Part 12

We shall gain a better idea of the spirit of early Flemish Art if we pause for a moment to look into the palace at Lille, in 1454, when Philip the Good was celebrating the “Feast of the Pheasant.” The large hall was hung with tapestry representing the _Labors of Hercules_. The _dressoir_ of enormous size was adorned with magnificent gold and silver vessels and there were three large tables, splendidly laden with viands artistically decorated. One of the guests wrote: “On a raised platform at the head of the first table sat the Duke. He was arrayed in his accustomed splendor--his dress of black velvet serving as a dark ground that heightened the brilliancy of the precious stones, valued at a million of gold crowns, with which it was profusely decked. Among the guests was a numerous body of knights, who had passed the morning in the tilting-field, and fair Flemish ladies, whose flaunting beauty had inspired these martial sports. Each course was composed of forty-four dishes, which were placed on chariots painted in gold and azure and which were moved along the tables by concealed machinery. As soon as the company was seated, the bells began to peal from the steeple of a huge pastry church with stained windows that concealed an organ and choir of singers; and three little choristers issued from the edifice and sang a very sweet _chanson_. Twenty-eight musicians, hidden in a mammoth pie,[19] performed on various instruments and the fine viands and wines were circulated.”

After the exhibition of _entremets_, the _pheasant_ was brought in, the Crusade proclaimed against the Sultan, and the vows registered.

It is safe to conjecture that Hubert and Jan van Eyck were among the painters who were employed to design the _entremets_, triumphal arches, and curiosities executed in pastry and in confections made of sugar, as well as to paint portraits of distinguished Flemings and altar-pieces for their churches.

The Flemish Primitives certainly had many occasions to feast their eyes upon magnificence!

John Paston, who went to Bruges to attend Charles the Bold’s second marriage in 1468 to Margaret of York, was overwhelmed and dazed by what he saw. “Nothing was like it save King Arthur’s Court,” he wrote home. The streets were hung with tapestries and cloth-of-gold, triumphal arches were erected and at intervals along her way the bride was entertained by “Histories,” the joint production of painters, decorators, dramatists, and machinists. The banquet-hall was superbly decorated and the chroniclers say “lighted by chandeliers in the form of castles surrounded by forest and mountains with revolving paths on which serpents, dragons, and other monstrous animals seemed to roam in search of prey, spouting forth jets of flame that were reflected in huge mirrors, so arranged as to catch and multiply the rays. The dishes containing the principal meats were ships, seven feet long and completely rigged, the masts and cordage gilt, the sails and streamers of silk, each floating in a silver lake between shores of verdure and enamelled rocks and attended by a fleet of boats laden with lemons, oranges, and condiments. There were thirty of these vessels and as many huge pastries in the shape of castles with banners waving from their battlements and towers; besides tents and pavilions for the fruit; jelly-dishes of crystal supported by figures of the same material dispensing streams of lavender and rose-water; and an immense profusion of gold and silver plate.”

When Charles the Bold was killed on the battlefield of Nancy (1477), a New Era was about to dawn. America was soon to be discovered; Vasco da Gama was to find an ocean route to the East Indies; the Moors were to be expelled from Spain; the Wars of the Roses were to end in England; Ferdinand and Isabella were to marry their daughter, the “mad Joanna,” to Philip the Fair of Austria, heir through his mother, Mary of Burgundy, to the Burgundian dominions (the issue being Charles V, born in Ghent in 1500). Of still more importance to the world of Art than these important events was the discovery of Italy by the French, who crossed the Alps with Charles VIII. The French were dazzled by what they saw in Italy. On their return the Renaissance in France and the Netherlands may be said to have begun to blossom. _The ground had already been prepared by the art-loving Dukes of Burgundy._

Let us return, however, to the Bruges painters:

“The rise of the School was aided by the Fourteenth Century Art of Cologne best shown in the work of Meister Wilhelm. The Art of the movement was, for the period, strongly realistic. Natural objects were painted with the utmost fidelity, interest in still-life and _genre_ begin to appear, and details of architecture and landscape were rendered as carefully as the heads of the most sacred personages in the compositions. So pronounced was this tendency that superficial observers are led to consider Flemish painting fundamentally material; but a thoughtful analysis will reveal a spirituality in the art quite as sincere, if not so obvious, as in the painting of contemporary Italy. In the early School, the painting was almost wholly religious, and scenes and actors were handled with reverence and deep feeling.

“The Flemings, however, inherited from earlier art a religious type to which they clung with great tenacity and which to the modern eye is ugly. The exaggeratedly-domed forehead of the Madonna, a symbol of intellect to the Fleming, is to the modern a distortion. Similarly the tiny mouth, the eyes almost without brows,[20] and the other features which Flemish symbolism demanded, are now somewhat disturbing to the eye. When native realism and symbolism were coupled, as in the over realistic rendering of the ascetic Christ-Child, the effect is sometimes startling to the layman; and the beginner in the study of Flemish Art should beware of mistaking accidents of convention for artistic defects. If the conventions of Flemish Art make it at first difficult to appreciate, the technical perfection of the work must appeal to any one. Oil-painting, perfected if not necessarily invented in Flanders, gave a richness of color and a lustre of surface which specially distinguished the style. The play and delicate gradation of light over richly-colored surfaces was rendered so skillfully that the artists approached the expression of a complete visual effect, finally reached in Seventeenth Century Holland in the work of Vermeer.--_Mediæval and Renaissance Paintings_ (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 1927).

Next in importance to the Van Eycks comes Roger van der Weyden (1400?–1464). By 1432 Roger had made a name for himself, for he had become a master painter in the Tournay Guild. In 1450 he went to Italy and seems to have visited Cologne on his way home (see page 166).

The Maître de Flémalle (Robert Campin?), who showed a great interest in still-life, is thought to have been the master of Roger van der Weyden. Petrus Christus (1410?–1473), a native of Baerle, Holland, free citizen of Bruges in 1444, is regarded as one of the ancestors of _genre_ painting (see page 169).

Hans Memling (1430–5–1494), a native of Holland, was a supposed pupil of Roger van der Weyden. It is believed that Roger van der Weyden took Memling with him to Italy in 1450. Memling was closely associated with his master Roger van der Weyden and sometimes painted the wing-panels for Roger’s great altar-pieces. Memling’s chief painting was done in Bruges (see page 172).

Taine thus sums up the Flemish Primitives: “A Flemish Renaissance underneath Christian ideas, such, indeed, is the two-fold nature of art under Hubert and Jan van Eyck, Roger van der Weyden, Memling, and Quentin Massys; and from these two characteristics proceed all the others. On the one hand, artists take interest in actual life; their figures are no longer symbols like the illuminations of ancient missals, nor purified spirits like the Madonnas of the School of Cologne but living beings and bodies. They attend to no anatomy, the perspective is exact, the minutest details are rendered regarding stuffs, architecture, accessories, and landscape; the relief is strong and the entire scene stamps itself on the eye and on the mind with extraordinary force and sense of stability; the greatest masters of coming times are not to surpass them in all this, nor even go so far. Nature is now discovered. The scales fall from their eyes; they have just mastered almost in a flash, the proportions, the structure, and the coloring of visible realities; and, moreover, they delight in them. Consider the superb copes wrought in gold and bedecked with diamonds, the embroidered silks, the flowered and dazzling diadems with which they ornament their saints and divine personages, all of whom represent the pomp of the Burgundian Court. Look at the calm and transparent water, the bright meadows, the red and white flowers, the blossoming trees and the sunny distances of their admirable landscapes. Observe their coloring--the strongest and richest ever seen, the pure and full tones side by side as in a Persian carpet and united solely through their harmony, the superb breaks in the folds of purple mantles, the deep azure of long, falling robes, the green draperies like a summer field permeated with sunshine, the display of gold skirts trimmed with black, the strong light which warms and enlivens the whole scene--and you have a concert in which each instrument sounds its proper note. They see the world on the bright side and make a holiday of it, a genuine _fête_, similar to those of this day, glowing under a more bounteous sunlight and not a heavenly Jerusalem suffused with supernatural radiance such as Fra Angelico painted. They are Flemings and they stick to the earth.”

Contemporary with Memling is Hugo Van der Goes (1430–1482), one of the last important figures in the Van Eyck School, more celebrated in his day than in ours, but powerful and austere, and painter of an altar-piece in 1476 for Tommaso Portinari, which was placed in the Church of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and was greatly admired by Ghirlandaio and Piero di Cosimo. With Gerard David (1450–1523), a follower of Memling and Massys, we leave the Flemish Primitives for a world of newer ideas.

Quentin Massys (1460–1530), creator of the Antwerp School, belongs to an intermediate epoch. He is herald of the Italianiate Flemings--Jan Mabuse, Bernard van Orley, Lambert Lombard, Jan Mostært, Bellegambe, Launcelot Blondeel, and others--all of whom, dazzled by the Renaissance, tried to combine their Flemish coldness with Italian grace. Some of them lived to see the triumph of Rubens and the rise of another School.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), is the recognized head of the Flemish School of Painting. His power was felt throughout Europe and he had more influence on taste in the Seventeenth Century than any other artist. Rubens painted more than two thousand pictures and made nearly five hundred drawings. In every style he proved himself a great master (see page 176).

Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641) studied under Hendrik van Balen and then became assistant to and pupil of Rubens. After a long stay in Italy he returned to Antwerp and thence settled in England where he became Court-Painter to Charles I. In his short life he painted nearly a thousand pictures and acquired such proficiency in portraiture that he is ranked among the greatest in this line (see page 181).

The important Brueghel (or Breughel) family affords an example of heredity in painting and how in the course of generations there was transition from the old to the new art. Pieter (Peasant) Brueghel (1530–16--?) received lessons from Van Orley and Jerome Cœck, but his real master was the long dead Jerome Bosch, whose fantastic works fascinated him. Brueghel went to Italy and was delighted with the Alpine scenery; but, on his return he tried to preserve the Flemish ideas that were fast dying under the Italian cult. He persisted in portraying the familiar scenes of his boyhood and familiar humorous situations. Therefore, he received the sobriquets of “Peasant Brueghel” and “Droll Brueghel.” His two sons were equally famous. Jan or “Velvet Brueghel” (1568–1625), so-called from his fondness for wearing velvet, was famous for his flowers; and he frequently painted garlands in the pictures of Rubens. Pieter Brueghel (1574–1637), so loved painting infernal scenes that he was nicknamed “Hell-fire Brueghel.” Their sons continued their names and professions until the close of the Seventeenth Century.

Pieter Pourbus (1510–1584) and his son Frans (1540–1580) are among the best portrait-painters of the Sixteenth Century.

Frans Snyders (1579–1657) studied under Peter Brueghel and Hendrik van Balen, became the friend and associate of Rubens, and a brilliant and unsurpassed painter of fruits and animals.

Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), born in Antwerp, son of a cloth merchant, depicted scenes from domestic life and popular festivities. He was astonishingly able to render mirth and jollity. Jordaens is distinguished for his unrestrained and boisterous humor and he often repeated his somewhat crazy home-concert, “As the old ones sing, so will the young ones twitter.” Jordaens sometimes collaborated with Frans Snyders, Jan Fyt, Adriaen van Utrecht, and others. Jordaens was entirely Flemish, absolutely unaffected by the foreign influences that charmed Rubens and Van Dyck.

David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690) is the greatest _genre_ painter of the southern Netherlands. Teniers is one of those Flemish painters who were sought after in Holland during their lifetime. This may have arisen from the fact that he was closely allied with the Dutch School and with Brouwer who lived and worked in Antwerp. Teniers was an indefatigable painter and left more than eight hundred pictures,--inn-interiors, _kermesses_, hawking-parties, drinkers, bagpipe-players and other musicians, “conversations,” bowling-games, kitchens, _Temptations of St. Anthony_, and monkey-scenes. Sir Joshua Reynolds admired him and said: “The works of David Teniers, jun., are worthy of the closest attention of a painter who desires to excel in the mechanical knowledge of his art. His manner of touching, or what we call handling, has perhaps never been equalled: there is in his pictures that exact mixture of softness and sharpness which is difficult to execute.”

One of the best artists of the second period of the Antwerp School is Gonzales Coques (1614–1684), a painter of interiors of elegance, wealth, gaiety, and happy serenity, and also portraits. His distinction he borrows from Van Dyck and his color is inspired by Rubens. However, in the dimensions of his pictures and their minuteness of detail and finish, Coques is reminiscent of the Dutch School,--particularly Terborch and Metsu.

In the Eighteenth Century there is little painting to claim attention. Charles Blanc has put the matter most succinctly:

“For the Flemish School the Eighteenth Century is a long _entr’acte_ during which the stage, so nobly occupied of old, is sad and deserted. Here and there an artist appears to remind us what Flanders was in color and decoration for two centuries. France was triumphing in spirit and grace; Italy, though decadent, was still ingenious and smiling; England at last was producing original masters; _but Flanders was asleep_.”

PORTRAIT OF A LADY.

_Roger van der Weyden (1400?–1464)._

_Collection of the Hon. Andrew W. Mellon._

This very striking portrait, an oil painting on panel (14⅜ × 10⅝), came from the Collection of the Duke of Anhalt, Ducal Castle of Dessau, and was previously in the Gothic Palace, Wörlitz, Germany.

[Illustration:

_Collection of the Hon. Andrew W. Mellon_

PORTRAIT OF A LADY

--_Roger van der Weyden_]

The subject is a Flemish lady of high birth. She is not beautiful, but she has an air of great distinction. Her half-figure is turned three-quarters to the left and dressed in a dark robe with a turned-over collar, opening at the throat, where a transparent piece of soft, white muslin is arranged into a V-shape, and over this hangs a fine gold chain. A crimson girdle fastened with a gold clasp encircles her waist. The hair is brushed back from the forehead, or rather the forehead is rendered bald by the fashionable style of plucking out the hair, and covered by a close-fitting cap, composed of interlaced bands edged with a black ribbon, holding in place a thin veil; and over this a transparent white “wimple” is pinned to the cap, passing over the forehead and fastened at the back where it spreads in a wing on either shoulder. The right hand is placed over the left, presumably resting on a parapet, and a simple gold ring is on a finger of each hand.

Dr. Max Friedländer writes in _Meisterwerke der Niederländischen Malerei des XV u. XVI Jahrhunderts auf der Ausstellung zu Brügge_ (1902):

“This simple, proud, and very well preserved portrait, which has up to the present time not received a great deal of attention, in my estimation appears to be characteristic of Roger van der Weyden, in the severe and somewhat Moorish outline of the face, in the economic modelling of the shadows, and in the drawing of the lean hands. Similar women’s portraits are in the National Gallery, London, and in Adolphe de Rothschild’s Collection (from the Nieuwenhuij’s Sale).

Roger van der Weyden, or Rogier de la Pasture, the son of Henri de la Pasture, was born in 1400 in Tournai, where the family had been settled since 1260. His father was a sculptor and gave Roger his first training. Next he was apprenticed to the Maître de Flêmalle (Robert Campin) and later went to Brussels to live. Here he quickly gained a great reputation, for in 1436 he was appointed painter to the city of Brussels. While busy on his great _Last Judgment_, commissioned by Nicholas Rolin for the Hospital at Beaune (a polyptych, which has been classed with the Van Eyck _Adoration of the Lamb_), Roger went on a long trip to Italy. Visiting Rome, he greatly admired the frescoes begun by Gentile da Fabriano in St. John Lateran. He also went to Florence, Ferrara, and, it is supposed, Venice. Roger painted a good deal in Italy and even had orders. Among other things he painted a _Madonna and Child_ for Cosimo de’ Medici.

Roger returned home, it is thought, by way of Cologne. While on this trip, Roger was commissioned by Leonello d’Este to paint a picture.

Roger van der Weyden left as much in Italy as he brought home. His influence is seen in many of the contemporary Italians. In like manner, the influence of the Italians appears in the pictures that Roger van der Weyden painted on his return. German artists, too, fell under the spell of Roger van der Weyden, particularly Martin Schöngauer, the greatest German painter of the Fifteenth Century.

Roger van der Weyden was extremely versatile: he produced paintings in oil and painted miniatures, designed cartoons for tapestry-weavers, and made wood-engravings.

Fierens-Gevaert, the greatest authority on Flemish Primitives, says of Roger van der Weyden:

“His figures, among which males predominate, both in number and interest, do not all possess the impassibility sometimes attributed to them. Their beauty, or their moral significance, is merely restrained, just like the artist’s own emotions. Both need to be discovered. As for the expression of the color, the novel truth of the light, the profound feeling of the landscape--these are the incontestable merits in the Louvain painter. They explain his profound influence upon Memling, Gerard David, Quentin Massys, the Master of the Death of Mary, his _prestige_ with the Sixteenth Century Renaissants, and the growing admiration of modern criticism for his genius.”

Roger van der Weyden died in Brussels, June 16, 1464, leaving many pupils and followers, the most noteworthy of whom was Hans Memling.

PORTRAIT OF A CARTHUSIAN MONK AS A SAINT.

_Petrus Christus (1410?–1473)._

_Collection of Mr. Jules S. Bache._

This interesting panel (8½ × 11⅝ inches) came to America by way of Spain, having been in the Collections of Don Ramon de Oms, Majorca, and the Marquis de Dos Aguas, Valencia.

The picture is signed and dated 1446 at the base of the portrait, below a ledge, on which an insect is slowly walking. The identity of the subject and the reason for the presence of the fly, or grasshopper (or whatever it is), are equally unknown. However, we have here a marvellous human document, which grows more amazing the longer it is studied. The portrait preserves the personality and features of a strong, kindly, and interesting man, who must have been beloved and honored, or he would not have been represented with a golden ring around his head, proclaiming him a saint.

And the painter has done more than this: he has thrown such atmosphere around the man that the interesting life in the old abbeys seems to rise before us. We see the picturesque buildings set in emerald swards and shaded by leafy trees, and surrounded by cloisters where the monks take exercise, or read in some traceried recess; and we peer into the halls where the artistic members of the community are writing, composing music, copying, or painting and illuminating beautiful miniatures in manuscripts, destined--although undreamed of by these painters and gold-leaf workers--to bring thousands of dollars at auction-sales five hundred years in the future and to be prized as treasures in a then undiscovered country across the Atlantic Ocean, whose waters were thought by those very monks to break upon the shores of Far Cathay!

Our _Carthusian Monk_, in his white cassock, carries us into the Chapel, where we see him and others of his Order in prayer at midnight, at early dawn, or at the vesper hour; and again with him we stroll to the near-by river in the golden sunlight of the afternoon and sit under the soft willows, dangling a line from a long fishing-pole until we have a sufficient catch for supper. On our return to the abbey we notice how heartily our _Carthusian Monk_ welcomes a group of arriving travellers--for the abbeys were the hostelries in the Middle Ages--and we join them at supper in the refectory. Doubtless, too, our Carthusian gives us a _petit verre_ of golden Chartreuse of his own making.

While the rules in the ancient abbeys were rigid and inflexible and religion, of course, the chief business, it was in these secluded places that art and learning were preserved and fostered. The world to-day is apt to forget what civilization owes to the Mediæval Abbey, and Petrus Christus has brought this _Carthusian Monk_ to tell us something of what that is.

[Illustration:

_Collection of Mr. Jules S. Bache_

PORTRAIT OF A CARTHUSIAN MONK AS A SAINT

--_Petrus Christus_]

Petrus Christus was born at Baerle, on the southern border of Holland, in 1410 (it is thought). In 1444 he became a free citizen of Bruges and, as he was a follower and probably a pupil of Jan van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden, he is classed as belonging to the School of Bruges. Petrus Christus painted religious pictures and portraits and is regarded as one of the direct ancestors of _genre_ painting. He died in 1473. Of late years his pictures have come into special prominence.

MADONNA AND CHILD WITH ANGELS.

_Hans Memling (1430–5–1494)._

_Collection of the Hon. Andrew W. Mellon._

This painting, an oil on panel (23 × 19 inches), came from the Collection of the Duke of Anhalt, Gothic Palace, Wörlitz, near Dessau, Germany.