Art in the Netherlands/Chapter VI

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We must look closely into the formation of Belgium in order to comprehend the rise of the school which bears the name of Rubens. Previous to the War of Independence the Southern provinces seemed to tend to the Reformation as well as the provinces of the North. In 1566 bands of iconoclasts had devastated the cathedrals of Antwerp, Ghent and Tournay, and broken everywhere, in the churches and the abbeys, all images and ornaments deemed idolatrous. In the environs of Ghent thousands of armed Calvinists flocked to the preachings of Hermann Strieker. Crowds gathered around the stake, sang psalms, sometimes stoned the executioners and set the condemned free. Death penalties had to be enacted in order to suppress the satires of the belle-lettre academies, and when the Duke of Alba began his massacres the whole country rushed to arms. The resistance, however, was not the same in the South as in the North; in the South the Germanic race, the independent and Protestant race, was not pure; the Walloons, a mixed population speaking French, constituted one half of the inhabitants. The soil, moreover, being richer, and living easier, there was less energy and greater sensuality; man was less resolved to suffer and more inclined to enjoy. Finally, almost all the Walloons, besides the families of the great, being attached to court sentiment through a court life, were Catholic. Hence it is that the Southern provinces did not contend with the indomitable stubbornness of the Northern provinces. There is nothing in them like the sieges of Maestricht, Harlem, Alkmaar and Leyden, where women enlisted, fought, and were slaughtered in the breach. After the taking of Antwerp by the Duke of Parma the ten provinces returned to their allegiance, and began apart a new existence. The most spirited citizens and the most fervent Calvinists had perished in battle and on the scaffold, or had fled to the North in the seven free provinces. The belle-lettre academies exiled themselves there in a body. On the termination of the Duke of Alva's administration it was estimated that sixty thousand families had emigrated; after the capture of Ghent eleven thousand more departed, and after the capitulation of Antwerp four thousand weavers betook themselves to London. Antwerp lost the half of its inhabitants, and Ghent and. Bruges two-thirds; whole streets were empty; in the principal street of Ghent a couple of horses cropped the grass. A mighty surgical operation had relieved the nation of what the Spaniards called its bad blood; at all events that which remained was the most quiescent. There is a great substratum of docility in the Germanic races; think of the German regiments exported to America and sold there to die by their petty absolute princes: the sovereign once accepted, they are faithful to him; with guaranteed rights he seems legitimate; they are inclined to respect the established order of things. The continued constraint, moreover, of irremediable necessity produces its effect; man accommodates himself to things when he is satisfied that he cannot change them certain portions of his character which cannot be developed languish, and others expand the more. There are moments in the history of a nation when it bears some resemblance to Christ taken to the top of a high mountain by Satan, and there bid to choose between a heroic and a common life; here the tempter is Philip II., with his armies and executioners; the people of the North and the South, both subject to the same trial, decide differently according to the petty diversities of their composition and character. The choice made these diversities grow, and are exaggerated by the effects of the situation they themselves have produced. Both people being two almost indeterminate varieties of one species become two distinct species. It is with moral types as with organic types; they issue at the beginning from a common origin, but as they complete their development they grow wider apart and are thus formed through their divergencies. The Southern provinces henceforth become Belgium. The dominant trait is the craving for peace and comfort, the disposition to take life on the jovial and pleasant side, in brief, the sentiment of Peniers. In fact, even in a dilapidated cabin or in a bare tavern on a wooden bench a man may laugh, sing, smoke a good pipe and swallow deep draughts of beer; it is not disagreeable to attend mass as a fine ceremony, nor to recount one's sins to an accommodating Jesuit. After the capture of Antwerp, Philip II. is delighted to hear that communions have become more and more frequent. Convents are founded twenty at a time. "It is a matter worthy of remark," says a contemporary, "that since the happy advent of the archdukes more new establishments have arisen than in two hundred years and before that "Franciscans, reformed Carmelites, friars of St. Francis de Paule, Carmelites, annunciada, and especially the Jesuits; the latter in fact bring with them a new Christianity, the most appropriate to the state of the country, and which seems manufactured purposely to contrast with that of the Protestants. Be docile in mind and in heart, and all the rest is tolerance and indulgence; in this connection see the portraits of the day, and among others, the gay fellow who was confessor to Rubens. Casuistry is shaped to and serves for difficult cases; under its empire there is scope enough for all current peccadilloes. Worship, moreover, is exempt from prudery, and winds up by being amusing. To this epoch belongs the worldly and sensualistic internal decoration of the grave and venerable cathedral, the multiplied and contorted ornaments – flames, lyres, trinkets and scrolls, the veneerings of veined marbles, altars resembling theatre façades, and the quaint diverting pulpits overlaid with a menagerie of carved birds and brutes. As respects the new churches, the outside suits the inside. That of the Jesuits, built in Antwerp at the beginning of the seventeenth century, is instructive, it being a saloon filled with étagères. Its thirty-six ceilings were executed by Rubens, and it is curious to see here as elsewhere an ascetic and mystic faith accept as edifying subjects the most blooming and the most exposed nudities, buxom Magdalens, plump St. Sebastians and Madonnas whom the negro magi are devouring with all the lust of their eyes, a display of flesh and fabrics unequalled by the Florentine carnival in luxurious temptation and in triumphant sensuality.

Meanwhile the altered political situation contributes to the transformation of the intellectual world. The old despotism becomes relaxed; to the rigors of the Duke of Alva succeeds the liberal policy of the Duke of Parma. After an amputation, a man who has bled profusely must be restored by soothing and strengthening treatment: hence it is that, after the pacification of Ghent, the Spaniards let their terrible edicts against heresy lie dormant. Executions are at an end. The latest martyr is a poor sewing woman, buried alive in 1597. In the following century Jordaens, with his wife and her family, become Protestants without being annoyed, and even without losing any of his commissions. The archdukes permit towns and corporations to govern themselves according to ancient usages, to collect imposts and attend to their own business; when they desire to have Breughel de Velours relieved of military duty or of exactions, they make their appeal to the commune. The government becomes regular, semi-liberal, and almost national; Spanish extortions, razzias, and brutalities disappear. At length, in order to keep possession of the country, Philip II. is compelled to let it remain Flemish, and exist as a separate state. In 1599 he detaches it from Spain, and cedes it in full possession to Albert and Isabella. "The Spaniards never did a better thing," writes the French ambassador; "it would be impossible to keep the country without giving it this new system, as it was ripe for revolution." The States-General meet in 1600, and decide for reforms. We see in Guiccardini, and other travellers, that the old constitution arises almost intact out of the rubbish under which it had been buried by military violence. "At Bruges," M. de Monconys writes in 1653, "each trade has a house in common, where those of the profession meet to transact the business of the community, or for recreation; and all the trades are distributed into four divisions, under the control of four burgomasters, who have charge of the keys of the city, the Governor exercising no jurisdiction or power over any but the military force." The archdukes are wise and solicitous of the public welfare. In 1609 they make peace with Holland; in 1611 their perpetual edict completes the restoration of the country. They either are or render themselves powerful; Isabella, with her own hand, strikes down, on the Place de Sablon, the bird which sanctifies the cross-bowman's pledge; Albert attends at Louvain the lectures of Justus Lepsins. They love, cherish, and attach themselves to famous artists - Otto Venius, Rubens, Teniers, and Breughel de Velours. The belle-lettre institutions flourish again, and the universities are favored; in the Catholic world, under the Jesuits and often by their side, is a kind of intellectual renaissance; a number of theologians, controversialists, casuists, erudites, geographers, physicians, and even historians, arise - Mercator, Ortelius, Van Helmont, Jansenius, Lepsius, all of whom are Flemings of this epoch. The "Description of Flanders," by Sander, a vast work completed after so many trials, is a monument of national zeal and patriotic pride. If, in turn, we wish to form an idea of the state of the country, take one of the tranquil and fallen cities to-day like Bruges. Sir Dudley Carleton, passing through Antwerp in 1616, finds it a handsome place, although nearly empty; he may have seen no more than "forty persons in the entire street," not a carriage, not a horseman, not a customer in the shops; but the houses are well maintained, everything being clean and cared for: the peasant has rebuilt his burnt cabin and is at work in the field; the housewife is attending to her duties; security has returned, and is about to be followed by plenty; there are shooting matches, processions, fairs and magnificent entries of princes; people are getting back to old comforts beyond which they do not aspire; religion is left to the Church, and government to the princes: here, as at Venice, the course of events has brought man down to the quest of enjoyment the effort to obtain it being the more strenuous in proportion to the strong contrast with their previous misery.

And, in truth, what a contrast! It is necessary to have read the details of the war in order to appreciate it. Fifty thousand martys had perished under Charles V., eighteen thousand persons had been executed by the Duke of Alva, and the revolted country had maintained the war for thirteen years. The Spaniards had reconquered the large cities only by famine after protracted sieges. In the beginning Antwerp was sacked for three days; seven thousand of her citizens were slain, and five hundred houses were burnt. The soldier lived on the country, and we see him in the engravings of the day plundering and robbing dwellings, torturing the husband, violating the wife, and bearing away chests and furniture in carts. When his pay was withheld too long he took up his quarters in a town, and this led to a republic of brigands; under an eletto of their own choice they ravaged the environs at their convenience. Karl Van Mander, the historian of the painters, on returning one day to his village, found his house pillaged along with the rest; the soldiers had even taken the bed and bedclothes of his old sick father. Karl was driven out naked, and they were already fixing a rope to his neck to hang him when he was saved by a cavalier whom he had known in Italy. Another time, as he was on the road with his wife and an infant child, they took his money, baggage and clothes, his wife's and those of the infant; the mother could only secure a small petticoat, the infant a tattered net, and Karl an old worn-out piece of cloth in which he wrapped himself up, and in which guise he readied Bruges. Under this regime a country ceases to exist; soldiers themselves finally die of starvation; the Duke of Parma writes to Philip II. that if he fails to send relief the army is lost, "for nobody can live without eating." On emerging from such calamities, peace seems a paradise; it is not merely the good at which man rejoices, but the better, and here the better is stupendous. A man can now sleep in his own bed, store up provisions, enjoy the fruits of his labor, travel about and assemble and converse with his fellows without fear; he has a home, a country and a future. All the ordinary occurrences of life get to be interesting and attractive; he revives, and for the first time seems to live. It is circumstances like these out of which always springs a spontaneous literature and an original art. The great crisis through which the nation has passed serves to remove the monotonous varnish with which tradition and custom have overspread things. We find out what man is; we seize on the fundamental points of his renewed and transformed nature; we see its depth, its secret instincts, the master forces which denote his race and are about to control his history; half a century later and we see them no more, because during a half century they have been constantly visible. In the meantime, however, the new order of things becomes complete; the mind confronts it like Adam on his first awakening; it is only later that conceptions get to be over-refined and weakened; they are now broad and simple. Man is qualified for this through his birth in a crumbling society and an education in the midst of veritable tragedies; like Victor Hugo and George Sand, the child Rubens, in exile, alongside of his imprisoned father, hears, in his home and all around him, the roar of tempest and of wreck. After an active generation which has suffered and created, comes the poetic generation which writes, paints or models. It expresses and amplifies the energies and desires of a society founded by its fathers. Hence it is that Flemish art proceeds to glorify in heroic types the sensual instincts, the grand and gross joyousness, the rude energy of surrounding mortals, and to find in the alehouse of Teniers the Olympus of Rubens.

Among these painters there is one who seems to efface the rest; indeed no name in the history of art is greater, and there are only three or four as great. But Rubens is not an isolated genius, the number as well as the resemblance of surrounding talents showing that the efflorescence of which he is the most beautiful emanation is the product of his time and people. Before him there was Adam Van Noort, his master, and the master of Jordaens; around him are his contemporaries, educated in other studios, and whose invention is as spontaneous as his own - Jordaens, Crayer, Gerard Zeghers, Rombouts, Abraham Janssens, and Van Roose; after him come his pupils - Van Thulden, Diepenbeeke, Van den Hoeck, Corneille Schut, Boyermans, Van Dyck, the greatest of all, and Van Oost of Bruges: alongside of him are the great animal, flower and still-life painters - Snyders, John Fyt, the Jesuit Seghers, and an entire school of famous engravers - Soutman, Vorsterman, Bolswert, Pontius and Vischer; the same sap fructifies all these branches, the lesser as well as the greater while we must add, again, the pervading sympathies and the national admiration. It is plain that an art like this is not the effect of one accidental cause but of a general development, and of this we have full assurance when, considering the work itself, we remark the concordances which assimilate it with its milieu.

On the one side it resumes or follows the traditions of Italy, and is seen at a glance to be pagan and Catholic. It is supported by churches and convents; it represents Biblical and evangelical scenes; the subject is edifying; and the engraver deliberately places at the bottom of his engravings pious maxims and moral problems. And yet, in fact, there is nothing Christian about it but its name: all mystic or ascetic sentiment is banished; its Madonnas, martyrs and confessors, its Christs and apostles are superb florid bodies restricted to the life of the flesh; its paradise is an Olympus of well-fed Flemish deities revelling in muscular activity; they are large, vigorous, plump and content, and make a jovial and magnificent display as in a national festival or at a princely entry. The Church, it is true, baptizes this last flower of the old mythology with becoming forms, but it is only baptism, and this is frequently wanting. Apollos, Jupiters, Castors, Pollux and Venus, all the ancient divinities, revive under their veritable names in the palaces of the kings and the great which they decorate. This is owing to religion, here as in Italy, consisting of rites. Rubens goes to mass every morning, and presents a picture in order to obtain indulgences; after which he falls back upon his own poetic feeling for natural life and, in the same style, paints a lusty Magdalen and a plump Siren; under the Catholic varnish the heart and the intellect, all social ways and observances are pagan. On the other side, this art is truly Flemish; everything issues from and centres on a mother idea which is new and national; it is harmonious, spontaneous and original; in this respect it contrasts with the foregoing which is only a discordant imitation. From Greece to Florence, from Florence to Venice, from Venice to Antwerp, every step of the passage can be traced. The conception of man and of life goes on decreasing in nobleness and increasing in breadth. Rubens is to Titian what Titian was to Raphael, and Raphael to Phidias. Never did artistic sympathy clasp nature in such an open and universal embrace. Ancient boundaries, already often extended, seem removed purposely to expose an infinite career. There is no respect for historic proprieties; he groups together allegoric with real figures, and cardinals with a naked Mercury. There is no deference to the moral order; he fills the ideal heaven of mythology and of the gospel with coarse or mischievous characters; a Magdalen resembling a nurse, and a Ceres whispering some pleasant gossip in her neighbor's ear. There is no dread of exciting physical sensibility; he pushes the horrible to extremes, athwart all the tortures for the punishment of the flesh and all the contortions of howling agony. There is no fear of offending moral delicacy; his Minerva is a shrew who can fight, his Judith a butcher's wife familiar with blood, and his Paris a jocose expert and a dainty amateur. To translate into words the ideas vociferously proclaimed by his Suzannas, his Magdalens, his St. Sebastians, his Graces and his Sirens, in all his kermesses, divine and human, ideal or real, Christian or pagan, would require the terms of Rabelais. Through him all the animal instincts of human nature appear on the stage; those which had been excluded as gross he reproduces as true, and in him as in nature they encounter the others. Nothing is wanting but the pure and the noble; the whole of human nature is in his grasp, save the loftiest heights. Hence it is that his creativeness is the vastest we have seen, comprehending as it does all types, Italian cardinals, Roman emperors, contemporary citizens, peasants and cowherds, along with the innumerable diversities stamped on humanity by the play of natural forces and which more than fifteen hundred pictures did not suffice to exhaust.

For the same reason, in the representation of the body, he comprehended more profoundly than any one the essential characteristic of organic life; he surpasses in this the Venetians, as they surpass the Florentines; he feels still better than they that flesh is a changeable substance in a constant state of renewal; and such, more than any other, is the Flemish body, lympathic, sanguine and voracious, more fluid, more rapidly tending to accretion and waste than those whose dry fibre and radical temperance preserve permanent tissues. Hence it is that nobody has depicted its contrasts in stronger relief, nor as visibly shown the decay and bloom of life at one time the dull flabby corpse, a genuine clinical mass, empty of blood and substance, livid, blue and mottled through suffering, a clot of blood on the mouth, the eye glassy and the feet and hands clayish, swollen and deformed because death seized them first; at another the freshness of living carnations, the handsome, blooming and smiling athlete, the mellow suppleness of a yielding torso in the form of a well-fed adolescent, the soft rosy cheeks and placid candor of a girl whose blood was never quickened or eyes bedimmed by thought, flocks of dimpled cherubs and merry cupids, the delicacy, the folds, the exquisite melting rosiness of infantile skin, seemingly the petal of a flower moistened with dew and impregnated with morning light. In like manner in the representation of soul and action he appreciated more keenly than any one the essential feature of animal and moral life, that is to say the instantaneous movement which it is the aim of the plastic arts to seize on the wing. In this again he surpasses the Venetians as they surpassed the Florentines. Nobody has endowed figures with such spirit, with a gesture so impulsive, with an impetuosity so abandoned and furious, such an universal commotion and tempest of swollen and writhing muscles in one single effort. His personages speak; their repose itself is suspended on the verge of action; we feel what they have just accomplished and what they are about to do. The present with them is impregnated with the past and big with the future; not only the whole face but the entire attitude conspires to manifest the flowing stream of their thought, feeling and complete being; we hear the inward utterance of their emotion; we might repeat the words to which they give expression. The most fleeting and most subtle shades of sentiment belong to Rubens; in this respect he is a treasure for novelist and psychologist; he took note of the passing refinements of moral expression as well as of the soft volume of sanguine flesh; no one has gone beyond him in knowledge of the living organism and of the animal man. Endowed with this sentiment and skill he was capable, in conformity with the aspirations and needs of his restored nation, of amplifying the forces he found around and within himself, all that underlie, preserve and manifest the overflow and triumph of existence; on the one hand gigantic joints, herculean shapes and shoulders, red and colossal muscles, bearded and truculent heads, over-nourished bodies teeming with succulence, the luxurious display of white and rosy flesh; on the other, the rude instincts which impel human nature to seek food, drink, strife and pleasure, the savage fury of the combatant, the enormity of the big-bellied Silenus, the sensual joviality of the Faun, the abandonment of that lovely creature without conscience and "fat with sin," the boldness, the energy, the broad joyousness, the native goodness, the organic serenity of the national type. He heightens these effects again through their composition and the accessories with which he surrounds them magnificence of lustrous silks, embroidered simarres and golden brocades, groups of naked figures, modern costumes and antique draperies, an inexhaustible accumulation of arms, standards, colonnades, Venetian stairways, temples, canopies, ships, animals, and ever novel and imposing scenery, as if outside of ordinary nature he possessed the key of a thousand times richer nature, whereon his magician's hand could forever draw without the freedom of his imagination ending in confusion, but on the contrary with a jet so vigorous and a prodigality so national that his most complicated productions seem like the irresistible outflow of a surfeited brain. Like an Indian deity at "leisure he relieves his fecundity by creating worlds, and from the matchless folds and hues of his tossed simarres to the snowy whites of his flesh, or the pale silkiness of his blonde tresses, there is no tone in any of his canvasses which does not appear there purposely to afford him delight.

There is only one Rubens in Flanders, as there is only one Shakespeare in England. Great as the others are, they are deficient in some one element of his genius. Crayer has not his audacity nor his excess; he paints beauty calm, sympathetic and content along with requisite effects of bright and mellow color. Jordaens has not his regal grandeur and his heroic poetic feeling; he paints with vinous color stunted colossi, crowded groups and turbulent plebeians. Van Dyck has not, like him, the love of power and of life for life itself; more refined, more chivalric, born with a sensitive and even melancholy nature, elegiac in his sacred subjects, aristocratic in his portraits, he depicts with less glowing and more sympathetic color noble, tender and charming figures whose generous and delicate souls are filled with sweet and sad emotions unknown to his master. His works are the first indication of the coming change. After 1660 he is already prominent. The generation whose energy and aspirations had inspired the grand picturesque revery, faded away man by man; Crayer and Jordaens alone, by merely living, kept art up for twenty years. The nation, reviving for a moment, falls backward; its renaissance never perfects itself. The archducal sovereigns, through whom it had become an independent state, ended in 1633; it reverts back to a Spanish province under a governor sent from Madrid. The treaty of 1648 closes the Scheldt to it, and completes the ruin of her commerce. Louis XIV. dismembers her, and on three occasions deprives her of portions of her territory. Four successive wars trample over her for thirty years; friends and enemies, Spaniards, French, English and Hollanders live upon her; the treaties of 1715 convert the Dutch into her purveyors and tax-gatherers. At this moment, become Austrian, she refuses the subsidy; but the elders of the states are imprisoned, and the chief one, Anneessens, dies on the scaffold; this is the last and a feeble echo of the mighty voice of Van Artevelde. Henceforth the country subsides into a simple province in which people keep soul and body together and only care to live. At the same time, and through a reaction, the national imagination declines. The school of Rubens degenerates; with Beyermans, Van Herp, John Erasmus Quellin, the second Van Cost, Deyster and John Van Orley we see originality and energy disappearing; coloring grows weak or becomes affected; attenuated types incline to prettiness; expression is either sentimental or mawkish; the personages occupying the great canvas, instead of filling it are dispersed, the intervals being supplied with architecture; the vein is exhausted; painting is mere routine or a mannered imitation of the Italian school. Many betake themselves to foreign countries. Philippe de Champagne is director of the Academy of the Fine Arts at Paris and becomes French in mind and country; still more, a spiritualist and Jansenist, a conscientious and skilful painter of grave and thoughtful spirit. Gerard de Lairesse becomes a disciple of the Italians - a classic, academic and erudite painter of costume and historic and mythologic resemblances. The logical reason assumes empire in the arts, having already obtained it in social matters. Two pictures in the Musée of Ghent equally display the change in painting and the change in society. Both represent princely entrees, one in 1666 and the other in 1717. The first, of a beautiful ruddy tone, shows the last of the men of the grand epoch, their cavalier air, their powerful frame, their capacity for physical endeavor, their rich decorative costumes, their horses with with flowing manes - here nobles related to Van Dyck's seigniors, and there pikemen in buff and cuirass kindred to the soldiers of Wallestein - in short, the last remains of the heroic and picturesque age. The second, cold and pale in tone, shows highly refined, softened, Frenchified beings - gentlemen clever at salutation, women of fashion conscious of their appearance, in brief, the imported drawing-room system and foreign modes of demeanor. During the fifty years separating the former from the latter both the national art and the national spirit vanished.