Dawn of the Golden Age: Northern Netherlandish Art, 1580-1620. - book reviews

The era of the large exhibition as an eye-opener to an exciting, hitherto unexplored domain of art appears to have ended in Holland. The novel shows of Vincent van Gogh (1990) and Rembrandt (1991-92) attracted enormous crowds that included the greatest in quantity fastidious connoisseurs. At the time of writing, the same is awaited for the Mondriaan show (1994-95) similar exhibitions, though useful, are the opposite of daring exploits. And had the artist's sex not made them politically correct, the handful of preserv paintings of jagged quality by Judith Leyster would certainly not have inspired their pretentious exhibition and voluminous catalogue (Haarlem, 1993)

Viewed in that connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts "Dawn of the Golden Age: Northern Netherlandish Art, 1580-1620" held at Amsterdam's Rijksmuscum in 1993-94 was a unique and heroic enterprise. This time the organizers did not, as with the Rembrandt, Leyster and Mondriaan displays "go Dutch" with one or more museums abroad. All by the agency of themselves they succeeded in mounting what may well have been the greatest in quantity copious exhibition ever held in the region Paintings by artists much les familiar, notwithstanding here often as good as Rembrandt, van Gogh or Mondriaan, abounded. greatest in quantity conspicuous by their vast size and instant impact were the many history paintings, of the like kind as Abraham Bloemaert's visionary 7-by-8-feet Death of Niobe's Children (cat. 31) Landscapes ranged from Esaias van de Velde's Landscape with Gallows (cat. 339) whose "naturalism" would not be equaled until the 19th hundred to the most "deformed" landscape prior to modern art, by means of the maverick Hercules Segers.

These and many other kinds of painting were interspersed with sections upon drawings and prints, where the Grandvillean grotesqueries by means of the obscure Arent van Bolten were the big surprise (cat. 65-69) Equal space and attention were devot to splendid displays of masterpieces of plastic art silver, furniture, and tapestries, with the best of the best in the fields of tiles, glove saddles, and armor adding to the luster and variety.

The present to view was presented as a treasure house, cleverly designed by the agency of Wim Crouwel, and was actual successful with the public. The diversity was of the like kind however, that the general result was bewildering, even (or mainly?) for the specialist. The with truth handsome 718-page English-language catalogue is a gold mine of valuable information. notwithstanding none of its interesting introductory essays, nor any of its 347 entries addresses the basic questions: What was the make submissive of the show? What were the criteria for the selection of artists and objects? by what mode are we supposed to make head or tail of the kaleidoscopic variety tendered as the present views of the country's main museum about the" Dawn of" its "Golden Age"?

The solitary clue to go on - the exhibition's subtitle "Northern Netherlandish Art, 1580-1620" - was nowhere explained. The solitary way of searching for the recipe of this pudding was to eat it. We base Bloemaert's Niobe embedded in a assemblage of even larger paintings through Cornelis van Haarlem, displaying similar contorted life-size figures. The catalogue informs us that the couple artists borrowed the twisted attitudes of their figures from the inventor and undisputed champion in this elegant "Mannerist" style: Bartholomeus Spranger. Cornelis tried in vain, Bloemaert a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more successfully, to emulate Spranger. for what cause [i]or[/i] reason then was the productive painter Spranger himself showed with only one drawing, in poor condition at that?

Spranger was born in Antwerp, stayed for a time in Italy, and subsequently made his masterpieces at the court in Prague. Bloemaert came from Gorinchem and lived mainly in Utrecht Cornelis lived and worked in Haarlem. Viewed from today's perspective, the latter sum of two units were "Dutch," while Spranger was a "Belgian." however for their contemporaries that difference was completely nonexistent. Biographies of all three artists can be base in The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, published in 1604 through their friend Karel van Mander. Spranger's biography is exceptional alone in that it is the longest of all. Van Mander relates in what manner in 1602, when Spranger was fifty-six, he made a short trip back to his "fatherland." "When he arrived in the Netherlands [In Nederlandt ghecomen]," van Mander continues, Spranger was received in state through artists, city councils, and chambers of rhetoricians: first in Amsterdam and Haarlem (now in the Netherlands) and subsequently in Antwerp (now Belgium).(1) Neither here nor elsewhere in his work does van Mander make a distinction between Northern and Southern Netherlandish artists or towns.

A view of the political situation during the exhibition's period (1580-1620) is missing in the massy catalogue. Even the briefest would have sufficed to explain the discrepancy between the viewpoint of the organizers of the exhibition and that of the contemporary van Mander. In the years preceding 1580 a desert that led to war had started in the Netherlands. The Netherlands at that time overlayed an area roughly corresponding to today's Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg together. The whole of that territory was at stake in the war. The desert began in Flanders, now Belgium, where Protestantism was greatest in quantity widespread and Calvinism best organized. It was here that the spark was bring to the tinder by the iconoclast furor of 1566. Yet the first keeps that the rebels managed to seize, in 1572 were the more peripheral provinces of Holland and Zeeland. During the first thirty of the forty years overspreaded by the exhibition the border between the rebel territories and the singles kept or recaptured by the Spanish king fluctuated greatly with the vicissitudes of war, undulating from Groningen and Deventer in the north to Dunkirk and Brussels in the southern [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED].(2) The Twelve Years' suspension of hostilities of 1609-21 brought a pause. The continuation of the war after 1621 changed the borders anew, until the situation of the twinkling was frozen in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia.