Yapp is a magazine created by the Book and Digital Media Studies master's students at Leiden University.

Transcription

1 Yapp is a magazine created by the Book and Digital Media Studies master's students at Leiden University. The handle holds the full collection of Yapp in the Leiden University Repository. Copyright information Text: copyright 2014 (Lorne Darnell). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Image: Karel van Mander, Theodoor Matham.

2 Title page of Het Schilder-Boeck, 1604 edition. Drawing: Karel van Mander; engraving: Theodoor Matham. Image: Koninklijke Bibliotheek. 130

3 Het Schilder-Boeck: A seminal first for Northern European art history lorne darnell HET Schilder-Boeck Waerin Voor eerst de leerlusti- ghe Iueght den grondt der Edel Vry SCHILDERCONST in Verscheyden deelen Wort Voorghedraghen Daer nae in dry deelen t leven der Vermaerde door luchtighe Schilders Des ouden en nieuwentyds Entlyck d uutlegghinghe op den METAMORPHOSEON pub. Ouidij Naso Nis Oock daerbeneffens uutbeeldinghe der Figuren Alles dienstich en nut den Schilders Constbeminders, en dichters, oock Allen staten van menschen Door Carel van Mander Schilder Voor PASCHIER VAN WESBUSCH Boeck vercooper Tot HAERLEM 1604 Met Privilegie Text from the title page of the 1604 edition (Haarlem: Paschier van Wesbuch) Born in Meulebeke, Belgium in 1548, Karel van Mander studied drawing and painting in Ghent, Kortrijk and Rome before taking up residence in Haarlem in With Cornelis of Haarlem and Hendrick Goltzius he was the founder of an informal art academy called the Haarlem Mannerists. Influenced by classical art, the work of Michelangelo, and that of their contemporary Bartholomaeus Spranger, they were instrumental in the spread of the muscular, physically contorted Mannerist style in the Netherlands. While van Mander s own artistic output has perhaps been overshadowed by that of his fellow academicians, he is best remembered for his influential Schilder-Boeck, a historical and theoretical work modelled on Giorgio Vasari s Le Vite de più Eccellenti Pittori, Scultori, e Architettori (1550). Widely recognized as the foundational text of modern Western art history, Vasari s Vite provided the earliest biographical details for many names now synonymous with the Renaissance: Botticelli, da Vinci, and Pontormo, among others. At the same time, he provided the template which later artists biographies would be modelled on, including sections on early life, studio training, and important works. Though he focused primarily on artists from his native Florence, Vasari also included Venetian, German, and Netherlandish figures: Titian, Dürer, and Lucas van Leyden. Much of this material forms the basis of Van Mander s work. In the Schilder-Boeck, Van Mander directly translates nearly half of Vasari s 131

4 biographies, supplementing them with those of his own contemporaries, both Italian and Northern, who had come to fame after Vasari s death. Thus it is from the Schilder-Boeck that we have the earliest accounts of the engraver and painter Goltzius, of the polymath Hans Vredeman de Vries, and of David Vinckboons, a key figure in the development of genre painting. As the first of many who would later copy the Vite, van Mander at once affirmed Vasari s aesthetic judgments in the artists he chose and disseminated those judgments, acting as a sort of midwife for the burgeoning Western canon. The Schilder-Boeck also helped to legitimate the idea of a purely Northern tradition by putting contemporary painters of the region alongside revered masters. Some of those painters, and many who came after, were inspired by the book to travel to Italy, bringing the influence of Classicism with them as they returned home. Finally, as one of the rare art historical-theoretical texts written in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, van Mander s work offers valuable insights into the ways in which viewers of the period valued art, both on the grounds of content and style. In turn, the Schilder-Boeck itself became the model for those few other texts that allow us to track the progression of taste in the North: among others, Cornelis de Bie s Het Gulden Cabinet der Edel Vry Schilderconst (1662), Samuel van Hoogstraten s Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst (1677), and Arnold Houbraken s De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen (1718). The book appeared in two editions. The 1604 edition includes a list of errata and an index that van Mander himself is likely to have prepared. The second edition was printed in 1618, twelve years after van Mander s death, and includes a short anonymous biography of its author. The first edition, with which this description is concerned, was published by Paschier van Wesbusch, a publisher and bookseller active in Haarlem from around 1601 until Like van Mander, van Wesbusch was a Mennonite of Southern Netherlandish origin in his case, Menen in Flanders. His output consisted primarily of Mennonite tracts, aside from a selection of van Mander s other mostly literary works. His main audience thus seems to have been other immigrants of Southern extraction, though the Schilder- Boeck would obviously have had wider appeal. As van Wesbusch lacked his own press, he outsourced the work to a variety of printers, all of whom had come originally from the South as well: M. van den Vyvere in Leiden, G. and A. Rooman in Haarlem, J. Tournay in Enkhuizen, G. van den Rade in Franeker, and Jacob de Meester in Alkmaar. It is de Meester, a Brugenaar once apprentice in Haarlem to Rooman, whom van Wesbusch selected to print the Schilder-Boeck. The book consists of six sections: the Grondt, a poem introducing the work and its intent; the lives of the painters of ancient Greece and Rome; the lives of the Italian painters; the lives of the Dutch and German painters; a translation of Ovid s Metamorphosis; and finally a discussion of the iconography of Greek, 132

5 Roman, and Egyptian antiquity. The book contains two title prints designed by van Mander himself and engraved by Jacob Matham. The first appears at the beginning as the general title page of the book, while the second appears at the head of the section featuring the Metamorphosis. The remaining four sections are headed by typographical title pages. The inclusion of title prints, present only in this first edition, is unusual among the works of de Meester. They are found in only one other of the approximately twenty-five books produced by him. Their inclusion in the Schilder-Boeck is perhaps then a mark of its status as envisioned by van Mander and his publisher. That there were two title prints is explained by the fact that the work was offered in three possible combinations: as the six sections complete, of course; or, as either the Grondt, with the lives of the Ancient, Italian, Dutch and German painters together; or the Metamorphosis with the discussion of antique iconography. As such, the latter two possibilities would each have their own title page. These smaller editions could thus be sold off more cheaply to buyers who were only interested in the respective subjects. Of this first edition, thirty-eight copies are known to have survived. Among them is an example at the Royal Library, The Hague, with van Mander s own marginalia. Bibliography Biblioteca Belgica: Bibliographie Générale des Pays-Bas. Ed. M.T. Lenger, et al. Vol. 5. Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, Mander, K. van. Het Schilder-Boeck. Haarlem: Paschier van Wesbusch, Mander, K. van. Het Schilder-Boeck. Ed. H. Miedema. Vol. 1. Doornspijk: DAVACO, Waterschoot, W. Karel van Mander s Schilder-Boeck (1604): A Description of the Book and Its Setting. Quaerendo 13.4 (1983):