Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market

PREFACE

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

—Isaac Newton

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

—William Butler Yeats, The Tower

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his book deals with artistic change over time—both within the span of time examined in its confines, roughly the sixteenth century, and within the larger span of European painting, where these more localized changes played out to lasting consequences (at least through the nineteenth century and, with mutations, well into the twentieth). In order to study historical change, we have to focus on pictorial forms themselves and their alterations over time, whether in dramatic shifts, slow drifts, or static continuity. I take as a starting point the theorizing about visual change developed by George Kubler in his Shape of Time. In order to use Kubler’s concepts and test them, however, I employ a case study, well located in both time and place: sixteenth-century Antwerp.

The phenomenon under consideration is the development of what we have come to think of in art history as pictorial genres, that is, families of artworks with similar subjects and conventionalized forms such that we recognize them as groups.¹ One of the problems with defining genre comes from the determination, so frequently a problem in visual studies, whether the subject or the form provides the primary determination of the group, as in the quotation, How can we know the dancer from the dance? Frequently genres are defined by essential individual works that are deemed to arise at a formative moment and to influence later examples. We shall see the usefulness of this model for Antwerp, where significant individual artists (especially Bosch and Bruegel; see Chapters 7, 8, 9) and their favorite themes and forms (hell scenes and peasant scenes, respectively) shaped later imagery for generations.

Genres also pose difficulties in the basic tension between categories and individual examples (akin to Ferdinand de Saussure’s theories of semiology, opposing a theoretical language to a particular usage, word).² However, the other key ingredient of any language group is a community of use, linking producers to audiences. Thus, as with language, there are shifts in any kind of picture-making over time, as the priorities and interests of these interactive groups change. Circumstances alter cases. Genres cannot be understood entirely as systems or outside history. Moreover, the relationships of parts to whole in any single instance of a genre can charge particular pictorial elements with enriched meaning, just as the syntax of any statement can shift its tone or content. There are no exact synonyms. This book will perforce have to focus on a succession of related but individual works by single artists as well as sequences of artists working in the same genre. We also have to recognize the phenomenon that the term hybrid denotes: that there are often mixed or compound genres within a single picture.

Perhaps the most familiar (in both senses of that word) and persistent of visual genres is landscapes, but this book will treat other pictorial groups as well: scenes of peasants, markets, hell settings, flower still lifes, animals, and seascapes, featuring both ships or naval battles and tempests. Besides trying to articulate the pictorial history of each genre, this study will also attempt to consider the origins of individual genres. Its first premise is that one can never pinpoint a fully originating moment, despite leaps and innovations. Rather, genres unfold in the fullness of time and take shape after a viewing community has become accustomed to seeing and grouping certain related works and seeing a sequence or development in the cluster. Indeed, many of the newer genres, as we shall see, begin with what I shall be calling hybrid traits.

Their first instances, therefore, are often compounds, such as landscapes-with-, physical settings whose inhabitants, often religious figures like isolated saints or component narratives, add an extra dimension. Most genres are defined by a basic subject matter, such as flower still lifes or peasant scenes, but their presentation also implies a calibration of such content with conventions of form, such as standard locations (village or even taverns for peasants) or features (caricatural exaggeration of peasant faces).

There is another, individual dimension to the Antwerp development: artistic identity. In an era when religious subjects and portraits no longer dominated the output of paintings—and, increasingly, the output of intaglio prints as well—certain artists quickly came to be identified with their favorite subjects and characteristic forms, so that a brand name prototype imagery readily came to be associated with a noted individual, even if that artist added features to existing images. Most of the genres considered in this book, therefore, also have a principal innovator: Joachim Patinir for (world) landscapes, Pieter Aertsen for markets and peasants, Hendrick Vroom for marine paintings. The earliest manifestation of this crystallization of a brand name imagery was the hell scenes and imaginative demons of Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516). Not surprisingly, these popular traits were frequently imitated by lesser artists, who might directly copy famous individual works or else make their own, more creative imitations of Boschian types, sometimes with the intent to forge the master and take advantage of his popularity for their own gain. Bosch’s works remained popular and recognizable throughout the sixteenth century, and at various moments they enjoyed widespread imitations in both paintings and prints (which often freely credited Bosch as the inventor of the imagery, usually falsely).

Pieter Bruegel began as an imitator of Bosch in his own right, chiefly producing designs for prints but also favoring the Boschian idiom of demons and hellfire for some of his inventive paintings. Bruegel also picked up the conventions of landscape settings, specifically the popular panoramas known today as world landscapes, while adding his own wrinkles to the genre, including some forms imported from Italy as well as forest landscapes, which would be more widely developed in the succeeding generation.

Bruegel’s own signature style, however, revolved around peasant images, showing village life in all its manifestations. Like Bosch before him, Bruegel was original but also patently imitable by his successors, including his own painter sons, Jan Brueghel and Pieter Breughel the Younger. While it would be an exaggeration to claim that either Bosch or Bruegel became a genre in his own right, we can certainly see their artistic progeny focusing on certain particular models while ignoring others from their repertoire. The same kind of signature imagery appears in the favorite or best known films by certain twentieth-century film directors, often with a repertory company of favorite star actors, such as the western subjects with John Wayne created by John Ford or the suspense thrillers with Cary Grant or James Stewart and a succession of beautiful blonde female leads by Alfred Hitchcock.

The relationship of genre creation to preexisting theory has vexed scholars ever since the classical pronouncements on tragedy and other literary genres in Aristotle’s Poetics seemed to be prescriptive rather than descriptive, for example in the unities of action and time, which loomed so large in the neoclassical French tragedies of Corneille and Racine: I propose to treat of poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential qualities of each, said Aristotle at the outset of his influential treatise. Later, Horace’s Ars poetica inveighed against any mixture of genres and called for unity and simplicity of form by using the metaphor of painting:

Should some painter take the fancy to draw the neck of a horse joined to a human head, and to overlay with varicolored plumage limbs gathered from anywhere and everywhere, making what appeared at the top a beautiful woman to end below as a foul fish, when you were admitted to the spectacle, should you, even though his friends, restrain your laughter?³

Genre theory in Renaissance literature, such as the seven-volume Poetics by Julius Caesar Scaliger (1561), seemed to be a surefire formula for production of literature but could also generate unwitting caricatures of hybrid combinations like those of Polonius’s speech in Hamlet: The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral; scene individable, or poem unlimited. (2.2, 405–8, ll. 396– 400).⁴

The dominant explanation offered by Ernst Gombrich for the rise of landscape in the sixteenth century also ultimately hinges on the revival of artistic theory during the same period that experienced the revival of Aristotelian poetic theory.⁵ To explain why Italian commentators, notably Marcantonio Michiel in Venice in 1521, already referred to certain pictures as landscapes (paesi), Gombrich turns (as most students of Italian painting still readily turn) to published theory—first to Alberti (Ten Books on Architecture) on building decoration and then to Leonardo (Paragone) on the capacity of painters as creators to invent distant settings. He also cites the frequent comparison between ancient artists, documented by Pliny, and living artists, including a Roman painter Studius (or Ludius), whose wall paintings featured villas and parks. While claiming that such written testimony suggests that Italian viewers were thus prepared to seek out and appreciate landscapes, particularly Northern imports, Gombrich credits the demand to a new aesthetic attitude and an emerging collector mentality. He also makes distinctions, anachronistic to the sixteenth century, between inhabited countrysides with human activity and pure landscapes, as understood from later nineteenth-century artistic practice. For Italians like Paolo Giovio, landscapes were still parerga, that is, accessories, or marginalia and diversions.⁶

In effect, this outlook only confirms the eventual hierarchy of genres as codified by the French Royal Academy in the later seventeenth century, as theorized by Félibien, which would then dismiss as inferior the very categories whose origins and early development we are exploring here.⁷ Gombrich characterizes the academic conventions of art as not only pedantic rules made to cramp the imagination and to blunt the sensibility of genius but rather as the syntax of a language without which expression would have been impossible. We are back to Saussure’s tension between langue and parole but with the added celebration of transcendent genius capable of inventing entirely new concepts.⁸

Yet such academic conventions and rules, the preexisting mold for artistic ideas, were actually the product of later centuries and of cultures alien to the Netherlands, where such images actually arose and flourished. They could play no role in the generation or the varied developments of landscapes or the other novelties we are about to examine closely in sixteenth-century Antwerp. We cannot account for Netherlandish landscapes, let alone the other pictorial genres of this book, by preexisting models and precedents from Pliny or from contemporary Italian theorists (though we shall also see that for kitchen scenes, for example, scholars have drawn connections there to Pliny and painters of humble objects, or rhyparography; see Chapter 5).

The other principal interpretation for the emergence of pictorial genres is a kind of essentialism, perhaps best exemplified by Max Friedländer in his book Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life.⁹ Friedländer reveals his conceptual bias when he speaks of the Emancipation of Landscape in the Sixteenth Century, ostensibly the precise phenomenon that we are examining here. However, from this point of view, pure landscape, adduced by Gombrich, is already implicit as a kind of ideal formula at the initial appearance of the genre and struggles for its own, independent existence against the conservative viewing habits of a tradition-bound audience. Production is dependent on audience taste and cannot achieve understanding and response if it is too far ahead of its time.

According to Friedländer, in sixteenth-century Antwerp landscape-painting extricated itself from the altarpiece and stood on its own two feet, but was distinct from fine art.¹⁰ His history quite acutely identifies the sixteenth century as the time when production for an art market led to professionalization and specialization by painters as well as the shaping of a personal manner (as noted above for Bosch and Bruegel), presented to an increasing body of art lovers (in fact the connoisseurs at the end of the century in Antwerp were referred to as precisely this, liefhebbers, art lovers).¹¹ Here anachronism, shared also by Gombrich, inclines toward a purely aesthetic experience, something that would rise in the early modern era of collecting but really find its fulfillment in the latter eighteenth century.¹² Landscape artists in Holland by the height of the seventeenth century are already viewed as expressing individual subjectivity and personal feelings through their works akin to the later art for art’s sake dictates of the recent Impressionist era in France.

By contrast, this book will chart the origins of various genres and their evolution over the course of a single century of production in the same civic center. Using case studies, this analysis will examine the genealogy of works of art and will trace what art historians conventionally call influence.¹³ But there is a new set of assumptions here, which emerge from the valid observations of Friedländer about specialist painters working for a new, open market for art in Antwerp. Rather than trying to assess the attitudes of art buyers in that market, for which there is scant evidence, my purpose instead is to note that successful formulas usually get repeated by their makers and soon imitated by aspiring lesser or younger artists. Moreover, the market itself should be viewed as a competitive environment, in which new or different forms have to find their own buyers or else disappear. The artists who survive, even thrive, in such competition usually manage to innovate their products, through novelties that stretch or even add a distinctive personal stamp to the familiar conventions of a genre, or else to innovate their processes, finding new ways to be more efficient and productive through technique or workshop procedures.¹⁴

After we have taken stock of the varieties of pictorial types in Antwerp and observed how they emerge from complex, compound combinations of themes and formal staging, such as Patinir’s foundational world landscapes with religious figures, we can then begin to assess how individual pictures and genre types grow out of their earlier instances—sometimes largely preserving the conventional forms they inherited, but sometimes also offering substantial novelties in their turn.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Cultural Selection

and the Origins of Pictorial Species

Genealogy is not an historical narrative, but has the essential function of renewing our perception of the . . . system as in an X-ray, its . . . perspectives serving to make perceptible the articulation of functional elements of a given system in the present.

—Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious

Each species is a biological experiment, and there is no way to predict, as far as an incipient species is concerned, whether the new niche it enters is a dead end or the entrance into a large new adaptive zone. Even though evolutionists may speak of broad phenomena such as trends, adaptations, specializations, and regressions, they are not separable from the progression of the entities that display those trends, the species.

—Ernst Mayr, This Is Biology

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odern viewers of art take for granted the conventional formulas of easel paintings that adhere to expectations of pictorial genre, such as landscape or genre painting (scenes of daily life and ordinary people). Yet these categories have their own origins and early histories, and the easel paintings that constitute their principal medium—as well as another vital new medium, inexpensive prints—did not always exist in a visual culture composed primarily of wall paintings or altarpieces and portraits of the elite.

As we shall see, the rise of these pictorial genres and their media coincided. Sixteenth-century Antwerp, the most volatile commercial and financial center in Europe, also gave rise to the first permanent open art market, located at the city Bourse.¹ In addition, Antwerp generated the first major successful print publishing house, appropriately named At the Sign of the Four Winds, run by entrepreneurial etcher Hieronymus Cock (and afterward by his widow).² This book offers an investigation of the origin and the early evolution of both the new pictorial types and their media, easel paintings and intaglio prints, as a local and historical Antwerp art phenomenon.

Origins are notoriously difficult to pinpoint. When does a painting of a saint in a landscape become a painting of a landscape with a saint? That is precisely the transition that occurred over the span of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, particularly in Antwerp and principally in the oeuvre of Joachim Patinir, designated already by Albrecht Dürer in 1521 as the good landscape painter. Modern scholars have agreed in assigning Patinir an innovator’s role in the formulation of landscape, despite the presence of saints in his settings. Of course for these scholars to use the same word, landscape, as Dürer had during his artist’s own lifetime (Patinir died in 1524), suggests that they are seeking origins for this pictorial category, finding continuities with current practices and concepts still recognized by that name (if considerably altered in appearance and variety). While such continuities surely remain relevant, both historically and conceptually, we also have to beware of drawing the contemporary conclusion that the saint is just an excuse in Patinir’s picture—precisely what Max Friedländer did assert early in the twentieth century, when he viewed this kind of painting as an origin for the pictorial category that he knew through its later instances, such as Monet’s gallery canvases.

In a chapter entitled The Emancipation of Landscape in the Sixteenth Century, Friedländer claims that landscape-painting extricated itself from the altarpiece and stood on its own feet, but was distinct from fine art.³ This kind of art history posits historical change as evolution, and its kind of evolution implies teleology, seeing in the prototype an anticipation or seed of the mature phenotype, or essential body type. This is the same kind of thinking that Erwin Panofsky promotes when discussing Gothic architecture as the fulfillment of an ideal type (in the sense used by Max Weber), what he calls a final solution.⁴ It assumes, as noted in the Preface above, that style types, like organisms, have lives of their own and that they have youth, maturity, and decline, with a high point of maturity constituting their classic phase.⁵ Obviously artworks of similar kinds are joined over time in linked solutions to common problems, something that theorists have noted for some time.⁶ Antwerp offers a situation not only for the initiation of such lasting series of what George Kubler calls prime objects, but also for consideration of the shifts of form and meaning across the series over time, in this case the span of the sixteenth century.

Patinir made hybrid works—at once both religious pictures and protolandscapes. His paintings were the product of his own repetition and specialization in this kind of painting, even sometimes of his collaboration with other artists, where the saintly figures were designed instead by either Dürer (in the case of a drawing of eight St. Christopher figures, mentioned by the artist in his journal) or Quinten Massys (with whom Patinir coproduced a notable Temptation of St. Anthony, now in the Prado; see Figure 3.3).⁷ Friedländer already noted correctly that this specialization itself resulted from a new condition of art-making: instead of individual commissions by individuals, the production of artworks for Antwerp’s open market resulted in replication of successful pictorial formulas and an increasing tendency toward specialization, precisely the conditions of Patinir’s several variations on the theme of St. Jerome in a panoramic world landscape.

In addition to the evolution of genres like landscapes, however, another major innovation flourished in the Antwerp art market: the phenomenon of recognizable artistic identity, in which both favorite forms and themes merge into viewer—and consumer—recognition. Here again one can look first to Bosch as a formative influence. One nonmodern category of works, devilries (diableries), based on the inventive formulations of grotesque monsters by Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516), enjoyed sustained popularity over the entire sixteenth century, especially for hell scenes or temptations of saints in landscapes. This combination can be seen in the image Patinir produced in collaboration with Massys (see Chapter 3).⁸ Bosch’s own favorite forms and themes were succeeded in Antwerp by a host of imitations and adaptations, by such artists as Jan Mandijn and Pieter Huys, as well as the more celebrated works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (act. 1551–69), both prints and paintings after mid-century (Chapter 7).

Later Bruegel’s own distinctive inventions would be widely esteemed and frequently imitated, especially his scenes of peasants in landscapes, imitated among others by his own pair of painter sons, Pieter the Younger and Jan Brueghel. Thus was born a dynasty of painters over multiple generations, each practicing the family business with what can only be termed trademark consistency (see Chapter 9).⁹ Patinir’s formula for religious scenes in a world landscape formula was immediately extended by Herri Met de Bles, who may have been his nephew, as well as by various imitators from the following generation up until the mid-sixteenth century.¹⁰

Indeed, this very development of a recognizable signature style, linked with favorite subjects by an individual artist, attests to another important new outgrowth of the nascent art market—and the early history of collecting, including print collecting—especially when those emerging name artists are imitated by later, lesser epigones. Brand recognition of celebrated leading masters generated a resulting demand even for their knockoffs, pictorial derivations in an era before copyright. While today we take such typical artists’ formulas as commonplace, along with their frequent use of identifying signatures (a Rothko), they emerged together within this early modern art market condition, on prints as well as on paintings. After a century when only a few artists inscribed their names on their works, first Bosch and later Bruegel would add visible, sometimes prominent signatures to the bulk of their mature paintings.¹¹

Indeed, prints provide a useful index for the diffusion of the concept of artistic identity through name recognition, in addition to the emerging notion of copyright, or as it was known in the early sixteenth century, privilege. In some ways we associate this convergence of artistic identity and copyright with German prints, particularly around the name of Albrecht Dürer, whose monogram was famous throughout Europe and was even forged by the young Marcantonio Raimondi in a famous 1505 copyright case in Venice, cited by Vasari.¹² Such distinctive and personal marks had already been the prerogative of engravers since the mid-fifteenth century, notably with the unknown Master ES, and probably grew out of the legal use of goldsmiths’ marks to guarantee both the maker and the quality of metalwork. Privilege is nothing more than legal protection of that maker’s mark on an artistic work, and the outcome of Dürer’s suit against Marcantonio resulted only in the protection of the artist’s mark, not the protection of his designs against replication by another.¹³ Thus authorship, in the form of a legal mark or a signature by an artist, was deemed to be an essential element of the marketing of artworks in the emerging commercial sector of printselling. Dürer soon extended the practice of monogramming from engravings to woodcuts, paintings, and even some drawings. He further extended the notion of copyright from a representation of authorship to something resembling intellectual property. His Latin colophon to his large woodcut cycles, published together in 1511, warns:

Beware, you envious thieves of the work and invention of others, keep your thoughtless hands from these works of ours. We have received a privilege from the famous emperor of Rome, Maximilian, that no one shall dare to print these works in spurious forms, nor sell such prints within the boundaries of the empire.¹⁴

Dürer copyists also frequently imitated or even forged his famous monogram.¹⁵

In the case of Dürer’s contemporary Bosch, Paul Vandenbroeck is surely right to note that his distinctive Latinized signature (albeit in Gothic lettering), Jheronimus Bosch, indicates both cultural aspirations and a rare self-assertion within Netherlandish art, which would be imitated (and even forged) by later artists.¹⁶ Moreover, the fact that he signed works of a distinctly unconventional cast, which modern scholars tend to label secular rather than sacred (distinctions that would probably not have been made in the early sixteenth century),¹⁷ suggests that his own inscription is not just a conventional piety, confined only to religious works.

Some of the best evidence for this brand-name recognition as a part of market success comes from the labels that survive on intaglio prints produced by Hieronymus Cock during the 1550s at his shop, At the Four Winds, in Antwerp. Cock was ever alert to diversification of his portfolio, and his stock of designs by celebrated artists included several by renowned Italian Renaissance masters from Rome, such as his prints (engraved by an Italian professional print-maker, Giorgio Ghisi) after Raphael’s School of Athens (under the title Paul Preaching in Athens, 1550) and Disputa (1552). Cock also produced other prints after Giulio Romano, Andrea del Sarto, and Lambert Lombard, a Liège artist who had gone to Rome.

At the same time, Cock also issued several prints ascribed (sometimes falsely) to Bosch’s design,¹⁸ and his earliest figural commissions from Bruegel comprised images done in the signature Bosch manner, including such favorite Bosch subjects as a Last Judgment (Figure 7.10) and a Temptation of St. Anthony (Figure 7.9), as well as a demon-filled series of the Seven Deadly Sins.¹⁹ But perhaps the most indicative sign of the pressure of brand name recognition in the art market is the substitution of Bosch’s name for Bruegel’s on one of the earliest prints designed by Bruegel for Cock, Big Fish Eat Little Fish (Figure 7.16), a work produced at a moment when the deceased artist (Bosch) was a household word but the emerging painter of peasants (Bruegel) had yet to establish his own reputation and distinctive subjects or figure types.²⁰ It is surely significant that in his 1567 Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, Lodovico Guicciardini makes mention of Cock, sole printmaker cited among the artists of Antwerp, characterizing him chiefly for his prints after the works of Bosch: Girolamo Cock inventore, e gran’ divulgatore per via di stampa dell’ opere di Girolamo Bosco, e d’altri eccelenti Pittori (Hieronymus Cock, inventor and great publisher by means of prints of the works of Hieronymus Bosch and of other excellent painters).²¹

Just as Cock presented Bruegel’s designs alongside a range of other options by Italians and Italianate print designers, such as Frans Floris and Maarten van Heemskerck, each of these individuals succeeded in establishing his own signature style as well as favorite subjects. Thus when we think of Bruegel we immediately evoke images that became the staple of his imitative sons, particularly the inferior painter and slavish copyist Pieter Brueghel the Younger, such as peasant weddings, Dutch proverbs, and seasonal labor and leisure in the countryside landscape. Often these painted copies stem not from painted originals but from Bruegel prints produced for Cock, multiple images that already had achieved a widespread popularity on the art market (Chapter 9). Bruegel the Elder, of course, produced a number of works in the Boschian idiom, almost throughout his career, and he also produced his own unconventional versions of religious narratives, such as the Flemish countryside location of Christ’s Infancy (Census at Bethlehem [Figure 3.17], Adoration of the Magi in the Snow, Massacre of the Innocents). Yet his defining images, at least those that were most frequently imitated and copied literally, were his peasant scenes.

Here, too, Bruegel was not a complete innovator. Before him a number of works in prints by sixteenth-century German artists had already introduced such subjects to consumers of visual culture.²² Bruegel’s innovation lay in his recasting of such peasant scenes from prints to the large-scale color of paintings, just as Pieter the Younger would make paintings out of his father’s earlier prints. In the Netherlands, this condescending viewpoint of middle-class urban dwellers was first picked up a few years earlier by Pieter Aertsen, who virtually naturalized his peasants in conjunction with their vegetable produce in market scenes (Chapter 5). Aertsen also showed peasants in festive leisure in such large, painted works as Egg Dance (Figure 6.3), Village Festival (Figure 6.1), and Peasant Company (Figure 6.2). It is a short step from these precedents to Bruegel’s own Peasant Wedding Feast (Vienna) and Peasant Kermis (Figures 6.12, 6.13), even though we could also mark the perceivable differences in attitudes between these two artists, as scholars have frequently done to Bruegel’s advantage. What is worth underscoring here is that innovation need not always be the initiative of artists who are conventionally singled out as great or canonical.

We should also recall that Bruegel’s successes were not achieved without vigorous contemporary protest and polemic. In particular, the poet and painter Lucas de Heere, an ardent adherent of the idealizing Frans Floris camp in Antwerp, attacked Bruegel in everything but name in a much-studied poem, published in 1565, entitled Invective Against a Certain Painter Who Scoffed at the Painters of Antwerp.²³ The painter of peasants is called seeing-blind and bereft of his senses for scorning true beauty and criticizing it as sugar images, and instead ornamenting his own paintings like kermis dolls. He is deemed a bungler who uses coarse brushes rather than the fine tools of a true artist, to produce works by the dozen in wretched, bad strokes, / That truly look neither Romish nor antique. Thus the world of Bruegel was not without its contemporary challengers, both in the marketplace within Cock’s shared print stable and in the marketplace of early criticism. Yet today de Heere and his Romish master Frans Floris are almost totally unknown, whereas Bruegel has become a household word.

That such critiques were still current in the seventeenth century is clear from the texts advanced and analyzed by Eric Jan Sluijter in his book Seductress of Sight.²⁴ In a 1624 poem by Dirck Raphaelsz Camphuyzen, painting itself is called the mother of all foolish vanities and a frivolous vexation that is the common bait for the uneasy heart overwhelmed by choice . . . / Painting bred from the dalliances of the fickle brain, / Is an ever-flowing fountain for the foolish desire of the eye. The problem here is not the success of one kind of picture-making but rather that of painting itself, tied to the evil of the eye.

We can often gauge such long-term success and dispersion of pictorial types and styles through multiples of prints as well as the various later painted copies and imitations of an artist’s signature imagery. We find a half-century of Boschian knockoff Last Judgments and temptations of saints, filled with the artist’s trademark hybrid demons, and Bruegel himself began his career within this familiar and popular idiom. Thereafter, not only Bruegel’s sons but also his forgers, such as Jacob Savery in his delicate flecked landscape drawings, or else production-line painters of peasant landscapes in his idiom like Jacob Grimmer or David Vinckboons, extended his distinctive brand of form and content into the seventeenth century on both sides of the Scheldt border between Flanders and Holland (for the forgeries especially, see Chapter 8). Sluijter published an article in 1999 citing complaints around 1610 by both the Amsterdam and Leiden painters’ guilds about the inexpensive paintings from Antwerp then flooding the northern art market.²⁵ Indeed, such market pressures seem to have induced Dutch artists during the teens of the seventeenth century to adopt both the specialization in landscape formulas for paintings and the efficient techniques of monochrome paintings and etched prints, as the example of Esias van de Velde demonstrates in Haarlem.²⁶

At exactly the same time and place, the engraved plates for Cock’s Small Landscapes series, first issued in 1559, then again in 1561, were republished in Amsterdam by Claes Janszoon Visscher in 1612, with a renewed if erroneous attribution to Pieter Bruegel himself.²⁷ The original title page had indicated that these landscapes were drawn from nature in the vicinity of Antwerp; the later Dutch reprint ambiguously designates them as some country farms and cottages of the duchy of Brabant, drawn by P. Bruegel and, to please painters, engraved and published by Claes Jansz. Visscher.

As far as landscape is concerned, we first find Cock producing several print sets, notably the Large Landscapes, a set of mixed subjects, featuring designs—by Bruegel—of both religious subjects and nonnarrative world landscapes, beginning in the mid-1550s. Here the uniform format suggests a series, but Cock provided neither a title page nor any numbering sequence, so these landscapes may well also have been sold singly. A later series of 1558, Landscapes with Biblical and Mythological Scenes after designs by his brother Matthys Cock, does bear a title page in both Latin and Dutch; the longer Dutch title reads: Various sorts of landscapes with fine histories composed therein, from the Old and New Testaments, and several merry Poems, very convenient for painters and other connoisseurs of the arts.²⁸ From this preface we see that landscapes were beginning to assume their own attraction in the midcentury marketplace, where serious subjects might well still be considered appropriate figural interest for the collector but without any particular need for consistency of either religion or mythology.

As noted, the Small Landscapes then appear the very next year with virtually no figures whatsoever and with a close-up, local, picturesque rendering at eye level of either country villages or estates: Many and very attractive places of various cottages, farms, fields, roads, and the like, ornamented with animals of all sorts. All portrayed from life, and mostly situated in the country near Antwerp. With this series of forty-four prints, the earlier, panoramic views of world landscape have now been replaced, and the formative model of much seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting has already been firmly established. In each of these cases, it is obvious that the audience for these new entertainments are urban, middle-class consumers, whose view of both the countryside and the peasants would be from an essential, even hierarchical distance of superior wealth and status, susceptible to pleasurable condescension and (pace Miedema) even humor. We also note the repeated phrasing for the overall titles to the series of Dutch countryside views of such terms as Delightful views or Very pleasant views to delight the eyes.²⁹ What happened with the advent of an open art market was the reformulation and broadening of the category of the image to include new conventions in replicable formulas, often combined with familiar subjects as a form of visual pleasure.

Walter Gibson in his Pleasant Places has stressed anew this key linkage between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century presentation of landscape compositions derived from local and typical views. He further stresses the basic differences of type between this kind of setting and the composite panoramas that constituted the earlier model of Patinir and Bruegel, the world landscape (the object of his earlier study, Mirror of the Earth). What is clear is that this evolving genre emerged in successive steps of formal experimentation—from the Bosch saints in landscapes to the Patinir and Bruegel landscapes with saints (and also with peasants) to the Cock Landscapes with Biblical and Mythological Scenes to the eventual Cock-Visscher Small Landscapes and the derived seventeenth-century Haarlem paintings and prints around Esias van de Velde.

These innovations and replications suggest the conditions of producing art within its new market situation, specifically connected to the use of either medium, easel paintings or printed images, linked with standard subjects, that is, the emerging pictorial genre of landscapes. Both kinds of images were usually relatively small and consistent in format. These works also suggest the importance of artist brand-name recognition, in conjunction with favorite forms and subjects, as a component of successful marketing of works in a crowded selling environment.

We have noted already the importance that should be attached to individual artistic innovation, reshaping, even warping or challenging, the inherited conventions, even to the point of adopting both replicable and recognizable personal stylistic traits, which I have termed the brand name effect of artistic identity around a pictorial type. Another of the elements that emerges from the origins of landscape art is that these types were taken to be distinct expressions of a national character and location. To a certain extent this indigenous fusion of form with setting can be understood from the present as the anachronistic self-confirmation of modern nationalists, particularly in the scholarly community. That is, the Dutchness of Dutch art is a kind of essentializing in praise of this major cultural phenomenon by modern museums and art historians, who seek out those country scenes with canals and windmills as the marker of distinctive Netherlands topography.³⁰

At least for the Netherlandish naturalism of landscape settings or ordinary peasants, we can still confirm some similar contemporary understanding of the phenomenon as we turn to the chestnut quotation, attributed to Michelangelo but penned by Francisco de Hollanda, a Portuguese in Rome in the 1540s, who makes a similar essentialist argument for Flemish pictures:

In Flanders they paint with a view to external exactness or such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example saints and prophets. They paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art.³¹

Reinforced by these near-contemporary insights, we still have to acknowledge the existence of landscapes as more than latter-day chimeras, as emerging and contingent phenomena, shaped in the competition of the marketplace and addressed to the attention of a newly constituted, urban community of viewers and readers. In effect, the pictures taught their own new consumers a new competence of how to read them, especially as pleasurable diversions or entertainments, though not without a strong countercurrent of cultural resistance and arguments about decline and moral corruption. Our modern notion of the artist emerges in each instance from this same matrix; each work offers a dialectic within its medium between individual innovations and collective reshapings of shared conventions, often steeped in reality effects, and refined in the crucible of market competition. In this fashion Patinir refines Bosch. The new entertainment engages a medium-based leisure of diversion through a process of stimulating the imagination and curiosity by the arrangement of either nature or art.³²

What happens in the Antwerp art market is that a new, emerging form transforms the previous dominant forms and modes of reading them. In that process, the dominant taste-makers become distinctive artists, whose subsequent creations receive repeat commitments from consumers and collectors. We find this marketing in the successes achieved first by Bosch and later, supplanting him, by his chief follower, Bruegel; in England we find a close analogy in the assertiveness of Hogarth. We can even credit an Antwerp publisher, Hieronymus Cock, for his productive collaboration.

In the modern visual industry of films we find analogous dynamics of both production and consumption. The dynamics of production and consumption in this living art remind us that films offer complex interactions around the artwork between industry production, audience responses, and critical or scholarly communities. Defining what a genre can be at any moment results from this kind of negotiation, of an object with both its previous models and its contemporary examples, reinforced by the tastes of purchasers and aficionados (including potential theorists or critics—something much more prevalent in later centuries).³³

Current genre theory, grounded in Hollywood films, suggests that recognition and definition of genres occurs retrospectively and often cannot be noted as a self-consciousness in their early stages. Rick Altman notes that later critics seek the origins of what they see in later films, finding them to be a component of what was initially mixed imagery, which served a variety of needs for a diverse audience, the more so in the open marketplace of films.³⁴ These historical developments, still firmly located within a evolving sequence of definable genres, surely expand the range of works that could be included in the shifting genre boundaries, and they can extend a full spectrum of responses by diverse audiences over time to such works.

Yet because the process of changing genres is culturally constructed and refined through human choices and readings, art genre history—the subject of this book—can be made up out of sudden or voluntary change as much as by willed adherence to models or traditions, including willed revivals of dormant forms and themes (renascences or neo- movements). This kind of cultural selection can thus operate without the biological constraints of genes and with either great suddenness or emphatic persistence.

The early evolution of genres—whether Bosch-like diableries or early landscapes—originate from initial individual inventions or mixed thematic hybrids and then become well conventionalized formulas. These innovations and individual contributions to inherited themes and forms need not originate only in the form of inexpensive works for the open art market. Indeed, there is some counterevidence to suggest that a certain freedom from the demands of earning an income could also foster greater inventiveness and personal distinctiveness on the part of painters. Bosch was clearly a wealthy, largely independent artist, who worked for a number of elite patrons, including the regent duke Philip the Fair.³⁵ In similar fashion, Pieter Bruegel the Elder numbered several eminent political and cultural figures among the patrons of his paintings, which were chiefly created in the second decade of his career after an initial specialization in drawing designs for Cock engravings.³⁶ We also find whole pictorial categories emerging out of such expensive virtuoso media as luxury illuminated manuscripts or large-scale wall paintings and tapestry—to cite the cases of flower painting and naval pictures (Chapter 10), which remained relatively costly pictorial genres in the seventeenth century.

We can see such institutionalization built into the hierarchy of genres, with most of the favorite Netherlandish genres bringing up the rear, in the (producers’ side) ideology of the French Academy after the middle of the seventeenth century.

When we return to Patinir’s landscapes with saints as the very models of a mixed genre, we note that the later derivative possibilities were manifold, even in just the works of Bruegel alone. They could just as easily develop in the field of religious pictures of hermit saints as in the secular realm of landscapes without figures. Imitation and repetition of certain aspects of successful pictures leads precisely to those later branches of development, which establish the importance of influential artists, such as Bosch and Bruegel, as well as the viable traits of emerging genre conventions, such as landscapes and peasant pictures. The marketplace provides the ongoing feedback of success through repeated sales and encouraged the repetition of formulas and artistic specialization for an appreciative and increasingly competent audience. It also increasingly led to collaborative productions between pairs of specialists, such as landscape and figure painters.

This phenomenon of collaboration by specialists, especially characteristic of the career of Jan Brueghel in the early seventeenth century, becomes increasingly tied to another phenomenon: the emerging body of collectors, who drew up inventories and acknowledged therein the clear importance of an individual artist’s authorship of works.³⁷ Moreover, the collaboration of genre specialists, particularly figure painters with painters of either landscapes or still life (or animals, such as Rubens’s collaborations with Jan Brueghel or Frans Snyders), marked much of the production of larger or more finished pictures by the early seventeenth century. Elizabeth Honig has argued that this collaboration actually enhanced the market value of such works for discerning collectors, in effect offering doubled authorship as well as virtuoso specialization for the sophisticated connoisseur.

Historically, we can consider the relationship of the new genres and their favorite themes, especially landscapes and peasants, to issues of ultimate cultural significance in the historical circumstances of sixteenth-century Antwerp—namely, burgeoning urbanism and capitalism in their transformations of religion and morality away from a meditative and essentially monastic ideal to a serious engagement with various forms of worldly temptations (see Chapter 11). In this evolution both Bosch and Bruegel are again key figures, whose visual themes of either sin or folly profoundly shaped the values of an emerging urban, bourgeois culture. Their several representations of familiar yet alien persons (peasants, beggars) and spaces (rural fields or mountain peaks) form a pictorial laboratory for urban, prosperous art buyers to measure themselves.³⁸ Sometimes these comparisons function as a usefully pointed contrast (a mode in the sense of Northrop Frye)³⁹ to their own norms of behavior and physical spaces. Such pictures can be taken as part of the larger historical shift of the civilizing process toward manners and self-constraint in bourgeois culture, which also points to the importance of kitchen scenes and peasantry in the general cultural formation of these pictures.⁴⁰ In many respects we see here the roots of a pictorial culture of seventeenth-century Holland (and eighteenth-century London for William Hogarth, as well as nineteenth-century Paris, with its own revived interest in Dutch art). Thus, like the retrospective definition of artistic genres and formative artists, we can truly see these developments of the art market in sixteenth-century Flanders to be the epicenter of an emerging early modern visual culture.

It will be one of the tasks of this book to try to survey and analyze the values, shifting over time, of these themes in turn, as well as to chart their relative importance in providing social norms toward the discipline of an ongoing civilizing process.⁴¹ In particular, the negatively critical Antwerp figural genres shift from an early preoccupation with images of actual handlers of money (money-changers, bankers, and tax collectors; see Chapter 4) to dark interior tavern scenes (some of which show more and more rural characters and constructions) to the in-between site of markets with rural produce (Chapter 5) to scenes of peasant leisure excesses at either kermis festivities or rural weddings (Chapter 6). Increasingly the imagery takes on a more socially distant (in terms of class) and physically distant (from urban settings to rural) presentation or staging of characters and sites. This combination of themes and localities, as well as finer elements of visual choice, can often be said to constitute style.

The traditional art historical separation of style or form from content or subject is an arbitrary and unsustainable distinction. One cannot have formless content, nor can one have pure form. If anything, the complex mixture of figures and settings, such as religious figures in landscape, is an intricate dialogue of parts to a whole that is greater than its individual components. As that formative example also makes clear, even to define or name the nascent genre of a landscape-with-religious-figure is arbitrary and limiting, though often either the setting or the