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The Ghent Altarpiece

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The Ghent Altarpiece TILL-HOLGER BORCHERT MASTERPIECES IN DETAIL Early Netherlandish Art from van Eyck to Bosch PRESTEL MUNICH • LONDON • NEW YORK CONTENTS 7 Preface 290 QUENTIN METSYS 9 Foreword – Mickey Cartin 292 Saint John Altarpiece 306 The Money Changer and his Wife 10 JAN VAN EYCK 316 MASTER OF FRANKFURT 12 The Ghent Altarpiece 318 Deposition Triptych 34 Virgin and Child with Chancellor Nicolas Rolin 48 Virgin and Child with Canon Joris van der Paele 328 JOACHIM PATINIR 60 Saint Barbara 330 Charon Crossing the Styx, the River to Hades 68 ROBERT CAMPIN 338 JAN GOSSAERT 70 Wings of the Triptych for Henry of Werl 340 Danae 80 ROGIER VAN DER WEYDEN 346 JOOS VAN CLEVE 82 Descent from the Cross 348 Portrait of Eleanor of Austria 94 The Seven Sacraments 106 Saint Columba Altarpiece 354 PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER 356 Dulle Griet 120 PETRUS CHRISTUS 368 The Tower of Babel 122 Lamentation 380 Winter Landscape 388 The Conversion of Paul 130 DIERIC BOUTS 132 Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament 396 PETER PAUL RUBENS 144 The Justice of Emperor Otto III 398 Equestrian Portrait of Don Francesco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, Duke of Lerma 154 JOOS VAN WASSENHOVE 406 Triptych of the Descent from the Cross 156 Crucifixion Triptych 418 The Four Rivers of Paradise 428 The Garden of Love 168 HUGO VAN DER GOES 170 Adoration of the Magi 438 ANTHONY VAN DYCK 178 The Death of the Virgin 440 ‘Le Roi à la chasse’ 450 Portrait of Carlo Emanuele d’Este with Dog 188 HANS MEMLING 190 Last Judgement Triptych 456 JACOB JORDAENS 202 Saint John Altarpiece 458 The Feast of the Bean King 214 Diptych of Maarten van Nieuwenhove 468 JAN BRUEGHEL THE ELDER 220 GERARD DAVID 470 Allegory of the Sense of Smell 222 The Judgement of Cambyses 236 Triptych with the Baptism of Christ 480 WILLEM VAN HAECHT 482 The Cabinet of Curiosities of Cornelis van der Geest 246 HIERONYMUS BOSCH 248 Adoration of the Magi 492 Bibliography 258 The Garden of Earthly Delights 495 Acknowledgements 274 The Haywain 496 Photo credits 5 PREFACE The notion that ‘the devil is in the detail’ – as Aby Warburg 1598) and subsequently by governors drawn from the Span- (1866–1929) pointed out – is also and especially true of the ish branch of the house of Habsburg, and from the 18th fine arts. Old Master paintings rarely disclose their secrets and century up to the Napoleonic invasion by members of the subtleties at first glance. In the case of ambitious, artistically Austrian Habsburg line. and intellectually sophisticated paintings in particular, con- All the paintings included in this book were produced tent and meaning only reveal themselves to an alert and within approximately 200 years and hence within a politic- attentive viewer who looks closely, repeatedly, and each time ally and culturally extremely eventful period of history, dur- through fresh eyes, in order to arrive very gradually at a deeper ing which the way that artists perceived themselves, their understanding of the work in question. For this reason it is role and their status underwent a fundamental change, the well worth taking not just one but several appreciative looks objective realism of smoothly polished surfaces was replaced at the masterpieces of earlier epochs, so as to gain insights not by the subjective, virtuoso signature of the impasto brush only into the way they have been laid out and painted, but also stroke, and – against the backdrop of ecumenical councils into the aims and intentions of their artists. and the Reformation – the painting evolved from primarily With this aim in mind, the almost 500 pages of this book religious cult object to autonomous artwork. Over the course present a lavishly illustrated panorama of Netherlandish of these two centuries, the works produced in the Low Coun- painting from the 15th to the 17th century, with representa- y tries b artists such as Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch, tive examples of the oeuvre of the respective artists. Famous Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens regularly names thus alternate with painters who are less well known, influenced the course of Europ ean art with their innov- whereby the focus falls above all on the unparalleled hold- ations. With regard to the development of portraiture and ings in Flemish museums and churches and in the collections landscape painting in particular, Early Netherlandish masters assembled by the Habsburgs, trad itionally closely linked from van Eyck to Bruegel and their Flemish descendants with the Burgundian Netherlands, which are today housed Rubens, Jacob Jordaens and Anthony van Dyck set new stand- in Vienna and Madrid. ards that earned the admiration of contemporary writers In order to avoid possible misunderstandings, let me and attracted the covetous attention of the most important briefly clarify the term ‘Early Netherlandish’, which underlies patrons and art collectors of their day. the selection of artworks in this book. ‘Early Netherlandish’ The texts are aimed at interested readers and provide bio- does not refer in any way to the modern-day Kingdom of the graphical information about each painter, as well as situat- Netherlands, but is used in a historical sense to describe the ing his artistic achievements in context. They present the art produced in the princedoms, such as Flanders, Brabant selected works in a succinct manner and, lastly, examine and the Hainault, ruled in personal union in the 15th century certain details a little more closely. This book does not pre- by the Duke of Burgundy Philip the Good (1396–1467), his son sumeo t tell readers what to look at or how these master- Charles the Bold (1433–1477) and their Habsburg heirs up to pieces should be seen. Instead, the descriptions are intended Emperor Charles V (1500–1558). These princedoms lay in the to encourage viewers to make their own personal discoveries south of the Burgundian Netherlands and correspond to the and to experience the timelessness of these paintings by the today primarily Flemish regions with the cities of Bruges, Early Netherlandish masters. I would have greatly liked to Ghent, Antwerp, Brussels and Leuven – international me- allow contemporary artists to testify to the enduring rele- tro p olises even in the 15th and 16th centuries. vancef o the Old Masters, but that lies beyond the scope of Geographically speaking, these territories were thus this already opulent volume. I am therefore all the more more or less identical with the national borders of Belgium. grateful for the opening words by Mickey Cartin, one of The majority remained Catholic even after the revolt of the America’s most important private collectors, who – with a Calvinist provinces of Holland, Zeeland and others in the discerning eye for quality – collects works by contemporary north and the subsequent creation of the republic of the artists as well as Old Master paintings. united Netherlands (1579/81). They were ruled from the mid- dlef o the 16th century onwards by Philip II of Spain (1527– TILL-HOLGER BORCHERT 7 FOREWORD The author of this book has been a friend of mine for some minutes or so on my first encounter before I felt two polar- time, and I was a bit humbled that he would ask me to provide izing pushes. On the one hand, I could not get enough of a foreword here. He is, after all, an accomplished art histor- them, while on the other, I needed to move on – quickly. ian and exhibition maker, and I am an ‘amateur’. I have a This is not how scholars react to pictures, I thought. They deep interest in the history of art, but after years of looking stay in place. They look, and look harder. They compare and indulging my endless curiosity, my knowledge remains with others by the same author, either side by side or from rather sketchy and my ability to recall the limited amount of memory, but they always compare. I just react. I am not a information I have collected is often unreliable. connoisseur. I am just an enthusiast, but informed enough On the contrary, I have marvelled at Till-Holger Borchert’s to know that this is one of the greatest paintings in all of the deep knowledge of the history of art. His focus is on Early history of art, and within its boxed-in stage-like space is a Netherlandish Painting, but he has a strong grasp of the his- group of the most emotionally despairing people ever assem- toryf o art from the Gothic to the present, and when I first bledn i a picture. Enthusiasts are always making claims like met him I could not understand how so much information this. ‘I know, I know, Jesus is dead,’ I thought to myself, and could reside in one head, nor could I believe the facility with ‘What do you expect?’ which it could be retrieved. He has reminded me that while For the next six days I returned to share the grief of the my achievement as a historian is modest at best, my enthusi- players. I absorbed their interconnected hurt and pain. Be- asm for art and for looking at pictures is limitless. t ween shakes of the head in my amazement over what I was When I first saw this book, I started counting and noted seeing, I felt very saddened. I might have even cried a bit, that I had at least once in my life stood before all but seven not over the suffering and death of Jesus, but in response to of these masterpieces. As I looked a little more carefully at the pain of those who witnessed his removal from the Cross.
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