Pero Tafur (c.1410–c.1484), a nobleman from Castile, who
in the 1430s undertook an extensive journey across Europe
Although northern painters, in particular,excelled in the creation of spatial, and other, illusions, it is only one ofthe many visual strategies which these sophisticated artists wielded, and theidea that this period witnessed a progressive advance towards greater naturalismor that this was the aim of any farsighted Renaissance artist is one thatshould not be encouraged.
Indeed where we have evidence of what was important to contemporary audiences, it tends to indicate that materials, their quality, and the skill of the artist in their manipulation and deployment were more current considerations when images were made, used, viewed, and valued than the more modern interest in style.
Names:
Margaret of Austria and Catherine of Aragon
the painter Friedrich Herlin (c.1425/30–1500, see 153) and the carpenter Hansen Waidenlich
Philip the Good wanted the cartoons for his tapestries of the story of Gideon painted by ‘Bauduin de Bailleul or by another better painter that they may fi nd’.
Claus Sluter (c.1360–1406)
Veit Stoss (c.1445/50–1533) carved wood
In this we can start to understand artistic choices as well as patronal desires, driven, in most cases, by practical and technical considerations: cost, availability, time, durability, visibility, and decorum.
the earliest historians of Netherlandish painting, such as the Italian Ludovico Guicciardini (1521–89) and the Netherlander Karel van Mander (1548–1606)
the great twentieth- century art historian, Max J. Friedländer (1867–1958)
bearing the date 6 May 1432, it measures over 5 metres across when open, making it also one of the largest surviving panels from this period
Albrecht Dürer was among the many to admire it; Antonio de Beatis, secretary to the Cardinal of Aragon, in 1517 on a visit from Naples declared it ‘the fi nest painting in Christendom’; in the later sixteenth century a lengthy ode was composed in its honour by the Ghent painter and poet Lucas de Heere, and it was the only painting outside of Italy that was specifi cally cited by Giorgio Vasari in 1568.4
Indeed, it is likely that if more works from the southern Netherlands in the century before this was made survived, we would fi nd this was certainly not the case: in terms of technique and form it was undoubtedly part of a long tradition of oil painting and altarpiece design that we can now only glimpse, literally, fragments of.
On 19 August 1566, during a wave of iconoclasm which swept the Netherlands, an eye witness account by the Ghent historian Marcus van Vaernewijck (1516–69) recorded how the Ghent Altarpiece was ‘taken to pieces and lifted, panel by panel, into the tower’ to preserve it from the rioters. 6 It was again nearly destroyed just ten years later, in another outbreak of image-directed violence, this time preserved only by a special guard placed on the work.
Napoleon!
the four central panels were looted by his troops and taken to the French capital. While the display of these panels in the Louvre gave them important publicity and, in eff ect, began the modern phase of the study of early Netherlandish art, the taste of that period on the whole did not favour works of this type.
Rogier van der Weyden’s (c.1399–1464) depiction of a church interior in his Exhumation of St Hubert [6], made for a chapel in the church of St Gudule in Brussels, gives some sense of the range of imagery evoked by van Varnewijck’s descriptions, and shows how any one image would necessarily be seen in relation to other images, repeating, enlarging, or diversifying the chosen themes and the most important religious fi gures.8
Some churches retain a sense of this visual complexity today, such as St Martin at Halle, near Brussels, St Leonard at Zoutleeuw, near Liège, or St Lorenz in Nuremberg [103, 149].9 Th e van Eycks’ altarpiece would have been viewed in a similarly rich visual context that we can only evoke today.
Wars which raged between France and Spain in the seventeenth century, fought mostly in the Netherlands, also took their toll: in 1695 Brussels, one of the central towns of the southern Netherlands from a political and artistic point of view, was bombarded, the most tragic loss being in the town hall, where a work which was as famous and signifi cant as the Ghent Altarpiece, the monumental scenes of the Justice of Trajan and Herkinbald by Rogier van der Weyden, perished in the fi re.1
Th e loss of these works is perhaps the single most destructive blow to our understanding of early Netherlandish painting, since if they had survived our view of the most infl uential and inventive painter of this period would have been very different: art historians trying to reconstruct the artistic personality of Rogier in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have had a signed undisputed, accessible work by him. In addition, these panels would have provided rare examples of monumental, narrative panel paintings of secular subjects, set in situ.
our earliest description of them is from 1453, when the German cardinal, Nicolas of Cusa, referred to them as ‘the very precious painting which is in the council room, of the very great painter Roger in Brussels’.
the closest surviving parallels in scale and nature are the Justice scenes by Dieric Bouts
the French revolution
Tombs were particular targets, and our only record of many of the most important monuments of the period is through the drawings made by antiquarians like Roger de Gaignières or Jacques-Philippe Gilquin in the eighteenth century [10]. Probably the biggest casualty for us in this context is a Burgundian monument: the Chartreuse de Champmol in Dijon [11], built for Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (1342–1404) between 1375 and 1410, which was razed almost entirely to the ground and most of its paintings and sculptures destroyed in the years between 1798 and 1815.14
Its decoration involved large teams of the very best artists of the day, recruited from the Netherlands (such as the sculptors Claus Sluter, Claus de Haine, and Jan van Prindale) and beyond (for
example, the tile maker Jehan de Gironna, a Spanish ceramicist capable of making the new and much-coveted blue and white glazed tiles).
with its destruction we lost the main, and sometimes the sole, documented works of many of the most highly respected and sought-after artists of the day, such as the woodcarver Jean de Liège (fl . 1381–1403); the painter Jean Malouel (d. 1415, uncle to the painters Pol, Jean and Herman de Limbourg, all d. 1416); Jean de Marville (fl . 1366–89), the head sculptor prior to
Claus Sluter; and Sluter’s best-paid assistant, Jan van Prindale (d. after 1424), the most important member of a family of Brussels sculptors, who went on to work at the cathedral in Geneva and for Amedée VIII, Count of Savoy.15 If the Chartreuse de Champmol had remained relatively intact, our view of this whole period of production would surely be rather diff erent since we would have an array of artistic identities to place alongside Sluter, André Beauneveu (c.1335–c.1401/3, see 17, 78), the painter Melchior Broederlam (c.1355–c.1411, see 12) and the de Limbourg brothers (see 74–6), who tend to appear, deceptively, as isolated giants.
not one major work by Rogier van der Weyden remains in Brussels, the town in which he worked for thirty years: his three most important works were all in Spain in the sixteenth century
Th ere is nothing (legible) by Robert Campin (c.1375/ 9–1444) in Tournai, and he was that town’s leading painter for over thirty years. Th ere is nothing by the Ghent painter Hugo van der Goes (c.1440–1482) left in Ghent: his most important surviving works are in Florence [66, 67], Edinburgh, and (via Spain) Berlin. Indeed, for each of these painters there are only one or two major works anywhere in Belgium. By comparison, the large numbers of works made in Florence in the fi fteenth century remain in Florence (which is especially true of artists like Fra Angelico, Botticelli, or Ghirlandaio); this has naturally made their study easier, and their impact and appreciation more immediate.
of the 350 or so carved wooden retables (altarpieces) that represent the surviving production
of the southern Netherlands from the period c.1380–1550, it has been estimated that only 25 per cent are now in that region, and many of these only returned there in the nineteenth century, like the de Villa Altarpiece made for the Italian family of that name and destined for a church in Chieri
the eff ect that such a scattered corpus has had on the study of Netherlandish art in particular should not be underestimated: art historians like van Mander in the early seventeenth century, Jean-Baptiste Descamps in the eighteenth century, and Eugène Fromentin in the nineteenth century composed their histories from works they had seen in their travels in the Netherlands and rarely beyond; they thus had relatively little left to build their writings upon.1
Although we have documentation of other types like inventories and payment accounts to provide (limited) evidence of authorship, the fact remains that only one extant panel painting from the whole of the southern Netherlands at this period can be matched to a surviving contract: the triptych by Dieric Bouts (c.1415–1475) for the confraternity of the Holy Sacrament in Leuven [13].19 Th ere is a slightly better situation with German carved retables, but only slightly so.
Th e consequences of this problem of documentation for the north are far reaching: more so than in Italy, much of the study of Netherlandish, German, and French painting and manuscript illumination in particular has necessarily concerned itself with the basic questions of who produced what, and when, and much of what cannot be fi rmly attributed remains less studied. In many cases we are left with artists of the highest talent who are given pseudonyms, ‘Notnames’ as the Germans term them, an emergency name, such as the Vienna Master of Mary of Burgundy (after a particular prayer book made for one of this artist’s patrons, 199, 200) or the Master of the Embroidered Foliage (named after a distinctive way this artist had of painting grass and trees).20 Artists to whom we cannot attach a real name, and thus a real documented history and even a personality, do not present the same potential for investigation, or the same appeal to a wider public, as named artists.
Th ere are also artists who fi gure signifi cantly in our histories of this period, such the Tournai painter Robert Campin, or the painter-illuminator Simon Marmion (c.1425–89), called ‘the prince of illuminators’ by Jean Lemaire de Belges in 1505, yet for whom today we have, arguably, not one documented work to their name, not even from sources distant in time and place like
Vasari; indeed, for both these artists the possibility remains that what we think they painted may not be by them at all.
Outside of Italy, and indeed to an extent outside Florence, it would seem that people did not write about art in this self-conscious or explicit way, perhaps because they saw little point in trying to explain or describe the stupendous visual achievements of their artists in verbal form: the fi rst literary source which has more than a passing reference to art and artists in the north are the poems by Jean Lemaire de Belges (1473–c.1523), La Plainte du Désiré (1503–4) and La Couronne Margaritique (1505).27 One of the consequences of this is that the fi fteenth-century literary appreciations we do have of northern art are entirely by Italians, such as Cyriacus d’Ancona (1449), Bartolommeo Fazio (1456), Francesco Florio (1477), and Giovanni Santi (1482). Again, this is testimony to the fame of Netherlandish painters, in particular, across Europe, but it also means that our contemporary view of their achievements is primarily an Italian one, and this has had certain consequences.
Fifteenth-century Italians were generally very positive about northern art; as the Neapolitan humanist Pietro Summonte remarked in 1524: ‘works from Flanders … at the time were the only ones to be reputed fashionable’. As early as 1400 Uberto Decembrio, another Italian humanist writer, placed the court painter of Philip the Bold, Jean d’Arbois, alongside Gentile da Fabriano and Michelino de Pavia as ‘pictoribus prestantissimis dici posset’: painters of the fi rst rank working at his period.2 Ghiberti eff used about the works of Master Gusmin, a mysterious northern goldsmith working for Louis of Anjou, in terms more fulsome than he used for any other artist he discussed.3 But mostly the attention of Italian writers was drawn by Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, who were generally considered the most important artists of their day. Th ese artists were two of the four painters Bartolommeo Fazio (c.1410–57) chose to devote biographies to (the other two being Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello) in his De viris illustribus (‘On Famous Men’) of 1456, which provides us with the most extended appreci ation of northern art and artists from the period.4 Fazio was in a good position to know something about Netherlandish painting since his patron, Alfonso of Aragon, King of Sicily (1396–1458), for whom this text was written, had, like many other rulers at the period, a particular interest in collecting such works. Several of the paintings Fazio eulogizes about were in Alfonso’s possession, and others he had seen in Genoa, Ferrara, or Urbino. His accounts of them are both particularly valuable and particularly frustrating since none of those he describes survive to this day, so while we have important records of otherwise lost works, we cannot compare his words with the images.
attempting to fi t northern artistic production of this period with what are essentially foreign criteria means the actual appearance of the work itself often gets distorted or ignored. A rather literal example of the eff ect this can have is found in the frontispiece to a book of 1905, entitled La Renaissance septrinonale et les premiers maîtres des Flandes (Th e Northern Renaissance and the First Masters of Flanders) by the Belgian art historian Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert [16].9 Th is shows the head of a tomb effi gy of King Charles V of France from the abbey church of Saint-Denis, carved by the Flemish sculptor André Beauneveu in 1364–6, but cunningly contrived to look like an antique-inspired portrait bust. Th is is achieved by using a cast of the head, rather than the original (in which, incidentally, the head is still attached to the body [17], setting it on a plinth, and photographing it with careful lighting and at an angle turned slightly to one side. Here Flemish art is actually turned into a potential prototype for Italian Renaissance works: if it cannot be tied to this tradition, its importance cannot be assumed.
Of all the ways in which we might view northern production through Italian eyes, the most insidious and tenacious today is the idea that Netherlandish painting, in particular, reproduces reality, merely imitating, observing, and describing rather than inventing. We can trace the beginnings of this to Fazio’s positive remarks discussed above, but the more negative version of this view of northern painters, and ultimately the more infl uential, is to be found in a famous statement purportedly by Michelangelo to Vittoria Colonna, recorded by the painter Franceso de Holanda (1517–1584) Th is was written in the 1540s
at a point, it must be said, when Netherlandish art was less universally admired but was still in demand, and pouring into Italy in some quantities, much of which was probably not of very high quality. Th e text is worth quoting in full: Flemish painting will, generally speaking, please the devout better than any painting of Italy, which will never cause him to shed a tear, whereas that of Flanders will cause him to shed many; and that not through the vigour and goodness of the painting, but owing to the goodness of the devout person. It will appeal to women, especially the very old and the very young, and also to monks and nuns and to certain noblemen who have no sense of true harmony. In Flanders they paint with a view to external exactness such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and prophets. Th ey paint stuff s and masonry, the green grass of the fi elds, the shadow of the trees, and rivers and bridges which they call landscapes, with many fi gures on this side and many fi gures on that. All this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skilful choice of boldness and fi nally without substance or vigour. Nevertheless, there are countries where they paint worse than Flanders.16
Assuming their skill is simply reproductive plays down the inventive powers of these painters, and suggests something less intellectual, more mechanical, is at work.
Th e terms ‘artifi ceux ouvriers’ (workers of artifi ce) and ‘dengigneux mestiers’ (ingenious trades or crafts) are applied to the famous craftsmen in Paris listed by Gillebert de Metz around 1435, which include the de Limbourgs; the term ‘engin’, which implied imagination and memory, was likewise evoked as a crucial quality for the best (legendary) artists in a set of manuscripts lauding famous women which were illuminated and read in court circles in Paris c.1400 (see image heading Chapter 14).18 Our fi rst comment by a northern artist on a northern work of art is Dürer’s on the Ghent Altarpiece, and it is invention he remarks on: ‘a most precious painting, full of thought’.19 Jean Molinet (1435–1507) in his epitaph of 1489 to the illuminator Simon Marmion claimed this artist had ‘tout painct et tout ymagine’: painted everything and imagined everything, something which seems particularly borne out by the visualizations of heaven and hell in various manuscripts attributed to his hand [22].20 And when Jean Lemaire de Belges, Molinet’s godson, described in his poem La Plainte du Désiré a personifi cation of Painting, she had all the equipment and materials needed to produce fi ne works, but what she had in most abundance, her last and most important asset, was invention:
Invention I have by the basket-full, I have what I have; I have more than I need.
- Sources and documents
We may not have an abundance of literary texts dedicated in whole or even in part to verbalizing about visual imagery in northern Europe at this period, but we do have other types of written evidence about artistic production and consumption, which include inventories, wills, payment accounts, contracts, and guild regulations. Although appreciation and response are implicit rather than explicit in these texts, we can garner from them some sense of what was valued and how.
Inventories Most notable among these administrative developments was the establishment of the Chambre des Comptes of the Valois kings and their dukes who in the late fourteenth century evolved accounting procedures that meant, among other things, that inventories of their belongings were made, and kept. From the 1360s onwards we have surviving documents of this sort for all the key players on the political and artistic stage in France, England, and the Burgundian Netherlands, where the most expensive and elaborate luxury goods were being made and acquired: Charles V (1363, as Dauphin, and 1379–80),2 his three brothers Jean de Berry (1401, 1406–8, 1416),3 Louis of Anjou (1379),4 and Philip the Bold (1388, 1404);5 Charles’s son Charles VI (several from 1391 to 1422);6 Philip the Bold’s wife Margaret of Flanders (1405),7 their
son John the Fearless (1412), grandson Philip the Good (1420, c.1430), and great-grandson Charles the Bold (1467–9);8 the widowed and powerful Jeanne d’Evreux, aunt to Charles V (1373);9 Louis of Orléans (1407) and his wife Valentina Visconti (1408).10 We also have examples for Richard II of England (1400)11 and for the regent of France, John, Duke of Bedford (c.1447–9).12 Th is practice continued to be important throughout the period, and there are major examples relating to Margaret of Austria (1523), Isabella of Castile (1504), and Henry VIII (1547).13
Looking at one of the rare instances in which we have both the object and a contemporary description of it in an inventory highlights the potential and limitations of such documents. Th e most ambitious, successful, and tech nically brilliant piece of metalwork surviving from this period, the Goldenes Rössl, socalled after the white horse which features in it [24],16 was described in the collection of Charles VI (1368–1422) in the Tour de Coin (then known as La Tour des Joyaux) of the Bastille, in cupboard A, opposite the fi replace, in 1405:
Item, an image of Our Lady who holds her child, sitting in a garden made in the manner of a trellis, which is enamelled. Our Lady is in white and the child of rouge cler and this image [of Our Lady] has a brooch at her neck, decorated with six pearls and a ruby, and above the head of Our Lady is a crown decorated with two small rubies and a sapphire and 16 pearls, and holding this crown are two small angels enamelled in white; the garden decorated with 5 large rubies and 5 sapphires and 32 pearls and there is a lectern where there is a book and this is decorated with 12 pearls, and in front of the image there are three images of gold, that is Saint Catherine, Saint John the Baptist, Saint John the Evangelist, and below these the image of the king, kneeling on a cushion decorated with 4 pearls, wearing the arms of France. And in front of him his book on a small bench of gold, and behind him a tiger, and in front of the king, on the other side, a squire, dressed in white and blue enamel, who holds the gold helmet of the king, and below there is a horse enamelled in white with the saddle and harness of gold, and a valet enamelled in white and blue who holds the horse by the bridle held in one hand, and in the other hand a baton. And this weighs about 18 marcs of gold and the base on which these things are set weighs around 30 marcs of silver gilt, and it was given by the Queen to the King the fi rst day of the new year 1404 [1405 new style].17
Authorship, even of the most accomplished and recently made objects, was very rarely recorded in these documents: either the name of the artist was not known or not of relevance to the value or identifi cation of the piece. In all the 3,602 items described by Louis of Anjou, not once is a maker’s name mentioned; in the 3,000 or so items detailed in Charles V’s collection, we have just three where the name of the artist who made it is given (a painted panel, an ivory diptych, and a painted cloth altar hanging)
Th ere are more occasions in Jean de Berry’s inventories, perhaps unsurprisingly given the nature of his patronage and intense interest in the making of his works (but here, still, there are only sixteen items with a clear attribution concerning their making).
When artists are named it may indicate that there is something about the object that was valued in terms of its maker rather than its medium, or that was only possible to value in terms of skill, such as paintings, rather than the materials employed. By the end of our period this changes to an extent: the collections of Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy and Regent of the Netherlands (1480–1530), contain more panel paintings and they more often have names of artists recorded with them.
Payment Accounts and Contracts
Payments concerning particularly important events like the Feast of the Pheasant at Lille (1454), or the marriage of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York in Bruges in 1468, can reveal the huge sums and vast teams of artists involved in pulling off such an extravaganza, which might involve stage sets, costumes, mirrors, lighting, and mechanical devices, all of which might be designed or executed by painters, sculptors, carpenters, and embroiderers. 25 On a more routine but equally illuminating level, payments to master craftsmen, such as those to the sculptors Jean de Marville and Claus Sluter at Dijon, can provide information about the number of assistants present at any one time in their workshop, what their specialized roles or skills might be, and what they were paid
the few depictions of joyous entries like those recording that of Joanna the Mad into Bruges in 1505;28 more evocative, perhaps, is the famous image by Jean Fouquet of the martyrdom of St Apollonia, from the Hours of Etienne Chevalier, made around 1450. Fouquet chose to set this event not in a historical past but as contemporary theatre, and the two-tiered platform surrounding the stage with props like the maw of hell (on the right) evokes the type of ephemera that artists were employed to create for such performances
Contracts can be mined for what they can tell us about procedures and costs, but also about values and preferences of patrons, and in this respect they are a rich, and relatively unworked, seam. Concern for materials comes across very vividly, as might be expected. Particular types of wood, even the origin of trees or when they should be felled, can be mentioned (this in Spanish and German contracts in particular);31 the type of stone, where and when it is to be quarried might be indicated; pigments and gilding are often carefully prescribed, notably the expensive blues (ultramarine and azurite) and reds (lakes in particular), and terms for its delivery are often detailed, since the potential risks of damage in transport and installation were high (see pp. 223–5). Th is all speaks for the concern that works would last, and be made with mater ial integrity: in a contract for a carved altarpiece commissioned in 1448 from a sculptor called Ricquart by the Abbess of Flines near Tournai, specifi cations such as ‘bien et proprement fait’—well and properly made—‘sans fraude’ and ‘sans malengien’—without fraud or deception—are peppered throughout the document, repeated in various forms around fi fteen times
As part of this concern for quality, another, existing work was often cited in the contract as a model, but rarely in the sense that the cited work should be copied. Th ey are evoked, rather, as exemplars in terms of size (a tomb commissioned by Charles de Bourbon in 1448 from the sculptor Jacques Morel had to be as high as that of Philip the Bold’s at Champmol, 133),33 or quality and craftsmanship: the parishioners of Warchin, near Tournai, wanted their altarpiece commissioned from the painter Philippe Truffi n in 1474 to be ‘the same and not less, in its carving, gilding, and polychromy, likewise in its painting’ as that in the church of St Catherine in Tournai
In Dalmau’s contract he is asked to paint the Magdalene in the (lost) predella ‘with a sad expression’, while in the contract for the Flines Altarpiece mentioned above, the Magdalene at the foot of the cross should be shown ‘having the appearance of wanting to come and kiss the feet of the crucifi ed [Christ] above’. In the same altarpiece, the fi gures of John and the Virgin at the Crucifi xion should be ‘sitting on the ground, having the manner and appearance proper [to having heard] the words that Christ said on the cross commending his mother to the care of Saint John’; in the Nativity, the Virgin is to be shown ‘kneeling, praying and adoring with hands joined her child, and on the other side will be the image of Joseph, also on his knees, praying aloud [priant de bouche], and holding in his hands a lit candle’ (we are reminded here of the Nativity by the Master of Flémalle, see cover). Th e Flines contract also reveals the way patrons and viewers might be alive to diff erences in how fi gures were
dressed: the three kings in the Adoration of the Magi are to wear precisely diff erentiated robes, defi ned by their relative fashionableness. Th e fi rst is to be dressed ‘du temps passe’, of past times; the second ‘selon du temps demiancien’, according to less ancient fashion (?), the third ‘ne trop vielz ne trop nouvel’—neither too old nor too new (and much more detail concerning the particulars of their relative modes is also included). Clearly the attitudes, poses, dress, and actions depicted in the work were important for the Abbess of Flines, and may refl ect common concerns and ways of thinking about images: it was also how Louis of Anjou described some of his precious metalwork objects (above). Th ese documents could, then, provide us in turn with clues as to how we might ‘read’ extant works.
Guild Regulations
Examples for painters, sculptors, glaziers, tapestry weavers, and other related crafts, of varying length and detail, survive for our period from, among other centres, Paris (1269 and 1391),38 London (1466),39 Antwerp (1382, 1442, 1470, 1494),40 Brussels (1387, 1474, revisions 1416, 1453, 1465; 1450–1 for tapestry weavers),41 Bruges (1444, 1479, 1497),42 Tournai (1480),43 Mons (1487),44 Leuven (1494),45 Lille (1510),46 Valenciennes (1367, 1403–4, 1462),47 Rouen (1507),48 Lyon (1496),49 Dijon (1466),50 Amiens (1491) and Abbeville (1508),51 Cologne (c.1371–96, 1449),52 Hamburg (1375, 1458),53 Lübeck (before 1425),54 Frankfurt (1355, 1433),55 Munich (1448, 1461),56 Würzburg (1470),57 Ulm (1496),58 Constance (1495),59 Basel (1437),60 Prague (1348–1527),61 and Krakow (1484).62 In Spain, purely professional guilds were prohibited by the rulers of Castile, Aragon and Navarre until the Reyes Católicos in the late fi fteenth century, but some towns with particularly advanced economic situations meant that exceptions were granted: the earliest guild regulations for Spain are those of Barcelona (1450), followed by Seville (1480), Mallorca (1486), Córdoba (1493), and Zaragoza (1517).63 Nuremburg, a free city, was unusual in having no guilds.
in most northern centres, if you were trained as a painter you could not work as a sculptor, although in German towns the same workshop combining the two trades, usually undertaken by diff erent craftsmen, was allowed and not uncommon – Bernt Notke (c. 1440–1509) in Lübeck or Lucas Cranach (1472–1553) in Wittenberg are good examples.
Th e case of the dispute between the weavers of Brussels and the painters highlights guild concerns:66 in 1476 the painters complained that ‘various journeymen, foreign and others, have made particular patterns on paper with charcoal and chalk for some tapestry weavers’.
Th e weavers, however, argued that they had done no wrong and that they ought to ‘be able to do this kind of work, or cause it to be done, without having to take the painters into account’. Th e result was a victory for the painters, in some respects: weavers could no longer design works which included fi gurative elements, but could produce ‘drapery, trees, foliage and grass’, and could alter or extend designs already in their stock.
Physical Evidence and Technical Examination
Th e type of wood used can thus be an important indicator in localizing an object. Baltic oak indicates a northern, usually Netherlandish place of manufacture; walnut is found mostly in France, but was also used for carving in the Netherlands; spruce is found in Germany, while pine was used in much of Spain, although both Spain and
Portugal imported Baltic oak and used it on occasion for panels; in Italy, poplar was used universally for panel paintings
Dendrochronology cannot then tell us a precise year for the creation of a work, but it can give us an absolutely reliable point before which a work cannot have been painted or carved because the tree from which it was made was still growing.
Th is has been most useful in distinguishing works which, once thought to be contemporary versions made in the same workshop as the original, are now shown to be replicas made at an often much later date, and not even, necessarily, in the same region or country as where the original was produced. Th is was most dramatically demonstrated for the two almost identical versions of a triptych associated with Rogier van der Weyden, one in Berlin, long thought to be a copy produced in his workshop, and one split between Granada and New York [33, 34], long thought to be the original given to the monastery of Mirafl ores near Burgos by Juan II of Castile, since it had a provenance to the collections of Isabella of Castile, his daughter.
When the wood of these works was tree-ring dated, however, it was revealed not only that the Granada- New York one was in fact the copy, but that it was a copy made long after Rogier’s death since the tree was still growing in 1473 (Rogier died in 1464)
in this case, it could also be determined that the Granada–New York copy was made in Spain, not the Netherlands (which makes sense), and that it was probably made by Juan de Flandes (c.1465–1519), Isabella of Castile’s court painter there, since planks from the same tree were used to make another altarpiece painted by that artist for Mirafl ores around 1500.
With both panel painting and wooden sculpture we should always look for their joins.
It will be the areas along the joins where most restoration is likely to have taken place and so attention should be paid to them for this reason alone. Looking at panel joins in relation to the composition of the work painted on to them is also insightful: the better artists composed, wherever possible, with these points in mind, and avoided placing the faces of the key fi gures in their narratives over these areas, since they knew this was where the damage would occur over time as the wood expanded and contracted with varying weather conditions; in the Seilern Triptych [31], the joint in the centre panel is off -centre, running down between the Virgin and St John but avoiding both their faces.
Th e construction of panels and their frames can also be an important indicator of a work’s original appearance, display, or use.
Diff erences in construction across the same work require explanation: the three large panels of similar dimensions, showing the Trinity, the Virgin, and St Veronica, now in Frankfurt [35], which form the centre of the group given to the Master of Flémalle, were long thought to be part of a painted triptych. However, the methods by which each panel was constructed vary radically from one to another (see 36), and thus demand another explanation—either the panels are from three
diff erent works (which the visual evidence and that of provenance makes highly unlikely) or they formed a diff erent type of object; the Trinity cannot be the reverse of the St Veronica, as had been assumed, but the Virgin and the St Veronica had to be visible together, given how carefully the visual plays between them have been thought out. Th e vital clue was in the series of dowel holes running in a horizontal line almost halfway up the Virgin and Child panel. Th ese dowels, which do not hold the plants together, must have had a purpose, suggesting something was fi xed along this point: the likely explanation is that the panels originally formed part of a double-winged folding triptych which had a sculpted interior (see 36 and 169 below).
Original frames can reveal a surprising amount about display and viewing practices: Jan van Eyck’s portrait of his wife, Margaret van Eyck [98], has a frame with a type of construction that suggests it was never intended to be hung from a chain or other form of suspension, but possibly set on a stand of some sort.9
Th e way the frames of diptychs are treated can reveal which was meant to be the primary side when shut, and thus indicate which way they were meant to be opened: Hans Memling’s Diptych of Maarten van Nieuwenhove [208] has a more fully carved, complex frame on the reverse of the panel with his praying portrait on it, suggesting that this side was the ‘top’, which would be opened to reveal the other panel, showing the Virgin, below;10 Jan van Eyck’s Annunciation Diptych [174] has reverses painted to resemble red marble, but fi nished to be smooth fl at surfaces with no frame at all. Th is is an unusual form for panels painted on the reverse, chosen perhaps to enhance the illusion that, when closed, the object was a solid slab of stone.
infrared refl ectography and x-radiography, both of which reveal more than is visible to the naked eye. What an x-radiograph registers is the atomic weight of materials, so that any pigments or parts containing heavy elements, usually metals (iron hinges or nails, leadbased pigments like lead white, lead tin yellow or red lead), will show up very white on the image.
It is important to compare the x-radiograph to the panel itself, both its back and front faces, since x-rays pass right though the work, creating an image of the whole object simultaneously, so that back and front are superimposed, and what might appear to be on the surface in an x-radiograph may not be so at all. In the x-ray of the Seilern Triptych [33], the white band across the top is the added baton on the reverse, which is coated with a lead-rich white pigment or preparation, while the band across the centre which registers as darker than the rest in the x-ray is where the surface has no coating at all on the reverse, as the baton has been removed.
An x-ray will also show something of how paint was applied and manipulated: it can reveal the brushstrokes of a priming layer, and it can indicate
how heavily lead white was used to model forms (which can help date a work or distinguish copy from original—painters earlier in our period tended to use lead white relatively sparingly, while by c.1500 it is much more heavily applied). In the Seilern Triptych the x-ray reveals how the three areas of red drapery in the central panel (that of the robe worn by the Mary seen from behind, that of the angel in red above, and that of St John) are all modelled using very diff erent distribution and application of lead white pigment
Most importantly, perhaps, x-rays can reveal changes made at a relatively late stage in the creative process, when something already established in the paint layer has been altered by another layer of paint, revised by the artist or by a later hand. Th is is evident in the x-ray of the Seilern Triptych, where we can see how the painter has adjusted the area around the heads of Christ and the Virgin to make less fussy conjunctions of form and colour, extending the hair of Christ in the fi nal paint layer to cover much of Joseph of Arimithea’s sleeve. Th is sleeve, as can be seen in the x-ray, is painted in full underneath Christ’s hair: artists would normally leave a reserve, that is an unpainted area, for the whole of a fi gure, and would not paint in parts of a fi gure which were not to be visible.12
to view the underdrawing on the white prepared surface of the panel before the painting stage began, a diff erent method is needed—using infrared radiation.13
the visibility of any drawing on the ground of the panel will depend on the nature of these paint layers themselves: black and gold cannot be penetrated at all; the green pigment malachite and the blue pigment azurite absorb all but the longer wavelengths of infrared radiation, requiring equipment sensitive to these longer wavelengths to detect the signal,14 whilst red lake absorbs little of the infrared radiation, allowing exceedingly good penetration.
As a result, the number of layers and their thickness will have an eff ect on how much is seen, as will the nature of the drawing material used: iron gall ink does not show up at all, while silverpoint can register very faintly, which leaves some works looking as if they have very little underdrawing, like Jan van Eyck’s Self-Portrait [106], when this may not be the case at all, as close examination of the surface under the stereobinocular microscope can reveal.15
Th e creative moment, the hand of the master, may not be this one: underdrawing could be a stage in the production process given to assistants who transferred up a model onto the panel for the master, and works documented as by the same painter may have completely diff erent styles of underdrawing. Indeed, underdrawing may vary in style and form even within a single work: thus the exteriors of the Portinari Triptych by Hugo van der Goes [66] and the Dombild Altarpiece by Stefan Lochner [14] are underdrawn in a diff erent manner to their inter iors, less freely and with more detail, which may have several explanations: an assistant may have transferred the drawing up in this area, or the artist may have wanted a more extensive graphic plan for himself or for an assistant to follow in these areas in the paint layers.1
Th e most rewarding example of this is probably the famous Portrait of Giovanni (?) Arnolfi ni and his Wife by Jan van Eyck, for which we have remarkably clear and informative refl ectograms [37, 38]. Th ese reveal how Jan’s underdrawn design had no indication at all of many of the elements which are so arresting in the fi nished work: absent were the dog, the beads, the chair and the shoes, and possibly the chandelier; these he only developed, and apparently conceived, as he worked the picture up in paint. Th e refl ectogram also shows how Jan altered, once he started painting, many elements of the design that he had established in the underdrawing: the mirror became smaller, the robe of Arnolfi ni longer, and shifts were made to the placement of hands and feet.17 Th is intense development of the composition on the panel itself, with the artist making signifi cant changes to the drawing in the paint layers, and enriching and altering the composition visually and iconographically, is characteristic of other works by Jan van Eyck.18 It shows that there cannot have been a preconceived meaning established at the start, which every object in the picture helped to expound, which has been one deeply entrenched way of interpreting the works of Jan van Eyck and the Arnolfi ni painting in particular.19 It also shows how Jan was developing his image with the visual demands of picture making in mind—in many cases the primary motivation for the inclusion or alteration of objects and the poses of the fi gures was to balance or improve the way the picture worked visually. So the added shoes provide a vital light area necessary to balance the white of the woman’s headdress; the changes in the position of Arnolfi ni’s raised right hand, which turn it from a more open form in the underdrawing to one seen side on in the paint layer, probably relate to the need to minimize its surface area, and thus reduce the tendency for hands to compete for attention with the face, although it also allows for an impressive piece of foreshortening; while the dog, added only in the paint stage, presents both a virtuoso passage of fur painting as well as providing a direct link with the spectator by looking straight out of the picture.
the ground, minute samples, often mounted as cross-sections for examination using microscopy [141], remain vital; these can also reveal the order, number and thickness in which the layers of paint were applied, and the way paint was prepared—for example, how coarsely or fi nely ultramarine was ground.
For analysis of organic materials, gas-chromatography- mass-spectrometry (GCMS) can be used on samples, but even with such sophisticated methods, interpretation of the evidence where the nature of the paint medium is concerned is a very highly skilled task.
the examination of the paint surface itself, with the aid of magnifi cation, and the reproduction of these magnifi cations in macro images, where perhaps the most enlightening perspective of all might be found: these images allow us to witness just how skilled painters and illuminators were in manipulating paint, and how that manipulation of paint might enrich eff ects and meaning
Th e virtuosity revealed in these details is astonishing. Van Eyck’s skill, in particular, was recognized by succeeding generations of painters, including Lancelot Blondeel and Jan van Scorel, who in 1550 began to ‘wash’ the Ghent Altarpiece (where we began), apparently undertaking their task ‘with such love that they kissed that skilful work of art in many places’. Displays of extreme prowess were not just the preserve of painters, however: the technical facility of the best sculptors, metalworkers, embroiderers, weavers, and printmakers was equally astounding, if diff erently expressed, and was also recognized and lauded at the time.
Centres
Th e jewel in the crown was Flanders, which had been inherited through Philip the Bold’s brilliant marriage to the heiress Margaret of Flanders in 1369. Her territories were densely populated and immensely rich though the trading activities of Bruges, Ypres, and Ghent. Th e region of Brabant, which Philip the Good acquired in 1430, also boasted the politically and economically signifi cant towns of Antwerp, with its great port and market-places; Leuven, the ancient capital of the duchy, with its recently founded (1425) university; and Brussels, situated on the crossing of several major trade routes, and which was to become the administrative capital of the Burgundian Netherlands.
Although the extent to which Bruges’ economic prosperity continued into the fi fteenth century has been debated by historians (and there were certainly moments of crisis), there is no doubt that at this period it was still the most important of these centres and, indeed, the most prominent commercial city of northern Europe, with the years 1440–75 being exceptionally prosperous by any account: wages were at their highest in real terms for over 400 years, and large numbers of craftsmen were immigrating into the town, attracted by earnings which were as much as two and a half times higher than other cities.
Bruges positively encouraged this immigration, by periodically lowering or suspending its
rates for foreigners to become masters in the town, and it has been estimated that at some points around 35 per cent of new registrations in the guilds were of outsiders.4 Indeed, it is hard to fi nd a famous native painter in Bruges at this period: Jan van Eyck came from Maaseick near Maastricht, Petrus Christus from Baarle in Brabant, Hans Memling from Seligenstadt in Germany, Gerard David (c.1460–1523) from Oudewater in Holland, Michel Sittow (c.1468–1525/6) from Reval (now Tallinn) in Estonia, William Vrelant (fl. 1449–1481) from Utrecht, and Ambrosius Benson (fl. 1518–c.1550) from Lombardy.
Th is shift towards the production of luxury goods by these Netherlandish towns had begun in the late fourteenth century, but these centres only became such a strong magnet for artists and consumers following the misfortunes of Paris and the collapse of the demand for luxury goods there in the years around 1420.
Paris was also, crucially, where the French kings were resident until the 1420s. During the 1360s and 1370s, Charles V, ‘wise artist, learned architect’ in the words of his biographer Christine de Pisan (c.1364–c.1430), undertook extensive artistic patronage and acquisition which included large numbers of richly illuminated manuscripts, with frequent depictions of himself in them, often emphasizing his learning, such as the full-page frontispiece heading a Bible Historiale painted by the ‘pictor regis’ Jan Baudolf (fl . 1368–81) [41].5 He also commissioned tombs for himself and his ancestors as soon as he came to the throne [17], and began ambitious building projects, with all the
concurrent decorative work they entailed. At Vincennes he built a palace with a vast courtyard surrounded by nine towers and enclosing a Sainte-Chapelle; at the Louvre he remodelled and expanded Philip Augustus’s building, adding four stories of apartments on the north and west flanks and new towers [42].One of these housed his large library complete with grills on the windows to ‘keep out birds and other fl ying creatures’, and in another—the ‘Grosse tour’—he placed dynastic portraits in the form of full length statues against the walls of the spiralling staircase that connected the apartments. According to Christine de Pisan, these projects were a social duty, akin to giving alms.6 Following Charles V’s death in 1380, his son Charles VI continued his acquisition and commissioning policies, accumulating the vast collections which, on his death in 1421, were to be inherited in large part by the English duke, John of Bedford (1389–1435).
is was a diff erent sort of spending on splendour to that of his father, which the epitaphs on their tombs [17] make clear reference to: there Charles V was called ‘sage et eloquent’, while his son was ‘large et debonnare’.
Charles VI’s queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, shared his tastes in rich attire, and was an important patron of manuscripts, tapestries, and metalwork, especially during the periodic bouts of madness the king suff ered from, when she took charge of the royal fi nances.7
As well as the king and queen, in the late fourteenth century the princes of the blood (Berry, Burgundy, Anjou, and Orléans), all avid consumers of luxury goods (as their extensive inventories attest), used Paris as their principal residence, and all embellished their hôtels here: it was from Paris that Philip the Bold ran his territories in the late fourteenth century, not from Dijon or Lille.
Representative of the very discerning and wealthy patronage available to artists in Paris is the Book of Hours commissioned by Jean II le Meingre, called Boucicaut (1365–1421).10 Boucicaut held the post of Marshal, one of the great offi ces of the French crown, and was also governor of Genoa following the capture of that city by Charles VI in 1396. Th e manuscript he commissioned, completed around 1408, is famous for its extensive landscapes and complex and innovative architectural settings; they were to be widely reused by this artist’s workshop and by later Parisian illuminators.
Th e artist who painted much of this work cannot be fi rmly identifi ed and is known as the Boucicaut Master after his patron, although circumstantial evidence suggests he may be Jacques Coene (fl . 1388–1404), a painter from Bruges who was in demand across Europe.11 He was in Paris in 1398 where on Sunday 28 July that year he dictated painting recipes to Johannes Alcherius (fl . 1382–1411);12 he was summoned southwards in 1399 by the opera of Milan Cathedral to advise on its construction (and where on 8 August, the day after he arrived, he began by producing a drawing of the cathedral), but he was back in Paris illuminating a (lost) Bible for Philip the Bold in 1404. Th e international desirability of Flemish artists is a pattern we will see continuing. Th at Paris was the place Coene went to fi rst, and returned to, is unsurprising: like the Netherlands in the period directly following it, the French capital was a magnet for artists throughout Europe in the years around 1400. In Paris the immigrants were often from the north, like the de Limbourgs and their uncle Jean Malouel (from Nijmegen), Charles V’s painter Jan Baudolf from Bruges (see 41) and his sculptor André Beauneveu (from Valenciennes, see 17 above), although some came from Italy, too, such as the illuminator unhelpfully known only as the Master of the Brussels Initials, but clearly a painter trained in Bologna.13
many artists left the capital, attracted by provincial centres or the possibilities of the relatively peaceful and prosperous Netherlandish towns,
Philip the Good’s court, following the murder of his father John the Fearless by agents of the French Dauphin in 1419, was increasingly based.
By the second half of the fi fteenth century it was the Burgundianruled towns of Bruges, Brussels, and Antwerp which, while no larger than Florence, London, or Genoa and smaller than Venice, Milan, and Seville, had the largest concentration of artists anywhere in Europe, and their numbers were growing.
Exactly how many painters, sculptors, or metalworkers were active in any one town at any one moment is impossible to ascertain with accuracy, but in 1425 alone it was possible for the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, to recruit 180 artists, mostly embroiderers but also painters and goldsmiths, from the towns of the southern Netherlands (but also Paris) to produce the astounding and extraordinarily expensive embroideries (the total cost was over 14,000 livres) to decorate the horses and pavilion for the duel he was to have with Humphrey of Gloucester.14 Similarly, in 1468 when preparations were in hand for the marriage of Margaret of York (1446–1503) to Philip’s son and heir, Charles the Bold (1433–77), 163 painters and 29 sculptors were enlisted, drawn again from a wide range of the duke’s towns
in Bruges between 1454 and 1530 the image-makers’ guild (which included painters, cloth painters, glass painters, saddle-makers and mirror-makers, with the painters being the largest group by far) registered
304 new masters and 374 new apprentices, with 177 of these masters and 215 of these apprentices enrolling in the 20 years from 1454 to 1475.16
In Brussels, by 1475, tapestry weavers were entering the guild there in such numbers and production had reached such a level that it was no longer possible for the established quality inspection methods to be maintained, and a new system was established in revised guild regulations.
In Antwerp between 1453 and 1579 in the guild of image-makers (which included painters, woodcarvers, glaziers, and most printmakers) there were 671 fi gurative painters, 230 craftsmen in the printing and related book-making trades, 181 glaziers, and 165 sculptors, although some may have been registering there simply to obtain the privilege of selling in the markets without being resident, as the Bruges-based painter Gerard David seems to have done in 1515. Added to these over the same period were 474 apprentice painters, 160 apprentice glaziers, and 126 apprentice sculptors, with in total 1,985 members registered in this guild over this period.19 It is not surprising, then, that by the mid-sixteenth century the Italian writer Ludovico Guiccardini (1521–89) could claim that in Antwerp painters and sculptors outnumbered bakers by two to one.20
Women were also trained as artists and practised as such, and must have made up a signifi cant part of the workforce in many towns, especially in certain crafts: both of the apprentices the illuminator Willem Vrelant took on in Bruges in the 1460s were female.21 Th eir routine presence is also made apparent by the wording of many guild regulations, which can refer to masters, apprentices, or compagnons (journeymen) in both the male and female form. Th us in Lyon in 1496 all ‘maistres et maistresses’ had to belong to the confraternity of St Luke;22 the Tournai regulations of 1480 speak of ‘apprentis ou
apprentices’ (article 8) and ‘serviteurs ou serviteresses ouvrans des ouvraiges’ (probably journeymen from the wording, article 42), and allow for ‘tous ceulx et celles qui volront apprendre à pourtraire’ (article 11), but only in relation to the lower level of membership, for those working on parchment and paper like illuminators, playing card makers, and painters of papier-mâché reliefs, and those painting children’s toys and parrot perches
the Burgundian court and its entourage, which increasingly from 1430 spent much of its time in either the Prisenhof in Bruges [50] or the palace on the Coudenburg in Brussels; considerable expansion and remodelling of the palaces took place in the middle years of the fi fteenth century. In Brussels the palace was given new gardens (complete with exotic animals), a Great Hall large enough for indoor tournaments, and a new courtyard that was paved and decorated with fountains and bronze statues: Dürer declared of the fountains, labyrinth and beast-garden in Brussels that ‘anything … more like a paradise I have never seen’.25 In Bruges, among other improvements, stained glass windows were installed in the gallery of the ducal apartments; the ducal chapel was remodelled allowing the duke to see the altar from his living quarters, and it was furnished with a new carved altarpiece by the sculptor Antoon Gossin and paintings by Rogier van der Weyden.26 According to Tafur, the duke was also a major customer at the Antwerp fairs, discussed further below, the existence of which, with all their vast array of goods, was in Tafur’s eyes, ‘the reason why so much splendour is to be seen at his court’.27
During his reign Philip the Good patronized fi fteen diff erent goldsmiths in Bruges alone, and around 180 in total are named in the ducal accounts from the fi fteenth century.28 Next to nothing remains of these commissions, but Philip poured money into this medium: it was, as with the French kings before them, the gift of choice to family and courtiers on New Year’s Day, to visiting royalty, on the occasion of the baptism of a child or the marriage of a relative, and they were the material of votive off erings. Many of these gifts must have been as elaborate and visually accomplished as the Goldenes Rössl [24] discussed in Part I; we can perhaps imagine such lost works as the gold equestrian votive portrait Philip gave to Our Lady of Boulogne-sur-Mer in thanks for his victory at Gavere in 1453 in the light of that object.
Th e most glamorous of these politically charged manuscripts was the three-volume Chroniques de Hainaut by Jacques de Guise, translated and partially transcribed by Jean Wacquelin in Mons, delivered to the duke for his approval of the text in Bruges, parts then illuminated in Brussels and others in Bruges, with 123 miniatures in total.31 Such a combination of diff erent people and places for each stage of the book was a common scenario for the production of manuscripts in the southern Netherlands, made possible by the eminently portable—and divisible—nature of their unbound bifolio.3
Th e most accomplished, and famous, of the miniatures in the Chroniques de Hainaut is the frontispiece [48], painted it would now seem entirely by Rogier van der Weyden’s own hand, and a vivid evocation of court ritual and splendour.33
In Brussels in the fi fteenth century whole areas of the city were rebuilt to accommodate the mushrooming population: members of the upper nobility from all of Philip’s territories, such as the Croy, Brimeau, Lalaing, and Lannoy families, built palaces on or near the Coudenburg to be close to their duke, as did other independent princes like the Dukes of Cleves and Bourbon and the Counts of Nassau, all of which required masons, sculptors, glaziers, and luxury goods to furnish them.
Both offi cial court artists and those without formal ties to the court saw the benefi t of being near the seat of power and in centres which had such a wealthy population: it is unsurprising that Rogier van der Weyden located his workshop in Brussels on the Cantersteen, not far from the Coudenburg, as did the court illuminator Dreux Jehan, his neighbour, although Jehan spent a period in between court appointments in Bruges from 1457 to 1461. Gerard Loyet, Charles the Bold’s goldsmith, settled in Bruges immediately on his appointment to the post (and owned two houses, one in the St Nikolas quarter and one in St Jacobstraat, not far from the Prisenhof ); the illumin ator Willem Vrelant settled in Bruges from Utrecht in 1454, where he picked up many court commissions, and Jan van Eyck moved from Lille to Bruges in 1431.
In Bruges, the fair was held once a year, in May, and in Antwerp twice a year, the Pentecost fair or Sinxemarkt beginning on the second Sunday before Pentecost and the St Bavo’s fair or Bamismarkt starting on the second Sunday after Assumption, 15 August. Th ese tended to run for at least six weeks although their duration gradually increased over the fi fteenth century
Tafur was obviously impressed with the market’s range and management, especially the specialist emporia in the town: ‘Pictures [pintura] of all kinds are sold in the monastery of St Francis; in the church of St John they sell the cloths of Arras [panos de Ras— tapestries]; in a Dominican monastery all kinds of goldsmiths’ work, and thus the various articles are distributed among the monasteries and churches, and the rest is sold in the streets’, and he concluded that ‘there is nothing which one could desire which is not found here in abundance’.39 Th ese emporia, known as Panden, set up in diff erent venues, must have made purchasing at the fairs much more productive and easier for an outsider, since all the type of object you were looking for was available in a particular place. As well as gold and silver work available at the Dominican convent, the surviving documentation shows that paintings and sculptures were also displayed there, at stalls rented out to the painters’ guilds of St Luke of Antwerp and Brussels.
Th e convent records reveal that exhibitors came from towns throughout Brabant, Flanders, and the northern Netherlands, with Brussels painters outnumbering the locals of Antwerp. Th e activity of this particular Pand was growing so fast that it was enlarged in 1460 and again in 1479 when the Brussels painters pressurized the authorities for more space. Th is demand for exhibition space instigated the construction in the 1460s of a completely new, specialist market, a large galleried building enclosing a courtyard, run by the cathedral church of Our Lady and on a site just south of it. Th is became known as Our Lady’s Pand and from 1484 all art sales had to be conducted there during the fairs.40
7 Products
Tapestries
an industry on which the Burgundian Netherlands, by the 1450s, had a virtual monopoly, with Arras, Lille, Bruges, and Tournai but especially and increasingly Brussels being important centres.
it was to Brussels that Pope Julius II sent the huge cartoons by Raphael to be woven into hangings for the Sistine chapel in 1517. It was also Brussels’ fame as a centre of excellence which instigated the use of a system of marking tapestries: from 1528 onwards, the BB sign ‘Brussel Brabant’ woven into the borders of their products guaranteed the quality of these works.
Tapestries were a reproductive medium, if a hugely expensive one: once full-scale cartoons had been made, potentially several sets could be woven from them (a process explicated in Part III below). Because of this, it was possible for every major court in Europe to own versions of the same set, which was the case with one of the most monumental and illustrious of all Netherlandish tapestries, the Trojan War series produced by the Tournai weaver and entrepreneur Pasquier Grenier. Over twenty years or so, Grenier and his sons produced as many as nine weavings of these tapestries, examples being owned by the Dukes of Burgundy, Milan, and Urbino and the Kings of Hungary, France, Scotland, and England.6 Th ese vast ensembles comprised eleven pieces, each one measuring 5 × 10 metres, which when (and if ) hung together stretched for well over 100 metres and covered over 500 square metres of wall. Only the Netherlands had the expertise, workforce, and equipment to produce tapestries on this scale and of this quality, and at this speed.
Carved Retables
Brussels, Antwerp, and Mechelen were clearly also centres of excellence in the making of large sculpted wooden retables, richly gilded and polychromed, and fi tted out with carved or painted wings. Although many other towns in the Netherlands, and indeed Germany, also produced these works (among them Bruges, Ghent, Cambrai, Tournai, Diest, Leuven, Courtrai, Mons, Cologne, Lübeck and Nuremberg), it was these three commercially well-provisioned cities which saw the largest production and export. It was also these three cities which instituted in the course of the fi fteenth century a system of marks guaranteeing the quality of both the carved and painted elements of these works, as recorded for Antwerp in the 1470 guild regulations
Th ese retables are distinctive products of our period: that Philip the Bold in the 1390s turned to Dendermonde (a town near Ghent) for the two carved examples he had sent to the Chartreuse de Champmol in Dijon [12] indicates that Flanders had a tradition of recognized quality in this type of work going back into the fourteenth century, but no examples earlier than the 1380s survive. Although production continued into the 1550s, it reached its height in the fi rst decades of the sixteenth century.
examples both commissioned and made on spec were sent to Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Scotland, England, France and Italy. Over 100 today remain in the Rhineland region alone, and around 25 in Sweden; an example with a Brussels stamp can be found in the burial chapel of King Kasimir IV Jagiellon in the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow; three Antwerp examples are to be found in the cathedral church of Västerås in Sweden; three more Brussels works are in the cathedral of Strängnäs, west of Stockholm, the most elaborate of which, a huge double-winged piece, was made for the Italian-educated bishop there, Conrad Rogge (d. 1501) [55]; and there are two equally impressive earlier examples in a church in Ternant in Burgundy made for members of the Ternant family, who were Burgundian courtiers.8
Illuminated Manuscripts
for long Flemish centres like Bruges had exported fairly routinely illustrated books of hours across the channel, written for Sarum use (a textual variant used most commonly in England), and, it would seem, further afi eld,
By the late 1470s this export market had expanded to include the very highest ranks of patron, as internal court patronage began to wane following the death of Charles the Bold in
1477, and many of the most talented illuminators like Simon Marmion [22] and the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book ( fl . c.1470–1520) who had worked on large historical and secular volumes for the court now adeptly turned their skills to producing the most splendidly decorated devotional books, hours and breviaries, for foreign nobility such as Englebert of Nassau, Eleanor of Portugal, and James IV of Scotland [197, 198]. Th e style of illumination developed in Bruges and Ghent at this period (generally referred to today as the Ghent-Bruges school because its focus of production was in those towns), depended for its eff ect on a very distinctive form of fi nely rendered illusionistic border decoration and script fl ourishes and forms [57]
Another stimulus to the development of such a style, designed to appeal to richer patrons, may have been the changes in the market caused by the increasing competition of printed books, an industry which was being established seriously in the towns of the Burgundian Netherlands at just this moment. Printed books could certainly not compete with such subtle, paint erly, and colour-rich decoration, and the elaborate refi ned bastarda script of many of these manuscripts.
Th e extraordinary inventive style of illumination developed in these towns c.1470 found new ways to play with scale and space, and of fi nessing the relationship between the three main elements of a decorated manuscript page: the border, text, and miniature. Th e Book of Hours that Englebert of Nassau commissioned in the 1470s and early 1480s written by Nicolas Sperinc of
Ghent [57] is one of the earliest and highest quality examples of a work in this style, illuminated by the artist at the forefront of its development, the Vienna Master of Mary of Burgundy.
Artists such as the Master of James IV of Scotland and the Master of the First Prayer Book of Maximilian continued to develop the ways the border, frame, miniature, and text could interact, sometimes setting the text as the primary plane, conceived as an object tethered by ropes or hanging from chains fl oating on top of a scene happening behind it [58]
Glass and brass
While there were important centres of glass making in England, France, and Germany, the skill of Netherlandish glaziers was internationally renowned and desired: this was recognized by Philip the Bold when he sent his sculptor Claus Sluter to Mechelen to purchase stained glass there for the church at the Chartreuse de Champmol, by Isabella of Castile in the 1480s when she ordered her stained glass for Mirafl ores in the Netherlands [59], and by Henry VI, King of England, in 1449 when he retained a Fleming, John Utynam, to make coloured glass but also to ‘give instruction in this and other arts new to England’, although they could not be practised there for twenty years without his consent
Th is tradition was continued in England with the appointment by Henry VII of the Netherlandish glazier Bernard Flower in 1496.
the Netherlandish towns were centres of a whole industry producing high-quality stained glass roundels. Th ese were in actuality not always round (they could be square or rectangular), but they are distinguished by their size (rarely larger than 30 centimetres across, which was the largest size possible in a single pane) and their technique—they were painted in silver stain, which limited their colour range to tones of yellow, black, and white. Both limitations made for commercial success—it allowed for roundels to be single images without leads, which could then be truly painterly in eff ect, as is the case for the roundel showing Rebecca taking leave of her parents made after a design by Hugo van der Goes [60], who seems to have provided a set of drawings for stained glass painters of Old Testament themes
Designs for such works were an industry by itself and many major artists, including engravers such as Schongauer and Dürer, as well as painters like Hugo van der Goes, produced roundel patterns.
Zinc ore (calamine) was needed in large quantities for the production of this metal and its richest deposits were in the area around Liège and Aachen, which fed a brass manufacturing industry that went back to the twelfth century. By the fi fteenth century, the production in the Meuse valley had shifted somewhat further east, to the towns of Dinant (until its sack in 1466), Tournai, Bruges, Ghent, and Brussels, all of which were important centres. Expertise in this fi eld was carefully guarded: in 1455 three brass workers were imprisoned in Dinant, to stop them taking their skills to England.16 Making this material was clearly something not easily done abroad, since the Netherlands also exported large quantities of brass in ingots: the Operai di San Giovanni of Florence in 1445 had 14,623 pounds of
‘ottone fi ne’—fi ne quality brass—at a cost of 1,135 fl orins, shipped from Bruges in this manner for Ghiberti to cast his second set of Baptistery doors (which technical analysis has confi rmed are brass, not bronze).17
Much of the production of brass objects in the Netherlands was centred on making lecterns, fonts [99], and light fi ttings of various sorts, for which the home market alone was considerable: the German traveller Jerome Münzer noted with awe that in the cathedral in Antwerp in 1495 there were over 400 brass chandeliers, both large and small.18 Th e domestic type of brass chandelier depicted by van Eyck in the Arnolfi ni portrait [37] was one widely desired and distinctive ‘Flemish’ product in this medium (possibly one reason why it, and the mirror, another Bruges speciality, are so prominently placed in this painting). Th e Medici had a magnifi cent example of such a chandelier weighing 400 pounds shipped to them by Tommaso Portinari in 1464 from Bruges, cast in several pieces each labelled for assembly on arrival. Portinari instructed Piero de’ Medici to put it back together with care, since, he notes, it was the fi nest example of this sort he had seen for a long time; it was probably the most valuable chandelier recorded in the 1492 Medici inventory, where it is described as having ‘12 candle holders with many branches, fi gures and foliage’.19
More common still and more widely exported were the engraved brass tomb slabs that were a Flemish, and particularly a Bruges, speciality (not solely a Tournai one as the earlier literature asserts). From the early fourteenth century these were being shipped to Spain, Germany, England, Scandinavia, and France.20 Some of the most impressive and inventive of these are still to be found in churches in Bruges, however. Th at of Kateline Daut (d. 1460) in St James’s church is particularly well preserved; its eff ects are reliant on the yellow colour of the brass and its high polish, which is only obtained by the correct combination of copper and zinc [61].21
More surprising perhaps than the brass work the Netherlands made and exported so extensively is that this region was also where a foreign patron might turn for a monumental bronze equestrian group. Th is should not surprise us, however, as bronze was a material increasingly favoured by the Dukes of Burgundy for tombs, and thus in the late 1480s it was to ‘Flanders’ that the Valencian nobleman Vincent Penyarroja turned when he instructed a Catalan merchant Domenech Perandreu to commission a life-size (260 × 230 centimetres) St Martin and the Beggar [63]. Th is most probably in fact came from Brussels given the attribution of this work with the circle of Renier van Th ienen and Pieter de Backere (d. 1527), who were based in that city (and who worked together on casting the gilt bronze tomb of Mary of Burgundy in Bruges: see 190). Perandreu charged 356 libras and 13 sueldos for the transport and purchase of the work, which was shipped to Valencia in 1492 in several boxes; it was cast in 40 pieces and, like the Medici’s chandelier and most larger objects made in this material, was reassembled on arrival
8 Patrons
despite the access the Medici had to many now-famous artists in their native city, around a third, possibly more, of the 142 paintings they owned in 1492 were ‘di fi andra’, Flemish. An inventory made of their palace in Florence at that date shows that there at least 20 per cent of the pictures on display were from the Netherlands, while in their villa at Coreggi it was a huge 75 per cent.
Th e majority of paintings the Medici bought from the Netherlands were, however, on cloth. None of the thirty-eight they owned survive, but their religious ones might have looked something like Dieric Bouts’s Resurrection [65], which itself may have been made for an Italian, since it has a Venetian provenance.2
Most famously, Tommaso Portinari commissioned the enormous triptych now in the Uffi zi (66, 67, over 5 metres wide when open) from the Ghent painter Hugo van der Goes and shipped it to Florence in 1483.5 Its size was such that sixteen men were needed to haul it through the streets of the city to the church of Saint Egidio in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Shipping such huge panels was both risky and expensive: an earlier, equally large triptych commissioned by Angelo Tani, Portinari’s predecessor as manager of the Medici bank in Bruges, had failed to reach Florence since the ship was commandeered in the English Channel. Tani never recovered his triptych, which is still in Gdan´sk in Poland where the privateers eventually took it.6 Given this, the choice to have a work painted in the Netherlands rather than produced in your home town reveals a very particular, and potentially risky, choice, and is indicative again of the strength of the appeal of Netherlandish works.
the Duke of Urbino, according to Vespasiano da Bisticci, sent to Flanders to fi nd a distinguished master because he was unable to fi nd in Italy any suitable painters skilled in the oil technique;8 the Sforza at Milan agreed to let their painter Zanetto Bugatto go to study with Rogier van der Weyden, who they thanked for ‘demonstrating to him freely all the things you knew about in your special trade’;9 Alfonso of Aragon gave the painter Lluís Dalmau 100 Castilian fl orins to go to Flanders in 1431, perhaps to negotiate a tapestry commission, since he was accompanied by a tapestry worker, but also perhaps to learn something from the painters there (which he did, to an extent, see 28, above).10 Alfonso also had a weaver from Tournai working for him in Naples, something other Italian courts and cities attempted too. Most notable of the Netherlandish weavers who were lured to work in this region was Aert van der Dussen, called Boteram, who was registered as an apprentice in Brussels in 1431–2 but by 1438 was in Siena, where he was employed by the commune there to teach his art to three or four Sienese citizens each year. Subsequently he worked for the Este and the Gonzaga courts, where he set up workshops, later basing himself in Venice where he acted as an intermediary for the northern Italian courts purchasing tapestries from the Netherlands
Th e patron who employed northern (not solely Netherlandish) artists most extensively was, however, probably Isabella of Castile (d. 1504). Th rough her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469 Isabella had united large areas of Spain and greatly increased her disposable wealth. As a result she pursued a policy of intensive building and art patronage, aimed at visually asserting through displays of magnifi cence her hard-won position and power as one of Europe’s leading rulers. To achieve these ambitious ends, Isabella employed foreign artists including the Brabantine architect-sculptor Egas Cueman, the Netherlandish-trained sculptor Gil de Siloé and painter Diego de la Cruz, the painters Juan de Flandes (possibly identifi able with a Jan van der Straete trained in Tournai) and Michel Sittow (from Tallinn, Estonia, but trained in Bruges by his own account). Th e latter received the very high salary of 50,000 marvadis a year, which would buy two large imported altarpieces at the rate Isabella paid for one from Flanders for her Mirafl ores monastery in 1495.12 It is also considerably more than the 20,000 marvadis a year initially received by Juan de Flandes, which was still one of the highest salaries at Isabella’s court. Sittow was clearly a very desirable employee, and he was deployed on several intimate and personal works for Isabella such as portraits of her family [69] and the series (with Juan de Flandes) of forty-seven small devotional images (164, 165, below), which she kept in a chest in her chambers (see pp. 236–7). Works like the portrait of Isabella’s daughter, Catherine of Aragon, probably painted when the artist was sent to England by his patron for that purpose, reveal what an astoundingly good portraitist he was [69].Th is was clearly recognized by his patrons: in 1505 Catherine of Aragon herself remarked, in relation to some portraits of Margaret of Austria she was shown, that ‘they would have been painted better, more surely and perfectly by Michel [Sittow]’.
Hans Memling Painting Panels in Bruges
How did this painter, who settled in Bruges in 1465, achieve such success? It must be said that he was not alone in making a very good living from painting, and, arguably, there are other artists of our period who made more money. Th is could be done by various means, not always entirely though their craft alone: Dieric Bouts’s wealth had come in part at least through marrying an heiress, imaginatively called Catherine ‘Mettengelde’ (‘Catherine with the money’);4 Rogier van der Weyden and Simon Marmion both invested in stocks and property;5 Lucas Cranach supplemented his considerable court salary by running a pharmacy and dealing in paper among his other entrepreneurial activities; Mathias Grünewald may have been in the business of manufacturing and dealing in pigments, as the inventory of his belongings on his death in 1528 indicates (see p. 200); the painter Bernt Notke was Master of the Mint in Stockholm from 1491 to 1493, and on returning to Lübeck became supervisor of the works of St Peter’s church there, which entailed managing a large brickworks that exported to the whole of the Hanseatic area.
the many monumental works he was increasingly commissioned to undertake from the late 1470s onwards: these included the Two St Johns Altarpiece (dated 1479), 388 × 193 centimetres when open [79]; the Moreel Triptych (dated 1484, Bruges, Memlingmuseum) 348 × 141 centimetres when open; the double-winged Lübeck Passion Altarpiece (late 1480s, Lübeck, St Annenmuseum), 333 × 202 centimetres when open; and the Nájera Altarpiece (late 1480s), whose three surviving panels measure together 7½ metres wide [82].7
Being able to handle such large panels in terms of time and space was part of the key to his fi nancial success: Memling must also have had a highly competent and well-managed team. We know little about them apart from references to two apprentices: a Jan Verhanneman and a Passchier vander Mersch, neither of whom went on to become masters in Bruges.
his output also suggests he was a canny professional who saw the potential of a market and played to it. Th is is evident early on in his decision to move to Bruges in 1465: this was the year after the death of Rogier van der Weyden in Brussels with whom, all the visual evidence suggests, Memling trained or at least spent time in his workshop.9 By deciding to settle in Bruges rather than to remain in Brussels (where Rogier’s son, Pieter, presumably looked set to take over his father’s clientele), Memling perhaps saw the potential of supplying the wealthy foreigners there, a market that Jan van Eyck and then Petrus Christus had already tapped into
He certainly succeeded: of his surviving works for whom the patron has been identifi ed (amounting to 28.7 per cent of his oeuvre), 20.2 per cent were made for Italians, 7.4 per cent were for Spaniards, and 4.3 per cent were for other foreign nationals; but if measured instead by painted surface area, 22.1 per cent were painted for Spaniards, 17 per cent for Italians, and 17.7 per cent for other foreign nationals.10 It would also appear that Memling managed to specialize entirely in panel paintings, and seems not to have been required to undertake polychromy of sculpture, or more decorative work for the city or court; he also did not seem to have needed to diversify into paintings on cloth.
the Eyckian tradition which were to prove very appealing to both his native Bruges clients and his foreign patrons
the Altarpiece of the Two St Johns for the hospital of that name in Bruges, one of Memling’s largest and most arresting works [79]. Th e central panel adapts many elements of van Eyck’s most famous painting on public display in Bruges—the Madonna of Canon van der Paele, then in Saint Donatian’s
Memling not only understood how to make paintings that had a distinctive brand, he knew how to make them both beautifully and fast, by means of both economic invention and economic execution. In terms of invention, his works reuse ideas, once developed, several times. Most popular, and adaptable, of these was the Virgin and Child with saints, seen in its grandest form in the Two St Johns Altarpiece [79]. Variations on this theme are found in works for the English courtier and diplomat Sir John Donne [81],12 for a member of the Flemish Floreins family, but which may have been destined for Spain (Paris, Louvre); for the Dominican friar Benedetto Pagagnotti [2], and for various other unidentifi ed clients.13 Th e repetition here may have been patron-driven, with clients wanting something similar to an impressive work they had recently seen on display in a church or chapel (such reference being a standard form in many contracts of the period, see above, p. 48) or they may have been seduced by a work of this sort that Memling had in his workshop for just this purpose—to demonstrate the possible options and the level of quality to prospective buyers. Whatever the motivating factors and their origin—and they were probably a mixture of these—Memling makes clever and inventive reuse of existing patterns. He never simply repeats; every fi gure is varied in some manner, or their arrangement is revised, the settings altered, or backgrounds changed. Th is can be seen even in the settings and props, like the cloths of honour behind his Virgins: they look similar, and may sometimes be rendered from the same bolt of cloth, but they are never the same pattern in the same area of its repeat.
e economic execution evident in Memling’s work is achieved in several ways, the fi rst of which is the limited number of relatively thin paint layers he uses to achieve his eff ects. Th is is confi rmed and explicated though tech
nical examination but also visible today to the naked eye: often his fl esh tones are applied sparingly enough that with increased translucency over time the underdrawing shows clearly through. Fabrics and materials are described in a minimalist manner, evident in how he has painted (impressively) the red velvet of St Catherine’s robe in 79 or the white fur edging of Maria Portinari’s dress [83]. Th roughout, he manages to achieve depth of colour with speed. In his red draperies, which required particularly slow-drying red lake glazes, Memling often adopts a system whereby a single layer of cross-hatched strokes creates depth of colour and shadow over the opaque vermilion base, rather than several layers of translucent glaze, each of which would have taken several days to dry. Whereas Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden built up their paint surfaces at the point of their deepest hue with as many as fi ve or six layers, Memling used fewer, sometimes just two. Yet such economy would be counterproductive if the fi nished eff ect was not up to standard. Memling’s skill is in retaining an eff ect of depth and richness with such an amazingly light touch
working to the foreign market did often require that he produce paintings in diff erent formats or with diff erent icon ography than would have been required by more local patrons. Th e double wings of the triptych made for the chapel of the Hanseatic merchant Heinrich Greverade and his brother in the cathedral of Lübeck, would have been demanded by the patron as necessary for the liturgical practices in use there, where two sets of wings were routine (see pp. 241–2). Th e triptych made for Benedetto Pagagnotti [2] is distinctly Netherlandish in format as most paintings for Italian patrons seem to have been, but its imagery of garlands held by naked putti and the choice of Lawrence as one of the saints depicted on the wings must have been included because of its Italian patron and his tastes.15
It is, however, in the realm of portraiture that Memling shone most brightly and led the fi eld by a very long way indeed.16 More than a third of his large surviving output is made up of portraits, which indicates the level of demand he catered to and the extent of his specialization in this fi eld.
Printmakers in the Rhine Valley Inventing, Marketing, and Distributing Images
Th ere were other ways of making money and extending one’s artistic inventions across Europe than through high-quality panel paintings for the merchant communities. More eff ective in certain respects was the new medium of prints, since although small in scale, they allowed the production of true multiple copies, enabling the same image to be seen at diff erent places across Europe by diff erent people at the very same time.
the printmaker worked in most instances speculatively, creating his images without patronal intervention, but instead with an eye to what would sell.
Most successful in this respect were probably the engravers based on the Rhine like the Master of the Berlin Passion (fl. late fifteenth century), Master ES (fl. c.1450–67), Israhel van Meckenem (fl c.1457–1503), and Martin Schongauer (fl . 1471–91), although twenty years later Dürer was to completely redefi ne the enterprise of printmaking and its economic and visual potential.2 Dürer’s activity falls in the most part outside the scope of this study, but his written testimony concerning how he sold, bartered, and gave away his graphic works is indispensable.
Th e output and the strategies these engravers employed to make their prints desirable, useful, and collectable will be the focus of this section.
Engraving emerged in the Rhine valley and southern Germany around 1440.3 Primarily this type of print was made by those with a training or background in metalwork (like Israhel van Meckenem, who signs himself ‘goldsmith’, or Master ES, who used goldsmith’s punches on many of his prints) or painting (like the Housebook Master (fl . c. 1470–1500), who also painted manuscripts, or Dürer, who also made woodcuts), or both, like Schongauer (whose father and brothers were goldsmiths, but who was trained as a painter)
For printmakers to be successful, however, they needed a good distribution network: the fact that so many of the most productive engravers were active on the Rhine where the river ensured easy traffi c in their goods is no accident
Centres on rivers such as the Rhine, Main, and Schussen were also important in the manufacture and distribution of the key raw material for printmaking—paper.
Paper seems to have become more widely available in the north, and less expensive, from the late fourteenth century: previously Italy and Spain had been the main centres for its production (and continued to be important for northern markets) but competing mills had been set up in Troyes, in France, in the 1330s, followed by other centres in the Auvergne and Champagne regions, with the fi rst mill in Germany established outside Nuremberg in 1391 by Ulmer Stromer.
One appeal of prints to their maker, and to those marketing them, was how widely and easily they could be sold and distributed, sometimes in extremely large numbers. In 1440 in Padua a local skin-dyer had agreed to sell 3,500 woodcuts (origin unknown) for a Flemish trader,5 while the scale in which Dürer distributed his prints to artists (painters, goldsmiths, sculptors, glass painters, their apprentices and journeymen), dignitaries, and collectors in the Netherlands on his journey there in 1521 is further testimony to how they might be widely dispersed: during his year-long stay he offl oaded at least 108 of his ‘Large Books’ (the woodcut Apocalypse, Life of the Virgin, and Great Passion), 24 sets of his Engraved Passion, 22 sets of his Small Woodcut Passion, dozens of his single-sheet engravings that were not parts of sets (such as 14 St Jeromes [84]), 21 unspecifi ed ‘whole-sheet’ engravings, 34 ‘half-sheets’, 71 ‘quarter-sheets’, many others just estimated by value (for example, 12 ducats’ worth of prints traded for 1 ounce of ultramarine), and no fewer than 8 complete sets of his prints (one, for example, to Margaret of Austria, another to an Italian artist ‘to send to Rome’)
Schongauer’s works reached almost as large an audience as Dürer’s (they were used by artists as divergent geographically and artistically as Bosch, Michelangelo, and Veit Stoss). Like Dürer, he travelled as a mature artist, and may, also like Dürer, have engaged his family members in the distribution of his works: at one time or another Schongauer had strategically placed brothers, who were either goldsmiths or painters, in the major trading centres of Ulm, Leipzig, Augsburg, Basel and Strasbourg (see Map 1).
the visual evidence of the wide and often very speedy adoption of their inventions by other artists. Th is allows us to track the movement and trade in prints from, for example, the Netherlands to Paris, Florence, Burgos and Palma, and from the Rhine to Nuremberg, Bruges, Venice, Milan, Florence, Poland, Zaragoza, Pamploma, Salamanca and Seville
how many good quality impressions they could pull from their plates, which, because of the relative softness of copper (the material most widely used in the north)
It has been estimated from a range of evidence that the most a copper plate might yield was around 200 fi ne impressions, 600 good ones, and another 1,200 to 1,500 poor if usable
ones, with the plate exhausted
Just how many, however, depended on how the plate was made (hammering the metal increased its density and thus longevity under the press), how it was cut (deeper burin cuts would print more good images), and how it was printed (the evenness or strength of the pressure used in the printing process would aff ect how many good prints could be achieved before the fi ner lines were obscured). Th ese elements were experimented with and improved by the most skilled and canny of engravers like Master ES and Schongauer. Th at we have over 30 complete sets of Schongauer’s Passion series in existence today, and over 70 impressions of some individual prints from this cycle, is testament to how many good quality impressions he could pull before the plate was exhausted, as well as an indication of how popular and successful these particular works were.9
Simple woodcuts were on the whole easier to make and print from than engravings: the blocks still wore out, but not as fast, allowing a larger number of reproductions to be made fairly quickly and relatively cheaply by anyone who could purchase or have a block cut, and who had access to ink and paper. In 1466, for example, the Abbess Jacoba van Loon at the convent of Bethanie at Mechelen had in her rooms on her death ‘an instrument for printing words and images’ and ‘nine blocks of wood and 14 blocks of stone for printing images’.10 Th e large number of woodcuts owned by the Dominican nuns of St Catherine’s convent at Nuremberg in the fi fteenth century, which included a ‘picture panel’ (Bild-tafel), an assemblage of 85 painted woodcut prints incorporated into a wooden triptych, has led to the suggestion that the
nuns here, too, printed woodcuts themselves in the convent
German, found at the convent of Wienhausen, near Celle Head of Christ, papiermâché roundel, c.1500.
Master of the St Erasmus scenes Arrest of Christ, copperplate engraving on paper stuck onto parchment, gilded, and painted, c.1470.
Master W with the Key (Willem vanden Cruce?) Design for a Monstrance, copperplate engraving on paper.
Some engravers, like the Master of the Berlin Passion and his associates, targeted this monastic market with some success, producing images in a format and iconography which could readily be incorporated into manuscript texts. Th ey issued extensive Passion cycles of as many as 45 or more images printed 8 to a sheet which could be cut and pasted or bound into manuscripts, or even, if printed in a certain sequence and position on the sheet, folded into booklets. Th e images themselves were consistently around 7–8 × 5–6 centimetres, a size comparable to small miniatures, and often had similar decorative frames incorporated into their design.
Prints could thus serve as actual, physical bases for the creation of more elaborate works, and were apparently marketed by their makers as such. Many engravers also saw the potential their medium presented for fulfi lling the considerable demand for design ideas and patterns by professional artists
it could be claimed that engraving was initially developed by artists for other artists
Th e major part of the output of the Bruges artist Master W with the Key (fl . 1465–85), for example, consisted of designs for metalwork or carved stone or wood: patterns for decorative carved leaf motifs, for chalices, censors, crosiers, water stoops, and monstrances, some with cross-sections showing how an object might be constructed, or printed over two sheets to provide a large design to scale [87]. He also produced a series of elaborate, empty architectural ‘stage sets’ [88], possibly patterns or ideas for the caisses of carved retables, metalwork shrines, or even tableaux vivants.15 Master ES, Israhel van Meckenem, and Martin Schongauer all produced similar designs, sometimes also with crosssections and sometimes also printed over more than one large sheet to allow a full-scale model, although some seem to be more about artistic and technical display than about a practical pattern to follow.
Master ES
His favoured small roundel format (with diameters of around 8–11 centimetres) was exactly the right shape and scale for mother-of-pearl carvers (who mostly produced small round plaques) or for metalwork decoration, and the round form of many other engravings may relate to the huge market for stained glass roundels.16
one of the fi rst to recognize the potential of issuing his engravings in sets, something Schongauer, van Meckenem, and particularly Dürer later exploited to great success
Master ES issued four diff erent sets of apostles, clearly designed to appeal to diff erent needs: a small set (9.3 × 6.3 centimetres) with the saints standing and each holding part of the text of the apostles’ creed (to get the whole text you needed the whole set); a large set with the saints standing, without scrolls (14.7 × 9.7 centimetres), a third with them seated in a slightly wider format (15.2 × 9.7 centimetres [89]) which, it has been posited, was targeted specifi cally at sculptors, and a fourth small but visually complex set (9.5 × 6.5 centi metres) where the apostles are paired in architectural niches. In addition, he pro duced two sets of seated evangelists (one square, one round). Th e apostle sets are a master class in variation within a potentially repetitive theme: the seated saints are particularly inventive, with unusual and complex viewpoints [89]. Many of the apostles are shown with their backs almost entirely to the viewer, or in strong profi le, or from a high viewpoint. Th ey are seated on diff erent benches and chairs, and with varied physical types and poses.
Israhel van Meckenem, a goldsmith from Bocholt who may have been the son of the Master of the Berlin Passion, worked in quite another way, exploiting very quickly a potential distinctive to this medium—that the copper plates used to make prints could be recut. Th is allowed a whole series of similar but not identical works to be produced with little actual invention or design and far less time and eff ort on the part of the artist. Van Meckenem acquired no fewer than 41 of the Master ES’s plates (suggesting he was working in that Master’s shop at his death),
as well as
several by the Netherlandish engravers Master FVB and Master W with the Key. He then recut them, adding his own initials, thus claiming the prints pulled from them as his own inventions. It has been estimated that 90 per cent of his engravings were copied from other artists, either by reworking their plates or by other means.
over 620 diff erent engravings are attributed to him, as opposed to 116 by Schongauer.
One of the sets of engravings made by Israhel van Meckenem which appears not to have been copied from other engravers is his series of Couples [95]. Here we see another market niche engraving both fi lled and expanded—the demand for secular imagery, albeit often with a moral overtone. Th is set of twelve couples places some in abstract backgrounds and others in detailed interiors, which are the most inventive of his works. Like so many other engravings, these had a wide and fast infl uence: the Dissimilar Couple was copied in Salamanca in a blockbook produced there in 1497.20 Th e decision to include blank banderoles in some of the engravings in this series suggests an invitation to the purchaser to become involved in the game—to make up their own dialogue or titles. Th is was yet another inventive marketing strategy developed by this most commercial of fi fteenthcentury printmakers.
Declaring Authorship and Expertise: Signatures and Self-Portraits
Painters, metalworkers, sculptors, glass painters [59] and other craftsmen claimed authorship of their images in various ways, and more frequently than might be supposed. Most famously, Jan van Eyck’s general practice was to inscribe his name on his works, frequently but not exclusively on their frames.
Netherlandish and German brass founders routinely signed and dated their work. Examples can be found on baptismal fonts, lecterns, paschal candleholders, and sacrament towers.5 Th e Tournai brass founder Guillaume Lefèvre signed his monumental baptismal font for the church of St Martin’s at Halle, near Brussels
in large inscribed letters around its base (‘ces fonts fi st Willaume le fevre fondeur a tournay lan mil CCCC.XLVI’).6 Perhaps most emphatic of all is the signature of Peter Vischer, who signs, in German, in raised Gothic lettering along its base, the large shrine of St Sebaldus in St Sebald’s church, Nuremberg, with the following inscription: ‘Peter Vischer, citizen of Nuremberg, has made this work with his sons, and [it] was fi nished in the year 1519, and it is solely to the praise of the Lord Almighty and to the honour of the heavenly prince St Sebald, paid for by the aid of pious people and alms.’ Th e inscription starts at the south-west corner of the shrine, and runs round to the end which faces east, and the altar. Here Vischer also set a fi gure of himself, dressed as he would be when working his trade, in a full-length apron, holding his tools
Wooden choir stalls, one of the most expensive and elaborate of church furnishings, were also very frequently signed (as are those at Amiens, Aoste, Lausanne, and Saint-Claude),8 and often by the craftsman in overall charge of the project (usually a carpenter and carver of decorative elements) rather than by the collaborating sculptor working on the fi gurative elements: Jörg Syrlin the Elder, active in Ulm from 1449 onwards, was a joiner who ran a workshop employing sculptors who made the fi gurative elements of his larger scale works.9 He asserted his authorship most prominently on the choir stalls he carved for the town church of Ulm [101, 102], which are signed and dated three times: these works are among the most elaborate of the period, adorned with sixteen large busts carved in the round, of scholars from antiquity and sibyls, and with apostles, saints, prophets, and Old Testament women in low relief set behind and above each seat
Positioning is also key to the interpretation of the self-portrait of the Nuremberg sculptor Adam Kraft (c.1440–1507) on the sacrament tower (used to reserve the consecrated host) for St Lorenz, Nuremberg, commissioned by the patrician Hans Imhoff in 1493
visually more prominent is the fi gure of Adam Kraft himself, who kneels under the base of the tower
proximity of names and words to relics was something that was understood as having important power and protective benefi ts.
Self-portraits
there would be no better way of showing how life-like you could make a portrait than by having an image of yourself for prospective clients to compare to the reality.
Workspace and Equipment
features of size, light, and selling space were crucial.
Th ose in which the painter and printmaker Lucas Cranach lived and worked in Wittenburg were very large indeed: the fi rst, acquired in 1510, was in fact two adjoining properties in a prime site on the market square and on which Cranach immediately undertook major building work, presumably to create a large studio area. Th is proved to be insuffi cient for his growing business, and in 1518 he purchased a larger property on the corner of the square, No. 1 Schloßstraße, now known as the Cranachhof; it had four fl oors, a gated side entrance, and six outhouses disposed around a central courtyard. Th e outhouses allowed discrete spaces for workshops for carving, printmaking, and panel preparation, which needed to be undertaken in separate areas given that wood dust would ruin oil paintings. Although it is not certain where in this array of buildings Cranach’s painting studio was located, it has been plausibly suggested that it was in the two- and three-storey sections on the east and south wing, which boasted a large ground-fl oor entrance and a room two stories high, 25 metres long and 7 metres wide, and a south-facing wall set with as many as ten windows.4
For painters, works on the scale of the Justice of Otto painted by Dieric Bouts for Leuven town hall, each panel measuring 3.24 × 1.82 metres [111], were not uncommon
A similar commission for four, even larger panels (possibly as large as 4 × 4.5 metres), showing scenes of the Justice of Trajan and Herkinbald for Brussels town hall (see 9, above), which Rogier van der Weyden was working on in the early 1440s, may have precipitated his move to two adjacent properties on the Cantersteen in 1443–4.
Buying adjoining properties seems to have been a common solution to the need for a large working area and commercial expansion (Hans Memling in Bruges, Stefan Lochner in Cologne, Jean de Liège in Paris and Simon Marmion in Valenciennes, for example, all did so
the successful Parisian illuminator and libraire (bookseller) Andry le Musnier (d. 1475) acquired three adjoining houses, Nos 12, 13, and 14 on the rue Neuve Notre-Dame in Paris, in the 1460s. His properties gave him a corner block of considerable size on the entrance to the street from the west, which was the main thoroughfare for pilgrims and other visitors to the cathedral.
Space was important for selling as well as making works: in Strasbourg in 1466 the painter Hans Ernst had a house in the rue de Hallebardes with a façade over 4 metres long, a canopy projecting into the street over a metre and a half long, and below it a stall 2 metres long and a meter wide, on which ‘doer sin helgen uff stelt’ (he displayed images);
Two very diff erent types of text can evoke for us the equipment of a painter’s workshop at this period. Th e fi rst, from Jean Lemaire de Belges’s poem La Couronne Margaritique, quoted at the opening of this chapter, gives a description of the workshop of Marcia, the legendary painter from antiquity, which, while somewhat romanticized, is clearly based on Lemaire’s close knowledge of painters’ studios of his own time. A more mundane source which complements this literary account is found in the inventory of the Brussels painter Jan van der Stockt, who in 1445 left to
his son Vranke, also a painter, his goods including those pertaining to his craft. Listed among these are 7 chairs, 7 wooden tripods, 6 chests, a trunk, 2 caskets, 18 panels (some large and some small, presumably unfi nished or unstarted pictures), 4 stone slabs for grinding colours, a long table and 2 altar slabs (one 9 feet long and the other 11 feet long, presumably used as workbenches).25
Th ere were two types used by painters, one made with pig or hog bristles (Dürer was buying this type in Antwerp), the other with fi ne hairs from squirrel or fox tails. Th ey are carefully distinguished in the documentary sources—Jean Lemaire de Belges’s poem describes pinceaux (fi ne or small brushes) and brosses à tas (bristle brushes); Lucas Cranach’s accounts refer to porspensel (bristle brushes) and harbensel (hair brushes); Jan van der Stockt’s inventory lists pinselen (fi ne brushes) and borstelen (bristle brushes), and the Tournai painters’ regulations of 1480 distinguish between pinceaux and brosses.34 Th ese two types of brushes were also constructed diff erently, as is made clear in the payments for supplies to Jean Malouel at the Chartreuse de Champmol where, in 1399, he received pig bristles, wax, and string to make brosses and 100 swans’ quills to make pinceaux.35
Painters must have owned literally hundreds of brushes: Jean Lemaire, in La Plainte du Désiré (1503–4), makes his artist exclaim, perhaps with some exaggeration, that ‘I have thousands of pinceaux and brosses and tools’.36 Th at Dürer brought 22 fairly casually in Antwerp, and that Malouel received equipment to make 100 of the fi ne sort alone, indicate just how many a busy painter’s shop would need: they must have had a limited working life, but it was also because a wide range of diff erent sizes and shapes were needed: X-rays of paintings by Lucas Cranach have revealed that he used a large blunt-bristle brush around 30 millimetres wide for painting the imprimatura, or priming layer, and a range of smaller sizes of bristle brush varying between 5 and 15 millimetres wide for blocking in areas of colours and their subsequent modelling.37 For the fi ner details, and areas like faces, the pinselen, again in a range of sizes, would be used. Th e eyelashes of St Veronica in the Flémalle panels [39], for example, could only have been achieved with a brush made to have a very fi ne point indeed.
Perhaps the most valuable items of equipment owned by artists were their collections of drawings and models, referred to collectively in the documents as patrons or pourtraicts (French), patroonen (Flemish), or Entwerfen (German), best translated as ‘patterns’ or ‘designs’.
Such collections often represented years of work or careful acquisition, some having been inherited, bought, hired, or even stolen; they would be diffi cult if not impossible to replace, and they played a fundamental role in creating images of all sorts. It is unsurprising then that they were much coveted, and we have records of disputes over their ownership and allegations of theft concerning them
A typical example is that of the Tournai painter Pierart Machelier made in 1461: he left to another Tournai painter, Haquinet de Haulterue, ‘so that he will pray to God for me, all my tools used for my trade, with all the patterns, papers, and portraits [patrons, papiers et pourtraitures] belonging to me’
the 1498 will of Bernardino Simondi, a Piedmontese painter active in Provence. His drawings and patterns were carefully divided between a range of artists with whom he had collaborated during his career: his engravings of the Passion and the twelve apostles (Master ES and Martin Schongauer, among others, had issued sets of both these subjects, see above, 89, 90) were to go to his compatriot and journeyman, Bartolomeo Dabanis; Claux Roux, his apprentice, was allowed to choose any twelve other drawings from his collection of models and patterns (poncifs); Josse Liefernixe, an established painter with whom Simondi had worked on several large altarpieces, was to have a pertracturarum, perhaps a sketchbook or modelbook; fi nally, Antoine Regis and Honorat Labe, two more journeymen, were to have his jointed wooden mannequin that came with its own clothes
Th e dispute in 1519–20 between Ambrosius Benson, a painter from Lombardy working in Bruges, and Gerard David, who by that date had been established as a master painter in Bruges for over thirty years, gives us further insight into the potential make up of an artist’s collection of workshop drawings, and how such works might circulate. Benson, recently registered as a master in the Bruges guild, claimed to have left two chests in David’s studio, where he had been previously working as a journeyman. Th ese contained mostly drawings, described as various projects or patterns for the painters’ and the illuminators’ craft (an interesting distinction), a small book full of studies of heads and nude fi gures, various patterns belonging to Benson but which came from Adrien Ysenbrandt (another Bruges painter), and more patterns, this time hired from yet another Bruges painter, Aelbrecht Cornelius, at the cost of 2 fl orins phillipus, a fairly high sum. In response, David claimed that he had looked in the trunks and found that some of the drawings were unfi nished studies which belonged to him, and anyway Benson owed David money, which Benson in turn had promised to pay off by working in David’s studio. Eventually David ended up in prison for not returning the chests to Benson, perhaps an indication of how keen he was to hold onto this precious stock of patterns.43 Somewhere in all this the idea of intellectual property may well be lurking: a trunk of brushes would not, one suspects, have elicited such a passionate response from both parties.
a group of fourteen small square maplewood panels, each with four compartments on to which a total of fi fty-four drawings on paper of heads of fi gures and animals, including a skull and a spider seen from above, are pasted [119]. Th ese panels are bound together in a manner which allows them to be folded up, leporello-fashion, into an object measuring
just 10 centimetres square; a contemporary, tooled leather case also survives in which they were kept. Th e form and materials used here suggest permanence— this is a set of designs and, as such, collectable, as indicated by the presence of something very similar in the possession of René of Anjou and of Margaret of Austria.49
Sculptors were certainly provided with drawings, usually by painters, as the scupstoel attests, and it was a particularly widespread practice for large complicated works like tombs and carved altarpieces: the sculptor Michel Colombe was given drawn models by the painter-illuminators Jean Fouquet and Jean Pérreal for the tombs, respectively, of Louis XI in 1474 and Philibert of Savoy in 1511 (neither, in the end, executed by Colombe). In the latter case, Colombe had the drawings reinterpreted by two members of his own workshop, his nephews the illuminator François Colombe (who redrew the gisant) and his mason Bastyen François (who redrew the ground plan and elevation), presumably to make them more practical as patterns for the sculpted monument
For sculptors a three-dimensional model was far more helpful, and it is probable that this was the main way a carver would realize his initial ideas and from which his assistants could work. We have already seen that wooden models were provided for the bronze founder Henri Costerel. Th is was a common practice for large-scale cast metalwork (such as the tomb of Mary of Burgundy, see 190) but also for stone and alabaster, documented in instances such as the alabaster altarpiece at Zaragoza (see 134). Sculptors’ models might also be in terracotta or stone: Michel Colombe produced two threedimensional models for the tomb of Philibert of Savoy, a terracotta one made ‘with my own hand, without anyone else touching it’, and another small one in stone, carved by his assistants, following the terracotta.58 Th is carved model served both for Margaret to approve (it was coloured to mimic the eff ects of the black and white marble and sent to her ‘so that Madame will be able to see the whole tomb’) and also as practice for the sculptors before carving the fi nal work. We have no examples of the fi rst type of model Colombe made surviving from northern Europe at the period, although we do have an example of the second type: a small-scale limestone relief, for another tomb project, intended to be in marble, made by the Ulm sculptor Hans Multscher for Ludwig of Bavaria in 1430
The Workforce
Larger enterprises might, however, encompass as many as ten or fi fteen fully trained assistants working together, as are recorded in the sculpture studio of Jean de Marville in Dijon in 1387, or in the painter’s shop of Lucas Cranach in Wittenburg in 1513.3 In general, these teams would involve three main categories of workers: apprentices, who were learning the trade; journeymen, variously referred to as cnapen (Flemish), gesellen, knechts (German), valets, compagnons, ouvriers, and serviteurs (French), terms which are not necessarily interchangeable, but seem to have denoted diff erent levels of experience—they were trained in the craft but for fi nancial or other reasons had not yet set up as independent masters; and hired hands (ouvrier de bras, lohnknaben).
tightly controlled category of apprentices.
In many centres their numbers were strictly controlled: painters in Amiens, Bruges, and Brussels and painters and sculptors in Ulm could only have one apprentice at any one time, although in Brussels and Ulm a second was allowed when the fi rst was in his last year; in Munich and Krakow painters were allowed two at any one time, and in Brussels tapestry weavers were also allowed two at any one time, as long as one was their own child, while for painters and sculptors in Paris (after 1391), in Lyon, Rouen, and Tournai, there were no restrictions on their number.
may have been a drain rather than a resource within the workshop and were not expected to do as much as a paid assistant: Lucas Cranach made occasional special payments to his apprentices when they had ‘done as much work as a journeyman’, clearly not a level of help which was routine.5
Perhaps because of this, some artists never had apprentices: it has been estimated that 60 per cent of the woodcarvers in Antwerp between 1453 and 1479 took on no apprentices at all.6 In addition, attracting them may not always have been easy and training them was an investment of both time and money, from each side.
Paris, prior to 1391, had some of the longest apprenticeships, with twelve years for paternoster (prayer bead) makers working in coral or mother of pearl, ten years for weavers, and eight (if an extra payment was made) to ten (if it was not) for sculptors; apprenticeships were six years for painters, glaziers, and woodcarvers in Cologne in 1449, raised from four years in previous regulations; fi ve for painters and sculptors in Rouen in 1507; four for painters in Antwerp in 1470 and Tournai in 1480; four to six years for painters and sculptors in Ulm, Augsberg, and in most Spanish towns; three years for painters in Leuven and Amiens and for tapestry weavers in Brussels; two for illuminators in Tournai in 1480 and only two for painters in Bruges (except between 1479 and 1497 when it was four).7 In Brussels, painters, gold beaters, glass makers, and goldsmiths were among the very few crafts that dictated four years’ apprenticeship—less taxing to learn, it would seem, was the work of the embroiderer (three years), the illuminator (two years) or the joiner (one year).
Th eir literal monetary value is vividly illustrated by a dispute between the Parisian illuminator and libraire Andry le Musnier (who we have met renting houses on the rue Neuve Notre-Dame in Paris) and his brotherin- law, who worked in the same trade. On the death of Andry’s father Guyot, also an illuminator-libraire, the control of his apprentices had fallen to his wife. She, however, loaned both of them, sometime before 1456, to her sonin- law to help complete work on a commission for the duchess of Brittany Françoise d’Amboise. Andry complained about this, saying they ‘were mine, by virtue of the division we made, my mother and I, of the other apprentices’. In the end, Andry sold his interest in them to his brother-in-law for the not inconsiderable sum of 16 écus.
Th e pattern of apprentice enrolment for one Tournai artist, the painter Philippe Truffi n (d. 1506), who trained with Rogier van der Weyden’s nephew Louis le Duc and became a master in 1461, is probably not untypical: over the forty years of his very busy and successful activity, as one of the leading artists in the town, he took on fourteen apprentices. Some of these were relatives of his, or sons of his colleagues in Tournai, but several came from further afi eld: from Ghent, Haarlem, Bruges, and even Spain. Only twice, in the early part of his career, does Truffi n have more than one at a time, despite there being no limit to this in Tournai, and in both cases they were taken on close together in time
Th e importance of grinding and paint preparation is verbalized in the complaints of the painters of Seville in 1480, who claimed that regulations were necessary since some painters in the city ‘don’t even know how to classify colours as they ought, or to process them for painting, and because of this what they paint is badly and thoughtlessly painted and the colours are lost and fall off ’.11 Similarly, the Córdoba guild regulations of 1490 state, following a list of allowable pigments, that ‘all these colours should be well ground because they will be more stable and more pleasing to see’.
Given the responsibility, skill, and physical demands of the job of grinding, it seems this was not, as is often thought, a role for the young apprentice: they would be learning this skill but it would not be their primary task, since it needed a worker with considerable experience and physical strength and was therefore more likely undertaken
by a journeyman or other fully trained assistant. When Jean de Beaumetz, the head of the painters’ workshop at the Chartreuse de Champmol in Dijon, needed help in this aspect of his craft, an independent painter from Dijon, Jehan Gentilz, was brought in for the job, to work for fi ve months ‘continually with Beaumetz, grinding colours to make into certain works of painting.’12
an engraving made in the late sixteenth century, the master painter in the centre of the studio, meant to represent Jan van Eyck, is working on an image of St George. A painting of St George by van Eyck, now lost, relatively large in scale (4 × 3 palms, around 84 × 63 centimetres, similar in size to the Arnolfi ni Portrait) and very highly priced (at 2,000 Valencian sous reyals, roughly 128 Venetian ducats), was among the most famous of the artist’s works, having been acquired by agents of Alfonso of Aragon in 1444 and sent, via Barcelona, to Naples, carefully packed in wool.23 Th is was possibly the painting that Vasari later said ‘became very dear to that King both for the beauty of the fi gures and for the novel invention shown in the colouring’.24 It was described by the Neapolitan humanist Pietro Summonte in 1524 as:
renowned work, where one could see the knight leaning and throwing the spear into the mouth of the dragon, piercing through so deep that the skin on the other side was already swollen and stretched outwards. And the fi ne knight was so bent forward and so strained against the dragon that his leg was seen losing the stirrup and he himself almost unseated. Th e refl ection of the dragon was visible on the left leg of the shiny armour as if in a mirror and the rust on the tree of the saddle stood out against all that metallic splendour.25
In many towns there was no limit put on the number of journeymen you could employ: in Ulm, the painters’ and sculptors’ regulations stated that ‘a master may engage as many as he wants’.29 Mostly, what would limit numbers were the fi nancial resources to pay wages and the space available
‘Zubereiters’, perhaps translatable as ‘preparers’, were specialists in making panels and sculptures ready for painting by laying on the layers of chalk ground, smoothing them down, and also often applying gilding—the two skills being interrelated since good gilding, as we have seen, relied on the quality of the ground.31
in 1507 in Nuremberg Dürer records how he had given the panel he was working on for Jacob Heller ‘to the preparer [zubereiter] who has whitened it and painted it and will put on the gilding next week’.32 Th e time it took to produce paintings or polychrome sculpture could be considerably reduced by employing specialists within the workshop or by outsourcing this element of the making of an image.
many artists also relied heavily on their wives or other female family members in the running of a workshop; they might be trained as painters themselves, but if not they could handle other aspects of the business of making, selling, or delivering art. In 1459 Rogier van der Weyden’s wife, along with several of his journeymen, accompanied a large altarpiece to Cambrai for delivery to the abbot of Saint-Aubert there,33 while Dürer’s wife and his mother were employed by him selling and marketing his prints, something common in Nuremberg and other German towns.34
Wives might also take over the running of a workshop completely on the death of their husband: such an event is catered for in the Lyon regulations of 1496, which specify that ‘all women widowed by the death of their husband in one of the aforesaid metiers of painting, sculpture, or glass painting may and should continue to hold shop in the manner of their husband when he was alive … and may have the same rights and privileges’.35 Other regulations, such as those of Krakow, specify that if a master dies the apprentice must continue with the widow so that her fi nancial hardship is alleviated. It is likely that for a few years after Jan van Eyck’s death his widow Margaret [98] continued the business of his workshop, ensuring the completion of commissions or selling off part-completed works.
‘Mature, Solid, Wise, Reliable, Self-Assured, Experienced, Well-Behaved People’: Recruitment, Collaboration, and Specialization
Th is quote comes from a letter written by the aged court sculptor Michel Colombe to his patron Margaret of Austria.36 Th eir correspondence gives us some of the most illuminating and precise evidence we have concerning the possible collaborations and specializations within a workshop at the period. In his letter, Colombe sets out how he will proceed with a tomb for Margaret’s late husband, Philibert of Savoy (d. 1504), the models for which we have discussed above.
Th e ways such networks might function, and the fl uctuating number and variety of personnel in artists’ workshops, can be examined from another rich documentary source from the beginning, rather than the end, of our period: the records of payments to the artists employed under Jean de Marville and then Claus Sluter at the ducal sculpture workshop in Dijon.37 Th is outfi t was well fi nanced by the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, who required, at various points, swift progress on the works. It was housed within the ducal palace in Dijon itself, and produced several major projects between 1385 and 1406, including the tomb of Philip the Bold [133] and the Great Cross, better known as the Well of Moses
In 1384–5, when the records begin, Marville was head of the team and in that year he employed ten diff erent workers, most for periods of between twenty-two and fi fty-two weeks, paid by the week or sometimes by the day. Th ese were all fully trained workers, not apprentices learning their craft. Of this ten, there was one father and son, and two pairs of brothers. Such family teams, as we have seen with Colombe and his nephews, were common at the period—the de Limbourg brothers and their uncle Jean Malouel being another famous example from the French courts.
By 1386–8 there were between thirteen and fi fteen workers on the payroll of Marville’s workshop each year, many of whom worked for the full fi fty-two weeks. Th e team included two specialist polishers from Paris (one of whom was a woman), brought in by Marville to work on the marble of Philip the Bold’s tomb, the artistic impact of which relies heavily on the eff ects of the highly polished and refl ective surfaces [133]. In the 1390s, with Sluter at its head, the workshop generally had a smaller workforce of between fi ve and nine people on the books in any one year.
Th at sculptors (and painters) within a workshop could also have produced works entirely by their own hand from start to fi nish which would then be sold as products of the shop is a possibility documented for us in the case of the painter-sculptor Wilhelm Klover, working in Lübeck at the end of the fi fteenth century. In his will of 1504, when the stock in his shop and its intended recipients are listed, several works are identifi ed by the names of the craftsmen who made them. To his daughter Brigitte and her husband ‘the painter’ Claus Heyne, Klover left all the wooden carvings: the ‘big cross and Our Lady and Saint John’ which was unfi nished, and four Virgins, one of which was also unfi nished, and one of which was by the hand of a Hans Nyckels. Th e panel paintings he left to religious institutions: one painted by a Pavel Grove was given to the House of the Grey Sisters and another, by a certain Wolter, was given to the ‘Pockenhaus’, the smallpox house.39 Clearly Klover’s journeymen produced identifi ably independent works, which were also part of the workshop output
any artist overseeing a project like a painted retable in which the whole was visible in one, two, or at most three stages (closed, fi rst opening, and second opening of a double-winged altarpiece), would aim to ensure that any teamwork it might entail was as seamless as possible. Th is aim, and its desirability for patrons, is made very clear in relation to the craft of printing by the blockcutter Jost de Negker, who, writing to Maximilian I in 1512, promises that despite employing two other cutters to undertake a certain work for the emperor, he will ‘take care to arrange and prepare everything … and fi nally complete and add the fi nishing touches in my own hand so that the entire work and all the individual blocks will in the end have similar carving and appear to have been made by one cutter, without anyone being able to distinguish more than one workman’.
It is unsurprising, then, that it is in this ‘middle ground’, beneath the surface of paintings, revealed to us in infrared refl ectograms, where evidence of collaboration in their making, albeit often hard to interpret, can best be found.
Refl ectograms reveal that the drawing of the composition onto the panel was not always undertaken by the master, or by the master unaided, and in workshops under commercial pressure may routinely have been left to assistants working from detailed preparatory drawings like those discussed above (p. 167–73). Indeed, this is certainly the case for some of the large-scale works by Rogier van der Weyden, such as the Exhumation of Saint Hubert [6], where the underdrawing reveals a complex collaborative procedure, with diff erent workshop members transferring up the patterns for each of the three main fi gure groups in this design.41
Materials, Methods, and Technical Virtuosity
Acquiring Materials: Availability, Cost, Expertise, and Decorum
Th e Spanish sculptor Pere Johan (d. after 1447) travelled over 1,000 kilometres around Spain at the cost of a whole year’s salary in the mid-1430s to fi nd the best alabaster for the high altarpiece of the cathe dral of Zaragoza
Th e supply of more portable artists’ materials like pigments was dependent instead on the networks of merchants and trade routes across Europe
artists did not routinely manufacture them themselves, despite the complex recipes to do so which were circulating at this period. Th ey would instead purchase them in a powdered form from merchants, apothecaries, or, in the later part of our period in Germany, from pharmacies
In Dijon, the painters working at the Chartreuse de Champmol were regularly supplied with pigments and metal leaf (gold, silver, and tin) by a merchant called Perenot Barbisey, but some supplies came from local painters; various specialist spice merchants were also drawn on, often for the more expensive blue pigments, while goldsmiths tended to supply much, but not all, of the gold leaf. A similar range of sources of supply is found in the Burgundian court accounts for 1420
Jean Malouel in 1403 sent an assistant to Paris with written instructions to give to a goldbeater there (a specialist in producing and supplying gold leaf ), who was to supply fi ve papiers (books of gold leaf, containing 300 leaves per book) of fi ne gold. Th e assistant was to wait while the goldbeater produced the leaf ‘in the manner specifi ed by Malouel’. Paris was the source for many other materials used at the Chartreuse, from Baltic oak to Italian marble for the gisant (recumbent effi gy) of Philip the Bold’s tomb [10], which Sluter himself went to Paris to purchase from a Genoese merchant there in 1392.7
Local production could infl uence availability, of course: Germany had good supplies of azurite, for example, since a high proportion of this pigment used in Europe was mined there (one mine alone produced 5,285 pounds of the mineral in 1511). Possibly because such abundant supplies were at hand there, the more expensive ultramarine was almost unheard of in this region: it could not be bought in German pharmacies supplying pigments and it is rarely found on German panel paintings, with the exception of those from Cologne, judging from the current state of knowledge
As well as cost and availability, there were other factors that dictated the use of materials: guilds might, as we have seen, establish certain limits, allowing the use of some pigments and not others, depending on the type of work. As a rule painters of panels, who were working in oil, were allowed to use the full range of pigments available, so long as they did not pass off one material for another of lesser quality or cost, a universal concern for all the crafts, not just those making images. Th us in Tournai in 1481 the makers of playing cards ‘may not employ gold, nor silver, nor azur nor any other fi ne colour’
Behind these limits lay a general desire to avoid shoddy work, which would bring the trade into disrepute: certain pigments did not last as well as others, or handle as well, or were not suitable for use in a glue- or waterbased medium. In addition, by limiting the range of pigments and other materials like metals that painters working on cloth, parchment and paper could use, and who appear to have had lesser standing (their training was shorter and they paid lower dues), the regulations were limiting competition between diff erent types of object:
Running through all this was also a concern for the appropriateness of materials for each type of object, from a panel painting in a church to a parrot perch. Various guild regulations specify, for example, that certain liturgical items should be made with particu lar care or with the best quality gold: these tend to be monstrances, which would hold the consecrated host, altarpieces, or more generally works ‘for the church’.15 Th is sense of decorum in terms of the matter from which an object is made is one of the defi ning characteristics of the period.
While the increased availability of oak for painters in the southern Netherlands, or of limewood for carvers in southern Germany, might help explain patterns of production in these regions, similarly lack of supply can help explain why some types of objects almost cease to be made: around 1400 it seems that supplies of elephant ivory, the source of which had always been India rather than Africa, became extremely scarce, and in turn the production of ivory carvers, so abundant in the previous two centuries, decreases considerably. 22
tapestry
Th e fi rst step in making a tapestry required the production of the initial design (called the petit patron in French documents; klein patroon in Flemish), which was a drawing on paper or parchment of the whole design. A rare surviving example, in pen and wash on ten pieces of paper (the largest measuring 31 × 57.5 centimetres), gives an idea of the nature and level of detail such a design might entail [142].36 Once this was approved by the client or the entrepreneur organizing the project, the large cartoon (called the grand patron, groot patroon) could be made (although changes could still occur at this stage: Isabeau of Bavaria rejected designs made by her painter Colart de Laon on seeing the grand patron, and this may have been just as crucial a point, when the full impact and success, or otherwise, of the design could be appreciated).37
Because the cartoons had to be to scale, they had to be made on a material which could be large, light, and fl exible. Th is meant cloth: in a commission of a tapestry made for the church of the Magdalene in Troyes in 1425–30, bed sheets, sewn together, were employed,38 but paper was also used, increasingly so by the early sixteenth century. Flexibility was vital because these grand patrons would function as the guide for the weavers, who would cut them into strips and pin them against the warp threads of their loom to trace the outlines of the design onto these uncoloured threads; then the strips would be placed, usually (and most effi ciently) underneath the loom as they worked, the weavers parting their warp threads to see the details of the design below. Th e consequence of this working method was that the cartoon was reversed in the tapestry as the weavers worked from the back of the textile, a consideration which had to be taken into account in their design
As each section was completed by the weaver, it would be wound onto the lower roller of the loom along with the cartoon, which would be crushed against the face of the tapestry. Cartoons thus had a limited working life, and were often repaired or entirely reworked to enable more sets to be produced from them; it is unsurprising that no examples of these full-scale cartoons survive from our period.
Th us measurements of how many warp threads there are per centimetre in tapestries is a useful guide to their cost and level of fi neness: a high-quality tapestry in wool alone tends to have 5–6 threads per centimetre; add silk and it rises to around 6–8 per centimetre; those with metal-wrapped threads and silk, the most costly, have as high as 9 or 10 warps per centimetre.
Th e Angers tapestries, made almost entirely of wool, have 5 and 6 warp threads per centimetre;48 the Zamora Troy
set [53] have 6–7; the Vatican Life of St Peter set designed by Raphael have 7; Bernard van Orley’s Passion set for Cardinal Wolsey or Henry VIII made c. 1525–8 has 10–12 per centimetre.49 In general, warp density rises in the later fi fteenth and early sixteenth centuries in the highest level of production as weavers sought ever increasingly subtle eff ects of tonal transition and illusion.
stone and wood
How an artist might plan his work with the demands of installation and delivery in mind is well explicated though the technical evidence of the large re table made for St Jacob’s church in Rothenburg, commissioned from Friedrich Herlin, a painter based in nearby Nordlingen [153]. To set against this, we can consider the same issue from the point of view of the documentation concerning the delivery and installation of another monumental carved retable, the altarpiece made for the church of St Wolfgang, upper Austria, by the painter-sculptor from Bruneck in the South Tyrol, Michael Pacher (fl . 1467, d. 1498), installed in 1481 [154].60
Moving Images
Note: the altarpiece is to be opened only on the festivals of the Nativity, Easter, Pentecost, and the two days following, Ascension, Trinity, All Saints, Epiphany, Corpus Christi, the Dedication of the Convent’s Church, and all festivals of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On the day of a festival it is to be closed straight after second Vespers. Twice every year it is to be cleaned. And there are not to be large lights on the altar, on account of the smoke: two small wall candles are enough and any others should be placed away from the altar. Instructions by Andreas Stoss, son of the sculptor Veit Stoss and Prior of the Carmelite house in Nuremberg, on how his father’s work was to be displayed1
Tableaux: Manipulation, Contemplation, Protection
We begin our exploration of moving objects with a category of mostly smallscale and intricate works termed ‘tableaux’ which became fashionable at the courts of France in the second half of the fourteenth century. Th ese tableaux are found in large numbers in the inventories of the French kings and dukes—Charles V owned around 110; Jean de Berry had around 80. Th ey came in a wide range of media: gold, silver, enamel, ivory, amber, parchment, panel, mother of pearl, embroidery, or combinations of these materials, often incorporating jewels, pearls and even cameos, their unifying characteristic being their relatively fl at form. Th ey were usually, but not always, rectangular in shape, and most were either double-sided or had multiple wings, anything from two to as many as thirteen (an object owned by Charles V),2 which could open, close, or fold in various ways. Some had hinges, others pins or plaques: one, owned by Louis of Anjou, is described as having ‘six small square parts that are held together with hinges, which fold and assemble all together one on top of the other in the form of a square book’.3 Often they were extremely compact, designated as ‘very small’ and designed to be carried on the person (specifi ed in the inventories as ‘a porter sur soy’ or similar); some were hung
above beds where they provided protection while the owner slept. Th is taste for small folding objects was not in itself new in the late fourteenth century: small-scale ivory, metalwork and painted diptychs and triptychs go back to antiquity and were popular in Byzantium and trecento Italy, but none of these predecessors developed the complexity of form, combinations of media, and compactness seen in the objects made in Paris c.1400
In images that did not fold, the working of both sides, front and back, was also very common; like folding objects, these were designed to be handled and manipulated, if in a different way. We find fictive marbling, coats of arms, or emblems on the reverse of many independent panel paintings, both portraits and devotional works. Th e reverse of a portrait possibly showing Guillaume Fillastre, advisor to the Dukes of Burgundy and later Bishop of Tournai [160], has an illusionistic depiction of holly, clearly a pun on the sitter’s motto, ‘Je he ce que mord’, inscribed on the top of the frame on the reverse and on the bottom of the frame on the front, translatable as ‘I hate that which bites.’12 Th e idea of handling something which at fi rst glance appears uncomfortably sharp was possibly an intended eff ect—it certainly seems to have been behind the dramatic treatment of the back of the Small Round Pietà [161, 162], a painting of around 1400 and again, from its imagery and form, likely to have been made for the ambit of the French kings or dukes, probably in Paris.13 Th e front of this panel is beautifully worked and richly gilded with a stamped gold background. On the reverse, however, the visual eff ect is very diff erent and momentarily disconcerting, since on turning it over one is faced with a blood-red object on which the crown of thorns and the three nails of Christ’s Crucifi xion are illusionistically painted. Th ere is no frame on this side of the panel to hold it by, so the impression of touching the actual crown with its dangerously sharp thorns, or an object on which it sits, is vividly conveyed: this work marries form and imagery beautifully—a rectangular panel could not achieve the same eff ect.
Philip the Bold had a panel painting
showing the apostles and St Anthony made by Jean Malouel in 1398–9 which was ‘put every day in front of him in his oratory’, a phrase which might imply movement from storage to place of worship.15 Equally, items stored might be visited where they were kept, to be examined, admired, and contemplated: we are told how Charles V, after his afternoon rest, retired to his private rooms to ‘peruse joyaux and other treasures’; in his study at Vincennes, one such location, Charles had over 500 items available to him, which included religuaries, jewels, cameos, boxes, mirrors, prayer beads, an astrolabe, and many tableaux.16
Th is practice of keeping paintings and other images in containers or covered in some manner, rather than hanging them on walls on constant display, continued throughout our period, at least for smaller scale devotional works: a series of forty-seven small panel paintings made by Juan de Flandes and Michel Sittow for Isabella of Castile were kept by her in a cupboard, and presumably brought out in various combinations for contemplation and prayer. Th eir imagery extends the standard Passion cycle considerably, including several highly unusual scenes such as Christ appearing to the Virgin with the Redeemed of the Old Testament [164]. When Margaret of Austria acquired thirty-two of them after Isabella’s death in 1504 she kept them in a specially made wooden box in a cupboard in her bedroom for eleven years, but two, by Michel Sittow with related iconography of the Ascension of Christ and the Assumption of the Virgin [165], she had made into a diptych, demonstrating an appreciation and recognition both of a particular artist’s hand and the way in which religious scenes could be juxtaposed to expand and enrich their meaning.21
Winged Altarpieces: Revelation and Concealment