12 - Early Modern Netherlandish Artists on Proportion in Architecture: or “de questien der Simmetrien met redene der Geometrien”

Summary

The early modern Low Countries occupy a peculiar position in the history of proportion in architecture. Situated at the crossroads between Italy, the Iberian world, Germany, and Northern Europe, they offer evidence of original interaction with the new theory of the column orders coming out of Italy already in the earliest decades of the 16th century, which defies inclusion into the prevailing views on the evolution of proportional systems as defined by Panofsky and Wittkower. Our case studies will thus fit in well with the critical notes recent scholarship has added to the antithetical view on “Gothic” versus “Renaissance.” At the time two different repertories of architectural ornament were present on the market on equal terms, the “antique” imported from Italy, and the newest “Renaissance Gothic,” consistently called “modern” in contemporary Netherlandish sources. Not only architects but also many painters, such as Jan Gossaert called Mabuse, were well versed in both languages, and used them with fluency as the occasion—and the patron—demanded. Pluralism of style was the prevailing characteristic of the leading art collections of the period, such as Regent Margaret of Austria's in her residence in Mechelen.

The port of Antwerp will play a central role in our essay. The first foreignlanguage translation of Sebastiano Serlio's Quarto libro, for instance, came out of the artistic and humanistic milieu of the city. It was published in Flemish in 1539 by the painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst in Antwerp, with the help of Cornelis De Schrijver, alias Scribonius, alias Grapheus, the learned town clerk. Most probably at the insistence of Grapheus, the city magistrate had subsidized Coecke's rent in 1542 and 1543 when he was preparing the costly first French and German translations of the book. Coecke had first-hand experience of the antiquities in northern Italy near Venice, and of Constantinople, which he visited in 1533; whether or not he knew Rome is still a point of debate. Coecke was also a court artist, one of only three to bear the newly invented title of artiste de l’empereur (artist to the emperor) during Charles V's reign, distinguishing the “artist”—self-fashioned as an intellectual, a master of the art of disegno—from the common craftsman who worked with his hands.