Jordaens: Lusty sensuality and ‘the wisdom of the Ancients’

Associated media

Jordaens and the Antique

Edited by Joost Vander Auwera and Irène Schaudies

In 17th-century Flemish painting, Rubens remains the giant, and his unmatched knowledge of classical imagery and subjects, based on humanist training and nearly a decade in Italy (1600–8).  But as Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678) built upon the Rubens heritage in Antwerp, he also used the classical past, including themes from classical literature, for his own earthy message, to complement his own celebrated pictures of peasant genre (The King Drinks; As the Old Sing, So the Young Twitter): his Bruegelian or 'Flemish' aspect. 

Unlike the last major Jordaens retrospective in Antwerp, 1993, this more recent exhibition at Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in Brussels (closed January 2013), had a tighter focus and pulled the younger Antwerp artist closer to the more familiar figure of Rubens, not as some lesser imitator but rather as a classicist with his own interests and character.  (Whether scholarship will want to substitute the conventional name of Jacob with the vernacular Jacques, as this catalogue proposes, must remain moot.)

Unlike most exhibition catalogues, which divide their contributions between essays and individual entries, Jordaens and the Antique freely combines both elements.  Leading Belgian university and museum scholars – a new team since the Antwerp exhibition – briefly introduce their themes before examining in detail some 80 Jordaens images in paintings, drawings, and tapestry, as well as reproductive engravings.   The loans from leading museums across the continent are splendid, and they even include an unfamiliar late self-portrait with a Venus and Cupid statuette (no. 17), from Angers. 

Additionally, this exhibition provides one other major early 17th-century painter, Antwerp classicist Abraham Janssen (d. 1632), with his proper place alongside Jordaens (cat. nos. 29, 31, 34, fig. 75, though one might have wished for more of his work, as well as the cabinet pictures by Hendrick van Balen, d. 1632; fig. 40; cat. nos. 71, 83). 

Schaudies' initial essay, 'Small Latin, Less Greek,' emphasizes the taste of Antwerp patricians as patrons and the use of classical texts in Dutch translations.  Jordaens did not travel to Rome but surely soaked up its lessons from his painter peers, many of whom did make that obligatory art pilgrimage.  In 'Jordaens, Not Jor-daens,' Nico van Hout addresses model studies, particularly a group housed in Düsseldorf and Dresden that stands close to Jordaens himself but also echoes poses of ancient sculptures and individual figures found in Rubens' paintings. 

Schaudies' second essay, 'Antiquity and its Uses’, pushes further into Jordaens' use of painted precedents, especially by Rubens, for his figures and classical themes and examines 'Jordaens Teaching Himself.'  This section also first presents the drawing studies (cat. nos. 47–48) for compositions made in the artist's signature red and black chalk medium, and it also introduces two works painted by Jordaens at full scale after Rubens's oil sketches for the Spanish royal hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada: Apollo's Contest for Pan (1637; Madrid; cat. no. 44) with the Rubens oil sketch (Brussels; cat. no. 43); and Vertumnus and Pomona (1638; cat. no. 45).

In his essay, 'Psyche, Satyrs, Philosophers,' Ulrich Heinen reveals how Jordaens employed 'the Wisdom of the Ancients,' like his other imagery of Dutch proverbs and proffered profundity under the guise of apparently crude subjects.  Here one finds one of Jordaens' signature themes in multiple versions (pp. 136–38; nos. 52. 55–57, 59–61): The Peasant and the Satyr, a tale from Aesop that held the same advantage of simple folk-wisdom lessons about blowing hot and cold combined with the pedigree of classical learning. 

From Apuleius, Jordaens extracts the theme of Cupid and Psyche in order to warn against vain striving in the search for true love, which is achieved through a Stoic freedom from base desire (no. 62).  Here, however, the nymphaeum of Psyche's purification bath echoes the garden portico of Rubens' house in Antwerp. 

Finally, the theme of Diogenes' Search for an Honest Man shows an ugly, cynical old man amidst a world of stupidity and depravity.  Again Jordaens' ability to render carnal nature and the body mockingly underscores the detached Stoic outlook that he shares with Rubens.

The artist’s ability to suggest sensuality and fecundity served him well in positive allegories of fertility, as vander Auwera's essay, 'The Abundance of Peace,' contends.  Satyrs, nymphs, and the cornucopia suggest a Golden Age of plenty during war-torn Europe's Thirty Years War.  Pen drawings (nos. 65–66) prepared one famous composition (c.1623–5; Brussels, no. 64).  As Ceres and Bacchus accompany Venus in the famous phrase by Terence, so do Bacchic pleasures – and excesses – also reappear in Jordaens' oeuvre, as Schaudies outlines in her 'Triumph of Bacchus' essay.  Here Rubens, van Dyck, and Jordaens all seem to converge. 

Remaining large-scale Jordaens mythologies and his later, larger drawings for the studio (especially in trois couleurschalks, nos. 101, 103) are discussed in concluding essays by Schaudies.  Koenraad Brosens ('Erudition and Originality') analyses monumental tapestry series with classical themes involving heroes: Odysseus, Achilles, and Alexander.  After the death of Rubens in 1640, Jordaens' busy late career also included architectural decorations for monarchs: Charles I of England, Christina of Sweden, and Amalia of Solms in The Hague.

Like many catalogues, the sum of these parts might not completely add up.  Whether the lusty sensuality of Jordaens is to be read in a positive or critical sense seemingly depends on the chosen subject, and presumably on the erudition of the patrons, whether in Antwerp or farther afield.  How Jordaens relates to Rubens, let alone Janssen or van Balen, also remains unexplored.  But this thoughtful, ambitious book does teach us to take this productive artist more seriously across his entire career and to respect his distinctly personal treatment of classical antiquity in terms of both form and content.

Jordaens and the Antique  edited by Joost Vander Auwera and Irène Schaudies is published by Mercatorfonds, distributed by Yale University Press, 2012.  320 pp., 220 color + mono illus, $65.00. ISBN 978-0-300-18871-4