Thursday, March 19, 2015

Haarlem Mannerist

Baptism of Christ
1588

Dutch painter Cornelis van Haarlem (1562-1638) is now remembered as one of the 'Haarlem Mannerists' working under Italian influence toward the turn of the seventeenth century.

In his painting of the baptism of Christ (above) the central action of the picture  the actual baptism – takes place in the far distance, upstream, receding into near-invisibility. The foreground is occupied by anonymous bathers. One prominent detail is the bottom of the largest bather's dirty foot, thrust toward the viewer.

Recent writing on Caravaggio regularly draws attention to the prominence of bare dirty feet in his paintings, as if no one else before him had ever dared to paint such things. But here we see Cornelis van Haarlem using the same trope in the 1580s  a time when Caravaggio himself was still an unknown Lombard teenager.      

Fall of Ixion
1588

Fall of Ixion (engraving)
1588

Two Followers of Cadmus Devoured by a Dragon
1588

Two Followers of Cadmus Devoured by a Dragon (engraving)
1588

The Fall of Man
1592

Bathsheba 
1594

The Preaching of St. John the Baptist
1602

Jupiter and other Olympian Gods urging Apollo to take up the reins of his Chariot
c. 1610

Venus & Adonis
1614

Neptune & Amphitrite
1583

Cornelis van Haarlem Self-Portrait
c. 1588-90