JACEK TYLICKI Three Paintings Reattributed to Pieter Isaacsz. Early in Dr.Gode Kramer of the Kunstsammlungen der Stadt Augsburg kindly sent me an ektachrome of a painting, St.John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilder- neH (fig. i), in the Bob Jones University Collection in Greenville, South Carolina, suggesting that it might be a work by Bartholomaus Strobel the Younger, a Sile- sian-Polish yth-century painter (1591 - after 1647), with whose work I was inten- sively involved at that time.2 I decided, after taking an investigative look at the photo, that it was not a picture by this Breslau artist, and put the slide into a draw- er. I recalled the painting at the sight of Pieter Isaacsz.'s (1 ,69 - I6z,) Rising of the LYlomenof Rome (fig. 3) at the exhibition 'Dawn of the Golden Age' in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum Back in Poland I began to assemble iconographic material and pulled out Dr. Kramer's letter too. In it, he associated the American painting with a Feast of Herod (fig. 5) in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, a widely published picture4 whose attribution had frequently changed until it was given to Strobel, an attribution of fairly long standing now, but one that has to be firmly rcjccted. ' I now realized that the Augsburg art historian had been right: the two fascinating pictures were by the same hand. Not from Silesia or Poland, however, but by a much better known hand, that of a Dutch artist who spent many years working for the artistic court of Denmark. The painter in question, Pieter Isaacsz., was a truly international personality - so 7 much so, in fact, as to call his loyalty into question. A pupil of Hans von Aachen,? one of the central figures at Emperor Rudolf n's cosmopolitan artistic court, he has merited the attention of Dutch, Danish, German, French, and even Czech au- thorns. Even so, two of his significant works were long attributed to the somewhat obscure Strobel.9 There is perhaps some explanation for this: it seems almost cer- tain that the latter was in Prague sometime between 1607 and 1624. TOBefore i6? he may well have worked in the studio of von Aachen, Isaacsz.' tutor." Alternatively, he is likely to have been acquainted with the studio of Aegidius Sadeler, a dissemi- nator of von Aachen's manner." The links between Strobel and Isaacsz., both de- voted to post-Rudolfine art, could have been even closer: it is known that the lat- ter, while administering the estate of Gillis van Coninxloo the Younger established some Danzig contacts around 16io searching for potential buyers of this artist's Paintings. T3 On the other hand, Strobel worked for Christian I v of Denmark, but later: his 1633 portrait of Prince Ulrik, murdered in Silesia that same year, graced Frederiksborg Castle until the disastrous fire of 1859.14 These facts re- mind us of how surprisingly little is still known about artistic production and con- tacts in the Baltic region in the early 17th century, when the area was not unimpor- tant.l s I35 I PieterIsaacsz., St.John the Baptist Prea- chingin the Wilderness, oil on panel, c. 86x 161cm. Bob Jones University, Greenville,South Carolina. Photo: The the entered the Bob collection UnusualFilms, Bob Jones Univ., Preaching of ,ft.John Baptist (fig. i) Jones University C?? rccnvillc. late in y?2, when it was purchased from the art dealer Julius Weitzner.I6 It was in excellent condition, needed little restoration and was subjected to only superficial clcaning.' The painting is composed according to the rules laid down by Karel van Mander (and was at one time actually attributed to the Netherlandish historio- IH - grapher) the principal theme is set in the background and the composition is filled with an audience consisting of figures in a variety of attitudes, movements and dress, enabling the artist to show off his skills. The crowd of standing onlook- ers is concentrated at the sides so as not to obscure the view of the landscape, which in the middle affords a prospect of a distant vista.'9 In van Mandcr's 'Lives', we discover that Isaacsz. did actually paint this subject - one such picture was report- edly in the possession of the 'the art-loving Mr Hendrick Franckin' in Amsterdam on the Voor Achterburgwal. It could not have been this selfsame painting - the one in Amsterdam was small, and on copper - but if it was a reasonably faithful replica or prototype of the discussed work, we can understand why van Mander labelled it 'well composed, lively and subtlel,20 for it conformed with his rules to the letter. In Isaacsz.' extant oeuvre, another landscape-storia piece, 'The Baptism of Christ', is a highly appropriate subject for comparison. Formerly with the Schickman Ual- leries, New York, it is now in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, attributed to Isaacsz. by Eliska Fucikova and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann on the basis of a sig- ned drawing in the Ecole Nationale Supericure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (fig. 2).21 The construction of the scene, although vertical in format, is largely the same; an- other recurring element, moreover, is the contrast between the softly painted, occasionally grotesque faces and the linear, decorative rendering of the costume. Both works display a Mannerist compositional device, inherited perhaps from Hans von Aachen, to place only partly visible figures in the foreground and depict them from an unexpected angle.22 The two works share many other unusual dc- tails : strange coiffures, exotic head-dresses such as the peaked turbans, or the platc-like hats of gypsy women (in those days regarded as Egyptian), and costly I36 .