CHAPTER 6 The Trope of Anthropomorphosis in Hendrick Goltzius’s Venus and Cupid (1590), Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres (1593), and Portrait of Frederick de Vries (1597)

Walter S. Melion

This article examines three allegories of art, two erotic, one parental, that fea- ture a curious prosopopoeic device: within these images, one or more faces are discernible in things of nature, such as trees, or natural phenomena, such as vaporous flame or an earthen ridge. These are versions of an age-old rhetorical figure—prosopopoeia or, better, personification—that Goltzius has altered in crucial ways: whereas prosopopoeia, in its traditional form, involved speaking through a person or, sometimes, a thing other than oneself, and personifica- tion involved giving speech to a humanized animal or thing, Goltzius anthro- pomorphizes things and phenomena, and yet allows them to remain both silent and for the most part unaltered. Faces are seen to materialize in a tree, a hillock, or a pyre, but the material medium whence these faces emerge is never fully humanized. The result is a compositio mixta or chimaera, whose compo- nent parts are never reconciled and instead appear mutually transformative, so that the human element seems always to be issuing from the natural or phe- nomenal substance that contains it. Typically, the anthropomorphic device is partially hidden, discernible if one looks attentively, but never easily or obvi- ously apparent. Goltzius, following the model of painters such as Herri met de Bles, challenges the beholder to find the human faces and, having found them, to consider how their presence inflects the pictorial argument he is adducing. In what follows, I ask how anthropomorphosis operates and what it signifies in the Venus and Cupid of 1590, the Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres of 1593, and the Portrait of Frederick de Vries of 1597.

1 “Eros and Love’s Body in the Venus and Cupid of 1590”

Venus and Cupid is a poëterij (‘poetic fable’) that celebrates the power of erotic love, bodied forth by Venus and Cupid, to mobilize the generative potency of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004346468_008 THE TROPE OF ANTHROPOMORPHOSIS IN HENDRICK GOLTZIUS 159 art and nature [Fig. 6.1].1 This dual potency is epitomized, on the one hand, by the event that unfolds within the mythological landscape, and, on the other, by the teyckenconst (‘art of delineation’) that the draughtsman, Hendrick Goltzius, displays meta-reflexively in his drawing.2 Contemporaries such as Goltzius’s close friend, the art theoretician , utilized the term penwercken (‘epitomes of penmanship’) to designate drawings of this type, ren- dered in the manner of engraving, with multiple layers of concentric hatches that gradually swell and taper along their orbital trajectories.3 The consummate mastery epitomized by such penwercken, or more accurately, their handelingh (‘handling’), secured for Goltzius the nicknames ‘Proteus or Vertumnus of art’, epithets coined by the artist’s admirers to encapsulate his ability imitatively to transform mere lines into the persuasive depiction of whatsoever he wished

1 On Venus and Cupid, see Reznicek E.K.J., Die Zeichnungen von Hendrick Goltzius, Utrechtse Kunsthistorische Studiën 6, 2 vols. (Utrecht: 1961) II 281; idem, Hendrick Goltzius Drawings Rediscovered, 1962–1992: Supplement to “Die Zeichnungen von Hendrick Goltzius” (New York: 1993) 83; and Bleyerfeld Y., “Hendrick Goltzius, Venus and Cupid 1590”, in Belyerveld Y. – Elen A.J. – Niessen J. et al., Bosch to Bloemaert: Early Netherlandish Drawings in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, [exh. cat., Fondation Custodia, Paris] (Paris – Bussum: 2014) 196–197. On the poëterij, see Mander Karel van, “T’leven van Ioan de Mabuse, Schilder”, in idem, Het Schilder-Boeck, waer in voor eerst de leerlustighe iueght den grondt der edel vry schilderconst in verscheyden deelen wort voorghedragen. Daer nae in dry deelen t’leven der ver- maerde doorluchtighe schilders des ouden, en nieuwen tyds. Eyntlyck d’wtlegghinghe op den Metamorphoseon Pub. Ovidij Nasonis. Oock daerbeneffens wtbeeldinghe der figueren. Alles dienstich en nut den schilders, constbeminders en dichters, oock allen staten van menschen (Alkmaar – , Jacob de Meester, voor Passchier van Westbusch: 1604), fol. 225 verso. 2 On Van Mander’s critical category teyckenconst, as it pertains to Goltzius, see Melion W.S., Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s “Schilder-Boeck” (Chicago – : 1991) 23, 34–35, 43–51, 168, 209, 219–221, 227–235. 3 On the penwerck, see Mander Karel van, “T’leven van Henricus Goltzius, uytnemende Schilder, Plaetsnijder, en Glaes-schrijver, van Mulbracht”, in Het Schilder-Boeck IV: Het leven der doorluchtighe Nederlandtsche, en Hoogh-duytsche schilders, fol. 285 verso. Van Mander reserves the term for epitomes of teyckenconst rendered by Goltzius in pen and ink on parch- ment or canvas, on which see Melion W.S., “Love and Artisanship in Hendrick Goltzius’s Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres of 1606”, Art History 16 (1993) 60–94, esp. 62–63; Miedema H. (ed.), Karel van Mander: The Lives of the Illlustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, trans. D. Cook-Radmore, 6 vols. (Doornspijk: 1998) V 207–208; Nichols L., The ‘Pen Works’ of Hendrick Goltzius [exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art], Bulletin Philadelphia Museum of Art 88, nos. 373–374 (Philadelphia: 1991); and Leeflang H., “His Arful Pen: Pen Works, Sketches, Chalk Drawings 1587–1614”, in Leeflang H. – Luijten G. et al., Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617): Drawings, Prints, and [exh. cat., , Amsterdam; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Toledo Museum of Art] (Amsterdam – New York – Toledo – Zwolle: 2003) 235–246, 248–250, 261–263.