Art in the Netherlands/Chapter V

by Hippolyte Taine

II

When a great change is effected in human affairs it brings on by degrees a corresponding change in human conceptions. After the discovery of the Indies and of America, after the invention of printing and the multiplication of books, after the restoration of classic antiquity and the Reformation of Luther, any conception of the world then formed could no longer remain monastic and mystic. The tender and melancholy aspiration of a soul sighing for the celestial kingdom and humbly subjecting its conduct to the authority of an undisputed Church gave way to free inquiry nourished on so many fresh conceptions, and disappeared at the admirable spectacle of this real world which man now began to comprehend and to conquer. The rhetorical academies which, at first, were composed of a clerical body passed into the hands of the laity they had preached the payment of tithes and submission to the Church; they now ridiculed the clergy and combated ecclesiastical abuses. In 1533 nine citizens of Amsterdam were condemned to a pilgrimage to Rome for having represented one of these satirical pieces. In 1539, at Ghent, the question having been proposed of: Who are the greatest fools in the world? eleven out of nineteen academies reply: The monks. "A few poor monks and nuns," says a contemporary, "always appear in the comedies; it seems as if people could not enjoy themselves without making sport of God and the Church." Philip II. had decreed the punishment of death against authors and actors whose pieces were not authorized or were impious. But they were performed, nevertheless, even in the villages. "The word of God," says the same author, "first found its way into these countries through plays, and for this reason they are forbidden much more rigidly than the writings of Martin Luther."^[1] It is evident that the mind had become emancipated from ancient tutelage, and that people and burghers, artizans and merchants began to think for themselves on matters of salvation and morality.

The extraordinary wealth and prosperity of the country lead to picturesque and sensuous customs; here, as in England at the same epoch, a renaissance pomp overlays a silent Protestant fermentation. When Charles V., in 1520, made his entry into the city of Antwerp, Albert Dürer saw four hundred triumphal arches, two stories high and forty feet long, decorated with paintings on which allegorical representations were given. The performers consisted of young girls belonging to the best bourgeois class, clothed simply in thin gauze, "almost naked," says the honest German artist, "I have rarely seen more beautiful. I gazed at them very attentively, and even passionately, inasmuch as I am a painter." The festivals of the belle-lettre academies become magnificent; cities and communities rival each other in luxurious allegorical creations. At the invitation of the violinists of Antwerp fourteen academies, in 1562, send their "triumphs," and the academy called the Guirlande de Marie, at Brussels, obtains the prize. "For," says Van Meteren, "there were full three hundred and forty men on horseback, all dressed in velvet and in dark purple silk, with long Polish cassocks embroidered with silver lace, and wearing red hats fashioned like antique helmets; their pourpoints, plumes and bootees were white. They wore belts of silver tocque, very ingeniously woven with yellow, red, blue and white. They had seven chariots made after the antique pattern, with divers personages borne thereon. They had, beside, seventy-eight ordinary chariots with torches; the said chariots were covered with red cloth bordered with white. The charioteers all wore red mantles, and on these chariots were divers personages representing a number of beautiful antique figures, all of which goes to show how people will assemble in friendship to share in amity." La Pione de Malines provides a parade almost equal to this consisting of three hundred and twenty men on horseback, attired in a flesh-colored material embroidered with gold, seven antique chariots emblazoned and naming with all sorts of lights. Add to this the entry of twelve other processions, and then enumerate the plays, pantomines, fireworks and banquets which follow after. "There were several similar games given during the peace in other cities … I have deemed it proper to narrate all this," says Van Meteren, "for the purpose of showing the happy union and prosperity of those countries in those days." After the departure of Philip II., "instead of one court there seemed to be a hundred and fifty." The nobles vied with each other in magnificence, maintaining free tables and spending without stint. On one occasion the Prince of Orange wishing to diminish his train, discharged in a body twenty-eight head cooks. Lordly mansions swarmed with pages and gentlemen and superb liveries; the full tide of the renaissance overflowed in folly and extravagance, as under Elizabeth in England, in pompous array, cavalcades, games and good cheer. The Count of Brederode drank so much at one of St. Martin's feasts that he came near dying the rhinegrave's brother did actually die at the table through too great fondness of Malvoisie wine. Never did life seem more bright or beautiful. Like Florence under the Medicis in the preceding century, it ceased to be tragic; man had expanded; murderous revolts and sanguinary wars between city and city and corporation and corporation quietly subsided; only one sedition takes place in Ghent in 1536 which is easily quelled without much bloodshed, the last and a feeble convulsion, not to be compared with the formidable insurrections of the fifteenth century. Margaret of Austria, Mary of Hungary, and Margaret of Parma, the three rulers, are popular; Charles V. is a national prince, speaking Flemish, boasting of his nativity in Ghent, and protecting, by treaties, the manufactures and trade of the country. He fosters and nourishes it; Flanders, in return, supplies him with the half of his entire revenue;^[2] in his herd of states she is the fat milch cow which is milked constantly without being dried up. Thus, while the mind is expanding, the temperature around it becomes modified and establishes the conditions of a new growth; we see the dawn of it in the festivals of the belle-lettre academies, which are classic representations precisely like those of the Florence carnival and quite different from the quaint conceits accumulated at the banquets of the Dukes of Burgundy. "The 'Violet,' 'Olive' and 'Thought' academies of Antwerp," says Guiccardini, "give public performances of comedies, tragedies and other histories in imitation of the Greeks and Romans.' Society, ideas and tastes have undergone a transformation, and there is room for a new art.

Already in the preceding epoch we see premonitory symptoms of the coming change. From Hubert Van Eyck to Quintin Matsys the grandeur and gravity of religious conceptions have diminished. Nobody now dreams of portraying the whole of Christian faith and doctrine in a single picture; scenes are selected from the Gospel and from history annunciations, shepherd adorations, last judgments, martyrdoms and moral legends. Painting, which is epic in the hands of Hubert Van Eyck, becomes idyllic in those of Hemling and almost worldly in those of Quintin Matsys. It gets to be pathetic, interesting and pleasing. The charming saints, the beautiful Herodias and the lithe Salome of Quintin Matsys are richly attired noble dames and already laic; the artist loves the world as it is and for itself, and does not subordinate it to the representation of the supernatural world he does not employ it as a means but as an end. Scenes of profane life multiply; he paints townspeople in their shops; money-changers, amorous couples, and the attenuated features and stealthy smiles of a miser. Lucas of Leyden, his contemporary, is an ancestor of the painters whom we call the lesser Flemings; his "Presentation of Christ" and "The Magdalen's Dance" have nothing religious about them but their titles; the evangelical subject is lost in the accessories; that which the picture truly presents is a rural Flemish festival, or a gathering of Flemings on an open field. Jerome Bosch, of the same period, paints grotesque, infernal scenes. Art, it is clear, falls from heaven to earth, and is no longer to treat divine but human incidents. Artists, in other respects, lack no process and no preparation; they understand perspective, they know the use of oil, and are masters of modelling and relief; they have studied actual types; they know how to paint dresses, accessories, architecture and landscape with wonderful accuracy and finish; their manipulative skill is admirable. One defect only still chains them to hieratic art, which is the immobility of their faces and the rigid folds of their stuffs. They have but to observe the rapid play of physiognomies and the easy movement of loose drapery, and the renaissance is complete; the breeze of the age is behind them and already fills their sails. On looking at their portraits, their interiors, and even their sacred personages, as in the "Entombment" of Quintin Matsys, one is tempted to address them thus: "You are alive - one effort more! Come, bestir yourselves! Shake off the middle age entirely! Depict the modern man for us as you find him within you and outside of you. Paint him vigorous, healthy and content with existence. Forget the meagre, ascetic and pensive spirit, dreaming in the chapels of Hemling. If you choose a religious scene for the motive of your picture, compose it, like the Italians, of active and healthy figures, only let these figures proceed from your national and personal taste. You have a soul of your own, which is Flemish and not Italian; let the flower bloom; judging by the bud it will be a beautiful one." And, indeed, when we regard the sculptures of the time, such as the chimney of the Palais de Justice and the tomb of Charles the Bold at Bruges, the church and monuments of Brou, we see the promise of an original and complete art, less sculptural and less refined than the Italian, but more varied, more expressive and closer to nature, less subject to rule but nearer to the real, more capable of manifesting spirit and personality, the impulses, the unpremeditated, the diversities, the lights and darks of education, temperament and age of the individual; in short, a Germanic art which indicates remote successors to the Van Eycks and remote predecessors of Rubens.

They never appeared, or at all events, they imperfectly fulfilled their task. No nation, it must be noted, lives alone in the world; alongside of the Flemish renaissance there existed the Italian renaissance, and the large tree stifled the small plant. It flourished and grew for a century; the literature, the ideas and the masterpieces of precocious Italy imposed themselves on sluggish Europe, and the Flemish cities, through their commerce, and the Austrian dynasty, through its possessions and its Italian affairs, introduced into the North the tastes and models of the new civilization. Towards 1520 the Flemish painters began to borrow from the artists of Florence and Rome. John of Mabuse is the first one who, in 1513, on returning from Italy, introduced the Italian into the old style, and the rest followed. It is so natural in advancing into an unexplored country to take the path already marked out! This path, however, is not made for those who follow it; the long line of Flemish carts is to be delayed and stuck fast in the disproportionate ruts which another set of wheels have worn. There are two traits characteristic of Italian art, both of which run counter to the Flemish imagination. On the one hand Italian art centres on the natural body, healthy, active and vigorous, endowed with every athletic aptitude, that is to say, naked or semi-draped, frankly pagan, enjoying freely and nobly in full sunshine every limb, instinct and animal faculty, the same as an ancient Greek in his city or palestrum, or, as at this very epoch, a Cellini on the Italian streets and highways. Now a Fleming does not easily enter into this conception. He belongs to a cold and humid climate; a man there in a state of nudity shivers. The human form here does not display the fine proportions nor the easy attitudes required by classic art; it is often dumpy or too gross; the white, soft, yielding flesh, easily flushed, requires to be clothed. When the painter returns from Rome and strives to pursue Italian art, his surroundings oppose his education; his sentiment being no longer renewed through his contact with living nature, he is reduced to his souvenirs. Moreover, he is of Germanic race; in other terms he is organically a morally good-natured map, and even modest; he has difficulty in appreciating the pagan idea of nudity, and still greater difficulty in comprehending the fatal and magnificent idea^[3] which governs civilization and stimulates the arts beyond the Alps, namely, that of the complete and sovereign individual, emancipated from every law, subordinating the rest, men and things, to the development of his own nature and the growth of his own faculties. Our painter is related, although distantly, to Martin Schœn and Albert Dürer; he is a bourgeois, almost docile and staid, a lover of the comfortable and the decent, and adapted to family and domestic life. His biographer, Karl Van Mander, at the beginning of his book, furnishes him with moral precepts. Read this patriarchal treatise, and imagine the distance between a Rosso, a Giulio Romano, a Titian and a Giorgione, and their pupils of Leyden or Antwerp. "All vices," says the good Fleming, "bring their own punishment. Distrust the maxim that the best painter is he who is the most dissipated. Unworthy of the name of artist is he who leads an evil life. Painters should never dispute or enter into strife with each other. To squander one's property is not a meritorious art. Avoid paying court to women in your youthful days. Shun the society of frivolous women, who corrupt so many painters. Reflect before you depart for Rome, for the opportunities to spend money there are great, and none are there for earning it. Ever be thankful to God for His bounties." Special recommendations follow concerning Italian inns, bed linen and fleas. It is evident that pupils of this class, even with great labor, will produce but little more than academic figures; man, according to their conceptions, is a draped body; when, following the example of the Italian masters, they attempt the nude, they render it without freedom, without spirit, without vivacity of invention; their pictures, in fact, are simply cold and meagre imitation; their motive is pedantic; they execute servilely and badly that which, in Italy, is done naturally and well. On the other hand, Italian art, like Greek art, and, in general, all classic art, simplifies in order to embellish; it eliminates, effaces, and reduces detail; by this means it gives greater value to grander features. Michael Angelo and the admirable Florentine school subordinate or suppress accessories, landscape, fabrics and costume; with them the essential consists of the noble and the grandiose type, the anatomical and muscular structure, the nude or lightly draped form taken by itself, abstractly, through the retrenchment of particulars constituting the individual and denoting his profession, education and condition; you have man in general represented, and not a special man. Their personages are in a superior world, because they are of a world which is not; the peculiar feature of the scene they depict is the nullity of time and space. Nothing is more opposed to Germanic and Flemish genius, which sees things as they are in their entirety and complexity; which, in man, takes in, besides man in general, the contemporary, the citizen, the peasant, the laborer, this citizen, that laborer, that peasant; which attaches as much importance to the accessories of a man as to the man himself; which loves not merely human nature but all nature, animate and inanimate - cattle, horses, plants, landscape, sky, and even the atmosphere - its broader sympathies forestalling any neglect of objects, and its more minute observation requiring the fullest expression. You can comprehend how, in subjecting itself to a discipline so contrary, it loses the qualities it had without acquiring those it had not; how, in order that it may arrogate the ideal, it reduces color, loses the sentiment of light and atmosphere, obliterates the true details of costume and of interiors, deprives figures of original diversities peculiar to portrait and person, and is led to moderate the suddenness of motion constituting the impulsiveness of nature's activity, and thereby impairing ideal symmetry. It finds difficulty, however, in making all these sacrifices; its instinct only partially yields to its education. Flemish reminiscences may be traced underneath Italian velleity; both in turn predominate in the same picture; each prevents the other from having their full effect; their painting, consequently, uncertain, imperfect and diverted by two tendencies, furnishing us with historical documents and not beautiful works of art.

Such is the spectacle presented in Flanders during the last three quarters of the sixteenth century. Like a small river receiving a large stream, the mingled waters of which are disturbed until the foreign affluent imposes its more powerful tint on the entire current, so do we find the national style, invaded by the Italian, dappled irregularly and in places, gradually disappearing, only rarely rising to the surface, and at last sinking into obscure depths, whilst the other displays itself in the light and attracts universal attention. It is interesting to trace in the public galleries this conflict of the two currents and the peculiar effects of their commingling. The first Italian influx takes place with John de Mabuse, Bernard Van Orley, Lambert Lombard, John Mostaert, John Schorel, and Launcelot Blondel. They import in their pictures classic architecture, veined marble pilasters, medallions, shell niches, sometimes triumphal arches and cariatides, sometimes also noble and vigorous female figures in antique drapery, a sound nude form, well proportioned and vitalized, of the fine pagan stock, and healthy; their imitation reduces itself to this, while in other respects they follow national traditions. They still paint small pictures, suitable for genre subjects; they almost always preserve the strong and rich coloring of the preceding age, the mountains and blue distances of John Van Eyck, the clear skies vaguely tinged with emerald on the horizon, the magnificent stuffs covered with gold and jewels, the powerful relief, the minute precision of detail, and the solid honest heads of the bourgeoisie. But as they are no longer restrained by hieratic gravity they fall, in attempting to emancipate themselves, into simple awkwardness and ridiculous inconsistencies. The children of Job, crushed by their falling palace, sprawl about grimacing and writhing as if possessed; on the other panel of the triptych is the devil in the air mounting upward like a bat towards the petty Christ of a missal. Long feet and lean ascetic hands form the odd appurtenances of a shapely body. A "Last Supper" by Lambert Lombard mingles together Flemish clumsiness and vulgarity with the composition of Da Vinci. A "Last Judgment" by Bernard Van Orley introduces demons by Martin Schoen amidst the academic figures of Raphael. In the next generation the rising flood begins to engulph all; Michael Van Coxcyen, Heemskerk, Franz Floris, Martin de Vos, the Franckens, Van Mander, Spranger, Pourbus the elder, and later, Goltzius, besides many others, resemble people ambitious of speaking Italian but who do so laboriously, with an accent and some barbarisms. The canvas is enlarged and approaches the usual dimensions of an historical subject; the manner of painting is less simple; Karl Van Mander reproaches his contemporaries with "overloading their brushes," which was not formerly done, and with carrying impastoto excess. Coloring dies out; it becomes more and more white, chalky and pallid. Painters enter passionately into the study of anatomy, foreshortenings and muscular development; their drawing becomes dry and hard, reminding one at once of the goldsmiths contemporary with Pollaiolo and the exaggerating disciples of Michael Angelo; they lay great or violent stress on their science, they insist on proving their ability to manipulate the skeleton and produce action; you will find Adams and Eves, Saint Sebastians, Massacres of the Innocents, and Horatii resembling grotesque forms of living and bare muscles; their personages look as if casting their skins. When they show more moderation, and the painter, like Franz Floris in his "Fall of the Angels," discreetly copies good classic models, his nudities are scarcely any better; realistic sentiment and the quaint Germanic imagination peer out among ideal forms; demons with the heads of cats, fishes and swine, and with horns, claws and humps, and blowing fire from their jaws, introduce bestial comedy and a fantastic sabbat into the midst of the noble Olympus; we have one of Teniers' buffooneries inserted in a poem by Raphael. Others, like Martin Vos, strain themselves to produce the great sacred picture, figures imitated from the antique, cuirasses, draperies and tunics, studied correctness in composition, gestures indicative of noble action and stage heads and head gear, while they are substantially genre painters and lovers of reality and accessories. They constantly fall back to their Flemish types and their domestic details; their pictures seem to be enlarged colored engravings; they would be much better were they of small size. We feel in the artist a perverted talent, a natural disposition thwarted, an instinct working against the grain, a prose-writer born for narrating social incidents of whom the public commands epics in sounding Alexandrines.^[4] Still another wave, and the remains of national genius seem wholly submerged. A painter of noble family, well brought up, instructed by an erudite, a man of the world and a courtier, a favorite of the great Italian and Spanish leaders who manage matters in the Netherlands, Otto Venius, after passing seven years in Italy, brings from that country noble and pure antique types, beautiful Venetian color, melting and subtly graduated tones, shadows permeated with light, and the vague purples of flesh and of ruddy foliage. Excepting his native stimulus he is Italian, and no longer belongs to his race; scarcely more than a fragment of costume or the simple attitude of a stooping old man connects him with his country. Nothing remains to the painter but to abandon it entirely. Denis Calvaert establishes himself at Bologna, enters into competition with the Caraccis, and is the master of Guido. Flemish art accordingly seems, through its own course, to suppress itself for the advantage of another.

And yet it still subsists underneath the other. In vain does the genius of a people yield to foreign influences. It always recovers. These are temporary, while that is eternal; it belongs to the flesh and the blood, the atmosphere and the soil, the structure and degree of activity of brain and senses; all are animating forces incessantly renewed and everywhere present, and which the transient applause of a superior civilization neither undermines nor destroys. This is apparent in the preservation of two styles which continue pure amidst the growing transformation of the others. Mabuse, Morstaert, Van Orley, the two Pourbus, John Van Cleve, Antonis Moor, the two Mierevelts and Paul Moreelze produce excellent portraits; often, in the triptychs, the faces of the donataires, arranged in rows on the shutters, form a contrast in their homely sincerity, calm gravity and profound simplicity of expression with the frigidity and artificial composition of the principal subject; the spectator feels himself quite re-animated; instead of manikins he finds men. On the other hand there arises the painting of genre subjects, landscapes and interiors. After Quintin Matsys, and Lucas of Leyden, we see it developing with John Matsys, Van Hemessen, the Breughels, Vinckenbooms, the three Valkenburgs, Peter Neefs and Paul Bril, and especially in the multitude of engravers and illustrators who reproduce, on scattered sheets or in books, the moralities, social incidents, professions, conditions and events of the day. They are, undoubtedly, to remain for a long time fantastic and humorous. This art mixes up nature promiscuously, according to its own disordered fancies; it is unconscious of the true forms and the true tint of trees and mountains: it makes its figures howling, and introduces amidst the costumes of the period grotesque monsters similar to those promenading through the kermesses. But all these intermediary objects are natural, and insensibly lead on to its final state, which is the knowledge and love of actual life, as the eye contemplates it. Here, as in the painting of portraits, the chain is complete; the metal of all its links is national: through Breughel, Paul Bril and Peter Neefs, through Antonis Moor, the Pourbus and the Mierevelts, it joins on to the Flemish and Dutch masters of the seventeenth century. The rigidity of ancient figures is relaxed; a mystic landscape becomes real; the transition from the divine to the human age is accomplished. This spontaneous and regular development shows that national instincts are maintained under the empire of foreign fashions; let a crisis intervene to arouse them, and they recover their ascendancy, while art is transformed according to the public taste. This crisis is the great revolution commencing in 1572, the long and terrible War of Independence, as grand in its events and as fecund of results as our French Revolution. Here as with us, the renewal of the moral world is the renewal of the ideal world; the Flemish and Dutch art of the seventeenth century, like the French art and literature of the nineteenth century, is the reaction of a vast tragedy performed for thirty years at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Here, however, the scaffolds and battles, having divided the nation, form two peoples; one Catholic and legitimist in Belgium, and the other Protestant and republican in Holland. While both were combined there was but one spirit; divided and opposed there were two. Antwerp and Amsterdam held different conceptions of life, and, accordingly, display different schools of painting; the same political crisis which divided their country divided their art.

Notes

1. In 1539 Louvain proposes this question: "What is the greatest consolation to a dying man?" The responses all have a Lutheran cast. The Academy of St. Wynockberge, bearing off the second prize, answers, according to the doctrine of pure grace: "The faith that Christ and his Spirit have been given to us."
2. Two million of crowns of gold out of five million.
3. Burckhardt's "Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italian," an admirable work, the most complete and most philosophic yet written on the Italian Renaissance.
4. This period of Flemish art is analogous to that of English literature after the Restoration. In both cases a Germanic art attempts to be classic; in both cases the contrast between education and nature produces hybrid works and multiplied failures.