University of Virginia Library

II.

When a great change is effected in human affairs
it brings on by degrees a corresponding change in
human conceptions. After the discovery of the Indies
and of America, after the invention of printing
and the multiplication of books, after the restoration
of classic antiquity and the Reformation of Luther,
any conception of the world then formed could no
longer remain monastic and mystic. The tender and
melancholy aspiration of a soul sighing for the celestial
kingdom and humbly subjecting its conduct to the
authority of an undisputed Church gave way to free
inquiry nourished on so many fresh conceptions, and
disappeared at the admirable spectacle of this real
world which man now began to comprehend and to
conquer. The rhetorical academies which, at first,
were composed of a clerical body passed into the
hands of the laity; they had preached the payment of
tithes and submission to the Church; they now ridiculed
the clergy and combated ecclesiastical abuses.

In 1533 nine citizens of Amsterdam were condemned
to a pilgrimage to Rome for having represented one
of these satirical pieces. In 1539, at Ghent, the
question having been proposed of: Who are the
greatest fools in the world? eleven out of nineteen
academies reply: The monks. "A few poor monks
and nuns," says a contemporary, "always appear in
the comedies; it seems as if people could not enjoy
themselves without making sport of God and the
Church." Philip II. had decreed the punishment of
death against authors and actors whose pieces were
not authorized or were impious. But they were performed,
nevertheless, even in the villages. "The
word of God," says the same author, "first found its
way into these countries through plays, and for this
reason they are forbidden much more rigidly than
the writings of Martin Luther."[19] It is evident that
the mind had become emancipated from ancient
tutelage, and that people and burghers, artizans and
merchants began to think for themselves on matters
of salvation and morality.

The extraordinary wealth and prosperity of the
country lead to picturesque and sensuous customs;
here, as in England at the same epoch, a renaissance
pomp overlays a silent Protestant fermentation.
When Charles V., in 1520, made his entry
into the city of Antwerp, Albert Dürer saw four
hundred triumphal arches, two stories high and forty
feet long, decorated with paintings on which allegorical
representations were given. The performers
consisted of young girls belonging to the best bourgeois
class, clothed simply in thin gauze, "almost
naked," says the honest German artist,—"I have
rarely seen more beautiful. I gazed at them very
attentively, and even passionately, inasmuch as I am
a painter." The festivals of the belle-lettre academies
become magnificent; cities and communities
rival each other in luxurious allegorical creations. At
the invitation of the violinists of Antwerp fourteen
academies, in 1562, send their "triumphs," and the
academy called the Guirlande de Marie, at Brussels,
obtains the prize. "For," says Van Meteren, "there

were full three hundred and forty men on horseback,
all dressed in velvet and in dark purple silk, with
long Polish cassocks embroidered with silver lace,
and wearing red hats fashioned like antique helmets;
their pourpoints; plumes and bootees were
white. They wore belts of silver tocque, very ingeniously
woven with yellow, red, blue and white.
They had seven chariots made after the antique
pattern, with divers personages borne thereon.
They had, beside, seventy-eight ordinary chariots
with torches; the said chariots were covered with
red cloth bordered with white. The charioteers all
wore red mantles, and on these chariots were divers
personages representing a number of beautiful antique
figures, all of which goes to show how people
will assemble in friendship to share in amity." La
Pione de Malines provides a parade almost equal to
this consisting of three hundred and twenty men on
horseback, attired in a flesh-colored material embroidered
with gold, seven antique chariots emblazoned
and flaming with all sorts of lights. Add to
this the entry of twelve other processions, and then
enumerate the plays, pantomines, fireworks and banquets
which follow after. "There were several similar
games given during the peace in other cities.....
I have deemed it proper to narrate all this," says Van
Meteren, "for the purpose of showing the happy
union and prosperity of those countries in those
days." After the departure of Philip II., "instead of
one court there seemed to be a hundred and fifty."
The nobles vied with each other in magnificence,
maintaining free tables and spending without stint.
On one occasion the Prince of Orange, wishing to
diminish his train, discharged in a body twenty-eight
head cooks. Lordly mansions swarmed with
pages and gentlemen and superb liveries; the full
tide of the renaissance overflowed in folly and
extravagance, as under Elizabeth in England, in
pompous array, cavalcades, games and good cheer.
The Count of Brederode drank so much at one of
St. Martin's feasts that he came near dying; the
rhinegrave's brother did actually die at the table
through too great fondness of Malvoisie wine. Never
did life seem more bright or beautiful. Like Florence
under the Medicis in the preceding century, it
ceased to be tragic; man had expanded; murderous
revolts and sanguinary wars between city and city
and corporation and corporation quietly subsided;
only one sedition takes place in Ghent in 1536 which
is easily quelled without much bloodshed, the last
and a feeble convulsion, not to be compared with
the formidable insurrections of the fifteenth century.
Margaret of Austria, Mary of Hungary, and Margaret
of Parma, the three rulers, are popular;
Charles V. is a national prince, speaking Flemish,
boasting of his nativity in Ghent, and protecting, by
treaties, the manufactures and trade of the country.
He fosters and nourishes it; Flanders, in return,
supplies him with the half of his entire revenue;[20]
in his herd of states she is the fat milch cow which
is milked constantly without being dried up. Thus,
while the mind is expanding, the temperature around
it becomes modified and establishes the conditions
of a new growth; we see the dawn of it in the festivals
of the belle-lettre academies, which are classic
representations precisely like those of the Florence
carnival and quite different from the quaint conceits
accumulated at the banquets of the Dukes of Burgundy.
"The `Violet,' `Olive' and `Thought'
academies of Antwerp," says Guiccardini, "give
public performances of comedies, tragedies and other
histories in imitation of the Greeks and Romans."
Society, ideas and tastes have undergone a transformation,
and there is room for a new art.

Already in the preceding epoch we see premonitory
symptoms of the coming change. From
Hubert Van Eyck to Quintin Matsys the grandeur
and gravity of religious conceptions have diminished.
Nobody now dreams of portraying the
whole of Christian faith and doctrine in a single
picture; scenes are selected from the Gospel and
from history—annunciations, shepherd adorations,
last judgments, martyrdoms and moral legends.
Painting, which is epic in the hands of Hubert Van
Eyck, becomes idyllic in those of Hemling and
almost worldly in those of Quintin Matsys. It
gets to be pathetic, interesting and pleasing. The
charming saints, the beautiful Herodias and the
lithe Salome of Quintin Matsys are richly attired
noble dames and already laic; the artist loves the
world as it is and for itself, and does not subordinate

it to the representation of the supernatural world
he does not employ it as a means but as an end.
Scenes of profane life multiply; he paints townspeople
in their shops; money changers, amorous
couples, and the attenuated features and stealthy
smiles of a miser. Lucas of Leyden, his contemporary,
is an ancestor of the painters whom we call
the lesser Flemings; his "Presentation of Christ"
and "The Magdalen's Dance" have nothing religious
about them but their titles; the evangelical
subject is lost in the accessories; that which the
picture truly presents is a rural Flemish festival, or
a gathering of Flemings on an open field. Jerome
Bosch, of the same period, paints grotesque, infernal
scenes. Art, it is clear, falls from heaven to earth,
and is no longer to treat divine but human incidents.
Artists, in other respects, lack no process, and no
preparation; they understand perspective, they
know the use of oil, and are masters of modelling
and relief; they have studied actual types; they
know how to paint dresses, accessories, architecture
and landscape with wonderful accuracy and finish;
their manipulative skill is admirable. One defect
only still chains them to hieratic art, which is the
immobility of their faces and the rigid folds of thei
stuffs. They have but to observe the rapid play of
physiognomies and the easy movement of loose drapery,
and the renaissance is complete; the breeze
of the age is behind them and already fills their
sails. On looking at their portraits, their interiors,
and even their sacred personages, as in the "Entombment"
of Quintin Matsys, one is tempted to
address them thus: "You are alive—one effort
more! Come, bestir yourselves! Shake off the
middle age entirely! Depict the modern man for
us as you find him within you and outside of you.
Paint him vigorous, healthy and content with existence.
Forget the meagre, ascetic and pensive
spirit, dreaming in the chapels of Hemling. If you
choose a religious scene for the motive of your picture,
compose it, like the Italians, of active and
healthy figures, only let these figures proceed from
your national and personal taste. You have a soul
of your own, which is Flemish and not Italian; let
the flower bloom; judging by the bud it will be a
beautiful one." And, indeed, when we regard the
sculptures of the time, such as the chimney of the
Palais de Justice and the tomb of Charles the Bold
at Bruges, the church and monuments of Brou,
we see the promise of an original and complete art,
less sculptural and less refined than the Italian, but
more varied, more expressive and closer to nature,
less subject to rule but nearer to the real, more
capable of manifesting spirit and personality, the
impulses, the unpremeditated, the diversities, the
lights and darks of education, temperament and
age of the individual; in short, a Germanic art
which indicates remote successors to the Van Eycks
and remote predecessors of Rubens.

They never appeared, or at all events, they imperfectly
fulfilled their task. No nation, it must be
noted, lives alone in the world; alongside of the
Flemish renaissance there existed the Italian renaissance,
and the large tree stifled the small plant. It
flourished and grew for a century; the literature,
the ideas and the masterpieces of precocious Italy
imposed themselves on sluggish Europe, and the
Flemish cities, through their commerce, and the Austrian
dynasty, through its possessions and its Italian

affairs, introduced into the North the tastes and mod
els of the new civilization. Towards 1520 the Flem
ish painters began to borrow from the artists of
Florence and Rome. John of Mabuse is the first one
who, in 1513, on returning from Italy, introduced
the Italian into the old style, and the rest followed.
It is so natural in advancing into an unexplored
country to take the path already marked out! This
path, however, is not made for those who follow it;
the long line of Flemish carts is to be delayed and
stuck fast in the disproportionate ruts which another
set of wheels have worn. There are two traits characteristic
of Italian art, both of which run counter to
the Flemish imagination. On the one hand Italian
art centres on the natural body, healthy, active and
vigorous, endowed with every athletic aptitude, that
is to say, naked or semi-draped, frankly pagan, enjoying
freely and nobly in full sunshine every limb,
instinct and animal faculty, the same as an ancient
Greek in his city or palestrum, or, as at this very
epoch, a Cellini on the Italian streets and highways.
Now a Fleming does not easily enter into this conception.
He belongs to a cold and humid climate; a
man there in a state of nudity shivers. The human
form here does not display the fine proportions nor
the easy attitudes required by classic art; it is often
dumpy or too gross; the white, soft, yielding flesh,
easily flushed, requires to be clothed. When the
painter returns from Rome and strives to pursue Italian
art, his surroundings oppose his education; his
sentiment being no longer renewed through his contact
with living nature, he is reduced to his souvenirs.
Moreover, he is of Germanic race; in other terms he
is organically a morally good-natured man, and even
modest; he has difficulty in appreciating the pagan
idea of nudity, and still greater difficulty in comprehending
the fatal and magnificent idea[21] which governs
civilization and stimulates the arts beyond the
Alps, namely, that of the complete and sovereign
individual, emancipated from every law, subordinating
the rest, men and things, to the development of
his own nature and the growth of his own faculties.
Our painter is related, although distantly, to Martin
Schœn and Albert Dürer; he is a bourgeois, almost
docile and staid, a lover of the comfortable and the
decent, and adapted to family and domestic life. His
biographer, Karl Van Mander, at the beginning of
his book, furnishes him with moral precepts. Read
this patriarchal treatise, and imagine the distance
between a Rosso, a Giulio Romano, a Titian and a
Giorgione, and their pupils of Leyden or Antwerp.
"All vices," says the good Fleming, "bring their
own punishment. Distrust the maxim that the best
painter is he who is the most dissipated. Unworthy
of the name of artist is he who leads an evil life.
Painters should never dispute or enter into strife with
each other. To squander one's property is not a meritorious
art. Avoid paying court to women in your
youthful days. Shun the society of frivolous women,
who corrupt so many painters. Reflect before you
depart for Rome, for the opportunities to spend
money there are great, and none are there for earning
it. Ever be thankful to God for His bounties."
Special recommendations follow concerning Italian
inns, bed linen and fleas. It is evident that pupils
of this class, even with great labor, will produce but
little more than academic figures; man, according
to their conceptions, is a draped body; when, following
the example of the Italian masters, they attempt
the nude, they render it without freedom,
without spirit, without vivacity of invention; their
pictures, in fact, are simply cold and meagre imitation;
their motive is pedantic; they execute servilely
and badly that which, in Italy, is done naturally
and well. On the other hand, Italian art, like
Greek art, and, in general, all classic art, simplifies
in order to embellish; it eliminates, effaces, and reduces
detail; by this means it gives greater value to
grander features. Michael Angelo and the admirable
Florentine school subordinate or suppress accessories,
landscape, fabrics and costume; with them
the essential consists of the noble and the grandiose
type, the anatomical and muscular structure, the
nude or lightly draped form taken by itself, abstractly,
through the retrenchment of particulars constituting
the individual and denoting his profession,
education and condition; you have man in general
represented, and not a special man. Their personages
are in a superior world, because they are of a
world which is not; the peculiar feature of the scene
they depict is the nullity of time and space. Nothing
is more opposed to Germanic and Flemish genius,
which sees things as they are in their entirety and
complexity; which, in man, takes in, besides man in
general, the contemporary, the citizen, the peasant,
the laborer, this citizen, that laborer, that peasant;
which attaches as much importance to the accessories
of a man as to the man himself; which loves
not merely human nature but all nature, animate and
inanimate—cattle, horses, plants, landscape, sky, and
even the atmosphere—its broader sympathies forestalling
any neglect of objects, and its more minute
observation requiring the fullest expression. You can
comprehend how, in subjecting itself to a discipline
so contrary, it loses the qualities it had without acquiring
those it had not; how, in order that it may
arrogate the ideal, it reduces color, loses the sentiment
of light and atmosphere, obliterates the true
details of costume and of interiors, deprives figures
of original diversities peculiar to portrait and person,
and is led to moderate the suddenness of motion
constituting the impulsiveness of nature's activity,
and thereby impairing ideal symmetry. It finds
difficulty, however, in making all these sacrifices;
its instinct only partially yields to its education.
Flemish reminiscences may be traced underneath
Italian velleity; both in turn predominate in the
same picture; each prevents the other from having
their full effect; their painting, consequently, uncertain,
imperfect and diverted by two tendencies, furnishing
us with historical documents and not beautiful
works of art.

Such is the spectacle presented in Flanders during
the last three quarters of the sixteenth century.
Like a small river receiving a large stream, the mingled
waters of which are disturbed until the foreign
affluent imposes its more powerful tint on the entire
current, so do we find the national style, invaded by
the Italian, dappled irregularly and in places, gradually
disappearing, only rarely rising to the surface,
and at last sinking into obscure depths, whilst the
other displays itself in the light and attracts universal
attention. It is interesting to trace in the public
galleries this conflict of the two currents and the
peculiar effects of their commingling. The first Italian

influx takes place with John de Mabuse, Bernard
Van Orley, Lambert Lombard, John Mostaert,
John Schorel, and Launcelot Blondel. They import
in their pictures classic architecture, veined marble
pilasters, medallions, shell niches, sometimes triumphal
arches and cariatides, sometimes also noble and
vigorous female figures in antique drapery, a sound
nude form, well proportioned and vitalized, of the
fine pagan stock, and healthy; their imitation reduces
itself to this, while in other respects they follow
national traditions. They still paint small pictures,
suitable for genre subjects; they almost always preserve
the strong and rich coloring of the preceding
age, the mountains and blue distances of John Van
Eyck, the clear skies vaguely tinged with emerald
on the horizon, the magnificent stuffs covered with
gold and jewels, the powerful relief, the minute precision
of detail, and the solid honest heads of the
bourgeoisie. But as they are no longer restrained by
hieratic gravity they fall, in attempting to emancipate
themselves, into simple awkwardness and ridiculous
inconsistencies. The children of Job, crushed
by their falling palace, sprawl about grimacing and
writhing as if possessed; on the other panel of the
triptych is the devil in the air mounting upward like
a bat towards the petty Christ of a missal. Long
feet and lean ascetic hands form the odd appurtenances
of a shapely body. A "Last Supper" by
Lambert Lombard mingles together Flemish clumsiness
and vulgarity with the composition of Da Vinci.
A "Last Judgment" by Bernard Van Orley introduces
demons by Martin Schœn amidst the academic
figures of Raphael. In the next generation the rising
flood begins to engulph all; Michael Van Coxcyen,
Heemskerk, Franz Floris, Martin de Vos, the
Franckens, Van Mander, Spranger, Pourbus the elder,
and later, Goltzius, besides many others, resemble
people ambitious of speaking Italian but who do so
laboriously, with an accent and some barbarisms.
The canvas is enlarged and approaches the usual
dimensions of an historical subject; the manner of
painting is less simple; Karl Van Mander reproaches
his contemporaries with "overloading their brushes,"
which was not formerly done, and with carrying impasto
to excess. Coloring dies out; it becomes more
and more white, chalky and pallid. Painters enter
passionately into the study of anatomy, foreshortenings
and muscular development; their drawing beomes
dry and hard, reminding one at once of the
goldsmiths contemporary with Pollaiolo and the exaggerating
disciples of Michael Angelo; they lay
great or violent stress on their science, they insist on
proving their ability to manipulate the skeleton and
produce action; you will find Adams and Eves,
Saint Sebastians, Massacres of the Innocents, and
Horatii resembling grotesque forms of living and
bare muscles; their personages look as if casting
their skins. When they show more moderation, and
the painter, like Franz Floris in his "Fall of the Angels,"
discreetly copies good classic models, his nudities
are scarcely any better; realistic sentiment and
the quaint Germanic imagination peer out among
ideal forms; demons with the heads of cats, fishes
and swine, and with horns, claws and humps, and
blowing fire from their jaws, introduce bestial comedy
and a fantastic sabbat into the midst of the noble
Olympus; we have one of Teniers' buffooneries inserted
in a poem by Raphael. Others, like Martin
Vos, strain themselves to produce the great sacred
picture, figures imitated from the antique, cuirasses,
draperies and tunics, studied correctness in composition,
gestures indicative of noble action and stage
heads and head gear, while they are substantially
genre painters and lovers of reality and accessories.
They constantly fall back to their Flemish types and
their domestic details; their pictures seem to be
enlarged colored engravings; they would be much
better were they of small size. We feel in the artist
a perverted talent, a natural disposition thwarted,
an instinct working against the grain, a prose-writer
born for narrating social incidents of whom the public
commands epics in sounding Alexandrines.[22] Still
another wave, and the remains of national genius seem
wholly submerged. A painter of noble family, well
brought up, instructed by an erudite, a man of the
world and a courtier, a favorite of the great Italian
and Spanish leaders who manage matters in the
Netherlands, Otto Venius, after passing seven years
in Italy, brings from that country noble and pure
antique types, beautiful Venetian color, melting and
subtly graduated tones, shadows permeated with
light, and the vague purples of flesh and of ruddy
foliage. Excepting his native stimulus he is Italian,
and no longer belongs to his race; scarcely more
than a fragment of costume or the simple attitude of
a stooping old man connects him with his country.
Nothing remains to the painter but to abandon it
entirely. Denis Calvaert establishes himself at Bologna,
enters into competition with the Caraccis, and
is the master of Guido. Flemish art accordingly
seems, through its own course, to suppress itself for
the advantage of another.

And yet it still subsists underneath the other. In
vain does the genius of a people yield to foreign influences.
It always recovers. These are temporary,
while that is eternal; it belongs to the flesh and the
blood, the atmosphere and the soil, the structure and
degree of activity of brain and senses; all are animating
forces incessantly renewed and everywhere
present, and which the transient applause of a superior
civilization neither undermines nor destroys.
This is apparent in the preservation of two styles

which continue pure amidst the growing transforma
tion of the others. Mabuse, Morstaert, Van Orley,
the two Pourbus, John Van Cleve, Antonis Moor, the
two Mierevelts and Paul Moreelze produce excellent
portraits; often, in the triptychs, the faces of the
donataires, arranged in rows on the shutters, form a
contrast in their homely sincerity, calm gravity and
profound simplicity of expression with the frigidity
and artificial composition of the principal subject;
the spectator feels himself quite re-animated; instead
of manikins he finds men. On the other hand there
arises the painting of genre subjects, landscapes and
interiors. After Quintin Matsys, and Lucas of Leyden,
we see it developing with John Matsys, Van
Hemessen, the Breughels, Vinckenbooms, the three
Valkenburgs, Peter Neefs and Paul Bril, and especially
in the multitude of engravers and illustrators
who reproduce, on scattered sheets or in books, the
moralities, social incidents, professions, conditions
and events of the day. They are, undoubtedly, to
remain for a long time fantastic and humorous.
This art mixes up nature promiscuously, according
to its own disordered fancies; it is unconscious of the
true forms and the true tint of trees and mountains;
it makes its figures howling, and introduces amidst
the costumes of the period grotesque monsters sim
ilar to those promenading through the kermesses.
But all these intermediary objects are natural, and
insensibly lead on to its final state, which is the
knowledge and love of actual life, as the eye contemplates
it. Here, as in the painting of portraits,
the chain is complete; the metal of all its links is
national; through Breughel, Paul Bril and Peter
Neefs, through Antonis Moor, the Pourbus and the
Mierevelts, it joins on to the Flemish and Dutch
masters of the seventeenth century. The rigidity of
ancient figures is relaxed; a mystic landscape becomes
real; the transition from the divine to the
human age is accomplished. This spontaneous and
regular development shows that national instincts
are maintained under the empire of foreign fashions;
let a crisis intervene to arouse them, and they recover
their ascendancy, while art is transformed according
to the public taste. This crisis is the great
revolution commencing in 1572, the long and terrible
War of Independence, as grand in its events and as
fecund of results as our French Revolution. Here,
as with us, the renewal of the moral world is the
renewal of the ideal world; the Flemish and Dutch
art of the seventeenth century, like the French art
and literature of the nineteenth century, is the reaction
of a vast tragedy performed for thirty years at
the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Here,
however, the scaffolds and battles, having divided the
nation, form two peoples; one Catholic and legitimist
in Belgium, and the other Protestant and republican
in Holland. While both were combined there
was but one spirit; divided and opposed there were
two. Antwerp and Amsterdam held different conceptions
of life, and, accordingly, display different
schools of painting; the same political crisis which
divided their country divided their art.