RKD STUDIES

11.4 History Paintings

... is sarcophagus (restoration of the wooden panel from c. 1450)...

... of armour as a secular prince and lying in his coffin in the habit of the Franciscans. Both paintings belonged together, as a copper engraving in Peter Lambeck’s Origines Hamburgenses from 1652 shows. Only the painting with the reclining figure has survived. The painting with the standing figure was destroyed during the bombing of Hamburg in 1943. Until this time, it was permanently in the possession of the Maria Magdalena Monastery. A photograph from the pre-war period shows that this painting, too, was restored or painted over around 1600 and provided with a new frame decorated with strapwork.43...

... es the life situation of the rich man who has accumulated a great fortune. The bread, the wine glass and the fruits seem to illustrate the meaning. In the context of the other two inscriptions, a moral sense emerges which, as memento mori, refers to the end of earthly existence and the transience of all earthly goods. The motif of the rich merchant who is struck by death in the middle of life goes back to the motif of the danse macabre. David Kindt abandons the medieval pattern of walking full-length figures and focuses on Hans Holbein’s pictorial inventions in his series of woodcuts on the Dance of Death, made around 1524.52 The still life-like arrangement on the table corresponds to the more recent form of representation of transience, which first appeared around 1600, and which, in the later 17th century, flows into its own genre with the Vanitas still life. The play De düdesche Schlömer by Johannes Stricker (1540-1599), which appeared in 1584 in Lübeck, can be considered as a literary model. It is an adaptation of the well-known play ‘Jedermann’ (Everyman) which has been known since about 1500: An unscrupulous rich man is condemned to early death by God and to eternal hell by Moses. As a dying man, he turns to God again and thereby achieves eternal live. The decisive factor for this turning point is the Protestant view that it is not good works but faith in God alone that makes the redemption of the soul possible. Related in content is also the story of the poor man and the rich Lazarus, written by Georg Rollenhagen (1542-1609) in 1590, which has produced its own pictorial tradition....

... ist, dated 1631...

... out for her modern, rich clothing. Unlike the other women, her head is not covered. She wears her blonde hair tautly combed backwards and a coiffure with a braid. Over a delicate, translucent undergarment with golden piping she wears a dark red coat with fur trimming. With her right hand she grabs her forehead, with her left she holds the jar of ointment. Her attentive gaze is directed at the corpse, but David Kindt refrains from depicting any signs of exalted mourning. It seems very unusual that the theme was even depicted in Lutheran Hamburg, since this subject is rarely found in Protestant regions....

... ist into Jerusalem, dated 1643...

... ist, riding on a donkey, is accompanied by his disciples, who swing palm branches. The compositi...

11.2 The Life of David Kindt (c. 1580-1652)

... hers (died 1650 or 1651).17 Their names are mentioned in the records of a legal dispute between David Kindt and Leonhard Schers in 1610, where David Kindt complains that Leonhard Schers had left his apprenticeship early. In return, Leonhard Schers complains that David Kindt had become violent towards him.18 Leonhard Schers is known for his entry in the album amicorum of Gottfried Müller of 1619.19...

... ohannes Lange (died 1611) and his wife Salome (died 1637). The...

... development of a mill, located at the Alster river, into a building for water distribution.24 In the years 1611 and 1619 he bought a country house, land and another house on the Hinschenfelde from the son-in-law of Gilles Coignet (c. 1542-1599), Philipp Vanderveke, in the district of Trittau. In 1611 David Kindt accepted the grandson of Gilles Coignet as an apprentice. In 1611 he also bought the family tomb from the descendants of Gilles Coignet in St. Jacob’s Church.25 David Kindt died on 26 February 1652 in Hamburg.26 It remains unclear why...

5.6 Changes in Berlin : Churches and Houses

... a better situation was reflected in the changes of the Berlin residence also.106 In 1679-1681 the wooden booths outside of the palace were removed and replaced by 16 arcades of stone in which tradesmen could sell their goods. The design was made by Johann Arnold Nering, the practical realisation lay in the hands of Michiel Smids.107 In 1684-1686 the over a hundred-year-old big hall of the palace was replaced by the alabaster hall, which served as a meeting room for the nobility. Again, it was the combination Nering-Smids that took care for the about 10 metres high hall, with square metres. The walls were articulated with pilasters and in the niches in between marble statues of emperors and 11 electors, together with a statue of his own, made by Bartholomeus Eggers (c. 1637-1692), were placed [26]. The floor was made out of white and black marble. The ceiling contained stucco and large paintings.108 In 1685 Michiel Smids signed a contract for the building of a new orangery in the palace garden, designed by Johan Nering.109 In 1687, Smids built a new library wing designed by Nering on the eastside of the palace garden, directly along the Spree.110 The building was to be long and wide and should have three pavilions, connected by two galleries.111 The death of the elector, on 9 May 1688 terminated building activities. Only the walls of the ground floor were built [27].112...

... churches in Brandenburg.117Painter-architect Rutger van Langevelt was – as far as yet is known – responsible for the design of only one other building; the palace of Köpenick near (nowadays in) Berlin [29].118 The elector gave Köpenick to his sons in 1674, after the death of Karl Emil, it became the property of Friedrich, the future elector. In palace of three storeys high was realised, with a façade to the water and some axes and avenues to the other side....

4.3 Netherlandish Painters in Mecklenburg

... portrait of Ulrich's parents, Albrecht VII and Anna of Brandenburg and the magnificent portrait of Ulrich himself, dated 1587 [29].18As was usual even in the Netherlands, both Boeckel and Kromeny as court painters became also occupied with a host of other obligations apart from creating artworks. For instance, Kromeny supplied frames for his own paintings, designed title pages and painted flags to be hung from bugles and other petty work,19 while Boeckel painted geographical maps on canvas. The altar in Rühn may be Kromeny's most important work for art history, while one of his latest works, the genealogy of the Dukes of Pommerania, must be his largest [30]. The canvas, signed and dated 1598, in the Szczecin National Museum is almost 7 meters wide. As Carsten Neumann has pointed out, it too must have been a commission by Ulrich, probably a gift from Güstrow to the Pommeranian court from which his second wife Anna originated.20...

3.1 Mobility Capital and Transmigration

... nexplored. In many cases, migrant families initially left due to religious persecution and the threat of war and violence and later stayed highly mobile and maintained their old networks over large geographical distances....

... plication to an age with a different technological infrastructure and comparably limited possibilities to communicate effectively over longer geographical distances. In an early modern context, it is obvious that direct contacts to distant places played a crucial role and that the maintenance of networks through letter writing and traveling required more efforts than today....

... ging in an international surrounding – thus, the past mobility of parents can play a crucial role for future generations. These ideas sound familiar when we apply them to an early modern context, in which mobility experiences such as grand tours were seen as indispensable for young adults in the higher social strata, and apprenticeships abroad were an essential feature of the training of merchants, artists or artisans....

... tunities and often allowed them to build ‘a career out of displacement’.6 As ‘Renaissance go-betweens’, they were able to use their migrant background as a form of cultural capital as they possessed linguistic, cultural and artistic knowledge that could be of interest to their host societies. These observations have not yet been applied to the following migrant generations who were often more successful as cultural brokers between European regions an...

... er. Instead of moving away and leaving their connections to the former homeland behind, migrants rather maintain ‘multiple linkages to their homeland’ even when they are solidly established in their new host societies.7 In many cases, migrant families continue to move back and forth between their old and their new homes and connect both cultural spheres....

... ld hometowns behind but remained oriented towards the Low Countries. Many families travelled back and forth between Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Frankenthal and Nuremberg but even those who stayed maintained their old connections. Especially merchant families were able to benefit from their diaspora abroad: the Thijs (or Thysius) family, for example, originally from Antwerp, was dispersed between Danzig, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and La Rochelle, which enabled them to build a reliable network of commercial agents between these places.9 Even though the initial reason to leave Antwerp was not primarily motivated by the idea of building such a network, the outcomes were immensely beneficial.10...

... t helps us understand the specific benefits of mobility for professions in the cultural industries. In comparison to the first generation, the descendants of migrants understood their parents’ host societies better, an...

1.2 Numbers of Artists on the Move

... the Southern Netherlands. Still, according to RKDartists&, there is one group of artists that travelled abroad as much as the Flemings, or even slightly more: German artists. From the 4,352 German artists active before 1800, 30.95% (1,347) travelled abroad. They definitely travelled abroad much more than artists from the Northern Netherlands. In the chart bar showing a breakdown of the mobility abroad of the two Netherlands, Germany, France and Italy [8], it becomes clear that, except for the Southern Netherlandish, all artists migrated most in the 17th century, with Germany in the lead. The mobility of Flemish artists, in contrast, was strongest in the 16th century.Scholten and Woodall remarked that migrating artists ‘formed a group of a rather particular kind’ within the migrating population, although rather similar to merchants.36 Naturally, groups of migrants, e.g. sailors, soldiers, tramping journeymen and long-distance transhumance shepherds, are all different, being set in motion for other combinations of reasons. But do the migration rates of artists differ from the average rate of the rest of the migrants? Efforts have been made to quantify ‘cross-community migration’ in early modern Europe by Jan en Leo Lucassen, which led to the conclusion that Europe was much more mobile in this period than had previously been assumed. However, it is difficult to compare the general mobility rates presented in this study [9] to the results derived from RKDartists&, among others because the Lucassens included immigration.37 The trend seems similar, with the highest rates in the 17th century, before this level was to be exceeded in the second half of 19th century.38 This pattern has been described as the ‘two waves of mass migration’ in Van Lottum’s study on migration in the North Sea region.39 The first wave, that is the wave in the 17th century, is explained by Van Lottum as a result of the booming economy and magnetic pull of the Dutch Republic. Obviously, this cannot be the only reason for the similar development over the centuries of the mobility of artists in several European countries, including some that do not belong to the North Sea region. To find out if and to which extent the Dutch Republic in the 17th century was a magnet for artists from other European countries, we have to find out more about the directions of their mobility. So far, I have only verified this for the Germany lands (see § 1.6)....

13.2 Ovens’ Self-Portrait (c. 1652) : between Rembrandt and Van Dyck

... ne Sill of 1639 [6] and his related painting from 1640, Self-Portrait at the Age of 34 [5].19 However, whereas Rembrandt’s arm rests on a balustrade, Ovens leans on an imaginary similar structure.20 This, together with the fact that Ovens portrays himself closer to the picture plane than Rembrandt does in his etching, creates a different spatial effect.21 Furthermore, Rembrandt turns his body more towards the viewer than Ovens. As has been stated many times, in creating these self-portraits, Rembrandt drew inspiration from Titian’s Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo of circa 1509/10 and Raphael’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, executed some five years later, both of which Rembrandt saw in Amsterdam in the collection of Alfonzo Lopez (1572-1649).22...

... creative urge of his mind. The fashionable, expensive black cloak of Franchoys and Ovens is essentially a sign of dignity and was almost always worn by Van Dyck in his self-portraits.28With his self-portrait, Ovens introduced a novelty in Northern Germany in the early 1650s. In fact, self-portraits by artists were barely known there.29 We may assume that Ovens’ painting remained in private collections in the 17th and 18th centuries. Except for a rather stiff copy of an unknown artist [9], the work does not seem to have been imitated in Ovens’ native region.30 It is no coincidence that a fashion-conscious artist like Ovens based his painting not only on Rembrandt’s self-portraits from 1639 and 1640, but also partly on Van Dyck’s Iconography....

12.4 Group Two : Inscriptions on the Recto

... rankenthal, as there are several of his paintings listed in the inventory of the art dealer Cornelis Caymox.27 In the inventory of Van Coninxloo’s estate, several watercolor canvasses of a certain Hendrick are mentioned as well: Een Jaecht van Hendrick op doeck van waterverff; Een waterverff doeck van Hendrick; Noch een cleene ordonnance van Hendrik wit ende swart.28 Still, these works could well have been made by a different Hendrick. Therefore it remains uncertain if the Hendrick mentioned in the inscription, is indeed Hendrik Gijsmans....

... ntion. Surprisingly, the name Albrecht is also mentioned in this inscription, despite the handwriting being completely different.In 2015 a painting was auctioned at Dorotheum showing a similar landscape with only slight differences in architecture and perspective [2a]. Although it exhibits a similar vibrant color pallet to Van Coninxloo’s, the rather simplistic style of painting excludes his authorship....

... ration. Only two words in a similar handwriting are still readable ‘…coninxloo… and …francendael…’. The date 1588 also appears, however, it seems like this is a later addition in graphite instead.32...

... fer drastically, which complicates the relationship between the painting and the drawing. Yet, the rich use of color, and the style of painting closely resemble Van Coninxloo’s other paintings. However, as its present whereabouts is unknown, it remains impossible to attribute this panel to Gillis van Coninxloo. Furthermore, it is painted on panel while the inscription only mentions a canvas. Lastly, the painting has also been copied [4b] with added figures and small alterations in the landscape....

... ption of the inventory adds ‘Adriaen van Nieulandt?’ in his transcription as Van Nieulandt is also listed among the buyers at the sale of Van Coninxloo’s possessions.36 Yet, again it is uncertain whether the Adriaen from the inscription is Adriaen van Nieulandt. Further research on this artist may provide answers....

... copy drawing and the lettering of the print refer to Van Coninxloo as inventor, it becomes more likely that Jan Brueghel worked after a design of Van Coninxloo. However, the relationship between the two artists remains complicated and leaves much room for debate. It is also uncertain whether Jan Brueghel made a stop in Frankenthal during his voyage to the south.37...

10.4 Somehow Ubiquitous. The Line of Tradition

... – we find another example for this kind of publisher’s series in small format (and, it is hoped, at a modest price) [21-24]....

... e town of Berne and country [25-26]. Georg Conrad Bodenehr’s series of six views of Augsburg, also published by Jeremias Wolff and dating from around the year 1700, stands in the same tradition [27-30]....

... hical realities. At the same time, it is an outlet for the artist’s creativity (and perhaps even a necessity for living up to one’s own artistic standard)....

10.3 Views in and around the Village : The Schwalbach Village Views

... Schwalbach village views the viewer seems to be standing right in the centre of a rural landscape. The depiction of trees seems to help Merian to establish the position of the viewer between the surrounding forest, its periphery, and the centre of the village. In the Small Landscapes the trees are examples of a more compository style. Smoking chimneys and a number of decorative items in the Schwalbach village views also indicate in what way the two series differ. The Small Landscapes include depictions that are devoid of people and can do with a few farm animals. Merian’s additions might have been a conscious decision, but they could also point to his being ignorant of the original prints, having known only the copies made by Claes Jansz. Visscher (c. 1587-1652).23...

... r the influence of the Small Landscapes in southern Germany is still quite visible, for instance in Johann Ulrich Kraus’s afore-mentioned Views of Nuremberg [13-15, 20]. Kraus is another artist who sees through Netherlandish eyes, both in terms of compositional aspects and of the format of the series. There is one difference, though, and that is the fact that Kraus has given each of his views a name, thereby helping the viewer to identify the buildings depicted. The original drawings were made by another German, Johann Andreas Graff (1637-1701). Kraus’s Views of Nuremberg captivate the viewer with their simplicity and spatial integration at eye level....

... at had been brought together first in the series of prints from Antwerp.25In this respect, it can be said that the Small Landscapes somehow started a fashion that quickly spread throughout the German-speaking countries. Not only its publishing history, but the mere fact that Merian’s Schwalbach village views can be found in almost every collection of prints and drawings,26 show their popularity, matched, perhaps, only by the Small Landscapes themselves. There are, in the case of the Schwalbach village views, for example, test prints or proof copies, and there is the edition by Pierre Aubry, brought out in 1620-25, and the new edition by Christoph Weigel published in Nuremberg in 1690, as well as countless copies, ‘zahlreiche Nachstiche’27, which make it difficult for the scholar to establish a certain order. We can therefore assume that, by 1690, the motives developed in the Small Landscapes were well known in the south of Germany....