Tags
Baroque artists, Caravaggio, Caravaggisti, Chiaroscuro, Georges de la Tour, Henrick ter Brugghen, Italian Renaissance, Memento Mori, Peter Paul Rubens, Tenebrism, Vanitas, Willem Kalf
Vanitas
After completing his apprenticeship [1] in Antwerp, Peter Paul Rubens spent nearly eight uninterrupted years in Italy. Rubens may have seen Caravaggio‘s Basket of Fruit, a painting that seems borrowed from the Dutch Golden Age painting; Netherlandish artists produced several paintings depicting decaying flowers and food, as well as skulls, hourglasses, candles, empty or nearly empty glasses and any object reminding one that life is conditioned by death. [2] These paintings are vanitas and Memento mori (remember that you die).
Unlike Ronsard’s Horatian carpe diem, a memento mori does not invite a celebration of life’s very few days. It represents the inevitability of death.
I wrote a short post on vanitas, but you will find a painting by Willem Kalf (1619-1693) below. Kalf’s painting shows a white and blue Ming dynasty vase and features a mostly red oriental carpet. The painting is a fine example of the Dutch Golden Age painting vanitas. The Renaissance was the Age of Discovery, and it intensified slavery. However, European traders had long travelled the Silk Road and brought back oriental objects. The ginger jar is recent. Marco Polo (1254-1324) published his Book of the Marvels of the World or The Travels of Marco Polo (Il Milione) in c. 1300. The book was written by Rustichello da Pisa in Franco-Venetian. It belongs to prison literature because both Rustichello and Marco Polo were incarcerated when Marco Polo told his story. Known as Il Milione, the book was entitled Le Livre des Merveilles du Monde.
Caravaggio and Caravaggisti
Given its dark background, Willem Kalf’s still-life can be labelled a chiaroscuro (clair-obscur). Caravaggisti could set an object or person, the subject matter, against a dark background, seeking cinematography’s spotlight effect. Artists “cut” into a dark background, creating dimensionality. Renaissance Humanism demanded a life-like resemblance, which was achieved by High Renaissance artists: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.
Baroque artist Caravaggio influenced Peter Paul Rubens and other artists is the power of contrast and dimensionality. However, Rubens is not a Dutch Caravaggisti. Many Netherlandish Caravaggisti traveled to Italy.
However, the Basket of Fruit featured above is well-known to art lovers, and I have used it without any reference to death. Nor have I linked it to chiaroscuro, tenebrism or the cinematic spotlight effect. Georges de La Tour was a Caravaggisti. It does not feature sharp contrasts. It is a vanitas and a still life.
Georges de La Tour (1593-1652) was born in Lorraine when it was technically the Holy Roman Empire. In other words, La Tour lived near the Low Countries.
His paintings reflect the Baroque naturalism of Caravaggio, but this probably reached him through the Dutch Caravaggisti of the Utrecht School and other Northern (French and Dutch) contemporaries. In particular, La Tour is often compared to the Dutch painter Hendrick ter Brugghen.
(See Georges de La Tour, Wikipedia)
Caravaggio also painted the Supper at Emmaus, a painting featuring a Basket of Fruit. This painting will be discussed later.
Conclusion
Italy is associated with the masterpieces of the Renaissance. Michelangelo (1475-1564) painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-1512), Leonardo‘s Mona Lisa, housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris, is one of the world’s most valuable paintings. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1564) died in France. Raphael (1483-1520) painted The School of Athens (1509-1511). However, there was a Northern Renaissance. Jan van Eyck (1390-1441) belongs to the Northern Renaissance. And there was an Antwerp Mannerism, which differed from Italian Mannerism. After the Fall of Constantinople (29 May 1453), Greek scholars fled to Italy, where they inaugurated the Renaissance. However, the Netherlands had been the cultural hub of Europe. The plague had relented in Renaissance Europe, but in 1626, it took the life of Isabela Brandt, Peter Paul Rubens’s first wife.
In the European devotional literature of the Renaissance, the Ars Moriendi, memento mori had moral value by reminding individuals of their mortality.
(See Memento Mori, Wikipedia.)
RELATED ARTICLES (to be completed)
- The Golden Age of Dutch painting (5 May 2023)
- An Older Orient (18 September 2016)
- The Arnolfini Portrait: mise en abyme (3 December 2014)
- Still-life Paintings: Vanitas Vanitatum (29 November 2012)
- Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (22 April 2012)
- Chiaroscuro: Shades and Shapes (21 April 2012)
- Pierre de Ronsard & the Carpe diem (02 January 2012)
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Notes
[1] Rubens apprenticed to Tobias Verhaecht, Adam van Noort, and Otto van Veen.
[2] Vanitas, (from Latin vanitas, “vanity”), in art, a genre of still-life painting that flourished in the Netherlands in the early 17th century. A vanitas painting contains collections of objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures; it exhorts the viewer to consider mortality and to repent. The vanitas evolved from simple pictures of skulls and other symbols of death and transience frequently painted on the reverse sides of portraits during the late Renaissance. It had acquired an independent status by c. 1550 and by 1620 had become a popular genre. Its development until its decline about 1650 was centered in Leiden, in the United Provinces of the Netherlands, an important seat of Calvinism, which emphasized humanity’s total depravity and advanced a rigid moral code.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “vanitas”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 Oct. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/art/vanitas-art. Accessed 06 August 2023.
Love to everyone 💕
© Micheline Walker
6 August 2023
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