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Designs for Altarpieces by Maarten Van Heemskerck*

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Designs for Altarpieces by Maarten Van Heemskerck* ILJA M. VELdmAN Designs for Altarpieces by Maarten van Heemskerck* The fame of Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574) as a draughtsman rests mainly on his drawings of classical sculptures and ruins made during his Roman stay (1532-1536/1537). The 66 folios of his travel sketchbook and more than seventy other, larger drawings are preserved in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett; several Roman drawings are found in other Print Rooms as well.1 A large collection of these drawings, equally admired by contemporaries and modern spectators, were carefully kept together by the painter during his life. After his death they came into the possession of his friend and pupil Jacob Rauwaert, and they were subsequently owned by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem and Pieter Jansz Saenredam. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the bulk of the drawings were assembled in two albums which were acquired by the Berlin Print Room in the following century.2 Rather different are Van Heemskerck’s hundreds of detailed preparatory drawings for prints, engraved in copper by professional engravers and etchers. The artist himself attached great importance to these drawings, for he signed nearly all of them and regu- larly added dates. At least 135 of these drawings were kept in an album of pink-purple pages, bound in velvet, which came into the possession of the Danish Royal family before 1690.3 Drawings submitted to engravers were usually returned to the artist with the prints. Some collectors valued them especially because they resembled engravings.4 Nearly all of Van Heemskerck’s preparatory drawing were nicely signed, so it is not surprising that so many of them have survived to this day. Preparatory drawings for paintings are a third category. It is quite amazing, though, that this category is hardly represented in Van Heemskerck’s oeuvre on paper, in spite of the fact that painting was his main activity and the reason for his fame - at least a 110 paintings have survived Iconoclasm and the ravages of time. It is this group of drawings that I will discuss in this article. There are only a few left, all depicting religious themes and all rather different in style. None of them has ever received much attention. Indeed, three of them (figs. 4, 6 and 13) have never appeared in the art-historical literature. But the sheets are important for they give us a glimpse of Van Heemskerck’s activity as a designer of religious paintings and altarpieces. And that is good news, for we have little idea how his designs looked on the prepared panels. In the case of many Netherlandish sixteenth-century panel paintings, infrared photography and infrared reflectography are able to reveal an underdrawing in black chalk, charcoal or carbon black ink on the ground or priming layers. Van Heemskerck’s panels produced after his return from Rome in 1536/1537 display the usual thin, lead white based priming layer, but no underdrawing in black chalk or charcoal. It has been suggested that Van Heemskerck drew his designs in red chalk that cannot be detected under the paint layers; that would be in line with the use of red chalk in several of his Roman drawings.5 The change in his working method is reflected in his two versions ofSaint Luke Painting the Virgin. In the painting of 1532 in Haarlem, the portrait that Saint Luke is working on has been underdrawn in black 17 Oud Holland 2015 volume 128 - 1 1 Maarten van Heemskerck, The Crucifixion, 1554, pen and brown ink, squared in black chalk, 37.7 x 26.4 cm. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. Photo: Holm Bevers. chalk or charcoal, but his later version of c.1553 in Rennes shows a panel with a prelimi- nary composition in brush and a reddish-brown paint.6 It is notable that a similar design in thick lines of black paint is clearly visible under the light-coloured and thinly painted skirt of the Eritrean Sybille (1564) in Amsterdam. This leads to the assumption that the painter used to apply a global underdrawing in brush and dark paint that is no longer discernible under the other coloured paint layers. Technical research on the Annunciation on the outside of the shutters of the Draper’s altarpiece (1546) in Haarlem, for instance, revealed only a few perspective lines and shadows in black chalk in the architecture below but no underdrawing at all in the figures and the landscape.7 It is also assumed that Van Heemskerck prepared his compositions for large paintings at a reduced scale on a piece of paper, and that he transferred this design to the panel by squaring, a method also used by Jan van Scorel and Italian artists. The lines in charcoal on the panel would then have been brushed away before painting.8 Most drawings 18 Oud Holland 2015 volume 128 - 1.
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