Peasant Scenes and Landscapes

The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market

Larry Silver

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812207439
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: European Art

Modern viewers take for granted the pictorial conventions present in easel paintings and engraved prints of such subjects as landscapes or peasants. These generic subjects and their representational conventions, however, have their own origins and early histories. In sixteenth-century Antwerp, painting and the emerging new medium of engraving began to depart from traditional visual culture, which had been defined primarily by wall paintings, altarpieces, and portraits of the elite. New genres and new media arose simultaneously in this volatile commercial and financial capital of Europe, home to the first open art market near the city Bourse. The new pictorial subjects emerged first as hybrid images, dominated by religious themes but also including elements that later became pictorial categories in their own right: landscapes, food markets, peasants at work and play, and still-life compositions. In addition to being the place of the origin and evolution of these genres, the Antwerp art market gave rise to the concept of artistic identity, in which favorite forms and favorite themes by an individual artist gained consumer recognition.In Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, Larry Silver examines the emergence of pictorial kinds—scenes of taverns and markets, landscapes and peasants—and charts their evolution as genres from initial hybrids to more conventionalized artistic formulas. The relationship of these new genres and their favorite themes reflect a burgeoning urbanism and capitalism in Antwerp, and Silver analyzes how pictorial genres and the Antwerp marketplace fostered the development of what has come to be known as "signature" artistic style. By examining Bosch and Bruegel, together with their imitators, he focuses on pictorial innovation as well as the marketing of individual styles, attending particularly to the growing practice of artists signing their works. In addition, he argues that consumer interest in the style of individual artists reinforced another phenomenon of the later sixteenth century: art collecting. While today we take such typical artistic formulas as commonplace, along with their frequent use of identifying signatures (a Rothko, a Pollock), Peasant Scenes and Landscapes shows how these developed simultaneously in the commercial world of early modern Antwerp.

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.

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 Dürer 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 Dürer 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 Friedländer 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,” Friedländer 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 Dürer (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 Friedländer 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 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 Dürer, 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 Dürer’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. Dürer 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 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

Dürer copyists also frequently imitated or even forged his famous monogram.¹⁵

In the case of Dürer’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 Liège 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 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 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Peasant Scenes And Landscapes
• Copyright
• List of 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