Decline in the South, Shift to Antwerp
After Philip the Good's death, southern Flanders declined for a time. Political disorder drove many weavers to England, and the growth of the British cloth industry pulled trade and raw materials away from the Flemish cities. By 1520 English cloth filled even the Flemish markets. Brussels, Malines and Valenciennes held on through their lace, tapestries and fine jewelry, Tournai through leather, and Louvain through its university and its beer.
In 1480 the channel joining Bruges to the sea silted up. Manly efforts were made to clear it, but wind and sand proved stronger. From 1494 oceangoing ships could no longer sail all the way to Bruges. Merchants, and then workers, left for Antwerp, which the great ships could reach on the tides of the Scheldt. Antwerp made trade treaties with English exporters and joined Calais in handling British trade with the continent.
In Holland, life depended on dikes that had to be rebuilt constantly and were always in danger of failing. In 1470, according to the book, some of them broke and twenty thousand people drowned. Holland's chief industry was catching and smoking fish. Many painters of this age came from Holland, but all except Geertgen tot Sint Jans moved to Flanders because of their country's poverty.
The Bourgeois Taste for Realism
Even in the damaged cities, townspeople dressed lavishly and lived in large brick houses with costly furniture. Tapestries from Arras or Brussels hung on their walls, and brass work from Dinant gleamed in their rooms. They built handsome, imposing churches such as Notre-Dame du Sablon in Brussels and St. James in Antwerp. They patronized painters, sat for portraits, "bribed heaven" with votive art, and let their wives read freely.
Perhaps this earthy, material outlook explains why Flemish painting in its second flowering stressed realism and landscape, even in religious subjects, and looked for its themes in houses and fields.
Dirk Bouts and Hugo van der Goes
Dirk Bouts began the realist style, with the exaggeration usual in innovators. He came from Haarlem to Brussels, studied under Rogier van der Weyden and settled in Louvain, where he painted a Last Supper for St. Peter's. His martyrdom scenes, such as those of St. Erasmus and St. Hippolytus, carry a shocking realism, and his Execution of the Innocent Knight shows an executed man's headless body in the foreground and his head asleep in a grieving widow's lap. Bouts offsets this violence with a calm acceptance of the dying and the dead. His colors are bright and living and there are fine landscapes, but the drawing is average, the figures stiff and the faces lifeless.
Hugo van der Goes was admitted to the Ghent painters' guild in 1467 and is another of the geniuses Holland bred and lost. His fame is shown by an Italian merchant in Flanders choosing him to paint a triptych for the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, a city already full of artists. In it, a standing Virgin at human scale foreshadows the charm of Raphael and Titian, and the winter landscape is a new success in following nature. Intense realism, original composition and sound drawing mark his work. About 1475 he entered a monastery near Brussels, perhaps for greater peace in which to work, or to ease religious fears. He fell into despair and finally into madness.
Flemish Art Meets Italy
Vespasiano da Bisticci reports that around 1468 Federigo, Duke of Urbino, sent to Flanders for a painter to decorate his library, since he knew no one in Italy who could work in oil. Justus of Ghent (Joos van Wassenhove), a friend of Van der Goes, accepted. He painted twenty-eight portraits of philosophers for the learned duke and an altarpiece, the Institution of the Eucharist, for the Confraternity of Corpus Christi. The style stays Flemish, but the works show a two-way exchange: oil and realism flowing into Italian art, Italian idealism and technique into Flemish.
Hans Memling
We have no record of Hans Memling's travel to Italy. His grace and delicacy may come from the painters of Cologne, from Rogier, or from Venice and the Rhine route. He was born near Mainz, probably taking his name from Memlingen, and about 1465 went to Flanders and Bruges. Three years later an English traveler, Sir John Donne, commissioned a Virgin crowned. It is conventional in conception and composition, but shows Memling's technical power, tenderness and professional piety. John the Baptist is realist in the Flemish way, John the Evangelist idealist after Fra Angelico, and a small self-portrait peeks from behind a pillar.
Like Perugino a generation later, Memling painted hundreds of Madonnas, all with motherly compassion and heavenly calm, now hung in museums in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Florence, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, London, New York, Washington, Cleveland and Chicago. Two of the best are in St. John's Hospital, Bruges. In the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine all the figures are skillfully painted, but Mary's face is best. In the Adoration of the Child, the prize goes again to Mary's face, though the Magus's portrait captures the scene.
A large panel in Munich presents all the main events of Christ's life, and another in Turin tells the Passion with a crowd of figures so numerous that even Bruegel would have found them hard to count. For an organ case in a monastery in Spain he painted a triptych of Christ among angels that rivals the angel musicians of Melozzo da Forlì. When the Antwerp museum paid 240,000 francs (about $1,200,000 in the book's conversion) for it in 1896, it did not consider itself cheated. He also painted a large Last Judgment for Jacopo Tani, agent of Lorenzo de' Medici in Bruges. It was shipped to Italy, but a small Hanseatic ship's captain seized it on the way, took the cash and sent the painting to the church of Our Lady in Danzig.
Memling's portraits are admirable: Martin van Nieuwenhove, and a woman in a tall hat with many rings in the Bruges hospital, a young man in London, an old man in New York, and a man with an arrow in Washington. His work does not equal Titian, Raphael or Holbein in depth and inspiration, but displays a master's skill in appearance. His few nudes, such as Adam and Eve and Bathsheba, are less appealing.
Late in life, for the Bruges hospital, he decorated the Gothic shrine built to hold the relics of St. Ursula. On eight wooden panels he told the saint's story: her engagement to Prince Conon, her delay of the wedding for a pilgrimage to Rome, her voyage with eleven thousand virgins up the Rhine to Basel, the crossing of the cold, slippery Alps in hope of the Pope's blessing, and the martyrdom of the whole company by pagan Huns at Cologne on the return. Nine years later (1488) Carpaccio painted this appealing legend for the Scuola di Sant'Orsola in Venice, with more exact drawing and lovelier color. (The book's spelling of his name is garbled.)
How to Judge Memling
It is unfair to Memling, or any painter, to judge his works together. Each was painted for a given time and place and conveys the painter's lyric feeling in that case. Whoever examines them all at once sees the limits of his temperament, the narrow range, the uniformity of portraits, even the sameness of the modest Virgins with long golden hair. The faces shine in clear, bright colors, but the brush rarely reaches sorrow, wonder, longing or the spirit beneath. His women lack vital force, and in the nudes the large bellies and small breasts leave us downcast. Perhaps in his day those bodies pleased; perhaps our desires are teachable.
Yet when he died (1495), by the verdict of friends and rivals, he was the foremost painter north of the Alps. Other artists knew his faults better than their own, but none matched him in delicacy of style, purity of feeling or splendor of coloring. His influence on the Flemish school was unrivaled for a generation.
Gerard David and Quentin Massys
Gerard David continued the manner. He came to Bruges from Holland about 1483 and fell under Memling's tender feeling. His Madonnas match Memling's, perhaps because both used the same model. In some works, such as the Rest on the Flight into Egypt in Washington, he equals Memling in the Virgin's serene beauty and surpasses him in painting the Child. In old age he turned to trade and settled in Antwerp. The Bruges school ended with him, and the Antwerp school began with Quentin Massys.
Massys was a blacksmith's son from Louvain who joined the Antwerp painters' guild of St. Luke at twenty-one (1491). Twice married, he had buried seven children, and he had nerves of steel and a bitter, biting brush. He caught the eye with scenes like a harlot deceiving an old usurer or, more mildly, a banker counting gold while his wife watches with admiration and envy. Yet his Madonnas are more human than Memling's. In one in Berlin, Mary kisses and caresses her child as all mothers do, and the bright blue, purple and red of her dress add to her beauty.
In portraiture Massys succeeded better than Memling in showing his sitters' character in their faces. The famous Portrait of a Man in the Jacquemart-André Museum in Paris is among his best. When Pieter Gillis wanted in 1517 to send Thomas More a faithful likeness of himself and Erasmus, he turned to Massys. The portrait of Gillis succeeded; unluckily the Erasmus lost out to Holbein's likeness of the same scholar. When Dürer (1520) and Holbein (1526) came to Antwerp, they paid Massys the respect due to the leader of Flemish art.
Hieronymus Bosch
Meanwhile the most original, and most satirical, artist in the history of Flemish painting appeared in Brabant. In Massys's work there are occasional heads as grotesque and furious as Leonardo's caricatures. Hieronymus Bosch made such strange forms his method. He was born in 's-Hertogenbosch, in north Brabant, in what is now the southern Netherlands, and spent most of his life there. He became known as Jerome Bosch. For a time he painted religious subjects and in some, like the Adoration of the Magi in Madrid, he leaned toward convention and reality. But his satirical sense overcame his imagination and art.
Perhaps in childhood he was frightened with medieval tales of goblins and giants watching from every rock and tree, and now by mocking them he purged his soul. With an artist's sensitivity, he hated the ugly blotches on humanity, the deformed and the misshapen, and drew them with fearful faces that blended rage and joy.
Even in descriptive scenes such as the Nativity in Cologne, the front of the picture is filled by an ox's muzzle. In the Adoration of the Magi in New York, peasants gaze at the Virgin and Child through windows and arches. Yet in the same painting the drawing shows a full master in the figures of the apostle Peter and a black king, whose grandeur outshines the others. As Bosch went on, he filled scenes from Christ's life with animal faces, wild staring eyes, big noses and greedy protruding lips.
In pictures of the saints' legends he painted John the Evangelist amid an extraordinary landscape of islands and sea. In a corner a thoughtful demon in a monk's hood, with a rat's tail and insect legs, patiently waits to inherit the world. In the Temptation of St. Anthony around the despairing hermit he drew drunken harlots and fantastic creatures: a dwarf with legs growing from his shoulders, a bird with goat's legs, a woman with a cow's legs, a rat sitting on two legs, and a wandering minstrel with a horse's skull on his head. He took the strange shapes of Gothic cathedrals and made from them an astonishing world.
The Hay Wain and the Garden of Delights
He was far from hard realism. Occasionally he painted scenes from people's lives, such as the Prodigal Son, but here too he exaggerated ugliness, poverty and fear. His Hay Wain shows no joy of May but a bitter description of humanity as "all of one cloth." On top of the haystack all is idyllic: a young man plays music for a singing girl, behind them lovers kiss, and an angel kneels in worship; above them Christ spreads his arms among the clouds. But on the earth a murderer stabs his fallen enemy, a procuress lures a young girl into vice, a quack sells medicine, a fat priest takes gifts from nuns, and a cart's wheels roll over drunken men oblivious to it. At the right a band of demons, helped by apes, drag the damned to hell. Philip II of Spain, himself a king of gloom, hung this picture in the Escorial next to a similar one, the Garden of Earthly Delights.
In the latter, naked men and women bathe around a pool, and a procession of nude riders on half-real, half-imagined beasts circles it; thorns and prickles intrude from all sides. In the foreground a pair of naked figures dance embraced while a giant bird looks on philosophically. Another panel shows the creation of Eve as the source of all evil, and another the tortures and writhing of sinners. The whole is a strange mixture of precise, masterly drawing and the fantasies of a sick mind.
Was Bosch Haunted?
Were there millions in Christendom, even at the dawn of modernity, who had such nightmares and fears but could not express them? Was Bosch one of them? That is hard to believe. The portrait of him in the Arras library shows him in old age, with sharp mind and piercing look, a man who knew how to adapt to life, whom satirical anger had not swallowed. Had he remained a prisoner of those horrible fancies, he could never have signed them so masterfully. His contemporaries liked his work not as religious dread but as pictured jokes, as the brisk sale of engraved copies shows.
A generation later Pieter Bruegel drove these demons off the stage and painted healthy, cheerful people instead. Four hundred years later, artists with troubled minds reflected the disorder of their own age in disturbing, allusive fantasies that recall Bosch.
Jan Gossart, Called Mabuse
The painter who most leaned toward convention closes this chapter of Flemish painting. Jan Gossart, called Mabuse for his birthplace Maubeuge, came to Antwerp in 1503, probably after learning the craft from David in Bruges. In 1507 he was invited to the court of Philip of Burgundy, one of Philip the Good's illegitimate sons, and went with him to Italy. On his return his brush had a new softness and a surprising love for nude figures and pagan myth. His Adam and Eve makes nude figures beautiful and appealing for the first time in Flemish art.
His Virgin and Child with Angels and St. Luke Painting the Virgin, with plump putti and Renaissance buildings behind, show the Italian manner, and the Agony in the Garden probably owes its moonlight to Italian art. But Gossart's gift was portraiture. After Jan van Eyck no Flemish painter has examined character as well as in the Portrait of Jean Carondelet in the Louvre. The painter concentrates his art on face and hands and shows the family wealth, the power to govern and the mind grown serious and stern under the weight of office. Massys closed the first period of Flemish painting, which had reached greatness with Van Eyck. Gossart brought from Italy the new technique, decorative delicacy, refined line, subtle chiaroscuro and fine portraiture, which in the sixteenth century (Bruegel excepted) drew Flemish painting from its native taste and kept it in a suspended state, not without grandeur and beauty, until it reached its height with Rubens and Van Dyck.
Mary of Burgundy and the Habsburg Inheritance
Charles the Bold left no son, but he had betrothed his daughter Mary to Maximilian of Austria, hoping that the Habsburgs would protect Burgundy against France. Louis XI seized the duchy, and Mary fled to Ghent. There, to be the lawful ruler of Flanders, Brabant, Hainaut and Holland, she signed the Great Privilege (February 1477). By it, without the consent of these provinces or their estates, no treaty or decree could be made, and Brabant was granted local liberty in the "Joyous Entry." In the book's words, Holland then began a hundred years' struggle for independence.
Mary's marriage to Maximilian (August 1477) opened the Low Countries to the powerful Habsburg house. When Mary died in 1482, Maximilian became regent. When he was elected emperor (1494), he left the regency to his son Philip. After Philip's death (1506), his sister Margaret of Austria was named by the emperor to govern the region. When Philip's son, the future Charles V, then fifteen, came of age (1515), the Netherlands became, under the rule of one of the shrewdest rulers in history, a part of the vast Habsburg empire.