Which were the glory years for Antwerp?

 

Rubens, portrait of Anna Anthonis, c1615-18. Pious, yes, but what a face Rubens has captured!

Antwerp certainly meets the criteria for a very visitable city: great restaurants, great museums, great buildings, very walkable – and one of the world’s most astonishing station designs. But when I visit any city, I like to create a kind of coherent story to the city. It is somehow satisfying to explain a city by looking at major forces affecting it, and to see the results in the built environment, and in the artistic works that were produced in it. So, for example, you can explain the sudden reversal of fortune that affected Bruges, or Rye, or equally, the proximity of strong flows of water and nearby mineral deposits that enabled regions such as Coalbrookdale to flourish in the Industrial Revolution. 

What can we say about Antwerp? Its history is tightly linked to the Scheldt. Antwerp is a great natural port, since it provides safe anchorage, being a long way inland from the sea. Although the Scheldt is still tidal at Antwerp, which means locks are required, Antwerp also has container terminals with direct access to the sea without locks (which must be similar to the situation at Felixstowe in the UK). But the Scheldt hasn’t always been accessible to ships. Is this the cause of Antwerp’s rise and fall? 

Michael Pye’s recent book, Antwerp: The Glory Years covers the 16^th century , when Antwerp flourished as never before. This weekend I am visiting Antwerp, but I don’t get the impression of a 16^th-century city. In many respects, the visible golden age appears to be the 17^th century: a hundred years later. Is this  simply my misreading? 

Let’s glance at the history books. Few cities can have had experienced such about-turns as Antwerp. It reached a peak of success during the first half of the 16^th century; it was responsible for 75% of all Low Countries trade in 1549. Yet in 1576, Spanish troops mutinied and killed some 8,000 citizens. Then in 1585 the Spanish recaptured Antwerp and incorporated it into the Spanish Netherlands. Protestants were given four years to convert or leave, and around half the population left. Hence a population decline from a peak of around 100,000 down to 49,000 at the end of the century. 

As if this wasn’t enough, in 1648, under the Treaty of Westphalia, the Scheldt, the river by which Antwerp traded with the world, was closed to all non-Dutch ships. This catastrophe ruined the port, until under Napoleon, 150 years later, the port was reopened, and by the mid-19^th century Antwerp was the world’s third largest port. Even today is it second only to Rotterdam in Europe.

 

How does this compare with artistic achievement? Antwerp is exceptionally good for museums relating the city with its inhabitants; the Rubens House is a great example. One of the best museums is the Plantin Museum. Christophe Plantin created one of the biggest printers and publishers in Europe. He founded the company in Antwerp in 1548, and within a year (if you believe Wikipedia) “he headed one of the most well-respected publishing houses in Europe” (whatever that means). His greatest achievement was a multi-volume Bible, the Biblia Sacra or Biblia Regia, published 1568-73. However, the publishing company appears to have continued to grow thrive for over a hundred years after that. 

Rubens, 1577-1640, the greatest Antwerp painter and one of the most famous painters of all time, lived in Antwerp for most of his life, and (together with his vast studio team) produced some 1,400 works, excluding copies! This sounds like success, by any measure. 

While the Rubens House was closed for this visit, we visited another stunning collection of 17^th-century work, the Snijders and Rockox House, actually two houses next to each other, celebrating an artist and a politician who both flourished in the first half of the 17^th century. Incidentally, this museum was a model of how to display a small collection effectively.

 It certainly seems, by this very simplistic assessment, that the evidence of the artefacts around the city suggest that, that despite losing half its population in the years to 1600, the remaining citizens of Antwerp created some astonishing achievements, both cultural (Rubens, van Dyck, Jordaens) and intellectual (the Plantin firm of publishers continuing and growing during the 17^th century). All this raises, of course, many questions. Can you make such sweeping judgements about a city on the evidence of one or two buildings? I haven’t even considered what effect these glory years, whether 16^th or 17^th centuries have on the present-day city – a subject for another post. Today was the Antwerp marathon, which meant that 12,500 runners passed the front door of the Rockox Museum, probably without noticing it was there. 

But the evidence above leaves me wanting to know more. For example: much of the success of the Netherlands following independence has been attributed to its religious tolerance. But is it as simple as that? Has the link between Protestantism and economic growth, as formulated by Weber a hundred or more years ago, been overstated? Was it possible for a city to be Catholic yet progressive? Antwerp has vast, bloated, Baroque churches, and Catholicism is still very noticeable in the historic centre: there is a statue of the Virgin or a saint looking down at you from most street corners. How was it possible, or was it indeed possible, for great art to flourish in a Counter-Reformation climate? 

All this requires more investigation, but, sadly, I don’t think Michael Pye’s Antwerp: The Glory Years is likely to give me the answer I am looking for. I haven’t got the patience to extricate a coherent story from Pye’s account. After 20 pages I had to look to other sources to find out what was going on. The journalistic style meant that every major event was introduced by looking at an individual, and only slowly revealing the event being described. It’s a time-honoured journalistic trick, which becomes annoying when you are trying to find out what happened. My response is to skip a paragraph or two to see if the author reveals what the subject really is, later on – a risky technique. So answers to the question of Antwerp’s rise and fall will take a few days longer. 

Black Atlantic: good for you, or simply good?

 

This is a review of the Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition “Black Atlantic: Power People Resistance”, viewed in October 2023.  

First, it’s absolutely essential that museums explore the origins of their funding. Much of the Fitzwilliam collection was acquired by money from the profits of slavery, clearly. This exhibition, Black Atlantic, starts from that point and, I assume, sets out to display what it has discovered, visually. 

As you might imagine, there are some real triumphs of detection. These include a bell, displayed in St Catherine’s College until recently, when it was discovered that the bell, dating from 1772, had been used in a slave plantation in what is today Guyana. 

The exhibition noted the change in depiction of black faces from before and after around 1700, when slavery became widespread. Before, black people were often recognisable, with an identity; later, under slavery, they became anonymous. But is this entirely true? It’s a thesis that cries out to be examined visually - perhaps in an exhibition dedicated to that one topic. There isn’t enough in this exhibition to prove (or disprove) this claim. 

Here was the problem. The exhibition was like a scattergun, covering far too many areas to look at any one of them in satisfying detail. There is no question of the validity of the topic of Black Atlantic, but was that exactly the subject? As I walked around the exhibition, I became increasingly confused: there is no way to cover all the potential exhibition themes in one show. In just three rooms, the range included:

• Studies by Keith Piper of black masculinity and relating to his father in the 1980s. The link seems to have been that Piper used the iconic depiction of slaves in a ship in one of the 14 images – very tenuous.
• A brief attempt to show objects created by the indigenous peoples (referred to in the catalogue with a capital “I”) of the Caribbean. There was one map and a few items, but this theme abruptly disappeared.
• Historic scientific instruments, including a sextant and a chronometer. The link is that such instruments enabled slavery to take place – which means you could include (by the same argument) ships, the navy, the history of navigation – the list is endless. It’s a similar situation with trying to define ESG  companies: do we discount companies that, say, extract oil, or do we discount companies that provide tools that can be used for extracting oil? Where do we stop?
• Two classical sculptures revealing implied depictions of slavery, one Greek, one Roman.
• Seven large-scale reproductions of rare plants and birds. The link was that these specimens had been gathered by black slaves for the white artist to draw from. The point is taken, but you can’t help looking at the exquisitely drawn plants and animals, not how they were collected. There is a tension between the quality of the artwork and the caption.
• A few objects from the Caribbean, because that is where Fitzwilliam made his money, but not a very thorough or detailed history of the region or survey of its indigenous art.
• One picture, by Gerrit Dou, is included simply because it was owned in the past by people involved with slavery, including Fitzwilliam himself. The picture, The Schoolmaster, has no connection with slavery. One picture by Rembrandt (or his studio) is included because it is painted on wood from South America.
• There are pictures of sea battles in the 17^th century between the Dutch Republic and England.
• The exhibition include gold weights from the Akan culture of sub-Saharan West Africa. 

You can see this is enough for several exhibitions, and putting them all together simply creates indigestion. But there were more fundamental problems with the exhibition.

Limitations of the exhibition

• Interpretation replaces assessment. Instead of being told to look at the objects, we are being told what the interpretation of the work is. Proselyting, pedagogical captions take the place of appraisal. Imagination replaces interpretation – the black servant in a portrait by William Dobson is described as suggesting “a deference he may well not have felt” – but it’s not visible in the painting itself.
• Several pictures by Barbara Walker, based on her reimagination of existing works including a black person – she shows the black character in full, with the other people only in outline. Unfortunately, in the exhibition we are not shown the original, so we have no way of comparing. In the catalogue, we see the originals, reproduced at tiny scale. Is this helpful?
• Similarly, Alberta Whittle’s work in response to 16th-century engravings does not include the original engravings, not even in the catalogue. No doubt the originals could be found via the Internet, but what is the point of an exhibition that leaves you to work everything out for yourself?
• Difficult to know where to stop when you identify not just human slavery, but evidence of white domination in, for example, searching for specimens for natural historians, or the wood used to make furniture, or the navigation instruments to enable slave ships to sail. It becomes difficult to draw the line.
• One orthodoxy simply replaces another. The history of the peoples of the Caribbean now doesn’t mention the Spanish conquest, which is a bit silly. The artworks by Barbara Walker cleverly show Western paintings that include a black figure, but with only the black figure displayed. This is fine – and Walker’s drawing is tremendously accomplished – but we are not shown the original! The captions refer to the original, so why can’t we those originals, even just as reproductions? 

It felt like this exhibition was the first time the Fitzwilliam had addressed the issue of where its wealth came from, and in an attempt to include all possible themes, the resulting show looked very provisional. It was like a simple search through the entire University collections to see anything with a link to slavery. Or representation of black people. Or indigenous art in Africa and the Caribbean. Or the history of navigation. And so on. 

Is it good for you or is it good?

One challenge faced by exhibitions of this kind Is fundamental. The criterion for display in the Fitzwilliam is quality. Of course, what constitutes quality will vary from one period to another, but you feel the curators strive to show  that every object in the collection is satisfying to look at. Of course, some works are shown because of extraneous circumstances – the subject is of great historical interest, like portraits of Martin Luther, or there is some association with a major event. Some years ago, the British Museum opened a gallery dedicated to the Enlightenment. Having just spent a lot of time reading Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, I went to the new exhibition with great enthusiasm, only to be disappointed because the objects illustrated did not correspond to my vision. Nor could they, because they were based on what was visually appealing, rather than corresponding with the ideas of Diderot et al.

In this exhibition, there is a constant tension between what is good for you, and what is simply good to look at. The exhibition, in its excitement to communicate a new theme by which to interpret art history, frequently forgets to check what is good to look at, and instead relies on work that they believe is good for you. Keith Piper’s work is an example: I’m sure it’s good for you, but it simply isn’t very good to look at, and it has only marginal relevance to this exhibition. An example of a works that is both good for you and good to look at is the range of exquisitely decorated plates by Jaqueline Bishop (above). 

After the exhibition

Visitors emerge from the exhibition straight into the Fitzwilliam permanent collection, in this case a room of 20th-century works, but only a few of which are of black subjects, a missed opportunity. Nonetheless, there is a recent (loan) portrait of William Gates a stunning example, and hopefully an addition to the Fitzwilliam collection.

What to make of Black Atlantic?

In summary, there is a great theme here, but the execution was insufficiently thought through. Let’s hope the next related exhibition (they promise several more) is more focused, and less wide-ranging. 

Rubens and Women

 

This marvellous exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery has one theme, and succeeds brilliantly in conveying that them. Rubens, although classically trained in the classical idiom (from several years in Rome), created his best works from life studies of the female nude, specifically, of his second wife, Helene Fourment. 

The evidence for this is carefully marshalled, but is most visible in some of the  small-scale drawings in the show, which are compared to a life-size classical sculpture, a Crouching Venus, from the second century CE.

The Crouching Venus clearly served as a reference for many works by the painter – you can see more than one example in the exhibition of the same pose. For example, here is a drawing of Venus nursing Cupids, from 1616:

Yet there is one major difference between the two female bodies. It is clear by comparing these two works that, while Rubens used classical poses as a model, he tempered his classical style by reference to the human body. The key difference is that the Crouching Venus has no folds of flesh; this is an idealised nude, with a kind of abstracted body and face. Helpfully, if perhaps a little voyeuristically, the exhibition provides two mirrors so you can observe the Crouching Venus from more than one angle. In contrast, what brings the Rubens drawing to life is the sense of immediacy, of actuality, despite the pose being classical and the woman’s body conforming more to the classical shape than the present-day ideal. 

There are several examples in the exhibition of this unique synthesis of classical and observation. So vivid is the observation that at times the ostensible subject is entirely lost in the figure being painted, as in the Hagar in the Desert, featuring what appears to be a portrait of Helene Fourment in a stunning blue dress. There is not the slightest sign of her being uncomfortable in her desert surroundings: she looks to be on an outing in her Sunday best:

An even more extreme example of the conflict between subject and model is a crazy depiction of Judith with the head of Holofernes, from 1616 (not in the exhibition, but in the catalogue). Judith looks so fetching, and so pleased with herself, you have to look twice to notice she is holding the head she has just chopped off.

Of course, it is well known that Rubens was a sensual painter – you half expected the famous portrait of Helene Fourment wearing nothing but a fur coat, but the exhibition theme was clearly established without this painting. What is conveyed here is that even in the religious works, there is a sense of life, of the characters jumping out from the picture, to engage with you. 

To conclude, there are two examples of just how skilled Rubens was as a painter. One is a copy by Rubens of the figure of Night by Michelangelo. 

Of course, in the classical tradition of art, painters learned by copying, but it seems very unlikely this Michelangelo was modelled from life. If Michelangelo used a model at all, it looks like he used a male model, and added token breasts to it. Rubens could paint women, but clearly Michelangelo could not (at least, not without looking at them). 

The final indicator of Rubens’ talent came unexpectedly after leaving the exhibition. In the permanent collection at Dulwich, there is a full-size Gainsborough portrait of two young women, that will be a shock for any visitor walking out of the Rubens exhibition: 

Don’t believe that it was the French 19th-century that put an end to the classical depiction of the human form. Here, with Gainsborough, you can see how we have lost the classical tradition. Here is the full horror of the insipid modern body: bodies with no limbs, no curves. So lacking in any substance are the women that it looks like the sheet music one of the women is holding is likely to slip off at any moment; there is nothing to hold it up. Give me the classical yet living world of Rubens any day.