Mercatorfonds

Koenraad Jonckheere

Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm

Experiments in Decorum | 1566–1585

64

!"#$ $%&))))))))@%53))))))))

Decorum Experiments and the Quest for Pictorial Ecumenicism

A fter this long detour, let us return to Hans Vredeman de Vries and Gillis Mostaert’s Paul and Barnabas at Lystra of 1567.¹ In this panel these two important Antwerp masters expounded their vision of visual art and the beeldenstorm of 1566 and engaged in the

public debate about Christian art. They embraced a story from the Acts of the Apostles to denounce the use and abuse of images. Through the painting itself they defended art as such, but through the choice of its subject – Paul forbidding the inhabitants of Lystra to worship him and the statues of the Olympian gods – they condemned the ‘abuse’ or the worship of images and the veneration of saints.

What is fascinating about Vredeman and Mostaert’s painting is that it is a kind of syn-thesis of everything that painters were experimenting with after the beeldenstorm, including the body, movement, materials and the architectural setting. In the following paragraphs I will brie"y elucidate the most important aspects of painting after the beeldenstorm to introduce the central focus of this study.

¶ The story of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra is unique in being the only example in the New Testament of ‘saints’ who forbid the faithful to worship them as though they were gods. They do this by calling attention to their physicality, the fact that they are human, people of "esh and blood. Paul and Barnabas tear the clothing from their bodies and show their naked, imperfect torsos as proof of their humanitas.² This notion is the core of Chapter .

As mentioned above, the con"ict surrounding statues and paintings in churches revolved around the inappropriate worship of saints by means of images, and the veneration of the images themselves as miracle workers. The various religious parties in the Low Countries put forward different solutions. Extremist followers of Calvin smashed to pieces the images in churches and chapels during the beeldenstorm in an attempt to prove Erasmus’s point that images were not even able to save themselves (and thus were not divine).³ Orthodox Catholics advocated retaining the age-old devotional practice and resumed the tradition of religious processions as soon as they could after the beeldenstorm.⁴ But by far the largest group of believers aimed for a reform of religious practices, some more radically than others. Everyone had their own view, so it seemed.

'(

Humanitas

Hans Vredeman de Vries and Gillis MostaertPaul and Barnabas at Lystra (detail of 'g. 13) Bremen, Kunstsammlungen Böttcherstraße, Roseliushaus

82

!"#$ $%&

As is argued in Chapter , after the beeldenstorm physical imperfection was a crucial issue in the religious imagery. The imperfection of the body was used as a metaphor for the imperfection of humankind and deployed to desacralize the saints. It created the possibility of depicting them without giving rise to the temptation of worshipping them as idols.

¶ The only missing element in Hans Vredeman de Vries and Gillis Mostaert’s Paul and Barna-bas at Lystra are portraits historiés. This is an exception. After the beeldenstorm a few dozen altarpieces and secular history paintings were produced in which patrons and painters identi'ed themselves or other individuals with biblical or religious 'gures. Despite the fact that painters and patrons of all religious denominations experimented with this device, the fascination with taking up the part of biblical characters remains bizarre. Iconoclasts made a point of scratching out the faces in paintings, and marble and alabaster statues were decapitated.⁵ Catholic theologians, too, had little taste for embedded portraits in altarpieces. Johannes Molanus, for instance, thought they were at odds with decorum and had a desacralizing effect.⁶

It is troubling therefore that Calvinist, Lutheran and even Catholic-oriented painters began experimenting with portraits historiés after the beeldenstorm like never before. In Chapter a few salient examples are given and an attempt is made to discover the ideas and mechanisms that could have provoked the painters and their patrons to explore the possibilities of the religious, historicized portrait on such a large scale.

¶ A third key point in the image debates was the way in which people dealt – literally – with statues and paintings. What conduct was appropriate in the presence of the statue of a saint? Should one kneel or bow one’s head, light a candle or pray in silence? Nowadays this may strike us as rather curious, but at the time of the beeldenstorm people became obsessed with the proper attitude with respect to a statue or a painting above an altar. The kneeling of the women of Lystra before Paul and Barnabus, as depicted by Mostaert and Vredeman, was the subject of 'erce controversy. Targeting the Catholic theological construct latria, dulia and hyperdulia, the Protestants devoted much attention to their adversaries’ physical conduct in worshipping and venerating God and the saints. They more particularly made fun of the various attitudes and gestures imposed on Catholics in front of these images depending on the degree of ‘sanctity’ of whoever was depicted.

In Chapter a few well-chosen examples are presented to illustrate the great implications the poses and gestures of certain 'gures have for the interpretation of the paintings in question. For these Mannerist painters active after the Iconoclasm, the gestures, poses and expressions were never accidental and contributed signi'cantly to the meaning of the scene.

¶ Vredeman and Mostaert’s Paul and Barnabas at Lystra is characterized by a – literally – monumental discrepancy between the enormous marble statues in the niches of the ancient temple and the insigni'cant nude torso of one of the apostles. The painters’ interest in the pictorial qualities of the naked body was not a coincidence, and nor was the contrast between the impressive yet lifeless stone statues and the powerless people of "esh and blood. This

Portraits historiés

Attitude

Material

83

)*+&#,- *.!*# /-*0$1

is something they must thought about as well, and they doubtless took into account the various viewpoints in the Bilderfrage.

One cannot turn the pages of any pamphlet from the second half of the sixteenth century without 'nding an allusion to the lifeless nature of statues and paintings: how could they be gods or be imparted divinity if they were merely stones or dead trees that had been felled and carved by human hands. The question posed by almost all reformers inside and outside the Church was how could these lifeless 'gures, which men called saints, perform miracles? The frequency alone of the references to the material of (religious) art in treatises in the second half of the sixteenth century makes clear that this was experienced as problematic by the majority of the writers – and probably their readers as well.

In Chapter I will argue that a number of painters intentionally employed the grisaille technique (traditionally used to create the illusion of freestanding stone sculptures or bas-reliefs in the wings of altarpieces) to broach the image issue: Bruegel was one of them.

¶ Finally, architecture and setting play a key role in Paul and Barnabas at Lystra. In itself, this was not novel, for architecture had been an important factor in Netherlandish painting since Jan van Eyck. Romanesque architectural motifs, for example, served as the decor for scenes from the Old Testament, while Gothic architecture was used to distinguish scenes from the Gospels. Jan Gossaert, one of the 'rst painters from the Low Countries to visit Italy, played with Gothic tracery to give additional meaning to his panels.⁷ And Hans Vredeman de Vries, too, imbued his architectural perspectives with meaning, as has been amply demonstrated.⁸

This practice simply continued after the beeldenstorm. The architecture of temples and churches was used to overturn the decorum of scenes from the Old and the New Testament. As is argued in Chapter , this phenomenon was related to the image debate as well as the introduction of new religious buidlings, including the Calvinist and Lutheran houses of prayer that had been built shortly before Alba’s arrival in the Low Countries. Various painters in the 1560s and ’70s deliberately explored the associations and connotations connected with certain architectural elements. They compelled those who viewed their work to read and interpret the imagery in a different way.

Setting and Architecture

65

. Chapter Three DIRT Y FEET A N D FILT H Y FINGER NA ILS

In 1562 Ameet Tavernier published a book in Antwerp, in which the then current Christian view on the human body is explained.⁹ This Corte onderwijsinge wter heyligher Schriftueren,

hoe wy onse vianden, die duuel, die werelt en ons eygen vleesch als christelijcke crijsluyden ende ridders wederstaen sullen … (Short guideline for Christian soldiers … to resist their enemies …) is plain and clear. The answer to the question ‘Wat is vleesch voor een dinck?’ (What kind of thing is "esh?) reads:

In the Holy Scriptures !esh and blood are called an Adam’s child, that is a human being full of sin, conceived in sin, born in sin and living in sin, riddled with haughtiness, avarice, impurity, dishonour, hatred and envy; a narcissistic liar who can neither bear nor undergo punishment, but acts against God and is nothing more than dust and ash, verily the food of worms, "lthy and infertile. Trees and herbs bring about beautiful !owers, leaves and sweet fruit; humans produce nothing but "lth and shit.¹⁰

Written by an anonymous author who propagates partly Catholic and partly Protestant beliefs, the Corte onderwijsinge is essentially about how a pious believer should conduct himself. It explains several Christian religious issues to laymen. The obsession with corporality evident throughout this slim volume is remarkable. Reference is made at random to the corporality of man and the sins resulting from it (common to all Christian beliefs in the sixteenth century). Flesh is sin and sin is "esh, according to the anonymous author, who was not alone in his belief. In every single one of the treatises mentioned in this book the words corporeal and sinful are being used synonymously. The question arises as to whether painters, when painting bodies, were equally obsessed with the sins inherent to man’s corporeal existence, and if so, how did they convey that pictorially?

It will be argued in this chapter that under the in"uence of the Reformation, in the broadest sense of the word, Antwerp painters in seeking solutions to the con"ict surrounding religious imagery in general and the depiction of saints in particular made use of such physical ‘details’ as dirty 'ngernails. They sought a compromise that was acceptable to both moderate Calvinists and reform-minded Catholics: a kind of ‘pictorial ecumenicism’.¹¹ I will limit myself to depictions of Saint Jerome by Adriaen Thomasz Key and Saint Matthew by Frans Pourbus, and focus on physical imperfections such as 'lthy 'ngernails, chest hair, wrinkles and the like, which are now unconspicuous to the point of going unnoticed. However, a quarter of a century before Caravaggio some Antwerp painters had already given the initial impetus to the desacralization of sainthood.¹²

'', '2, 34

Adriaen Thomasz KeySaint Jerome in his Study (detail of 'g. 66)Dublin, The National Gallery of Ireland

!"#$%&' %"'&&

86

66

67

68

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

87

Adriaen Thomasz KeySaint Jerome in his StudyDublin, The National Gallery of Ireland

Adriaen Thomasz KeySaint Jerome in his Study (detail)Paris, Musée du Louvre

Michiel CoxcieSaint Luke the Evangelist Exterior wing of Jan Gossaert’s Saint Luke Drawing the VirginPrague, Saint Vitus Cathedral

69–70

70–70

Hans Vredeman de Vries and Gillis Mushaus

!"#$%&' %"'&&

88

¶ In the two decades between the beeldenstorm and the Fall of Antwerp no one experimented with the iconography and decorum of religious art as much as Adriaen Thomasz Key.¹³ In the turbulent decades after the Iconoclastic Fury he painted exceptional altarpieces for wealthy and in"uential patrons as well as devotional pictures. Dirty feet, but above all 'lthy black rims under the 'ngernails are an unmistakable feature of Key’s history paintings. The nails are intentional references to impurity. This becomes very clear when zooming in on the hands of Adriaen Thomasz’s Saint Jerome in his Study. In the two variants that he painted, Key portrayed the Church Father as a Bible scholar.¹⁴ Key’s imagery accords with that of Pourbus’s Saint Matthew and the Angel, which is discussed below.¹⁵

In a remarkably sober cell the Church Father – with nude torso – takes on his trans-lation of the Bible into Latin, the so-called Vulgate, that won him so much praise from humanists. In both versions (the one in pro'le is known in a number of copies), the saint holds a board on which lies a sheet of paper.¹⁶ The dirt under Jerome’s 'ngernails stands out starkly against the blank snow-white sheet of paper. Comparing this with the way in which Jan Massys portrayed Saint Paul in 1565, we can see that Key painted the dirty 'ngernails most deliberately.¹⁷ The nails of Massys’s Paul are as pristine as the sheet on which he writes.

In Key’s pro'le variant of Saint Jerome, the scholar’s dirty foot extends forward pro-vocatively. In the frontal variant, along with dirty 'ngernails, the old man has hair on his chest, which to my knowledge was highly exceptional in a sixteenth-century depiction of a saint.¹⁸ His brownish skin tone was equally rare: saints generally had white skin.¹⁹

Adriaen Thomasz Key was fully conscious of his actions. This is evident from his copy of a work by Michiel Coxcie depicting Cain murdering Abel, mentioned in the Introduction.²⁰ Unlike Coxcie, Key painted a black rim under Abel’s 'nger- and toenails. Furthermore, Key’s pro'le variant of Saint Jerome is most likely also derived from a painting by Michiel Coxcie.

Filthy !ngernails

'', '2

34

'5

'3–26

24

27

5, '

Jan MassysSaint Paul in his Study

Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen,

71 72

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

89

Adriaen Thomasz KeySaint Jerome in his Study (detail of 'g. 66)Dublin, The National Gallery of Ireland

Adriaen Thomasz KeySaint Jerome in his Study (detail of 'g. 67)Paris, Musée du Louvre

73

!"#$%&' %"'&&

90

The picture’s format is based entirely on Coxcie’s Saint Luke, one of the exterior wings of the triptych of the Mechelen Guild of Saint Luke from the 1560s.²¹

Adriaen Thomasz’ Saint Jerome and Cain and Abel are excellent examples of the way in which he challenged the traditional iconography, but this experiment would not have been so extraordinary had there only been isolated cases. This was not so. After the beeldenstorm more painters deviated from the ‘right way’ by giving saints 'lthy lines under their 'nger-nails. A second example is Maarten de Vos’s Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, now in the Mu seum het Maagdenhuis in Antwerp.²² In contrast to Key’s depictions of Saint Jerome, in which the Church Father is always portrayed as a Bible scholar, De Vos presented the saint as a repentant sinner.²³ He has removed his cardinal’s vestments and wears a hair shirt around his waist. His nails are dirty.²⁴ I will come back to this

A striking third example of dirty feet and 'lthy 'ngernails is found on the back of Pieter Pourbus’s so-called Gouda Altarpiece in which Saints Crispin and Crispinian are depicted, and which probably originated around 1570.

'8

29

2(, 25Maarten de Vos

Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1583–5Antwerp, Maagdenhuismuseum

74

75

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

91

AnonymousSaint Crispin and Saint Crispinian, on the back of The Baptism of Saint EustaceGouda, MuseumgoudA

Pieter PourbusThe Baptism of Saint EustaceGouda, MuseumgoudA

!

!"#$%&' %"'&&

92

The two saints are presented in an exceptionally profane context: both are shown at work tanning leather, with dirt under their 'ngernails. ‘Were it not that the decorum on the reverse suggests that we are dealing with saints, the depiction could just as easily be interpreted as a secular image’, according to Paul Huvenne.²⁵ Indeed, there is nothing in the scene that recalls their sainthood, unless perhaps the gesture of the arm of one of the ‘tanners’. It alludes to representations of John the Baptist as the prophet of Christ’s cruci'xion. Shortly after the Fall of Antwerp, Ambrosius Francken painted Saint Eligius in an equally mundane manner on the exterior wings of an altarpiece commissioned by the blacksmiths, albeit in grisaille:²⁶ he depicted the saint hammering away in his forge, but without dirty 'ngernails.

It is uncertain who painted Saints Crispin and Crispinian on the back of Pieter Pourbus’s altarpiece. Paul Huvenne, the leading Pourbus expert, does not believe the scene is by the artist.²⁷ Yet if the question of the attribution remains unsettled, on the basis of the profane nature of the iconography and in particular the dirt under the 'ngernails, the author should be sought in the Antwerp entourage of Pieter Pourbus’s son, Frans Pourbus the Elder, and Adriaen Thomasz Key.

However, it should be noted that Pieter Pourbus did experiment with dirty 'ngernails in the 1560s. For instance, some of the apostles in a Last Supper attributed to him, which appeared recently on the art market, have dirty 'ngernails.²⁸ Judas, the red-haired apostle seated before Christ on the left has black rims under his nails. He was not the only one to betray Christ: Peter, sitting at Christ’s left with his arms crossed on his chest, also has soiled nails. ‘Before the rooster crowed’, he, too, would deny his master. In Pieter Pourbus’s altarpiece

2'–2

76–77

78

77

Hae, Roseliushaus

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

93

of the same subject in Our Lady’s Church in Bruges which is signed and dated 1562, we again encounter apostles with dirty toe- and 'ngernails.²⁹ A telling example is Judas’s foot. With respect to the Last Supper it is interesting to note that dirty nails had a pejorative meaning not only in painting. Erasmus, for example, spoke of a rouwrand, literally mourning band, in relation to table manners: ‘At dinners you should be alert, but not exuberant. Only go to table once you have washed your hands, and also trim your nails, so that no dirt remains under them and people say that your nails are in mourning.’³⁰ Dirty 'ngernails con"icted with bourgeois morality. Moreover, in his Convivium Religiosum, Erasmus wrote: ‘Let us wash ourselves, my friends, in order to present ourselves at table with clean [pure] hands and souls. For if it is true that even the pagans have a religious respect for the table, it should be even more sacred to the Christians, who consider it the symbol of the holy meal our Lord Jesus Christ partook for the last time with his disciples.…’³¹ When discussing the expression ‘with 'lthy hands’ in his Adagia (19, 55), Erasmus expounds even more on the phenomenon and explicitly refers to Jerome and his work. Obviously, the dirty nails of some of the apostles symbolize the fact that they sat down to supper with an impure soul. This immediately brings up the next point, namely what exactly did 'lthy nails signify in Antwerp paintings in the second half of the sixteenth century?

¶ Before elaborating on the signi'cance of dirty feet and nails in a number of religious history scenes and devotional paintings from shortly before and in particular after the beeldenstorm, it is important to determine what this impurity was associated with. Was it simply in the service of realism, or was there more to this? The answer is fairly straightforward: in the second half of the sixteenth century dirty rims under 'nger- or toenails were associated with vulgarity and sinfulness, as Erasmus noted.³² They had a very negative connotation and actually epitomized the opposite of sanctity. To demonstrate this, we need only mention a few eloquent examples, including Ambrosius Francken’s Martyrdom of Saints Crispin and Cris-pinian,³³ and Frans Pourbus the Elder’s Martyrdom of Saint George Triptych.³⁴ But let us begin with with some paintings by Frans Floris and his workshop.

In so far as I have been able to determine, Frans Floris de Vriendt was the 'rst to experiment systematically with dirty nails when he wanted to expose the sinful character of one of his 'gures. This idea was not entirely new, for Gerard David had also occasionally portrayed his 'gures with dirty nails – for example, one of the executioners in his Judgement of Cambyses. However, Floris did so on a regular basis.

In Adam and Eve, a composition from 1560 of which there are various versions, Eve holds the apple she has just picked from the Tree of Knowledge.³⁵ Her nails, and those of Adam who embraces her, are utterly 'lthy. Similarly, the nails of their sons in Floris’s Cain and Abel from about 1555 are a brownish black.³⁶ Moreover, Cain’s skin tone is somewhat browner than Abel’s.³⁷ A third painting by Floris in which dirty 'ngernails occur is the Judgement of Solomon, now in the Koninlijk Museum in Antwerp.³⁸ The ‘good’ 'gures have clean, pure hands, the ‘evil’ ones caricatured features and 'lthy nails.

While it will be clear from the above that the motif of dirty 'ngernails was not unfamiliar in Floris’s workshop practice, the association of impure hands with peccability is most evident in a triptych by Ambrosius Francken. This master was a contemporary of Adriaen Thomasz Key, a pupil of Floris, and one of the most important painters of altarpieces when the churches were refurbished during the early Counter-Reformation after the Fall of

Sin: the signi!cance of !lthy !ngernails

8(–5

8'–2

28

23

86

84

Attributed to Pieter Pourbus The Last Supper, c. 1565Present whereabouts unknown

Gerard DavidThe Flaying of Sisamnes (detail) Right wing of The Judgement of Cambyses, 1498Bruges, Stedelijke Musea, Groeningemuseum

David Cambyses, detail

!

79

!"#$%&' %"'&&

Frans FlorisAdam and Eve

Cognac, Musée municipal

80

81

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

95

Frans FlorisCain and Abel, c. 1555Present whereabouts unknown

Frans FlorisThe Judgement of Solomon, c. 1547–50Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten

82

83

!"#$%&' %"'&&

96

Antwerp.³⁹ The wings of Francken’s Martyrdom of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, the altarpiece he painted for the shoemakers and tanners’ guilds around 1589, demonstrates at a single glance how sanctity and dirty 'ngernails were not compatible in the second half of the sixteenth century.

Francken’s triptych originated during the early Counter-Reformation, following the Fall of Antwerp.⁴⁰ After the city was retaken by Farnese, Calvinists and Lutherans were ‘requested’ to leave the city. Anyone unwilling to comply had to convert to Catholicism. The Catholic Church seized the opportunity to refurbish all churches, most of which had been either ransacked or ruinously damaged during the beeldenstorm and the stille beeldenstorm (c. 1581).⁴¹ New retables were made in the spirit of the decrees of the Tridentine Council⁴² and Francken’s triptych is an early example of these Counter-Reformational altarpieces. The centre panel as well as the wings feature scenes from the lives of the guilds’ patron saints. As is so often the case in the second half of the sixteenth century, rather than their miracles or unconditional piety the saints’ martyrdom was magni'ed.⁴³ The tortures of Crispin and Crispinian are depicted in the centre panel and wings of Francken’s triptych. The heads of the executioners are coarsely painted caricatures. The saints accept their fate serenely. Their faces are sensitively modelled and their skin is white and clean. Particularly interesting in the context of this chapter is the altarpiece’s left wing, showing awls being driven under the 'ngernails of one of the saints. The contrast between the torturers’ dirty 'ngers and 'lthy nails and the pure pale hands of the saints is particularly startling in this scene.

8(–5

89

265%

Frans FlorisThe Judgement of Solomon, c. 1547–

50 (detail of 'g. 81)Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum

voor Schone Kunsten

Ambrosius FranckenThe Martyrdom of Saint Crispin

(detail of 'g. 84)Antwerp, Church of

Saint Carolus Borromeus

84

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

97

Ambrosius FranckenAltarpiece of the Shoemakers and Tanners’ Guilds:

Antwerp, Church of Saint Carolus Borromeus

!"#$%&' %"'&&

98

vrijstaand, mét lijst

85

86–87

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

99

Notwithstanding the torture, hardly any blood "ows from under the saint’s nails – they remain unblemished. Ambrosius Francken’s panel is entirely characteristic of what I wish to demonstrate, because the hands are so focal: the scene is concentrated around the 'ngertips. Moreover, since it is an altarpiece, the religious authorities must have approved its iconography, and its meaning must have been clear and compliant with the Tridentine decrees.⁴⁴ There can be no doubt that Ambrosius Francken, his patron and the of'ciating bishop, who had to sign off on the iconography, thought long and hard about the rendering of the nails of both the saints and the torturers.⁴⁵

Frans Pourbus the Elder experimented with dirty feet in the aforementioned Saint Matthew and the Angel, but he also used the dirty/clean contrast like Ambrosius Francken. In the wings of the Martyrdom of Saint George Triptych now in Dunkirk, which Pourbus painted for the Guild of Saint George in 1577, the executioners – just as in Ambrosius Francken’s triptych – have brownish skin, deeply lined faces and dirty 'ngernails.⁴⁶ Pourbus also emphasized the black rims. One of the executioners "eeing the wrath of God sticks out his dirty hand. In contrast, Saint George’s skin is spotless and he submits to his fate serenely.

In short, there was nothing holy, nothing virtuous about dirt under nails.⁴⁷ The nails illustrate that a ‘person is full of sin, was received in sin, born in sin, and lives in sin, full of pride, greed, lust, indecency …’, as stated in Tavernier’s book.⁴⁸

34

8'–2

Ambrosius FranckenAltarpiece of the Shoemakers and Tanners’ Guilds: centre panelAntwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten

Frans Pourbus the ElderMartyrdom of Saint George Triptych, 1577Wings: Dunkirk, Musée des Beaux-Arts

!"#$%&' %"'&&

100

¶ Adriaen Thomasz Key portrayed the Church Father Jerome in about 1570 with brownish skin, dirty 'ngernails and a bare, hairy chest. The hands are rendered so that the nails are very visible, not to say strongly foregrounded. Like the Francken brothers and Pourbus, Key placed the dirty 'ngers conspicuously on a light surface, thus emphasizing the contrast between soiled and clean literally as black on white. The viewer cannot fail to notice these 'ngers. In the light of the examples discussed above, the question arises as to what were Key’s intentions with this iconography. After all, Saint Jerome was one of the most highly esteemed Church Fathers in the sixteenth century.⁴⁹ Because of his translation of the Bible into Latin – the Vulgate – this saint had become an icon of humanists and Bible scholars,⁵⁰ and, as a hermit he was a model of austerity, penitence and piety.⁵¹ This notwithstanding, Key did not refrain from presenting him as a sinful, impure human being. He did not do so with Jerome the hermit, like De Vos, but with the exegete, Jerome the biblical scholar. On the basis of a comparison with the contemporary examples just given, there is not a shred of doubt regarding this association. Key’s depiction "ies in the face of the Counter-Reformational recommendations as formulated by the Council of Trent and elaborated by Johannes Molanus, among others.⁵² Had not Rome determined that saints were to be portrayed with 'tting, sacral decorum? For Molanus, even bare feet were indecorous, let alone dirty nails. This view echoes an Erasmian idea of almost a century earlier.⁵³

Along with the nails, also noteworthy in Key’s Saint Jerome are the brownish skin and the chest hair.⁵⁴ Neither the skin colour nor the chest hair has a distinct precedent in the Netherlandish iconographic tradition of the subject. Until that time Jerome had rarely been depicted as a biblical scholar with a bare upper torso.⁵⁵ The Jeromes portrayed in their cell, for example by Joos van Cleve and Marinus van Reymerswaele, are clearly pale-skinned, certainly compared to those by Adriaen Thomasz Key. The latter quite possibly used the light ochre "esh tones for the same reasons as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, namely to portray the saint as even more ‘rustic’ than he was with dirty 'ngernails. Karel van Mander recounts that Bruegel painted ‘faces and unclothed parts of the bodies of the peasants in yellow and brown as if tanned by the sun – and their skin is ugly … different from that of town dwellers’.⁵⁶ Incidentally, in the Leerdicht, the didactic poem introducing the biographies, Van Mander devotes exceptional attention to the rendering of "esh. He notes that the skin of sailors and country bumpkins – people who work out of doors – requires a fair amount of ochre.⁵⁷ The association of brownish skin with boorishness and vulgarity was commonplace in the second half of the sixteenth century and the contrast between pale white and dark skin was often exploited in the martyrdom scenes by Pourbus and the Franckens, for example, or in the better-known Raising of the Cross by Rubens.⁵⁸ In each case the skin of the executioners is tanned while the body of the martyr is pure and pale. I noted above that Frans Floris painted Cain’s skin a darker tone than that of Abel, Cain’s victim. Certainly Adriaen Thomasz Key, too, was well aware of what he was doing. He was a highly respected portraitist and the skin of the men in his numerous likenesses is always much paler than that of his Saint Jerome pictures.⁵⁹ Key almost certainly used the tanned skin to reinforce the meaning of the dirty 'ngernails.

The hairs around the nipples of Saint Jerome are a third important feature.⁶⁰ To my knowledge, there are no convincing precedents for this in either the Low Countries or Italy in the sixteenth century.⁶¹ And looking forward, the ‘naturalism’ achieved with the chest hair surpasses that of Caravaggio and all other ‘naturalistic’ painting in the Mannerist and the early-Baroque periods. For reasons that have hardly been investigated until now, body hair was avoided in depicting saints. This seems strange, given on the one hand that chest

Godless decorum. Sanctity and vulgarity '2

35, 3'

86

27

88

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

101

hair is entirely natural for adult men, and on the other that it was virtually every painter’s ambition since the beginning of the Renaissance to paint from life. Nevertheless, Key’s halfhearted attempt to render chest hair is fairly unique in sixteenth-century Antwerp and it would seem that he was conscious of the controversy this naturalism could have generated.⁶² Body hair could refer to temptation – think of some images of Mary Magdalene (cf. infra pp. – ) – or to physical neglect and contemplation, as in the case of hermits.⁶³ Yet while it seems entirely possible to explain the presence of chest hair by the fact that the traditional iconography of Jerome in the wilderness was beginning to contaminate that of Jerome in his study, it is not very likely that Key wanted to emphasize that the translator of the Bible and the hermit who had had an extended spell in the desert were one and the same man. Perhaps he simply wanted to accentuate corporeality. The smattering of hairs that he painted on the older saint’s chest broke with the ideal image of the immaculate male body so resolutely sought in Italian Renaissance art (Michelangelo, Raphael). The ‘physical’ Jerome is at odds with the neo-Platonic conception of the ideal body. He is depicted as a normal rather than a perfect person. That Key’s contemporaries noticed this kind of details in paintings is evident from a comment by Marcus van Vaernewijck in his description of the Van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece. The Ghent chronicler was surprised by the tiny hairs on the legs of Adam and Eve and considered this detail, and the fact that their blood could almost be seen coursing through the veins under their skin, the nec plus ultra of verisimilitude.⁶⁴ Such details transformed Adam and Eve into real people, according to Van Vaernewijck. For Key’s contemporaries, his Jerome must have been ‘very alive’ indeed. Moreover, it is remarkable that Adriaen Thomasz Key – and other artists, too – chose an ideal, Italianate body to which imperfections, such as dirty 'ngernails and chest hair, were added. The impact of perfection ostentatiously disrupted is entirely different from that of perfection as yet unachieved. I will return to this below.

A point still to be mentioned is the ‘penitence’ of Saint Jerome in his cell. In the frontal variant, the barechested saint sits in his study, with a toga knotted around his waist by way of loincloth. The pose refers to Poenitentia as it is depicted in a print by Philip Galle.⁶⁵ A bare torso, with clothing knotted or draped around the loins was commonplace in reformist and Counter-Reformational art. Bernard de Rijckere, a contemporary of Key, used this motive to depict the penitent Magdalene.⁶⁶ The topos derived from devotional practice in the sixteenth century, when it was customary to uncover the torso while doing penance.⁶⁷ Moreover, a nude torso was not unusual in the iconography of Saint Jerome, at least not when the Church Father was presented as a hermit in the wilderness.⁶⁸ At the time Key made his painting (c. 1570–75), Jerome was never portrayed as a Bible translator and scholar in his studio barechested and with a loincloth.⁶⁹ Adriaen Thomasz Key’s iconography deviates signi'cantly from that of, for example, Michiel Coxcie’s Saint Jerome in his Cell, which does correspond fully with the prevailing standards of decorum.

With his depiction of Jerome as a combination of scholar, sinful and penitent hermit, Adriaen Thomasz Key must have had a speci'c goal in mind. Presumably he wanted to underscore the saint’s physical imperfection through the dirty 'ngers, chest hair and tanned skin. This makes sense, given that Key experimented with pictorial decorum throughout his entire career. He systematically stripped certain images of ‘apocryphal decorum’. He explicitly reduced the stories to their accounts in the Bible, ostentatiously eliminating all apocryphal accretions added in the course of time. By emphasizing the omissions, moreover, he entered into a dialogue with his most distinguished predecessors, Willem Key and Michiel

Michiel CoxcieSaint Jerome in his CellPresent whereabouts unknown

COXCIE St Jerome

!

!"#$%&' %"'&&

102

Coxcie, who heavily relied upon Italian High Renaissance models and ideals. The dirty 'ngernails, brownish skin, chest hair and bare torso were iconographic

innovations in Antwerp, as was the combination of these four elements. Adding them up, we must conclude that Key foregrounded Jerome’s sinfulness in his capacity as Bible scholar, nota bene. Key indicated that he saw the saint as a sinner and considered the Church Father’s writings as the work of a human being, with all their strengths and shortcomings. Like every other man, Jerome made mistakes. His Latin Bible translation and the canon it determined was neither perfect nor sacrosanct.

This notion is particularly important, for this is how Key visualized a rather common reformatory idea, one nicely phrased by Petrus Bloccius, for instance, in his Tvvee hondert ketteryen.⁷⁰ The concept of the fallibility and imperfection of the Bible translations corresponds entirely with the views of this Reformed preacher. Bloccius writes: ‘Yes, in many places Jerome (one must understand that his translation, used by the papists, is unlearned and false) has added new words and sentences that are not to be found in the actual text. And this translation is so highly esteemed by the papists that they call us heretics …’.⁷¹ He argues that the Bible is written in many languages and that no single Latin text is perfect because the people who made these translations are imperfect – he counts saints categorically among normal, sinful humans. This is why he even reprimands his fellow believer Theodore Beza – Calvin’s ‘successor’ – for his prejudice: ‘I wish Beza had not slandered Sebastiano Castalionem [i.e. Sébastien Châteillon] (who was a human, and was therefore allowed to make mistakes, like the rest of us as the apostle taught us) in his translation’.⁷² Bloccius was certainly not alone in subscribing to this view. It also occurs in Veluanus’s Leken Wechwyser. ‘They have also often fallen and must daily say, Father forgive us our sins’, Veluanus lets slip when he touches on the ‘many merits’ of saints.⁷³ These ideas, however, are voiced most beautifully and powerfully by Dirck Volkertsz Coornhert, the Haarlem humanist and engraver who inspired so many painters. In the Synode over gewetensvrijheid (Synod on the freedom of conscience) he has Theodore Beza say in the fourth session (on the reliability of the writings of the Church Father) that it ‘would not be dif'cult to 'nd ample evidence of the shortcomings of the greatest and oldest Church teachers’.⁷⁴ They are just people, and people are imperfect and sinful. And the meeting of the imaginary synod is closed with these words by Galmaliël: ‘Do not all the Church Fathers testify in their own writings that they are people and can fail?’⁷⁵

Because of the dirty 'ngernails, then, Adriaen Thomasz Key’s depiction of Saint Jerome must have been controversial in the decades after the beeldenstorm. It is a subtle combination of viewpoints that struck at the core of the disputes between reformers and counter-reformers. In the 'rst place they question the sanctity of the saints and reduce them to people of "esh and blood. Second, they challenge the authority and the dogmatic character of the Vulgate for which the Catholic Church claimed exclusive rights.⁷⁶ And this of all things is the essence of Frans Pourbus’s Saint Matthew and the Angel from 1573. 34

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

103

¶ What applies to Key in a certain sense also applies to Frans Pourbus: he, too, was sympathetic to Calvinism.⁷⁷ He thus did not have a high opinion of the Catholic Church and the Spanish ‘occupiers’, as also emerges from his personal engagement during the Revolt, which found expression in that intriguing satirical drawing of Spain and the Catholic Church (see 'g. ).⁷⁸ The subjects of many of his paintings have a hidden meaning. Although they would seem to be simple biblical stories, upon closer inspection they prove to have unexpected religious and political connotations.

In order to the chart more closely the complexity of pictorial imagery in the wake of the beeldenstorm, I will discuss a painting by Frans Pourbus the Elder which in concept is closely related to Adriaen Thomasz Key’s Saint Jerome variants. In a short article on Caravaggio’s 'rst version of Saint Matthew and the Angel, Irving Lavin pointed out that the Italian master’s depiction of the Evangelist displayed some kinship with a painting by Frans Pourbus the Elder in Brussels. Lavin discerned remarkable parallels in two areas: 'rst, he noted that the composition was very similar, and second, that the text Matthew is penning in Pourbus’s painting is not without meaning. His initial assumption that Caravaggio was the 'rst to have painted the opening lines of Matthew’s Gospel in Hebrew rather than in ancient Greek or Latin turned out to be wrong. The author acknowledged that Pourbus preceded the Italian master. At 'rst sight the Hebrew letters may appear to be a meaningless detail, but as Lavin noted they become salient in combination with the ‘profane’ rendering of Matthew. Lavin failed to mention a third similarity, namely Pourbus’s aversion to the traditional decorum of the depiction: Pourbus was experimenting with the iconography of the Evangelist a quarter of a century before Caravaggio.⁷⁹

I begin with the inscription as it is crucial for contextualizing Pourbus’s painting as well as the matter in hand. Why were the Hebrew letters and the text so important and what was revolutionary about this inscription? In the course of the sixteenth century a heated debate had erupted between Protestants and Catholics concerning the language in which Matthew, the 'rst and foremost Evangelist, had written his text. The dispute was sparked by Erasmus. He doubted the words of Saint Jerome, who around ad 400 claimed that Matthew had written his Gospel in Hebrew. Erasmus, the sixteenth-century biblical scholar par excellence, suggested that Matthew spoke the same language as the other Evangelists, namely Aramaic – the vernacular – of the Palestinian Jews in Christ’s time. Reformers seized upon this humanistic concern to question the orthodoxy of the Catholic faith and its numerous dogmas. Indeed, if the Roman Catholic Church itself did not know in which language the 'rst Evangelist had written, how could it assess the orthodoxy of the Christian doctrine, as it claimed. The debate also stressed that Matthew was a fairly uneducated man of the people, a sinner moreover, who was forgiven by God for his belief only (sola !des) in Christ. What is more, he was chosen to write the Gospel of the New Testament in the vernacular. In the eyes of the Protestants Matthew legitimized both the Protestant Bible translations and the notion of forgiveness through faith alone, two points contested by the Catholic Church.⁸⁰ Symptomatic of this discourse is the fact that Luther was portrayed as Saint Matthew in the frontispiece of his translation of the New Testament of 1529. Pourbus’s landscape vista and the undeniable portrait features of his Matthew seem to refer to the ideas underlying this print.⁸¹

Pourbus used the ‘Plantin Polyglot’, the Biblia Polyglotta published by Christophe Plantin in Antwerp in 1571, as his source for the lines of text in his Saint Matthew. He quoted the Aramaic text in Hebrew letters, as in the Polyglot, for Plantin’s of!cina did not have Aramaic

Frans Pourbus’s ‘Saint Matthew and the Angel’

83

36

89

90

91

!"#$%&' %"'&&

104

CaravaggioSaint Matthew and the Angel(destroyed; formerly Berlin,

Kaiser Friedrich Museum)

Frontispiece of Martin Luther’s

Frans Pourbus the ElderSaint Matthew and the AngelBrussels, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique/Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België

92

93

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

105

printing type at its disposal. Lavin indicated that Pourbus was taking a controversial stance, for the Catholic Church insisted that Matthew had written in Hebrew, as Saint Jerome had claimed. However, Pourbus, took it one step further: he supported Erasmus and Luther’s provocative idea and transformed it into an unmistakable image – at least for those who recognized the Aramaic in the Hebraic inscription. Pourbus’s painting was steeped in the intellectual, humanistic and reformist ambiance. It goes without saying that not everyone fully understood these iconographical niceties. Only someone with exceptional knowledge of the Bible and the various Bible translations would have been able to comprehend its deeper signi'cance. The commissioner of the work certainly belonged to the reformist, humanistic establishment. A quarter century after Pourbus, Caravaggio took up the Hebrew text when he copied the 'rst sentences of Matthew’s Gospel.⁸² He defended the Catholic viewpoint in the debate and thus responded – most probably unconsciously – to Pourbus’s provocative scene.

With respect to the Gospel text, the ideas of Pourbus and Caravaggio (or their patrons) may have been miles apart, but the two painters were on the same wavelength when it came to their dislike of conventional decorum. Pourbus and Caravaggio alike portrayed the Evangelist with dirty feet. Although Pourbus’s Matthew wears sandals, his dirty toenails stick out quite visibly. Matthew’s features are not generalized. If it is not a portrait historié, it certainly has all of the characteristics of a likeness. The man has wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead and his beard is asymmetrical. Like Caravaggio, the painter makes visible the distinction between the earthly apostle and divine inspiration, symbolized by the angel.⁸³ Just as Adriaen Thomasz Key desacralized Jerome by means of the dirty 'ngernails, so Pourbus underscored the profane nature of the Evangelist Matthew by having him write in the vernacular and portraying him emphatically as an earth dweller. Both iconographic innovations effect a ‘desacralization’. Key and Pourbus thus entered into the fray of opposing religious ideologies in a totally different way. In so doing, they rewrote the iconography of images of saints as known in the Netherlands: the emphasis came to lie on the saints’ humanity, their profane character.

37, 39

CaravaggioSaint Matthew and the Angel (detail of 'g. 89)(destroyed; formerly Berlin, Kaiser Friedrich Museum)

Frans Pourbus the ElderSaint Matthew and the Angel(detail of 'g. 91)Brussels, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique/Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België

!"#$%&' %"'&&

106

¶ A number of paradigms of the Reformation, in the broadest sense of the word, underlie Adriaen Thomasz Key and Frans Pourbus’s iconographic experiment with dirty feet and 'lthy 'ngernails. One of these was the strict division between the sacred and the profane, as advocated by Erasmus and Calvin. A second more Calvinist-oriented point is related to the doctrine of original sin, or the sinfulness of humankind since the Fall of Man. A third thorny issue was the Catholic Church’s exclusive claim to the use and interpretation of the Scriptures. In the sixteenth century these three points of contention were ineluctable. The discourse was widespread in the Low Countries, as outlined in the previous chapter, and every educated individual undoubtedly had their own opinion about it.

The strict division between the spiritual and the material was considered a solution to idolatry, as the late medieval cult of saints was called by its adversaries. Here is how Carlos Eire summarizes Calvin’s fundamental objection to idolatry: ‘Calvin systematically juxtaposed the divine and the human, contrasted the spiritual and the material, and placed the transcendent and omnipotent solus of God above the contingent multiple of man and the created world. Calvin’s attack on Roman Catholic “idolatry” is a condemnation of the improper mixing of spiritual and material in worship.…’⁸⁴ Nevertheless, as Eire rightly notes, the notion of splitting the material and the spiritual had been gaining ground in the Netherlands for some time. The Brethren of the Common Life (Devotio Moderna), for instance, and their most famous and in"uential disciple, Erasmus, basically advocated the same idea. According to the humanist of humanists the late medieval cult of saints and relics in which saints and even statues of saints were ascribed divine powers, was very far removed indeed from the faith that Christ had preached and which was recorded in the Scriptures. This is why Erasmus and other reformers devoted themselves to a re-evaluation of the basic principles. Taking early Christian society as a model, they noticed that God and Christ were central in this community and that there was no such thing as the veneration of saints. Had not Paul and Barnabas in Lystra ripped the clothing from their bodies to show those eager to worship them that they were simply human beings of "esh and blood, and not idols? In the course of time, however, the worship of saints only increased and even acquired the status of a pagan polytheism. According to the reformers, the resulting cult of saints, in particular the veneration of relics and statues of saints, distracted believers from the true Christian faith as described in the Scriptures. Relics and statues of saints were material objects while the core of religion, they maintained, was spiritual. Saints were only human and remained so even after their death. When Bloccius refers to saints, he systematically talks about ‘the dead’ or ‘dead people’.⁸⁵ For him idolatry lies in the fact that ‘papists’ ascribe supernatural, divine powers to them. Admittedly, saints had led exemplary lives and therefore served as models, but they most certainly did not have the divinity that Christ – and Christ alone – possessed. Not a single saint had ever risen from the dead, and had they done so there would no longer be any relics. Not a single saint was without sin. In the strict division that 'rst Erasmus and later Calvin and his followers in the Low Countries made between the spiritual-divine (mental) and the profane-earthly (physical), saints belonged to the second category. Saints were human.

This brings us to a second key concept in Calvin’s theology, the so-called doctrine of predestination.⁸⁶ This complicated doctrine is based on the writings of Augustine. The crux of the matter here is original sin, or the sinfulness in every man. According to the Church Father, man had been sinful through and through since the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden, and could only be redeemed through God’s grace. To this end Christ sacri'ced himself on

Reformed ‘sanctity’

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

107

the cross. Who would ultimately receive this grace was already determined, in other words, predestined. However, according to Calvin this predestination did not excuse the faithful from leading a devout life in the service of God. Central to Calvin’s theology, therefore, was the sinfulness in every person.⁸⁷ Our sins cannot not be forgiven during our physical life on earth and the Catholic sacrament of confession is nonsense. Nor were saints exempt from this since they belonged to the worldly and not the divine sphere.

Third, the monopoly that the Church of Rome claimed on the use and interpretation of the Bible exacerbated matters perhaps even more than the two points mentioned above. The Church’s authority with regard to reading and interpreting the Bible had been questioned since the beginning of the Reformation. Moreover, the most important reformers inside and outside the Church, such as Erasmus, Luther and Calvin, challenged the prevailing Bible canon.⁸⁸

Adriaen Thomasz Key and Frans Pourbus were both inclined to Calvinism and were surely aware of these humanistic Reformed ideas, if only because they were preached at the hedge sermons and other gatherings of fellow believers. In their art, both Key and Pourbus played with the concept of sinfulness and saintliness. By depicting Jerome and Matthew as people of "esh and blood, sinful and impure, like everyone else, Key and Pourbus averted the danger of inappropriate hagiolatry. Moreover, by portraying them as as an exegete and an evangelist, respectively, they raised questions about the nature of their writings. And so the words of an anonymous rhetorician from 1540 were 'nally converted into image:

You [impure idolaters] have left these [Godly gifts], that is well known/ And found human images full of sinfulness/ Whose teaching is false and horribly af!icted.⁸⁹

¶ A problem that has hitherto been touched upon only super'cially is the question of possible antecedents for Adriaen Thomasz Key and Frans Pourbus’s experiments with decorum. In other words, had there been attempts before the beeldenstorm to ‘desacralize’ saints? After all, idolatry and Protestantism had been troubling the calm for much longer and the aforementioned generation of painters did not simply appear out of thin air.⁹⁰ Did older masters, such as Joos van Cleve, Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Marinus van Reymerswaele and Key and Pourbus’s own teachers Willem Key and Frans Floris also endow saints with dirty feet and 'lthy 'ngernails?⁹¹ In so far as I could ascertain, under no circumstances did the masters just mentioned depict saints with dirty 'ngernails. Their hands are always as pure and clean as those of the Antwerp burghers in their portraits. Their skin is white, their chest hairless. Yet this does not mean that there are no connections between the depictions of Saint Jerome by Van Reymerswaele and Van Hemessen on the one hand and Adriaen Thomasz Key’s Saint Jerome in his Study on the other. Key and Pourbus’s imagery also accords more closely with that of Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer than one might suspect at 'rst sight. Even though they upended the iconography, Key and Pourbus embroidered on the work of their predecessors. Several generations of Antwerp painters experimented in entirely different ways with the iconography of virtue and vice, the sacred and the profane.

Artists in the Low Countries had long used physical characteristics to picture sin, also with Saints Jerome and Matthew. That Adriaen Thomasz Key and Frans Pourbus speci'cally chose these two saints as the focus of their experiment was hardly a coincidence. Both remained rewarding subjects throughout the sixteenth century, and after mid-century many

Antecedents?

35, 3', 33

''

!"#$%&' %"'&&

108

Antwerp burghers had images of Matthew or Jerome in their homes. In comparison with representations of other saints these two were well in the lead.⁹² Their popularity was related to a number of factors listed above.⁹³ Jerome had made the Vulgate translation and thus stood at the cradle of the canon and the monopoly Rome claimed on the Bible text. He was the icon of the humanists. Matthew was a sinner who became an apostle and later was the 'rst to commit the story of Jesus’ life to paper. He was a convert who, guided by the Holy Spirit in the form of an angel, wrote down the truth. Second, both saints served as moral exemplars. Matthew renounced his sinful riches.⁹⁴ Despite his af"uent background, Jerome retired to live as a poor hermit.⁹⁵ Their lives thus demonstrated that the wealth of the Catholic Church and the decadence associated with it had little to do with the beliefs of the early Christians. They gave up their prosperity in favour of their faith.

Dürer’s rendition of the Church Father was the prototype for the depiction of Saint Jerome in Netherlandish art in the sixteenth century.⁹⁶ Dürer painted it for a Portuguese patron while he was sojourning in Antwerp in 1521. The interpretations of the subject by Quinten Massys, Jan Massys, Joos van Cleve, Marinus van Reymerswaele and Jan Sanders van Hemessen, among others, largely hark back to Dürer’s invention.

If Van Cleve and Van Reymerswale depicted the saints with caricatured, tormented heads, the tronies (character heads) of Pourbus and Key’s saints are almost likenesses, if not actually portraits. They are lifelike and characterized by an Eyckian precision. Particularly in Van Reymerswaele’s Saint Jerome, however, there is an unnatural tautness to the tendons of the 'ngers and the back of the hands. The tension in the caricatural, lined face of his Church Father runs from the crown of his head to the tips of his 'ngers. The body might be white and unblemished, but the spirit is clearly agitated. This also applies to Matthew in Van Hemessen’s Calling of Saint Matthew.⁹⁷ That painting presents the story of the publican who was called by Christ to be his pupil; an offer he accepted. He turned his back on wordly luxury and riches and converted. Van Hemessen rendered the sinful Matthew – that is before his conversion – with a tormented face.

Van Hemessen and Van Reymerswaele’s paintings accord perfectly with an idea that was omnipresent in the Renaissance, namely that the face was the mirror of the soul or that a person’s face re"ected his mind.⁹⁸ For instance, Leonardo da Vinci believed that the stirrings of the soul could be conveyed in a portrait. Shakespeare wrote: ‘there’s no art to 'nd the mind’s construction in the face’.⁹⁹ In the Netherlands Karel van Mander argued in his Leerdicht (didactic poem) that a person’s emotions, his soul, could be captured in paint.¹⁰⁰ Depicting the affecten (affects, passions), as he called them, is precisely what painters like Van Reymerswaele and Van Hemessen were striving for in their interpretations of Saint Jerome.

In the 'rst half of the sixteenth century the images of Matthew and Jerome nearly always allude to two aspects, namely the physical tension resulting from the sinfulness of the saints and their profane human character. The contrast between Christ’s perfection and the tormented Matthew in Van Hemessen’s scene is a case in point. Key and Pourbus also stressed the profane, sinful character, but in a completely different naturalistic manner. They placed the emphasis on verisimilitude while the older generation portrayed the restlessness of the soul, or sin through exaggerated facial tension. In other words, Key and Pourbus took the ideal body – an achievement of antiquity and the Italian Renaissance – as their point of departure and made it imperfect. The perfection, the divine status of the saint, was dis'gured. The perfect idol was torn from its pedestal as it were and ‘besmirched’. Although it remains an open question whether these painters did this under the in"uence of Erasmus, who raised

3(

35–8

33

94

95

Albrecht DürerSaint Jerome in his StudyLisbon, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga

Joos van CleveSaint Jerome in his StudyPrinceton University Art Museum. Gift of Joseph F. McCrindle

!

96

97

!"#$%&' %"'&&

110

Marinus van ReymerswaeleSaint Jerome in his Study

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Quinten MassysSaint Jerome in his Study

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

!

98

99

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

111

Jan MassysSaint Jerome in his StudyVienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Jan Sanders van HemessenThe Calling of Saint MatthewMunich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek

!

100

!"#$%&' %"'&&

112

verisimilitude above all other forms of representation and disapproved of caricature or beauti'cation – ‘I do not take for honest, the painter who, in his picture, shows us a deformed person as beautiful’¹⁰¹ – it seems entirely possible.

Before the beeldenstorm shook the world of artists to its foundations and Key and Pourbus entered the stage, in addition to caricaturization other visual means were deployed in the Netherlands to picture the imperfection and mortal nature of saints. The work of Pieter Aertsen naturally comes to mind here.

A striking example of a series of paintings in which a saint – in this case an apostle – is presented in a very unsaintly way is Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, a subject treated on more than one occasion by Pieter Aertsen among others. Keith Moxey and Hans Buijs have already outlined its unusual iconography with a drunken apostle Peter making his appearance in the scene in front of the 'replace.¹⁰² Through the inversion of the iconography, the subsidiary scene of the degeneration of the apostle is literally foregrounded, while the actual subject of the painting, Christ visiting Martha and Mary, is relegated to the background.¹⁰³ Consequently, Aertsen did not centre on the story from the life of Jesus, but uses it to expose the improper conduct of the founder of the Church of Rome, Peter, as a drunk. Erasmus, who was not averse to satire, deemed this outrageous.¹⁰⁴ He considered it inappropriate that the holy apostle be portrayed as a dissipated drunk.¹⁰⁵

In other words, Aertsen, too, questioned the sanctity of a saint by bringing to the fore

466

Pieter AertsenChrist in the House of

Martha and Mary, 1553Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans

Van Beuningen

101

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

113

his improper behaviour. His painting, dated 1553, precedes Key and Pourbus’s inventions, but his way of desacralizing the saint, is entirely different from theirs.

Even more interesting perhaps is the way in which Joachim Beuckelaer depicted the subject of Christ in the house of Martha and Mary in a panel now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. In that painting the scene with Christ is barely visible.¹⁰⁶ Two maids hold large pieces of meat in the foreground and immediately behind them is the drunken apostle Peter. His pose – one leg forward, the other bent back –  is surely based on ancient models and resembles similar postures in Key, Pourbus and Aertsen {ok?} .¹⁰⁷ Beuckelaer accentuated precisely what offended Erasmus: the desacralization of the apostle. That the chunks of meat refer to carnal sin strikes me as self-evident. By means of a still life (analogous to 'lthy 'ngernails or caricature) the profane, sinful character of a saint is accentuated here. In the background Christ points out to the beholder the choice between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa.¹⁰⁸

As Hans Buijs noted correctly, there existed in the Low Countries a tradition of emphasizing the sinful, vulgar conduct of Peter and/or other apostles,¹⁰⁹ at the latest since Erasmus, who was the 'rst to express criticism of this kind of depiction in 1526. In this sense the profanation of saints after the beeldenstorm was not new. What was entirely novel, however, was that artists like Key and Pourbus now departed from an idealized image – imported

464

Joachim BeuckelaerChrist in the House of Martha and Mary, 1565Stockholm, Nationalmuseum

!"#$%&' %"'&&

114

from antiquity and the Roman High Renaissance – and added desacralizing elements to it. This created an entirely different effect. This new approach did not develop from an existing local tradition but focused on a new foreign style and challenged it. In stylistic terms this is comparable to what Bruegel did when he opposed the supremacy of the Italian style and weighed it against the Netherlandish tradition and vice versa.¹¹⁰

The concept of desacralization of the saints that comes to the fore so strongly in painting in the course of the two decades following the beeldenstorm, ties perfectly in with the quest inside and outside the Church for a stricter division between virtue and vice, the sacred and the profane, the saintly and the sinful. By portraying a saint as a sinful human, instead of idealizing him as a demigod, the accusation of idolatry is refuted. The representation of the saint thus became a kind of ‘portrait’ of someone who indeed has led an exemplary life that could serve as a model for every pious Christian, but who, like anyone, was above all human and impure. Starting from the dialectic of the imagery itself, I consider the dirty feet and 'lthy nails as symptoms of a ‘profanation’ of the sacred under pressure from the beeldenstorm and the Reformation. What painters like Adriaen Thomasz Key and Frans Pourbus the Elder did was to ‘incorporate’ sin in their images of saints. They shattered the illusion of perfection not by rendering the saints with caricatural grooved heads as their predessors had done, but rather by turning them into "awed, naturalistic portraits in which dirty feet, 'lthy nails and chest hair made their appearance. This approach was new and therefore possibly more controversial than that of the older generations of Netherlandish artists. It was Caravaggism avant la lettre, but I will return to this in the .

¶ but what about female saints? Did Adriaen Thomasz Key and others paint Mary Magdalene or the Madonna with dirty nails, or did they deal in a different manner with decorum in the case of female saints? In 1567 the Catholic Martinus Duncanus warned his readers that ‘Many more perils reside in beautiful women, because of which even the wisest people have succumbed to crazy idolatry’.¹¹¹ Female nudity had always been controversial and nude female saints even more so. The beeldenstorm actually did very little to change this. Erasmus criticized images of nudity as early as 1516.¹¹² He 'rst touched upon this subject in his Institutio principes christiani, a manual for educating Christian princes.¹¹³ Indecent paintings should not be hung in a house because they encouraged sinfulness, he believed, and he repeated his criticism in his re"ections on marriage, Christiani matrimonii institutio of 1526. To lend support to his argument that immoral depictions drove men to sin, he quoted a story from Pliny about a youth who left traces of his excitement on a statue of Venus.

This kind of criticism was repeated throughout the entire sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but after the beeldenstorm it became a powerful weapon in the dispute regarding iconoclasm and the veneration of images.¹¹⁴ In his book Een cort onderscheyt tusschen Godlyke ende Afgodissche Beelden that appeared the year after the beeldenstorm, Duncanus gets down to brass tacks: ‘We should 'rst purge our own houses of such idols, over which we have power, before we desecrate and violate the churches.’¹¹⁵ The Catholic polemicist objected to the Calvinists’ hypocrisy. Whereas they smashed the statues and altarpieces in the churches with demonic delight, they had no qualms about hanging history and devotional paintings above the mantelpieces in their own homes, and these, according to Duncanus, they left

Female saints

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

115

alone. Worse still, they preferred portraits of Roman emperors, even of Turks, to the memory of Christ. Was the likeness of Christ not better than a pagan tronie? Renatus Benedictus, the other proli'c Catholic writer, made the same observation. The Calvinists despised the images of Christ and the saints, but ‘take pleasure in looking at images of non-believers and pagans’.¹¹⁶ He, too, wondered why they destroyed the images of saints but left these false gods untouched. Anna Bijns, a convinced Catholic poetess, made a similar comment in 1548, about twenty years before Duncanus and Benedictus formulated their criticism. Bijns reproached the Protestant factions for condemning and destroying images in churches, while idolizing paintings and prints of pagan, nude men and women in the privacy of their own homes.

These days chalices are smashed and ciboria. The saints, who are with Christ in heaven, Are despised and their images burned. The cruci"x that reminds us of Christ’s death, Is obscured by strange tales, Poetry in the heathen manner. That which engenders devotion must be e#faced, While all that arouses impurity Is painted, engraved; the ugliness is seen Of naked women, naked men; yes, idols almost …¹¹⁷

Duncanus, Benedictus and Bijns denounced the ambivalence of the reformational hatred of images.¹¹⁸ They denounced the hypocrisy of the iconoclasts who hung nude Venuses and Lucretias at home without batting an eye, while a chaste likeness of the Holy Virgin in the church was taboo.

The facts would seem to support the Catholic polemicists up to a point. That art in the public domain in the decades shortly after the beeldenstorm was perceived differently from the art hanging in the sitting room indeed emerges from the stance of some of the Calvinists themselves. As opposed to what one would expect, leading Calvinists in Antwerp did not refrain from hanging biblical representations, images of saints or even pagan nudes of all kinds in their homes. Indeed, it emerges from research in the last few decades that many distinguished Calvinists owned modest collections of art which in their composition deviated little from what Catholics had at home.¹¹⁹ Both groups of believers owned primarily religious art. ‘Papists’ naturally had more devotional works, such as Madonnas, and the Protestants opted more often for depictions of less well-known Old Testament stories. In spite of that, no signi'cant differences between the two religious factions can be discerned during the early years of the Reformation in the Low Countries. Martinus Duncanus and Anna Bijns certainly had a point when they accused their opponents of being schizophrenic. In the decades after the beeldenstorm there was a huge discrepancy between Calvinist word and deed, in public and private. New to Bijns, Benedictus and Duncanus’s criticism is the fact that they seized upon Erasmus’s views of nudity to undermine the Calvinist theology with regard to statues and paintings.

This schizophrenia can also be held against several leading painters in this period. Adriaen Thomasz Key and Frans Pourbus, for instance, were Calvinist-minded, but they nonetheless painted altarpieces, saints, female nudes and even nude saints like Mary Magdalene. It is unlikely that opportunism and pro't can explain their paradoxical attitude 46(, 462–3

102

!"#$%&' %"'&&

116

with respect to the nudity of saints. Another factor will have been the coexistence of two contradictory models, on the one hand the ideological and iconographic impact of the Reformation, on the other hand the overwhelming aesthetic in"uence of the Italian Renaissance, which inspired artists on both sides of the religious divide to emulation. Many artists with reformist sympathies must have been torn apart by this choice, all the more so because the Italian Renaissance was an exclusively Catholic affair.

The commotion surrounding the nude was not new at the time of the beeldenstorm. All things considered, the female body had begun to play an important role in painting by the mid-sixteenth century, albeit in a different manner. It was no coincidence that Anna Bijns formulated her poetic criticism in the 1540s. Many painters, including Frans Floris, Vincent Sellaer, Jan Massys and Willem Key experimented with naked bodies in those years.¹²⁰ Frontal depictions of Susanna, Lucretia, Judith and Lot’s daughters were extraordinarily popular then.¹²¹ There, too, the dangerous notion of the ideal body was at the forefront, because the perfect female anatomy was used to make people aware of their carnal sinfulness. The role of the double moral of Lucretia, Susanna and other beauties simultaneously was to display their seductive allure while warning against the physical longings they aroused.¹²² Among others, Willem Key, Adriaen Thomasz’s teacher, was famous for his depictions of this kind of ideal nude; his skills as a painter of nude women were praised in a sonnet by Lucas de Heere.¹²³ The body of Key’s Susanna is virtually perfect by Renaissance standards.

She is very close to the ideal of the Venus Pudica, for example. Her "awless body is marble white and perfectly proportioned. This also applies to Willem Key’s Venus and Cupid.¹²³bis Susanna can easily withstand the comparison with Venus, a pagan divinity. Willem Key comes very close to what a Renaissance man would have considered perfection, according to Lucas de Heere, or in the words of his pupil Karel van Mander:

yet the women should lack hardness, their !esh is more rounded than that of men, in the muscles which are wholly soft …, velvety !esh, with folds and grooves …, dimpled hands, like children have.¹²⁴

Especially the dimpled hands – like those of babies and toddlers – are a salient aspect of the ideal rendering of the female body and were used to underscore the body’s pristine condition.

Adriaen Thomasz Key trained in the workshop of Willem Key. As a young 'gure painter he was inspired by the art of his master, but his nudes eventually evolved in the direction of exceptional naturalism. The dimples in the hands, for example, were replaced by bony knuckles. He distanced himself from the ideal body that had come to be a main objective since the diffusion of the Renaissance in the Netherlands: equalling the ancients, and surpassing them if possible. It is as if he has taken to heart – with prior knowledge – Rubens’s comment that the painted female body was not to resemble tinted marble but real "esh and blood.¹²⁵ Adriaen Thomasz Key, however, did retain another aspect of Willem Key’s nudes, namely the use of the body itself to warn against the temptations of the image.

As will be argued below, physical imperfection became an important aspect in the representation of female saints in Adriaen Thomasz Key’s work after the beeldenstorm. Imperfection of the body was used as a metaphor for human fallibility. As a means to de-sacralize images of saints it is comparable to the 'lthy 'ngernails he used on other occasions and similar to what Caravaggio would do in Rome thirty years later.¹²⁶ Emphasizing the physicality of the contested saints made it possible to represent them without giving rise

467

Willem KeySusanna and the Elders

Pommersfelden, Schloss Weissenstein, Count von

Schönborn Collection

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

117

103

!"#$%&' %"'&&

118

to the temptation to worship them: their bodies were too human for that. Vredeman and Mostaert’s Paul and Barnabas at Lystra is, again, illustrative in this respect, for the story itself contains a key to solving at least a part of the Bilderfrage. The apostles are depicted, but they themselves decry being worshipped. They tear the clothes from their bodies and ask the inhabitants of Lystra to acknowledge that they are mere mortals and not stone gods or idols. Their bodies are a sign of their humilitas vis-à-vis God and their claim to humanitas. This claim was also used in other contexts in an attempt to settle the image debates, among others by Key.

49, '(

Adriaen Thomasz KeyPortrait of a 42-Year-Old Man, 1580

Brussels, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique/

Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

119

¶ Before delving into Adriaen Thomas Key’s images of the Magdalene it is crucial brie"y to consider his portraiture, for Key was a leading portraitist and portraits were also involved in the discussion about idolatry.¹²⁷ There is something unusual about his portraits. They evidence a ‘photorealistic’ rigidity unprecedented in the second half of the sixteenth century, which only increased in the course of his career. In the last portraits he painted, including the Portrait of a 42-Year-Old Man of 1580, the pores of the skin are almost visible.¹²⁸

Key did not make any concessions to reality. He depicted people exactly as they were. He even emphasized the exceptional, physiognomic precision by systematically eliminating all anecdotal detail and placing the bright faces before a dark, often black background. Portraits by Adriaen Thomasz are neither psychological experiments nor idealizations but the purest mirrors of reality, representing people with such imperfections as wrinkles and facial cysts.

In interpreting the various Mary Magdalenes by Adriaen Thomasz Key we must bear in mind this striving for perfect physiognomic realism. Key’s quest for the proper rendering of the sinner led him to paint a female nude. Representations of Mary Magdalene with a bare bosom or nude torso were all but non-existent in the Low Countries until Key turned his attention to the subject.¹²⁹ He devised two types. The 'rst was a response to a very well-known Netherlandish typology.¹³⁰ The traditional format of the Mary Magdalene theme in the Netherlands was indeed the portrait historié going back to Rogier van der Weyden, Quinten Massys, Jan Massys, Jan Gossaert, Jan van Scorel, Ambrosius Benson and others.¹³¹

Ladies at court and from the urban patriciate had themselves portrayed as the courtesan Magdalene, holding the (alabaster) jar of ointment in one hand, and the lid in the other. The distinguished women in question are about to raise the lid or have just done so, signalling their repentance. The pose of the Magdalene varies from pro'le to frontal, but most are shown in three-quarter view, both their heads and their bodies. They are always represented wearing expensive contemporary clothing. This type of image was produced by the hundreds in the Low Countries by masters of varying quality and status. Van der Weyden, Massys and Van Scorel have already been mentioned, but the Master of the Female Half-Lengths, the Master of the Parrot, and other anonymous artists produced multiple images of this type.¹³² So stereotypical and often repeated was this formula that we might call it commonplace in the art of the Netherlands.

Johannes Molanus had strong objections to the depiction of the Magdalene as a woman of the world; the Catholic theologian believed it was inappropriate to depict the saint in her capacity as a sinful, vain woman. Instead, her conversion and repentance needed to be emphasized.¹³³ Images of the Magdalene, according to him, were to focus on her poenitentia.¹³⁴ Adriaen Thomasz Key was aware of Molanus’s recommendations with respect to iconography and decorum (as I indicated above) and it is entirely possible that here, too, he was seeking a solution for an ‘icon’ of Netherlandish painting: the Magdalene had become problematic for both the Catholics and the Protestants – for Catholics because a wrong moment in her life was depicted, for Protestants because a saint should not be worshipped.

Adriaen Thomasz was the leading portraitist of his time. It can hardly be a coincidence that he was the one who completely reworked this (portrait) type. We see a delicate girl looking down and wearing only some tulle and a small cap with a crenated edge – a reference to contemporary, sixteenth-century garb. The painting is obviously derived from the traditional pictorial format. What Key did is nothing more or less than to ‘undress’ the widely known portrait type. Key’s panel refers to the conventional typology in every respect but completely ignores the pattern of expectation by omitting the clothing, thereby shifting the

Adriaen Thomasz Key’s ‘Mary Magdalene’

469

46(

465

46'

104

!"#$%&' %"'&&

120

emphasis entirely to the saint’s body. It is as if Mary Magdalene, analogous to Paul and Barnabas at Lystra, cast off her clothes to make it perfectly clear to the beholder that she is not a courtly Venus, but simply a woman of "esh and blood. Was the artist trying to address the reproaches of Molanus? We do not know – the nudity in any case will not have been appreciated – but as he nearly always did, Adriaen Thomasz Key took a universally known visual motif as his point of departure and reworked the decorum. We are reminded of his adaptation of Coxcie’s Cain and Abel and of Willem Key’s Adoration of the Magi. There can be no doubt that Adriaen Thomasz wanted to underscore the physical aspect of Mary Magdalene’s sin. He transformed

49

5, ', 795

Adriaen Thomasz KeyMary Magdalene

Present whereabouts unknown

105

106

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

121

the courtly lady with which the urban patriciate in Antwerp identi'ed into a fragile, nude girl, seemingly unaware of the viewer, who is conscious and even ashamed of her carnal sin. She is on the verge of opening the alabaster jar of ointment to salve Christ’s feet and being forgiven. This is the moment when the worldly woman 'nds God and is redeemed through her faith.

One of the arguments in the image debate was about the material of the image and the manner in which images were treated. As I will demonstrate more extensively in Chapter

the clothing of Mary Magdalene, for example, received a great deal of attention in the writings of both Protestant and Catholic theologians.¹³⁵ One of the reproaches heaped upon the Catholic Church was that the Virgin Mary and all the other saints were adorned with gold and cloth of gold. ‘But this [Mary] is hung with gold and silver like a queen,’ Marnix van Sint Aldegonde lamented, ‘and wishes people to worship her clothing and her jewels, her churches and chapels, her gilded chests and other paraphernalia, rather than the eternal living God.’¹³⁶ In addition, the link was always made with the golden idols mentioned variously throughout the Old Testament that were destroyed through the wrath of God.¹³⁷ Gold brocade and costly clothing belonged to idols, according to the Reformed. It would seem that Adriaen Thomasz Key here literally removed the cloth of gold from the Magdalene’s shoulders, in a metaphorical sense, to appease the complaints of Protestant pamphleteers.

In his 'rst version of Mary Magdalene Adriaen Thomasz thus did two things. First, by omitting the clothing, he entirely reworked the decorum of a highly successful pictorial subject in sixteenth-century Netherlandish art.¹³⁸ Second, he made conspicuous use of the nude (or the body), even though this was highly contested by those who accepted the Catholic tenets and heeded the decorum that institutionalized and idealized saints.¹³⁹ Given this context, Adriaen Thomasz Key’s Mary Magdalene could never have been devoid of meaning. I will return to this below.

A second type of Mary Magdalene by Key is even more interesting, because it was

46(

Rogier van der WeydenMary Magdalene, c. 1450Right wing of the Triptych of Jean BraqueParis, Musée du Louvre

Ambrosius BensonMary MagdaleneBruges, Stedelijke Musea, Groeningemuseum

!!

107

108

!"#$%&' %"'&&

122

entirely new in the Netherlands and because the artist, in his search for a 'tting style and iconography, shows an increasing interest in the body.¹⁴⁰ The three variants shown here – all dating from the 1570s – represent three phases in Key’s quest for the most succesful image. In a 'rst version Key depicted Mary Magdalene half-length and entirely nude.¹⁴¹ Her body is sheathed only in a swath of tulle, which accentuates rather than covers her nudity. Her contemporary headgear strongly resembles the cap in the version discussed above.¹⁴² A lock of hair lies on Mary Magdalene’s right shoulder. There is no setting: the Magdalene poses before an entirely neutral background. This, too, is unique, for the repentant Magdalene is

traditionally depicted in the wilderness.¹⁴³The second version, now in Monticello (USA), is signed with Key’s monogram on the lid

of the jar of ointment. The pose of the 'gure is identical to that of the version just discussed, with a few notable differences. Here Mary Magdalene has long, chestnut brown hair falling luxuriously around her bosom.¹⁴⁴ Her body is "ushed, as though she has just made love and she raises her eyes to heaven. A carmine red cloth is draped over her left arm. The little cap is here replaced by a somewhat amorphous hair covering. There are various copies of this version which have been auctioned in the course of time under different names.

The third variant was formerly in Sweden but can no longer be traced.¹⁴⁵ It is quite close to the second version, but here Mary Magdalene weeps, and her hair is even more luxuriantly draped around her body. Her lips are more widely parted, revealing her teeth. In this version, too, Mary Magdalene looks upward.

The beginnings of Adriaen Thomasz’s quest for the most suitable depiction of Mary

462–3

462

46(

463

468

Adriaen Thomasz KeyMary Magdalene

Present whereabouts unknown

Adriaen Thomasz KeyMary Magdalene

Present whereabouts unknown (formerly Ivar Hellberg Collection, Stockholm)

!

109

110

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

123

Adriaen Thomasz KeyMary MagdaleneMonticello, The Jefferson Plantation

Willem KeySusanna and the EldersPresent whereabouts unknown

!"#$%&' %"'&&

124

Magdalene can be traced back, as usual, to the workshop of his master Willem Key. A Susanna and the Elders, which originated in the latter’s workshop, formed the point of departure for Adriaen Thomasz’s Magdalene.¹⁴⁶ That Adriaen considered the nude bodies of Susanna and Mary Magdalene

¹⁴⁷ Adriaen Thomasz began by ridding the Magdalene subject of all super"uous

iconography. The omission of excess anecdotes is a constant in his oeuvre.¹⁴⁸ As a consequence, Mary Magdalene is completely isolated before a neutral background. The rocky landscape, imperative when the penitent Magdalene is depicted nude, is gone.¹⁴⁹ Subsequently, he experimented with the body of the saint, which automatically gained prominence owing to the omission of the background. Her hair, symbol of her beauty but also of her sins and later her contrition, has become longer. The skin betrays folds and wrinkles. The arms are sinewy and muscled. Ever more blood "ows through the originally marble white ideal image: her "esh is rosy and her face "ushed. Finally, her teeth are visible and she weeps.¹⁵⁰ In other words, Adriaen Thomasz portrayed the Magdalene completely in keeping with how Marnix van Sint Aldegonde, one of the most important Calvinists and hater of saints in the Netherlands, described her – as a whore.¹⁵¹ Seen in this perspective, Adriaen Thomasz Key’s 'nal result is far removed from Willem Key’s Susanna, who is perfect and puzzles the viewer with her sensuality. Both Willem and Adriaen Thomasz Key’s images are profane, but the latter was clearly not aiming for an ideal image. As a matter of fact he focused increasingly on the imperfections of the woman. Where Willem thoroughly ‘photoshopped’ and idealized the woman, Adriaen Thomasz did exactly the reverse. He showed the woman as she as she might have been in reality, physical and imperfect, but repentant – the ointment jar is open. Instead of striving for the Renaissance ideal, Adriaen Thomasz did the exact opposite: he started from the ideal and toned it down.

¶ To lend further support to the argument that Adriaen Thomasz Key experimented with the ‘imperfect’ nude in his Mary Magdalene, it is important to look at one of his Antwerp colleagues, Jacob de Backer.¹⁵² Like Adriaen Thomasz, Jacob de Backer built on Willem Key’s legacy, but he treated the female nude entirely differently. The ideal played a major role in his rhetoric. In what follows I brie"y analyse how De Backer’s nudes deviate from those of Adriaen Thomasz Key.

Karel van Mander was exceptionally laudatory about his contemporary, in particular when he talks about De Backer’s talent for painting nudes: ‘… he is easily one of the best colourists that Antwerp has known: he had a "eshy manner of painting because he highlighted not just with white but with "esh colour, so that he earned eternal fame among painters’.¹⁵³ We will never know whether De Backer’s many nudes contributed to this reputation or whether he began to paint them because of his reputation. However, it is clear that his oeuvre (unlike that of Adriaen Thomasz) consists largely of scenes of nude or semi-nude 'gures.¹⁵⁴ Among them are representations of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In a painting in the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, De Backer represented the scene in which God points out the Tree of Knowledge to Adam and Eve.¹⁵⁵ He included the creation of Eve in the left background. The Creation of Eve is also the subject of a recently auctioned painting by De Backer.¹⁵⁶

Two aspects are noteworthy in De Backer’s depictions of the Garden of Eden. First, God is

446

A counter example

444

111

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

125

Jacob de BackerThe Creation of EvePresent whereabouts unknown

112

113

!"#$%&' %"'&&

126

shown in them. In the eyes of the reformers this painting would thus have been a deadly sin.¹⁵⁷ Their charter, the Heidelberg Catechism, has little to say about images, but does emphatically stipulate that God, who is purely spiritual and not physical, may not be depicted.¹⁵⁸ Here, by placing his hand on Eve, God becomes entirely physical and is presented as a human being among other human beings. Someone with Calvinist sympathies, like Adriaen Thomasz Key, who deliberately excluded God from his Cain and Abel, would not have appreciated this subject. Second, and more important within the context of this chapter, De Backer did his utmost to render the 'rst humans, before the Fall, as beautiful and perfect as possible, for only after the Fall did Adam and Eve lose their innocence and ideal beauty. The pose of Eve in the Creation of Eve is modelled on that of the Venus Pudica, but Jacob de Backer has captured her a moment earlier,¹⁵⁹ so to speak, so that the woman’s nudity instead of being covered is rather accentuated.¹⁶⁰

In comparing the body of De Backer’s Eve with that of Adriaen Thomasz Key’s Mary Magdalene we see respectively the ‘velvety’ full-bodied ideal that Van Mander recommends next to a glowing, sinewy woman. De Backer’s Eve has little dimples in her hands, as Van Mander prescribed.¹⁶¹ Key’s Magdalene has hard, muscular knuckles. In the 'nal stage of his ‘quest’ Key succeeded in abandoning the ideal and depicting Mary Magdalene very realistically. It seems incorrect to attribute the imperfection of her body to a lack of skill or ambition on the part of the exceptionally talented portraitist, who must have wilfully emphasized these imperfections. Just as he broke with the ideal body of Jerome by adding vulgar details, so too did he ‘tarnish’ the body of the biblical whore by deliberately portraying her as "awed.

447, 449

Adriaen Thomasz KeyMary Magdalene (detail of 'g. 109)

Monticello, The Jefferson Plantation

Jacob de BackerThe Creation of Eve

(detail of 'g. 111)Present whereabouts unknown

114

!"#$ % &''$ ()! & "*$+% & "),'#)( "*-

127

It is important to note that the quest for a new ‘photorealistic’ body for Mary Magdalene did not end with Adriaen Thomasz Key. In the Mary Magdalene attributed to Peter Paul Rubens, the grand master of the European Baroque took Adriaen Thomasz Key’s experiment and transformed it into a high point.¹⁶² Rubens built upon Willem and Adriaen Thomasz’s serpentine 'gure and used it both for Susanna (like Willem Key) and Mary Magdalene (like Adriaen Thomasz).¹⁶³ The pose and the drapery over the saint’s left arm refer entirely to Adriaen Thomasz Key’s invention.¹⁶⁴ Rubens did cover her chest, painted less hair and represented her with tensed muscles. In Rubens’s hand the Magdalene’s body is even "eshier and lifelike. And so, it would seem, Rubens’s Mary Magdalene is the endpoint of the quest initiated by Adriaen Thomasz Key. Rubens painted the body as it is, not as it could be. It is perfect reality rather than perfected reality.

¶ In the sixteenth century the body could be a sign of virtue (nuditas virtualis) as well as vice (nuditas criminalis). Both the saint and the executioner could be depicted nude, but the nudity of the saint was meant to be perfect and divine, that of the executioner utterly imperfect and therefore evil.¹⁶⁵ Nudity was the natural state of man and thus seen as modesty, humilitas with respect to God. Naked saints were often considered as imitators of Christ, whose nudity symbolized his human side. However, nudity was also tempting and thus had to be banished from the religious context. Ideal nudity recalled, moreover, the idols of the Greeks and the Romans which were so closely and intensively studied in the sixteenth century.¹⁶⁶

Given that Mary Magdalene was virtually never depicted nude in the sixteenth-century Netherlands and that images of nudes as well as images of saints were highly controversial after the beeldenstorm, it is all the more remarkable that a painter with strong Calvinist sympathies, such as Adriaen Thomasz Key, began to experiment with the nude body of one of the most detested saints. The experiment per se must have been important for Key. Just as he imparted new meaning to his Cain and Abel, the Adoration of the Magi and the Last Supper through his experiments with decorum, he clearly did this also with the subject of the repentant Mary Magdalene. That the depiction of her body was the core of this experiment should be obvious by now.

With his Mary Magdalene, who became increasingly more ‘alive’ in the course of the experiment, Adriaen Thomasz Key tried to reconcile reformational and budding Counter-Reformational standpoints. He did not give up painting saints, as his fellow believers might have wanted, but he rendered them lifelike, and in so doing emphasized the body as the temple of sin and the profane, sinful character of the saints instead of their semi-divine status. His point of departure was a body that recalls the ancient and Renaissance Venus ideal: smooth and marble white. He corrupted that beauty by adding imperfections – or characteristics regarded as such – including muscularity, wrinkles and a rosy "es tone suggestive of excitement. At the same time he increasingly accentuated those aspects that symbolize sin and repentance, such as the Magdalene’s hair and her tears. Thus Mary Magdalene was actually transformed into a repentant woman of "esh and blood. The nude, highly lifelike rendering of a repentant Magdalene would recur much more frequently in Flemish Baroque art, by Peter Paul Rubens, among others. Adriaen Thomasz Key’s decorum experiments were instrumental in the development of that tradition.

44(

44', 79(

Peter Paul RubensThe Repentant Magdalene

183

. Chapter Six

IM AGES OF STON E A N D IDOLS OF GOLD

A constant feature in the debate surrounding images of saints and iconoclasm is the actual material of which they were made. Dozens of references to the physical aspect of

religious art can be found in the numerous pamphlets published shortly before and after the Iconoclastic Fury. From Erasmus to Marnix van Sint Aldegonde, from Martinus Duncanus to Petrus Bloccius, virtually all the writers who addressed the image debate focused to some extent on the material of sculptures and paintings: marble or wood, gold or silver, unpainted or polychromed. To us this may seem inconsequential, but for the many polemicists active in the wake of the beeldenstorm substance mattered a great deal. In fact, for many it was even the crux of the matter. For reformist writers, such as Petrus Bloccius and Marnix van Sint Aldegonde, it was curious that Catholics gave human names to ‘their deaf, dumb and blind wooden and stone images’ and treated them as if they were alive and performed miracles.⁴⁰¹ Moreover, these Calvinist authors were quick to point out that the blocks of wood and pieces of stone had been unable to save themselves from iconoclasm, and nor had God spared them. A tree has more life in it than a dead piece of wood, according to Bloccius. The Catholic theologian Martinus Duncanus responded to these reproofs in a passage cited above (see Chapter , p. ). Referring to a statue of Jupiter, he states that it was ‘false and deceitful’ (‘valsch en[de] logenachtich’) on two counts:

First, in its own material, for even were it made of gold or silver, of wood or stone, it was disposed and used as if it had some godly power in and of itself and as if it was worthy of being honoured as though it were God, with sacri"ce and worship, which was heathenish.⁴⁰²

Duncanus, in other words, suggests that the material of which heathen idols are made – and by extension images in general – is false (valsch) by de'nition. The Romans treated the sculpture as though divine power resided in the physical object, but this is not the case: this was their pagan fallacy. It is the meaning that matters, not the material. To make his point he propounded the argument used by Erasmus, and later – needless to say – by the iconoclasts, that sculptures and paintings ultimately are only hewn stones or felled wood, dead in their materiality and therefore ungodly.⁴⁰³ Duncanus proves his point that the essence lies not in the image, but in the idea it visualizes.

Another Catholic polemicist, Renatus Benedictus, used the same reasoning as Duncanus in Een Catholic Tractaet van de Beelden. He repeatedly takes up the defence of the Catholic practice in these terms: ‘The correct use of images is not to praise them for their substance, but for their representation and meaning [or ‘form and content’]’ {ok?} .⁴⁰⁴ Duncanus and Benedictus remain true to the Catholic doctrine, for in the Dutch version

Philip Galle, after Marcus GheeraertsA Wooden God Yields Gold When SmashedEtching from Esbatement moral des animaux, Antwerp: Gerard Smits, 1578

184

!"#$%&' ()*

200

of the decrees of the Council of Trent (1565) this is described as follows: ‘That one shall not believe that there is any divinity or power in a single image … but that the honour bestowed upon the images refers to the saints they represent.’⁴⁰⁵ François Richardot, bishop of Arras, added another important point to the debate: ‘In themselves things are neither good nor bad; they are good and bene'cial when they are properly used.’⁴⁰⁶ Put differently, as neither good nor evil resides in the material, the moral value of the object depends on the (physical) treatment of this substance. Richardot gives the example of a Christian who visits the Capitol in Rome and sees the sculptures of the Roman idols. A believer is not ‘contaminated’ by the pagan idolatry through their physical character. If he becomes idolatrous, this is due to his own attitude to the material. Richardot contends, thus, that the purity of a sculpture depends on the impeccability of the individual dealing with that image. In other words, a sculpture or a painting comes to life only when you want to believe that life is hidden within it. And so Richardot subtly lobs the ball back to the iconoclasts who were bent on beating the life out of sculptures and paintings – a most remarkable paradox.

It should be clear by now that the materiality of religious art was a crucial issue in the period under investigation. This conclusion is interesting in and of itself, but more fascinating still is the radical caesura of which this obsession is a symptom. The disproportional attention placed on material lays bare one of the most fundamental fault lines between the doctrine of the Catholic Church and that of the Reformation, in particular of Calvin. As noted above, Calvin, like most reformers after Erasmus, made a strict division between the spiritual world of God and the physical, sinful world in which man is imprisoned.⁴⁰⁷ The use of sculptures and paintings for devotional purposes is an inappropriate combination of both, according to the reformer. It confuses the somatic with the spiritual and divine.⁴⁰⁸ In the eyes of the reformers who more or less held on to Calvin’s doctrine, faith was entirely spiritual. The physical world had nothing to do with it. Therefore, dead wood and dead stone were unrelated to God, even in ‘'guere ende beteekenisse’ (representation and meaning). Accordingly, there was no need to bow or kneel before an image. Following this line of reasoning, draping a stone with brocade or kissing it would be ridiculous in the extreme.⁴⁰⁹ Issues aplenty, one might say, for a heated debate, which via the beeldenstorm seems to have hit a raw social nerve. In this chapter I explore whether and, if so, how painters experimented with the decorum of materiality and the consequences thereof.

¶ At 'rst sight, the concern with stone, wood and precious metal does not seem to have been of vital importance for painters. They painted in oils on panel and did not make statues of saints, but altarpieces and epitaphs (polemicists made no distinction between the two). Nevertheless, for painters, too, the discourse about substance became problematic for two reasons. First, since Jan van Eyck the exterior wings of altarpieces had practically always been painted in grisaille in the Netherlands.

Except for the donor portraits, the monochrome exterior wings of the Ghent Altarpiece suggest the semblance of a petri'ed reality. Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist are pure trompe-l’œil renderings of late Gothic sculptures. The lifelike depiction of the donors – kneeling in adoration before the (painted) statues nota bene – contrasts strongly with this cold illusion of stone. A few exceptions notwithstanding, most the early Netherlandish painters after Jan van Eyck followed this trompe-l’œil tradition.⁴¹⁰

Second, the so-called paragone – or competition and rivalry among the arts – emerged as

Paragone: painting and the material controversy

48(–5

Jan and Hubert van EyckThe Ghent Altarpiece, 'nished 1432

ExteriorGhent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral

!"#$%& '( &)'*% #*+ !+',& '( $',+

201

vrijstaand mét lijsten

!

!"#$%&' ()*

202

!

185

!"#$%& '( &)'*% #*+ !+',& '( $',+

203

a topic of debate for artists in Italy (and the Netherlands) in the mid-sixteenth century. Artists and humanists discussed the question of which art form was the most elevated. In"uenced by Italian art theory of the sixteenth century the debate often focused on sculpture and painting, and by extension architecture, prose and poetry. Erasmus, for instance, suggested that rhetoric be ranked higher than painting because language can disclose someone’s thoughts and emotions, which according to him painting cannot.⁴¹¹ This ‘academic’ dispute smouldered in the Netherlands, where ever more artists derived inspiration from Italian and ancient art and where theorists like Lampsonius and Lambert Lombard maintained close contacts with Roman, Florentine and Venetian artists and men of letters.⁴¹²

To fully understand grisaille painting in the Netherlands in the decades following the beeldenstorm, it is crucial to have some idea of its tradition in the Low Countries and of the paragone debate. Both are brie"y addressed below.

The most important characteristic of grisaille is that it suggests a sculptural reality. In other words, it gives the impression of being a three-dimensional bas-relief or a fully plastic sculpture, while it is actually only a two-dimensional painting. When a tripych or polyptych like the Ghent Altarpiece is closed, the trompe-l’œil grisailles on the outer wings create the illusion of a stone retable that has merged, as it were, with the plastered walls of the church. When opened, thanks to colour and movement, it comes to life. Grisaille produces the opposite effect: the monochrome grey tones create the illusion that what is depicted is made of stone, and therefore lifeless.

Given the aforementioned controversy surrounding the material of religious statues, after the beeldenstorm no one could paint grisailles on the outer wings of altarpieces, or anywhere else for that matter, as if nothing was wrong with them. Or, to put it otherwise, it was no longer possible to do so without taking position in the image debate. If an artist painted a trompe-l’œil image of a stone sculpture, willingly or not he was alluding to the controversies surrounding the images of saints and iconoclasm, for the painted sculptures virtually restored the churches to their full glory as temples full of ‘idols’ (cf. infra pp. – ). And if the artist chose an alternative solution, then the pattern of expectations was broken and indirectly reference was also made to the commotion that had arisen. How could painters deal with the exceptional attention placed on the material of religious art? Polemicists could spout their views and ridicule each other’s rituals and convictions; artists and their patrons had to 'gure out a solution. Certainly leading history painters owed it to their standing to come up with an answer. To understand how they employed materiality in doing this, I must brie"y rephrase two of the core issues in the image debate. First, is it possible to render saints or other religious images without raising the suspicion that idols are depicted? Second, can a painting be made so that the imagery itself prevents the object from being idolized? In the turbulent period 1566–85 this was a tall order; at the risk of sounding contradictory, I argue that the polemicists’ obsession with material contained the germ of a solution. Extending the logic of the writers in both the Catholic and the Reformed camps and assuming that wood and stone because of their very materiality are unrelated to God, the painter is given the opportunity to dispose of the semblance of the ‘living’ idol.⁴¹³ The lifelike "esh tints are suppressed and replaced by lifeless material. More on this below.

As noted above, alongside the discussion on the materiality and reputed divinity of images, a second debate was occupying the minds of artists in Antwerp, namely the paragone (Italian for ‘comparison’). While this discourse took place primarily in Rome and Florence, it

Jan and Hubert van EyckThe Ghent Altarpiece, 'nished 1432(detail of 'g. 184)Ghent, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral

!"#$%&' ()*

204

is clear that the leading Netherlandish painters had some notion of it.⁴¹⁴ Indeed, remarkably little was written about art during the sixteenth century in the Low Countries, which has created the impression that no one thought about its essence. However, it can be fairly easily demonstrated that the nature of art was in fact seriously contemplated in Antwerp workshops, guild halls and chambers of rhetoric.⁴¹⁵ Zirka Zaremba Filipczak was the 'rst to demonstrate this in her in"uential book Picturing art in Antwerp.⁴¹⁶ She relied on a legal dispute between the various guilds that erupted into open con"ict in 1593. The masons demanded that the woodcarvers, sculptors and architects remained members of their own guild, while the latter three considered themselves part of the Guild of Saint Luke. The reasons they put forward to justify enforcing their switchover legally are fascinating. The sculptors argued that their craft was one of the Liberal Arts requiring the necessary intellectual baggage. Had Floris not included Sculpture among the Liberal Arts on the front of his house, they asked?⁴¹⁷ The masons in turn found that the material used by the various crafts was decisive for membership in a given guild. For Filipczak, and I agree with her, this legal battle proves that the paragone was indeed an issue in the Netherlands in the second half of the sixteenth century. As in the discussions of religious art, the materiality of the various art forms played an important role here, too.⁴¹⁸

It is worth realizing that the dearth of Netherlandish art literature on this matter may be symptomatic of the development of art theory in the Netherlands. Was art its own theory and were artistic disputes settled with artistic arguments, in particular art itself?⁴¹⁹ This conclusion would help explain why Pieter Bruegel, as if out of the blue, began to experiment with cabinet pieces ultimately conceived as grisaille trompe-l’œil paintings. Were these his visual arguments in the debate? I will return to this below, but for now it will suf'ce to point out that the materiality of painting and sculpture were thoroughly commented on from both a religious and an artistic perspective. Sculpture and painting were played off against each other and their respective qualities dissected. All of this more than warrants pausing to examine the way in which painters could have applied grisaille and materiality in the decades following the beeldenstorm, just when art was controversial in itself and its physical character subject to debate as never before.

¶ A survey of grisailles painted between 1566 and 1585 must begin with two famous examples. Produced by Pieter Bruegel the Elder on the eve of the Iconoclastic Fury of 1564–65, they represent the Death of the Virgin and Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery.⁴²⁰ Both pictures are exceptional for a number of reasons. In the 'rst place they occupy a unique position in the master’s oeuvre, as they were painted around about 1565, just when the image debate was "aring up.⁴²¹ Moreover, they are fully "edged, autonomous paintings⁴²² – not preparatory studies, but 'nished works possibly intended to imitate stone bas-reliefs, which, it should be noted, was highly exceptional in Netherlandish art.⁴²³ This alone proves that in the 1560s artists in the Netherlands were thinking about the possibilities and limitations of grisaille trompe-l’œil – certainly the talented innovator Bruegel and his entourage.⁴²⁴ This is intriguing, for given the scope of the religious and artistic polemic of the materiality of painting and sculpture, it was virtually impossible to paint grisailles, or trompe-l’œil sculptures, without referencing this issue. Bruegel, who worked for humanist, urban elites and whose prints and paintings were quite often intellectual tours de force, would surely have been aware of this.⁴²⁵ Furthermore, there is at present a consensus among specialists that in the 1560s Bruegel

Bruegel’s grisailles

48', 482

186

!"#$%& '( &)'*% #*+ !+',& '( $',+

205

Pieter Bruegel the ElderThe Death of the Virgin, c. 1564Banbury, Upton House (National Trust)

!

187

!"#$%&' ()*

206

did, indeed, incorporate references to the contemporary political-religious discourse.⁴²⁶ If we take into account that Bruegel was also questioning the very nature of art in the mid-1560s – as emerges from his drawings of The Painter and The Connoisseur and the Calumny of Apelles from around 1565 – it is quite worth asking what may have been the master’s motives for experimenting with grisailles.⁴²⁷ In the following paragraphs I will argue that Bruegel’s grisailles allude to the image debate in the Netherlands in the 1560s and visually comment on the physical character of art and religion.

¶ Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery is signed and dated 1565 at the lower left. Christ, who takes up the defence of an adulterous woman, bends down and writes on the ground with his 'nger: ‘Die sonder sonde is die V…’ (Let him who is without sin …).⁴²⁸ Bruegel stops at the word ‘throw’. The full biblical verse (John 8:7) reads as follows: He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her 'rst.’⁴²⁹ This painting has hardly been studied until now and never within the context of the contemporary image debate. Nevertheless, there are several reasons for interpreting this scene as a visual reference to the iconoclastic remonstrance. Why did Bruegel paint an image intended as a trompe-l’œil of a stone relief? Why does Christ stop short at the word ‘throw’ and why did the artist depict the adulterous woman in an

77, 488

‘Let him who is without sin …’

Pieter Bruegel the ElderChrist and the Woman

Taken in Adultery, 1565London, The Courtauld Institute

of Art, Seilern Collection

188

!"#$%& '( &)'*% #*+ !+',& '( $',+

207

anachronistic manner?⁴³⁰ A closer analysis of the painting reveals that the grisaille formula, the subject and the composition all hint at the contemporary image debate.

Adultery – the subject of the depiction – hypocrisy and idolatry are three concepts we do not immediately associate with one another. However, in Bruegel’s time they were often linked. François Richardot, bishop of Arras and confessor to Margaret of Parma, opens his Sermoon vande beelden teghen die beeldtschenders (1567; Sermon on the images against the iconoclasts) with this observation: ‘The Holy Scripture and especially the Prophets unanimously call idolatry harlotry, fornication and adultery of the soul, and such with good reason. For as a woman in this world can do nothing worse to tarnish the honour of her husband than cheat on him, so the soul cannot be more disgraced or humiliated than when it lowers itself to the banned veneration of idols; nor can it [the soul] dishonour God more, who made it after his image.’⁴³¹ Richardot goes on to con'rm that the worship of images is, indeed, one of the worst sins, comparable to ‘harlotry’, only subsequently to explain that the Catholic notion of the worship of images follows a different pattern. Acknowledging that he has taken to heart the widespread reproach that Catholics physically venerate their statues and paintings,⁴³² he retorts that the Calvinist censure holds no water and refutes the charge that Catholic iconolatry equals adultery. Richardot’s opening sentence is symptomatic. Comparisons between images of female saints, such as Mary Magdalene, and whores, and between iconolatry and whoring abound in Protestant pamphlets.⁴³³ The fact that the Roman Catholic Church was often equalled to the whore of Babylon in satirical prints,⁴³⁴ goes to show that Richardot’s iconolatry–adultery metaphor did not come out of the blue and refers to a topical and highly charged polemic.

Pieter Bruegel the ElderThe Calumny of Apelles, c. 1565Drawing.London, The British Museum

189

190

191

!"#$%&' ()*

208

The most important New Testament story regarding adultery is, naturally, that of the woman taken in adultery recounted in the Gospel of John (8:3–8). Jesus was preaching in the temple surrounded by a crowd. Several scribes and Pharisees brought before Him a woman, who had been caught in the act of adultery. The scribes suggested that she be stoned, as commanded by law. When Jesus was asked to pass judgement, he stooped down and wrote on the ground the – now famous – pronouncement: ‘He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her 'rst.’ The crowd dispersed. The dumfounded adulteress remained behind with Christ and was forgiven.

Like most painters in the sixteenth century, Bruegel depicted the moment when Christ writes the famous words in the sand with his 'nger.⁴³⁵ He presented that act prominently and powerfully illuminated, with the adulterous woman looking on and pointing to a stone with her right index 'nger. Christ’s unspoken words lend the biblical story its ethical valence, pointing out the hypocrisy of those wanting to throw stones and judge people without thinking.⁴³⁶ One must acknowledge one’s own sins before judging others.

This brings us to hypocrisy. Whoring was not only attributed to the ‘papists’ in the second half of the sixteenth century; the Catholics invariably countered the charge of adultery by accusing the ‘heretics’ of hypocrisy.⁴³⁷ Yes, we venerate images of the Virgin, pamphleteers such as Duncanus, Richardot, Molanus and Benedictus asserted in unison, but that does not make us guilty of adultery.⁴³⁸ Moreover, we honour the Mother of God, while you iconoclasts lust after the images of the nude Venus and other pagan goddesses you hang in your homes. Who, then, is idolatrous, adulterous and hypocritical, wondered the papists? He who smashes statues in churches, but venerates nudes at home, or he who honours the Virgin Mary and bars pagan gods from his house? ‘Let him who is without sin …’. By transforming this generally known story about hypocrisy into stone, or the illusion thereof, at a time when iconoclasm was subject to close scrutiny, Bruegel seems to have been wondering what a believer’s position regarding religious art should be. Accordingly, it may not be a coincidence that Bruegel has Christ stop at the verb ‘throw’, for the legitimacy of iconoclasm, the smashing or destruction of religious images, was debated throughout the entire sixteenth century, also in the Netherlands.⁴³⁹

Although the above observations suggest that the iconography of Bruegel’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery could allude to existing controversies, they do not afford conclusive evidence. Moreover, the chances of discovering such evidence are slight. Nevertheless, this should not deter us from examining closely all possible explanations for the unusual visual language and asking whether there are other factors that might lend weight to this interpretation. In fact, this turns out to be the case. As Manfred Sellink notes in his recent catalogue raisonné of Bruegel’s oeuvre, this painting is atypical for yet another reason: namely, its anachronistic visual idiom. According to Sellink, this applies particularly to the pose and the clothing of the adulterous woman, who has ‘an almost Gothic elegance’. And, indeed, the woman stands apart from the crowd and rather than a sixteenth-century lady recalls a Gothic sculpture.

Naturally, the grisaille technique, as well as the particularly angular folds of the fabric, the dais, and the way in which the people are positioned around the woman, further reinforces the suggestion of a sculpture. These were unusual features in the visual tradition of the subject, indicating that the composition and the iconography were deliberate choices on Bruegel’s part.⁴⁴⁰ The dais refers to the grisailles on the outer wings of altarpieces and epitaphs in the second half of the sixteenth century. At that time, trompe-l’œil images of

483

Pieter Bruegel the ElderChrist and the Woman Taken in

Adultery (detail of 'g. 187)London, The Courtauld Institute

of Art, Seilern Collection

Hugo van der GoesSaint Genevieve

Grisaille on the exterior of the Lamentation of Christ

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Willem KeyThe Virgin and Child

with Saint AnneExterior wing of the Vincent de

Smidt TriptychBrussels, Musées royaux des

Beaux-Arts de Belgique/Koninklijke Musea voor Schone

Kunsten van België

!"#$%& '( &)'*% #*+ !+',& '( $',+

209

sculpture in the round were invariably depicted on such an elevation, as is extensively described and illustrated further on in this chapter. Moreover, the crowd of people stand around the woman in a semi-circle, as though forming a niche. Pieter Bruegel created the illusion that Christ is writing his legendary words in a niche at the base of a Gothic sculpture.

A 'nal, indirect clue for interpreting Bruegel’s grisaille of Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery as a ‘visual pamphlet’ in the image debate is anachronistic in nature. This is found in a painting by Pieter Neefs the Elder from the second quarter of the seventeenth century.⁴⁴¹ Neefs copied Bruegel’s composition, albeit in colour, situating it in an empty Gothic church. It is a rendering of the interior of Antwerp Cathedral, similar to many others Neefs painted, but devoid of the imposing altars he usually included. Neefs thus painted Bruegel’s scene in a church from which all statues, paintings and altars have been banished, but which can still be recognized as the ‘local’ cathedral. In contrast to Neefs’s other interiors of the cathedral, for citizens of Antwerp this image must have been most peculiar and unreal.No such emptied church was to be found in Antwerp. Pieter Neefs’s Interior of a Church with Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery could well be a late echo of Bruegel’s preoccupation with the image debate.

436–34

!

!"#$%&' ()*

210

¶ The association of Bruegel’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery with the image debate would remain controversial were it not that the master’s other famous grisaille contains all manner of elements that justify this thesis. Pieter Bruegel painted both works around the same time.

The subject of the Death of the Virgin derives from a (partly) apocryphal story recounted in the Legenda Aurea and elsewhere.⁴⁴² According to it, while Mary lay on her deathbed (Dormitio),⁴⁴³ an angel brought all the apostles on a cloud to her house and they witnessed the assumption of her soul accompanied by a host of angels. Bruegel placed this event in the sixteenth century.⁴⁴⁴ The depicted interior – with a bed, a large open 'replace with andirons and a beamed ceiling – could easily be found in Brabant in the 1560s.⁴⁴⁵ The wall is lined with wainscoting. For someone who had visited Italy and was fully aware of classical antiquity, humanism and the Renaissance, this was a conscious and therefore meaningful choice. The Virgin sits up in bed, bathed in (divine) light. Peter, wearing a sixteenth-century cope, places a candle in her hand.⁴⁴⁶ This candle is important in Bruegel’s rhetoric for he accentuates it visually with the corner of the backlit bed curtain hanging above. The boy standing behind Peter holds a long-staffed patriarchal cross, used by prelates (for example, bishops) in processions. A cushion with a cruci'x rests on the bed at Mary’s feet. On a table at the foot of the bed are an aspergillum and two ointment jars. They refer to Extreme Unction, one of the Catholic sacraments that was vehemently disputed by Lutherans and Calvinists.⁴⁴⁷ Numerous men, women and some children are gathered in the room and around the deathbed, kneeling before the Mother of God and praying for her. The seated man holding a bell in the right foreground is a so-called bellman, or undertaker’s man, who oversaw funerals in the sixteenth century.⁴⁴⁸ The sleeping young man near the 'replace at the left is frequently identi'ed as John the Evangelist.⁴⁴⁹

Most of these elements are part of the subject’s standard iconography and belong to the German-Netherlandish visual tradition. Bruegel was deeply inspired by the prints of Martin Schongauer, Israhel van Meckenem and Albrecht Dürer,⁴⁵⁰ deriving compositional elements and some of the poses of his 'gures from them. Bruegel, however, also did something quite unusual, which must be explicitly pointed out:⁴⁵¹ he added a wing, as it were, to the composition. Traditionally, images of the Death of the Virgin focused on the deathbed, which was located centrally and 'lled the picture plane. This was the case not only with Schongauer and Dürer, but almost all the other important masters who engraved or painted the subject, including Hugo van der Goes. Bruegel’s contemporaries, including Michiel Coxcie, were also faithful to this compositional scheme.⁴⁵² Bruegel, however, shifted the main theme to the right side of his painting and introduced several seemingly anecdotal elements at the left:⁴⁵³ a table with the remains of a meal, a 'replace and a number of 'gures. Why did he do this? Did he insert clues for deciphering his grisaille in the added ‘left wing’? Considering that many of Bruegel’s works are intellectual 'reworks this would not come as a surprise.

On the mantelpiece in the sixteenth-century sitting room is a statuette of a saint holding a sword and looking out at the viewer, "anked by some books to the left and a triptych on the right.⁴⁵⁴ Traditionally, a lit candle was placed before a statue or a triptych, as we can see in Joos van Cleve’s Death of the Virgin in Munich, for instance.⁴⁵⁴bis Here, the candle is included, but it is not lit. In contrast, the candle in Mary’s hands burns brightly (and is also emphasized by the backlit bed hanging). The statue with the extinguished candle serves as a kind of pendant. In the left background above the cabinet hangs a triptych, but the candles in front of the painting are not lit either. This combination of lit and extinguished candles

The Death of the Virgin

437

439, 43(

435

!

192

!"#$%& '( &)'*% #*+ !+',& '( $',+

211

Pieter Bruegel the ElderThe Death of the Virgin (detail of 'g. 186)Banbury, Upton House (National Trust)

!

193

194

195

Martin SchongauerThe Death of the VirginEngraving.London, The British Museum

Albrecht DürerThe Death of the Virgin, 1510Woodcut.London, The British Museum

Hugo van der GoesThe Death of the Virgin, 1481–2

Bruges, Stedelijke Musea, Groeningemuseum

!

196

!"#$%& '( &)'*% #*+ !+',& '( $',+

213

and the grisaille technique (stone trompe-l’œil) suggests that Bruegel was alluding yet again to contemporary discussions and controversies regarding the materiality of religious art and its treatment.

One aspect of the veneration of images singled out in the debate in the mid-1560s was the lighting of candles before statues – even now an important Catholic practice. ‘The 77th heresy is that the heretics lit candles, lamps and torches in daytime in front of blind statues: where the Babylonian-Papal liturgy is extinguished, the light of candles will glow no more … God illuminates all who come into this world.’ Petrus Bloccius summarizes the accusations, which incidentally stem from Erasmus.⁴⁵⁵ ‘The 74th heresy is that the heretics call a stone or wooden sculpture the beautiful mother of God, as if God had had a mother’.⁴⁵⁶ Lighting candles before images of saints, in particular the Mother of God, was abhorrent and blasphemous in the eyes of the Protestants. ‘Venerating wood and stone with candles serves no one other than the devil’, is how Veluanus summed up the reproaches.⁴⁵⁷ In discussions of art and the worship of images in the contemporary Protestant literature in the Netherlands, reference was always made to the custom of lighting candles before images of Christ or saints, which the Protestants perceived as ridiculous.

Not surprisingly, Catholics did not stand by with folded arms. Reacting to these harsh accusations, Duncanus elucidates the Catholic point of view in the chapter on the veneration of images, entitled ‘People are permitted to light and burn candles in the temple before the images.’⁴⁵⁸ It goes without saying that one can light candles before statues and paintings, he contends. Not because the images – which, naturally, are blind – require this, nor because the saints want this, but to symbolically display the light of faith by which the saints have conquered ‘die Rijcken’ (the realms [heaven and earth]). This is followed by several biblical passages evidencing that God allows and even stimulates the lighting of candles. Duncanus subsequently quotes a few Church Fathers who had earlier approved of this practice. Even the Leuven theologian Johannes Molanus found suf'cient reason to devote a chapter to the subject in his De historia SS. imaginum et picturarum.⁴⁵⁹ His reasoning is formulated in somewhat more erudite terms but nonetheless analogous to that of Duncanus.

Of interest to us for the interpretation of Bruegel’s iconography are both the debate on candlelight and ‘living images’ and the idea of light as a symbol for conquering the ‘Two Realms’ (‘twee rijcken’ – life and life after death). Regarding the fact that images are inanimate, the Catholics and Protestants actually are in complete agreement. Candlelight as a symbol of the divine was a more delicate issue, however, and placing candles before ‘dead’ sculptures or paintings was nothing less than highly controversial. Let us look, therefore, at what exactly Bruegel has depicted and how this relates to the contemporary discussion of light, the materiality of images and the lighting of candles before ‘lifeless stones’. The Antwerp-Brussels master appears to have visualized this debate in a subtle manner. Bruegel seems to ask the viewer whether candles were lit before a living image – the Mariae Dormitio – or before a ‘dead’ stone or wooden statue on the mantelpiece. If the grisaille technique underscored the issue, then the dialectic of the ‘living’ and the ‘dead’ image forced someone who dealt with this problem on a daily basis (anyone who had heard either one of the factions fulminate) to ponder the meaning of lighting candles before stone statues. Bruegel inquires into the materiality of art and the treatment of that materiality. He seems to suggest that divine light, and not their images, helped the saints transcend death.

In addition to the inclusion of the statuette, the triptych and the extinguished candle, there is yet another reason for assuming that in the Death of the Virgin grisaille Bruegel alludes

43'

Hans Holbein the YoungerTwo Women Lighting Candles before a Statue of the VirginDrawing in the margin of Erasmi Roterodami encomium moriae (Basel: Johannes Froben, 1515, fol. m1v)Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett

ekta > Die Keure

!

!"#$%&' ()*

214

to contemporary controversies surrounding the lighting of candles before ‘dead’ matter. Reading the Legenda Aurea, the story’s most important source, we learn that a discussion ensued between the apostles John and Peter about who was to carry the light during the procession with the bier.⁴⁶⁰ John felt that Peter should hold the ‘palm of light’ because Christ had appointed him primus inter pares. In turn, Peter believed that John was better suited: after all, he had been allowed to rest on Christ’s chest and had therefore drunk at the ‘fountain of eternal light’. It would seem that Bruegel wanted to conjure up John and Peter’s discussion about light. In the prints by Schongauer and Dürer mentioned above, Saint John, not Peter, takes the candle from Mary’s hands. The opposite is shown in Bruegel’s grisaille, where Peter – traditionally considered the 'rst pope of Rome (and shown wearing a distinctly Catholic cope)⁴⁶¹ – places the candle in the hands of the Virgin. If the sleeping apostle next to the 'replace can in fact be identi'ed as John, then Bruegel is illustrating the dialectic of the discussion as a re'ned and topical chiasmus. The lifeless statue, without candlelight, and sleeping apostle are set in inverted parallelism to the body of the Virgin enveloped in light (De Voragine even speaks of blinding light) and Peter taking the candle.⁴⁶² This kind of substantial compositional modi'cation in the work of an intellectual artist such as Bruegel should not be overlooked.

Finally, there is a third reason that justi'es reading Bruegel’s Death of the Virgin as an allusion to the contemporary image debate. The sacrament of Extreme Unction (‘vvterste olyen’), which Bruegel in fact represented, was – like so many Catholic traditions and dogmas – controversial in the 1560s.⁴⁶³ The Protestants simply did not accept this sacrament and fought it consequently the processions from the church to the homes of the dying became problematic in the 1560s. Godevaert van Haecht, for example, recounts that few people still wanted to be associated with this Catholic practice. Many were unwilling to participate in the processions and refused to carry lit torches. The problem was so pressing that the authorities tried all manner of ways to convince people to take part again.⁴⁶⁴ In short, the doctrine and practice of Extreme Unction caused a great deal of commotion.

There is no doubt that Bruegel has depicted here the end of just such a cortège.⁴⁶⁵ A man with an impressive cope holds the candle in Mary’s hand: a sixteenth-century custom.⁴⁶⁶ The acolyte behind him carries the processionary staff. At the front, on the chest before the bed, is an aspergillum with a sprinkler, next to it the consecrated oil, and a cruci'x rests on a cushion at Mary’s feet. Bruegel has pictured the death of the Virgin in a contemporary setting and analogous to contemporary practices. This encouraged viewers to recognize themselves in the event. Death was commonplace and visible in the sixteenth century, and processions of the ‘vvterste olyen’ passed through the streets almost daily. Bruegel portrayed a controversial sacrament using a visual language that emphasized points of contention, in particular the physical character of religious art and the lighting of candles before inanimate matter. He visualized a social issue in all of its complexity with the greatest subtlety. The little panel is a sample of Bruegel’s ingenious ability to transform word into image.⁴⁶⁷

In conclusion, it seems not unreasonable to assume that Bruegel was touching on the image controversy in his grisailles. He did so by experimenting with a technique that suggests inanimate matter, and primarily by incorporating many subtle and less subtle references to the thorny issues in the public debate about religious art, among which the lighting of candles and the smashing of statues. In the knowledge that Bruegel often alluded to contemporary discussions in his work, it is indeed plausible that his grisailles also contain various layers of meaning, in this case about materiality. However, it would be wrong to state that Bruegel took a speci'c stance. He preferred to raise questions rather than offer clear-cut answers.

!"#$%& '( &)'*% #*+ !+',& '( $',+

215

¶ Bruegel’s grisailles were intended to grace the sitting rooms of educated humanists, such as Abraham Ortelius, who received the Death of the Virgin as a gift. The man in the street never saw them, or not until ten years later when they were reproduced in print form. They made no impact on public opinion. The situation is very different with respect to the grisailles painted on altarpieces in churches.⁴⁶⁸ This was art in the public arena and if the beeldenstorm made one thing clear it was that religious art in public spaces stirred emotions.

A fascinating example of the experiment with the decorum of grisaille painting in the public arena is Frans Pourbus’s extensive grisaille series commissioned by the abbot of Saint Martin’s Abbey in Tournai.⁴⁶⁹ Around 1574 Pourbus was asked to paint a series of eight scenes from the Passion, in full colour, and another one showing eight episodes from the life of Saint Martin, in grisaille. All the panels measure approximately 125 by 92 centimetres. He also painted a Calvary in the same year, intended for the main altar in the choir of the abbey church.⁴⁷⁰ In the lower right is the donor’s portrait of Pourbus’s patron, Abbot Jacques Duquesne. It is signed and dated, and serves as a point of departure for attributing and dating the rest of the panels.

Carl Van de Velde recently demonstrated that the grisailles were originally painted on the reverses of the Scenes from the Passion of Christ and that the panels were displayed above the choir stalls.⁴⁷¹ The grisailles with the scenes from the life of Saint Martin were only visible in the ambulatory. Both series 't into a larger ‘counter-reformatory’ scheme. After the beeldenstorm, Abbot Duquesne vigorously set about refurbishing his abbey. The bishop of Tournai followed suit. Tournai had been a Calvinist bulwark in the 1560s, but after the Iconoclastic Fury the Catholic prelates, supported by Alba’s regime, made every effort to provide the Reformation with a visual response. Among those solicited to help them in this enterprise were Cornelis Floris, the leading architect and sculptor in the Netherlands, and his son-in-law Frans Pourbus, the most talented pupil of Cornelis’s brother Frans Floris.⁴⁷²

It is inconceivable that Abbot Duquesne was not involved in the iconographic pro-gramme,⁴⁷³ or that the decision to render the scenes of Saint Martin’s life in grisaille would have been made without consulting him. It was unusual for a series of scenes from a saint’s life to be painted in this technique and only a few years earlier Frans Pourbus had painted the Life of Saint Andrew in colour for Viglius ab Aytta, the provost of the Saint Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent.⁴⁷⁴ This brings us straight to the most fascinating aspect of both series, namely that the life of Christ was ‘'lmed’ in colour and that of Saint Martin in grisaille. In other words, for the scenes from the life of Christ he used the ‘divine power of painting to bring the dead back to life and to make those absent present’, while for the episodes from Saint Martin’s life he explicitly abandoned that option and rendered them as though they were carved from inanimate material.⁴⁷⁵ Why did the painter and the patron opt for this technique and what were the consequences of their decision? In the light of the issues raised in this chapter, this cannot have been a noncommittal decision. To begin with, a strict visual distinction is made between the scenes from the life of the Messiah, which are very ‘alive’, and those of the saint, which are explicitly colourless and lifeless. Why? According to the detractors of the Catholic Church, Christ’s life was being eclipsed by the saints and martyrs, and the relationship between the Church itself and the Son of God had become very thin. The Church of Rome had become the ‘tollhouse of limbo’, as Petrus Bloccius expressed it graphically.⁴⁷⁶ Saints, their miracles and their relics were commercially exploited and images played a key role in this. Polychrome sculptures were often treated as though they were actually alive, to the great annoyance of the reformers, who denounced this popular devotion. It was this

Pourbus’s grisaille series for Saint Martin’s Abbey in Tournai

432–3

438

429

197

!"#$%&' ()*

216

Frans Pourbus the ElderScenes from the Passion of Christ

Tournai, Séminaire épiscopal

!"#$%& '( &)'*% #*+ !+',& '( $',+

217

198

!"#$%&' ()*

218

Frans Pourbus the ElderScenes from the

Life of Saint MartinTournai, Séminaire épiscopal

!"#$%& '( &)'*% #*+ !+',& '( $',+

219

199

200

!"#$%&' ()*

220

Frans Pourbus the ElderCalvary

Tournai, Séminaire épiscopal

Frans Pourbus the ElderSaint Martin Ordained Bishop

(detail of 'g. 198)Tournai, Séminaire épiscopal

!"#$%& '( &)'*% #*+ !+',& '( $',+

221

mockery that Catholic theologians, such as Molanus, Duncanus and Benedictus, subtly appropriated in their treatises on the image dispute.⁴⁷⁷ As I pointed out above they insisted that the material in itself made clear that no life was concealed in sculptures and paintings and that they therefore could not and should not be regarded as idols. It strikes me that Frans Pourbus in consultation with the abbot cleverly annexed and blunted the accusations of the extreme Calvinists in a manner similar to that of the Catholic polemicists. By making a visual distinction between Jesus and the saint, Pourbus not only showed that they must not be treated in the same way, he also made explicit the fact that statues of saints are nothing more than material objects. On the other hand, Christ’s Passion, rendered in full living colour, shines in the choir, the place where transubstantiation takes place during mass.⁴⁷⁸ The visual contrast between the life of Christ and that of Saint Martin could not be greater.⁴⁷⁹ By opting for grisaille in commemorating the saint, Duquesne and Pourbus contrasted the lifeless materiality of the trompe-l’œil images with the lively rendering of Christ’s Passion in the choir, accentuating both the commemorative function of images of saints and the ‘Real Presence’ of Christ during the Catholic mass.

Finally, I should like to point out that aside from the contrast between living colour and dead stone, Pourbus also experimented with the portrait historié, this time in grisaille. The facial features of the saint in the trompe-l’œil relief of Saint Martin’s consecration as a bishop are without a single doubt Jacques Duquesne’s. It is clear at a glance from a comparison with the donor’s portrait in the Calvary that the facial features are identical, whereas the saint’s features in the previous four scenes and those that follow are different. As I demonstrated in a previous chapter (pp. - ), historicizing portraits in the decades after the beeldenstorm often had a special meaning. This is the case here, for the abbot identi'ed himself with the patron saint of the abbey when the latter was ordained bishop. To understand the meaning of this fully, we must turn to the Legenda Aurea, the literary source for the painting.⁴⁸⁰ De Voragine recounts how the inhabitants of Tours elected Saint Martin as their bishop. Because the lector was absent during the consecration, a disciple opened the Book of Psalms at random and landed on Psalm 8:⁴⁸¹ ‘O Lord, our lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth! Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted by the mouth of babes and infants, thou hast founded a bulwark because of thy foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.’⁴⁸² Although this part of the text was not depicted, it becomes clear for those familiar with the story that Abbot Duquesne presented himself as a prelate who joins the struggle against ‘the enemy and the avenger’. In Pourbus’s painting, the clergyman gazes emphatically at the Psalter. Pourbus and Duquesne thus incorporated a subtle warning to the iconoclasts.

433, 766

228

205

206

229

. Chapter Seven

T HE CH U RCH IN RU INS

In 1564, two years before the beeldenstorm made it painfully clear that the supposed unity of the Catholic Church in the Low Countries was a sham, Cornelis van Dalem painted an

intriguing landscape.⁴⁹⁶ The composition revolves around the ruins of a church or an abbey. An ancient oak rises in the foreground. Although it is hollow and withered, new branches are growing from the dead trunk. A few poor peasants are hard at work in a run-down shed.

In the past decades, art historians have analysed the deeper signi'cance of landscape painting in the sixteenth century at length. Some assume that landscapes are metaphorical and therefore have ‘meaning’, while others doubt this and believe that their meaning is limited to their aesthetic value.⁴⁹⁷ The debate will probably never be de'nitively settled, but then again this is not necessary. Quite separate from these differing views, determining what metaphors the painters could have used, if this was – indeed – their intention, would be highly interesting. It would explain how the viewers of this landscape could have interpreted it. That a complex culture of ‘looking at art’ existed among the urban elites in the second half of the sixteenth century has by now been proved thanks to Reindert Falkenburg, among others.⁴⁹⁸ If the painter did not imbue his work with meaning, the viewer certainly did.⁴⁹⁹

Looking at Cornelis van Dalem’s Landscape with the Ruins of a Church as a simple meta-phor requires little imagination. This is certainly the case when taking into consideration the year in which the painting originated (1564) and the artist’s religious beliefs. When he painted this landscape, the wealthy and humanistically oriented Van Dalem resided in Antwerp and made his living as a cloth merchant.⁵⁰⁰ He was a member of the De Olijftak chamber of rhetoric. He had registered with the Guild of Saint Luke in 1556 and painted in his spare time, collaborating with Gillis Mostaert and Jan van Wechelen, among other artists.⁵⁰¹ Only a few works by him have come down to us. One year after he painted this landscape, Van Dalem ‘"ed’ to Bavel near Breda, where he and his wife moved into a small castle. His exodus has always been linked to his religious convictions. According to witnesses, Cornelis van Dalem made no secret of his aversion to the papists and regularly attended Protestant services.⁵⁰² By that time the Catholic Church had long been in decay, at least according to Reformed believers who sincerely hoped that new, fertile branches would grow from the old, dead trunk. Cornelis van Dalem’s landscape can thus easily be considered a metaphor of the Reformation, not least because he signed it in the ruins of the church.⁵⁰³ Moreover, comparing some passages from contemporary reformatory pamphlets with the painting, the temptation to read Van Dalem’s landscape as a metaphor only increases. In his Tvvee hondert ketteryen for instance, Bloccius devotes a great deal of attention to religious structures and their – in his eyes – excessive architecture. God does not reside in heylichdommen or shrines – he often uses the word temples – fashioned by human hands, so he keeps repeating.⁵⁰⁴ The ‘papist temples,

76'

Pages 226–7:Michiel CoxcieTriptych of the Holy Sacrament Chapel, 1567 (detail of 'g. 213)Brussels, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique/Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België

Cornelis van DalemLandscape with the Ruins of a Church, 1564Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek

!"#$%&' ( )*&

230

207

208

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

231

which are murderers’ dens and whorehouses’ should not be used for prayer, according to the author, for Christ lived in self-denial and did not dwell in a magni'cent temple 'lled with wealth and luxury.⁵⁰⁵ This is why it can hardly be a coincidence that lightning, the wrath of God, destroys churches more often than simple dwellings in a village, he believes. Church towers are ‘Towers of Babel’.⁵⁰⁶ Moreover, Bloccius argues, John the Baptist, Christ and the apostles did not preach in temples, but in the streets, in the desert or in the humble abodes of simple folk.⁵⁰⁷ Those wanting to follow Christ and the apostles should not seek their salvation in the Catholic churches, for they were nothing more than places of rot and evil, and not of sanctity. ‘And so it has transpired that the Christians no longer wish to come to the idolatrous papist temples’, he concludes.⁵⁰⁸ One may rightly wonder whether the painting by Cornelis van Dalem, who had turned his back on Rome and clandestinely celebrated Communion, can be read as an illustration of Bloccius’s Tvvee hondert ketteryen and the many other Reformed treatises.

Nevertheless, can the interpretation of this painting be that straightforward? Does the painter actually allude to the downfall of the Catholic Church? And why did he paint two dilapidated barns? Were they a reference to the poverty ravaging the countryside in the Low Countries or was Cornelis van Dalem invoking widely known visual motifs – topoi with a hidden meaning? The demolition of a church building, for instance, was also illustrated in a print lampooning the Catholics from around 1570. The theme of a dilapidated sheep fold was frequently used during the Reformation in Germany and later in the Low Countries.⁵⁰⁹ A notable example of this is the Tafereel ofte Proef-steen wie op dese werelt na Gode leven …, a satirical print produced in the Seventeen Provinces.⁵¹⁰ Another is an anonymous painting from 1581.⁵¹¹

762, 768

AnonymousTafereel ofte Proef-steen wie op dese werelt na Gode leven …, c. 1560–80. Engraving.Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet

AnonymousThe Good ShepherdUtrecht, Rijksmuseum Het Catharijneconvent

209

!"#$%&' (&)&*

232

Hans Vredeman de Vries and Gillis MostaertPaul and Barnabas at Lystra, 1567 (detail of 'g. 13)Bremen, Kunstsammlungen Böttcherstraße, Roseliushaus

210

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

233

Hans Vredeman de Vries and Gillis Mostaert completed their Paul and Barnabas at Lystra in 1567, three years after Cornelis van Dalem’s Landscape with the Ruins of a Church. It was their response to the iconoclasm that had raged a year earlier and with which I began this book. No ruins can be discerned in the large panel by these two Antwerp masters: the history scene is dominated by classical architecture, actually a Netherlandish Renaissance interpretation of a Doric temple. The architecture is based on Raphael’s School of Athens, a fresco in the Stanze of the Vatican that was known in the Low Countries through Giorgio

Ghisi’s print, which was published by Hieronymus Cock in 1550.⁵¹² Marble statues of Greco-Roman gods are in the aediculae, and another eight sculptures of pagan goddesses are found beneath the barrel vault.

As explained above, the dominance of the pagan sculptures over the Christian scene from the Acts of the Apostles is surprising to say the least. Paul and Barnabas are depicted as tiny humans, insigni'cant in relation to the ancient idols. The success of this effect is due to the monumental architectural setting. The story of Paul and Barnabas is indeed about man’s insigni'cance, the fact that man should not, may not and cannot considerer himself a god because he is trapped in his own sinful "esh. God must be honoured, but people remain people even when – like the apostles – they come close in their words and deeds to the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Or, as Dirck Volkertsz Coornhert expressed it: ‘Paul was a chosen vessel full of the Holy Spirit, but did not assume the role of lord and master of the faith [God] with respect to his followers.’⁵¹³ This contrast between the idols and the humanity of the apostles

763

746

Giorgio Ghisi, after RaphaelPaul’s Sermon on the Areopagus in AthensEngraving.Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, Graphische Sammlung

!"#$%&' (&)&*

234

is explicitly foregrounded in Vredeman and Mostaert’s panel and the imposing architectural decor plays a key role in this. Anyone seeing this painting one year after the beeldenstorm would have immediately recalled the events that took place in the autumn of 1566 and which must have made such a powerful visual impact.

Does the interpretation of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra stop here, or … does the architecture evoke other associations? The latter would appear to be the case, for, as Heiner Borggrefe noted, it refers indirectly to Raphael’s fresco of the School of Athens in the pope’s Stanze. ⁵¹⁴ In other words, Vredeman ‘emulated’ a ‘papist-heathen’ pictorial motif to call into question the cult of images and devotional practices. The heathen depiction of the School of Athens painted on the walls of the private papal quarters is here weighed against the words of the apostle Paul, who did not want to be worshipped like some pagan idol. The pope as Paul’s ‘successor’ and his semi-divine unapproachable status were charged issues in sixteenth-century Europe.

Moreover, the architectural motif in Paul and Barnabas at Lystra would seem to refer to an existing controversy in the Low Countries, for Giorgio Ghisi’s print after the School of Athens which inspired Vredeman was published under the title Paul’s Sermon on the Areopagus in Athens by Hieronymus Cock’s In de vier winden in Antwerp. While the image is identical, its content is changed entirely by the caption. Knowing that this story from the Acts of the Apostles is quoted dozens of times, for instance in Petrus Bloccius’s Tvvee hondert ketteryen, to denounce the supposedly sacred character of the Catholic Church’s buildings, this new title is at the very least ambiguous. (Bloccius over and over again cites Paul, pointing to this story: ‘God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands.’)⁵¹⁵ One may rightly wonder whether the reason why the fervent Catholic Michiel Coxcie was so disturbed by the publication of Hieronymus Cock’s print actually had to do with the fact that it gave away his visual source, as Karel van Mander maintained.⁵¹⁶ The new title lent all kinds of undesirable connotations to these Raphaelesque architectural motifs, which Coxcie used systematically in his altarpieces. He would have been far more upset by this than the idea that he emphatically emulated Raphael. After all, this was hardly a secret: he was nicknamed the ‘Flemish Raphael’ and he even named his son after the great Italian master.⁵¹⁷

The interpretation of architecture in a painting is often not neutral. Cornelis van Dalem’s church ruins as well as the ancient temples raise questions. Setting conveys meaning, which can call forth powerful associations.

If anyone in the 1560s was aware of the signi'cance and possibilities of architectural motifs in painting it was Hans Vredeman de Vries. In 1577, about ten years after he painted the scenographia of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra, Vredeman published his Theatrum Vitae humanae with Pieter Baltens in Antwerp.⁵¹⁸ In this book – consisting of a title page and six coloured etchings – the stages of life are linked to the classical architectural orders. The Corinthian order symbolized young adulthood and the Tuscan order ‘depicted’ old age. To the 've classical orders (Composite, Corinthian, Ionic, Doric, Tuscan) Vredeman de Vries added a non-existent one, namely the Rvyne (Ruin) which, according to him, corresponded with death.

The idea Hans Vredeman de Vries worked out here derives from classical antiquity. Writing on rhetoric and poetry, Aristotle and Horace, among others, had already pointed out that the style and tone had to be't the subject.⁵¹⁹ Tone and style of a comedy had to differ from those of a tragedy, for example. Vitruvius had applied these rules of decorum to architecture.

746

744

211

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

235

And Leon Battista Alberti 'rst advocated their use in painting in the Renaissance.⁵²⁰ In depict-ing a scene, an artist had to fashion an appropriate setting: pose, clothing, expression and architectural surroundings are all part of the staging. Erasmus also published on the subject and Vredeman based his scene on his writings.⁵²¹ It seems fair to ask whether Van Dalem’s Landscape with the Ruins of a Church can also be interpreted as a Theatrum Vitae humanae.

Interest in architectural decor and decorum was certainly not unique to the Renaissance. Netherlandish painters had been aware of the signi'cance of architectural motifs long before the dissemination of the Italian Renaissance ideals. Ever since the 'fteenth century, architecture had been used to enhance the content of religious paintings. In Jan van Eyck’s Madonna in the Church (c. 1437–9) in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, for instance, the Virgin and Christ Child literally 'll the house of God.⁵²² The relationship between the 'gures and the architecture here signi'cantly enhances the painting’s symbolic meaning, as Panofsky noted long ago. Perspective, and thus architecture was a key factor in the art of early Nether-landish masters.

Greco-Roman architecture was still unknown in the Low Countries at the time of the ‘Flemish Primitives’. Only after Jan Gossaert had travelled to Italy and Raphael’s cartoons had become familiar in the beginning of the sixteenth century were references made to purely Renaissance architecture. However, Gothic ornament continued to play an important role in Netherlandish art. Jan Gossaert’s ‘Renaissance Gothic’ – an excellent term coined by Matt Kavaler – is a very good example of this.⁵²³ While it is not always clear what precisely the architectural framework signi'ed, its is evident that it generally had a meaning.⁵²⁴

Hieronymus Wiericx, after Hans Vredeman de VriesRvyne (Ruin), 1577From Theatrum Vitae humanaeEtching.Lyons, Bibliothèque municipale

!"#$%&' (&)&*

236

All things considered, Hans Vredeman de Vries surely knew what he was doing when he painted the scenographia of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra. We may also assume that he was not the only one conversant with the decorum principles – the publication of the Theatrum Vitae humanae alone suggests there was a market for them. And this is precisely the point I want to make here. Painters in Antwerp were keenly aware of the importance of the setting in their history paintings and altarpieces. More than a dozen artists had visited Rome in the meantime and the views of Vitruvius, Alberti, Sebastiano Serlio and others had become common knowledge. All of this made them conscious of how fundamentally different architecture in the Netherlands was from that in Italy (c.q. classical antiquity).⁵²⁵ In what follows I will demonstrate that after 1566 the way in which architectural motifs were incorporated in painting was anything but neutral. The decor was modi'ed as a consequence of these turbulent times, as was the decorum. This chapter explores the changing functions and meanings of architectural motifs in painting after the beeldenstorm. In the 1560s and ’70s experiments with the architecture in painting were intended to alter the decorum of certain Christian subjects radically. In the examples given below, the architecture at 'rst seems to be purely decorative, but looks can be deceiving. Architecture was used to rede'ne what was depicted. Just as the rendering of the body as the temple of the soul was renewed, redrawing the temple itself also became a special point of interest.

¶ Michiel Coxcie and Adriaen Thomasz Key were each other’s opposites in many respects. Although they probably knew one another well and Adriaen Thomasz’s history scenes were strongly in"uenced by the work of the ‘Flemish Raphael’, their views on religion and art were miles apart.⁵²⁶ From about 1540 Coxcie resolutely worked in a style inspired by the High Renaissance, in which classical architecture was a crucial element of the decor and the decorum. He had become acquainted with this style during his lengthy stay in Rome in the 1530s.⁵²⁷ Upon his return from Italy Coxcie introduced the principles of the High Renaissance into the Netherlands, and abided by them right up to his death in 1592. His art is characterized by monumental 'gures and a strict application of the ancient architectural rules he had learned in the Rome of Raphael and Michelangelo. Unlike many of his guild brothers, Coxcie also remained a loyal adherant of the Church of Rome throughout his entire life.⁵²⁸ This explains in part why this very artist, in spite of his old age, was commissioned after the Fall of Antwerp in 1585 to paint a number of guild altarpieces for the cathedrals of Mechelen and Antwerp.⁵²⁹ These works perfectly express the views of the early Counter-Reformation (i.e. before Rubens returned to Antwerp in 1608) because they hark back entirely to art just before the beeldenstorm and disregard twenty years of experimentation with decorum.

Even though Adriaen Thomasz Key never went to Italy, he came into contact with the work of Coxcie and many other painters who had adopted the Renaissance ideals in Antwerp.⁵³⁰ Out of these in"uences Key distilled an entirely individual, very distinct style characterized by exceptional austerity and a relentlessly objective realism.⁵³¹ Key reduced the architectural setting to the strict minimum and disrupted the ‘monumental, ideal body’ by including vulgar details and imperfections, as we have seen above. In other words, he systematically referred to the principles of High Renaissance Italian art while simultaneously deconstructing them just as methodically. And, contrary to the court painter Michiel Coxcie, Adriaen Thomasz Key openly confessed his Calvinist sympathies by the end of the 1570s at the latest.⁵³²

Adriaen Thomasz Key, Michiel Coxcie

and the Communion debate

212

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

237

Key and Coxcie were artistic rivals. In the 1570s Adriaen Thomasz frequently engaged in a pictorial duel with Michiel Coxcie, court painter to Philip II and protégé of the Duke of Alba. As their Cain and Abel pictures demonstrate, Coxcie and Key’s views of the decorum of religious art followed different lines. Accordingly, it would be interesting to 'nd out how these painters dealt with classical architecture in their art. Because of its af'liation with the theological debates on the Eucharist, the Last Supper was a highly charged topic in the wake of iconoclasm, and their interpretations of it offer an excellent point of departure.

Indeed, the Last Supper was a highly volatile subject in the sixteenth century.⁵³³ The polemic surrounding the sacrament of the Eucharist had "ared up anew a few years before Michiel Coxcie and Adriaen Thomasz Key painted their versions of the Last Supper. The theological complexity is wonderfully depicted in the drawing of The Mystic Wine Press by Pieter Aertsen.⁵³⁴ Between roughly 1550 and 1590 many – often Dutch – writings appeared that questioned the Roman Catholic faith and defending the Calvinist interpretation of the

795, 79'

44', 749, 77(

747

Pieter AertsenThe Mystic Wine PressDrawing. Utrecht, Rijksmuseum Het Catharijneconvent

!"#$%&' (&)&*

238

biblical message and the rite deriving from it. Other authors upheld the Catholic beliefs and made mincemeat of Calvin’s ideas about Communion. In the meantime Calvin had surpassed Luther as the most in"uential theologian with the largest following in the Low Countries. The wave of publications crested around 1566–67, when the Calvinist and Lutheran factions were permitted to build their own houses of worship and celebrate Communion in Antwerp, among other places. From contemporary accounts we know that the Catholics in the Scheldt city gaped en masse at the Calvinist version of Communion in their newly built quarters and that this also led to social unrest.⁵³⁵ Theologians jumped into the fray and published their doctrines. Treatises – and there are dozens – on the theological and liturgical interpretation of the subject were penned by Martinus Duncanus (1558), Gregorius Cassander (1564), Jean Hessels (1564 and 1566), Claude De Sainctes (1566), Zacharias Ursinus (1567), Theodore Beza (1567), Antoine De Chandieu (1567), Theodoricus Maelcote (1567), Martin Chemnitz (1568), Philips van Marnix van Sint Aldegonde (c. 1582) and Michael Bajus (1582), among others.⁵³⁶ And these are only the ones dealing solely with the Last Supper and the Eucharist. More general polemical writings also broach the subject.⁵³⁷ Their sheer volume and the fact that they were also available in Dutch or written by Dutch-speaking authors prove just how heated the battle over this subject was in the Low Countries. But not only these treatises added fuel to the "ames. Petrus Dathenus, a leading Calvinist, had earlier published (1566) a catechism laying down the rite of Communion for the Reformed.⁵³⁸ Although intended for the English refugee churches, this book soon also became the guideline for the Calvinist communities in the Low Countries. It was predated by Guido de Bres’s so-called Confession de foy (1561), which posited more general rules for the Reformed Communion.⁵³⁹ As a ‘Calvinist’, Adriaen Thomasz was most probably familiar with Dathenus’s guidelines and with De Bres’s precepts in his Confessio Belgica, as his Confession de foy was popularly known. In 1570 Pope Pius V issued a papal bull compelling the local churches to celebrate mass as speci'ed in the Tridentine Roman Missal,⁵⁴⁰ which described the Catholic liturgy for the Eucharist in minute detail.

The ‘Communion debate’ was actually a much older battle in which painters such as Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer had engaged from the very beginning, and later Pieter Coecke in the Low Countries as well.⁵⁴¹ Revolving around the correct interpretation of the Last Supper and the sacrament of the Eucharist, this debate erupted in the German lands in the early 1520s between Luther and Rome on the one hand, and Luther and other reformers, such as Zwingli, on the other.⁵⁴² While this colossal ideological struggle, which went to the very core of Christian faith, cannot be summarized in a few words, it is worth sketching its main lines, for without insight into these issues the polemical meaning of Last Supper images in the sixteenth century is largely lost. Moreover, some notion of the discussion is essential, certainly with respect to the interpretation of the subject in the aftermath of the beeldenstorm.

The Communion debate broke out in all its fury around 1520, shortly after Martin Luther had shaken West-European Christianity to its very foundations with his 95 theses (1517) against the sale of indulgences. In the periphery of the skirmishes between Luther and Rome, an unprecedented battle of broadsheets about form and meaning of the sacraments "ared up north of the Alps. The Eucharist, a central sacrament of Catholicism and instituted by Christ at the Last Supper, was not spared. The formulation of the problem was hardly new, but the impact of the theological con"ict was. As it was, there had been no clear guidelines for the ritual until then and theologians had reached neither consensus nor compromise regarding its precise religious signi'cance.⁵⁴³ Before the Council of Trent Rome had never

479

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

239

issued an unequivocal regulation which determined form and content of the Eucharist once and for all (that is, until the Second Vatican Council, 1962–5).⁵⁴⁴ Until then, Communion was celebrated differently from village to village depending on the local pastor’s interpretation of it.⁵⁴⁵ As a result of the lack of clarity, in the wake of the Reformation dozens of learned men expounded their own views of Mass and Holy Communion, often in pamphlets. The dispute revolved around different aspects of the sacrament, such as the structure of the ritual, its theological signi'cance and the form in which Christ is or is not present at the Eucharist, the ‘mimesis’ of the Communion.⁵⁴⁶ Could only a priest emulate Christ? Could the lay community also drink the wine? What if the sacramental wine was actually Christ’s blood and you spilled a drop of it? Or what if a "y fell into it, that is into Christ’s blood? Should the wine be drunk from a gold chalice or a simple cup? No question was too far-fetched. In Augsburg, that meltingpot of Christian movements, passions mounted so high that non other that the local magistrate – the secular authorities – took matters in hand and issued rules for Communion, the sacrament of the Eucharist.⁵⁴⁷

The momentum may not have been as great in the Low Countries in the 'rst half of the sixteenth century, but the polemic certainly reverberated there, too, for the battle was fought with pamphlets written mostly in German, French or Latin and thus accessible to educated people in the Low Countries. Traditionally closely connected with one another, rhetoricians and painters were open to new views and the Last Supper became tremendously popular as a pictorial subject.⁵⁴⁸ Pieter Coecke’s Last Supper alludes to the broadsheet battle that destroyed the unity of Christianity for ever.⁵⁴⁹ The setting is grand and detailed: the scene takes place in a richly decorated mansion. The large medallions on the wall behind the table represent David defeating Goliath and Cain murdering Abel, two stories about strife.⁵⁵⁰ Judging from the way in which Pieter Coecke depicted the theme and the numerous copies that were made of it, it exerted a particular fascination. Art lovers and pious burghers who could afford it hung these paintings in their houses. When the beeldenstorm erupted a quarter of a century later and the battle around Communion came to be fought in the Netherlands as well – this time between Calvinists and Rome – they were still hanging there as silent witnesses of an old wound.⁵⁵¹ It is clear from the estate inventory of Viglius ab Aytta that the iconography of these paintings was not always perceived as orthodox Catholic, for the Last Supper in his estate was described as ‘in line with the orthodox (Catholic) doctrine’.⁵⁵² This means that Viglius, at least, set great store on the orthodox rendering of the subject, but also that deviating iconographies did exist. Given the controversy in word and image, we may assume that Michiel Coxcie and Adriaen Thomasz Key and their respective patrons deliberated at length on how to portray this subject.

479

213

!"#$%&' (&)&*

240

¶ Michiel Coxcie painted several Last Suppers in the course of his long career.⁵⁵³ Of particular interest is the one signed and dated 1567, just a year after the beeldenstorm. This was the moment when the most fervent Catholics, sometimes against their better judgement, set about redecorating their battered churches.⁵⁵⁴ Coxcie was commissioned to paint the most controversial theme of the sixteenth century on the centre panel of a triptych destined for the high altar of the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament in the church of Saint Gudula and Saint Michael in Brussels. On the wings are Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet on the left and Agony in the Garden on the right; extending across the outer wings is Elijah Fed by an Angel in the Desert.⁵⁵⁵ Coxcie’s Last Supper is notable for its relatively original, diagonal composition, the decorum and the accessories. The architecture in which the events take place and the anecdotal details that Coxcie added to the scene are critical. Particularly intriguing is the dresser laden with gold and silver objects; it is unique in the rendering of the Last Supper in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century.⁵⁵⁶

Some time ago Bob van den Boogert wrote a fascinating article on the architecture in Michiel Coxcie’s oeuvre that did not receive the attention it deserved.⁵⁵⁷ He justi'ably argued that in the mid-sixteenth century Coxcie’s purely classical style was associated with the Habsburgs and by extension the Catholic Church. He arrived at this conclusion because it was indeed the Habsburgs and their noble entourage who introduced the classical pictorial idiom in the Netherlands. Van den Boogert does have a point. Before and after the publication

Michiel Coxcie’s ‘Last Supper’

765, 749

Michiel CoxcieTriptych of the Holy Sacrament

Chapel, 1567: Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet, Last Supper and

Agony in the GardenBrussels, Musées royaux des

Beaux-Arts de Belgique/Koninklijke Musea voor Schone

Kunsten van België

214

215

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

241

of his article a great deal of research was conducted on the introduction of Renaissance architecture in the Netherlands, among others by Krista de Jonge. A constant feature seems to be the decisive role played by the Habsburgs and the aristocrats at their court. Nearly all the important buildings in the Netherlands that can be catalogued as (relatively) pure Renaissance architecture were built by either the emperor, members of his family, or leading clerics and noblemen in their immediate vicinity, for instance the palaces of Binche, Boussu and Mariemont, the Nassau Palace in Breda and the palace of Cardinal Granvelle in Brussels.⁵⁵⁸ Even if the emperor was not the patron, a building or structure was often erected in his honour, such as the famous monumental mantelpiece of the Franc of Bruges in Bruges or the Sint-Jorispoort (Keizerspoort) in Antwerp.⁵⁵⁹ For the Joyous Entries, too, for example that of Philip II in 1549, the classical idiom was the new visual language of the Habsburg empire.⁵⁶⁰

Since this Renaissance style differed so radically from the Gothic style in Netherlandish architecture, it must be assumed that the innovations in this respect wrought by artists such as Lambert Lombard, Jacques Du Brœucq and Cornelis Floris who had travelled to Italy, made quite a visual impact.⁵⁶¹ Until the Antwerp city government commissioned Cornelis Floris to build a new city hall in the Renaissance style ('nished in 1564), the use of the classical idiom had been the ‘privilege’ of the Habsburgs, the high nobility and the most prominent clerics. Shortly before and after the beeldenstorm they were the targets of all blame. The palace of the detested Cardinal Granvelle, the palaces of the Habsburgs and of the noble elite were built

745

74(

Palace of Cardinal Granvelle in Brussels (demolished)

Abel GrimmerIce Skating before the Sint-Jorispoort (Keizerspoort) in Antwerp, Antwerp, private collection

216

!"#$%&' (&)&*

242

ever more frequently in the Renaissance style and differed visually entirely from the Gothic tradition. This was no doubt also the case with Alba’s palace, built in the citadel in Antwerp, which was so vehemently despised.

Because the maniera all’antica was deliberately used for political ends, its association with a segment of the hated elite was clear for everyone to see.⁵⁶² As Van den Boogert pointed out, with respect to painting Michiel Coxcie was certainly one of the key 'gures involved in disseminating Renaissance principles in the Netherlands. The author gave the imposing stained-glass windows in the Saint Gudula and Saint Michael’s as an example. As is argued below, Coxcie’s use of classical architecture in his altarpieces was anything but fortuitous. Before continuing, however, it is worth mentioning that Coxcie was certainly not the only artist who before and after the beeldenstorm employed the maniera all’antica as a premature Counter-Reformational reaction to the Reformation and iconoclasm. Cornelis Floris’s imposing rood screen in the Cathedral of Tournai had exactly the same effect, as Matt Kavaler argued not long ago.⁵⁶³

The Tournai rood screen offers an excellent opportunity for gaining a better under-standing of the impact of classical architecture on Netherlandish art. It was built between 1570 and 1573, thus shortly after the cathedral had been thoroughly vandalized during the beeldenstorm.⁵⁶⁴ Both its iconographic programme and its style glorify the ancient Roman Catholic rituals and customs. The abundant statues of saints and bas-reliefs and the classical architecture contrast strongly with the church’s early Gothic choir. Cornelis Floris’s choir screen is divided into two storeys. The lower storey is built in the Tuscan order and consists of three bays with large barrel vaults. The outermost bays are aediculae containing personi'cations of Faith and Charity, respectively. The middle bay is open and

74'

742

Frans HogenbergWalloons Leaving the

Citadel of Antwerp in 1577Etching.

Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet

217

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

243

affords a view of the main altar (the holiest of holies in a Catholic Church), where the most important religious mystery of transubstantiation takes place. The spandrels between the arches are covered with bas-relief representations of the prophets, the roundels between them containing alabaster reliefs of scenes from the Old Testament: the Torture of the Seven Maccabean Martyrs, the Elders Accusing Susanna, Abraham and Isaac on the Road to Moriah, the Brazen Serpent, Jonah Swallowed by the Whale and Jonah Cast on Shore by the Whale. The upper register, articulated by Ionic engaged colonettes, follows the layout of the lower storey. Between the colonettes are rectangular bas-reliefs with scenes from the Passion of Christ corresponding to the Old Testament pre'gurations in the roundels. This creates a typological relationship in the tradition of the Bibliae pauperum. Above the aediculae are statues of saints on corbels. Above Faith at the left is Saint Piat, and above Charity at the right is Saint Eleutherius. Centrally, above the entrance to the choir, is a trapezoidal pulpit with a statue of the Virgin and Child. A cornice divides the upper and lower storeys. The frieze is decorated with vines and grotesques.

Cornelis Floris’s choir screen propagated the Catholic doctrine of images in churches in three ways, as if it were a Roman triumphal arch.⁵⁶⁵ First, it was installed right after the beeldenstorm. The Iconoclastic Fury had raised hell in Tournai, destroying the cathedral and the Gothic rood screen, along with all the images. Floris’s rood screen is full of images and sculptures of saints. A statue of the Virgin and Child is even placed right before the chancel, despite the fact that the veneration of the Holy Virgin was the most contested form of hagiolatry.⁵⁶⁶ This ruthless countering of the Calvinist adversaries immediately after the beeldenstorm must be considered an act of provocation. Moreover, the iconography accords with the medieval Biblia pauperum tradition. This tradition is closely related to Gregory the

Cornelis FlorisRood screen of Our Lady’s Cathedral, Tournai

218

219

!"#$%&' (&)&*

244

Great’s ancient dictum that sculptures and paintings were permissible in churches because they taught illiterate people about Christ’s life. Shortly before and after the beeldenstorm this Catholic tenet played a key role in the debates on iconolatry and iconoclasm. Floris referred to this controversy visually. A third way in which the Catholic vision of the Bilderfrage is propagated in Floris’s choir screen is the classical architecture itself. This aspect is crucial in connection with the argument put forward in this chapter. Considered inordinately sumptuous and associated with the Habsburg palaces and the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, this architecture is here explicitly linked to the choir. In a Catholic church, the choir is the space in which the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist is re-enacted in the Communion.⁵⁶⁷ Thus, the mystery of faith, the transubstantiation, when the wine and the bread literally become the blood and the body of Christ, took place behind the Renaissance wall of the rood screen. In other words, the lavish marble construction concealed one of the most contested points of Catholic doctrine. It created a barrier between the people and the choir, preventing them from experiencing Communion. Lutheran and Calvinist ministers continually hammered on this ‘injustice’. Bloccius, for instance, kept repeating that ‘Burghers should not be excluded from that Communion.’⁵⁶⁸

By situating the Last Supper in an imposing classical (temple) ruin, Michiel Coxcie was surely evoking associations among his contemporaries: associations with buildings erected by the Habsburgs and their entourage; with early Counter-Reformational rood screens; and with Rome. Was not the new Saint Peter’s in Rome both the monument of Renaissance architecture and one of the most important sources of aggravation for the reformers because it was 'nanced through the sale of indulgences? Coxcie’s use of an ancient setting for the subject was decidedly not unique in the sixteenth century, and neither was the aggravation with the decadence associated with this magni'cent architecture, which was controversial,

Paul Vredeman de Vries and Frans Francken II

Salome with the Head of John the BaptistLemgo, Weserrenaissance-Museum

Schloss Brake (on extended loan from the Staff-Stiftung)

Michiel CoxcieTriptych of the Holy Sacrament Chapel,

1567 (detail of 'g. 213)Brussels, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts

de Belgique/Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België

220

221

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

245

certainly after the beeldenstorm. Lea'ng through Bloccius’s Tvvee hondert ketteryen we come across dozens of quotes condemning the decadence of this kind of marble opulence.

The prominent place of the dresser in Coxcie’s Last Supper is unique. A dresser is a kind of sideboard used in the sixteenth century to display 'ne tableware and was usually found in the sitting room. There are only a very few painted examples of this custom, including Paul Vredeman de Vries’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, in which a dresser laden with silver and gold is depicted against the wall on the right.

A more interesting example in this context is an anonymous drawing of the festivities at Binche Castle on the occasion of Philip II’s visit to the Netherlands in 1549. We see richly laid tables being lowered from a star-spangled sky by means of a complicated mechanical construction, a moveable dresser. The mechanism is concealed behind a Renaissance front. As Mary of Hungary’s court painter, Coxcie – like the anonymous artist who made this drawing – more than likely witnessed this dazzling spectacle.

Another drawing by an anonymous artist shows the prominence of the dresser at feasts held by the highest nobility in the Netherlands. The gouache, which is part of an album of ten drawings, presents a banquet on the occasion of the wedding of Alessandro Farnese and Mary of Portugal in Brussels in 1565.

Coxcie was not the only artist to include a dresser in the context of a Last Supper. Before him, Pieter Coecke had painted a fancy sideboard with pewterware in one of the best versions of his Cena, now in the Brussels museum.⁵⁶⁹ When the debates "ared up again Coxcie emphatically foregrounded an unseemly and anecdotal detail of the widely known image (I referred above to the more than forty known copies). But given the controversy surrounding Communion and the Eucharist this was certainly not without meaning. Within the boundaries of the traditional context of the Last Supper, Coxcie refers to the contemporary custom of publicly displaying expensive household items, even gold and silverwork. In order to understand just how controversial this was in 1567, one year after the beeldenstorm,

743

748

776

774

vrijstaand, met zwart kader

AnonymousEnchanted Room at Binche Castle during the Festivities of 1549Drawing. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes/Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België, Prentenkabinet

AnonymousPourtraictz au vif des Entrees, Festins Joustes & Combatz matrimoniaux celebrees en la Ville de Bruxelles …, 1565Drawing. Warsaw, Biblioteka Uniwersytecka w Warszawie, Print Room

!

222

!"#$%&' (&)&*

246

we need only compare Coxcie’s painting with some contemporary satirical prints and refer to descriptions of the events that took place during the Iconoclastic Fury. In fact, the prints speak for themselves, for in them the iconoclasts are shown hauling the gold and silver liturgical vessels out of the churches and destroying them.⁵⁷⁰ 777

Marcus GheeraertsCaricature of the Catholic Church

Etching.London, The British Museum

!

223

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

247

They bury them, smash them to pieces, burn them. In an anonymous print of 1566 en-titled ‘Tis al verloren ghebeden oft ghescheten’ the iconoclasts and thus the Calvinists’ aversion to the gold and silver liturgical vessels is illustrated even more clearly. The statues, together with the chalices, ciboria and patens, are being trampled on and destroyed by the rebels. Contemporary writings, such as Godevaert van Haecht’s Antwerpsch chronykje or Marcus van Vaernewijk’s account of the 'rst years of the rebellion, contain various descriptions of ‘geuzen’ or rebels who destroy the vasa sacra.⁵⁷¹ Petrus Bloccius was infuriated by the display of gold and silver in churches and houses.⁵⁷² ‘But they do not know that we must not pretend to be wiser than God whose words say that we shall not bring gold and silver into our homes.’⁵⁷³ The apostles had no need of gold or silver chalices, Bloccius argues, and ‘instead of thirty or forty jugs or platters, which [are] a great adornment in the houses of Christians (the heathens love to feast the eyes and fail to see what God commands or forbids, but enrich their houses so, as though they will live there for ever)’, they would be better advised to bring Bibles into their homes.⁵⁷⁴ Great umbrage was taken at the gold and silver vessels, particularly in the church, for the Catholics ‘make a mockery of the bread and turn the food into a sight or spectacle’, writes Marcus van Vaernewijck quoting the iconoclasts: ‘it brings to mind the ostentation of Ahasuerus or the feast of King Belshazzar’. ⁵⁷⁵

Given this context, Coxcie’s innovative dresser was certainly not without meaning. He emphatically refers to the precious metals of which the liturgical vessels of the Catholic clerics were made and explicitly displays this wealth, visually supporting the Catholic practice so contested by the reformers.⁵⁷⁶

779

(4

Anonymous‘Tis al verloren ghebeden oft ghescheten’, 1566Engraving.Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet

vrijstaand

!"#$%&' (&)&*

248

In sum, Coxcie does in fact two things. First, he situates the Last Supper in an ancient temple-like building. In itself this was not new, for a somewhat archaic setting for this subject had become customary in the Low Countries since the introduction of Pieter Coecke’s successful formula. What is new is that Coxcie – Willem Key was the only artist in the Netherlands who preceded him in this regard – used a purely classical architectural background. This maniera all’antica was almost exclusively used by the Habsburgs and their noble and religious entourage to distinguish themselves visually. Second, Coxcie displayed gold and silver plates and drinking vessels on a dresser. This was somewhat more controversial because the expensive, exclusive liturgical vessels offended reformers, in particular the Calvinists. By linking Christ’s Last Supper to ‘papish’ wealth, Coxcie distanced himself pictorially from the reformers’ positions on Communion and the Eucharist. They advocated a celebration of Communion in utter austerity, if need be in the homes of ordinary people, but in any event far removed from the decadent temples of Rome.

¶ Adriaen Thomasz Key’s Last Supper could not be more different.⁵⁷⁷ As noted in Chapter , it is painted on the exterior wings of the altarpiece that Key completed for Gillis de Smidt in 1575, so it originated roughly eight years after Michiel Coxcie’s triptych. De Smidt, a wealthy Antwerp merchant and a syndic of the church of the Recollects, commissioned the triptych for the high altar of the Franciscan church. As altarpieces were kept shut throughout most of the ecclesiastical year, in this case churchgoers generally would only have seen the Last Supper on the exterior. Coxcie had not portrayed Christ blessing the bread and wine, and nor did Key. The mimesis of this moment was still the highpoint of the celebration of mass for all Christians, but around 1575, when Key began working on the triptych, the religious disputes had shattered this perfect image. Just like Leonardo, he depicted Christ in the act of announcing that one of his disciples would betray him that very evening and the consternation this caused among the apostles. Judas, who in keeping with tradition has red hair and wears a yellow toga (the colour of sin), conceals the purse containing his blood money.⁵⁷⁸

In Chapter I concluded that the painting must be read as a Calvinistically inspired humanist manifesto advocating a return to the essence of the Christian belief and the Scriptures.⁵⁷⁹ It may be useful to brie"y review the arguments substantiating this conclusion and supplement them with new information.

Adriaen Thomasz was actually the 'rst to strictly portray the biblical passage on Com-munion. While he consciously referred to compositions by his predecessors, such as Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Willem Key and Michiel Coxcie, he systematically stripped the traditional iconography of all apocryphal decorum: if it was not in the Bible he did not paint it. In this manner he effectuated a particularly humanist idea, namely a return to the primary source. Erasmus zealously advocated – as did Luther and Calvin incidentally – a re-appreciation of the Scriptures as the sole article of faith (Sola Scriptura).⁵⁸⁰ In so doing, the Roman Catholic Church’s appeal to so-called ‘tradition’ was undermined. Following Erasmus, reformers and counter-reformers each strove in their own way to purify the Scriptures, which, naturally, had consequences for the Christian imagery.

In addition to almost systematically stripping the Last Supper of its apocryphal iconographical additions (except for the dog, which is not mentioned in the Bible), Key made two singular innovations: he omitted the architecture, and painted silver cups instead of chalices on the Communion table. It seems to have gone undetected that this was highly

47(, 749

Adriaen Thomasz Key’s ‘Last Supper’

77(

479, 47(, 749

224

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

249

unusual in his day. The Netherlandish pictorial tradition prescribed a monumental ancient setting and chalices.

While we would hardly notice such a distinction, for Key’s contemporaries there was a world of difference between a chalice and a cup. To illustrate this I quote a passage from the Antwerpsch chronykje. Its anonymous author, a convinced papist, describes the way in which the Calffsterten (literally ‘calf’s tails’, as the Calvinists were nicknamed in Antwerp, Ghent and elsewhere in the sixteenth century) celebrated Communion in 1566 in one of their newly built houses of worship: ‘On the Monday after Christmas, the Calffsterten … administered Communion to the people in their new church as follows: there were two preachers in the Mollekes Rame [‘mole’s window’, the church’s nickname], one being brother Isenbrant, who gave the men, twelve of them sitting at a table, a piece of white bread each, saying “take this and eat, for it is the body of Christ which was offered for our sins on the trunk of the Cross”, and he spoke likewise above a silver cup, instead of a chalice. The other [preacher] called Master Joris, a Fleming, distributed [the host] in the same way …’⁵⁸¹

This anonymous witness, and he was probably not alone, clearly took offence at the use of plain white bread and above all silver drinking cups instead of gold or at least gilded chalices as stipulated by Rome.⁵⁸² How could he have failed to notice Key’s silver cups upon entering the church of the Recollects and beholding the Last Supper – all the more so because Key simply eliminated the classical architecture that was part of the decorum of pictures of the subject in the Netherlands. I will return to this below, but would 'rst like to gloss on a few other contemporary sources that also illustrate the commotion about chalices and cups. The iconography of an initially ‘Catholic’ print by Johannes Wierix after a design by Maarten van Heemskerck of 1571 was subsequently (second state) refashioned into a ‘Protestant’ one. In the 775–'

Adriaen Thomasz KeyThe Last SupperExterior wings of the Gillis de Smidt Triptych, 1575Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten

225–226

!"#$%&' (&)&*

250

Johannes Wierix, after Maarten van Heemskerck

Panem nostrum quotidianum danobis hodie, 1571

Engraving, 1st and 2nd statesVienna, Graphische

Sammlung Albertina; Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

251

print Panem nostrum quotidianum danobis hodie (Give us today our daily bread) we see a Gothic Catholic church in which one priest is preaching while another is giving Communion.⁵⁸³ The latter stands before an altar on which the liturgical vessels are displayed as if on a dresser, and above which hangs a triptych. The centre panel of that altarpiece shows Christ on the cross, and on the wings are two Old Testament pre'gurations of the Messiah’s death on the cross.⁵⁸⁴ The priest holds a chalice. Stone statues of the apostles grace the columns, as is customary in Catholic churches. In the second state of the print the statues have vanished and the Communion scene has been radically altered. A man in plain clothing rather than a chasuble stands behind the table and distributes the bread. The bread is in a basket and he holds a cup, not a chalice.

Another visual example, Frans Francken’s altarpiece of the Last Supper with scenes from the life of Christ and the Virgin in Ghent, makes it clear that gold chalices and silver or pewter cups were regarded as fundamentally different.⁵⁸⁵ In it Christ is giving Judas (with dirt under his 'ngernails) a host. He holds a gold chalice far from Judas and in front of Peter, ‘the rock on which he built his Church’ and the 'rst pope of Rome. Peter seems about to take the chalice from Christ. On a small table in the foreground is a cup which is expressly not being used. Francken’s Last Supper thus visualizes Peter’s reception of Christ’s chalice (not the cup) and by extension the Catholic Church.⁵⁸⁶ By the same token it illustrates the priest’s ‘privilige’ to drink the blood of Christ, which was con'rmed at the Council of Trent.⁵⁸⁷

The Calvinist text paintings made after the beeldenstorm to replace the traditional paintings also referred systematically to drincbekers, drinking cups, as in the Last Supper in Saint Bavo’s in Haarlem.⁵⁸⁸ Practically all Reformed writers referred systematically to cups. Not surprisingly, Catholic polemicists used the word ‘chalice’. That a chalice and a cup were considered to be fundamentally different also emerges from the zeal with which the Catholic Church veri'ed whether the parish priests used the appropriate liturgical vessels. The so-called Decanale Visitaties which the deans paid to their parishes to enforce the papal guidelines regarding the liturgy and liturgical objects were established after the Council of Trent, around 1570.⁵⁸⁹ The disposition of the church interior as well as the appropriateness of the works of art there were also subject to investigation. The 'rst decanal reports of the 1570s (only a few have been preserved) evince a preoccupation with the shape and material of liturgical vessels. Cups and chalices were very unalike in the minds of Key’s contemporaries. Even though we have no knowledge of how people reacted to Adriaen Thomasz Key’s Last Supper, at the very least some would have frowned upon seeing the silver cups on the Communion table.

Was Key the 'rst and only artist to paint silver cups? He may well have been, at any event in Antwerp in the second half of the sixteenth century. Only a few Last Supper paintings were produced at that time (or have come down to us), all of them ‘orthodox Catholic’ in the sense that they consistently include a chalice which is either held by Jesus or set before him.⁵⁹⁰ Frans Francken’s polyptych is mentioned above, but there are also depictions by Coxcie, Lambert van Noort, Pieter Pourbus, Maarten de Vos and Frans Pourbus.⁵⁹¹ A chalice is central in every one of them. Willem Key’s Last Supper, the inspiration for Adriaen Thomasz, is an exception because a kind of glass chalice 'lled with water, rather than wine, stands on the right corner of the table. Moreover, Willem Key does not depict the institution of the Eucharist, but the moment when Christ announces his betrayal.

The position of the chalice was also an important issue.⁵⁹² Was the lay community permitted to drink the wine, or was this the sole privilege of the priest, as stipulated by the

772

765, 749

2'–2, 778

47(

227

252

Catholic Church? First Luther, and later most of the other reformers, asserted that Christ had offered the wine to his apostles and therefore Christians were entitled, obligated even, to drink it while taking the Lord’s Supper. Johannes Anastasius Veluanus, Petrus Bloccius and numerous other Reformed pamphleteers also pleaded incessantly for the wine to be shared with the religious community. This was not new; in fact all Protestant movements differed from the Catholic stance on this very point.⁵⁹³ The passage from the Antwerpsch chronykje quoted above and the second state of Maarten van Heemskerck’s print reveal that this was also put into practice. By placing a silver drinking cup 'lled with red wine amidst the apostles – and so not before Christ – Key seems to be tackling this point of contention as well. He does not take a position, however.

Frans Francken IThe Last Supper

Exterior wings of the Altarpiece of the Life of Christ and the VirginGhent, Museum voor Schone

Kunsten

228

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

253

That the Recollects permitted this démarche may seem strange at 'rst, but it actually makes sense given the circumstances surrounding the painting’s genesis. Godevaert van Haecht tells us that in August 1574 the grau monicken, or grey monks, that is the Recollects, gathered in Antwerp to discuss the massive exodus of Catholics. Some of them felt it was ‘necessary for laymen to partake of the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper’.⁵⁹⁴ Although the proposal came to naught, it indicates the monks’ willingness to acknowledge the Reformation and consider a new interpretation of ‘Catholic’ religious practice. Key’s painting, completed one year later and probably commissioned in 1574, visualizes this aspiration.

Let us return to Michiel Coxcie’s Last Supper in which the dresser plays such a prominent role. The prominent silver and goldware so central to the Catholic liturgy stand in sharp contrast to the restraint permeating Key’s picture. In a time when dozens of treatises on the ‘celebration’ of mass were being published, when hundreds of people came to see for themselves how the Reformed administered Communion, and when zealous Calvinists were removing and destroying liturgical vessels, these fundamental iconographic differences cannot be dismissed as meaningless. They penetrated to the very core of the debate and accordingly were visual pamphlets in a bitter struggle.

The absence of the proper vasa sacra is not the only fascinating aspect of Key’s Last Supper, though. The omission of classical architecture, whereby the prevailing visual tradition was so conspicuously ignored, is also notable. Since the success of Pieter Coecke’s Last Supper Antwerp burghers had become used to a rich ancient or purely classical mise en scène. In sixteenth-century Netherlandish interpretations of the subject, Christ is nearly always

479

Maarten de VosThe Last SupperTokyo, Museum of Western Art

!"#$%&' (&)&*

254

shown distributing bread among his disciples in an ancient setting replete with marble columns and pilasters. Pieter Coecke, Pieter Pourbus, Willem Key, Frans Pourbus, Maarten de Vos, Michiel Coxcie and all the others situated the story in (what had to pass for) a classical mansion.⁵⁹⁵

Why did Adriaen Thomasz depict the gathering of Christ and his apostles in a plain room with brownish plaster on the walls? Did this also evoke associations for contemporaries, like the cup? In order to demonstrate that Key’s architecture – or absence thereof – did allude to contemporary events, let us return to Godevaert van Haecht’s chronicle of the 'rst years of the Revolt in the Netherlands. He recounts how after the beeldenstorm and before the arrival of Alba, the Lutherans and the Calvinists were granted the right to build houses of worship.⁵⁹⁶ From the descriptions, they seem to have been simple constructions and in no way comparable to the existing Gothic churches and cathedrals. The masonry must not exceed a height of 've feet (just over one and a half metre) above ground level, and they were completed and put into use within two months. In addition to building new structures, one Calvinist faction also used a converted stable, at least according to the anonymous author of the Antwerpsch chronykje: ‘in the Nieuwstad [new city], a cowshed near the eyschen huys [Hessenhuis?] was made into a church for the Calvinists …’.⁵⁹⁷ The shed had been used surreptitiously as a clandestine church for years, leading the cynics to call the Calvinists kalveren, or calves. Judging from the accounts this space could not have been very large either.

Very little is actually known about the sixteenth-century ‘temples’ of the Lutherans and Calvinists in the Low Countries and in particular in Antwerp. Andrew Spicer recently published an excellent study on the buildings that reformers erected for the sake of their services in the Low Countries and elsewhere, and a few years ago Joris Snaet wrote an article on the 'rst Protestant temples in the Netherlands.⁵⁹⁸ They were all built shortly after the beeldenstorm in the autumn of 1566 and destroyed upon Alba’s arrival in 1567, but it is nevertheless possible to distil a somewhat reliable picture of such a ‘Beggars’ church’ in Antwerp from the known descriptions. Very little information is available about the interior of the Antwerp temples, but according to Van Vaernewijk, the one in Ghent was plastered with ‘tanner’s mortar’.⁵⁹⁹ It is more than plausible that the sheds and stables Van Haecht mentioned were also 'nished with this brownish plaster. In any case, the constructions were rudimentary, swiftly built and functional. Their interiors in no way recalled the tracery in Gothic cathedrals or the multicoloured marble classical Roman temples and Renaissance churches.

For their celebration of the Lord’s Supper the Antwerp Calvinists placed a ‘long table draped with a white linen cloth’ at which the faithful took their seat.⁶⁰⁰ The anonymous author of the Antwerpsch chronykje noted that they did this in groups of twelve; according to Van Haecht, this was as many as could be accommodated.⁶⁰¹ When they were done, a new group of worshippers took their place and Communion continued in this fashion throughout the night.

The image of a converted stable plastered with tanner’s mortar with in its centre a table covered with a white linen cloth combined with the knowledge that the traditional location for the Last Supper in paintings of this subject in the Netherlands was an opulent Roman residence makes clear just how far-reaching was Key’s alteration of the traditional decorum of the scene. How could such a radical reworking of a controversial subject with a conventional iconography not provoke all kinds of questions and associations for his contemporaries. We should not forget that hundreds of people gaped at the Calvinist

22, 479, 47(,

765, 749, 778

77(

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

255

Communion in Antwerp; according to Van Haecht, some even came especially from other cities to witness the spectacle.⁶⁰²

Besides being a kind of theological manifesto, the omission of the lavish architecture in Key’s Last Supper was also thinly veiled social criticism. The apostles, and Christ in particular, wear plain clothes. Some togas, like Christ’s, are almost rags. Only Judas’s clothing is costly.⁶⁰³ Reformist scholars, inside and outside the Church, were deeply critical of the sumptuous lifestyle of the bishops and popes which, according to them, was far removed from the basic tenets of Christianity. The overelaborate vestments and expensive liturgical vessels used for the rites were a thorn in the "esh of reformers, such as Petrus Bloccius, for ‘the apostles travelled without money and without bags’.⁶⁰⁴ ‘But now one sees more adornment in the papist temples than in the houses of princes; and with such haughtiness they want to pray, sing, preach …’, Bloccius wrote, denouncing the wealth of the Catholic clerics.⁶⁰⁵

This social criticism was omnipresent in the sixteenth century. Someone like Erasmus, who could not be accused of apostasy, also strongly objected to the luxury in which some clergymen wallowed.⁶⁰⁶ The construction of Saint Peter’s in Rome – the most important ‘neo-antique’ structure – and the countless indulgences sold to realize it, had been the straw that broke the camel’s back for Luther.⁶⁰⁷ He believed that faith was being abused to feed Rome’s decadence. Calvin even turned the socio-economic issues into a capital offence and put his socio-economic ideas about a new relationship into practice in ‘his’ Geneva.⁶⁰⁸

It would be too far-fetched to suggest that Adriaen Thomasz Key took an unequivocal stance. Even so, he broached the points of contention and alluded to reform-minded concerns with respect to Communion or the Eucharist. I suspect that while Key did not fully fathom the theological complexity of the ‘Communion controversy’, he did have a thorough understanding of the problems surrounding its interpretation. At the very least he might have read a few of the numerous pamphlets and arrived at his solution in consultation with his patrons. Like his confrère Godevaert van Haecht, he was probably aware of the Recollects council in 1574, at which the adjustment of the liturgy was discussed.⁶⁰⁹ In any case, as a painter with Calvinist convictions Key must have heard Reformed preachers fulminating against the Catholic sacraments at one of the many secret gatherings that were held at that time. He would have been privy to how the Reformed celebrated Communion in stables, sheds or back rooms, and he surely must have apprehended how Bloccius or people like him perceived the Last Supper and other religious matters. ‘Like John baptized in the Jordan and Philip in the water that was near him. Should we not also be allowed to break bread at home, like Christ and the apostles did?’ With these ideas, among others, Bloccius criticized the Catholics’ ‘afgoddische tempels’.⁶¹⁰ Key’s Last Supper touches the very heart of the Christian creed and the essence of the revolt against the Catholic doctrine and its dogmas. Key, informed by his Calvinist background, went in search of a new kind of pictorial ecumenicism. His solution was deemed valid by his patrons and the Recollects. Instead of an arrogant glori'cation of Catholic wealth, as is the case with Coxcie, his Last Supper is a Spartan mimesis of the biblical story set in sober surroundings. Christ directs his gaze directly at the faithful – who would have been riddled with doubts in the 1570s – and seems to be entreating them to think deeply about their religious convictions. In this sense, Key’s Last Supper also has a missionary bent to it, while Coxcie’s triptych will surely have served to reinforce the convictions of Calvinist sympathizers.

Recapitulating, Adriaen Thomasz Key’s reworking of the setting functioned as a new decorum and ran counter to the fashionable classical architectural motifs used by the rulers

229

!"#$%&' (&)&*

256

in the Netherlands until then, as seen in the work of Michiel Coxcie, among others. Moreover, it is important to take into account the historical context, on the eve of the Paci'cation of Ghent (1576). Luis de Zúñiga y Requesens had taken over from Alba and reversed some of his despised decisions: the Council of Blood was abolished and the tenth penny tax rescinded. Longing for peace, the population could breathe more freely. The terror was over, up to a point. And those pleading for religious tolerance could raise their voices.

¶ Because Adriaen Thomasz Key experimented so emphatically with decorum and archi-tecture played such an important role in this, it is worthwhile investigating whether this approach can also be found in his other devotional or history paintings. The answer is yes. Key’s painting is most certainly characterized by a puri'cation of the imagery and a reduction of the iconography to the bare minimum. For example, he drastically reduced the iconography in his nude image of Mary Magdalene discussed above.⁶¹¹ The saint stands before a dark back-ground and can be identi'ed only by the alabaster jar of ointment. The depiction is devoid of any landscape or architectural elements, which was truly unique in the second half of the sixteenth century. The same holds true for his Saint Jerome. Only a vague wall serves to indicate that the Church Father is in his studio. How different this is in the work of, say, Coxcie and in all earlier renditions of this subject for that matter. Key did not succumb to the temptation of devising imaginary spaces in which Jerome could have worked.⁶¹² Once again, the iconography is boiled down to its very essence. This puri'cation of the imagery found favour among both Catholic theologians, such as Johannes Molanus, and moderate Calvinists and Lutherans. It is a quest for a solution to the image con"ict through ‘visual ecumenicism’.

While Key systematically reduces and eliminates architecture, Coxcie never does. In fact, the reverse is true. His scenes are virtually always set in an imposing framework. Whether they are scenes from the life of Christ or the Virgin or the martyrdom of the saints, com manding Greco-Roman structures are practically always part of the decor. From a purely art-historical perspective he simply followed in the wake of Renaissance grandees such as Raphael. Yet matters were hardly that simple in the Netherlands after the beeldenstorm. Every style was suspect! Classical architecture was associated with the papists and the Habsburg rulers. Coxcie must have known this but nonetheless continued working in this style. No wonder that after the Fall of Antwerp in 1585 the elderly painter was called upon to jump start the Counter-Reformation in the cathedrals of Mechelen and of Antwerp. He received the most important altarpiece commissions and worked consistently in the style he had never relinquished.⁶¹³ The curtain closed on Adriaen Thomasz Key.

How about other painters? Did Frans Pourbus the Elder, Gillis Coignet, Jacob de Backer and their likes also experiment with architectural decorum? I will limit myself here to Gillis Mostaert and examine some cabinet pictures in which the architectural setting deeply affects the picture’s meaning.

One example has already been discussed above, namely Paul and Barnabas at Lystra. But this is not the only painting in which the man who was ‘neither very religious nor of proper Spanish persuasion’ presented his view of contemporary events.⁶¹⁴ Mostaert comments on the perils of religion in his Ecce Homo before the Old City Hall of Antwerp and the setting once again provides the key to its interpretation.⁶¹⁵

The scene from the Passion of Christ is told in the Gospel according to John (19:5–7):

Other masters and architecture

46(

'', '2

88

773

763

96Michiel Coxcie

The Circumcision of Christ, 1587Mechelen, Saint Rombout’s

Cathedral

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

257

230

231

!"#$%&' (&)&*

258

Gillis Mostaert and Hans Vredeman de Vries

The Judgement of ZaleucusAntwerp, private collection

Gillis Mostaert and Hans Vredeman de Vries

The Massacre of the Roman Triumvirate

Tarbes, Musée Massey

Vredeman en Mostaert Massacre

!

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

259

‘Then Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And [Pilate] said to them, “Behold the Man!” Therefore, when the chief priests and of'cers saw Him, they cried out, saying, “Crucify [Him], crucify [Him]!” Pilate said to them, “You take Him and crucify [Him], for I 'nd no fault in Him. The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to our law He ought to die …’ The event is not set in classical antiquity, as prescribed by Renais-sance decorum, but in the sixteenth-century Brabant city of Antwerp. Christ is shown to the people on the steps of the ‘old’ city hall of the Scheldt city. When Mostaert made this painting, this building had already been replaced by Cornelis Floris de Vriendt’s new Renaissance city hall.

Mostaert’s work is a curious combination of biblical events and 'gures in a contemporary setting. The painting might seem to portray a Passion play being performed by rhetoricians in the market square, but that is not the case. Mostaert’s painting is a complex indictment against the persecution of the Protestants and unvarnished criticism of the Spanish governors. In the foreground Franciscans and Dominicans call out for the execution of Christ. Both religious orders were under 're at the time because of their involvement in the Inquisition. Spanish soldiers – wearing the uniform of Alba’s troops – guard the city hall and show the helpless man, Christ, to the people. The Spanish are thus identi'ed with the Catholics, and the Catholic clergymen with the Jews who turned their back on Christ’s message. The public consists of a mixed bag of 'gures in contemporary and historicizing, ancient attire. Some of them were recently identi'ed as major players of the time: William of Orange, the Duke of Anjou, Philip II, and so forth.⁶¹⁶

What is highly interesting here is the architecture. Mostaert chose to illustrate Antwerp’s old rather than its new city hall. Around 1578, when this panel originated, the Calvinists had assumed power in the grand new building ('nished in 1564). The former Gothic city hall with statues in the niches, which had already been demolished by then, symbolizes the old ousted regime. Elisabeth Honig noted correctly that the city hall was where justice was administered, while the market was the place of execution.⁶¹⁷ Thus the old jurisprudence denouncing Christ himself is called into question. To crown it all, Mostaert painted idols in the niches above Christ. Attention is drawn to them by the Jewish high priest in a long white gown who points to them. The architectural setting and the composition compel the viewer to read the scene as a metaphor of the wicked injustice under the ‘Spanish rule’ of Philip II.

An unpublished painting that can be securely attributed to Gillis Mostaert and Hans Vredeman de Vries recently surfaced at auction in 2008 under the erroneous title ‘L’annonceur public’.⁶¹⁸ Its subject – The Judgement of Zaleucus – derived from Greek history,⁶¹⁹ was rarely depicted in the sixteenth century, and even less so in the Netherlands.⁶²⁰ Zaleucus was a Greek lawgiver active around 660 bc. He drew up the 'rst Greek code of law, called the Locrian Code (Epizephyrian Locris, Italy), and determined that the penalty for adultery was the loss of one’s eyes. Zaleucus’s impartiality was soon tested when his own son was condemned of this crime. Zaleucus refused to exonerate him, but sacri'ced one of his own eyes to spare his son from total blindness. The legendary story of Zaleucus’s administration of justice is generally read as a warning to the legislative and judiciary powers to be merciful. In the sixteenth century these had not yet been separated and the king was both lawgiver and judge.

As in all works issuing from the collaboration between Hans Vredeman de Vries and Gillis Mostaert, the scene is dominated by a scenographia, an architectural perspective. Vredeman was responsible for the architecture and Mostaert for the 'gures in the

796

794

232

233

!"#$%&' (&)&*

260

foreground. However, in contrast to virtually all other perspectives by Vredeman something exceptional is going on here, as it is a strange combination of sixteenth-century Southern Netherlandish archi tecture and an imaginary Renaissance structure. At the left, behind the classical temple pediment where the sentence is being read and the punishment carried out, is a row of houses similar to those found along Antwerp’s Grote Markt. Opposite it, on the other side of the street, it is as if we step into antiquity. Indeed, one of the buildings can be identi'ed as the Spaengien Guild House on Grote Markt:⁶²¹ the house of the ‘Oude Voetboog’ Guild which had borne this name since at least 1397. Immediately recognizable is the statue of Saint George crowning the façade: it occupies a central place right in the middle of the row of houses and the panel itself.⁶²²

The entire composition and the architecture framing it are hardly a coincidence. The Spaengien Guild House – a familiar sight to Antwerp citizens in the sixteenth century – is here emphatically linked to a scene of judgement. At the very least, Vredeman and Mostaert subtly alluded to the jurisdiction of Spaengien, that is ‘Spain’ or the Spanish king. Because the entire scene is so decidedly staged in their own time, it is well worth asking whether the artits were not referring to contemporary events, for instance the General Pardon Alba announced on the Grote Markt in Antwerp on 16 July 1570.⁶²³ This was a rare act of clemency on the part of the Spanish king and the pope. Reading the description of the event in Godevaert van Haecht’s chronicle we instantly recognize several references, such as the stairs, the red carpet and the reciting of a text.⁶²⁴ Naturally, the scene is not an accurate record of this event, but Vredeman and Mostaert may well have been referring to the announcement of the pardon. They often alluded to contemporary events in other paintings. The Massacre of the Roman Triumvirate, the picture most closely related to the Judgement of Zaleucus and which is dated 1570, is also a reference to topical events.⁶²⁵

¶ In conclusion, we should remember that the Duke of Alba headed the ruthless Council of Blood and that his son Fadrique was his most important ally. A story about a father and a son and about ruthless corporal punishment would surely have fascinated the Antwerp population in the 1570s.

The beeldenstorm propelled art into the middle of public attention in the Low Countries – this much is clear. But with the attack on sculptures and paintings the entire church interior was under discussion. What should a church be, what architecture was suitable and how should it be embellished? At 'rst sight these seem to be questions best answered by architectural historians, and yet nothing is further from the truth. Painters too, who used architectural elements as decor for their ‘biblical histories’ could no longer do so with impunity after the beeldenstorm. All architecture de facto laid the problem of decorum on the table: contemporary religious practice was weighed against the words and deeds of Christ and his apostles. For some it was too super'cial, for others too profound. Most believers, though, had one thing in common: they questioned the past and the future of religion, its temples and its rites.

797–9

79(

The Spaengien Guild House on Antwerp’s Grote Markt

Gillis Mostaert and Hans Vredeman de Vries

The Judgement of Zaleucus (detail of 'g. 230)

Antwerp, private collection

!

234

!"# $"%&$" '( &%'()

261

Cornelis van DalemInterior of a Church with Christ Preaching to a CrowdAmsterdam, Rijksmuseum