The Ruin Landscape in Jan Van Scorel's Workshop

Chapter 2 The Ruin Landscape in Jan van Scorel’s Workshop

Prototype, Imitation, Emulation, Invention

We know very little about Maarten van Heemskerck’s tenure in Jan van Scorel’s workshop (1527–30). We have Karel Van Mander’s biog- raphies of both artists, which, as we have seen, are of mixed reli- ability while serving to give Van Scorel a somewhat false primacy over Van Heemskerck. We know of no Roman or post-Roman drawings attributable to Van Scorel, and no pre-Roman drawings by Van Heemskerck, let alone drawings by him from his time in Van Scorel’s workshop.1 Moreover, only a few paintings from their period togeth- er have come down to us. Van Scorel’s post-Roman oeuvre contains several examples attributed to his circle rather than to him. Van Heemskerck’s pre-Roman painted oeuvre is small and contested.2 While the body of material evidence between Van Scorel and Van Heemskerck is slight, looking closely at what remains hints at a more complex scenario lurking beneath the simplistic traditional view of Van Heemskerck’s indebtedness to Van Scorel. Examining these sources allows us to move past the historiographic biases Van Man- der established to reveal Van Heemskerck’s critical revision of his artistic inheritance from Van Scorel’s workshop. Jan van Scorel first appears in Van Heemskerck’s biography as the younger artist’s beacon. Van Mander tells us that after Van Scorel re- turned from Rome, the Utrecht painter

was very famous and had brought with him from Italy an un- usual and much more beautiful, novel manner of working which appealed to everyone, and especially to Marten, [who] managed to get to this master in Haarlem.3

Van Mander goes on to note that while in Van Scorel’s Haarlem workshop, Van Heemskerck assimilated the master’s manner thor- oughly. He further claims that, “one could barely distinguish their works from each other,” with Van Heemskerck having “made [Van Scorel’s] manner his own.”4 Therefore, Van Mander next tells us, Van Scorel banished Van Heemskerck from his workshop “out of envy.”5