RKD STUDIES

On 12 December 2019 the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) officially launched Gerson Digital: Italy, the richly annotated and illustrated English version of one of the central chapters of Horst Gerson’s Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (1942).¹ This project was carried out in close cooperation with the Dutch University Institute for Art History in Florence. By joining forces we were able to cover the biographies and activities of several hundreds of painters from the northern Netherlands who had spent part of their careers in Italy. For the annotations and the additions to the RKDartists and RKDimages databases we drew on the wealth of publications that had appeared over the intermediate decades. These included monographs on individual artists as well as studies of a more general nature, for instance on the development of pictorial genres and on artistic patronage and the art trade. Other additions came (and continue to come) from the field of technical art history. Scholarship concerning the ‘Italo-centrics’ has developed in various directions. Rieke van Leeuwen and I therefore felt it most appropriate to combine the launch of Gerson Digital: Italy with an international conference that would consider such developments and trends in art historical practice.

When we issued the call for papers for our conference we decided to take a wider view of the subject than Gerson could do. He wrote his book in response to a prize question (prijsvraag) set by Teylers Tweede Genootschap to produce ‘a study on the expansion of 17th-century Dutch painting’. This forced him to make a somewhat artificial distinction between Flemish and Dutch schools, as he himself (with some discomfort) was the first to admit. From the 17th-century Italian perspective there wasn’t a sharp distinction between artists who came from the Dutch Republic and those who came from the Southern Netherlands. In contemporary sources they were both called ‘fiamminghi’ or ‘fiamenghi’, regardless of their city of origin.² It is also worth noting that the number of Southern Netherlandish artists present in 17th-century Italy largely exceeded that of the artists from the Northern Netherlands, as Rieke van Leeuwen’s systematic statistical analysis of the recently updated biographical data from RKDartists makes clear.

Johannes Lingelbach
Carnival in Rome, c. 1650-1651
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv./cat.nr. 9149

In the papers that are presented here the main theme is the social and cultural contexts in which the Netherlandish artists worked. Generally speaking, such contexts can be reconstructed with precision when a painter stayed in Italy for more than three or four years.³ The Venetian career of Dirck de Vries, from the city of Leeuwarden, is a case in point. He established a family in Venice, and lived there for more than 26 years. He became a figure in the Netherlandish community in Venice around 1600. Ine Legerstee’s contribution provides sharp insight into his family life. Among her archival findings, the hitherto unknown document concerning his death at the age of 58 deserves special mention. Another Netherlandish artist whose career in Italy lasted for several decades is Jan Miel, a native of Beveren, who worked in Rome for 25 years before moving to Turin. He enjoyed the privilege of receiving various public commissions and of working with Italian artists of great repute such as Andrea Sacchi and Pietro da Cortona. Francesca Romana Gaja carefully reconstructs his career path, and also draws attention to his often overlooked production of small devotional paintings on copper.

No city attracted more foreign painters than Rome, and it is there that we find the formation in clusters of artists from the same city. Lara Yeager-Crasselt's contribution on the Brussels artistic community in Rome shows that Louis Cousin, François Duquesnoy, Karel Philips Spierincks and Michael Sweerts maintained various kinds of personal ties while living in the Eternal City and successfully sought opportunities through one another. All seem to have benefitted from their background, since Brussels was the only Catholic Habsburg court city in the Low Countries. It is surprising that two of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, Dirck van Baburen and Gerard van Honthorst, received support from Spanish patrons, since the former probably came from a Protestant family. In her essay Michiko Fukaya analyses the social network around Baburen and Honthorst that may have included the successful – hence well-connected – cabinet maker and architect Johannes van Santen, who also came from Utrecht..

After Rome, the cities with the largest foreign artistic communities were Venice, Naples and Genoa. These were thriving centres of artistic production, so they have received much attention in art historical literature. The merit of the studies of Jasmine Habcy and Federica Veratelli lies in the fact that they discovered precious evidence in the archives of two ‘centri minori’ – the court cities of Ferrara and Novellara – concerning the social position and artistic output of Jan van Beyghem and Jan van Gelder. Van Beyghem painted large altarpieces as well as portraits for the Ferrarese elite, while Van Gelder specialized in the production of portraits of members of the Gonzaga family. The study of the presence of Netherlandish artists in the smaller centres of culture and commerce of the Italian penisula appears to be a fruitful venue of research. A collection of essays on Dutch and Flemish artists in southern Italy is about to appear,⁴ and new studies on foreign artists in the city of Livorno are under way.⁵

As early as the 16th century Italian art lovers and collectors expressed admiration for landscape painters from the Low Countries. In 17th-century Rome this section of the art market was still largely dominated by painters from Northern Europe. Maartje Vissers’ essay provides insight into the Roman careers of the Dutch landscapists who succeeded the generation of Bartholomeus Breenbergh, Herman Swanevelt and Jan Both. She draws attention to the fragmentary nature of the written and visual evidence concerning the artists who arrived between 1640 and 1660. Johannes Lingelbach, for instance, is known to have worked in Italy for several years, but none of the works that he painted on Roman soil has been traced. Other painters who stayed in Rome for just one or two years largely concentrated on gathering study material by making drawings of the buildings and ruins of modern and ancient Rome and its surroundings. They then used this material once they were back in the Netherlands.

Anna Bianco’s essay on the Master of the Roman Songbook draws attention to the fact that the Netherlandish landscape tradition forged by Paul Bril continued to have an impact on the production of finely executed pen drawings on paper and parchment for at least four decades. Several of such drawings were specifically made for small elite circles in Rome, notably illustrations and vignettes of secular songbooks.

In our conference two researchers presented the results of recent technical studies, carried out in cooperation with scientists and restorers. Moorea Hall-Aquitania talked about the Utrecht Caravaggisti’s use of coloured grounds. Her findings will be included in her PhD thesis, to be presented at the University of Amsterdam. The essay by Kirsten Derks published here focuses on Michael Sweerts, the most gifted among the painters of Roman genre scenes (Bambocciate). Thanks to MA-XRF scanning she and her co-authors are able to pinpoint specific differences in Sweerts’ working methods between the years he spent in Italy and those he spent in the Low Countries.

As Marjolein Dieltens’s thorough analysis of the Venetian elements in the painted oeuvre of Jan Lievens makes clear, technique is a topic of great interest when it comes to the artistic exchange between Italy and the Low Countries. Lievens never undertook a trip to Italy, but thanks to his contacts with important art collectors in Antwerp and London he had access to major works by Titian and eagerly assimilated his style, especially in some of his large-scale commissions. It is also significant that the disegno–colorito debate that started in Italy in the 16th century found a place in 17th-century Dutch literature on the arts. Learning about such issues, Rembrandt too was stimulated to strive for naturalness and glowing softness through masterful colouring in the Venetian tradition. For Netherlandish artists who did not have the opportunity to travel south there were alternative ways to learn from the glory of Italian art. And yet the poet Constantijn Huygens somehow regretted that Lievens and Rembrandt did not venture on a trip of some months to Italy. There were many aspects of the artistic exchange between Italy and the Low Countries in the 17th century. Artists, works of art, ideas – all travelled across Europe, contributing to the extraordinary cultural vibrancy of the age.

Gert Jan van der Sman
Dutch University Institute for Art History (NIKI), Florence

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Capitelli/De Nile/Witte 2023
G. Capitelli, T. de Nile and A. Witte (eds.), Fiamminghi al Sud. Oltre Napoli, convegno internazionale di studi, Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut Rome, 20–21 Sept. 2018, Rome 2023 (to be published)

Van der Sman 2021
G.J. van der Sman, ‘The living conditions and social networks of northern Netherlandish painters in Italy, c. 1600–1700: evaluation of the archival sources’, Simiolus. Netherlands quarterly for the history of art 43 (2021), 1–2, p. 73–104