The seventeenth century was a time of huge change in Europe. Religiously, politically, scientifically and philosophically nothing was standing still. In France the philosopher Descartes reduced all real knowledge down to ‘I think therefore I am’, with implications that undermined absolutely everything the world had believed in. (His views on the infinite nature of the universe were too heretical to air.) Before the Roman Inquisition, Galileo was forced to recant his proof of Copernican theory that the planets revolved around the sun, while in England the physicist Newton conclusively explained gravity and planetary rotation. Politically the century was just as violent and chaotic as the one before. Germany had the Thirty Years War. England had its Civil War, regicide, Republic and Restoration, which dispersed the great art collection of Charles I around Europe. The nothern Netherlands, having won their independence from Spanish rule in 1581, split the region in two – a free Protestant Netherlands and a Catholic Flanders (roughly modern Belgium), still ruled by a Spanish archduke. By 1670 the Netherlands had became the world’s most important trading power, with colonies from New Amsterdam (now New York) to Japan, where it held the monopoly on trade. The Dutch, British and French had eclipsed the old importance of the northern Italian city-states like Florence and Venice. And the Catholic church, once the only real power, was rejected by most of northern Europe, dividing the continent in two.
Rome initiated new artistic styles in the first half of the century, and it continued to attract most of the good artists of the time, being the city of Michelangelo and Raphael as well as the cradle of ancient civilization. Artists from all over Europe felt it was necessary to learn in the world’s greatest cultural city. But it wasn’t Roman, or even Italian artists who dominated the new century. It was the Flemish, the Dutch, the French and the Spanish, who studied there but returned home to reinvigorate their own countries. The ubiquitous pilgrimage to Rome broke down the barriers between the northern and southern Renaissances. Artists in all parts of Europe still worked out of their local traditions, but now they also understood what was happening in other artistic circles. Europe began to harmonize its local differences under the cloak of the Baroque style. This was the new style of exuberance, where compositions were asymmetrically crowded with movement and action. The cool classicism of the High Renaissance had been transformed into a riot of colour and activity.
Mannerism had started in Italy and by the late sixteenth century was influencing most painters from Parma to Prague, but the tide was turning against its false aesthetic. What seemed for so long to be a noble ideal of transcending earthly beauty for something better was beginning to look like a shallow stylistic trick. Caravaggio was the first to react against its conventions of elegance. He was a strong-willed character and saw the painting of otherworldly beauty as valueless and dishonest. What better way was there to express real human emotions and situations than with real human beings? So he hired working Romans to be his models, warts and all. It outraged some of the old guard, who saw him as attacking beauty itself and reducing the grandeur of painting to merely portraying the everyday and low-life. But to others it was exactly the sort of rebirth and redirection that painting needed. His characteristically bold chiaroscuro, where the action is caught emerging from the shadows, was as influential all over Europe as his gritty realism. Carracci took up Caravaggio’s ideas in a slightly different way. He wanted to keep as much reality as he could but he didn’t want to lose the monumentality and grandeur of Michelangelo or Raphael. So he founded a school of painting that went back to basics, to drawing. His academy in Bologna trained up the next generation of painters to take inspiration from these High Renaissance masters, as well as the realism of direct observation of character and detail. His student Reni combined both of these, but wasn’t afraid to draw on the flowing beauty of the Mannerists either.
Meanwhile in Flanders and the Netherlands something very different was going on. Rubens had come back from years in Italy, with brushwork that had all the painterly freedom of Titian. Being from Catholic Antwerp he was able to use his immense talents for grand compositions in huge altarpieces and religious commissions, that came to him from his Spanish rulers. Over the border in the independent Netherlands, however, some of the greatest artists of any age – Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer – all died in poverty after trying to make a living out of small portraits and genre scenes for the Protestant middle classes. All five had one thing in common – a deeply sensuous and expressive use of oil paint. And this was something that was shared by their Spanish counterpart Velázquez, whose rich use of paint has helped mark him out as the country’s greatest painter. More typical Spanish traditions can be seen in the paintings of their South American colonies. There are no significant surviving paintings from the pre-Colombian world but, as in North America, the traditions of the parent colonial country were simply transported in a simplified way to the new world. Exported art traditions were carrying on in the Islamic and Asian worlds too. The Mughal Emperor in India ruled over more than one religion and was open to all influences. So the art of India drew on the Islamic influences of painters in nearby Persia, and added traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism to forge a particularly colourful Indian style that continues today. The Chinese were carrying on in a similar vein to the outline drawing principles that had been slowly developing over a thousand years, and they were exporting their traditions to neighbouring countries like Japan.
Back in Europe, Poussin’s serious and classical landscapes were splitting France’s artists into two camps, the Poussinistes and the Rubénistes. This represented the old Italian conflict between disegno and colorito (design and colour). It was a century of divisions, religious conflicts, wars and change. But seventeenth-century Baroque art brought together Europe’s painters, while their style grew in colonies around the world. For the first time since International Gothic, Europe was sharing a common artistic aim.
THE PAINTING The young god is peering at us from over his glass of wine. Wine is the symbol of his power, and its surface ripples with movement as he offers it in his outstretched hand. The sense of action instantly draws us to him. From the glass we naturally look up the diagonal of his arm to his face. He is no traditional god. From his drunken red cheeks, dark hands and dirty fingernails, to the sensual intent of the eyes and lips, he is a very worldly god, human even. Although he was the god of wine, no one had ever painted Bacchus so young or so blatantly sexual before. Once this was thought to be a self-portrait, but now it is taken to be a male prostitute, offering himself to the artist. This incredibly frank earthiness is one of Caravaggio’s greatest innovations and achievements. It helped blast away the last remains of the artificially elegant Mannerist style, which had reached its climax a generation earlier with Parmigianino. Caravaggio even went as far as using prostitutes as models for the Virgin Mary, but the church still loved the way their saints were becoming human by his brush. His critics thought this kind of realism, with its fruit rotting in Bacchus’s bowl, debased art by ignoring the ‘rules’ of beauty.
THE ARTIST Caravaggio was one of the most influential artists in history. His brilliant use of light and shade (chiaroscuro), together with his powerful humanism and imagery, led to a vast following of artists throughout Europe, known as the ‘Caravaggesques’. But he was also one of art’s most volatile geniuses. Some of his most powerful paintings are about sex or violence, and it was a combination of both these things that was his downfall. There are plenty of theories about why he killed a man in a brawl in Rome – an argument over a shared mistress is the most likely – but it meant the end of his Roman career. He fled to Malta to escape justice and his enemies, and became one of the island’s knights of St John. But he was soon in another duel and had to flee again, fearing his life. When the Knights caught up with him a year later in Naples they nearly beat him to death. He escaped, only to be accidentally arrested eight months later. He died, within days, of a fever.
b. Milan or Caravaggio 1571; d. Porto Ercole 1610
The Young Bacchus, c. 1596
Oil on panel
98 × 85 cm (38½ × 33 in)
Uffizi Gallery, Florence
THE PAINTING Judith’s sword is half-way through Holofernes’ neck. His brief struggle was in vain and now it is almost over. Deep red blood spurts out of his arteries and soaks the white bed. It is a painting of pure violence, cool and considered. But importantly for Artemesia it is a painting of justified, if enraged, killing. Judith’s city was laid siege to by General Holofernes’ troops. Just when it was about to fall, the beautiful widow Judith stepped in with a plan. According to the Old Testament she dressed ‘to catch the eye of any man who might see her’ and left the city with her servant to seduce Holofernes in his camp. After a drunken banquet she met him in his tent – and left with his head. Taking it back to the city she roused the Jews to battle, and Holofernes’ Assyrian troops fled in panic at the sight of their leader’s severed head. This scene was close to Artemesia’s heart, and it became her most reproduced subject. Its strong Caravaggesque light catches only the important angles of the picture; the rest is cloaked in darkness.
THE ARTIST Artemesia was one of Caravaggio’s best followers, and like her famous artist father, Orazio, she was deeply influenced by his style. As a teenager she was already a brilliant painter, and aged twenty-three she became the first ever female member of Florence’s prestigious Accademia del Disegno. Both her father and her painting teacher, Agostino Tassi, trained her to paint using the strong light and shade technique of chiaroscuro. However, Tassi’s interest in Artemesia was less than professional. When she was seventeen Artemesia and her father had him in court for serial rape. The trauma and long case affected her for the rest of her life. Her reaction to the ordeal is visible in her art. Her Judith and Holofernes scenes have been read as revenge paintings, with Artemesia herself pre-emptively slicing off her attacker’s head as he lies in wait for her. She had an incredibly strong character, and led a very independent life. She carried Caravaggism out of Rome and into Florence, Genoa and Naples during her travels. Her painting abilities were never in doubt, but for whatever reason, perhaps because of male patrons and competition, she struggled for commissions. She was almost written out of art history until the twentieth century, when she was rediscovered as one of the greatest Caravaggesque painters.
b. Rome 1593; d. Naples 1652–53
Judith and Holofernes, c. 1612–21
Oil on canvas
199 × 162 cm (78½ × 64 in)
Uffizi Gallery, Florence
THE PAINTING This image of a wine drinker is one of Carracci’s most enduring paintings. He is a real man, studied from life. You can see the movement in his neck muscles as his head goes back to drink. He is not an elegant figure, nor a particulary dirty one like Caravaggio might have painted. Carracci’s painstaking study of the human figure paid off in this painting, which has none of the pretension of most of the Mannerist art of his day. The background is not crammed with pointless detail. He has filled every inch with the drinker, and everything important we can see in the light. Carracci himself dressed like this, like an artisan, and he was relaxed with such people. It was his exaggerated sketches of people like this that became the first caricatures. Acting the part of the aristocratic courtier painter was what he hated, and it was this lifestyle that led to his mental breakdown.
THE ARTIST Along with his artist brother Agostino and cousin Lodovico, Carracci was one of the most influential artists Italy ever saw. Together they started one of the first art academies, the Academy of the Progressives. It turned Bologna into one of Italy’s great cultural cities. In trying to improve the art of the time Carracci preached drawing from live models, and drew thousands of sketches of everything he saw. The seventeenth-century art historian Count Malvasia said that he ate with ‘food in one hand and a pencil in the other’. His invention of the ideal landscape, where a perfect grand scene is set up like a stage for actors to play out a story, had a massive influence on the two French painters, Poussin and Claude. Like Caravaggio in Rome, Carracci revolted against the artificial elegance of the Mannerist style. But where Caravaggio reacted to it by painting gritty realism, Carracci went back to salvage the realistic draughtsmanship of Michelangelo and Raphael. He tried to re-create the ideals of the High Renaissance, before Mannerists like Parmigianino had ended it with their decorative principles. He idealized bodies in the classical style, but added his own powerful movement, energy and chiaroscuro. Along with Caravaggio he started off the period of painting known as the Baroque, with its solid figures and powerful emotional movement. Of Carracci’s many students there was one that he was famously jealous of – the next superstar of Bolognese painting, Guido Reni.
b. Bologna 1560; d. Rome 1609
A Man Drinking, c. 1581–84
Oil on canvas
56 × 44 cm (22 × 17 in)
Private Collection, Zurich
THE PAINTING Hercules fought the god Achelous for the love of Deianeira. Predictably Hercules beat him and won her love. But in this picture Reni has gone for a more popular scene from the story, that of the centaur Nessus trying to ravish her. Hercules and Deianeira needed the ferryman Nessus to take them across a river. Having taken Hercules across first (the small figure in the background). Nessus tries to make off with the beautiful Deianeira. Unfortunately for him he is about to be killed from the shore by Hercules’ poison-tipped arrow. But for now the centaur is still speeding across the water, excitedly looking up at his prey as she looks up to the heavens with those doleful eyes that Reni made his trademark. He is holding onto her flowing dress, which billows out in every direction. There is so much pale pink, peach, red and blue that Nessus looks like he is wearing it himself. The floating drapery gives all the feeling of motion that Reni needed, but it also gives the scene an otherworldly quality suitable for a classical story. He had learnt a great deal from his teacher Carracci. Reni used his classical idealization of figures, ultimately derived from Raphael, but he tinted it with the flowing elegance of the older Mannerist ways. This combination is the first flowering of the Baroque seeds laid by Caravaggio and Carracci.
THE ARTIST Reni is one of the seventeenth-century’s most influential painters. Until the nineteenth century, when the English critic John Ruskin trashed his reputation, Reni had been ranked next to Raphael. His huge studio cranked out thousands of copies of his paintings – not all were great ones, thus Ruskin’s rant against him. But Reni had a massive gambling habit he needed to pay for. We know more about him than about any artist of the time. He was prim, got embarrassed by obscenities, and venerated the cult of the Virgin Mary because he was a virgin himself. It is now thought he was also a repressed homosexual. He lived with his mother, but the art historian Count Malvasia wrote that he froze up ‘like marble’ in front of any other woman. He was haughty, and preferred to dress and act like an aristocrat as he walked around with his servants, which must have annoyed his down-to-earth teacher Carracci. But as the highest-paid artist to date, Reni could act as he liked.
b. Bologna 1575; d. Bologna 1642
The Abduction of Deianeira by the Centaur Nessus, 1620–21
Oil on canvas
239 × 193 cm (94 × 76 in)
Louvre, Paris
b. Arenella, Naples 1615; d. Rome 1673
Self-Portrait, c. 1645
Oil on canvas
116 × 94 cm (45¾ × 37 in)
National Gallery, London
THE PAINTING Against a heroic expanse of sky, the brooding Rosa glares at us. The Latin on the plaque he holds says, ‘Keep silent unless what you have to say is better than silence’. He is so self-important and serious that it is comical. He was a fiery artist, musician, poet, etcher, philosopher and actor, and that fire comes across here. He challenged eventhing and everyone, whether it was the artistic conventions of landscape painting, patronage or society itself. In this portrait he even seems to be challenging us. His huge British following believed he had been a bandit and a freedom fighter, trying to kick the Spanish out of Naples in 1647. This portrait helped to fuel those myths.
THE ARTIST Rosa was the first wild, romantic artist. His totally free landscapes were thrashed out in oils directly onto the canvas. Craggy ravines, mountain paths infested with bandits and dark brooding scenery filled his mind and his art. He was the first artist to reject the wishes of patrons – until then the patron had told the artist what to paint, no matter how great the artist. Rosa turned this on its head by telling the world that he was painting not for money but because he was an artist. This was revolutionary, and it meant he had to publicize himself constantly. He had one-man shows in Rome’s Pantheon and sold through dealers, much like a modern-day artist. Defining himself as an individual genius, he still demands our attention.
b. Cento 1591; d. Bologna 1666
The Incredulity of St Thomas, c. 1621
Oil on canvas
115 × 140 cm (45½ × 55½ in)
Vatican Museums and Galleries, Vatican City
THE PAINTING Doubting Thomas does not believe that Christ has risen after death, and puts his finger to the wound left by the Roman lancer Longinus. Christ benignly invites Thomas to touch the wound for himself. Thomas’ doubt turns to stunned fear as he grasps his red cloak; other disciples look on in wonder. Christ is holding the banner of the Resurrection, and around His head is a faint white saintly aura. This is one of Guercino’s earlier paintings, where he is still using the vivid colours of his Venetian colourist background, and the texture of his paint is thick and richly worked like Titian’s. His use of contrasting light and shade, chiaroscuro, is brought to life by his electric colour and deep paintwork.
THE ARTIST ‘Guercino’ means ‘the squinter’, a nickname given to him after a childhood accident when he was left with an injured eye. This did not stop him from becoming the leading Bolognese artist after Reni’s death in 1642. He continued with the best traditions of Venetian colorito, when painting in Venice itself was on the decline, and married it up with his own dramatic lighting and strong emotional movement. The result was a fiercely colourful and powerful kind of Baroque art. But the popularity of Reni’s smoother and more subdued colouring, more like Raphael than Titian, ruled the tastes of Rome and Bologna. Guercino’s own style never saw the limelight, and by his later years his work became very like the painting of Reni.
THE PAINTING Rubens’ greatest talent was the way he could give life to paint. Like Titian, who died the year before Rubens was born, he had in instinctive feel for oils. This little portrait, probably of his eldest daughter Clara Serena, has an incredible immediacy and feeling, more than the great portraits of the past. Her clothes are brushed on to the canvas with the fastest smudges of colour and the thinnest outlines, while still showing what she is wearing. Her penetrating happy eyes are visibly wet and real. Catching the light from her right, they stare deeply into ours from the centre of the picture. On her right shoulder Rubens has thickly pasted on shimmering white paint, brilliantly lighting up her face, while on her left is a pale shadow. Rubens was the master of paint. With fast and perfectly accurate brushstrokes he flicks her tied-up head of hair into being, and thick ridges of paint, called impaslo, catch the light on her forehead and down her nose. Rubens’ great love was his family. Clara was his first child, and the bond between her and her father as he paints her comes straight through in this painting.
THE ARTIST Rubens was the most influential of all northern painters. He was also the most successful northern artist in history, painting thousands of pictures in his vast studio for heads of state all over Europe. Born into a wealthy Flemish family, he had to move around to escape religious and political intolerance. At the age of twenty-three he went to Italy, like all promising artists, to study the greatest masters. Eight years later he was back, as the new Titian for the Baroque age. He immediately became a success in the Netherlands and set his huge staff of apprentices to outline his ambitious allegorical and religious designs. It was only when his team had finished that he would step in and over-paint the details with his quick and solid hand, transforming them into his own. This was the only way he could meet demand. Being friends with royal clients, he was put into service as a diplomat between them. He even managed to secure some peace between England and Spain, and was knighted by both art-loving kings because of it. His varied art has inspired thousands of artists including Watteau, Gainsborough, Constable and Delacroix.
b. Siegen 1577; d. Antwerp 1640
Head of a Girl (probably the artist’s daughter) c. 1615
Oil on canvas
33 × 26.3 cm (13 × 10¼ in)
Collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein, Vaduz Castle
THE PAINTING Hals’ most famous painting shot him back to fame after 200 years of obscurity. All we know about the sitter is that he was twenty-six, and that Hals painted him in 1624. Whoever he was, he has become one of the most famous faces in paint. In 1865 the Marquis of Hertford battled with Baron Rothschild at an auction in Paris for a painting catalogued as Portrait of a Gentleman. Hertford walked away with The Laughing Cavalier after bidding the unheard of sum of 51,000 francs for it. Hals became an immediate worldwide phenomenon. Since his death he had been forgotten about and his free, painterly looking pictures, when mentioned at all, were rubbished as the unfinished sketches of a drunkard. But Hertford had seen him through mid-nineteenth-century eyes, ready for the new realism of Courbet and the free paintwork of Manet and the Impressionists. Hals was painting with both, 250 years earlier. The Cavalier is wearing rich clothes and stands above us, looking down with a grand hand-on-hip pose. But with that roguish smile Hals has burst the bubble of pomp, and shown the sitter in all his human charm.
THE ARTIST Hals was the most individual portraitist of his time, and the first great artist of the newly independent Protestant Netherlands. His genius was to capture a moment in his sitters’ lives forever; he was able to take a snapshot of emotion and transfer it into paint, catching fleeting moments like no one else. This might be why he pioneered such a fast and flowing style that was even bolder than Rubens was attempting. Hals became quite famous around Haarlem, but over the years his free style fell out of favour, which only increased his lifelong debt problems. Later critics claimed his debts came from drinking, but true or not his enormous family was a bottomless money pit. He was married twice, and his second wife was often in trouble for brawling and once tried to have one of their ten children, Sara, put in a workhouse because of her ‘loose morals’. Another, Pieter, was imprisoned as a public menace. Hals tried dealing paintings, buying at auction and selling privately, as well as cleaning pictures to make enough money to keep the bailiffs away, which he didn’t always manage to do. He retired penniless, living on a tiny pension. Ironically he is now one of the world’s most sought-after Old Masters.
b. Antwerp 1581–85; d. Haarlem 1666
The Laughing Cavalier, 1624
Oil on canvas
86 × 69 cm (33¾ × 27 in)
Wallace Collection, London
b. Utrecht c. 1618; d. Utrecht 1652
A Capriccio of the Plompetoren,
Utrecht, early 17th century
Oil on panel
32.4 × 40 cm (12¾ × 15¾ in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING This warm, late afternoon is painted with such detail that it seems like the quiet beach-front of a real place. The Dutch buildings are real (they are in Both’s hometown), but there aren’t any mountains in the Netherlands, and the hot sandy beach and peasants are straight out of Italy. The artist has mixed up his two loves, the Roman campagna (countryside) and his home country, and created a peaceful, idealized fantasy landscape that the Dutch could almost recognize as their own land. It brought to mind a free and peaceful Netherlands at a time when religious wars were raging across Europe. The contented donkey-riding man is one of Both’s favourite figures, popping up in most of his pictures.
THE ARTIST After training in the Netherlands, Both went to Rome aged nineteen to live with his older brother, the artist Andries. There he teamed up with the established classical landscapist Claude, and came away with Claude’s skill at pervasive yellow sunlight. But instead of following his grand style he painted the Roman campagna and filled it with simple farmers, rather than classical or Biblical characters. The Roman holiday ended in 1641. On a trip through Venice, Andries accidentally drowned in a canal. Both’s time in Italy ended in tragedy, but he came back from there the greatest painter of the Dutch Italianate school. He nostalgically adapted the warmth and peacefulness of his Italian peasant scenes to the darker landscapes back home.
b. Champagne, Lorrain 1600; d. Rome 1682
An Italianate Harbour at Sunset, c. 1638
Oil on canvas
40.5 × 55.5 cm (16 × 22 in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING The picturesque fantasy port of a beautiful Mediterranean coastline is one of Claude’s favourite subjects. Taking up Carracci’s invention of the ideal landscape, he transformed it into the ultimate picture of beauty. Here his open harbour is balanced with classical buildings on each side, and scattered boats and busy figures are everywhere. He silhouettes the masts and riggings of the men-o’-war ships against an incandescent sky. The scene recalls the classical world but it is a reflection too of what Claude knew of Italy and its Amalfi coast. His exotically dressed merchants, clearing out their boats before nightfall, have a conscious continuity about them that stretches back to antiquity.
THE ARTIST Claude was the most prized and famous landscape painter in history. Paintings like this dominated landscape art into the nineteenth century. In England, country house estates were even modelled on his paintings. Constable called him ‘the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw’. Orphaned in France, Claude worked as a pastry chef and servant, and was later a pupil of Agostino Tassi in Rome (the same Tassi who was imprisoned for raping Artemesia Gentileschi a few years earlier). Outgrowing Tassi’s style, Claude learnt to paint with deep space and a misty lighting that gives his work its powerful moods. He could only paint a few of these exacting landscapes a year, and despite his fame he lived modestly and piously. His influence on landscape painting is equalled only by Poussin.
THE PAINTING The huge one-eyed monster Polyphemus sits on the mountain playing his pipes. He is so inhuman and distant that his flesh looks like stone. Poussin loved to paint idyllic Arcadian landscapes with contented shepherds and farmers living side-by-side with gods and monsters. It is the pagan equivalent to the Garden of Eden. Looking out to the ocean, Polyphemus is playing a love song to win over the beautiful sea nymph Galatea. In the foreground three classically draped nerids, the nymphs of fresh water, are about to be ravished by two horned and hoofed satyrs, the drunk and lecherous attendants of the wine god Bacchus. But there is no real sense of threat or even eroticism in Poussin’s world – it is the perfect natural order of antiquity. Poussin painted this when Galileo was finding mountains on the moon and the Milky Way; the earth was no longer the centre of the universe. For Poussin this was pure escapism from the new uncertain world. He wasn’t painting religion like most artists, because to him religion was transitory. He could find eternal ethical truths in the ancient world, which is why his art is just as lively now.
THE ARTIST Founder of the French classical tradition, Poussin is France’s best seventeenth-century artist. Born into a peasant family in northern France, his active mind led him to study painting and the classics. Like his friend Claude he felt most at home in the classical world of Rome, and actually spent most of his life there. After a serious illness (venereal disease according to his friend and biographer), he stopped looking for large public commissions and turned to the sort of pictures that suited him best: paintings that reflected his own feelings for the lost ancient world. He was a serious classical scholar. Where Claude’s landscapes are like beautiful dreams of a hazy antique world, Poussin’s are usually exacting passages from classical sources. Unlike most artists who painted pagan scenes, Poussin understood them completely. Reynolds said Poussin ‘had a mind thrown back two thousand years’. He was practicing High Renaissance ideals of seriousness in a world that had moved on past Mannerism and into the Baroque. He had no worthy followers because he worked alone and no one could match his knowledge. By the end of his life he had become a hermit, immersed in ancient writings and painting.
b. Les Andelys 1594; d. Rome 1665
Landscape with Polyphemus, 1648
Oil on canvas
150 × 199 cm (59 × 78¼ in)
Hermitage, St Petersburg
b. Fuente de Cantos, Badajoz 1598; d. Madrid 1664
Still Life, c. 1633–40
Oil on canvas
46 × 84 cm (18 × 33 in)
Prado, Madrid
THE PAINTING A simple shelf, lined with humble jugs and pewter, is the subject of Zurbarán’s mastery. The warm earthenware contrasts with the cold shining pewter plates and the bronze chalice. All with little handmade imperfections, they are tied together by a soft mellow light, balanced by falling shadows. It is not how pretty the pots are themselves that matters; Zurbarán has made them beautiful because of how he has handled the paint and light. Still lifes were commonly crammed with details, like Ruysch’s floral ones would be in Holland. But Zurbarán strips away all the unwanted clutter and proves that the simplest things can be handled with his honest Christian grandeur, and that anything can be painted beautifully.
THE ARTIST Zurbarán was one of the founders of Spanish painting. Caravaggio’s art had reached Spain, and his deep shadow effects (chiaroscuro) and gritty realism were big influences on the young Spaniard. He used these new effects to capture the religious feeling of Spanish society in his day. His saints, lit dramatically in dark monastic cells, made him hugely famous and in demand. But Zurbarán had strong competition from Murillo, and soon his patrons deserted him. Though his friend Velázquez got him some royal commissions he ended up cranking out second-rate pictures for the South American colonies. Tragically his payments sank into the Atlantic after the warship they were on was destroyed. By now onto his third wife, with countless children to support, Zurbarán died in poverty.
b. Seville 1617–18, d. Seville 1682
Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, c. 1650
Oil on canvas
107 × 171 cm (41 × 67¼ in)
Prado, Madrid
THE PAINTING Eliezer has been sent out by his master Abraham to find a wife for Isaac, his son. Eliezer decides, after praying a bit for guidance, that whichever woman at the next well gives him water will be his choice for Isaac. Rebecca offers him her bucket. So she gets taken back to Canaan, meets Isaac who takes her into his mother’s tent, and ‘she became his wife, and he loved her’. Not our idea of love at first sight, but it did the trick in Murillo’s time and most Old Masters painted the story at some point. Murillo has given it warmth, with very mellow browns. All the outlines have a softness closer to Correggio, Rubens or van Dyck than to the harsh realism that Zurbarán and the popular Caravaggesque artists were using in Spain.
THE ARTIST Murillo outstripped Zurbarán as Seville’s premier artist because of this softer approach. Orphaned young with his thirteen siblings, he only found happiness, in life and art, at the time of his marriage. Of his nine children, only three outlived Murillo, and his wife also died young. These tragedies directly influenced his art. His religious paintings are full of happy floating cherubs and beautiful motherly Madonnas, idealizing his dead wife and children in heaven. His orphaned street children paintings, close to his own experiences, were 200 years ahead of their time in their sweet sentimentality. They had a huge influence on the English artists Hogarth, Gainsborough and Reynolds.
THE PAINTING Velázquez’s greatest masterpiece is Spain’s most famous picture, and one of the most discussed. As soon as we look at it, the questions start. Is it a portrait of the confident Infanta Margarita in the foreground, or the king and queen in the mirror? Is it an amusing record of what they were seeing as Velázquez painted them? But then he has shown himself to be painting this picture as he looks at us, looking at him. Is it about the status of Velázquez himself, proudly showing off his Knight of Santiago clothes, in his huge palace studio, surrounded by royal friends? Or is it a dangerous social painting where the servants have more importance than their royal employers? Velázquez painted it to ask questions, not to give answers. This fleeting, informal moment did not come about casually. It is a painting of the Baroque period where everything is carefully ordered to give effortless movement. Velázquez leans one way, his easel the other. The light from the right is curtained off by the dark room behind, but it is echoed again up the stairs which draws us to the mirror, reflecting us right back ‘outside’ of the painting again. It is a triumph of spatial illusion. The mirrored figures echo those in van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage, hanging in the Spanish collection at the time.
THE ARTIST No other Spanish artist has ever rivalled Velázquez. Like his friend Rubens in Flanders he effortlessly rose to the top, with as much financial and social reward. But unlike him he was tied to court and only managed to escape it twice in his career. On Rubens’ advice he had two year-long stints in Rome. From these trips he left an illegitimate child, and brought back a wider understanding of Italian art. His style was an original progression from Caravaggism mixed with the love of working oils that he learnt from Titian. Velázquez worked and lived in the Alcázar in Madrid, where Titian’s paintings hung. The light painterly touch in Las Meninas ultimately comes from him. Velázquez dominated Spanish art, but Spain was an isolated place, getting poorer and desperately trying to hold on to its foreign possessions. It wasn’t until the Prado Museum opened in 1819, with forty-four of Velázquez’ best paintings on view, that he became known outside Spain. Within decades Manet and the Impressionists were calling him ‘the painter of painters’.
b. Seville 1599; d. Madrid 1660
Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour), c. 1656
Oil on canvas
316 × 276 cm (124½ × 108¾ in)
Prado, Madrid
THE PAINTING The Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés, wields his sword as his mount rears up heroically. The Aztecs climbing out of the reeds will clearly be no match for the Spanish leader. His disciplined European army, with their cannon ships and armour, are slaughtering the spear-toting Aztecs. The earliest conquest of the New World is ambitiously recorded with a grandeur that recalls Altdorfer. Cortés’ troops swarm in from three angles, looking like a massive force of armoured knights, but in fact Cortés destroyed the Aztec Empire with a tiny band of adventurers. This painting, one of a narrative of eight scenes showing the winning of America, is from the most important historical series in Mexican art. Tenochtitlan (modern Mexico City) was the Aztec capital, and it stunned the invaders with its vast pyramids, temples, palaces and fountains. The Emperor Montezuma ruled most of what is now Mexico from the city seen here in the distance being sacked and burned, to be left in ruins like the civilization of the Aztecs themselves. The empire was now a Spanish possession. The bright gold jewellery of these accurately painted Aztecs would be taken from the dead, melted down, and shipped back to Spain to fund the further conquering of America.
THE ARTIST The Meso-Americans, like the African nations of the same date, have mainly left stone carvings and pottery behind, not painted art. Their artists, from the earliest Olmecs, through the Maya, Toltec and Mixtecs, to the later Incas and Aztecs, shared similarities of geometric stylized patterning and design. We know they continued these traits in their now lost paintings. But when Cortés repressed the Aztec’s religion of human sacrifice with his victory in 1519, and broke the imperial power of the Incas in 1532, the art and culture that went with them soon died away. It was replaced by mostly unnamed Spanish colonialist artists, like the unknown artist who painted this history of the conquest for an anonymous local patron. Artists as famous as Zurbanán sent religious paintings from the new mother country back in Europe, with hundreds more local Spanish South American artists weakly reproducing the style of the exported art for centuries to come. Without surviving paintings of the Meso-American peoples, this exported European style represents American painting up to the work of the North American landscape artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like Church.
The Conquest of Tenochtitlan, 17th century
Oil on canvas
120 × 200 cm (47¼ × 78¾ in)
Private Collection
THE PANTING Basawan’s employer, the brilliant young Mughal Emperor, Akbar, is the real subject here. He is the one on the charging elephant’s back. Akbar inherited his father’s title at the age of fourteen, and this picture from his biography illustrates one of his most important acts of youthful heroism. Akbar mounted the famously difficult elephant Hawa’i in order to fight another elephant, in a sort of old Indian joust. The angry beast chased the second elephant, causing carnage as he went, with Akbar holding on. As the massive animals thunder across a weak pontoon bridge, boatmen fly off into the water and swim for their lives to the shore of Akbar’s new Red Fort at Agra. According to his biography this was proof that, having put himself in such a dangerous situation, God had allowed Akbar to triumph. This showed that as a young man he was divinely sanctioned to spread his huge empire and to rule over man and beast. The painting is a development from Persian School art, where the outlines are drawn and then coloured in like Chinese and Japanese painting. Basawan drew this and his colourist Chatai added the bright, Hindi colours. Basawan’s new feeling of space and distance was influenced by Europeans in India.
THE ARTIST Basawan revolutionized Mughal art with his action packed three-dimensional paintings. His sensitive portraits made him famous, and were imitated by generations of followers. Emperor Akbar developed the arts at his expanding court, leading the way for his grandson to build the Taj Mahal fifty years later. Basawan rose to be Akbar’s best painter. An incredible leader, it is from Akbar’s interest in multiculturalism that Basawan’s art developed. He brought together at court artists from Persian Iran, Hindus, local Muslims and Europeans. Basawan was a rational artist who painted only what he could see; he didn’t care much about the otherworldly imagery of religious artists. Because of his down-to-earth concerns, the painting of the Mughals developed into dense story-telling narratives. He painted in miniature, which was the usual format of Indian art, and over his forty years in the imperial workshops he painted for nearly all the important manuscripts that were produced. His understanding of European oil painting led him to break away from the tight outline art people were used to, and he introduced a sense of three-dimensionality that was groundbreaking in Mughal painting.
Active c. 1556–1600
Akbar Tames the Savage Elephant, c. 1590
Gouache on paper
34.5 × 21.7 cm (13½ × 8½)
British Museum, London
The History of Yuzu Nenbutsu Sect, 1528
Ink and colour on paper, detail from a scroll
29.4 × 1098 cm (11½ × 432½ in) – total size
Private Collection
THE PAINTING This is a small detail from one of a pair of enormous scrolls that recorded the history of a Japanese Buddhist sect in the sixteenth century. The scroll itself is a perfect illustration of Japanese artistic culture of the time. It records the history of a religion, one powerful enough to convert the Emperor Toba, and it gives a telling insight into the place of the artist in Japanese artistic culture. The artist’s name is unrecorded because it was the calligrapher’s art surrounding it that was thought to be important. While calligraphy could express the subtlest thoughts of the artist’s mind, a painter, though capable of great subtlety, was only seen as capable of drawing things, rather than complexities. This artist has painted an apparently casual but balanced composition of townspeople, beggars, mothers, and the elderly, all ripe for conversion by the Buddhist monk Ryoshin into his Nenbutsu sect. His self-proclaimed mission was to teach every level of society the way to salvation and eternal paradise with Buddha. Pure Land Buddhism offered an easy path to eternal happiness and had became popular. Ryoshin improved on this and preached an even faster route. By repeating his Nenbutsu, a simple mantra, until reaching a meditative state, you could gain admission to paradise.
THE ARTIST Here the painting on the scroll is less important than the calligraphy that surrounds it, which is why the painter was not deemed worth recording, while the calligrapher proudly signed his work. The sort of naturalism that had developed in Europe by this time was still unknown to our artist in the east. In Japan, like its artistic motherland China, outline drawing in ink was the tradition that had been carried on for centuries. It would continue without the three-dimensionality or shading of Western art until into the nineteenth century. Though the Japanese were far more open to outside artistic influence than the Chinese, these western practices, when known about at all, were considered unattractive. This unknown painter, typically of Japanese figurative painters for centuries, is already pointing forward to the casual, everyday scenes of the Ukiyo-e (floating world) school of Japanese art that dominated from the next century until the nineteenth. Unlike his Chinese counterparts who were caught in a ever more critical academism, this artist was free to paint a casual arrangement of characters from all classes and without the need for continual reference of his work to earlier great masters.
THE PAINTING This is Van Dyck’s greatest tribute to aristocratic grandeur, ego and power. The two young lords, cousins to the Stuart king Charles I, reek of haughtiness and wealth. It was painted just before their grand tour of Europe, which would polish up their artistic and cultural learning. The younger ‘most gentle’ brother, Bernard, is standing down a step, reflecting his lower status, but van Dyck has given him the pose, clothes and manner befitting a man in line to Charles’ throne. His ‘rough natured’ older brother looks gormless; his flat, stupid face is about as uninteresting as his stance and dress. Otherwise van Dyck has made them almost reflections of each other, which gives the picture the dynamic tension of the Baroque period. The fanatically painted satins were amongst the specialities that helped him found the elegant courtly style that lasted in British portraiture for the next 200 years. He created such a powerful idea of nobility that these faces still look familiar today. Unfortunately in England at the time, not everyone shared the Stuarts’ view of aristocratic superiority. Parliament and royalty were about to start a civil war. The boys were called home, and like their cousin the king, were killed.
THE ARTIST From Rubens’ huge studio of assistants, only one artist came out to rival the master’s powers – van Dyck. At the age of fourteen he was painting self-portraits, by eighteen he was Rubens’ chief assistant, and at twenty he was being called the next big thing. It looked like a brilliant start to a promising career. Like all artists he visited Italy, and stayed for six years. Like Rubens and Velázquez, he came back with a feeling for the texture and possibilities of oil paint, learnt from the painterly Venetian colourists like Titian, Back in Antwerp and in huge demand, he was invited by the art-loving Charles I of England to be court painter. Van Dyck was ambitious. He knew he could only ever be second best in Antwerp, as Rubens ruled the roost, so he accepted. His court portraits reached new heights of suave and dignified grandeur, suiting his aristocratic manners as well as flattering his sitters. But in Protestant England, without religious subjects to paint, his talents were narrowly confined to portraits. Never a very healthy man, he died aged forty-two, only a year after the much older Rubens and never getting the chance to take his place.
b. Antwerp 1599; d. London 1641
Lord John Stuart and his Brother Lord Bernard Stuart, c. 1638
Oil on canvas
237.5 × 146 cm (93½ × 57½ in)
National Gallery, London
THE PAINTING Rembrandt was the new boy of Netherlandish art, and with his dramatic self-portraits he proved his credentials with the older Hals, Rubens and van Dyck. He painted more self-portraits than any artist had ever done before (more than a hundred paintings and etchings). In the paintings of the 1630s, completed soon after he had moved to Amsterdam, he painted himself as a wild, energetic man. Now, older and wiser, he looks at us with no less energy. His penetrating stare betrays a knowledge of the world that is disarmingly life-like. This was painted during the last decade of his life, just a few years after his bankruptcy. He had seen both success and impoverishment, and his turbulent life shows in his features. The lighting is typically Caravaggesque, but with a softness of paint that is Rembrandt’s own. His characteristic root-vegetable nose throws a shadow along his face, and with his deep eyes he catches our gaze. Rembrandt’s greatest power was his ability to paint with deep psychological understanding, far more than the flashier Rubens was doing a hundred miles away in Antwerp. Rembrandt is holding his paintbrush in his hand, proud still to be an artist.
THE ARTIST Rembrandt is acknowledged as the greatest Dutch artist who ever lived. During a decade of huge success in 1630s Amsterdam, he married an heiress, bought a big house and spent a lot of money filling it with art and oddities. But by the 1640s his own students were flooding his market, and the rising fashion for the lighter and more colourful portraits of van Dyck was hitting him. With the death of his wife Saskia his style turned more introspective, to landscapes and ever more penetrating portraits. He didn’t seem to care anymore about his buying public. He painted as he liked, so fast and free that a friend wrote that his pictures ‘looked as if they had been daubed with a bricklayer’s trowel’. With fewer commissions, even his unrivalled skill as the greatest etcher in European art couldn’t stop him going bankrupt. In 1657 his vast collection was auctioned off. He moved to a small house in a poorer part of Amsterdam and had two children with his housekeeper, unable to marry her because of a clause in his wife’s will. Still he continued to paint, and his self-portraits became more and more compassionate and revealing.
b. Leiden 1606; d. Amsterdam 1669
Self-Portrait, c. 1660–63
Oil on canvas
81 × 65 cm (32 × 25½ in)
Prado Madrid
THE PAINTING Vermeer’s women have become iconic symbols of natural beauty, from their pearl jewellery and their glowingly-lit domesticity to their hauntingly real moods. But only a few dozen paintings by him actually exist. We have just walked into the room, and the young woman catches our eye and smiles faintly. This might seem inviting, but unlike most of his other women Vermeer has given her a pale stony look, more like the Virgin in Memling’s Annunciation than a real person. His pictures were thoughtfully crafted, and this, like everything else he produced, has a meaning. His choice of instrument, a mini harpsichord called a virginal, brings in the idea of chastity without making obvious references to it. As Shakespeare said, ‘if music be the food of love, play on’. The empty chair looks as if it is waiting for her future lover to return. Behind her the painting of Cupid holding up a card is a symbol of fidelity, like the dog in van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage. On the wall and the virginal are two mountainous landscapes, hinting that the lover is travelling far the from flat terrain of the Netherlands. These things might give an undercurrent of unanswered questions, but it is Vermeer’s indescribably airy paint that gives it a weird sense of mystery.
THE ARTIST For 200 years Vermeer was virtually unheard of, yet now he has taken his place with Rembrandt and Hals as one of the greatest seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Like them, he died in poverty. For an artist who painted so few pictures this is a pretty big reputation. Although well regarded as an artist when he was alive, he made his real living as an innkeeper and art dealer. In 1672 the French decided that taking over his rich, new and small country was worth their while. The economic chaos that followed their occupation destroyed Vermeer’s carefully balanced income. With a wife and fifteen children to support, he died aged forty-three. The Dutch critic Jan Veth later described his very individual paintwork as ‘crushed pearls melted together’. He used it to paint simple domestic scenes, all heavy with symbolism, but with a feeling of frank simplicity that gave them incredible grandeur. He was rediscovered by a nineteenth-century French art critic who saw this quality and, comparing it to the political art of Courbet’s Realism, hailed him as fellow socialist.
b. Deift 1632; d. Delft 1675
A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, c. 1670
Oil on canvas
52 × 45 cm (20½ × 17¾ in)
National Gallery, London
b. Antwerp 1610; d. Brussels 1690
Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Picture Gallery, 1653
Oil on canvas
81 × 87.6 cm (28 × 34 in)
Private Collection, formerly in the Rothschild Collection
THE PAINTING This private gallery, stuffed with works of art from all over Europe, is presided over by Teniers, holding up an inventory for the hat-wearing archduke. Painted for two egos – royal and artist – it reflects the self-consciously ‘arty’ pride of the archduke alongside Teniers’ pride in his high status. Teniers was the Flemish court painter, as Rubens had been previously, building up his collection with paintings bought from the dismembered collection of the executed Charles I of England. In this painting there are recognizable pictures by Titian, Reni, Bellini, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rubens, and others. It is a window into the new world of collecting that was developing. Royalty were competing all over Europe to outdo each other with the Old Masters they could buy.
THE ARTIST At the age of twenty-seven Teniers married Bruegel’s heiress granddaughter. He was making his name by painting the sort of peasant scenes Bruegel started eighty years before. By then he was already a master at the painters’ guild of St Luke, and looked to be on his way to great things. By befriending the Antwerp dealers he managed to create for himself a new kind of patronage, as they told their clients to buy his pictures from them. It was the new way to collect art, and it is still that way today. Teniers painted thousands of pictures. Like Rubens he was made a noble and bought a country estate. Art had become an established path to the top of society.
b. Gooiland c. 1600; d. Haarlem 1670
River Landscape with Fishermen, 1644
Oil on panel
52 × 83 cm (20½ × 33 in)
Private Collection
THE PAINTING Two fishermen are trawling with their nets on the still waterway. The line of their netting arches around the boat, through the reflections of the trees and back to the shore. The tumbledown cottages seem to be growing out of the wetland like the scrubby trees and bushes around them. Ruysdael has filled three quarters of the painting with sky. It is still, with just some thin hazy clouds hanging in the air. Far in the distance there is a town, and the sails of boats recede away out of sight. Their activity doesn’t break the feeling of quiet, it just continues the tone of this peaceful world as far as we can see. The colours are muted, there’s nothing to distract our attention from the calm activities of man and nature harmoniously living together. This was the atmosphere of natural beauty that Ruysdael spent his life creating.
THE ARTIST Along with Jan van Goyen, Ruysdael led the way in ‘tonal’, atmospheric landscapes in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. He specialized in them. Like so many artists at the time he took one kind of painting and made it his own. He created countless scenes like this that have come to represent the Dutch landscape. Two hundred years later his lush waterways and country labourers were an inspiration for Constable, who grew up in a similar landscape in England. Ruysdael’s nephew Jacob learnt from his quiet style but rebelled against it, creating the next phase of dramatic and heroic Dutch landscapes.
THE PAINTING These flowers are painted with almost mind-numbing attention to detail. The Netherlandish tradition of building up perfect details couldn’t be better represented than here. Ruysch’s paintwork is so meticulous, fine and clear that she has bathed it in a creamy white light to soften it. The flowers are full of life. There are opening buds everywhere and the flowers are strong and vibrant. It is like a celebration of the beauty of living things. But Dutch art is rarely without symbolism. Still lifes in Italian are natura morta, literally ‘dead nature’, and in Dutch painting that symbolism is always hanging over them. Earlier vanitas (‘all is vanity’) still lifes used to have skulls, violins with broken strings and hourglasses in them, but by Ruysch’s time those obvious pointers to death were clichés. Pure prettiness could do the same job, only better. A peacock-like Admiral butterfly flies by, but his brilliantly colourful life will end after just a few days. Butterflies and flowers, like us, are only alive for the shortest time. Even the flowers are already cut from their plants, so for all their beauty they are hollow echoes of real life – doubly so, as we are seeing merely an illusion of life in paint.
THE ARTIST Ruysch was one of the most gifted still life artists of the Dutch school. The tradition started there about one hundred years before she was born, and continued for another hundred after she died, but her luminous flowers set against dark shadowy backgrounds are some of the most memorable ever painted. She was the first female artist ever to become internationally famous. She was born into a rich scholarly family in Amsterdam. Her professor father was a renounced botanist and anatomist, and her mother was the daughter of a famous architect. She grew up with drawing and flowers on either side of the family. By the age of fifteen she had started painting with a still life artist, and went on to be court painter to the Elector Palatine in Germany. She travelled there with her minor portrait painter husband and an ever-increasing number of children (she had ten in total). There are only about one hundred pictures known to be by her. Praised by poets during her lifetime, she was still painting at the age of eighty-three.
b. Amsterdam 1664; d. Amsterdam 1750
A Bouquet of Flowers, c. 1695
Oil on canvas
34.4 × 27.2 cm (13½ in × 10¾ in)
Private Collection
b. Dordrecht 1620; d. Dordrecht 1691
The Avenue at Meerdevoort, Dordrecht, c. 1650-52
Oil on canvas
72 × 100 cm (28¼ × 39½ in)
The Wallace Collection, London
THE PAINTING The early evening sun is setting over Dordrecht, Cuyp’s native town. Newly free of Spanish oppression, by 1670 the Netherlands was the world’s biggest trading power; it was entering its golden age. In Cuyp’s hands that phrase translated into paint, with the honey-soaked stillness of his landscapes. He was a prominent Calvinist, and underpinning his work is the Calvinist view that nature, man and commerce were unified. The high man-made path is a reminder that the Netherlands itself only exists because of man’s work reclaiming it from the sea. On this land that God and Dutchmen built together, Cuyp’s noble cattle, travelling merchants and fishermen play out their harmonious roles together, in the perfectly still and peaceful light of a prosperous country.
THE ARTIST Cuyp is one of the most celebrated landscape painters in western art. He rarely left his own town, and was happy painting its merchant ships gliding past or the cattle of the nearby farms silhouetted against the luminous sky. He specialized in beautiful, peaceful landscapes bathed in a soft evening or morning light. Dutch painters had used this light before – it had been learnt in Italy generations earlier – but Cuyp perfected it. After his marriage to a rich widow his painting output slowly dried up, and his reputation dwindled until the 1750s when the British discovered him. They took most of his unwanted pictures back to Britain, and his effect on the country’s painting since then has been huge.
