Handsomely produced, this catalogue accompanies an exhibition co-organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Albertina Museum. Curated by Emily J. Peters and Laura M. Ritter, it includes entries for ninety-six artworks, eighty-six of which are from the Albertina’s unparalleled collection of graphic art. Recent exhibitions, like Bosch to Bloemaert: Early Netherlandish Drawings from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2017–18), have centered the functions and techniques of Netherlandish and Flemish drawings. This one instead presents the motif of the city as the organizational, albeit loose, matrix within which drawings and their makers both reflected the values of and actively shaped Netherlandish society in the long sixteenth century, a time of continual religiopolitical, economic, and moral strife. Indeed, the writers demonstrate how drawing—as process and product—served manifold roles in society and across art forms, through close examinations of their materiality
Whereas the drawings reflect a variety of cities, the essays focus on Antwerp: as its port became the main Netherlandish center for international trade and finance ca. 1500, the city emerged as a major center for art production for the newly moneyed merchant class, which wanted to see its morals and ideals aesthetically represented. Referencing understudied tracts, Koenraad Jonckheere contends that the process of determining form and content in and through drawing innately overlapped with religious theology and art theory in the sixteenth-century Netherlands. The degree to which images were to imitate, emulate, or change observed reality was debated by artists, religious thinkers, and the general populace in public forums. In this welcome contribution to the transhistorical study of image theory, Jonckheere succinctly lays out 1) the dilemmas on the spectrum between similitudo (likeness) and simulacrum (invention); 2) the potential inaccuracies of tituli (inscriptions); and 3) solutions available to artists and Catholic and Protestant patrons.
Peters treats mythological portrayals of biblical scenes set in historic and contemporaneous urban landscapes; she convincingly proposes that these compositions merged old and new iconographic traditions while engendering new meanings. Her analysis of drawings is especially insightful when she shows how drawings intersected with other media. For example, through a forensic study of incised lines, black and red chalk, and ink wash of Pieter Coecke van Aelst the Elder’s design, The Consecration of Saint Nicholas, she delineates how glass and cartoon makers took turns adding to the drawing as they negotiated the final design for a stained-glass window commissioned by the merchants’ guild.
Stephanie Porras argues that the use of colored grounds in 1500–30 Antwerp directly correlates to the many roles of drawings and to workshop practices. She illustrates of over ten functions of these chiaroscuro drawings, from patronen for learning to ricordi for recording finished compositions, and sheds light on the relationships between artists as friends, as gift and loan recipients, and even as thieves. Like a visit to an artist’s workshop, her essay memorably contextualizes and clearly describes drawing processes and techniques, making it a strong teaching tool.
Ritter studies images of three saints inspired by the fantastical work of Hieronymus Bosch, popular among the new urban elite as they fashioned their new identity as morally upright city dwellers. In each case study, the saint is presented in relation to the lower class: Saint Martin of Tours is juxtaposed with the disabled and the destitute, Saint James the Great with jugglers and street artists, and Saint Anthony with tavern revelers and prostitutes. While more examples would better support her thesis, Ritter presents just how ambiguous saints’ depictions could be at this religiously charged time.
The catalogue entries provide new perspectives through visual and scientific analysis. Some helpfully compare drawings to metalwork, a related painting, tapestry cartoon, or engraving. “Before 1500” contains stunning and rare copies after works by Jan van Eyck, Dieric Bouts, and Hugo van der Goes. Wherein “City Views” includes detailed city renderings, “City as Stage” presents narrative and decorative designs. “Urban Inhabitants” comprises representations of military soldiers, peasants, rural laborers, gentlemen, and ladies, complemented by scenes of proverbs and religious events in “Urban Morality and Politics.” Beneficial to scholars and students particularly of art, history, religion, and literature, the essays and entries will become a repeated resource on Netherlandish social contexts, religious ideology, and workshop processes, while inspiring further research.
