ENGLISH VERSION Karel van Mander. Principe et fondemente de l'art noble et libre de la Peinture. Les Belles Lettres, 2008

CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION

Karel van Mander
Principe et fondement de l’art noble et libre de la Peinture
Edited by Jan Willem Noldus

Les Belles Lettres, 2008

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro

Pieter Brueghel il Vecchio, The Tower of Babel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Anyone knowing Karel Van Mander heard of him as the Vasari of the North. The section of his work (the Schilder-boeck, or the Book on Painting) which has attracted more attention of the experts is in fact the one on the lives of the illustrious Netherlandish and German painters. Published in 1604 in Haarlem, then re-printed in 1618 in the second edition with the addition of a biography probably written by his son, the Schilder-boeck is however composed of six parts, which are summarized below: 

• The principles and foundations of the noble and free art of painting; 

• The Lives of the ancient painters (basically taken from Pliny); 

• The Lives of the Italian painters (he adheres closely to Vasari, although more information is added for developments occurred after the writing of the second edition of Vasari's Lives (1568): Van Mander, for example, provides indications on the life of Caravaggio); 

• The Lives of the Netherlandish and German painters; 

• A commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses; 

• A final section of iconography, dedicated to the representation of the ancient gods.

The section on northern biographies, as mentioned, is the most popular. There is one magnificent critical edition in English, in six volumes by Hessel Miedema; but also a recent Italian translation edited by Ricardo de Mambro Santos. Much less attention was devoted to everything else, especially the first part, namely the Principles and foundations of painting, which also constitute a fundamental milestone in the work of Van Mander. Published in a critical edition in Dutch (also curated by Hessel Miedema), the Principles are not available in Italian. We are helped, thankfully, by this translation in French, performed and commented by Jan Willem Noldus. Only by keeping in mind the breath and complexity of the work, we will be able to grasp the significant differences with respect to the project by Vasari.

What is, after all, the Schilder-boeck? A work of didactic content, clearly directed not to an audience of enthusiasts or collectors, but to the young painter during his training and targeted to provide tools that will enable him to become a complete artist. All six parts of the work of Van Mander share this purpose. The first book (whose original title is Den Grondt der Edel vrij Schilder-const) is intended to provide the disciple with a learning programme of both a theoretical and technical nature, which helps him to grow and mature. The other sections contain materials that the artist (as a cultivated person) must know: the examples, thus, of the preceding painters, whether Dutch, Flemish or Italian, ancient or modern, and some literary models (the Ovid's Metamorphoses or exhibitions of iconology on the kind of Ripa) to inspire him in the "invention" of the artwork. 

It is clear from now, therefore, that (while resorting at certain points of the model by Vasari) the Schilder-boeck is written with intentions very different from those of Vasari in his Lives. Van Mander’s goal is not to outline a historical model of art development from the Middle Ages onwards, crowning with Michelangelo; nor to support the supremacy of a particular region for substantially courtesan purposes. Van Mander aims instead at writing a training manual - both technical and theoretical - which should be able to raise the status of the artist from the mere craft level of the guilds to the "noble" and "free" exercise of painting. From this point of view, the Schilder-boeck is much more closely related to Alberti's De Pictura or the Book of the Art by Cennini than to Vasari. But there is a (very Italian-centric) preconception that the topics addressed by Van Mander in the Netherlands (but also, for example, by the theorists of the Spanish Golden Century) cannot be but a tedious rhetorical repetition of commonplaces of the art literature of the sixteenth century in Italy. Nothing could be more wrong. In fact there is ample evidence that forms of professional organization of the arts with a medieval footprint (essentially: the corporations or guilds, whatever you want to say) have ruled the arts (even in Italy) at least until the boom of the creation of the academies in the eighteenth century (see the masterful “Academies of Art, Past and Present” by Nikolaus Pevsner (1940)). The world in which Van Mander moves is still the world of the guilds. 

Pieter Brueghel il Vecchio, The Peasant Wedding, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

It is just obvious that, in the Netherlands, Van Mander was a highly unusual figure as an artist: a man, first of all, who came from a family of the lower nobility, with a cultural education far from trivial; a passionate lover of art, but especially of literature.  Of theatre and poetry. With particular admiration for Pierre de Ronsard, one of the founders of the Pléiade. A man who, when young, travelled to Italy and stayed there for three years. He personally met an elderly Vasari; arrived in the peninsula when the myth of Michelangelo (who had died less than ten years before) still resisted the counter-reformation’s policy on images and displayed itself in the maniere ('manners') of his followers. But even a person who had experienced first-hand the tragedy of war. A native of the Southern Netherlands (i.e. a Flemish Dutch), he is forced later to immigrate to Haarlem (however not immediately after the outbreak of the civil war). He knows the misery, but he is able to recover through the exercise of his profession, and creates an Academy (along with the friends and colleagues Hendrick Goltzius and Cornelis Cornelisz), clearly intended to emphasise his distance from the guilds.

There has been much discussion about the religion of Van Mander. It is not an idle debate, in the sense that this issue has an impact also on his writings. It was certainly neither Lutheran nor Calvinist; most likely he was not even Catholic, but simply a Baptist. Thus, he did not recognise any church hierarchy, but he believed in freedom and personal interpretation of sacred texts. Under this point of view, the approach of Van Mander is particularly 'open' for those times. Noldus (p. XXI) notes how the Principles will prove to be a widely inter-confessional text; there are no statements in favour of this or that profession of faith. When, in his work, Van Mander in fact suggests the figure of the artist as an intermediary between the heavenly realm and the earthly world (anticipating, in a nutshell, a theme that will be after centuries by the Nabis), he does not use, for example, the figures of the Saints, not to offend the religious sensibilities of anyone (in the Catholic world, it would have been normal to compare the artist to Saint Luke, the prototype of the painter, who, according to tradition, portrayed the first image of the Virgin and Child, inspired directly from God); but he uses the image of the rainbow as an expression of divine inspiration that directly impacts the artist. 

In fact, the artist's task is to "live well”: "The fact of living, of living well is the basis of all ethics, outside any rule, of any principle whatsoever. True art, for each artist, is a lifestyle, which means both that we can be truly artist only if we know how to live, and on the other hand that knowing how to live provides a universal wisdom that permits addressing all areas of art. It is in this sense that we must understand the anecdotes which Van Mander reports on painters: Raphael is nice, Apelles is polite. It is not only about looking at them in a moralising way, but mostly to show that they have a vision of life. The role of every artist is to allow others to live well, both by being himself a good model, and by putting the others on the right path through his art. Therefore, living well is the principle and fundament of art"(p. XXI). 

How can you get to "live well"? Or, in other terms, how can you become a good artist? Of course, following a long apprenticeship with a teacher (pp. XXIX-XXXI); an internship divided in phases: you start learning how to prepare the materials (canvasses and colours) and to practice in the design; you draw "following the life” or reproducing reality, objects, people, animals that you see before our eyes. After five or six years of training you pass to painting "according to the teachers." It is an advanced stage of the studium (study), in which one analyses the ways of painting of his master, but also of the great examples of previous painting and replicates the way they operate. The next step, the final step is to draw "according to nature"; whereby nature, mind you, does not mean the world around us, but our character, our style. Painting according to nature means to express the ingenium (talent) next to the studium: "Nature is not the outside world: that is the nature of the artist, it is innate, his ingenium. The artist draws from his mind, as formed with new ideas, with new approaches; he is master, that is to say, he is capable of invention, a very important concept throughout the Principles, to which the whole chapter on the order is devoted" (p. XXXI). What allows a painter to switch from the second to the third stage? One thing to which Van Mander attaches great importance, i.e. emulation. It is emulation which first allows to reproduce the style of the master and then pushes to overcome it, to express the own ingenium, and then to ripen the own style, allowing to be able to produce inventions. Here emerges a very dear theme to Italian Mannerism: "The invention is a visualization: first of all an interior one - the imagination of an idea, a story; this is what the Italians call the disegno interno (interior design), the design as design, the internal project which is a sort of drawing displayed on an interior imaginary screen. Then, the painter externalizes, implements this visualization in a work. It is impossible to invent, if one does not know the tradition. The invention is nourished with erudition and experience "(idem). 

Hans Holbein il Giovane, The Ambassadors, National Gallery, Londra

There are so many things to say (and the introduction of Noldus is particularly interesting). First things first. 

After reading the lines reproduced above, the ultimate goal of the Schilder-boeck is best understood, at least I hope. Van Mander is the teacher who gives young artists the material to make them switch from the second to the third stage: on the one hand, the theoretical teaching, on the other one the practical one. He offers to the reader the model of the artists through their biographies (all artists are models of equal range, as they are all capable of invention; there is no "ranking" and no evolutionary process culminating with Michelangelo, as in Vasari). And finally he provides literary and iconographic materials that will help the invention. 

We have mentioned the Italian Mannerists. It is clear that Van Mander is under the influence of mannerism. The theme of the 'interior design’ and that of the Idea are and will be particularly dear to theorists such as Zuccari, Lomazzo, and Bellori. Van Mander shows that he has lived in Italy for a long time, and that he was able to grasp the most up-to-date stimulus of that artistic environment. 

Compared to the theoretical elaborations on the interior design derived from Italian sources, Van Mander shows however his originality by insisting particularly on the immediate translation of the Idea into a work of art. There is therefore an attention to the process of translation, the implementation of the Idea into an image that is particularly compelling and which is the real core of artistic activity. In this context, of particular importance is the colour. It is no coincidence if the Principles, which start with issues concerning design, conclude with a chapter on the meaning of the colours. In fact, in the course of the work, the handling of colours appears in at least three chapters; and this also outlines the structure of the book, which proceeds through subsequent discussions of topics proposed several times (like if it was aimed at enabling the reader to experience and metabolize them, and then at analysing them again and enhancing their knowledge). The reflection that Van Mander makes on colours (and therefore their use, which should be appropriate) is very interesting. Very interesting primarily because it uses the narrations of the explorer Girolamo Benzoni and his Historia del Mondo Nuovo (History of the New World), published in Venice in 1565. Benzoni tells of the Inca king Atahualpa, who asks a missionary how he may be certain that Christ, who gave life for us, also created the world. The priest replied that it is written in his breviary and hands it to him. Atahualpa examines it and throws it to ground. For him to interpret the signs that are drawn on the book (the letters of the words) is inconceivable. On the other hand, however, in the homes of Inca one can find artefacts of different colours, which – just depending on their colours - indicate different moments in the history of their civilization, and there are experts who know how to judge their significance examining them at first sight. The colour is therefore the true universal language. And it is a language that can have different meanings, depending on where you are, "In short, anywhere in the world, / with all kinds of peoples (you cannot be mistaken) / the nature of colours, strengths and qualities are essential/ and their effects and their meanings. / That the latter can be very diverse, it is manifest in the East / with the Javanese. For them, indeed, white means and raises / sadness, while black is a sign / of anything that can bring pleasure and joy"(p. 189). Beyond the attention to distant worlds (which is no doubt an outcome of trade openness of the Netherlands in the world), the message is that colours are read, and that their meaning changes depending on who does it. Hence the importance to know them properly, to translate the interior design into an image. 

I purposely left for last the linguistic and literary aspect. The Principles are written in Dutch, but they have a feature that makes them unique in 1604, when they are published. It is a poem in rhyme; to be accurate, in octaves with an abaabbcc structure. Italian art literature presents artistic texts in poetic form, but they are all of a subsequent date and have a Baroque nature (the Galeria by Marino is perhaps the most critical expression of it). There is nothing baroque, instead, in the style by Van Mander. We have already alluded to the fact that the artist was fond of poetry; he had composed a whole series of compositions inspired to Ronsard and his classicism. The decision to write the Principles in rhyme is not done to impress, or to captivate the reader. It has indeed a precise pedagogical function: it helps to memorise the text; a key aspect, when we consider that it was a work for young painters. The rhyming structure of the work, however, is most likely one of the reasons that it has been a disincentive for a translation into any other languages. Translators were faced with the choice whether to try to reproduce the same metric, thus keeping the musicality of the text, but losing the fidelity of the translation itself; or whether to sacrifice the rhymes and instead try to keep the text as much as possible in line with the meaning of the original. Noldus has followed, rightly so in my view, this second path.