Author: Will Durant
Category: Nonfiction
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Hubert van Eyck moves out of our ken after 1432,* but we can vaguely follow Jan through a prosperous career. Philip the Good made him varlet de chambre (then a position of much dignity and affluence), and sent him abroad with embassies as a jewel from the Burgundian crown. Some twenty-four extant paintings are ascribed to him, and nearly every one is a chefd’œuvre. Dresden has a Virgin and Child second only to the Adoration in the Van Eyck production; Berlin boasts The Man with the Pink—a dour face strangely incongruous with the fondled flower; Melbourne has the brilliantly colored “Ince Hall Madonna” hardly nine inches by six, yet valued at $250,000; Bruges treasures The Madonna with Canon van der Paele—the Virgin lovely from her flowing hair to the hem of her marvelously wrinkled gown, the Canon fat and bald and good-natured, one of the great portraits of the fifteenth century; London shows the newly weds Giovanni Arnolfini and his spouse in an interior sparkling with mirror and chandelier; the Frick Collection in New York has recently acquired, at unstated but enormous cost, a richly colored Virgin and Child with Sts. Barbara and Elizabeth; Washington has an Annunciation remarkable for its illusion of spatial depth, and for the splendor of Gabriel’s raiment, which steals the scene from Mary; and the Louvre owns The Madonna with Chancellor Rolin, with a fascinating landscape of winding river, crowded bridge, towered city, flowered gardens, and a range of hills rising to greet the sun. In all of these, besides their full-bodied colors, there is a resolve to picture the donors as they were and looked, to reveal on a face the life its owner had led, the thoughts and feelings that through the years had formed the features into a confession of character. In such portraits the medieval spirit of idealization is set aside, and a modern naturalism—perhaps reflecting middle-class secularism—is in full swing.
Many other painters reached renown in that fertile land and age: Petrus Christus, Jacques Daret, Robert Campin (“the Master of Flemalle”). We bow to them humbly and pass on to Campin’s pupil Roger de la Pasture. By the age of twenty-seven Roger had made such a name for himself in his native Tournai that it gave him twice the three measures or casks of wine that it had voted to Jan van Eyck. Nevertheless he accepted an invitation to be official painter for Brussels, and thenceforth gave his name the Flemish form Rogier van der Weyden. In 1450, aged fifty-one, he went to Rome for the jubilee, met Italian painters, and was feted as a world celebrity; possibly oil painting in Italy was advanced by his influence. When he died at Brussels in 1464 he was the most widely renowned artist in all Europe.
He is preserved in quantity. He too painted Philip the Good, Rolin—Philip’s chancellor for forty years—Charles the Bold, and many other celebrities. Beautiful beyond description is the Portrait of a Lady in the Washington National Gallery—embodied pugnacity and piety, modesty and pride. In portraiture Rogier was too romantic to match Jan van Eyck; but in his religious pictures he revealed a tenderness and refinement of sentiment, and an emotional intensity, missing in Jan’s masculine and matter-of-fact art; here, it may be, the French or Italian spirit spoke through the Flemish form,12 and the medieval mood revived.
Like the Italians, Rogier recorded the vital episodes in the moving story of Mary and her Son: Gabriel announcing to a startled girl that she is to be the mother of God; the Infant in the manger; the adoration of the Magi; St. Luke painting the Virgin as she nurses her Babe; the visit of Mary to Elizabeth; the mother happily contemplating her Child; the presentation in the temple; the Crucifixion; the descent from the cross; the Resurrection; the Last Judgment. In this final scene Rogier reached his apogee, in a complex polyptych probably designed, but not quite worthy, to rival The Adoration of the Lamb. It was painted for Rolin, and is now in the pretty hospital that the great chancellor founded in Beaune. In the central panel Christ sits in judgment, but more tempered with mercy than in Michelangelo; on either side angels robed in gleaming white carry the instruments of His passion and death; below them Michael the Archangel weighs in a scale the good and the bad; at the left Mary kneels in adoration and supplication; on one side the saved genuflect in grateful prayer, on the other the damned tumble in terror into hell. Almost as famous as this painting is a triptych in Antwerp illustrating the Seven Sacraments with symbolic scenes. And then, lest we think him quite lost in pious ecstasy, Rogier paints a bathing beauty, and two youths peeping at her through a chink in the wall, with that anomalous anatomical curiosity which satisfaction never satisfies.
IV. CHARLES THE BOLD: 1465–77
All this effervescence evaporated under the hot temper of Charles le Téméraire, the Rash, commonly miscalled the Bold. Rogier van der Weyden pictured him as the handsome, serious, black-haired young Count of Charolais, who led his father’s armies to bloody victories and champed the bit waiting for him to die. In 1465 Philip the Good, sensing his impatience, yielded the government to him, and relished the youth’s ambition and energy.
Charles resented the division of his duchy into northern and southern provinces severed in space and diverse in speech; he resented more the feudal fealty that he owed for some of these provinces to the French King, for others to the German Emperor. He longed to make Greater Burgundy, like the Lotharingia (Lorraine) of the ninth century, a middle kingdom between Germany and France, physically coherent and politically sovereign. Even, at times, he mused that the opportune deaths of a few intervening heirs would hand him the French, English, and Imperial crowns, and raise him to a pinnacle beside the loftiest figures in history.13 To realize these dreams he organized the best standing army in Europe, taxed his subjects beyond precedent, disciplined himself to every hardship and trial, and gave neither his mind nor his body, neither his friends nor his foes, any respite of ease or peace.
However, Louis XI thought of Burgundy as still an appanage of France, and fought his rich vassal with superior strategy and guile. Charles joined French nobles in war against Louis; he won some further towns, and the lasting enmity of an undiscourageable king. In that struggle Dinant and Liège revolted against Burgundy and declared for France, and some enthusiasts at Dinant labeled a hanged effigy of Charles as the bastard son of a careless priest. Charles shot down the walls of the city, gave it over to three days of pillage by his troops, enslaved all men, expelled all women and children, burned all buildings to the ground, and threw 800 of the rebels, bound hand and foot, into the Meuse (1466). Philip died in the following June, and the Count of Charolais became Charles the Bold. He renewed the war with Louis, and compelled his company and co-operation in the siege of repeatedly rebellious Liège. The starving citizens offered Charles all their goods in return for their lives; he rejected the bargain; the city was plundered down to the last dwelling and chapel; chalices were snatched from the hands of priests celebrating Mass; all captives who could not pay a heavy ransom were drowned (1468).14
The world, though long inured to violence, could not forgive Charles his severity, nor his unfeudal imprisonment and humiliation of his King. When he conquered Gelderland, acquired Alsace, and stepped on Imperial toes by interfering in Cologne and besieging Neuss, all his neighbors took steps to check him. Peter van Hagenbach, whom he had appointed to govern Alsace, so provoked the citizens with his insolence, rapacity, and cruelty, that they hanged him; and as Swiss merchants had been among Peter’s victims, and French gold was strategically distributed in Switzerland, and the cantons felt their liberties imperiled by the spread of Charles’s power, the Swiss Confederation declared war on him to the death (1474). Charles left Neuss, turned south, conquered Lorraine—so for the first time uniting the ends of his duchy—and marched his army over the Jura into Vaud. The Swiss were the doughtiest warriors of the age; they defeated Charles near Granson, and again near Morat (1476); the Burgundians were routed, and Charles neared insanity in his grief. Lorraine saw its chance and rebelled; the Swiss sent men.
Louis sent money, to help the revolt. Charles formed a new army, fought the allies near Nancy, and in that battle met defeat and death (1477). On the morrow his body, stripped naked by ghouls, was found half submer
ged in a pond, the face frozen fast in the ice. He was forty-four years old. Burgundy was absorbed into France.
V. ART IN THE LOWLANDS: 1465–1515
Southern Flanders declined for a time after Philip the Good. Political disturbances drove many weavers to England; the growth of the British clothing industry took trade and raw materials from the Flemish cities; by 1520 English cloth crowded the markets of Flanders itself. Brussels, Mechlin, and Valenciennes survived through superior lace, carpets, tapestries, and jewelry, Namur by its leather, Louvain through its university and its beer. About 1480 the canal that brought the sea to Bruges began to silt its bed; heroic efforts were made to clear it; wind and sand won; after 1494 seagoing vessels could no longer reach Bruges. Soon its merchants, then its workers, left Bruges for Antwerp, which deep-draught ships could enter by the estuaries of the Scheldt. Antwerp signed agreements with English exporters, and shared with Calais the British trade with the Continent.
Life in Holland existed by grace of the dykes, which had to be repeatedly rebuilt, and might at any time collapse; some gave way in 1470 and drowned 20,000 of the population. The only major industry was the capture and cure of herring. Holland produced many of the famous painters of this period, but was too poor to hold them; all but Geertgen tot Sint Jans migrated to Flanders.
There, even in cities that suffered decline, rich burghers dressed gorgeously, dwelt in sturdy brick houses luxuriously furnished—hung with the tapestries of Arras or Brussels, and gleaming with the brass vessels of Dinant. They built lovely churches like Nôtre Dame du Sablon at Brussels and St. Jacques at Antwerp, raised stone by stone the towering façade of Antwerp Cathedral, and began the proud town hall of Ghent. They financed the painters, sat for portraits, bribed heaven with votive art, and allowed their women to read books. Perhaps it was their earthy mood that led Flemish painting, in its second flowering, to stress realism and landscape even in religious pictures, and to seek new subjects in homes and fields.
Dirk Bouts inaugurated realism with the exaggerations natural to innovators. He came from his native Haarlem to Brussels, studied there under Rogier van der Weyden, settled in Louvain, and painted for its church of St. Pierre a polyptych, The Last Supper, with an interesting panel—Passover in a Jewish Family—which seemed to suggest that the Last Supper was the celebration of an orthodox Hebrew rite by Jews still faithful to Judaism. For a chapel in the same church Bouts painted The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus with a shocking literalness: two executioners turn a windlass that slowly draws the intestines from the naked saint. In The Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus four horses, driven in four directions, pull out the arms and legs of the holy victim. In The Beheading of the Innocent Knight a cavalier, vengefully accused by an unsuccessfully amorous empress of trying to seduce her, has his head cut off; the bleeding corpse straddles the foreground, the severed head rests comfortably in the widow’s lap; Bouts almost redeems his violence with the calm content of the dying and the dead. There are vivid colors in these paintings, now and then a good landscape or perspective; but their mediocre drawing, rigid figures, and lifeless faces suggest that time does not always winnow wisely.
Probably Hugo van der Goes took his surname from Goes in Zeeland, and was another instance of Holland’s generating and losing genius. In 1467 he was admitted to the guild of painters at Ghent. It bespeaks the repute of Flemish painting that an Italian merchant in Flanders chose him to paint an immense triptych for the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in a Florence already teeming with artists. Hugo chose for his theme the phrase Quem genuit adoravit—” Whom she bore she adored.” The life-size figure of the Virgin, rapt in reverence, is masterly; a shepherd at the left anticipates the magic of Raphael and Titian; the winter landscape is a novel achievement in delicate fidelity to nature. Vigorous realism, original composition, accurate drawing, incisive delineation of character, placed Van der Goes at the top of the Flemish school in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Whether to find more quiet for his work, or to calm the religious fears that obsessed him, he entered a monastery near Brussels (c. 1475), where he continued to paint and (says a brother monk) drink excessively. The notion that God had destined him for eternal damnation darkened his sober moments, and drove him into insanity.15
Vespasiano da Bisticci tells us that about 1468 Duke Federigo of Urbino sent to Flanders for a painter to decorate his study, since he “knew of no one in Italy who understood how to paint in oil colors.”16 Joost van Wassenhoeve, a, friend of Van der Goes’, accepted the call, settled in Urbino, and came to be known as Justus van Ghent. He composed for the learned Duke twenty-eight pictures of philosophers, and for an Urbino fraternity an altarpiece, The Institution of the Sacrament. Though these works are Flemish in style, they date a growing exchange of influence between Flanders and Italy: an increased use of oil, and a trend to realism, in Italian painters, and the infiltration of Italian idealism and techniques into Flemish art.
Hans Memling, though we have no record of his visiting Italy, brought into his painting an elegance and delicacy that he may have acquired from the painters of Cologne, or from Rogier van der Weyden, or that may have come up from Venice and along the Rhine to Mainz. Born near Mainz, and probably named from his native Mömlingen, Hans left Germany for Flanders and Bruges about 1465. There, three years later, Sir John Donne, a visiting Englishman, commissioned him to paint a Virgin Enthroned. It was conventional in conception and composition, but it already displayed Memling’s technical competence, his refinement of feeling, and his professional piety. St. John the Baptist was represented with Flemish realism, St. John the Evangelist with Fra Angelico idealism; and the rising individualism of art betrayed itself in the surreptitious portrait of Memling peering around a pillar.
Like Perugino a generation later, Memling made a hundred Madonnas, tenderly maternal, divinely calm. They hang on museum walls wherever the eye can reach: in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Florence, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, London, New York, Washington, Cleveland, Chicago. Two of the best are in the hospital of St. John at Bruges; Mary dominates The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, where almost every figure is superb; she presides again in The Adoration of the Child, but there the Magi—one a veritable Privy Councilor Goethe—capture the scene. In a panoramic painting at Munich Memling pictured all the major episodes in the recorded life of Christ. In another at Turin he told the story of the Passion with such a medley of men and women as even Brueghel would find it hard to outnumber. For the organ case of a monastery at Najera, in Spain, he composed a triptych of Christ Surrounded by Angels, rivaling Melozzo da Forlì’s Angeli Musicanti of a few years before; and the Antwerp Museum did not think itself bilked when it paid 240,000 francs ($1,200,000?) for this picture in 1896.17 Another multiple altarpiece, The Last Judgment, was painted for Iacopo Tani, an agent for Lorenzo de’ Medici in Bruges; it was put on a ship bound for Italy, but the vessel was seized by a Hanseatic skipper, who kept the cash and let the picture go to the Marienkirche of Danzig.18
In these major works, and in individual panels, Memling painted some admirable portraits: Martin van Nieuwenhoev and A Woman—stately under her lofty hat and with her many rings—both in the hospital at Bruges; A Young Man in the London Gallery; An Old Man in New York; The Man with an Arrow in Washington. They do not reach the inspiration or penetration of Titian or Raphael or Holbein, but they catch simple surfaces with workmanlike skill. The occasional nudes —Adam and Eve, Bathsheba at the Bath—do not allure.
Toward the end of his career Memling decorated for the hospital in Bruges a Gothic shrine designed to receive the relics of St. Ursula. In eight panels he told how the pious maiden, betrothed to Prince Conon, deferred their marriage till she might make a pilgrimage to Rome; how she sailed, with 11,000 virgins, up the Rhine to Basel, led them trippingly over the Alps, basked in the blessings of the Pope, and how, on their return, all 11,001 were martyred by pagan Huns at Cologne. Nine years later (1488) Carpaccio told the same pretty absurdity, with more accurate drawing and finer coloring
, for the School of St. Ursula in Venice.
It is unfair to Memling, or any painter, to look at his pictures wholesale; each was meant for a separate time and place, and there conveyed his lyric quality. To view them in the gross is at once to perceive his limitations—his narrowness of range and style, the monotony of his portraits, even of his modest Madonnas with their streaming golden hair. The surface is lovely or true, and shines with smooth, bright hues; but the brush rarely reaches to the soul beneath, to the secret loneliness, wonderment, aspirations, griefs. There is no life in Memling’s women; and when he unclothes them we are chagrined to find them all stomach and tiny breasts. Perhaps the fashion in such items was different then than now; even our desires may be indoctrination. Yet we must acknowledge that when Memling died (1495) he was, by the common consent of his patrons and his rivals, the leading painter north of the Alps. If other artists felt his faults more keenly than their own, they could not match the delicacy of his style, the purity of his sentiment, the splendor of his coloring. For a generation his influence was supreme in the Flemish school.
Gerard David continued the mood. Coming from Holland to Bruges about 1483, he felt the spell of Memling’s aria dolce; his Madonnas are almost identical with Memling’s; perhaps they shared a model between them. Sometimes, as in The Rest on the Flight to Egypt (Washington), he equaled Memling in the demure beauty of the Virgin, and surpassed him in delineating the Child. In his older years David followed trade and moved to Antwerp. The school of Bruges ended with him, while that of Antwerp was beginning with Quentin Massys.