The diffusion of Netherlandish art 1430–1530

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Van Eyck to Dürer. The Influence of Early Netherlandish Painting on European Art 1430–1530.

By Till-Holger Borchert

‘Make no small plans’, proclaimed architect Daniel Burnham, and he proceeded to develop the master plan for the city of Chicago. That could be the watchword for Till-Holger Borchert, whose massive exhibitions in Bruges have recast the interaction of all Europe with the ars nova paintings of the 15th-century Netherlands. His memorable first foray studied Van Eyck and the Mediterranean (2002), and now he surveys the further diffusion of Netherlandish models – here sparked mostly by Rogier van der Weyden – across Central Europe, broadly defined.

This point has long been acknowledged.  But except for some notable instances of close influence, such as Hans Holbein the Elder in early 16th-century Augsburg, the larger question has not been revisited for many years. Notably, Borchert’s catalogue includes significant illustrated sections of loans that go well beyond the usual Germano-centrism to encompass points considerably farther east, accompanied by introductions: Austria (Arthur Saliger); Bohemia (Olga Kotková); Silesia (Antoni Ziemba); Poland (Malgorzata Kochanowksa); and Hungary (Gyöngi Török). But Germany is not slighted, either. Successive regions receive close attention. All-important neighbour and archdiocese to Flanders, Cologne, is covered by Julian Chapuis. Borchert himself discusses Franconia.  Another crucial region, Westphalia, is analysed by Stephan Kemperdick, fresh from his own magisterial exhibition of Flémalle/Van der Weyden (Frankfurt-Berlin, 2008-09). Bavaria is discussed by Matthias Weniger; Swabia and the great artery of the Upper Rhine by Anna Mohrat-Fromm.

Another important aspect of the exhibition is its consideration of media other than painting: drawings (discussed by Guido Messling), sculptures in varied materials, manuscript folios. The influence of prints as intermediaries (discussed by Christof Metzger, fresh from his own brilliant print show on Daniel Hopfer, 2009) facilitated this geographical exchange, as did the travels of individual artists, far more than the pan-Mediterranean influences that formed the focus of the previous Bruges exhibition. The expected climax and terminus of the exhibition emerges appropriately from the return visit to the Netherlands by renowned draftsman/printmaker/ painter Albrecht Dürer in 1520–1.

To set up the major themes of the exhibition and to stitch the regional sections together, Borchert commissioned a book-within-a-book of essays. Borchert begins with a vivid sketch of the pictorial innovations of illusionism, which diffused outwards from the Van Eyck brothers. Equally important (but less visible in the works on display), German sculpted retables (framed altarpieces) are surveyed by Reinhard Karrenbrock in a beautifully illustrated essay that features intact works from Central Europe (Sweden, not included, also became another major region for exported works from Brussels). Then Kemperdick surveys the crucial ‘First Generation’ in German-speaking countries (Conrad Witz, Lucas Moser, et al., including in Bavaria Gabriel Angler, formerly known as the Master of the Tegernsee Tabula Magna).

Occupying the crucial centre of influence for Germany, the art of Rogier van der Weyden is ably, if briefly, discussed by Antje-Fee Köllerman. Mighty Cologne properly receives its due, but early, almost simultaneous adherents of Rogier van der Weyden also included Friedrich Herlin in Nördlingen (1462), the Master of the Sterzing Altarpiece in Tyrol (1458), and Hans Pleydenwurff from Nuremberg but also painting farther afield in Wroclaw/Breslau (1462; no. 212) as well as in the familiar Hof Altarpiece (1465). Transmission of Netherlandish ideas also travelled widely through the mediation of Martin Schongauer’s prints, discussed for ‘Central Eastern Europe’ by Ingrid Ciulisová.

In terms of the increased opportunities for travel by individuals during the 15th century, a few key artists should have been stressed further, notably Michael Sittow from Reval/Talinn in Estonia, even though he already appeared in the earlier exhibition, since his travels through Bruges carried him all the way to the court of Isabella in Spain before he returned to his home town. In this volume Sittow is represented only by a lone portrait (the not-especially-typical man’s head in the Mauritshuis, whose attribution has been doubted on several occasions; no. 96). So once more this individual artist falls between geographical stools, even though he is the one foreign painter who stems from this larger region and whose work demonstrably derives from direct exposure in Bruges to the template of Hans Memling.

Moreover, the final map in the volume, while helpful, shows only overland routes, whereas surely many of the linkages between cities in the late Middle Ages followed sea lanes – particularly the well-plied trade routes of the Hanseatic League. Through those maritime links Bruges and the Netherlands reached across the Baltic to Reval (Sittow), Gdansk (where Memling’s Last Judgment Altarpiece arrived through piracy), and Lübeck (where Memling’s Greverade Altarpiece reached its permanent home).

A very stimulating essay by Juliane von Fircks, ‘Nuremberg to Antwerp and Back’, carries the history into the early 16th century and really considers the rich exchange, still to be explored more fully, of regions that were then peers in the post-Dürer generation that included, among others, Baldung and Holbein on one side and Gossaert and Lucas van Leyden on the other. But that topic signals the opportunity for yet another great Borchert exhibition!

The standard cliché of reviews like this holds that space does not permit proper discussion of either the catalogue or the visual discoveries that were on the walls of the original exhibition (which closed in January last year). But easy truths are magnified in the exhibitions by Till-Holger Borchert, which – as was already proved by the 2002 Mediterranean concept – can justly be seen as enduring and seminal.

Van Eyck to Dürer. Early Netherlandish Painting & Central Europe 1430–1530 by Till-Holger Borchert is published by Thames and Hudson, 2010. 552 pp., 615 colour & 20 mono illus. ISBN 978-90209-9341-7.