ILJA M. VELDMAN

Adaptation, emulation and innovation: Scorel, Gossaert and other artists as a source of inspiration for the young Heemskerck

The nature and scope of the early oeuvre of Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574) long remained indistinct. Produced before his departure for Rome at the end of May 1532, Heemskerck’s early work was also underestimated and misjudged, due to the absence of signatures and dates on many of his paintings and a dearth of other critical information. In his Schilder-boeck (1604), Karel van Mander centers his brief account of the painter’s fijirst thirty-two years on the omanticr anecdote of an artist of humble birth who persists in a career as a painter despite his father’s opposition.1 As Van Mander recounts, Heemskerck’s fijirst apprenticeship to the Haarlem painter Cornelis Willemsz asw cut short when his father fetched him back to their farm in Heemskerk to milk the family’s cows. But the boy ran away from home and apprenticed himself to the Delft painter Jan Lucasz, who taught him to draw and paint well. When Maarten learned of Jan van Scorel’s return from Italy and of the new Italian style he had developed there, he joined him as his assistant in Haarlem. Heemskerck mastered Scorel’s new art of painting so rapidly and so well, Van Mander writes, that one could barely distinguish their works from each other. Thereupon a jealous Scorel sent him away.

Defijinition of Heemskerck’s early oeuvre On the basis of Van Mander’s account and the assumption that Scorel’s talents were naturally superior to those of a mere assistant (‘discipel’), much of Heemskerck’s early oeuvre was widely credited to Scorel, including paintings that in time would be recognized as his most outstanding works. In 1932, Carla de Jonge convincingly argued that Heemskerck, not Scorel, had painted the so-called Bicker portraits of husband and wife in the Rij ksmuseum, Amsterdam (fijigs. 1a-1b), the Portrait of a family in Kassel (fijig. 2) and the Schoolboy in Rotterdam (fijig. 3). Yet only in 1955 were the Amsterdam portraits and the Kassel Family generally accepted as by his hand.2 In 1986 Molly Faries and Jeffferson Harrison defijinitively reattributed both the Schoolboy and the Madonna and Child in Washington to Heemskerck.3 In 1979, Harrison reassigned the Adam and Eve in Hatfijield House (UK) to Heemskerck, and in 1986 he added the Crucifijixion in Detroit to the artist’s early oeuvre.4 Harrison was also the fijirst to reassign to Heemskerck the heavily overpainted Lamentation in Cologne, providing an overpowering spectacle after a recent and thorough restauration.5 The painter must have produced a second large Lamentation around the same time, for a good copy still survives in the Museum Catharij neconvent, Utrecht.6 A related but much smaller early Lamentation is in a private collection in New York.7 Heemskerck’s extensively overpainted Madonna and Child with grapes (1532), formerly attributed to Scorel, is in another private collection.8 Thus, a fair and more comprehensive picture of Heemskerck’s early oeuvre did not emerge until the fijinal quarter of the twentieth century. Though more than four hundred years have passed since his death, his talents have only recently been recognized.

171 Oud Holland 2019 - 4 volume 132 172 Oud Holland 2019 - 4 volume 132