FLEMISH AND DUTCH PAINTING DURING THE 16TH CENTURY, PART I

The numerous commercial relationships that in the 15^th century involved Bruges with the most commercially and culturally important Italian cities of the time contributed the Flemish painting of the 14^th century to be known in Italy. This was evidenced when in 1478 arrived from Flanders the Portinari Triptych by Hugo van der Goes (Uffizi Gallery), which was soon exhibited in the church of Sant’Egidio in Florence. The realism and emotional expressiveness of this painting influenced several Florentine masters, such as Botticelli and Filippino Lippi. Thirty years later, a similar influence but in the opposite direction, would determine a thorough appreciation by the Flemish painters of the time of the innovations brought by contemporary Italian painting. This phenomenon occurred when the primacy of trade in Flanders had passed from Bruges to Antwerp as a result of the obstruction (silted-up) caused by sea sand of the Scheldt estuary in the commercial port of Sluys, which until then had been the destination of maritime traffic with Bruges.

Soon, the prosperous city of Antwerp became a center of the first order not only for trade, but for painting, in which Quentin Matsys fully embraced in many of his works the characteristics of Leonardo‘s art that affected both the landscape backgrounds and the drawing and monumental nature of compositions and color qualities. Thus, a clear imprint of the Italian Renaissance was left on the Flemish painting of the time, which would continue throughout the 16th century, not only among artists from Flanders, but also from the area occupied by present-day Holland.

**Christ in the House of Martha and Mary**, oil on panel, by Cornelis Engelbrechtsz., ca. 1515, 55 x 44 cm (*Rijksmuseum*, Amsterdam).

**Christ Taking Leave of his Mother**, oil on panel, by Cornelis Engelbrechtsz., ca. 1515, 55 x 43 cm (*Rijksmuseum*, Amsterdam). Cornelis Engebrechtsz. was the head of a large workshop in the first decades of the 16th century and trained among others Lucas van Leyden. His workshop focused in the production of altarpieces and smaller works for private devotion. This painting and the one pictured before were part of an altarpiece illustrating episodes from the life of the Virgin.

This mutual appreciation between two artistic productions: that of the Netherlands and that of Italy, which originally showed so many divergences, was undoubtedly a consequence of the spread, from the second half of the 15th century, of the spirit of Humanism.

As a phenomenon characteristic of a historical period of deep crisis, Humanism was not limited to being a conscious and systematic approach to the texts written in classical antiquity, but rather, by totally altering the framework of values of the previous era and by stimulating the rapid diffusion of new ideals it determined a radical change in the collective mentality of the whole of Europe, which profoundly meant for political and cultural history, the beginning of a new era and a new whole way of thinking.

**Crucifixion Altarpiece**, oil on panel, by Cornelis Engelbrechtsz., 1510s (*Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal*, Leiden, Netherlands).

**Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen as a Gardener (*Noli me tangere*)**, oil on oak panel, by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, 1507, 55 x 39 cm (*Staatliche Museen*, Kassel, Germany). In the foreground, van Oostsanen shows a scene from the story of the Resurrection as recounted in the Gospel of St. John: Mary Magdalene meets the risen Christ and mistakes him for a gardener. When she recognizes him, she throws herself at his feet. Christ then speaks to her the words the artist has painted in artful Gothic lettering on the trim of his garment: ‘Touch me not, Mary, for I am not yet ascended to my Father’ (Maria *noli me tangere* – *nondum enim ascendi ad patrem*). The artist has depicted Mary in the usual manner of the time, as an elegantly-dressed early-16th-century young lady.

**Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen as a Gardener (*Noli me tangere*)** (detail), oil on oak panel, by Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, 1507, 55 x 39 cm (*Staatliche Museen*, Kassel, Germany). In van Oostsanent’s time, it was customary to portray together a series of events on one single panel. In this detail we can see in the middle and far distance, integrated in a finely-detailed landscape, four more episodes grouped around the central motif: the two Marys at the empty tomb, Jesus meeting the three Marys, his encounter with the pilgrims on the road to Emmaus, and the meal at Emmaus.

The penetration of the new style, the Renaissance, mixed at first with the complicatedly elegant conceptions typical of the late Gothic. This is visible in painters of the 15th and 16th centuries, such as two contemporary Dutchmen that worked throughout the first third of the 16th century: Cornelis Engelbrechtsz. from Leiden (ca. 1462-1527) and Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (before 1470-1533).

**Laughing fool (Laughing jester)**, oil on panel, attributed to Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, ca. 1500, 35 x 22 cm, (Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, United States of America).

**Crucifixion**, oil on panel, by Cornelisz van Oostsanen, ca. 1510, 105 x 87 cm (*Rijksmuseum*, Amsterdam). Van Oostsanen has included in this panel several episodes of the Passion. In the middle a Crucifixion, with four angels collecting the blood in gold calices. In the foreground Mary Magdalene, Mary, John, and Saint Veronica holding the sweat cloth with the image of Jesus’ face. In the background to the right we see the carrying of the cross, and to the left Christ saying goodbye to his mother and the prayer in the Garden of Olives in Gethsemane.

Van Oostsanen worked in Amsterdam and Engelbrechtsz was the teacher of Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533), a great painter, engraver, and draughtsman, a figure somewhat comparable to Dürer because of his Nordic sensibility. Without leaving his homeland, Lucas van Leyden knew how to learn the sense of spatiality and mastery of the human figure typical of Italian works that he must have known through engravings, as evidenced by his table of the Worshipping of the Golden Calf (Amsterdam) and the great triptych of the Last Judgment (Leiden). In his painting Lot and his daughters (Louvre), Lucas von Leyden appears as a visionary who illuminates with strange nightmarish lights the scene of fire falling from heaven on Sodom. The land sinks and the lake swallows bridges and boats while, far from danger, next to his tent, the patriarch Lot has fun with his daughters. It corresponded to this master to incorporate Renaissance formalism into the nascent Dutch school, a task that would be completed by the so-called “Romanist” painters, Romanists because of their stays in Rome and Italy that would definitively ensure identification with the characteristics of the Italian Renaissance.