Garlanded icons

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Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings

By Susan Merriam

One way to formulate the enticement of still-life pictures is to note their appeal to viewers’ senses in an 'erotics of looking' (to adopt a phrase of Susan Sontag’s).  This allure is redoubled in the poignant transience and ephemeral beauty of floral still-life, a major – and costly – genre of Netherlandish art of the 17th century.  Until now, however, no scholarship has examined one of the most complex manifestations of floral still-life: Flemish Catholic paintings that combine flower garlands with iconic religious subjects.  Now Susan Merriam, professor at Bard College (New York), investigates these religious garland paintings, particularly through their three major practitioners across the first half of the 17th century: versatile Jan Brueghel, who often collaborated with other Antwerp painters; luxury still-life specialist Jan Davidsz. de Heem; and dedicated garland painter, Daniel Seghers, Brueghel's student but also a lay Jesuit.

Instead of a series of monographic chapters investigating these individuals in turn, Merriam instead chiefly looks at the audience for these images, as well as the religious effects of such devotional works in the post-Iconoclastic setting of the Counter Reformation in the Southern Netherlands.   She argues forcefully for the reaffirmation of Catholic imagery, conveyed through the central icons, within the flower garland frame, of Virgin and Child, through related stone sculptures of the holy figures, or through ecclesiastical ritual symbols of Eucharist, monstrance, or wine cup, especially by de Heem (Chapter 5).  These very items precisely focused on the criticisms of ritual as well as religious imagery that had been raised (often via iconoclasm) by Protestant reformers of the previous century (Chapter 2). 

Often these later images, produced for the Habsburg court in Vienna, were surrounded by symbolic fruits as well as flowers.  Contemporary inventories reveal how many of these garlanded icons wound up in royal collections across Catholic Europe. All of these works test the dialectic between the material and the spiritual, between illusion and meditation.  Over time, the sheer abundance of these floral decorations increases, to suggest the variety and fecundity in divine creation, as celebrated by an early, founding patron of Brueghel's garlanded icons, Archbishop Federico Borromeo of Milan.

Merriam also stresses the formal properties of these works, which engage in tests of perception and illusion as trompe l'oeil exercises.  Their visual deception poses questions about material values, even while these works are often produced as costly, virtuoso displays, often by distinctive collaborators.  Sometimes their central images even contain classical mythic imagery instead of Christian themes, whether seemingly painted or sculpted, to be viewed in large-scale as ornaments for patrician settings.   Over time, the illusionism of their flower frames received increased attention to modelling and volume, especially when tied to the newer sculptural central religious figures in subdued colours by Antwerp Jesuit Daniel Seghers (Chapter 4).   All invite viewers’ interpretation of the artistic relations between centre and frame, surface and depth, substance and decoration, and of artistic innovation within established convention.

Merriam's monograph offers an exemplary analysis of Flemish garland paintings, a perfect period case study of self-conscious illusion and representation itself during the 17th century.  She also attends closely to how such pictures were received by their owners (Chapter 3), including their presence in local Antwerp inventories and their prominence in contemporary local gallery pictures of collection ensembles.  Ashgate complement her insights with abundant colour images of these virtuoso pictures.  Like 17th-century viewers, modern readers are encouraged to delight in both artistry and the visual world while using such hybrid imagery to contemplate greater matters.

Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings by  Susan Merriam is published by Ashgate, 2012. 173 pp., 28 colour and 30 mono illus, $104.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-0305-0