The deck has lengthy been stacked towards Maarten van Heemskerck, a large of Sixteenth-century Dutch artwork. Celebrated in his lifetime for non secular and mythological scenes, and for his standard print collection depicting the traditional Wonders of the World, Van Heemskerck (1498-1574), a pious Catholic, lived lengthy sufficient to see his native northern Netherlands turn out to be Protestant, beginning within the 1540s. By the 1560s, his extravagantly Italianate works had been being destroyed or scattered in a wave of Calvinist iconoclasm. Then, over the course of the Seventeenth century, as a gentle output of landscapes and style scenes helped form trendy Dutch identification, he was progressively consigned to a previous that few cared to recollect.
Van Heemskerck has been the topic of an ongoing rediscovery for the reason that Nineteen Eighties, when he was a breakout determine in a landmark present on the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam that checked out Dutch artwork earlier than the foremost iconoclastic occasions of 1566. 4 a long time later, on the 450th anniversary of his demise, the artist is able to be enshrined as a preferred determine with a present of 130 works over three Dutch museums.
Haarlem place to begin
In Haarlem, the town the place he skilled and later labored, the Frans Hals Museum will have a look at the early a long time of his profession, as much as the purpose the place he departed for Rome in 1532. A brief stroll away, the town’s Teylers Museum will show some 65 Heemskerck prints, together with his Wonders of the World collection. In the meantime, 30km north, the Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar will look at his 4 years within the Rome of Michel-angelo and the decades-long aftermath.
The three-part present displays years of analysis into the artist, a lot led by the Dutch scholar Ilja M. Veldman. Veldman’s work has led to quite a lot of new identifications of sitters, together with a 1543-44 oil-on-panel portrait of a girl now believed to be the artist’s first spouse, Marie Jacobsdr de Coninck, which can be on view in Alkmaar.
The 2 restored panels of Saint Luke Portray the Madonna (1532) Frans Hals Museum; Photograph: René Gerritsen; modifying Ton van der Heide
Van Heemskerck’s future was altered for good by his Roman sojourn, however his earlier part produced a number of exceptional work. Man of Sorrows (1532) remade what was normally a small devotional scene of a determine considering Christ’s ardour right into a monumental close-up of human struggling.
These pre-Rome years culminated in Saint Luke Portray the Madonna, primarily based on the Byzantine legend that turned the Evangelist right into a painter. Created in 1532 as two massive panels—one displaying the Madonna and a spry Christ baby, and the opposite an aged Luke onerous at work on his picture-within-a-picture—they had been joined collectively in a single huge panel round 45 years later.
Now, as a part of a current conservation remedy, the works have been transformed again into separate pendant panels. The accompanying remedy has additionally uncovered a brightened grey-blue background, including to the work’ expansive depiction of area. Christi M. Klinkert, the senior curator of Outdated Masters on the Frans Hals Museum and curator of the Alkmaar portion of Martin van Heemskerck, calls the 2 works “the spotlight of the present.”
Van Heemskerck made essentially the most of his keep in Rome, the place he produced almost 200 drawings, the overwhelming majority of which at the moment are a part of the gathering of Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett. A number of of those drawings will make their technique to the Netherlands, together with a pen-and-brown-ink sketch of the Belvedere Torso (1532-36), the 5ft-high historical statue fragment that had an infinite impression on Michelangelo, amongst others.
Van Heemskerck’s Belvedere Torso (1532-36) Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett; Photograph: Dietmar Katz, public area
Remembrance of Rome
Again in Haarlem by early 1537, Van Heemskerck spent the remainder of his profession utilizing and reusing what he noticed and did in Rome. The impression of these years is taken into account in Self-Portrait with the Colosseum (1553), on mortgage from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Right here, together with his personal likeness within the foreground, the artist turns Rome right into a type of reverie, with the Colosseum as a looming image of the passage of time.
After Rome, Van Heemskerck collaborated on etchings and engravings with Dirck Volkertsz Coornhert from Amsterdam, a real Renaissance man: a printer, theologian, notary and politician. The Teylers presents the fruits of its labours in works like The Satan Fills the Human Coronary heart with Want for Worldly Issues (1550), which can be proven together with the unique Van Heemskerck drawing that impressed it. In a sardonic and sinister tackle the artist at work, the etching reveals the satan with a palette, defacing the human coronary heart with symbols of vice.
Rembrandt was a fan of Van Heemskerck’s prints. However the brand new concepts of Dutchness that developed throughout Rembrandt’s lifetime had no place for the sooner artist’s Excessive Renaissance tendencies. The cows, meadows and still-lifes that dominated Seventeenth-century Dutch artwork, and dwell on as we speak as nationwide symbols, “spoiled it” for the likes of Van Heemskerck, says Veldman, who likes to sum up the canon-making interval as “that damned Golden Age”. The Golden Age’s debt to Van Heemskerck can be recalled on the Teylers, which incorporates Rembrandt etchings that had been straight impressed by the work of the Haarlem artist.
• Maarten van Heemskerck, Frans Hals Museum and Teylers Museum, Haarlem; Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar; 28 September-19 January 2025
