Die Erfindung des Gemaldes: Das erste Jahrhundert der niederlandischen Malerei. - book reviews

Before the next to the first World War, through Max J Friedlander and Friedrich Winkler, the investigation of 15th-century Netherlandish painting was wholly dominated by dint of scholars writing in German. The Nazi takeover, and the forced exile to America of a crucial sector of Germany's academic elite, brought this situation brutally to an extreme point During the 1950s and 1960 English overtook German as the primary language in this field, as in many others. The novel "classics" of the discipline were published in English, from Erwin Panofsky's famous research to the more recent works of Barbara Lane and Craig Harbison.(1) At the same time, young German art historians avoided late medieval Northern European painting upon ideological grounds: as a field, it had been too distorted by dint of the Nazis' celebration of "Germanness." That a German art historian with the reputation of Hans Belting has now co-authored a monumental investigation of early Netherlandish painting is particularly important in this words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following The book marks the recuperation of German Kunstwissenschaft - and of its have hermeneutical traditions - for a field of scholarship that it had omited for nearly half a hundred Other recent publications, such as those of Jochen Sander, Winfried Wilhelmy, and Michael Rohlmann,(2) presage a veritable rebirth in Germany of the research of Netherlandish art of the 15th century

Nineteen ninety-four, the year of the 500th anniversary of Hans Memling's death, witnessed the publication of numerous general studies of the primitifs flamands. In addition to Belting and Kruse's work there appeared the collective convolution published under the direction of Roger van Schoute and Brigitte de Patoul;(3) striving to be the couple as encyclopedic and as objective as possible, this contortion constitutes a true "state of the question." sum of two units other works of a more personal and speculative nature were also released in the same year. Otto Pacht's Altniederlandische Malerei: Von Roger van der Weyden bis Gerard David (Munich, 1994) publishes posthumously the discourses on early Netherlandish painting which the author delivered as chair of the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna; and Paul Philippot's La Peinture dans le anciens Pays-Bas: XVeme-XVIeme siecles (Paris, 1994) reworks his hold Pittura fiamminga e Rinascimento italiano of 1970 The work by Belting and his pupil Christiane Kruse is as abundant an encyclopedic treatise as it is a personal essay. It therefore occupies an intermediary position among the three works cited above. While Kruse's entries attempt to totalize the at hand state of knowledge about the major works of the 15th-century Netherlandish masters, from the van Eyck brothers to Hieronymus Bosch Belting's lengthy introductory text proposes a "reading" of the evolution of painting in the late Middle Ages in the depressed Countries based on the conception of the painted tableau, or (in German) Gemalde.

Belting rightly deplores the absence of any lexicological and historical application of mind of the word and external reality Gemalde (p. 33). This question at issue of terms is particularly acute, it appears in English, where the notions designated by means of the German Gemalde, the Italian quadro, or the French tableau have no pure equivalents. During the period analyzed by means of Belting, the Low Countries themselves have a title toed only a rather ambiguous vocabulary in this regard, since neither the French ymaige de peincture nor its Netherlandish counterpart, schilderye, overlays completely the semantic field of the words tableau, quadro, Gemalde, or Tafelbild. These sole became current in the 17th hundred as the result of an evolution that single recent commentator has proposed to define as a proces of "painting's coming to consciousness from one side itself."(4) From this perspective, Belting's body seems an audacious, even rash, attempt to trace what might be referr to as the "prehistory" of the idea of the tableau, concentrating notice upon its "invention" by the Netherlandish "primitives."

In a forgotten on the other hand interesting article of 1935, Fritz Baumgart propos to research the ancient tabula picta (whose rebirth he situated, as does Belting, at the beginning of the 15th century) as a "spiritual form."(5) In for a like reason doing, Baumgart attempted to transcend the strict dichotomy between "style" and "iconography," in order thereby to lay the sods for an investigation of the true mechanisms of representation. To be confident the author had no way of knowing the possibilities today proffered by the study of communicative media ("medialogy"), hence the differences between his conclusions and those of Belting. For Baumgart, the panel painting, or Tafelbild, is a self-enclos reality. Taking the example of a still life depicting a basket of fruit, he writes: "There is nothing in the image other than itself [i.e., the basket], and it fits into no other words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following than what is delimited by means of the image's frame. Beyond the frame, there exists no extra-artistic relationship." For Belting, by dint of contrast, the invention of the Gemalde is to [i]or[/i] at a great depth linked to the desire to endow the image with the character of a "representation of the world" (p 10) The fresh type of support, far from closing the image in upon itself, would on the contrary render free of access it up to the real, as a great deal of from the thematic as from the conceptual point of view.