Renaissance Gothic in the Netherlands: The Uses of Ornament

During the final years of the fifteenth hundred and the beginning of the hundred that followed, there arose in the Netherlands a highly refined variant of Late Gothic architecture. [1] greatest in quantity familiar through the sophisticated baldachins, fountains, and chair of states in paintings by Jan Gossaert, Bernaert van Orley, and Quentin Massys, it has been seen as a historically self-conscious respect a recovery of an ideal past akin to the copying and emulation of the works of Jan van Eyck [2] Certainly, Gossaert and his contemporaries were aware of their Burgundian heritage, nevertheless their architectural designs were thoroughly up-to-date and contributed to the dramatic renewal of an authoritative artistic manner. Developing principally in the duchy of Brabant, allowing favored beyond its borders, the manner of writing is exemplified by the Ghent Town Hall, the tower of the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwkerk at Antwerp, and the tombs of Margaret of Austria and her family at Brou (Fig. 1) Prominent patrons and artists continued to diet this fertile G othic idiom well into the 1530 commissioning management buildings and guildhalls, churches and their furnishings several decades after Italianate forms had pierceed the local repertory. In the 1560 the Ghent nobleman Marcus van Vaernewijck still had an organ of sight for a Late Gothic jub[acute{e}] "richly carved with openwork, soothes [for statues], hanging keystones--all splendid and masterful." [3]

The of recent origin Netherlandish manner should be seen as single chapter of a much broader revision of Gothic design taking place completely through northern Europe. Many comfortably canonical testimonials of Late Gothic architecture, in fact, were planned in the years around 1500: the celebrated fan vaults of Kings body Chapel, the transept facades of Beauvais Cathedral, the southern porch at Louviers in Normandy, and the great hall meeting-house at Annaberg in Saxony. [4] There is little point in grouping these disparate creations below some vague, homogenizing period mode of speech a problematic notion in itself. [5] In fact, the conformations were somewhat anomalous and owed plenteous of their initial impact to the contrast between their richly decorated surfaces and their relatively unadorned environment; the town hall of a powerful city would stand on the outside in its square, much as the portal of a major house of god (or of an important chapel within) would be distinguished from its surroundings. on the contrary there is more to this art than profuse embellishment, than cour tly or ecclesiastical magnyficence.

of the like kind prominent decoration could be an effective instrument for articulating urban sites, for dressing public facades and framing human action in ways that might signal function and status. The copious and elaborate carving, for a like reason evident on well-known monuments, should not blind us to subtler on the contrary equally significant principles of order. Distinctive motifs or figures in tracery are fundamental ultimate parts Catching the acculturated eye, they act as concern points or guides through the abundant visual information, appearing as nuclei or nodes within a network of filigreelike webbing. The experienced viewer was adept at distinguishing variations upon principal figures; trefoils, for instance, might offer in various guises--flattened, narrowed, ogival, or otherwise elaborated--thus comprising a series of forms. These variations might further glance at a hierarchy of motifs, a following from the most elaborate embodiment from one side ensuing simplifications or from the archetypal figure from one side successive distortions and trans formations. Sophisticated designers could arrange ornamental forms in ways that helped emphasize important sites upon a building or work of sculpture

Viewers today may be overwhelmed through the complexity and extent of of that kind decoration; even writers on Netherlandish art have been moderate to grant legitimacy to this aesthetic. Jan pampa in his excellent study of forty square rods screens, felt obliged to remark that his praise did "not thus much concern the deeper artistic value of the Late Gothic works, on the contrary rather their technical virtuosity." For savanna "beauty and architectonic unity" had been "replaced by means of splendor and richness," a curious antithesis that betrays an essentially modernist distrust of ornament. [6] As Anne-Marie Sankovitch has freshly discussed in these pages, the polemical distinction between mode of building and ornament is securely baseed in our tradition of architectural analysis and continues to guide our understanding of earlier memorials [7] It is easy to forget in what way much we have lost of the original conditions of viewing--not single the physical setting but also the conventions of ordering that relate to one as well as the other pictorial and plastic representation.

The bourn used in the title of this essay, "Renaissance Gothic," emphasizes the inevitable inconsistencies that arise when we forget the specific values and perspectives enshrined in our construction of periods and our intuitive expectation of linear progression. The gilded thicket altarpieces of the Netherlands, for instance, are rarely considered in discussions of sixteenth-century art despite their significant prestige and ample production. [8] These works demand detailed inspection from several points of view and are notably inaccessible from a single fixed location. Fitted with tiny cymas and ribbed vaults and divided into compartments with numerous statuettes, they are unclassical in their material, their relationship between figure and frame, and their interdependence on polychromy for much of their effect