producers, chiefly Cock, and he remained willing to utilize any repertoire of landscape forms, including well-established formulas, which might meet with market success. One other Bol drawing, Winter Landscape with Skaters (private collection, United States) builds, on both the forms and the themes of Bruegel’s art—two paintings of 1565, both the background ice scenes of the Hunters in the Snow (Vienna) as well as the Winter Landscape with Skaters (1565; Brussels, many copies).14 Here an open, flat, characteristically Netherlandish landscape extends steadily into depth, with recession marked by the diminishing scale of the clusters of anonymous figures along the canal. Despite the consistent use of undulating, tall, slender trees to frame his spaces, as in his earliest landscape drawings, Bol here evokes a kind of omniscient naturalism in his viewpoint, which would have lasting influence on his pupil, Jacob Savery, and other younger artists of the succeeding generation (Chapter 8).15 If Bol managed to insert himself into Bruegel’s idiom and graphic work for Cock, another Bruegel contemporary, Jacob Grimmer (ca. 1525–90) and his son Abel (ca. 1570–1619) , wound up imitating his painted achievements in small panel pictures for the market—reduced to a considerably lower

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price.16 Jacob Grimmer entered the Antwerp guild in 1547 as the student of Matthys Cock (according to van Mander), and he was already praised by van Mander as ‘‘such an outstanding landscape painter that in some respects I do not know a better one, so lively and lovely were his skies.’’17 Jacob’s extant pictures show explicit connection to the region around Antwerp,18 as well as more generic landscape constructions. One series of the Four Seasons, dated 1577 (Budapest), presents village life with small figures, who appear in graduated zones of recession along rolling hills to a horizon about halfway down the panel.19 Jacob also designed a set of four roundels for engravings, produced by Philips Galle; both the inserted mythological subjects as well as the rolling hills, punctuated by a few tall trees, reveal the debt to Hieronymus Cock’s 1558 landscape print cycle after his brother Matthys (see Chapter 3).20 Another print cycle of twelve, advertised as By Antwerp, was engraved by Adriaen Collaert and later published in Holland by Claes Jansz. Visscher.21 In both its subject and its alleged local flavor, this cycle partakes of the Cock Small Landscapes (1559/61; see Chapter 3) with a more distant view and an admixture of more hills and trees for the village and villa settings. Jacob’s son Abel Grimmer, master in 1592 after his apprenticeship with his father, continued the family business, producing numerous paintings in small format, sometimes as roundels, often in series dedicated to the Seasons or the Months. He also explicitly copied prints by either Bruegel or Bol, including their joint Seasons engravings of 1570 for Cock (1607; Figure 9.4), and he often signed and dated his panels. Abel Grimmer’s work has largely been dismissed because it is both pictorially derivative of his predecessors as well as simplified in its effects, but this combination actually enabled him to survive in the Antwerp marketplace. Yet he was able to be so prolific a painter precisely because of his streamlined technique. Each pictorial zone of his landscapes was composed in essentially a single color with little or no modulation or subtle modeling, and he used minimal varnishing, thus eliminating some of the pictorial effects of roundness or reflection. This process innovation permitted rapid repetition of standard pictorial formulas.22 At the same time, with the substantial borrowings from Bruegel and Bol, the content of the panels was clearly derivative, akin to the Boschian knockoffs by Huys, Mandijn, and lesser imitators studied above (Chapter 7). The result was a kind of stylization and codification of inherited landscape formulas, but available in a format and technique that permitted paintings to be almost as inexpensive and widely available as prints. Such survival mechanisms of vast output at low prices through efficient technique would be adopted in later Dutch monochrome landscapes, especially for the inexpensive paintings by Jan van Goyen, but in that case with a vastly different technique: a far livelier, virtuosic display of brushwork and subtly modulated modeling, which achieved further efficiency by utilizing ‘‘wet-in-wet’’ painting without the delay of waiting for each layer to dry.23 The Bruegel painting tradition was also adopted and extended by his younger Flemish contemporaries, led by Lucas van Valckenborch (1535–97).24 Like Bol, Lucas joined the Mechelen guild in 1560 but fled in 1567 during political troubles to Lie`ge and Aachen. Although he returned to Antwerp in 1575, that same rootlessness became his pattern: in the service of Archduke Matthias of Austria he settled in Brussels (1577/79), then Linz (1582), and Vienna (also probably Prague); finally he resided after 1593 in Frankfurt. His wanderings result from the dislocations of the Dutch Revolt, or Eighty Years’ War, and echo not only the peregrinations of the e´migre´ artists to the North Netherlands but also

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9.4. Abel Grimmer after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Summer, 1607. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. Scala/Art Resource.

an entire generation of painters and printmakers who made their way to German-speaking regions or to Italy.25 Lucas van Valckenborch continued the emphatic rocky landscape elements basic to the world landscape tradition while at the same time imposing a more tightly composed, plausible sense of an actual site. He made topographic drawings of actual sites, such as his 1593 View of Linz (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris), which served as the basis of the cartographic representation of that site in the Cologne publication Civitates orbis terrarum by Braun and Hogenberg (1572–98).26 Most of his landscape pictures show a consistent preoccupation with riverside cliffs, extending across much of the width of the composition; these cliffs often feature heavy industrial activity, chiefly mining (Figure 9.5; see Chapter 3 for related images by Bles), often at so small a scale that it has to be discovered by the viewer within the dominant verdant idyll. These landscapes also employ the familiar Bruegel formula of spatial construction with a foreground ledge or wedge, behind which the main background vista opens out along a diagonal, often behind a substantial drop-off.27 Another set of outdoor images without mountains by Valckenborch, such as the Cow Meadow Under Trees (1573, Frankfurt) or the Angler Beside a Woodland Pond (1590; Figure 9.6), features towering trees as the defining markers of spaces of retreat in forest settings (compare Coninxloo; Chapter 8), which became dominant in landscapes at the end of the sixteenth century (also see Jan Brueghel, below).28 In general Bruegel’s landscapes form the point of

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9.5. Lucas van Valckenborch, Landscape with Mining Scenes, 1580. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

departure for Valckenborch, whose paintings extend the conventions of earlier drawings and prints as well as the mature painted works of his predecessor. The angler (probably a self-portrait) in Valckenborch’s 1590 painting wears the distinctive lace collar and dark fabrics of fashionable court costume, derived from Spain, and his quiet activity of fishing is analogous to the use of forest preserves for more active aristocratic pastimes of hunting.29 We recall the artist’s role as court painter to Archduke Matthias in this period and note further that he also produced portraits of both Matthias and his brother Rudolf II as well as an important cycle of the Months in the mid-1580s.30 Noteworthy in Valckenborch’s reworking of Bruegel’s precedent of The Months is his more inclusive set of activities for the Labors of the Months. Though some of the images essentially continue the Bruegel layout and model of subjects, such as Valckenborch’s 1585 Summer (July or August; Vienna) with wheat harvest and resting peasants or his 1586 Return of the Herd (November; Brno), others fill in missing gaps. Spring (May; 1587; Figure 9.7) follows tradition for this merry month, as it features aristocratic figures at leisure in rich dress, pairing off as couples in forest glades and formal gardens; in the distance a knightly joust is visible in front of the palace and city of Brussels.31 Fall (October; 1585; Vienna) features another courtly picnic, this time in the vineyards at harvest time, and the earlier month (September; 1585; Vienna) features a fruit harvest with festive celebration of peasant games and dances

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9.6. Lucas van Valckenborch, Angler Beside a Woodland Pond, 1590. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

before a distant view of Antwerp.32 For Valckenborch’s cycle the precedent of calendar pages with the Labors of the Months from luxury illuminated manuscripts seems closer and stronger than Bruegel’s own cycle, and its obvious aristocratic participants further link this cycle to Archduke Matthias as the likely patron and principal audience for the works, perhaps for his castle in Linz.33 Other images, including archducal portraits, of aristocratic pastimes, such as spa visits, were also part of Valckenborch’s repertoire.34 Thus this artist moved well beyond the market world of Antwerp painting to satisfy a more traditional form of princely patronage for his imagery, even as he built upon the heritage of Bruegel (who himself had worked for some prominent individual patrons, both wealthy and princely, especially after his 1563 move to Brussels).35 Just as the Grimmers basically watered down and mass-produced the rustic landscape inventions of Bruegel, so did Joos de Momper (1564–1635) in the next generation build a career out of efficient and formulaic replication of rocky landscapes originating in the world landscape tradition (Figure 9.8), most recently in the refined compositions of Lucas van Valckenborch.36 De Momper, named for his grandfather, was the son of Bartholomeus de Momper, whom we have met as a print publisher, featuring

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9.7. Lucas van Valckenborch, Spring, 1587. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

Bruegel’s 1559 engraving Kermis at Hoboken (Figure 6.11). A precocious Joos joined the Antwerp painters’ guild in 1581 when he was just seventeen. Eventually he generated a large output, which surely included substantial workshop participation, and he also collaborated with select figure painters, especially Jan Brueghel (both Elder and Younger), usually on large, mountainous landscapes.37 De Momper works often appear in the prestigious gallery paintings of collections (real and imagined) from the early seventeenth century.38 Moreover, the regent of Flanders, Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia, sent a 1616 letter (renewed in 1626) to the Antwerp magistrate on behalf of de Momper to excuse him from taxes and fees.39 Like that of Abel Grimmer, his work has often been dismissed by modern scholars for its formulaic repetition of stock motifs and presentation, usually in a graded series of colors tied to distance, ranging from golden brown to green to blue in the farthest distance. In many respects de Momper’s large works offer merely a ‘‘broad-brush’’ version of Patinir’s peaks a full century after the initial formulation of the world landscape; moreover, his continued work in Flanders rather than his emigration to what scholars consider the more progressive landscape centers in Holland (Chapter 8) has led to his critical marginalization as the end of a tradition more than a revitalization in his own right.40 However, both their large size (which would become a standard in seventeenth-century Flemish landscapes) as well as the painter’s ready collaboration with other leading artists suggest costliness and esteem for pictorial refinement (especially compared to Grimmer). The artist surely enjoyed the benefits of a large workshop for his prolific production; in addition to three sons (Jan, Gaspar, and Philips) he had several recorded apprentices.41 De Momper’s works derive chiefly from the steep slopes of craggy Alpine images by Bruegel, such

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9.8. Joos de Momper, Mountain Landscape, ca. 1615–25. Sammlungen des Fuersten v. Liechtenstein Collection, Vaduz. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

as the Large Landscapes prints St. Jerome in the Desert and Penitent Magdalene, as well as from a few of the high tors of his paintings, such as the 1562 Suicide of Saul (Vienna; possibly then in the collection of Rubens).42 His friendship and collaboration with Jan Brueghel the Elder would also have facilitated exposure to the entire Bruegel legacy. De Momper also produced other works in the tradition of Pieter Bruegel’s inventions, particularly winter landscapes but also grain harvests.43 One work, Storm at Sea (Vienna), is now almost universally ascribed to de Momper but had many earlier scholars advocating an attribution to Bruegel (for seascapes, see Chapter 10).44 De Momper has also been seen as influenced by an older Mechelen landscape specialist, Lodewijk Toeput, who went on to make a career in Italy under the literally translated name of Ludovico Pozzoserrato (‘‘Closed Well’’).45 De Momper clearly emphasized stylization over naturalistic effects, using the three-color palette for atmospheric perspective as well as his distinctive calligraphic brushwork. Spatial construction through depth and atmosphere remained his chief goal, and the scale of his pictures is underscored by the small figures who inhabit its foreground ledges. Once again process and its visible novelties contribute to the success of such pictures as well as their efficient production, even as the imagery adheres closely to local pictorial traditions and expected landscape conventions. We have seen several career trajectories in Antwerp art by Bruegel contemporaries. Hans Bol quickly moved into his role of Bruegel imitation and essentially graphic production for Hieronymus

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Cock (although he later enjoyed an e´migre´ career as a courtly miniaturist). The Grimmers produced the equivalent of painted prints, inexpensive small paintings, often in series (including The Months), produced in labor-saving, efficient processes. By way of contrast, Lucas van Valckenborch began with Bruegel’s painted models of both landscape constructions and themes (Tower of Babel, Labors of the Months) and moved increasingly with those staples into a new role of court painter with Archduke Matthias. De Momper for the most part adapted Bruegel favorites like the Grimmers but on a larger scale, particularly rocky landscapes but also winter scenes, sometimes with collaborators whose contributions enhanced the initial value of his own work. These contrasting career choices—either producing numerous or multiple works for the Antwerp art market or else aligning with aristocratic patrons and collectors of pictures to produce more expensive and exclusive imagery—formed the twin poles within which most artists maneuvered their professional careers. They were also the principal polar trajectories of the two Bruegel sons, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel. Pieter the Younger (1564–1637/38) was just a boy when his father died in 1569; he entered the guild in 1585 as a ‘‘master’s son’’ and married in 1588.46 He trained under Gillis van Coninxloo, the renowned landscape artist who left Antwerp in 1585 (see Chapter 8). The artist enrolled nine pupils between 1588 and 1626, and one of his sons, also named Pieter (born 1589), became a painter in his own right in 1608. These numbers become important, because a massive and prolific workshop with varying quality reproductions of standard compositions—usually by Pieter the Elder—characterizes the output of Pieter the Younger.47 Despite his vast output—or perhaps because of it, since his pictures sold for modest prices, especially compared to those of his brother Jan—Pieter the Younger seems to have suffered continual financial difficulties (possibly the result of heavy drinking).48 Many of his works were sold for export out of Antwerp, sometimes by way of Paris.49 He has usually been dismissed as a mere and lesser copyist of his famous father’s work, mined for records of lost pictures preserved only in copies; however, it is certain that much of the survival and spread of his father’s reputation resulted from such copying enterprises, since original pictures by Bruegel the Elder chiefly had disappeared into elite private collections, such as the imperial collection of Rudolf II in Prague or the Farnese collection in Parma.50 Indeed, much of the material copied by Pieter the Younger is extracted from his father’s figural print and drawing output, and his work is unthinkable without the extant demand for ‘‘Bruegel’’ pictures. (It should be said that there were intermediate links in Antwerp offering images of peasants between Bruegel the Elder and Brueghel the Younger, chiefly the works of Pieter Balten and Marten van Cleve. These two lesser painters occupy a similar role to the Grimmers, presenting lesser variations on the Bruegel peasant theme, often with a more overtly satirical tone, so their contributions will not be examined here.)51 Both Bruegel’s sons made copies, sometimes refashioned in distinctive ways (more often by Jan), of several original compositions by Pieter the Elder. They did not reprise known works then in the imperial and archducal collections or the more elite local Antwerp collections, such as those of Rubens or Pieter Stevens, but they obviously did have access to several important compositions, which Pieter the Younger in particular reproduced on numerous occasions. Their copies included religious as well as proverb, peasant, and landscape subjects, often in the same large scale as the painted original, such as the Census at Bethlehem (Figure 9.9; see also the 1566 original, Figure 3.17). It is not always certain whether they had access to their father’s original, since discrepancies—either wholesale or particular

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9.9. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Census at Bethlehem, undated. Muse´e des Beaux-Arts, Caen. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

color changes or even missing figures—sometimes distinguish all the copies from the original. In the case of the Census copies, Christina Currie hypothesizes that Pieter the Younger relied instead on a lost preparatory compositional drawing, perhaps with a few color notes, of an earlier stage made by his father.52 Carefully outlined underdrawing in a consistent technique undergirds these pictures, although stylistic variation in the underdrawings as well as the paint surfaces suggest that several artists were involved in the production process. Paint layers are thin and closely conform to the outlines in the underdrawing. They are painted by means of ‘‘reserves,’’ spaces left for later sections to be painted, which meant that luminosity could be suggested by the visible ground layers and also that the sluggish drying process could be staggered across a picture, permitting greater efficiency of execution. The figures themselves, their faces, and distinct color areas also tend to be outlined finely on the surface. Clearly planning and supervision of standardized production from template compositions was fundamental to workshop image assembly by Pieter the Younger. Based on our current knowledge, carefully preserved compositional drawings from the father were retained by his widow, or more likely by his artist mother-in-law, Mayken Verhulst, as a patrimony for any artist descendants. Pieter the Younger took full advantage of the family legacy and founded his career on it. To itemize Pieter the Younger’s derivations from his father would be too lengthy a task to pursue here, and the monograph by Klaus Ertz performs this cataloging task admirably. The subjects comprise the entire range of themes and works by Pieter the Elder, including specific religious compositions on both the grand and the small scale (such as the copies after the 1567 Adoration of the Magi in the Snow;

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9.10. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap, undated. Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Bridgeman Art Gallery.

Winterthur).53 Many copies (the most of any composition by Pieter the Younger) repeat one landscape, the Winter Landscape with Skaters (original[?] 1565; Brussels; see Chapter 8). Ertz discusses more than one hundred copies of varying quality (Figure 9.10), more than a dozen of them signed.54 Most other landscape copies were infrequent but also meticulous, such as the two replicas of the 1568 Magpie on the Gallows (Figure 6.17).55 At the same time, Pieter the Younger also produced small painted copies after the Hans Bol print design Winter, as well as the other drawings by Bol and Bruegel (Summer) for Cock’s 1570 Seasons cycle.56 The chief subjects derived from Pieter the Elder by his namesake were proverb and peasant scenes. Folkloric concepts, such as the Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559; Figure 4.12) and Netherlandish Proverbs (1560; Berlin) were reproduced full-size from the father’s originals, but they were also produced in smaller-scale works, whose connection to Pieter the Elder seems likely but not incontrovertible in terms of actual authorship.57 Chief among these works is the set of twelve engraved roundels of basically single-figure proverbs (1568), cut by the professional engraver Hieronymus Wierix; some subjects reprise themes that Bruegel also used for his pictures, notably two late canvases, The Misanthrope (also a roundel, 1568, Naples; see Figure 6.26) and The Blind Leading the Blind (1568; Naples).58 Another is a related set of twelve wooden roundels, assembled into a common frame with inscriptions (Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp); this work, too, although of high quality, is rarely accepted today as an authentic Bruegel the Elder.59 Nonetheless, these compositions became staples of the work-

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shop output of Pieter the Younger, who freely added background settings for the isolated figures of the Antwerp roundels, and he also made variants of solitary figure images from later Bruegel drawings, such as the (Goose)Herder/Standing Shepherd (Dresden).60 Other peasant-inspired proverbs about proper moral behavior include Pieter the Younger versions of his father’s Peasant and the Bird-Nester (1568, Vienna; see Figure 6.23 and Chapter 8 for later Dutch variations on this theme) and both (lost originals) Good Shepherd and Bad Shepherd.61 Of course, the latter themes derive from a parable of Christ (John 10: 1–5).62 At the same time, Pieter the Younger is not just a passive copyist. He seems to have devised his own versions of similar proverb figural images, usually small roundels, most closely related to the proverb roundel prints (whose designer is still uncertain) in composition.63 For example, in one roundel a pair of fools, in contrasting, colorful costumes, point at one another to exemplify universal folly and lack of self-awareness.64 A set of four combined roundels of villagers (Bamberg) includes one from the Wierix print series—Man Shoved into the Pig Sty—that castigates gluttony. Another part of that roundel set, unexplained and seemingly original to Pieter the Younger, shows an Arrow Maker. The two further novel images show a Bread Eater (another glutton?) and a couple exchanging the Gift of a Mirror (by a peddler?). One other rather enigmatic, separate image shows two peasants gathering twigs in the forest with a third on a ladder behind them; the association of this activity with responsible preparation for winter might suggest its virtue and value as a form of peasant labor (a similar process occurs in the early spring pruning of pollard trees in Bruegel’s 1565 Dark Day). Although seven instances of this composition stem from Pieter the Younger, a lurking suspicion persists that the original idea goes back to Bruegel the Elder (there is a kinship to the bulky peasant figures of 1568, in Summer or The Peasant and the Bird-Nester). What all these works have in common is their adoption by Pieter the Younger as his own, often with little or no connection back to his father’s own designs. Another category of picture seems to stem from Pieter the Elder but enjoyed far more repetition after his death: head studies in roundels (or ovals).65 A few small painted images have been plausibly ascribed to the father’s hand, such as the Peasant Woman (Munich) or a more problematic Yawning Man (Brussels);66 of course, these character heads echo the gaping or staring faces found in many of Bruegel’s later peasant subjects. But the Bruegel craze of the next generation seems to have generated a number of expanded imitations of this kind of head study, some of them firmly attributed to Pieter the Younger, and print series of peasant heads amplify his prototypes with additional examples.67 These character heads resemble the studies, known as tronies, produced in workshops for individual figures, often later included within larger group compositions, most often of narrative subjects. Such works were frequent during Bruegel’s lifetime in the Antwerp studio of his rival Frans Floris.68 Bruegel, however, never seems to have used such a workshop practice to prepare peasant heads in group images, even though his figures there offer a variety of facial expressions, such as wonder or anger. In this he was followed after the turn of the seventeenth century with colorful, isolated painted heads of indulging taverngoers, produced in Flanders by Adriaen Brouwer (1605/6–1638).69 Peasant subjects formed the core repertoire for Pieter the Younger. We have already noted his prodigal use of village landscapes, particularly the Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap (Figure 9.10) but also such works as The Peasant and the Bird-Nester and copies after print designs, such as Summer. Yet along with literal copies after his father’s works (such as the Peasant Wedding variations on

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9.11. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Wedding Dance in the Open Air, 1607. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

the same peasant themes; e.g., Peasant Feast after the Vienna painting),70 Pieter the Younger also invented his own village scenes, variations on the same peasant themes, though without any overriding messages like proverbs or seasons. For example, the Wedding Dance in the Open Air (Figure 9.11), closely related to Pieter the Elder’s large 1566 painting (Figure 6.14), actually is identical to a print, the posthumous engraving by Pieter van der Heyden for Cock’s widow (Figure 6.15). Scholars have debated whether the lost source was a painting or a drawing by Pieter the Elder.71 We shall see that this unresolvable quandary emerges in several other adapted peasant themes, including kermis and wedding celebrations. As noted above in Chapter 6 on peasants, Pieter the Younger produced a vast array of wedding scenes that depict successive moments from earlier in the ceremony, including separate processions of bride and groom as well as the presentation of gifts to the bride.72 One composition, closely copied, if simplified, by Pieter the Younger as well as by his brother Jan (Maison du Roi, Brussels), shows The Wedding Procession, presumably after a lost painting by Pieter the Elder, though the possibility remains here that the younger brother inspires the older.73 There are also close copies after the Vienna Peasant Wedding Feast.74 One distinctive subject of Pieter the Younger is his Peasants’ Quarrel, an original, large-figure composition, which still seems to go back to Pieter the Elder.75 Confirmation of the status of this composition—with finer features than the coarse visages by Pieter the Younger—comes from a close replica

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9.12. Pieter Brueghel the Younger, The Village Lawyer. Israel Museum, Jerusalem, estate of Edward D. Mitchell, Los Angeles.

engraving of the same figures, in reverse, by Lucas Vorsterman.76 These are clearly peasant figures, whose ‘‘weapons’’ consist of a flail and a pitchfork. Their location is an outdoor tavern area in the midst of a village festivity, closely akin to the Peasant Kermis (Vienna; Figure 6.13) by Bruegel the Elder; indeed, a central background scene of dancing makes the shared context clear, and the argument itself looks like an enhanced detail of the contending figures at the left side of the Vienna prototype. The specifics of their dispute also seem apparent from accessories: cards and drinking crocks litter the foreground. These monumental and ponderous figures also resemble the thick peasant figures of Bruegel the Elder’s later paintings, such as the 1568 Peasant and Bird-Nester or the dancers and pipers of the Vienna Peasant Kermis, not to mention the other image of conflict, the controversial 1567 Peasant Couple Attacked by Soldiers (University Art Collection, Stockholm). Pieter the Younger’s ongoing fascination with peasant life resulted in one of his most often replicated compositions, with nineteen signed and dated versions (1615–22) out of some 25 originals and 35 questionable instances, in two distinct formats: The Village Lawyer (Figure 9.12)77 Unlike so much of his work, this subject seems to have been his own original design. Here the site is a crowded room, filled with papers and hanging bags, akin to the world of tax collectors and lawyers seen in Antwerp during the second third of the sixteenth century (Chapter 4; see especially the images by Jan Massys of peasants in Tax-Collector’s Office; Figure 4.23). The cast of characters are similar: a woman with a basket of eggs, an older man with a dead chicken over his arm and a companion bearing grape clusters, and a

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receiver in a scholar barret with his own pair of assistants to either side. Here, as in the imagery of the prior century, the image takes advantage of double stereotypes—both the allegedly intrinsic naı¨vete´ of the peasant and the scurrilous unscrupulousness and greediness of lawyers. The peasant world so fully embraced in the workshop of Pieter Brueghel the Younger also played a modest role, albeit more refined and subtle, in the output of his brother Jan. We have noted earlier (Chapter 6) his repeated interest in the theme, both as grisaille and in color, of The Visit to the Peasants (Figure 6.20), and his own version of the Wedding Procession (Maison du Roi, Brussels) remains the finest extant instance of that composition.78 He also adapted the Peasant Wedding Dance to a broader landscape and devised his own original variations, usually small-figure crowds within expansive countryside settings of either peasant weddings or kermis celebrations, sometimes with included portraits of the ruling archdukes.79 These latter works, often in pendant canvases of larger format and with meticulous fineness of execution, certainly were produced on commission from the archducal court in Brussels, where Jan had been associated since 1606 (and officially designated as court painter since 1610).80 For the most part, Jan offers greater attention to the breadth and atmosphere of his settings and much less emphasis on either character heads or caricatures of peasants than his father or older brother. In addition to his ambitious late pendant canvases, he also produced a number of original but formulaic compositions of country settings, beginning in the first decade of the seventeenth century, which were replicated by his workshop in characteristically meticulous copies, usually on panel but also on copper. These works tended to focus more on sites than on figures. Many of them still retain the color formula for atmospheric perspective—gold-brown, green, then blue—which had been pioneered a century earlier by Patinir for world landscapes. For example, Jan emphasized village crossroads like the Small Landscapes prints from half a century earlier, but he populated them with characteristic crowds of small figures, as in his Village Entryway with Windmill (private collection, Zurich).81 Another, more novel staple of the workshop consisted of riverside views of rural countryside with even more miniature figures.82 In similar fashion, Landscape with Windmill (whether positioned at the left or the right) served with a lower horizon (about midway down the composition) to suggest a more typical Netherlandish setting in numerous variants (Figure 9.13).83 A final formula by Jan consists of a vast, open landscape, still with a color structure for depth, where travelers and their covered wagons moving in or out structure the composition; except for a few flanking trees, there are no other markers.84 An example of this imagery is the rather large copper with dancing peasants within a wooded village against a mountain valley, Dance on the Route (1600; Royal Collection, Hampton Court).85 Jan also combines similar traveling groups with other, hillier localities with thicker forests, which conform more closely to the current fashion for forest landscapes (see Chapter 8), beginning with a 1605 copper (Munich) and 1607 panel (New York; Figure 9.14).86 Jan Brueghel adopted both the newer forest landscape formulas and the hilly vestiges of world landscape peaks in order to depict wilderness. Especially in his early career, he built upon the centuryold landscape foundations transmitted from his father, in such works (on copper) as the 1594 River Landscape with Resting Travelers (private collection, Italy) and Return from the Hunt (Nantes), where the exaggerated soft blue distance underscores the use of color to suggest atmosphere.87 Using similar dramatic contrasts of color articulation, Wooded River Valley with Pathway (Basel; Figure 9.15) is constructed along diagonal vistas like Bruegel the Elder’s Large Landscapes and is populated with small-

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9.13. Jan Brueghel, Landscape with Windmill, drawing. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1942.

9.14. Jan Brueghel, Woodland Road with Travelers, 1607. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Fletcher, Rogers, Pfeiffer, Dodge, Harris Brisbane Dick, and Louis V. Bell Funds, and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1974.

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9.15. Jan Brueghel, Wooded River Valley with Pathway, ca. 1602. Oeffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel. Photo: Martin Bu¨hler.

scale figures, gypsies and peasants returning from the fields; this small copper exists in another replica version (Aschaffenburg).88 It is complemented by a latter-day world landscape construction on copper (1603; Hannover), which aligns well with Lucas van Valckenborch’s own recent refinements on the formulas of Pieter the Elder.89 Early in his career Jan Brueghel also certainly became one of the leading promulgators of the new forest landscape, ultimately derived from his father’s work (albeit chiefly in drawings), and at roughly the same moment as Gillis van Coninxloo (see Chapter 8).90 Here his compositions recapitulate the development of Patinir’s world landscapes, because they almost always include religious figures in small scale within their wilderness settings. In 1595–97 he had already produced a suite of six landscapes on copper for a distinguished patron in Milan, Cardinal Federico Borromeo; one of these was a dense forest, empty of any residents.91 However, because the remainder of the scenes for the cardinal include a hermit saint on a barren mountainside, based upon Antwerp religious prints by Marten de Vos, clearly such a setting is a wilderness site of contemplation, a ‘‘landscape of devotion’’ that can serve as a hermitage. Moreover, hermits were the usual inhabitants of Jan’s wooded landscapes, along with several other subjects of tribulation, such as the Flight into Egypt (1595; figures by Hans Rottenhammer; private collection) or the Sacrifice of Isaac (1599; London, Brod Collection).92 Such elite patronage during the artist’s tour of Italy prior to his resettling in Antwerp in 1597 also

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set the tone for his later career: a succession of courtly collectors and more expensive works, often on commission (note the 1623 Madrid Peasant Festivity with the portraits of the archdukes). This success story contrasts utterly with the alternative career path taken by his older brother, Pieter the Younger, whose market-driven, prolific workshop repetitions, usually after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, fetched lower prices and resulted in wildly inconsistent quality. Moreover, as we shall see in the following chapter, Jan’s work in new genres, such as floral still lifes (which gave him the nickname ‘‘Flower Brueghel’’), as well as his production of elaborate series devoted to the Five Senses and the Four Elements, point to his participation in an elite intellectual world of learning and specimen collecting. In fact, Jan’s career reminds us to avoid pigeonholing an artist and his work too exclusively into isolated spheres of activity between court and city, commission and market production, even individual creations and collaborations.93 One other surprising subgenre of importance to Jan Brueghel should be noted: hell scenes (which earned him another nickname, ‘‘Hell Brueghel,’’ later mistakenly associated with his brother); however, Jan’s hell scenes depart significantly from the enduring, Christian model established by Hieronymus Bosch at the turn of the sixteenth century (see Chapter 7). In contrast, Jan’s chosen subjects often derive from Greco-Roman mythology. Jan seems to have begun with imagery in the Boschian tradition, particularly the hell-on-earth imagery of saintly tribulation, such as the early Temptation of St. Anthony (Kassel), additional versions (e.g., Figure 9.16; Munich, 1601; Vienna, Karlsruhe), and a final work of this theme in 1604 (Dresden).94 He also generated other hell images with religious figures, such as Lot and His Daughters Before the Burning Sodom (Munich), just as he had done for his forest landscapes. But he also produced a 1594 Orpheus in the Underworld (Pitti Palace, Florence), a 159(8), Juno in the Underworld (Dresden), and a 1600 Aeneas in the Underworld (Budapest; Figure 7.20; see Figure 9.17)—all of which contain characteristic hybrid demon figures as well as glowing red brimstone fires at their skylines.95 Moreover, Jan Brueghel also produced a number of images with hell-like environments (and monsters) as part of his Four Elements series, specifically to depict ‘‘Fire,’’ such as the 160(6) Forge of Vulcan (private collection).96 These newly transmogrified Boschian hell scenes, whether populated with mythological figures or else representing Fire as part of cycle of the Four Elements, show again how much Jan Brueghel’s art began to partake in an elite and intellectual milieu and altered previous models. His frequent use of copper points not only to a novel and fashionable support but also to a sophisticated taste for virtuoso fineness of handling, glowing colors, and enamel-like surfaces.97 Again, this technique and support can be contrasted with the brisker assembly line production for the market by the large workshop of his brother, Pieter Brueghel the Younger. Between them, the sons of Pieter the Elder extended their father’s full range of patrons—from the anonymous buyers of prints on the open market to expensive commissions from an intellectual or political elite. But at the same time they also extended his imagery, just as he had extended the pictorial themes and conventions that he had inherited in turn—from Patinir and met de Bles for landscape, from German prints and Aertsen for peasants. Even where Pieter Brueghel the Younger chiefly copies his father’s repertoire of themes and figures, he still manages to devise his own novelties, such as The Village Lawyer, which deftly combines money-handler imagery with peasants. For Jan Brueghel, extension of the heritage of world landscapes and Small Landscapes, often combined with peasant celebrations, is now complemented by experimentation with innovative forest settings; at the same time that

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9.16. Jan Brueghel, Temptation of St. Anthony, 1594 (?). Private collection. Agnew’s London/Bridgeman Art Library.

he updates conventional hell scenes with mythological narratives, Jan provides numerous new settings for fire landscapes within cycles of the Four Elements. Such pictorial manipulation by both brothers points to the importance of genres in relation to their audiences in every generation. On the one hand, inherited expectations and familiar genre conventions have to be respected and fulfilled by popular pictorial types (and by signature artistic formulas, such as those of Bruegel the Elder or even Bosch). Yet at the same time collectors and connoisseurs demand not only the familiar—and the affordable, whether as prints or cheaper, mass-produced paintings—but they also seek innovation within a genre or a signature tradition like that of Bosch, then Bruegel. To satisfy this more discerning clientele, artists explore collaborations, experiment with challenging new themes for older forms, or refine their own distinctive, discernible technique (sometimes employing the additional refinement of another novelty, the copper support). Following upon the generation of Lucas van Valkenborch and Hans Bol, it is clear that Jan Brueghel made a far more significant and lasting contribution to the history of Flemish art than did his imitative older brother, Pieter the Younger. In the case of Jan Brueghel, we shall see in the next chapter how much he personally contributed to two emerging new pictorial categories: seascapes and flower (as well as animal) pictures. Thereafter, we will be ready at last to draw some conclusions about artistic careers in Antwerp and the always tense dialectic between tradition and innovation.

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9.17. Jan Brueghel, Aeneas in the Underworld. ca. 1600. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/ Art Resource.

C H A P T E R 10

TRICKLE-DOWN GENRES The ‘‘Curious’’ Cases of Flowers and Seascapes

We don’t like flowers that do not wilt; they must die —Marianne Moore, ‘‘The Sycamore’’

The policy of letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science. —Mao Zedong

I remember . . . . . . the beauty and majesty of the ships, And the magic of the sea. —Longfellow, ‘‘My Lost Youth’’

The sea is the land’s edge also . . . The sea has many voices. —T. S. Eliot, ‘‘The Dry Salvages, I’’

T

he career of Jan Brueghel shows us how complex generalizations about genre formation can be. We have seen Jan reprising some of the oldest traditions of sixteenth-century Flemish painting, including both world landscapes (going back to Patinir) and hell scenes (going back to Bosch), both staples transmitted on to him by his father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In the process, of course, he also infused his own refinements to the images, working on a small scale with exquisite delicacy of color and brushwork and often combining these familiar forms with altered subject matter, such as the mythological subjects within the hell scenes. He also fostered the new wilderness landscape of dense forests, although here he tended to populate these spaces with traditional hermit saints and their tribulations as well as with humbler figures, including travelers and hunters.

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Jan Brueghel also worked early and often for sophisticated, often aristocratic patrons, who included Cardinal Federico Borromeo in Milan early in his career (1595–97), Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, and especially the archduke and duchess Albert and Isabella in Brussels (after 1606).1 In this respect his career followed the documented precedents of Bosch, whose clients included the regent of the Netherlands, Philip the Fair, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who numbered Cardinal Granvelle, adviser to regent Margaret of Parma, among his collectors.2 In his own lifetime Jan came to be known as ‘‘Flower Brueghel,‘‘ and he became a major participant in the promulgation of ‘‘flower pots’’ (blompot), which were not yet known as still life.3 In fact one legend holds that the flower piece was invented by Jan Brueghel in Antwerp when a lady who could not acquire some tulips, already and increasingly a costly and prized collector’s item, asked the artist to paint them for her.4 Indeed, tulips in particular were such luxuries that a celebrated Dutch emblem by Roemer Visscher (Sinnepoppen, 1614) uses a tulip to embody the concept that ‘‘a fool and his money are soon parted.’’5 Moreover, Jan Brueghel the Younger painted a full-size panel satire on the tulip craze (Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem) in which a company of monkeys in an outdoors scene at a forested villa, redolent of contemporary Dutch ‘‘merry company’’ scenes of rich young sybarites (see Chapter 8), act as if they were tulip traders: inspecting a garden of tulips, weighing bulbs, and gathering cuttings for a bouquet.6 Such extreme examples point to the role of flowers as the playthings of the rich and famous. Tulips in particular were the flowers of high fashion. Imported from Turkish palace gardens in the mid-sixteenth century, they were brought in 1570 from Vienna to Mechelen in Flanders by the famous Netherlandish botanist Carolus Clusius, who went on to write a scientific treatise, illustrated with woodcuts, on the tulip in 1601.7 Jan Brueghel was one of the first artists to portray tulips along with other flowers in elaborate bouquet pictures produced in the first decade of the sixteenth century (Figure 10.1). Writing to his patron Federico Borromeo in 1606 about one of his earlier flower pieces, Brueghel claims that his work (probably identical with the large work on copper, 1606, still in the Ambrosiana, Milan) will succeed admirably: not only because it is painted from life but also because of the beauty and rarity of various flowers which are unknown and have never been seen here before: I therefore went to Brussels to portray a few flowers from life which cannot be seen in Antwerp. Your excellency will marvel at this work . . . the flowers are lifesize.8 In this picture every flower can be identified by modern observers—irises, lilies, roses, and tulips, among the larger specimens—and brings a meticulous naturalism even to an obviously artificial collection, studied individually and ‘‘assembled.’’ As the tulip craze suggests and as Brueghel’s own letter to the cardinal attests, these would have been extremely expensive and rare items, chiefly to be seen in the gardens of the nobility in Brussels, which were themselves the objects of real or imagined representation in prints.9 He also acknowledges to Borromeo that this collection of flowers, more than one hundred varieties according to another letter, is a ‘‘marvel,’’ a source of wonder: ‘‘I do not believe that so many rare and varied flowers have ever been painted before nor rendered so painstakingly: it will be a fine sight in the winter. Some of the colors are very close to the real thing.’’10 In a letter to Ercole Bianchi in 1611, Jan Brueghel notes that he sent a second, presentation version

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10.1. Jan Brueghel, Flower Still Life in Blue Vase, ca. 1608. Kunsthistorische Museum, Gemaeldegalrie, Vienna. Bridgeman Art Library.

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10.2. Joris Hoefnagel, Still-Life Allegory on Transience of Life, 1591. Muse´e des Beaux-Arts, Lille. Re´union des Muse´es Nationaux/Art Resource.

of the Milan flower piece to his patrons in Brussels, the archduke and duchess Albert and Isabella. Indeed, that donation cemented the close relationship between them, which culminated in his eventual acceptance as a court artist in their favor, akin to the incomparable Rubens. Whether that second flower picture is correctly identified with a similar ‘‘large bouquet’’ version, Flowers in a Wooden Vase (Vienna), the aristocratic patronage for such a work is assured.11 Here, too, the high quality replication of Jan’s prototypes by his polished workshop (often associated with his namesake son, Jan the Younger) also comes into play, as a dozen copies after it are known.12 Jan Brueghel was not the first painter to produce flower pictures. However, earlier examples of such works principally came from exceptional artists in Germany. One was Ludger tom Ring the Younger of Mu¨nster, whose works maintained the largely religious symbolism of flowers.13 But the most important was the e´migre´ miniature painter from Antwerp (and student of Hans Bol), Joris/Georg Hoefnagel (1542–1600), whose work emerged from the heritage of luxury illumination before printed books and was primarily produced for aristocratic rulers in German courts, first in Munich (Duke Wilhelm V) and later in Frankfurt (Emperor Rudolf II).14 Hoefnagel’s images, often accompanied by learned classical or biblical Latin distychs, frequently served as emblems or allegories, sometimes within intellectual structures, such as the Four Elements (later so important for Jan Brueghel), or else as commentaries on the transience of life itself, so aptly exemplified by the perishable beauty of flowers (as well as insects, such as butterflies and moths, often paired with the flowers; Figure 10.2).15 While we can assume that some

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of these images might have become known to Jan Brueghel during his 1604 exposure to Rudolfine Prague, Joris Hoefnagel’s combinations of flowers and insects were issued as a series of engravings (48) for wider distribution: the Archetypa Studiaque patris (Frankfurt, 1592) by his son, Jacob Hoefnagel.16 Most of the representations of flowers and other plants were tied during the sixteenth century to an explosion of interest in botanical illustration, whether in printed treatises or in albums, part of the emerging use of visual description to record and disseminate knowledge.17 We have already encountered the printed herbals of both Conrad Gesner and Rembert Dodoens, whose refined woodcut illustrations vividly evoke living plants. Dodoens and Clusius served as botanists at the imperial court in Vienna, and their publications were issued in Antwerp (1569, 1601) by the press of Christopher Plantin, as noted above. Isolated print images, florilegia, also began to appear at the turn of the seventeenth century; the first significant example is the Florilegium (24 sheets) by Adriaen Collaert, published in Antwerp around 1600 by Philips Galle.18 Similar watercolor paintings of individual flowers and plants of all kinds were produced at the end of the sixteenth century by an anonymous artist for pharmacist Theodorus Clutius.19 Meanwhile a variety of watercolors of flowers, made with conscious awareness of Hoefnagel’s precedent, were made by Jacques de Gheyn II in The Hague (1600–1604) for the circle of Carolus Clusius and his celebrated botanical garden at nearby Leiden University (after 1593).20 De Gheyn also produced several painted flower bouquets, all undated. He was joined in two works of 1603 (Centraal Museum, Utrecht; private collection, New York), the first securely dated flower pieces, by Roelandt Savery, who also emigrated in that year to the court of Rudolf II in Prague.21 Savery’s combination of expensive and exotic flowers, including tulips, standing in a stone niche alongside various shells and animal forms points clearly to a desire to satisfy the naturalist curiosity of a sophisticated patron and likely collector of naturalia (Figure 10.3). His Prague connection might have provided an opportunity for Savery to meet Jan Brueghel in 1604 and to stimulate further the production of the great Milan flower piece, beyond the basic Hoefnagel precedent (clearly Jan’s image was richly overdetermined).22 Thus around the year 1600 a convergence of interest in flowers and other botanical knowledge, sponsored by aristocratic nobles and abetted by increasingly specialized and published scientists, had begun to crystallize in the Low Countries.23 With such an audience, because of their fine workmanship and extended time in production (as the artist had to journey to make images after rare living flowers only in those varied seasons when they came into bloom)24 and also because of the extraordinary preciousness of some of those floral objects depicted, Jan Brueghel paintings as well as works by successor flower specialists in Holland and Flanders in the seventeenth century (e.g., Bosschaert, van der Ast, Beert) fetched some of the highest prices of any pictures.25 These prized flower paintings could not only show the rarest of specimens, vivid and recognizable in eternal bloom (ars longa vita brevis), but they could also combine flowers of varied seasons into a single assembled bouquet. Some Jan Brueghel flower paintings, beginning with the large Milan flower piece for Borromeo, even point expressly to their own material value by simulating the precious items of jewelry and coins alongside the bouquets.26 Of course, artists reused their careful sketches after the living flowers in a succession of pictures. While we do not find such sketches or studies among the surviving drawings of Jan Brueghel, the relatively close repetition of some compositions by his workshop strongly suggests that once established, the painted versions were maintained with minimal alterations.27 We certainly do find such works

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10.3. Roelandt Savery, Still Life in a Niche, 1611. Private collection. Factuur Centraal Museum, Utrecht.

within the careful drawing oeuvre of Jacques de Gheyn II, such as two works in Berlin: Studies of an Old Woman, Two Vines, and a Gourd and Rose Sprig.28 One noteworthy oil sketch study in pendant panels by Jan features animals: dogs (Figure 10.4) as well as asses, cats, and monkeys (ca. 1616; Vienna, with another, related panel in Ghent); several of these creatures have been located as accessories in mythical narratives by the artist.29 Such studies doubtless underlay a series of images by Jan Brueghel of animals, compiled like the flowers of his bouquet paintings within encompassing subjects, such as The Garden of Eden (1594; Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome) or the later examples of The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark (Budapest; 1613, Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Figure 10.5; 1615, Wellington Museum, London).30 This kind of work is also founded on a century of careful individual animal studies, ranging from the watercolors by Albrecht Du¨rer in Nuremberg and his imitators and forgers to later careful individual album studies,

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10.4. Jan Brueghel, Animal Study (Dogs), ca. 1616. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

particularly for the German courts, culminating in Prague with Rudolf II.31 Indeed, it is even worth noting as a connection between these traditions that during his brief sojourn in Prague Jan Brueghel made a painted copy (Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome) after one of Du¨rer’s most celebrated watercolor drawings, a virtual summa of his independent nature studies of both animals and plants: the Madonna with a Multitude of Animals (1503; Albertina, Vienna).32 In the Netherlands animal drawing studies by de Gheyn II built on Hoefnagel and other isolated precedents.33 Roelandt Savery made this kind of collective animal image into a personal specialty, beginning in Prague and continuing in Utrecht after his return in 1615.34 Often, as with Du¨rer or Savery as well as Jan Brueghel, the basic point of this display is to show the variety of animal life, especially through the awareness of rare and exotic species in close proximity. Savery emphasizes such variety most frequently with collections of bird species, drawn from Rudolf II’s menagerie. This tradition in particular had an extended afterlife in the Bruegel artistic family dynasty, when Jan’s grandson, Jan van Kessel, made his own specialty out of small-scale clusters of animals on copper or panel as well as copies and adaptations after Jan Brueghel.35 Jan Brueghel also put his flower and animal studies to purposeful use in comprehensive allegories in the Five Senses and Four Elements series. Chief among these was a large-scale collaboration with Rubens of The Five Senses (1617–18; Prado, Madrid; see Figure 10.6), produced as a commission from the archdukes in 1618.36 Of course, Smell is dominated by flowers growing abundantly in a courtly garden setting (as well as by a particular animal with distinctive musk, a civet cat). Other bouquets and animals appear in the other four images of the cycle. Taste, quite naturally, partakes richly of the emerging alternative still life subgenre of the game-piece (derived from the works of Aertsen and Beuckelaer,

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10.5. Jan Brueghel, The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark, 1613. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

above, Chapter 5) and features a painting of the goddess Cybele with the Four Seasons (based on an actual painting, produced by Jan in collaboration with Hendrick van Balen);37 meanwhile, Hearing displays on its back wall a characteristic animal picture, marked as appropriate for the sense by its subject of Orpheus and his lyre enchanting the wild. Sight offers up an image filled with both paintings (as well as optical instruments), closely related to the contemporary Kunstkammer, or art collecting, represented in many contemporary Antwerp images.38 Jan Brueghel had also produced many related allegories featuring animals and plants, especially for his representations of the Four Seasons or the Four Elements. For example, his Four Elements (1604, Vienna; Figure 10.7; second version in Madrid), produced in collaboration with Hendrick van Balen, offers the earliest example of Jan’s work representing the same intellectual schema as Hoefnagel had produced in his luxury miniatures of a generation earlier.39 It centers around Ceres, goddess of Earth as well as abundance, surrounded by nymphs of the other three elements, water, air, and fire as well as gamboling putti to represent fertility. Fruits of the sea—fish and sea birds as well as exotic shells—in the lower left accompany the sea nymph, probably Amphitrite, the consort of Neptune. At the feet of Ceres sits Flora amid fruits as well as flowers; behind her stretches one of Jan’s early Paradise forests with tiny animals, including lions as well as rabbits and other humbler animals, within it. The remaining two personifications, who hover together in the air, represent the lighter elements of both air and fire, and they are quite naturally surrounded by birds, though only a golden glow for the sun shows any index of fire.40 Beyond these single-panel allegories of the Four Elements, Jan also produced quite a number of tetrads, with each panel encompassing a single element. For the most part, such cycles had

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10.6. Jan Brueghel and Peter Paul Rubens, Allegory of Sight and Smell, ca. 1618. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Scala/Art Resource.

been the province of printmakers during the sixteenth century, especially for professional engravings made for print publishers by noted artist-designers, such as Heemskerck, de Vos, and Goltzius.41 In his painted cycles Jan usually used collaborators, particularly the figure specialist Hendrick van Balen, but his own expansive settings, filled as always with an abundance of meticulously rendered animal and plant life, dominate the paintings. Evidence of the early production of such works emerges from the correspondence with Borromeo in Milan, dating from early 1609, when Jan mentions work on Air as a pendant to an earlier Fire (1608), centered around the forge of Vulcan and a profusion of armor and other metallurgical creations (as well as remnants of the hellish world of Boschian demons). Thus the idea for a painted set of four images on copper might well have stemmed from the initiative of his patron, the cardinal.42 One complete series remains intact in Lyons (Musee´ des Beaux-Arts), with dates ranging from 1607 (Fire) to 1610 (Earth) and 1611 (Air), and clearly others were being produced and assembled in this same period with more variation in the van Balen figures than in the bird and animals so carefully depicted by Jan. Numerous copies after these images persisted by such followers as Jan Brueghel the Younger. Like the print cycles that treated such allegories the previous century, these Jan Brueghel painted cycles are collectors’ items, and their enframing context of collections are represented by the emerging Antwerp genre of gallery paintings, already mentioned. These artistic ensembles are the counterpoint to the Wunderkammer, ‘‘cabinets of curiosity,’’ assembled by aristocratic collectors in the same late sixteenth-century period, where pictures complemented the shells, flower samples or bulbs, and other

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10.7. Jan Brueghel, The Four Elements, 1604. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldegalerie, Vienna. Erich Lessing/Art Resource.

naturalia epitomizing nature’s own artifice and beauty, which satisfied the emerging scientific urge of ‘‘curiosity,’’ focused around early modern scientific inquiry, particularly into details and subtleties.43 Such objects of ‘‘wonder,’’ while often unusual for being strange, were also coveted for their rarity and their resulting exquisiteness or luxury, as we saw in the pairing in some of Jan Brueghel’s flower pieces of natural specimens with precious jewels and valuable coins or metalwork. As Victor Stoichita has insightfully pointed out, the collections formed during this period into cabinets of curiosities, both Kunst- and Wunderkammer, are formed not only by assembling varied objects but also by classifying them, making an orderly system, often organized by a catalog.44 Jan Brueghel’s cycles of the Five Senses or the Four Elements certainly provide cohesion through the overall system of knowledge as well as the assembled details forming an internal system within the images themselves. This was already the kind of organization performed in earlier generations by the printmakers’ series or by the related images of Hoefnagel as well as the principles of collection organization, related to the ‘‘memory theaters’’ expounded in sixteenth-century treatises.45 As Stoichita interprets such images, they are ideal collections, gatherings of models, like literary anthologies, or even bouquets, like the published specimen collections of flowers we have already encountered, florilegia. Jan Brueghel’s practice in his allegories, therefore, resembles his garland-fashioning around the Cybele image of the seasons or his isolated flower pieces, intended to use meticulous visual display as a means to provide intellectual interaction for an audience of owner and observers—and as a testimonial of the artist’s own prior participation in that intellection. Clearly the known patrons of Jan Brueghel, such as Cardinal Federico Borromeo and the archduke rulers of Flanders, were moving forces behind his knowing use of collected flowers and animals, just as

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10.8. Frans Floris, Feast of Sea Gods, 1561. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Foto Nationalmuseum.

connoisseurs (liefhebbers) participated actively in his sophisticated collaborative paintings with Rubens, van Balen, and other artists. In one other major genre, ‘‘seascapes,’’ or marine paintings, Jan participated actively and innovatively, passing on pictorial conventions and favorite subjects to later generations of Flemish and Dutch painters, just as he experimented with the forest wilderness (see Chapter 8).46 Actually marine paintings, like still lifes, do not form a single conceptual whole until later, when several strands are construed to be a single tradition. In fact, two marine paintings comprise two fully discreet subjects, alternatively concentrating, as it were, on figure and on background: first, a concentrated depiction of ships under sail, essentially an emphasis on the human component; second, a focus on the sea itself, usually as a stormy adversary and hazard to anything human, in which ships are dwarfed and threatened by heavy waves. It should not surprise us that Antwerp, the principal depot for international shipping (see Chapter 2), should have a particular interest in imagery of ships and the sea. Even in the lifetime of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the image of sea powers was conveyed by mythological gatherings, particularly the Feast of Sea Gods by Frans Floris (1561, Stockholm; Figure 10.8), and this imagery persists in prints, such as de Gheyn II’s roundel Kingdom of Neptune (after Willem Tetrode; 1587), or a quartet of sea gods in roundels surrounded by sea creatures by Adriaen Collaert (published by Philips Galle). We have also seen (Chapter 2) Bruegel’s own use of a major oceangoing ship within the wider context of an antimythological setting, his Fall of Icarus (Figure 6.21). Yet most of the first images of ships once more arose not in paintings but rather in varied series of engravings, including a series of prints after Bruegel, produced by Frans Huys and issued by Hieronymus Cock (1562–65; see Figure 10.9).47 This tradition of ship prints is noteworthy for its attention to detail and accuracy as well as its isolated focus on

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10.9. Peter Huys, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Armed Four-Masted Ship Sailing Toward Harbor, 1564–65.

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individual vessels; indeed, the phrase ‘‘ship portraits’’ is justified by such early works as the fifteenthcentury engravings by the anonymous Master W A.48 This kind of careful distinction would have had meaning for the knowledgeable audience of Antwerp, just as we noted that the components in Jan’s flower pieces would have rewarded the close attention of his elite collecting audience. Bruegel’s ships, presented in small groups or singly, include oceangoing vessels as well as smaller coastal craft, warships as well as merchantmen, and a selection of foreign ships, such as the Mediterranean’s oared galleys and caravels, square-rigged oceangoing ships used by Iberian Christians in those contested waters. For the most part, these ships sail in smooth water on the open sea, but a few of the ocean sites offer more turbulent waves, approximating the tempest-tossed seas of the other maritime tradition (see below).49 While not so systematically presented as the specimens that illustrated botany manuals, such ship images, well characterized as ‘‘portraits,’’ distinguish between distinctive sizes, shapes, and exotic types in much the same fashion and employ the same replicable medium of prints, here engravings rather than woodcuts. The other ship print produced by Huys after Bruegel, his largest engraving (two plates), depicts a major conflict between Christians and Turks: Naval Battle in the Straits of Messina (1561).50 Its size points to a greater ambition and a display closer to that of a painted picture. The accompanying inscription, however, refers only to the geography and uses mythic terms, relating the Straits of Messina to Scylla. By implication, this particular conflict could also be compared to the ancient history of the Mediterranean (Rome’s Punic Wars in particular) and still be used later in relation to the larger, ongoing struggle for supremacy in the region between Christians and Turks.51 Once again, Bruegel’s innovations bore fertile fruit in later generations. His combination of careful ship portraits in dramatic action would soon come to commemorate significant historic naval events, but chiefly in truly mural media, both panels and tapestries, at once grander as well as quite costly.52 It should also be noted that a seldom discussed small work, usually considered to be an authentic Bruegel original, View of Naples (Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome) also shows a sea battle between galleys and galleons in the foreground.53 Just as the earlier woodcut botanical specimen illustrations were succeeded by luxury painted production of rare flowers in miniatures by Hoefnagel and fine copper panels by Jan Brueghel, so did ships portraits and historical naval battles appear later in the sixteenth century in both tapestries and large-scale paintings on panel. Their chief producer was Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom, an innovator in seascapes equivalent to Patinir for landscapes. Born in 1566 (according to van Mander, writing from the same city in 1604) and active in Haarlem until his death in 1640, Vroom even collaborated with his painter son Cornelis Vroom, now largely known for landscapes.54 Vroom traveled to Spain and then Italy, where he worked for Cardinal Ferdinand de Medici, as well as Danzig, where his uncle Frederick Vroom was city architect, and finally Portugal. He was back in Haarlem by the early 1590s, but his aristocratic connections must surely have remained in effect, for in 1592 his first important commission called for designs for a suite of ten tapestries (lost) depicting the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588; the patron was Lord Howard of Effingham, British admiral of the fleet.55 A second suite of six tapestries soon followed, commissioned in 1598 by the States General of Zeeland for their chambers in Middelburg (now in the Abbey) to commemorate the Dutch naval victory, the Battle of Rammekens (1573), by the ‘‘Sea Beggars’’ over the Spanish at the outset of the Dutch Revolt. After these coordinated cycles of designs, where clusters of carefully delineated ships are shown in

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10.10. Hendrick Vroom, Arrival in Vlissingen of Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart on 29 April 1613, 1623. Frans Hals Museum de Hallen, Haarlem.

battle formation against high horizons on the open seas, Vroom dedicated himself entirely to large paintings. Some of his other subjects presented ceremonial arrivals of dignitaries in Dutch ports as well as the massing of commercial fleets. His careful attention to the depiction of city skylines behind the ships provided additional attractiveness to his urban clients. In fact Vroom made his own presentation in 1634 of a Panoramic View of Delft, completed in 1615, to the city’s magistrates to honor the city where his mother was buried.56 A good example is his large—and wide—canvas painting Return of the Second Dutch Expedition to the East Indies (1599), the origin of the 1602 Dutch East India Company (VOC) by the States General, whose chambers included not only Middelburg and Delft but also Amsterdam, whose skyline appears at the horizon on the right side.57 The specifics of the event and of the principals are inscribed on the frame, which describes the voyage and lists the four ships that returned so successfully. A similar creation is Vroom’s imposing masterwork, Arrival of Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart in Vlissingen on 29 April 1613 (1623; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Figure 10.10), where the city skyline again localizes the setting.58 The central flagship, bearing English colors and markers of the current prince of Wales, specifies the principals, the future ‘‘Winter King and Queen,’’ whose marriage was considered a major alliance for the Dutch in the European power balance before the Thirty Years’ War and their political demise after 1620. Although the exact circumstances of this commission remain unknown, it is clearly another case of convergence between celebrated and aristocratic patrons as well as civic officials, probably of the city of Haarlem; here the particulars of ships, flags, and skyline are crucial to this nostalgic recreation of a significant local event. Vroom’s works, like Jan Brueghel’s, were highly prized and appropriately costly, in part for those very details, though here the virtuosity played out on a large scale rather than small. Evidence of this costliness comes from the year 1621, when the Admiralty of Amsterdam sought to commission from him a Battle of Gibraltar (a major naval event of 1607, the first Dutch victory over Spain at sea) for

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presentation to the stadhouder of the Netherlands, Prince Maurice; however, Vroom insisted on the astronomical sum of 6,000 guilders, so the commission went to his pupil Cornelis van Wieringen for a still-considerable fee of 2,400 guilders.59 The first van Wieringen version (1622; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) shows the explosion of the Spanish flagship in a terrible concussion between two ships in the center foreground. Then he produced a modello of a more sedate conflict with ships more widely scattered across a broad panel with a horizon about halfway up (and with a more prominent view of the Rock of Gibraltar in the right distance). The definitive large panel of 1622 by van Wieringen (today in the Scheepvaart Museum, Amsterdam) follows his modello closely but at a scale of almost five meters’ breadth. An example of what such a painting by Vroom might have looked like is given by a print after Vroom, issued in two plates by Cornelis Claesz. in Amsterdam, The Landing at Philippine, which shows an invasion force of 2,800 vessels to transport the army of Prince Maurice to the coast of Flanders in June 1600, prior to the victorious Battle of Nieuwpoort.60 For this print Vroom received 150 guilders, and his drawing design still survives (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam). Another print (1603, reprinted 1608), made in the expanse of three plates after an anonymous artist (published in Amsterdam by Claes Jansz. Visscher) shows one more celebrated naval battle from 1601, the decisive victory over the Portuguese at Bantam, in the Spice Islands, which secured the Dutch domination over what would eventually be their colony in Southeast Asia of Indonesia.61 This print displays the arms of the Dutch Republic and of Prince Maurice above as well as the Dutch East India Company (VOC) below. Any one of these distinguished patrons could have commissioned this documentary work. Just as with flower still lifes, marine paintings flourished in Holland after the innovations by Vroom at the turn of the seventeenth century and also found a limited resonance in Flanders (notably in the work of Bonaventura Peeters, 1614–62). Such images culminated in the naval battles between Holland and England after mid-century, as painted by the father and son artists Willem van de Velde, Elder and Younger.62 As Vroom’s early commissions for designs for tapestry cycles indicate, the commemorative battles scenes derive most closely from the mural tradition of tapestries, going back to such military celebrations as Jan Vermeyen’s tapestry cycle designs, produced in 1545 for Emperor Charles V (cartoons, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and intended for audiences of the highest social rank.63 Essentially these works combine such historical events with the specifics of naval battles, ship portraits. Yet if Peter Bruegel the Elder laid some of the groundwork for ship portraits and even scenes of naval battles in his prints and paintings, the main contribution of his innovative son, Jan Brueghel the Elder, lay in his storm-tossed ships of the other major marine subgenre: the tempest at sea. Here, too, the heritage of the sixteenth century began with religious narratives, scenes from the Gospels that took place along the sea. Old Testament themes, chiefly the Jonah story, as well as New Testament stories— the miraculous draft of fishes, Christ on the Sea of Galilee—could demonstrate salvation as well as the powers of faith.64 During the 1580s Flemish artists showed particular interest in the Jonah story with its combination of stormy seas and the threat of a particular sea monster as the tests of human faith as well as nature’s power over limited humanity. Dirck Barendsz designed one Jonah image, engraved by Jan Sadeler (1582), which seems to equate the leviathan with the swelling of the waves and also emphasizes theatrical distress by the boatload of sailors on deck. One key example from the New Testament was the 1576 commission by the Bruges Fishmongers to the local Bruges artist Pieter Pourbus for a

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triptych with this kind of maritime subject (Brussels).65 Around a large central Sea of Galilee, ringed by mountains, unfold a series of events: a central Christ Calling His Four Disciples with the Miraculous Draft of Fishes, then on the left wing The Tribute Money and on the right wing Christ Appearing to His Disciples on the Shore of the Sea of Galilee. This kind of imagery also was presented by Joachim Beuckelaer (Chapter 5) in his 1563 The Miraculous Draft of Fishes (see Figure 5.5); also behind his several images of actual fish markets Beuckelaer shows the background scene of Christ appearing to the disciples (1569, Ghent; 1570, Naples).66 As noted above in conjunction with some of Bruegel’s ship portraits prints, such as the Arion, the isolated ship in a stormy sea took on a significance of its own, often interpreted as a symbol—of the life of an individual (or the course of love) or else of some institution, such as the traditional ship of state.67 Sometimes these images of ships in storms were paired with images of calmer seas or of particular battles; for example, Vroom’s Ships in a Tempest (British private collection) was originally paired with the artist’s Battle of Cadiz and should not be read as a symbolic image in isolation.68 Bruegel sometimes explicitly used storms allegorically, as in his 1559 engraving design (Berlin) for the allegory of Hope, which asserts that the hope for worldly things is vain and subject to sudden storms as well as threatening whales (like the Jonah story).69 Nature’s power and domination over tiny mankind is perfectly exemplified by ships immersed in stormy seas. Some of the dangers and contrasts between the safety of the harbor and the dangers of open water are provided in a Bruegel drawing, View of the River Scheldt near Antwerp (ca. 1559; Courtauld Institute, London), where a city skyline at the left gives way to a dark sky and rain at the right, the direction toward which a galleon, small in scale at the top center, is sailing.70 A key picture, formerly attributed to Pieter Bruegel but now properly associated with Joos de Momper, is the Storm at Sea (Vienna).71 Dendrochronology of the tree rings of the panel dictate a later origin, a felling date between 1575 and 1585, than the lifetime of Pieter Bruegel (d. 1569), yet Lawrence Goedde is surely right to remind us (following the original, if now obsolete attributions) that this picture owes more to the prior constructions of Bruegel—and to a series of images continued in the next generation (see below) by Jan Brueghel—than to the conventional mountain landscapes usually favored by de Momper (see Chapter 9).72 Unlike Pieter Bruegel’s drawing View of the River Scheldt, this painting shows open ocean and a high horizon, though it also retains a structure of contrast by reserving a small segment at the upper left for a port city skyline (akin to some of Bruegel’s ship portrait prints) under a clearing sky as an ultimate destination. Ships in the field are small in scale; these ships also are struggling to sail from right to left, against the grain of normal viewing, the reverse of the calmer, steady progress, left to right, of ships in the drawing River Scheldt. Goedde and Ertz quite properly link the Momper Vienna picture to a cluster of Jan Brueghel marine pictures (we recall that de Momper collaborated with Jan Brueghel as figure painter in several landscapes).73 Already among the meticulous paintings of 1595 made by Jan for Cardinal Borromeo in Milan was a Stormy Seascape with Christ and the Apostles (Ambrosiana, Milan; a second version is in the Thyssen Collection, Madrid), featuring a fragile bark in the left foreground before a complex background of towering rocks, seaport and distant mountains. He also produced an early image of Jonah (Munich), which, like the Barendsz engraving, emphasizes the whale, this time disgorging the prophet on a shell-strewn beach.74 There is even a variant of the Paradise landscape with (fewer) animals in a Noah (1601; Zurich; replica, Kassel).75 But Jan also produced several nonnarrative shipwreck scenes in

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stormy seas, starting around 1595 with Shipwreck with Castaways (German private collection), featuring a foreground broken vessel whose crew clamber upon craggy rocks.76 Thus, while he is not prolific in this pictorial genre, nonetheless Jan Brueghel encompasses both of the standard image types of stormy marine pictures—those with biblical narratives at their heart (both Old Testament and Gospels) and those with only ships and ordinary sailors at risk. He also utilizes the same structural contrasts—storm/ clearing, open water/port harbor—as the Vienna Storm at Sea. As noted earlier, right after the turn of the seventeenth century Hendrick Vroom became the Dutch artist of marine pictures with storms, just as he was the pioneer painter on a grand scale of ship portraits and naval battles. His storms often features ships on the open water without either the distant harbor or clearing weather of the Bruegel tradition, but he also sometimes adds details that increase the peril, not a safe haven but instead menacing, tall, coastal rocks.77 Sometimes archaic monstrous whales appear in the waters. In Vroom storm scenes, of course, the ships, meticulously rendered and correct in details, appear at larger scale and at the center of the compositions. These storm scenes with rocks would continue into the seventeenth century with some artists, for example, Adam Willarts of Utrecht (1574– 1664), emphasizing exotic foreign coasts, though, as in other aspects of Dutch painting, the new emphasis after the teens on naturalism and monochrome painting soon came to dominate marine storm pictures, especially in the work of Jan Porcellis.78 One final genre related to seascapes by Jan Brueghel should also be noted: the coastal landscape, which emerges out of the juxtaposed details inherent to the world landscape tradition (Chapter 2) and like the world landscapes of Patinir is animated by the presence of saintly figures within a religious narrative.79 One of these formative works in his oeuvre is the 1595 Coastal Landscape with Jonah (Girardet Collection, Kettwig), in which the picture is divided roughly in half, with observers along a beach and background harbor, rocks and mountains at the left and open water with a large ship under a gathering storm at the right. In 1596 Jan followed up this model, reversed, with another coastal landscape, chiefly devoted to a religious theme, Departure of Paul for Caesarea (North Carolina Museum, Raleigh). At first glance the principal figures of the foreground are fishmongers as well as well-dressed contemporary figures, but the tiny saint with a halo appears within a dense crowd, including the soldiers who hold him in custody at the right edge in the near middle ground. Prominent ships, associated with the saint’s voyage, are docked at harbor in the middle distance, and high mountains loom against the distant coast. The entire image is articulated along the traditional gold-brown/green/blue color scheme for distance and atmosphere. Other early, dated Jan Brueghel works also make the same kinds of religious scenes, surrounded by similar crowds (including fishmongers, alluding to the miraculous draft of Fishes) in elaborate coastal landscape constructions: Harbor Scene with Christ Preaching from a Boat (1597; private collection) and the celebrated Munich Christ Preaching at the Sea of Galilee (1598), both from Luke 5, comprising a flotilla of ships and a crowd of hundreds of figures.80 Again, Christ is a small figure with a halo, located in the geometrical center of the panel but obscured by countless adjacent figures, most of whom are heedless of his words and message, as well as other details. In this respect, Jan Brueghel’s small religious figure scenes involve the same process of discovery as his father’s did a generation earlier (Chapter 3; works such as the 1567 Conversion of St. Paul; Figure 3.16). Moreover, this work can be regarded as a synthesis of fish still life, market scene, world landscape, and marine

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painting—a compound of emerging and traditional genres that Jan Brueghel experimentally combined while also making a strong narrative with a religious point involving viewer interaction. It should be noted, however, that just as Jan Brueghel’s marine storm imagery shifted from a religious narrative matrix to an anonymous population, so did his coastal scenes in the new century also focus anew (like the market scenes of Joachim Beuckelaer, Chapter 5) on the market setting rather than the hybrid world with a religious scene. After a 1600 Roman topic, the Continence of Scipio (Munich),81 Jan produced a Fishmarket with Self-Portrait (1603; Munich) and a related variant, Fishmarket on a Riverbank (1605; Munich). In many respects this busy port city and its market can be compared to the multifigure overviews of village life in the kermis print designs by Pieter Bruegel (Chapter 6), yet now the combination of motifs is still richer, including much larger cities with specific buildings borrowed (St. Peter’s of Rome for the 1603 picture; Prague Castle and Cathedral for the 1605 work, based on Jan’s recent 1604 visit). Shortly after these pictures, Jan developed a new formula, widely yet carefully repeated with variations from his workshop, in which the maritime basis of the coastal landscape was transformed into a formula still closer to the village life favored by his father: the river landscape.82 These works, too, divide the field into halves, one of them dominated by a direct recession of a river into depth, the other one by village buildings and people. The wildness of the ocean has been tamed, along with the diversity and grandeur of the city, and this successful formula would enjoy a long life in both Flanders and Holland.83 If we take Jan Brueghel’s career as an index of the status of genres and audiences at the turn of the seventeenth century, then we notice consistent patterns in his production. His most celebrated image types, particularly flower pieces, were luxurious and expensive works, first produced for aristocratic patrons, such as Cardinal Borromeo and the Flemish archdukes. Earlier works also frequently steeped their innovations of animal painting or marine storms in the framework of serious intellectual pursuits, often religion but also mythology and cycles of allegory (even the hell scenes depicted classical themes). The sources for some of these images—flowers and animals, but also ships portraits—lay in printed works, whether scientific treatises or commercial engravings (Pieter Bruegel’s portraits of ships). But turning such sources into detailed and costly virtuoso paintings was the innovation of Jan Brueghel (or his counterpart in ships portraits, Hendrick Vroom). Later, more intimate pictures, still finely wrought, were produced by Jan and his workshop (and by Vroom and his workshop), and these works would have a long afterlife for specialist painters, often better compensated than their peers in landscape or peasant subjects, in both Flanders and Holland. But these themes, whatever their original links to Pieter Bruegel or to prints, elicited fundamentally elite works, whose later establishment as pictorial genres should be understood as a ‘‘top-down’’ expansion of aristocratic taste.

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CONCLUSIONS Value and Values in the Capital of Capitalism

Every nation has the government it deserves. —Joseph de Maistre, Letter, 1811

One calls genre painters, without distinction, those who busy themselves with flowers, fruit, animals, woods, forests, mountains, as well as those who borrow their scenes from common and domestic life. —Denis Diderot, Essais sur la peinture

Genres are institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function it is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact. —Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

How does one think a marketplace? At once a bounded enclosure and a site of urban commerce, it is both the imagined centre of an urban community and its structural interconnection with the network of goods, commodities, markets, sites of commerce and places of production which sustain it. . . . At the market centre of the polis we discover a commingling of categories usually kept separate and opposed: centre and periphery, inside and outside, stranger and local, commerce and festivity, high and low.’’ —Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

P

ictorial genres crystallize into conventions only after a period of experimentation. Their eventual characteristics emerge out of a pathway of successes, imitated by later successors striving for similar results (genres are made out of other genres, asserts Tzvetan Todorov).1 As noted in the previous chapters on individual themes, genres usually begin as complex hybrids, and only in retrospect

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does their trajectory seem apparent. More unsuccessful ventures find few successors, so the defining features of themes and forms often seem to have been inevitable from the start. Sometimes the variants overlap simultaneously in a given moment. For example, later in the sixteenth century, available models of ‘‘landscapes’’ could include both panoramic and varied ‘‘world landscapes,’’ often inhabited by important figural scenes from the Bible or mythology, or else ‘‘rural landscapes,’’ of either small villages or (often forgotten) stately country homes. These alternatives already found serial presentation in the print cycles of Hieronymus Cock in the 1550s, and they would continue to flourish into the seventeenth century (for example in the landscapes by Rubens), although world landscapes gradually lose their prominence, especially in Dutch paintings and prints.2 In similar fashion, what art academies would consolidate under the rubric of ‘‘still life’’ in later centuries began as separate strands of discrete categories, defined by the objects in their imagery: ‘‘kitchen pieces,’’ ‘‘game pieces,’’ flowers, and fruits, and as we have seen, some of these— particularly game, based on the privilege of hunting, and flowers, expensive and exotic imports— implied aristocratic patrons, thus higher prices as well as less dependence on the open market for sales.3 For the most part, however, the emerging genres that we have seen, both in prints and in paintings, consisted of repeated and evolving formulas, ratified and reinforced in the art market.4 All scholars situate the origins of the dominant pictorial genres to this time and place, sixteenth-century Antwerp. By way of a conclusion, let us consider why these several types emerged when and where they did out of the cultural system of Antwerp (Chapter 2), or what they contributed to what Thomas Beebee calls their ‘‘use-value’’ as ideology in that period and place. If society gets the government that it deserves, then it is equally true that a buying public chooses the art whose values define it, often by opposition. In effect, these images serve as the measure of selfdefinition. Rather than worrying about whether these images actually resemble contemporary social reality or else provide only a stereotype or arbitrary semiotic system of signs, we can see them as measuring what Paul Alpers calls a ‘‘mode,’’ the ‘‘manifestation in a given work of the writer’s [artist’s] and the putative reader’s [viewer’s] assumptions about man’s nature and situation.5 This concept allows us to use the collective content of the artworks—both their formal features and their attitudes toward subjects, in short through their genres in a system—to clarify a composite vision of what the images represented to their owners.6 Paul Alpers’s choice of pastoral verse exemplifies this kind of analysis. The fictional shepherd who creates the verses is taken to be a figure of ordinary strength, vulnerable to political turmoil and humble, situated in the tranquil countryside at a remove from the city and thus often in tension with the urban culture of its readership. Pastoral’s values of otium, or a life of leisure, sometimes spent in contemplation, were founded in classical literature, particularly in Vergil’s Eclogues, and modern scholars have sketched the full range and variety of its later forms.7 Its characteristic setting is an idyllic, summery landscape. This fictional complex offers a concatenation of features rather than any single defining feature; hence later redactions can emphasize or develop in different directions of form, theme, or attitude. A quartet of market and kitchen scenes by Joachim Beuckelaer (National Gallery, London) was painted in the late 1560s in the wake of iconoclastic destruction of religious pictures in churches as well as the outbreak of hostilities in the Dutch Revolt.8 The sheer size and coordination of these images (matched only by Bruegel’s Months series, five large panels of 1565) suggests that they were a commis-

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sioned work by a patron, not offered on the open market, although individual pieces stand close to other Beuckelaer canvases with the same subjects.9 These canvases also are structured according to the Four Elements, a popular set of allegories in contemporary print cycles.10 The Vegetable Market (1569) would represent Earth, the Fish Market (1569) Water, the Fowl Market (1570) Air, and the Kitchen (1570) Fire. Moreover, like the works by Aertsen and Beuckelaer that combine market scenes with religious narratives (Christ and the Adulterous Woman, Ecce Homo—see Chapter 5), three of these images, too, have evident religious scenes in their backgrounds. These secondary actions are painted in softer color tones and require viewer discernment to find their spiritual significance behind the larger, attractive comestibles of the foreground.11 Only in the Fowl Market does a religious subject seem to be entirely absent; however, the National Gallery argues that the erotic scene of engagement in the central background actually recounts a worldly moment from the ‘‘loose companies’’ of the Prodigal Son narrative rather than offering the usual ‘‘birding’’ innuendos of most other fowl market images, even though nothing identifies this male figure as the Prodigal.12 In the other pictures, by contrast, the background religious scenes are clear: the Flight into Egypt behind the Vegetable Market, the seemingly inevitable Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha (Luke 10: 38–42) behind the Kitchen, and the appropriately maritime Miraculous Draft of Fishes (John 21: 4–14) behind the Fish Market. Both of the latter Gospel scenes evoke ways in which the spiritual infuses the everyday. In one case Christ’s sermon (Luke 10: 38–42) proclaims that a simpler life of religious devotion with Mary is better than the worldly cares of Martha, whereas in the case of the fishing scene Christ reveals himself to his disciples through his miracles in the world.13 Even in the Vegetable Market, the Flight into Egypt (indeed probably the Return from the Flight, since the figures are entering the picture from the left background) represents a contrast, like the figure of Mary in the Mary and Martha scene, to the consumer products and the worldly concerns of the foreground abundance. In this image, the young female vendor has been characterized by modern scholars as sexually charged and available in her own right, so the presence of the Holy Family, especially the pure figure of the Virgin Mary, underscores the differences and alternatives between the two painted zones. Beuckelaer’s market scenes with religious backgrounds echo the choices of Mary and Martha, now put before an individual viewer, between active worldliness and contemplative godliness.14 In effect the very thematics of choice marked the new issue of the relationship between religion and the world. In the Netherlands Erasmus of Rotterdam (ca. 1466–1536) marked the shift between a monastic model of piety and the engaged morality of an intelligent laity, stimulated by widely distributed printed texts, such as Erasmus’s own Enchiridion militis Christiani (Handbook of the Christian Soldier. 1503).15 Practical morality and an inner religion, guided by scripture and the example of Christ, can serve the pious Christian, just as Beuckelaer’s background scenes provide a touchstone for evaluating the foreground temptations and choices of his market and kitchen scenes. Erasmus had already warned in his Institution of Christian Marriage (1526), commenting on the subject of Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha—a full generation before the works of Aertsen and Beuckelaer—that some of these images also contained scandalous pictorial actions (‘‘impious follies’’) of the apostles drinking and chatting during the Lord’s sermon, a subject more fit for an inn than for a religious picture. Not only do such dissipations present a deficiency among even Christ’s closest followers, but they also offer a negative third term to the devotion of Mary or fastidiousness of Martha: the

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self-indulgence of consumption, as seen in isolation in Jan van Hemessen’s taverns (Chapter 4). Although not marked as an apostle, there is one older man who warms himself and drinks from a crockery tankard beside the fireplace in Beuckelaer’s London Kitchen. This kind of figure introduces dissipated behavior into the household, just as the flirtatious prodigal eroticizes the outdoor Fowl Market. Pieter Bruegel’s large, early painting, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559; see Chapter 4, Figure 4.12) picks up the same opposition as it juxtaposes one indulgent meat-eating, tavern-based, festive revelers against somber, fish-eating, alms-giving churchgoers opposite. This image, however, exemplifies the principle of the excluded middle, specifically the pious activism of Martha, even within the central, civic marketplace.16 Indeed, although largely cleared out of food stalls by the holiday period, this site is the same as Beuckelaer’s markets for fish and fowl, the two poles of the holiday season, exemplified in the very center of the picture by contrasting costumed figures: a fool in motley (carrying a torch in daytime) as well as a devout couple in dark pilgrimage cloaks. Because neither of these alternatives can be sustained on a continual basis and because they are mutually and reciprocally selfdefining—indulgence versus abstinence—the viewer cannot really make a choice; rather he or she must reflect on the missing term—moral behavior under everyday circumstances, in effect the life of Martha rather than either drinking or unwavering devotion. But this is the dilemma of practicing religion in the real world rather than the artificial world of holidays, whether festive or solemn. In effect, this is the world of lay ethics that Erasmus presents in his Colloquies (first published in 1518).17 Like the Enchiridion, these lay dialogues in Latin often present the same theme of seeking the substance behind the signs or rites of religion. Throughout the Colloquies Erasmus also adheres to a view, like that of the Mary and Martha episode, which accords importance and dignity to women; he even consistently advances the virtues of matrimony over celibacy.18 Indeed, Erasmus’s treatise The Christian Widow (1529) also singles out Martha for praise: ‘‘Coming now to the other side of piety, indeed there will be no leisure if we give due and frequent attention to Martha’s complaint against Mary. Nor does anything prevent both sisters from being combined in one woman, and this reproach is most welcome to Christ.’’ Moral and intellectual life, abetted by his own witty and conversational Colloquies, is what drives Erasmus’s practice of religion. Indeed, his targets of ridicule in the Colloquies principally focus on the same two groups in Carnival and Lent: fools and pious hypocrites. In the lifetime of Bruegel and Beuckelaer another leading religious author was writing in the Dutch vernacular: Dirck Volkertsz. Coornhert (1522–90), whose most celebrated work picks up the same concerns with using religion to make proper choices in the world.19 Coornhert also was an etcher and engraver, who began work with Maarten van Heemskerck in Haarlem in 1547 and produced some two hundred collaborative prints, including early cycles of parables: Prodigal Son (woodcuts), Unmerciful Servant (1549), and Good Samaritan (1549), as well as Lazarus and the Rich Man (1551). Each of these themes emphasizes the need for forgiveness and true charity, and those parables of choice and temptation were also a staple of van Hemessen’s large-figure paintings in the generation before Bruegel and Beuckelaer (see Chapter 4). Heemskerck and Coornhert also produced ambitious print cycles of allegories, including a group of early allegorical works—Allegory of Human Ambition (1549), Allegory of the Hope for Gain (1550), and Allegory of the Unbridled World (1550)—as well as a work whose duality of laughter and weeping about the nature of the world recalls Bruegel’s Carnival and Lent: Allegory of the Vanity of Human Passions /

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Democritus and Heraclitus (1557). In this latter print where both philosophers are criticized; the central Latin inscription concludes: ‘‘And you, do not shed tears like Heraclitus, nor roar with laughter like Democritus. Endure and forbear, as is proper.’’ Coornhert’s first play, Comedy of the Rich Man (1550), also showed the vanity of worldly wealth, and in 1580 he penned a treatise, The Merchant: Teaching the Honest Art of Practicing Trade in a Christian Manner and with Equal Courage Whether Gaining or Losing.20 Outcomes are not important in this stoical worldview, summed up not only in the Latin (toleres abstineasque) but also in the equivalent Dutch phrase lijd en mijd, suffering and forbearance.21 Together with Heemskerck’s friend and former student, the glass painter Willem Thibaut, Coornhert also produced a set of six prints (1556–57) with texts from both Ecclesiastes and Proverbs about the foolish temptations to which mankind is prey: avarice, greed, deceit, drunkenness, and bodily desires.22 Coornhert’s chief published work (completed in 1586) is a manual of good living, the first treatise on ethics in a vernacular language, Dutch, entitled Zedekunst dat is Wellevenkunst (Ethics, that is, the Art of Living Well), with the subtitle in translation, ‘‘by means of truth, knowledge of men, of the sins, and of the virtues.’’23 This is a book meant, in the words of its preface, to provide self-awareness ‘‘of man himself, his condition, his conduct’’ (vanden mensche zelve, van zynen state, handel ende wandel). It offers a mirror of vices and virtues. Love of God and thus of one’s neighbor will guide men to shun sins and to exercise virtue in the world. Thus, for Coornhert, both pictorial art and vernacular writing can offer instruction about the proper use of riches (for the benefit of others) and other ethical conduct, based on choice and free will. Indeed, one of Coornhert’s later allegorical prints, designed by Adriaan de Weert (ca. 1572/76), offers an allegory of humans in a fishbowl enticed by competing baited hooks of both good (a crucifix) and evil (a statue of Cupid, labeled ‘‘Libido’’).24 Prints by Heemskerck and his contemporaries also demonstrate the virtue of hard work (see Chapter 6). Specifically they associate the hard life of the peasant in the country with God’s decree (Genesis 3: 17–19) that ‘‘in toil you shall eat of [the soil] all the days of your life. . . . In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.’’25 Peasant labor operates in a system of thought that asserts that diligence will be rewarded and idleness punished with poverty and begging. This essentially is the theme of Heemskerck’s designs for a six-print engraved cycle The Reward of Labor and Diligence (1572, engraved in Antwerp by Philips Galle). Moreover, the peasant further embodies the laboring class within the traditional medieval three orders of society, led by those who pray (clergy) and those who fight (knights), also represented by Heemskerck in a four-part cycle with Galle, The Divine Charge to the Three Estates (ca. 1566–70). Though Bruegel uses a different vocabulary from Heemskerck’s usual allegory, his own image of sloth and food fantasy among the same three estates in his Land of Cockaigne (1567; Alte Pinakothek, Munich; Figure 6.22) depicts a comic inversion of the virtue of labor through the folk myth of the ‘‘Big Rock Candy Mountain,’’ or in Dutch, ‘‘lazy-luscious land’’ (Luilekkerland).26 The inscription on the engraved copy of this Bruegel painting reads, ‘‘The lazy and gluttonous farmers, soldiers, and clerks/ get there and taste all for nothing.’’27 Even though both these social ranks and their shared fantasy are purely conceptual, they do establish a set of norms and behaviors within the value system implied by Antwerp visual culture. Such selfdefinition for the (relatively prosperous) urban viewer emerges in juxtaposition to the rural, working

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(or festive) peasant as well as the idle, poor beggars in the city.28 Labor is part of a virtuous life, with the sin of sloth as its opposite. Wealth, if associated with avarice, cannot be taken as an end in itself, as we learn from both Coornhert and Heemskerck (see also his cycle of six prints, produced with Philips Galle, Unhappy Lot of the Rich, 1563).29 Yet poverty and worldly renunciation, the medieval monastic ideal, are no longer socially desirable goals, and they had already been emphatically been rejected by Erasmus, beginning with his first work, the Antibarbarorum Liber (1493/95).30 As Bruegel’s Luilekkerland shows, folly/sin as a negative example often structures sixteenth-century pictures, beginning with Massys’s Ill-Matched Pair (Figure 4.14), where grotesque faces and a costumed fool-as-accomplice point out the unattractiveness or absurdity of the represented behavior, including both avarice and lust. In some respects the grotesque and comical use of Boschian demons (especially by his imitators—Chapter 7) in the service of vices serves the same purpose. To the extent that peasant features are often grotesque as well and their behavior gross (‘‘Grobian’’) and uncivilized, these images, too, can be taken as exempla, not of virtue but of folly, perhaps even of vice (Chapter 6).31 Like Freud’s opposing concepts of id and ego, these wilder or baser figures represent antipodes to the cultivated, urban(e), self-disciplined model of the viewer of such pictures. Once more the writings of Erasmus can offer a touchstone for the fundamental shift in the sixteenth century toward inculcation of what the historical sociologist Norbert Elias called ‘‘the civilizing process.’’32 Erasmus’s influential, often reprinted Manners for Children (De civilitate morum puerilium, 1530) attempts to teach the outward signs of inner character: cleanliness and discretion in bearing, gestures, speech, expressions, and movements. Like all his writings, particularly the Colloquies, this one aimed to promulgate moral virtue to the literate Christian laity. In fact, the traditional, aristocratic ‘‘courtesy,’’ linked to social class superiority, is replaced by Erasmus with the term ‘‘civility,’’ the expression of citizenship, an urban concept, to be complemented by such terms as urbanitas and honestas. Repression of emotions, of the baser instincts, and of bodily functions was fundamental to the new manners, making the uncensored or unrepressed behavior of both fools and peasants—as well as carousers in the fleshpots of the taverns—a glaring contrast of improper conduct.33 This characterization of the peasants as defined by their close contact with ‘‘the natural’’ explains their juxtaposition with their wares in the market scenes, and it also suggests why kitchen pieces also include figures (possibly even apostles in the Mary and Martha scenes) who indulge in drinking and sensual pleasures. Scholars who have read the marketing peasants in negative terms, especially against inserted background religious scenes (Ecce Homo, Christ and the Adulterous Woman), usually see the worldly life in fleshly terms against the apostolic life of spiritual retreat—again without the middle term of moral but worldly activism, like Martha. Elizabeth Honig’s revisionist readings remind us how much materialism, desire, and judgment remain incumbent upon the viewer of an Aertsen or Beuckelaer, just as in the marketplace itself. Yet this is the same worldliness around goods encountered by the morally shortsighted, bespectacled figure of ‘‘Everyman’’ (Elck, 1558; Figure 5.9), or mistakenly—and ruinously—coveted by the Alchemist (ca. 1558) in two of Bruegel’s most refined print designs.34 Honig is surely right that the market scenes pose the continual problems of consumption, leading toward consumerism, which were posed by the commerce and prosperity of Antwerp as an urban metropolis (Chapter 2). But this situation still calls forth the moral dilemma of the middle term between indulgence and renunciation—the

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ethics of an active life in the real world, including the marketplace and its temptations. Those unambiguous urban figures of dissipated taverngoers or grotesque money changers, which dominated Antwerp figural painting before mid-century, gave way in the era of both Aertsen and Bruegel to ambiguous, shifting characters of ‘‘natural’’ and corporeal peasants—hardworking laborers in the fields of nearby exurban farms or alien visitors to the city markets; or else hard-playing revelers in their annual rural parish kermis or rustic weddings. The importance of judgment and discernment, raised anew by Honig, is confirmed in many of the Antwerp works of the sixteenth century, from landscapes (even Boschian landscapes) to market and kitchen scenes. As we have often noted, the religious core of a picture often lies in the background of a landscape rather than at its center.35 This compositional hide-and-seek dominates Patinir and met de Bles works from the first half of the century, and in the works of Pieter Bruegel even serves to obscure familiar religious scenes within either rural settings (Parable of the Sower, Census at Bethlehem; Figure 3.17) or mountains (Conversion of St. Paul; Figure 3.16). It underlies some of the van Hemessen religious subjects, particularly the Calling of St. Matthew (Figure 4.24) and the Prodigal Son in the Tavern (Figure 4.15). And it structures both the Mary and Martha scenes and markets with religious subjects—themes about judgment, Ecce Homo (Figures 5.4. 5.8) and Christ and the Adulterous Woman (Figure 5.3)—by both Aertsen and Beuckelaer, who also embed religious subjects of the holy figures (The Miraculous Draft of Fishes; Figure 5.5; Flight into Egypt) within seemingly everyday activities by peasant groups. Thus even the forms of these images, seemingly at odds with the dignity and decorum of religious subjects, call forth viewer discernment and ability to achieve balance between worldly concerns and religious lessons.36 Little wonder that parables also formed a vital part of this visual repertoire, especially for van Hemessen and Bruegel (whose use of proverbs further underscored this parlaying of wisdom through simple imagery).37 Like the true followers of Christ and like the fertile soil in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13: 1–17; Mark 4: 1–34; Luke 8: 4–15, 13: 18–21), a painting that Bruegel made one of his earliest landscapes with a peasant (1557; Timken Gallery, San Diego; Figure 3.15), those who are receptive can heed the greater spiritual message behind the seemingly mundane imagery of mustard seeds, ‘‘Blessed are your eyes, for they see.’’ In today’s art history, ‘‘visual culture’’ has various meanings (and agendas). This book has proposed to make a case about a historical condition for a new and specific visual culture—namely, that these emerging genres in Antwerp constitute a coherent, consistent representation of humanity and nature, and ‘‘a moral compass.’’38 The approach here has been to start with the system posed by the pictures themselves, both paintings and prints, while acknowledging their inevitable historical conditioning, provided in the urban, commercial society of Antwerp. This sixteenth-century visual culture presents as much convention and conception as depicted reality. It is intended to be employed within a rhetorical context of viewing, addressing an audience and requiring interpretation, then as well as now. But it also serves as part of an ideological structure peculiar to that society.39 This approach has already been employed by Lawrence Goedde in a case study; his more limited but original artistic phenomenon arose in Antwerp in the aftermath of Pieter Bruegel the Elder: the Dutch tempest seascape.40 In contrast to large-scale, public commissions, celebrating famous admirals and their battles or ceremonial arrivals (often before carefully delineated topographical city harbors— Chapter 10), Goedde attends to smaller, private images of storm-tossed barks on the open sea, which

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formed a subcategory of marine imagery. In itself the tempest seascape offered an opposition to the calm, order, peace, and abundance, already well established in the print series of ships issued by Frans Huys after Pieter Bruegel in the 1560s.41 As noted in discussing Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus (Chapter 6; Figure 6.21), a sailing ship reaching port can be compared to the successful and productive utilization of nature, akin to farming. Thus its foundering and isolation (or even its shipwreck on a ‘‘foreign,’’ rocky coast)42 measures the limited capacities of humanity in the face of nature’s power and offers a challenge to the notion of mariners’ control or harmony with nature. As Goedde notes, this subgenre, too, often utilizes structural oppositions in pictorial motifs: man/nature, light/dark, sea/clouds, waves/ rocks. Selectivity of such motifs and repeated conventionality in their juxtaposition permits interpretation of posited relationships, just like the example of pastoral. These vulnerable ships, even when dwarfed by the waves and storms around them, are as essential to the meaning of their pictures as the diminutive hermit saints in the corners of Patinir’s world landscapes or the background scenes of Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha behind their active, wellstocked kitchen pieces.43 Even in the absence of such religious scenes, the human figures (or Boschian demons) in world landscapes or rural villages, in markets, taverns, or kitchens, inhabit a realm of action and potential, of order (or disorder)—and of choices amid mortal dangers and moral temptations. Whether innovators (Bosch, Patinir, Massys, van Hemessen, Bruegel) or imitators, whether painters or printmakers, sixteenth-century Antwerp artists did create a coherent visual culture—comparable either to the moral spirituality of Erasmus and his followers or to the verses and plays of urban rhetoricians (rederijkers) in an emerging early modern culture of urban capitalism.44 Perhaps for this very reason their inventive and effective pictorial genres sustained a long afterlife in modern art capitals, from seventeenth-century Amsterdam to nineteenth-century Paris.

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NOTES Preface 1. The best discussion of visual genres and their literary equivalents comes from the parallel universe of cinema: Altman, Film/Genre, a work whose constant stimulation has been most important for the thinking in this book. See especially ‘‘Conclusion: A Semantic/Syntactic/Pragmatic Approach to Genre,’’ 207–26. I am also grateful to Professor Altman for personal exchanges. 2. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics; Barthes, Elements of Semiology. 3. Quoted from Smith and Parks, The Great Critics, 114; for Aristotle, 25–61; for Horace, 112–28; for Scaliger, 149–63. 4. For Renaissance literary theory, consult several important works: Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance; Colie, The Resources of Kind; Fowler, Kinds of Literature; Lewalski, Renaissance Genres. 5. Gombrich, ‘‘The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,’’ in Norm and Form, 107–21. 6. Gombrich, Norm and Form, 114–15, 148–51. See also Melion, ‘‘Ad ductum itineris,’’ esp. 50: ‘‘The title Parergon signifies ‘accessory’ . . . the term derives from Pliny, who says that it was coined by painters to designate subordinate elements in their pictures.’’ The fact that Alberti and the followers of Vitruvius (Book VII) regarded landscapes as the appropriate decoration for villa walls and country houses shows the relative insignificance of landscape in the hierarchy of pictorial genres (and of literary genres, where the setting of landscape was deemed by Serlio, following Vitruvius, as appropriate to satire and the ‘‘satyric’’ rather than to tragedy or even comedy) as well as the lack of basic interest in the type by ‘‘serious’’ Italian painters. This hardly seems to be the stuff of Italian art theory as a generative influence on picture-making. 7. Stechow and Comer, ‘‘The History of the Term Genre.’’ 8. Gombrich, ‘‘The Renaissance Theory of Art,’’ 121. 9. Friedla¨nder, Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life, 11–153 for landscape. 10. Friedla¨nder, 47–48, observing that the pioneer of landscapes in Antwerp, Joachim Patinir, still ‘‘did not paint pure landscapes at all but religious pictures.’’ 11. On Antwerp liefhebbers, see in particular Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 47–57; Honig, Painting and the Market, 202–6. 12. Kristeller, ‘‘The Modern System of the Arts,’’ in Renaissance Thought II, 163–227. See also Abrams, ‘‘Art-as-Such.’’ 13. Hermere´n, Influence in Art and Literature. 14. Montias, ‘‘Cost and Value in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art.’’

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Chapter 1. Introduction: ‘‘Cultural Selection’’ and the Origins of Pictorial Species 1. Most recently, see Vermeylen, ‘‘The Commercialization of Art’’; Vermeylen, ‘‘Exporting Art Across the Globe’’; for prints, Van der Stock, Printing Images in Antwerp. For the Antwerp art market, Ewing, ‘‘Marketing Art in Antwerp.’’ 2. Riggs, Hieronymus Cock; Riggs, ‘‘Bruegel and His Publisher.’’ 3. Friedla¨nder, ‘‘The Emancipation of Landscape in the Sixteenth Century,’’ in Landscape- Portrait-StillLife, 47. 4. Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, esp. 60–70; of course, there are many scholars who focus on the ‘‘High Gothic’’ as a ‘‘classic’’ phase, just as they construe other periods, such as fifth-century Athens and the Italian Renaissance, to attain a climactic, classic moment. See, for example, Jantzen, High Gothic; Frankl, Gothic Architecture. 5. The key work advancing this view is Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art; see also Frankl, Das System der Kunstwissenschaft. For criticism see Schapiro, ‘‘Style,’’ in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 69–81; Ackerman, ‘‘Style,’’ in Ackerman and Carpenter, Art and Archaeology, 164–86, esp. 170–73. 6. Panofsky, ‘‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,’’ 20–21; Kubler, The Shape of Time, esp. 31–39. 7. Koch, Joachim Patinir, esp. 49–56. 8. Silver, ‘‘Second Bosch’’; Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch. 9. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Brueghel-Breughel; Bruegel: une dynastie de peintres. 10. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth. On Herri met de Bles specifically, see Toussaint, Autour de Herri Bles. 11. On the rarity of signatures for Netherlandish pictures during the fifteenth century, see Folie, ‘‘Les oeuvres authentifie´es des primitifs flamands.’’ 12. Even before the 1505 Du¨rer case, a formal petition for privilege to the Senate in Venice had been taken out in 1500 by Anton Kolb, publisher of the multi-block View of Venice by Jacopo de’ Barbari; see Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 43, 237, citing Wu¨rtenberger, Das Kunstlerfa¨lschertum, 186– 90. The practice of engravers using a monogram as signature began with the unknown Master ES after the middle of the fifteenth century; Landau and Parshall, 46- 50. On Du¨rer’s monogram and these larger issues of authorship, see Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture, 203–23, esp. n. 42. See also Liebmann, ‘‘Ku¨nstlersignatur im 15.-16. Jahrhundert’’; Wu¨rtenberger, Albrecht Du¨rer, 43–65, both cited by Koerner. 13. Conveniently summarized by Vasari-Milanesi, Opere, 5: 405–6. Now see Pon, Raphael, Du¨rer, and Marcantonio Raimondi, esp. 39–43. 14. Quoted by Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, 213. 15. Oehler, ‘‘Das Du¨rermonogramm auf Werken der Du¨rerzeit’’; on copyists in Nuremberg, brought to

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lawsuit in 1512 (Rupprich I, 244), see Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, 209. Outright duplications are discussed by a pair of print exhibitions: Du¨rer Through Other Eyes; Vorbild Du¨rer. Most recently see Bartrum, Albrecht Du¨rer and His Legacy. 16. Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch, 171–74, esp. nn. 1267, 1269, for other practices of artistic signatures. Local traditions seem to play a large role, as the van Eyck practice of signatures was followed in Bruges by both Petrus Christus and Hans Memling. Citing the importance of the craft traditions, Vandenbroeck cautions against the ready assumption, fundamental to Koerner on Du¨rer, that an artistic signature can be taken as an index of modern individuation and self-consciousness, though Koerner would doubtless respond by asserting that Du¨rer represents that crucial step into modern selfconsciousness out of the earlier craft tradition, and Vandenbroeck himself goes on to posit for Bosch similar claims to erudition and invention as those made for Italian Renaissance artists. 17. This large-scale question of categories and the possibility of modern anachronism in our own understanding still has not been widely considered by scholars. The finest contributions to date have been made by Peter Parshall, using early print collections to make a distinction between text illustrations (historia) and ‘‘theological and exemplary subjects’’ as well as ‘‘secular topics . . . bearing instructive messages’’ (moralia). See Parshall, ‘‘Art and the Theater of Knowledge,’’ esp. 17–18, ‘‘Thus these moralia extend from the jocular to the sober, and from the proverbial to the historical. Collectively they portray the human condition by particular example and in its larger setting. . . . Moralia is a rubric describing a continuum of meaning that assimilates history to genre, and biblical illustration or theological teaching to moral philosophy.’’ See also Parshall, ‘‘Kunst en reformatie.’’ 18. Jheronimus Bosch, 216–20, nos. 98–103; also Lafond, The Prints of Hieronymus Bosch, 107–15, nos, 30–38. 19. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 137–39, 163–65, nos. 36–37, 56–57. 20. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 140–42, nos. 38–39. 21. Riggs, Hie¨ronymus Cock, 1510–1570, 214. 22. For peasant subjects across the sixteenth century in both Germany and the Netherlands, see Raupp, Bauernsatiren. 23. Most recently analyzed by Meadow, ‘‘Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary,’’ 181–82; see also Freedberg, ‘‘Allusion and Topicality in the Work of Pieter Bruegel: The Implications of a Forgotten Polemic,’’ in Freedberg, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 53–65. 24. Sluijter, ‘‘Introduction: ‘With the Power of the Seemingly Real We must Conquer and Capture the Eyes of Art Lovers,’’ in Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, 9–14. 25. Sluijter, ‘‘Over Brabantse vodden.’’ 26. Silver, ‘‘The Importance of Being Bruegel,’’ esp. 73–74; Gibson, Pleasant Places, esp. 43–47, 101–3. 27. Gibson, Pleasant Places, 1–26, 32–36.

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28. ‘‘Veelderleye ordinantien van lantschappen, met fyne historien daer in gheordinneert, wt den ouden ende niewen testamente, ende sommighe lustighe Poetereyen, seer bequaem voer Schilders, ende andere liefhebbers der consten,’’ Riggs, Hie¨ronymus Cock, 1510–1570, 273, nos. 38–50. 29. Gibson, Pleasant Places; also Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints, 11, 28–38, esp. 30, for the Latin caption on Visscher’s own series (ca. 1612–13) of small landscapes: ‘‘You who enjoy looking at the varied appearance of country houses and the many ever-charming turns in different roads, come feed your eager eyes on these flat scenes provided by the sylvan surroundings of Haarlem,’’ or the Dutch, ‘‘Pleasant places you may see here, you art lovers who have no time to travel far, places situated outside the agreeable town of Haarlem or thereabouts. Buy without thinking for too long.’’ For this series, see Luitjen, Dawn of the Golden Age, 653, no. 327. 30. The historiography of ‘‘Golden Age’’ Dutch art is presented by Grijzenhout and Van Veen, The Golden Age of Dutch Painting; see also the special issue ‘‘The Evolving Canon of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Painting,’’ Simiolus 26 (1998). The self-confirming image of Holland in art is a subject deserving much more extended treatment. See also the classic essentialist appreciation, penned significantly by an immigrant, Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art. 31. Quoted by Alpers, The Art of Describing; the citation is taken from Hollanda, Four Dialogues on Painting, 16. 32. Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 232–33, claims the relevance of Joseph Addison’s aesthetic program, outlined in his Spectator essay, no. 411, ‘‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination.’’ See also Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, 49, emphasizing the primacy of sight and an aesthetic of novelty rather than either beauty or sublimity. 33. Critical discourse on artworks begins in Renaissance Italy, but in seventeenth-century Flanders, connoisseurs, known as art-lovers, liefhebbers, were actually enrolled in the Antwerp painters’ guild. For the larger phenomenon, tied to collecting, see Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions. On liefhebbers in Antwerp, see Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 51–52; Honig, Painting and the Market, 202–5. The rise of aesthetics in relation to the formation of a literary canon at the end of the eighteenth century is discussed by Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market. 34. Altman, Film/Genre, esp. 30–82, discussing the topics of where genres come from, whether genres are stable, and whether genres are subject to redefinition. For example, Altman cites the ‘‘biopic,’’ or film biography, which had quite diverse figures (Pasteur, Disraeli, Zola) as subjects and were not originally marketed together as a genre type, although the innovations in one studio might well be imitated by a host of lesser followers. He also cites the case of ‘‘women’s pictures,’’ a ‘‘phantom genre’’ subset of melodrama, which was only constituted by feminist critics of a later generation to recover the positive common qualities originally disparaged by hostile critics (as Impressionism was constituted by its critical opponents), but never expressly part of the production process. This book, written for a sister discipline, has been enormously influential on my own thinking, and I wish to acknowledge further the stimulation of personal dialogue with Prof. Altman.

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35. Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck, and Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch, 39–44. 36. Orenstein, ‘‘The Elusive Life of Pieter Bruegel the Elder,’’ in Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 8–11. The connection with Cardinal Granvelle before his political demise in 1564 might have prompted the painter’s otherwise unexplained move from Antwerp to Brussels in 1562. 37. Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, particularly on the subject of ‘‘connoisseurs,’’ or liefhebbers. See also the images of galleries, discussed by Filipczak, 47–72, as well as by Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image, 81–88, 103–47, whose discussion of the rhetoric of collections emphasizes their bouquet-like diversity and creative intertextuality to attract the viewer attention. See also Honig, ‘‘Value in Display and the Aesthetic of Judgment,’’ in Painting and the Market, 170–212. For early print collecting, see Parshall, ‘‘Art and the Theater of Knowledge’’: ‘‘In western Europe, art collecting got its start mainly through the accumulation of antiquities, medals, and portraits in the late Renaissance. The beginnings of systematic art collecting, however, can be rooted somewhat later in the activities of print collectors’’ (30). For the seventeenth century in Holland, see Robinson, ‘‘This ’Passion for Prints’.’’ 38. Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de andere; Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel. 39. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 33, 53; for an extension of this analytical concept and its application to the mode associated with rural themes and nature in general, Alpers, What Is Pastoral? 44–78. 40. See the classic study by Elias, The History of Manners. More recently, see Jeanneret, ‘‘Ceremonies and Manners,’’ in A Feast of Words, 39–61, pointing to the connection between ‘‘manners and Mannerism.’’ 41. The term comes from Elias, The History of Manners. Elias, with Vandenbroeck, also sees the sixteenth century as a critical turning point in the institutionalization of manners. 42. Riggs and Silver, Graven Images, esp. 101–18. 43. The change of forms over time suggests theories about evolution in the natural world, keeping in mind Rick Altman’s justified warning about how much more interaction (movie) genres can elicit than living organisms: ‘‘In the genre world, however, every day is Jurassic Park day. Not only are all genres interfertile, they may at any time be crossed with any genre that ever existed. Altman, Film/Genre, 70, continuing, ‘‘The ‘evolution’ of genres is thus far broader in scope than the evolution of species . . . a record not of the past but of a living geography, of an ongoing process.’’ 44. On Tennyson’s ‘‘tooth and claw,’’ see Gould, ‘‘Red in Tooth and Claw.’’ 45. This is the biological definition of ‘‘species’’ furnished by Mayr, This Is Biology, 127–34, 311: ‘‘A reproductively isolated aggregate of populations which can interbreed with one another because they share the same isolating mechanisms.’’ 46. The principal sources for my understanding of evolution begin with Ernst Mayr’s works: Evolution and the Diversity of Life (1976); This Is Biology (1997); and What Evolution Is (2001). Also fundamental are the works of the late Stephen J. Gould, Wonderful Life (1989), and his recent The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002); also Wilson, The Diversity of Life; Bowler, Evolution. More argumentative—

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and critical of Gould’s concept of ‘‘punctuated equilibrium’’ adopted here—is Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker. 47. These meticulous observations by Princeton researchers Peter and Rosemary Grant have been discussed by Weiner, The Beak of the Finch; see also Quammen, The Song of the Dodo, 216–17, 222–30. 48. Dash, Tulipomania, with references. See also Segal, Tulips Portrayed; Ann Goldgar, ‘‘Nature as Art.’’ 49. Sluijter, ‘‘Over Brabantse vodden.’’ 50. For the wider perspective on this innovation and Seghers’s innovative but unsuccessful contribution to it, see Luijten, Dawn of the Golden Age, esp. 316, 672–76, nos. 343–47. 51. Israel, ‘‘Adjusting to Hard Times.’’ 52. Goedde, ‘‘Naturalism as Convention.’’ I have also benefited greatly from the published work and the stimulating discussions of Melanie Gifford. See the following works by her: ‘‘Jan van Goyen en de techniek van het naturalistische landscape’’; ‘‘Esias van de Velde’s Technical Innovations’’; and for the lingering Flemish painting tradition, ‘‘Landscape Painting, Style and Technique.’’ My sincere thanks for generously sharing both published and unpublished work with me. 53. Efficiency, however, could also be realized in the traditional Flemish technique, as Gifford ‘‘Landscape Painting,’’ 182–84, makes clear. She notes that divided responsibilities in the workshop permitted ready collaboration, including superimposition of figures on landscapes, as we have noted in the cases of Jan Brueghel; moreover, looser underpainting and reduced detailing or rapid brushwork in distinct color zones could further streamline the production process, as the generation after Pieter Bruegel (the Grimmers, de Momper; Chapter 9) quickly realized. 54. On the appreciation of Jan van Goyen by his contemporaries, such as the critics Huygens (1629) and Orlers (1641), and his presence in artistic collections, see Sluijter, ‘‘Jan van Goyen als marktleider. See also Westermann, ‘‘Fray en Leelijck,’’ for the case of an artist who ‘‘remade himself as a painter, relinquishing his specialty in polychrome painting of aristocratic outings for a novel specialization in abject, even grotesque images of the socially marginal painted in monochrome . . . and shaped market interest in imagery of lowlife, verbal and pictorial wit, and the grisaille medium’’ (221). 55. His justly celebrated study: ‘‘Cost and Value in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art.’’ 56. The key work advancing this view is Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art; see also Frankl, Das System der Kunstwissenschaft. 57. Schapiro, ‘‘Style,’’ in Theory and Philosophy of Art, esp. 69–81; Ackerman, ‘‘Style,’’ in Ackerman and Carpenter, Art and Archaeology, 164–86, esp. 170–73. See Kubler, The Shape of Time, 8–9, on the biological metaphor and his desire to substitute a more mechanized, physics-based alternative, a fundamental criticism of his own teacher, Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art; also Kubler, 31–36, 55–62. 58. Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art.

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59. Bowler, Evolution, 371–74; Gee, In Search of Deep Time, noting in particular the connection between this historical analysis to stemma research on manuscript texts or language evolution (168). He also makes the conceptual distinctions between evolution as a concern with process—specifically natural selection—and cladistics, focused exclusively on relationships of pattern, cousinhood, rather than similarity of structure (144–45). Cladistic analysis was pioneered by Willi Hennig (English ed. 1966), though the term (based on the Greek word for ‘‘branch’’ and introduced by Julian Huxley in 1957) was defined by Mayr, whose own response to its approach was critical. See Mayr, This Is Biology, 143–46; Mayr, ‘‘Cladistic Analysis or Cladistic Classification?’’ in Evolution and the Diversity of Life, 433–76.

Chapter 2. Antwerp as a Cultural System Epigraph: Van Mander, Das Leben der niederla¨ndischen und deutschen Maler, fol.156: ‘‘De vermaarde heerlijke stad Antwerpen, door de Coopmanschap in voorspoet wesende, heeft overal tot haer gewenckt de uytnemenste onser Consten, die veel hun tot haer oock begheven hebben, omdat const gheern is by den rijkdom.’’ Fol. 232: ‘‘In dezelfde mate als Florence vroeger in Italie¨, lijkt nu Antwerpen in de Nederlanden een moeder van de kunstenaars te zijn. Zo heeft deze vermaarde stad ook verscheidene kunstenaars voortgebracht, die diverse takken van kunst hebben beoefend.’’ For an English translation with commentary, see van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters. 1. Van der Stock, Antwerp: Story of a Metropolis, offers a synoptic view with current bibliography; also Leon Voet, Antwerp: The Golden Age. A fundamental earlier study is Van der Wee, The Growth of the Antwerp Market, building on the foundations of Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger. For the wider economic picture, see Braudel, The Perspective of the World. 2. Goris, Etude sur les colonies marchands me´ridionales; Coornaert, Les franc¸ais et le commerce international; Ramsay, The End of the Antwerp Mart. 3. The Maximilian episode in Bruges history has been discussed by van Miegroet, ‘‘Gerard David’s Justice of Cambyses’’; this interpretation has been criticized by van der Velden, ‘‘Cambyses Reconsidered.’’ 4. This trading triangle in metals and precious goods is the earliest example of the ‘‘world system’’ outlined by Wallerstein, The Modern World System. The Germans, led by the Fugger, extracted both silver and copper from Tyrolean mines that they held in pawn for loans to Emperor Maximilian I, who needed hard currency to finance his ongoing wars. These metals filled a demand for copper as a basis of bronze casting on the coast of Africa, especially among the Benin people, and the demand for silver as bullion for exchange for spices and durables in India (later much of this European silver would be targeted toward even more distant markets in China; see Frank, ReOrient. In return the Portuguese returned with gold and ivory from Africa as well as precious spices from India. 5. Van der Wee and Materne´, ‘‘Antwerp as a World Market.’’ 6. Antwerp, Stadsarchief; transferred to the collections of the Museum Plantin-Moretus and the Stedelijk Prentenkabinet. Composed of twelve blocks. Van der Stock, Antwerp: Story of a Metropolis, 154, cat. 9. Reinforcing this identity is the presence of two Roman gods: Mercury, god of commerce on the left,

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and Vertumnus, god of seasons, on the right. See also Grieten and Huvenne, ‘‘Antwerp Portrayed,’’ esp. 70. The fullest discussion of Antwerp depictions is Delen, Iconographie van Antwerpen. 7. Van der Stock, Antwerp: Story of a Metropolis, 234–35, illustrated as no. 84; Materne´, ‘‘ ‘Schoon ende bequaem tot versamelinghe der cooplieden’.’’ 8. Van der Wee and Materne´, ‘‘Antwerp as a World Market.’’ 9. Briels, De Zuidnederlandse immigratie; Briels, Zuidnederlanders in de Republiek; Briels, Vlaamse schilders in de Noorderlijke Nederlanden. 10. Vermeylen, Painting for the Market; Ewing, ‘‘Marketing Art in Antwerp’’; already in 1481 the painters’ guild of Brussels had concluded a contract to show their wares in Antwerp at the annual fairs in the earlier pand location beside the Church of Our Lady. For surveys of Antwerp in this period, a good overview is provided by Faggin, La pittura ad Anversa; see also the exhibition catalogue, Von Brueghel bis Rubens. For the contemporary art market in Bruges, located like most markets in the large plaza near a main church, see Wilson, Painting in Bruges at the Close of the Middle Ages. 11. Rombouts and van Lerius, De liggeren en andere historische archieven. Good archival sources can be found (without references) in van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche Schilderschool. 12. Baudouin, ‘‘Antverpia Pictorum Nutrix,’’ n. 17. 13. On the Master of Frankfurt and the identification as Wueluwe, see Goddard, ‘‘The Master of Frankfurt and His Shop’’; for Massys, Silver, The Paintings of Quinten Massys. 14. Du¨rer, Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands; Albert Du¨rer aux Pays-Bas. 15. Dubbe and Vroom, ‘‘Mecenaat en kunstmarkt in de Nederlanden,’’ 13; Balis, ‘‘Antwerp, FosterMother of the Arts,’’ 115; Vermeylen, ‘‘The Commercialization of Art,’’ esp. 49. These articles all furnish an elegant survey of Antwerp as an art market. 16. De Nave, ‘‘A Printing Capital in Its Ascendancy,’’ with extensive references. Statistics tell part of the story of Antwerp’s dominance of printing: of 133 printers active in the sixteenth century in the Netherlands, fully 66 were based in Antwerp, and of the approximately 4,000 books published in the region, 2,254 stemmed from the city. Of course, quantity is also complemented by quality, particularly in the leadership of Christopher Plantin (ca. 1520–1589) and his press, the Golden Compasses, probably the most important publisher in Europe. On Plantin, see chiefly Voet, The Golden Compasses; Clair, Christopher Plantin. 17. Riggs, Hie¨ronymus Cock; de Pauw-de Veen, Je´roˆme Cock, e´diteur d’estampes et graveur; Burgers, In de Vier Winden; Silver, ‘‘Graven Images.’’ 18. For the fullest study, see Vermeylen, Painting for the Market. Also Vermeylen, ‘‘Exporting Art Across the Globe’’ and ‘‘Commercialization of Art.’’ 19. Ewing, ‘‘Marketing Art in Antwerp’’; see also Vermeylen, ‘‘Marketing Paintings in Sixteenth-Century

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Antwerp.’’ For a similar market situation in contemporary Bruges, see Wilson, Painting in Bruges; for documents, Maximiliaan Martens, ‘‘Some Aspects of the Origins of the Art Market in Fifteenth-Century Bruges.’’ The pioneering study was Campbell, ‘‘The Art Market in the Southern Netherlands’’; see also more generally Ainsworth, ‘‘The Business of Art’’; Montias, ‘‘Socio-Economic Aspects of Netherlandish Art.’’ 20. Jacobs, Early Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces, 149–208; also Jacobs, ‘‘The Marketing and Standardization of South Netherlandish Carved Altarpieces.’’ 21. Jacobs, Altarpieces, 209–37. For the influential discussion of art production and pricing, drawing a distinction between product innovation and process innovation, Montias, ‘‘Cost and Value in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art.’’ 22. Ainsworth, Gerard David, esp. 47–49, see also 55, n.79; Wilson, Painting in Bruges. For the tracing of patterns for brocades and drapery in an early Antwerp painting workshop, run by the Master of Frankfurt (Wueluwe) see Goddard, ‘‘Brocade Patterns.’’ 23. Honig, Painting and the Market, 271, n.11. See also Franz, ‘‘Landschaftsbilder als kollektive Werkstattsscho¨pfungen.’’ 24. Vermeylen, ‘‘Commercialization of Art,’’ 50, citing document SSA, N 1478, dated February 26, 1583. 25. Van Mander, Das Leben der niederla¨ndischen und deutschen Maler, fol. 249r. See also Wolfthal, The Beginnings of the Netherlandish Canvas Painting. 26. Orenstein, ‘‘Images to Print,’’ in Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 41–55; see also the references above, note 18. The most important study of Antwerp prints in general is van der Stock, Printing Images in Antwerp. 27. From Haarlem: Heemskerck made numerous designs, while Philips Galle produced engraved plates and then succeeded Cock after his death. On Cort, see Sellink, Cornelis Cort (exh. cat.); Sellink, Cornelis Cort. One engraver, the Italian Giorgio Ghisi, returned to Italy around 1555 after working for Cock about half a decade. See Boorsch, The Engravings of Giorgio Ghisi. 28. Balis, ‘‘De nieuwe genres en het burgerlijk mecenaat,’’ esp. 238. 29. Du¨rer, Diary of His Journey, 89. Du¨rer also mentions drawing a metalpoint portrait of Patinir (88). On Patinir’s foundational role in the establishment of Antwerp’s distinctive type of ‘‘world landscape,’’ see Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 3–16. 30. As argued by Gombrich, ‘‘The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,’’ in Norm and Form, 107–21, the alliance in Italy between art theory and art practice, as well as between verbal description of classical painted precedents and cinquecento emulations, remained crucial to assimilation of landscape in the Renaissance. Obviously such considerations do not exist in Flemish painting; see Chapter 3 for considerations of the origins and meanings of landscape in sixteenth-century Antwerp.

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31. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, chapter 2, ‘‘The Second Generation,’’ 17–36, esp. 26–30 for Bles. On Bles, see also Toussaint, Autour de Henri Bles. 32. See Nelson, The Idea of Usury; Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury. 33. See, for some of what follows, see Honig, Painting and the Market, 4–13, 53–60; Gibson, ‘‘Artists and Rederijkers.’’ For general background, see Mak, De Rederijkers; van Elslander, Het Refrein in de Nederlanden; Coigneau, Refreinen in het zotte bij de rederijkers. 34. Honig, Painting and the Market, 7, n. 23 for original text; also collected in the anthology of refrains by van Doesborch, De refreinenbundel van Jan van Doesborch. See also Pleij, ‘‘Antwerp Described.’’ 35. Silver, ‘‘Power and Pelf’’; Moxey, ‘‘The Criticism of Avarice.’’ Both articles cite considerable contemporary textual criticism of merchants and money dealers. 36. Honig, Painting and the Market, 8, 11–12; Moxey, ‘‘The Criticism of Avarice.’’ 37. Pleij, ‘‘Antwerp Described,’’ 83, n.20. 38. Kaveler, Pieter Breugel, fig. 43; Kuyper, The Triumphant Entry of Renaissance Architecture, 6–78, esp. 20–23, fig. 7; Meadow, ‘‘Ritual and Civic Identity’’. 39. Pleij, ‘‘Antwerp Described,’’ 82; Bostoen, ‘‘Zo eerlijk als goud’’; Kruyskamp, Het Antwerpse landjuweel; van Autenboer, Het Brabants landjuweel der rederijkers, 48–86; Steenbergen, Het Landjuweel van de rederijkers; Honig, Painting and the Market, 8, 53–56, esp. App. A, 218–28, for the full text and translation of the Mechelen landjuweel presentation in 1561. 40. Pleij, ‘‘Antwerp Described,’’ 83–84. 41. Van der Stock, Antwerp: Story of a Metropolis, 170, no. 23; 235, no. 84. The accompanying engravings, by Peter van der Borcht of Mechelen, depict the Cathedral, Bourse, and City Hall. For maps and topographic images of the city, painted as well as printed, see Grieten and Huvenne, ‘‘Antwerp Portrayed.’’ 42. Quoted by Pleij, ‘‘Antwerp Described,’’ 83. 43. Pleij, ‘‘Antwerp Described,’’ 84. 44. Renger, Lockere Gesellschaft. 45. Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 111–48. 46. The same could still be said of Chicago in the later nineteenth century: ‘‘From the heart of the city, the frontier history of the Great West looks to be a story of metropolitan expansion, of growing incursions of a market economy into ever more distant landscapes and communities. . . . It imposed on the land a new geography of second nature in which the market relations of capital reproduced themselves in an elaborate urban-rural hierarchy that would henceforth frame all human life in the region’’ (Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 46–54).

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47. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 263–309, esp. 283–84. See also in comparison to Antwerp as a center of vice, above, the chapters on ‘‘Metropolitan Vice,’’ 350–56, and ‘‘Moral Economy of the City and Country,’’ 357–64. 48. Honig, Painting and the Market, esp. 19–99. For a conceptual reading of the market as crossroads between country and city, see Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, esp. 27–43, emphasizing the interaction between high and low in the symbolic domains of psychic forms, the human body, geographic space, and social order: ‘‘How does one think a marketplace? At once a bounded enclosure and a site of open commerce, it is both the imagined centre of an urban community and its structural interconnection with the network of goods, commodities, markets, sites of commerce and places of production which sustain it. . . . At the market centre of the polis we discover a commingling of categories usually kept separate and opposed: centre and periphery, inside and outside, stranger and local, commerce and festivity, high and low’’ (27). 49. Honig, Painting and the Market, 57–60; Kaveler, Pieter Breugel, 67–70. 50. Duby, The Three Orders; Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought, 251–360; Kaveler, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus,’’ 105–7, quoting the Antwerp Songbook of 1544, ‘‘On the Noble Farmer [Landtman]’’: ‘‘Let us praise the farmer thus: . . . / The farmer noble and good, / Providing everyone’s livelihood.’’ 51. Carroll, ‘‘Peasant Festivity and Political Identity,’’ esp. 296–98, arguing that praise of one’s local peasants had a patriotic overtone in an era of increasingly self-conscious resistance against Spanish dominion. She also quotes from the Antwerp Songbook: ‘‘He is virtuous in his customs. / Therefore I must praise him, / For with his sweaty limbs he feeds / Nations, provinces, fortresses, and cities. / The good landsman, inspired by every virtue, / Serves loyally without coercion. / He plows, he delves, he hacks, he digs . . .’’ More generally, see Meertens, De Lof van de boer. 52. Quoted by Gibson, ‘‘Bruegel and the Peasants,’’ 19–20; see also Gibson, Pleasant Places, 128–40. On this georgic tradition, also tied to Vergil, see also Vergara, Rubens and the Poetics of Landscape, esp. 160–70. 53. Translated with original text by Honig with Annemarie van Toorn, Painting and the Market, App. A, 218–29. 54. Miedema, ‘‘Feestende boeren—lachende dorpers’’; Miedema, ‘‘Realism and the Comic Mode’’; Moxey, ‘‘Sebald Beham’s Church Anniversary Holidays’’; Vandenbroeck, ‘‘Verbeek’s Peasant Weddings’’; Raupp, Bauernsatiren. 55. Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de Andere, offers the fullest, most integrated discussion not only of beggars but also of the structural dualities in relation to the bourgeois urban consumer of sixteenth-century images. Much of the following discussion can be amplified by this rich and thoughtful text. Also important for the conceptual framework of a ‘‘dionysian’’ and ‘‘transgressive’’ conceptual definition of peasants or beggars as antitypes, see Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression. For beggars, see also Silver, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel in the Capital of Capitalism,’’ esp. 138–44. One of the first to associate the

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figures of beggar and peasant as related concepts for an urban bourgeois consumer of images was Renger, ‘‘Bettler und Bauern,’’ 9–16. 56. The most comprehensive sociocultural investigation of the history and its art for seventeenthcentury Holland is Schama, Embarrassment of Riches. Most of these works have come in the form of dissertations, quite a few of them supervised by Svetlana Alpers at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1970s (while she was working on Pieter Bruegel and Dutch genre in her own right). See especially Reinold, ‘‘The Representation of the Beggar as Rogue’’; Muller, Charity in the Dutch Republic; Durantini, The Child in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting. A more sympathetic view of ‘‘peasant distress’’ at the hands of brigands is provided by another subgenre, studied by Fishman, Boerenverdriet: Violence Between Peasants and Soldiers in Early Modern Netherlands Painting, a topic touched on chiefly in the generation after the death of Pieter Bruegel (see Chapter 8). 57. In addition to the Durantini study just cited, now see Bedaux and Ekkart, Pride and Joy. 58. Impressionism and the urban issues in and around Paris provide analogous examples of the same kinds of concerns in the period after the Industrial Revolution: Herbert, Impressionism; Clark, The Painting of Modern Life. 59. Silver, ‘‘Bruegel in the Capital of Capitalism,’’ 125–53; Kaveler, ‘‘Pictorial Satire, Ironic Inversion, and Ideological Conflict’’; Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 77–110. 60. Orenstein, Drawings and Prints, 166–67, 219–21, nos. 58–61, 95. As noted in the catalog, The Merchant Robbed by Monkeys derives from a long-standing pictorial tradition, perhaps directly modeled on a late fifteenth-century German woodcut. For the tradition, see Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, 216–25. One should also point out the earlier appearance of the theme in a painted landscape by Herri met de Bles (Dresden), a work attested in Amsterdam by Karel van Mander in 1604; Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, fig. 91. The setting conforms to the system outlined above: monkeys appear in a thickly wooded forest, the appropriate setting for wildness, beyond which lies a clearing in the countryside, home to a peasant’s cottage, where such baubles would be largely useless but nonetheless prized. Though no prior commentary on this print comments on the choice of setting, both the peasant dress of the ‘‘merchant’’—who is really more of a peddler—as well as his location suggest that he was marketing his wares in the country, not in the city. This is another form of displacement of gullibility and folly onto the peasant population by the generation of Bruegel. For the unsavory reputation of peddlers, especially in the work of Bosch, where the depicted ‘‘landlopers’’ are identified as itinerant peddlers, scarcely better than vagrants, see Renger, ‘‘Versuch einer neuen Deutung von Hieronymus Boschs Rotterdamer Tondo’’; Renger, Lockere Gesellschaft, 26–28, 51–54, where the peddler is identified as a gambler, named ‘‘Light Fortune,’’ in the woodcut cycle of ‘‘Carefree’’ (Sorgheloos). 61. The principals of the Alchemist, led by the scruffy figure who does the actual work, are also depicted in a subsequent second scene in the background on their way to the poorhouse after squandering their gold coins on these foolish experiments. On the haggard figure, who also resembles Bruegel’s Painter in his later drawing, The Painter and the Connoisseur (Figure 7.18), see Winner, ‘‘Zu Bruegels ‘Alchimist,’ ’’ pointing out the literary heritage (Petrarch, Brant, Agrippa of Nettesheim) of satire on alchemy as

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intellectual folly founded on greed. The main figure also recalls the fireside peasant in ragged garments in Bruegel’s 1563 Thin Kitchen (Orenstein, Drawings and Prints, 62, fig. 59). 62. Silver, ‘‘Bruegel in the Capital of Capitalism,’’ 136. The items in his line of goods, in contrast to the fruits and vegetables that are the real produce of the countryside, include hobby horses (images of playacting appropriate to children), spectacles (images of shortsightedness, even deceit), and items that abet vanity (mirrors, gloves, purses). The deep sleep and tucked arm suggest possible drunkenness as well as the gestural marker of sloth; see Koslow, ‘‘Frans Hals’ Fisherboys: Exemplars of Idleness.’’ This peddler figure is like a horizontal anticipation of Bruegel’s foolish, striding peasant (also before a background cottage and in the edge of the woods) of his 1568 Peasant and the Bird-Nester (Vienna; Figure 6.23). 63. Kaveler, Pieter Breugel 20–23; Janson, Apes and Ape Lore, 145–62; Sullivan, ‘‘Peter Bruegel the Elder’s Two Monkeys’’; Genaille, ‘‘Sur les ‘Deux Singes’ de P. Bruegel’’; Mu¨ller, Das Paradox als Bildform, 142–55. 64. Silver, ‘‘Bruegel in the Capital of Capitalism,’’ 126–30; Orenstein, Drawings and Prints, 212–18, nos. 89–94. 65. See Mu¨ller, Das Paradox als Bildform, esp. 153, who, though insisting on a Christian framework, arrives at a similar reading: ‘‘Decisive for my interpretation is the motive of the boundary, the scenic break between fore- and background, the illusion, to which mankind falls prey, which distances him from the apes, instead of recognizing in this creature his own destiny. The observer misses the intellectual point of the picture if he simply posits the sinfulness of both apes, which signifies human fallibility. . . . The Two Monkeys is a mirror—in the sense of an inversion—with reversed symbols, a mirror which shows not simply human idleness but rather involves self-awareness and self-possession.’’ Kaveler, Pieter Breugel, 22–23, notes the problems with the ambiguous presentation: ‘‘The massive chamber with the two monkeys is a framing device, both literally and conceptually, and it is fitting that Bruegel signed and dated the work about its edge. . . . The problem comes in wrestling with relationships, measuring interpretations that may not quite fit, sensing oppositions that cannot be reconciled, and becoming aware of one’s potential complicity in attitudes and behavior comfortably ascribed to others.’’ Sullivan, 121, has noted that a pair of monkeys in prison appears within the artist’s (roughly) contemporary work Mad Meg (Figure 7.12), an ironic image of female plunder at the very gates of hell. Genaille and Mu¨ller both suggest that the small size of this panel, like the 1568 Cripples, suggests that it might have been a personal creation or even a gift to a particular individual rather than a work made for sale on the market. This circumstance might reinforce its tendency toward greater ambiguities and complex thoughtfulness. 66. The story is also recorded in the Latin text, Jewish Antiquities, by Flavius Josephus (I.4 2). Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 67–68; Grieten, ‘‘De Iconografie van de Toren van Babel bij Pietr Bruegel’’; Snow, ‘‘The Language of Contradiction in Bruegel’s Tower of Babel’’; Mansbach, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel’s Towers of Babel.’’ A general study, charting shifting valences of the Tower is provided by Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel.

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67. Van de Velde, ‘‘The Labours of Hercules,’’ 123, document II. 68. Klein, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel the Elder’’; Snow, ‘‘The Language of Contradiction,’’ noting the degree to which the structure in the 1563 printing looks as if it were being carved out of a preexisting mountain rather than being constructed principally out of bricks or stones from the bottom up. These components, however, are visibly piled up on the quays in the harbor. Snow finds ambiguity in the structure, modeled on the celebrated Roman Colosseum (the subject of a number of etchings by Hieronymus Cock himself in 1550–51—see Burgers, In de Vier Winden, 32–33, nos. 15–16), which functioned in its own right as both a model and an epitome of ambitious greatness fallen into later decline. Snow contrasts Breugel’s later Tower, which seems even more fascinated with inventiveness and the activity of construction, akin to the process of artistic creativity. 69. Borst, Turmbau, 3: 1063–1101. See, however, Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 67–68, and Mansbach, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel’s Towers,’’ who hypothesize that the current intellectual project in Antwerp for a new ‘‘polyglot’’ Bible, to be published after 1567 by Christopher Plantin in its six various original languages, might have been imagined as a redress of the downfall of humanity into multiple tongues after Babel. A good monograph on the historical period of Bruegel’s activity is Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation. It should be noted here that the Tower of Babel formed an Old Testament antitype in Books of Hours to its reversal under grace in the New Testament: the ability of the apostles to speak in tongues, Pentecost (Acts 2). These precise images were paired, for example, in the Grimani Breviary, ca. 1510–20, which has also been adduced as a potential source for Labors of the Months scenes for Bruegel’s Months. The Tower of Babel episode can also be seen as the opposite of the revelation to St. Paul. When Bruegel produced a 1567 image of the Conversion of St. Paul (Figure 3.16), his construction is a mirror opposite of his Towers of Babel. In the latter work, the revelation takes place atop a towering peak, the opposite of the manmade spire of Babel, where confusion reigns; the ordinary, material world appears as another flatland coastline, visible at the left horizon as seen from a vertiginous height. Both works feature antlike crowds of tiny figures against a central figure who motivates the narrative, respectively Paul and Nimrod. 70. The works of the period 1566–67 include Census at Bethlehem (Figure 3.17), Adoration of the Magi in the Snow (1567; Winterthur, Reinhart Coll.), and the original version (probably Hampton Court, Royal Collection) of the Massacre of the Innocents.

Chapter 3. Town and Country: Painted Worlds of Early Landscapes 1. Du¨rer, Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands. Du¨rer also mentions drawing a portrait of Patinir, 88. For Patinir, see also Gibson, Mirror of the Earth; Reindert Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir. 2. For this theme, see Friedmann, A Bestiary for Saint Jerome; for this and related themes but in a Germanic context, Silver, ‘‘Forest Primeval.’’ 3. For discriminations of quality between these versions, see Koch, Joachim Patinir, 30–33, 75–76, nos. 10 (Paris), 11 (Madrid), 12 (London), described as the ‘‘left part of a variant composition of the Prado Jerome,’’ copied in turn in three other pictures, probably by the Patinir workshop; see also Kolb, ‘‘Varieties of Repetition.’’

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4. First christened by Baldass, ‘‘Die niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei’’; also Gibson, Mirror of the Earth. Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir, 83–92, sees antithetical meanings of contrasting spiritual versus material realms in these juxtapositions. See also Falkenburg, ‘‘Antithetical Iconography’’; Falkenburg, ‘‘Iconographical Connections.’’ 5. Gombrich, ‘‘The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,’’ in Norm and Form, 107–21. Gombrich acknowledges the Northern practitioners of landscapes (as does Friedla¨nder’s essay on the genre), but claims that ‘‘It is in Venice, not in Antwerp, that the term ‘a landscape’ is first applied to any individual painting. To be sure, the painters of Antwerp were far advanced in the development of landscape backgrounds, but there is no evidence that the collectors of Antwerp had an eye or a word for the novelty’’ (109). He cites the notebook entries by Marcantonio Michiel of 1521, the same year as Du¨rer’s journal entry on Patinir; ironically, the paintings cited as tavolette di paesi were in the collection of Cardinal Grimani, a noted collector of Netherlandish art, including both Patinir and Bosch (n. 11), specifically the paintings of one ‘‘Albert of Holland.’’ For two previous, late fifteenth-century uses of the word landscape in contracts, see Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 53. 6. Gombrich, Norms and Forms, 113–14; Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 40, 48. 7. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer; Silver, ‘‘Forest Primeval.’’ 8. For Lorenzetti, see Norman, Sienna, Florence and Padua, 2: 144–67, esp. 161; for the Limbourgs, Meiss, French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry, esp. 184–206. 9. Du¨rer, Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands, 93. For the Patinir St. Christopher, now in the Escorial, see Koch, Joachim Patinir, 40–41, 78, no. 18. The Du¨rer drawing does not survive, but another set of nine studies of St. Christopher (Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, no. KD 4477, W.800), from the same period is probably related to the diary entry. See From Schongauer to Holbein, 177, no.76. For the collaboration with Massys, see Koch, 39–40, no. 78, no. 17 10. Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir, 122–32; Falkenburg, ‘‘Antithetical Iconography,’’ esp. 26–28. 11. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 9–12, emphasizes the artifice of Patinir’s peaks but also associates them with representations of one famous mountain, Mount Sinai, as a type. Though not generally interpretive about the meaning implicit in Patinir’s landscapes like Falkenburg, Gibson underscores the association of such mountains with holiness, thereby making a good case that the uplands of these terrains, contrasted with the adjacent lowlands, denote wilderness as a site of sacred trials for saints (as argued for German prints of the early sixteenth century, in Silver, ‘‘Forest Primeval’’). 12. Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir, 23–57, 97–103. The Flight into Egypt is one of the early scenes clustered together in the late medieval composite visual image and cult of the grieving Mary, for which see Schuler, ‘‘The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin.’’ 13. Mundy, ‘‘Gerard David’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt.’’ 14. Koch, Joachim Patinir, 23–24, 37–39, also 77, no. 16. The source of this legend has not been found, but it is repeated by Patinir in several works.

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15. The source for this incident is Pseudo-Matthew, chap. 23; Koch, Joachim Patinir, 24 n. 19. 16. Krinsky, ‘‘Representations of the Temple of Jerusalem.’’ Note that two further idols are already toppling from the bell tower of this pagan temple. 17. Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir, 102–17; the crystalline space and hellfire juxtaposition resembles the settings in Bosch’s renowned Garden of Delights (Prado, Madrid). For a recent discussion of these items, see Silver, ‘‘God in the Details,’’ with Charon at 627, Garden of Delights at 641–45. 18. Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, 206–9, 240, no. 3. 19. Silver, ‘‘God in the Details,’’ 627, where the argument is advanced that viewer attention to the details of the background figures, such as Lot’s wife and Lot and his daughters, is an aspect of ‘‘right seeing,’’ in contrast to spiritual blindness. 20. See in particular Kitses, Horizons West, 7–27; French, Westerns, 100–134; Wright, Six Guns and Society. A good recent anthology is Kitses and Rickman, The Western Reader. 21. If we continue with the analogy of the modern Western movie, both the farms of homesteaders and the open range of their rivals, the ranchers, can be contrasted with the main street of town, particularly the corrupt town center of the saloon with dance hall, where most of the characters converge. Obviously in Western movies, the camera-based medium of film necessitated finding appropriate locations for the mythic events of the genre, but it is significant that some particular sites achieved their own mythic status through repetition, most notably John Ford’s use of Monument Valley in Arizona. See Buscombe, ‘‘Inventing Monument Valley,’’ noting the prior conventionalization and repetition in nineteenth-century photography (and paintings, e.g., Albert Bierstadt’s Yosemite or Thomas Moran’s Yellowstone and Grand Canyon). 22. See Kolb, ‘‘Varieties of Repetition.’’ Her basic distinction—between ‘‘brand,’’ or trademark works associated with an artist’s name, and ‘‘trend,’’ or recurrent repetition of popular works on the market—is perhaps easier to distinguish theoretically, but both concepts are essential to the arguments about art in and for the Antwerp market developed throughout this book. 23. Wilson, Paintings in Bruges. For particulars on Gerard David and his Bruges workshop, see Ainsworth, Gerard David, esp. 207–55 for workshop modification of landscape motifs, 257–308 for Mary icons. 24. Kolb, ‘‘Varieties of Repetition,’’ 177–89; Kolb also observes considerable exchange between the Antwerp workshops of Joos van Cleve and Patinir, 175–77. See also Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 15; Campbell, ‘‘The Early Netherlandish Painters’’; Dijkstra, ‘‘Methods for the Copying of Paintings.’’ 25. The basic analysis is Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 17–36; see also Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, esp. 68–77 on landscape drawings of this generation, 78–117 on the artists surveyed by Gibson.

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26. For the Master of the Half-Lengths, see Koch, Joachim Patinir, 56–65; Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 16. For Gassel, see Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 108–13; Gibson, 17–21. Gassel seems to have had contact with Joos van Cleve; Gibson claims, 17–18, that he provided landscape backgrounds for two van Cleve pictures now in America: the Ann Arbor John on Patmos and the Boston Crucifixion. 27. Five etched and engraved prints, several with the monogram LG. Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 110–12, figs. 142–45; Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 20, figs. 2.13–14; also Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 50, 335–36, no. 103; Janssen, Panorama op de Wereld, 105–6, nos. 14–18. 28. Nalis, The Van Doetecum Family, 2: 112, nos. 291–95. The Jerome print is captioned ‘‘Jerome in the Desert’’ (hieronimus in deserto/LG/h. Cock excud.). 29. Pseudo-Gassel was first noticed and dubbed by Faggin, La pittura ad Anversa nel cinquecento, 39, n. 18. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 20, also noticed this same artist, there called the Master of the BrusselsNew York panels, for his ‘‘eccentric deformation of Gassel’s style.’’ See now Ainsworth, ‘‘An Unfinished Landscape Painting Attributed to the Master LC.’’ A roster of works ascribed to this master is given in Toussaint, Autour de Henri Bles, 272–75, no. 53 (Antwerp, The Pilgrims to Emmaus). 30. Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 68–77; Wood, ‘‘The Errera Sketchbook‘‘; Bevers, ‘‘The Antwerp Sketchbook of the Bles Workshop.’’ 31. Mielke, Pieter Bruegel d. A¨. als Zeichner, 122–24. One of them (KDZ 393, 122, no. 155) is monogrammed and dated 1560. 32. Koch, ‘‘A Rediscovered Painting.’’ For the underdrawings on the Princeton panel, see Muller, ‘‘Technical Analysis of the Princeton Road to Calvary.’’ Additional evidence from relationships between other paintings and the Berlin Sketchbook strongly suggests that this album originated in the Bles workshop; Muller, 33–35. However, Bevers argues that the Berlin sheets are records of the composition, not preparatory studies for the Princeton painting (‘‘Antwerp Sketchbook,’’ 46–48). 33. In the engraved portrait of Bles called Henrico Blesio Bovinati (Henri Bles of Bouvignes), with verses in Latin by Domenicus Lampsonius (1572, no. 14), the artist is shown before a small niche with a little owl, and he is directly compared to, but found inferior to Patinir in the text (‘‘Iochime, tantum cedit Henricus tibi’’). Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 78–92; Gibson, ‘‘The Man with the Little Owl.’’ See also Toussaint, Autour de Henri Bles, esp. Allart, ‘‘Henry Bles, un paysagiste a` rede´couvrir,’’ who notes, 21–22, that Bles as ‘‘Henri Patenier’’ in fact paid taxes in Bouvignes (1541–42). See also the massive doctoral thesis by Luc Serck, ‘‘Henri Bles et la peinture de paysage.’’ 34. Serck, ‘‘Bles dans l’historiographie,’’ has compiled several prestigious inventory listings of Bles paintings: 1586, the Amerbach collection in Basel (Holy Family, Basel); 1589, Medici collection in Florence (⳱ Mining Scenes, Uffizi); 1592, Lucrezia d’Este collection in Ferrara (⳱ Road to Calvary, DoriaPamphilii Collection, Rome). Also cited by Allart, ‘‘Henry Bles, un paysagiste a` rede´couvrir,’’ 25–26; Gibson, ‘‘The Man with the Little Owl,’’ 133.

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35. Serck, ‘‘La Montee´ au Calvaire.’’ He also presents a unique etching, artist unknown (53, fig. 49), which replicates in reverse the composition of the Doria Calvary. See also Toussaint, Autour de Henri Bles, 196–203, nos. 21–24 (no. 24 is the etching, in Berlin). For other multiples (some widely divergent) of favorite religious themes, Autour de Henri Bles, Preaching of John the Baptist (nos. 9–11), Good Samaritan (nos. 14–18), Conversion of St. Paul (no. 28 and Oberlin College version), Way to Emmaus (nos. 29–34), and St. Jerome in the Wilderness (nos. 35–39). 36. Muller, ‘‘Technical Analysis’’ and Faries and Bonadies, ‘‘The Cincinnati Landscape with the Offering of Isaac. 37. Again named by Faggin, Pittura, 41; Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 33. Called the Master of the Lie`ge Way to Emmaus by Serck and Toussaint, Autour de Henri Bles, 250–55, with the roster of works on 252–53. 38. See, however, Falkenburg, ‘‘Marginal Motifs in Early Flemish Landscape Paintings.’’ As usual, and as an extension of his interpretive reading of Patinir landscapes, Falkenburg sees purposefulness in details, which often include miniaturized, secondary scenes of the same religious narrative, or else reversals of the main event in the actions of figures in a crowd. He sees such deliberately obscure details, often of ‘‘antithetical iconography,’’ as key to the meaning of such works, because of the demands that they place on ‘‘right seeing’’ on the part of the attentive and spiritually self-conscious viewer. For a similar view of Bosch, see Silver, ‘‘God in the Details,’’ though Falkenburg claims in his Bles article that ‘‘the devil is in the details.’’ I wish again to acknowledge the importance of shared discussions on such matters with Reindert Falkenburg. 39. Serck, ‘‘Les ‘Topiae’ chez Bles,’’ itemizes ten of these motifs in a list, citing their appearance in a range of Bles paintings, though not clarifying whether he has evidence of their tracing from patterns, as claimed for Patinir by Kolb. These items include combinations of such motifs as chaˆteaus, natural arches, and windmills. 40. Montias, ‘‘Cost and Value in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art,’’ discusses the issue of product and process innovation in Dutch art as a form of increased efficiency in the art marketplace; Israel, ‘‘Adjusting to Hard Times.’’ Art history, by contrast, sees this as a cost-cutting necessity brought about by hard economic times in the 1620s. This point about Bles and his workshop production has also been made recently by Buijsen, ‘‘De zoektocht naar de betekenis van het geschilderte landschap,’’ esp. 52–53. 41. The idea that the process of seeing is a message in itself is most fully developed by Falkenburg in his various studies, most recently (1998) in ‘‘Marginal Motifs, 153–69, with references; see also the related article on Bosch by Silver, ‘‘God in the Details.’’ Falkenburg has found Bles particularly useful in presenting ‘‘antithetical iconography.’’ To his examples, one more can be added, well discussed but left as a riddle by Chong, ‘‘Cleveland’s Landscape with John the Baptist,’’ esp. 91, fig. 79. Within the Cleveland image of the Sermon of John the Baptist, which characteristically shows a tiny background scene of the Baptism itself (fig. 74), a small but prominent figure in the lower right foreground is shown bending, ‘‘Narcissus-like,’’ to gaze into the water. In a previous study Gibson described the figure as a drinker;

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however, it is evident from the detail that the figure (the gender is uncertain, though the detail appears to show braids) is gazing into the water and as Chong asserts, ‘‘he clearly ignores the word of God as preached by the Baptist.’’ That alone would be meaningful as ‘‘antithetical iconography,’’ but there is more: the river apparently is filled in the same corner with a profusion of shells and other aquatic life, perhaps literally generated by the miracle of the Baptism. This small figure would naturally be curious about such a preternatural phenomenon but obviously mistakes the effects for the cause, thus missing out on the significance of the Baptism itself in the background (just as a casual viewer can miss that event because of its small size and placement in the distance). Bruegel scholars have also focused on the process of viewing as a significant message in itself, especially the difficulty of finding small holy figures within a landscape, such as the 1567 Conversion of St. Paul (Figure 3.16) or the Census at Bethlehem (1566, 3.17); see Huppe´ and Lindsay, ‘‘Meaning and Method in Brueghel’s Painting,’’ plus discussion below. 42. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 19 (Gassel, fig. 2.7), 30, nn. 117–18 (Bles, fig. 2.48; copy in Prague, additional versions in Graz, Vaduz, Budapest). The Budapest version is discussed in Toussaint, Autour de Henri Bles, 242–43, no. 43; the Vaduz version is discussed in Liechtenstein: The Princely Collections, 279–80, no. 177. This subject was also taken up in the generation after Bruegel by Lucas van Valckenborch (1535–97, master in Mechelen guild 1560) as a smaller motif within his numerous cliffsides; Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, 23, 28, nos. 23, 27, 30, 40–42, 44, 55–56, 71–73, who describes the mine as a blast furnace (Hochofen) without analyzing the significance of such a frequent and favorite motif in the artist’s works; indeed, some of the Valckenborch depictions seem associated with topographical renderings of Mosan sites (Huy, no. 23; Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp), which might associate them more with local iron and coal mining than with precious metals from Bohemia and Austria. 43. Van der Wee and Materne´, ‘‘Antwerp as a World Market.’’ See also Braudel, Perspective of the World. For imagery, see Heinrich Winkelmann, Der Bergbau in der Kunst (Essen, 1938), cited by Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 30, n. 121. Gibson (n. 124) insightfully links this subject to the confusion by Lomazzo, in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century, on the ‘‘Bohemian’’ origins of Bles, since Bohemia is one of the main areas of both copper and silver mining activity. 44. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 30, n. 116, notes that figures that resemble a Holy Family have been literally lifted from a fifteenth-century print of a Peasant Family by Martin Schongauer. To this one could note that the disguise of the Holy Family as peasants is a theme that will reappear in the painted works of Pieter Bruegel in the next generation, most notably the Census at Bethlehem (Figure 3.17), so that viewer discernment of the identity of these figures is part of the message of humility with holiness implied by this visual version of the Incarnation. Moreover, this adoption of figures from a standard image shows the degree to which Bles is willing to delegate the painting of figures, either to specialists within his workshop or else to secondary importance in his own landscape-dominated works. 45. Riggs, Hieronymus Cock; Lydia De Pauw-de Veen, Je´roˆme Cock; Burgers, In de Vier Winden; Silver, ‘‘Graven Images’’.

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Notes to Pages 39–41

46. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 64–65; Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, 17–33; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 120–36, nos. 22–34, 35, which argues for the first time that one or more engravings in the Large Landscapes series might have been designed in the manner of Bruegel by a lesser artist. 47. Credit for the first attribution to the Doetecums, who are better known as etchers of maps, goes to Oberhuber, Zwischen Renaissance und Barok, 148–49; see also Oberhuber, ‘‘Bruegel’s Early Landscape Drawings’’; Nalis, The Van Doetecum Family. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 120–21, reattributes the compositions of two of the weaker designs in the Large Landscapes, Rest on the Flight and Rustic Peddlers, to the Doetecums instead of Bruegel. 48. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 121, no. 3. This undermines the sense of the entire series, advanced by Levesque as an early version of the ‘‘journey through landscape.’’ Neither do these prints record particular places, with the notable exception of the Tivoli Prospect (Orenstein, 124, no. 24), based on a site Bruegel visited near Rome during his earlier Italian journey. Of course, some of the images are explicitly Alpine in their settings, but the prints devoted to holy figures by definition have no contemporary location and clearly derive from the imagined Patinir world landscape tradition. 49. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 122–23, nos. 22–23. 50. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 133–34, no. 33. She argues persuasively that these ‘‘thin, insubstantial’’ figures as well as the additive rather than unified landscape betray the compositional hand of the Doetecums, who etched the plate, or some other designer than Bruegel. As she attentively notes, this print and the other one she assigns to the Doetecums as designers, Rustic Peddlers, are unique in having proof or first states without the name of Bruegel, which was later added. 51. Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel offers the best introduction to the theme of Bruegel and the peasant, with references to earlier literature on this essential topic. Also Gibson, ‘‘Bruegel and the Peasants: A Problem of Interpretation,’’ in Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 11–52. 52. Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, 26–32. 53. Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, 28, n.72, noting the importance of nest-robbing in both paintings and drawings by Bruegel more than a decade later; see the drawing The Beekeepers (ca. 1567–68; Figure 6.24), Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 238–40, no. 107, and the related painting, The Peasant and the Bird-Nester (Figure 6.23); also discussed by Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 233–54. For the use of this theme by Vinckboons and other Bruegel followers at the end of the sixteenth century, see below, Chapters 8, 9. 54. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 219–21, no. 95. For the theme, see Jantzen, Apes and Ape Lore, 216–25; discussed in Silver, ‘‘Capital of Capitalism,’’ 136–38. This subject appears in a landscape from the Bles circle now in Dresden (no. 806), and the subject is described by van Mander in 1604 as one of the Bles paintings that he saw in Amsterdam in the collection of Martin Papenbroeck. 55. Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, 31–32, discusses the danger posed by such soldiers as well as noting the presence of passing soldiers in the village of Wooded Region. She reminds us of the praise

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Notes to Pages 42–44

of peace advanced by humanist authors in the sixteenth-century Netherlands. For the Rabbit Hunt, see Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 200–202, no. 82. For more on soldiers in the art of Bruegel in all media, including the theme of ‘‘peasant distress,’’ or boerenverdriet, see Silver, ‘‘The Importance of Being Bruegel,’’ 75, n. 38. 56. Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, 35–120; Gibson, Pleasant Places, 1–49, 85–140; on Bruegel influence in Holland, see Silver, ‘‘The Importance of Being Bruegel,’’ esp. 74, 77, as well as Chapters 8, 9 below. 57. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 274–76, no. 125; the reason for the reattribution of the drawing away from Bruegel’s own hand is tied to its connection with other landscape drawings that clearly seem to postdate Bruegel, now assigned to the anonymous Master of the Mountain Landscapes. Intriguingly, a much sketchier drawing in chalk and ink (Institut Ne´erlandais, Paris; Orenstein 200–202, no. 81), which is now reassigned to Bruegel himself, seems to have served as the design rather than the record of the composition of Bruegel’s only authentic etching, the 1560 Rabbit Hunt (no. 82). See the fuller argument by Royalton-Kisch, ‘‘A Sketch for a ‘Journey to Emmaus’.’’ 58. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 129, no. 29, fig. 84. 59. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 108–10, nos. 15–16. 60. The same association of forests with wildness and wilderness is seen in early sixteenth- century German art; see Silver, ‘‘Forest Primeval,’’ passim; Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer, 128–202. More generally, see Harrison, Forests; Schama, Landscape and Memory, esp. 75–134. 61. Bruegel also produced a Temptation of St. Anthony design for a Cock intaglio of 1556 (drawing in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 137–39, nos. 36–37). But this has a Boschian heritage of demonic attacks (see Chapter 7) instead of a world landscape construction, like the Patinir collaboration with Quinten Massys (Figure 3.3). 62. Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 140–51; Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 34–35. Dates for Matthys Cock are uncertain, but he registered a pupil in 1540, so he must have been a master in Antwerp before that date. His mother made arrangements for a trust for his young son in 1548, so he must have died young prior to that moment. For some of the drawings, see Mielke, Pieter Bruegel d. A¨. als Zeichner, 109–15, nos. 135–43. 63. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 34; Faggin, ‘‘Aspetti dell’influsso di Tiziano’’; Zwollo, ‘‘De Landschaptekeningen van Cornelis Massys,’’ 44. Matthys and Cock went to Italy sometime during the 1540s (Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 29–30), a visit that bore fruit in a variety of Cock etchings of the Roman Colosseum and other ruins (1550–51; Riggs, 256–65, nos. 1–25). The influence of Venetian landscape, especially Titian and Domenico Campagnola (and possibly the young Girolamo Muziano), on the young Bruegel, then traveling in Italy, has recently been underscored by Royalton-Kisch, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel as a Draftsman: The Changing Image,’’ in Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 15–16, 19–23. Also Cafritz, Gowing, and Rosand, Places of Delight, 73, 113–14.

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Notes to Pages 44–46

64. Toussaint, Autour de Henri Bles, 268–71, no. 52, with a roster of the assigned pictures and references. Also Gibson, Mirror of the Earth as a ‘‘contemporary of Cornelis Massys,’’ 22–23, figs. 2.26–2.27; Dunbar, ‘‘Landscape Paintings of Cornelis Massys.’’ These landscapes are often dominated by a soft blue-green that links the middle zone to the far distance. 65. See Robinson and Wolff, ‘‘The Function of Drawings in the Netherlands,’’ esp. 34–38; also 29–31, for drawings as designs for prints. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer, esp. 66–80, argues for a similar phenomenon in early sixteenth-century Germany for collecting the virtuoso drawings with highlights on colored paper by Altdorfer. 66. Riggs, Hieronymus Cock; Silver, ‘‘Graven Images.’’ 67. Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 271–79, nos. 37–50 68. ‘‘Veelderleye ordinantien van lantschappen, met fyne historien daer in gheordinneert, wt den ouden ende niewen testamente, ende somighe lustighe Poetereyen, seer bequaem voer Schilders, ende andere liefhebbers der consten,’’ quoted by Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 273. 69. Discussing the use of Ovidian mythology and the rivalry of the sister arts of painting and poetry, Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh, 189–203; also for the specifics on Titian, see Harold Wethey, Titian, 3: 71–84. 70. Rubens would later take up the theme in The Drowning of Leander (Yale Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.) in an early work, painted while the artist was still in Italy. That the Italians also took up the Northern landscape even with its traditional religious subjects can be seen in an engraving, signed and dated 1568, by Giovanni Paolo Cimerlini of Verona, showing St. Christopher (Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 47, fig. 3.22) before a Patinir-like set of rocks that closely resembles the heritage as recomposed by Matthys Cock. See a close comparison of Matthys’s drawing of St. Christopher (private collection, Netherlands; Gibson, fig. 2.65). On the general assimilation of Netherlandish world landscapes by Italians, see Gibson, 45–47. Gibson notes the assimilation of Flemish models by Italians, such as Muziano or Campagnola—see his fig. 3.18, the Louvre Rape of Europa, which closely resembles Cock’s 1558 mythologies of Venus and Adonis and Cephalus and Procris. However, he fails to note the importance of the reciprocal influence of such artists on Matthys Cock or Bruegel, which has been an insight of more recent scholarship. 71. Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 370, nos. 231–32; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 289–99, nos.135–44, with references, discusses the drawings and the scholarship on attribution of this anonymous master, tentatively identified by Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann as the obscure artist Joos van Liere, known from written sources. 72. Bevers, ‘‘Antwerp Sketchbook,’’ esp. figs. 35, 37–40 73. Gibson, Pleasant Places, esp. 1–26; see also the important exhibition, Brown, Dutch Landscape, esp. 18–19, 110–11; Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints, 21, 28. When the series was reprinted in Amster-

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Notes to Pages 47–49

dam by Claes Janszoon Visscher in 1612, the title page mistakenly bore the name of Bruegel as designer (Gibson, Pleasant Places, 27–42, esp. 42, fig. 43). 74. Some scholars have even divided the responsibility for the Small Landscapes drawings between two or more hands; Sellink, ‘‘ ‘The very lively and whimsical Pieter Bruegel’,’’ 297, no. 144. The 1601 reprint edition by Philips Galle cites Cornelis Cort, a professional engraver, as the draftsman, and in light of his unknown status as a designer as well as Galle’s own proximity to the Cock publishing firm, this suggestion probably is the most plausible of all proffered attributions, although unverifiable by any comparison. Sellink notes (n.10) that he is preparing a publication on Cort’s drawings as well as the Master of the Small Landscapes. 75. For Bruegel landscape drawings, see Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 87–119, nos. 1–21. It is a remarkable fact that in the current state of Bruegel studies, only early landscape drawings are accepted as authentic, the last being those two surviving studies for the Large Landscapes prints (no. 22, Pilgrims to Emmaus, Figure 3.9; no. 29, fig. 84, Alpine Landscape). Other works associated with his later design have now been relegated to imitators, followers, and forgers (264–81, nos. 119–29). For Bruegel landscape paintings in the world landscape tradition, see Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 163–81; Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 60–75, touchstones for much of what follows on this all-important artist. 76. This peasant preoccupation with working the land and with growing produce for the market can be compared to the peasants in composition scenes by Pieter Aertsen, who appear at market before religious subjects, such as Christ presented to the people or Christ and the adulteress. See Honig, Painting and the Market, 39–44, 60–72, with references to an extensive literature, and below, Chapter 5. 77. A third, engraved work from the Bruegel circle also shows the Good Shepherd parable, where the heroic spiritual conflict with a wolf unfolds out in a hilly countryside at a distance from the large city in the faraway lowlands. See Sellink, ‘‘ ‘The very lively and whimsical Pieter Bruegel’,’’ 59–60, fig. 56. For the fullest discussion of the Naples Blind Leading the Blind, see Sedlmayr, Pieter Bruegel: Der Sturz der Blinden. 78. This reconstruction was also noted by Kaveler, 348, n. 150, citing Marlier, Pierre Bruegel le Jeune, 112, 115. 79. On Bosch’s clientele and financial success, see Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch, 169–200. 80. The Princes Gate Collection, 6–7, no. 8. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 66–67; the inventory of Granvelle’s heirs in 1607 first mentions this painting. 81. Geyl, The Revolt of the Netherlands, 69–75; Parker, The Dutch Revolt, 44–55. 82. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 67–68. For the influence here of Flavius Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, see Tu¨mpel, ‘‘Die Rezeption der Ju¨dischen Altertu¨mer des Flavius Josephus.’’

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Notes to Pages 49–53

83. The Triumph of Death (Figure 7.15) is often dated around the 1562 date of the Suicide of Saul, but on grounds of both formal construction and despairing thematic content, it more likely dates from the latter years of Bruegel’s career, sometime around or shortly after 1566; see Silver, ‘‘Ungrateful Dead.’’ 84. Smith, The Paintings of Lucas van Leyden, 106–9. 85. The Tower of Babel with its incompatible languages formed an antitype in Flemish Books of Hours to its reversal under grace, the ability of the apostles to speak in tongues, Pentecost, as recounted in the book of Acts (2: 1–47). These two images are paired in the Grimani Breviary, ca. 1510–20, which has been adduced as a potential source for Bruegel in his Tower imagery as well as its Calendar pages as sources for his cycle of the Months in 1565. See Ferrari, Salmi, and Mellini, The Grimani Breviary, plate 41, fol. 206r. See also Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 67–68. If either of these subjects can be taken to be a commentary by Bruegel on contemporary religious factionalism between Catholics and Protestants, the other should be seen in the same way—perhaps with King Nimrod of Babel as a specific allusion to the Catholic king of Spain, Philip II; if this were the case, Bruegel might also be construed as a cryptoProtestant with St. Paul, a favorite Protestant protagonist, as his spiritual hero. This is essentially the argument of Mansbach, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel’s Towers of Babel,’’ noting the contemporary printing project at the publishing house of Christopher Plantin of a Polyglott Bible, sponsored by the Spanish crown; also Gibson, 68. Klamt, ‘‘Anmerkungen zu Pieter Bruegels Babel-Darstellungen,’’ suggests that in the Rotterdam version the contemporary Church, represented by a tiny papal procession on the colossus, is taken to be the problem rather than King Nimrod. On such readings and the shifting valuations of the Tower of Babel, see Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel, esp. 1: 1063–1101; also a deconstruction of previous interpretations, Snow, ‘‘The Language of Contradiction in Bruegel’s Tower of Babel.’’ 86. The Flemish text reads: ‘‘Om dat de werelt is soe ongetru/ Daer om gha ic in den ru.’’ Grossmann (Bruegel: The Complete Paintings) translates the sense of this phrase as follows, ‘‘Because the world is so faithless I am going into mourning.’’ The roundel print, executed by Jan Wierix, has a longer, even more cynical inscription around its circumference: ‘‘I wear mourning seeing the world in which so many deceits abound. He wears mourning because the world is unfaithful; most people behave without rhyme or reason. Few now live as one should live. People rob, grab, and everyone is full of deceit’’ (Freedberg, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 172, no. 67). 87. The surrounding globe recalls another poor figure in a globe, stooping at the center foreground of Bruegel’s 1560 Netherlandish Proverbs (Berlin), which is usually read by commentators on this painting as ‘‘One must bend if he wants to get through the world.’’ Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs, 41–42, contrasting this figure with an adjacent rich dandy with the world balanced easily and confidently on his thumb. The Bruegel figure also resembles an old, vagrant peddler by Bosch, proceeding amid the temptations and travails of the world and found on the exterior of his Hay Wain Triptych as well as in another tondo (Figures. 4.10, 4.11); see Silver, ‘‘God in the Details,’’ 634–35, with references.

Chapter 4. Money Matters 1. Stechow and Comer, ‘‘The History of the Term ‘Genre.’ ’’ 2. Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch, 174–83; also Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck, and Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch, esp. 37–39, 59, 91 for Bosch’s patrons; for Bosch’s home town, 29–51; for his life, 53–59. 258

Notes to Pages 54–58

3. For the Four Last Things, see Binski, Medieval Death, 164–203, with references; Lachner and Wirth, ‘‘Dinge, vier letzte.’’ The early placement of the Seven Deadly Sins in Bosch’s chronology remains disputed, though with the presence of pentimenti, the work is not usually relegated to imitators or workshop. For a more negative assessment by Bernard Vermet, including the dating of the costumes from around 1500 and the signature as ‘‘too crude and too large,’’ see Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck, and Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch, 93. The chief study of this work in its content remains Gibson, ‘‘Hieronymus Bosch and the Mirror of Man.’’ 4. For the inherited conventions of late medieval love gardens in such artworks as ivories, tapestries, and—after the middle of the fifteenth century, engravings, see Favis, ‘‘The Garden of Love.’’ Moxey discusses earlier satirical views of such luxurious indulgence in prints: Moxey, ‘‘Master E. S. and the Folly of Love’’; Moxey, ‘‘Chivalry and the Housebook Master.’’ 5. Binski, Medieval Death, 40–50; Arie`s, The Hour of Our Death, 107–10. See also Vandenbroeck, in Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck, and Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch, 136–37. 6. This interpretation was first advanced by Morganstern, ‘‘The Pawns in Bosch’s ‘Death and the Miser’ ’’; also Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch, 96–97. A similar image of Death himself as holder of a pawn ticket appears in Jan Provoost’s early sixteenth-century image of Old Miser with Death (Groeninge Museum, Bruges); see Martens, Bruges and the Renaissance, no. 21B; Figure 4.3. 7. Silver, ‘‘God in the Details,’’ 629–30. 8. I owe both the date and further information about this picture to Ron Spronk, whose dissertation on Provoost will be the standard work on the artist. Spronk notes that the third observing figure in the shutters, who gestures with a pointing finger in echo of Death, is likely a self-portrait, whose features square well with a Du¨rer drawing (now in the British Museum, London), now to be identified as Provoost (Du¨rer’s Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands does record a charcoal portrait of Provoost). I am most grateful to Spronk for his discussion of this important picture, rendered the more significant for its personalized self-portrait. See Spronk, ‘‘Jan Provoost.’’ 9. Vandenbroeck, in Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck, and Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch, 138–39, suggesting that the bedroom location of these goods might indicate a clandestine pawnbroker and explains that ‘‘charging interest effectively meant selling time, which belonged to God alone.’’ See also Nelson, The Idea of Usury; Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury; Kaye, Economy and Nature. 10. Bosch’s labeled image of Avaritia shows a corrupt judge, with his hand surreptitiously extended out behind his back, accepting a bribe in a legal proceeding. 11. Morganstern, ‘‘The Rest of Bosch’s Ship of Fools’’; also Hand and Wolff, Early Netherlandish Painting in the National Gallery of Art, 16–22. For a more interpretive approach, see Cuttler, ‘‘Bosch and the Narrenschiff.’’ 12. Vandenbroeck, ‘‘Jheronimus Bosch’s ‘Hooiwagen’ ’’; Vandenbroeck, ‘‘Nieuw materiall voor de studie van het Hooiwagenmotief.’’ The classic article remains Lebeer, ‘‘Het hooi en de Hooiwagen.’’ 259

Notes to Pages 58–60

13. According to Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch: Die Rezeption seiner Kunst, neither of these surviving triptychs is original, and now dendrochronological examination of the wood felling date for these panels puts them at a later moment than the usual chronology, 1498/1504 for the Escorial version, 1510/16 for the Prado image; however, changes in the underdrawing layer and the presence of pentimenti in the Prado painting suggest that this was an original composition. See Klein, ‘‘Dendrochronological Analysis,’’ which also confirmed the presence of the Rotterdam Landloper as the exterior of the Washington/ Paris/New Haven triptych wings. For the discussion of the Hay Wain, see Vermet in Koldeweij, VandenBroeck, and Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch, 88. 14. Silver, ‘‘God in the Details,’’ 634–36. See also Vandenbroeck in Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck, and Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch, 134–36, who notes that the color blue is associated with deceit in Netherlandish art and that the entire ensemble atop the hay wain should be taken as an image of ‘‘False Enticement,’’ including the ominous owl as a lure for day birds. 15. Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch, 68–73. 16. Swain, Fools and Folly; Vandenbroeck, Over wilden en narren, 40–60. 17. Baer, Gerrit Dou, 100–103; Sluijter, Seductress of Sight, 258–61. Lucas van Leyden made an engraving of the same subject, a Dentist, with a pickpocket female assistant working on a pained and gullible peasant (1523, Hollstein, 145, B. 157). 18. Vandenbroeck in Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck, and Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch, 150–53; also Hamburger, ‘‘Bosch’s Conjurer,’’ interprets the scene more allegorically and abstractly as deceit of a heretical kind. The text below a mid-sixteenth-century engraving by Balthasar van den Bosch after this composition declares: ‘‘Oh what tricks abound in the world. Those who are able to produce wonders from the conjuring bag can, with their idle tricks, cause people to spew up marvellous things onto the table. That is how they strike. Never trust them, therefore, because you will regret it if you lose your purse.’’ Another caption at left reads: ‘‘One quietly cuts the purse, the other, turning a blind eye, takes to his heels.’’ Vandenbroeck, fig. 131. A related drawing of a Conjurer, ascribed to Bosch, is in the Louvre, fig. 139b. 19. This image also appears in Dou’s Quack. 20. Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch, 1987, 69–70; see also Cuttler, ‘‘Exotics in Fifteenth Century Art.’’ Such figures could already be seen in the Low Countries by the fifteenth century. The standard history of gypsies in Netherlandish history is van Kappen, Geschiedenis der Zigeuners in Nederland; see also Grossmann, ‘‘Cornelis van Dalem Re-examined,’’ discussing a mid-sixteenth-century work (Berlin, destroyed) with gypsies as wanderers in cliff settings by Cornelis van Dalem (ca. 1530/35-ca. 1575?). 21. The association of gypsies with wanderers, alluded to in the previous note, might also account for the use of similar turbans as traveling costumes for the holy figures, especially the Virgin Mary with wicker travel basket in Patinir’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Figure 3.4). 22. Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch, 58–62; Vandenbroeck, Over wilden, 117–26, with bibliography. The pioneering study is Sudeck, Bettlerdarstellungen vom Ende des XV. Jahrhunderts bis zu Rembrandt. A

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useful view of later developments is Reinold, ‘‘The Representation of the Beggar as Rogue’’; this can now be supplemented with the study of Rembrandt’s beggars in Held, Rembrandt Studies, 153–63; TothUbbens, Verloren beelden van miserabele Bedelaars. 23. Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir, 95–96, 110–11; Hallerstedt, ‘‘The Blind Man and His Guide.’’ 24. Winternitz, Musical Instruments and Their Symbolism, 66–85. 25. To´th-Ubbens, Verloren beelden van miserabele Bedelaars, esp. 12–37. 26. This rare subject does appear in a few Netherlandish images, most notably a religious panel (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) from the circle of Cornelis Engebrechtsz in Leiden; see Gibson, ‘‘Pieter Cornelisz. Kunst as a Panel Painter.’’ 27. de Pauw-de Veen, ‘‘Das Brusseler Blatt mit Bettlern und Kruppeln.’’ See also Renger, ‘‘Bettler und Bauern,’’ 13–16, esp. 15; Reinold, ‘‘The Representation of the Beggar,’’ 57–59, for this drawing and the Cock print after it. The pejorative inscription added to the Vienna drawing for the print need not indicate the original purpose of the design; however, it is uncompromising in its disdain for the beggars and for their leader, the ‘‘Cripple Bishop’’: Al dat op dem blauwen trugelsack, geheerne leeft Gaet meest al Crueppele, op beyde syden Daerom den Cruepelen Bisshop veel dinaers heeft, Die om een vette proue, den rechten ghanck mijden. 28. Konrad Renger cites a carnival antiestablishment in a text of Jan van den Berghe, Het Leenhof der Ghilden, which mentions the ‘‘pope of drunkards, the cripple bishop, and the abbot with whom one drinks’’ (‘‘Bettler und Bauern,’’ 15). Magdi To´th-Ubbens developed an opposing argument in detail for various other works with lepers as satires not against the Church establishment but rather on the leaders of the independence movement, the ‘‘Beggars’’ (Verloren beelden van miserabele Bedelaars). 29. The drawing is illustrated in Jheronimus Bosch, 164–65, no. 50, with the Cock print, 218, no. 101. There the (‘‘rough’’) translation is given as ‘‘All who would live by sloth and deceit, / Usually go as cripples through the world. / Hence the Lame Bishop has many servants / Who, for easy gain, depart from the straight path.’’ The related Brussels drawing of Cripples is 162–63, no. 49. 30. The key lines by Brant associate the false beggar with false pilgrimage: ‘‘He borrows children by the score / So he’ll have mouths to feed galore, / Equips an ass with baskets nine, / As though he’d seek St. James’s shrine [Santiago de Compostela in Spain].’’ Silver, ‘‘Of Beggars.’’ A more systematic image of a dozen beggars as types of social misfits is given by a Barthel Beham woodcut, ca. 1524–25, illustrated and summarized by Held, Rembrandt Studies, 154–55, fig.1, as well as Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch, 61–62. On the general attitudes toward beggars by Bosch and his contemporaries, see Vandenbroeck, Bosch, 43–78. For the bagpipe as well as the hurdy-gurdy, see Winternitz, Musical Instruments, 66–85. 31. Luther, The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars. In the Netherlands, later versions of this book in Dutch translation appeared well into the seventeenth century, beginning with Der Fielen, rabauwen, oft Der

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Notes to Pages 62–65

Schalcken Vocabulaer (Antwerp, 1563; reprint Haarlem, 1613); cited by Reinold, ‘‘The Representation of the Beggar,’’ 50–52. 32. Silver, ‘‘Of Beggars.’’ 33. Vandenbroeck, Over wilden, 121. 34. Freedberg, ‘‘Allusions and Topicality in the Work of Pieter Bruegel: The Implications of a Forgotten Polemic,’’ in The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 53–65; Muylle, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel en Abraham Ortelius’’; Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, 177–79; Meadow, ‘‘Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary,’’ esp. 192–96. 35. This identification was made by Stone-Ferrier, Dutch Prints of Daily Life, 120–22, no. 29, discussing an engraving by Claes Janszoon Visscher, Leper Procession, 1608 (Figure 8.15). 36. Drawing in Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam. See Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 180–81, nos. 66–67. 37. van Os and Kok, Netherlandish Art in the Rijksmuseum, 81–82, no. 19. 38. Enklaar, Varende luyden; Enklaar, Uit Uilenspiegel’s kring. Beggars were assumed to be in league with one another, as we see in Lucas van Leyden’s early engraving of ca. 1509 (Hollstein, 136, B. 143) of a small group at rest in the countryside, or an image of a Beggar’s District by an anonymous contemporary of Bruegel known as the Master of the Prodigal Son. 39. Vandenbroeck in Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck, and Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch, 62–65. A locus classicus for this late medieval trope is the fourteenth-century Pelereinage de la vie humaine (1330–31; translated and reprinted in Dutch fifteenth-century book versions) by the Cistercian author Guillaume de De´guilleville. See also Camille, The Master of Death, esp. 133–41. 40. A related figure on the exterior of Bosch’s Last Judgment Triptych (Akademie Vienna) shows St. James as a pilgrim with his standard attributes of cloak and hat with cockleshell as he moves through a similarly dangerous landscape. Opposite James stands the prosperous figure of St. Bavo, dispensing alms to beggars and cripples in an urban context, showing that this dialectic of urban and rural, almsgiver and pilgrim, as noted in this chapter, formed an overall counterpoint in Bosch’s oeuvre. 41. Vandenbroeck in Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck, and Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch, 185–86, summarizes contemporary Dutch literary representations of peddlers as ‘‘deceitful, avaricious, fond of gambling, and fixated on quick and easy pleasures,’’ but he also notes plays of this period where peddlers are given a positive or ambiguous role. That ambiguity offers the possibility of repentance from his spiritual blindness and sinfulness. 42. Vandenbroeck in Koldeweij, Vandenbroeck, and Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch, 183–84; de Bruyn, ‘‘Hieronymus Bosch’s So-Called Prodigal Son’’; more fully de Bruyn, De vergeten beeldentaal van Jheronimus Bosch, with more discussion of the contemporary literary motif of the peddler. All this discussion stems from the initial identification of the peddler figure by Renger, ‘‘Versuch einer neuen Deutung von Hieronymus Boschs Rotterdamer Tondo.’’

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Notes to Pages 67–78

43. Vandenbroeck, ‘‘Bubo significans.’’ 44. Renger, Lockere Gesellschaft, 42–65, 136–39; Gibson, ‘‘Artists and Rederijkers in the Age of Bruegel,’’ 435 n. 74; for related depictions of the Prodigal Son, see Barbara Haeger, ‘‘Cornelis Anthonisz’s Representation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son’’; Armstrong, The Moralizing Prints of Cornelis Anthonisz, 19–34, 88–100. 45. Gaignebet, ‘‘Le Combat de Carnaval et de Careˆme.’’ 46. Jheronimus Bosch, 130–31, no. 39; Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch, 305–9, noting a document of 1614 where such a painting was inventoried in the Casa del Pardo in Madrid; see also 247–50, for his Bakhtinian view of comic strife as a form of ritualized cultural conflict, with carnival representing subaltern culture. The touchstone for this outlook is Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World; see also Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. 47. Pleij, Het gilde van de blauwe schuit. 48. Renger, Lockere Gesellschaft, is the basic study for much of what follows. 49. Silver, ‘‘The Ill-Matched Pair’’; also Silver, The Paintings of Quinten Massys, 143–46. This seems to be a case where a print stimulated a painting, as both the chin-chuck gesture and the pocket-picking of Lucas’s woodcut get repeated in Massys’s painting. 50. For Hemessen, see Renger, Lockere Gesellschaft, 120–29; for the Master of the Brunswick Monogram, see 96–119. 51. Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, Jan Steen. See also the works of the Ostades. For a general survey of tavern genre subjects, see Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting; Franits, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting. 52. Silver, ‘‘God in the Details’’; Huppe´ and Lindsay, ‘‘Meaning and Method in Bruegel’s Paintings’’; Parshall, ‘‘Lucas van Leyden’s Narrative Style’’; Falkenburg,‘‘Marginal Motifs in Early Flemish Landscape Paintings.’’ 53. Silver, Paintings of Quinten Massys, 144–46; Gibson, ‘‘Artists and Rederijkers in the Age of Bruegel,’’ pointing also to the popularity of Latin school plays, particularly about the Prodigal Son. 54. The original frame was cited by van Fornenbergh, Den antwerpsche proteus, 26–27; Silver, Paintings of Quinten Massys, 136–38. 55. Silver, Paintings of Quinten Massys, 136, draws the analogy to the Vermeer scene of a Woman Balancing Scales (National Gallery, Washington), where the notion of eternal judgment as the analogue or echo of worldly judgments is provided by a painted scene of a Last Judgment behind the woman in her darkened room. This interpretation has been advanced by Snow, A Study of Vermeer, 133–34; see also Wheelock and Broos, Johannes Vermeer, 140–45, no. 10. 56. Silver, ‘‘Power and Pelf’’; Silver, Paintings of Quinten Massys, 138–41. 57. The fuller version of this argument is Silver, ‘‘Power and Pelf,’’ where the thumb ring is discussed in relation to its association with political office, as in the words of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who calls it an ‘‘alderman’s thumb-ring’’ (Henry IV Part One, act 2.4.331).

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58. In 1615 painter Hans van den Bossche said that he saw in the house of the mayor of Antwerp a panel ‘‘of one customs collector [tollenaer] or money-changer [wisselaer] by Master Quinten,’’ which had earlier been in the collection of burgomaster Nicholas Rockox. Another document, the inventory of Jan van Meurs, refers to ‘‘a painting by Master Quinten Metsys, being the customs-collectors.’’ Quoted by Yamey, Art and Accounting, 51; citing Denuce´, Inventare von Kunstsammlungen zu Antwerp, 28, 133. For the fullest catalog of these images, see Campbell, The Early Flemish Pictures, 114–18, citing sixty versions of this image. Given the name recognition of Massys in the seventeenth century as a founding father of Antwerp painting, the ascriptions to him in inventories of that period might be highly optimistic. 59. Van Werveke, ‘‘Aantekening bij de zogenaamde Belasting pachters,’’ 57. 60. Yamey, Art and Accounting, 53, n. 33, also noting that with so many coins in circulation a moneychanger or merchant might well keep a ‘‘specie book’’ to enter the various coins received and placed on account. Drawing a distinction between an oral order to transfer funds and a simple deposit on account, Yamey argues for the latter transaction as the subject of the painting. See de Roover, Money, Banking, and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges, esp. 262. Such transfers were outlawed by the Dukes of Burgundy in 1489 (Van Werveke, ‘‘Aantekening bij de zogenaamde Belasting pachters,’’ 54), so the very procedure depicted in the painting is archaic, like the fifteenth-century turban headdress, which stems from the era of Jan van Eyck (d. 1441). There need not, however, be such a sharp distinction between a deposit on account and a request for transfer (or exchange into another currency), as Yamey insists. This would be more likely for a transaction no longer in current practice for more than a generation. Massys and his followers need not be held to the exactitude of documenting old banking practices. 61. This sequence of Massys and his followers in ‘‘bureau scenes’’ is discussed by Yamey, Art and Accounting, 44–58. Yamey correctly notes that there is no ring or other evidence that this couple is married, and it remains possible that the woman is a shop assistant to the banker. See also Moxey, ‘‘The Criticism of Avarice,’’ 21–34. The Marinus van Reymerswaele images have still received fairly little analysis, but see van Werveke, ‘‘Aantekening bij de zogenaamde Belasting pachters; Puyvelde,’’ Un portrait de marchand par Quentin Metsys’’; now see Mackor, ‘‘Are Marinus’ Tax Collectors Collecting Taxes?’’ nos. 3–4, 3–13, concluding that the writing man in the Warsaw picture by Marinus is ‘‘probably inspired by the counter-book-keeper of the city of Reymerswaele, while the other man represents the tax collector there, a rented office.’’ He concludes that the image offers the moral that ‘‘money corrupts,’’ but that it is also accurate to sixteenth-century settings. I am grateful to Dr. Mackor for sharing his researches on the variations on this image by Marinus van Reymerswaele with me over the years. 62. Mackor, ‘‘Are Marinus’ Tax Collectors Collecting Taxes?’’ 63. De Me´ly, ‘‘Les Primitifs et leurs signatures.’’ These inscriptions often seem to refer to named individuals as well as to annuities deposited with municipalities, like tax accounts. See also Yamey, Art and Accounting, 50, who sees such accounts as unproblematic in terms of those who duly recorded them; thus he concludes that ‘‘the Marinus version of the Banker and his Wife theme were intended as bureau scenes, which were made interesting by the inclusion of extravagant, archaic or colourful touches. The substitution of Massys’s Book of Hours by a mundane account-book adds to the genre-

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like character of the paintings. It would have appealed to the municipal treasurer or to the business man, whether in banking or other commercial activities, who in many cases may have been supported in his affairs by a wife who kept his books or helped with his accounting.’’ This is a view like that advanced earlier by van Puyvelde, ‘‘Un Portrait de marchand par Quentin Metsys.’’ However, taxcollectors have never been popular; Moxey, ‘‘The Criticism of Avarice,’’ esp. 27–29, assembles considerable contemporary literary evidence (such as Sebastian Brant’s ‘‘Of Usury and Profiteering,’’ Chapter 93 of his 1494 The Ship of Fools) that (along with lawyers and merchants) they were frequent targets of social satire and criticism. 64. Yamey, Art and Accounting, 51; Davies, National Gallery, 83–84. 65. Silver, ‘‘Power and Pelf,’’ 88–92; Moxey, ‘‘The Criticism of Avarice,’’ 27–31. 66. Moxey, ‘‘The Criticism of Avarice,’’ 22. On vanitas imagery as a subgenre of still-life painting in seventeenth-century Holland, see Bergstro¨m and Wurfbain, Ijdelheid der ijdelheden; also Chong and Kloek, Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands, 13–16. Moxey, 30, n. 48, also points out that the Wintgis who owned a ‘‘Massys’’ money changer in 1615 (see above, n. 58) was just such a financial figure, specifically the master of the Zeeland mint, noting that ‘‘tax collectors and lawyers . . . may themselves have owned pictorial satires of their own professions as a means of asserting their recognition of the abuses for which their colleagues were responsible as well as their own virtue in refusing to succumb to temptation.’’ For more on the intended audience for these fairly expensive works, perhaps including those whose financial activities are directly implicated, Yamey, Art and Accounting, 56. The overt satire, especially by Marinus, seems less susceptible to this hypothesis than the more tempered, earlier moralizing by Quinten Massys. 67. Yamey, ‘‘The Criticism of Avarice,’’ 24; Rosenberg, ‘‘A Portrait of a Banker’’; Hand and Wolff, Early Netherlandish Painting, 103–7. 68. Buijnsters-Smets, Jan Massys, 161–62, no. 8 (Stockholm); 166–67, no. 11 (Dresden). 69. Buijnsters-Smets, Jan Massys, 162, notes that in the Stockholm picture beside the head of the tax collector and next to the metalwork is a metal plaque with a pagan or demonic head, a marker of the un-Christian conduct of this official. She notes also that his wife offers an apple to the peasant’s child, perhaps connoting temptation in the guise of polite sharing. The man also wears a thumb ring, like Quinten Massys’s Grotesque Old Man. She goes on to posit a possible portrait likeness for the official in both the Stockholm and Dresden images, a hypothesis that seems unlikely. 70. The Dresden accounts book is legible and not only bears the date of 1539 but also lists rent (hueren oft pacht) accounts. Buijnsters-Smets, Jan Massys, 166, n. 54. 71. Moxey, ‘‘The Criticism of Avarice,’’ 23–27, discussing contemporary literary criticism of the legal profession; Monballieu, ‘‘The Lawyer’s Office by Marinus van Reymerswael,’’ discussing in particular the lawsuit regarding local saltworks in Reimerswaal, legible in the documents of the New Orleans version, as well as the identifiable seals and signet-ring, marking an alderman or bailiff, in that meticulous image.

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Notes to Pages 83–89

72. Yamey, Art and Accounting, 64–69; Vlam, ‘‘The Calling of St. Matthew.’’ 73. Wallen, Jan van Hemessen, 67–77, 291–92, no. 16, with the claim that the picture was enlarged in the seventeenth century in the segment with the figure of Christ and the Latin caption, ‘‘SE QVERE ME./MATTHAEI CAP:IX.’’ Studio copies boldly showed the money broker greeting an unseen visitor rather than a literal depiction of Christ, necessitating the ‘‘corrective’’ clarification of the addition. 74. A weak copy of a lost Marinus Calling of Matthew (Ghent) is dated May 14, 1536; see Wallen, Jan van Hemessen, 68, who credits Marinus with the innovation of this subject in Flemish painting. 75. The perennial association of Jews with money lending results from the Church’s long prohibition of usury, which meant that social outsiders were permitted to practice this impure, if necessary activity. On usury rules, see Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury; Nelson, The Idea of Usury; on anti-Semitic markers of identity such as the pointed hat, see Mellinkoff, Outcasts. 76. Yamey, Art and Accounting, 79–82. The subject was first identified by Snyder, ‘‘The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant.’’ See also Wallen, Jan van Hemessen, 122, 319–20, no. 50. 77. Yamey, Art and Accounting, 82–84. 78. Quoted by Bergstro¨m, Dutch Still-Life Painting, 7; also mentioned by Vlam, ‘‘The Calling of St. Matthew,’’ 565. 79. Wallen, Jan van Hemessen, 119–22, 317–18, no. 48. Yamey, Art and Accounting, 70–74.

Chapter 5. Kitchens and Markets The Cicero epigraph is taken from Irmscher, ‘‘Ministrae voluptatum,’’ 221, nn. 19–20. The translation into Dutch by Dirck Volkertsz. Coonhert, appeared in Haarlem, 1561 (cit. fol. 58v.), later echoed in Coornhert’s own Zedekunst dat is wellevenskunste (III.v.42). 1. For this painting and many of the market scenes discussed afterward, see Honig, Painting and the Market, esp. 29–52, with references. A useful survey of interpretations is Moxey, ‘‘Interpreting Pieter Aertsen.’’ 2. Oysters in particular were considered to be aphrodisiacs; see Jan Steen’s Girl Offering Oysters (Mauritshuis, The Hague); Chapman, Kloek, and Wheelock, Jan Steen, 126–28, no. 9; also Cheney, ‘‘The Oyster in Dutch Genre Paintings.’’ 3. Houghton, ‘‘A Topical Reference.’’ On this urban development, see Soly, Urbanisme en kapitalisme te Antwerpen. 4. Junius, Batavia, 239–40: ‘‘We cannot pass over Pieter, nicknamed ‘the Tall . . .’ He apparently set himself to paint humble things and he has, in everyone’s view, reached the heights of fame with these humble objects.’’ Falkenburg, ‘‘ ‘Alter Einoutus’ ’’; Honig, Painting and the Market, 31–32. See also Muylle, ‘‘Pieter Aertsen en Joachim Beuckelaer.’’ The discussion of still life in general as a Renaissance emulation of rhyparography was first advanced by Sterling, Still Life Painting.

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5. Honig, Painting and the Market, 31–33. 6. Emmens, ‘‘ ‘Eins aber ist no¨tig’ ’’; see also Craig, ‘‘Pieter Aertsen and the Meat Stall.’’ 7. Craig, ‘‘Pars Ergo Marthae Transit.’’ 8. The carnation is a frequent symbol of Christ’s Incarnation, or Word-made-flesh, in religious contexts, and it is significant that this image shows the flower directly in front of the religious scene, contrasting with the rich butter and other foodstuffs. See Bergstro¨m, ‘‘Disguised Symbolism’’; Bergstrom, Den symboliska nejlikan; Stridbeck, ‘‘Den gatfulla nejlikan.’’ This linkage resembles the crossed fish amid the meats of the Aertsen Meat Stall from the previous year, which appears directly below the scene of the Virgin giving alms in the background. Of course, given the proper religious vision, some of the foreground objects could even be read symbolically, with the wine and bread transformed into the components of the eucharist. For the Serlio connection, see Scheurleer, ‘‘Pieter Aertsen en Joachim Beuckelaer’’; Meadow, ‘‘Aertsen’s Christ in the Home of Martha and Mary,’’ has provided the most sensitive rhetorical interpretation of the altered level of address of the Serlian space as a religious setting, akin to the use of similar Serlian architecture for the allegories in civic triumph stages. 9. This license by a leading apostle apparently had an apocryphal life in contemporary religious drama, and it was also criticized before Aertsen’s day by no less a religious authority than Erasmus; see Moxey, ‘‘Erasmus and the Iconography.’’ See also Meadow,‘‘Aertsen’s Christ in the Home of Martha and Mary.’’ 10. Falkenburg, Fruit of Devotion; Renckens, ‘‘Een Ikonografische aanvulling,’’ argues that the lily refers to Christ’s parable (Luke 12: 22–32) about the lilies that grow as objects of beauty for whom God provides without their toil. Thus, in this case, the Mary in question would be the devoted but contemplative and nonlaboring Mary Magdalene. In this regard the later remark (Luke 12: 29) is important, where Christ disparages consumption: ‘‘And do not set your heart on what you will eat or drink.’’ 11. On majolica ceramics, especially those with yellow fields ornamented with currently fashionable grotesque ornament, see in general the scholarly research of Claire Dumortier, as well as the more general discussion in Van der Stock, Antwerp, 254–55, no. 103. 12. Honig, Painting and the Market, 39–44, esp. 43–44; for related imagery in similar market imagery by Aertsen’s nephew Joachim Beuckelaer, see Kaveler, ‘‘Erotische elementen.’’ The connotation of ‘‘birding’’ in slang Dutch as a metaphor for sexual predation is advanced by de Jongh, ‘‘Erotica in vogelperspectief’’; see also Honig’s recent study of seventeenth-century market scenes, ‘‘Desire and Domestic Economy.’’ An analysis of the foodstuffs in terms of material culture and the staples or luxuries of contemporary diet is provided by Falkenburg, ‘‘Matters of Taste.’’ 13. Emmens, ‘‘ ‘Eins aber ist no¨tig’,’’ 96; on the discussion of vogelen as an image in later Dutch paintings, see de Jongh, ‘‘Erotica in vogelperspektief.’’ See also Honig, ‘‘Desire and Domestic Economy’’ for later versions of this motif with peasants and birding in Dutch paintings of markets. 14. Grossman, ‘‘Bruegel’s ‘Woman Taken in Adultery’ ’’; Honig, Painting and the Market, 39–41.

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Notes to Pages 91–93

15. This disjunction, a commonplace among Aertsen observers, is acknowledged by Honig, Painting and the Market, 42–44. 16. Silver, ‘‘God in the Details’’; Parshall, ‘‘Lucas van Leyden’s Narrative Style’’; Falkenburg, ‘‘Antithetical Iconography’’ and ‘‘Marginal Motifs.’’ 17. This particular form survives in several versions, usually ascribed to the anonymous Brunswick Monogrammist, including examples at Bob Jones University Museum (Greenville, South Carolina) and Museum Ridder Smidt Van Gelder (Antwerp). A wider version, on loan to the Catherijne Convent, Utrecht, provides a variant. See Honig, Painting and the Market, 60–65, figs. 17–18. The attribution to Aertsen was made by the specialist on the Brunswick Monogram, Schubert, Die Gema¨lde des Braunschweiger Monogrammisten, 215, no. 19. Its precedents include an engraving of 1510 by Lucas van Leyden as well as Bosch’s Frankfurt painting, usually dated early, that is, to the later fifteenth century. This composition in Rotterdam has recently been associated with Herri Bles; see Toussaint, Autour de Henri Bles, 194–95, no. 20, pointing out that the architecture echoes the woodcut depiction of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem as illustrated in Bernard Breydenbach’s 1486 (Mainz) publication of Peregrinationes in Terram Sanctam, a pilgrimage guide to the Holy Land. 18. Another quack doctor appears among the several deceivers at the bottom center of Bosch’s Hay Wain Triptych, where the materialism of the central image of hay anticipates the actual food-stuffs of the market scenes by Aertsen and Beuckelaer. Of course, quacks doubtless did frequent the actual public market spaces—then and now—as the images of patent medicine men and other con artists in American literature and films also attests. 19. The earliest dated Beuckelaer Ecce Homo is the 1561 image, formerly in Schleissheim, of which a replica in the Germanisches Museum, Nuremberg, was destroyed during World War II. Another 1561 panel is in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, which possesses an obelisk as well as a classical temple front on a raised platform, reprised in a 1565 variant, also in Stockholm. See also a 1564 work in the Schottenstift, Vienna, and a 1566 variant in the Uffizi, Florence. A later Stockholm Nationalmuseum image with a fish market (Figure 5.9) dates from 1570. For color reproductions, see Honig, Painting and the Market, plates 6–8, as well as figs. 23–25. 20. Here the principal discussion is by Meadow, Rhetoric; Meadow, ‘‘Ritual and Civic Identity.’’ For the associations with theater, see Honig, Painting and the Market, 68–70. 21. Honig, Painting and the Market, 66–67. 22. Honig, Painting and the Market, ‘‘Farmers, like merchants try to deceive the townsfolk who are not able to judge how much the wares they offer are worth. By showing farmers who are not country bumpkins but regular businesspeople, Beuckelaer calls upon the tradition of peasant satire and at the same time disallows satiric distance’’ (78). See also Silver, ‘‘Power and Pelf’’; Moxey, ‘‘Criticism of Avarice.’’ 23. Honig, Painting and the Market, 73–76.

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Notes to Pages 94–97

24. Honig, Painting and the Market. Other artists produced representations of Gospel miracles related to fishmongers, whose guild patronized such works as the Pieter Pourbus triptych (Musee´s Royaux, Brussels), for which see Philippot, ‘‘Le ‘Retable des Poissoniers’.’’ 25. Beuckelaer also produced a more integrated but at the same time more obscure hybrid picture of the Holy Family on the road, pausing at a riverside ferry with other humbly dressed peasants (some of them on their way to market with produce, others overtly erotic in their interactions) in his Flight into Egypt (1563; Musee´s Royaux, Brussels). This kind of disguised immersion of the holy family in a peasant setting was reprised by Pieter Bruegel in his 1566 Census at Bethlehem (Figure 3.17). In Beuckelaer’s painting beyond the river a religious festival procession takes place, whose anachronistic relationship to the religious figures remains unresolved, especially considering their emphasis of festive license over religious depth (cf. Bruegel’s prints and paintings, such as the engraved Kermis at Hoboken, 1559, Figure 6.11, and Festival of St. George, Figure 6.10). We can recall that the Holy Family also appears amid a similar religious procession in the background scene of Aertsen’s 1551 Meat Stall, so that act of charity by the Madonna might be part of the Flight into Egypt episode, as Honig suggested (37). Moreover, Aertsen made a depiction of a religious festival, Return from the Procession (Musee´s Royaux, Brussels). For a discussion of such peasant leisure activities, see Chapter 6. 26. Signed with the artist’s monogram and dated ‘‘16 Cal. Aug. 1559), suggesting that this is an imagefor which the painter took responsibility, if not outright pride. A related Aertsen panel shows Two Women Cooking (1562, monogrammed with trident mark, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm). See CavalliBjo¨rkman, Dutch and Flemish Paintings, 22–23, no. 1. In this latter work a possible negative reading of this image of poultry preparation is suggested by a burned out candle, associated with the passage of time and death in seventeenth-century vanitas imagery, and an owl, a bird usually associated with evil or stupidity. See Vandenbroeck, ‘‘Bubo significans.’’ 27. Falkenburg, ‘‘ ‘Alter Einoutus’ ’’; Falkenburg, ‘‘Pieter Aertsen, Rhyparographer.’’ For the literary phenomenon, see Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica. 28. For images in the margins of medieval manuscripts, see Camille, Images on the Edge and Randall, Images in the Margins. Falkenburg’s argument, to be more fully spelled out in a forthcoming book (I am most grateful to my colleague for sharing his stimulating ideas with me in advance publication), is broached in his articles on ‘‘Alter Einoutus’’ as well as ‘‘Marginal Motifs.’’ 29. The phrase ‘‘paragon of virtue’’ derives from the study of images of virtuous Dutch women by Franits, Paragons of Virtue; on the Vermeer Amsterdam Kitchen Maid, see Wheelock and Broos, Johannes Vermeer, 107; Chapman, ‘‘Women in Vermeer’s Home,’’ esp. 245–51; on her activity as a thrifty production of bread pudding, see Rand, ‘‘What the Kitchen Maid Made.’’ The catalog entry observes that ‘‘the kitchen maid conveys a physical and moral presence unequaled by any other figure in Dutch art.’’ 30. Emmens, ‘‘ ‘Eins aber ist no¨tig’ ’’; Wuyts, ‘‘ ‘Coekenmaerte, cokinne of coquine’.’’ For the juxtaposition of mistresses and maids in spatial terms in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, see Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes, esp. 129–40.

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Notes to Pages 97–100

31. Vulnerable because young and lower class, maids were usually stigmatized as sexually available; see Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes, 129–40; also Franits, ‘‘The Depictions of Servants’’; Franits, Paragons of Virtue, 100–110; Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 455–62. 32. Honig, Painting and the Market. 33. Honig, Painting and the Market, 44–52; Wuyts, ‘‘Joachim Beuckelaers Groentemarkt van 1567,’’ 27–38, who not only argues for the erotic implications of the foodstuffs as noted aphrodisiacs as well as fruitful metaphors of love and lust but also notes that their different seasons suggest a more general allegorical significance. He is unambiguous in claiming that the woman in the market is a ‘‘seductive wanton . . . who can be identified with her own merchandise’’ (88). 34. An entire Beuckelaer composition, the 1567 Market (Rockox House, Antwerp) is built out of an explicitly amorous encounter between a young male vendor, who places his fingers down her decolletage, and his female counterpart; Joachim Beuckelaer, 119, no. 5. She even holds a pottery crock with glowing coals between her legs. As noted by Honig, Painting and the Market, 95, the wares on display are divided along gender lines to accord with the two figures: she is associated with fecund fruits, he with amorous fowl. 35. Honig, Painting and the Market, 90–91, finds evidence that female sellers were still generally looked upon with suspicion, and associated with both lust and the love of profit (see also Honig, ‘‘Desire and the Domestic Economy,’’ 304: ‘‘only three female professions—market woman, domestic servant, and prostitute—are depicted with any frequency’’). The ill manners of fishwives, already adduced by van Mander in 1604, remain proverbial, even in English. Honig also points to gender roles incorporated into these Beuckelaer paintings, which provide only the men with the knives to cut up larger fishes, but she argues too emphatically for the visual evidence that the painted fish markets became largely female sites (see as a counterexample the de Vos-Snyders collaboration from the 1620s, her own figs. 72, 88). Honig also notes (‘‘Desire and Domestic Economy,’’ 304) that the presence of female sellers in the public market was unusual and strong, commented upon by visitors to Holland. 36. Joachim Beuckelaer, 124–30, nos. 8–11. 37. Wolters, ‘‘Creativity and Efficiency.’’ 38. Honig, Painting and the Market, 95–99. 39. Honig, Painting and the Market, 85; Muylle, ‘‘Pieter Aertsen en Joachim Beuckelaer,’’ 15. Van Mander’s remarks appear in the biography of the artist in his 1604 Schilderboeck, 238, 243v, 269. 40. Honig, Painting and the Market, 88; Verbraeken, ‘‘Inleiding,’’ 10–12. One such patron is Chiappino Vitelli, military commander for Alessandro Farnese and the duke of Alva, noblemen from the court of Spain in Spanish-ruled Flanders; he or the Parma nobleman Cosimo Masi might have been the source of the Farnese collection images now in the Naples Museum. 41. Honig, Painting and the Market, 115–69; Sullivan, The Dutch Gamepiece. 42. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 166–70, nos. 58–59, which includes commentary by Ju¨rgen

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Notes to Pages 101–104

Mu¨ller; see also Mu¨ller, Das Paradox als Bildform, 56–76; Silver, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel in the Capital,’’ esp. 136. 43. Calman, ‘‘The Picture of Nobody’’; Mu¨ller, Das Paradox als Bildform, 69–72. Wu¨rtenberger, Pieter Bruegel d. A¨., 80, cites the precedent of a Georg Pencz woodcut of Nobody (1535; Mu¨ller, Das Paradox als Bildform, fig. 11) amid broken objects (some of the items around Bruegel’s Nobody are broken, such as the crockery, and all are askew). In discussing both the glasses and the lantern, Mu¨ller, 62, fig. 14, adduces a woodcut, formerly ascribed to Erhard Schoen, The Owl Hates Light (1540), which shows an owl with spectacles next to a burning candle (recall the burned-out candle of Elck), and the inscription: ‘‘What help are sunlight or glasses if I don’t choose to see?’’ 44. Wheelock and Broos, Johannes Vermeer, 140–45, no. 10. 45. The Carnival figure resembles Bosch’s barrel-riding figure of Gluttony, who wears a funnel hat rather than Bruegel’s meat-pie chapeau, in his Allegory of Luxury (Figure 4.4). For Bosch’s own lost Battle Between Carnival and Lent, preserved in copies, see Jheronimus Bosch, 130–31, nos. 39–40. 46. For this instrument, see the painting (‘‘Circle of Frans Hals’’), The Rommel-Pot Player, discussed in Welu and Biesbor, Judith Leyster, 356–60, no. 40. Rommel-pot players were particularly associated with the time of Shrovetide or Carnival, and the vulgar sound of the folk instrument, also associating the player with fools, was appropriate to the bawdy, bodily functions of the season. An engraving by Cornelis Bloemart after his father, Abraham Bloemart’s design (fig. 40e) further shows a child player bedecked with playing cards, a beer mug, bells (the very emblem of a fool), Shrovetide sausages, and a ladle (laziness and folly) 47. Gaignebet, ‘‘Le combat de Carnaval et de Careˆme’’; Wied, Bruegel. 48. A similar point can be made for the town center and the leisure activities that unfold in Bruegel’s subsequent Children’s Games (1560; Vienna), for the fullest analysis of which see Snow, Inside Bruegel.

Chapter 6. Labor and Leisure: The Peasant The Erasmus quotation in the epigraph is taken from Carroll, ‘‘Peasant Festivity,’’ 296, citing The ‘‘Adages’’ of Erasmus, 209–11. The Bredoro quote is taken from Miedema, ‘‘Realism and the Comic Mode,’’ 213. 1. One book stands out as a survey of images of peasants in German and Netherlandish prints and paintings: Raupp, Bauernsatiren. There is really no careful study of Aertsen’s images, except for Raupp, 214–23, but for Bruegel two overviews provide the best introduction and further references: Gibson, ‘‘Bruegel and the Peasants: A Problem of Interpretation,’’ in Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 10–52; Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel. 2. Renger, Lockere Gesellschaft, esp. 120–30. 3. Renger, Lockere Gesellschaft, 130–32, fig. 83, noting that the painting has been called Return of the Prodigal Son and related to such precedents as Hemessen’s 1536 painting.

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Notes to Pages 104–108

4. Winternitz, Musical Instruments, 66–85 on bagpipes. See the contemporary German poetic satire, Brant, The Ship of Fools, chap. 54, 186 (‘‘Of Impatience of Punishment’’) on bagpipes, ‘‘If bagpipes you enjoy and prize / And harps and lutes you would despise, / You ride a fool’s sled, are unwise.’’ 5. Filedt Kok, Halsema-Kubes, and Kloek, Kunst voor de Beeldenstorm, 344–45, no. 226. 6. The interpretation of vegetables as erotic markers of a market scene is advanced by Kavaler, ‘‘Erotische elementen in de market-taferelen,’’ 18–26; Wuyts, ‘‘Joachim Beuckelaers Groentemarkt van 1567’’; Honig, Painting and the Market, 43–44. For the broken pot, see Renger, ‘‘Tra¨nen in der Hochzeitsnacht,’’ 315–16. 7. Renger, Lockere Gesellschaft, 100, 121. 8. The date of this work is disputed; after many years of being read as 1557, the Rijksmuseum restoration altered the inscription to ‘‘1552,’’ which will be adopted here. Filedt Kok, Halsema-Kubes, and Kloek, Kunst voor de Beeldenstorm, 344, fig. 226a. 9. Leeks on the floor were frequently identified as aphrodisiacs, and eggs of course are emblems of fecundity but are also associated with sexual encounters. See Honig, Painting and the Market, 43, fig. 8, noting that the print by Cornelis Matsys (1549) shows three peasants with a basket of eggs and the notation by a distressed woman that the male in question is ‘‘laying his eggs in another’s nest.’’ 10. Filedt Kok, Halsema-Kubes, and Kloek, Kunst voor de Beeldenstorm, 346–47, no. 228. 11. Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 219–20; Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 189–91; Moxey, ‘‘Reflections on Some Unusual Subjects.’’ 12. Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 40–83, 134–94; however, as Paul Vandenbroeck points out in a review of Raupp’s book, 70, n. 3, the origin of this satirical genre remains unclear and untheorized in the sixteenth century. See also Greenblatt, ‘‘Murdering Peasants’’; Mittig, Du¨rers Bauernsa¨ule, esp. 32–40; Stewart, ’’The First ‘Peasant Festivals’ ’’; Stewart, ‘‘Paper Festivals and Popular Entertainment’’; Moxey, Peasants, Warriors and Wives, 35–66. 13. Elias, The History of Manners; Jeanneret, A Feast of Words, for the opposite end of the class spectrum. 14. Smith, German Sculpture, 220–22, fig. 184, pointing out that this representation avoids the ‘‘physiognomic caricatures, often engaged in some form of bodily emission or moral excess’’ of most German prints in favor of ‘‘an icon of the honest, hard-working farmer as symbolized by his physical strength, rolled up sleeves, and straightforward gaze.’’ Earlier versions of the same patronizing view of productive peasants appear in German sculpture and design, including a table fountain by Du¨rer himself (1499, W. 236; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Raupp, fig. 95); see Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 99–103. 15. Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de andere. This book remains fundamental to my own conceptual analysis of interpreting peasants and other ‘‘marginal’’ groups (wild men, fools, and beggars are also discussed). See also Vandenbroeck, ‘‘Verbeek’s Peasant Weddings,’’ which draws a sharp, satirical image of the peasant, linked to ‘‘Grobianism’’ (vulgarity) and folly, and marshals a literary tradition as evidence.

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Notes to Pages 108–112

16. Strauss, The Book of Hours, featuring a peasant revolt against soldiers (fol. 28r), two bagpipers (38v), drunkard (47r), peasant woman with egg basket (51v), and dancing peasant couples (56v)—all by Du¨rer. 17. Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 197–202. For their lack of discipline and vulgarity as well as deceit, Bosch remains much more focused and critical of beggars. 18. Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 203–5; Wuyts, ‘‘Lucas van Leyden’s ‘Melkmeid’ ’’; Silver, ‘‘Fools and Women.’’ 19. Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 205–13; van der Stock, Cornelis Matsys, nos. 9, 10–21 (The Dancing Cripples, 1539), 22–23, 27, 55 (Allegory of Excess, 1549). 20. Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 185–88, 207, draws these connections between Matsys and Sebald Beham, pointing out that Matsys’s Drunken Peasant closely depends on a Beham image from the series Wedding Procession (figs. 186, 169–7). The rapidity of influence suggests that even undated works were produced only a year or two apart. 21. Renger, Lockere Gesellschaft; van der Stock, Cornelis Matsys, 34–35, no. 27. The text beneath the print reads: ‘‘Tis hier goey vente laet druck verslaen / Dwort al ver-cocht eert vorrt is ghedae[n].’’ A print in the image pasted on the wall of the tavern shows a man sitting on eggs in a farmyard while surrounded by chickens, a clear image of inversion that van der Stock reads as a power of women image, in part by means of the proverb underneath (recorded by 1550): ‘‘Tis den huyse een groot v[er]drie[t] / Daer de hi]inne] crayt e[n]d[e] / [Die hane niet]’’ (’tis a great folly in a house where the hen crows and the rooster doesn’t). 22. Raupp, 211, fig. 192, with the inscription: ‘‘My man syn eyeren ontlaeyt / In eens anders nest en laet my onpaeyt.’’ The Sebald Beham model is from the Peasants Dance series of 1537 (fig. 168–11). 23. Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 212–13. 24. Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 213; de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 63–66, no. 5, there entitled ‘‘Master John Blockhead.’’ The inscription is a plea to the ‘‘tuner’’ to ‘‘string’’ (versnaren) her own instrument. The metaphor of the lute player as a male sexual operator becomes particularly popular in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, such as the genre paintings of Utrecht Caravaggisti. For its interpretation, see de Jongh, ‘‘Re´alisme et re´alisme apparent,’’ 175. 25. Vandenbroeck, ‘‘Bubo significans.’’ 26. Vandenbroeck, ‘‘Hieronymus Bosch,’’ 127, figs. 101–2. 27. Burgers, In de Vier Winden, 70, no. 53; Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, no. 15. The drawing is in Albertina, Vienna as ‘‘Flemish Master,’’ ca. 1560. 28. Sellink, ‘‘ ‘The very lively and whimsical Pieter Brueghel’,’’ 61, figs. 59–60. 29. Most comprehensively by Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel; see also the synthetic consideration of the general issue by Gibson, ‘‘Bruegel and the Peasants.’’ Also recent on the topic of humor and satire in such

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Notes to Pages 112–117

images are Gibson, The Art of Laughter; Sullivan, Bruegel’s Peasants, albeit narrowly focused in the latter case to argue that Bruegel was producing learned satires for a humanist audience based on classical literature 30. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 196–200, nos. 79–80. Also de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 44–48, no. 1. 31. As pointed out by Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 196–97, the Kermis of St. George was the last Bruegel design produced by the same etchers, Joannes and Lucas Doetecum, who had executed the Large Landscapes in a distinctive technique that simulated engraved lines. 32. The fullest discussion of Children’s Games is Snow; Inside Brueghel; for the connection to manuscript images of playing children, another marginal element raised by Brueghel to full-scale status in painting, see Hindman, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel’s ‘Children’s Games’.’’ 33. Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 245–51; Gibson, ‘‘Bruegel and the Peasants,’’ 14–15, fig. 6; Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 187–88, fig. 99, noting the overlap between the inscription on van der Borcht’s 1559 Peasant Kermis and Bruegel’s Hoboken text. 34. De Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 47. 35. Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 184–211, chiefly discussing the Vienna painting rather than the prints. See also Gibson, ‘‘Brueghel and the Peasants’’ for a fine and critical overview of the principal literature, especially the heated debate between Alpers and Miedema. 36. Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de andere, esp. 63–113. 37. First to notice this important component of prosperous and prominent urban guests in fashionable costume at rural festivities was Alpers, ‘‘Bruegel’s Festive Peasants,’’ esp. 169–71. See also Gibson, ‘‘Bruegel and the Peasants,’’ 26–29, 41 for the Wedding Feast; also 37 for the Vienna Peasant Kermis: ‘‘A sense of immediacy created by the man and woman as they hurry past is heightened by the low viewpoint and the monumental treatment of their large-scale figures. . . . Indeed, we seem to be drawn into the dance almost as participants.’’ 38. For wider consideration of the role of social release through social rituals of inversion, such as carnival season, see Davis, ‘‘The Culture of Misrule,’’ in Culture and Society in Early Modern France, 97–123. 39. Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 149–83; Alpers, ‘‘Bruegel’s Festive Peasants.’’ See also Gibson, ‘‘Some Notes on Peter Bruegel the Elder’s Peasant Wedding Feast’’; Scheyer, ‘‘The Wedding Dance.’’ 40. Van Mander, Schilderboeck, 1604, fol. 233r; Grossmann, Bruegel: The Paintings, 7. 41. Alpers, ‘‘Bruegel’s Festive Peasants,’’ 167 n.15. Alpers notes that the prominent codpieces on the breeches of the men (overpainted as bowdlerization in a more prudish period) were a current fashion and doubtless part of a more frank outlook toward sexuality in Bruegel’s day (though this would not reduce their value in associating peasants with franker sexuality itself ).

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Notes to Pages 118–123

42. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 248–50, no. 113; de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 54–57, no. 3. 43. Van den Brink, Brueghel Enterprises; Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel. Arguments against the authenticity of the Detroit painting are undermined not only by its apparent high quality but also by several copies, some literal and others variants, including a literal copy in the Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp, no. 973, discussed in the Flemish edition of Breughel-Brueghel, 91, no. 23. 44. Gibson, ‘‘Some Notes,’’ 197–98. 45. Illustrated in Gibson, ‘‘Bruegel and the Peasants,’’ 33, fig. 27; Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 248, fig. 235; de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 56, citing the inscription with its emphasis on gifts: ‘‘Peasant weddings are an odd spectacle, / The motto is: give freely, and gift the bride / With money and fine things, be they men or women, / And the worse the food the better the drinking.’’ See also Miedema, ‘‘Feestende boeren,’’ esp. 203. 46. Vandenbroeck, ‘‘Verbeek’s Peasant Weddings’’; Gibson, ‘‘Verbeeck’s Grotesque Wedding Feasts: Some Reconsiderations’’; Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 265–70. 47. Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 149–83. Gibson, ‘‘Bruegel and the Peasants,’’ 37–41. 48. Alpers, ‘‘Bruegel’s Festive Peasants,’’ 167 n. 14, utilizing the research of Sidra Stich in an unpublished master’s thesis. 49. Scheyer, ‘‘Wedding Dance,’’ 186–87. 50. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 2: 631–40, 699–703, nos. 806–32. The finest extant example of the Wedding Procession (Maison du Roi, Brussels, Ertz, 635–36, fig. 508, no. 828, n. 745; Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 232–34, fig. 217) is not by Pieter the Younger and has even been ascribed to Pieter the Elder, but is possibly by Jan Brueghel or another accomplished copyist after Pieter the Elder. See also Scheyer, ‘‘Wedding Dance,’’ esp. 176, figs. 6–9. 51. Gibson, ‘‘Bruegel and the Peasants,’’ 45–46; Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 217–33. 52. Van Mander, Schilderboeck, 1604, fol. 234r: ‘‘In his will he bequeathed to his wife a painting of a Magpie on the Gallows. By the magpie he meant the gossips whom he would deliver to the gallows.’’ Grossmann, Bruegel: The Paintings, 9. 53. Novotny, Die Monatsbilder; Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 69–75; Buchanan, ‘‘The Collection of Niclaes Jongelinck, II’’; for the New York Wheat Harvest, see most recently Ainsworth and Christiansen, From Van Eyck to Bruegel, 386–91, no. 102. 54. For the medieval heritage of the Labors of the Months, see Maˆle, The Gothic Image, 64–75; still valuable but virtually forgotten, Webster, The Labours of the Months. For the representation of the activities of the months within the calendar pages of late medieval manuscripts, Wieck, Time Sanctified, 45–54. For the debate about whether the series comprised twelve original pieces or six, see especially Klaus Demus, in Seipel, Pieter Bruegel d.A¨., 84–89; van Miegroet, ‘‘The Twelve Months Reconsidered.’’

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55. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 236–38, nos. 105–6 (Spring; extant drawing in the Albertina, Vienna); 243–45, nos. 109–10 (Summer; extant drawing in Kunsthalle, Hamburg). De Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 58–62, no. 4. For other, far more allegorical presentations of the Seasons in Netherlandish prints contemporary with Bruegel, see Veldman, ‘‘Seasons, Planets, and Temperaments.’’ 56. On Jongelinck, see especially Buchanan, ‘‘The Collection of Niclaes Jongelinck’’; also van de Velde, ‘‘The Labours of Hercules’’; Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 51. Nicholas’s brother, Jacques Jongelinck, was both a major metal sculptor and a medalist (Kaveler, fig. 23), who worked in close association with Charles V and the court of his sister, Mary of Hungary, regent of the Netherlands. 57. See Gibson, ‘‘Bruegel and the Peasants,’’ 20, fig. 13, showing March from the Da Costa Hours (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, Ms. 399, fol. 4v), where a seigneur supervises the planting of his formal garden, including background pergola and chateau, much as Bruegel had presented the gardening scene in his own 1565 drawing of Spring (see above). See also the Bening months from other manuscripts in Munich and London, dated to the period of Bruegel’s youth, 1535/40; Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, figs. 5.24–26. For more on Bening and his contemporaries in Flemish manuscript illumination, see Kren and McKendrick, Illuminating the Renaissance, esp. 447–87. 58. This point was first observed by Renger, ‘‘Bettler und Bauer.’’ 59. For Valkenborch, see Wied, Lucas and Martin van Valckenborch, 28–29, 153–59, nos. 46–52, a cycle of twelve Months (seven extant), dated 1584/87. 60. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 115–20, nos. 15–17; Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 1: 474–86, nos. 462–88. Also Sullivan, Bruegel’s Peasants, 107–8, fig. 54 (Vienna). This image survives in at least three grisaille copies as well as numerous colored oils, so the possibility remains strong that the original by Pieter the Elder was also a grisaille. Some scholars have nominated the grisaille image in Fondation Custodia, Paris (Lugt Collection; Ertz no. 488, fig. 354) as the original, but this proposal has not found wide acceptance. Ertz even claims that the composition was invented by Jan Brueghel in the manner of his father (for the Jan/Pieter II relation to Pieter the Elder, see Chapter 9). 61. Fullest discussion in Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 59–60. For the Icarus picture more generally, a discussion of foundational importance to what follows here, see the Kaveler chapter, ‘‘The Fall of Icarus and the Natural Order,’’ 57–76, as well as his earlier article, Kaveler, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel’s Fall of Icarus.’’ The Brussels version, usually considered original, is so damaged that it cannot be properly evaluated, though its original appearance can be discerned in the other good version, a clear copy, also in Brussels (Van Buuren Collection), which shows a Daedalus figure, lost in the Museum version, flying in the top center. Figure types in the Icarus, especially the plowman seen from behind, who closely resembles the tinker in the Visit to the Peasants, or the profile shepherd who can be matched with the older peasant, suggest the kinship of these two paintings, even through the intervention of copies after them. Other elements, such as the accomplished depiction of the background ship can be related to Bruegel’s series of Ships prints in the early 1560s (Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 212–18, nos. 89–94) and should probably occasion a rethinking of the customary early dating of this picture. When this is done, even the landscape layout, usually compared to Bruegel’s prints for Cock, the Large Landscapes (ca. 1555), can be

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seen as related to aspects of the Months series, notably the 1565 Dark Day (Vienna), whose bulky figure types stand quite close to the plowman of the Icarus. Another good comparison of peasant types is the 1566 Peasant Wedding Dance (Detroit). See also Silver, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel in the Capital of Early Capitalism,’’ 147, nn. 21–22. 62. Kaveler, ‘‘Fall of Icarus’’; see also Robert Baldwin, ‘‘Peasant Imagery and Bruegel’s ‘Fall of Icarus’.’’ 63. Discussed by Veldman, ‘‘Images of Labor and Diligence,’’ esp. 236, fig. 12; see also Sullivan, Bruegel’s Peasants, esp. 15–18, fig. 19. 64. Noted earlier by Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 60. 65. Veldman, ‘‘Labor and Diligence,’’ 239–44. On sloth (acedia), one of Bruegel’s Seven Deadly Sins, see Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 144–45, 156–57, nos. 52–53, whose drawing (Vienna, Albertina) is inscribed ‘‘Sloth makes [man] powerless and tires out the nerves until man is good for nothing.’’ Also Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth. 66. ‘‘Pies on the roof’’ appear among the proverbs in Bruegel’s 1560 Berlin Netherlandish Proverbs. There they are being shot at in vain (one arrow after another, or good money after bad) by a crossbowman with an appetite. Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs. 67. This painting was reproduced, reversed, in an engraving, possibly published after 1570, when both Cock and Brueghel had died; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 255–57, no. 116. Inscribed: ‘‘The lazy and gluttonous farmers, soldiers, and clerks / Get there and taste all for nothing. / The gardens are sausages, the houses are made of tarts. / The capons and chickens fly by already roasted.’’ On the theme in art, see Lebeer, ‘‘Le Pays de Cocagne’’; more generally, Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne. On the three orders, evoked by both Heemskerck and Bruegel, see Duby, The Three Orders; Constable, Three Studies. 68. Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 249–54. Bostro¨m, ‘‘Das Sprichwort vom Vogelnest.’’ 69. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 238–40, no. 107. Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 233–49. 70. This original portion, now lost but preserved in vestiges visible in close study, has not been often observed; but see Silver, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel in the Capital of Early Capitalism,’’ 141–42, 152, n. 81; Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 348, n. 150. The Louvre painting, sometimes ascribed to Jan Brueghel, is no. RF 829; see Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 1: 83–91, esp. 87–89, figs. 30 (Louvre), 31 (Parma), 32 (Vaduz). 71. Sedlmayr, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel.’’ 72. An engraving by Jan Wierix after what might have been a Brueghel design essentially repeats the main elements of the Naples tondo; it in turn was often copied by Pieter Brueghel the Younger in the following century. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 1: 78–82, fig. 17. The print, part of a cycle of a dozen proverbial images in the round with inscriptions, which also includes a compact version of the Blind Leading the Blind, is regarded as a posthumous extension of Bruegel’s art rather than a graphic work conceived or planned during his lifetime; hence, unfortunately, it was excluded, undiscussed,

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from Drawings and Prints. It also adds ominous details to the background, such as a gallows and a wagon attacked by bandits. See Louis Lebeer, Bruegel: les estampes, nos. 64–76, specifically no. 67 (Blind Leading the Blind is no. 72). The inscription on the print reads: ‘‘I wear mourning seeing the world in which so many deceits abound. He wears mourning because the world is unfaithful; most people behave without rhyme or reason. Few now live as one should live. People rob, grab, and everyone is full of deceit.’’ 73. Bruegel also seems to have been the first important promulgator of the theme of ‘‘peasant distress’’ (boerenverdriet), principally represented by a painting, Peasant Couple Attacked by Soldiers (1567[?],University Art Collection, Stockholm), whose authenticity has been contested by some scholars. See Gibson, ‘‘Bruegel and the Peasants,’’ 43–44; fig. 39; Karling, ‘‘The Attack by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.’’ For the legacy of this painting and the theme more generally, see Fishman, Boerenverdriet. The influence of this subject in the generation after Bruegel will be discussed in Chapter 8. 74. This is the moment to demur from Sullivan, Bruegel’s Peasants, who insists so inflexibly that a learned humanist audience motivated, and in turn enjoyed, the satirical images of peasants by the artist, though her reading sensitively considers the paintings she discusses as belonging to the genre of satire (cf. Raupp, Bauernsatiren, whose view of this genre involves harsher social views), that is ‘‘ ‘earnest jests’ in which the didactic and amusing coexist, and philosophical problems could be presented under cover of a joke’’ (128). This is a more intellectual, classically informed audience than even Jongelinck or Cardinal Granvelle, another member of the social elite known to be an avid Bruegel collector. See also the more encompassing and judicious considerations of Bruegel’s audience by Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, esp. 36–56, focusing in the latter discussion on the peasant pictures by Bruegel inventoried in 1572 by the mint-master Jean Noirot; see also Smolderen, ‘‘Tableaux de Je´roˆme Bosch.’’

Chapter 7. Second Bosch: Family Resemblance and the Marketing of Art 1. Quoted by Freedberg, ‘‘The Life of Pieter Bruegel the Elder,’’ in Freedberg, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 23 2. There are two chief exceptions to this pattern of neglect. Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, remains singular for its attention to the phenomenon up to the period of Pieter Bruegel. Extending even farther, though focusing on a single, principal Bosch motif, the ‘‘fire landscape,’’ is Corwin, ‘‘The Fire Landscape.’’ As Corwin’s title emphasizes, this pictorial phenomenon should actually be extended through the entirety of the sixteenth century and should be considered to have encompassed the hell scenes of the noted scion of Pieter Bruegel, his younger painter son, Jan, in the early seventeenth century. Bosch copies also play a significant role in the exhibition catalogue in the artist’s hometown, Jheronimus Bosch, with a most useful concluding section (‘‘C’’) on prints ‘‘after’’ Bosch and other influences, 211–28, nos. 90–107. 3. Snyder, Bosch in Perspective, 29. Also quoted in Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, 67–69. For the original text, see de Salas, El Bosco, 9. 4. The biography of Mandijn is sketchy at best, though he appears to have died by 1559. See van Puyvelde, La peinture flamande, 69–72.

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Notes to Pages 134–137

5. For the subject of Anthony, see Cuttler, ‘‘Some Gru¨newald Sources’’; Cuttler, ‘‘The Lisbon Temptation of St. Anthony.’’ For the Patinir version of the theme, see Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir: Landscape, 13–15, 53–54, 63–64. 6. Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, 19, 79–82; the most recent catalog discussion of the Lisbon triptych is Levenson, Circa 1492, 134–36, no. 18. By 1574, the altarpiece was possibly in the Escorial in the collection of King Philip II. The inventory of that year mentions a ‘‘tentacio´n de Sant Anton, de mano de Gero´nimo Bosqui,’’ with corresponding measurements. 7. Silver, The Paintings of Quinten Massys, 124–25, 217–18, no. 26; Koch, Joachim Patinir, 21, 39–40, 44, 40–50, 78. 8. For the Huys biography, see van Puyvelde, La peinture flamande, 74. 9. Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, 281, no. 126, fig. 132. A signed 1554 Brussels Last Judgment (Unverfehrt, no. 129), a 1570 Prado Last Judgment (Unverfehrt, no. 127), and a signed 1577 Antwerp Anthony (Museum Mayer van den Bergh; Unverfehrt, no. 128) round out the core works of Huys. 10. On the Prado tabletop, see Gibson, ‘‘Hieronymus Bosch and the Mirror of Man.’’ For a succinct image of the foods of carnival, including a pig’s head on a spit, see Pieter Bruegel’s central allegory in The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (see Figure 4.12). This detail seems to be persistent amid numerous variant copies after the Louvre Huys (cf. Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, nos. 130, fig. 155; 131, figs. 133–34), and it might well be associated with materials of witchcraft, as once suggested by Cuttler, ’’Witchcraft‘‘ (cf. also Baldung’s cow skulls at the base of his 1510 woodcut of Witches). 11. On this fragment and its original context, probably as the lower segment of the Louvre Ship of Fools, see Morganstern, ‘‘The Rest of Bosch’s Ship of Fools.’’ 12. For the early instances of luxury in Antwerp art, chiefly in the form of tavern scenes by such artists as Jan van Hemessen, see Renger, Lockere Gesellschaft. 13. Quoted by Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, 72, n. 271. 14. Guevara, quoted by Snyder, Bosch in Perspective, 28–29. Compare also the 1572 Lampsonius Latin lines about Bosch, in contrast to the lighter characterization he gave to Bruegel as the emulator of Bosch (‘‘the wit and inventiveness of his painting in the manner of his old master is certainly worthy of laughter’’): What is the meaning, Hieronymus Bosch, of that frightened eye of yours? Why that pallor of your face? It seems as if you were seeing Spectres and apparitions of Hell flying face to face. (quoted by Snyder, 1)

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Notes to Pages 137–142

15. Based on the Brussels ‘‘original’’; Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, 281, no. 129, fig. 211; dated on the original frame 1554. Another version, not known to Unverfehrt, and attributed to Jan Mandijn, is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts (Figure 7.5); see Davies, 16th- and 17th-Century Dutch and Flemish Paintings, 84–89. The superior workmanship and color tonalities of the Springfield panel, as well as its own greater use of detail, omitted from the Brussels painting, leads Davies to conclude that the Springfield picture not only dates from before 1554 but also is by Mandijn, judged by most careful observers to be the more talented painter. 16. The model for this ‘‘wormhole’’ of heavenly salvation is Bosch’s image with angels buoying souls aloft in the Palazzo Ducale, Venice. 17. Ewing, ‘‘Marketing Art in Antwerp’’; see in general Montias, ‘‘Socio-Economic Aspects of Netherlandish Art.’’ For a related phenomenon of painting responding to market situations in nearby Bruges, see Wilson, Painting in Bruges. 18. De Pauw-de Veen, Jeroˆme Cock; Riggs, Hieronymus Cock (1510–1570); Burgers, In de Vier Winden. 19. In addition to the references in the previous note, see also Riggs and Silver, Graven Images, esp. 8–25. 20. Jheronimus Bosch, 216–19, nos. 98–103, is a useful compendium of the principal Cock prints ‘‘after Bosch,’’ including Big Fish Eat Little Fish of 1556, now universally ascribed to the young Pieter Bruegel. 21. Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch, 40–41, fig. 10, engraved by Pieter van der Heyden, with accompanying inscriptions in Latin and French. One of six Bosch paintings in the collection of Felipe de Guevara was a large canvas of similar theme. That Bruegel (in both the 1568 Naples canvas and a posthumous proverb print) as well as Hans Bol (1581 van der Heyden engraving) and Goltzius (Strauss no. 229, inscription) followed the lead of Bosch is additional evidence of the continuity of the Bosch repertoire after mid-century, even if the connections to an original in this case remain elusive. Certainly, Cock would not have had access to the Bosch model alluded to in the Guevara collection in Madrid, so either a replica already existed or else the thematic invention was ‘‘recreated’’ as a ‘‘Bosch’’ design for the Antwerp print. 22. Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, 206–9, no. 3, figs. 197–98; the author dates the work to the lifetime of Bosch by a talented follower, ca. 1510, because of its use of motifs from The Garden of Delights. See also Jheronimus Bosch, 144–45, no. 44. This triptych is ‘‘signed’’ prominently in the center panel. The Cock engraving is Unverfehrt, 211, fig. 200; see also Jheronimus Bosch, 215, no. 94. 23. Grossmann, ‘‘Notes on Some Sources of Bruegel’s Art,’’ 149, n.26. Also Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, 211. 24. Specifically, Grossmann, ‘‘Notes on Some Sources of Bruegel’s Art’’: the ship and harp-playing angel from the Bruges triptych; the upper story of the rare Heaven structure from the Prado tabletop, The Seven Deadly Sins; the millstone scene, nail-studded wheel, and enthroned Prince of Hell from the right wing of the Vienna Last Judgment. Without having examined the Princeton drawings of the wings, which

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are clearly traced on their reverse for transfer, Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, n. 773, agrees with the connoisseurship of Grossmann that the drawing is a ‘‘copy’’ of a presumed lost, superior drawing by Bruegel. 25. Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, 230, fig. 244; Jheronimus Bosch, 216, no. 96; Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch, 59–60, fig. 14, mentioning that here too (as in the case of The Blind Leading the Blind, another subject of a ‘‘Bosch’’ design engraved by Cock, noted above) documents suggest that this subject was associated with the name of Bosch in Spanish inventories, including three from the collection of Philip II. The otherwise excellent text of Vandenbroeck takes such inventories at face value and ends up positing hosts of lost Bosch originals, where in fact there might well have been Bosch ‘‘copies’’ (what Hans van Miegroet in de Marchi and van Miegroet, ‘‘Pricing Invention,’’ 42–48, calls ‘‘phantom copies’’) invented freely by his followers and epigones over the course of the sixteenth century. Unverfehrt compares the spatial arrangement of this print to Bruegel’s 1559 design (now in Berlin) for Cock, Hope. 26. To´th-Ubbens, Verloren beelden van miserable bedelaars; also Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de andere, 117–21. On Bruegel and beggars, see Silver, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel in the Capital of Capitalism.’’ Also see above, Chapter 4. 27. See the related image by Pieter Balten of St. Martin’s Day (Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp), discussed in brief in Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de andere, 212, no. 81, fig. 135. The ‘‘Bruegel’’ fragment in Vienna (no. 2691) probably copies a lost original, but the issue of invention in the manner of Bruegel as well as Bosch is always a possibility and should not be discounted or viewed only in relation to a lost ‘‘original’’ (see below). 28. Jheronimus Bosch, 216–17, no. 98. The boat is labeled on its side ‘‘bie [sic] blau schuyte.’’ The Netherlandish inscription is translated in the catalog as follows: ‘‘Flat-breeches being here both player and steersman, / The birds take him for an owl [i.e., a bird of stupidity], / and though his company may frolic and sweat / They will be called the passengers in the Blue Boat.’’ This scene provides a variation on the theme of Bosch’s Ship of Fools in the Louvre, of which the Yale Allegory of Luxury probably provided the bottom portion (see Morganstern, ‘‘The Rest of Bosch’s Ship of Fools’’). A later print variation on this engraving was provided by Cock and van der Heyden in 1562, Jheronimus Bosch, 217, no. 99, where the sixteen figures are crowded into an open, floating mussel-shell. 29. For this kind of social instruction through negative stereotyping, see Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de andere; also Vandenbroeck, ‘‘Verbeek’s Peasant Weddings.’’ 30. Quoted by Freedberg, ‘‘The Life of Pieter Bruegel the Elder,’’ in Freedberg, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 23; compare the less initiated but similar remarks of a pair of Italians about the tone of laughter associated with the works of Bruegel as well as the later artist’s imitation of Bosch. Lodovico Guicciardini’s 1567 Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi declares ‘‘Pietro Brueghel di Breda grande imitatore della scienza, & fantasie di Girolamo Bosco, onde n’ha anche acquistato il spranome di secondo Girolamo Bosco.’’ This phrase was translated by C. Kiliaan into Netherlandish for the 1612 edition in Amsterdam with the term grillen, which refers to the fantastic and bizarre qualities of Bosch’s inventions, as used by Guicciardini for Bosch, ‘‘Girolamo Bosco di Bolduc, inventore nobilissimo, & marauiglioso

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Notes to Pages 144–147

di cose fantastiche & bizzarre.’’ Guevara had used the term grillo for Bosch’s work. See the several articles, by Josua Bruyn and Hessel Miedema, in Proef (May 1984): 82–84, 84–86, 87–88. A year later (1568), the second edition of Vasari’s Vite in Florence included a related commentary on Bruegel, based on Guicciardini, calling the St. Martin print ‘‘ed a Ieronimo Bos una carta di S. Martino con una barca piena di diavoli in bizzarrissime forme.’’ The passage concludes by describing Bruegel as filled with ‘‘tante altre fantastiche e capricciose invenzioni.’’ See the commentary by Muylle, ‘‘ ‘Pier den Drol.’’ 31. Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, 47, no. 30. This drawing is oriented in the same direction as the eventual print and is not traced for transfer. The signature and date were added, but they probably replaced authentic markers when the drawing was cut down on top and bottom. 32. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 137–39, nos. 36–37. The original drawing is in Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, signed and dated 1556 by a second hand; Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, 47, no. 30. 33. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 163–65, nos. 56–57; Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, 53, no. 40. The drawing, signed and dated 1558, is in the Albertina, Vienna. This image has sometimes been associated as a kind of extension of the Seven Deadly Sins series for Cock, completed the previous year as designs and likewise engraved by van der Heyden in 1558. Noteworthy is the insectlike representation of the angels above the side of the damned, which more closely resembles Bruegel’s own later, 1562 painting, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (Brussels). 34. This lingering medieval convention of the hellmouth does not appear in consensus original works by Bosch but does frequently recur in the varied versions of Christ in Limbo by his anonymous followers; see Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, 201–5, nos. 158–59, whose prototype is dated after mid-century. 35. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 161–62; no. 55; no drawing for Patience survives. For the Seven Deadly Sins, see Orenstein, 144–60, nos. 42–54; Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, 48–53, nos. 33–39. The principal study of value on this series remains. van Gelder and Borms, Brueghels deugden en hoofdzonden; see also the study by Serebrennikov, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Series of ‘Virtues’ and ‘Vices’.’’ 36. Boon, ‘‘Patientia dans les gravures.’’ As has been noted, the prudence of Cock occasioned one change to a potentially inflammatory detail in the Luxuria. Where the first state (Royal Library Albert I, Brussels; Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, no. 36) showed a ‘‘heretic’’ figure with a bishop’s miter as the object of scorn in the background jeering procession, the final print instead substituted a more innocuous and illegible top hat with a written passage attached. 37. Serebrennikov, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Series of ‘Virtues’ and ‘Vices’,’’ xiv-xvi, points out that the phrase under Avaritia derives from Juvenal’s fourteenth Satire, ‘‘No Teaching like That of Example’’; Luxuria derives from Seneca’s 104th letter, ‘‘On Care of Health and Peace of Mind’’; Ira is from Ovid, Ars amatoria, book 3. She cites Cicero as the touchstone for the idea of commonplaces (De Inventione), but the nearer source would surely have been Erasmus’s rhetorical handbook of Bruegel’s own century, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, trans. King as Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas). On the general humanist phenomenon of compiling commonplaces from classical texts for reuse, see Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs, esp. 83–97.

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38. See above, note 30. 39. Quoted by Snyder, Bosch in Perspective, 34. 40. Snyder, Bosch in Perspective, 35. 41. Snyder, Bosch in Perspective, 37. 42. Gibson, ‘‘Bruegel, Dulle Griet’’; Sullivan, ‘‘Madness and Folly.’’ 43. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 188–89, nos. 74–75; the Fortitude drawing is in the Museum Boymans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, 59–60, no. 50). The wings of the allegory of Fortitude might well allude to the archangel Michael. The animals representing the Deadly Sins in the previous Cock cycle are all shown slain or under attack at the feet of this personification. 44. Along with his ingenious use of a fish at the lower right, who flies with wings made out of open mussel shells, Bruegel also includes cleverly employed parts of the hurdy-gurdy derived from Bosch’s Garden of Delights hell panel as well as fragments of an astronomical device, a torquetum (cf. Holbein the Younger’s 1533 French Ambassadors, National Gallery, London; or his earlier Nicholas Kratzer, Louvre, Paris, 1527) as the shield of a helmet-wielding demon with scimitar who confronts the archangel Michael. On the London Holbein double portrait see Foister, Roy, and Wyld, Holbein’s Ambassadors. See also the often overlooked (perhaps because it is believed in its own right to derive from a lost painted work of the fifteenth century by van Eyck or Bouts) Bruegel (?) drawing of demons shoving the damned into a mouth of hell (Louvre, Paris; Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, 71–72, no. probl. 4). These demons had their own afterlife in the paintings of Jan Brueghel (see below and Chapter 9), particularly his Aeneas in the Underworld (1600, Budapest and Vienna, Figure 7.20; see Ertz and Christa Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 177, no. 41; 503, no. 190, respectively). 45. This is not a book about dating Bruegel paintings; nonetheless, the usual assumption by scholars has led them to associate all the Boschian Bruegel paintings together around the year 1562, when the Fall of the Rebel Angels is dated and when the Mad Meg presumably was once dated (its final digit is effaced). Yet the subtler color harmonies and elevated viewpoint and control of panoramic views align the Triumph of Death more closely with Bruegel’s 1564 Way to Calvary (Vienna) or his 1565 landscape series of The Months (Vienna, New York, Prague). Consensus need not imply closed questions. Further to this argument, see Silver, ‘‘Ungrateful Dead.’’ 46. Corcoran, The Triumph of Death. Two earlier replica versions after Pieter the Elder were produced in 1597 by Jan Brueghel (Liechtenstein Princely Collection, Vaduz; Landesmuseum, Graz); two unsigned and undated versions ascribed to Pieter the Younger have also been noted (15–16). For the Graz Jan Brueghel, see also Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 111–14, no. 14; the Cleveland Pieter the Younger is 106–11, no. 13. 47. Jheronimus Bosch, 130–31, nos. 39–40; Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, 226, 286, nos. 145–46, where the title is ‘‘Fools’ Dance’’; Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch, 1987, 306–10. 48. Typically, this picture (no. 49.82) has been ignored and removed from display since being discredited as an original work of Pieter the Elder, but its high quality deserves renewed inspection, possibly

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as a work of Jan Brueghel; it is noteworthy for continuing a theme that might display continuity from Bosch through to one of the sons of Pieter the Elder. See Swarzenski, ‘‘The Battle Between Carnival and Lent.’’ 49. See Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, for the imitator, there dubbed the ‘‘Master of the Mountain Landscapes,’’ 266–76, nos. 120–25. See in particular Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, esp. 74–89, as well as the references to earlier Mielke articles on the problem of attributing Bruegel drawings. Most of the lettered and signed drawings are now ascribed to Jacob Savery, Orenstein, 276–81, nos. 126–29. The breakthrough article on the ‘‘naer het leven’’ group, now attributed to Roeland Savery, was Spicer, ‘‘The ‘Naer het Leven’ Drawings.’’ The phenomena of copying, forging, and adapting Bruegel by the next generation of followers, closely related to the Boschian imitations discussed here, have not been viewed as a group (though useful articles on these adaptations have been produced by Arndt and Gerszi in particular); see Silver, ‘‘The Importance of Being Bruegel’’ and Chapter 8. 50. See Chapter 9. See Briels, Vlaamse, esp. 116–25 on peasant genre and 298–353 on landscape. Briels does not sufficiently credit Bruegel for the invention of the marine seascape, and— unsurprisingly—he omits the Boschian genre altogether. 51. Riggs, ‘‘Bruegel and His Publisher.’’ 52. Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, 64–65, no. 60, illustrating four copies/replicas by later artists; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 228–30, no. 100. 53. See Schatz, The Genius of the System, esp. 87–97, 228–31; Balio, Grand Design, 298–310, 313–29. 54. For example, Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks, 1974; Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Woody Allen, 1972, whose penultimate scene involves a giant breast as a parody of mutant enlarged animal forms, such as Tarantula (1955). Horror could also inspire studio hybrids, which mixed independently successful genres, particularly with Abbott and Costello, who in turn ‘‘met’’ Frankenstein (1948), the Invisible Man (1951), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953), and the Mummy (1955), the principal staples of the most successful Hollywood horror films of the 1930s at the same studio, Universal. A good primer of the horror film up to 1967, including the sequels, is Clarens, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film. 55. Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch, is still the best resource; for Patinir, see 170–71, 196–97, 228, 268; Bles attributions are catalogued at 279. Also for Patinir and Bosch, see Falkenburg, Patinir and the Pilgrimage of Life, esp. 67–75, and 109–11 on Bles (but not Bles and Bosch). 56. Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 43. 57. Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, esp. 88–96, on the topic of character identification. See also Dickson, ‘‘The Aesthetics of Fright.’’ 58. Discussing contemporary horror film but relevant here is Pinedo, Recreational Terror, esp. 9–50, where she compares the experience to that on a roller coaster, where pleasure commingles with fear.

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See also Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 59–96, for a more general analysis of the effects of horror on its audience, including consideration of the fictionality and artifice of the threatening characters. 59. Klaus Ertz, ‘‘Die Malerei Jan Brueghels d.A¨.,’’ 24, 171–82, nos. 39–42. See the earlier Bruegel: une dynastie, esp. on Jan Brueghel, Ertz, 165–78, 180, 182, nos. 107, 114, 119. 60. Ertz, ‘‘Die Malerei Jan Brueghels d.A¨.,’’ 171–72, no. 39, showing comparison to another Jan Brueghel Anthony image (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.; Bruegel: une dynastie, 182, no. 114); to this could be added another image in Vienna, ca. 1603–4 (505–6, no. 191), and the dated Munich 1601 work, both on copper. 61. Bruegel: une dynastie, 180, no. 107, where Ertz emphasizes the kinship to the models of Bosch. 62. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 174–77, 503; nos. 40–41, 190.

Chapter 8. Descent from Bruegel I.: From Flanders to Holland The epigraph quote from Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 104, is from Shiff, ‘‘Originality,’’ in Nelson and Shiff, Critical Terms for Art History. 1. The issue of Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 47 (1996) dedicated to Bruegel may signal a watershed of outlook, one stressing continuity rather than contrast of nations and centuries, as per Brown, Dutch Landscape, who opens his account of ‘‘early Dutch’’ landscape by contrasting Joos de Momper with Jacob van Ruisdael. However, Brown also notes that ‘‘experimentation and innovation in Dutch landscape art took place in drawings and prints far earlier than in the longer-established, technically more complex and more traditional medium of painting’’ (12). Certainly the wider influence of Bruegel works for the next generation would derive at least in part from that artist-designer’s production of drawings for prints. 2. For the most recent work on Bruegel’s sons, see Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, esp. 76–130. 3. This artistic generation has been studied best by Briels, Les peintres flamands; Luijten, Dawn of the Golden Age, esp. Bruyn, ‘‘A Turning-Point in the History of Dutch Art,’’ 112–21, where the role of Flemish e´migre´s is mentioned (119–20) but not highlighted (a general tendency of most previous Dutch art history). 4. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, esp. 60–75 on Bruegel, 83–84 on Rubens. Of course, the chief contrast between Flemish and Dutch landscape traditions insisted on in recent scholarship consists of an assertion that Dutch landscapes, excepting the eccentric Hercules Seghers, at least after the decisive Haarlem decade of the teens in the seventeenth century (defined by Esias and Jan van de Velde in particular) took a distinctive turn toward local, particular, and close-up views of typical canals and villages. This viewpoint is most forcefully advanced as a watershed definition by Brown, Dutch Landscape, esp. 21–24, which outlines their ‘‘common aim: the convincing representation of a familiar landscape, with no attempt at strict topographical accuracy (although it might incorporate recognizable landmarks such as a church spire), but a landscape of a generic type with which the citizens of Haarlem would be well

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acquainted through their own experience of walking in the nearby countryside.’’ This is essentially the view advanced specifically for graphic art by Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints. 5. Brown, Dutch Landscape, 35–43, includes a helpful summary of van Mander’s turn-of-the-century theory of landscape, offering a translation of Chapter 8 of the section of the Schilderboeck dedicated to a theoretical treatise, Den Grondt der Edel vry Schilder-Const (The Foundation of the Noble Free Art of Painting). Section 25 states, ‘‘As if it were a contest, I could also praise Bruegel’s beautifully colored and ingeniously composed paintings and prints. These appear so natural, and teach us how to render with much ease those angular, rocky Alps and views into steep-sided valleys as well as precipitous cliffs, and pine-trees kissing the sky, or long vistas with murmuring streams. For van Mander’s biography of Bruegel, a convenient translation is in Grossmann, Bruegel: Complete Paintings, 7–9, which includes the famous line of praise, ‘‘On his journeys Bruegel did many views of nature so that it was said of him, when he traveled through the Alps, that he had swallowed all the mountains and rocks and spat them out again, after his return, on to his canvases and panels, so closely was he able to follow nature here and in her other works.’’ See also Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, esp. 11–12, 64–65, 97–98, 179–81 on Bruegel as a landscape artist. 6. For example, Slive, Painting in Holland, 10, fig. 5; Reznicek, ‘‘Hendrick Goltzius.’’ However, Goedde, ‘‘Naturalism as Convention,’’ esp. 137–39, points out that even in this canonical, landmark depiction of native Dutch scenery the drawing technique employed by Goltzius follows the dot-and-stipple modeling that was a virtual trademark style of Bruegel landscapes. 7. The Frisius etching is Hollstein 7: 29, no. 106; for the drawing see Stampfle, Netherlandish Drawings, 42, no. 68. On Frisius, a shadowy figure still in need of considerable research, see Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints, 26–27, fig. 15; also Orenstein, ‘‘The Shift from Antwerp,’’ 53 n. 18; Orenstein, Hendrick Hondius; Ackley, Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt, 77. Characteristically Frisius passes almost without mention in the massive survey catalogue, Luijten, Dawn of the Golden Age, 172–73. 8. The Age of Bruegel, nos. 97–100, discusses Jacob Savery and his imitation of the Bruegel drawing technique in such works as the Berlin Landscape with a Castle, inscribed ‘‘Bruegel, 1561’’ (no. 97), and it also reassigns the drawing cluster of the walls and gates of old Amsterdam, inscribed ‘‘Bruegel 1562’’ (no. 98). Most recently Mielke, Pieter Bruegel Zeichnungen, nos. A21–45, has clustered these drawings within the rejected works, all reassigned to Jacob Savery. Moreover, another cluster of Bruegel landscape drawings has now been reassigned by Mielke to Jacob’s brother Roelandt Savery, nos. A1–20. For both groups see Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 276–81, nos. 126–29 (Jacob Savery); the other group is left as the anonymous ‘‘Master of the Mountain Landscapes,’’ 266–76, nos. 120–25. Roelandt Savery was also the noted producer of Bruegel-simulations of figure drawings, a cluster known as the ‘‘naer het leven’’ (from life) drawings, Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 282–88, nos. 130–34. This group for years was considered to be authentic Bruegel figure studies until correctly assigned to Roelandt Savery by Joaneath Spicer on the basis of watermarks, handwriting, stylistic comparison, and costume analysis. See Spicer, ‘‘The ‘Naer het Leven’ Drawings.’’ These figure drawings have been so discredited as Bruegel originals that they are no longer even discussed as rejected works by Mielke in his definitive study of the drawings.

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9. Franz, ‘‘Das niederla¨ndische Waldbild’’; Arndt, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel d. A¨.’’; Hanschke, Die fla¨mische Waldlandschaft; Devisscher, ‘‘Die Entstehung der Waldlandschaft.’’ 10. The Prague drawing was first published by Arndt, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel d. A¨.,’’ no. 3; for the Jan Brueghel drawing variation on the Pieter theme, see Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 436, no. 151 11. Mielke, Pieter Bruegel d. A¨. als Zeichner, 43–48, nos. 41–45, 46–49. The Jan Brueghel drawing in the Lugt Collection is 95–96, no. 113 in Berlin, 1975. The influence of Italian landscapes, particularly the works of Domenico Campagnola in Venice, has been adduced for early Bruegel landscape forms in these Italian years of his career; see Royalton-Kisch, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel as a Draftsman,’’ esp. 14–23. The same is still true of Goltzius a generation later; see Reznicek, ‘‘Hendrick Goltzius,’’ 58–59, where the ‘‘broad manner of sketching with a rough feather pen’’ is compared to the Campagnola woodcuts after Titian. 12. Gerszi, ‘‘Zur Zeichenkunst Jan Brueghels.’’ This assessment of Jan’s role follows Mielke’s discussion of Jan’s variations on his father, Pieter Bruegel Zeichnungen, 17, B.7; 1975, nos. 41–49, 50–51; note also the Bruegel originals in London (British Museum; Figure 8.6) and Brussels (Royal Library), Mielke, nos. 18–19,. 22; Arndt, ‘‘Unbekannte Zeichnungen.’’ 13. See the entries by Alexander Wied in Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, esp. nos. 186–88, 194–95; sometimes the figures were painted by collaborators. See also 132–35, no. 22, for River Landscape with Resting Travelers, the earliest dated image, on copper. 14. ‘‘De boomen die hier wat dor waren, beginnen zo goed mogelijk te groeien op zijn manier, hoewel een aantal schilders dit maar met tegenzin zou erkennen,’’ Luitjen, Dawn of the Golden Age, 303–4; 639–40, nos. 310–11. 15. Franz, ‘‘De boslandschappen van Gillis van Coninxloo’’; Gerszi, ‘‘Bruegels Nachwirkung’’; for both prints and paintings, see Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 270–88, figs. 411–37, where the engravers are routinely uncited except in the list of illustrations. On Claes Jansz. Visscher, see van der Coelen, ‘‘Something for Everyone?’’ On Coninxloo prints in context, see Hu¨rkey, Kunst, Kommerz, Glaubenskampf, 132–37, 248–53. 16. Mielke, Pieter Bruegel d. A¨. als Zeichner, 42–43, no. 40. This connection was first noted by Devisscher, ‘‘Die Entstehung der Waldlandschaft,’’ 193, figs. 2–3. 17. On the issue of right seeing within Flemish landscape settings, a major theme later in such Bruegel paintings as the 1564 Way to Calvary, 1566 Census at Bethlehem, or 1567 Conversion of St. Paul, see the important study by Falkenburg, ‘‘Marginal Motifs in Early Flemish Landscape Paintings,’’ who cites the Emmaus story among other instances of the ‘‘blind with their eyes open.’’ 18. For a related phenomenon in early sixteenth-century German art of the forest, particularly Albrecht Altdorfer, see Silver, ‘‘Forest Primeval.’’ Within the Netherlands the fullest exposition of the landscape of moral choice has been Falkenburg, beginning with his Joachim Patinir; see also his ‘‘Pieter Bruegels

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Kruisdraging,’’ where the Bruegelian exposition of this issue is broached, and ‘‘Marginal Motifs in Early Flemish Landscape Painting.’’ 19. Of course several Bruegel paintings of snow scenes feature Christian subjects: the Massacre of the Innocents (often copied; original at Hampton Court), the Census at Bethlehem (1566; Muse´es Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels), and the Adoration of the Kings in the Snow (1567; Winterthur Museum). 20. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 381–84, nos. 123–25, where the catalogue entry by Ertz lists 123 versions, 43 as ‘‘autograph’’ by Brueghel the Younger and 52 doubtful, with 28 unsigned. 21. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 236–38, 243–45; nos. 105–6, 109–10. 22. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 378–80, no. 122; another painted copy was made by Abel Grimmer, now in Antwerp. 23. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 174–76, nos. 62–63; Mielke, Pieter Bruegel Zeichnungen, 55, no. 43. The drawing is signed and dated ‘‘Brueghel 1558.’’ 24. See, e.g., Bauer and Bauer, ‘‘The Winter Landscape with Skaters’’; see also Falkenburg, ‘‘Marginal Motifs.’’ A Latin inscription, ‘‘lubricitas vitae humanae,’’ the slipperiness of human life, was added to later editions, which also credited Bruegel with authorship of the design. The reason the print is assumed to have been backdated to an earlier moment is that a surviving drawing for the engraving (private collection; Orenstein, 174, no. 62) bears the date ‘‘1558.’’ For the fullest discussion, see de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 49–53, no. 2; also Monballieu, ‘‘P. Bruegels ‘Schaatsenrijden’.’’ As de Jongh and Luijten note, Bruegel is not unique at this moment in showing skaters outside a city in a print: Pieter van der Borcht’s 1559 etching, On the Ice near Mechelen, is virtually contemporary. 25. Luijten, Dawn of the Golden Age, 299, 634–38, nos. 305–8. 26. Luijten, Dawn of the Golden Age, 658–60, no. 330. See also Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints, nos. 33–34, 43. Freedberg notes (36) that van de Velde’s skating scene print ‘‘is part of a long tradition. In the closeness of its mood to Bruegel’s skating scenes, notably the print of skaters at the St. George’s Gate in Antwerp—for all the telling differences in compositional structure—it serves as yet another reminder of that master’s [Bruegel’s] continuing influence on seventeenth-century Dutch art.’’ 27. Briels, Vlaamse schilders, 306–53, where the mountain and forest landscapes are discussed at length, and 356–71, winter/seasons landscapes. 28. Franz, Landschaftsmalerei, 190–91, 195; Franz, ‘‘Hans Bols als Landschaftszeichner’’; Luijten, Dawn of the Golden Age, 301. 29. Luijten, Dawn of the Golden Age, 315. His own winter landscape drawing (Albertina, Vienna) appears on 100, fig. 174. 30. Briels, Vlaamse schilders, 116–49, emphasizing the pivotal role of Bol and Jacob Savery, as well as Vinckboons. See also the prints and drawings of kermis scenes with peasants, notably the engraving by Willem van Swanenburg after David Vinckboons, but also the drawing by Jacob Savery dated 1598

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(Victoria and Albert Museum, London) in de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 104–7, no. 15. More generally, see Zwollo, ‘‘Jacob Savery,’’ discussing both kermis and landscape scenes. 31. Raupp, Bauernsatiren; Alpers, ‘‘Bruegel’s Festive Peasants’’; for some of the later Dutch legacy of peasant scenes, see Alpers, ‘‘Realism as a Comic Mode.’’ 32. For Bruegel’s Kermis at Hoboken, see de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 44–48, no. 1, who again cite a comparable contemporary print image of the kermis, the 1559 etching by Pieter van der Borcht; for the Peasant Wedding Dance, see de Jongh and Luijten, 54–57, no. 3. 33. Mu¨ller, ‘‘ ‘Pieter der Drollige’.’’ For the ongoing dynasty and its ties to Teniers, see Bruegel—une dynastie des peintres, esp. 251–312. For the later Dutch tradition of peasant images, see the overview by Sutton, Masters of Seventeenth Century Dutch Genre Painting, xxxiv-xxxvi, featuring the artists Brouwer, the brothers van Ostade, and Bega. Most recently in the realm of graphic art, see the exhibition catalogue, see Phagan, Adriaen van Ostade. 34. Fishman, Boerenverdriet; see also Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier, 257–392, extending the theme well into the seventeenth century. 35. The Stockholm picture was published by Karling, ‘‘The Attack by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.’’ The controversy about attribution derives in part from the reprise of the kicking gesture of the soldiers, which repeats the marauding henchmen of Herod in Bruegel’s wintry village scene of the Massacre of the Innocents (original at Hampton Court, collection of the Queen; several replicas, including one at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). For the fullest discussion of this painting and its copies, see Campbell, The Early Flemish Pictures, 13–19, no. 9. Fully 14 copies of this work are known; see Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 322–27, nos. 98–99; Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier, 102–12. 36. Even Bruegel’s painted images of Adoration of the Magi (esp. 1565; National Gallery, London) feature threatening crowds of soldiers with weapons within the entourage of the kings around the holy figures, and with this sense of threat in mind we can easily discern the coercive force explicit in the assorted weaponry of halberds and broadswords surrounding the allegory of Justice (original drawing, 1559, in the Bibliothe`que Royale, Brussels; Mielke no. 49). Bruegel’s Triumph of Death (undated, often presumed to be ca. 1562 but possibly several years later) implicates the devastation of war by arming the irresistible forces of Death against the vain resistance of living soldiers and other civilians, just as his (virtually neglected) small panel of 1562 The Suicide of Saul (Vienna) and his Conversion of St. Paul (1567; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Figure 3.16) both point to the futility of armies in the moral landscapes of mountain passes, where divine will can produce epiphanies and life-changing experiences. 37. Fishman, Boerenverdriet; Briels, 154–63. 38. Briels, Vlaamse schilders, figs. 190, 192; Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier, 283–313; Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 190–91, no. 46; Sutton, The Age of Rubens, 466–68, no. 84; Auwera, ‘‘Sebastiaen Vrancx.’’ 39. Goosens, David Vinckboons, 1954; Huisken and Lammertse, Het Kunstbedrijf van de familie Vingboons, 13–43.

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40. Briels, Vlaamse schilders, 1976, 235–44; cited in Huisken and Lammertse, Het Kunstbedrijf van de familie Vingboons, 33–34, n.14. 41. Nevitt, Art and the Culture of Love, esp. 21–98, though this study of pleasure-seeking upper-class youths for the most part does not tackle related biblical subjects, such as the Prodigal Son, nor prints. For the prints, see Hellerstedt, Gardens of Earthly Delight, who considers readings of a positive kind as well as a warning kind. 42. Briels, Vlaamse schilders, fig. 52; see also fig. 48, close to Jan Brueghel, and in general, 64–71. For liefhebbers in the Antwerp of Jan Brueghel, see Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 51–53, 69–70; Honig, Painting and the Market, 202–5. 43. Wegner and Pee´, ‘‘Die Zeichnungen des David Vinckboons.’’ 44. Silver, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel in the Capital of Capitalism,’’ esp. 138–44 45. Briels, Vlaamse schilders, 133–40 46. Stone-Ferrier, Dutch Prints of Daily Life, 120–22, no. 29; see also 86–88, no. 18, fig. 13. 47. The Age of Bruegel, 256–57, no. 99, comparing the drawing forms and style of another of the same group, the Braunschweig, Farmhouses by a Stream, falsely inscribed and dated 1562, Mielke, no. A40; Mielke, Pieter Bruegel d. A¨l., 73–74, no. 84. 48. The Age of Bruegel, 299, no. 118. 49. The Age of Bruegel, 99–100, no. 28, discusses the Kermis of Hoboken drawing design, Mielke no. 44; now in the Courtauld Institute Galleries, London. See Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 196–200, nos. 79–80, for the two kermis prints. 50. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 238–40, no. 107; The Age of Bruegel, 1986, 105–6, no. 31. The Dutch original lines on the Berlin drawing read: ‘‘dije den nest Weet dije[n?] Weeten den Roft, dij heeten.’’ 51. Luijten, Dawn of the Golden Age, 614–15, no. 286; here the proverb text reads: ‘‘Die den nest weet die weethen, / Maer die hem rooft die heeften.’’ 52. Silver, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel in the Capital of Capitalism,’’ 142. 53. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 127, no. 27. Concerning the erotic potential of either birdcatching or fishing as a visual motif, see de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 85–89, no. 10: Pieter de Jode, Bird-Catcher and a Woman / Woman Drying a Net. This reading seems not to be demanded by the Vinckboons drawing but should not be utterly excluded, as sexual license is often associated with peasant life. 54. Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints, 23, no. 9 55. Fishman, Boerenverdriet, esp. 19–44 for Bruegel and Vinckboons; Fishman also points out that Hans Bol’s View of the Scheldt (Los Angeles, Brussels), contains amid its Flemish panorama a miniature scene of the peasants attacked by soldiers. For the Stockholm picture, see Karling, ‘‘The Attack by P. Bruegel the Elder’’; Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier, 111–12.

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56. Czobor, ‘‘Zu Vinckboons’ Darstellungen’’; for a related drawing in Amsterdam, see Schapelhouman, Nederlandse tekeningen omstreeks 1600; on the series, Fishman, Boerenverdriet, 31–34; Kunzle, From Criminal to Courtier, 286–92. 57. The Age of Bruegel, 301–2, no. 119, a design for an engraving by Nicolaes de Bruyn. Hellerstedt, Gardens of Earthly Delight, 42–44, no. 16, identifies this scene as a hidden religious work, The Dance of Mary Magdalene, referring back to a large engraving of carousing pleasure-seekers by Lucas van Leyden (1519). Compare the Garden Festival, engraving by Nicolaes de Bruyn after Vinckboons (Figure 8.22), in Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints, 23, no. 7 (Hellerstedt, no. 23). Nevitt, Art and the Culture of Love, 35–50, offers an extended analysis of both works. 58. For the Susannah drawing in the Pierpont Morgan Library, see Stampfle, Netherlandish Drawings, 100, no. 217, engraved by Jan van Londerseel; the Dance of the Magdalene theme originated in a 1519 engraving by Lucas van Leyden. For this theme and the general issue of gardens in Netherlandish prints and paintings, see Hellerstedt, Gardens of Earthly Delight, esp. 42–44, no. 16, and the general section ‘‘ungodliness in the garden,’’ 28–29. For the related theme of the pleasures of the Prodigal Son in a garden, where the background scene of expulsion makes the subject fully clear, see de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 118–23, no. 19, Visscher after Vinckboons, 1608. 59. Nevitt, Art and the Culture of Love, 57–98, esp. 67–70; Briels, Vlaamse schilders, 95–107; Hellerstedt, Gardens of Earthly Delights, 44–47, ‘‘garden parties.’’ 60. Nevitt, Art and the Culture of Love, 35–50; Briels, Vlaamse schilders, 95, fig. 99; The Age of Bruegel, 301, no. 119, discusses a related drawing; Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints, 23, fig. no. 7, points out that the 1601 de Bruyn engraving features Christ’s words of grace to the Magdalene: ‘‘Her sins which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.’’ 61. Luijten, Dawn of the Golden Age, 96–97, fig. 167, although here these vignettes of court life are discussed as ancestors of the city views of the seventeenth century. The later career of Hans Bol is a major lacuna in scholarship, which would fill in many of the blanks in this account of the transition from Bruegel to the seventeenth century. 62. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 236–38, no. 106. This connection was made earlier by Hellerstedt, Garden of Earthly Delights, 8–9, no.1, noting that the background scene of the garden party was most often associated with May in depictions of the Months, with sheep-shearing and beekeeping, also in the Spring engraving, associated with April. Hellerstedt also argues that Bruegel deliberately contrasted the hardworking gardeners with an indolent, partying landowner class. 63. Serebrennikov, ‘‘Imitating Nature/Imitating Bruegel’’; Meadow, ‘‘Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary,’’ esp. 191–2; Miedema, Kunst, kunstenaar en kunstwerk, 72–78; Mu¨ller, Concordia Pragensis, 41–45. 64. Gombrich, ‘‘The Renaissance Conception of Artistic Progress and Its Consequences,’’ in Gombrich, Norm and Form, 1–10; of course, the classical contests between Apelles and Protogenes in Pliny provided a verbal historical precedent for competition in the arts as well as the prototype for both Vasari

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and van Mander compendia of biographies of artists as the foundation of a history of art. On the general phenomenon, see Soussloff, The Absolute Artist. 65. See above, Chapter 7. See Meadow, ‘‘Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary,’’ 190–92, citing Lampsonius’s 1572 verse eulogy of Bruegel. 66. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon, esp. 34, 43–49 on Goltzius, who is praised as a ‘‘Netherlandish Apelles’’ (along with Bartholomeus Spranger); also Melion, ‘‘Theory and Practice’’; Melion, ‘‘Hendrick Goltzius’s Project’’; Leeflang and Luijten, Hendrick Goltzius, 210–15, no. 75. 67. Filedt Kok, ‘‘Artists Portrayed by Their Friends,’’ esp. 171–72, fig. 11. In setting the broader context of this Bruegel portrait among contemporary portraits of artists by their peers, Filedt Kok notes quite correctly that the rhetoric suggests memorialization, here using the elements of tomb, trumpet of Fame, putto with skull, and inverted torch. This means that the image of Bruegel refers only to Pieter the Elder rather than to his son and namesake, Pieter the Younger, as had been argued earlier by Bedaux and van Gool, ‘‘Bruegel’s Birthyear.’’ Filedt Kok further notes about the inscription on the print that it asserts that ‘‘art excels over nature, and that nature in turn confers eternity upon art.’’ Significantly, he underscores the fact for this print that both the engraver, Aegidius Sadeler, and the artist-designer, Bartholomeus Spranger, stemmed from Bruegel’s Flanders. 68. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 228–30, no. 100; Mielke, no. 60, noting four copies. One of these copies has been assigned to Rubens himself by Michael Jaffe´, ‘‘Rubens and Bruegel,’’ 41–42. 69. Nevitt, Art and the Culture of Love, 114–22. 70. Brown, Dutch Landscape, 110–11, no. 18; Freedberg, Dutch Landscape Prints, 21–22, 28, no. 20. 71. Luijten, Dawn of the Golden Age, 649–66, nos. 323–35.

Chapter 9. Descent from Bruegel II: Flemish Friends and Family 1. For the most recent work on Bruegel’s sons, see Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, esp. 76–130. 2. Alpers, The Making of Rubens; Vergara, Rubens and the Poetics of Landscape, esp. 89–98, 117–20. See also Jaffe´, ‘‘Rubens and Bruegel,’’ 37–42. 3. Jaffe´, ‘‘Rubens and Bruegel,’’ 7–38; Muller, Rubens: The Artist as Collector, 128–30, nos. 191- 93, 195–99. 4. Nevitt, Art and the Culture of Love. 5. Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 76–82; Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 182–299. 6. Biography in Briels, Vlaamse schilders, 301; discussion in Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 182–97. See also Franz, ‘‘Beitra¨ge zum Werk des Hans Bol.’’ Van Mander praises him for his skill in landscapes and his mastery of the technique of painting in watercolors on canvas, a specialty of Mechelen, which is only occasionally preserved. A member of the Mechelen guild in 1560, Bol only officially enrolled in the Antwerp painters’ guild in 1574 (according to Van Mander on account of Spanish

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occupation of Mechelen). Van Mander speaks of his giving up canvas works once he arrived in Antwerp, in order to avoid copyists: ‘‘He then fully dedicated himself to painting landscapes and panels in miniature,’’ with the challenge of his rivals to copy that if they could. Bol left Antwerp in 1584 to relocate in Amsterdam. His later phase of miniature paintings on vellum and small panels (Van Mander: ‘‘very careful lovely miniatures’’), representing what seems to be a courtly taste, has never been studied. An example of this is the handsome gouache (with a painted inner frame) Landscape with Venus and Adonis (1589; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Briels, Vlaamse schilders, fig. 311). In addition, the Munich Residenz has no fewer than 26 Bol images (1587–92), today in later frames built into its curiosity cabinet, and in 1587 Elector August of Saxony acquired eight gouache miniatures (1580–87) for the Dresden collections. However, Bol’s clear affiliation with Cock by 1570 for the Seasons print series as well as earlier landscape prints (see below) shows that his familiarity with Bruegel and other Antwerp art must have been considerable. 7. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 236–38, 243–45, nos. 105–6, 109–10; de Jongh and Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life, 58–62. An example of Bol’s extension of Bruegel’s pictorial ideas and themes in his own idiom is a gouache on paper version of The Fall of Icarus (1590; Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp); see also the earlier version (1567; Damme), illustrated in Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, fig. 307; discussed by Kaveler, Pieter Bruegel, 61, fig. 29. 8. Veldman, ‘‘Seasons, Planets, and Temperaments’’; Parshall, ‘‘Art and the Theater of Knowledge.’’ 9. In particular, see Franz, ‘‘Hans Bol als Landschaftszeichner.’’ 10. Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 183–84; for Cornelis Matsys, 92–93; the 1557 Rotterdam drawing by Bol is also discussed in The Age of Bruegel, 71–72, no. 14. On Bruegel and Italy, see RoyaltonKisch, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel as a Draftsman,’’ esp. 14–23. 11. Two drawings for the 1562 series survive: one in Leiden (Rijksprentenkabinet), the other in Paris (Fondation Custodia, Lugt Collection). One print composition is replicated in a painting with traces of a signature (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 186, color plate 25). 12. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 289–99, nos. 135–44. Gibson, Pleasant Places, 1–26. Bol’s earliest landscape drawings are actually the ones that most closely resemble the Small Landscapes; see The Age of Bruegel, 71–73, no. 14. Bol also produced etchings that bear only his own signature (Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, figs. 301–2). Both of these expand the Bruegel repertoire in significant directions: the first shows brigands attacking a Belgian covered wagon (so peaceful in the Large Landscapes engraving by Bruegel; Orenstein, no. 30); the second is a riverside village folk competition of a retrieval from a moving boat of a goose tied to a high wire. 13. Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 187, figs. 304–6. Bol also designed a similar work, Large Landscape with the Prodigal Son (Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 188–89, fig. 303) for another Antwerp print publisher rival of Cock, Bartholomeus de Mompere, who had already made one Bruegel’s rare non-Cock prints, the Kermis at Hoboken (ca. 1559; see Figure 6.11; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the

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Elder, no. 80). This multiscene narrative is an even more traditional use of landscape sections, akin to the paintings of Patinir’s generation. 14. The Age of Bruegel, 73–74, no. 15, there dated to the mid-1580s. A Bol miniature of Winter (1586; Residenz, Munich) from a cycle of the Four Seasons (74, fig. 2) closely resembles this drawing. 15. See, for example, the two Jacob Savery drawings of village scenes in The Age of Bruegel, 258–59, figs. 1–2: Winter (1595; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford); Village Kermis (1598; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Figure 8.13); also Zwollo, ‘‘Jacob Savery.’’ 16. Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 242–48; Bertier de Sauvigny, Jacob et Abel Grimmer. More generally, see Genaille, ‘‘De Bruegel a` G. van Coninxloo.’’ 17. Van Mander, Lives, 245–46. 18. Two are now in the Antwerp Koninklijk Museum: a view of the Scheldt (1587) and a view of suburban Kiel (1578); Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, figs. 359–60. 19. Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 244–45, figs. 343–46. 20. Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 247, figs. 365–68. 21. Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 248; figs. 347–58. Visscher presumably obtained and then published the plates in early seventeenth-century Antwerp, like his reprint of the Small Landscapes in 1612. Visscher (1587–1652) published his own etched series of Pleasant Places from the Vicinity of Haarlem about 1611/12 in emulation of the Master of the Small Landscapes. See Gibson, Pleasant Places, 32–49, 85–101, and esp. 23–26 on Grimmer and his prints; also Levesque, Journey Through Landscape, 35–54. 22. For this material, I am greatly indebted to the work and the generous discussions by Melanie Gifford, scholar and curator. See in particular ‘‘Style and Technique in the Evolution of Naturalism’’ and ‘‘Landscape Painting Style and Technique.’’ 23. Vogelaar, Jan van Goyen. See especially the following: Sluijter, ‘‘Jan van Goyen als marktleider’’; Gifford, ‘‘Jan van Goyen en de techniek.’’ In her essay, Gifford explicitly contrasts the van Goyen efficiency with the carefully modeled, multilayered forest landscape painting by noted Flemish e´migre´ Roelandt Savery (younger brother of Jacob; see Chapter 8). Van Goyen worked not from a colored underpaint but from a wash base in a nearly monochrome sketch. The net effect is a simulation of the celebrated etched landscapes of his teacher Esias van de Velde and other landscape printmakers of Haarlem, and the analogy of Savery would be to the meticulous craftsmanship of engravings. Once again I am deeply grateful to Gifford for numerous clarifications and exchanges about her technical research. 24. Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 198–209; Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch. 25. For artists in the courts of Munich and Prague, see Kaufmann, The School of Prague; also for the Dutch and Prague, see Luijten, Dawn of the Golden Age, 60–69. For Flemish landscape painters in Italy, see Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 131–36, 300–312. Chief among the e´migre´ printmakers

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in German courts was the Sadeler family: father Jan, uncle Raphael, and son Aegidius; see de Ramaix, Les Sadeler. 26. The Age of Bruegel, 201–2, no. 74, figs. 1–2; Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, G11. Joris Hoefnagel produced his own drawing copy (1594) after Valckenborch as the intermediary stage of the production of the Cologne printed map (1597). A painted version of this image was also produced in 1593 (Staedel, Frankfurt; Wied, color plate 18, no. 63). Other painted images by Valckenborch have been associated with depictions of particular sites, especially rocky riverside sites along the Meuse River; see Wied, nos. 3 (Lie`ge), 8 (Dinant), 23 (Huy). 27. Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, 23, 28, nos. 23, 27, 30, 40–42, 44, 55–56, 71–73. A rare landscape with mine whose site has been tentatively identified as Huy (Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp, no. 23). 28. Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, 21, 137, 163–64, nos. 16, 60; Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 207–8; see the fine analysis, which anticipates some of the longer arguments of this book, by Ellenius, ‘‘The Concept of Nature.’’ As Ellenius points out, the pond in the 1590 Angler emphatically distances itself from a nearly invisible village spire and buildings at the left horizon, ‘‘the only trace of civilization in this virgin landscape’’ (111). He further notes that ‘‘activity is suppressed, calm and contemplation are hailed as dominating virtues’’ (112). On Valckenborch in the emerging context of the forest landscape, see Devisscher, ‘‘Die Entstehung der Waldlandschaft,’’ esp. 199–200. 29. See Ellenius, ‘‘The Concept of Nature,’’ 112–13, on the aristocratic associations and literary praise of angling in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The locus classicus of aristocratic hunting and fishing as princely pastimes is provided by Emperor Maximilian I (d. 1519) of Habsburg; see Egg, Ausstellung Maximilian I., 69–74; Silver, ‘‘Caesar Ludens.’’ 30. Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 205–7; Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, 27–29; the Months cycle in particular (1584–87) is nos. 46–52; seven pictures are extant, strongly suggesting that the original cycle consisted of twelve parts rather than the six parts generally assumed for Bruegel (see Chapter 6). 31. Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, 28, 159, no. 52. Ellenius, ‘‘The Concept of Nature,’’ 114, discusses this image in terms of what he calls the ‘‘Venetian tradition,’’ which I take to mean an emphasis on pastoral pleasures, for which see also Cafritz, Gowing, and Rosand, Visions of Delight. Ellenius speaks of the images as visualizing ‘‘a world of longings and desires . . . the tempting environment of the landed aristocracy’’ rather than ‘‘recording the rural life on particular social levels.’’ He also refers to both urbanization and court life as the two factors that shaped the desire for a private experience of nature, permitting contemplation and aesthetic appreciation. 32. Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, 28–29, 155–56, nos. 48–49. The games include not only boule/bocce (see the Hans Bol drawing, 1580; Uffizi) but also the same boatside grasping for a goose featured by Hans Bol in his etching (see n. 12). 33. Another Habsburg brother and regent of the Netherlands, Archduke Ernst, held a similar cycle in his possession at the time of his death (February 20, 1595): ‘‘Vier grosze Stuck auf Lainwath die vier anni temporibus, M. Lucas’’ (four large pieces on canvas, the four times of year by Master Lucas), but

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this cannot be identified with the extant canvases with any certainty. Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, 28, 223. 34. Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, 44–45, 169–70, 180, nos. 68–69, 86–87. One of these topographic sites (no. 86; 1596; Braunschweig) has been identified as Bad Schwalbach in Aartal. The portraits of Rudolf II, Matthias, and Ernst underscore the archducal audience for these works. Lucas van Valckenborch also produced conventional, full-length, formal portraits and miniatures of Archduke Matthias (Wied, 27, 146–48, nos. 33–36). 35. It is also noteworthy that Lucas van Valckenborch produced a full four versions of Bruegel’s distinctive Tower of Babel imagery (see Chapter 2). Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, 31–34, nos. 6 (1568; Munich), 66 (1594; Louvre), 82 (1595; Koblenz), 102. Two further versions were produced by his brother Marten van Valckenborch. Since Lucas went into exile in 1567, his awareness of Bruegel’s undated Tower (Rotterdam) provides a terminus ante quem for that work, often dated as late as 1568. 36. Gerszi, ‘‘Joos de Momper und die Bruegel-Tradition’’; Koester, ‘‘Joos de Momper the Younger’’; Ertz, Josse de Momper; Thie´ry, Les peintres flamands, 138–62. 37. Other collaborators include Sebastian Vrancx, Hendrik van Balen, Frans Francken II, Hieronymus Francken II, and David Teniers the Younger. See Ertz, Josse de Momper, 391–414. Honig, Painting and the Market, 184, points out that Francken, Teniers, Bruegel, and de Momper are all members of ongoing family dynasties of painters in Antwerp. She also cites the case of Jan Brueghel the Younger, who bought up finished landscapes by de Momper and added his own figures to them before selling the revised works himself at a profit (181). Her discussion of collaboration in seventeenth-century Antwerp (170– 89) expands our critical understanding of the importance of this phenomenon, especially at its ‘‘high end’’ of two renowned artists working together, in terms of the emerging local ‘‘aesthetic of judgment.’’ 38. Ertz, Josse de Momper, 60–70; Honig, Painting and the Market, 202–8; esp. 203–4 on de Momper. Also Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 58–72; Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image, 76–88, 103–47. 39. Ertz, Josse de Momper, 45–47. This same status, renewed in 1626, was also accorded to his friend, the better connected courtly artist Jan Brueghel the Elder; for documents on the artist, 43–49; for inventory references, 50–59. A further indication of his value to collectors is his adaptation for them of unusual formats, as noted in the inventories, doubtless on the specific request of a commission; Ertz argues that he would work ‘‘according to the place’’ (‘‘na de plaetse’’) (58). These same inventories often cite the artists who collaborated with de Momper by adding figures. Prices listed in the inventories range from single to double digits, so they were not nearly as costly as Jan Brueghel’s, for example. 40. Note the characterization of de Momper’s role in the post-Bruegel period, itself described as an ‘‘Epilogue’’ by Gibson, Mirror of the Earth, 77, 82: ‘‘Joos de Momper translated the mountain panoramas of Bles and Bruegel into his own fluent, almost immaterial style.’’ 41. Philips de Momper was a close friend of Jan Brueghel the Younger, with whom he traveled to Italy in 1622; Ertz, Josse de Momper, 407.

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42. Gerszi, ‘‘Joos de Momper und die Bruegel-Tradition,’’ 156–60. Ertz, Josse de Momper, 363–90. For the Large Landscapes, see Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 120–36, nos. 22–34, esp. nos. 25–26. See also Large Alpine Landscape, 136, no. 35. The later generation of Bruegel imitators in drawings, led by the Master of the Mountain Landscapes as well as Jacob Savery’s Bruegel forgeries, 266–81, nos. 120– 29, also doubtless provided models for de Momper, including greater emphasis on the stylization of technique, there stippled dots akin to his own emphatic, repeated brushwork. For the Vienna Bruegel paintings, see Demus, Klauner, and Schu¨tz, Fla¨mische Malerei, 61–136, esp. 72–76 for the Suicide of Saul. The Suicide of Saul has sometimes been equated with the otherwise unknown picture, entitled Battle Between Turks and Christians in the 1640 Rubens inventory; see Muller, Rubens: The Artist as Collector, 132, no. 212. 43. Gerszi, ‘‘Joos de Momper und die Bruegel-Tradition,’’ 160–64; Ertz, Josse de Momper, 231–56 on winter landscapes; 222–30 on grain harvests. 44. Ertz, Josse de Momper, 366–90 on the Vienna Storm at Sea, for which see also Demus et al., Fla¨mische Malerei, 128–36. In part the attribution of the Vienna painting to Bruegel stems from its foundational role in the emerging subgenre of seascapes with storms; few scholars wanted to see Joos de Momper as the originator of that important pictorial category; Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 70–76: ‘‘If not by Pieter the Elder himself—and its exact relationship to his work cannot at this point be specified—the picture extends and enriches motifs and formal devices in Bruegel’s marine images in a manner that makes it appropriate to discuss within the development of his own work. If attributed to Joos de Momper, this fundamental link to Pieter Bruegel’s work remains, for the few comparable stormscapes by de Momper are directly dependent on Jan Brueghel’s seascapes, which in turn rely on the works of Pieter the Elder’’ (71). Ertz also argues for a chain of images reaching back to Pieter Bruegel; he does not include the Vienna picture, in his view a later de Momper from the second decade of the 1600s. He also cites formative works by Jan Brueghel the Elder from the mid-1590s, including the Munich Jonah, and places them earlier in the seastorm sequence than the Vienna work. 45. Gerszi, ‘‘Joos de Momper als Zeichner.’’ For Toeput, see Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 303–8; Koenraad Brosens, ‘‘Besonder in Italien seer begeert,’’ esp.76–77. He is already recorded in 1576 as working for Tintoretto’s atelier in Venice as a landscape specialist, perhaps through an introduction by his own master, Marten de Vos, who had earlier visited Venice. He later moved to Treviso, where he died in 1604. Pozzoserrato also can be characterized as a looser follower of Bruegel landscapes, and he even included such telltale subjects as the Tower of Babel (Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, fig. 450) within his repertoire. He was praised in 1648 by the Italian artist biographer Carlo Ridolfi for his atmospheric and dramatic settings, the same features as de Momper (who is assumed by most scholars to have traveled to Italy in the decade of the 1580s, after his guild membership but before his 1590 marriage and documented apprentices; see Ertz, Josse de Momper, 321–22, 331- 34 on Toeput). Further on influences, see Ertz, 334–36, on Lucas van Valckenborch; 342–45 on Jan Brueghel the Elder; 348–49 on Hans Bol; 350–63 on Coninxloo and Vinckboons. 46. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere; Marlier, Pierre Brueghel le Jeune; Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, BreughelBrueghel, esp. 16–20 for biography; Van den Brink, Brueghel Enterprises.

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47. Ertz’s catalog discusses more than 1,400 pictures with some claim to authorship by Pieter the Younger. 48. De Marchi and Van Miegroet, ‘‘Brueghel in Paris.’’ On the marketing of Flemish art, see the important study by De Marchi and Van Miegroet, ‘‘Pricing Invention.’’ 49. Denuce´, Art Export in the 17th Century; De Marchi and Van Miegroet, ‘‘Novelty and Fashion Circuits.’’ 50. Allart, ‘‘Did Pieter Brueghel the Younger See His Father’s Paintings?’’ 51. Raupp, Bauernsatiren, 254–57 (Balten); 258–64 (van Cleve); Marlier, ‘‘Peeter Balten, copiste ou cre´ateur?’’; Faggin, ‘‘De genreschilder Maarten van Cleef.’’ For Balten (1527–84) and van Cleve (1527– 81), see also Van Bruegel tot Rubens, 172–74, nos. 73–74; 234–35, no. 107; 304, 306. 52. A close comparison of Pieter the Younger’s copies after Pieter the Elder’s 1566 Census at Bethlehem (Brussels) is Currie, ‘‘Demystifying the Process’’; also Duckwitz,’’ The Devil Is in the Detail’’; see Van den Brink, Bruegel Enterprises in general for valuable attention to the process of copying as well as the individual works by Pieter the Younger. It is interesting to note that the dimensions of Pieter the Younger’s thirteen known copies of the Census, some dated from the period 1604–10, are consistent and quite close to the format of the original (4 x 6 Antwerp feet) but not scrupulously identical. See also a comparative study of another Pieter the Younger copy, Corcoran, The Triumph of Death. 53. Van den Brink, Brueghel Enterprises, 149–59, nos. 14–21. This exhibition was the first to redate the Winterthur painting (Oskar Reinhart collection) from 1567 to 1563. Ertz counts twenty-four authentic and ten doubtful copies by Pieter the Younger after this small composition, whose location is not recorded until 1669 (Jabach Collection, Paris). Thus the source of Pieter the Younger’s copies is also unclear, which is all the more significant as most of the copies omit the falling snow of the original. Once again, most of the copies retain the same basic proportions and size as the original but diverge ever so slightly in exact measurements. 54. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 575–87, 604–30, nos. 682–805, whose dated images range from 1601 to 1625. Also Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 381–84. Ertz considered 123 works, judging 43 as authentic, 52 as questionable, the rest unacceptable. This small image was clearly a continuing ‘‘cash cow’’ for Pieter the Younger. 55. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 390–93, no. 131; Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 945–97. 56. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 537–44, 589–604, nos. 603–81; Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, BreughelBrueghel, 372–80, nos. 120–22. These prints had also been favorite sources of Abel Grimmer panels. 57. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 24–75 for Netherlandish Proverbs; 76–142, for proverbs in various combinations and series; 221–56 for Carnival and Lent, esp. 247–56 for the reduced versions of the theme. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 336–50, nos.103–08. 58. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 76–114. The prints are discussed in Lebeer, Catalogue raisonne´, nos. 65–76. None of these prints mention the name of Bruegel, and their basis in authentic drawings

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has been challenged, but their status must remain open in light of the considerable posthumous interest in producing prints after Bruegel designs, both authentic and more questionable or unintended for prints. 59. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 115–33, nos. 70–96. Goldstein’s dissertation, ‘‘Keeping Up Appearances,’’ deals with this series and related proverbs issues around Bruegel. For Pieter the Younger’s utilization of this Antwerp roundels series, see Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 343–50, 358–63; nos. 104–8, 112–15. 60. Mielke, Pieter Brueghel: Zeichnungen, no. 59; see The Age of Bruegel, 104, no. 30; Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 133–37. Compare the authentic Bagpiper (Washington, National Gallery, Woodner Collection) and its close, high quality copy; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 225–27, nos. 98–99. 61. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 137–50. 62. Bruegel also produced a print with a different composition of The Good Shepherd (1565; engraved by Philips Galle); Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 58, fig. 56. A finer version of the Good Shepherd (Kronacker Collection, Brussels) was accepted as a partial original by Fritz Grossmann and by RobertsJones when it was presented at the 1980 exhibition, Bruegel: une dynastie, 58, no. 6. It is discussed by Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 142–46, who cites the 1616 signed and dated copy by Pieter the Younger now in the Brussels Museum, but demurs from assigning the Kronacker painting to the original design, since it stands close to the image of Christ as well as the position of a sheep thief in the Good Shepherd engraving. In this respect, the necessary self-citation by Pieter the Elder resembles the attribution difficulties concerning the Stockholm Peasant Couple Attacked by Soldiers. 63. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 151–90; Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 353–63, nos. 110–15. 64. Bruegel the Elder designed a print, engraved by Pieter van der Heyden and published posthumously, of The Festival of Fools; Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 251–52, no. 114; see also Moxey, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel and The Feast of Fools,’’ Art Bulletin 64 (1982), 640–46. Another pair of prints of fools, printed by Hendrick Hondius, allegedly after designs by Bruegel (though modern scholars are skeptical of the inventor) also show carnival fools (1642; Lebeer, Catalogue raisonne´, nos. 94–95). Of course a fool also appears at the geometrical center of Carnival and Lent. 65. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 953–62; Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 364–72, nos. 116– 19. The fullest discussion of Bruegel’s own contribution to this pictorial type is Oberhuber, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel und die Radierungsserie.’’ 66. Accepted as authentic in Bruegel: une dynastie, 52, cat. E, with bibliography. This work has often been ascribed to Brueghel the Younger, who is surely the author of a replica in a roundel (rather than an oval), which was auctioned by Christie’s, London, 1982; see Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 366–68, no. 117, there identified as a sick and agonized man rather than the usual understanding of the open mouth as a yawn. The 1640 Rubens inventory describes ‘‘A Yawning Man by the Elder Bruegel’’ (no. 197); see Muller, Rubens, 129, no. 197, as well as nos. 195–96, ‘‘two faces in round by old Bruegel,’’

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and no. 198, ‘‘a face of a Beggar in round, by the same.’’ Moreover, there is also an intaglio, etching and engraving, by Lucas Vorsterman, Rubens’s own reproductive printmaker, which repeats this Brussels composition (or a replica after it) in reverse (Lebeer, Catalogue raisonne´, no. 90), with the inscription ‘‘Pieter Breughel Pinxit.’’ 67. Oberhuber, ‘‘Pieter Bruegel und die Radierungsserie.’’ This etched series, not considered authentic by Bruegel scholars and thus removed from attention, consists of 36 pairs of male and female peasant heads. Issued by Claes Jansz. Visscher (publisher of the Small Landscapes restrikes in 1612), they are related to a series by Adriaen Brouwer, which itself also credits Bruegel as ‘‘inventor’’ in its first state. Oberhuber credits the Duetecum brothers as the etchers and points to close kinship to individual heads in later Bruegel peasant paintings, as if these heads were more conventional workshop tronies, used for compositional details like the head studies by Frans Floris. 68. Van de Velde, Frans Floris, 65–74. In the seventeenth century, Rembrandt is one of the artists most associated with the production of tronies; see van der Veen, ‘‘Faces from Life.’’ 69. Renger, Adriaen Brouwer, esp. 23, 39–44. An edition of 1642 with twelve etchings ascribes these works to Brouwer. 70. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 398–400, no. 135, four extant versions (one dated 1622); Ertz, Pieter Bruegel der Ju¨ngere, 646–58, 709–10. Inventive variations on peasant wedding feasts outdoors also exist: Breughel-Breughel, 401–3, no. 136, which survives in eight small format, authentic versions of small figures arrayed against an open village commons, like the kermis compositions. 71. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 664–98; Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 125–28, no. 20. The numerous paintings extend from two higher quality works of 1607 (Baltimore; Brussels) to 1624 and number over a hundred exemplars, of which Ertz considers 31 unquestionably authentic and another 34 as questionable. One group of the Pieter the Younger works reverses the orientation of the print, suggesting the possibility of a lost drawing, reversed in the printing process. For the print, see Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 248–50, no. 113. 72. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 394–97, nos. 132–34. Also Scheyer, ‘‘The ‘Wedding Dance’.’’ 73. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 121–22, no. 18. Rubens made a drawing (British Museum, London) after one of the lead figures (a father) from this procession: Jaffe´, ‘‘Rubens and Bruegel,’’ 39–40, fig. 10. 74. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Brueghel-Breughel, 398–401, no. 135; Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 646–58, 709–10. See also the inclusion of the same figure group into a wider outdoor village setting, BreughelBreughel, 401–3, no. 136. 75. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 406–7, no. 138. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, nos. 1054– 63, considers ten versions of this composition, extending from 1610 to 1622, to be Pieter the Younger originals, with another ten as questionable.

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76. Muller, Rubens, 120, no. 143, citing the 1640 Rubens inventory, ‘‘A combat of peasants made after a drawing by the old Bruegel.’’ Fig. 65 shows the Vorsterman engraving. The presumed Bruegel the Elder original (drawing?) is assumed to stem from the collection of Jan Brueghel. 77. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 404–5, no. 137; van den Brink, Brueghel Enterprises, 173– 85, no. IV. 78. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 116–22, nos. 16–18. 79. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 122–25, no. 19. For the original compositions, see especially the Madrid pendants of 1623, Peasant Wedding and Country Festival with Dukes, Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Ju¨ngere, 254–57, nos. 73–74. See also another pair of Madrid pendants with the archdukes, Nuptial Procession and Wedding Banquet; Bruegel: une dynastie, 200–201, nos. 136–37. 80. For the chronology of Jan’s career, see Klaus Ertz in Breughel-Brueghel, 21–22. 81. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 206–8, no. 53; Bruegel: une dynastie, 189, no. 122. See also the related work of a village square setting for the holy figures in search of a place at the inn (BreughelBrueghel, 208–10, no. 54). Both works date to around the year 1603 (or 1605), and serve as foundations for the 1609 Village Street with Canal (210–12, no. 55) or the Munich 1612 Village Sunday (213–15, no. 56). 82. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 215–30, nos. 57–63; the last of these, dated 1616, includes a self-portrait. A pair of authentic works, signed and dated by the artist himself, are the two panels in Antwerp (1603) and Indianapolis (1612); see Bruegel: une dynastie, 190, nos. 123–123a (another version in a private collection, Paris); 196–97, nos. 130–31, with two works from the middle teens bearing further self-portraits. 83. Beginning with the image in Rome, Galleria Spada, dated 1607; Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, BreughelBrueghel, 231–35, nos. 64–65. 84. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 235–37, no. 66; also 305–7, no. 94. 85. Bruegel: une dynastie, 188, no. 121. 86. Sutton, The Age of Rubens, 461–65, nos. 82–83. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 188–96, nos. 45–48: the 1604 Vaduz Way to Market copper, no. 45, offers another authentic point of departure. 87. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 132–37, nos. 22–23. For a focused analysis of Jan’s early career relation to the world landscape tradition, see Paulussen, ‘‘Jan Brueghel d. A¨.,’’ 16–48. 88. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 157–58, no. 33. 89. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 159–60, no. 34. 90. Recall, too, that the Lucas van Valckenborch Angler Beside a Woodland Pond is already dated 1590; see Devisscher, ‘‘Die Entstehung der Waldlandschaft,’’ esp. 194–96 for Jan Brueghel. For the early

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Notes to Pages 204–209

drawings by Jan Brueghel, some of them dated, see Gerszi, ‘‘Zur Zeichenkunst Jan Brueghels d. A¨.,’’ 34–35; also 434–37, nos. 150–51, especially the dated 1593 Rotterdam Swamp Landscape. 91. Bruegel: une dynastie, 180–81, nos. 117–12. See Jones, ‘‘Federico Borromeo as a Patron of Landscapes’’; Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana, esp. 76–84. For the general issue of Jan Brueghel’s relationship of landscape to religious content, especially of hermits in retreat, going back to Patinir (see Chapter 3), see Prosperetti, ‘‘Jan Brueghel and Landscape of Devotion.’’ I am most grateful to Dr. Prosperetti for sharing her research with me prior to publication. 92. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 146–48, no. 29; 183–85, no. 43. 93. Jan’s collaborators include Peter Paul Rubens, Joos de Momper, Hendrick van Balen, Sebastian Vrancx, Hendrick de Clerck, and Frans Francken II. 94. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 171–73, no. 39; for another version of this subject, Bruegel: une dynastie, 182, no. 114 (private collection; Figure 9.12). 95. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 174–80, nos. 40–41. Texts vary from Ovid for Juno (Metamorphoses 4.451–56) to Vergil for Aeneas (Aeneid, 6.269–82). 96. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 181–82, no. 42. Compare also the Allegory of Fire (1608; Ambrosiana, Milan, fig. 1) as well as a pair of collaborations with van Balen in Lyons (fig. 2) and Rome (Palazzo Doria-Pamphilij). For the suite of images, usually print cycles, of the Four Elements and related series, see Veldman, ‘‘Seasons, Planets and Temperaments’’; Veldman, ‘‘ ‘Goltzius’ Zintuigen, Seizoenen, Elementen, Planeten.’’ 97. Bowron, ‘‘A Brief History of European Oil Paintings on Copper.’’

Chapter 10. Trickle-Down Genres: The ‘‘Curious’’ Cases of Flowers and Seascapes 1. See the chronology by Klaus Ertz in Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 21–22. 2. For Bosch see Koldeweij, ‘‘Hieronymus Bosch and His City,’’ esp. 39–41; Orenstein, ‘‘The Elusive Life of Pieter Bruegel the Elder,’’ in Drawings and Prints, esp. 8. 3. Van Leeuwen, ‘‘Still-Life Painting in the Netherlands.’’ Analytical surveys of the flower pieces in Flanders and Holland include Segal, Flowers and Nature; Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting; Brenninkmeijerde Rooij, Roots of 17th-Century Flower Painting; Wheelock, From Botany to Bouquets. 4. Cited in Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 115, from Bol, The Bosschaert Dynasty, 17. On the tulip craze see Taylor, 10–15, 62–66; Segal, Flowers and Nature, 43–45; also Segal, Tulips Portrayed; Dash, Tulipomania; Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 350–66; Goldgar, ‘‘Nature as Art.’’ 5. Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 6, plate 2; Segal, Flowers and Nature, 44, 158, no. 10; Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 354, fig. 160. 6. Segal, Tulips Portrayed, 12, fig. 12; Segal, Flowers and Nature, 44–45, fig. 23.

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Notes to Pages 209–212

7. Segal, Flowers and Nature, 43, 152–63, no. 15. The first description and woodcut illustration appeared in Conrad Gesner’s 1561 botanical treatise; a similar publication in the Netherlands was the 1568 herbal by Rembert Dodoens (Segal, 161, no. 13), published in Antwerp by Christopher Plantin; see Cockx-Indestege and de Nave, Christoffel Plantijn, 27–28, 55, 94, no. 27; see also Backer, de Nave, and Imhof, Botany in the Low Countries. 8. Translated by Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, ‘‘Rare Blooms, ‘Fatta tutta del natturel’ by Jan Brueghel I,’’ in Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, Roots of 17th-Century Flower Painting, 47–93, esp. 49–50. Also Jones, ‘‘Federico Borromeo,’’ esp. 268–69. 9. Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, Roots of 17th-Century Flower Painting, 52, citing the cycle by Crispijn de Passe the Younger, Hortus Floridus/Den Blom-Hof (Utrecht, 1614). Also pertinent are the two print cycles of perspective views of gardens by Hans Vredeman de Vries, printed in Antwerp by Philips Galle (1583; ca. 1587); see Wheelock, From Botany to Bouquets, 25–26, figs. 16–17; Segal, Flowers and Nature, 1590– 61, no. 12; Hellerstedt, Gardens of Earthly Delight, no. 31. 10. Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, Roots of 17th-Century Flower Painting, 50; Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, ‘‘Federico Borromeo,’’ 269; she quotes from Borromeo’s writings, Pro suis studiis, and other devotional writings, to discern how the cardinal viewed his still-life paintings, even out of season and especially during the winter, as evidence of nature’s variety as well as God’s goodness. Citing the Jesuit reformer Roberto Bellarmino, De ascensione mentis in Deum per scalas creaturarum (1615) on the greatness of the world as a manifestation of the greatness of God: ‘‘Now in the great world which comprises the sum total of things, there are many most wonderful qualities, but notably these—greatness, multitude, variety, efficiency, and beauty. If we consider all these matters attentively in the light which God gives us, they will have great power to raise our soul so that we shall, as it were, faint in admiration of them’’ (273) 11. For the Vienna painting, see Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 513–16, no. 196. 12. Hairs, Les peintres flamands, 207. 13. Lorenz, Die Maler tom Ring. 14. This prehistory of flower painting is best summarized by Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, Roots of Seventeenth-Century Flower Painting, 11–44; see also Wheelock, From Botany to Bouquets; Segal, Flowers and Nature, 19–23, 49–53; Langemayer and Peters, Stilleben in Europa, esp. Norbert Schneider, ‘‘Vom Klostergarten zur Tulpenmanie’’; Pieper, ‘‘Das Blumenbukett’’; Ingvar Bergstro¨m on Hoefnagel, 555–56. For Hoefnagel’s artistic career, see Kaufmann, The School of Prague, 202–10. For earlier flower painters, such as Lodewijck Jans van den Bosch, documented by Carel van Mander (1604, fol. 217r) as active around the middle of the sixteenth century, see Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 119–21; on Tom Ring, 122–23. 15. Vignau-Wilberg, ‘‘Joris Hoefnagel’s Ta¨tigkeit in Mu¨nchen’’; Vignau-Wilberg, ‘‘Joris Hoefnagel, the Illuminator’’; Hendrix, ‘‘Joris Hoefnagel and the Four Elements’’; Hendrix, ‘‘Natural History Illustration.’’ 16. Vignau-Wilberg, Archetypa; Segal, Flowers and Nature, 154–55, no. 7.

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17. A useful summary is Saunders, Picturing Plants, esp. 17–64 on herbals and florilegia. For a lovely example of Dutch botanical watercolors contemporary with Jan Brueghel, made for pharmacist Theodorus Clutius (now in the Jagellonian Library, Cracow), see Swan, The Clutius Botanical Watercolors. 18. Segal, Flowers and Nature, 163–64, no. 16. Fig. 26 shows a engraving of a bouquet in a flowerpot. See also 165–66, no. 17, another florilegium, Hortus Floridus, by Crispijn de Passe the Elder (1564– 1637) and Younger, with 61 plates and 120 numbered species, first published in Utrecht, 1614. Also see Saunders, Picturing Plants, 48, 52–57; Wheelock, From Botany to Bouquets, 27–29. This collection includes the first published instance of a broken color tulip. For the de Passes, Antwerp e´migre´s in Cologne and then Utrecht, see Veldman, Crispijn de Passe. 19. Swan, The Clutius Botanical Watercolors. 20. Swan, ‘‘Jacques de Gheyn II’’; Swan, The Clutius Botanical Watercolors, 11; van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn, esp. 1: chap. 3; Segal, ‘‘Jacques de Gheyn’s Plants,‘‘ with the portrait drawing of Clusius, to be used as the basis of an engraving for his 1601 book, fig. 12. De Gheyn arrived in Leiden in 1595, and he surely knew the work of Hoefnagel; the bulk of his imagery of plants and insects dates between 1600 and 1604. He sold some of his works to Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. 21. Wheelock, From Botany to Bouquets, 34–38; for Savery, see Segal, Flowers and Nature, 172–74, no. 24; also Segal, ‘‘The Flower Pieces of Roelandt Savery,’’ esp. figs. 19.1–2. Roelandt was the younger brother of Jacob Savery (see Chapter 8), who had studied with Hans Bol and had already moved to Amsterdam from his native Kortrijk/Courtrai and Antwerp. Concerning Jan’s initiation of flower painting and his relationship to other near contemporaries, see Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 128: ‘‘In the burst of activity around 1600 it is not easy to tell which artists led and which followed; indeed, it seems likely that there was a simultaneous and independent development in different towns. The four central protagonists in the new floral still life movement, Jacques de Gheyn, Jan Brueghel, Ambrosius Bosschaert and Roelandt Savery, were born in 1565, 1568, 1573, and 1576 respectively. The first dated flower pieces of each which are currently known to art historians stem from 1600, 1608, 1605 and 1603 respectively, but it can be established that all the artists had painted floral still lifes before these dates.’’ 22. As noted by various scholars (see Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, Roots of 17th-Century Flower Painting, 49, figs. 48–49) in 1605 Jan had made a close copy on copper, in reverse of one of Hoefnagel’s miniatures, as reproduced by Jacob Hoefnagel in the Archetypa, featuring rosebuds, a mouse, caterpillar, and butterfly. His proud note (July 6, 1605) to his patron, Federico Borromeo, declares that ‘‘no one has ever seen the like in oils, painted so painstakingly and in such detail.’’ Vignau-Wilberg, Archetypa, 51, observes that the rosebuds appear, also reversed, in a different image, and she suggests that Jan saw not (only) the Archetypa prints but rather the original pattern book of Joris Hoefnagel in making his image. See also Bedoni, Jan Brueghel in Italia, esp. 103–7. 23. For the Leiden University botanical garden and its wider context, see de Jong, Nature and Art, esp. 122–55, ‘‘Hortus Sanitatis: The Hortus Botanicus and the Hortus Medicus as Scientific Gardens.’’ For Prague, see Hendrix, ‘‘Natural History Illustration.’’ For Italy’s contribution to such interests, especially

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in connection to Jan Brueghel, see Bedoni, Jan Brueghel in Italia; more broadly, Findlen, Possessing Nature, esp. 164–70, 256–59. This phenomenon is also a contribution to the Wunderkammer, collections of nature’s wonders, which flourished in the second half of the sixteenth century; the classic work on this phenomenon is von Schlosser, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern; also Impey and MacGregor, The Origins of Museums, esp. Scheurleer, ‘‘Early Dutch Cabinets of Curiosities’’; Bergvelt and Kistemaker, De wereld binnen handbereik. 24. Jan Brueghel’s 1611 letter to Bianchi, Borromeo’s agent, notes that bouquets were tricky (fastidioso) to paint because the flowers he sought only came into bloom over the limited period from April to August. Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, Roots of 17th-Century Flower Painting, 59. She also notes, 54–55, that to make the flowers more recognizable in his bouquets, the artist used diffuse light without shadow. Jan also noted to Bianchi that his depicted flowers were rare and uncommon, ‘‘which I found not without difficulty in gardens; such flowers are esteemed too highly to have in the home.’’ Quoted by Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 119. 25. Taylor, ‘‘Painters in a Market,’’ in Dutch Flower Painting, 116–93, esp. 124–34, noting that de Gheyn was paid 1,000 guilders by the States General for one of his flower paintings, which was presented to the queen of France, again showing the aristocratic audience for such works. Bosschaert pressed for 240 guilders for a flower basket picture in a lawsuit of 1620, and Willem van Aelst was wealthy enough to buy a lordly home on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. See also Loughman, ‘‘The Market for Netherlandish Still Lifes,’’ esp. 93–94 on prices: ‘‘in general, still-life artists who painted complex compositions in a detailed manner, with tight brushwork and a polished finish, tended to fare better. . . . These artists specialized in elaborate flower pieces, still lifes with hunting equipment and the spoils of the hunt, or ornate laid tables, now called ‘pronkstilleven.’ Prices in excess of 100 guilders are regularly recorded for each of them.’’ 26. In a follow-up letter to Cardinal Borromeo by Jan (August 25, 1606), Jan declares, ‘‘Under the flowers I have painted a jewel with coins, with rare objects from the sea. It is up to your honor to judge whether or not flowers surpass gold and jewels.’’ Quoted by Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, Roots of 17thCentury Flower Painting, 50, 57, who also points to the contemporary Antwerp images of collections, especially by Frans Francken II, which feature costly imported oriental vases as well as sea shells, coins, and prized artworks. On such meticulous collectors’ images in Antwerp, see Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image, with several significant discussions: ‘‘The Birth of Still-Life as an Intertextual Process,’’ 17–29; ‘‘Assemblage,’’ 76–88; ‘‘The Intertextual Machine,’’ 103–47. 27. Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, Roots of 17th-Century Flower Painting, 61–83, noting not only the virtually identical pieces in Cambridge and Prague (figs. 61–62), plus some minor variations, but also repetitions of individual flowers (some derived from botanical treatise illustrations) as well as the repeated use of pictorial types of compositional structures, outlined in her appendix. 28. Jacques de Gheyn II: Drawings, 81–83, nos. 85–86. For Jan Brueghel drawings, see Winner, ‘‘Jeane Brueghel l’Aıˆne´’’; Gerszi, ‘‘Zur Zeichenkunst Jan Brueghels d. A¨.’’ Most of Jan’s surviving drawings relate closely to his landscapes, both in general compositions and in motifs.

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29. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 304–5, 523–24; nos. 93, 200. In a 1621 letter to Borromeo Jan reports that he has been making studies of the animals in the zoo of Archduke and Archduchess Albert and Isabella in Brussels. 30. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 163–67, nos. 36–37; Kolb, Jan Brueghel the Elder. Some of these animals compare closely to prototypes by his colleague, friend, and collaborator Rubens, such as the lions (related to the Daniel in the Lion’s Den, ca. 1615, Washington, D.C.), the leopards (Nymph with Satyrs, Montreal, a copy after a Rubens work sold in 1618 with the Daniel to English ambassador Dudley Carleton), or the frontal white horse with the flowing mane (compare the 1603 Portrait of the Duke of Lerma, Prado). In light of the delegation of some animals to Frans Snyders and other collaborators within the Rubens studio, the possibility should be considered that Jan Brueghel was sometimes the originator, rather than the recipient, of these model-book sketches. See also the (undated but presumably contemporary, ca. 1615) collaboration between Jan Brueghel and Rubens in the image Adam and Eve in Paradise (Mauritshuis, The Hague), for which see Broos, Intimacies and Intrigues, 88–95, no. 8. A monkey with an apple behind Adam and a cat behind Eve both stem from the Vienna oil sketch from life, discussed above. 31. Koreny, Albrecht Du¨rer; also Eisler, Du¨rer’s Animals. For Prague and the court of Ambras, see Hendrix, ‘‘Natural History Illustration’’; Kaufmann, The School of Prague, 74–85; Maselis, Balis, and Marijnissen, De Albums van Anselmus de Boodt; Auer and Irblich, Natur und Kunst. It should also be noted that here, as with the botanical illustrations of the sixteenth century, Conrad Gesner looms large, through his encyclopedic four-volume Historia animalium (1551–58); see Ashworth, ‘‘Remarkable Humans and Singular Beasts.’’ 32. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 170–71, no. 38. 33. Smit, ‘‘The Animal Drawings of Jacques de Gheyn,’’ 31–34, 76–80, nos. 75–83. Hoefnagel’s principal animal studies appear in his Four Elements albums, for which see Hendrix, ‘‘Joris Hoefnagel and the Four Elements.’’ In general, see Balis, ‘‘Facetten van de Vlaamse dierenschilderkunst.’’ 34. Buysschaert, ‘‘Roelant Savery als Tiermaler.’’ Note also the particular genre specialty by Savery of painting individual ‘‘portraits’’ of celebrated stallions from the imperial stables, Mu¨llenmeister, ‘‘Das Stallinterieur als eigensta¨ndiges Genre.’’ 35. In 1624 his daughter Paschasia married painter Hieronymus van Kessel; their son Jan van Kessel (1626–79) was born shortly afterward. Laureyssens, ‘‘Jean van Kessel le Vieux.’’ 36. The fullest analysis of this series is given by Ertz, Jan Brueghel d. A¨. Die Gema¨lde, 328–88; Paulussen, ‘‘Jan Brueghel d. A¨.,’’ 91–154; Mu¨ller-Hofstede, ‘‘ ‘Non saturatur oculus visu’.’’ On the representation of the Four Elements, Four Seasons, Five Senses within still life cycles, see Klemm, ‘‘Weltdeutung— Allegorien und Symbole in Stilleben.’’ 37. In the Prado, Madrid; see Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 296–98, no. 90 (Mauritshuis, The Hague). 38. Mu¨ller-Hofstede, ‘‘ ‘Non saturatur oculus visu’ ’’; Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image, 81–88, 103–47; Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 58–72; Speth-Holterhoff, Les paintres flamands.

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39. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 264–66, no. 72. 40. In the Madrid version the two remaining females are more clearly marked as Vesta (with the fire of her sacred hearth) and Juno for Air, with a bird of paradise accompanied by Jupiter’s eagle. Another, later image of this allegorical combination, produced by Jan in collaboration with Hendrick de Clerck, is also in the Prado, Madrid. Another variant with van Balen is in the Ambrosiana, Milan. 41. Veldman, ‘‘Seasons, Planets, and Temperaments’’; Nordenfalk, ‘‘The Five Senses in Flemish Art’’; Silver, ‘‘Graven Images,’’ esp. 14–16; Kaulbach and Schleier, ‘‘Der Welt Lauf ’’. 42. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel (Flemish ed., Antwerp), 228–33, nos. 73–74. Repeated references to the cycle, still unfinished, continue in letters to Milan until their arrival there in April of 1611, after which the cardinal commissions a second set in 1613, completion of which extended until 1616. Another, final image of Air for the cardinal (today in the Louvre, Paris) dates from 1621. The intact series of Four Elements from Lyons (1607–11) is illustrated as figs. 73/74 c-f. 43. See Parshall, Art and Curiosity, special issue of Word and Image 11 (1995): 327–404, with fundamental articles by Parshall, Christopher Wood, Claudia Swan, Lee Hendrix, and Lorraine Daston, whose additional works have already appeared in these notes and in the general bibliography. As studied etymologically by Wood, ‘‘ ‘Curious Pictures’ and the Art of Description,’’ the term ‘‘curious’’ is from the Latin, curiosus, ‘‘inquiring.’’ See also Daston, ‘‘Curiosity in Early Modern Science.’’ Book-length investigations include Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities; Swann, Curiosities and Texts; plus the fuller study by Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry. 44. Stoichita, ‘‘The Intertextual Machine,’’ in The Self-Aware Image, 104–47, ‘‘Catalogue’’ derives etymologically from the Greek, katalogos, or ‘‘logical list,’’ organizing its items in conceptual relationships. 45. On the organization of collections, see the program organized for the Munich court of Albrecht V by the Flemish scholar and bibliophile Samuel Quiccheberg (1529–67), as discussed by Hajo´s, ‘‘The Concept of an Engraving Collection’’; also Meadow, ‘‘Merchants and Marvels.’’ For the memory theater, see Yates, The Art of Memory; also Bernheimer, ‘‘Theatrum Mundi.’’ 46. For what follows, two essential monographs are foundational: Russell, Visions of the Sea and Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck. Two exhibitions sketch the history of Dutch seventeenth-century marine paintings: Keyes, Mirror of Empire and Giltaij and Kelch, In Praise of Ships. 47. De Groot and Vorstman, Sailing Ships; Bos and de Haan, Het Rijk van Neptunus, esp. 18, no. 6 for de Gheyn II’s engraved Kingdom of Neptune (1587); 48–51, nos. 24a-d, for Collaert. For the Bruegel ship prints, Orenstein, Drawings and Prints, 212–18, nos. 89–94; de Groot and Vorstman, 24–31, nos. 1–5; Silver, ‘‘Capital of Capitalism,’’ 126–30. 48. Russell, Visions of the Sea, 51–61. Master W A was active ca. 1465–85 in Bruges and at the Burgundian court of duke Charles the Rash; he produced nine engravings of different ship types, extremely rare today. De Groot and Vorstman, Sailing Ships, 9, fig. 3. See also Unger, ‘‘Marine Paintings and the History of Shipbuilding,’’ esp. 83: ‘‘Bruegel took the most care of any sixteenth-century artist to repre-

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sent ships accurately.’’ On this issue, see Unger, ‘‘Dutch Ship Design in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’’; Smekens, ‘‘Het Schip bij Pieter Bruegel de Oude.’’ 49. See especially Three Caravels in a Rising Squall with Arion on a Dolphin, ca. 1561–62; Orenstein, Drawings and Prints, 212–13, no. 90. 50. Orenstein, Drawings and Prints, 204–7, no. 85. The publisher was Cornelis van Dalem (ca. 1530/ 35-ca. 1575), also known as a painter in Antwerp; see Franz, Niederla¨ndische Landschaftsmalerei, 222– 28. However, van Dalem is more likely to have been a financial backer than the actual publisher, almost surely Cock as usual, as Drawings and Prints, 206, perceptively notes. A second state of the print from the same year, 1561, gives Cock’s address. For the overall setting and the sixteenth-century naval conflicts, see Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World. 51. Orenstein, Drawings and Prints, 207, notes that reprints from the original plates were produced in Paris in 1601, in Haarlem around 1610, and again in Amsterdam in 1632. Considering the mythological allusions, recall that several of the ships prints after Bruegel also feature mythological narratives of dangerous ventures by sea and air (Arion, Daedalus and Icarus, and Phaeton). 52. De Groot and Vorstman, Sailing Ships, fig. 9, shows an anonymous engraving of 1588, commemorating the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. 53. Grossmann, Bruegel, 194. 54. Russell, Visions of the Sea; Giltaij and Kelch, In Praise of Ships, 79–98, nos. 1–7; Keyes, Mirror of Empire, 191–201, 425–28, nos. 48–52. 55. Russell, Visions of the Sea, 116–37, 137–38 for the second set in Middelburg. These tapestries, woven in Delft by Franc¸ois Spierincx, were sold to King James I in 1616 to decorate the Tower of London; after being transferred to the House of Lords by Oliver Cromwell, they burned in the great fire of the Houses of Parliament in 1834. 56. Russell, Visions of the Sea, 94; this painting is usually discussed, almost as a foil, as a principal precedent for Vermeer’s celebrated View of Delft (Mauritshuis, The Hague). See Montias, Artists and Artisans, 185–88. 57. Keyes, Mirror of Empire, 195–97, no. 50. Russell, Visions of the Sea, 152, notes that the commission probably came from either the fleet commander, Jacob van Neck, or the Amsterdam Oude Compagnie, which underwrote the expedition. 58. Giltaij and Kelch, In Praise of Ships, 86–89, no. 4; this is the largest of all Vroom’s large marine paintings. Compare the later recreation of this scene by Cornelis Claez. van Wieringen, Vroom’s former pupil and townsman; Keyes, Mirror of Empire, 201–3, no. 53. A large multiplate engraving of the same event was produced in 1618 after Adriaen van de Venne; see Giltaij and Kelch, 88–89, fig. 1, and they mention several versions by Adam Willarts (see Keyes, 204–6, no. 54 for one of the Willarts) as well as a total of six additional works besides the Vroom. 59. Keyes, Mirror of Empire, 427, noting that Vroom did make another painting of the same subject for the States General for 1800 guilders. For van Wieringen, see Giltaij and Kelch, In Praise of Ships, 105–12, nos. 9–11.

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Notes to Pages 222–223

60. Bos and de Haan, Het Rijk van Neptunus, 29, no. 13; Keyes, Mirror of Empire, 321–23, no. 122. 61. Bos and de Haan, Het Rijk van Neptunus, 31, no. 14. Keyes, Mirror of Empire, 326–27, no. 124. 62. Keyes, Mirror of Empire, 22–23, 155–76, 419–22, nos. 32–40; Giltaij and Kelch, In Praise of Ships, 17, 48–50, 333–60, nos. 75–83; 411–28, nos. 97–101. 63. Twelve tapestries, woven in Brussels in the workshop of Willem de Pannemaker, 1549–54. Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance, 385–91, 428–34, no. 50; also Horn, Jan Vermeyen. There is also a suite of tapestries, woven in Brussels in 1572, also extant (five pieces) in the Palazzo Doria in Rome, commemorating the Battle of Lepanto. 64. Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 47–83, is fundamental; for the Barendsz image of Jonah, see 77, fig. 44; also 220, n. 49, reference to a lost Pieter Bruegel painting of Jonah, located in the seventeenth century in the Antwerp collection of Pieter Stevens, as well as a distemper painting of ships (cf. the portrait prints) in Rubens’s collection (no. 211). See also Judson, ‘‘Marine Symbols of Salvation’’; Judson, ‘‘Martin de Vos’ Representations.’’ In the later, more erudite era of Jan Brueghel and Rubens, classical tempest scenes could also be utilized (as Jan had used mythologies for his hell scenes); see Rubens’s Shipwreck of Aeneas (Berlin), discussed in Vergara, Rubens and the Poetics of Landscape, 33–43. 65. The original frame of the triptych cites the Gospel sources for the depicted scenes: (center) Matthew 4 and Luke 5; (left) Matthew 17; (right) John 21. Phillipot, ‘‘Le ‘Retable des Poissoniers’ ’’; for the artist, see Huvenne, Pieter Pourbus, esp. 58–59, figs. 29–30. 66. Honig, Painting and the Market, 82–86, figs. 26–30. She stresses the contemporary economic history of Antwerp, featuring expansion and capitalization of the fishing industry: larger boats, longer voyages, and the intermediary industry of wholesalers to finance the expeditions and distribute the catch. Compare the discussion of contemporary economic history and real estate in Antwerp in relation to Aertsen’s 1551 Meat Stall, by Houghton, ‘‘A Topical Reference to Urban Controversy’’; Houghton, ‘‘This Was Tomorrow.’’ 67. For symbolic readings, see Russell, Visions of the Sea, 62–82; on the literary tradition, see Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 25–45. 68. Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 85–86, 158, rebutting the interpretation as the ship of state, offered by Russell, Visions of the Sea, 154, 210–11, yet Goedde acknowledges that the pairing suggests another metaphor, a symbol of the ‘‘whole struggle. . . of the Dutch state. . . in the storms of war with Spain.’’ On pendants in general, see Goedde, 156–61. For the images of the ship as the image of the course of love, see Goedde, 148–49, 169–70, discussing a pair of pendants of letter-writers by Metsu, as well as the more celebrated Vermeer Love Letter (Amsterdam) with its own background painting of a sailing ship; de Jongh, Zinne- en minnebeelden, 52–55. 69. Orenstein, Drawings and Prints, 184–85, nos. 70–71; Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 65–67; also Bergstro¨m, ‘‘The Iconological Origins of Spes.’’ For the association of the allegory of Fortune with stormy seas, see Russell, Visions of the Sea, 71–73; Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 151–54.

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Notes to Pages 223–224

70. Orenstein, Drawings and Prints, 217, fig. 95; Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck 70. 71. See Chapter 9. Recent discussion of this picture begins with the Vienna catalogue, Demus, Klauner, and Schu¨tz, Fla¨mische Malerei, 128–38; also fundamental are Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 70–76; Ertz, Josse de Momper, 366–89. Key early interventions were by Bostro¨m, ‘‘A¨r ‘Stormen’ verkligen en Bruegel?’’; Bostro¨m, ‘‘Joos de Momper’’; Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 70–76. 72. See, however, the large de Momper picture in Stockholm, Shipwreck of the Greek Fleet on the Voyage Home from Troy (Ertz, Josse de Momper, no. 548), which combines mythology with storm scenery, just as Rubens refers to the Aeneas epic in his stormy sea image (see above, note 64). See Cavalli-Bjo¨rkman, Dutch and Flemish Paintings, 1: 88–89, no. 41; Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 223, n. 70; Bostro¨m, ‘‘Joos de Momper.’’ The figures were surely added by another Antwerp painter, though this attribution remains uncertain for the period of the 1590s, when the painting was probably completed. 73. Ertz, Jan Brueghel d.A¨., 470–91. 74. Ertz, Jan Brueghel d.A¨., 108–14, esp. 108, no. 12, fig. 108 (Milan, 1595); 114, no. 23, fig. 115 (Jonah, Munich). Another early work (1595; Girardet Collection, Kettwig) shows the Jonah narrative in what is basically a coastal scene (see below); Ertz, 28–29, no. 13, fig. 5; Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, BreughelBrueghel, 196–98, no. 49. The subject of Christ and the Apostles on the Stormy Sea of Galilee is the subject of Rembrandt’s only marine painting (1633; Gardner Museum, Boston, stolen; Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 81, fig. 48). 75. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 154–56, no. 32. 76. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 148–50, no. 30; Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 75, fig. 40; see also the comparable Shipwreck by Jan the Younger (Vienna), fig. 41, which shows a whale with a barrel, just like the Vienna Storm at Sea, whether that work is by de Momper or some member of the Bruegel family. See Gerszi, ‘‘Pieter Bruegels Einfluss,’’ esp. 162–71. 77. Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 84–87; Russell, Visions of the Sea, 114–15; Gerszi, ‘‘Pieter Bruegels Einfluss,’’ 176–82. 78. For Willarts’s biography, see Keyes, Mirror of Empire, 429–30, noting the prominence in his repertoire of religious subjects, always favored in Catholic-dominated Utrecht: Jonah (Greenwich), Miraculous Draft of Fishes (Bruges), Christ Preaching from the Boat (private collection, Turin; Keyes, Mirror of Empire, 207–9, no. 55), Paul on Malta (Utrecht); also Giltaij and Kelch, In Praise of Ships, 113–24, esp. nos. 12 (Hunting Chamois on the Coast, Hamburg), 15 (Shipwreck on a Stormy Sea, Vaduz). In particular on Willarts and the exotic landscape coast, see Spicer, ‘‘The Genesis of a Pictorial Vocabulary.‘‘ In Flanders, Bonaventura Peeters specialized in images of sailing ships in the unexplored regions of the Americas; see his 1648 Dutch Men-of-War in the West Indies (Hartford), Sutton, The Age of Rubens, 478–80, no. 88. On Porcellis, see Keyes, Mirror of Empire, 14–15, 414–15; Giltaij and Kelch, In Praise of Ships, 145–56. 79. Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 196–205, nos. 49–52; Ertz, Jan Brueghel d. A¨., 28–41; Paulussen, ‘‘Jan Brueghel d. A¨.,’’ 24–56.

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80. Paulussen, ‘‘Jan Brueghel d. A¨.,’’ 31–35, argues that the choice of a ship should be read in its traditional Christian symbolism as the figure of the church and that the presence of a crowd in the harbor can be seen as the haul of Christ as the ‘‘fisher of men’’ (Matthew 4: 18–20). 81. Leopoldine Prosperetti has interpreted this particular interest in Scipio as a humanist idea, connected with the theory of otium, or leisure, and specifically underscored with Jan’s exposure in Rome to the alleged ‘‘Tomb of Scipio,’’ which he drew and then included in the 1600 Munich painting as well as a number of other works; for the Scipio Tomb as a motif in Jan’s work see Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 202, no. 51. See Prosperetti, ‘‘Jan Bruegel and the Landscape of Devotion,’’ chap. III.5. I am most grateful to Dr. Prosperetti for sharing her work and am happy to direct readers to her original interpretation, the first to make Jan’s Scipio themes meaningful. 82. Ertz, Jan Brueghel d.A¨., 169–91; Ertz and Nitze-Ertz, Breughel-Brueghel, 215–30, 520–24, nos. 57–63, 199. 83. For the Dutch riverside landscape, see the outline of landscape conventions by Stechow, Dutch Landscape Painting, 50–64, ‘‘Rivers and Canals.’’ See also for comparisons to both coastal landscapes and to marine paintings, 101–9, ‘‘The Beach,’’ and 110–23, ‘‘The Sea.’’

Chapter 11. Conclusions: Value and Values in the Capital of Capitalism 1. Todorov, ‘‘The Origin of Genres,’’ 161. For the purposes of this concluding chapter, a useful orientation is provided by Beebee, The Ideology of Genre, esp. his ‘‘Theoretical Postlude,’’ 249–83, which argues for the ideological significance and intersubjectivity of genre, particularly as it contributes ‘‘use-value’’ to a cultural system. The Lonnie Mack epigraph also comes from Beebee, a valuable reference I owe to Professor Susan Siegfried. 2. Surveys of these two distinct early landscape traditions have been provided by Gibson, Mirror of the Earth; Gibson, Pleasant Places. For Rubens, see Vergara, Rubens and the Poetics of Landscape; Brown, Rubens’s Landscapes. 3. Van Leeuwen, ‘‘Still-Life Painting in the Netherlands’’; Chong, ‘‘Contained under the Name of StillLife: The Associations of Still-Life Painting,’’ in Chong and Kloek, Still-Life Paintings, 11–37. For the two more elite categories, see Sullivan, The Dutch Gamepiece; Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting. 4. The repetition of forms and formulas occurs not only in the multiple images of prints, but also in the replicas and copies of a painting workshop, such as the landscapes of Patinir and Herri met de Bles; see Kolb, ‘‘Varieties of Repetition’’; on met de Bles, see Chapter 3, nn. 32–34, esp. the publications by Luc Serck and Toussaint, Autour de Henri Bles. For the notion of genres in relation to the category of ‘‘genre,’’ see Stechow and Comer, ‘‘The History of the Term ‘Genre’,’’ citing the Diderot quotation that serves as one epigraph of this chapter. 5. Keith Moxey, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Peasants, Warriors, and Wives, 1–9, raises the issue of semiotics in relation to problems of interpretation while advancing an argument about the status of an image as an ideological construct (‘‘ideology is defined as cultural semiotics’’), following Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and

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Ideological State Apparatuses.‘‘ For a less politicized concept of ‘‘mode,’’ defined largely as ‘‘strength relative to the world,’’ see Alpers, ‘‘Mode and Genre,’’in What Is Pastoral? 44–78. This idea of mode derives in turn from the structural theory of literature by Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 33–67. Both scholars—Moxey and Alpers—have been very important to this book. See the related process of relational analysis offered by the classic study of Burke, A Grammar of Motives, which utilizes a paradigmatic ‘‘representative anecdote’’ to define representations of reality. 6. Guillen, Literature as System, esp. 107–34 for the relationship between form and content in genres; Colie, The Resources of Kind, esp. 1–31; Fowler, Kinds of Literature, esp. 37–74. 7. Alpers, What Is Pastoral? esp. 9–43; Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology; Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet; Poggioli, The Oaten Flute; Tayler, Nature and Art; Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry. Related useful studies on periods later than the sixteenth century include Williams, The Country and the City; Marx, The Machine in the Garden. For a fine survey of the pictorial mode of pastoral since the Renaissance, see Cafritz, Gowing, and Rosand, Places of Delight. 8. For the wider artistic setting of these pictures, see Freedberg, ‘‘Art and Iconoclasm‘‘; see also Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation. 9. Honig, Painting and the Market; Joachim Beuckelaer, 124–30, nos. 8–11, with large color plates. 10. Popitz, ‘‘Die Darstellung der vier Elemente’’; Veldman, ‘‘Goltzius’ Zintuigen.’’ For other graphic cycles of market and kitchen scenes within Four Elements structures, see Joachim Beuckelaer, nos. 73–84 (Adriaen Collaert, Crispijn de Passe the Elder, Jacques de Gheyn II). Frequently the Four Elements are associated with the Four Humors of the human body, with warm/moist Air associated with blood and the sanguine humor. 11. Falkenburg, ‘‘Iconographical Connections.’’ On the importance of careful visual discernment of background scenes and spiritually meaningful details, see above. 12. Honig, ‘‘Desire and Domestic Economy’’; de Jongh, ‘‘Erotica in vogelperspectief,’’ trans. ‘‘A Bird’sEye View of Erotica.’’ For related sexual innuendoes in the Vegetable Market scenes of Beuckelaer, see Kaveler, ‘‘Erotische elementen’’; Wuyts, ‘‘Joachim Beuckelaers Groentemarkt.’’ 13. Aertsen’s Meat Stall (1551; various versions; Figure 5.1) had already included in its background an apocryphal scene of the Holy Family dispensing alms behind the image of overflowing edible flesh, the foodstuff of carnival self-indulgence. In similar fashion, Beuckelaer had isolated some religious subjects, such as the Flight into Egypt (1563; Muse´es Royaux, Brussels,), with the Holy Family crossing a river on a ferry amidst marketing peasants and before a religious procession on the opposite bank, or his Miraculous Draft of Fishes (1563; Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Figure 5.5), with a foreground scene of the unloading of the wares on the shore. See above, Chapter 5. 14. Moxey, ‘‘Erasmus and the Iconography,’’ citing Erasmus’s Institution of Christian Matrimony (1526). See also the modern general studies of Erasmus and the visual arts, Giese, ‘‘Erasmus and the Fine Arts’’; Marlier, Erasme et la peinture flamande; Panofsky, ‘‘Erasmus and the Visual Arts,’’ esp. 211, n.30; Moxey,

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‘‘Pieter Aertsen.’’ On the Mary and Martha tradition from medieval and early modern texts and images, see Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought. 15. Of course there is an entire library of books on Erasmus, but a lasting, useful assessment of his role in sixteenth-century religion is van Gelder, The Two Reformations. 16. The importance of the fair or marketplace as crossroads is advanced by Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 27–43, discussing interactions between high/low, center/periphery, inside/outside, local/stranger, commerce/festivity in a variety of domains: psychic, bodily, geographic, and social. 17. Erasmus, The Colloquies; Thompson, Under Pretext of Praise, 87–151. 18. Thompson, Under Pretext of Praise, 130–32; see also Rummel, Erasmus on Women, esp. his treatise for Mary of Hungary, The Christian Widow (1529), 219, for the quotation about Mary and Martha. 19. On Bruegel and Coornhert, see Stridbeck, Bruegelstudien. Coornhert was a sometime professional engraver who produced prints, including religious allegories, designed by Haarlem artists, first Maarten van Heemskerck and later Hendrick Goltzius; see Veldman, Maarten van Heemskerck, 55–93; Veldman, De Wereld tussen Goed. The standard biography is Bonger, Leven en werk van Dirk Volckertsz Coornhert. See also Bonger, Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, esp. Veldman, ‘‘Coornhert en de prentkunst.’’ A recent, more focused study in English about Coornhert, toleration, and religious freedom is Voogt, Constraint on Trial, which offers a useful brief biography of life and times. 20. Honig, Painting and the Market, 8–9. 21. Veldman, De Wereld tussen Goed, 13, n. 14, citing Coornhert’s verse Myt ende lyd, dit leert een Heyden (‘‘Forebearance and suffering, this is the teaching of a heathen’’ [Epictetus]) from Coornert’s Recht ghebruyck en misbruyck van tydtlijcke have (‘‘Right Use and Misuse of Temporal Goods’’). 22. Veldman, ‘‘Leerzame dwaasheid’’; Veldman, De Wereld tussen Goed, 56–57, no. 3. 23. Coornhert,. Zedekunst dat is wellevenskunste, ed. Becker. 24. Veldman, De Wereld tussen Goed, 54–55, no. 2. Other temptations include a moneybags (‘‘Divitiae,’’ wealth) and wineglass with meat pie (‘‘Gula,’’ gluttony). 25. Veldman, ‘‘Images of Labor and Diligence.’’ 26. On the three estates in medieval social thought, see Duby; The Three Orders; Constable, Three Studies, 249–360. On the Land of Cockaigne, see Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne; Bruegel’s image is specifically discussed by Louis Lebeer, ‘‘Le Pays de Cocagne’’; Frank, ‘‘An Interpretation of Land of Cockaigne.’’ For the posthumous print, see Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel, 255–57, no. 116. On the use of comic inversion as a technique to preach positive virtues, see the seventeenth-century example of a Bruegel descendant, Jan Steen, particularly the ‘‘Jan Steen household,’’ as discussed by Westermann, ‘‘Steen’s Comic Fictions,’’ esp. 60–62. 27. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel, 255–57, no. 116.

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28. For this larger argument, related to Paul Alpers’s concept of literary ‘‘mode’’ (n. 4 above), see Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de andere, discussing the conceptual figures, respectively of wild men, fools, peasants, and beggars. 29. Veldman, Dutch Humanism, 85–90, citing Coornhert’s Wellevenkunst, III, 3. 19: ‘‘Is it not folly to forsake the certain and best good and to choose uncertain base money?’’; Veldman, ‘‘Images of Labor,’’ 252–53. 30. Most recently Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, 90–94. 31. Vandenbroeck, ‘‘Verbeeck’s Peasant Weddings,’’ esp. 109–16 for the Grobian, with earlier references, notably Miedema, ‘‘Feestende boeren—lachende dorpers.’’ Of course, many earlier scholars have argued that Bruegel’s own images of peasants were intended as images of vice, but now this interpretation is quite controversial, challenged chiefly by Svetlana Alpers and Margaret Deutsch Carroll. For other images, however, particularly the Verbeeks, discussed by Vandenbroeck, or print images with inscriptions, the negative interpretations of peasants are clearly justified. 32. Elias, The Civilizing Process; Jeanneret, A Feast of Words; Arie`s and Duby, A History of Private Life, vol. 3, Passions of the Renaissance; Bremmer and Roodenburg, A Cultural History of Gesture; Muir, ‘‘Manners and the Upper Body.’’ 33. Alternatively, this kind of transgressive behavior can be taken in a positive, literally countercultural light, as in the analysis by Stallybrass and White as well as the celebrated (anti- Stalinist) study, Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. On the subject of behavior in inns, Erasmus also penned a Book of Inns (Diversoria, 1523), a work that itemized the varied habits and body functions of guests by nationality, gender, age, and class in a German hostelry. Then (as now) he regarded civility as marked by moderation and cleanliness. 34. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel, 166–72, nos. 58–61. Recently, Rothstein, ‘‘The Problem with Looking at Pieter Bruegel’s Elck,’’ discusses how little the act of looking enables a viewer really to see knowledgeably. On the Alchemist, whose scruffy physical type so closely resembles the painter in Bruegel’s drawing The Painter and the Connoisseur (Figure 7.18), see Winner, ‘‘Zu Bruegels ‘Alchimist,’ ’’; Orenstein, 170– 73, no. 60–61. 35. For the roots of this process of making a picture into a puzzle to be discerned by the viewer, see Silver, ‘‘God in the Details,’’ as well as the numerous articles by Reindert Falkbenburg cited therein, to which should be added Falkenburg, ‘‘Iconographical Connections.’’ 36. This is a point argued more narrowly for Aertsen’s 1551 Meat Stall by Houghton, ‘‘This Was Tomorrow,’’ esp. 290–94, which arrived just as this ms. was going to press. 37. Meadow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs. On the wider phenomenon, see Natalie Davis, ‘‘Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors.’’

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Notes to Pages 232–233

38. A handy primer is Mirzoeff, Visual Culture Reader; also Mirzoeff, Introduction to Visual Culture. The phrase ‘‘a moral compass’’ derives from a fine recent exhibition of that name about seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, organized by Luttikhuizen, A Moral Compass. 39. Todorov, ‘‘Origins of Genres,’’ 164; also Todorov, Genres in Discourse, 19. This ideological purpose of genres in culture provides the link between ideology in the poststructuralist Marxism of Althusser or Raymond Williams and the current, more theorized consideration of genre as a formal and/or thematic phenomenon of differentiation. For this view as well as emphasis on visual rhetoric and the variability of interpretation, see Moxey, The Practice of Persuasion; also Beebee, Ideology of Genre. 40. Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck in Dutch and Flemish Art, esp. 204–6, concluding with an interpretive viewpoint that could serve equally well here: ‘‘The formal integration of tempest images—in effect, the imposition of pictorial order on natural discord—clearly indicates that these paintings result from acts of the imagination rather than from a copying of appearances. . . . This might as aptly be called a rhetorical naturalism . . . in emphasizing the opposition of the elements and enhances their distinctive characteristics and their eternal conflict. And it is rhetorical in selecting from nature incidents and forms that give the images a universal reference. . . . For all their verisimilitude, these pictures are types, formed by conventions that permit the recognition of patterns of meaning. Ultimately all interpretations of these paintings must be based on the recognition of this conventionalized naturalism, in which the compelling drama and comprehensiveness and formal integration make these works images of a meaningful cosmos.’’ For a wider discussion of the importance of convention in Dutch landscapes, see also Goedde, ‘‘Naturalism as Convention.’’ 41. Orenstein, Pieter Bruegel, 212–18, nos. 89–94; Silver, ‘‘Capital of Capitalism,’’ 126–30. 42. Such imagery of rocky foreign coasts became a subgenre of seascapes, carrying real resonance in the era of Dutch overseas expansion in the seventeenth century. See works by artists such as Adam Willaerts, Simon de Vlieger, and Bonaventura Peeters, Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, esp. 171–85, figs. 50, 56–58, 62, 71–75, 79–80, 101–2, 128–36, 155, 161–62; Spicer, ‘‘The Genesis of a Pictorial Vocabulary.’’ 43. Goedde, Tempest and Shipwreck, 31–35, 193–96, even adduces references to the ‘‘love and strife’’ of the Four Elements in such paintings as the sources of weather phenomena. See also Vergara, Rubens and the Poetics of Landscape, 48–55. 44. On rederijkers and Antwerp art, with references, see Silver, The Paintings of Quinten Massys, 144–60; Gibson, ‘‘Artists and Rederijkers in the Age of Bruegel’’; more generally Koopmans, Meadow, Meerhoff, and Spies, Rhetoric-Rhe´toriqueurs-Rederijkers.

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INDEX Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Ackerman, James, 13 Aertsen, Pieter, xiv; hybrid images of foodstuffs and religious scenes, 87–92, 88, 89, 91, 93– 95, 232; nonreligious works with foodstuffs, 95–98, 96, 98; peasants and peasant celebrations, 5, 103–7, 104, 105, 106. See also kitchens and markets of Aertsen and Beuckelaer Aertsen, Pieter, works: Christ and the Adulterous Woman (ca. 1557), 90–91, 91; Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha (1552), 89, 89–90, 267 n.8; Christ in the Home of Mary and Martha (1553), 90, 267 n.10; Cook (1559), 95– 97, 96, 106, 269 n.26; Egg Dance (1552), 5, 106, 106, 272 nn.8–9; Four Peasants with Market Goods (1562), 97; Interior with Pancake Eaters (1560), 106; The Meat Stall (1551), 39, 87–89, 88, 91, 94–95, 103, 269 n.25, 312 n.13; Peasant Company (1556), 5, 105, 105–6; Peasant in a Niche (1561), 97; Peasant with Market Goods (1560s), 97; Produce Seller (1567), 97, 98; Return from the Procession (ca. 1550), 106–7, 269 n.25; Two Women Cooking (1562), 269 n.26; Village Festival (1550), 5, 103–4, 104 Agricola, Georgius, De re metallica (1556), 38 Albert, Archduke, 209, 211, 306 n.29 Alberti, Leon Battista, xv, 235 n.6 Aldegrever, Heinrich, 36 Alpers, Paul, 227 Alpers, Svetlana, 117–18, 170–71, 274 n.41, 314 n.31 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 27 Altman, Rick, 8, 235 n.1, 238 n.34, 239 n.43 animal studies, 213–18; Jan Brueghel, 213–16, 214, 215, 306 n.29; collections, 216–18; de Gheyn, 214; flower and animal cycles, 215– 16, 216, 217; Roelandt Savery, 214

‘‘antithetical iconography,’’ 252 n.41 Antwerp, sixteenth-century, 16–25; burgeoning urbanism and capitalism, 9–10, 22–23; contemporary impressions, 20–21; financial system and commerce, 16–17; marketplacecountryside relationship, 21–22, 24–25, 244 n.46, 245 n.48; merchants, 20; open art market, 17–19, 140; population, 17; self-definition and visual culture, 9–10, 22–25, 232; taverns and brothels (moral corruption), 21; world trade, 16, 241 n.4. See also Antwerp’s open art market; Dutch Revolt; pictorial genres in sixteenth-century Antwerp Antwerp Chambers of Rhetoric, 73 Antwerp Songbook, 245 nn.50–51 Antwerp’s open art market, 17–19, 140, 242 n.10; and Antwerp’s burgeoning urbanism and capitalism, 9–10, 22–23; artistic identity and copyright (‘‘privilege’’), 3–4, 236 n.12, 237 n.16; artistic identity and signature styles, 2–6, 155; artist population and notable artists, 17; the artists’ pand, 17–18, 242 n.10; audience, 6, 7–8; and Bosch’s artistic descendants, 140–59; collaboration by genre specialists, 9; collectors, 3–7, 9, 239 n.37; emergence of landscape genre, xv–xvi, 2, 19, 26–52, 235 n.6; imitators, 3, 4–6, 12; innovations, 2–7; painter’s gallery (schilderspand), 18; printers, 17, 242 n.16; product innovation, 18–19, 186–88; production and consumption, 8, 238 n.33; production and divisions of labor, 18, 42, 46–47; production efficiency, 12–13, 240 n.53; selling practices, 18; specialization, 2; technique changes, 12– 13, 240 nn.53–54. See also Cock, Hieronymus, and ‘‘At the Four Winds’’ shop; pictorial genres in sixteenth-century Antwerp

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Aristotle, xv; Poetics, xv, 158 The Art of Dying Well, 56 ‘‘At the Four Winds.’’ See Cock, Hieronymus, and ‘‘At the Four Winds’’ shop Avercamp, Hendrick, 169 Baldass, Ludwig, 27 Balten, Pieter, 196 Barendsz, Dirck, 222 Barocci, Federico, 18 Beebee, Thomas, 227 beggars, 22, 60–65; and almsgiving, 62–65; attitudes toward, 60–62, 61, 63, 142–43, 261 nn.27–28, 261 n.30, 262 n.38; and blindness, 60, 129, 130, 176, 178; Bosch, 22, 60, 111, 142–43; ‘‘Bosch’’ prints, 60, 61, 142–43; Bruegel, 22, 60, 62–65, 64, 129, 130, 175; cripples, 60, 61, 108, 142–43, 261 nn.27–28; and leprosy, 60; Patinir, 60; and peasants, 111, 128–29, 130; Jacob Savery’s The Blind, 176, 178; Vinckboons and the Bruegel tradition, 175–76 Beham, Barthel, 62, 261 n.30 Beham, Hans Sebald: and Matsys’s Peasants’ Dance (1537), 108, 109; and Matsys’s Wedding Procession, 273 n.20; Large Church Festival (1535), 112, 115 Bellarmino, Roberto, 303 n.10 Bening, Simon, 123 Berlin Sketchbook, 36, 38, 42, 46, 251 n.32 Beuckelaer, Joachim: hybrid images of foodstuffs and religious scenes, 91–95, 97, 227–29; imitators, 99; production methods, 98–99; wealthy patrons, 99, 270 n.40. See also kitchens and markets of Aertsen and Beuckelaer Beuckelaer, Joachim, works: Ecce Homo paintings (1561–1570), 91–94, 92, 97, 99, 232, 268 n.19; Fish Market (1569), 228; Fish Market with Ecce Homo (1570), 97, 99; Flight into Egypt (1563), 232, 269 n.25, 312 n.13; Fowl Market (1570), 228, 229; Kitchen (1570),

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228, 229; Market Scene with Ecce Homo (1561), 92; The Miraculous Draft of Fishes (1563), 94, 94–95, 223, 232, 312 n.13; Produce Seller (1563 and 1564), 97; Vegetable Market (1567), 97, 270 n.34; Vegetable Market (1569), 97, 228; Village Fair (1563), 106–7 Bianchi, Ercole, 209, 305 n.24 Bloemart, Cornelis, 271 n.46 Bol, Hans, 292 n.6; and Bruegel’s peasants, 123; and Bruegel tradition, 162, 169; and ‘‘distress of the peasants,’’ 172; landscapes in Bruegel tradition, 167, 172, 181, 188–89, 189, 195–96, 198; pleasure garden imagery, 180; and Jacob Savery, 162; van Mander on, 292 n.6; winter landscapes, 167, 172, 181, 188–89, 198 Bol, Hans, works: Autumn (1570), 188, 189; The Blind Leading the Blind (1581), 280 n.21; Fall of Icarus (1590), 293 n.7; Landscape with Venus and Adonis (1589), 293 n.6; Tobias cycle (1565), 188; View of the Scheldt, 290 n.55; Winter (1570), 167, 172, 181, 188, 198; Winter Landscape with Skaters, 189 Bolswert, Boe¨thius a`, 179 Borromeo, Cardinal Federico, 303 n.10; Jan Brueghel’s correspondence with, 209, 216, 304 n.22, 305 nn.24, 26, 307 n.42; as patron of Jan Brueghel, 158, 204, 209, 217 Bosch, Hieronymus, xiv; and Antwerp’s burgeoning urbanism and capitalism, 9; and avarice/ usury, 56–58; beggars, 22, 60, 111, 142–43; deathbed scenes, 54–56, 55; diableries, 2–3, 54–56, 136–37; and emergence of artistic identity, 2–3, 4–5; everyday life subjects and moralizing representations, 53–60; inversions, 91, 268 n.18; Latinized signature, 4; and the moralizing shutter, 56–57; patrons, 8–9, 23, 53, 209; peasants, 108, 110–11, 112; theme of moral excess/indulgence, 54, 54–60, 59, 65–67, 66, 69; wanderers, 65–

Index

67, 142, 262 n.40. See also Bosch, imitator; Bosch’s artistic descendants Bosch, Hieronymus, works: Allegory of Luxury (ca. 1485–90), 57, 57–58, 68, 69, 104, 135, 142, 153, 271 n.45; Conjurer, 58, 260 n.18; Death of the Miser (ca. 1485–90), 54–56, 55; Death of the Usurer (National Gallery), 57, 68, 74, 83; Garden of Delights, 283 n.44; Hay Wain Triptych (ca. 1510–16), 58–61, 59, 65, 66, 74, 108, 258 n.87, 260 nn.13–14, 268 n.18; Hay Wain Triptych (Escorial), 58, 260 n.13; Last Judgment Triptych, 137–38, 140– 42, 141, 152, 262 n.40; Peasant Interior (van der Heyden engraving); Seven Deadly Sins, 53–55, 54, 57, 74, 78, 108, 135, 259 n.3; Ship of Fools (Louvre), 57, 281 n.28; St. Anthony Triptych (1577), 134, 135; St. Jerome in Prayer (ca. 1505), 27, 28; St. Martin in a Boat, 142, 143, 152; Wanderer, 65–67, 67, 73, 74, 105, 108; Wanderer, Hay Wain Triptych, 65, 66 Bosch’s imitator(s), works: Beggars and Cripples (ca. 1550–60), 60, 61; The Blind Leading the Blind (Cock engraving), 140, 142, 280 n.21; Blue Ship (Cock engraving), 142, 281n.28; Carnival and Lent, 60; Last Judgment (Cock print), 140–42, 141; Peasant Interior (Cock engraving, 1567), 111, 112; St. Martin in a Boat (Cock engraving), 143, 143 Bosch’s artistic descendants, 4–5, 133–60; and Antwerp art market, 140–59; the attractions of Bosch’s imagery, 142, 147–48, 154–59; and audience demand, 155, 284 n.54; Boschian images and ‘‘recreational terror,’’ 151–52, 157–59; Bruegel and Bruegel family, 133, 278 n.2; Bruegel’s Bosch imitations, 4–5, 143–55, 144, 145, 146, 148, 182; Bruegel’s demons, 147– 49, 279 n.14, 283 n.44; Bruegel’s depiction of good versus evil, 148, 148–49; and Bruegel’s own imitators, 153–55, 182–83; Jan Brueghel’s hell scenes, 158–59, 159, 160, 205, 206, 207; changed meaning of Bosch’s

demons, 135–37, 157–59; Cock’s shop and production of ‘‘Bosch’’ prints, 60, 61, 140– 42, 141, 143, 143–46, 152, 154–55, 157, 280 n.21; collectors of Bosch, 133–34; Huys, 135–40; imitations and Bosch’s marketability, 152; imitators, 4–5, 133–40, 143–55, 157; imitators’ interest in the Bosch forms/ the monsters, 136, 149–50, 152, 157–59; Judgment and Hell scenes, 137, 138, 139, 145, 145; Mandijn, 134–40; moral warnings in Bruegel pictures, 150–51; scholarly neglect of, 133, 278 n.2; and temptation of St. Anthony, 134–35, 135, 136, 137 Bosschaert, Ambrosius, 304 n.21, 305 n.25 Bourse, 17, 140 Brant, Sebastian, Ship of Fools, 20, 62, 261 n.30 Bredero, Gerbrand Adriaensz, 103 Bronzino, Agnolo, 140 Brouwer, Adriaen, 71, 199, 300 n.67 Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, xiv; beggars, 22, 60, 62–65, 129, 175; Bosch imitations, 4–5, 143–55, 144, 145, 146, 148, 182; and Cock’s shop, 4–6, 18, 19, 23, 143–46, 154–55, 282 n.36; demons, 145, 145, 147–49, 279 n.14, 283 n.44; depiction of good versus evil, 148, 148–49; designs reflecting on Antwerp’s capitalism, 9, 23–25, 24, 246 nn.60–61, 247 n.62; designs reflecting on city and country, 24–25, 25; head studies, 199, 300 n.67; landscape formulas, 161–69; mountain landscapes, 162–63, 286 n.5; patrons, 9, 23, 123, 209; peasants, 5, 111–32, 161, 170–73, 230–32; seascapes (‘‘ship portraits’’), 218– 20, 219; seascapes (tempests), 223, 232–33; winter landscapes, 161, 167–69, 173, 189, 288 n.19; and world landscape, 39–52, 162, 188–95. See also Bruegel tradition and his Dutch successors; Bruegel tradition and the Flemish legacy; landscapes, early Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, works: Adoration of the Magi in the Snow (1567), 5, 197–98, 248

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Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, works (continued ) n.70, 288 n.19, 289 n.36, 298 n.53; Alchemist (1558), 23, 231, 246 n.61; Alpine Landscape, 42, 257 n.75; Anger, 147, 148, 149; Arion, 223; Armed Four-Masted Ship Sailing Toward Harbor (1564–65), 218, 219; Bad Shepherd, 199; Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559), 21, 67–68, 68, 88–89, 102, 105, 111, 142, 152, 198, 229, 271 n.45, 283 n.48; Battle of the Moneybags and the Strongboxes, 23; The Beekeepers, 127, 128, 130, 177; The Belgian Wagon, 40; Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1557), 4, 152, 153; Blind Leading the Blind (1568), 22, 48–49, 51, 52, 60, 64, 128–29, 152, 175, 176, 280 n.21; Census at Bethlehem, 5, 49–50, 51, 175, 196, 198, 232, 248 n.70, 253 nn.41, 44, 269 n.25, 288 n.19; Charity (1559), 64, 65; Children’s Games (1560), 113, 115; Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (1565), 90; Conversion of St. Paul (1567), 49, 50, 50, 175, 224, 232, 248 n.69, 253 n.41, 289 n.36; Country Concerns, 40, 42, 255 n.57; Cripples (1568), 62–64, 64, 175, 247 n.65; The Cunning Bird Catcher, 40, 41, 178; The Dark Day (1565), 105, 123, 199, 277 n.61; Everyman (Elck), 23, 100–102, 101, 231; Fall of Icarus, 125– 26, 127, 128, 218, 233, 276 n.61; Fall of the Rebel Angels (Brussels) (St. Michael and the Apocalyptic Dragon), 148, 282 n.33, 283 n.45; The Fat Kitchen (1563), 111–12, 113; The Festival of Fools, 299 n.64; Fortitude (1560), 148, 149, 150; Good Shepherd, 199, 299 n.62; Haymaking, 123; (Goose)Herder/ Standing Shepherd, 199; Hope (1559), 223; Hunters in the Snow, 123, 124, 189; Justice (1559), 122; Kermis at Hoboken (ca. 1559), 112–15, 115, 170, 177, 194; Kermis of St. George (ca. 1559), 112–14, 114, 170, 177, 274 n.31; The Land of Cockaigne (1567), 127, 128, 154, 230; Landscape with Bears (1554),

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43; Landscape with Temptation of Christ, 43, 43, 163; Landscape with the Flight into Egypt (1563), 49; Landscape with the Parable of the Sower (1557), 47, 48, 51, 232; Large Landscapes, 6, 39–42, 113, 172, 178, 195, 202, 254 n.48; Last Judgment, 4, 145, 145, 282 n.33; Mad Meg, 148, 148, 150, 247 n.65; Magpie on the Gallows (1568), 121–23, 122, 198, 275 n.52; Massacre of the Innocents, 5, 172, 178, 248 n.70, 288 n.19, 289 n.35; Merchant Robbed by Monkeys (1562), 23, 41, 247 n.62; The Misanthrope (1568), 51–52, 129–30, 130, 175, 178, 198, 258 nn.86–87, 277 n.72; The Months (1565), 23, 123–24, 124, 128, 192–93, 248 n.69, 277 n.61, 283 n.45; Naval Battle in the Straits of Messina (1561), 219, 308 nn.50–51; Netherlandish Proverbs (1560), 131, 174, 176, 177, 198, 258 n.87; The Painter and the Connoisseur, 155, 156, 183, 246 n.61; Patience (1557), 146, 146–47, 282 n.36; The Peasant and the Bird-Nester (1568), 127–29, 129, 177, 178, 199, 201, 247 n.62; Peasant Couple Attacked by Soldiers (1567), 172, 178, 201, 278 n.73, 289 n.35; Peasant Kermis (ca. 1568), 5, 113, 115–16, 117, 179, 201, 274 n.37; Peasant Wedding Dance (1566), 117–19, 118, 200, 274 n.41; Peasant Wedding Dance (after 1570), 118–20, 119, 170, 200; Peasant Wedding Feast (Vienna), 5, 116, 121, 124, 125, 200; Peasant Woman, 199; Penitent Magdalene, 195; Pilgrims to Emmaus (ca. 1555–56), 40, 41, 257 n.75; Procession to Calvary (1564), 121; The Rabbit Hunt (1560), 41, 172, 255 n.57; Return of the Herd, 123, 124; Rustic Peddlers, 40, 41; Seasons prints, 123, 125, 167, 181, 188; Sermon of St. John the Baptist (1566), 60; Seven Deadly Sins (1558), 4, 146–47, 148, 282 n.33; Seven Virtues, 64, 147; Ships series (1560s), 276 n.61; Skating Before the Gate of St. George (ca. 1568), 167–

Index

69, 173, 288 n.24; Soldiers at Rest, 40, 41, 172; Spring (1565), 123, 167, 181, 291 n.62; St. Jerome in the Desert, 195; Suicide of Saul (1562), 49, 195, 289 n.36, 297 n.42; Summer (1568), 123, 125, 126, 167, 199; Temptation of St. Anthony (1556), 4, 144, 144–45, 255 n.61; Thin Kitchen (1563), 247 n.61; The Thin Kitchen, 111–12; Tower of Babel (1563), 23–24, 25, 49, 50–51, 248 nn.68–69, 258 n.85; Tower of Babel (1568), 23–25, 248 n.68; Tower of Babel (Rotterdam), 49, 50–51, 296 n.35; Triumph of Death (ca. 1562), 49, 150–51, 151, 258 n.83, 283 n.45, 289 n.36; Twelve Flemish Proverbs, 175; Two Monkeys (1562), 23, 24, 247 n.65; View of Naples, 219; View of the River Scheldt near Antwerp (ca. 1559), 223; The Visit to the Peasants, 124–25, 126, 128, 276 nn.60–61; Way to Calvary (1564), 153, 283 n.45; Wedding Procession, 121; Wheat Harvest, 123, 124; Winter Landscape with Skaters (1565), 50, 189; Wooded Landscape with Mills (1552), 167; Wooded Region (ca. 1555–56), 41–42, 42, 43, 46, 163; Yawning Man, 199, 299 n.66 Bruegel, Pieter, the Elder, works after: Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 154; Blind Leading the Blind, 130; Forest Landscape with Wild Animals, 168 Bruegel tradition and his Dutch successors, 161–85; biblical scenes, 165–66, 166, 171, 174; Bol, 162, 167, 169, 182–84, 189; Bruegel imitators, 153–55, 182–83; Bruegel’s landscape formulas, 161–69; Jan Brueghel’s forest landscapes, 164, 166, 169, 202–4, 203, 204; Coninxloo, 162, 164–65, 169, 182–84, 204; differences between Flemish and Dutch landscape traditions, 162, 186–88, 285 n.4; emulation and successors’ reception of Bruegel, 181–85; forest landscapes, 161, 163–66, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 203, 204; Goltzius’s mountain

landscapes, 162, 163, 164; landscape forgeries, 162, 165, 286 n.8; mountain landscapes, 162–63, 163, 164, 165, 286 n.5; naer het leven drawings, 153, 176, 183, 286 n.8; and Patinir’s world landscape tradition, 162, 163; peasant scenes, 161, 170–73, 174–79; product innovation, 186–88; Jacob Savery, 162, 169–70, 182–84; Roelandt Savery, 162, 169, 182–84; successors and transmission, 169–85; Vinckboons, 162, 169, 173–80, 182–83, 184; Vinckboon’s beggars, 175–76; Vinckboon’s peasant scenes, 174–79, 179, 180, 181; Vinckboon’s pleasure garden imagery, 179–80, 183, 184, 184; Vinckboon’s proverbs, 177–78, 180, 181; winter landscapes, 161, 167–69, 172, 173, 174, 189, 288 n.19 Bruegel tradition and the Flemish legacy, 186– 207; Bol’s landscapes, 188–89, 189, 195–96; Jan Brueghel, 161, 186, 196–97, 202–6; Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 161, 186, 196– 202, 205–6; Joos de Momper’s landscapes, 193–96, 195; development of genres and importance of audiences, 206; differences between Flemish and Dutch landscape traditions, 162, 186–88, 285 n.4; Abel Grimmer’s landscapes, 190, 191; Jacob Grimmer’s small landscapes and print cycles, 189–90, 196; process innovation, 188, 190; Rubens, 186, 187, 196; Valckenborch’s landscapes, 190–93, 192, 193, 194, 196, 204; world landscape tradition, 188–95 Brueghel, Jan, xiv; animal studies, 213–16, 214, 215, 306 n.29; Bruegel copies, 3, 49, 196– 97, 202; and Bruegel tradition, 161, 186, 196–97, 202–6; collaborations, 9, 18, 186, 214–15, 306 n.30; and ‘‘distress of the peasants,’’ 172–73; elite patrons, 202, 204–5, 209–11, 217–18, 225, 296 n.39, 303 n.10; flower still lifes, 205, 209–13, 210, 304 n.21; forest landscapes, 164, 166, 169, 202–4; hell

357

Index

Brueghel, Jan, xiv (continued ) scenes, 158–59, 159, 160, 205, 206, 207; original country/village scenes, 202; participation in elite intellectual milieu, 204–5, 217–18; peasant scenes, 202, 203; seascapes, 218, 222, 223–25; wilderness scenes, 202–4, 204 Brueghel, Jan, works: Adam and Eve in Paradise, 306 n.30; Aeneas in the Underworld, 205, 207; Aeneas in the Underworld (1600), 158, 160, 283 n.44; Air (1611), 216, 307 n.42; Air (1621), 307 n.42; Air (before 1608), 216; Allegory of Sight and Smell (ca. 1618), 214–15, 216; Animal Study (Dogs) (ca. 1616), 214; The Blind Leading the Blind, 49; Christ Preaching at the Sea of Galilee (1598), 224, 311 n.80; Coastal Landscape with Jonah (1595), 224; Continence of Scipio (1600), 225, 311 n.81; Dance on the Route, 202; Departure of Paul for Caesarea (1596), 224; Earth (1610), 216; The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark (1613, 1615), 213, 215, 306 n.30; Fire (1607), 216; Fire (1608), 216; Fishmarket on a Riverbank (1605), 225; Fishmarket with Self-Portrait (1603), 225; Five Senses series (1617–18), 214–15; Flight into Egypt (1595), 204; Flowers in a Wooden Vase, 211; Flower Still Life in Blue Vase (1608), 209, 210; Forge of the Vulcan (160(6)), 205; Four Elements series, 205, 206, 214, 215–16, 217, 307 n.40, 307 n.42; The Garden of Eden (1594), 213; Harbor Scene with Christ Preaching from a Boat (1597), 224; Hearing, 215; Jonah, 223; Juno in the Underworld, 205; Landscape with Windmill, 202, 203; Lot and His Daughters Before the Burning Sodom, 205; Metamorphoses, 158; Noah (1601), 223; Orpheus in the Underworld (1594), 205; Peasant Festivity (1623), 205; Peasant Wedding Dance, 202; Return from the Hunt, 202; River Landscape with Resting Travelers (1594), 202; Sacrifice of Isaac (1599),

358

204; Shipwreck with Castaways (1595), 224; Sight, 215; Smell, 214; Stormy Seascape with Christ and the Apostles (1595), 223; Swamp Landscape with Angler, 164, 169; Taste, 214–15; Temptation of Christ (1595), 163, 166; Temptation of St. Anthony (1594), 205, 206; Temptation of St. Anthony (ca. 1603–4), 158, 159; Village Entryway with Windmill, 202; The Visit to the Peasants, 124–25, 126, 202, 276 n.60; The Wedding Procession, 200, 202; Wooded River Valley with Pathway (ca. 1602), 202–4, 204; Woodland Road with Travelers (1607), 203 Brueghel, Jan, the Younger: and flower paintings, 209, 211; Four Elements series, 216; and Joos de Momper, 194, 296 n.37 Brueghel, Pieter, the Younger, xiv; biography, 196; Bruegel copies/imitations, 3, 4, 154, 183, 186, 188, 196–99, 197, 198, 298 nn.52–53; and Bruegel tradition, 161, 186, 196–202, 205–6; head studies, 199, 299 n.66, 300 n.67; peasant scenes, 121, 198– 202, 200, 201; peasant weddings, 121, 200, 200; proverbs, 198–99; roundels, 199; and standardized workshop production, 197, 205 Brueghel, Pieter, the Younger, works: Arrow Maker, 199; Bad Shepherd, 199; Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 198; The Blind Leading the Blind, 198; Bread Eater, 199; Census at Bethlehem, 196–97, 197, 298 n.52; Charity, 154; Gift of a Mirror, 199; Good Shepherd, 199, 299 n.62; (Goose)Herder/Standing Shepherd, 199; Magpie on the Gallows, 198; Man Shoved into the Pig Sty, 199; The Misanthrope, 198; Netherlandish Proverbs, 198; Peasant and the Bird-Nester, 199; Peasants’ Quarrel, 200–201; Peasant Wedding, 199–200; Summer, 198, 199; Triumph of Death, 150; The Village Lawyer, 201, 201–2, 205; Wedding Dance in the Open Air, 200, 200; The Wedding Procession, 200; Winter, 167, 198; Winter Landscape with

Index

Skaters, 154, 198, 199, 298 n.54; Yawning Man, 199, 299 n.66 Brunswick Monogrammist, 268 n.17 Buijnsters-Smets, Leotine, 265 n.69 ‘‘cabinets of curiosity,’’ 216–17 Campagnola, Domenico, 44 Camphuyzen, Dirck Raphaelsz, 5 Campin, Robert, Entombment, 60 Carnival and Lenten activities, 67–69; Aertsen, 88–89, 97, 105–6; Bosch, 69; Bruegel, 67– 68, 88–89, 102 Carroll, Margaret Deutsch, 314 n.31 Carroll, Noel, 157 Charles V, Emperor, 62, 222 Chong, Alan, 252 n.41 Christ at the Home of Mary and Martha: Aertsen, 89, 89–90, 95; Beuckelaer, 228, 229; Bruegel’s Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 229; Erasmus of Rotterdam and, 228–29 Cicero, 87 Civitates orbis terrarum (Braun and Hogenberg) (1572–98), 191 cladistics, 14, 241 n.59 Claesz., Cornelis, 222 Clusius, Carolus, 209, 212 Clutius, Theodorus, 212 Cock, Hieronymus: and ‘‘At the Four Winds’’ shop, 1, 4–6, 17, 140; Bol’s landscapes, 188, 293 n.6; ‘‘Bosch’’ prints, 60, 61, 140–46, 141, 143, 152, 154–55, 157, 280 n.21; Bosch’s peasants, 110–11, 112; brand-name recognition and prints, 4–5, 6; Bruegel designs/collaborations, 4–6, 18, 19, 23, 43, 43–44, 111, 163; Bruegel imitations, sales of, 154–55; and Bruegel’s Boschian career, 143–46, 152, 154–55, 282 n.36; Bruegel’s Large Landscapes series, 6, 39–42, 113, 172; Bruegel’s peasants, 111, 113, 123; Bruegel’s seascapes, 218; Gassel’s landscapes, 36, 40; landscapes as staple of early publishing, 6,

19; Matthys Cock’s landscapes, 44, 44–45; production and divisions of labor, 18, 19, 40; Small Landscapes series, 6, 42, 45–47, 184– 85, 188, 190 Cock, Matthys, 6, 19, 44–45; dates of works attributed to, 44, 255 n.62; and Jacob Grimmer, 190 Cock, Matthys, works: Flight into Egypt (1543), 45; Landscapes with Biblical and Mythological Scenes (1558), 6, 45; Landscape with Cephalus and Procris (1544), 44, 45; Landscape with Hero and Leander, 45; Landscape with Mercury Holding the Head of Argus (1558), 45, 46; Landscape with Rest on the Flight, 44, 44; Landscape with St. Christopher, 45; Sacrifice of Isaac (1551), 45; St. Jerome (1541), 44; Temptation of St. Anthony, 44 Collaert, Adriaen, 190; seascapes, 218; Florilegium, 212 collectors: and Bosch tradition, 133–34; early print collecting in sixteenth-century Antwerp, 3–7, 9, 239 n.37; and Vroom’s ship portraits, 221–22 Colton, Charles Caleb, 133 Coninxloo, Gillis van: and Bruegel tradition, 162, 164–65, 169, 204; forest landscapes, 164– 65, 170, 171, 204; and Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 196; and Vinckboons, 173–75 Coninxloo, Gillis van, works: Christ and the Woman with an Issue of Blood, 165, 166; The Discovery of Moses (1601), 165, 171; Elisha and the Children of Bethel (1602), 165; Jacob and Esau, 165; The Judgment of Paris (1600), 166; The Prophet Hosea Praying, 165; Samson Fighting with the Lion (1603), 165; The Way to Emmaus, 165 Coornhert, Dirck Volkertsz, 229–30, 313 n.19; Allegory of Hope for Gain (1550), 229; Allegory of Human Ambition (1549), 229; Allegory of the Unbridled World (1550), 229; Allegory of the Vanity of Human Passions / Democritus

359

Index

Coornhert, Dirck Volkertsz (continued) and Heraclitus (1557), 229–30; Comedy of the Rich Man (1550 play), 230; Good Samaritan (1549), 229; Lazarus and the Rich Man (1551), 229; The Merchant (1580 treatise), 230; Prodigal Son, 229; Unmerciful Servant (1549), 229; Zedekunst dat is Wellevenkunst (1586), 230 Copper Monday, 62–64, 68 Cort, Cornelis, 18, 47, 257 n.74 Corwin, Nancy A., 278 n.2 Crul, Cornelis, Heynken de Luyere, 20, 21 Currie, Christina, 197 David, Gerard, 32 da Vinci, Leonardo, xv, 75 de Bles, Herri met, 3, 19, 36–39, 246 n.60; early landscapes, 36–39, 251 n.33; signature and reputation, 36–37 de Bles workshop landscapes: Landscape with John the Baptist (ca. 1540), 47; Landscape with Mining Scenes, 38–39, 39, 253 n.42; Preaching of John the Baptist, 38; Road to Calvary theme, 37, 38; Sacrifice of Isaac (Cincinnati), 37; Sermon of John the Baptist (Cleveland), 252 n.41 de Bruyn, Nicolaes: Coninxloo engravings, 164– 65, 171, 174; Vinckboons engravings, 174, 175, 183, 184 de Clerck, Hendrick, 307 n.40 de Gheyn, Jacques, II: animal drawing studies, 214; flower paintings, 212, 213, 304 nn.20– 21, 305 n.25; seascapes, 218 de Gheyn, Jacques, II, works: Kingdom of Neptune (1587), 218; Rose Sprig, 213; Studies of an Old Woman, Two Vines, and a Gourd, 213 de Heere, Lucas, 5 de Hollanda, Francisco, 7 de Jode, Gerard, 188 del Sarto, Andrea, 4, 45 de Maistre, Joseph, 226

360

de Momper, Bartholomeus, 112, 120, 140, 170, 177, 193 de Momper, Joos: and Bruegel landscape tradition, 193–95, 195, 196; and Jan Brueghel, 194, 195; collaborations, 194, 195, 296 n.37; tempest seascapes, 195, 223, 297 n.44; and value to collectors, 194, 296 n.39; wealthy patrons, 194 de Momper, Joos: Mountain Landscape (ca. 1615– 25), 193, 195; Storm at Sea, 195, 223, 297 n.44 de Vos, Marten, 204, 216, 297 n.45 de Weert, Adriaan, 230 d’Hondecoeter, Gillis, 173 Diderot, Denis, 226 ‘‘distress of the peasantry’’ (boerenverdriet), 171– 73, 176, 178–79, 278 n.73 Dodoens, Rembert, 212, 303 n.7 Doetecum brothers (Joannes and Lucas): Bruegel designs/etchings, 40, 41, 42, 114, 254 n.50, 274 n.31, 300 n.67; at Cock’s shop, 40, 254 n.47; Gassel productions, 36, 37, 40; head studies, 300 n.67 Dou, Gerrit, Quack (1652), 58 Du¨rer, Albrecht: animal studies, 213–14; artistic identity and monogramming, 3–4, 36, 237 n.16; imitators, 36; as notable artist in early Antwerp market, 17; on Patinir’s landscape painting, 2, 19, 27, 30; peasants, 107, 107–8; St. Christopher studies, 30 Du¨rer, Albrecht, works: The Bagpiper (1514), 107, 107; Cook and His Wife (ca. 1496), 107; Madonna with a Multitude of Animals (1503), 214; Peasants Dancing (1514), 107, 107; Three Peasants in Conversation (ca. 1497), 107 Dutch East India Company (VOC), 221, 222 Dutch Revolt (1568–1648), 17, 122, 227; Battle of Rammekens and Dutch naval victory, 220; and emigration of Flemish artists into Holland, 161–62, 171, 190–91; Spanish Fury (1576), 17, 100

Index

Eighty Years’ War. See Dutch Revolt Elias, Norbert, 231 Eliot, T. S., 208 Ellenius, Alan, 295 n.28, 295 n.31 Emmens, Jan, 89 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 81, 103, 228–29; and emergence of civility, 231, 314 n.33; Adages, 21, 103; Antibarbarorum Liber (1493/95), 231; Book of Inns, 314 n.33; The Christian Widow (1529), 229; Colloquies (1518), 229, 231; Enchiridion militis Christiani, 228; Institution of Christian Marriage (1526), 228; Manners for Children, 231; Praise of Folly, 20, 95 Errera Sketchbook, 36 Ertz, Klaus: and Bruegel copies by Pieter the Younger, 197–98, 298 nn.53–54, 299 n.62; and Jan Brueghel’s works, 223, 276 n.60; and de Momper, 296 n.39, 297 n.44 Everaert, Cornelis, The Coin of Varying Value, 20 Ewing, Dan, 140 Falkenburg, Reindert: on Aertsen, 89, 95; on de Bles’s world landscapes, 252 n.38, 252 n.41; on forest landscapes in Bruegel tradition, 166; on Patinir’s world landscapes, 31–32 Fe´libien, Andre´, xv films: and analogies to rise of pictorial genres, 26; artistic identity and signature imagery in, xiv–xv; genre theory and film genres, 8, 11, 238 n.34, 239 n.43; horror genre and Bosch’s imagery, 155, 284 n.54; production and consumption, 8; westerns, xiv–xv, 34– 35, 250 n.21; wilderness-town relationships and oppositions, 34–35, 250 n.21 Flight into Egypt: Beuckelaer’s Flight into Egypt (1563), 232, 269 n.25, 312 n.13; Beuckelaer’s Vegetable Market, 228; Bruegel and, 40; Jan Brueghel’s Flight into Egypt (1595), 204; Matthys Cock’s Flight into Egypt (1543), 45; Patinir’s Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, 32; Patinir’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (ca.

1520–23), 31–33, 32; Patinir world landscape tradition, 30, 31–33, 249 n.12 Floris, Frans, 4, 5, 45, 199, 300 n.67; Feast of Sea Gods (1561), 218, 218 flower still lifes, 205, 209–13, 304 n.21; Bosschaert, 304 n.21, 305 n.25; Jan Brueghel, 205, 209–13, 210, 304 n.21; costliness, 209, 212, 305 nn.25–26; de Gheyn, 212, 213, 304 nn.20–21, 305 n.25; and elite patrons, 209–12; Hoefnagel, 211, 211–12, 304 n.22; isolated print images (florilegia), 212, 217; problem of production and seasonal blooming times, 212, 305 n.24; reused sketches and repetitions, 212–13; Roelandt Savery, 212, 213, 304 n.21; and sixteenth-century interest in botanical illustration, 212; tulips and tulip craze, 209–11, 210, 303 n.10; watercolors, 212 forest landscapes: and biblical scenes, 165–66, 166, 171; Bruegel tradition, 161, 163–66, 191; Jan Brueghel, 164, 166, 169, 202–4, 203, 204; Coninxloo, 164–65, 170, 171, 204; Valckenborch, 191, 193; Vinckboon’s pleasure gardens, 179–80, 183, 184, 184 Francken, Frans, II, 296 n.37, 305 n.26 Francken, Hieronymus, II, 296 n.37 Franz, Heinrich Gerhard, 36 Freedberg, David, 288 n.26 French Royal Academy and hierarchy of genres, xv, 9, 53 Friedla¨nder, Max, xvi–xvii, 2, 15, 235 n.10; Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life, xvi Frisius, Simon, 162, 164 Frye, Northrop, 9 Fuller, Buckminster, 133 Galle, Philips: Bruegel’s Fortitude, 150; Collaert’s Florilegium, 212; Heemskerck’s The Reward of Labor and Diligence, 230; Jacob Grimmer productions, 190; and the Small Landscapes, 257 n.74

361

Index

Gassel, Lucas, 36; mining motif, 38–39; Landscape with Mining Scenes (1544), 38; Landscape with St. Anthony, 36, 37 Gee, Henry, 241 n.59 Genaille, Robert, 247 n.65 Gerritsz, Hessel, 181 Gesner, Conrad, 212, 303 n.7, 306 n.31 Ghisi, Giorgio, 4, 45, 140 Gibson, Walter: on assimilation of Flemish models by Italians, 256 n.70; on Bles’s workshop and output, 37–38, 252 n.41, 253 nn.43–44; on Bruegel’s Large Landscapes, 40; on Bruegel’s peasants, 118–19, 122; on landscape compositions derived from local and typical views, 7; on Matthys Cock drawings, 45; on Patinir’s world landscapes, 27, 31, 249 n.11; Peasant Places, 7; and the Small Landscapes, 46 Gifford, Melanie, 240 n.53, 294 n.23 Giovio, Paolo, xv Goedde, Lawrence: and Bruegel’s seascapes, 232– 33, 297 n.44, 315 n.40; and Goltzius landscapes, 162; and Jan Brueghel’s seascapes, 223 Golden Compasses (Antwerp printer), 242 n.16 Goltzius, Hendrick: collaboration with Jan Brueghel, 216; emulation and Bruegel tradition, 182; mountain landscapes and Bruegel tradition, 162, 163, 164 Goltzius, Hendrick, works: The Blind Leading the Blind, 280 n.21; Mountainous Landscape (1608), 162, 164; Mountainous Landscape (ca. 1596–97), 162, 163 Gombrich, Ernst, xv–xvi, 27, 243 n.30, 249 n.5 Goose Bearer Fountain (German sculpture ca. 1540), 108, 272 n.14 Gossaert, Jan, Portrait of a Banker, 82 Gould, Stephen J., 11 Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de (archbishop of Mechelen), 49, 209 El Greco, 14

362

Grimani Breviary (ca. 1510–20), 248 n.69, 258 n.85 Grimmer, Abel: and Bruegel tradition, 190; Summer (1607), 190, 191 Grimmer, Jacob, 6, 189–90; small landscapes, 189–90, 196; By Antwerp, 190; Four Seasons (1577), 190 Grossman, Fritz, 132 Gru¨newald, Matthias, 14 Guevara, Don Felipe de: and Bosch, 134, 136– 37, 144, 147, 280 n.21; Commentaries on Painting, 134 Guicciardini, Lodovico: and Bosch, 149–50, 281 n.30; Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (1567), 4, 17, 20–21, 281 n.30 gypsies, 58–60, 260 nn.20–21 Haarlem school of landscape, 12 Hamlet (Shakespeare), xv Heemskerck, Maarten van, 4, 45; collaborations with Coornhert, 229–30; collaborations with Jan Brueghel, 216; and peasants’ labor, 126, 230 Heemskerck, Maarten van, works: Allegory of Hope for Gain (1550), 229; Allegory of Human Ambition (1549), 229; Allegory of the Unbridled World (1550), 229; Allegory of the Vanity of Human Passions / Democritus and Heraclitus (1557), 229–30; The Divine Charge to the Three Estates (ca. 1566–70), 126, 230; Good Samaritan (1549), 229; Lazarus and the Rich Man (1551), 229; Prodigal Son, 229; The Reward of Labor and Diligence (1572), 126, 230; The Task of the Laboring Class, 126, 230; Unhappy Lot of the Rich (1563), 231; Unmerciful Servant (1549), 229 Hellerstedt, Kahren Jones, 291 n.62 Hemessen, Jan van: and Aertsen’s peasants and taverns, 103, 104, 105; and market scenes of Aertsen and Beuckelaer, 100; religious themes in images of commerce, 83–86, 84,

Index

85, 94, 232; tavern scenes, 69, 71–74, 72, 73, 89, 103–5 Hemessen, Jan van, works: The Calling of Matthew (ca. 1540), 83, 84, 86, 94, 100, 232, 266 n.73; Christ Expelling Money Changers from the Temple (1556), 85, 94; Loose Company (ca. 1540), 72–73, 73, 103, 105; Parable of the Unmerciful Servant (ca. 1548–52), 84–85, 85; The Prodigal Son (1536), 71–72, 72, 83, 84, 100, 103, 108, 232 Heynken de Luyere (Crul), 20, 21 Hoefnagel, Jacob, 212 Hoefnagel, Joris: flower pictures, 211, 211–12; view of Linz, 295 n.26 Hoefnagel, Joris, works: Archetypa Studiaque patris (1592), 212, 304 n.22; Still-Life Allegory on Transience of Life (1591), 211, 211–12 Hogarth, William, 8, 10 Hogenberg, Frans, 112 Holy Family on the Road: Aertsen’s Meat Stall (1551), 88, 269 n.25, 312 n.13; Beuckelaer’s Flight into Egypt, 269 n.25, 312 n.13; Bruegel’s Census at Bethlehem, 253 n.44, 269 n.25; Matsys’s peasants, 109 Hondius, Hendrick, 299 n.64 Honig, Elizabeth, 9; on Aertsen, 89, 90, 97, 100; on Beuckelaer, 93, 99, 100, 268 n.22, 270 n.35; on Joos de Momper’s collaborations, 296 n.37; on market scenes, 93, 100, 231– 32, 268 n.22, 270 n.35 Horace, 21; Ars poetica, xv Houghton, Charlotte, 88 Howard, Lord of Effingham, 220 Huys, Frans: Bosch prints, 110–11; Bruegel prints, 173, 218, 219, 220, 233; Matsys designs, 108–9, 111 Huys, Pieter: as Bosch imitator, 3, 135–40; Judgment and Hell scenes, 137, 138; St. Anthony scenes, 135–37, 137 Huys, Pieter, works: Last Judgment, 138, 138; Temptation of St. Anthony (1577), 137

‘‘Invective Against a Certain Painter Who Scoffed at the Painters of Antwerp’’ (de Heere), 5 Isabella, Archduchess, 209, 211, 306 n.29 Isabella Clara Eugenia, Archduchess, 194 Isenheim Altarpiece (Gru¨newald), 14 Israel, Jonathan, 12 Jacobs, Lynn, 18 Jameson, Frederic, 1, 226 Jongelinck, Nicholas, 23, 24, 123, 132, 276 n.56 Jonson, Ben, 186 Junius, Hadrianus, 89, 126 Kavaler, Ethan Matt, 121, 122, 247 n.65 kermis scenes, 106–7, 112–17, 114, 115, 117, 170, 175, 176–77, 179. See also peasants kitchens and markets of Aertsen and Beuckelaer, 87–102; Aertsen’s Cook, 95–97, 96, 269 n.26; Aertsen’s hybrid scenes, 87–92, 88, 89, 91, 93–95, 232; Aertsen’s Meat Stall, 87–89, 88, 91, 94–95; Beuckelaer’s Ecce Homo paintings, 91–94, 92, 97, 99, 232; Beuckelaer’s hybrid scenes, 91–95, 97, 227–29; Beuckelaer’s production methods/production efficiency, 98–99; Beuckelaer’s The Miraculous Draft of Fishes, 94, 94–95, 232; and Bruegel’s Battle Between Carnival and Lent, 88–89, 102; Carnival and Lent, 88–89, 97; fish stalls and vendors, 97; Holy Family on the Road, 88, 269 n.25, 312 n.13; hybrid images of foodstuffs and religious scenes, 87–95, 88, 89, 91, 232; inversions, 88, 88–91, 89, 92, 94–95; judgment theme, 93, 268 n.22; nonreligious works, 95–99; peasant women vendors, 97, 270 nn.33–35 Koch, Robert, 32, 36 Koerner, Joseph, 237 n.16 Kok, Filedt, 292 n.67 Kolb, Arianne, 35, 250 n.22 Kubler, George, xiii, 2, 10, 13

363

Index

Labors of the Months: Bruegel’s The Months, 23, 123–24, 124, 128, 192–93, 248 n.69, 277 n.61, 283 n.45; Valkenborch’s The Months, 124, 192–93, 194 Lampsonius, Domenicus, 133, 143, 147 Landjuweel, 20 landscapes, early, 26–52; Bruegel and culmination of world landscape, 39–52; Bruegel’s Large Landscapes, 6, 39–42, 113, 254 n.48; Bruegel’s religious motifs, 39, 40, 43–44, 47–52, 232, 257 n.77; city corruption motif, 50–52; Cock-Bruegel collaborations, 43, 43–44; Cock’s production of Small Landscapes, 6, 42, 45–47, 47, 184–85, 188; de Bles workshop, 37–38, 252 nn.38–39, 252 n.41; as expression of national character and location (self-definition), 7–10; Gassel and Gassel imitators, 36, 38–39, 251 n.29; genre emergence in sixteenth-century Antwerp, xv–xvi, 2, 19, 26–52, 227, 235 n.6; hybrid landscapes with religious figures, 29–35; local views and small landscapes, 6–7, 238 n.29; Matthys Cock, 44, 44–45; mining motif, 38–39, 39, 253 n.42; next generation (after Patinir), 35–39; Patinir’s motifs, 30–35; Patinir’s ‘‘world landscapes’’ and conceptual organization of imagery, 27, 30–35; religious and mythological themes, 44, 45; town-country opposition, 27–29 Larson, Pamela, 117 Levesque, Dorothy, 40–41, 254 n.55 Liber vagatorum (Book of Wanderers), 62 Limbourg Brothers, Tre`s riches heures, 27 Lischbloeme, 22 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo, 36, 37, 253 n.43 Lombard, Lambert, 4, 45 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 208 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, Effects of Good Government, 27

364

Loughman, John, 305 n.25 Luther, Martin, 62 Mandijn, Jan, 3, 134–40; Last Judgment (ca. 1554), 139; Temptation of St. Anthony (ca. 1550), 134, 136 Mao Zedong, 208 Mariken van Nieumeghen (ca. 1500), 21 marine paintings. See seascapes/marine paintings Marinus van Reymerswaele: moneychangers, 78– 81, 80, 81, 83, 88, 264 n.61, 264 n.63; religious themes in images of commerce, 83–85, 86 Marinus van Reymerswaele, works: Banker and His Wife (1538), 78–80, 80, 264 n.61, 264 n.63; Calling of Matthew, 83; Lawyer’s Office, 83, 88; Parable of the Unjust Steward, 84–85, 86; Tax Collectors, 80–81, 81 markets. See kitchens and markets of Aertsen and Beuckelaer; money and commerce Mary and Martha. See Christ at the Home of Mary and Martha Massys, Jan, Tax Collector’s Office (ca. 1535–40), 82, 82, 201, 265 n.69 Massys, Quinten: collaborations with Patinir, 2, 3, 18, 30, 31, 134; images of commerce and the allegory of choice, 74–78, 75, 76, 77, 85–86; images of material excess, 74–78, 76, 77; imitators, 264 n.58; moneychangers, 74, 75, 78, 79, 264 n.58; as notable artist in early Antwerp market, 17 Massys, Quinten, works: Banker and His Client, 78, 79 (after Massys); Grotesque Old Man, 74–78, 77; Grotesque Old Woman, 74–78, 76; Ill-Matched Pair, 69, 71, 74, 78, 100, 231, 263 n.49; The Money Changer and His Wife, 74, 75, 84, 94, 95, 100; Temptation of St. Anthony (ca. 1520–24), 2, 18, 30, 31, 134 Master ES, 3, 236 n.12

Index

Master of Lille Sermon, 37 Master of Alkmaar, 64 Master of the Half-Lengths, 36 Master of the Mountain Landscapes, 255 n.57, 286 n.8, 297 n.42 Master of the Prodigal Son, Beggar’s District, 262 n.38 Master of the Small Landscapes, 45, 46–47, 256 n.71, 257 n.74; Country Farms and Cottages, 185; Village View (ca. 1555–60), 47 Master of the Toledo Judgment of Paris, 44 Master W A, 220, 307 n.48 Matsys, Cornelis, 44, 47, 116, 188; peasant images, 108–10, 109, 110, 111, 116 Matsys, Cornelis, works: The Beggars’ Dance, 108; Beggars’ Mealtime, 108; Drunken Peasant, 273 n.20; Loose Company (1539), 108, 109, 273 n.21; The Lute Tuner, 109–10, 111, 273 n.24; Peasant Love Triangle (1549), 108, 110; The Strife Between Beggars and Beggar-Women (1539), 108 Matthias, Archduke, of Austria, 190, 192, 193, 196 Maximilian I, Emperor, 16, 108, 241 n.4 Mayr, Ernst, 1 Medici, Cosimo de’, 74–75 Medici, Cardinal Ferdinand de, 220 Melion, Walter S., 235 n.6 ‘‘merry company in a garden,’’ 180, 184, 184 Michelangelo, 7 Michiel, Marcantonio, xv, 249 n.5 Miedema, Hessel, 22 Mielke, Hans, 153, 162, 176, 286 n.8 money and commerce, 53–86; beggars, 60–65; Bosch and avarice/usury, 56–58; Bosch’s moralizing representations and everyday life subjects, 53–60; Bosch’s theme of excess/ indulgence, 54, 54–60, 59, 66, 69; Bruegel’s Everyman (Elck) and self-knowledge through material goods, 23, 100–102, 101; Carnival

and Lenten activities, 67–69; gypsies, 58– 60, 260 nn.20–21; images of commerce, 74–86; Massys’s images of worldly excess and the allegory of choice, 74–78, 75, 76, 77, 85–86; moneychangers (bankers and taxcollectors), 74, 75, 78–83, 79, 80, 81, 82, 264 n.60; religious themes, 83–86, 84, 85, 86, 232; tavern scenes, 69–74, 70, 71, 72, 73; vanitas imagery, 81, 265 n.66; wanderers/ peddlers, 64–67, 142, 260 n.21, 262 n.41 Montias, John Michael, 13, 18, 186 Moore, Marianne, 208 More, Thomas, 81 mountain landscapes: Bruegel tradition and his Dutch successors, 162–63, 163, 164, 165, 286 n.5; de Momper’s, 193, 194–95, 195; Goltzius, 162, 163, 164; Jacob Savery, 162, 165, 286 n.8 Moxey, Keith, 22, 81, 112, 311 n.5 Mu¨ller, Ju¨rgen, 247 n.65 naer het leven drawings, 153, 176, 183, 286 n.8 Newton, Isaac, xiii Oberhuber, Konrad, 300 n.67 Orenstein, Nadine, 254 n.50 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 125, 126 Panofsky, Erwin, 2 parables: Bruegel’s landscape paintings, 47–49, 48, 232, 257 n.77; and images of commerce, 83–85, 84, 85, 86, 86, 232 ‘‘paradoxical encomium,’’ 95, 121 parerga (accessories), xv, 27, 235 n.6 Parshall, Peter, 237 n.17, 239 n.37 Patinir, Joachim, xiv, 235 n.10; hell scenes/temptations of saints, 3; hybrid landscapes with religious figures, 2, 3, 9, 19, 27; motifs, 30–35; ‘‘world landscapes’’ and conceptual organization of imagery, 27, 30–35

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Index

Patinir, Joachim, works: Burning of Sodom (ca. 1520), 34, 34; Charon Crossing the River Styx (ca. 1520–25), 33, 33; Landscape with St. Jerome (ca. 1515–20), 27, 29, 30–31, 60; Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, 32; Rest on the Flight into Egypt (ca. 1520–23), 31–33, 32, 260 n.21; Temptation of St. Anthony (ca. 1520–24), 2, 18, 30, 31, 134 Paulussen, Markus, 311 n.80 peasants, 103–32; Aertsen, 5, 103–7, 104, 105, 106; and beggars, 111, 128–29, 130; Bosch, 108, 110–11, 112; and bourgeois disdain (genus satiricum), 107; Bruegel, 5, 111–32, 161, 170–73, 230–32; Bruegel imitations, 112–14, 113, 114; Bruegel’s attitude toward, 116–17, 121, 128, 131; and Bruegel’s audience, 132, 278 n.74; caricatures, 111–12; Carnival and Lent, 105–6; ‘‘distress of the peasantry,’’ 171–73, 176, 178–79, 278 n.73; Du¨rer, 107, 107–8; eroticism and sexual suggestion, 104, 105–6, 109, 119–20, 272 n.9; gluttony, 111; hard labor, 123, 124–27, 127; Holy Family, 109; indolence, 127, 128; kermis scenes, 106–7, 112–17, 114, 115, 117, 170, 175, 176–77, 179; labor and industry, 21, 123–31, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129, 130, 245 nn.50–51; Matsys, 108–10, 109, 110, 111, 116; peasants’ characteristics, 104–7; peasants’ knowledge, 127–28, 129; social distance and peasants’ marginality, 108, 132; soldiers’ attacks on, 172, 178–79, 289 nn.35–36; and taverns, 103–4, 105; vulgarity and grossness, 22, 107–8, 120, 231, 314 n.31; wedding rituals, 117–21, 118, 119, 275 n.45; women, 104, 105–6, 108–10, 119–20 Peeters, Bonaventura, 222 Philip II, 45, 49; as Bosch patron/collector, 8–9, 133–34, 151, 209; and city of Antwerp, 17, 20 Philip the Fair, 78 pictorial genres in sixteenth-century Antwerp,

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1–15, 226–33; analogy of biological evolution and art history, 11–12, 13–15; art and self-definition, 7–10, 22–25, 227–33, 315 n.39; art history and art theory, xv–xvi, 10–15; artistic identity and signature imagery, xiv–xv, 2–6, 155; consumption and consumerism, 231–32; defining visual (pictorial) genres, xiii–xiv; early print collecting, 3–7, 9, 239 n.37; emergence of landscape genre, xv–xvi, 2, 19, 26–52, 227, 235 n.6; and emerging civility, 231, 314 n.33; essentialism, xvi–xvii; genres and ‘‘hybrid’’ traits, xiv; imitators, 3, 4–6, 12; innovations in Antwerp market, 2–7; judgment and discernment, 232; ‘‘modes,’’ 227, 311 n.5; and the new relationship between religion and the world, 228–30, 232–33; and the new value of hard work, 230–32; specialization, 2; technique and production efficiency, 12– 13, 240 nn.53–54; tempest seascapes, 232–33; ‘‘visual culture’’ and emerging genres, 232, 315 n.39. See also Antwerp’s open art market; landscapes, early Piraeicus, 89 Plantin, Christopher, 212, 242 n.16, 248 n.69, 303 n.7 pleasure garden imagery, 179–80, 183, 184, 184 Pliny, xv, xvi, 27, 89, 235 n.6 Porcellis, Jan, 224 Pourbus, Pieter, 222–23 Pozzoserrato, Ludovico, 195, 297 n.45 Prodigal Son: Bosch, 65–67; Hemessen’s The Prodigal Son, 71–72, 72, 83, 84, 100, 103, 108, 232; in images of commerce, 86; tavern scenes, 71–72 Prosperetti, Leopoldine, 311 n.81 Provoost, Jan, Old Miser with Death (ca. 1515– 21), 56, 56, 259 n.6, 259 n.8 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 3 Raphael, 4, 45, 140; Disputa (1552), 4; School of

Index

Athens (Paul Preaching in Athens) (1550), 4; and Cock prints, 4 Raupp, Hans, 22, 107 Rembrandt, 162; Christ and the Apostles on the Stormy Sea of Galilee, 310 n.74 Renger, Konrad, 108, 261 n.28 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 161 rhyparography, xvi, 89 Ridolfi, Carlo, 297 n.45 Robinson, William, 153, 162 Romano, Giulio, 4 Roover, Raymond de, 78 Rottenhammer, Hans, 204 Rubens, Peter Paul: animal studies, 306 n.30; and Jan Brueghel, 161, 186, 214–15, 216, 306 n.30; and Bruegel tradition, 186, 187, 196; collaborations, 9, 18, 161, 186, 214–15, 216, 306 n.30; flower and animal studies series, 214–15, 216; and world landscape tradition, 162 Rubens, Peter Paul, works: Adam and Eve in Paradise, 306 n.30; Allegory of Sight and Smell, 214–15, 216; The Drowning of Leander, 256 n.70; The Kermis (ca. 1635), 186, 187; Rainbow Landscape (ca. 1636–37), 186, 187 Rudolf II, Emperor, 37, 192, 196, 209, 212, 214 Sadeler, Aegidius, 182, 292 n.67 Sadeler, Jan, 222 Saussure, Ferdinand de, xiii, xvi Savery, Jacob: Bruegel forgeries, 6, 153, 162–64, 169, 176, 178, 183, 188, 297 n.42; and Bruegel tradition, 162, 169–70; and ‘‘distress of the peasants,’’ 172; forest landscapes, 163–64, 169; mountain landscapes, 162, 165, 286 n.8 Savery, Jacob, works: The Blind, 176, 178; Landscape with a Castle, 286 n.8; Mountain Landscape with Four Travelers (ca. 1600), 162, 165; Village Kermis (1598), 170, 175 Savery, Roelandt: animal drawing studies, 214;

Bruegel forgeries, 163–64, 286 n.8; Bruegel imitations/naer het leven drawings, 153, 176, 183, 286 n.8; and Bruegel tradition, 162, 169; flower pieces, 212, 213, 304 n.21; forest landscapes, 163–64; and van Goyen, 294 n.23; Still Life in a Niche (1611), 213 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, Poetics, xv Schama, Simon, 246 n.56 Schapiro, Meyer, 13 Schiller, Friedrich, 133 Schongauer, Martin, Peasant Family, 253 n.44 seascapes/marine paintings, 218–25; Bruegel the Elder’s ‘‘ship portraits,’’ 218–20, 219; Bruegel the Elder’s tempest seascapes, 223, 232–33; Jan Brueghel, 218, 222–25; coastal landscapes, 224–25; religious scenes, 222–25; sea mythology, 218, 218; ships and shipping, 218–22, 219, 221; ships in storms, 223; tempest seascapes, 218, 222–24, 232–33; Vroom and tempest seascapes, 223, 224; Vroom’s ship portraits and naval battles, 220–22, 221, 225 Sedlmayer, Hans, 128–29 Seghers, Hercules, 12, 162, 240 n.50, 285 n.4 Serck, Lou, 37, 252 n.39 Serlian architecture, 90, 92, 95 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, xv, 87; Henry IV, Part One, 69 Shape of Time (Kubler), xiii, 10 ’s-Hertogenbosch, 20, 53, 140 Ship of Fools (Brant), 20, 62, 261 n.30 Sigu¨enza, Jose´ de, History of the Order of St. Jerome, 147–48 Sittenbild (image of morals), 53 Sluijter, Eric Jan, 5, 6, 12; Seductress of Sight, 5 Small Landscapes series (1559 and 1561), 6, 42, 45–47, 184–85, 188, 190 Snow, Edward, 248 n.68 Snyders, Frans, 9, 306 n.30 Spicer, Joaneath, 153, 286 n.8 Spierincx, Franc¸ois, 308 n.55

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Index

Spranger, Bartholomeus, 292 n.67 Spronk, Ron, 256n.8 St. Luke’s guild, 17 Stallybrass, Peter, 226 Steen, Jan, 71 Stevens, Pieter, 196, 309 n.64 Stewart, Alison, 112 Stoichita, Victor, 217 Stradanus, Joannes, 19 Studius (Ludius), xv Sullivan, Margaret A., 247 n.65, 278 n.74 tavern scenes, 69–74; Bosch, 69; Bruegel, 69; Hemessen, 69, 71–74, 72, 73, 89; Massys, 69–71, 71; religious themes, 71–72; and soldiers, 71; van Leyden, 69, 70, 72, 73 Taylor, Paul, 304 n.21, 305 n.25 Teniers, David, 171, 296 n.37 Thibaut, Willem, 230 Titian, 18, 44, 45 Todorov, Tzvetan, 226 Toeput, Lodewijk, 195 tom Ring, Ludger, the Younger, 211 To´th-Ubbens, Magdi, 261 n.28 Unverfehrt, Gerd, 142, 278 n.2 van Aelst, Willem, 305 n.25 van Balen, Hendrick, 215, 216, 296 n.37 van Cleve, Marten, 196 van Dalem, Cornelis, 47, 308 n.50 van den Bossche, Hans, 264 n.58 Vandenbroeck, Paul, 22, 116, 120; on artistic signatures, 4, 237 n.16; on Bosch’s Hay Wain Triptych, 260 n.14 van den Vondel, Joost, 26 van der Borcht, Pieter: Peasant Kermis (ca. 1568), 114–15, 116; Peasant Wedding (1560), 120, 120 van der Heyden, Pieter: Bol’s Autumn, 189; Bol’s Winter, 172; Bosch’s Peasant Interior, 111,

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112; Bruegel’s Anger, 149; Bruegel’s Big Fish Eat Little Fish, 152; Bruegel’s Everyman (Elck), 101; Bruegel’s The Festival of Fools, 299 n.64; Bruegel’s Patience, 146; Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding Dance, 118, 119, 200; Bruegel’s Temptation of St. Anthony, 144, 144 van der Stock, Jan, 108 van de Velde, Esias, 6, 12; and the ‘‘merry company’’ subgenre, 180; and van Goyen, 294 n.23; and Vinckboons, 173, 180 van de Velde, Jan, 12 van de Velde, Jan, II, Winter, 169, 174, 288 n.26 van de Velde, Willem, the Elder, 222 van de Velde, Willem, the Younger, 222 van Goyen, Jan, 12, 190, 294 n.23 vanitas imagery, 81, 265 n.66 van Kessel, Hieronymus, 306 n.35 van Kessel, Jan, 18, 214, 306 n.35 van Leyden, Lucas, 49, 91, 260 n.17; False Pilgrims (1520), 62, 63; The Milkmaid (1510), 108; Tavern Scene (ca. 1520), 69, 70, 72, 73, 74 van Liere, Joos, 47, 256 n.71 van Londerseel, Jan, 165, 173, 176, 178 van Mander, Karel, 16, 18, 36, 182; on Aertsen, 89; on Beuckelaer’s patronage and commissions, 99; on Bol, 292 n.6; on Bruegel’s mountain landscapes, 162, 286 n.5; on Bruegel’s peasant scenes, 122, 171; on Herri met de Bles, 36–37; on Jacob Grimmer, 190; on Mandijn’s Bosch imitations, 136; on Matthys Cock, 44; Schilderboeck (1604), 147, 162, 164, 174, 286 n.5 van Ruisdael, Salomon, 12 van Schoonbeke, Gilbert, 88 van Stijevoort, Jan, 20 van Valckenborch, Lucas: and Bruegel landscape tradition, 124, 190–93, 196, 204; mining motif, 253 n.42; wealthy patrons, 190, 192, 193, 296 n.34 van Valckenborch, Lucas, works: Angler Beside a

Index

Woodland Pond (1590), 191–92, 193, 295 n.28; Cow Meadow Under Trees (1573), 191; Fall (1585), 192–93; Landscape with Mining Scenes (1580), 191, 192; The Months cycle (mid-1580s), 124, 192–93, 194; Return of the Herd (1586), 192; Spring (1587), 192, 194, 295 n.31; Summer (1585), 192; Tower of Babel, 296 n.35; View of Linz (1593), 191, 295 n.26 van Valckenborch, Marten, 296 n.35 van Wieringen, Cornelis, Battle of Gibraltar (1622), 222 van Wueluwe, Hendrik, 17 Vasari, Giorgio, 3, 36, 282 n.30 Verbeek family, 120, 121 Verhulst, Mayken, 197 Vermeer, Jan, 14; Kitchen Maid, 95, 97; Woman Balancing Scales, 102, 263 n.55 Vermeyen, Jan, 222 Vermeylen, Filip, 18 Vinckboons, David: beggars, 175–76; biography, 173–74; and Bruegel tradition, 6, 162, 169, 173–80, 182–83, 184; and ‘‘distress of the peasants,’’ 172–73, 176, 178; peasant scenes, 174–79, 179, 180, 181; pleasure garden imagery, 179–80, 183, 184, 184; proverbs, 177–78, 180, 181 Vinckboons, David, works: Bird-Nester (1606), 177, 181; Bird-Nester (drawing), 177–78, 180; Blind Hurdy-Gurdy Player (1609), 176; David Spying Bathsheba, 180; Festive Peasants, Soldier, and Harlots, 179, 182; Garden Festival (1601), 180, 184; Landscape with Travelers Attacked by Robbers, 176, 178; Leper Procession (1608), 176, 177; The Pleasures of Mary Magdalene (ca. 1601), 180, 183; The Preaching of John the Baptist (1610), 174; Susannah and the Elders, 180; Village Kermis (1603), 176–77, 179

Vinckboons, Philip, 173 Visscher, Claes Janszoon, 6, 165; and Bruegel head studies, 300 n.67; Jacob Grimmer productions, 190, 294 n.21; and the Small Landscapes, 184–85; and Vinckboons, 173, 178 Visscher, Claes Janszoon, works: Charming Country Districts (Plaisante Plaetsen), 185; Leper Procession (1608), 176, 177; Peasant Places from the Vicinity of Haarlem (1611/12), 294 n.21 Visscher, Roemer, 209 Vitelli, Chiappino, 270 n.40 Vorsterman, Lucas, 201, 300 n.66 Vrancx, Sebastiaan, 173, 296 n.37 Vroom, Cornelis, 220 Vroom, Frederick, 220 Vroom, Hendrick Cornelisz, xiv; biography, 220; early tapestries, 220, 308 n.55; ship portraits and naval battles, 220–22, 221; tempest seascapes, 223, 224 Vroom, Hendrick Cornelisz, works: *Arrival in Vlissingen of Frederick V of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart in Vlissingen on 29 April 1613 (1623), 221, 221, 308 n.58; Battle of Cadiz, 223; The Landing at Philippine, 222; Panoramic View of Delft, 221, 308 n.56; Return of the Second Dutch Expedition to the East Indies (1599), 221; Ships in a Tempest, 223 wanderers, 64–67, 142, 260 n.21, 262 n.41 White, Allon, 226 Wierix, Hieronymus, 175, 198 Wierix, Jan, 277 n.72 Willarts, Adam, 224 Wilson, Jean, 35 Yamey, Basil, 81, 264 nn.60, 61, 63 Yeats, William Butler, xiii

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AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

A

t least as much as any child, a book ‘‘takes a village.’’ Without the nurture and constructive criticisms of an entire scholarly community of colleagues, not to mention the financial support of institutions and foundations, such works could never get written. This book, which has been long in gestation, remains especially indebted to a variety of people and places. The older one gets, the deeper the debts—and the sloppier or less reliable the memory, especially to the wonderful range of colleagues one has worked with over a long time. Support for initial researches and writing goes back to a marvelous year at the National Humanities Center, Robert Connor, Director, whose truly interdisciplinary academic environment fostered some of the more innovative thinking connected with this book. In particular the section on landscape benefited from a spontaneous, interactive and critical but never rancorous reading group—really a symposium—on ‘‘Man and Land’’ in which I was fortunate to participate. I particularly want to single out Richard Bushman and Sylvia Tomasch for helpful insights in formulating an early concept of this project. One also remembers gratefully the emotional support of such a community during a year of mourning the sudden loss of my father. The other major institution that supported this project was the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Elizabeth Cropper, Dean, where much of the drafting of chapters occurred. That scholarly community of art historians and its wonderful library were just the ingredients necessary to foster thought and productivity at the writing stage. Presenting the controversial ideas of the Introduction within the CASVA Colloquia offered a perfect opportunity to get an informed response from within the discipline, and I am most grateful to all of the participants. During a most stimulating year I want to single out both Nicholas Penny and Shreve Simpson as models of professionalism and collegiality. For half a century scholars and artists of all stripes have been indebted to the Guggenheim Foundation, and I too was their beneficiary for a year in which the writing and refinement of these ideas was brought to completion. Without that support and a subvention towards this volume, this book could not have been finished as you see it here. Such foundations are all the more critical to scholars during an era in which academic publishing as an institution hangs precariously in the balance, at a moment when the costs of publishing (not least, for art books, due to the extortionate costs for even rented photos) and the shrinking market for scholarly publications have provoked a crisis that promises to become widespread throughout the university (although art books, like the canary in the coal mine, seem to be the harbinger of a more global freeze). My friend and colleague, Reindert Falkenburg, now at the University of Leiden, deserves the lion’s share of my personal gratitude for his generous exchange of ideas (including some of the concepts of evolution in the Introduction), for his ongoing encouragement, and for the boldness and vigor of his own scholarly example—not to mention his brotherly love. As the preface indicates, any scholar stands on the shoulders of giants, and my own greatest debt of the past quarter century is due to the dean of this field of Netherlandish art in Antwerp, Walter Gibson. His studies on landscape (both ‘‘world’’ and local), on Bosch and Bruegel, and on the relationships between all forms of art and the context of local culture, especially images of peasants, remain enduring and inspirational to us all. All while being the world’s nicest guy.

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Acknowledgments

Many other friends and fellow toilers in the vineyards have abetted my thinking while also providing a true community of scholars. My true intellectual debts to them will appear in the frequency with which they are cited throughout the notes that will follow, but I do want expressly to acknowledge some of them by name at this point. Mark Meadow especially has offered valuable opportunities to publish earlier versions of some of these ideas along with an enduring amity. His important work on Bruegel and pictorial rhetoric has been truly provocative. In similar fashion, Walter Melion, a colleague since his days as an undergraduate prodigy, has offered continuing and valued dialogue on word and image in Netherlandish visual culture, ranging from Bruegel to the Counter Reformation and Haarlem Academy. Ilja Veldman’s wide-ranging studies of sixteenth-century prints and their rich meanings have proved continually indispensable. Peter Parshall remains one of the most insightful investigators of basic issues, particularly concerning early prints and collections, but I also treasure a career-long friendship with him and Linda that now stretches across more than a third of a century. Lynn Jacobs has been an especially close friend and colleague, with whom I enjoy sharing critical and mutual readings of each other’s works. Don McColl also read earlier drafts of this ms and has been a continual source of close friendship and personal support as well as critical feedback. Henry Luttikhuizen has been a superb collaborator on other related projects and at critical times both an indispensable colleague and pal. And nobody masters the big picture nor achieves better the fragile balance between great scholarship and righteous living than Jeffrey Chipps Smith, whom I admire and esteem. For Bruegel in particular, I have utilized the—sometimes conflicting—contributions of Svetlana Alpers (a former colleague at Berkeley), Margaret Deutsch Carroll (a former classmate in graduate school), Keith Moxey (erstwhile classmate at a still earlier stage), and Alison Stewart (fellow print maven and long-term Germanophile), as well as Robert Baldwin, Bret Rothstein, Nina Serebrennikov, and Matt Kaveler. Other scholars of the Antwerp art market have also made major contributions that complement and sustain some of these arguments, particularly Dan Ewing, John Michael Montias, Hans Van Miegroet and Neil de Marchi, and Philip Vermeylen. Elizabeth Honig, who shared her original insights prior to publication, has been a special inspiration and touchstone for ideas. Melanie Gifford has offered the special insights of someone who uniquely is both a curator and a conservator. At the National Gallery I have also benefited enormously from the expertise of curators John Oliver Hand and Arthur Wheelock, and at the Metropolitan Museum in New York from both Maryane Ainsworth and Nadine Orenstein (whose nonpareil exhibition of Bruegel drawings and prints remains one of the great museum experiences of any lifetime). Joaneath Spicer of the Walters Art Gallery and Susan Dackerman of the Fogg Art Museum are also valued colleagues and neighbors. Having connections at the scene of the crime are indispensable, and I have been highly fortunate in my scholarly colleagues in both Belgium and Holland. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the most generous and supportive Antwerp contingent: Paul Huvenne, Arnout Balis, Jan van der Stock, and most senior, Carl van de Velde. I single out foundational studies by Paul Vandenbroeck on Bosch as well as his systematic considering of cultural stereotyping and wider social issues. In Bruges Manfred Sellink and Till-Holger Borchert have been wonderful colleagues. In the Netherlands, Jan Piet Filedt Kok and Ger Luijten have made Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum a haven for serious study of objects, and Kees Zandvliet has been most generous in responding to queries about maps and Dutch history. Konrad

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Acknowledgments

Renger and Thea Vignau Wilberg were early curatorial colleagues in this field in Munich, whose work and friendship continue to resonate. Harry Rand merits special commendation for his unstinting friendship and intellectual encouragement, in particular for his receptive listening to nascent, often half-baked concepts well before they should have been aired at all. Philadelphia has been a most nurturing laboratory of ideas, starting with the Museum, led by Katie Luber, Joe Rishel, Lloyd Dewitt, Innis Shoemaker, John Ittman, and Shelly Langdale. But perhaps the greatest nurturing has come from the warm intellectual community and ongoing symposium (including weekly colloquia!) at the University of Pennsylvania, where many of these ideas were first broached. Special highlights here include a joint seminar on landscape with Beth Johns, and the beyond-the-call support of a pair of chairs: Renata Holod and David Brownlee. I also warmly acknowledge financial and moral support of the James and Nan Farquhar Professorship of Art History, whose title I hold proudly at Penn, as well as the most academic Farquhar of them all, Doug, long-time friend. At the Penn Press, I have been fortunate to know several great professionals: my editor, Jo Joslyn, Ted Mann, director Eric Halpern, and humanities editor Jerome Singerman. Working with them has been a labor of love on many different levels. This book is dedicated to my children and to my parents. Since it is about genealogies, I cannot help reflecting gratefully on my own. I deeply miss both of my parents and am sorry that they could not be around to enjoy some of the happy results of their own nurturing. But I rejoice in their grandchildren for them, and delight that they are becoming remarkable people in their own right, original and distinctive, with minds of their own, in large part due, as all acknowledge, to their wonderful mother.

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