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Tag Archives: northern renaissance

Jan Swart van Groningen: Nativity Triptych

In this triptych the artist beautifully pictures several of the most familiar Christmas story events.

Northern Mannerism: The Martyrdom of Peter

This intriguing painting of Peter’s martyrdom highlights the Northern painters’ penchant for fantastic backgrounds.

Gaspar de Crayer

St. Augustine 

Gaspar de Crayer

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Frans Francken, the Younger

The Adoration of the Magi
Frans Francken, the Younger

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Object of the Month: December 2013

The Adoration of the Shepherds

Oil on panel

Hans von Aachen

German, 1552-1615

At Christmas, our thoughts naturally turn to gifts. Given a choice, would you choose a large package or a small one? Perhaps it would be wise to remember the adage, “Good things come in small packages.” That sentiment is certainly true of M&G’s Object of the Month, a small painting (9.25” x 7”) that is like a precious jewel in a small gift box.

In addition to the Holy Family and the shepherds, the crowded scene includes women, another child, barn animals, the requisite angels tumbling from heaven, and a huge mastiff. Other innovative additions include bagpipes and a shovel. Far in the background the light of the angelic host can be seen illuminating the hillside. The painting is housed in a tabernacle-type frame with decorative gold tooling and stone insets. Tabernacle frames often held large pieces of art; this version captures the architectural features in miniature.

Aachen lived in Italy from 1574–1588, studying the great Italian masters, and in 1592 he became Court Painter to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, a prestigious position that entailed diplomatic as well as artistic responsibilities. Rudolf was the greatest patron of the arts of his time, acquiring works by Dürer, Brueghel, and Veronese as well as works of contemporary northern Mannerist artists such as Aachen, Archimboldo, Spranger, and Savery.

The provenance, or history, of the painting can be traced to English ownership in 1834. English collectors of the nineteenth century amassed great quantities of art, much of it available because of wars and unrest in Europe. This work was part of an 1834 bequest to the Fitzwilliam Museum of Cambridge University; they retained ownership until 1959 when it was sold at Sotheby’s and acquired by the museum.

Anne Short, Former Research Supervisor

 

Published in 2013

Object of the Month: June 2013

The Holy Family

Oil on panel

Joachim Bueckelaer

Monogrammed and dated: JB (top middle column) 1565 (top left column)

Flemish, c.1534–d.1574

Joachim Bueckelaer received his training in Antwerp from his uncle, Pieter Aertsen, who originated a type of genre painting with peasants or biblical characters set amidst a kitchen or market scene. As an innovator in a new approach to narrative painting, Aertsen enjoyed considerable success with patrons, though not a large following from other artists. Bueckelaer emulated Aertsen’s style closely when he became an independent master in 1560 and remained inspired by his teacher-uncle’s style for the rest of his career.

The painting came to the collection in 1963, three years after it was purchased at a Sotheby’s auction by dealer Julius Weitzner. Weitzner relates in a letter to Dr. Bob Jones Jr. (founder of the Museum & Gallery at Bob Jones University that the under-bidder for the sale was Phillip Pouncy (then Deputy Keeper of the Drawings Department at the British Museum) on behalf of Dr. Julius Held—representative for the Ferre Foundation and assembling works for the new Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico.

Dr. Held later wrote to Dr. Jones about the painting saying, “Congratulations on the acquisition of the Bueckelaer; I know the picture very well and have always liked it very much. You did well to buy it.” Dr. Alfred Stange also commented that “The Holy Family by Bueckelaer is an outstanding picture; and signed and dated pictures by this master are, besides that, extremely rare.” Thieme-Becker listed the painting first among the artist’s most important works. The same year it was acquired by the museum it traveled to the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels for the important Le Siècle de Bruegel: La peinture en Belgique au XVIe siecle exhibit.

In the present work, the artist places the biblical scene front and center, forming a pleasing figural arrangement with limbs at active diagonals and a triangular focal point between the three main character’s faces. The large-scale figures of Joseph and Mary fill the immediate foreground, giving a monumentality and nobility to the peasant-looking characters. Bueckelaer’s other market scenes with biblical narratives often had a moralizing purpose, contrasting secular and spiritual values and/or illustrating the frivolity of pleasing the flesh. Here the spiritual tone is elevated throughout the scene, and the beautiful basket of fruits underscores the satisfaction and blessing that can be found only in Christ, the focus of the narrative.

Though Bueckelaer’s work influenced Northern Italians such as Bartolomeo Passarotti and Annibale Carracci, he had no close successors in the Netherlands. Nonetheless, his lifelong commitment to still life and genre painting proved an important on-going presence in Antwerp. Seventeenth-century painters such as Frans Snyders illustrate his continued influence into the Baroque era. His small, respectable output of about forty extant paintings and few followers can be explained perhaps by his early death at age forty.

 

Published in 2013

Object of the Month: February 2013

Madonna of the Fireplace

Oil on panel, ca. 1500

Attributed to Jan Gossaert, called Mabuse

Flemish, b. Maubeuge?, ca. 1478, worked in Antwerp, d. Antwerp 1532

 

Though the Madonna of the Fireplace is a painting that continues to lack a firm attribution to a known painter; nonetheless, it is one of the “star” paintings in the collection. One of the primary considerations of Dr. Bob Jones Jr. in assembling the collection during the 1950s and 60s, was the importance of the painting’s quality, even if the work lacked sure authorship by a known artist.

The characteristics of this painting epitomize late fifteenth-century painting in the area of the Low Countries generically referred to as Flanders. The highly angled and stylized folds of the drapery are typical of paintings in the 1400s and even occur in carved sculpture from this period. The slightly awkward proportions and elongated facial features are stylistic hallmarks of the era as well as the very accomplished and detailed surface treatment. Even the setting for Mary and Christ strongly betrays its Northern origins. Though the fireplace carvings and treatment reveal the artist’s knowledge of Italian models, the tile floor patterns and the carved linen-fold wooden paneling would have been found in many well-to-do homes throughout Flanders. It is also the same kind of carved, period paneling on the very gallery wall on which this painting hangs in the museum.

One of the turning points in the history of Northern Renaissance art began when painters started depicting the Virgin in domestic interiors. Artists of the 1300s and early 1400s typically placed the Virgin within a church interior as part of an Annunciation scene or other narratives. However, this setting changed with innovations in the 1420s by Robert Campin, whose famous Merode Altarpiece (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) broke with tradition and pictured the Virgin in a domestic interior typical of a fifteenth-century home. M&G’s painter continues Campin’s vision later in the century with this remarkable panel—one of the most beautiful and well preserved paintings in the entire Museum & Gallery Collection.

 

Published in 2013