Flemish Art

Flemish art, art of the 15th, 16th, and early 17th centuries in Flanders and in the surrounding regions including Brabant, Hainaut, Picardy, and Artois, known for its vibrant materialism and unsurpassed technical skill. From Hubert and Jan van Eyck through Pieter Bruegel the Elder to Peter Paul Rubens, the Flemish painters were masters of the oil medium and used it primarily to portray a robust and realistically detailed vision of the world around them. Their paintings reflect clearly the changes in fortune of this narrow slice of country between France, Germany, and the Low Countries: first came the peaceful, pious, and prosperous 15th-century reigns of the dukes of Burgundy, then a long confused succession of religious crises and civil wars, and finally the imposition of autocratic rule by the kings of Spain.

The precursors of the Flemish school are usually placed in Dijon, the first capital of the dukes of Burgundy. Philip the Bold (reigned 1363–1404) established the powerful Flemish-Burgundian alliance that lasted more than a century—until 1482. He also established a tradition of art patronage that was to last nearly as long. Among the artists he attracted to Dijon were the sculptor Claus Sluter of Haarlem and the painter Melchior Broederlam of Ypres, in whose richly textured works one can see the attachment to the world of surface appearances that is so characteristic of the Flemish school.

Philip the Good (reigned 1419–67) moved the Burgundian capital to Brugge (Bruges), centre of the northern wool trade, transforming that commercially minded city into an artistic centre. In 1425 Philip officially employed Jan van Eyck as his painter. The major works of van Eyck—the Ghent Altarpiece (1432), The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (1432), and The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami (1434)—are astonishing in that they are both the beginning and the culmination of early Flemish painting. Van Eyck is credited by Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari with the invention of oil painting (paint in which a drying oil is the vehicle), but, if so, it is an invention that began at the peak of technical perfection, for no succeeding painter’s works have so well maintained their freshness of surface and brilliance of colour. Van Eyck’s artistic vision, static and formal though it is, also has maintained its power, imbuing everything he painted with a spiritual presence, for all his unbridled love of material appearances.

While continuing to embellish their works with brilliant colour and richly textured surfaces, the following generation of painters wisely did not attempt to imitate van Eyck but looked to Italy for advances in pictorial structure. In his masterpiece, The Descent from the Cross (c. 1435), Rogier van der Weyden focused on the drama of the scene, eliminating everything extraneous. The linear rhythms of assembled mourners move horizontally across the shallow, crowded composition, preventing the viewer from dwelling on any one detail, and Petrus Christus explored the underlying physical structure of his human subjects, giving them a strangely geometric appearance. These innovations, however, were extraneous to the spirit of the early Flemish tradition, which inevitably declined along with the self-assurance and religious convictions of the Flemish burghers, caught as they were in the late 15th century by the fall of the house of Burgundy and the economic collapse of Brugge. Of the late masters of early Flemish art, Hugo van der Goes went mad, and Hans Memling and Gerard David produced melancholy, sometimes insipid pastiches of earlier works.

More in tune with the spiritual crisis that racked the continent at century’s end were the bizarre allegories painted by Hiëronymus Bosch. In his three-paneled Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500), humankind moves in swarms from paradise to perversion to punishment, acting out myriad fantasies of sensual gratification.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Peasant Dance

The turbulent 16th century in Flanders was not hospitable to art and produced only one great master, Pieter Bruegel. It is in Bruegel’s powerful portrayals of peasant life that one finds best reflected the brutality of the age. Bruegel, influenced by Bosch and educated by a two-year sojourn in Italy, developed a robust style marked by structural solidity, rhythmic sweep, and an ironic moralizing eye for the grotesque. Bruegel left behind two sons, Pieter the Younger, also called Hell Bruegel because of his paintings of damnation, and Jan Bruegel, called Velvet Bruegel, who devoted himself to still-life painting.

Peter Paul Rubens: The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus

In that capacity Jan Bruegel assisted in the flourishing workshop of the great master of the Flemish Baroque, Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens showed an unrivaled mastery of the oil medium, creating for the monarchs of France and Spain fluid, luminous works of great energy and power. The works of his early maturity, such as The Elevation of the Cross (1610), show evidence of careful study of the Italian masters Michelangelo, Tintoretto, and Caravaggio, but these works also have a rippling, silky surface and an animal vitality wholly Flemish in character. Rubens’s mature allegorical style, exemplified by his cycle of paintings (1622–25) memorializing the career of Marie de Médicis, queen of France, was ideally suited to the ostentatious tastes of the Baroque age. In these exuberant works, fleshy classical deities, swirling from the air and bounding from the sea, watch over many events of Marie’s life. Rubens’s studio became a training ground for many Flemish painters, among them Anthony van Dyck, a child prodigy who later became famous as a court portrait painter in England; Frans Snyder, a still-life specialist; and David Teniers the Elder and Adriaen Brouwer, both known chiefly for their paintings of carousing peasants.