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Faszination Rom. Maarten van Heemskerck zeichnet die Stadt/The Allure of Rome. Maarten van Heemskerck Draws the City (Gemäldegalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 26 April–4 August 2024). Catalogue in English and German by TatjanaBartsch and ChristienMelzer (eds.), Faszination Rom. Maarten van Heemskerck zeichnet die Stadt, exh. cat., Munich: Hirmer, 2024. 352pp. col. ill. ISBN 978‐3777443430. The Allure of Rome. Maarten van Heemskerck Draws the City , exh. cat., Munich: Hirmer, 2024. …

2024; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/rest.12970

1477-4658

Kathleen Christian,

Historical and Religious Studies of Rome

In his biography of the Northern Netherlandish artist Maarten Van Heemskerck published in 1604, Karl van Mander wrote that when Van Heemskerck was in Rome, 'he neither slept away his time nor neglected it in the company of Netherlanders with boozing or whatever, but instead he copied many things, as much after antiquities as after the works of Michelangelo – also many ruins, ornaments and all kinds of subtleties of the ancients […] When the weather was good he usually went out sketching.'1 It is likely that Van Mander knew first-hand the extraordinary drawings Van Heemskerck made in Rome between 1532 and 1536 or 1537 since they were treasured and used by artists long after Van Heemskerck's death. Passed down through the generations, nearly all of Van Heemskerck's Roman drawings that are known to have survived (c. 170, counting rectos and versos) eventually reached the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen in Berlin. These captivating works took centre stage at the Kupferstichkabinett's exhibition Faszination Rom. Maarten van Heemskerck zeichnet die Stadt, curated by Tatjana Bartsch, Hans-Ulrich Kessler and Christien Melzer, which ran between 26 April and 4 August 2024. The exhibition, held in the Ausstellungshalle of the Kulturforum, told a three-part story, focusing on Van Heemkerck's motivations for undertaking the trip to Rome, his Roman period itself and its aftereffects on his long and productive career as a painter and print designer. In the first section, a small but well-chosen group of objects contextualised Van Heemskerck's decision to travel to Rome, including a painting by Van Heemskerck's teacher-collaborator Jan van Scorel, a famous drawing of the Colosseum made c. 1508–1509 by Jan Gossaert and prints of Roman antiquities that were studied in Netherlandish workshops. Essays in the catalogue (by Eising, Miedema and Büttner) consider Van Heemskerck's relationship with the Netherlandish tradition, his interest in antique and contemporary Italian art before he ventured on to Italy himself, and even the type of maps he might have used to navigate his journey. The second section was focused on Van Heemskerck's Roman period, combining the Roman drawings with a number of key paintings from the 1530s. Most of the drawings that survive from Van Heemskerck's Roman period were once part of a single, small drawing book of oblong format. By the eighteenth century, this drawing book had been taken apart and, by the nineteenth century, many of its folios had been collected into an album owned by the French architect Hippolyte Destailleur. In 1879, the Berlin museums acquired the Destailleur album (the so-called Album I, inv. 79 D 2), and in 1892 purchased from a dealer in London another album (Album II, inv. 79 D 2 a), which combines several sheets by Van Heemskerck with drawings by other artists. In the 1980s, curators in Berlin remounted the Destailleur Album I. The preservation of so many of Van Heemskerck's drawings in Albums I and II has obscured the original composition of his drawing book; it has also over time exposed these drawings to the damage caused by viewers leafing through the albums, page by page. Thus in 2021, in preparation for the exhibition, curators of the Kupferstichkabinett decided to take apart the 1980s-era Album I, freeing up 70 sheets by Van Heemskerck, most of them folios from the dismantled drawing book. Album II, which holds 21 sheets with autograph drawings by Van Heemskerck, was left intact. Breaking up Album I enabled conservators to carry out extensive technical analysis on its contents. Crucially for the Berlin exhibition, this examination was able to shed new light on Van Heemskerck's drawing book which, even if its binding is lost and many of its folios have gone missing, is an utterly exceptional survival, and indeed one of the greatest treasures of Early Modern graphic arts. In the exhibition, the Kupferstichkabinett's collection of Van Heemskerck's Roman drawings was displayed to the public in its totality for the first time: the drawings from Album I were put on view as individual sheets, while those still bound in Album II were shown by opening the album up to different pages on different days. Most of the folios from the small drawing book were displayed in a purpose-built scaffold of metal and glass that allowed visitors to see both sides of each sheet at eye level, suspended in air and without any frame (Fig. 1). The display allowed viewers to share in Van Heemskerck's 'Faszination Rom' and become fully absorbed in each sheet. Many reached instinctively for their cell phones to view the drawings through their cameras and zoom in on mysterious figures emerging from doorways, torsos pulsing with life, or panoramas of overgrown Roman ruins. This captivating display brought out the potential of Early Modern drawings to appeal to an audience far beyond the rather small academic community that researches them, as has been demonstrated in other recent shows focussed on the drawings of Dürer, Raphael and Michelangelo. Van Heemskerck's Roman sketches, however, have a unique allure, since they not only preserve his impressions of a place he regarded as an artistic Nirvana, but also open a door onto the lost world of Rome in the 1530s, soon before Pope Paul III and his successors began to organise and regularise the city. They vividly convey the wild beauty of the Forum when it was still half-buried (Fig. 2), or the enchantment of ancient statues when they were still lying in the shadows of collectors' courtyards. Given that so much has been discovered recently about Van Heemskerck's drawing book, it was at first surprising to see that the display was not consistently focused on the goal of reconstructing its original appearance. Folios from the drawing book were arranged in the glass installation largely according to themes chosen by curators – antiquities collections, portraits, landscapes and other topics. While panoramas that once ran across two pages of the book were gratifyingly reunited, the display thus prioritised the subject matter of Van Heemskerck's book over its internal logic. In the end, however, the curatorial decision was a wise one, since it made the drawings accessible while reserving more detailed discussion for the essays in the catalogue. To visualise Van Heemskerck's original drawing book, a media stand designed by the Fototeca of the Bibliotheca Hertziana (a collaborating partner in the exhibition) provided a reconstruction on a computer screen. A facsimile edition of the book was, moreover, published on the scale of the original, which will offer a useful tool for teaching and research.2 Now, after many decades of discussion, starting with publications by Leon Preibisz and by Christian Hülsen and Hermann Egger in the early twentieth century,3 a corpus of Van Heemskerck's autograph Roman drawings has been established. His work has been distinguished from the sheets of other artists represented in the Berlin albums, the Anonymous A (discussed in Maffei's essay in the catalogue) and the Anonymous B (who was first identified by Ilja Veldman).4 The art-historical discussion of Van Heemskeck's Roman drawings has also been greatly advanced by Tatjana Bartsch's monograph of 2019. Bartsch made much progress in the reconstruction of the original drawing book, while illuminating Van Heemskerck's techniques and choice of subjects, contextualising the Roman drawings within Van Heemskerck's artistic aims and tracing the reception of his drawings after his death.5 These issues are discussed in the catalogue in essays by Bartsch and by Bartsch and Melzer, and are supplemented by an essay on Van Heemskerck's methods of architectural drawing by Zanchettin. Further findings have resulted from the recent technical examination, as is discussed in the catalogue by Dietz, Penz and Wintermann. Their work has confirmed that Van Heemskerck drew on Italian paper and that he used lead stylus in his drawings, an Italian technique that – like red chalk, like painting on canvas – he adopted during his years in Rome. Experimentation with local materials and techniques, and learning from Italian artists, were clearly important goals of his Roman stay; Van Heemskerck's red chalk drawings of muscular antique torsos (Fig. 3), for example, lay bare his admiration for Michelangelo's drawings. Another important discovery was that Van Heemskerck did not use the black inks that were standard in his day, but brown inks made using a vinegar solution. The current warm, reddish-brown colours of the inks are thus close to those chosen by the artist. After Van Heemskerck's drawings were freed from Album I, technical analysis could also investigate further the original order of the folios in the small drawing book. From a reconstruction of the gatherings, conservators could confirm that there are now at least 20 sheets missing from it. Other findings include the surprising discovery that Van Heemskerck's drawing of the upper court of the Galli collection and a statue of Mars Ultor (Fig. 4) did not originally belong to the small drawing book. Although this sheet is the right size, given the direction of its chain lines, it cannot have been bound with the rest of the sketchbook. Possibly, the authors conclude, the artist inserted it as a loose sheet, perhaps to supplement his famous drawing of Michelangelo's Bacchus in the Galli antiquities collection (inv. 79 D 2, fol. 72r). Fortuitous loans offered visitors the opportunity to examine the Roman drawings in proximity to two of the three surviving paintings that the artist is known to have made in Rome: The Venus and Cupid at the Forge of Vulcan now in Prague and another long, horizontal panel of a related subject, the Venus and Mars at Vulcan's Forge borrowed from a private collection in Milan. The third is the enormous Abduction of Helen in Baltimore that Van Heemskerck painted for Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi in 1535–1536 (discussed in the catalogue by Bartsch and in an essay on Van Heemskerck's Roman network by Mazzetti di Pietralata). It is the most important of Van Heemskerck's Roman paintings, but could not have travelled to Berlin due to its size, not to mention the budgetary restraints and sustainability ethics of German state museums. Nonetheless, the Abduction's brand of fantasy landscape was represented by other gems present in the show, in particular Hermanus Posthumus's enthralling Tempus edax Rerum, painted in Rome in 1536, and the little-known Extensive Landscape acquired for the Liechtenstein collections only in 2018 (Fig. 5). An attribution to Posthumus for the Extensive Landscape has been suggested based on its similarity to the Tempus edax rerum. Like the Tempus edax rerum, it prominently features a pseudo-antique inscription, this one reading 'NON OMNIBUS CONTINGIT ADIRE CHORINTUM' ('it is not everyone's fate to go to Corinth', following a quotation from Horace). In the catalogue, Bartsch argues for an attribution of this painting to Van Heemskerck himself, and there will certainly be further debate about this intriguing work. The final section of the exhibition, treating the afterlife of Van Heemskerck's Roman experience after his return to the Netherlands, engaged viewers with the artist's endless powers of invention. While Van Heemskerck's Roman drawings render antiquities reverently, with respect for the artistic authority of his models, in his paintings and prints he freely reworked the antique in novel ways, using his drawings as a source of inspiration for new visual ideas. As is discussed in the catalogue essays by Bartsch, Melzer and Kessler, Van Heemskerck borrowed at will from antique costumes, ruins, or the poses of antique statuary. A selection of examples from his massive oeuvre represented this approach in his post-Roman career, including the exquisite Landscape with St. Jerome (1547), the fever-dream of his Bullfight in an Antique Arena (1552) and the enigmatic allegorical painting, Momus Criticizing the Gods' Creations (1561), which belongs to the Berlin museums. Although an exhibition on Van Heemskerck's Roman drawings was long a desideratum of the Kupferstichkabinett, waiting until this particular moment had its distinct advantages. The year 2024, the 450th anniversary of the artist's death, is also being marked by a triad of exhibitions on Van Heemskerck running between 28 September 2024 and 19 January 2025 in the Netherlands (at the Frans Hals Museum, Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar and Teylers Museum). The artist's extraordinary St. Luke Painting the Virgin made in 1532, just before his journey to Rome, has been restored, and the exhibitions are being accompanied by a much-anticipated catalogue by Ilja Veldman, with contributions by museum conservators. This Van Heemskerck 'moment' follows a wave of important research and will no doubt secure the artist's central position in the field of Early Modern art history. Indeed, Van Heemskerck is emerging as a Michelangelo of the North, a master talent with great ambition and limitless powers of invention who also managed to produce an impressive quantity of work, even if many of his paintings were lost to iconoclasm. In Berlin, the homage paid to Van Heemskerck by the curators' sensitive approach to his drawings, and by the spectacular method used to display them, was both visually gratifying and historiographically significant. The exhibition succeeded in fully reversing the view expressed in 1884 by Jaro Springer, in an article announcing the arrival of Album I in Berlin: since Van Heemskerck's work was so unpleasant and over-Italianised, his drawings would primarily be of interest for their evidentiary value. Archaeologists, he correctly predicted, would plunder them for knowledge about the survival of ancient sculpture and architecture, while art historians would do the same to investigate the construction history of New St. Peters, or other topics deemed more worthwhile than the art of Van Heemskerck himself.6 While a few evocative casts of antiquities taken from the stocks of the Berlin Gipsformerei reminded viewers of the ancient sculptures Van Heemskerck drew, and indeed of the unique significance of Van Heemskerck's drawings for archaeological research, the exhibition embraced a new era. In the last twenty years, thanks primarily to the publications of Bartsch and Arthur J. Di Furia, Van Heemskerck's drawings have invited new interpretations from multiple art-historical perspectives – as visual and technical experiments, as agents of memory, or as traces of Van Heemskerck's relationships with patrons and artists in Rome.7 The Berlin exhibition brought out the richness of these approaches, emphasising Van Heemskerck's abilities as a draughtsman while also keeping the discussion centred on his creative processes. By so doing it underscored, to an extent rarely achieved in previous exhibitions, the significance of drawing for sixteenth-century artists. The before-during-and-after format of the exhibition told a story of an ambitious artist who, already in his thirties, undertook a risky journey across the Alps, not only to train or to build up a repertoire of visual ideas. He also sought a type of glory and self-transformation he believed he could only find in Rome, and he could only achieve through drawing.