[From van Eyck to Brueghel. Writings on Arts by Dominicus Lampsonius]

Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro
Translation by Giovanni Mazzaferro
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Da van Eyck a Brueghel
Scritti sulle arti di Domenico Lampsonio
[From van Eyck to Brueghel
Writings on Arts by Dominicus Lampsonius]
Introductions and notes by Gianni Carlo Sciolla and Caterina Volpi
Translations by Maria Teresa Sciolla

Turin, UTET, 2001

Jan van Eyck, Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, about 1435, Paris, Louvre Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Lampsonius, the Flemish scholar

In Italy, the name of Dominicus Lampsonius (1532-1599) is directly associated to Vasari, who acknowledged him as one of the sources deserving merit for the chapter on "several Flemish artifices" which was introduced in the second edition of his Lives (the Giuntina, 1568) and was not included in the first one (the Torrentiniana, 1550).

One thing is certain: Vasari and Lampsonius did exchange correspondence, but never met. Unlike many of his Flemish compatriots, whether artists or members of circles of antiquarian erudition or philosophy, Lampsonius was never in Italy. To impede him travelling (to his great regret, judging by what is written in his works) was the professional activity as secretary and adviser he performed uninterruptedly for three prince-bishops of Liege. Lampsonius, in short, was, from a certain point of view, a senior bureaucrat, whom were entrusted delicate diplomatic and administrative functions. I highly doubt that he considered himself a "courtier", at least judging from what he wrote in the Life of Lambert Lombard, his master in the arts (see below) about Lombard himself: "he called the courtiers “the purple ones", implying with this epithet that they only possessed the purple of their clothes, sometimes allowing themselves to make jokes on and pranks aimed at people who seemed to possess nothing, either by birth or in terms of wealth ..." (p. 56). More likely, Lampsonius considered himself a humanist, that is an integral part of a circle of wise and learned people who cultivated erudite interests, related to science, philosophy and art: whether cartographers, numismatics or artists, these men were influenced by the thought of Erasmus, showed to be relatively open about the religious questions that in those years were bloodying and dividing Europe, were united by a passion for antiques and collectibles, and used Latin as a common language, which allowed exchanges of views among them regardless of the knowledge of the individual languages. One of them, for example, was that Samuel Quiccheberg who drafted the first treaty in the history of museology in 1565. All, without exception, looked at Italy, and Rome in particular, as the homeland of the ancient culture; and in Rome they found support and backing in particular at the court of the Farnese family, which was particularly open, at the end of the Sixteenth century, to the contamination coming from Northern Europe.

Jan and Hubert van Eyck, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, about 1430-32, Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Lampsonius and Italy Attraction

Gianni Carlo Sciolla and Caterina Volpi have presented the Lampsonius texts in chronological order. I tend to believe that they can be divided into two parts: on the one hand the printed texts, i.e. the Life of Lambert Lombard (1565) and the Portraits of famous Flemish painters (1572), on the other one the private correspondence and in particular two letters to Giorgio Vasari (1564 and 1565), one to Titian (1567) and a fourth one to Giulio Clovio (1570). In many ways, these are nothing but fragments of the literary production of Lampsonius, that besides being the secretary of the bishops of Liege, was above all a poet and artist. In particular, the passion for art was something that - according to his own words in the first letter to Vasari – was imprinted in him since the very early days. Lampsonius used to be a painter (although one painting only remains of him) fully inserted into the "fashion" of the so-called "Roman" Flemish artists, i.e. of those artists who, after the Roman experience, brought back home the stylistic features of the Italian manner. The wave of these artists began in the early sixteenth century and became impetuous in the second half of the century. To make a journey to Rome had become an imperative (thus, Lampsonius regretted not having been able to do it) and the taste that was imported in Flanders was the "heroic" one of Michelangelo and his Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. For this reason, as we said, one of the reference places in Rome was indeed the Farnese court, around which gathered the champions of Michelangelism, when things began changing and the work of Michelangelo was openly challenged. The "spiritual father" of these Flemish artists was precisely Lambert Lombard (1505-1566), who returned to Liege after a one year stay in Rome (1537) and decided to found here an Academy on the model of Baccio Bandinelli. Lombard had joined that Academy precisely in Rome. To attend the Academy of Liege, in fact a drawing school, were Lampsonius and other artists who would mark the Flemish artistic production over the next decades: Willem Key, Lambert Suavius, Hubert Goltzius, Lucas de Heere and Frans Floris. 

Dominicus Lampsonius, Crucifixion, Church of Saint-Quentin, Hasselt
Source: Wikimedia Commons

As Lampsonius followed the myth of the "modern manner", it does not surprise that he decided to purchase a copy of Vasari's Lives once the Torrentina edition had been released. In the above-cited letter to Vasari (dating from 1564), the humanist wrote he had managed to get hold of it four years earlier, and (perhaps exaggerating) stated to have learned Italian (he already knew Latin and Greek) just studying the Lives. There must be some part of truth (and thus not only the will of flattery towards Vasari), since the sample which belonged to the man of letters still exists and shows, at the beginning of the work, a poem in praise of the same Vasari, hand-written by Lampsonius [1].

Lambert Lombard, Self-Portrait, Saint Petersburg, Hermitage Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Life of Lambert Lombard

However, when it came to choose a literary path matching with the artistic activity, Lampsonius seemingly proposed different solutions than those of Vasari. The Life of Lambert Lombard itself, written in 1565 and printed in such a limited number of copies to suggest a distribution only among the disciples of the artist (who died a year later), was not a biographical medallion in the strict sense. The attention to the events in the life of the artist and to the catalogue of artworks was virtually zero. If anything, the totally humanistic intention prevailed to propose Lombard as an example and role model. Within the Life of Lombard, for example, Lampsonius defined those limits inside which the painter must operate. Certainly, there was not much new compared to the previous Italian art literature, but it was also the first time we saw that such a systematic (and pro-Italian) discourse was developed by a Flemish painter:

"The first masters of Lombard lacked those qualities that made a drawing seduce the eyes and the spirit of the educated people: the doctrine and the intelligence that reveals the artist as erudite and prudent in the invention, but also rich in imagination; the ability to place the figures in harmony, to be submitted, in the individual parts, not only to proportionate beauty, but to a majestic  and ample motion realised with well-calibrated attitudes, movements and gestures, as the subject itself requires. These are the qualities you like best in a painting, in which we must also find a sense of proportion, beauty, calm, vigour and vehemence of doing or at least a certain enthusiasm; or, conversely, languor, abandonment, softness; in short, the sensitive expression of some passion that produces the same effect of language ... "(p. 50)

The choice Lombard (and consequently Lampsonius) made was clear:

"[Lombard] recognized to Titian the splendour and vivid colours that evoked nature with so much power to capture senses at a first glance. But it was especially Andrea Mantegna, Michelangelo and Baccio that he had elected as models among the artists. He worshiped them as heroes, because he found in them a genius and an inspiration superior to those of other painters, although he recognized that the works of the latter could be criticized by those who sought decorum and formal perfection in the artworks...".

Titian and Michelangelo were the two giants of the Italian Cinquecento; the presence of Bandinelli can be explained by the attendance of his Academy in Rome. It is surprising, in some way, the high esteem which he had of Mantegna, from others concerned as a "dry" artist. But it is precisely in these characteristics that Lombard gleaned that "genius" which we mentioned a moment ago: 

"These works, made up of images with very simple colours, were perfectly fitting, he said, with the ancient works. Because of these aspects, they were in line with the grammatical rules of those, and therefore he recognized in them the foundation of his art "(p.52).

Portraits of Flemish famous painters

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight between Carnival and Lent, 1559, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Published in Antwerp in 1572 in Latin (the original title is Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies) [note of the translator: literally, ‘Some portraits of famous painters in lower Germany’] the Portraits of Flemish painters marked a further distancing from the method of Vasari's Lives. The booklet of Lampsonius recalled the collections of emblems and, more than Vasari, the Elogi degli Uomini Illustri (Portraits of Illustrious Men) by Paolo Giovio, published by Torrentino in 1551, it being understood that neither the latter publication nor Vasari's Lives did contain the portraits of the artifices (which were however planned in the initial project and were inserted into later editions). The Portraits were precisely 23 engravings dedicated to artists, under which were displayed very short poetic compositions of Lampsonius, aiming at characterizing the main qualities of the respective artists. As far as the fifteenth century, the choice of subjects appears inspired to the already occurred historic classification of the artifices (which began with Hubert and Jan van Eyck, the "inventors" of oil painting) and continued through the sixteenth century, with particular attention to the "Roman" Flemish. The Portraits are nevertheless an excellent opportunity to clarify how, despite being very close to the world Italian, Lampsonius identified Flemish specificities, which he mentioned in all his published writings and also in the letters to Vasari, Clovio and Titian. I believe that under this point of view it is useful to mention, for example, his verses for Jan van Amstel (p. 86):

"It is the pride of Flemish to paint well the landscapes,

the Italian paint well men and gods.

No wonder: it is said

that Italians have the brain in the head,

while the Flemish in the capable hands.

You then choose that your hand

paints well landscapes

rather than your head

wrongly paints men and gods."

Just facing the Flemish specificity, Lampsonius recognized the Italian superiority in "history painting", considered in Italy as the dominant genre, but flagged how the mastery of hand of his countrymen had firmly enhanced landscape painting and (as he will discuss in other occasions) portraiture. That the Flemish humanist had a somewhat different hierarchy of art genres from that of the Italians was also reflected by a passage from the first letter to Vasari, where Lampsonius, talking about his work as a painter, said to have designed "natural things, and above all naked people, or wearing clothes of every kind", but that he had not enough courage to go beyond "and in particular to paint more indefinite things, requiring a more expert and safer hand, like landscapes, trees, water, clouds, splendours, fires etc." (p. 35).

I would suggest that this assessment on "the brain in the hands" could not only be a rhetorical device, but something more, i.e. a distinctive character of a literature that combines theory and practice. I do not think it is a coincidence, moreover, that this type of argument was also supported by Charlene Villaseñor Black with reference to the later treatise on painting by Francisco Pacheco. It would be indeed needed to evaluate more carefully, in short, the influence of the Flemish art theory on the Spanish one, in order to highlight their common features.

Antonis Mor, Portrait of  Queen Mary, 1554, Prado Museum, Madrid
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Engraving

One thing is certain. In the appreciation of the Flemish specificities, Lampsonius attached great importance to engraving as an art. He fully captures the outreach potential of etchings, especially because of "their infinite multiplication thanks to the truly divine invention of printing" (p. 128). In fact, one should observe that Lampsonius was able to build an artistic culture precisely thanks to engraving (let us remember – he never came to Italy). Probably, the writer also realised the failure of ekphrasis as a language description of art, and he thought it had to be paired with an illustration of art works. The fact is that one of the most often discussed topics in his letters to Vasari, Titian and Clovio was precisely the existence of young and excellent Flemish engravers (above all, Cornelis Cort) whose activity Lampsonius sought to promote with the leading artists working in Italy. We do not know if this was also due to Lampsonius’ support, but the fact is that Cort met a remarkable success in our country (first in Venice with Titian, then in Rome with Clovio, Girolamo Muziano and Federico Zuccari). Lampsonius did not stop short of proposing highly ambitious projects both to Vasari (the production of a work with Vasari’s drawings related to scenes of the Old and New Testament, to be transformed into printable etchings by Cort and accompanied by poems of the same Lampsonius) as well as to Clovio (the printing of etchings of the whole Last Judgement by Michelangelo). The fact is that, in those years, the Flemish artifices firmly established themselves in Italy for their skills in the etching, so that Vasari decided to include a brief history of engraving in the second edition of the Lives.

Cornelis Cort, St. Jerome in meditation, after Titian, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum
Source: http://alchetron.com/Cornelis-Cort-752256-W

The influence on Vasari's Lives

We do not know what information Lampsonius passed to Vasari about the Flemish artists. The brevity of the relevant chapter suggests that it was very sketchy news (after all, as mentioned, Lampsonius was not specifically a biographer). Vasari cited the Flemish correspondent on three occasions: the first time about Frans Floris, Willem Key and Mattijs Cock: "where the Flemish Messer Domenico Lampsonius (...) compares them to a harmonious music accord, where each of them makes his part with excellence” [2]; then about the activity of Antonis Mor and finally when talking about Lambert Lombard. In the latter case, Vasari also quoted the text of the first letter of Lampsonius, that of October 1564, by which the latter introduced himself. The quotation of the letter ended abruptly with the statement by Vasari: "This letter contains, besides this, many other details, which is not appropriate to quote here." As the original did not come to us, we know nothing about it. In the second letter, which has come to us, Lampsonius wrote in April 1565: "As to what you would desire, namely that I would send you some treatise of our artifices which would seem worthy of memory, unfortunately I do not know any others that those few, which I specified in my previous missive" (p. 40). According to Hessel Miedema, author of a monumental and fundamental edition of the Lives of van Mander (van Mander himself presented a Flemish translation of the texts of the Portraits in the second edition of his Schilderboeck (1618)), the information would be contained in the part of the letter that Vasari cut out in his work [3]. I have a different view. The letter of October 1564 was clearly a self-presentation text to Vasari. It does not seem logical that Lampsonius provided him unsolicited information. It should also be noted that the second letter known to us, in the following year, was accompanied by a copy of the Life of Lambert Lombard. All leads to the result, in short, that there was a denser (and unfortunately lost) correspondence in which the project of transmitting information matured gradually.

NOTES

[1] See in this blog Giovanni Mazzaferro, The Annotated Specimens of Vasari's Lives: an Inventory.

[2] Opere di Giorgio Vasari con nuove annotazioni e commenti di Gaetano Milanesi (The works of Giorgio Vasari with new annotations and comments by Gaetano Milanesi). Facsimile reprint of the 1906 edition, Florence, Sansoni, 1973, vol. VII, p. 585.

[3] Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, Vol II, p. 173 Davaco, Doornspijk, 1995.