Grade
6 Student Sources Supplement V Conflict and Absolutism in Europe
Source #21
What is the effect of commerce and mercantile wealth on the development of
both religious and secular painting in Northern Europe?
Johannes Stradanus, Jan van Eyck’s Studio
One of the most representative paintings of the time was The Arnolfini Portrait (or The
Arnolfini Wedding, The
Arnolfini Marriage, the Portrait
of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife. It is a 1434 oil painting on oak
panel by the Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck. It forms a full-length
double portrait, believed to depict the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao
Arnolfini and his wife, presumably in their home in the Flemish city of Bruges.
How do we know this couple was wealthy?
What are symbols of wealth and marriage and fertility?
Mostly secular, but is religious symbolism in the painting as well?
The Arnolfini Portrait
Symbols of wealth:
The chandelier, richly dressed, stained
glass windows, intricately woven rug, sandals, fur-trimmed robes, mirror, dog,
and oranges are all signifiers of incredible wealth in 15th century Belgium.
Double symbols of wealth and marriage/fertility
The chandelier has one lit candle, which
represents the seeing eye of God; the mirror is decorated with scenes from the
Passion of Christ; and an unblemished mirror is also a symbol of the piety of
Mary, Mother of God. There are also rosary beads hanging next to the mirror.
Oranges represent fecundity in art, as does the red bed. There is a figure on
the finial of St. Margaret, the patron saint of pregnancy and childbirth, while
the cherry tree outside the window is a symbol of love.
Detail of chandelier
Detail with rosary and mirror
Detail of mirror with the passion of Christ
Detail with oranges and St. Margaret
What tensions existed between the financial wealth of the North and its
ethical and moral climate?
The pessimism and moral ambiguity of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings ran
through the Northern intellectual climate as a whole: The human body was widely
regarded as the vehicle and instrument of sin. This is in stark contrast to the
Southern humanist approach to the body as an object of beauty that reflects the
beauty of God. And, rather than offering hope, the Church seemed to many to be
morally bankrupt and intent on bankrupting the faithful as it rebuilt Rome.
Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the French poet Jean Meschinot
(1420–91) summed up the sense of physical and spiritual melancholy that
pervaded the North with these words: “O miserable and very sad life!… We suffer
from warfare, death and famine; Cold and heat, day and night, sap our strength;
Fleas, scabmites and so much other vermine make war upon us. In short, have
mercy, Lord, upon our wicked persons, whose life is very short.” As Johan
Huizinga noted in the passage from his Autumn of the Middle Ages: “Sickness
contrasted more strongly with health. The cutting cold and the dreaded darkness
of winter were more concrete evils. Honor and wealth were enjoyed more
fervently and greedily because they contrasted still more than now with
lamentable poverty.” Thus, in a painting like van Eyck’s Arnolfini portrait,
Giovanna’s robe, in all its bright color and fur-lined warmth, would also have
evoked in the Northern imagination its opposite—dismal darkness, poverty, and
cold. The tension between material well-being and spiritual narrative that we
see in the Arnolfini portrait appears in all Northern painting.
Christ Carrying the Cross
Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516) was born, lived, and worked in the town of
’s-Hertogenbosch (the correct spelling and now in southern Holland). The town
owed its prosperity to wool and cloth. Bosch was a contemporary of the painters
in southern Europe who worked in the so-called High Renaissance. Such a
distinction seems inappropriate in the North, where there was greater
continuity between fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art. (Only Albrecht Dürer,
a German, fits comfortably into the High Renaissance cult of the individual
creative genius.) Bosch’s paintings are at once minutely detailed and brutally
imaginative, casting a dark, satiric shadow over the materialistic concerns of
his Northern predecessors. In Carrying of the Cross, Bosch (there is scholarly
dispute about the painting since it may be by a close follower) presents Christ
in the middle of the painting, the crown of thorns on his head, bent under the
weight of the cross, his eyes closed, and several days’ growth of beard on his
face. It is difficult to say whether he closes his eyes from exhaustion or from
sorrow and pity for the grotesque menagerie of humanity that surrounds him.
From their faces, these participants in Christ’s pain and humiliation seem
morally bankrupt, hideously evil, almost sublimely stupid, if not criminally
insane.
What is the effect of commerce and mercantile wealth on the development of
both religious and secular painting in Northern Europe?
