Baroque and Rococo

 

Baroque and Rococo Art Map

 

The Art of the Portrait


 

Masterpieces of European Portrait-Painting


1420-1670

 

Portraits of 16th and 17th-century Rulers

 

see also:


Anthony van Dyck

 

Anthony van Dyck:


Charles I of England, Hunting


 

Antonu van Dyck
Charles I: King of England at the Hunt
1635
Oil on canvas
Musee du Louvre, Paris

 

Soon after his graduation as master of St. Luke's painters' guild in Antwerp (1618), Anthony van Dyck, who had worked independently since 1615 when barely more than a youth, started work on a number of important paintings in the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, who was twenty-two years his senior. Rubens's influence on the style of the younger artist is unmistakable, and this was as good an entry as any to the world of society portraiture, both at home and abroad. Van Dyck specialised in portraiture from very early on. An important early work is the double portrait, actually a pair, of a Genucse senator and his wife, probably executed in 1622 during a visit to Italy. It is an early example of the monumental style used by van Dyck to emphasise the power, dignity and rank of his artistocratic patrons, a style which, in spite of the artist's attention to the individual psychology expressed in each face, bestowed upon his sitters a demure sense of reserve, further intensified by painting them against a background of palatial architecture.
In 1632 van Dyck went to London, where he became painter to Charles I.
Here he remained until his death in 1641, except for a two-year visit to Brussels (1634/35). As "principalle Paynter in Ordinary to their Majesties at St. James" from 1633 onwards, and with an annual income of two hundred pounds per annum, he now had the necessary freedom and routine to develop his own style. While remaining within the bounds of conventional decorum, his elegant portraits nonethless allowed the sitter to appear more relaxed.
This is well illustrated by a portrait of Charles I (now in the Louvre)168 which, during the eighteenth century, entered the collection of Countess Dubarry, who had insisted, rather too boldly as it turned out, that she was an heir to the Stuarts. Unlike many of van Dyck's official portraits of the English king - often modelled on paintings like Titian's Emperor Charles V after the Battle of Miihlberg, or Rubens's equestrian portraits such as the Duke of Lerma, which show the ruler from below in order to emphasise his sublime grandeur and regal majesty - Charles I is portrayed here almost as a private gentleman, without the insignia or pomp of royalty. A closer look, however, reveals that the purpose of this painting, too, is to demonstrate the power of the throne. Even the theme itself - a hunting trip - refers to an aristocratic privilege. Accompanied by two pages, or stable boys, one of whom is saddling the horse, while the other brings blankets, Charles I stands casually in a forest clearing, posing against a distant maritime landscape. He is wearing a fashionably tilted, broad-brimmed hat, a shining silver doublet and turndown boots. His left hand rests on his hip, nonchalantly holding a kid glove. However negligent the pose may initially seem, its gestural vocabulary was, in fact, quite rigorously defined. The hand-on-the-hip was a set-piece gesture adopted by rulers to impress their subjects, a gesture whose exclusivity became even more visible when non-aristocratic sitters, for example Frans Hals's Willem van Heytbuyzen, attempted to imitate it. The glove, too, was a symbol invested with special chivalnc significance.
Christopher Brown has rightly pointed out that the impression of casual elegance imparted by this painting must be viewed in relation to the reception of Baldassare Castiglione's Cortegiano. The "courtier's code" described in this book had been influential in England since Elizabethan times. Charles I was concerned to appear before his subjects as the ideal, universally educated nobleman, well-versed in all the arts, including that of hunting. Here, his pose is leisurely, unconstrained; at the same time, his regal dignity is intact, commanding a respectful distance between the spectator and himself.
     

Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) ran his own studio from the age of 17. His fame soon spread beyond the Flemish borders. His work was much in demand abroad. He became painter to the English court in 1620/21. In October 1621 he travelled to Italy with letters of introduction from Rubens, whose workshop he had entered in 1617. Van Dyck's portraits of Genuese nobility were modelled on standards set by Rubens's own portraits of noblemen. Rubens had emphasised the dignity and rank of his patrician patrons, commanding the spectator's respect by viewing the sitter from slightly below.
 

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Hyacinthe Rigaud:


Louis XIV of France


 

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Louis XIV
1702
 

This portrait, partly owing to the frequent use of reproductions of it in history textbooks, is often viewed as the classic symbol of the absolutist state. Hyacinthe Rigaud painted it when the sixty-three year-old king was at the height of his power. It was the period in which Louis XIV radically implemented his Catholicization policy, persecuted the Huguenots for the second time and wiped out Jansenism at Port-Royal. This "terreur", which Jules Mi-chelet thought even worse than the revolutionary terror of 1793, enabled Louis XIV to stabilise his power, which, according to Jacques Benigne Bossuet, who coined the phrase, was based on the princicple: "un roi, une loi, une foi".
Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659-1743), whose real name was Jacinto Rigau y Ros, had entered the Academie Royale in 1681, where he soon took second prize in historical painting, established his reputation as a portraitist and entered the services of the French court. His portrait of Louis XIV had been intended for the Spanish court. However, the king's admiration for the portrait was so great that he had it copied, keeping the original at Versailles. It is almost impossible to imagine anything which could outdo this exhibition of courtly pomp and circumstance. The king wears a long, flowing robe with a gold, Bourbon, fleur-de-lys pattern repeated on a blue ground, folded back to reveal to the spectator a full, ermine lining. He is presented in a full-bottomed wig, posing in an attitude similar to, but considerably less casual than, that adopted by van Dyck's Charles I of England, Hunting. Louis XIV rests one hand on a staff - a martial sceptre bearing the flcur-de-lys -while his other is propped on his hip behind the bejewelled hilt of his sword. The king has risen from the throne, which is placed on a podium beneath the vaulted, tasselled canopy behind him. His chief badge of office, the crown, lies on a cushion-topped table, spread, once again, with a fleur-de-lys-patterned cover. Rising behind it is the pedestal of an enormous column, a symbol of power and grandeur, the mark of lasting majesty and stability. Since the days of early Renaissance portraiture - in the work of Giovanni Battista Moroni, for example - the column had featured as an attribute of the aristocracy.
The exposure to view of the ruler's legs is not dandified, as we might assume today, but exemplifies a ritual followed by ruling princes since antiquity. In 1783, Antoine-Frangois Callet portrayed Louis XVI with his knee exposed to view, and Ingres continued the tradition in his portrait of the newly enthroned French Emperor Napoleon in 1804.
 

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see also:


Philippe de Champaigne

 

Philippe de Champaigne:


Triple Portrait of Cardinal Richelieu


 

    

Philippe de Champaigne
Triple Portrait of Richelieu
c. 1640
Oil on canvas, 58 x 72 cm
National Gallery, London
 

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Two Views of the Artist's Mother
1695
Musee du Louvre, Paris
 

The painting of three different views of the sitter's face may have been inspired by knowledge of the "Prudentia" theme, a subject of central importance in Italian painting of the Renaissance. A fifteenth-century Florentine relief (London, Victoria and Albert Museum) shows an - admittedly syncretistic - allegory of prudence in the form of three faces. This can be traced back to Cicero's discussion of "prudentia" as a human quality consisting of three parts - "mcmoria" (memory), "intelligentia" (understanding) and "providentia" (foresight) - each of which, in turn, corresponded to a temporal dimension: past, present or future (Cicero, De inventione II, 13). Inscribed on an allegory of prudence attributed to Titian are the words: EX PRAETERITO/PRAESENS PRUDENTER AGIT/NI FUTURA AC-TIONE DETURPET (from the past come the wise actions in the present of a person who wishes to make no mistakes in future). This could almost be Richelieu's motto, a man who took every known factor into account before coming to a rational decision.
 

Philippe de Champaigne
Cardinal Richelieu
c. 1637
OiI on canvas, 260 x 178 cm
National Gallery, London

 

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Marriage and Family Portraits

 

See also:


Peter Paul Rubens
 

Peter Paul Rubens:


Rubens and Isabella Brant
 

under the Honeysuckle


 

Peter Paul Rubens
The Artist and His First Wife, Isabella Brant, in the Honeysuckle Bower
1609-10
Oil on canvas, 178 x 136,5 cm
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

 

Following his return from Italy, Peter Paul Rubens married Isabella Brant, the daughter of a respected patrician and secretary of state. To mark the occasion, he painted this double portrait. He had spent the previous eight years working for the Duke of Mantua, in whose service he had been sent on diplomatic missions to Spain, Venice, Rome and Genoa. Rubens, the son of an Antwerp lawyer, had graduated as master of St. Luke's painters guild in Antwerp in 1598. Since then he had come into frequent contact with courtly society, developing manners that would have been becoming in a person of aristocratic birth, while maintaining his bourgeois sense of freedom and independence of mind. Intellectually, he had reason to be grateful to Justus Lipsius, the teacher who had schooled him in Stoic philosophy.
 

Rubens married Isabella Brant (1591-1626),
the daughter of the Antwerp patrician and humanist Jan Brant (1559-1639),
on 3rd December 1609. The double portrait which he painted to mark
the occasion is set against a natural background,
a pastoral idyll emphasising the happiness and loving tenderness
of the moment rather than the offical ceremony.
 

Peter Paul Rubens
The Artist and His First Wife, Isabella Brant, in the Honeysuckle Bower (detail)
1609-10
 

In his portrait Rubens transforms the joining of hands - the "dextrarum junctio", still considered a legally binding, ritual gesture of betrothal in Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini-portrait - to a sign of loving tenderness, playing down the more official aspect of the ceremony without losing respect for the gesture's legal and symbolic significance. Love and affection are shown as the basis of the union, and the free decision of each of the spouses to enter marriage is underlined, irrespective of legal relations governing their property. It is nonetheless apparent that affluence, luxury, rank and reputation ultimately form the material basis of their union. This is especially evident in the couple's clothes. Rubens himself, his left leg crossed casually over his right, is wearing an elegantly fashionable costume with a pressed lace collar, while Isabella Brant wears a long, voluminous, red silk skirt, with a lace ruff encircling her lace bonnet and high yellow hat. Her bejewelled bracelet displays her family wealth. The sword hilt nonchalantly held in Rubens's hand - his hand partly hides it, partly attracts the spectator's attention to it - is a casual reference to the quasi-aristocratic status of the artist. The relationship between the sexes initially seems egalitarian; a hierarchy is suggested, however, by the fact that he is sitting, while she kneels on the grass.
The couple is posed in an arbour under some honeysuckle. Traditionally, in Italian betrothal and marriage portraits of the Renaissance-in Giorgione's Laura, for example - bushes and other such settings or backdrops were included as symbolic attributes or emblematic decorations, while here the honeysuckle appears natural, a bush blossoming in a real garden or landscape. The symbolism seems quite coincidental: "longer-the-better" was a popular name for the shrub. Whereas the couple in van Eyck's Arnolfini-portrait is seen in a parlour, Rubens's double portrait suggests that "his" couple has left the interior for a "love garden", or pleasance, a sphere of human happiness in the natural world. The tradition of the pastoral idyll, with its Utopian allusions to a Golden Age and the Garden of Eden, had been revived in the literature of the period.
 

In 1622, almost two dacades later, Frans Hals returned to Rubens's subject of the seemingly unconstrained and unconventional couple under the honeysuckle, exploring the theme in a portrait which probably shows Isaak Massa and his wife. The pose of the recently married couple, leaning against the trunk of a tree, emphasises the casual air of the portrait. The ivy twining itself around the tree and curling round at the woman's feet, who, in turn, has her hand negligently resting on the man's shoulder, symbolises the permanence of marriage. The thistle growing next to the man in the bare patch of ground at the bottom left of the picture may be an allusion to God's words to Adam after the Fall: "Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee." (Genesis 3,17f.) Thus, the thistle may symbolise labour, itself a consequence of the Fall. In puritanical Calvinist ethics, which had already gained considerable currency in the Netherlands, work was considered a cardinal virtue, and achievement a central aspect of personal conduct.
While Peter Paul Rubens found it neither desirable nor necessary - at least in his Honeysuckle painting - to add ennobling background scenes, Frans Hals's work for his Dutch bourgeois couple included an Italian landscape background on the right - a sunlit villa, marble statue and spring - whose purpose was to create the impression of elevated rank and dignified elegance. However, the background features are fanciful, bearing no relation whatsoever to the real world of the couple. Rather than the couple's country residence, scrutiny of iconographical details shows the villa to be the temple of Juno, the goddess of marriage, whose attribute was the peacock.