Karel Van Mander's Mennonite Roots in Flanders
2005; Volume: 79; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0025-9373
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Cultural Studies of Poland
ResumoAbstract: Scholarship treating the life and work of Dutch humanist and nobleman Karel van Mander has not recognized the connection between his Mennonitism and his classic Het Schilder-Boeck, so indispensable for art history. Nor has it given serious attention to his Mennonite roots in Flanders. This study helps to fill those gaps, and includes an interpretation of his early painting, Beheading of St. Catharine at Kortrijk [Courtrai] in 1581-1582, from the perspective of his mastery within the Chamber of Rhetoric. ********** Karel van Mander (1548-1606) one of the most prominent humanists during the Renaissance in the Netherlands. He a rhetorician, a poet, an art historian, a painter and a teacher of painters. As leader of the Haarlem School of Painting, he became an influential colleague of such prominent painters as Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Hendrick Vroom and Hendrick Goltzius, and had Frans Hals a student. (1) Today van Mander's influence continues primarily through his Schilder-Boeck (Book on Picturing), which he began in 1597 and published in 1604. According to art historian Walter S. Melion: It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Karel van Mander's Schilder-Boeck to northern European theory and practice of art.... The Book on Picturing offered the first fully argued theory of Netherlandish painting, drawing and printmaking. It included, too, the first history of Dutch and Flemish painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Every subsequent theoretical text on Netherlandish art ... invokes Van Mander, either to revise his theory or to update his history of painters. (2) Van Mander also a Flemish In fact, although he a humanist, he a member of the Old Flemish Mennonite Church in Haarlem, a very conservative congregation of Flemish refugees pastored by Hans Busschaert, whose influence in Flanders dated from 1555. Despite the assessment of Dutch historian Nanne van der Zijp that van Mander played no important role in the church, his collection of poems in De Gulden Harpe (1599) used as a hymnal in Old Flemish congregations, whose piety shaped through its nine reprints. (3) Two ongoing problems in van Mander scholarship relate to his Mennonite affiliation. First, it is not clear when he became a Was he a Mennonite during his early years in Flanders (present-day Belgium), or did he become a Mennonite only after he fled as a refugee to Haarlem in 1583? Second, the influence of Mennonite thought on his work, especially his Book on Picturing, has been largely ignored or underestimated. For instance, in Melion's otherwise seminal work, he barely mentions the fact that van Mander a Mennonite, and he does so only in a page-long footnote about van Mander's other written works, merely noting in passing that van Mander's publisher, Paschier van Wesbusch of Haarlem, was like him [van Mander] a Fleming and a Mennonite. (4) My own consideration of the evidence suggests that van Mander's Mennonitism, especially his Mennonite pacifism, inspired the Book on Picturing; and that his Mennonite commitment can be perceived prior to his move to Haarlem, as evidenced most clearly in an overlooked detail in the Catholic altarpiece that he painted for St. Martin's Church in Kortrijk (Flanders) in 1581-1582. This evidence suggests that van Mander a significant figure in Belgian Mennonite history. PACIFISM AND THE BOOK ON PICTURING Van Mander expressly stated that his work in the Book on Picturing a pacific alternative to militarism. Unlike a more traditional approach to history-writing which chronicled military exploits, van Mander's historical approach would focus on art. As he put it in his preface to Book 4: [Some persons] may think that only those renowned through weapons and their high deeds are worthy of being described with the pen. …
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