An Drew Martindale

An drew Martindale HEROES, ANCESTORS, RELATIVES AND T H E BIRTH OF THE PORTRAIT Previously published H.W. Janson, Form follows function - or does it.~ Modernist design theory and the history of art (The First Gerson Lecture, held on October 2, rg8r) David Freedberg, Iconoclasts and their motives (The Second Gerson Lecture, held on October 7, rg83) Craig Hugh Smyth, Repatriation of art from the collecting point in Munich after World War IJ (The Third Gerson Lecture, held on March 13, rg86) The Fourth Gerson Lecture, held in memory of Horst Gerson (1907-1978) in the aula of the University of Groningen on May 26, 1988 Andrew Martindale Heroes, ancestors, relatives and the birth of the portrait Gary Schwartz I SDU Maarssen I The Hague © tgA88 by ndrew Martindale Designed by Ton Ellemers, Amsterdam Filmsetting, lithography and printing by Drukkerij Groenevelt , Landgraaf Binding by van Strien , Dordrecht Produced in the Neth erl a nds Distributed in the U nited Kingdom by Tre foi l Producti ons, London I SBN go 6179 o6g 7 Gary Schwartz I SDU Publishe rs P. O. Box 162, 36oo AD Maarsscn The N ethcrla nds The Gerson Lectures a rc publi shed under the auspices of The Gerson Lectures Founda ti on lnstituut voor Kunstgeschicdenis der Rijksuniversi teit Groningen Oude Boterin gestraat 81 9712 cc G roningen The Netherl a nds H eroes, ancestors, relati ves and the birth of the portrait (There arc stylistic probl ems surrounding the publi cation of a lecture. T he spoke n word obeys d iAcrcnt conventions from that whi ch i s written; and t he two wi ll seldom be identical. It is a rgu abl e, therefore, tha t all published lectu res after del ivery s hould be rewri tten to convert the spoken t o t he wri tten style. Bu t the printing of a lec ture is a lso the reco rd of a n occasion a nd a rewriting will necessaril y obli terate some part of that record . O n that account, I have left t he text of thi s lecture as deli vered and virtuall y unalte red.) In O ctober 1414 , according to his own account, Edmund de Dynter, secretary to Anthon y o f Burgundy, duke of Bra bant, was in Bohemia o n a diplom atic mission. ' When he s ubsequently cam e to w rite his c hronicle of events, he recorded f rom this m iss ion a memorable account of the kin g o f Bohemia, the ex-emperor Wenzel , son of C ha rl es IV of Luxemburg. Wen zel was a terrifyingly erratic ruler . Nevertheless, when sober h e was, according to de D ynter, an excellent and courteous conversationali st, dignified and well informed , a nd well able to behave like a prince before visiting e missaries . D e Dynter a nd W enzel had a common interest in the succession t o Brabant; a nd Wen zel, obviously with considerabl e cha rm, took d e Dynter b y the hand after one a udience and led him through t o a nother room , w here, said de Dynter , 'were painted the precious images of all the dukes of Braban t down t o John Ill. T hese images,' he continued , ' had b een commissioned b y the Emperor C harles, W en zel's father. T he K ing also said to me that this was his geneal ogy, and that h e was descended from the progeny of the T roja ns, and more specifically from the e mperor Saint C harles the G reat and the noble house of Braba nt. For he said that his g reat- grandfa ther , the e mpe ror Henry of Luxemburg, was m arried to the da ughter of John I D uke of Bra ba nt from which union sprang his gra ndfather J ohn , king of Bohemia a nd Poland.' (Figs . 2-3-) Edmund de D yn ter then went on to describe wha t h a ppened when W enzel was drunk. That however b elongs to another lecture . In fact , the passage which I have just quoted had a s pecial place in the history of art since it a p pears to be the first a ccount of somebody being taken r ound a family portrait gallery. The paintings we re a lmost certainly in the castl e o f K arlstein; and 5 1 Robert of Anjou, king of Naples. Deta il of the altar of St. Louis of Toulouse by Simonc Martini . Naples, Museo di Capodimonte. 6 although they were unfortunately destroyed in the very late sixteenth century, we still have, as you have seen, late sixteenth-century copies of the figures themselves! L ittle enou gh is known about the setting of these lively if bizarre people. It seems clear from one of the images (of N imrod) that the portraits were enclosed in fairly narrow niches and in fact a row of cusped frames seems likely 3 Of the room itself, we know that it was an apartment separate from but adjacent to the main audience halJ. 1 This is of passing interest since this relationship has some similarity to that of one of the other great concentrations of court portraiture, Mantegna's Camera degli Sposi. This suggests that its function was primarily to divert and intrigue rather than to overwhelm - and indeed de Dynter recollected it principally as an interesting collection of images of the dukes of Brabant whence he came. Wenzel certainly drew him aside into the room with that interest in mind. 2 Charlemagne, from the Luxembourg ge nealogy. Sixteenth-century copy in 3 Emperor Charles IV of Luxemburg (for details Vienna, Nationalbibliothek. see plate 2). 7 To repeat, then , this is the first surviving account of somebody being taken round the fa mily portraits a nd, from a modern sta ndpoint, it will certainly seem an odd collection of paintings . It is a genealogy - yes; but what sort of a genealogy goes back to Noah by way ofPriam and Jupiter ? W enzel cl aimed it as his family descent; but Wenzel was a Luxemburg and this is mostl y about Brabant a nd Lorraine. I h ave called it a portrait gall ery a nd it is true that the subjects were for the most p art real historical fi gures reaching back to the fifth century AD 5 Charles IV, the pa tron , was clearly painted in hi s own like ness;6 perhaps the sam e was true of his fi rst wife B lanche of V alois a nd of his parents7 But when it com es to Charles' gra ndfather the e mperor H enry VII, it is very unlikely. The evidence of the sepulchral monument at Pisa m akes it fairly certain that H enry's actual appearance was no longer alive in people's minds in P rague by the 136os. Since C harles himself was born in 1316, three years after his grandfather's death, this is not perhaps surprising 8 But in all , portraiture in terms of life-like representation was at Karl stein thinly spread. Nevertheless, the very a mbiguity of the Karlstein figures makes them a good starting point. Faced b y the Luxemburg genealogy, it m ay be asked why these images were needed and what p articular d em and or fashion they satisfi ed . Faced by the a pparently intermittent regard for life-like representation , the questi on arises why it happened at all. Behind much of this there li es the theoretical question posed b y m y distinguished predecessor in this series, HorstJ a nson , when , as m any of you will rem ember, he asked 'form follo ws function - or does it?' 9 In his exposition of the them e, Professor J anson discussed brilliantly a wide range of m aterial ranging from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries . I shall not attempt to emulate this. The result would be a failure a nd I should instantly be exposed for what I am - a m edievali st. There a re indeed good and interesting historical reasons for concen tra ting on the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in this m a tter of portraits. To begin with, m y friends a re well aware that I h ave for som e years been working on the a rtist Simone Martini. '" The first r ecorded portrait in our modern sense - a painted or drawn life-like representation of a face - was produced by him in 1336 . The question 'why?' was for me unavoidable. But on the larger stage of the hi story of portraiture, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries usuall y get rather m eagre treatment. The historian s of portraits tend to jump straight from R om an coins to Pisanello, from Roman busts to Antonio Rosselino. If the fourteenth century is m entioned , it comes in the chapter h eaded 'predecessors and antecedents.' The Karlstein genealogy tends to become simply the forerunner of the eighteenth-century Ahnengalerie at 8 M unich. T he two surviving portrait heads of John II of France and Rudolph of Austri a (fi gs . 4-5) become the forerunners ofjan van Eyck and H a ns Mem ling. T he fourteenth century is like o ne of those wayside s tations dimly per ceived from the w indow of an express train on its way to somewhere else. But what if the fourteenth century is seen as a point of arrival ra ther than one of depa rture or rapid transit? That is what I propose to do now.

Load more