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The Genre of Calendar Illustrations from Origins to Lucas and Maarten Van Valckenborch

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GHENT UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ARTS AND PHILOSOPHY THE CYCLE OF THE YEAR: THE GENRE OF CALENDAR ILLUSTRATIONS FROM ORIGINS TO LUCAS AND MAARTEN VAN VALCKENBORCH. VOLUME I. A Thesis Submitted in 00902394 Partial Fulfillment of the Master in Art Science Requirements for the Degree Academic Year 2009- 2010. Of Master of Arts in Art Science at Ghent University Promoter: Prof. Dr. M. Martens By Nadya Lobkova Promoter: Prof. Dr. M. Martens CONTENTS VOLUME I: TEXT INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I: EMERGENCE AND FORMATION OF THE CALENDAR ICONOGRAPHY. 1. The vision of time and the year cycle in the medieval and Early Modern world picture. 2. Seasons and months in visual arts in antiquity: from allegory to the new concept. 3. Calendar illustrations in Early and High Middle Ages: 3.1. Early Middle Ages: formation of the iconography; 3.2. Moths in the High Middle Ages: regional variations; 3.3. The concept of labour in the Middle Ages. CHAPTER II: TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE GENRE BETWEEN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES AND PIETER BRUEGEL THE ELDER. 1. Calendar illustrations in Très Riches Heurs du Duc de Berry of the brothers Limbourg. 2. Calendar illustrations in XV-XVI centuries: 2.1. Page lay-out. 2.2. Iconography. 2.3. Nature and city. 3. Genre mass-produced: transition into new media. 4. Bruegel‘s Twelve Months: the crossbreeding of calendar and landscape: 5.1. The genre of landscape in the first half of the 16th century. 5.2. Bruegel‘s cycle Twelve Months: the problems of iconography. 5.3. Composition of the cycle. 5.4. Bruegel‘s drawings Spring and Summer. 5. 5. Bruegel‘s genre synthesis and its significance. CHAPTER III: LUCAS AND MAARTEN VAN VALCKENBORCH. 1. Biography: 2 1.1. The family and the beginning of the brothers‘ professional career. 1.2. Lucas van Valckenborgh: biography after 1566. 2.2. Marten van Valckenborch: biography after 1566. 2. Lucas van Valckenborch: experiments in genre cross-breeding. 2.1. Professional milieu. 2.2. The cycle Twelve Months: the kaleidoscope of genres: 2.2.1. Spring landscape (March or April). 2.2.2. Summer landscape with corn harvest (July or August). 2.2.3. Autumn landscape with vegetable harvest (September). 2.2.4. Autumn landscape with grape harvest (October). 2.2.5. The return of the herd and the cattle sale (November). 2.2.6. Winter landscape (January or February). 2.2.7. Spring landscape with the Palace in Brussels (May). 2.3. Seasons and markets: an urban fantasy. 2.3.1. The genre of the market scene in Flemish art of the 16th century. 2.3.2. Historical and biographical context. 2.3.3. Market scenes and allegories of seasons. 2.3.3.1. Type I: market scenes proper. 2.3.3.2. Type II: allegorical representations. 3. Maarten van Valckenborch: 3.1. A love for pastoral: the early cycle of the months. 3.2. The Biblical cycle in Vienna: calendar inversion. CONCLUSION. VOLUME II: ILLUSTRATIONS, TABLES AND DOCUMENTS. 3 INTRODUCTION. Man has a need to impose an order onto the mass of indiscrete reality around him. One of the categories that always fascinated the imagination of people is time. Time is an inherent aspect of things, as invisible as ubiquitous. In expressions like ―Time flies‖ or ―De tijd loopt als zand door je handen‖ the language fixes the natural disposition of the human mind to translate the unseen into the categories of space that are directly visible to the eye and therefore more comprehensible. The ways by which this processes happens reflects the world model of a given culture and reveals its underlying patterns and mechanisms. That is why studying the genre of calendar illustrations as one of such forms of ―translation‖ can bring the world(s) that produced it into a sharper focus. This paper focuses on the development of the visualization of seasons and months in plastic arts. (―Calendar illustrations‖ is perhaps an unfortunate name because the functions of these images vary throughout historical periods, regions and media, therefore it is rather a provisional name used for the simplicity of usage). The historical scope of the study is very broad, from Ancient Greek and Roman representations of seasons and months to the end of the sixteenth century. The overview is alternated with a closer look at some the art works that mark the peaks or turning points in the evolution of the genre. The brothers van Valckenborch are chosen as a border of the period in focus because their art reflects the beginning process of the dissolution of the genre, its splitting into different directions and their absorption by other genres. For the purpose of the research a lot of visual material was collected and analysed. The results are to be found in Volume II: Appendices. The most valuable material in terms of the iconography of the genre is in Appendix IV, divided into months followed by the table with the data on the frequency of occurrence of the motifs for the given month. The first chapter deals with the origins and the formation of the genre. To understand its specificity it is necessary to get an insight into the network of notions spinning around the category of time. The world picture stemming from the antiquity maintained a strong continuity throughout the Middle Ages and to a big extent in the Early Modern period, so the model that I outline in the first part is more or less relevant for the whole period in question. Because the world picture is a web of notions, gestalts, beliefs and the like, pulling on one thread always extracts unexpected results, at first glance having nothing in common with one‘s initial intention. Therefore I sometimes make digressions to elucidate a concept that gets involved onto the orbit of the calendar genre, for example, the concept of labour, the attitude to nature, the tensions between the Christian and pagan world pictures and later the conflict between Christian values and the forming market economy. Chapter two is devoted to the period when the calendar genre endured great changes in terms of involving natural and social environment into its pictorial field, transgression of the traditional media and getting appropriated by other genres. A substantial part of the study is devoted to the analysis of the revision of the genre in the cycle of Twelve months by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The brothers van Valckenborch, whose contribution to the genre is analyzed in chapter three, were the heirs of a very old tradition and its very recent transformations. Their cycles of months and seasons are considered not only in the light of the old genre but also within the context of the new forms and genres that were in the process of their formation appropriated the elements of the traditional forms. 4 Speaking about this or that genre, it makes sense to define what is understood by this technical term. Here immediately springs the difficulty because genre is an elusive phenomenon resisting a strict definition. The word itself in translation from French means ―kind‖ and is derived from Latin genus (origin, genesis) (cognate with Ancient Greek γένος, race). The etymology of the word thus suggests ―family resemblance‖ transferred genetically from a certain model. According to the Van Dale Groot Woordenbook van de Nederlandse Taal, genre is : 1. soort, t.w. van voorwerpen, voortbrenselen of stijlen van kunst of kunstnijverheid <...>; 2. (schild.) genrekunst, schilderkunst die zich bezighoudt met de voorstelling van (in het atelier gecomponeerde) taferelen uit het dagelijks leven . Thus the linguistic usage fixes the empiric nature of the genre, which is subject to historical change. The immediate linguistic association with ―genre painting‖ on the principle pars pro toto is as misleading as enlightening. It reveals that in popular usage genres in visual arts are defined by the object of depiction: scenes of everyday life (genre painting), nature (landscape), a vase with flowers or displayed fruit (still life), a human image (portrait), etc. In a certain sense it is true. But it is not the whole truth. If we, for example, depict a vase from a bird‘s eye view, it will be no still life. A person depicted from the back is not a portrait. A piece of nature depicted very close up does not make a landscape. It means that the genre is connected with a specific point of view, the position of the viewer. As is mentioned before, spatial categories render temporal categories – the mechanism exemplified by the genre of calendar illustrations par excellence. For this fixed time-space relation Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the term ―chronotopos‖ which he laid at a basis of his study of Early Modern genres.1 Dissolved in later epochs older genres can echo in new ones through the use of their elements (a point of view, a certain image, etc) that serve as bearers of the ―memory of the genre‖.2 This ―memory‖ becomes an active element of enhancing the meaning of the text (let it be literary or visual) that makes use of it. A genre is also defined by its function. A face of a saint in an altar-piece, even if painted from a live model, is no portrait. A piece of land depicted on a chart to define property rights is no landscape. A flower depicted in a botanical treatise is not a still life. Functions are, however, unstable notions. They are born from the social demand and the communal view of a certain thing and its role in social life. The views change over time. That is why it would be a gross anachronism to ascribe our modern understanding of ―landscape‖ to a painting of, say, Patinir.
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